A la recherche du temps perdu

After all his spinning for King George over the last three years (example), Christopher Hitchens finally sees a problem:

If it becomes widely believed that it has been or is being targeted, the consequences in the region will be rather more than Karen Hughes' "public diplomacy" can handle.

But much as his eagerness for the War on Christmas, the apparent indication of dissent has a rather obscure cause -- namely the unresolved issue of whether King George was thinking about bombing al Jazeera headquarters in 2004. Now this is a serious issue, but rather than believe what his own eyes are telling him -- that it's true -- he wants to see the actual secret documents that underlie the claim:

It is high time that this question was ventilated by people other than British editors and journalists who labor under the repressive conditions of the Official Secrets Act.

So what Hitch wants is not the truth, but a cause celebre -- the frisson of illicit documents, and the hyperventilating prose that would follow the assumed crackdown. So not for the first time, Hitch gets dragged out of his reactionary present by the ghosts of Hitch past -- specifically his peripheral role in the 1978 ABC secrets case, when he publicly revealed confidential details about the jury in an Official Secrets Act prosecution, and so became part of the history of the case.

[It's surprisingly difficult to track down information about the case on the Web; here are very selected excerpts from an old Hitch piece in the Nation about his role in it; here's a Guardian article that mentioned it obliquely and then had to run 2 corrections; finally here's a recent Radio 4 program about it, which covers Hitch's role]

As of yet, the investigation of the leak about National Security Agency spying within the USA has not drawn the same response from him, despite the eagerness of his friends at the Wall Street Journal editorial page to defend it.

UPDATE: Useful links on the underlying controversy from Free Stater, the New York Times, and the Guardian. One key detail from the Guardian:

[John] Latham [US contact of the two accused] was appalled. "I thought that President Bush must be in the early stages of paranoia." But it was decided not to write to US newspapers at the time [2004]. It is understood Democrats feared Mr Bush's behaviour, if exposed, might win him votes, rather than lose them.