European Holiday Greetings. Money for Nothing.

"And lo it came to pass, the indebted banks of Europe needed to recapitalise and so the Central Banks printed the cash for them.


And there was a great wailing from the people as inflation arrived to take away their bread and wine."

Hat Tip: Telegraph




Eurozone banks have rushed to take out cheap three-year loans offered by the European Central Bank, borrowing 489 billion euros, that is $643 billion.

The central bank had hoped to lend up to 450bn euros to stop another credit crunch crippling the banking system.

When the plan was announced, French President Nicholas Sarkozy said banks could use the money to invest in eurozone sovereign debt.

However, analysts were uncertain if banks will use the money in this way. This video is long but well worth the watch.

Ron Paul on Iran

Please identify which part shows Ron Paul to be wrong.



HAT TIP: AIPAC

The Senate on Dec. 1 voted by a unanimous vote of 100-0 to pass an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would sanction the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), a key facilitator of Iran's nuclear weapons program. The amendment, offered by Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Mark Kirk (R-IL), seeks to dramatically escalate the pressure on Tehran by targeting the CBI, virtually the only Iranian financial institution capable of conducting international financial transactions for the regime. Iran’s ability to sell its crude oil—from which it derives 80 percent of its hard currency—is dependent on transactions through its central bank.

The National Defense Authorization Act also passed the House on Dec. 14 and the Senate on Dec. 15, and now goes to the president for his signature.

Who Do You Believe in The Middle East?

What are the successes of fifty years of US policy in the Middle East? What has been the cost? Who has won and who has lost? How did a foreign power, Israel,  develop so much influence over the US political duopoly? Why has there been unending conflict?

My generation fought a war over a lie and an historic mistake in Viet Nam. We knew that when we fought it.Viet Nam was and is a natural adversary of China. The  Vietnamese know the territory, we don’t. Our interventionist policy failed there and has been failing ever since in the Middle East. Our collaborative ignorance about foreign affaies and the Middle East in particular, has been made apparent by our disastrous  democracy crusade in Afghanistan and Iraq. At this very time, far right wing religious and political parties in Israel are doing their best to further entangle the US with a war with Iran. We are supposed to believe that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon and use it against Israel which has anywhere from 150-300 nuclear weapons, the means to deliver them, and the intelligence and defense system to stop any Iranian attack and destroy Iran in total.

Iran has the means to acquire nuclear weapons and in the long run, we can do littlle to stop it at a price that is acceptable to us and with any benefits to us.

We have a scary Islamic power, Pakistan, that has the technology and the crazies to do the unthinkable. We cannot do much about that except what we are doing and that is letting them know about the certainty of our response to any nuclear attack.  Israel has that same power and strength against any enemy on the planet. The argument of a life and death nuclear struggle between Iran and Israel is just another myth in the land of myths. I for one am sick of their myths and their intrusions into  the internal political affairs of The United States of America.

I have no interest in telling the Israelis what to do about their security problems except that they are their problems. Israel should be cut free of US support and US manipulation in the affairs of Israel. I am sure that there are many Israelis that share my concerns and would welcome such freedom. The Likud being the exception, but even the Likud should welcome such freedom. Currently, you have an Israeli election schedule being manipulated because of concern that Obama will win re-election next year. Why should that be?

Our priority should be the welfare of 315,000,000 Americans, half of them not doing so well. Our priority should be in the Americas. We know how to destroy and punish any enemy that is foolish enough, crazy enough and has the temerity to attack the US. We also should recognize that we have interests and priorities with countries. We do not have friends in countries. It should be obvious that we neither understand the Middle East nor has our foreign policy done us much good. Are we up for another fifty years of such expensive failures?

Who do you listen to? Who do you believe?

In Memoriam, my courageous brother Christopher, 1949-2011

By Peter Hitchens

How odd it is to hear of your own brother’s death on an early morning radio bulletin. How odd it is for a private loss to be a public event.

I wouldn’t normally dream of writing about such a thing here, and I doubt if many people would expect me to. It is made even odder by the fact that I am a minor celebrity myself. And that the, ah, complex relationship between me and my brother has been public property.

