We’re a fractious people, always have been, and our politics have been especially colorful. I’m a nearly lifelong fan of John C. Calhoun’s line about Henry Clay: “Like a mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks …”. Our political candidates have been mocked for their love affairs, their wooden legs, their false teeth, and their drinking habits. It’s not elegant, but rude, insulting talk is one of the products of free speech.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that free speech around the world is still a rarity, and seems to be becoming even rarer. Lots of countries have the death penalty and other violent punishments for “insulting the state” or “the leader.” In religious states, such talk is branded blasphemy; in all too many secular states, unrestrained criticism of favored groups falls under the arbitrary classification of “hate speech” and is suppressed.

Citizens and subjects of such places are not at all like Americans; they learn habits of mind and mouth that are quite different from ours. They learn to be silent about any subject that could arouse the displeasure of the thought police, and they learn to speak in code, using words to mean things very different from their dictionary meanings. If they are unhappy with their lot or see ways things could be improved, they don’t dare reveal their true feelings openly and explicitly.

That means they can’t think their way to new ideas, because creativity requires trial and error; it needs open criticism, it relishes the destruction of bad ideas.

Free societies are so much more productive and creative than the others in large part because of open debate, just as scientific discovery demands testing all manner of hypotheses. Once you lose the habits of the free mind, it extends to all areas of endeavor. Stifling free speech crushes creativity in all areas of life. And once the censors get their teeth into us, there’s no stopping them.

In my youth, there was a fine cartoon which showed two nasty-looking men outside a movie theater with “CLOSED” on the marquee (I think it was Lady Chatterly’s Lover), and one said to the other: “You know, I enjoyed censoring the movie so much, I think I’ll go censor the book.”

There’s no stopping them. So it’s always urgent to fight the censors, and to embrace free speech, rudeness and all.

That’s not happening nearly enough. Have a look at a few recent cases here at home, and then at a frightening event overseas:

● Four students in Oxnard, California were reportedly suspended for chanting “USA! USA!” at an athletic event. The school superintendent, incoherently, said that he was trying to advance the concept of “cultural proficiency,” whatever that means. The kids are back in school, but the matter is still open. They and their cohorts had better watch their language.

● Apparently, it’s very dangerous to criticize a judge in Indiana.

● If you’re criticizing the president, you’d better not … drink water or something. If you do, your ideas won’t get reported. Only your thirst will make headlines. You don’t think that’s censorship? I do.

● Segue to Denmark, where the estimable journalist, editor, and free speech advocate Lars Hedegaard answered his doorbell when he saw a mailman there, only to have the guy draw a gun and shoot at his head. Blessedly, the would-be assassin missed, Hedegaard swung at him, and the guy ran off.

We can all be thankful that the killer missed, but Lars is now “under protection,” in the usual undisclosed secure location, surrounded by men and women with guns of their own. This may reassure you, but in practice it’s another form of restriction of free speech. Like Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Geert Wilders, and others before him, Hedegaard is so well-protected that he no longer appears in public (not even on TV). He’s been taken out of the public square; the censors have thereby won at least a partial victory.

Not so long ago, when President Obama reluctantly permitted American military power to be used in the Libyan insurrection against Muammar Gaddafi, it was said that he did so when three forceful women convinced him it was a moral imperative.  The three — Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice — were dubbed “the Valkyries,” and the “doctrine” they were credited with presenting to the president was “responsibility to protect” (RtoP, as it is called in the United Nations) or “humanitarian intervention” on behalf of innocents facing slaughter from their own rulers.

We were told that, henceforth, Obama and his warrior women would not tolerate large-scale bloodbaths directed by tyrants against civilian populations.  No more Cambodias.  No more Rwandas.  No more Bosnias.

Quite aside from whether or not this was good strategic policy, pundits noted the “man bites dog” aspect of the story.  Strong women had imposed their will on the president and his male advisers (all of whom were opposed).  Thus Maureen Dowd, for example:

We’ve come a long way from feminist international relations theory two decades ago that indulged in stereotypes about aggression being “male” and conciliation being “female.” And from the days of Helen Caldicott, the Australian pediatrician and nuclear-freeze activist who disapprovingly noted the “psychosexual overtones” of military terminology such as “missile erector” and “thrust-to-weight ratio.” Caldicott wrote in her book “Missile Envy:” “I recently watched a filmed launching of an MX missile. It rose slowly out of the ground, surrounded by smoke and flames and elongated into the air — it was indeed a very sexual sight, and when armed with the ten warheads it will explode with the most almighty orgasm.”

