A young woman died of a drug overdose in Vancouver yesterday. Her name was Ashley. She became one of the approximately 120 people who will die of drug overdoses in Vancouver this year.

She happened to be at the Occupy Vancouver encampment when she died.

Or perhaps it wasn’t coincidental. Perhaps she had been drawn there by the communal spirit of the place. By a desire for company. Or safety. Maybe she was there because she believed in its ideals. Or wished she could. At any rate, that’s where she was.

It has been instructive, overnight, to watch her death congeal into a reason to shut down Occupy Vancouver, especially among journalists. One watches this, of course, on twitter:

garymasonglobe Gary Mason

Gregor Robertson has no choice now. The OV camp has to come down. Now. This isn’t about politics any longer.

fabulavancouver Frances Bula

Can see why this death an argumnt for shuttng camp. If you claim you’re in charge, you are responsibe. Imagine if a shelter had an OD death

rodmickleburgh Rod Mickleburgh

The point that #OccupyVancouver needs to consider is whether the occupation at VAG makes any sense any more, the original cause is forgotten

garymasonglobe Gary Mason

#occupyvancouver is a health and safety issue now. The original cause is beside the point.

steveburgess1 Steve Burgess

@rodmickleburgh Eventually it was going to be about itself. It always happens.

acoyne Andrew Coyne

@steveburgess1 @rodmickleburgh I agree, except for the eventually part.

Mr. (James Andrew) Coyne, son of James Coyne, the governor of the Bank of Canada from 1955 to 1961,  appears to be saying that the Occupy movement has always been “about itself” — in other words, one big self-indulgent wank. Perhaps we should be grateful: It’s not often Coyne so candidly tips his hand.

One plaintive note of logic was sounded among Canadian journos:

colbycosh Colby Cosh

How can a death at Occupy Vancouver be a cause for breaking up the camp in the absence of any real knowledge of the cause?

colbycosh Colby Cosh

And if breaking up the camp is unconstitutional–which appears to be the consensus among officials everywhere–how does a death change that?

colbycosh Colby Cosh

But by all means let’s overreact; that’s what makes the mainstream media mainstream, dammit.

And so they did — overreact, that is. By the end of the evening, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, in the middle of an election campaign, and knowing that all this self-satisfied hand-wringing would show up in the newspapers over the next 24 hours, had announced that the city would “expedite the appropriate steps to end the encampment as soon as possible, with a safe resolution being absolutely critical.” Good luck with that, Mr. Mayor.

Journalists such as Mason et al. are paid to think — but only for a moment or two. Then they must produce their required column inches of opinion. So, in fact, what they mostly do is react, and, as we have seen, with no less emotion and bluster than most people. They simply have a knack for expressing it better. We can hope that by the time they get around to generating their think-pieces today, they will have gotten over the notion that Ashley’s death is any more meaningful, or any less, than those of the other 120 people who die of drug overdoses in Vancouver every year, and that somehow it means the Occupy Vancouver encampment should be shut down. That is an absurdity. Chasing the protestors off the art gallery lawn will make no difference to the numbers of addicts who die each year; it will simply guarantee that they go back to doing it on the streets of the Downtown East Side, where they may be comfortably ignored.

Of course, maybe that’s the point. Much of the middle-class is discomfited by the Occupy the World movement, and would like to see it go away — why should journalists be any different? But if that’s the case, they should just admit it’s all too messy and amorphous for them, and that they’d prefer to be able to watch football without the distraction. (The Lions game was another trending topic among them last night.) But let them not invoke Ashley and cry crocodile tears for her while they do it.

Because, somehow, I don’t think Ashley would appreciate it.

The massive article, “Anatomy of the G20,” published by the Toronto Star last Friday, is a curious document indeed, especially coming from a newspaper that has taken a hard editorial line against the police’s actions that weekend. It feels like one of those articles that has gone all wonky as higher-ups got their hands on it and started messing around for political reasons.

