Torturing the CIA

Christopher Hitchens goes after the CIA for reasons beyond the current torture scandal, looking for reasons that the Agency would have been so desperate as to use such means. As usual, incompetence is a better explanation than any conspiracy or consciously evil intent.

This week one of the visitors to this blog commented on my review of Legacy of Ashes. He was of the opinion that the CIA was implicated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I'm sorry, but the reason Kennedy's assassination looks like the work of a lone gunman is that it was the work of a lone gunman. If the CIA - which employed E. Howard Hunt at the time - had been involved, it would have left not fingerprints, but footprints all over the place.

Last July I read a book called Tears of Autumn. (I posted about it in my reading list XIX.) It was an enjoyable read, and its plot revolved around a rather plausible explanation of the Kennedy assassination: it was an act of revenge for the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. It made perfect sense; it was a very plausible story. But it was labelled a novel, a work of fiction. It would be nice if the authors of these conspiracy theories would be honest enough to label their work as fiction, too.