Once again I'm shocked but not at all surprised by the ingenuity Christopher Hitchens puts into his disingenuousness. This time the subject at issue is torture by Uncle Sam's willing executioners, and in Hitch's view the biggest lesson we need to learn is that the fault and blame lie with the Central Intelligence Agency. It's all laid out in his April 27 Slate piece Yet Another CIA Failure: What the torture revelations tell us about the culture of Langley.
Hitch begins his column with a piece of revealing information about himself. "Moral smugness reigns," he declares, before going on to mock his local Episcopal church for displaying a sign saying "Torture is Wrong."
Then he inserts a double-quarter-pounder whopper heavy on the onions. Actually, it's a long division exercise designed to dilute any complicity that Bushie, Cheney, Condie, Rummie and company might conceivably bear for ordering thousands of people's lives destroyed through torture to the point where they are no more guilty than the average Joe or Jane.
When torture was actually being practiced, it was in order to slake an unspoken demand from everyone from Congress and the public and the 9/11 commission that swift results be obtained, that no more "warnings" be overlooked, that we all feel more "safe." Only a very few people were consistently against using "harsh methods," let alone making use of the information that such methods might (or might not) have produced.
No, Christopher, torture — and as far as we know it is still actually being practiced today — in the G.W. Bush administration years was undertaken by torturers on the orders of their superiors. The guys who did the waterboarding and the raping and the electric shock treatment and burning of the nipples and genitals with lighted cigarettes and the insertion of bamboo under the fingernails and the hanging of people suspended in midair by the arms for days on end, etc., did this under orders from above. If you are not prepared to condemn and call for the prosecution of the people at the top of the ziggurat but instead ignore them and deflect attention away from their alleged offenses, then you are not actually against torture but are, on the contrary, a supporter of torture and quite possibly an accessory after the fact to its practice and a perverter of the course of justice into the plea bargain.
In such a cacophonously verbal culture as that of the mainstream United States, it is hard to see how an unspoken demand can be recognized, yet alone slaked. But in any case, it is not the Government's business or duty to slake unspoken demands, particularly when such demands are for illegal or immoral activity. The Government is charged with governing and protecting the nation while upholding the law and the Constitution. It isn't even allowed by law to order the burning of witches, the bludgeoning to death of abortion doctors or the hanging of uppity Negroes, let alone the hanging, drawing and quartering of bankers and stockbrokers, although an unspoken demand for all of the above wouldn't be too difficult to stoke up with a suitable media campaign. Indeed, this is precisely how the Rwandan Holocaust of close to a million poor souls was affected within the space of a few short weeks in 1994, to take just one recent example. So why blame the Rwandan leadership that presided over the slaughter, if, like the Bushies, they were only following public opinion?
I look down on Americans as much as the next foreigner, but I don't hold them in anywhere near the sort of contempt that Hitch does. Of the 300 million or so people who comprise the US public, one wonders how many of them Hitch actually asked before declaring "only a very few" of them to have been "consistently against using 'harsh methods'?" Of the several dozen Americans with whom I am in fairly frequent personal contact, all several dozen of them were and still are consistently against using "harsh methods". Of course, I don't hang out with the likes of William Kristol, Alan Dershowitz, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin or even Pam Atlas, so I admit my sampling could be less than fully representative.
After using basic arithmetic to convict the entire US population, apart from the very few, of complicity in torture, Hitch moves on to moral calculus:
The absolute amount of torture in the world was also very much reduced by the removal of the Taliban and the Baath Party from power in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This claim cannot be verified as we cannot know how much torture the Talibanies and the Baathists would have engaged in had they remained in power. We can assume that both groups are still practicing torture although they are out of power, and that the "War on Terror " itself has resulted the practice of torture by groups on all sides. Also, the absolute amount of torture in the world has always been much greater than the absolute amount of torture practiced by the Talibanies and Baathists, and this absolute amount of torture may well have increased significantly for reasons unconnected with Iraq and Afghanistan. So there is absolutely no basis for claiming an absolute decline in the absolute amount of torture — absolutely not.
Lastly, Hitch rehashes his version of the Abu Ghraib "bad apple" theory, accomplishing a mathematical feat involving differentiation of motive, integration of character assassination and dividing aesthetic sensibility by zero. After all, some of those poses were genuinely artistic:
After all, in the case of Abu Ghraib, it was not even seriously argued that the gross maltreatment of our Iraqi detainees was motivated by a search for information. The foul images from that jail were of recreational and pornographic torture, undertaken by bored amateur sadists and third-raters.
However, as the Washington Post had it on June 17, 2008:
The Bush administration has long held that overly-aggressive interrogation methods used on detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were the work of a few "bad apples." Now, an investigation being conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee has revealed that William Haynes II, General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Defense, sought the advice of military psychologists within a Pentagon agency to design the interrogation techniques. The Committee's findings add to mounting evidence that the detainees' torture resulted from decisions made at the highest levels of government, particularly within the office of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.
While the column under discussion represents yet another triumph of contrarian limbo dancing, Hitch's attempts to deflect blame and fudge issues are far from cute. Oh, this is precisely the sort of behavior that must have been extremely cute when as a child he employed it to escape parental or headmasterly punishment for various misdemeanors, back when he could still disguise a smirk as a smile. But just look where his subsequent career of crafty deception has lead him: To a prominent perch, not among the defenders of torture per se, as that would obviously be beneath his dignity, but among the defenders of the architects of torture, where a entirely different morality prevails.
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Hitchens Watches Hitchens Watch: How The Watchers Became The Watched
Comrade FGFM has posted this, but I wanted to add an addendum here as this is the most brazen attack on little old us since Peter Hitchens declared that he didn't care if he watered his horses at HW. Take a look at this damning indictment from the lips of our archnemesis, The Great Satan, himself:
BL: Have you ever gotten on your Wikipedia site?
CH: No. You mean have I ever looked myself up?
BL: The Christopher Hitchens Wikipedia site.
CH: No.
BL: You have never looked at it?
CH: No, I don't surf much anyway.
BL: I got on, and it was twenty pages long.
CH: A-ha.
BL: And you know how this works?
CH: No, this an area I'm very poor on. There are several websites, I know, about me. I daresay there's a Wikipedia one, there's a, there's a website, or there was, called Hitchens Watch or something, that's unfriendly to me, there's another one that is more friendly. I don't have time for this, to be honest to you.
First of all, what the hell is Brian Lamb doing structuring half of an interview around Hitchens' Wikipedia article? (Which he does if you watch all the clips). Gee, I wonder why mainstream journalism is on its deathbed.
As for The Unspeakable One, he claims to have never seen his own Wikipedia article, even by accident, that he doesn't know how Wikipedia works, and is coy about whether he even thinks he has an entry. Plus he claims he doesn't "surf" (I guess he doesn't use Google to look up stuff then, because that pretty much means surfing). And to top it all off, he plays dumb as to whether he knows if Hitchens Watch still exists.
Now, it's true that with these tough economic times that we're living in we've had to lay off Sonic, Mark G., yoyo, Hidari, a couple trolls, substantially cut Greywolf's $75/hour wages as part of our merger with Fiat, and leave the office of our Chief of Staff FGFM dangerously understaffed--but rest assured, the Hitchhunt goes on, and the elusive Hitch-monster will still be caught, we guarantee. We shall not, and cannot, rest, for as Article 7 of the HW Charter decrees: "The Judgment Day shall not arrive until The Fallen One is wiped off the map and eliminated from the page of history."
But there is something fishy about all of these categorical denials as it seems he has gone out of his way to distance himself, to a suspicious degree, from his own Wikipedia page. One would reasonably assume that he must have stumbled across it, by accident at least, given the ubiquity of Wikipedia on the internet and Google. His deniability is just not plausible. And as Intelligence has informed us, we know that people email him HW posts and that he occasionally reads them (God knows why), so there's something suspect about his agnosticism on the existence of Hitchens Watch as well.