For example, why, in an article that purports to be “The story from both sides of the fence,” devote the lede and end to police explanations that are intended to be exculpatory? One reason might be that this is an old journalistic strategy to give an article a point-of-view without actually articulating it. About 200 words in, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair is depicted as heroically marching into the TPS command centre and, despite his concerns about subverting standard operating procedure, ordering that the protestors and assorted bystanders kettled at Queen and Spadina be released. “I went to the command centre and I said, ‘I believe now is the appropriate time to end this thing. End this thing,’” he declaims.

Blair was apparently a widely-admired police chief before his lost weekend; with PR like this, it won’t take him long to regain his standing, or at least his self-image.

Later, this:

“The black bloc was growing. And for police, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Just two blocks north, a military repatriation ceremony was underway. The body of Sgt. Jimmy MacNeil, killed in Afghanistan on June 21, was being transported to the coroner’s office, just north of where the boisterous rally was headed.

“According to Blair, about 30 black-clad protesters began breaking off from the crowd and moving north toward the coroner’s office.”

And:

“Police say their lines were stretched thin; officers could not disengage from their responsibilities. At one point, police were facilitating the transportation of a kidney to a downtown hospital, according to Insp. Scott Weidmark, a planner stationed at the command centre.”

So there you have it: not only were Blair’s forces protecting the city — sort of — they were also protecting the remains of a Canadian soldier and making sure those raving anarchists didn’t steal the kidney of a needy recipient. I’m not suggesting the Star is in the propaganda business — but it might consider it as a hedge against declining journalism revenues.

My favourite bit: “Officers ordered people to move out of the way but Emomotimi Azorbo, a deaf man, failed to hear police demands and was arrested.” He failed to hear them? Damn those deaf people; they’ll just have to try harder to hear.

Look, the Star has acquitted itself better in reporting and following-up on the G20 than any other of our major news organizations. It has certainly done better than the CBC, which was hopelessly weighed down by the hardware of television, or Maclean’s, which revealed that it really will put anything on its cover. But that doesn’t forgive the basic failings of this piece, which are most evident in the questions it begs but doesn’t pursue. “By early afternoon [on Friday], police were already ringing the site, searching people’s bags and confiscating potential weapons”? Er, um, weren’t those searches illegal? And what potential weapons did they confiscate, given that they had nothing significant to show the press days later?

“Two undercover agents had infiltrated [the Blac Block]“? Why then did Blair not know “beforehand of the intent of this group to engage in criminal acts away from the summit site”? And if the answer is, well, you can’t know everything, how is it police were so sure, once the vandals allegedly melted into the crowd at Queens Park, that “they weren’t done,” and used that as a pretext to attack peaceful protestors?

A police cruiser was abandoned on Queens because “A handful of black bloc members — now revealing a cache of golf balls and hammers — engulfed the lone car and began smashing its windows and lights”? Okay, but what about that other “abandoned cruiser” with “‘murderer’ scrawled on its hood,” the one at King and Bay? If anyone’s explained what it was doing sitting there, I’ve yet to see it. The Star doesn’t ask.

There’s a lot the Star doesn’t ask.

While the paper’s columnists continue to hold authorities to account, per Thomas Walkom’s“The G20 protests and judicial farce,” it’s prominently played big pieces such as this one that tend to seep into the public mind and become the accepted version of events. If the Star‘s going to take them on, it needs to do the job properly — or at least not let them become vehicles for authorities trying to explain away their criminal behaviour.

It’s been pretty difficult to find any humour in G20, hasn’t it?

Inside — a billion dollar bunfest in which leaders talk about implementng austerity.

Outside — 20,000 police decline to confront a hundred or so rioters in favour of spending the following day assaulting and arresting a thousand nonviolent citizens and locking them up in cages for a day.

