Reviewed by Frank Moher

On the evening of Saturday, June 26, 2010, Jonathan Kay headed out on his bike into the streets of Toronto to see what was up with the G20. What he saw, he wrote early the next morning in the National Post, convinced him of “”the extraordinary professionalism of the police patrolling Toronto this week.” The city was intact: tourists thronged Yonge Street, a band played on the corner. He toodled west along Queen, where he found a line of police staring down protestors. But: “There wasn’t any violence — at least none that I saw.”

Er, not so much.

We know now, of course, that the police were engaged in widespread brutality and violations of civil liberties all over Toronto that day. But Jonathan Kay didn’t see any of it and, so, of course, the police acted with “extraordinary professionalism.” Or perhaps he would argue that a little head-bashing and snatch-and-grabbery is not really violence, as in, you know, violence, and the police and state agree with him, and so that is that.

We don’t really know what Kay was thinking in the wake of the G20, as he didn’t blog much about it after that, except to call Toronto a “city of wimps.”

And so we come to Mr. Kay’s latest item of “reporting,” a book titled Among the Truthers: A Journey into the Growing Conspiracist Underground of 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, Armageddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings and Internet Addicts. All the tropes evidenced in his G20 coverage are present here, too: perception peddled as reality, ad hominens, and a firm conviction that anyone who sees things differently than he does must be a nut. Kay, Managing Editor of Comment at the Post, bills himself on his twitter feed as an “Engineer-turned-lawyer-turned-journalist-turned-book-writing-guy.” But while he is indubitably a journalist and a book-writing-guy, he is not a reporter; he is an editorialist, and remains so here.

I should mention that I am referred to in passing in the book, which identifies me, bizarrely, as a “poet.” (I have worked in theatre and journalism for some 35 years, but the last poem I wrote, other than this piece of doggerel, was in high school.) It also lumps me in with the rest of its specimens as a “Truther,” which is more arguable, though I don’t identify myself as such, not only because the term is subject to the sort of mish-mashing Kay gives it here, but because it strikes me as pompous (kind of like calling oneself a “pro-lifer”). In any event, if I am a Truther, I’m a pretty bad one: I don’t think George Bush or Dick Cheney or anyone in the White House hatched the plot, I do think an airplane flew into the Pentagon, I’m agnostic about what brought down World Trade Centers 1 and 2 (though not so much 7), I regard Alex Jones as a highly unreliable (if entertaining) source of information, and I think Ron Paul would be a disaster as president. If the Truther movement issued membership cards, I’d probably be required to turn mine in.

I also wrote for the National Post for 11 years (including a piece with Jonathan Kay as editor). It was their itchy-trigger-finger syndrome when, in a book review, I alluded to the suspicious stock trading that preceded 9/11, that caused me to stop doing so.

What I certainly am is a sceptic — about the official version of 9/11 as well as much else I am told, whether by government or others who have a stake in a story. That, to me, is what is involved in being a journalist. But Jonathan Kay tells us that too much of that sort of thing can get out of hand. “Voltaire understood that man cannot survive on skepticism alone,” he writes, in the sermonly conclusion to his book — “that society requires some creed or overarching national project that transcends mere intellect.”

One thing that can be said for Among the Truthers — it certainly transcends “mere intellect.”

Kay’s tactic here is the same one used by Michael Shermer of the seriously missnamed Skeptics Society, which is, as the subtitle indicates, to mix up the 9/11 truth movement with The Protocols of Zion, holocaust denial, birtherism, moon hoaxism, etc., into one big wacky ball of racism and lunacy. And his method is as dishonest as Shermer’s as well. Thus, in his interviews, he emphasizes figures he can most easily characterize as charming but quaint, such as Ken Jenkins, a “Bay area flower child” who “embodies the sixties soul of the 9/11 truth movement’s older members.” Or, where he does speak with Truthers who are more immediately credible, he makes short work of their bona fides before reverting to the book’s default mode — a sort of bland superciliousness. Thus Barrie Zwicker, a journalist of longer standing and quite a bit more distinction than Kay, becomes “an amiable crank,” of interest mostly because he insisted on conducting his own counter-interview when they met, complete with “a chess clock to regulate our usage of time.” (Update in video below: Zwicker says it wasn’t a chess clock.) And David Ray Griffin, who has spent not two but eight years studying his subject and published 11 books about it, is also, simply, a “crank.”

Kay never addresses the arguments of his interlocutors, because, he tells us late in the book, a New York City editor warned him that “Debunking books don’t sell.” Instead, he refers the reader to various of those books, and sites. This is defensible on editorial grounds; were he to get into his own reasons for rejecting 9/11 Truth theories, the book would be even weightier than it is. But it is also a convenience; it means Kay never has to address what he calls the “anomalies” in the official story of that day. We never learn why his interviewees are so head-shakingly wrong — they just are.