I have this morning turned down three invitations to talk on the radio about my brother. I had a powerful feeling that it would be wrong to do so, not immediately explicable but strong enough to persuade me to say a polite ‘no thank you’.


Loss: Peter Hitchens, right, describes his relationship with his late brother Christopher, left, as 'complex' but adds the pair got on better in the last few months than they had in 50 years

And I have spent most of the day so far responding, with regrettable brevity, to the many kind and thoughtful expressions of sympathy that I have received, some from complete strangers.

Many more such messages are arriving as comments here. My thanks for all of them. They are much appreciated not only by me but by my brother’s family.

Much of civilisation rests on the proper response to death, simple unalloyed kindness, the desire to show sympathy for irrecoverable loss, the understanding that a unique and irreplaceable something has been lost to us. If we ceased to care, we wouldn’t be properly human.
So, odd as it would be if this were a wholly private matter, I think it would be strange if I did not post something here, partly to thank the many who have sent their kind wishes and expressed their sympathy, and partly to provide my first raw attempt at a eulogy for my closest living relative, someone who in many ways I have known better – and certainly longer - than anyone else alive.


Brotherly love: Peter, left, and Christopher, right, play in the sand during a holiday in Devon in the fifties


And in Scotland in 1954: Peter says his brother was courageous - a trait to be envious of

It is certainly raw. Last week I saw my brother for the last time in a fairly grim hospital room in Houston, Texas. He was in great pain, and suffering in several other ways I will not describe. But he was wholly conscious and in command of his wits, and able to speak clearly.

We both knew it was the last time we would see each other, though being Englishmen of a certain generation, neither of us would have dreamed of actually saying so. We parted on good terms, though our conversation had been (as had our e-mail correspondence for some months) cautious and confined to subjects that would not easily lead to conflict. In this I think we were a little like chess-players, working out many possible moves in advance, neither of us wanting any more quarrels of any kind.

At one stage – and I am so sad this never happened – he wrote to me saying he hoped for a ‘soft landing’ (code, I think for abandoning any further attempts to combat his disease) and to go home to his beautiful apartment in Washington DC.


Journey: Peter, right, says he is still baffled by how far he and his brother came from 'the small, quiet, shabby world of chilly, sombre rented houses and austere boarding schools'

There, he suggested, we could go through his bookshelves, as there were some books and other possessions he wanted me to have. I couldn’t have cared less about these things, but I had greatly hoped to have that conversation, which would have been a particularly good way of saying farewell.

But alas, it never happened. He never went home and now never will. Never, there it is, that inflexible word that trails close behind that other non-negotiable syllable, death.

Even so, we did what we could in Houston, as the doctors, the nurses, the cleaners, and who knows who else, bustled in and out.
I forgot, till I left, that I was wearing a ludicrous surgical mask and gown, and surgical gloves (I am still not sure whose benefit this was for, but it was obligatory) all the time I was sitting there, and – this is extraordinary – time seemed to me to pass incredibly swiftly in that room. I was shocked when the moment came to leave for the airport, that it had come so soon.


Early days: Christopher stands outside the offices of the New Statesman where he developed a fierce reputation as a left-wing writer in the 1970s


Changing camps: Christopher, right, with former British prime minister Tony Blair in Toronto last year, supported the Iraq war, much to the shock of his left-wing political friends

Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it.
I don’t have much of this myself, so I recognise it (and envy it) in others. I have a memory which I cannot place precisely in time, of the two of us scrambling on a high rooftop, the sort of crazy escapade that boys of our generation still went on, where we should not have been.

A moment came when, unable to climb back over the steep slates, the only way down was to jump over a high gap on to a narrow ledge. I couldn’t do it. He used his own courage (the real thing can always communicate itself to others) to show me, and persuade me, that I could.
I’d add here that he was for a while an enthusiastic rock climber, something I could never do, and something which people who have come to know him recently would not be likely to guess.


Talking heads: Peter, right, wishes to thank the many who have sent their kind wishes and expressed their sympathy for him and his family

He would always rather fight than give way, not for its own sake but because it came naturally to him. Like me, he was small for his age during his entire childhood and I have another memory of him, white-faced, slight and thin as we all were in those more austere times, furious, standing up to some bully or other in the playground of a school we attended at the same time.