Undaunted by the emergence of uglier and uglier police stories, culminating in the one where police yank off an amputee’s prosthetic leg and order him to hop to his own arrest, Maclean’s appears to have asked The Onion‘s chronically gormless Area Man to write its unsigned front page cover story this week.

Some highlights from Lock them up :

Anxiety over the behaviour of police is wildly overdone . . . arrests and claims of police brutality need to be kept in perspective.

Only the professionalism and preparedness of police prevented circumstances from being much worse.

Many of the complaints seem to involve the quality of the sandwiches in detention.

At the end of the day, debate over street violence, protest and police ought to be secondary to the summit’s practical achievements . . . . The role of formal summits is largely to provide world leaders with an opportunity to mingle and pose for a group photo.

Yup, that’s Area Man alright.

Gosh, what a surprise. The Walrus leads this year’s National Magazine Awards with 33 nominations, followed by Maclean’s with 27 and Toronto Life with 26. This compares to 28 for The Walrus, 27 for Toronto Life, and 20 for Maclean’s last year, and 37 for The Walrus, 29 for Toronto Life, and 18 for Maclean’s in 2008. L’actualité is occasionally allowed to rupture the Toronto Top Three, but only if it promises not to let it happen too often.

The Walrus is a radically improved magazine since I last wrote about it — for one thing, under John Macfarlane, it actually looks and reads like a magazine. So is that the reason it now dominates the awards? No. It does so because it fills the historical role of Toronto alpha-magazine, a role that used to be filled by Saturday Night. When I was jobbed-in briefly as an editor at SN in the late ’90s, I handled seven stories that were eventually nominated for National Magazine Awards. I’d like to think this means that I was the most freaking brilliant editor since Tina Brown, but all it really means is that I was working at Saturday Night.

There must always be a Toronto alpha-magazine, so when Saturday Night folded it was briefly succeeded by Toronto Life, but that raised the uncomfortable question: if this is a national magazine award, why is a city magazine all over it? Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when The Walrus finally got good enough to assume the stance — though it’s worth noting that that happened before The Walrus actually became good.

So now we are returned to the status quo: The Walrus will win mucho d’awards, just because. Meantime, the “coveted” Magazine of the Year prize will continue to be handed out on a semi-regular basis to magazines not from Toronto, as per last year’s award to Alberta Views. Which begs the question: if these publications aren’t good enough to receive double-digit nominations — which they apparently never are — how are they good enough to be the Magazine of the Year?

One explanation would be that the award-givers understand that an allegedly national prize must occasionally be given to a magazine not from Toronto, lest it appear to be less than national. But that would be cynical.

What’s the solution? There isn’t one. It would be nice if the English-language judges weren’t overwhelmingly from Toronto (which, despite the claims of the organizers, they are). In the case of the French-language and bilingual juries, however, it’s inevitable that they’ll be drawn almost entirely from central Canada. No, the only possible solution is to stop calling them the National Magazine Awards. Pick some deserving Toronto magazine icon — Pierre Berton, Doris Anderson — and name them after him/her. That would be fitting. But they have never been national magazine awards, and never will be. So why keep pretending they are?

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”

The more Maclean’s changes, the more it stays the same. At a recent public discussion in Calgary, co-presented by Maclean’s and CPAC and titled “The West is in. Now What?”, the panel included Fort McMurray Mayor Melissa Blake, Alberta Minister of Culture Lindsay Blackett, Saskatchewan Environment Minister Nancy Heppner, University of Winnipeg president Lloyd Axworthy, and Rob Anderson of Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance. Sounds pretty Westy to me.

But who, besides CPAC moderator Peter Van Dusen, were the journalists on the dais? None other than Maclean’s columnists Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells, fresh from Toronto or Ottawa or wherever, parachutes still billowing behind them. This despite the fact that Maclean’s actually maintains bureau chiefs in Calgary and Vancouver. But they, of course, don’t speak English. Or something.

We have been here before.