He does, though, fall back on some of the easier explanations for why so-called conspiracism has thrived since the Kennedy assassination: the world is too complex, conspiracy believers can’t deal with its chaos, and so they develop over-arching narratives to make its unpredictability more palatable. All of which is nonsense; the notion that one could take comfort from the idea that Kennedy was killed by a cabal, still unidentified to this day, or that somebody blew up the World Trade Centre towers (and got away with it), is sillier even than the most exotic conspiracy theories. But there’s more where that came from. Kay is a proponent of the “If I Write It, Maybe It’ll Become True” school of prose. As I got deeper into his book, with its explanation that conspiracism is the result of “midlife ennui” (or that, as an alleged “poet,” my day job requires me to “weave a self-invented reality”; I wish), I began to find Among the Truthers as ludicrously entertaining as any Alex Jones broadcast.

Kay does offer an interesting history of conspiracy movements (though this leaves him in the uncomfortable position of having to acknowledge that some are legitimate; again, we never find out what makes one plot real and another not). And he is right that, for some adherents, 9/11 Truth evolves into a kind of religion. The comfort believers find in it, however, comes not from a simplifying explanation of the world, but from a group of shared verities, repeated over and over in incantatory fashion. Mind you, this could also describe the editorial pages of the National Post.

Less harmless than Kay’s pop-psychologizing is his zeal to eradicate ideas other than his own. Having concluded that “any effort to engage committed theorists in reasoned debate is a waste of time” — because, of course, they refuse to come around to his way of seeing things — he offers, in his final chapter, a proposal to shame them out of their wrong-thinking, by “applying the same self-critical, self-aware mindset that has served to stigmatize racism, overt anti-Semitism, and related forms of bigotry in recent decades.” What he has in mind are first-year university courses using an “anticonspiracist curriculum” to teach students “to recognize the patterns of conspiracist thought.” In other words, if you can’t beat ‘em, kill their young.

Well, okay. Sounds like an interesting course. Of course, the problem is that if it were taught in any way other than Jonathan Kay, dreamer-upper, envisions — if, say, discussion as to the merits as well as the vagaries of the 9/11 Truth movement were allowed — then Jonathan Kay, National Post writer, would no doubt take off after it. Kay got his start on this beat when, as he reminds us, he discovered that a Liberal candidate in the 2008 federal election had six years earlier reported on some of the findings of various independent researchers into 9/11. He immediately employed the Post in a successful campaign to have her turfed as a candidate. More recently he’s been trying to work the same voodoo on a student at the University of Lethbridge. For all that Kay affects to be really, really interested in 9/11 Truth as a sociological movement, and to really, really want to understand its actors, Among the Truthers is of a piece with his daily journalism. He isn’t out to understand them; he’s out for their scalps.

 
Six months after the G20, Jonathan Kay had a bit of a rethink. “A few weeks ago,” he wrote in his Post blog, “I thought the police response to the G20 protests was yesterday’s news — and I never really reconsidered the opinion I formed at the time of the event, based on what I saw with my own eyes.” But then the Toronto Star got on the case of Adam Nobody, the G20 peaceful protestor tackled and beaten by cops, and lo-and-behold: “. . . it’s now clear that there was some thuggish police behavior that that went on.”

“Thuggish.” So it’s a start.

We can hope that someday some mainstream publication gets on the case of 9/11, thus allowing Jonathan Kay to reconsider that also. We can hope, as he approaches midlife ennui, that he decides it’s okay after all to have heretical thoughts — or, at least, to let others have them. We can hope that he learns to use YouTube. Meantime, we can be reasonably sure Among the Truthers will have little impact, except to buttress the beliefs of the orthodox in the same way he claims (quite rightly) that the outpourings of the Truth movement reinforce its gnosticism. It’s a Battle of the Bibles, whether Kay accepts their equivalency or not, and, Brother, it’s not going to be settled in my lifetime.

But while debunking books may not succeed, neither do books that aren’t better at peddling their hortatory wares than this one. I would have liked to read an insightful study of conspiracy movements. Among the Truthers, on the other hand, is a failed salvo, that might just as well have been titled The Protocols of All Those People Who Make Me Think Twice.

***

Jonathan Kay in debate with Richard Gage, Barrie Zwicker, and Paul Zarembka on TVO’s “The Agenda”:

The Americans who gathered outside the White House and at Ground Zero last night, waving their inevitable flags to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden, were touching in their desire to see an end to the nightmare that has been made of their lives and their country in these last nine-and-a-half years. Not so Stephen Harper in his statement on the subject, which was as cynical as one would expect.

He was right, of course, when he said that “Bin Laden’s death does not end the threat of international terrorism.” International terrorism existed long before Bin Laden made the scene, as anyone who remembers the Baader-Meinhof Group or the Japanese Red Army or the Munich Massacre can attest. For that matter, much American foreign policy of the last century-or-so could be described as international terrorism, though those partyers last night would not like to think so.

