Christopher Hitchens

In his introduction to his essays, Hitchens honors the memory of martyrs who took their own lives in the service of high principle, in the pursuit of freedom, whether they immolated themselves to make a statement or even committed a suicide bombing, against tyrannical regimes such as Qaddafi of Libya. He then makes a point of contrasting what they did to what the 9/11 terrorists did. It is a striking point to make, and being a devout Orwellian, Hitchens makes it plain that the key divide is whether one is pursuing freedom or totalitarianism, so that you cannot say that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, that it is just a matter of whose side you are on. For Hitchens, the sides are clear.

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Especially over the course of the last ten years, the word “martyr” has been utterly degraded by the wolfish image of Mohammed Atta: a cold and loveless zombie - a suicide murderer - who took as many innocents with him as he could manage. the organizations that find and train men like Atta have since been responsible for unutterable crimes in many countries and societies, from England to Iraq, in their attempt to create a system where the cold and loveless zombie would be the norm, and culture would be dead. They claim that they will win because they love death more than life, and because life-lovers are feeble and corrupt degenerates. Practically every word I have written, since 2001, has been explicitly or implicitly directed at refuting and defeating those hateful, nihilistic propositions, as well as those among us who try to explain them away.

-- Christopher Hitchens, “Arguably”

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War on Terrorism

One of the more bitter controversies in America’s war on terrorism, and which haunts the Obama administration, is the use of drones to kill identified terrorists. At home, there was a lawsuit “to require the Justice Department to disclose a memorandum providing the legal justification for the targeted killing of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who died in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.” A federal judge, Colleen McMahon, ruled against that suit, but she did so with extreme reluctance.


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“I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret. [...] The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me.”

-- Judge Colleen McMahon

(Source: “The Rachel Maddow Show”, February 4, 2013)

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The judge also offered that the legal tangle in which she finds herself is “a veritable Catch-22.”

Daimon says, “War is usually fought in the moral grey-zones, isn’t it? You don’t really want to wait to strike until after every terrorist event, do you? If one can prevent a few terrorist attacks by sacrificing a little moral certainty, is it not worth it?”

Pi says, “Well, I am certainly more willing to trust a President Obama than I am a President George W. Bush or a President Romney, but a policy of secret killings opens up a massive sinkhole for corruption. Who knows where it will end?”

Daimon says, “Aww, don’t you have any faith in the American people and the leaders they choose? in their blessed Constitution?”

Pi smirks, “I worry a little sometimes.”

Scott Adams

Scott Adams did not care for the movie "Les Miserables".

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Daily Fun

1972

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