Hitchens has to understand that many of us are still struggling to find our bearings in an ideological framework whose axes seem to be so fluid, and whose fundamental principles seem to be so counterintuitive. We’re constantly being told that we’re at war with the terrorists, and that we’ve been seriously harmed because we’ve lacked the intelligence-gathering assets “on the ground” in the world’s far-flung hotspots. So you’d think—wouldn’t you?—that those who went to considerable trouble and risk to gather that desperately-needed intelligence in faraway lands would be seen as the heroes, and someone else, who sought to permanently sabotage the ability of those aforementioned people to do their intelligence-gathering work—all in the service of a petty partisan vendetta—would be seen as a villain.
By the same token, you’d think that an administration who’s official passwords seem to be “Freedom and Democracy” would have some respect for the laws of our land, its courts and its principles of due process. But no! As it turns out, the same people willing to violate the strictly specific provisions of a law (“FISA”) designed to ensure a basic right of Americans to not be subjected to warrantless search and seizure, who grant themselves the limitless power to arrest and imprison anyone they declare to be a terrorist suspect and subject them to torture in foreign prisons without ever even charging them with a crime or granting them the service of an attorney, who attempt to turn the very Department of Justice into a tool for partisan profit and then suborn perjury to cover up these activities—these same people then turn around and say that a legally pristine process of investigation, indictment, trial, conviction and sentencing should all be overturned on their whim. Not overturned because Libby didn’t actually lie, of course, but because prosecuting attorney Fitzgerald was either a “principal” or “inferior” officer, or because the judge at Libby’s trial wrote something that seemed snotty.
Are we to grant the same special exemption for bad memory to our many hundreds of unindicted prisoners, who were probably also extremely tired and busy when they were arrested? Should we show mega-traitors Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen leniency if they can prove that the Russians already kinda suspected the spies that they ratted out, so it wasn’t really as bad as it looked? The whole point is that there seems to be no bedrock principle that the Bush administration and its neocon apologists respect. No principle except the notion that whatever they decide to do—even if it seems, or in fact can be proven in court, to violate the law—should be OK, and everybody should just shut up about it. Pardon our confusion.