To be sure, the Valkyries of Norse myth didn’t save innocents; their main tasks were to decide which fighters survived the battle, and then rescue the spirits of the bravest slain warriors and accompany them to Valhalla, whence they would rise to fight again alongside Odin in the final battle against the forces of evil.  But never mind the technicalities; they were armed and armored, and they were battle maidens, just like Obama’s Furies.

Not only had the American Valkyries imposed their will on Gaddafi, they had also squeezed a doctrine out of a president who had previously dithered his way through the earlier Iranian and Arab uprisings.  Or so it was said, by admirers and critics alike.

A week ago, something went seriously wrong in the underground tunnels beneath the Iranian nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz.  I don’t know if it was an explosion, on-site sabotage, an accident, or a cyber attack, but eight people were killed, and several others are being treated for irradiation.  The tunnel leading to the damaged sector has been walled off.  And another disaster, several days earlier, took place at the heavy-water facility at Arak, whose existence has been public knowledge since the mid-nineties.

Along with the explosion in a gas line leading to a new, secret, nuclear facility in a mountain near Fordow, this makes three setbacks to the Iranian regime’s nuclear program.  Maybe their feng chui has gone negative in anticipation  of the oft-dreaded Year of the Serpent, but whatever the explanation–no doubt the supreme leader sees the omnipresent satanic activity of the Jews hard at work–things are not going swimmingly for the terror masters in Tehran.

And that’s not counting the ongoing crash of the currency, the inflation, the many strikes throughout the country, the Hobbesian war of all against all among the ruling class, dramatic signs of technical incompetence such as a new oil rig that sank unceremoniously beneath the waters of the Persian Gulf, and the mounting death toll of Iranian killers on the Syrian battlefields.

Take President Ahmadinejad, for example.  As he flew off to Cairo for what he hoped would be a triumphant performance in the Egyptian capital, his close ally Saeed Mortazavi, the former chief prosecutor responsible for thousands of brutal arrests, torture, and executions, was arrested and thrown into Evin prison in Tehran.  That this was a slap at Ahmadinejad rather than a serious move against Mortazavi was demonstrated by his release within 48 hours.  Many of the adepts who analyze Iranian runes and tea leaves saw this in the context of the public screaming match between the president and the Larijani brothers who currently head Parliament, the Judiciary and the “human  rights” bureaucracy, which is true in part, but there are many warring factions within the thin veneer of the fabulously wealthy, powerful and corrupt ruling elite.  These include the Revolutionary Guards Corps, with their military, intelligence and economic domains, the Khamenei mafia–notably the supreme leader’s son Mojtaba and their chief henchman Ali Akbar Velayati–and their allies, the “hard liners,” mostly in the clergy, who want an even more violent crackdown on what’s left of public opposition to the excesses of the regime, and the bazaaris, suffering mightily under the combination of Western sanctions and the RG’s iron grip on valuable foreign trade in everything from medicine to food.

Ahmadinejad is on his way out (presidential elections are slated for June, and he can’t run again), and knows that his enemies will not be kind and gentle once he leaves office, so he’s using his final months to damage as many of them as he can.  He can’t attack Khamenei directly (capital punishment awaits even a president for such blasphemy), so he goes after the leader’s factotums, such as the Larijanis, whom Ahmadinejad publicly accused of corruption in recent days.  Hence the suspicion that the Mortazavi arrest was ordered by one of them.  Meanwhile, the Cairo trip was highlighted by a tongue lashing from the top Egyptian cleric, and two thwarted physical attacks, apparently enraged by Iranian support for the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad.  Just a couple of years ago, Ahmadinejad was lionized by islamists throughout the Middle East;  now he is at least equally an object of scorn.  Some Egyptian even launched a shoe at the Iranian president shortly after his arrival.

Here comes Ross Douthat, trying to sort out Obama’s foreign policy.  He’s got the right idea: watch the actions, add them up, toss with just enough realism-speak, and voila!  An Obama Doctrine.