We should therefore take the Ronin's remarks with a grain of salt here.
And I also have to take umbrage with his claim that we're "unfriendly." To the contrary, we've been far too friendly towards the guy. Hitchens is a sort of O'Brienesque character out of 1984 come to life, and at moments is almost charismatic and even alluring (when he's not cheering on the massacre of millions of Muslims), and there are still a lot of things that he's quite right on, so at times I fear we have been too soft on him. But that's for our fellow Watchers to judge.
No Popinjay, I think you know exactly what "unfriendly" would be. If this site were truly mean-spirited it would be spouting what one would expect. Namely what Kissinger did, and what others have done. We would constantly accuse Hitchens of anti-Semitism, and go on and on about how he's a Holocaust Denier, his ties to David Irving, his anti-Zionism and harsh criticism of the State of Israel, etc.. etc.. ad nauseum. But we don't do that here, nor do we indulge in cheap ad hominem like "because Hitchens is a drunk, therefore the Iraq war is unjust" rubbish. Well, at least not in excess.
Joe Wilson with wife Valerie Plame, the government spy whose cover was blown when Dick Cheney allegedly had her identity leaked to the media in move that endangered US security, probably resulted in dozens of other US agents in the field being killed, exposed or compromised, and undercut the nuclear non-proliferation goals Hitch claims are so close to his heart.
With Dick Cheney calling for the release of classified memos — wonders will never cease! — the man Hitch daubed "clueless", Joseph C. Wilson IV is reviewing the Plamegate story and casting his gaze over America's tangled web of torture, while getting a few choice kicks into the former Vice President along the way. It's all here at The Daily Beast.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s reemergence on the political stage after his ignominious departure on Inauguration Day, eschewing the traditional handshake with his successor and the new president, is nothing if not ironic. The most secretive individual in American politics is now calling for the selective release of documents that remain classified in one of his own files marked “Detainees.” We have also learned that a principal reason for having tortured senior al Qaeda detainees was not, in fact, to defend the Homeland, but rather to build the case for war with Iraq based on alleged ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Despite literally hundreds of waterboarding sessions, there was no evidence developed that such a link existed. But that did not stop Cheney. He and others in the Bush administration simply asserted a link even though they knew one did not exist.
I know something about Cheney’s disinformation. When I, and a number of others, including a four-star Marine Corps general, Carleton Fulford, and the then-U.S. Ambassador to the West African nation of Niger, reported to the CIA that there was no evidence to support the assertion that Iraq had entered into a contract to purchase 500 tons of uranium yellowcake, our conclusions were ignored by the Bush administration. Instead, the president, in his State of the Union address in 2003, proclaimed a falsehood: “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was trotted out to assert that we could not afford to “wait for the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” and Cheney himself asserted that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program.
There is no longer any question that we were misled by an administration that had already made the decision to invade, conquer, and occupy Iraq, and did everything it could to force the facts to justify their action. Cheney, the architect of the Bush administration’s disastrous national security and foreign policies, now wants to declassify certain classified documents that he believes will vindicate his advocacy of a war of choice in the Middle East and his support of torture. Cheney asserts that the ends justify the means whatever the insult to international law, the conscience of the world, and damage to the long-term U.S. national-security interests.
Cheney’s request for the declassification of material is a welcome development, but it should not be limited to his narrow request. Our country’s understanding of what was done in our name by the Bush administration depends on the release, not just of the documents Cheney has designated, but of all documents related to the efforts of the Bush administration and Cheney himself to defend the indefensible—the decision to invade Iraq despite the knowledge at the time that Iraq did not have a nuclear program, had no ties to al Qaeda, and posed no existential threat to the United States or to its friends and allies in the region.
Christopher Hitchens has never ever, to my knowledge, come out in defence of torture, but apart from that saving grace he has been a vocal defender of the Bushies as part of the disinformation campaign that sold their highly lucrative war on an ill-defined six-letter abstract noun. According to Wilson:
The disinformation campaign to manipulate public opinion in favor of the invasion, the torture program, and the illegal exposure of a clandestine CIA agent—my wife, Valerie Plame Wilson—were linked events. In their desperate effort to gather material to whip up public support, Cheney and others resorted to torture, well known in the intelligence craft to elicit inherently unreliable information. Cheney & Co. then pressured the CIA to put its stamp of approval on a series of falsehoods—26 of which were inserted into Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech before the United Nations Security Council. At the same time, Cheney was furiously attempting to suppress the true information that Saddam Hussein was not seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger. After I published the facts in an article in The New York Times in July 2003, Cheney tried to punish me and discredit the truth by directing the outing of a CIA operative who happened to be my wife.
Several people defended Cheney in the comments, including one who had the termerity to bring up Hitch's Slate ramblings on Plamegate as if they had somehow debunked Wilson's testimony. This gave an opportunity for someone named Blissfulight to set the record straight with as good a summing up of the case against the contrarian's view as I've yet read. So I'll leave you with that:
Clearly, maxpower1013, you have no clue what you are talking about. After researching your claims, including rereading Hitch's fantastic and well-written (but fictional) tale, and following up with a timeline of events and reports following the yellowcake story, I have to conclude that you aren't cut out for the intelligence analysis business. You obviously didn't take the time to read Ambassador Wilson's story in the NYT, which I would suggest you start with first, nor did you investigate any of the claims Hitch made misconstruing Wilson's visit (funny, how Hitch never actually visited Niger to follow up on his wild and unsubstantiated claims). The evidence is clear, if you had actually bothered to read it: The documents in question, purporting to show that Niger had sold yellowcake uranium to Iraq, were forgeries, passed on by an Italian information broker and con-man to British intelligence, which based their less-than-substantive report on those forgeries, and the testimony of the man who produced them. (The British, in their embarrassment at being had by a con-man, repudiated the forged documents and stood by their original analysis, which was based exclusively on the testimony of the individual who forged the documents, and who spun the tale behind the them; in other words, they are standing by nothing). Despite the fact that U.S. intelligence threw some cold water on the original idea (and the documents themselves), Ambassador Wilson was sent to investigate the claims in question, to verify whether or not Iraq had purchased yellowcake uranium. He found no evidence of Iraqi perfidy, or Niger complicity in the sale of yellowcake uranium (the mines in question are tightly controlled by French consortiums). The intelligence in support of the Bush administration's claims was stovepiped past the rigorous analysis that normally challenged raw information, in the hope that if they (the neo-cons) believe it, it will become. The end result was a long, expensive, and bloody war, and despite scouring the deserts of Iraq and interviewing hundreds of participants in Saddam's weapons programs, NO WMD's WERE FOUND. (This is a nice way of saying that they lied to us, and of course themselves. Which would make Cheney the Vice Chief of Lying. Bush can be forgiven for just being a rube.) Of course, since you are a Feith-based believer, no amount of evidence can allay your suspicions that "something was going on". (There most certainly was something going on: The "market" demanded proof, and for a nice bit of change, a certain Italian fellow found, or rather made the smoking gun to fit the crime.) In the interim, I would suggest that you chew your yellowcake a little more carefully before you swallow it; I don't won't you to choke on the lies.
I've been negligent in my HitchWatching duties. One Christopher Hitchens made an appearance with the omnipresent Brian Lamb on his C-SPAN Q&A program and I failed to check the listings beforehand. One of the most Glorious of HitchHunters, JQisAwesome of YouTube altered me to the fact that Hitch actually mentioned this blog on the air! This, of course, inspired me to whip up a quick salute to this landmark moment courtesy of one of the fan boys who had immediately uploaded it. There appears to be plenty of other hilarious and telling moments in this interview and C-SPAN just uploaded it to YT so watch the whole thing.