Perhaps the most embarrassing moment of the evening, besides Heppner’s mispronouncing “surreal,” was Wells’ assertion that Blackett must be Alberta’s first culture minister “ever,” or at least “in your lifetime,” and that this was a sign that Alberta was now wearing its big boy pants. That will be news to Horst Schmid, the debonair culture minister with whom many of us worked in Alberta’s fully-fledged arts scene in the 1970s (and I expect he had his own predecessors). Fearlessly, Wells continued to ventilate: “This wonderful theatre that we’re in [Calgary's Theatre Junction Grand], that I saw an extraordinary Russian theatre troupe perform in on Saturday night . . . is a reflection of the reality that this whole region, led by its capital cities, has to admit that it’s becoming sophisticated, even if it doesn’t always feel comfortable.”

It’s true, Paul; it isn’t comfortable, having to dress up in them cummerbunds and all. But it seems to me I also remember international theatre troupes visiting Alberta in the 1970s, though that may just be some ridiculous phantasm of the memory. Why, we sometimes even put on plays of our own — though, of course, they were only ever about cows and gopher hunts.

The West is in. Just not at Maclean’s.

Liberal MP Gerry Byrne says he believes the federal government should investigate whether the pieing of Fisheries Minister Gail Shea by a woman opposed to the seal hunt constitutes an act of terrorism.

I think Gerry should at least get a cupcake for that.

Byrne hails from Newfoundland Labrador where, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada:

“Approximately 1% of the total population. . . derive income from sealing.”

When last we heard from our FishMin Gail Shea, she was promoting BC’s fish farms at a trade show in Norway, where their Minister of Fisheries is “a co-owner of a salmon farming company and former head of the Norwegian salmon farmers association.” Over 90% of the open-pen fish farms in BC originate in Norway.

Asked about the connection between fish farming and the collapse of the Skeena and Fraser River salmon fisheries in December, Gail Shea, minister in charge of Fisheries and Oceans, said : “Nobody knows what’s happening in the marine environment.”

I’m betting right now you want to replay that vid at least one more time.

We have had five pieings of politicians in Canada in the last decade, two of which were misses. Colby Cosh at Maclean’s says it’s all fun and games till someone throws an acid pie — a particularly daft and rather desperate argument which depends on conflating tofu with acid. Or as one commenter over there points out: “It is stupid to say that pie throwing is serious because somebody could throw something WHICH IS NOT A PIE”

UPDATE : From Dammit Janet : Tofu Pie — It’s the New Anthrax

The various human rights commissions that rejected the complaint against Maclean’s magazine — most recently the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal — were right to do so, of course. Members of the Canadian Islamic Congress had charged Maclean’s with inciting hatred and contempt towards Muslims when it published an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s America Alone, in which he advanced various xenophobic warnings about jihadists taking over the world. Much hand-wringing followed, as the media proclaimed that the media should be left to do as it pleases.

In its decision, the B.C. tribunal — and if they wanted to raise the spectre of totalitarianism, they couldn’t have done better than by calling themselves a “tribunal” — declared that “The article may attempt to rally public opinion by exaggeration and causing the reader to fear Muslims, but fear is not synonymous with hatred and contempt.” I’m inclined to agree with Andrew Coyne that this bit of casuistry was just the members’ way to avoid enforcing B.C.’s human rights law. Whether Steyn’s article incites fear or hatred depends on the incitee, it seems to me; maybe it’ll cause wimps like me to flee from the nearest brown-skinned person, but your average good ol’ boy might react differently.

Still, except for one genuinely hateful paragraph, in which he links some teenagers’ violence to their North African background, Steyn’s article is soft soap. As usually happens when he cares about a subject, he ceases to be funny. And without the disarming laughs, Steyn is — here, at least — revealed as a common coin hysteric, even claiming at one point that Japan’s declining birth rate means it’s “likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.”

The CIC’s critics were right — dragging this stuff into court was unnecessarily heavyhanded.

