Christopher Hitchens on what he refers to as the flaws in Seymour Hersh’s theory that bureaucratic and ‘butt-covering’ obstacles which so stymied the Pentagon’s terrorism-fighting tactics engendered frustration that top-level secret policy to apply ruthless methods resulted:

If I understand Hitchens correctly, he does not want so much to dispute Hersh’s analysis as to use its premises to preen and gloat about what he perceives as a devastating inconsistency in the anti-war left’s stance — that it both wanted to hold the Pentagon to the rules of engagement in the WoT® and hold the Pentagon to human rights standards in the detention and interrogation of prisoners-of-war. Where is the inconsistency? Actually, I am using a bit of the same sophistry here as Hitchens does; the real inconsistency he finds is that the left castigates the administration both for its lack of adherence to standards of humanity and for its lack of alacrity and success in capturing terrorist leaders. And for evidence of this he uses… one snide statement by Michael Moore, whose heart may be in the right place but who is surely a sort of loose cannon. Hitchens comes off simpering, and adds to it when he claims that the discovery of the supposed sarin-containing warhead proves there were WMD in Iraq all along.