I'm ready to leave I push the facts in front of me Facts lost Ya facts are never what they seem to be There's nothing there! No information left of any kind LLLifting my head L'L'Looking for danger signs
According to his profile, James Hrynyshyn is a science journalist based in the southeast corner of western North Carolina (the "sea of certainty") and he is an independent-minded journalist specializing in science, ecology and, whenever possible, marine issues. He has a degree in marine biology, another in journalism, and experience working on the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic coasts. The name of his blog, "Island of Doubt" is taken from the Talking Heads song Crosseyed and Painless, but for real inspiration, he says he's drawn on the writings of Richard Dawkins, Stephen J. Gould, and Carl Sagan, among others. From his photo, he seems like a dog lover and an OK guy, and for several of the above reasons, despite his sincere embrace of the Anthropogenic Global Warming dogma, I have developed an instant liking for the guy. Heck, some of my best friends are warmies!
Of course, liking a guy who likes Dawkins, Gould, Sagan and David Byrne is insufficient reason for making him the subject of a Hitchens Watch post, even for me. But luckily there is a Hitch link and it was provided by James himself in the shape of a recent post: Christopher Hitchens is right: The churches have some 'splaining to do, in which he draws attention to a report from The Pew Forum, in which they attempt to break down people's views on AGW classified by religious affiliation. Sure, they missed out the Hare Krishnas and the Parsees, but they may have got some significant data. Among the conclusions that can be drawn from this data are that White evangelical Protestants are a lot less likely to believe there is solid evidence that human activity is responsible for the recent bout of global warming than other groups, and that "unaffiliated" (non-Christians? including agnostics and atheists?) folks are the most likely to believe that there is solid evidence. This, for James, is the reason why Hitch is right: Religion has poisoned people's minds against global warming, just as it poisons everything else.
I understand where he's coming from, and I have it on the sound advice of a New Yorker who has retired to rural South Carolina that for the most part it's pointless arguing with the natives about scientific issues that clash with their traditional worldview, be it the theory of evil-ution, the unlikelihood of "the Rapture", or global warming. Also, I am prepared to concede that many of the "religious" respondents to the Pew survey answered the question out of ignorance of the issue, and I expect James would agree with me in this.
However, much the same thing could also be said for many of the "unaffiliated", and since a majority of these folks think there is solid evidence that the earth is warming because of human activity, which I contend is a false belief, I am forced to conclude that there is a great deal of ignorance on this entire subject, period.
What the survey does show is a statistically significant difference between the views of "unaffiliated" and "Christian" respondents, with the speaking in tongues White evangelicals differing most markedly from the rest of the population and the White mainline Protestants making an excellent proxy for the average American on this issue. But rather than attributing this result to the noxious effects of holy incense or evangelical preachers, the scientific thing to do would be to put this result down to differences in the type of propaganda the various groups have been exposed to.
After all, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, we're living in a propaganda-haunted world, and Americans, as Gore Vidal famously declared, are the most propagandized people of the lot. From my own personal research, which has involved getting my hands and my reputation dirty, I am quite sure that most people who believe that humans are causing global warming do so because they've been propagandized and not because they understand the science. I'm sure that the same is true of most of those who don't believe. It's the pale blue dot we live on.
Understanding the science of climate is a time-consuming occupation, even for those with the education and enthusiasm to pursue it. But the general public is not being asked to understand the science; it is merely being ordered to accept or at least acquiesce in the dogma. Is this why the task of selling AGW has fallen to that old smoothie Al Gore rather than to someone with a gift for elucidating and explaining real science; someone of the calibre of Dawkins, Gould, Sagan, or even David Byrne—a man after my own heart who likes to keep his carbon footprint small? Where have all the great communicators of science gone?
Facts are simple and facts are straight Facts are lazy and facts are late Facts all come with points of view Facts don't do what I want them to Facts just twist the truth around Facts are living turned inside out Facts are getting the best of them Facts are nothing on the face of things
Ever since Barack Obama entered the Race for the White House, Christopher Hitchens has been exceedingly generous in dishing out free advice, first to Obama the candidate and later to Obama the sitting President. I've sensed a definite touch of white man's burden in the Popinjay's condescending tone towards the Cool Cat, so different from either the Spanish Inquisition attitude taken to Slick Willy or the obsequious and almost feudal reverence shown to the Decider.
On reading Hitch's Fighting Words pieces over the past 18 months, I come away with the distinct impression that he is attempting to play Svengali to Barack's Trilby, or, if you prefer something a bit less sinister, Henry Higgins to Barack's Eliza Doolittle. And on his form so far, I suspect it will only be a matter of time before we catch Christopher boasting that it was his gems of well-aimed advice to the candidate, not to mention the electorate, that got Barack elected. But while we're waiting for that historic moment, let's take a brief trip down memory lane.
Isn't there something pathetic and embarrassing about this emphasis on shade? And why is a man with a white mother considered to be "black," anyway? Is it for this that we fought so hard to get over Plessy v. Ferguson? Would we accept, if Obama's mother had also been Jewish, that he would therefore be the first Jewish president? The more that people claim Obama's mere identity to be a "breakthrough," the more they demonstrate that they have failed to emancipate themselves from the original categories of identity that acted as a fetter upon clear thought.
One can't exactly say that Sen. Obama himself panders to questions of skin color. One of the best chapters of his charming autobiography describes the moment when his black Republican opponent in the Illinois Senate race—Alan Keyes—accused him of possessing insufficient negritude because he wasn't the descendant of slaves! Obama's decision to be light-hearted—and perhaps light-skinned—about this was a milestone in itself. But are we not in danger of emulating Keyes' insane mistake every time we bang on about the senator's pigmentation? If you wanted a "black" president or vice president so much, you could long ago have turned out en masse for Angela Davis—also the first woman to be on a national ticket—or for Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. So, why didn't you? Could it have been the politics?
By March 24, in Blind Faith, we found Hitch actually admitting to giving Barack unsolicited advice and rebuking him for not distancing himself from his family pastor.
It's been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest. But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it's at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. "If Barack gets past the primary," said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, "he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen." Pause just for a moment, if only to admire the sheer calculating self-confidence of this. Sen. Obama has long known perfectly well, in other words, that he'd one day have to put some daylight between himself and a bigmouth Farrakhan fan. But he felt he needed his South Side Chicago "base" in the meantime. So he coldly decided to double-cross that bridge when he came to it. And now we are all supposed to marvel at the silky success of the maneuver.
So amnesiac have we become, indeed, that we fall into paroxysms of adulation for a ward-heeling Chicago politician who does not complete, let alone "transcend," the work of Dr. King; who hasn't even caught up to where we were four decades ago; and who, by his chosen associations, negates and profanes the legacy that was left to all of us.
On May 5, Michelle Obama came under the spotlight in Are We Getting Two for One? Is Michelle Obama responsible for the Jeremiah Wright fiasco?. After Barack had bowed to pressure, or heeded Hitch's warning, and "cut the ties that bound him to his crackpot mentor", the dogged journalist decided to explore the reasons why Barack had been kneeling and singing in Wright's pews for so long in the first place:
I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. I remember poor Stokely Carmichael quite well. After a hideous series of political and personal fiascos, he fled to Africa, renamed himself Kwame Toure after two of West Africa's most repellently failed dictators, and then came briefly back to the United States before electing to die in exile. I last saw him as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in 1985, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews, "You can't say 'Never Again' to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you're there forever."
After applauding Barack's victory over Hilary Clinton and his deft support of "the surge" in the summer, Hitch was perplexed in September wondering Is Obama Another Dukakis? Why is Obama so vapid, hesitant, and gutless?. This column is notable in that it shows him sending forth a veritable pyroclastic flow of gratuitous advice for the Obama camp while simultaneously hinting at a personal preference for a Republican victory:
I ran into a rather clever Republican operative at the airport last week, who pointed out to me that this ought by rights to be a Democratic Party year across the board, from the White House to the Congress to the gubernatorial races. But there was a crucial energy leak, and it came from the very top. More people doubted Obama's qualifications for the presidency in September than had told the pollsters they had doubted these credentials in July. "So what he ought to do," smiled this man, "is spend his time closing that gap and less time attacking McCain." Obama's party hacks, increasingly white and even green about the gills, are telling him to do the opposite. I suppose this could even mean that Sarah Palin, down the road, will end up holding the door open for Hillary Clinton. Such joy!
