The Epstein Files, 9/11, and Other Important Matters Obscured by the Iran War

By
The Unz Review

September 8, 2026

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks will arrive this Friday but I’m not sure how much attention that date will receive.

Perversion of Justice:... Brown, Julie K. Best Price: $16.53 Buy New $27.88 (as of 02:12 UTC - Details) Those landmark events of a quarter-century ago were certainly among the most important in modern times, constituting the largest and most dramatic terrorist attacks in the history of the world. Indeed, they were arguably far larger than all such previous terrorist attacks combined, and they set into motion a long series of Middle Eastern wars that killed or displaced many millions in that region while costing our own country many trillions of dollars.

The Iraq War was one of the earliest and most important of those. In a recent interview with former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges, Prof. John Mearsheimer explained that the conflict had regularly been ranked by leading academic scholars as the most disastrous blunder in our entire national history.

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But in that same discussion, Mearsheimer also emphasized that our current war with Iran had easily displaced Iraq at the top of such doleful charts, already having been far worse for our country. And since we are still in the midst of this new conflict, much less attention will probably be paid to that earlier war or to the anniversary of the terrorist attacks that precipitated it.

Over the last few years I’ve written some long articles on the 9/11 Attacks, but I have always emphasized that I was actually very much of a latecomer to the topic. For almost a decade, I’d never really paid much attention to the details of 9/11 let alone to those who were challenging the official narrative or analyzing its major anomalies. The Spider: Inside the... Levine, Barry Best Price: $8.59 Buy New $17.87 (as of 06:31 UTC - Details)

I first explained this in a 2018 article and I have regularly repeated that account on a number of other occasions:

Oddly enough, for many years after 9/11, I paid very little attention to the details of the attacks themselves. I was entirely preoccupied with building my content-archiving software system, and with the little time I could spare for public policy matters, I was totally focused on the ongoing Iraq War disaster, as well as my terrible fears that Bush might at any moment suddenly extend the conflict to Iran. Despite Neocon lies shamelessly echoed by our corrupt media, neither Iraq nor Iran had had anything whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks, so those events gradually faded in my consciousness, and I suspect the same was true for most other Americans. Al Qaeda had largely disappeared and Bin Laden was supposedly hiding in a cave somewhere. Despite endless Homeland Security “threat alerts,” there had been no further Islamic terrorism on American soil, and relatively little anywhere else outside of the Iraq charnel house. So the precise details of the 9/11 plots had become almost irrelevant to me.

Others I knew seemed to feel the same way. Virtually all the exchanges I had with my old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who had run the NSA for Ronald Reagan, had concerned the Iraq War and risk it might spread to Iran, as well as the bitter anger he felt toward Bush’s perversion of his beloved NSA into an extra-constitutional tool of domestic espionage. When the New York Times broke the story of the massive extent of domestic NSA spying, Gen. Odom declared that President Bush should be impeached and NSA Director Michael Hayden court-martialed. But in all the years prior to his untimely passing in 2008, I don’t recall the 9/11 attacks themselves even once coming up as a topic in our discussions.

During those same years, I’d also grown quite friendly with Alexander Cockburn, whose Counterpunch webzine seemed a very rare center of significant opposition to our disastrous foreign policy towards Iraq and Iran. I do recall that he once complained to me in 2006 about the “conspiracy nuts” of the 9/11 Truth movement who were endlessly harassing his publication, and I extended my sympathies. Each of us moves in different political circles, and that brief reference may have been the first and only time I heard of the 9/11 Truthers during that period, causing me to regard them more like an eccentric UFO cult than anything else.

It is perfectly understandable that discussions of dramatic or important events may often be swept aside by even more dramatic and important events.

Indeed, when President Donald Trump launched his war against Iran some especially conspiratorial individuals argued that he was doing so primarily to distract public attention away from the controversy over the Epstein Files.

I was very skeptical of that theory at the time and remain so today. But it’s undeniably true that many important aspects of the Epstein Files story have been ignored because of the overwhelming public focus on Iran throughout most of the last half year.

However, that latter conflict has now receded to a relatively low boil, mostly involving intermittent strikes and counter-strikes. Therefore, I think it’s worth revisiting some aspects of the Epstein Files issue that had come to the forefront just before the outbreak of the Iran War completely swamped all other topics.