Douthat rightly, I think, starts by saying that the Hagel and Brennan nominations to head the Pentagon and the CIA are good starting points for analysis, because they represent what he intends to do.  And he’s got the major themes right, too:

Like the once-hawkish Hagel, Obama has largely rejected Bush’s strategic vision of America as the agent of a sweeping transformation of the Middle East, and retreated from the military commitments that this revolutionary vision required. And with this retreat has come a willingness to make substantial cuts in the Pentagon’s budget — cuts that Hagel will be expected to oversee.

But the Brennan nomination crystallizes the ways in which Obama has also cemented and expanded the Bush approach to counterterrorism. Yes, waterboarding is no longer with us, but in its place we have a far-flung drone campaign — overseen and defended by Brennan — that deals death, even to American citizens, on the say-so of the president and a secret administration “nominations” process…

To the extent that it’s possible to define an “Obama Doctrine,” then, it’s basically the Hagel-Brennan two-step. Fewer boots on the ground, but lots of drones in the air. Assassination, yes; nation-building, no. An imperial presidency with a less-imperial global footprint.

I don’t think this rises to the level of a strategy, let alone a doctrine. It’s all about tactics.  It lacks a mission statement.  What is Obama trying to accomplish?  When and how will we know we’ve won or lost?  And what is “imperial” about it?  Are assassins “imperialists”?

Douthat seems to recognize this when he talks about Obama’s retreat from Bush’s “revolutionary vision.”  A president in full retreat from those challenging America, and killing Americans and our friends and allies wherever they can, is hardly an imperialist, whatever his shoe size.  Indeed, the president’s increasingly embarrassing insistence on cutting some sort of deal with the biggest and most aggressive American enemy — the Iranian regime that arms, trains, and supports most all of the killers — suggests that “appeasement” is a better description.

And yet, as Douthat (and Obama) would hasten to object, we’re killing a lot of al-Qaeda Arabs, aren’t we?  And we certainly didn’t appease Osama bin Laden, did we?  And Camp Gitmo is still producing obese terrorists, isn’t it?

True.  These are the Bush tactics, carried forward by Obama.  And the lack of strategic vision is also a carryover from the Bush years.  The Bush Doctrine was enunciated early after 9/11:  to wage war against the terrorist organizations that were targeting us, and against the states that supported them.  That was the original rationale for going after Saddam, and the foundation for the campaign against the “Axis of Evil,” explicitly including Iran, Iraq and North Korea.  But the Bush Doctrine was only fulfilled twice.  It began and ended with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Long before Obama, the United States was seeking deals with Iran and North Korea, and embracing Syria as a friendly.

So Douthat’s claim that Obama has abandoned the “revolutionary” Bush policy is overstated;  Obama is carrying on both the Bush tactics (from drones to vigorous interrogations to military tribunals) and the failed, post-revolutionary Bush strategery, as crafted by Colin Powell, Stephen Hadley, Condi Rice, and Richard Armitage.

To be sure, there is one big difference:  where Bush seemed inclined to keep a meaningful number of fighting men and women on the ground in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama sounded the retreat.  That’s a big difference, and its consequences are much more significant than a smaller footprint in the region.  Just ask our friends and allies in the Middle East.  As Tony Badran writes, all our non-Israeli allies are Sunnis, and they see an Obama policy that seems consistently anti-Sunni.  Take the Saudis, for example.  They keep asking why the United States doesn’t support the Syrian opposition (contrary to what you read in the popular press, we have done next to nothing to help Assad’s enemies).  And they ask why Obama is so acquiescent to Iraq’s top dog, Maliki, who supports Assad and enables Iranian assistance to the besieged tyrant in Damascus.

John Mackey, the feisty CEO of Whole Foods, says Obamacare is “fascist economics” and he regrets having said it, even though he insists — correctly — that it’s a textbook case of Mussolini-style corporate statism.  Private property continues to exist, but the state controls all business.  That’s why the fascists called their totalitarian system a “third way” between unbridled capitalism and Soviet-style Communism.

Back in the twenties and early thirties, before German National Socialism became the archetypal “fascist” doctrine, Mussolini’s call for a new kind of national economy intrigued many serious thinkers and leaders, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Mr. Mackey was also right to regret using the term “fascist,” because it invokes so many passions and stereotypes that it hinders, rather than advances, understanding. But “fascism” was a very successful mass movement in Western Europe for an entire generation, and it flourishes in many countries today.  It behooves us to understand why it was so popular, and how most of our politics differ from it.  We have fascist economics, but certainly not fascist politics or foreign policy in America today, even though there are echoes of  it every so often.

