Talk about pot calling the kettle black? Whether either of them is right or wrong, compared to Hitchens's repeated, heated, solemn references to "conspiracy', Gore is far more measured, albeit laden with a heavy-dose of the blackest irony.
Misconstruing McVeigh
Similarly, on Gore's reference to Timothy McVeigh as a "noble boy': Lazily as usual, Hitchens relies only on the solitary interview with Hari, but Gore's off-hand comments to Hari about McVeigh are simply an ironic snapshot of a thoughtful, well-documented analysis printed in Vanity Fair in the same month as 9/11, where Gore points to US authorities' attempts to deflect attention from a much wider plot. Gore refers to a "classified report prepared by two independent Pentagon experts' concluding that the 1995 Oklahoma bombing "was caused by five separate bombs' with a "Middle Eastern "signature"'. Sources close to the study "say Timothy McVeigh did play a role in the bombing but "peripherally", as a "useful idiot"'. Gore's argument is not to laud over McVeigh's role in this heinous atrocity, but to highlight that his desire for revenge against Waco and so forth was part of a simplified self-righteous moral framework manipulated by a wider terrorist network for its own ends; a self-righteous moral framework that has often plagued Western foreign policy with its callousness about "collateral damage' in the South. Alas, it seems such nuances are beyond Hitchens's own selectively bankrupt moral framework.
Triumphant Denialism
This hypocritical selectiveness is evident again when Hitchens attempts to laud over the supposedly self-evident preposterousness of Gore's prediction that the US will end up "somewhere between Brazil and Argentina', the empire collapsing militarily in Afghanistan and internally when China calls in US debt. Yet over a year ago, in the midst of the financial storm, Hitchens himself wrote that the meltdown will put the US "on a par with Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea.' He even refers reverentially to Milton Friedman - and Gore Vidal! - for coming up with the phrase "socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest' to describe the "collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns': a condition characterising the US, and thus grounds for defining it as a "banana republic'.
But when Gore Vidal says the same, with greater prescience, precision and panache, it is for Hitchens evidence of his craziness. Given Gore's one-time playful endorsement of Hitchens as his literary "successor' (erased by Gore himself with the recent apt observation "You know, he identified himself for many years as the heir to me. And unfortunately for him, I didn't die. I just kept going on and on and on.'), one detects more than a hint of jealous dejection here, perhaps for Gore's unique ability to deploy just a few witty turns of phrase to capture harsh truths. Such as Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen's warning to US Congress about the Afghan War that "We can't kill our way to victory' or that "We're not winning... and if we're not winning we're losing'; not to mention Obama advisor and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's sobering observation that China's economic rise underscores a decline in US "economic' and "intellectual' leadership: "I don't know how we accommodate ourselves to it', Volcker told Bloomberg News. "You cannot be dependent upon these countries for three to four trillion dollars of your debt and think that they're going to be passive observers of whatever you do'. Alas, it seems, all this is simply beyond Hitchens's hopelessly impaired cognitive faculties.
Ahmed Vs Hitchens
Hitchens's contempt for reality is also evident from his bizarre misrepresentations about myself, motivated to discredit Gore's reference to my work in his Observer piece. I am casually described as follows: "... a risible individual wedded to half-baked conspiracy-mongering, his "Institute" a one-room sideshow in the English seaside town of Brighton, and his publisher an outfit called "Media Monitors Network" in association with "Tree of Life," whose now-deceased Web site used to offer advice on the ever awkward question of self-publishing,' my writings "wild-eyed and croaking stuff'.
Hitchens conveniently overlooks the fact that I am at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex (Brighton); that my "one-room sideshow' Institute is based in London Marylebone and advised by a board of 20 leading scholars; and that Media Monitors Network is not "deceased' at all, but remains a flourishing alternative news website. After I informed him of these and other facts in a letter to the editor at Vanity Fair, Hitchens responded by insisting: "When he brought out The War on Freedom, its place of publication was given as a distinctly unassuming street address in Brighton. I did not say that his publisher was deceased but that its then Web site was no more.' My letter of reply, as yet unpublished, stated as follows: "He is either hallucinating or pretending. The book was published in Joshua Tree, California, as clearly stated inside. He thus demonstrates that he has never even seen a copy of my book, let alone read it. He also forgets that in his original article, he located my Institute in Brighton, not the publisher, whose website is alive and well. In any case, these trivial details that Hitchens prevaricates over have no relevance to my credibility or lack thereof.'
In The War on Freedom (2002), I merely laid out facts and lines of inquiry for an official investigation. The book was the first read by the Jersey Girls, informing their work with the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, and is part of the 9/11 Commission Collection at the US National Archives (a collection of 99 books, copies of which were provided to each Commissioner). Hitchens particularly objects to what he describes as the book's "pathetically conspiratorial rambling about the behavior of the military and Federal Aviation Administration that day', which he thinks "has since been utterly refuted by a long and exhaustive article, "9/11 Live: The Norad Tapes" by Michael Bronner in Vanity Fair (September 2006).'
Actually, in The War on Freedom, I argued that the behaviour of Gen. Richard Myers, Dick Cheney, George W Bush, among other senior officials, during the attacks on that terrible day amounted to a systemic dereliction of duty. If, for instance, then-Commander-in-chief President Bush had got involved in the US air force response as soon as he was informed of the first WTC attack, rather than notoriously chatting to children about a pet goat, the US air force may have been able to respond sooner and more coherently, potentially saving lives now lost. I have used the term "complicity' to characterize this dismal failure in the strict sense of criminal law - the US legal definition of complicity applies "when someone is legally accountable, or liable for a criminal offense, based upon the behavior of another', and is implied specifically in the following sense: "... having a legal duty to prevent the commission of the offense, a person fails to make an effort he is legally required to make.' Instead of engaging with the fact of systemic senior official dereliction of duty on 9/11, for which officials should be held accountable, Hitchens skirts over it by valiantly critiquing a straw-man.
In The War on Truth (2005), I elaborate, blaming the failure of US air defence on a collapse of standard operating procedures linked to confusion over various hijack exercises and simulations on 9/11. This argument is corroborated by Bronner's excellent investigation of the 9/11 NORAD tapes, cited by Hitchens, which reports that throughout the attacks pilots thought they were dealing with a simulation and had to keep checking that "inputs' on the screen were in fact real hijackings. Due to the excessive privatization of the US national security apparatus, a company such as Ptech - financed by indicted Saudi al-Qaeda terrorist and bin Laden supporter Yassin al-Qadi - was granted high-level security clearance by its clients which included the Pentagon, FAA, and US Air Force. Ptech, which was investigated by the FBI in relation to 9/11, specialised in integration software solutions and had access to some of the most sensitive computer systems across the US government. Ptech's links to these security holes which could have been exploited by al-Qaeda on 9/11 were ignored by the 9/11 Commission. The fact that the Pentagon continued to do business with Ptech even after 9/11 and despite the FBI's investigations, illustrates an ongoing dereliction of duty and continued politicization of the US intelligence system. Hitchens's misrepresention of such lines of inquiry as "conspiracy-mongering' does a disservice to the 9/11 victims and their families.
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