Then again, I would say that. I’m white. And so are almost all the people running Maclean’s. And so are most of the journalists wringing their hands. But do you think if we were, say, Arab or South Asian or Trinidadian we might feel differently? D’ya think?

Maclean’s waxing about freedom of the press and creeping fascism and whatnot would be a lot more convincing if they could point to a few more non-Anglo Saxons on the masthead. Then we’d know that they know the marketplace of ideas isn’t just for the majority, and we’d know they have a genuine marketplace of ideas happening in their newsroom. Frankly, I don’t really care what Ken Whyte or Andrew Coyne has to say about the CIC suit; it’s all too predictable. What I would like to know is what their Features editor, Sarmishta Subramanian, has to say. (Has Subramanian commented on it? If so, I couldn’t find it.)

Similarly, Ian Mulgrew’s grumblings in The Vancouver Sun aren’t nearly as pertinent as Haroon Siddiqui’s analysis in The Toronto Star — not only because Siddiqui is liable to have the more nuanced view, but because The Star‘s hiring actually reflects Canadian multicultural reality. They’ve earned the right to an opinion.

This skirmish is a heads up for Maclean’s and all its journalistic brethren who are behind the curve. Time to change up their staffs to look more like the country they cover. Then maybe next time Steyn writes one of his nativist screeds they’ll decide to pass on it — not because they’re self-censoring, but because they can’t stop laughing long enough to get it into print.

In my post of a few days ago, I asked some questions of CBC and Maclean’s pundit Andrew Coyne, about his answers to a 9/11 Truther after a television taping. I said I’d e-mail him a link to the article (did) and advertise it on a few sites, including his own (did). I think I’ll stop waiting for him to reply. He’s still welcome to, of course; the Comment link is below.

Again, let’s give Coyne credit for sticking around to engage his interlocutor, rather than making like Elvis and leaving the building, as Gregg and Hébert did. Still, his responses were vapid, and characteristic of what’s wrong with the mainstream journalistic approach to 9/11.

It’s easy enough to dismiss his first argument: that the chances that “all of the people who’d have to be involved” in a conspiracy could be kept quiet and on side are inconsiderable. If any or all elements of 9/11 were a CIA or Mossad or Pakistani ISI operation, rogue or otherwise (and there are reasons to suspect all three), thinking you’re doing the right thing and/or fear of being killed would be quite enough to keep you quiet. And we’re not talking thousands, or even hundreds of people here, not even to bring down the buildings, which could have been prepped by a handful of people over a course of months or even years.

I remain agnostic about what brought those buildings down, but there are plenty of reasons to keep wondering, and to want a new, proper investigation. Mr. Coyne, however, is done wondering (if he ever started). And why? Because “people whose judgment I trust have looked at this in some detail and don’t find it credible.”

This is journalistic thin gruel indeed. He doesn’t say he’s looked into it himself and decided it’s goofy. No, he says he’s let others form his opinion for him. One wonders: when Coyne wants to express a view on, say, Conservative tax policy, does he phone up a few people and ask them to tell him what he thinks? No? Then why is this his approach to the most formative event of this young century?

Or is he simply not the inquiring type? This is possible. As I mentioned previously, I occupied an office across from Andrew Coyne for a few months, while working as an editor at the late Saturday Night magazine. I hadn’t been in Toronto for a few years, and was genuinely shocked at the numbers of homeless on the streets. One day I asked Coyne why he thought this had happened. I thought perhaps he’d allow that the conservative fiscal policies for which he and others had been plumping for years, successfully, might have contributed to the problem. Or maybe he’d offer some insight that hadn’t occurred to me.

But he didn’t know. He just didn’t know why people were sleeping in doorways all over his city. Just had no idea.