This explains plenty. I offer it because the word ‘courage’ is often misused today. People sometimes tell me that I have been ‘courageous’ to say something moderately controversial in a public place. Not a bit of it. This is not courage. Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to.

My brother possessed this virtue to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it. I’ve mentioned here before C.S.Lewis’s statement that courage is the supreme virtue, making all the others possible. It should be praised and celebrated, and is the thing I‘d most wish to remember.
We got on surprisingly well in the past few months, better than for about 50 years as it happens. At such times one tends to remember childhood more clearly than at others, though I have always had a remarkably clear memory of much of mine. I am still baffled by how far we both came, in our different ways, from the small, quiet, shabby world of chilly, sombre rented houses and austere boarding schools, of battered and declining naval seaports, not specially cultured, not book-lined or literary or showy but plain, dutiful and unassuming, we took the courses we did.
Two pieces of verse come to mind, one from Hilaire Belloc’s ’Dedicatory Ode’
‘From quiet homes and first beginnings, out to the undiscovered ends, there’s nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends’
I have always found this passage unexpectedly moving because of something that lies beneath the words, good and largely true though they are. When I hear it, I see in my mind’s eye a narrow, half-lit entrance hall with a slowly-ticking clock in it, and a half-open door beyond which somebody is waiting for news of a child who long ago left home.

And T.S.Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ (one of the Four Quartets)

‘We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time’

These words I love because I have found them to be increasingly and powerfully true. In my beginning, as Eliot wrote elsewhere in the Quartets, is my end.
Alpha et Omega.

Last Uniformed US Combat Troops Leave Iraq

Here is an early look at the mentality and emotions that got us into Iraq:




On May 23, 2003 when I heard it announced that Paul Bremer issued "Order Number 2" firing the entire former Iraqi army, I asked a friend, “What are 400,000 former Iraqi soldiers out of work, with guns and without paychecks going to do in a country with 40% unemployment?"

We soon found out. Here we are ten years later; deeply in debt, our own army bloodied and tens of thousands of decent Americans with lives wrecked by injuries, mostly caused by IEDs. These IEDs were artillery shells, abandoned when unpaid Iraqi soldiers left their bases. Many of these ex and unpaid Iraqi soldiers became the insurgents against a bone-headed foreign invader.

Today, L. Paul Bremer, with a nice fat safe government pension is oil painting New England landscapes. Here is the level of his artistic talent not quite to the same standards as his tour of duty as “Viceroy of Iraq."

Prior political announcements about the Iraqi threat to the US:

Hat Tip: The Green Hornet

“if you give Falwell an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox”. Hitchens on Jerry Falwell

Christopher Hitchens: 'I wish I'd done more of everything'

The controversial author was a brilliant but challenging conversationalist, as Telegraph writer Mick Brown discovered earlier this year.

Hitchens in 2005: the publication of his book 'God is not Great’ brought him to the attention of a much wider public  Photo: CHARLIE HOPKINSON

By Mick Brown

8:31PM GMT 16 Dec 2011

24 Comments

When I interviewed Christopher Hitchens at his home in Washington in February, the discussion – sadly, inevitably – turned to the subject of mortality. He and a friend, he said, contemplating their demise, had mused that there would come a day when the newspapers would come out and they wouldn’t be there to read them. “And on that day, I’ve realised recently,” he went on, “I’ll probably be in the newspapers, or quite a lot of them. And etiquette being what it is, generally speaking, rather nice things being said about me.” He shrugged. “Just typical that will be the edition I miss.”

As a journalist, polemicist, author and indefatigable man of letters, Hitchens devoured the written word as much as he exulted in it, and he would be enjoying the obituaries and tributes in today’s newspapers, dwelling on his fiercely brilliant intellect, the grace and elegance of his language, his combative nature and his raffish charm. Hitchens took a characteristically robust approach to eulogy and remembrance. He could be generous in his praise – he once lionised Professor Freddy Ayer as “a tireless and justly celebrated fornicator”; but brutal in his condemnation: within hours of the televangelist Jerry Falwell’s passing, Hitchens was fixing him as an “ugly little charlatan”, adding that “if you give Falwell an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox”.