For example, less than two weeks before our attack against Iran, I’d published a long article discussing some of the emerging revelations regarding the Epstein Files and the contrasting perspectives presented by Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson.

I’d noted that Fuentes had been extremely dismissive of the more conspiratorial interpretations of the Epstein Files, especially including the widespread allegations of pedophilia. He had devoted nearly three hours of his shows to debunking much of that evidence, seeming to do so in quite convincing fashion. Nobody’s Girl: A... Virginia Roberts Giuffre Buy New $0.00 (as of 09:42 UTC - Details)

But as I explained, a podcast by Tucker Carlson released around the same time revealed some astonishing facts about the case that completely reversed that conclusion.

At this point I was inclined to dismiss most of the more lurid aspects of the Jeffrey Epstein case as smoke lacking any serious evidence of fire.

But the second show of Fuentes had aired around the same time as one by Tucker Carlson on the same subject, and after I watched the latter my verdict shifted once again.

Carlson’s guest was a researcher named Ian Carroll, previously unknown to me, but clearly someone who had spent a good deal of time carefully investigating the contents of the Epstein Files. And although just like Fuentes, he hadn’t found any explicit smoking guns, certain seemingly innocuous words and phrases that regularly appeared set off massive alarm bells. These included repeated references to simple food items such as pizza and grape soda, but used in a context that didn’t make any logical sense.

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When I’d published my original 2019 article on Epstein and his activities I’d also discussed the very strange story of the Pizzagate Scandal, in which such food items had seemingly been used as codewords by a ring of politically powerful pedophiles. But perhaps naively, I’d never once suspected at the time that Epstein or his network had any direct connection to Pizzagate, so I was shocked to discover that his own private emails used some of those same exact codewords. Relentless Pursuit: Ou... Edwards, Bradley J. Best Price: $5.27 Buy New $17.71 (as of 07:01 UTC - Details)

I don’t regularly read the New York Times these days, but on Friday one of their stories on the Epstein Files mentioned that connection:

The document dump also included hundreds of references to pizza, leading several popular conservative commentators to revive Pizzagate, a debunked conspiracy theory from 2016 about a child sex-trafficking ring operating out of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C.

Does it seem plausible that the Epstein Files would contain “hundreds of references to pizza” if the actual food were the intended meaning? Did Epstein and his ultra-elite circle of friends enjoy eating pizza so much that they would constantly mention it in their important emails?

After Trump had reversed himself last year and refused to release the Epstein Files, Carlson had interviewed Darryl Cooper for nearly three hours on the Epstein case, and to their tremendous credit, the last portion of that show had discussed the long-suppressed Pizzagate Scandal in considerable detail. That had probably been one of the very rare times that shocking story had been brought before a national audience since 2016.

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When the Pizzagate Scandal first erupted in 2016 I’d republished a couple of articles that had attracted a great deal of attention. The sudden arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 led me to revisit the topic in an article, and I had done so again in 2025 when the Epstein Files controversy suddenly flared up once again. Epstein: Dead Men Tell... Cronin, Melissa Best Price: $9.48 Buy New $19.99 (as of 02:12 UTC - Details)

In my February 2026 discussion I’d seconded some important points made by Carlson and also suggested the obvious reason that the Epstein Files containing these striking Pizzagate references had been released even while many other incriminating emails had probably been held back.

In considering those very strange references in Epstein’s emails, Carlson made an excellent point.

There is obviously nothing illegal about discussing pizza and grape soda with anyone, even a notorious conspirator such as Jeffrey Epstein. Opening any sort of criminal investigation might not be justified at this stage.

But since all of Epstein’s interlocutors are so easily available, why shouldn’t FBI agents merely interview them and ask them about all those hundreds of references to pizza and other basic food items? And if they indeed referred to the actual foods, why were they usually used in such strange contexts?

Observers have also noted that the Epstein Files released contained no mention of many of the more controversial things that people expected to find, leading to suspicions that those other, more incriminating files had been kept back from the public, Congressional mandates notwithstanding.

But suppose that were the case. Given that the files numbered in the millions, it seems likely that simple text-searches were used to flag and then review those files that mentioned any sinister activity, doing so based upon the presence of certain words such as “blackmail.”

