Life and Death of Journalist Christopher Hitchens
ANDERSON: Welcome back, it's Friday in London at just after half past nine in the evening. You're watching CONNECT THE WORLD here on CNN, I'm Becky Anderson for you. Let's get you a check of the headlines this hour. Massive protests and more violence reported in Syria. Crisis groups say 17 people were killed across the country, nine of them in Homs. CNN cannot independently confirm reports from inside Syria as we are not allowed to report from there. Escalating violence in Cairo. CNN's Ben Wedeman reports four people have been killed and more than 200 injured in clashes between protesters and security forces there. It's the worst violence in weeks and overshadows the vote count in Egypt's historic general election. A setback for the defense of US soldier Bradley Manning. The 24-year- old allegedly funneled thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. Now, his legal team today tried and failed to get the presiding officer in the case to step aside. Customs agents in Moscow's main airport say they've seized baggage packed with radioactive material. They say they've registered radiation levels 20 times above normal and belonging to a passenger bound for Tehran. That passenger wasn't detained, and apparently traveled to Iran. Those are your headlines this hour. Iconoclastic, argumentative, admired, and reviled. There is rarely a shortage of opinions when talking about the British-born author and journalist Christopher Hitchens. His topics range from religion to waterboarding to his own battle with esophageal cancer. Sadly, Hitchens succumbed to that cancer on Thursday night. Our Senior International Correspondent Nic Robertson now takes a look back on what was a controversial life.</s>CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, AUTHOR/JOURNALIST: Christopher to you. We've never met.</s>ROBERTSON (voice-over): Never missed a deadline.</s>HITCHENS: I'm sitting at the same table as you, either.</s>ROBERTSON: Rarely missed a chance to stir it up.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now wait a minute. That is the most outrageous thing --</s>HITCHENS: Excuse me.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: -- that I have ever --</s>HITCHENS: Excuse me.</s>ROBERTSON: Spanning four decades in journalism, Christopher Hitchens' biting, acerbic intellect had many victims. The Vietnam War. Mother Theresa. Princess Diana and her husband, Prince Charles, to name but a few.</s>HITCHENS: I am the only person who wrote when they got engaged, this is a farce.</s>UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: A farce?</s>HITCHENS: And no good can come of it. And it wasn't just because I was a Republican.</s>TONY BLAIR, FORMER PRIME MINISTER OF BRITAIN: He was so much more than just a contrariran or a controversialist. He was somebody who -- thought deeply about an issue, but once he came to a view, was fearless in its pursuit.</s>ROBERTSON: Blair knew Hitchens because he debated him on the writer's most controversial topic, God and religion.</s>HITCHENS: Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well. I'll repeat that. Created sick and then ordered to be well. And over us to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship. A kind of divine North Korea.</s>BLAIR: He wasn't unpleasant about people who themselves had faith. The debate we had was tough and hard, but it was actually very good-natured at the same time.</s>ROBERTSON: Hitchens' book in 2007, "God is Not Great," in which he calls the church "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry" made more headlines than anything else he'd done, heaping fame on his infamy.</s>HITCHENS: The Soviet Union's let him down.</s>ROBERTSON: British-born, Oxford educated, publishers ate up his polarizing prose. "Vanity Fair," "The Nation," "The Atlantic," Slate.com. A powerful, sharp with few of his contemporaries could serve up. But as his life began to fade, ravaged by cancer, fueled in part by his love of cigarettes and drink, it seemed he was as tough on himself as those he scorned.</s>COOPER: You've said to me you burn the candle at both ends. You think --</s>HITCHENS: And it gave a lovely light.</s>COOPER: It gave a lovely light. But do you think part of that -- the way you lived is responsible for this?</s>HITCHENS: Well, it would be very idle to deny it. And I might as well say to anyone who might be watching, if you can hold it down on the smokes and the cocktails, you might be well-advised to do so.</s>ROBERTSON: To the end, he never flinched from his Godless reality.</s>HITCHENS: I'm -- I do resent, always have resented, the idea that it should be in some way be assumed that now you may be -- now that you may be terrified, or miserable, or as it might be, depressed, surely now would be a perfect time for you to abandon the principles of a lifetime. I've always thought this to be rather a repulsive mode of approach.</s>ROBERTSON: Christopher Hitchens, dead, age 62.</s>ANDERSON: Well, on Twitter there's been a wide range of tributes to the outspoken writer. This one from Richard Dawkins, a fellow author, an atheist. He said, "Christopher Hitchens, finest orator of our time, fellow horseman, valiant fighter against all tyrants, including God." Also on Twitter, the Christian author and pastor Rick Warren says, "My friend Christopher Hitchens has died. I loved and prayed for him constantly and grieve his loss. He knows the truth now." And book-winning prize novelist Salman Rushdie wrote, "Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops." I wonder what Chris would have said about that. We are going to take a very short break. We'll be back after this.