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On Oct. 4, 2007, the New York Times ran a story in which it published classified details of the CIA's interrogation program, after a 2005 memo was leaked to the paper. Officials inside the Bush White House, like top speechwriter Marc Thiessen, were uneasy with the report for two reasons: the Times story erroneously, they felt, cast the memo as approving of torture, and the memo's publication made available sensitive national security information to anyone with a computer.

But the White House was hamstrung in its own defense; any counterarguments officials could use to correct the story and defend the administration were still classified.

The administration's detractors would have the field to themselves until, ironically, President Barack Obama made a controversial decision in April 2009 to release Justice Department memos describing the techniques used to interrogate prisoners captured in the war on terror, making the details public and clearing the way for "Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack," Thiessen's comprehensive explanation and defense of the Bush administration's antiterrorism tactics.

"[Critics] were free to spread whatever mistruths they wanted from a pinnacle of near-perfect ignorance," Thiessen told The Jewish State in a phone interview Feb. 9. "And all this information seeped into the public consciousness, and the concrete hardened. And so what I'm trying to do with this book at least in that sense is take a sledgehammer to the concrete, and now that Obama has released these documents we can finally tell how they were actually applied and the successes that they had."

Not the Spanish Inquisition

Such critics, many of whom are named in the book, compared the CIA's use of waterboarding to the Khmer Rouge, Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and the Spanish Inquisition. One chapter in the book lays out in detail the differences between the CIA's waterboarding tactics and all the other forms. The techniques are different -- the CIA's version put a cloth over the detainee's face before the water was poured while the versions used by the Khmer and other regimes of water-coercion included pumping the victim's stomach and lungs full of water to distend his internal organs. Additionally, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reportedly even counted off the seconds on his fingers awaiting the end of each episode.

"There's a legal definition of torture, which is severe mental and physical pain and suffering," Thiessen said, when asked by The Jewish State to explain why waterboarding is not torture. "But there's also a common sense definition, which is: If you're willing to try it to see what it feels like, it's not torture. Several journalists, including Chris Hitchens, have undergone it to see what it feels like, and in Chris Hitchens and his case, he even tried it twice because he was so unhappy with how he did the first time he underwent it. Generally speaking, people who are tortured don't ask to try it again."

Thiessen pointed out that only three detainees were waterboarded out of 80,000 captured, but tens of thousands of American servicemen and women have been waterboarded -- the technique is part of their military training.

"We don't burn [U.S. soldiers] with hot pokers, we don't electrocute them with cattle prods, we don't pull their fingernails off with pliers, but we waterboard them," Thiessen said, noting that the laws against torture make no exception for training troops. The fact that it has been used for decades in training, Thiessen said, makes clear that U.S. law does not consider waterboarding to be torture.

Not just another speech

Back on that October 2007 morning when the Times story ran, a decision was made that would put Thiessen in the fraught position of writing what would immediately become a historical marker. President George W. Bush's planned speech later that month to the National Defense University would include a public defense of the CIA interrogation program and the terrorist plots it prevented.

In the book, Thiessen recounts the president's reaction after reading the Times story: "Did we use these techniques? Hell, yes! We detain these terrorists and find out what they know. If we didn't, I would be testifying about why we let another attack happen."

Those planned attacks, according to the White House, included plots
-- to blow up high-rise apartment buildings in the U.S.;
-- to fly a plane into L.A.'s Library Tower;
-- to hijack planes and fly them into Heathrow airport;
-- to blow up the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan;
-- to blow up the U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti;
-- to develop anthrax for use against U.S. targets.

"It was a great privilege, but also great responsibility to get it right, to make an effective case," Thiessen said. "Because it was one of the rare times the president was going to be talking about this, we had one shot to sort of get it right, and I think we did a pretty good job."

In addition, Thiessen was given access to all the intelligence from the interrogation program, as well as to the interrogators themselves. The speech was classified as top secret until the day of delivery.

Legal, but is it just?

Thiessen's book includes a chapter on how the interrogation techniques are in line with the just war theory within the Judeo-Christian value system. Thiessen contends that a captive who has vital information about an imminent terrorist attack cannot and should not be considered neutralized.

"In traditional war, when soldiers wear uniforms and fight on a battlefield and they're captured -- you capture them, they surrender, you take away their weapon, you put them in a P.O.W. camp and they have been rendered unable to cause harm, which is the standard of the Judeo-Christian just war tradition," Thiessen said. "A terrorist who is captured has not been rendered unable to cause harm."

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as KSM, had already set in motion several of the aforementioned plots, Thiessen said. According to Thiessen, by withholding information about those planned attacks, KSM was actively endangering the lives of thousands of innocent people. Waterboarding him, Thiessen said, was not done for punishment or to elicit a confession, but rather to protect innocents, thus meeting the Judeo-Christian standard of just war.

"And so you have not only just a right, but I would argue under the just war tradition a moral obligation to render this unjust aggressor unable to cause harm," Thiessen said.

Waterboarding is not, in Thiessen's view, an intrinsically evil act. To support his case, he would remind critics that waterboarding is used to train American soldiers, and therefore cannot be considered an act that is evil on its own, though it can and should be opposed in most situations. Thiessen said the CIA program distinguished between and among captives, and the standard to allow waterboarding was difficult to meet (which is why only three, he said, were waterboarded -- none at Guantanamo Bay).

Enhanced interrogation techniques were often unnecessary, Thiessen said. According to the head of intelligence at the U.S. military's facility at Guantanamo Bay, one prisoner revealed the details of a ratline (escape route) for terrorists that stretched from Yemen to Pakistan in return for five additional Snickers bars on his daily candy allotment.

"You don't need these techniques for every person," Thiessen said, "but KSM isn't going to give you the plans for the next 9/11 in exchange for a Snickers bar."

Playing catch-up

The one-sided leaks frustrated the administration, but the fact that much of the information was still classified enabled some reporters and opinion writers to do something that to Thiessen was worse than sloppy reporting. In her book "The Dark Side," Jane Mayer writes that a landmark speech by Bush on the subject in 2006 was a twin: there was an alternative draft of the speech that would have announced the closure of the CIA program drafted by State Department lawyer John Bellinger.

Bellinger, however, denies such a draft ever existed. So does Thiessen, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, CIA director Michael Hayden, and all the other officials who were involved in the writing and approval of the speech. Mayer never produced a copy of the speech, which she claimed to have in her possession.

When journalists would produce similar stories while the information was still classified, all the administration could do was deny them. Otherwise, the White House would have had to release information that would spell out for terrorist groups the CIA's interrogation process.

"So basically, the president made a choice where he decided to take the lumps and do what was right," Thiessen said.

But Thiessen was actually pleased to some degree with how the public reacted. The Pew Research Center regularly conducted opinion polls on the question of whether and when Americans would support torture. (Thiessen pointed out that American law doesn't consider waterboarding, nor many forms of enhanced interrogation, torture, and thus the question was weighted against the administration by using the buzzword.)

Thiessen noted that in 2005, 43 percent were in favor of using torture in certain situations. By April 2009, 49 percent were in favor, versus 47 percent opposed. But if you add those who answered that torture was "rarely" acceptable, the number of those in favor jumps to 71 percent. This was consistent with other polls, which found a majority of respondents approved of the enhanced interrogation of terror suspects as the Bush administration had conducted them.

The more the former administration's officials -- notably Vice President Dick Cheney -- publicly defended the interrogations, the more the public agreed; it was into this climate that Thiessen's book was released.

Thiessen proudly chalks the polls up to a "rule" developed by his former boss, Bush speechwriter Bill McGurn.

"The liberals win when they obscure the facts, and conservatives win when they clarify," Thiessen quipped, describing what he called McGurn's Law. "And the more we clarify on this issue, the more we gain support among the American people. And the fact that the book is on the bestseller list means that people are anxious to get these facts and get this information. National security books usually don't make it into the top 10 of the N.Y. Times bestseller list."

Walking a tightrope

Thiessen's book is also meant as a warning; he disapproves of the changes Obama has made to the interrogation program, such as requiring that all captives be interrogated according to the Army Field Manual, which doesn't include many of the most effective interrogation tactics, according to Thiessen, and is milder than what New York City police may use during interrogation.

Thiessen believes the U.S. is losing critical intelligence, thus endangering American civilians. When asked by The Jewish State how, barring another domestic attack, those on Thiessen's side of the debate could claim that Americans are less safe, Thiessen said we already had a prime failure -- that of the Christmas day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's successful attempt at getting explosives onto an American passenger jet.

"We did not see that attack coming because we are no longer interrogating senior terrorists who can tell us that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has the intent and capability of striking us at home," Thiessen said. "[U.S. officials] said that we were surprised that they even had that intent and capability."

Though the bomb malfunctioned, Thiessen said, it showed that our defenses were down.

"If I walk on a tightrope between two tall buildings without a net, and I make it across, was I just as safe as if I had a net underneath me?" Thiessen said. "We're basically walking on a tightrope without a net."

The fact that Abdulmutallab's bomb didn't detonate, Thiessen said, shouldn't leave U.S. officials content with how the case was handled.

"Depending on luck," Thiessen said, "is not a proper national security policy."