Christopher Hitchens has a piece on the torturers at Abu Ghraib today, and he does righteous anger as well as anyone. Then he takes on the subject of Ahmed Chalabi and reveals his weaknesses as an analyst:

It’s a change, though, from the authorized smear and jeer of last year, which was that Chalabi was an American puppet.

The problem with Chalabi has never been that he was an American puppet, the problem is that he’s power hungry and dishonest, and that the neocons believed him when he led them to believe that he was an American puppet. He has proven over the years to be perfectly willing to sidle up to anyone who can help hin attain his aspirations, whether it’s out of power Iraq hawks at think tanks, New York Times “journalists,” the government of the United States, the government of Iran, or the Shiite leadership in Iraq. I find it odd that Hitchens would cast his ideological lot with Chalabi.