Hitchens echoing my increasing frustration with how we are prosecuting the war on terror:
[ John Walker ] has illuminated the utter unfitness of our police and intelligence chiefs for the supreme power they now wish and propose to award themselves. And he has also accidentally exposed the stupidity and nastiness of the Patriot Act. Consider: With no resources beyond his own evidently rather feeble ones he was able to join the Taliban and become a confidant of the Al Qaeda network; an accomplishment completely beyond the wit or strength of our multibillion-dollar CIA, which possessed no human asset within a thousand miles of anywhere Osama bin Laden happened to be.
Not to mention the free-pass we see to be giving the Saudis:
Consider the following. On September 11, you could not fly and I could not fly. The national airspace was locked down. But twenty-four members of the bin Laden family, living in the United States, were gathered by private jet under the auspices of Prince Bandar Bin-Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington. With what he gratefully describes as the cooperation of the FBI, the Prince mustered all the bin Ladens, who at the first opportunity were taken under FBI escort to Boston’s Logan Airport (departure point for two of the death squads) and then permitted to fly home with no questions asked. I do not think that any question of racial profiling would have been involved if members of the immediate bin Laden tribe had been inconvenienced to the extent of being asked a few questions.
