Battle of the bookworms: Gore Vidal proves he has just as many books as Christopher Hitchens and he can pile 'em just as high.
—By Anthony Thorne
Hitch sh*ts me these days, and like others, I used to be an admirer. (He made some amazing appearances on the Clive James show in the UK). I wrote the following as a comment on the Vanity Fair piece but suspect it won't make the safe landing to acceptance:
Christopher Hitchens's airy dismissal of Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's heavily documented book — also praised by such noted loony conspiracy theorists as John Pilger on the back cover — is amusing. "Risible conspiracy theorist" Ahmed testified in US congressional hearings on the failures of the 9/11 Commission Report in July 2005, so he's not really the stuck-in-a-bedsit anorak type Hitchens has painted him as here. (Then again, perhaps offering expert testimony to US politicians isn't as untarnished an achievement as it used to be. Googling dear old Chris's activities that same month shows ample evidence of his own fevered — and fruitless — barracking for the neocon war effort, a poisonous achievement even when compared to the rest of his recent history).
Hitchens's subsequent "debunking" of Ahmed's book — an example of his remaining intellectual prowess, I gather — attacks the author's flat, publisher and publisher's website but neglects the presumably trivial task of pointing out any factual errors in what Ahmed wrote, or why Pilger and Vidal were presumably so misguided in being convinced by the numerous facts Ahmed assembled. Ah, but Hitchens, you old wheeze, I forgot what a fervent believer you still are in the Neocons' self-proclaimed ability to make their own reality, a bold assertion at the beginning of the "War on Terror" and one that Hitchens — like a drunken, red-faced entrant on BRITAIN'S GOT TALENT refusing to be escorted off-stage by security — still hasn't given up on.
This roundabout attack on Vidal, throwing sulky glares at Ahmed's robustly researched and heavily documented history of the 9/11 failures, obscures the real source of the author's ire. Vidal has committed the utter, unforgiveable blasphemy of doubting some of the Bush administration's self-serving statements regarding 9/11, and dared to suggest that the administration figures that orgasmically pined for a New Pearl Harbor in September 2000 might not have been completely torn up when they got it in September 2001. What a shocker! Of course, Vidal, to his well-known credit, continues to do interviews on the topic with more worth and acuity than Hitchens's journalistic career has managed for a decade. The only "miserable coda" Hitchens displays in this article is his own.
All that noted, Hitchens's karmic nemesis George Galloway — a man forever blessed with the ability, at any moment, on any occasion, to have Hitchens's number — has also recently expressed doubts about the official story of 9/11. Before he moves slooowly back to the typewriter to begin his refutation of Galloway's current position, I'm sure Hitchens will be faced with a painful decision — Highland Eagle or Glenlivet Single Malt?"
Ahmed Mosaddeq Ahmed at the chalk face explaining the background to how and why America was attacked on September 11, 2001: Seven years after the appearance of The War on Freedom, Hitchens has overcome his perennial reticence to mention serious 9/11 studies and lashed out with a puerile attack on the scholar's reputation.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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