Hitchens stays Clean In the sober light of day, in that hour in the afternoon between when the head starts throbbing and when Happy Hour begins, Chris Hitchens manages to squeeze out a column. And it being composed in that magic hour before with tremulous fingers on occasion the old Hitchens seeps through. ...but golly, just two weeks ago Sully was feeling so good about Iraq having seen Hitchens. Apparently, somebody told Hitchens all is not sweetness and light. About Abu Ghraib:

It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe ("I'm outraged more by the outrage") have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see. And one linguistic reform is in any case already much overdue. The silly word "abuse" will have to be dropped. No law or treaty forbids "abuse," but many conventions and statutes, including our own and the ones we have urged other nations to sign, do punish torture—which is what we are talking about here at a bare minimum.