However, the officials running such text-searchers may not have considered flagging emails that contained seemingly innocuous words such as “pizza,” allowing those to slip out along with all the others.

If so, then the use of those simple codewords by Epstein and his fellow conspirators may have been responsible for this major break in the case. Shadowland: From Jeffr... Thomas Horn Best Price: $15.00 Buy New $15.11 (as of 04:26 UTC - Details)

Around the same time I’d published that article, some other surprising aspects of the Epstein Files related to the 9/11 Attacks suddenly came to public attention only to be swept away by the outbreak of the Iran War.

In late November 2002, the Bush Administration had been pressured into establishing the official 9/11 Commission, whose eventual later report was widely denounced and ridiculed by the 9/11 Truth movement.

Prior to her conviction and imprisonment, Ghislaine Maxwell had spent years as Epstein’s closest associate. In an email from early January 2003 she had been invited to serve on something called “the Shadow Commission on 9/11” by longtime investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein, someone unrelated to the other Epstein.

Although Maxwell had politely turned down that offer, those couple of sentences provoked a great deal of discussion in conspiratorial circles, much of it suggesting extremely nefarious implications.

My own interpretation of that brief email was quite different and I found it rather innocuous. The journalist was simply putting together an informal group of individuals who would privately discuss or investigate the 9/11 Attacks much like the official commission planned to do, and that hardly struck me as strange. One Nation Under Black... Webb, Whitney Alyse Best Price: $11.99 Buy New $18.00 (as of 04:56 UTC - Details)

But another item that came out almost immediately afterward did seem exceptionally suspicious to me.

Despite Congressional legislation mandating the full release of the Epstein Files, only a little more than half of the 6 million documents had actually been made available, with some 2.6 million held back based upon a wide variety of less than plausible excuses.

As I mentioned above, there were widespread suspicions that the unreleased documents had been retained because they had been flagged as containing incriminating keywords or other politically sensitive material, perhaps even including numerous “smoking guns.”

But as investigators began examining the document dump, they discovered something quite shocking and suspicious. A very large fraction of the missing files were concentrated around the years 1999-2001, with the gap beginning around September 1998 and ending around January 2002. This soon became known as “the Canyon.”

A Tweet presenting this very surprising information was viewed over 6 million times, with physicist Steve Hsu confirming those strange facts.

This large gap in the released emails produced widespread conspiratorial speculation, including suggestions that some members of Epstein’s circle had been involved in the 9/11 Attacks and the unreleased documents revealed their complicity. But that seemed extremely unlikely to me.

Even if a few of those individuals had actually been among the 9/11 conspirators, I couldn’t imagine that they would have discussed their involvement in the sort of ordinary emails included in the Epstein Files.

However, some related possibilities were much more plausible.

One Nation Under Black... Webb, Whitney Alyse Buy New $19.00 (as of 09:36 UTC - Details) Epstein’s circle constituted an ultra-elite international group, now often called “the Epstein class.” So perhaps a few of them might have been privy to leaks or other indications that the terrorist attacks were planned for 2001. Considered in hindsight, they may have said things that would completely destroy the official narrative that 9/11 had been solely carried out by nineteen Arab hijackers armed with boxcutters who were followers of Osama Bin Laden.

Even if that had not been the case and the members of Epstein’s circle possessed no more information than ordinary American citizens, the 9/11 events would surely have dominated their email discussions in the immediate aftermath. So perhaps some of them had privately expressed exactly the same extreme skepticism towards the official narrative as the ordinary citizens who eventually coalesced into the 9/11 Truth movement.

Suppose the world discovered that top corporate executives, international billionaires, senior political figures, and distinguished academics had actually been among some of the earliest 9/11 Truthers. That would demonstrate the sheer dishonesty of the heavy-handed attempts by the establishment to suppress any such skeptics with ridicule.

It’s impossible for me to say whether any of these possibilities might be correct, but it does seem extremely suspicious that the missing files are so heavily concentrated around 9/11. Concerned citizens should therefore redouble their demands that the government fully comply with the law and release those millions of missing files so that we can decide one way or the other on the matter.

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Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, served as chairman of English for the Children, the nationwide campaign to dismantle bilingual education. He is also the founder of RonUnz.org
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