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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 My letter of reply, as yet unpublished, stated as follows: "He is either hallucinating or pretending.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.
In this context, his screed on Gore Vidal is merely yet another example of Hitchens's escalating propensity to project his own increasingly vast distance from reality onto those who object to his war-mongering. It is not Gore who has "taken a graceless lurch toward the crackpot', in the unabashed words of Vanity Fair's introduction to Hitchens's outburst. Rather, it is Hitchens who has become after 9/11 an unhinged and deranged cheerleader for Total War. After Gore, Hitchens would have himself anointed "emperor'. But it is Hitchens, not the indefatigable Gore Vidal, who staggers and stumbles, shamelessly exposed, screaming nonsensically, through the streets of the American capital.
