ttp://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=287
Freezerbox: the Hunter S. Thompson interview
The mainstream press, you mean?
Yeah, the mainstream press is uh, is uh, in the bag, in the pocket of Bush and the military and they seem to like it there! Not all of them, I've got a lot of good friends, good people in journalism, that feel more strongly than I do, or at least as strongly.
Right.
The uh, New York Times, eh, yeah, it's a different animal. There's not too many papers like that. But the press in general, the media, the TV, is doing a disgraceful job in covering this situation in this country and around the world. This is where I have to bring some subjectivity into it that I believe is right! A president that came in here, uhhh... about two years ago...
Right, barely elected.
Barely elected, yeah, and I guess it's only been two years, and he's taken this nation from a, uh, um, let me think looking at it from a, uh, just objectively, from a prosperous nation at peace to a broke nation at war.
Right, but I mean, there were those assholes who flew the plane into the World Trade Center.
Who were they indeed? Now, [cough] do you believe that, that a bunch of Arabs jumped up from some kind of a campfire and fucking mountains over there and snuck into this country and hijacked those planes and did that by themselves?
Well what are you proposing? I mean I think they were funded years ago by the CIA and it was a blowback, but, I don't think there was any direct... Are you saying there might be some other American agency or some international agency that directly supported them in that?
Uhh, this is tricky territory, but yeah, that's what I'm getting at.
Really.
I can't sit here and jerk up documents like Joe McCarthy, there's no proof of that. But I'm sure there is. And the idea that we're getting the whole story, uh, through the uh, the media, or from the president, is absurd on it's face because you never do, for one thing. And there's so many unanswered questions and loose ends and uh, lets see, well, lies! Yeah, about what happened. That they, in the run-up to that day, the years, I wrote a column about it right after it happened.
Yeah, I've read it. I thought that was great, the thing about your phone conversation with Johnny Depp, right?
Yeah, that was one of them. Yeah, that one and the one right before it. I was just finishing my sports film for ESPN when, I was about to go to bed, and I had been up all night, you know the usual, you know struggle, deadline...
Mmhmm.
And sort of on my way to bed, I saw something on the, heard or saw, something about a plane hitting the World Trade Tower. The first reports were of the "small plane"--like one of those things that sometimes hits buildings around the world. That got my attention just enough not to go straight to bed. I turn around and have a look at the TV set, just in time to see that other one go straight in. Jesus.
Um...
Hang on a second there... there's so many things about who uh, oh boy, this is a dangerous area. But I talked to witnesses, I'm just thinking of one in particular, a guy, a driver who watched the, just happened to be taking uh, maybe the owner of the Giants, I forget who he was, but he was out at the Meadowlands. But he saw both of them hit.
Right.
Direct line of sight. The first one, he didn't get really get a line on, but it got his attention, though he hadn't seen the approach. But the second one, he said, uh, and I heard this from other people, but very few, really, calm and sane accounts the moments of insanity. I happened to see the second one go in, but just the last few seconds, as it came out of the left, stage left, and then plowed right into the front of the center of the TV picture and the center of the building, uh, perfectly. And I wrote that it was one of the most efficient, uh, most skillful and just about impossible um, acts of piloting... That's a very rare, uh, uh pilot... can take a big plane and plant it right as if a target or bulls-eye was on the side of the building. Apparently that second plane approached, and veered off, and made sort of a half-loop and then sort of came back and aimed again and then hit the building.
Right.
Have you heard this, or did you see that, or do you know about it?
Yeah, well I've seen the tape so many times.
But have you seen what would be before the tape that we see, like a minute before the hit?
No, I haven't.
Well, I haven't either, really. But there were eyewitnesses. And several people have said that, but you had to be watching. This guy happened to be at the Meadowlands. Cause I've kind of seen it as something that's really horrible and atrocious but not that hard to pull off. I mean it just seems like they got some box-cutters and they hijacked a plane and they flew it into a building. It doesn't seem like there was that much skill or that much preparation really. It's pretty broadly assumed that there's is a lot more to that story than the uh, the simple, kind of evil guys who just wanted to learn enough about flying to take a plane off but not land it.
Right.
Remember, everything we know about that, that incident, and it was a horrible thing, I mean tragedy! Uh, and about Iraq and about Afghanistan and the people allegedly inside those countries, you know, Bin Laden... Everything we know in this country is spun through the CIA or NSA, but lets call it the CIA.
Do you think that the foreign press is any better off?
Well the foreign press is not necessarily...don't agree with us, do they? No, I would say that, the, just the round-the-world feeling about our invasion of Iraq using, I'm not sure what the hell they're using now as a pretense. Did they say the World Trade Towers?
What, the pretense for invading Iraq?
Yeah, is it more of that stuff or is it...?
No, they want to spread democracy now, that's the message.
Well I've been dealing with these guys for forty years. I've been covering politics and I was in the air force and kind of around that stuff. I know... something about the structures and behavior of the military and politics, the White House. And uh, it gives you a certain perspective, at least to ask questions.
Yeah, your depth of knowledge and personal experience...
Well, plus if you go back and read some of the things I've written, I don't stand by that first column I wrote on the World Trade Tower, uh, tragedy. Like I said, I was just going to bed, and they called back and said, 'you gotta write another column about the bombing in New York.' Nobody really knew what it was. And I wrote a column, and it's in the book.