Then Harper added, “this does remind us why Canadian Armed Forces personnel have been deployed to Afghanistan: to deny Al Qaeda, and organizations like it, the use of Afghanistan, where the 9/11 attack was conceived and planned.”

But — also of course — Bin Laden denied responsibility for the attacks. And even if you suppose he was lying, the fact is the Taliban offered to cooperate in prosecuting Bin Laden provided the U.S. presented some evidence of his involvement. The U.S. didn’t feel like it, and invaded instead. Puppy-dog-like, Canada tagged along.

Oh well. If Bin Laden’s purported killing yesterday (we won’t be seeing the body, so I suspect we’ll have to take the US’s word for that, too) puts an end to our adventurism in Afghanistan, and to the winnowing of civil liberties that Americans have been subjected to since 2001, I’ll celebrate too. There are still a lot of bad guys out there — like the ones who knew 9/11 was coming and did nothing about it (except to try to profit from it on the stock market). They have yet to be brought to justice. And then there’s the vexing question of Building 7.

But for a pair of wars that have been largely showbiz from the start, this “happy ending” is perfect. Or at least it is for those touchingly credulous people on the streets last night.

Time to update our 9/11 Honour and Dishonour Roll. Some fine qualifees have presented themselves in recent months.

The original idea of the list was to record for posterity those news organizations that have or haven’t done their job in covering 9/11. You’ll find that roster here. For this iteration, I’m expanding it to include individual media types — columnists, hosts — as  they’ve been the busiest truthers or obscurantists of late.

As noted before, entrants may appear on both lists. And, as always, suggestions for additions are invited.

The 9/11 Media Honour Roll

Geraldo Rivera (Fox News). After walking in lockstep with his fellow Fox News hosts for years (see Dishonour Roll below), Geraldo recently allowed as how “the most obnoxious protestors in recent years may be right.” Welcome to the right side of history, buddy. Hope you stick around.

Eric Margolis. In an entry on his website, the former Sun Newspapers columnist calmly laid out some facts and asked some questions about 9/11, for which he received a sweaty attack from the National Post‘s Jonathan Kay (see Dishonour Roll below). Perhaps notably, Margolis did not speak out about 9/11 until after he was fired by the Sun chain, but better late than etc., etc.

The 9/11 Media Dishonour Roll

Geraldo Rivera (Fox News). Having given Rivera his props, we may as well show you his “Oh get a life” moment with those “obnoxious” protestors back in 2007.

Jonathan Kay (The National Post): Kay puts on a good show of objectively contemplating the 9/11 Truth movement for purposes of a forthcoming book, but Margolis’s column (see above) caused him to drop the pretense. Kay has also averred that he “just can’t get [his] head around the possibility of any kind of 9/11 truth conspiracy being true,” which is about as pathetic a starting point for a journalist as can be imagined.

Evan Solomon (CBC): Back when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the UN a simple truth — that there are numerous theories out there about what happened on 9/11 — Solomon followed-up by asking a guest on his “Power & Politics” chatfest whether there was any point in trying to reason with a guy like that. (I paraphrase from memory; sorry, the podcast is long gone.) Apparently, Evan is still stuck back in Geraldo-pre-2010 mode: don’t bother with facts; just go straight for the conventional wisdom.

We liked him better doing arts news.

As it becomes increasingly clear that the official explanation of 9/11 is insupportable and won’t stand the test of time, I thought it might be apropos to establish a media “Honour” and “Dishonour” roll, recording those news organizations who have or haven’t done their job in reporting the story. The idea here is that, 10 or 15 years from now, when the great majority of people have cottoned-on to the fact that the government lied — just as the great majority now realize that about the Kennedy assassination — we’ll be able to look back and see which of them maintained the best traditions of journalism, and which were compliant or complicit.

This list is pretty much off the top of my head, and certainly subject to change, persuasion, and the wisdom of crowds. In other words, if you have suggestions for additions and subtractions, or moving an organization from one list to the other, let me know via the comments form. Please explain your reasons, and provide links to back them up when you can. Note that organizations can appear on both lists, and that individual columnists are excluded, as an organization may well maintain a columnist it disagrees with. We’re looking for institutional responsibility here. The exception is columnists like Alexander Cockburn, who also have senior editorial responsibility, and thus are the institution, or part of it. Maybe I’ll start a category for just-columnists down the road.

As well, the fact that a newspaper or magazine or network is big and mainstream, and possibly even corporate-owned, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be recognized when it does something right.

“Doing the job” is defined here as not swallowing the government line wholesale, remaining sceptical, reporting new evidence as it emerges, and investigating the facts where warranted. Or at least some of the above. “Dishonour” means credulity in the face of government explanations, ignoring or actively suppressing contrary evidence, deriding debate, failing to correct information that has been proven false, and various other forms of pernicious and/or bush-league behaviour.

