More than a dozen substantial books published since 2002 undermine the official 9/11 story: that 19 crazed Arabs caught the whole of the U.S. intelligence, military and civil aviation establishments completely off guard.
Yet no major media outlet in North America, to my knowledge, has published a substantial review of any of these titles, including my Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11. And apart from the LRC’s review of Towers, no literary journal in North America has to my knowledge reviewed any of these titles. The LRC is to be warmly congratulated for taking the topic of 9/11 skepticism seriously—and making publishing history.
I agree with several criticisms Peter Desbarats makes of Towers. His claim that the book’s organization is confusing has merit. My intention was to break out of the mould and add variety. Hence the “Diary of 9/11 and the Media” entries (I’m a media critic after all), sidebars (“What is a False Flag Operation?”) and profiles of heroes of “9/11 Truth” activism (I fear no one else will recognize them). Point taken, however. My next book will be more conventional in organization.
Desbarats’s take on my 15,000-word chapter “The Shame of Noam Chomsky and the Gatekeepers of the Left” is mistaken on two counts. First, it isn’t true I wrote this chapter because Chomsky and the other 20 individuals and “alternative” media outlets I define as left gatekeepers “do not agree with or pay attention to” my analysis. My ego is not nearly that large.
Desbarats’s certainty that most readers will find this chapter “embarrassing and largely irrelevant” is contradicted by the fact this chapter is the most discussed, most popular and most agreed-with chapter in the book, now in its second printing.
I take issue with Desbarats’s central thesis, which I think he himself undermines. It is that there is a breed of cats called “conspiracy theorists” who just can’t think straight. This overlooks the fact that the aforementioned dozen-plus titles provide reams of hard evidence. And it is cumulative. Desbarats’s review is completely typical: to sustain his thesis that I am a theoretical conspiracist, he glosses over my evidence-rich chapters, including Chapter 2, with its numerous footnotes and photographs. Example: WTC Building 7, a 47-story steel-reinforced skyscraper, suddenly collapsed into its own footprint at near freefall speed at 5:20 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. It had not been seriously damaged by the earlier events of that day. It was a controlled demolition.
Desbarats’s typical over-psychologization of an imagined category of people lumped together as “conspiracy theorists” is beside the point unless and until he and his fellow armchair psychologists first look at evidence. Forensic evidence, for instance, stands hermetically sealed from the emotional or mental state of individuals presenting it.
I fervently hope the LRC will choose to review more of this almost completely blacked-out genre of non-fiction titles. It is the failure of the media to investigate evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, or even question the official story, that impelled me to write Towers of Deception.
To learn the true story of 9/11 is crucial: the official 9/11 fiction is the linchpin for the so-called “war on terror,” which in turn is being used to justify full-scale wars, diminution of ancient civil liberties and obscene expansions of surveillance and militarism, at the expense of worldwide human needs ranging from saving the environment to reducing poverty.
Barrie Zwicker
Toronto, Ontario
