Christopher Hitchens Can Teach Our Legal Establishment A Thing Or Two
[posted by Justin Levine]
From Hitchens’ interview in Vanity Fair:
From your story this month, I get the feeling you think extremists such as Abu Hamza, the former Finsbury Park Mosque imam, should not go unnoticed. Would you eavesdrop on suspected extremists in Britain?
You don’t have to eavesdrop on someone who gets up in public and says, “Kill the Jews.”True—
Someone who’s bellowing racism and malice through a megaphone, I don’t need to tap his fucking phone.But you might want to tap the phone of the people who are listening to him.
If the Metropolitan Police are not listening to his phone and the phones of people like him, then they should be impeached and removed from office. I don’t think you’d have much difficulty getting that warrant.
Well said.
Would Vanity Fair have questioned the FBI tapping the phones of Mississippi Klan leaders in 1963? I think they’d have been all for it, and not too concerned about the warrant thing.
Kevin Murphy (0b2493) — 5/11/2007 @ 10:45 pmDidn’t Hitchens join the ACLU suit challenging the NSA wiretaps? The one that was heard by the nutcase in Detroit?
nk (f28d83) — 5/12/2007 @ 3:19 amWhy do so many feel the need to point out CH’s accuracies, limited as they are? Is he the last liberal to cling (conservatively) to his opinion
semanticleo (710d38) — 5/12/2007 @ 8:29 amon Iraq? How does he do that, Glennfiddich, or Remy Martin?
I really don’t get the connection between the title of this post and its content.
Phil (427875) — 5/12/2007 @ 9:03 amNeither do I. On issues around Islamist terrorism, Hitchens has been, I think, consistently sensible. That, on the left, there are so few commentators with a keen eye for the obvious is, all in all, pretty depressing — but I think that makes CH’s common sense all the more important.
That said, if folks want to bash him (metaphorically) for his blind eye toward suborners of Arab terrorism like his late friend, the lying scumbag Edward Said (I do hope I’ll be forgiven for such mild language), that’s fine.
Joel Rosenberg (677e59) — 5/12/2007 @ 9:10 amYou wouldn’t.
Christoph (12b77c) — 5/12/2007 @ 5:53 pmHitchens is not actually very liberal. He just happens to take some liberal stances from time to time, but he’s always struck me as being fairly conservative. I will admit, however, that I have had no use for him since I read his book against Kissinger. He made many valid points against Kissinger, but time and time again the focus of his indictment was not the actual illegality of Kissinger’s actions but the disapproval of said actions by Christopher Hitchens.
And now he’s merely one of a number of conservative writers who prefer to defend the War on Iraq instead of actually fighting the War on Terror.
kishnevi (ba7408) — 5/13/2007 @ 5:37 pmyeah, kishnevi, because radical Imams preaching hatred in London are all about the War in Iraq, and have nothing to do with the Real War on Terror.
Al Maviva (89d0b6) — 5/14/2007 @ 4:24 am