In a career spanning more than 40 years, Hitchens had a view on pretty much every subject under the sun, from the war in Iraq to the pleasures of oral sex. And it is odd to reflect that he should have achieved his greatest recognition and notoriety in the last years of his life for his contempt for religious belief and, more melancholically, for the courageous manner in which he faced up to his illness and impending death. Until the publication in 2007 of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens had been, in the words of a late friend, the author Susan Sontag, “a sovereign figure in the small world of those who tilled the field of ideas” – but largely unknown outside it.

God Is Not Great changed all, making him a champion of the New Atheism, alongside such celebrated non-believers as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, the American neuroscientist. His growing public status as God’s fiercest critic would lend a particular poignancy to his struggle with the cancer of the oesophagus that would take his life.

When I met Hitchens, he was in the midst of the genome sequencing treatment which, it was hoped, would cure his cancer. The plan had been to film a conversation to be shown at the Hay Festival, where he was a perennial favourite, but which he was too ill to attend. He greeted me at the door of his apartment with profuse apologies. He felt terrible, he said, and not up to being interviewed on camera. I took that as my cue to leave, but he insisted that I stay.

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Over the next five hours – and still more the following day – fortified by cups of tea and glasses of whiskey, he held forth on everything, from politics to literature, to Bob Dylan and “the Bhagwan” Rajneesh. He was gossipy, indiscreet and scabrously funny about his enemies (step forward Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton). It was one of the most entertaining – and challenging – conversations I have ever had the privilege to enjoy. Even on the doorstep of death, he was a colossal force for life. I have not met anybody with such a well-furnished mind – nor such a well-stocked drinks cabinet: he had a prodigious appetite for alcohol, and a happy facility for being able to function under the influence, if not always in the aftermath. Large sections of his memoir Hitch-22 describe him staggering from one hangover to the next.

He also, famously, enjoyed a fight. He was passionate about intellectual freedom and contemptuous of any orthodoxy or ''ism’’. He was often described as a contrarian – a description he disowned; he was disputatious, but never, it seemed, for the sake of it. His opinions were always drawn from a deep well of conviction – although you sensed that the more people scandalised by those opinions, the greater the pleasure he took in holding them. He was an equal opportunity provocateur.

He was also enormously charming and likeable. It seems striking that many of his adversaries in his public debates on religion should have ended up as his friends. Among them was Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian, and the former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which pioneered the treatment Hitchens was receiving. (I wasn’t sure, I said to Hitchens, whether that constituted irony. “Take your time…,” he replied equably.)

Any suggestion that his illness might have occasioned second thoughts about the existence of God – either as a dispenser of divine justice or of infinite mercy – was met with short shrift. If such a thing were to happen, he said, it would be because his illness had rendered him demented. He seemed discomfited by the fact that his illness had become a battleground on which the forces of belief and non-belief had come to wage war: well-meaning Christians praying for him, and doubters who had come to see him as some kind of champion of non-belief in extremis. “That makes me a bit alarmed,” he confessed, “to be the repository of other people’s hope.”

His attitude to people praying for him could be described as a mixture of polite gratitude and a determined refusal to let it sway his opinions. But he had no patience for bedside evangelists. “They’re allowed to roam the wards,” he said, his voice rising in indignation. “They tried it on me.” He had been thinking that he, Dawkins and Harris might set up a secular equivalent of hospital visitors. “We’d go round – 'Hope you don’t mind, you said you were Catholic? Only three weeks to live? Well, listen, you don’t have to live them as a mental slave, you know; you could have three weeks of freedom from fear of the priest. Don’t be a mug all your life…’. I don’t think it would be considered in very good taste.”

I said that I didn’t think it would be a kindness, either.

“I think it would,” he replied. “Absolutely.”

He could marshal every rational argument against religious belief and deliver it with a lethal mixture of irony and venom, but what he lacked in this regard at least was empathy. When it came to any discussion about the consolations or the empowering strengths of belief, as Hitchens admitted, he simply didn’t ''get it’’.

