Sorry if this is longer or more involved than it should be. I have been a supporter of yours for 25 plus years. Your reporting on the mendacity of the United States Government surrounding the alleged use of sarin gas by the Assad government in Syria is only the most recent example of what has impelled that support. I am not willing to use the term “single-handed” to describe your responsibility for the aversion of war with Syria; the reporting by Mintpress in the US and by local journalists on the ground in Syria about the possible involvement of Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, not to mention Putin, obviously deserve credit, as well as others probably, of whom I am unaware.
What you have done, however, serves to enhance and exacerbate the disappointment, and admittedly the anger I am afraid, at the path you have chosen to take with regard to the rather much larger homegrown atrocity of 9/11. I hope the presence of these words in this public way will lead you to keep reading, a course of action you might not take in another forum of a more private nature.
The only way that there can exist even the hope of justice, not just as regards that one day in our lives, but of justice in this country as an enduring and uniting, driving force, is if someone with power decides on a course of redemption. I don’t mean to overblow your position as a journalist; I think I understand the distance you stand from the ball, but the first step by that individual to whom I refer will come after their mind has been changed, by an event, by a fact, by an essay, or by the smile on a granddaughter’s face when that person imagines that child’s life with, and then without, action on their part.
The world needs you to conceive of the critical analysis that you have brought to the Syria sarin gas story and its theoretical effect in the case of 9/11. What are you going to say to your granddaughter when she has what it takes to ask you why Norman Mineta’s testimony concerning what Cheney was doing and saying at the time of the crime, at the place of the crime, and concerning an instrumentality of the crime, was left out of the 9/11 Commission Report?
What are you going to say when she inquires about over 2000 architects and engineers visibly and publicly asserting that the 3 buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition, a possibility never even suggested in the 9/11 Commission Report?
What are you going to say when she asks about the peer-reviewed scientific paper which establishes the use of nanothermite in those buildings’ destruction? How much further along in the Syria story would you be if the UN findings concerning the non-existence of sarin had been peer-reviewed? Peer-review is in fact the essence of a National Intelligence Estimate, is it not?
To be quite honest, I do not criticize you in the slightest for any sort of inability you may have possessed, even for a number of years, to conceive of US government agents reeking the kind of havoc, physical, psychological, or political, that they did on 9/11. But the case has grown in every way. The suspicions have turned into proof. The strength of that proof at this point can only be denied to oneself, or in the presence of others whose conclusions are a known quantity. So much so that I have, for quite a long time now, given up trying to provoke a debate, the depth of the returning silence, so profound and so complete.
The only reason I bother to write these words is because of my belief in your essential integrity; the contrast with the work today so stark and jarring; and because I acknowledge the ability in all of us to be better.