11/9 And the Terrorist Who Loved Bonsai Trees is a romp through the streets of Jersey City and New York City, and through the world of the power elite. It will strike those who are unaware of how wars are started and how the national security state is constructed as pure fiction. But for those who are aware of how consent is manufactured and how gullible and willfully ignorant we-the-people can be – the characters, the themes, and the plot will ring true.

The novel is also a romp through the minds of the those who make the decisions and who make Congress, the president, the judiciary, and the media fall in line.  And it’s not difficult to make them fall in line, given their penchants for self-promotion and war, and their sure knowledge that war and destruction are the method and the solution. Mr. Kraske exposes how it’s done, and, without a preaching word, rips into the idiot liberal notion that, for those in power, a disastrous, imperial, long drawn-out war is a mistake. 

The heroes and heroine jump off the page. The puppet-master villains lurk in a secret cabal, planning murders and treason and false-flag terrorism carried out by their lieutenants and cheered on by the press.

Our heroes operate under brilliant cover. It is a given that the media is part of the war-making machine and that no evidence of a false-flag crime would ever cross their lips or appear in the pages of the press. The language of the media is accurately reproduced as they cover up the truth and point the public toward the patsies and the ever-present scam/religion of fighting terrorism. These are the enemies that our heroes confront.  They know going in that bringing eye-witness, provable facts to the media is career ending and suicidal.  

What they do will surprise and delight you, and you will cheer for them all the way.

As to 11/9 as a literary accomplishment:  it is witty without being snide, knowledgeable in its technological expertise, poetic in its use of language without seeming so, lively in its conversations and narration, consistently creative, rich in the variety of its characters and their speech, and gripping in its plot.  
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Not part of the book review, but of interest to some, are the parallels to the national security state,  to 9/11, to the wars, and to the neo-con brains behind the Plan for a New American Century. The planners are well-known and the plans were published.

Some of the players were caught in the act of the 9/11 attacks, and the stories were even covered by the media. Anyone paying attention could connect the dots. It didn’t matter. The guilty walked away and were rewarded. The public at large didn’t care enough to demand accountability, and were happy enough to support the subsequent perpetual wars, the security state, and the mass kidnapping of innocent men in the name of security. 

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon . . . all possible due to a few key lies that the peace movement accepted. The planners of the attacks knew the results in advance because they knew the peace movement would buy the lies or be too cowardly to confront them. 

It’s one thing to believe a lie that is plausible and possible, but quite another to believe the impossible in support of treason and wars.  

Vermonter Jim Hogue is a historian, thespian, and citizen activist. Visit his web site at http://www.earnestproductionsvt.org.