When I asked whether he felt he’d been a good person, he gave a dismissive shrug: “Not particularly.” For that definition to apply, he said, the world expects a good deal of selflessness. “And while no one scores very high on that, I score lower than most.” He had seen his adult life partly as a sustained act of compensation or redress for the boredom and limitations of his stiflingly conventional, middle-class childhood.

So what, I asked, did he wish he’d done more of?

He laughed. “Everything…”

At the end of our second meeting, I felt the urge to tell him that such was his fighting spirit I was sure that he would win this most critical of battles.

“It’s funny you say so,” he said. “I hope you’re a person of hidden intuition. I actually don’t feel that. I can’t tell you why. It’s almost as hard for me to imagine being around in the next 10 years as not being, strangely enough. But it’s not in my hands, fortunately.”

A few weeks later I sent an email, saying what a privilege it had been to spend time with him, and expressing my hope that things were looking up.

“No need to say anything,” he wrote back. “Have had a vile time since, but still hope for a re-match.” I feel immensely sad that it’s not to be.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO 'THE HITCH'

On why women aren’t funny

Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: “He’s really quite cute, and he’s kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he’s so funny…” However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: “She’s a real honey, has a life of her own… (interlude for attributes that are none of your business)… and, man, does she ever make ’em laugh.”

Now, why is this? Why are men, taken as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one outside chance. He had better be able to make the lady laugh.

Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter – I am talking about that out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight – well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further.

On wine waiters

There are two main ways in which a restaurant can inflict bad service on a customer. The first is to keep you hanging about. (“Why are they called waiters?” inquired my son when he was about five. “It’s we who are doing all the waiting.”)

The second way is to be too intrusive, with overlong recitations of the “specials” and too many over-solicitous inquiries. A cartoon in The New Yorker once showed a couple getting ready for bed, with the husband taking a call and keeping his hand over the receiver. “It’s the maître d’ from the place we had dinner. He wants to know if everything is still all right.”

The vile practice of butting in and pouring wine without being asked is the very height of the second kind of bad manners. Not only is it a breathtaking act of rudeness, but it conveys a none-too-subtle message: hurry up and order another bottle.

On the burka

The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burka – whether the garment covers “only” the face or the entire female body – are often described as seeking to impose a “ban”. To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and – no less important – equal in the face of one another.

On the door of my bank in Washington, DC is a printed notice politely requesting me to remove any form of facial concealment before I enter the premises. The notice doesn’t bore me or weary me by explaining its reasoning. A person barging through those doors with any sort of mask would incur the right and proper presumption of guilt.

This presumption should operate in the rest of society. I would indignantly refuse to have any dealings with a nurse or doctor or teacher who hid his or her face, let alone a tax inspector or customs official.

The particular demand to consider the veil and the burka as an exemption applies only to women. And it also applies only to religious practice (and, unless we foolishly pretend otherwise, only to one religious practice). This at once tells you all you need to know. Society is being asked to abandon an immemorial tradition of equality and openness in order to gratify one faith, one faith that has a very questionable record in respect of females.

On the Bible

Until the early middle years of the 16th century, when King Henry VIII began to quarrel with Rome about the dialectics of divorce and decapitation, a short and swift route to torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It’s a long and stirring story, and its crux is the head-to-head battle between Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale (whose name in early life, I am proud to say, was William Hychyns).

For generations, [the Bible] provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivalled only by Shakespeare. A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,” says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve on that for Twitter?

At my father’s funeral I chose to read an injunction from St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” As much philosophical as spiritual, with its conditional and speculative “ifs”, and its closing advice – always italicised in my mind since first I heard it – to think and reflect on such matters: this passage was the labour of men who had wrought deeply with ideas and concepts.

On the last Harry Potter book

For some time now the novels have been attempting a kind of secular dramatisation of the battle between good and evil. The Ministry of Magic (one of Rowling’s better inventions) has been seeking to impose a version of the Nuremberg Laws on England, classifying its subjects according to blood and maintaining its own Gestapo as well as its own Azkaban gulag.

But over time and over many, many pages, this scenario fails to chill. The prejudice against bank-monopoly gobwwlins is modelled more or less on anti-Semitism, and the foul treatment of elves is meant to put us in mind of slavery, but the overall effect of this is somewhat thin and derivative, and subject to diminishing returns.