So here’s the list for starters:

The 9/11 Media Honour Roll:

A Channel (Victoria, BC)
Report on Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth press conference

The British Broadcasting Corporation
The Power of Nightmares

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
The Fifth Estate, “The Unofficial Story”
Sunday Special Edition, “9/11: Facing the Fallout”

Channel One Russia
Showing of documentary Zero, followed by debate

The Copenhagen Post
Article on scientific study of nanothermite found in WTC residue

“Democracy Now!”
9/11 debate (Many Truthers regard Amy Goodman as a “left gatekeeper” — but she did run this debate.)

The Japan Times
Article on 9/11 Diet member Yukihisa Fujita

KBDI, Colorado Public Television
Showing of 9/11 Press for Truth and 9/11 Blueprint for Truth

KMPH FOX 26 (Fresno, Calif.)
Interview with Richard Gage

La Télé Libre
Interview with Cynthia McKinney and Niels Harrit

Maclean’s
“Hijacking the Truth on 9/11″

RT
Various programs and reports

TV2 News (Denmark)
Interview with Danish Scientist Niels Harrit

Vanity Fair
Article on Loose Change

The Washington Times
“Explosive News”

Zoomer Radio (Toronto)
Interview with author of A Guide to 9/11 Whistleblowers

The 9/11 Media Dishonour Roll:

ABC News
Nightline, “Inside a 9/11 ‘Truther’ Convention”

British Broadcasting Corporation
“9/11: The Conspiracy Files”

Counterpunch
“The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts”

Daily Kos
“The Conspiracists”

The Huffington Post
Editor’s Note

The National Post
“A theory that just won’t die”
From back ofthebook.ca: “On being disappeared by the National Post”
From back ofthebook.ca: “Part II: On being disappeared by the National Post”

Popular Mechanics
“Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report” (Much of the info in this early piece has since been disproven, but PM has never run a correction.)

The Washington Post
“A leading Japanese politician espouses a 9/11 fantasy”

In our last episode, I said I’d tell you what I found out about why my review of What the Furies Bring disappeared from The National Post website a day after being put up. My little investigation provides a tonic insight into what happens when journalists find themselves on the receiving end of an interview.

First, I phoned up Mark Medley, co-editor of the Post‘s online books section. Medley had earlier e-mailed me that he was looking into the matter. Now that I was calling as a reporter, though, he didn’t want to say what he’d found out. Hm.

So then I phoned up Duncan Clark, “Executive Editor, Digital.” If anyone would know why an article went poof on the Post‘s website, it’d be the Executive Editor, Digital, right? But Mr. Clark said he knew nothing of the matter and that he’d pass my number on to those who might. Something told me, however, that I wouldn’t be getting a call back from those who might.

So then I called up a third individual who, it turned out, did know what had happened but would only tell me off the record. So, of course, I can’t tell you what this individual said. I will say, though, that my prognostication skills, as demonstrated in that previous post, are pretty damn good.

You have to wonder what it is about 9/11 that puts the Post into such a dither. I have previously written about the inertia that keeps newsrooms firmly locked in groupthink. And yet all over the world, millions of people are now speculating about what really led to that day, and what really happened. And not just on internet fringe sites, but increasingly in the mainstream press and TV (see here and here and here and here), and in academic articles such as the one I cited. Truthiness isn’t just for Truthers anymore.

For the Post, however, the matter must remain fixed and dry, because . . . because why? Because otherwise it might have to look into the matter? Because corporations dislike uncertainty? Because they’ve been told to toe the line? Because other newspaper people might laugh at them?

Of course, the Post might say that they simply have high standards for certitude. According to that scholarly article, there’s only a 1% chance that the sort of extraordinary stock trading that went on prior to 9/11 could have occurred randomly. But hey, 1% is 1%. “Beyond reasonable doubt” may be good enough for the court system, but not for the Post! Mind you, this is a paper that regularly publishes articles sceptical of global warming, also in the face of official explanations, and based on quite a bit less evidence than I can offer about those stock trades. But ya choose yer conspiracy theories. And besides, most of those were opinion pieces.

Oh, wait, so was mine.

And that’s what really makes what the Post did scuzzy, not to mention a bit dumb. The books section of a newspaper has traditionally been the place for a trade in ideas — ideas that originate between covers, and ideas that are offered in response. It is not just a place to remark on prose styles; it is, much of the time, a place for debate. Or should be. The appropriate response to my piece, from both a journalistic and business point-of-view, would have been to leave it on the site and let the festivities begin. Let some readers damn me, let others comment in support — think of all those page views! Let its columnists go after me, run an op-ed dissociating itself; whatever. The Books section would never have been livelier.

Instead, it chose the Delete key. If this is the way the Post intends to toddle into the prismatic future created by the internet, in which there is no one “truth,” and control of information is an anachronism, it truly is doomed, and deserves to be.