Imaging loosening the Ghostbusters on the troubled spirits of Langley, Virginia to exorcise them and eliminate their malign influence on the waking world?
Christopher Hitchens has advocated abolishing the CIA on more than one occasion. For example, in his December 2007 Slate piece headed, appropriately enough, Abolish the CIA, he declares that the agency's destruction of interrogation tapes "amounts to mutiny and treason." "Why", he asked:
have our intelligence agencies helped to give the lying Iranian theocracy the appearance of a clean bill, while simultaneously and publicly (and with barely concealed relish) embarrassing the president and crippling his policy? It is not just a hypothetical strike on Iran that is rendered near-impossible by this estimate, but also the likelihood of any concerted diplomatic or economic pressure, as well. The policy of getting the United Nations to adopt sanctions on the regime, which was about to garner the crucial votes, can now be regarded as clinically dead. A fine day's work by those who claim to guard us while we sleep.
One explanation is that, like Mark Twain's cat, which having sat on a hot stove would never afterward sit on a cold one, the CIA has adopted a policy of caution to make up for its "slam-dunk" embarrassment over Iraq. This is a superficially plausible hypothesis, which ignores the fact that for most of the duration of the Iraq debate, the CIA was all but openly hostile to any argument for regime-change in Baghdad. This hostility extended all the way from a frenzied attempt to discredit Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, to the Plame/Wilson imbroglio, and the agency's "referral" of Robert Novak's disclosure to the Department of Justice. Interagency hostility in Washington, D.C., between the CIA and the Department of Defense has never been so damaging to any administration, let alone to any administration in time of war, as it has been to this one.
And now we have further confirmation of the astonishing culture of lawlessness and insubordination that continues to prevail at the highest levels in Langley. At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence. This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason.
Of course, veteran Hitchwatchers may well think that our Contrarian's real reason for trashing the spooks is that he's a bitch for a much more mutinous and treasonous bunch of miscreants led by the likes of Condie and Wolfie and Rummy and Pearly and Uncle Dick Cheney and all, whose only real beef with the CIA is that they don't control it. And the further thought may occur that as bad as the organization has been, throughout the G.W Bush years, the CIA has been among the forces that have been guarding us while we sleep from the further predations of these demagogues who see pre-emptive war as the solution to every problem. With that thought in mind, let me offer you an alternative view from Jacob G. Hornberger of The Future of Freedom Foundation, who also wants to abolish the CIA, but for a rather different set of reasons.
Not only are the CIA and the military the source of America’s foreign-policy woes, not only are their actions subjecting Americans to a perpetual threat of terrorist blowback, not only are they bankrupting our country financially with their ever-growing expenditures, not only have they shamed our country with their torture and sex abuse antics, but they also just happen to pose the biggest threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people, as the Founding Fathers and President Eisenhower suggested.
Consider the kind of people the CIA looks for and attracts: the type of person who loyally follows the orders of his superiors, no questions asked. These are the people in life who lack the courage and moral fortitude to say no when ordered to do something that’s morally or legally wrong. They are compliant, submissive, subservient, and sycophantic.
Even worse, they honestly think that they’re the good guys in society as they faithfully follow their superiors’ orders to break the law. When they encounter people in society who do possess the courage and moral fortitude to challenge government wrongdoing, they look upon them as bad people — people who hate their country, traitors.
The situation is really no different, in principle, in the military. In fact, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the military has been working with the CIA to develop the methods of torture that have been utilized. Familiar with the torture techniques of the Chinese communists during the Korean War, the military simply used those techniques as a foundation for the U.S. torture program. Let’s not forget that long before 9/11 the U.S. military’s infamous School of the Americas was teaching torture to Latin American military and intelligence officials who faithfully carrying out the orders of their brutal and tyrannical superiors.
In both the CIA and the military, loyalty to the president is paramount. While they take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution,” in their minds they fulfill that oath by faithfully carrying out the president’s orders.
It’s not a coincidence that the military and the CIA established their kidnap, torture, and sex abuse camps overseas. They wanted their operations to be totally free of interference from both the Supreme Court and the Congress, which they view as impediments to the president’s efforts to protect the nation. Again, all that matters to these people is the commander in chief and the will to carry out his orders.
Consider, for example, the invasion of Iraq. Everyone knows that President Bush never secured a congressional declaration of war, as the Constitution requires. Yet, the military faithfully carried out his order to invade and occupy that country, killing as many Iraqis as necessary in the process.
Yet, there was at least one military officer who said no. He was Lt. Eric Watada. He refused to deploy to Iraq on the ground that to do so would be legally and morally wrong.
How did the military view Watada? As a bad guy! They condemned him, reviled him, and criminally prosecuted him. In their minds, supporting and defending the Constitution means faithfully and obediently carrying out the orders of the commander in chief, something that Watada refused to do because to do so would be wrong.
The thought that Watada is the hero for having the courage, conviction, and moral fortitude to stand against unlawful orders is alien to the CIA/military mindset. The way they see it, the job of the CIA agent and the soldier is not to question why, but simply to carry out orders or die.
My ten cents worth, the US needs its spooks and its troops, so it should definitely hang onto both the CIA and the military, but guys of the calibre of Lt. Watada should be promoted and there should be a major shakeout of the sadistic sickos who wield such a malign influence. Cutting the ties currently binding the spooks to organized crime should be a priority, of course. And prosecuting everyone who was involved in torture either by giving, following or attempting to legitimize orders would be an excellent start.
It's truly a tell-tale sign that Christendom is dying a slow death when we see Christianists swooning over pompous mediocrities like William Lane Craig, and considering him to be amongst their brightest stars. Where are the Christians' G.K. Chestertons of today? Their Dostoevskys? Their Solzhenitsyns even? Are lackluster and unmemorable figures like D'Souza, Craig, Turek, etc.. really the best that Christianity, one of the greatest intellectual traditions in recorded history, has to offer in defense from the challenge being raised by this burgeoning neoatheist movement?
It's no wonder that the Christians are losing an entire generation of followers, and increasingly more than just the Millennials, given their mediocre and punch-drunk response to this shift in the zeitgeist, and this pablum they're trying to spoonfeed us.
Craig is a case in point. For all the hullabaloo and hype surrounding the guy, all we end up getting from him is just old hat and the same trite arguments we're heard again and again from the Christian side. It's as if they think that everyone hasn't heard the design argument or something. And does Craig really believe that comically adding mathematical formulas to his arguments are going to compensate for their fallacious and uncompelling nature? This is scientific sophistry, and Craig has got to be as overrated as the Hitch-beast himself.
As for our preening Popinjay, he seemed intimidated, nervous, anxious, and unnerved before the debate, and had clearly bought into all the hype around Craig.
Watch Chris bungle a quote from The Brothers Karamazov during the discussion:
The video of the whole debate doesn't appear to be out yet, although, if you must hear it, a low-quality audio version of it has become available (let us thank the Prophet for that).
Hopefully, when the entire video comes out, maybe we'll get to see Chris pull out this new and very intellectually honest proposition he's come up with that Stalin was so not really an atheist. Bravo Hitchens. In between that and saying Religious leaders are full of shit on national television, this really goes to show why you are The King of Atheists and our fearless leader.
Things got juicy on the BBC's Newsnight programme following the Great Walkout at the Iranian Prsident's speech at the UN Conference on Racism last week. Interviewer Jeremy Paxman pulled no punches as he interrogated UK Ambassador Peter Gooderham on the reasons for the walk-out. I understand that the Beeb has been trying their best to bury this video, but it's a bit late to bolt the stable door now. The exchange between these two men is signficant in that the journalist clearly recognizes the antics in Switzerland as a "stunt" but the Ambassador insists on calling it a "protest". As for the difference between Zionism and racism, that's a toughie.
