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Hitchens Has No Clothes: A Response to 'Vidal Loco'

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As other whistleblowers such as the FBI's Coleen Rowley and Robert Wright have said, the problem was the politicization and corruption of the intelligence system - a reality which reared its ugly head yet again in the Iraq-WMD fable, also thoroughly documented by George Washington University's National Security Archive, which found that "the public relations push for war came before the intelligence analysis, which then conformed to public positions taken by Pentagon and White House officials.' This assessment is corroborated by multiple senior CIA officials, including the former highest ranking CIA officer in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, who said that when incoming information proved "there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs', the White House group dealing with preparation for the Iraq war said "Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.' Drumheller observes: "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy.'

But particularly since 9/11, reality has never been Hitchens's strong point. Failing entirely to have learned his lesson over Iraq War 2003, in relation to which he was a leading protagonist, he now continues to pontificate on Iran, lambasting the findings of successive National Intelligence Estimates to the effect that there is scant evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme. Opining 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' (ignoring that the reason for this was precisely the lack of evidence) he superimposes the same twisted logic on the Iran scenario:

"Why, then, 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.'

Due to the CIA's failure to generate a convenient justification for Total War on Iran, Hitchens entitles his piece, "Abolish the CIA', and declares: "The system is worse than useless - it's a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again.' So the CIA should be abolished not for extra-judicial assassinations or torture or anything like that, but because" it doesn't tow the neocon line on unilateral pre-emptive warfare!?

Perhaps we should also abolish the FBI for failing to indict bin Laden for 9/11. Or abolish the entire Western intelligence community for lampooning the widely debunked neocon allegation, supported by self-anointed crystal-ball intel-gazer Hitchens, that 9/11 chief bomber Mohamed Atta was linked to Saddam Hussein. Or abolish the British Ministry of Defence, whose Chief Scientific Adviser described the Lancet study finding of 655,000 Iraqi civilian deaths as "robust' and methodologically "close to best practice' - the same study hysterically described by Hitchens as "politicized hack-work', a "crazed fabrication', and "conclusively and absolutely shown to be false'. While we're at it, let's abolish the BBC for reporting the MoD's inconvenient opinion.

Notice the pattern - the need for war is an unquestionable given; those who pull the rug out from under the war-machine by pointing out the emperor's brazen nudity are committing "treason'. Yet it is the impassioned concern for evidence, and for the well-being of Americans and the world, that motivates Gore's discussions about issues like Pearl Harbour, Timothy McVeigh, and the collapse of the American empire.

Historical Revisionism: From Pearl Harbour to the Lusitania

Here, again, we see Hitchens incapable of even-handedness. On Pearl Harbour, Vidal's remark "Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war!' is a call to question the received wisdom about a historical debate that still continues. His disquiet reflects some of the views of high-ranking officials in Roosevelt's own administration, such as Vice-Admiral Frank E. Beatty, aide to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who wrote in 1954 in US News and World Report:

"Prior to December 7, it was evident even to me... that we were pushing Japan into a corner. I believed that it was the desire of President Roosevelt, and Prime Minister Churchill that we get into the war, as they felt the Allies could not win without us and all our efforts to cause the Germans to declare war on us failed; the conditions we imposed upon Japan - to get out of China, for example - were so severe that we knew that nation could not accept them. We were forcing her so severely that we could have known that she would react toward the United States. All her preparations in a military way - and we knew their over-all import - pointed that way.'

This perspective, we should note, neither contradicts nor fully supports the conclusion that Roosevelt specifically provoked and knew about the attack on Pearl Harbour as such - rather it suggests that Pearl Harbour occurred as a consequence, surprise or not, of US provocation. There is a lesson in this, as in Gore Vidal's wise remark that "In geopolitics as in physics, there is no action without reaction'.

If Gore's scepticism about Pearl Harbour represents a "crackpot' strain, then what do Hitchens's writings about the sinking of the Lusitania in his Blood, Class and Empire (2004) say about him? Hitchens points to how the US sank its own ship, the USS Maine, in Havana as a pretext for the Spanish-American War. This was precedent for Winston Churchill's "pivotal role' in the Lusitania deception, a "psychological warfare' operation that "prepared United States public opinion for a war on the terrain of old Europe' by placing the ship in the line of German fire. He concludes ominously:

"I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill's express permission and approval.'

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Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the 'System Shift' column for VICE's Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East Eye. He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work.

Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New (more...)
 

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Hitchens Has No Clothes: A Response to 'Vidal Loco'

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