There are many varieties of fascism, but the principal elements are:

• A single party dictatorship, headed by a charismatic leader.
• A politics of enthusiasm, involving the masses in ritual public celebration, and direct exchanges between the leader and his followers en masse.
• Hypernationalism, or, in the Nazi case, racism, based on the claim that the nation or race is unique, superior, and entitled to play a major role in world affairs.
• The aforementioned “corporate state” in which private property is legitimate, but the state dictates its proper use.

Fascism was created by the generation that fought, and died in historically unprecedented numbers, in the First World War.  It was very much a war ideology:  the post-war world, they insisted, must not be governed by the effete and corrupt ruling classes of the past, but by those who had demonstrated courage and virtue in the trenches.  The elevation of war heroes to national  leadership was seen as a guarantee that future generations would be shaped by the best the nation (or, in the case of the Third Reich, the race) could offer, and they vowed to fight, and destroy, those who had opposed the war, and sapped the nation’s virility thereafter.

As they extended their control over their countries, the fascists bragged of having created a new polity, a totalitarian state that controlled everything and everybody.  Fascists’ heroic virtues were incarnated in a charismatic leader.  Mussolini’s mass appeal was remarkable — you can see it in the monster crowds that gathered under his balcony in Piazza Venezia — as was Hitler’s, and that of others, from Romania to Spain (the charismatic leader there was not Franco, but Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange).  It was common to speak of such leaders as “men of destiny,” world-historical individuals who had imposed their will on history and would reshape the world.

You know all this, of course, because you’ve been reading these blogs all along.  But as my mother used to tell me with her charming smile and melodious voice, repetition is the basis of all learning.

It is no doubt true, as so many wonks intone over and over, that we are targeted by lots of “non-state actors.”  But those “actors,” gangs like al Qaeda, Hezbolah, Islamic Jihad, and Jammaah this-or-that, are state-supported.

My old boss, Alexander Haig, used to growl, “we have to go to the source,” by which he meant the Soviet Union.  And whenever he said it, there were pious cries of “but NO!”  from the usual quarters, such as Foggy Bottom and Langley-on-the-Potomac.  They insisted that we did not “know” that the Kremlin was in any way “behind” terrorist groups, and when it was pointed out that the PLO actually trained IN the Soviet Union, they responded by denying it was a terrorist organization.  They redefined it as a “national liberation front.”

Turns out Haig was right;  we know the KGB and GRU were actively supporting groups including Baader-Meinhof in West Germany, and Red Brigades in Italy, as well as Arafat’s killers.  We know it from their own archives, their own emigres, their own defectors (take PJ Media’s own Ion Mihai Pacepa, for example).

Further confirmation from the real world:  When the Soviet Union imploded, terrorism took a hit.  It revived when the Islamic Republic of  Iran, working with the reconstituted Russian intelligence services, became the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, and waged war against us.

By now, everybody knows about Iran’s activities in the Middle East and South Asia, from its proxies (Hezbollah, the small army around Mookie al Sadr in Iraq, Islamic Jihad, al Qaeda, Taliban) to the Quds Force killers at work in Syria and Lebanon.  We also know about Iranian activities in Latin America, from the massacres in Argentina in the 1990s, to the remarkable spread of Iranian agents, including large numbers from Hezbollah, in recent years, starting in Venezuela.  The Defense Department recently published a helpful study of this worrisome phenomenon.  And we are learning about Iranian activities in Africa:

● Iranian weapons have been pouring into Kenya, and are being used by various murderous militias;

● Iranian ammunition is all over the place, from the Ivory Coast to Nigeria.

● Our ambassador in Yemen stood up the other day and announced that Iran is doing its best to foment civil war in that country.  

And I haven’t even mentioned Mali, where thousands of French soldiers are fighting, and we are providing logistics.  If things go badly, which can always happen, American fighters may join in.

It’s what happens when you lead with your behind, which is Obama’s strategery of choice.  Try this:  “AQIM’s creation of a haven in northern Mali was made possible in part by the fall of Libya’s dictator, Moammar Ghadafi, which unleashed a flow of weapons and fighters from Libya into Mali.”

