POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT
This isn't an attack.
Gore Vidal is a crackpot, a rather delightful and entertaining one.
Christopher Hitchens, however, has become something much more unpleasant, and far more dangerous, than a crackpot.
Hitchens is now a relentless defender of the establishment, eloquent and wordy certainly, but serving interests a genuine writer should never serve.
Graham Greene said it so superbly:
"You remember Thomas Paine’s great apothegm, ‘we must take care to guard even our enemies against injustice,’ and it is there – in the establishment of justice – that the writer has greater opportunities and therefore greater obligations than, say, the chemist or the estate agent."
No matter what you believe about 9/11, it is simply a fact that there are many unanswered questions.
I do not think that that fact means the government was involved, but it could not be clearer that the government is hiding things.
Just the simple facts that structural steel used there required twice the temperature that aviation fuel burns at 3000 versus 1500 degrees), that most of the force of the impact and explosion was depleted by blowing out the other side, and that we have pictures of survivors standing by the entrance hole tell us clearly there was not enough energy to cause those collapses.
The recorded images of the collapse are, almost to a certainty, images of a controlled demolition, not a "pancaking" down of floors. Indeed, the central core was so immensely strong – overbuilt from an engineering point of view – that even if the floors could have “pancaked” down, the core would have been left standing.
And there are so many other questions.
Most of the perpetrators were Saudis, and, crucially important, had legitimate visas for the US. Who issued those? The Israelis knew about them and were curious, following them around with a large gang of agents who were arrested and deported afterward.
What was going on? A CIA training operation gone sour? A much larger plot than the men in the planes, including others who planted explosives at the building bases? Who knows, but we do know we have not been told the truth.
And as for the fourth airliner, there is absolutely no question but it was shot down by an American fighter plane. The debris field was vast and could not possibly have resulted from the official fantasy story of “let’s roll,” a story concocted to save the government from a monstrous set of lawsuits.
Yes, Christopher Hitchens is not a writer in the truest sense of the word, he is the kind of talented scribbler who has always served those with power.