Jeremy Paxman: What is the difference between Zionism and racism?
Peter Gooderham: Well we see the two as being quite distinct…
Jeremy Paxman: Yeah what’s the difference?
Peter Gooderham: Well Zionism is a political movement related to the establishment of a homeland…
Jeremy Paxman: So are some forms of racism.
Peter Gooderham:…a Jewish homeland, in the er…in what is now Israel and racism is something else. I mean racism is, I think we all know it when we see it and it’s not, it’s not that, and we have fought long and hard at the United Nations to keep that, to maintain that distinction.
Adrian Hamilton: Walking out on Ahmadinejad was just plain childish What are we trying to say? That any mention of Israel is now barred?
Read Ahmadinejad's address at the UN conference on racism in Geneva this week and there is little to surprise and a certain amount to be agreed with. His accusations against the imperial powers for what they did with colonial rule and the business of slavery is pretty much part of the school curriculum now. His anger at the way the economic crisis originated in the West but has hit worst the innocent of the developing world would find a ready echo (and did) among most of the delegates.
It was not for this, however, that the countries of Europe and North America gathered up their skirts and walked out of Ahmadinejad's peroration. The UK's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Peter Gooderham, rather gave the game away when he said afterwards: "As soon as President Ahmadinejad started talking about Israel, that was the cue for us to walk out. We agreed in advance that if there was any such rhetoric there would be no tolerance for it." The Iranian leader, he went on to say, was guilty of anti-Semitisim.
Just how you can accuse a man of anti-Semitisim when you haven't stayed to hear him talk is one of those questions which the Foreign Office no doubt trains its diplomats to explain. But what basically was our representative trying to say here? That any mention of the word Israel is barred from international discussions? That the mere mention of it is enough to have the Western governments combine to still it? In fact, Ahmadinejad's speech was not anti-Semitic, not in the strict sense of the word. Nowhere in his speech did he mention his oft-quoted suggestion that Israel be expunged from the map of the world. At no point did he mention the word "Jews", only "Zionists", and then specifically in an Israeli context. Nor did he repeat his infamous Holocaust denials, although he did reportedly refer to it slightingly as "ambiguous" in its evidence.....
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Ahmed Chalabi, remember him? He used to be quite important you know.
In perhaps his most grammatically incorrectly titled essay ever Ahmad and Me (Ahmed and I Christopher, Ahmed and I!) he thundered.
"As to the accusation that Chalabi has endangered American national security by slipping secrets to Tehran, I can only say that three days ago, I broke my usual rule and had a "deep background" meeting with a very "senior administration official." This person, given every opportunity to signal even slightly that I ought to treat the charges seriously, pointedly declined to do so. I thought I should put this on record."
Translated, "somebody very important, who is a close personal friend of mine" told me this was bollocks.
Now of course it is no longer 2004, so what is our Ahmed saying these days?
It turns out that, in this interview he responds at last to the charges that his aim all along was to help Iran, In his own words...
"[Al-Hayat]: If you want to describe George Bush, then how would you describe him?
[Chalabi]: A man with very little skill and knowledge.
[Al-Hayat]: He did Iran a great service by toppling Saddam?
[Chalabi]: Iran benefited from toppling Saddam. Bush didn't mean to do it a favor but it was clear that Iran would benefit from Saddam's fall. I am convinced that Saddam would not have fallen except for an implicit agreement between America and Iran.
[Al-Hayat]: This happened?
[Chalabi]: Yes, of course it did.
[Al-Hayat]: Through whom?
[Chalabi]: We worked on this and so did the Supreme Council and Jalal Talbani.
Delving down the memory hole we find this article from Christopher about how he stood up to a simulated waterboarding ( he had privately arranged for himself)
" I had read that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had impressed his interrogators by holding out for upwards of two minutes before cracking. (By the way, this story is not confirmed. My North Carolina friends jeered at it. “Hell,” said one, “from what I heard they only washed his damn face before he babbled.”) But, hell, I thought in my turn, no Hitchens is going to do worse than that. Well, O.K., I admit I didn’t outdo him....then I said, with slightly more bravado than was justified, that I’d like to try it one more time."
Whoa, that Hitch, much tougher than some two bit terrorist.
Yet it turns out that the aforementioned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not waterboarded once before he broke like a little girl. He was in fact waterboarded 183 times in a month, 5 times a day on average.
What does this illustrate? I would contend that our argement is not always that Hitchens is lying to us. On the contrary often he is merely naively repeating the lies he has been told by others.
And what else would one do on an evening with the Godfather of Gonzo?
From The New York Post: CREDIT booze for bringing Christopher Hitchens and Hunter S. Thompson together. In his introduction to "Ancient Gonzo Wisdom," a collection of Thompson interviews due out in July, Hitchens, who covered a summit between Margaret Thatcher and George H.W. Bush, says he was denied a double gin at a cocktail party at the top of the slopes because it would be twice as strong at such a high altitude. So he hightailed it to Aspen's Owl Farm, where he met Thompson, who was just getting up. "Refreshments of all sorts were available without any references to health-impact considerations, as were numerous stimulants and analgesics," the razor-tongued "God Is Not Great" author recalls. "At some point, towards the advent of the rosy-colored dawn, it seemed important to go outside, set up some bottles and cans, and blast them into shards with high-velocity rifles. This may also have had something to do with reminding the Aspen sheriff's department to keep its distance."
How far these two actually "bonded" is debatable, since although drinkers this devoted to their dram are invariably sticky when deep in their cups, they tend to bond so keenly with their booze that the main function of their drinking companions is to keep the glasses filled while making approving noises and gestures. In any case, Hitch's anecdote will be old history to Slate readers, who will doubtless recall that Hitch wrote about HST and their drinking and shooting session in February 2005:
In early August of 1990 I went to Aspen, Colo., to cover what looked as if it would be a rather banal summit involving Margaret Thatcher and George Bush. (The meeting was to be enlivened by the announcement of the forcible annexation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, who would go on to trouble our tranquility for another 13 years.) While the banal bit was still going on, the city invited the visiting press hacks for a cocktail reception at the top of an imposing mountain. Stepping off the ski lift, I was met by immaculate specimens of young American womanhood, holding silver trays and flashing perfect dentition. What would I like? I thought a gin and tonic would meet the case. "Sir, that would be inappropriate." In what respect? "At this altitude gin would be very much more toxic than at ground level." In that case, I said, make it a double.
The very slight contraction of the freeze-frame smile made it plain that I was wasting my time: It was the early days of the brave new America that knew what was best for you. Spurning the chardonnay and stepping straight back onto the ski lift, I was soon back in town and then, after a short drive, making a turn opposite the Woody Creek Inn (easily spotted by the pig on its roof). And there, at the very fringe of habitation, was Owl Farm and its genial proprietor, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Once inside these well-armed precincts, I could drink and smoke and ingest any damn thing I liked. I finished a fairly long evening by doing some friendly target-practice, with laser-guided high-velocity rifles, in the company of my host. An empty bottle didn't stand any more of a chance outside than a full one would have had within. It was vertiginous, for me, to be able to move from one America to another, in point of time and also of place, so rapidly.
As April 20 is Hitler's birthday, and as I haven't had time to write anything about Hitch, I'm posting this Donald Duck cartoon that gives a taste of how Walt Disney portrayed the Fuehrer and his "World New Order" ambitions back in 1943.