I knew when I submitted my last book review to The National Post that it might not be published. What I didn’t expect was that the Post would publish it, and then unpublish it.

The review was of a book of essays, What the Furies Bring, by Canadian poet Kenneth Sherman. Doesn’t sound like hot-button material, you say? Well, Sherman has pegged his book to 9/11, and that, of course, remains combustible — especially if you are of the opinion that the official explanation for the events of that day remains, er, incomplete.

The Post put my review on its website at 7:30 pm on December 18th. Of course, it might have been something less sensitive that caused them to remove it sometime the next day. Sherman’s book is mostly about literature, and hence my review was too. Maybe some Mallermé-lover on staff didn’t like the fact that the book is cool towards the poet and thought, “I’m not putting up with this aesthete-bashing any longer!” But somehow I don’t think so.

No, I expect what caused someone to press the delete button were these two paragraphs:

His reading of 9/11 itself, however, is thoroughly conventional. In “Amis’s Atta” he deals with the British writer’s collection of short stories and essays The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom. Amis portrays Muhammad Atta, who, we are told, flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, as a death-bent fanatic, and Sherman is happy to echo him. “After all,” Sherman writes, “those sons of militant Islam who crashed the twin towers were operating from a skewed sense of manhood, and their morality was topsy-turvy: Death is good; Life (World/Manhattan) is evil.”

The problem with received wisdom, though, is that it is sometimes wrong, or premature, or incomplete. Psychoanalyzing the hijackers without also assaying those who had sufficient foreknowledge of the attacks to profit from them on the stock market is to miss half the meaning of the event. But they don’t appear in Sherman’s reading, and so they don’t appear in his essays. He writes that John Updike’s novel Terrorist “addresses the essential questions that thinking Americans posed after 9/11. Is there truth in the fundamentalist’s assertion that materialist America has poisoned itself with trivia? Has America justly incurred the wrath of the globe’s unfortunate by becoming an exploitive, soulless nation?” But this is a sentimental explanation for 9/11, handed down by the Bush administration at the time – “They hate our freedoms” – and it doesn’t sit on Sherman’s book any better than it did on Updike’s.

The Post might have been able to tolerate that note of doubt about Atta — after all, we are told he piloted Flight 11, right? Nothing wrong with saying so, right? They might even have gritted their teeth and put up with my bit of Bush-bashing. After all, he’s gone now, right? No need to keep defending him, right?

But that bit about the stock trades? Not so much.

Now, I was quite careful about what I wrote. There’s an immense amount of speculation around 9/11, and most of it remains just that — speculation. But the fact that there was extraordinary trading on the stocks of American and United Airlines in the weeks prior to the attacks — up to 100 times the usual volume — is acknowledged even in the 9/11 Commission Report. The trading was in the form of “put options,” which are taken in anticipation of a stock’s price dropping. The more it drops, the more money is made. The Commission adopted a “We checked into it, nothing to see here, move along now” approach to the matter, but a scholarly, peer-reviewed article published in 2006 noted that the chances of such trading happening randomly are 1%. That’s good enough for me. Of course, it might not be good enough for the Post, but the place to deal with that would have been during the editorial process, before publication. Instead, I got a nice note of praise from my editor, and that was that.

It’s a little hard for me to cry censorship because the review did appear that same day in the print edition of the paper. But the Post‘s behaviour suggests that they would have removed it from there, too, were newsprint as ephemeral as the Web. The fate of one little book review may not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but the excision does beg the question: what else is the Post leaving out of its pages? And why?

I’ve told them I won’t be writing for them anymore, which ends a relationship of 11 years, going back to the earliest days of the paper. I’ve enjoyed it, but I don’t do loyalty tests. But I do have some questions for them. (Mark Medley, co-editor of the Post‘s online Books section, told me before Christmas that he was looking into what happened, but the rest has been silence.) They are: Who removed the review? Were they told to do so? If so, by who? And, regardless, why was it removed?

I’ll let you know if they have anything to say. Or, of course, they can always use the Comments section below to reply. I promise not to delete it.

Meantime, I have posted the review in backofthebook’s Arts & Books section. And if you’d like to see the web page that The National Post would rather you didn’t, I’ve posted it here. Because if there’s one thing the Internet has taught us, it’s that if you want to suppress information, you’d better do it before you publish it.

Review by Frank Moher

What does it mean to be an intellectual? Does it simply mean to think a lot, and vigorously, about something other than yourself? If so, some cab drivers I’ve had are among the most impressive intellectuals in my experience. Does it mean to be well-read? Can that possibly be enough? If you’re an idiot, but a well-read idiot, does that make you an intellectual?

In Canada, what we call “intellectuals” are generally academics with some sort public platform — a newspaper, say. This leads to a certain bookishness in our life of the mind. So it is with Kenneth Sherman’s What the Furies Bring, a collection of literary essays written in the wake of 9/11. Sherman, a poet and an instructor at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, whose criticism has appeared in various publications, quotes the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam in his opening essay: “An intellectual needs no memory — it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.” Sherman adds: “This is essentially true.”

