Review: Among the Truthers — A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground

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Jonathan Kay

Shallow, Scribbler Who Ignored the Books and DVDs, May 23, 2011

I came to this page asking myself if three stars would be too hard on this author and what has proven to be a disturbing amount of garbage. The other reviews kept me at three, I was toying with two stars.

When I received the book, and then again today, my first impressions of the author are hugely negative: glib, arrogant, smug, condescending. This guy has crawled out from under some Canadian rock where he led a very sheltered life–either that or he is an “agent of influence” funded by CSIS and the CIA to undermine the 9/11 Truth Movement just as it is gaining even more traction in the aftermath of the Wall Street looting of the American and global economies. [Cf. GRIFTOPIA and the DVD “Inside Job”]
First, my own qualifications: former spy, honorary hacker, senior civilian founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Center, author, publisher, speaker–and quite by accident, the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, including most of the 9/11 books and many of the 9/11 DVDs. I mention all this because the bulk of my dismissal of this largely worthless self-serving book is contained in my substantive summary reviews of the more honorable and forthright books and DVDs by others. Virtually any of the books or DVDs I have reviewed is a de facto dismissal of this book's shallow demeaning puffery.

Here is a list of items, not just books but also journal entries, that add to our understanding of 9/11:

Review: 9-11 on Trial
Review: 9-11 Descent into Tyranny–The New World Order’s Dark Plans to Turn Earth into a Prison Planet
Review: 9/11 Synthetic Terror–Made in USA, Fourth Edition
Review DVD: 9/11 Mysteries – Part I: Demolitions
Review (DVD): Aftermath–Unanswered Questions from 9/11 (2003)
9-11 Video from CitizenInvestigationTeam
Journal: 9-11 WTC 7 You Tube Videos
Journal: 9-11 Ideas for Further Public Investigation
Reference: Global Outlook Special on False Flag Operations
Review: 9-11
Review: A Pretext for War–9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies
Review: Breakdown–How America’s Intelligence Failures Led to September 11
Review (DVD): Green Zone (2010)
Review: Osama’s Revenge–THE NEXT 9/11 : What the Media and the Government Haven’t Told You
Review: Painful Questions–An Analysis of the September 11th Attack
Review: Shooting the Truth–The Rise of American Political Documentaries
Review: The 9/11 Commission Report–Omissions And Distortions (Paperback)
Review: The American Truth
Review: The Big Wedding–9/11, the Whistle Blowers, and the Cover-up (Paperback)
Review: The Hidden History of 9-11
Review: The Looming Tower–Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Review: The New Pearl Harbor–Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Paperback)
Review: The Road to 9/11–Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America
Review: The Terror Timeline–Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11–and America’s Response (Paperback)
Review: The War On Truth–9/11, Disinformation And The Anatomy Of Terrorism (Paperback)
Review (Guest): Zero — an investigation into 9/11
Worth a Look: Israeli Connections to USS Cole & 9-11
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Disinformation, Other Information Pathologies, & Repression

I struggled to find meaning in this book, and could not. For this author, anyone who believes any account contrary to the government account is, in his own words, suffering a mid-life crisis, a failed historian, a damaged survivor, a cosmic voyager, a clinical conspiracist or a crank, an evangelical doomsayer, or a firebrand. I suppose I fall in the latter category, and am wondering why he did not assume we were all drunks high on painkillers and clearly also abused children.

As a professional intelligence officer I have spent a lifetime studying the pathologies of information, including forbidden and forgotten information, lost history, fog facts, manufacturing consent, missing information, and propaganda, to name just a few. Were the author as intelligent as he thinks he is, he would recognize that all but one of the above are titles of books I have reviewed here at Amazon and at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.

There is no bibliography in this book and although the author makes passing reference to selected publications I am left with the distinct impression that he could have gotten same book out of interviewing the 100 or so people in the Los Angeles drunk tank on any given week-end. Despite the author's credentials, no doubt earned on blander materials where deep seriousness was not a requisite, this book is a travesty, a mockery, a mystifying compilation of pure utter back-handed bon mots. This is the opposite of gonzo journalism, perhaps we should call it potty pontification.

I am limited to ten links by Amazon, so I will end by saying that I have reviewed over 25 deeply significant 9/11 books and DVDs, and all of them can be found at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, under BOOKS in the top menu, or in the middle menu toward the bottom just after the heading reviews. Here I link only to a handful of 9/11 materials, and a few other items that demonstrate that the US Government consistently lies to the public, to Congress, and the world.

I am amply satisfied that 9/11 was allowed to happen (Dick Cheney planning a nation-wide counter-terrorism exercise, months ahead of time, coincident with “the day” is something of a clue) and that more than enough evidence exists to indict and properly investigate Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Larry Silverstein, and Rudy Gulliani. As with John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the USS Liberty, and so many other trumpeted cover-ups, 9/11 is a scar on the American psyche, one that demands the truth first, and then reconciliation. The author of this book is a twit, not a truth teller, let that be his eulogy.