Fear and Loathing with Nostradamus

I have been reading Hunter Thompson's book "Hey Rube", a collection of the columns he wrote for ESPN.com in 2000 - 2003 or so. I found it cheap on the bargain table somewhere, and while I could care less about the sports aspect of the book, I love HST's style and humor. I certainly miss Raoul Duke and if there was ever a presidential campaign that needed him, its this one.

I read also somewhere or the other that there is now a conspiracy theory making the rounds that HST did not commit suicide but was murdered because he was about to go public with the information that what really destroyed the Twin Towers back on 9/11 was not the planes but explosives in the towers set in place by the US government. I read this at almost the same time I read Hunter's column in Hey Rube that he wrote on 9/12/01, just hours after the event.

While I dont believe the government set the bombs, I was struck by how Hunter's column predicted what would happen as a result of 9/11. He really laid it all out, Nostradamus-wise, and reading it in light of the conspiracy talk ran a slight shiver up my spine.

Without further ado, here's an excerpt:

"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the U.S. or any other country. Make no mistake about it: we are At War now - with somebody- and we will stay At War with that strange and mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

"It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad,fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be a guerrilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden will be a primitive "figurehead"- or even dead, for all we know- but whoever put those all-American jet planes loaded with all-American fuel into the 110-story-high Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bull's-eye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper....

"...We are going to punish somebody for this attack but just who or where will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possible all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for war seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

"This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed-for anyone, and certainly not for a baffled little creep like George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started a war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil Industry to finish it off. He can declare a National Security Emergency and clamp
down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won'y hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force."