{"id":460562,"date":"2010-03-22T18:14:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T22:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/opiniojuris.org\/?p=11680"},"modified":"2010-03-22T18:14:16","modified_gmt":"2010-03-22T22:14:16","slug":"jane-mayer-takes-down-marc-thiessen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/460562","title":{"rendered":"Jane Mayer Takes Down Marc Thiessen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>by Kevin Jon Heller <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In case you haven&#8217;t seen it, make sure to check out <a  href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/arts\/critics\/books\/2010\/03\/29\/100329crbo_books_mayer?currentPage=all\">Jane Mayer&#8217;s demolition<\/a> of Marc Thiessen&#8217;s book-length apologia for torture, &#8220;Courting Disaster.&#8221;\u00a0 As her review demonstrates, it&#8217;s much easier to defend torture when you distort nearly everything.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: This, I think, is the money quote:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The publication of \u201cCourting  Disaster\u201d suggests that Obama\u2019s avowed determination \u201cto look forward,  not back\u201d has laid the recent past open to partisan reinterpretation. By  holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no  commission on what did and didn\u2019t protect the country, President Obama  has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those  who most want to whitewash it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I have always been skeptical of claims that trials are well-suited to creating enduring historical narratives.\u00a0 But it is clearly the case that convictions can help prevent certain narratives from becoming accepted.\u00a0 The conviction of even one CIA torturer or a member of the Torture Team for waterboarding would effectively end the ability of people like Thiessen and <a href=\"http:\/\/opiniojuris.org\/2010\/02\/27\/stuart-taylors-dishonest-apologia-for-torture\/\">Stuart Taylor<\/a> to sell their claim &#8212; both historically revisionist and legally wrong &#8212; that waterboarding is something other than torture.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/opiniojurisfeed\/~4\/vmP7PfcztPk\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Kevin Jon Heller In case you haven&#8217;t seen it, make sure to check out Jane Mayer&#8217;s demolition of Marc Thiessen&#8217;s book-length apologia for torture, &#8220;Courting Disaster.&#8221;\u00a0 As her review demonstrates, it&#8217;s much easier to defend torture when you distort nearly everything. UPDATE: This, I think, is the money quote: The publication of \u201cCourting Disaster\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4229,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-460562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4229"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}