Christopher Hitchens Enjoying Himself

The Missing Fast and Furious E-mails

The Department of Justice continues to conceal documents.

“Withholder General of the United States"

There was a time when opposing generals met before a battle. They’d exchange terms and gentlemanly propriety before trying to kill one another.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) might have fit into that age. He purposefully strode across a crowded House Judiciary Committee hearing room Thursday morning and held his hand out to Attorney General Eric Holder. The attorney general flinched when he noticed Issa suddenly so close before looking submissively down at the room’s blue carpet as he quickly took then let go of Issa’s hand.

Representative Issa walked back to the second row of two benches where committee members were taking their seats. Hours would pass before Issa would get his five minutes with Holder, but it was worth the wait.

Behind the seated congressmen and along the walls of the room congressional staffers — some of whom had nicknamed Holder “Withholder General” — were waiting to play their parts in the coming battle.

Issa, who also chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has been leading the congressional charge to find out who authorized Operation Fast and Furious, a secret ATF program in which the Obama administration allowed guns to “walk” into Mexico and into the arsenals of Mexican drug cartels. He has complained of being lied to by the Obama administration. He and Sen. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) have had to warn Obama administration officials not to retaliate against whistleblowers. And Issa has pointed out that many of the documents he’s received from the U.S. Department of Justice are so blacked out with redactions that personnel must have had to refill printer ink cartridges constantly to erase all the evidence.

Issa has a right to be incensed. Incredibly, just last week, the Obama administration even had to formally withdraw a letter it sent to Congress last February that falsely claimed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) didn’t watch guns “walk” into Mexico.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R., Wis.) brought up this withdrawn document.

Holder said, “First let me make something very clear, in response to an assertion you made, or hinted at: Nobody in the Justice Department has lied.”

Sensenbrenner demanded, “Then why was the letter withdrawn?”

Holder answered, “The letter was withdrawn because there was information in there that was inaccurate.”

So Sensenbrenner asked, “Tell me what the difference is between lying and misleading Congress in this context.”

Holder replied, “If you want to have this legal conversation, it all has to do with your state of mind, and whether or not you had the requisite intent to come up with something that can be considered perjury or a lie.”

Despite the legal basis for his statement, the idea that the truth depends on your “state of mind” sounded so much like Pres. Bill Clinton’s semantics with the word “is” that the spectators — who sat quietly under the watchful eyes of United States Capitol Police — laughed.

As Issa sat waiting his turn, Rep. Dan Lungren (R., Calif.) wanted to know who authorized Operation Fast and Furious.

Holder said, “People in the criminal division of the Justice Department were aware of Fast and Furious. Who did it and who knows about it is being investigated by the inspector general.”

Lungren pressed further by saying, “You’re responsible for what these folks did. After all this time we still don’t know who . . . made the decisions.” Lungren then brought up a recent CBS report that covered an e-mail sent on July 14, 2010. After the operation, former ATF field operations assistant director Mark Chait e-mailed Bill Newell, then ATF’s Phoenix special agent in charge of Fast and Furious, to suggest a possible way to use Fast and Furious:

Bill — can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.

This “demand letter” refers to the push for a policy that would require U.S. gun shops in southwestern states to report the sale of several rifles or shotguns to a single buyer. According to CBS, “Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.”

Lungren pointed out that the Obama administration was attempting to use “this program as an excuse to broaden their control.”

Holder replied, “You’re taking that out of context.”

Lungren said, “No, we are not.”

Later in the exchange, Lungren asked, “The Justice Department creates the situation where thousands of weapons go south and use that as an excuse to have more gun-control regulations? You ought not to use your screw-up as a basis to expand your authority. Don’t use it as an excuse to expand your legislative agenda.”

All that was the preliminary bombardment before Issa’s planned assault. After hours of waiting, Issa leaned forward to speak into his microphone and began in part by asking,

“Do I need to serve a subpoena on you . . . or will you come before my committee?”

After several exchanges, Holder said, “I will consider it.”