When Der Fuehrer says, "We ist der master race" We HEIL! HEIL! Right in Der Fuehrer's face Not to love Der Fuehrer is a great disgrace So we HEIL! HEIL! Right in Der Fuehrer's face When Herr Gobbels says, "We own der world und space" We HEIL! HEIL! Right in Herr Goring's face When Herr Goring says they'll never bomb this place We HEIL! HEIL! Right in Herr Goring's face
Are we not the supermen Aryan pure supermen Ja we ist der supermen Super-duper supermen Ist this Nutzi land not good? Would you leave it if you could? Ja this Nutzi land is good! Vee would leave it if we could
We bring the world to order Heil Hitler's world New Order Everyone of foreign race will love Der Fuehrer's face When we bring to der world disorder
When Der Fuehrer says, "We ist der master race" We HEIL! HEIL! Right in Der Fuehrer's face When Der Fuehrer says, "We ist der master race" We HEIL! HEIL! Right in Der Fuhrer's face
Mr. Definitely makes an appearance on Morning Joe to chat about the Obama Administration's decision to release the torture memos, and to talk about why the CIA should be abolished.
Our Popinjay has been consistently inconsistent in his opposition to torture, his simulated "waterboarding" publicity stunt notwithstanding, so Hitchens' cant here should be dismissed as pure posturing, and not principle. If he were sincere, he would not continue to be deafeningly silent on extraordinary rendition, or what's going on at Bagram, for instance (though these are merely footnotes in his longstanding efforts to cover-up and defend indefensible torturers and sadists).
As for his curious call to shutter The Agency, which Hitchens has been espousing for some time now, it is possible that the reason he is calling for this is due to the fact that the CIA displayed a modicum of professional integrity and objectivity during the Bush years, instead of being completely obsequious to an Executive which demanded totalitarianesque obedience and "intelligence" based on neither intelligence nor reality. It's quite revealing that even for a band of thugs and killers like the CIA, the Bush Administration was just too over-the-top.
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That's Hitch in the spotlight, that's Hitch on the box, loosing Ben's religion....
Journalist and founder of Michigan Citizens for Science Ed Brayton was prompted to write this post when he heard Christopher Hitchens's claim in the TV debate with Ken Blackwell that Benjamin Franklin was an atheist:
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Hitchens Distorts Franklin's Religion by Ed Brayton
I saw this Youtube video at Balko's blog of Christopher Hitchens debating the utterly dense Ken Blackwell about whether this is a Christian nation or not. Balko says Hitchens "annihilates" Blackwell, and that is true. Blackwell babbles like an idiot for most of it. But what jumped out at me was something Hitchens said that just grinds on me because it is so blatantly false and it is being presented by someone who so often speaks for causes I believe in.
Speaking about the Declaration of Independence, when Ken Blackwell mentions the notion of unalienable rights being self-evident, Hitchens says, "The person who put in the words 'self-evident' on that committee was Benjamin Franklin, who was undoubtedly an atheist." But this is every bit as transparent a lie as anything David Barton has ever said.
There is not a shred of evidence that Franklin was an atheist and volumes of evidence from Franklin's own writings that prove he was not. The most obvious is in a letter that he wrote to Ezra Stiles a mere six weeks before he died in which he laid out his creed:
Here is my Creed: I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we can render to him, is doing Good to his other Children. That the Soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its Conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental Principles of all sound Religion, and I regard them as you do, in whatever Sect I meet with them. As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw, or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity: tho' it is a Question I do not dogmatise upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble. I see no harm however in its being believed, if that Belief has the good Consequence as probably it has, of making his Doctrines more respected and better observed, especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the Believers, in his Government of the World, with any particular Marks of his Displeasure.
This certainly is not Christianity, but neither is it deism. And it sure as hell isn't atheism. Hitchens needs to stop this, immediately. It discredits him and, by extension, the causes he fights for, many of which need fighting for. He will do to the cause of separation the same kind of damage that Barton has done to the other side.
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The visitors to Ed's excellent blog include plenty sharp, hard-headed secular, skeptical and scientific types, and by and large they were more than ready to pounce on Hitch's sininster piffle and ventriloquism of the beliefs of the dead. Although amazingly, none of them commented on that kiss curl. Here are some of the highlights.
Chris Rodda I saw that Hitchens segment and it made me cringe. He also said that most of the signers of the Declaration were deists. "Experts" like Hitchens are apparently too lazy to do any real research on the founders and get over the tired, old, and often untrue arguments you see in the most inane arguments on blogs and message boards. All people like Hitchens do is feed the Christian nationalists' strawman that all of us "secularists" say that all the founders were deists and atheists.
SLC The impression I got from reading a biography of Franklin was that he had no particular religious views himself but thought that, on the whole, religion might be a good thing. He contributed money to construct churches in Philadelphia and also to the construction of the first Synagogue in that city. It should be noted that Mr. Brayton quotes a statement made only six weeks before Mr. Franklins' death, which might not be indicative of his thinking earlier on.
JimV Interesting stuff about Franklin's masonry, AN. I have a friend who has been a lifelong, active Mason, reaching the 33rd degree or whatever their grand poobah status is. He was always after me to join, and showed me a membership form once. One of the requirements was to agree that, "I believe in a Supreme Deity." So I am convinced. Franklin was not an atheist.
Julian The problem that folks like Hitchens have, I think, beyond a simply preferential reading of history, is that they read the modern conclusions of anti-clericalism and the skeptical tradition into the anti-clericalism and skepticism of the past, particularly when the direct subject is the opinion of a major, ancestral figure.
Just as Dante's pen transformed Moses and Plato into proto-Christians; condemned by accident of time yet spared damnation by their essential agreement with his creed, so too does Hitchens portray his own intellectual and "spiritual" heroes from the past as holding opinions that both bolster his own and counteract those aspects of their thinking he might find unacceptable in a contemporary. As understandable as this may be, it is hardly the act of a rational, dispassionate, and precise scholar.
We win these argument without need for misrepresentation, and if we allow our preferences to decide how we present our historical heroes in debate, then we are no better than the egotists who insist biblical figures were blond, blue-eyed Nords.
Please say it ain't so? Where woud all the sinners go?
On April 8 on Hardball, Christopher Hitchens chatted with Ken Blackwell about the issue of whether or not the United States is a Christian nation. For Hitch, the satement that "the United States is a Christian nation" is:
... literally a meaningless statement" because "the Constitution quite deliberately forbids all mention of God — I should say omits all mention of God — let alone of Jesus. And though the Declaration mentions a Creator it very specifically doesn't say that this Creator intervenes. Most of the people who wrote the Declaration were deists, not theists. It's true to say that the majority of believers in America are Christian, but that's a banal fact; many of them — I know from going and debating them on my book tour — when you go to their churches, are full themselves with doubt. In other words people who have responded by saying they're Christian are very full of doubt and skepticism....
He's certainly got the waffle down pat: "Quite deliberately", "very specifically", "deists not theists", "a banal fact". As if the religious character of the US today could be determined by what was written in the Constitution over 200 years ago. As if being a deist as opposed to a theist prevented one from being a Christian. As if doubt and skepticism were incompatible with Christian belief. As if being literally meaningless invalidated this type of statement in the opinion of any mind but the literal mind — you know, the kind that doesn't understand a thing about irony, metaphor or shades of meaning.
Notice too how Blackwell is courteous enough to allow Hitch to cruise right his insipid spiel uninterrupted and is immediately rewarded by a series of interjections from Hitch aimed at disrupting the flow of his own argument and thought. So much for atheist morality based on the principle of reciprocation. This is the intellectual equivalent of knocking one's opponents ball into the bushes during a croquet game and is incorrigible to say the least.
Hitch has turned into a really nasty piece of work, and my advice to anyone who is opposite him on Harball is to take along the intellectual equivalent of a croquet mallet, aim metaphorically for his balls and hit 'em hard, then while he's frantically pushing ice cubes down his contrarian pants in an attempt to numb the pain, you might just be able to get a few words in edgeways.
On a more positve note, I love Hitch's Zombified Michael Jackson look. It makes me wonder whether he has his own personal coffin in the basement of the TV station containing a spadeful of soil and a quart of whiskey from his native land.