Well. Either way — whether Coyne lets others make up his mind for him or just isn’t the sort to ask pertinent questions in the first place — it leaves him in an untenable position. When he writes, as he did last year in the National Post, that if Canada pulls out of Afghanistan “the reality is that . . . the gap will have to be filled by the countries that are doing it now,” he skips blithely over the fact that perhaps nobody should be fighting there at all, the whole mission being premised on false information. Yes, the Taliban are nasty, etc., but we are not there because the Taliban are nasty; we’re there because they supposedly sheltered Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attack that he supposedly was behind.

Only, the Taliban offered to cooperate in the prosecution of bin Laden if given some evidence that he was involved in the attacks, which bin Laden disowned. Only, Mr. Coyne may not know these things because “people” have told him otherwise, or believe them because “people” have told him not to. Instead, as the woman in the video that started all this points out, he and his colleagues “adhere to the official narrative” whenever they write about Afghanistan. It is not, as Mme. Hébert would have it, that they “do not have enough experts” to tell them what happened. Rather, they chose a long time ago to believe the government’s “experts,” and leave it at that.

If journalists like these had been working the Watergate beat, Richard Nixon would have served out his time in office, because they’d have accepted his assurances that he wasn’t a crook. Andrew Coyne is still welcome to tell us who advised him that alternative theories regarding 9/11 aren’t credible, but it really doesn’t matter what he says: the problem is that he’s outsourced his ability to think for himself in the first place. If it were just a matter of the latest government scandal, it might not matter. Given that it’s a matter that has killed over a million people and reshaped our world, it does.

While researching my next-to-last post (and did you realize that “blogging” and “research” are not necessarily mutually exclusive?), I came across the following video:

In it, a very earnest and nervous woman confronts Alan Gregg, Chantal Hébert, and Andrew Coyne after a taping of the CBC political panel “At Issue,” with a question about the media’s handling of the events of 9/11:

“Why has the media failed to investigate the most glaring anomalies of 9/11, like the freefall collapse of the third tower, Building 7, or interview any of the high-ranking dissenters of the official 9/11 conspiracy theories –”

The Truther doesn’t get to finish her question. Before she can, her companion notes that the events have affected Canadian policy, and Hébert humbly interjects that “It’s the strength of our panel that we do not talk about things that we do not have enough experts to tell us about” (at least that’s what I hear; judge for yourself).

Some screenshots from along the route of the questioning may be instructive:

Also before our Truther finishes, Gregg insists “I’m completely unqualified to answer this question.” This, mind, before the question has actually been posed. Granted, the preamble is a bit long-winded, but that’s entirely because most mainstream pundits need to be informed of basic facts surrounding 9/11 before they can be asked about them.

After expressing their regret at being uninformed, Gregg and Hébert make for the exits. Coyne, to his credit, remains to engage the woman. What follows is less admirable.

Now, I was going to take off after Coyne for his responses: that you couldn’t keep quiet “all the people who’d have to be involved” in the demolition of the towers, or that “people have actually looked at this in some detail, and the people whose judgment I trust have looked at this in some detail and don’t find it credible.” But I think, first, I’ll ask some questions. After all, maybe Mr. Coyne will have some better responses this time around.

So, Andrew. (May I call you Andrew? You may remember that we worked across the hall from each other for a few months. Or maybe not.) Here are my two, simple questions:

- Who do you mean when you talk about the people who have looked at this in some detail?

- And, who are the people “whose judgment [you] trust who have looked at this in some detail and don’t find it credible”?

Maybe they’re the same people in both instances, in which case that’s a single question. Even simpler.

Now, you may suppose that Andrew Coyne doesn’t check into backofthebook.ca on a regular basis, and you’d probably be right. So, in addition to e-mailing him a link to this article, I’m going to advertise it on a few sites — including andrewcoyne.com. One way or another, hopefully he’ll see it. I’ll let you know if he replies (or he can simply click on that Comment link down there).

Mr. Gregg and Mme. Hébert are also welcome to respond, but I wouldn’t count on it. After all, we already know they’re too busy to answer questions after the cameras are turned off.

Part 2