Meanwhile Issa’s staff had stacked boxes of papers on either side of the congressman. Issa later used them as a prop for a question: “Does it surprise you that five boxes are what one gun dealer gave us voluntarily while this is all you gave us?” Issa held up and shook a few files before continuing, “Do you have documents . . . that have not yet been granted?”

Holder didn’t answer the question; meanwhile, Issa focused his attack with the tone of voice a prosecutor might use with a hostile witness. “Don’t you think it is a little conspicuous that there is not one e-mail from or to you on Fast and Furious? . . . Isn’t it true that executive privilege does not include you?”

Holder answered, “We have not withheld any documents that are responsive. We have withheld information about ongoing investigations.”

Issa said, “That’s how John Mitchell responded.”

John Mitchell was attorney general under President Richard Nixon, and was found guilty of charges related to the Watergate break-in. He was sentenced to 19 months in prison.

Holder turned to Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith and said, “The reference to John Mitchell, let’s think about that. At some point, you know, as they said at the McCarthy hearings,” then he looked back at Issa he finished, “Have you no shame?”

Issa lashed back, “Have you no shame?”

During their verbal battle Issa accused Holder of being in “contempt” for refusing to turn over documents.

Holder replied, “We will respond in a way that is consistent with the way in which the Justice Department has always responded to those kinds of requests.”

Issa’s explosive five minutes were interrupted several times by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D., Texas). She wanted Issa to give Holder more time to answer, but Issa said, “I only get five minutes,” and he’s “filibustering.” Finally Chairman Smith, had to tell Jackson-Lee she had not been recognized.

Though Issa’s time quickly ended, Holder’s e-mails were still the focus of the Republican member’s attention.

Later, Holder was asked if he authorized the IG investigation into Operation Fast and Furious. He said, “I was in fact the person who asked the IG to investigate, but I didn’t put anything in writing. I have a good relationship with the IG. I don’t think there’s any writing from me, but I can check.”

That was too cute.

Rep. Trent Franks (R., Ariz.) focused on the e-mails: “Mr. Issa mentioned some internal e-mails that I think are pretty important.”

Holder acknowledged during the hearing that he has an official e-mail address and a private one, but he wouldn’t say how often he uses these accounts. He also said he had not seen e-mails that were printed in a CBS report that argued new gun-control regulations might have been the reason for Operation Fast and Furious.

Moments later Franks said he understood that Holder doesn’t read all the memos his staff sends to his desk, and Holder seemed to agree with this. Then Franks asked, “Do you read letters from Grassley and Issa?”

After a pause, Holder said, “I think it’s fair to say over the last few months I’ve read all of Issa’s and Grassley’s letters.”

This also drew a laugh from the spectators, but it was really a set-up.

Representative Franks next said, “Mr. Holder, these e-mails were attached to one of those letters.”

Holder tossed his head and replied that he “doesn’t always read attachments.”

The next congressman to continue the push for Holder’s e-mails was Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah): “Have you spoken with [Secretary of Homeland Security Janet] Napolitano, [Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton, [President Barack] Obama, the president of Mexico . . . about Operation Fast and Furious?”

Holder indicated he hadn’t.

Chaffetz said, “We have 50 members of Congress calling for your resignation . . . you took five days to go to the Caribbean, and you didn’t take five minutes to talk to Hillary or Napolitano?”

Holder responded that his staff has been in touch with them.

Chaffetz then asked about a joint task force Holder has with Napolitano and added, “Yet you never talked about Fast and Furious?”

Holder responded in part by saying, “Let me tell you how Washington works, okay . . . ” This drew another laugh.

In the end this seven-hour hearing — interrupted twice for congressmen to run to the floor for votes — didn’t have any smashing developments. A government-created gunrunning operation that has already gotten at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent killed and that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans was exposed nearly a year ago.

The investigation into who authorized it has been going since at least late last spring, yet no one has been fired or jailed. Now the attorney general gives the unmistakable impression of obfuscating and hiding his own involvement (his e-mails) behind the cloak of an inspector general’s investigation. Somehow it doesn’t now seem hyperbolic to compare Holder’s withheld e-mails to the tapes President Nixon famously kept.

— Frank Miniter is the author of The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide, and, more recently, Saving the Bill of Rights.