You probably have never heard of Marc Thiessen, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read or heard his words.  Over the past fifteen years, Thiessen has written speeches for some of the most powerful figures in the world — then-President Bush, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Senator Jesse Helms.

As long as he was working for such men, Thiessen remained largely in the shadows, crafting sentences that others speak.  But with a Democrat now in the White House, Thiessen is now able to speak for himself, and is quickly making a name for himself as an agent provacateur and apologist-in-chief for the torture wing of the conservative movement.

Since the end of the Bush Administration, Thiessen has written a series of provocative pieces arguing that Bush protected America from new terrorist attacks and that Obama is making the United States more vulnerable.  He loves nothing more than to make bold, largely unsubstantiated assertions that have little connection to the facts.

Take, for example a piece he wrote for the Washington Post back in January 2009, two whole days after Obama was inaugurated:

When President Bush left office on Tuesday, America marked 2,688 days without a terrorist attack on its soil. . . .During the campaign, Obama described the techniques used to prevent these attacks as “torture.” He promised that if elected, he would “have the Army Field Manual govern interrogation techniques for all United States Government personnel and contractors.” If he follows through, he will effectively kill a program that stopped al-Qaeda from launching another Sept. 11-style attack. It was easy for Obama the candidate to criticize the CIA program. But as president, what will he do when the next senior al-Qaeda leader — with actionable intelligence on plots to strike our homeland — is captured and refuses to talk? Will the president allow the CIA to question this terrorist using enhanced interrogation techniques? If Obama refuses and our country is attacked, he will bear responsibility.

There are, of course, several problems with Thiessen’s basic argument.  The first, of course, is that he praises Bush for keeping America “attack-free” but fails to mention that the day before his clock started ticking, over 3,000 Americans died on 9/11.  In addition, by talking about attacks “on [American] soil,” he conveniently excludes all the other attacks that took place on Bush’s watch — in Bali, in Madrid, and in London, to name just three.  Are we to surmise that Thiessen’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” worked to prevent attacks on the United States, but didn’t prevent other attacks?  Was that somehow okay as long as Americans didn’t die? 

Furthermore, Thiessen’s core assertion — that terrorist attacks in the U.S. did not take place because we tortured key al Qaeda figures in our custody — is a classic non sequitur, a fallacious assumption that his conclusion follows from its premise.  To put it another way, just because there were no attacks, that doesn’t mean that torture prevented possible attacks from taking place.

Over the past fourteen months, Thiessen has continued to apologize for torture and to make unsubstantiated assertions that it helped prevent attacks.  What Thiessen never manages to point out is that as a speechwriter, he would not have had the level of clearance necessary to see the documents “proving” his assertions.  He is basing his entire thesis on material that he was unlikely to ever have the opportunity to read.

Let me acknowledge that I may be wrong about this.  Perhaps Thiessen sat in on the President’s daily intel briefings.  Perhaps in his copious free time, Bush and/or Rumsfeld shared highly classified reports with their speechwriter.  Perhaps Thiessen really did have a high enough security clearance, but chances are he didn’t.  And even if he did, it’s highly unlikely that he would have had access to some of the Administration’s most closely-held secrets.  The reality is that speechwriters don’t need to know such things.  They are told only what they need to know to convey the President’s message to the world.

But that hasn’t stopped Thiessen from portraying himself as an expert on “enhanced interrogation.”  Most recently, he took to the pages of Foreign Policy magazine to suggest that the current Administration was killing too many terrorists for its own good:

President Barack Obama’s escalation of drone strikes is one area in the counterterrorism fight where he has earned plaudits from even his most vocal critics on the right. Hold the applause. Obama’s escalation of the “Predator War” comes at the very same time he has eliminated the CIA’s capability to capture senior terrorist leaders alive and interrogate them for information on new attacks. The Predator has become for President Obama what the cruise missile was to President Bill Clinton — an easy way to appear like he is taking tough action against terrorists, when he is really shying away from the hard decisions needed to protect the United States.

The problem is that Obama is increasingly using drone strikes as a substitute for operations to bring terrorist leaders in alive for questioning — and that is putting the country at risk. . . .Today, the Obama administration is no longer attempting to capture men like these alive; it is simply killing them. This may be satisfying, but it comes at a price. With every drone strike that vaporizes a senior al Qaeda leader, actionable intelligence is vaporized along with him. Dead terrorists can’t tell you their plans to strike America.

So if I understand Thiessen’s logic correctly, it is better to capture a terrorist — and torture him — than to kill him, because living terrorists can tell you about the next attack.  As Think Progress blogger Matt Yglesias put it, Thiessen apparently believes that it is better to let four terrorists go free if that means you can torture the fifth.

In response, I would only note that dead terrorists also can’t attack America.  They are, after all, dead. 

In addition, Thiessen’s basic premise — that the President would rather kill terrorists than capture them — has been proven patently false over the past few weeks.  On the very day that Thiessen’s piece appeared in Foreign Policy, a joint U.S.-Pakistan operation captured Mullah Baradar, the Taliban’s senior military commander.  Since then, two Taliban governors and another senior Taliban offical have been arrested, seriously damaging the Taliban’s strategic capacity.

Here’s a prediction:  in the next two weeks, Thiessen will pen another op-ed, this time arguing that Obama is failing because he won’t torture these guys or because he might let them be tried in a civilian court.  Of course, that will come on the heels of news yesterday that Najibullah Zazi, a key figure in a planned al Qaeda attack on the New York City subway system, had agreed to plead guilty to terrorism charges, and has been actively cooperating with investigators — and has done so without the Administration having to resort to torture.

These days, it’s hard to avoid Thiessen.  He’s been all over the airwaves promoting his new book, Courting Disaster, which according to his website shows “as no other book has—just how close we’ve come to the next 9/11 and how enhanced interrogation techniques (including waterboarding) have saved us from numerous would-be terrorist attacks.  Offering a behind-the-scenes look at the CIA’s “black sites,” the book also provides substantial evidence to prove the tactics used by the CIA were not only effective, but lawful and morally just.”

To help promote the book, Thiessen has lined up endorsements from a who’s who of torture apologists, including his old boss Donald Rumsfeld and former Attorney General Michael Mukaskey.  But his biggest catch is none other than the torturer-in-chief, Vice President Dick Cheney:

Marc Thiessen knows, in ways that few others do, just how effective, heroic, and morally justified were the interrogators who kept this nation safe after 9/11. If you want to know what really happened behind the scenes at the CIA interrogation sites or at Guantanamo Bay, you simply must read this book.

Again I have to ask the question:  how does a speechwriter get access to highly classified materials so that he can offer an exclusive “behind-the-scenes” look at the CIA’s supposedly double super secret probation black sites?  And given the fact that he argues that torture is effective, what is he doing revealing just how much we supposedly learned from using it?  To use his own logic, doesn’t that hurt America?  Don’t the terrorists win?

Thiessen apparently isn’t interested in letting a few stark facts get in the way of his book sales.  He has spent his entire career spinning the truth to advance his various bosses’ interests, so it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s now using those same talents to promote himself. 

For more on the current “controversy” over torture, check out Jessica Pieko’s post on the Justice Department’s decision not to discipline the chief authors of the legal memoranda used by the Bush Administration to sanction its use of torture.  For a look at how that report refutes Dick Cheney’s claims that torture worked, check out Aaron Pendell’s post.