Mr. Hitchens explains his views on the NSA mess in the Huffington Post (which really, really must need the traffic)

Let me give a very direct instance of what I mean. We have recently learned that the NSA used law enforcement agencies to track members of a pacifist organisation in Baltimore. This is, first of all, an appalling abuse of state power and an unjustified invasion of privacy, uncovered by any definition of "national security" however expansive. It is, no less importantly, a stupid diversion of scarce resources from the real target. It is a certainty that if all the facts were known we would become aware of many more such cases of misconduct and waste.

We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence? The agencies entrusted with our protection have repeatedly been shown, before and after the fall of 2001, to be conspicuous for their incompetence and venality. No serious reform of these institutions has been undertaken or even proposed: Mr George Tenet (whose underlings have generated leaks designed to sabotage the Administration's own policy of regime-change in Iraq, and whose immense and unconstitutionally secret budget could not finance the infiltration of a group which John Walker Lindh could join with ease) was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

I believe the President when he says that this will be a very long war, and insofar as a mere civilian may say so, I consider myself enlisted in it. But this consideration in itself makes it imperative that we not take panic or emergency measures in the short term, and then permit them to become institutionalised. I need hardly add that wire-tapping is only one of the many areas in which this holds true.

Sending our service men and women, the ones who don't fight their war at the bottom of a bottle in the green zone, to die in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at the discretion of the self-same venal incompetents is, of course, not a stupid diversion of scarce resources from the real target. Nor, apparently, is it in any important sense waste.

Calling anyone who disagrees with you a traitor and a supporter of terrorism (both crimes, by the way) is not at all appalling and unjustified, although oddly it seems that the government is not meant to take your word for it and behave with the reckless abandon with which they feel entitled to treat traitors and supporters or terrorism.

Even though you're pretty much OK with that otherwise.

We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence?

Well, this Hitchens guy always says...

Yeah, you're right. No reason at all.