But if all a writer has to offer is the received wisdom of books, however handily he makes connections between them, he is not engaging his subject; he is refracting it through the lenses of others. That’s too often what happens in this dignified but stolid collection.

Sherman is best when he sticks to his own artistic ground. In “Poetry and Terrorism,” he examines the American poet Wallace Stevens and others whose work makes a determined attempt to engage public events. He sides with them, decorously, against the art-for-art’s-sake crowd, as represented by French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, while noting that Stevens managed to straddle the two. “By claiming that the very sound of words is useful and restorative, Stevens gave us an ingenious defence of poetry, affirming poetry’s public worth, while remaining in the Mallarmé camp.” It’s not surprising that Sherman admires this; his book is a tentative reaching out to the idea of the intellectual as engaged citizen, even while it remains, on the whole, hermetically focused on literature.

In “Lowell, Hughes and Bishop”, about the poets Robert, Ted, and Elizabeth respectively, he parses their work for evidence of artfulness under duress. He finds it readily in the work of Lowell and Hughes, but labours to locate it in Bishop’s. When he does, it is in poems that Bishop considered incomplete, but which Sherman convincingly regards as, in their imperfection, addressing “our growing unease.”

His reading of 9/11 itself, however, is thoroughly conventional. In “Amis’s Atta,” he deals with the British writer’s collection of short stories and essays The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom. Amis portrays Muhammad Atta, who, we are told, flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, as a death-bent fanatic, and Sherman is happy to echo him. “After all,” Sherman writes, “those sons of militant Islam who crashed the twin towers were operating from a skewed sense of manhood, and their morality was topsy-turvy: Death is good; Life (World/Manhattan) is evil.”

The problem with received wisdom, though, is that it is sometimes wrong, or premature, or incomplete. Psychoanalyzing the hijackers without also assaying those who had sufficient foreknowledge of the attacks to profit from them on the stock market is to miss half the meaning of the event. But they don’t appear in Sherman’s reading, and so they don’t appear in his essays. He writes that John Updike’s novel Terrorist “addresses the essential questions that thinking Americans posed after 9/11. Is there truth in the fundamentalist’s assertion that materialist America has poisoned itself with trivia? Has America justly incurred the wrath of the globe’s unfortunate by becoming an exploitive, soulless nation?” But this is a sentimental explanation for 9/11, handed down by the Bush administration at the time — “They hate our freedoms” — and it doesn’t sit on Sherman’s book any better than it did on Updike’s.

In his final essay, “The Angel of Disease,” Sherman springs himself free of his source material and, for the first time, is able to assemble it into something new. Here his subject is illness and writing. “When we write under duress,” he proposes, “our passive suffering becomes active making; the act of composing makes us feel less helpless while facing an implacable reality.” Ironically, the subject of decay prompts Sherman’s freshest insights. This one entry, sharp and, as always, elegantly composed, makes you wonder what he might write if he put away his reading and, like the firefighters in that iconic video footage of the first plane hitting WTC 1, looked up and simply asked himself, “What is happening?”

“A bit useless” is how 23-year-old Private Jonathan Couturier, the 131st Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan, described the Afghan “mission” that took his life.

If we are to have standing armies, the very least we can do, the absolute minimum responsibility we have to them, is not send them off to die in the useless occupations of nations who have done nothing to us.

Why are we occupying Afghanistan again?

Not, as Gordon O’Connor foolishly announced in the HoC in April 2006, to prevent “them from coming here.”

Not, as recent elections there attest, to bring democracy to the people.

Not even apparently to improve their lot in life.

Fisk:

“Every three months, the Canadian authorities publish a scorecard on their military “progress” in Afghanistan . . . .  The latest report, revealed this week, proves that Kandahar province is becoming more violent, less stable and less secure – and attacks across the country more frequent – than at any time since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. There was an ‘exceptionally high’ frequency of attacks this spring compared with 2008.

“There was a 108 per cent increase in roadside bombs. Afghans are reporting that they are less satisfied with education and employment levels, primarily because of poor or non-existent security. Canada is now concentrating only on the security of Kandahar city, abandoning any real attempt to control the province.

“Canada’s army will be leaving Afghanistan in 2011, but so far only five of the 50 schools in its school-building project have been completed. Just 28 more are ‘under construction.’ But of Kandahar province’s existing 364 schools, 180 have been forced to close.”

And not, as Ann Jones – author of Kabul in Winter and a teacher in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006 – writes at Tom Dispatch following her return trip this July, to train an Afghan police force and army to take over after we’ve gone either:

“So who are these security forces? They include the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan National Police (ANP). International forces and private contractors have been training Afghan recruits for both of them since 2001. In fact, the determination of Western military planners to create a national army and police force has been so great that some seem to have suppressed for years the reports of Canadian soldiers who witnessed members of the Afghan security forces engaging in a fairly common pastime, sodomizing young boys.