Everybody Knows: Sibel Edmonds Everybody knows about the details of Sibel Edmonds' case. Except the public.
An Inconvenient Patriot Turkish-American former FBI translator and gagged whistleblower Sibel Edmonds is an intriguing character with a story gripping enough to make a whole series of spy thrillers. Her story was covered in a long article by David Rose in the September 2005 issue of Vanity Fair entitled An Inconvenient Patriot, which begins:
Love of country led Sibel Edmonds to become a translator for the F.B.I. following 9/11. But everything changed when she accused a colleague of covering up alleged illicit activity involving Turkish nationals. Fired after sounding the alarm, she’s now preparing a Supreme Court appeal—and threatening some very powerful people.
As a VF scribe himself, Christopher Hitchens will undoubtedly be familiar with Sibel Edmonds's name. And Sibel is a close ally of one of the Popinjay's more persistent targets — "clueless" Joe Wilson. On top of that, Hitch is presently [In Slate, to be covered elsewhere] giving advice to President Obama about how he should be dealing with Turkey and Iran and mentioning in passing "nontrifling matters such as nuclear proliferation." As it happens, several of Sibel's revelations and her gag order relate specifically to Turkey, Iran and Nuclear proliferation.
But strangely, a Google search of Hitch's and Sibel's full names together in the same paragraph nets precisely zero hits. Well, I've fixed that problem. But his lack of interest in the chanting of the Sibel remains baffling, as he's usually such a free speech absolutist and he must be dying to hear what she has to say.
But I've already said too much....
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How many atheists has Hitchens converted to Christianity?
This month has witnessed the public admission by hard-core British atheist intellectual and occasional Hitch drinking buddy A.N. Wilson that after twenty years of forsaking God, he's has regained his Christian faith. In the course of his academic career, Wilson has penned a string of books about high-profile Christians including Leo Tolstoy and C.S Lewis (himself a one-time atheist) from a skeptical standpoint. In 1999, he published God's Funeral is a historical work charts the decline in religious faith and the rise of atheism in 18th and 19th century Europe. And in 1992 he wrote a life of the Big Man himself: Jesus: A Life, which was described by Publishers Weekly as:
a lucid and absorbing, if inconclusive, meditation on the historical Jesus: the " 'real' Jesus amid so much religion and folk-lore." In Wilson's interpretation, Jesus was a Galilean holy man, an heir to the prophetic tradition, who possessed charismatic healing powers; it is improbable that this monotheistic Jew ever believed himself to be the Second Person of the Trinity or that he instituted the Eucharist.
Atheism can be a bit like acne. Young people are prone to catching it from around the age of puberty, and many continue to exhibit the symptoms for life, but in many other cases it clears up on its own after they mature and their hormones settle down. Wilson is far from being the only academic luminary to have undergone a conversion from atheism to Christianity, and such cases are always interesting because these are people who are endowed with ample intellect, education and capacity to reason, and who have the entire resources of over three centuries of Enlightenment thought and ample peer pressure to support and sustain them in a God-free Universe paradigm.
In Why I believe again in New Statesman, Wilson has written about his initial "conversion experience" to atheism 20 years ago at the age of 38, which he likened to a road of Damascus experience, as well as of his slow and doubting return to faith. First, the loss of faith, which plunged him into a state of atheistic euphoria bordering on Hitchification:
I can remember almost yelling that reading C S Lewis’s Mere Christianity made me a non-believer – not just in Lewis’s version of Christianity, but in Christianity itself. On that occasion, I realised that after a lifetime of churchgoing, the whole house of cards had collapsed for me – the sense of God’s presence in life, and the notion that there was any kind of God, let alone a merciful God, in this brutal, nasty world. As for Jesus having been the founder of Christianity, this idea seemed perfectly preposterous. In so far as we can discern anything about Jesus from the existing documents, he believed that the world was about to end, as did all the first Christians. So, how could he possibly have intended to start a new religion for Gentiles, let alone established a Church or instituted the Sacraments? It was a nonsense, together with the idea of a personal God, or a loving God in a suffering universe. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.
Back in the late eighties, our Hitch was delighted with the new convert, as Wilson goes on to explain:
As a hesitant, doubting, religious man I’d never known how they [the faithful] felt. But, as a born-again atheist, I now knew exactly what satisfactions were on offer. For the first time in my 38 years I was at one with my own generation. I had become like one of the Billy Grahamites, only in reverse. If I bumped into Richard Dawkins (an old colleague from Oxford days) or had dinner in Washington with Christopher Hitchens (as I did either on that trip to interview Billy Graham or another), I did not have to feel out on a limb. Hitchens was excited to greet a new convert to his non-creed and put me through a catechism before uncorking some stupendous claret. “So – absolutely no God?” “Nope,” I was able to say with Moonie-zeal. “No future life, nothing ‘out there’?” “No,” I obediently replied. At last! I could join in the creed shared by so many (most?) of my intelligent contemporaries in the western world – that men and women are purely material beings (whatever that is supposed to mean), that “this is all there is” (ditto), that God, Jesus and religion are a load of baloney: and worse than that, the cause of much (no, come on, let yourself go), most (why stint yourself – go for it, man), all the trouble in the world, from Jerusalem to Belfast, from Washington to Islamabad.
Unlike the dogmatically certain Hitch, however, Wilson has always been a bit of a skeptic, and it is this character trait, rather than its antithesis of credulity, that has saved him from a bout of terminal apostasy. "My doubting temperament," he confesses, "made me a very unconvincing atheist. And unconvinced."
As for his philosophical reasons for acknowledging the deity, they don't strike this old agnostic wolf as anything that would stand up in court, but they make him the sort of thinker who would put up a good argument against Hitch if our lad could be weened off his habit of only debating Chaucerian frauds.
Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.
For a few years, I resisted the admission that my atheist-conversion experience had been a bit of middle-aged madness. I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off Thought for the Day when it comes on the radio. I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief “don’t matter”, that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.
When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion – prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.
Why did I, along with so many others, become so dismissive of Christianity?
Like most educated people in Britain and Northern Europe (I was born in 1950), I have grown up in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular and anti-religious. The universities, broadcasters and media generally are not merely non-religious, they are positively anti.
To my shame, I believe it was this that made me lose faith and heart in my youth. It felt so uncool to be religious. With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy, like having spots or wearing specs.
This playground attitude accounts for much of the attitude towards Christianity that you pick up, say, from the alternative comedians, and the casual light blasphemy of jokes on TV or radio.
It also lends weight to the fervour of the anti-God fanatics, such as the writer Christopher Hitchens and the geneticist Richard Dawkins, who think all the evil in the world is actually caused by religion.
The vast majority of media pundits and intelligentsia in Britain are unbelievers, many of them quite fervent in their hatred of religion itself....
The Polly Toynbees of this world ignore all the benign aspects of religion and see it purely as a sinister agent of control, especially over women.
One suspects this is how it is viewed in most liberal circles, in university common rooms, at the BBC and, perhaps above all, sadly, by the bishops of the Church of England, who despite their episcopal regalia, nourish few discernible beliefs that could be distinguished from the liberalism of the age.
For ten or 15 of my middle years, I, too, was one of the mockers. But, as time passed, I found myself going back to church, although at first only as a fellow traveller with the believers, not as one who shared the faith that Jesus had truly risen from the grave. Some time over the past five or six years - I could not tell you exactly when - I found that I had changed.
I can tell you exactly when. It was the day he first saw Hitch standing up smug and certain holding a copy of his magnum opus of yellow journalism God is Not Great, which is an attempt to do for the deity and religion what the Bay City Rollers did for tartan and the little corporal in the Chaplinesque moustache did for the swastika. And how many others besides Wilson has Hitch's pro-atheist campaigning managed,according to some law of unintended consequences, to convert to Christianity? Could it be as many as the number of priests and nuns he has tempted into swearing profanities? Or as many young Muslims as his war-mongering jingoism has edged into a life of terrorism? Or even as many as the number of Vanity Fair readers he has grossed out into cancelling their subscriptions? At any rate, he can be persuasive character, can our Hitch!
