I haven’t paid much attention to Christopher Hitchens of late because, as prominent born-again wingnuts go, his value to the forces of darkness is much diminished. His latest Slate missive, though, in which he takes after the CIA for destroying the video of interrogations involving the torture of terrorism suspects and participating in the recently released Iran National Intelligence Estimate, really warrants a mention.

Most of the people lamenting the destruction of the tapes are upset because they think it was done to cover up a crime, specifically torture. Not Hitch, though. He’s upset because the tapes represented a golden opportunity to restore America’s image in the eyes of the world, and now they’re gone forever. Yes, that’s right: he apparently believes the video of a mentally ill prisoner being waterboarded would be good for us. Hitchens is a proud contrarian, but this is extreme even for him.

The NIE is a different and more conventional story. Hitchens is still angry with the agency for disavowing his pal Ahmad Chalabi, whose intelligence proved so valuable during the runup to the invasion of Iraq, and besides, his own intelligence network indicates that Iran never did stop pursuing nuclear weapons.

Let’s go to the tape.

At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence. This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason.

“Extreme Interrogation”, coming soon to ESPN 2.

Of course “mutiny” would require that the agency have been ordered by the White House to preserve the videos, which doesn’t seem to have happened. And treason is a pretty specific crime: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” One could argue that the CIA has done just that in the past, with varying degrees of deliberation, but destroying the tapes and forever limiting to the imagination the details of what was done to Abu Zubaydah hardly seems to qualify. Everyone already thinks we’re torturers; if the tapes were to become public, they’d wind up where the Abu Ghraib photos did, on al Qaeda recruiting CDs selling for a buck a pop in bazaars everywhere.

On the matter of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program and the NIE for which the CIA was one of 16 participating U.S. intelligence outfits, Hitchens’ ire is aimed squarely at the word “stopped.” Iran has not stopped the program, he says, merely paused it for for four years and counting. They still want to have a bomb—shades of Saddam!—they’re just not doing anything about it. And you can’t trust anyone who doesn’t trust Chalabi. And the Brits told him … well, he can’t tell us what the Brits told him, but if you only knew.

The briefing that I was given by the British Embassy in Tehran in 2005, showing the howlingly glaring discrepancy between what Iran claims and what Iran does, is not in the least challenged by the most recent conclusions. To say that Iran has “stopped” rather than paused its program is to offer an opinion, not to present a finding.

…

One explanation is that, like Mark Twain’s cat, which having sat on a hot stove would never afterward sit on a cold one, the CIA has adopted a policy of caution to make up for its “slam-dunk” embarrassment over Iraq. This is a superficially plausible hypothesis, which ignores the fact 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. This hostility extended all the way from a frenzied attempt to discredit Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, to the Plame/Wilson imbroglio, and the agency’s “referral” of Robert Novak’s disclosure to the Department of Justice. Interagency hostility in Washington, D.C., between the CIA and the Department of Defense has never been so damaging to any administration, let alone to any administration in time of war, as it has been to this one.

One might think that there’s a conflict between the CIA’s hostility to regime change and the agency’s obligingly inaccurate assessment of Iraq’s banned weapons—there weren’t any, but perhaps the programs were just paused for a decade—but not in HitchWorld, where the only reliable landmark is Chalabi. And one might think too that the agreement on Iran between the analysts at the CIA and the various Department of Defense shops, along with the NSA, the State Department and FTD Florists, would tend to mitigate suspicions of hostility beyond the usual turf issues between the two intelligence power centers. Again, no. And purely as a matter of timing, the outing of Valerie Plame, which resulted in the conviction of Dick Cheney’s top aide on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, occurred after the invasion and hence had little effect on the debate over whether or not to invade.

But Hitch is Hitch, and on he’ll roll, slapping gloss on a pig the size of Manhattan if that’s what it takes.

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