Tuesday - April 28, 2009

The CIA and Torture

I'm starting to think that Christopher Hitchens is about the smartest man in America.  Not all knowing, but better at analyzing things than others.

His latest column on the CIA and its use of torture, defended by so many good christians of the right wing, is another example of his ability to bring clarity to a topic fouled by moral equivocation.

Here's the money quote:

On 9/11, according to Bob Woodward, George Tenet audibly hoped that the suicide-murderers of al-Qaida were not connected to the shady-looking pupils at those flight schools in the Midwest. The schools, that is to say, about which the CIA knew! In other words, and not for the first time, the CIA (which disbelieved the evidence of Saddam's plan to attack Kuwait in 1990 and continually excused him as a "secularist") had left us defenseless and ignorant. Unprofessional and hysterical methods of interrogation, therefore, were unleashed in part to overcompensate for—and to cover up—a general lack of professionalism at every level of the agency from the top down. 

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