I'll quote the whole of his letter and Hitchens' reply here:
Dear Sir—
I was bemused to note major inaccuracies about myself in “Vidal Loco,” by Christopher Hitchens (February 2010).
Hitchens’s reduction of me to “conspiracy-mongering” and as having a “one-room sideshow” institute is contrasted by the fact that I’m an academic at the University of Sussex; my book, The War on Freedom, was used by the 9/11 commission; I’ve testified before the U.S. Congress; I’ve given evidence to a U.K. parliamentary inquiry; and my institute is advised by a board of 20 leading scholars. Hitchens also bizarrely targets my first publisher, which is not “deceased” but is in fact a flourishing alternative news source.
This hit piece is merely an example of Hitchens’s projecting his increasing distance from reality onto those who object to his war-mongering.
Yours,
Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, M.A., D.Phil (Sussex)
Hitchens Responds
I congratulate Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, M.A., D.Phil (Sussex) on “growing” his résumé in the past few years. But the facts remain what they are. 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. Any bloody fool can testify anywhere, but nobody has yet been fool enough to accept his argument that the attacks on New York and Washington were part of a pre-arrangement involving the United States government. (His pathetically conspiratorial rambling about the behavior of the military and Federal Aviation Administration that day 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). Finally, I think the expression “war-mongering” is better applied to somebody who makes excuses and offers smarmy justifications for the original aggressor, Osama bin Laden.
On reflection and on a rereading of his “book,” I would change my original article and remove the word “risible.” A more apposite term for both the author and his illiterate pages would be “contemptible.”
Christopher Hitchens, B.A. (Oxford)
Roger S. Mertz Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
Adjunct Professor in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research
Andrew Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh
Koret Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley
I. F. Stone Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley
(See how boring this can get?)
6 comments:
As they say don't mess with the Hitch. If only we could all have hiw way with words.
Great blog BTW
Thanks Stephen!
Hitchens is always interesting even when I don't agree with him.
Hitchens is really sloppy here. He glibly dismisses Nafeez Ahmed as some amateurish nobody, and when the latter spells out his credentials, Hitchens doesn't seem to understand, or forgets, why Ahmed felt obliged to. And really lazy for Hitch to spend 2 minutes Googling Nafeez Ahmed and assuming that he was a Troofer based on some of the titles of his works (that admittedly do sound a hint Trooferish, though I don't see him presenting any evidence at all to suggest that he is in fact a bona fide Truther).
Yes, I agree that Nafeez Ahmed might have felt compelled by Hitchens' sniggering to cite his qualifications given Hitchens' ad hominem attack. I do also wonder about this one too:
On reflection and on a rereading of his “book,” I would change my original article and remove the word “risible.” A more apposite term for both the author and his illiterate pages would be “contemptible.”
Hitchens had actually read Nafeez Ahmed's book even once?
Well, it does seem that Nafeez Ahmed's main argument is that NORAD was suspiciously incapable when it came to intercepting the airliners and, I think, he pushes the theory that there had been a stand-down order.
The executive summary of his book clearly states that there was complicity by the US government to allow the planes to hit their targets meaning that although he isn't talking about the more exotic types of conspiracy theories (i.e controlled demolition, star wars laser beams, remote-controlled planes, or no planes), he is suggesting an FDR-let-Pearl-Harbor-happened-type scenario (especially on p.16). He goes on to say, on p.17 that perhaps there had been an unholy pact between Bush administration (or whoever really controls them) and the Islamic radicals who perpetrated it.
So, I think it's fair to say that he is a Truther of some kind.
Hitchens had actually read Nafeez Ahmed's book even once?
Yeah, I highly doubt it.
Well, it does seem that Nafeez Ahmed's main argument is that NORAD was suspiciously incapable when it came to intercepting the airliners and, I think, he pushes the theory that there had been a stand-down order.
Well, there was a stand-down order at first issued by Cheney in my understanding, but obviously not for the reasons that the Troofers assert. I've always assumed that Cheney's negligence on 9/11 was more the result of being both pathologically incompetent and an obsessive control-freak at the same time. One of the many ancillary benefits for the Bush Administration with the 9/11 Truth movement in my opinion is that it has really prevented any serious discussion about the actual appalling, and perhaps criminal, negligence of the Bush Administration in failing to prevent or mitigate the 9/11 attacks.
I had taken a quick look at Ahmed's stuff at the time of the Vidal Loco article and didn't really see any actual smoking-gun proof that Ahmed is a Truther, but yes, on a closer examination of his blog he seems to be a fellow-traveler at the least, i.e. pretending that people like Steven Jones are credible sources, etc..
A new book written by John Farmer, who was one of the authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, lays into its description of Bush and Cheney acting heroically on that day. I haven't read it but I understand that it mainly strips away the attempts by the commission to avoid blaming any of the politicians. At the same time, Farmer still concludes without any doubt that 19 guys hijacked planes and flew them into buildings.
A lot of Truthers have tried to do the usual have-your-cake-and-eat-it routine by saying that if someone as close to the commission can cast doubt on it then it proves the report was a sham. And at the same time they try to refuse any of his other conclusions.
I've heard from someone who has listened to Nafeez Ahmed that he often confuses a lot of Truthers as he seems to have a more "nuanced" view than many of them.
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