“Current training and mentoring is provided by the US, Great Britain, France, Canada, Romania, Poland, Mongolia, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as by the private for-profit contractors MPRI, KBR (formerly a division of Halliburton), Pulau, Paravant, and RONCO.”

Eight years on and $10-billion later just for training the police force, Ann Jones tells us, with a projected goal of 400,000 as the supposed end-strength quota for the combined security forces — an army of 240,000 soldiers and a police force with 160,000 men, where are they?

The Invisible Men:

“What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training? Although in Washington they may talk about the 90,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army, no one has reported actually seeing such an army anywhere in Afghanistan.

“When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police.

“Why, you might ask, didn’t the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own? No explanation has been offered. American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to ‘operate independently,’ but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?

“My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of ‘Basic Warrior Training’ 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.”

And with 40% of country unemployed who can blame them ?

“Think instead about what you might have won — and could still win — had you spent all those military billions on food. Or maybe agriculture. Or health care. Or a civilian job corps. Is it too late for that now?”

Yes, Ann, it is.

John Pilger:

“The Afghan war is a fraud. It began as an American vendetta for domestic consumption in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which not a single Afghan was involved. The Taliban, who are Afghans, had no quarrel with the US and were dealing secretly with the Clinton administration over a strategic pipeline. They offered to apprehend Osama Bin Laden and hand him over to a clerical court but this was rejected.

“The establishment of a permanent US/NATO presence in a resource-rich strategic region is the principal reason for the war. . . . The game is over. Corporatism and a reinvigorated militarism have finally appropriated parliamentary democracy, a historic shift.”

War is a racket. Not “a bit useless” after all.

All links via Rabble.

Monday night update: Ten days ago Senator Colin Kenny compared Canada’s role in Afghanistan to that of the US in Vietnam and used the word “retreat.” Tonight he is calling for a diplomatic solution: “I certainly from Day 1 thought [Defence Minister Peter] MacKay was a nitwit to suggest we should not be talking to the Taliban.”

Senator Kenny! Yo! Why would MacKay want to talk to the Taliban? This is not a war in which two sides are groping towards some solution; it is an occupation. From his point of view, what’s to fix?

You might suppose that as the editor of an online magazine, I’m glad to see the collapse of the old-school, dead-tree print guys. You might suppose wrong. I say that partly because I still write for what we used to quaintly refer to as “the papers” (ask an anthropologist near you), but also because, when I look around at their would-be online successors, I don’t see a worthy among them. It’s not just that they don’t have the money to pick up where print journalism will soon leave off, but because they haven’t the ethical testicles to do it either.

A case in point is dailykos.com, as presided over by publisher Markos Moulitsas. For a guy who claims to be a Democrat, Moulitsas acts an awful lot like the boy-emperor of a walled kingdom. Odd behaviour for the author of a book about the power of web-driven populism.

Moulitsas’ tyrannical instincts manifest themselves most plainly, and shamelessly, in his ban on discussion of 9/11 on his site. Correction: you can discuss 9/11, but only so long as it’s within the parameters set out by Mr. Big:

“DailyKos accepts that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by agents of Al-Qaeda. It is forbidden to write diaries that:

1. refer to claims that American, British, Israeli, or any government assisted in the attacks

2. refer to claims that the airplanes that crashed into the WTC and Pentagon were not the cause of the damage to those buildings or their subsequent collapse.

Authoring or recommending these diaries may result in banning from Daily Kos.”

I like that “forbidden.” Dr. Evil, pinky raised: “Don’t you know that disagreeing with me is . . . forrrrbiddddennnnnn!!!?”

Readers of this section of backofthebook.ca will know that I’m sympathetic to 9/11 scepticism, but mostly what I’m sympathetic to is scepticism in journalism. The notion that the publisher of a major website would forbid discussion of a topic, any topic, is anathema to me. Not that this sort of thing hasn’t gone on for eons, but at least traditional print publishers could claim they only had so many column-inches available and so couldn’t accommodate every point-of-view. Moulitsas has no such excuse, which makes his behaviour all the more retrograde. (Let’s also mention his sidekick, Timothy Lange, who, as “Director of Community” — pretty fancy name for a censor — often takes care of the banning.)

Moulitsas may have learned this behaviour in the U.S. military, in which he enlisted immediately after high school. As he wrote when he first delivered his edict: “I can’t imagine what fucking world these people live in, but it sure ain’t the Reality Based Community.” (“Reality Based Community” is his handle for the site, and only about 10 times more overweening than The New York Times‘ “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”) Translated into army-ese, this would be: “SOLDIER! THAT SOUND LIKE SOME KINDA COMMUNIST FAGGOT BULLSHIT TA ME!” And his decrees haven’t been limited to 9/11. “[Hillary Clinton] doesn’t deserve ‘fairness’ on this site,” he advised his audience in March, 2008. He had various internecine Democratic party reasons for saying so, but mostly his beef was that she couldn’t win the presidential nomination. Of this are Kossian principles made.

