Was Gore Vidal's Vanity Fair article on Timothy McVeigh of September 2001 disinformation?

[daggett]

As promised in the forum thread "My concerns about John Pilger", I am posting the article below about my concerns about Gore Vidal. I would be interested to read other comments which either confirm or refute my concerns.

I vaguely remember Gore Vidal's defence of the motives that apparently drove Timothy McVeigh to apparently participate in the murder of 168 Americans of in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1993.

Although at the time, I never made the link to the attacks of September 11 that followed shortly afterwards, I have since been struck by the timing of Gore Vidal's statements about McVeigh. The article "The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh" was [url="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2001/09/mcveigh200109"]published[\URL] in the September 2001 edition of Vanity Fair. Although the actual day of publication is not clear, it is my expereience that a magazine dated by the month will be on the stands by the first of that month at the latest, that is, before 11 September 2001.

The essential content of the article was revealed in a widely reported speech to the Edinburgh writers fesitval on 16 August 2001. The Title of the UK Guardian's report was "Vidal praises Oklahoma bomber for heroic aims". The byline was "Writer applauds executed killer McVeigh and his Revere-like message that 'the Feds are coming'".

Earlier that year on 8 May the BBC ran the story "Gore Vidal defends McVeigh".

The Vanity Fair article was mostly very good and said mostly precisely the kind of things that we would say about the Oklahoma City bombing, the Waco massacre that apparently drove McVeigh to participate in that crime, the unanswered questions and the inconsistencies in the case against McVeigh. It included compelling arguments against US foreign policy, including examples of false flag terrorism including one from the Vietnam War:

[The bombing] is not different from the bogus Viet Cong units that were sent out to rape and murder Vietnamese to discredit the National Liberation Front.

Nevertheless, in spite of all this it still seems that the whole article and Vidal's overall message at the time actually served the interests of the US rulers that Vidal purported to oppose for the following reasons:

1. the timing of the publication of the article;
   
2. It acknowledged Tim McVeigh's intention to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City; and
   
3. It sympathetically reported McVeigh's motives as a response to the Waco massacre.

(2) and (3) aren't necessarily inherently wrong, but its publication in the context of America in August or September would have been massively disorienting to people trying to cope with the psychological shock of the subsequent and obviously similar 9/11 attacks.

As many of us are, unfortunately, all too familiar with, many on the left, instead of questioning the 9/11 attack itself, sought to justify it as a legitimate response to the aggrieved Islamic world against the West. Whatever Gore Vidal's intentions were, it seems to me that his article would have further encouraged people on the left to go up that blind alley so well suited to the interests of the US rulers at that time.

One problem for those who would have sought to use Vidal's (largely correct) conclusions about the nature of the Oklahoma City Bombing was that the article was (needlessly, in my view) long-winded and circuitous, and few ordinary people would have made the effort to read the whole article very carefully to see all of what Vidal actually wrote.

Whilst the 9/11 Truth Movement has, from time to time, claimed Gore Vidal as one of our own, I have yet to see a clear and unambiguous statement from Gore Vidal in support of the 9/11 Truth Movement and against the US Government Big Lie of 9/11.

In my view his claim that 9/11 was a 'coup' as stated in that interview of May 2008 with Amy Goodman does not constitute such a statement. Whilst we might think that what he said is clear, it seems to me that it is likely to be lost on ordinary members of the public. The fact, that the 9/11 Truth Deniers who run a Peak Oil mailing list that I subscribe to (and which in other ways is still quite good) posted the transcript of that interview to their mailing list whilst censoring other 9/11 related material after having banned 9/11Truther Kim Bax from the list, would appear to confirm this. In any case, if he labels 9/11 as a 'coup', then why not also the assassination of JFK? (See below.)

Other concerns I have about Gore Vidal include:

(The following is adapted from an e-mail I sent to some leaders from the 9/11 Truth Movement on 17 August.)

1. His close friendship with the deeply reactionary former 'Labor' Premier of the Australian state of New South Wales, Bob Carr. Amongst Carr's almost innumerable crimes against democracy, accountability, free speech and the welfare of ordinary people were his denunciation as vandals of that heroic pair that scaled the Sydney Opera House in order to paint "No War" in huge letters, shortly before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. They were subsequently forced by the NSW courts to pay the ridiculous and ruinous fine of AU$150,000 to remove the paint.

2. Once, on a his fairly numerous radio interview with Australian 'left' Gate Keeper Phillip Adams[1] in which he described JFK emphatically as a "terrible president" (I can't date this, but I think it was this decade, maybe in 2005). From what we all know know about Kennedy, he was one of the very few decent Presidents who had the backbone to stand up to the corrupt powerful vested interests in control of the US, who was murdered as a result and Vidal should have known that more than anyone and been prepared to say that.

3. Some time in the 1990's I saw Gore Vidal interviewed on TV (I am fairly certain it was the ABC's Lateline), in which he told audiences words to the effect that Muslims are becoming ever more numerous in the world and that we had better watch out or they would be able to wreak terrible vengeance on all of us for the crimes that we in the West had committed against him. I felt it rather odd that someone purportedly sympathetic to those trampled upon by the US would seek to use the interview to effectively instill fear of the Muslim World into the his audience. How this would have subsequently aided the US Government's manufactured reality of 9/11 should be obvious. (I would definetely be interested to hear from anyone who may have happened to see that interview to see if they formed the same impression.)

4. This may, at first seem distant from the topic at hand and may seem subjective, but, contrary to seemingly near-unanimous critical acclaim of the movie Spartacus, for which Vidal wrote the script, my recollection was that the story it told was quite uninspiring compared to the reality. The reality, I learnt of many years later in a TV documentary series with a title of something like "The Enemies of Rome" was the slaves rebelled and defeated the best armies Rome could muster against them again and again and again, performing military feats that appeared impossible.

The slaves' eventual recapture and mass execution by crucifiction happened more because of their misguided decision not leave the Italian Peninsula and go back to their own lands when they had the opportunity. Their terrible demise was not inevitable.

It's a story that should have been a huge inspiration to the audiences all over the world for decades. Instead, it was depicted as a brief flash in the pan rebellion, doomed to defeat at the outset.

Apparently, because, amongst other possible reasons, Vidal managed to put in the dialogue, some fairly obvious references to homosexuality, many of the supposed intelligentsia regarded it as brilliantly subversive.

Maybe if I view Spartacus once more, I might change my views, but it seems to me, from my recollection, that Gore Vidal emasculated what could have been a far more powerful and inspiring movie.

Footnotes

1. See http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/ . Note Adams' recent article, BTW, claiming, albeit only in passing, that Oswald assassinated Kennedy at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...013491,00.html)