ACLU vs NSA

Yesterday's big news concerned the two lawsuits filed by civil rights groups against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program. One of the plaintiffs? Our own friend Christopher Hitchens.

Here's his statement, posted on the ACLU's website:

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.

The irascible contrarian pissed off a lot of leftists because he supports the war in Iraq. What drives his critics bonkers though is their inability to understand that his commitment to fighting Islamo-fascism stems from his opposition to any form of government encroachment on the rights of its citizens.