Finally, I must point out that Wilson is by no means soft on terrorism or the dangers of Islamism. There is a lot of Hitch and a fair amount of Enoch Powell (the thinking man's Pat Condell) in this lengthy September 2008 article entitled The Great Surrender: How Britain has given in to the religious fanatics intent on destroying our way of life. I strongly disagree with most of Wilson's conclusions and some of his "facts", but stating why that would take another post as long as this one. So I'll just say that if he is right, the situation for British society is dire indeed.
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White House press corps abandon Hitch's place to party at the French Ambassador's
A great time was had by all at last year's "Bash Beside the Bookshelves" where a tieless Salman Rusdie entertained the other guests with an improptu impression of the Iranian ambassador.
In huge news from inside the Beltway, Vanity Fair's annual party after the White House Correspondents Dinner will not be taking place at Hitch's place this year. According to John Koblin of the New York Observer:
Mr. Hitchens, who has played host for Vanity Fair’s intimate after-party on and off for years, is pulling out this time around.
A spokeswoman for Vanity Fair said the magazine has decided to make its annual soiree a bit bigger this year and will team up with Bloomberg News on a combined bash taking place at the nearby Kalorama Road residence of French Ambassador Pierre Vimont.
So, what has the French Ambassador got that Hitch hasn't? Is Hitch sulking because after all his fawning he still hasn't managed to get most favored journalist treatment from the Obamas? Or has Carol finally decided she's not going to put up with catering to celebrity champagne louts anymore.
Mr. Hitchens hosted the exclusive fete the past two years—and had hosted it five times before that—with Todd Purdum and Dee Dee Myers in the one surefire after-party that promised to be quieter, cooler and free of crowds and lines.
Last year, The Daily Transom spotted David Carr, Christiane Amanpour, Jacob Heilbrunn and Jacob Weisberg mingling among the giant stacks of books, including 28 volumes by Gore Vidal, in Mr. Hitchens’ writerly apartment on Columbia Road. In 2007, his guests included Jane Fonda, Paul Wolfowitz, Antonin Scalia and Michael Chertoff.
Reason Weekly, who love watching the Hitch as much as we love hunting him, are running a who-said-that quiz pitting The Man Himeself against a bunch of cartoon characters.
Under the rules, you are presented below with 25 quotes. You must guess where each quote comes from: South Park or Christopher Hitchens.
Kids, when you're building sandcastles, it's a good idea to mix your own wet sand. Adding sand to water, instead of the other way around. And remember, it's OK to be creative!
As a fellow sage and crackpot once put it, "I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
I find it incredible that Anglo Saxon societies could have moved so rapidly from an era of enlightenment to an era in which the pursuit of objective and empirical facts is widely condemned and ridiculed as "truthiness" or as a psychological malady. Have we learned so little from Hitler and Mussolini, not to mention Stalin and Mao, that we are prepared to sit back and allow another bunch of psychopaths to take over the asylum, tie us into straightjackets and impose their "reality" on the rest of us?
If so, then all I can says is "They're coming to take me away, ha ha! to the Fema camp where life is beautiful all the time, ha ha!"
From the comments.
Peter: anyway - 5 greywolf posts in a row, of which one or perhaps two are about hitch... come on guys, get it together already
— Au contraire, mon ami, they are all Hitch-related, as any true HitchWatcher can see. We do not see only what Hitch wants us to see. We reserve the right not to be hijacked into exclusively following his Vanity Fair makeover and Rock Against Religion tour activities at the expense of his murkier side.
Angrysoba: Or what? You'll cancel your subscription?
I'm sure if you write something out and punctuate it correctly, ask a friend to check the spelling and remember to use capital letters in the right place then Greywolf will put it up.
— He certainly would. But it's amazing how few people are willing to stand up for Hitch these days either in print — even Squeaky has twisted the knife — or on the streets of Beirut. The rumor I heard is that running shoes are now compulsory for all his companions.
Peter: thickness factor - 10? you may note that I am a commenter here, not a HW poster. you apparently think it's cool that greywolf hijacks this site for his embarrassingly lame pontifications about religion and 9/11 but hey, wasn't there a Tim G. time when he actually took that shit elsewhere? btw, punctuation being most key!
Angrysoba: That's a very hefty dose of concern you have there. This being Greywolf's site more than anyone's I am sure he is more than entitled to post his...er... shit (Peter! I thought you were raised better than that) here. But like I say, if you are worried about the standards dropping at HW he might post some of your, no doubt less malodorous, shit.
—Actually I'm more of a Stalin to the Great Sonic's Lenin. He would be posting and pontificating a lot more around here but I've got him preserved in formaldehyde in the basement. But the plain fact is that defenders of the official XXX story (fill in your own preferred dogma here: 9/11, AGW, WMD, HIV, etc.) never debate the detractors. It is a matter of orthodoxy vs. heresy. This is The Name of the Rose and Steve Jones is a latter day Saint Sean Connery being threatened with the inquisition again for daring to seek truth or establish facts rather than to confirm dogma. These gangsta dudes and their often anonymous flunkies have used similar MOs to make their own reality and force it down everyone else's throats all down the ages and in all kinds of cultures. If they have to wreck the institutions of the open society including the sciences in order to secure their power, then needs must. And if they have to go a bit further and kill millions of their fellow humans and totally poison the minds of the rest, well it's only rock & roll. That's the real culture war, the great war for civilization, the war between "women and children first" and "me first". And there comes a time in every real man's life when you've gotta make the ultimate decision and say "I'll drive that rig!" "Get off of my plane!" Go ahead, make my day!" And, as a last resort, "Fuck you ASSHOLE!" Or else, forever bow your head and hold your tongue.
D: Christ, this place is a fucking joke.
—The blasphemous literal mind cannot comprehend the humorous mind, let alone the ironic mind, but praise the Lord, at least it can get the occasional joke. Seeds of hope there.
I wish some of our Hitchens Watchers would explore Our Boy in terms of his either wildly neglected or discarded Marxism. In part because of my own ignorance on such matters, but also due to how recent years have no doubt cleared up what Sydney Blumenthal called Hitch's "money problems." The Nation gave Hitch his stardom, but couldn't pay him a star's salary. As Counterpunch unkindly put it when He walked off the Nation, but didn't walk off Vanity Fair (same reasons could have been applied), there was "too much gravy on the train."
While the paperback of God Is Not Great is flying off the shelves; I currently have in my possession the one copy (properly checked out, of course) in the Los Angeles Library system of Walter Benn Michaels's The Trouble With Diversity: How we learned to love identity and Ignore Inequality. The title, along with it's inspired cover (three multi-cultural little lambs) well sums up the tale. The book is the work of a true Contrarian, and the sternest judgement is on the left: "What the commitment to diversity seeks is not a society in which there are no poor people but one in which there's nothing wrong with being poor, a society in which poor people—like Blacks and Jews and Asians—are respected. And in the effort to create such a world, liberalism has ended up playing a useful if no doubt unintended role; the role of supplying the right with just the kind of left it wants. What the right wants is culture wars instead of class wars because as long as the wars are about identity instead on money, it doesn't matter who wins. And the left gives it what it wants."
Michaels, seems to me, was trying to poach the five hundred pound Gorilla in the room who still roams free after all our recent meltdown (the book came out in 2006). An interesting literary critic himself, Michaels is a far cry from Hitchens, with his respect for the likes of Shellby Steele.
Micheals is writing about the great four-letter, five-letter word in American life: class. Was it always enough for an obvious snob to claim an affinity for Marx to win him a pass on the American left, while he lined his pockets sucking up to the most oppressive forces on the hard right?
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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