Christopher Hitchens: The Case Against Hillary Clinton

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

I'd put Hitchens in the same category as Gaddafi and bin Laden. All three were bloodthirsty thugs who loved torture and mass murder.

Hillary Clinton and Hitchens saw eye to eye on foreign policy IIRC.

["'Oeps!' De blunders van Rick Perry Indicted"]

Isn't he dead? How can he be writing things if he's dead?

He was always very prolific.

[Cory]

Obama governs as a hawk? That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard for quite some time. I think you should have a really hard time trying to find someone who thinks Osama bin Laden or Muammar Gaddafi actually deserved to live. Even Saddam Hussein doesn't come remotely close to the cruelty those two persons embodied. Most Libyans today pretty much consider Gaddafi as the equivalent to Satan. Few people since Hitler has perpetrated more evil than Gaddafi.

Saddam Hussein was much, much worse then either Gaddafi or Bin Laden.

[Mordecai]

Christopher Hitchens was a bloodthirsty monster anyway who supported Bush in 2004 because of his love of warmongering, mass murder and torture, so why should anyone give a [inks] what that dead monster thought?

It's funny you should say that though, given that he then went on to support Obama in 2008.

However, he did speak out against the use of water-boarding and said it was a form of torture.

[eric82oslo]

I guess you don't know much about Gaddafi and his methods then Cory. Neither did I until a couple of days ago when I watched this British documentary. A documentary team had gone to Libya and other places and interviewed people who either had daily contact with or was particularily affected by his regime. They all said the same. He was a completely normal person the first few years after he couped the power from the hands of the previous king (in 1969), even highly respected as people thought/expected him to work for the improvement of life of ordinary Libyans (as he constantly claimed he would). But from the 80ies on he became a tyrant - even against many of his closest friends/those working for him - and he just became more and more insane as the years passed. People interviewed told about the most cruel things he did. Not only did he order the shut down of the famous Pan Am "Lockerbie" plane, killing 100s of civilians, including Americans (it was a retaliation against his hated evil US empire after all). He also placed a bomb inside a civilian Libyan airplane of the same size. When the bomb did not work as intended, he ordered the air force to shoot it down instead. I don't think it became a huge talking point in the West, as most of us must have thought it was just an accident. He just did it to get attention and as a mean to get Western countries to hopefully lift the sanctions from his country/oil export. He also had plans to shoot down even more planes, especially if the sanctions were kept for a longer period. The torture methods/ways of execution he used against his own people, especially political dissidents, are by far the most cruel I've ever heard of in my life. They exceed even the most cruel methods German doctors used during the nazi regime. Gadaffi ordered one dissident to be placed between two cars. Then they would both drive in different directions until the body was torn apart in two. All while he was still alive of course, in order to cause him the most painful death imaginable. He asked for people he didn't like to be decapitated and their heads brought back to him personally. He stored several, probably more than ten, bodies of political enemies, including his own former ministers (a foreign minister included) in freezers in his enormous palace, so that he could take a look at them in satisfaction whenever it pleased him. Needless to say he ordered them all dead. They were still laying there when Libyan rebels occupied his properties after his murder. He went to local schools to pick out young girls he had the desire to rape. He just pointed at some random girl and his bodyguards knew immediately what to do. Many of the girls were later forced to have an abortion and most of them were declared insane and placed in hospitals for mental illnesses. He even had a bedroom at the local university which he used whenever it pleased him. Needless to say what it was for. All of the time he ordered the execution of random people who had for whatever reason not followed his orders 100% of the time and/or executed with 100% perfection. Usually there were small children who had to witness the executions, probably destroyed for life mentally as a result. After executions he would order the bodies crushed into as small pieces as possible - almost to powder if possible - place them in bags and dump them on sea, so noone would ever figure out what atrocities he had committed. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what was revealed during the documentary. The stories of torture were neverending. Even his closest allies hated him with a gut, especially during the latter years/decades. Yet of course they were way too afraid to ever say no to anything he asked them to do. Except for the Lockerbie incident, I think extremely little of this was known to Western leaders at the time. And if they did, at least they pretended to not know much, and repeatedly gave him new chances to reveal his regrets for the Lockerbie incidence. Regrets were not in his mental capacity of course, yet everyone interviewed said he was extremely smart and did whatever it would take to enhance his foreign relations. He thought of black Africans as lower creatures than even animals, yet worked forcefully for years and years in order to become the so-called "King of Africa" - this being a reaction of almost every Arab leader hating him intensely, so his prestige in his beloved Arab world was as non-existant as imaginable. Arab leaders of course started truely hating him after he ordered/asked for the assasination (in 1981) of the former Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, who had negotiated a peace treaty with the 2nd satan (US was the other in Gaddafi's mind), Israel. Throughout his entire political career he kept trying to get a hold on the atomic bomb. And a couple of times he was really close to achieving it. American intelligence stopped him in the very last minute at least one time (when material to make the bomb was being shipped across the Mediterranean Sea). His closest friend was even a German rocket scientist who he hoped would help him make long-range rockets. All in all it's easily the most atrocious documentary I've ever seen. I can simply not fathom how it's possible for a human being to become that evil. Even though I know Hitler existed and he was of course (if possible) even worse/more cruel.

[Cory]

Oh wow that's worse then I thought. Can you give me the name/link to the documentary please?

The thing is Saddam did things like that to. Killing people by putting them feet-first into plastic shredders, security forces smashing a newborn against a wall to make a point, endless torture, ect.

Never mind Uday and Qusay who were even worse (personally, at least).

[Mordecai]

Oh wow that's worse then I thought. Can you give me the name/link to the documentary please?

The thing is Saddam did things like that to. Killing people by putting them feet-first into plastic shredders, security forces smashing a newborn against a wall to make a point, endless torture, ect.

Never mind Uday and Qusay who were even worse (personally, at least).

Hitchens actually had a stump speech on it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUukjX-Nee0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eaEuf5Z6yA

[eric82oslo]

Oh wow that's worse then I thought. Can you give me the name/link to the documentary please?

The thing is Saddam did things like that to. Killing people by putting them feet-first into plastic shredders, security forces smashing a newborn against a wall to make a point, endless torture, ect.

Never mind Uday and Qusay who were even worse (personally, at least).

You can still watch it here (don't know for how long though): http://tv.nrk.no/program/koid21001114/gaddafis-hemmelige-liv

It's called "The Secret Life of Gaddafi" and I see now that it is in fact British.

[Cory]

You can still watch it here (don't know for how long though): http://tv.nrk.no/program/koid21001114/gaddafis-hemmelige-liv

It's called "The Secret Life of Gaddafi" and I see now that it is in fact British.

Thanks.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

If you believe that a leader of a country being evil is enough to justify going to war against them, that is being a hawk.   But actually I think we can say Obama is a little more nuanced than that, even if he's often been more ready to use military force than I would like.

[Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God]

I never cared about Hitchens' pretentious opinions when he was alive.  I don't see why I should care about them now.