Why is it that people who want to re-investigate the official 9/11 account are thought to be dragging their heels in the past, but publishing industry flag-wavers can trot out the orthodox 9/11 dogma every election cycle to repave America’s jack-boot stay-the-course resolve?

This week it’s Firefight, a book about the firefighting aspect of the still-veiled 9/11 attack on the Pentagon which destroyed Department of Defense offices which contained, of all darned things, their budget data. NPR’s Fresh Air featured an interview of the Firestorm co-authors, one of them a volunteer firefighter and Iraq veteran, with nary a question about the peculiarities of the Pentagon disaster, but plenty of evocative details. Jet fuel, plenty of it, spreading all over the roof, etc, etc. with nothing of bodies, aircraft parts, or unbroken glass, un-scorched lawns, no etcetera.

If I was a too-devious-for-my-own-good Neocon stink-tank thinkee at Presidio Press, I’d concentrate on a detail to make this story recall the audience’s own false-memory of the event. Being so clever I’d know that the most powerful memory trigger is smell. But how to reference a smell if everyone’s experience was primarily through television visuals -not even that, actually? Perhaps the suggestive power of radio could evoke the illusion of smell if enough radio land characters were to belabor its significance…

For the Pentagon story in Firefight, that detail would be “horse hair” in the ceiling insulation. Not only was this apparently a striking memory for the firefighters, but interviewer Terry Gross reaffirmed that America’s 2001 media audience had fixated on the curious detail as well. Had you?

Oddly today the subject didn’t lead to explanations about the use of horse hair insulation, or the impediment it might have created for firefighting. Nope, just the smell. On top, added the co-author, of the smell of all that jet-fuel don’t you know. Of course.

They’re hoping for our sense of smell-memory to kick in, because of course our sight-memory wasn’t there either. We have only print-news accounts to go by, the still photos themselves dispute the official story.

But there was video we didn’t see, and haven’t yet seen.

The book begins with a reference to the adjacent Citgo gas station, but not its cameras. Why did federal agents immediately confiscate all security camera video that had captured the incident and subsequently release only a couple seconds of footage that actually shows nothing? If an American readership is sought for this new book, by guys who’ve taken this long to do the research, would there be no interest in answering the predominant curiosity out there? Was it a jet that pierced the Pentagon?

The Firefight book is re-writing the emerging 9/11 narrative, re-branding, re-imprinting the 9/11 mythology for the election year John McCain Neocon reelection.

The reason for the timing of this coincidental to election year publication was that one of the authors was waylaid by a couple deployments to Iraq. Wonderful! An alibi AND a not-unsubtle tying of 9/11 to Iraq. Host Terry Gross preempted listener skepticism by asking what the soldier author thought of what’s been shown to be a debunked linking of Saddam Hussein to 9/11. His answer of course, a soldier’s duty to his nation’s call, regardless the leadership’s methods.

Throw in the author’s IED head-trauma injury that has left his memory impaired. Now he’s a wounded vet, deserving of our patronage, and his personally responsibility to these 9/11 untruths will be inoculated from the eventual debunking of this treasonous 9/11 lie.

What a thoroughly wrapped package! Unfortunately for the clever stinkers a not inconsiderable portion of the American public believe the Pentagon was hit by a missile, and their smell-memory is of fish.