Moulitsas’ defenders say it’s his website, so he can do what he wants with it. Sure. And William Randolph Hearst was able to use his papers to plump for war, but that didn’t make it good civic practise. There have always been sleazoid publishers who’ll pursue an agenda not just via convincing argument but also by suppressing dissent, but why Kos wants to join their ranks is beyond me. Maybe he needs to re-read his own book.

Or perhaps what he should do is institute a ban on all conspiracy theories. Here’s one now, uncovered just the other day on Daily Kos: “Something is not quite right here: The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that a fundraiser for Francine Busby, who previously ran for the deeply-Republican Fiftieth District and came close to winning in the 2006 special election and subsequent regular election, was raided by sheriffs after an unnamed neighbor made a noise complaint . . . . Here’s the twist: The fundraiser was hosted by a lesbian couple, and shortly before the sheriffs came a particular neighbor had shouted anti-gay slurs at the assembled crowd . . . . So San Diego cops usually respond to a noise complaint with eight patrol cars and a helicopter? Really?”

Sounds like the author might be on to something. His name? Markos Moulitsas.

“Something is not quite right here.” Said like a true Truther.

ArmorGroup mercenaries in charge of security at the US embassy in Kabul:

“. . . dancing naked around a fire, licking each others nipples and grabbing each others testicles, sex acts, peeing on each other, vodka shots from butt cracks, eating potato chips from clenched buttocks . . .”

Well, boyz will be boyz, stress of the mission and all that, leading directly to:

“hazing, weekly ritual humiliation, forced by their supervisors to take part in the demeaning sex games. Anyone who refused to take part in the games was ridiculed, humiliated, demoted or even fired. Those who took part were rewarded with better shifts and postings.”

and sexual predation and intimidation of Afghan employees:

“An Afghan national who works in the dining hall at Camp Sullivan submitted a signed statement to the POGO [US Project On Government Oversight] in which he described how a guard had grabbed him and said: “You are very good for fucking.” The man was accompanied by four other men and all were only wearing short underwear and carrying bottles of alcohol. The man said he was too afraid of them to say anything.”

“The climate of fear and coercion” according to the US Project on Government Oversight, has led to “complete distrust of leadership and a breakdown of the chain of command, compromising security.”

As in the “cowboy mission” — complete with weapons and night-vision goggles — leaving embassy staff “largely night-blind” in the event of an emergency:

In May, 18 guards, who are not trained for such missions, dressed up as mujahedin fighters and went out on unauthorised night-time military operations in the Afghan capital. The guards are said to have photographed themselves taking part in the “undercover” operation, later posting the images online.

“They were living out some sort of delusion,” one of the whistleblower guards told The Washington Post.

The report reveals that, instead of taking action against the guards involved, ArmorGroup North America gave them a mocked-up citation which improperly bore the seal of the US State Department and praised them for their “intrepidity.”

ArmorGroup North America has been protecting almost 1,000 US diplomats and Kabul embassy personnel. The 450 security personnel assigned to the embassy, including Canadians, all live at Camp Sullivan, where the sex parties took place.

At a Senate hearing on waste, fraud and abuse by ArmorGroup in June, senator Claire McCaskill asked in exasperation: “Is this the best we can do?“

The [POGO] report accuses the State Department of being complicit in the problems, citing numerous letters in which the agency expressed concerns about security deficiencies at the American mission in Kabul and threatened to terminate ArmorGroup’s contract. Yet in sworn testimony to Congress, the report said, department officials said the problems had been fixed.

The State Department renewed the company’s contract, worth $180 million a year, through July 2010.

30 supervisors and guards are alleged to have been the instigators of the sex parties, hazing, and cowboy mission.

The State Department has demanded that the security guards in the photos be fired. ArmorGroup has fired eight and two have resigned. Their identities are being withheld.

The Guardian: Guards gone wild:

“As of 30 June, there were nearly 74,000 military contractors – including 5,165 armed private security guards – in Afghanistan, far outnumbering the roughly 58,000 US troops in the country.

Privatised war: It gives those in power an easy way to circumvent traditional democratic processes. They can escalate war under the radar with far less interference from the public.

Hiring additional contractors in Afghanistan — the vast majority of whom are local nationals or citizens from other poor countries — simply doesn’t generate the headlines that sending more US troops does. Moreover, contractor deaths are not counted in any official tally of casualties, which ultimately serves to slow the growth of public opposition to the war.”

The Star‘s appallingly etiolated coverage . . .

U.S. embassy in Afghanistan cuts out booze :

“Private guards accused of wild partying, hazing

Photos were released of guards and supervisors in various stages of nudity at parties flowing with booze.”

. . . is the reason for this post.