Over and over again, we are told that direct U.S.-Iranian negotiations would be a radical departure from past practice, and might decisively improve the “relationship.”

Both claims are false.  Direct negotiations would not be new — talks between the United States and the leaders of the Islamic Republic have been conducted by every administration since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini brought down the shah — and there is no reason to believe that a “grand bargain” is on the horizon.

The Obama administration started talking to the Iranian regime even before the 2008 elections, and those talks have continued apace.  They have recently hit a snag over a familiar subject: hostages.

Although the talks between the two countries are invariably conducted in secret, the long story of U.S.-Iranian negotiations is abundantly documented. The United States started negotiating with the leaders of Khomeini’s revolutionary movement even as the shah was preparing to flee Tehran in early 1979.  High-ranking officials of the Carter administration’s State Department and Pentagon worked feverishly to maintain the military, commercial, cultural, and diplomatic alliance between the two countries.  These efforts famously failed, but the talks continued, even during the long hostage crisis, and led to a formal agreement (the Algerian Accords of 1981) that produced the release of the American hostages on Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration Day.

Every American administration thereafter attempted to reach a modus vivendi with the Iranians.  Reagan’s efforts led to weapons sales and further hostage releases.  Clinton and Albright publicly apologized for previous American policies, and eased visa restrictions and sanctions. George W. Bush actually believed that Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Nicholas Burns had negotiated an historic deal with Iran’s regime (in the person of Ali Larijani) in the late summer of 2006.

The conviction that Bush never tried to reach a working agreement with the Iranians is deeply embedded in the conventional wisdom (and in Iranian versions of events; see for example the preachy oped in the New York Times last Friday, in which two Iranians say that when the Bush administration offered to talk, “the Iranian government rejected the offer of direct, high-level talks as insincere”)  yet full details are in a multi-part BBC television series broadcast several years ago.  In that documentary, major participants (including Nicholas Burns) appear on camera recounting how, at the last minute, the Iranians requested three hundred extra visas for a monster delegation to fly to the UN.  The visas were duly issued — Rice understandably didn’t want to give the Iranians an easy out — but Larijani’s plane never left Tehran.  Burns and Rice had gone to New York to greet Larijani and celebrate the historic moment.  When the Iranians failed to appear, Rice flew back to Washington.  Burns hung around for a couple of days, vainly hoping the Iranians would eventually show up.

The Obama team began talking directly to the Iranians even before the 2008 elections — a campaign representative traveled to Iran to present the candidate’s hopes for improved relations — and the efforts continued throughout Obama’s first term.  The latest talks took place in Lausanne and Doha in the months prior to the 2012 elections and, as the New York Times reported, the two sides agreed to continue negotiating if the president were reelected.

Well, it sure beats talking about Benghazi.  A few days after the (acting) chief spook wrote his review of Zero Dark Thirty, the Agency itself has returned to its new favorite subject, enlightening its readers about their latest deep thinking about Hollywood.  And guess what?  After careful study and analysis, they still think that you shouldn’t believe everything you see on the big screen.

You can get the gist of it from the headline:  “Hollywood Myths vs. the Real CIA.”

Maybe they’re preparing to offer an online course or something.

Meanwhile, your friends in Langley are trying to make you better informed, and, as before, they’re not talking about our enemies, or the global war against American civilization, or the unmentionable “terrorism.”  Nope.  Taking a cue from their leader in the White House, it’s all about themselves.  “CIA.gov wants to share some of the facts with you.”

Really.  Like what?  Well, like the CIA has very small (indeed “insect-sized”) listening devices (I guess that’s why they’re called “bugs,” huh?) and froovy robot fish that can sample water.  But the big “reality” from CIA.gov is that most of the folks who work for our once-secret espionage agency are NOT spies.  They may recruit spies, and run spies, but they are not actually spies themselves (true enough).  Furthermore (although you won’t get this from CIA.gov), most of our important spies have been walk-ins.  We didn’t go out and find them and lure them to betray their country.  They decided to do that, and came to us. And you’ll be pleased to learn that we’re in great shape to deal with them.  CIA’s got “a diverse workforce.”

