Blech

I barely managed to stomach Hitchens latest on the McCarthy leak; I don’t recommend the effort. Suffice it to say that Hitch can’t quite manage to recommend the notion of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, but he doesn’t have a problem with completely ignoring the issue by bringing the focus back to Joe Wilson. It Hitch’s world, a CIA agent relating the fact of secret prisons is exactly, exactly the same as an administration official blowing a CIA agent’s cover in an effort to discredit a critic.

Yep.

I’ve heard the argument that Hitchens should, if nothing else, be respected as a wordsmith. I’ve never been particularly compelled by his prose, though. I can also say with a bit of pride that I didn’t care for his work before he became a right-wing hack. He is not a thoughtful writer; this is apparent regardless of whether he’s writing about Henry Kissinger, Mother Theresa, Saddam Hussein, or Joe Wilson. I do wonder whether he can actually measure any ethical or moral distinction between those four. He has no particular commitment to evidence or consistency per se, just to the pursuit, take no prisoners, of a particular line of argument. The existence of an enemy is more important than the characteristics of that enemy.

Anyway, he also manages, in this piece, to argue that the CIA, which is staggeringly incompetent, was nonetheless correct in its disputation of Clinton’s attack on the Al-Shifa factory in Sudan, which was the wrong factory even though it clearly demonstrates that Saddam Hussein was linked to Osama Bin Laden, a fact which no one is mentioning except Richard Clarke other than when he’s not mentioning it. Oh, and even if there was a link and it was the right factory, Bill Clinton was only inclined to order the strike because of a “wag the dog” scenario. Oh yes, and all Clinton-era CIA appointees suck, except, perhaps, for the ones that think he’s wrong about stuff.

I think that’s it. Oh, one other thing; that the Iraqi Foreign Minister met with some guys from Niger demonstrates that the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium all along. Now, a thoughtful author might ask who else the Iraqi Foreign Minister met with in an effort to determine whether all of his meetings involved the desire to purchase uranium. That’s not Hitch.