That’s not always a good thing, by the way.  It prompts a flashback to a  Cold War story, I think when the hapless Stansfield Turner was in charge of CIA.  The wonderful Carter years.  A man in Czechoslovakia who wanted to spy for us arranged to meet a CIA guy at a bistro in Prague.  He was told that the spook would be easily recognizable because he would have the Herald Tribune with him.  So the would-be secret agent goes to the bistro and spots a big black man–six and a half feet tall–wearing cowboy boots, with the Trib on the table in front of him.

December 30th is Vladimir Bukovsky’s seventieth birthday.  He is the only Russian barred by special law from running for president, a tribute to his immense popularity and force of character. Among the great generation of democratic dissidents–the generation that punctured the monstrous Soviet bubble and produced the celebrated sucking sound that ended the Soviet Empire and gutted the world Communist movement–Bukovsky is arguably the most important.

Otherwise that law wouldn’t be necessary.

Bukovsky has a rare combination of toughness, common sense, and good humor.  He never compromised with his oppressors, even though he was subjected to the KGB’s infamous psychological and biochemical torments during his years in prison and the camps.  His unrivaled courage and tenacity inspired a generation, and his standing was dramatically demonstrated when the Kremlin traded him for the Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan in 1976.

His memoir, To Build a Castle,  is one of the masterpieces of the period, and his subsequent works document the crimes of the Soviet state, the complicity of Western leaders who played useful idiots to the evil empire, and the survival of the Soviet vision in the European Union.

He organized an effective international organization, Resistance International, whose members ranged from German Greens to French “new philosophers,” a New York diamond merchant of blessed memory by the name of Bert Jolis, and the celebrated Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco.  Whenever Brezhnev or Chernenko or Gorbachev or Gromyko set foot in the West, Resistance International was there, filling the streets, denouncing the Soviets, warning Western diplomats against going wobbly.

In the final year of the Soviet Empire, Bukovsky organized five of us to write a novel, The Golden Convoy, that predicted the internal fission of the Soviet Union.  It was an ambitious project, but he convinced me, Irina Ratushinskaya, her husband Igor, and “Viktor Suvarov” to meet every 2-3 months to consume considerable quantities of vodka and herring and black bread, and outline the next few chapters.  The book, which culminates in a military coup in Moscow, was published in Russian a few weeks before the failed military coup.  As the regime came tumbling down, The Golden Train was read on Moscow radio, to the great delight of the listeners, and it sold out in record time.  Typically, no English-language publisher was willing to print it (too hard on Gorbachev, who is removed from office in the last chapter), nor could Bukovsky find an American or British publisher for his subsequent blockbuster Judgment in Moscow based on hitherto-secret documents from the Politburo archives.  We’d equipped him with a laptop and a hand-held scanner, and during the brief period when Soviet archives were open to scholars, he scanned thousands of pages.  Eventually the archivists figured out what he was doing, and he headed for the airport.

In case anybody doubted that the United States is in the grips of collective idiocy, consider that the head of our “secret intelligence service” has just issued a movie review of a new film about the operation that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.  In that review–nominally written for all CIA employees but quickly distributed to all manner of media around the world–we are given  Acting Director Michael Morell’s heads-up that Zero Dark Thirty is not a documentary, that the film compresses years of hard work into a couple of hours on the screen, that it “takes liberties” describing some CIA personnel (including some who died in the effort), and that “enhanced interrogations” (waterboarding, sleep deprivation, etcetera) of captured terrorists were not the only source of the information that led to the operation.

It’s embarrassing.  Everybody knows that feature films are not documentaries, and that when you dramatize a decade in a few hours of on-screen action, it’s not going to be the whole truth.  We don’t need the CIA to tell us that.  Indeed, we shouldn’t be hearing from him at all.  It’s supposed to be a secret organization.  If some journalist asks about such a subject, the CIA spokesperson (if there should even be such a thing) should say:  “We don’t do movie reviews.  We do espionage.”

But in this loony town, everybody’s angling for good press, lest they suffer death-by-media-scandal.  And everybody’s worried to death about the last big thing, which in this case is Benghazi, which you’ll recall was originally presented as having begun with angry riots on the Arab Street, provoked by a video trailer.  Mr. Morell is clearly worried that there will be riots protesting the “enhanced interrogation” scenes, so he gives us an example of tortured prose:

the film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Ladin.  That impression is false.  As we have said before, the truth is that multiple streams of intelligence led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was hiding in Abbottabad.  Some came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well.  And, importantly, whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved.