“We have got to understand that people in 3rd world countries think and care and smile and cry just like us
We have got to understand that they are us; we are them.”
- Rachel Corrie, aged 10
In 2005, Brazilian football star Ronaldo travelled to Palestine and Israel as the UN Goodwill Ambassador. Having visited the West Bank and Israel, he was then due to visit Gaza, where he has been invited, amongst others, by a 12-year-old boy named Hamad Al-Nairib. Hamad had written a letter to Ronaldo, which went as follows:
“Dear Ronaldo,
My name is Hamad al-Nairab, I am 12-year-old, live in the Refugee Camp of al-Shabboura in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah. I like football very much, and love you very much. I am one of the supporters of the Brazilian football team. Everyday, I watch football matches on TV to see you while playing football.
I used to play football in our quarter. I used to wear the yellow shirt with number 9. I hoped to visit Brazil to see you there, play with you and to take picture with you.
I had a dream to be older and older and to become a famous professional footballer like you, I had a dream to be the Ronaldo of Palestine. Dear Ronaldo, I cannot play football because I lost my left leg. On May 19, 2004, me and my friends participated in a peaceful march in Rafah. The Israeli helicopters hit us with missiles. A lot of friends were killed and others wounded. On that day, I lost my leg and my dreams dead. No more playing football.
I was so pleased and surprised when I heard that you are visiting our homeland Palestine. But, unfortunately, I will be not able to see you because of the Israeli checkpoints and my health condition. All of my friends love you so much, and love football, they hope just to see you even for seconds. Seeing you is one of their big dreams.
I invite you to visit Rafah and beg you to agree, to award me the opportunity to shake hand with you and to take pictures with you. And to see how much the people here love you. All of them talk about you and about your visit. I hope you will not disappoint the children of Rafah and all the people here who love you.
We are waiting for you,
Hamad al-Nairab.”
Ronaldo
It’s obviously heart breaking and thought provoking to understand that even the most basic of dreams for the youngest of people are so tough to hold on to in this and of course other conflicts. If such a story were to have occurred in the West it would be imprinted on all our consciences; but there is no reason why it should not do likewise wherever it occurs. This is the insightfulness of Rachel Corrie’s abovementioned dictum.
I, like many others the world over, owe much of my political awareness to the work of Noam Chomsky. Described in 1979 by the New York Times, indeed of his many targets within establishment politics and media, as “arguably the most important intellectual alive, Chomsky’s dissection of political affairs certainly benefits from his formidable intellectual capacities. A study done by the Arts and Humanities Index in 1992, showed that between 1980 and 1992, he was the 8th most cited source in arts and humanities journals during that time. The complete list ran: Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, Freud, Chomsky, Hegel and Cicero. So it is not without substance that one can state that he ranks on a par with the greatest intellectuals in history including antiquity.
However it is not his intellectual capacities that makes him such an unparalleled incisive commentator. There are 2 factors that make him stand out:
1. His range. He knows an unbelievable amount of detail about an unbelievable number of topics. From libertarian anarchism, to American militarism, to the origins of the US Republic, to economics, to every conflict the West has been involved in the world over for the last few centuries, his passion for social justice is surely what fires his voracity for knowledge in these domains. As a result, his command of the facts regarding any particular situation will often immediately put him far ahead of any other commentator or detractor.
2. His moral clarity. So detached is Chomsky from the indoctrinations of propaganda systems that condition us to see black as white, that he is able to make observations that are startling and penetrating solely for their simplicity. When Condaleeza Rice stated that for violence in Iraq to cease there would need to be an end to “foreign fighters coming over the border”, though no mainstream journal noted it, it was left to Chomsky to point out the absurdity that the US army was precisely such an army, and one would be correct in concluding that they were indeed responsible for the bloodshed, as Rice unwittingly intimated.
Moral clarity is not something that is complicated- it usually just requires detachment from ones own interests in a given situation. We all know what is right and what is wrong. Where Chomsky rises above other intellectuals and writers in my eyes, is the fact that he combines not just the intellectual powers of a great scholar with the depth of knowledge of a hardened journalist, but also the moral clarity and steadfastness of any of the great popular leaders of the last century. It is the fusion of these 3 elements that make Chomsky what he is.
The following video is, even by Chomsky’s standards, just indispensable viewing.
Check out this unbelievable clip of the IDF (the Israeli army) tear gassing not only peaceful Palestinian protesters, but then, amazingly, an Al Jazeera correspondent reporting the protest live on air !
Despite this, the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, stated today that the US does not at the moment take the report seriously, since they have a “very serious concern with the mandate that was given by the Human Rights Council prior to our joining the council, which we viewed as unbalanced, one-sided, and basically unacceptable”. So a massacre has been committed by one side against another, and there is an expectation that a report into such a massacre should focus equally on the victims of such, as well as its perpetrators.
Such apathy, of which I have given but 2 very different examples, towards Israeli crimes, and then the contempt which this breeds within Israel for basic standards of right and wrong, as judged by the civilised people everywhere, makes me beg the question- how far is too far for Israel? Namely, what would they have to do, what unprecedented crime would they have to add to their unrivalled sordid history, for something to actually happen? For the international political community to actually take some sort of punitive action against them? For the US to stop providing them with billions of dollars in military aid every year? For the mainstream media, especially in the US, to stand up and say “This is enough!”; or even, possibly, for military action to be taken against them?. I really do wonder, if, hypothetically speaking, Israel were to start systematically gassing Palestinians; if they were to poison the water of Gaza; if they were to nuke the West Bank; would anything happen? They have committed so many atrocities already, with no serious backlash; how much further do they have to go for something to happen?
There are certain notions that are taken as absolute truths. Our governments are benign, if occasionally misbehaving entities; our national histories and cultural heritages are glorious and dazzling; and conspiracy theories, whatever they may be about, are wrong. This is accepted axiomatically, with the result that it removes all credibility from whatever it can tar with its brush. All you need to do is label something as a conspiracy theory, and then people will acquiesce towards the belief that since it is, or could conceivably be a conspiracy theory, it must be wrong. Not only that, but so serious is the problem, that “conspiracy theorist” is far more than a description of someone who believes in conspiracy theories; it is someone who has a deep and intrinsic flaw in his system of reasoning, in his world view, even in his personality. Illustrating the latter, he is described as a tin-foil hat wearer, a kool-aid drinker- designations that reflect not just on his belief with regard to that particular set of circumstances, but on his entire character.
What is considered a typical conspiracy theorist
This is a notion that does not just limit itself to social discussions, but pervades more influential domains, such as politics and journalism. No member of either domain is going to be keen to endorse anything that could be labelled as a conspiracy theory, since not only are they endorsing something that is, according to dogma, de facto wrong, but they are also by extension conspiracy theorists, and thus mentally deficient. And it is hard for them to defend themselves in the public domain, because all a critic has to state is “conspiracy theory/theorist”, and his/her argument has already gained a huge amount of currency in the eyes of Joe Public. It is much easier to argue based on labels than it is on facts.
The Problem
However, there is a problem in the camp of the anti-conspiracy theorist. They do not know what “conspiracy theory” means. Trust me, I always ask the question nowadays. Try it yourself- you will not get an answer that supports an a priori opposition to a conspiracy theory. Two examples from recent days, both from bright individuals: a conspiracy theory is “a theory not believed by the majority of the population” (so we can add Copernicus to the list of kool-aid drinkers then); and “explains an event or series of events as the result of a liberated plan by a group of, usually, powerful and often unidentified people” (so powerful, unidentified people don’t plan events I suppose). Yet these were the definitions both these people used initially that they believed satisfied their a priori opposition to conspiracy theories. Its just another example of the lack of uncommon common sense- no great brain power required, just a second’s thought, and then you realise that the argument, which you are often fervently defending, and which is accepted axiomatically in society, has no basis.
Copernicus. Also a tin foil hat wearer, by some definitions
A slightly, though not much better effort is offered by David Aaronovitch, journalist for the Times, rewarded for his apologetics for UK government crimes by getting the chance to interview Tony Blair for Blair’s farewell “tribute show” on UK TV. His definition, from his book: “Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History” goes as follows: “the attribution of secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another”. There are two main problems with this definition, given that Aaronovitch, as suggested by the title, is also one who deems a conspiracy theory to be wrong a priori. Firstly, the word “might”. If it “might” be far more reasonably explained by X, then it also might be far more reasonably explained by Y. So the use of the word “might” removes any possibility the definition may have had of being an axiomatic truth. Further, even if we give him the benefit of the doubt over the “might”, all the definition essentially states is that a conspiracy theory is a theory that is wrong, since it “…might far more reasonably be explained…” by something else. But this means that in order to ascertain whether a theory is a conspiracy theory or not, you should have to ascertain whether it is true or not; but under Aaronovitch’s reasoning, this is not the case- a conspiracy theory is that which we understand as a conspiracy theory, and all conspiracy theories are wrong, since they are all more reasonably explained by something else. Thus Aaronovitch’s definition does not satisfy his intention for it, namely to illustrate a logically sound a priori opposition to conspiracy theories, since it falls prey to the basic logical fallacy of circular reasoning- a conspiracy theory is always wrong, since it is defined as a theory that is always wrong.
David Aaronovitch, whose ability to articulately not question state crimes, rightly earned him a seat as Tony Blairs propaganda mouthpiece for "The Blair Years"
This is not to say that a priori reasoning has no place. You can point to a type of argument that can be shown to lack coherent reasoning, such as the circular argument illustrated above, and state that the logic used there is faulty, and so the argument cannot carry. But the ability to do this rests on your being able to prove that the reasoning rests on a structure that is inherently faulty. This is easy to do with circular reasoning. But with conspiracy theories, this, it would appear, is beyond most people; or at least most of its decriers.
The Definition
I’ll offer my definition of the term shortly, but it is important to say that even the definition that advocates of conspiracy theorists, such as 9/11 Truthers give, is also faulty in my view. The likes of the highly praiseworthy David Ray Griffin state that a conspiracy theory is simply a theory that proposes that 2 or more people have conspired to do something. That is a literal definition, but it clearly does not hold outside of the relatively meaningless literal domain. Hitler and the Nazis conspired successfully to invade Poland, yet that the Germans invaded Poland is not a conspiracy theory, evidently. One needs to distinguish between the literal definition and the vernacular definition. The literal definition is worthless- Arabs are also Semites ethnically, but this doesn’t mean that anti-Semitism is also anti-Arabism. Given that the dispute around the term revolves around its use in the vernacular, the definition that we have to identify is the vernacular one. I would define a conspiracy theory as this:
A theory that asserts that a misdemeanour has been committed by a member of any hierarchy, and that has then been either ignored, or had the blame/responsibility shifted onto someone or something else, by members of the same and/or a related hierarchy
Conspiracy theories always involve a crime or misdemeanour having taken place. They always attribute the guilt for that misdemeanour on a higher power. They always state that the guilt/cause has then either been ignored by other higher powers (as well as the same higher power), or that those higher powers have then placed the blame/responsibility for it on someone or something else- a patsy.
I think that you can apply this definition to any conspiracy theory:
9/11:
The crime/misdemeanour: complicity in the terrorist attacks of that day
The purportedly guilty higher power: the US government/intelligence establishment
The related higher power that has shifted the blame: the mainstream media
The patsy: Al Qaeda
The JFK assassination:
The crime/misdemeanour: assassination of JFK
The purportedly guilty higher power: US Intelligence; military-industrial complex
The related higher power that has shifted the blame: the mainstream media
The patsy: Lee Harvey Oswald
The Iraq War being about oil (declared by Tony Blair to be a conspiracy theory, read the opening remarks of the article for clarification on why)
The crime/misdemeanour: The invasion of Iraq for oil
The purportedly guilty higher power: The US/UK government
The related higher power that has shifted the blame: the mainstream media
The patsy: Iraq’s supposed WMDs
You can even apply it to conspiracy theories that I do not believe in:
The Moon landings:
The crime/misdemeanour: Faking of the 1969 Moon landings
The purportedly guilty higher power: the US government/NASA
The related higher power that has shifted the responsibility: the mainstream media
The patsy: The crew of the Apollo 11
Elvis’s “death”
The crime/misdemeanour: Faking of the death of Elvis
The purportedly guilty higher power: Elvis himself (I suppose?)
The related higher power that has shifted the responsibility: his family, his coroner
The patsy: His supposed drug overdose
(Just to repeat- I do not believe in these last two!)
Note that a patsy is not necessarily someone who is accused of a crime, but as I outline in my definition, it can also be someone/something on whom the responsibility for an action, even a positive action, is placed. The action is attributed to the patsy, although it was not him/it that carried it out, and it is the circumstances that revolve around this action that constitute the crime.
We can test this definition further by removing one of the variables. Let’s say that the crime/misdemeanour has not been covered up by members of a related hierarchy. In other words, let’s say that the conspiracy theory of, for example, 9/11, had been fully endorsed by the mainstream media. Imagine if tomorrow, every newspaper ran a headline stating a variant of “9/11: Inside Job”; TV station such as the BBC, CNN, MSNBC started running reports about how the event clearly appears to have been a government plot, and that from that point on, in all their reports on the War on Terror, it was acknowledged that this war was founded on a lie. If this happened, the conspiracy theory of 9/11 would no longer be a conspiracy theory. It is basically a contradiction to state that the mainstream media can as a body endorse a conspiracy theory, since their refutation of it is one of the prerequisites of it being such. We have empirical examples of this. Iran-Contra was at one point a conspiracy theory, satisfying all of my definitions- it was a crime/misdemeanour (selling arms to Iran and funnelling profits to the Nicaraguan Contras); alleged to have been commited by members of a hierarchy (the US government); initially ignored both by that hierarchy, and then by a related one (the mainstream media), and this time, with no blame shifted on anyone else, since the event was being ignored. But no one would allege today that Iran-Contra is a conspiracy theory. The only factor that has varied is that it has been accepted by the related hierarchies in question- the corporate media and the government- as having occurred. The fact that a test of whether a conspiracy theory is such or not, is whether it is admitted to by members of the same hierarchy within which guilt is suspected, illustrates the absurdity of deeming a conspiracy theory to be a priori false.
So the critical point is not that conspiracy theories are necessarily all true, but that to allege that they are all necessarily false, is ill thought out. That hierarchies commit crimes, and then either ignore them or blame them on someone else is a sequence of events so evident, logical and normal, that it barely needs elaboration.
The Explanation
So two things happen now. Firstly, the absurdity of an a priori opposition to something because it is a conspiracy theory is illustrated, since it demonstrates a normal, possibly even regular, sequence of events. Secondly, the reason why the term “conspiracy theory” gets such a bad press in the mainstream becomes evident. Since it is a theory that suggests that powerful interests commit misdemeanours, and either cover them up, or pin the blame for them on others less powerful than themselves, it’s obvious why said powerful interests would want to encourage an understanding of such a term that was completely pejorative. If a theory that was a threat to powerful interests was actually examined carefully by the public, namely the facts behind it were studied and considered dispassionately, then this would vastly restrict the possibility for such powerful interests to commit their necessary crimes. Imagine if the term “conspiracy theory/theorist” were absent from debates around 9/11- the dynamic would be unrecognisable, since the debate would revolve solely around facts. But since powerful interests want, logically and completely understandably, to deflect any discussion away from the facts, since the facts will indict them, the notion of a conspiracy theory as being something which is de facto wrong, is cultivated by them and then swallowed uncritically by the public, until it becomes an opposition that is actually quite violent in its fervour, and of course completely unthinking, to the extent where it is essentially used as a cudgel against any popular accusations of serious government crimes. Given my definition of conspiracy theory, it follows that such theories only pertain to very high crimes, and thus the importance of cultivating a correspondingly high, automatic and mindless opposition to it.
So the next time you are in a discussion with someone, and they deem something to be “just a conspiracy theory”… you should know what to say.
This is Paddy O’Connell, BBC presenter, who we met outside BBC Television Centre on the 9/11 Anniversary protest. The sound sucks at the start, but gets better as it goes on:
His point was essentially, that he didn’t know enough about the various scientific arguments to pronounce an opnion on them, except to say that they did not merit further investigation. The non scientific elements, such as the death of Barry Jennings, he concluded that though he was sure that Jennings “believed what he said”, he did not believe that the events he recounted actually happened, thus suggesting that Jennings’ experience was in his eyes hallucinatory.
The goal of the 9/11 Truth Movement (hererafter “TM”) is for there to be a criminal investigation into possible complicity by the US government in the attacks of that day. Consequently, the baseline proposition of the TM is, logically, that there is sufficient evidence of government complicity in 9/11 to warrant such an investigation.
This distinction, one that is rarely made, is crucial, since it changes drastically the dynamic of most, if not all, of the debates that have been happening in the public domain about the subject. Given that the goal of the TM is one of illustrating evidence of a sufficiently significant gravity to warrant a criminal investigation, there are many “debunking” tactics that have absolutely no relevance any more. The idea that it is the role of the TM to prove the government’s guilt, for instance, is a common assertion that, with a moment’s reflection, is illustrated to be neither here nor there. It is not the duty of the TM to prove something so that it can then be proved. To state that there is an onus on the TM to prove the guilt of an accused party, regardless of whether it can or cannot, is as ridiculous as if one were to ask someone who is accusing someone else of murder to prove it, and only then can any criminal investigation into the murder take place. Since it is not the TM’s job to be judge jury and executioner, such arguments have no place.
A similar dynamic is true for another accusation, which is that the TM needs to construct an alternative scenario under which the attacks could have proceeded, one that is watertight, and covers all eventualities. This again, just shows a drastic misunderstanding the TM, and the entire dynamic of the debate. It is not the TM that is constructing an scenario to be defended- this is the job of the other side. They have drawn up a very intricate and improbable scenario that needs to be defended at every corner; a scenario that if there is one flaw, the whole tapestry comes crashing down. Though it is tempting to make hypotheses about who did what and when, this is something that I feel the TM should not get into too publicly, since it is not something that has any relevance. I don’t care who did what and when to WTC7, and the details are utterly irrelevant- all that matters is that I can show that there is sufficient evidence to illustrate that the government could have been criminally involved in its demise to warrant an investigation into such. That’s all I need to show, given the goal and baseline proposition of the TM as outlined at the top.
The collapse of World Trade Center 7
Furthermore, one of the most common retorts, “Yes, but maybe it was just a coincidence/built that way/an off day for NORAD…” again, no longer has any validity whatsoever. While it may well be that, for instance, military grade incendiaries got into the WTC dust by accident, the point is that this is a significant piece of evidence pointing to government complicity that needs to be part of a criminal investigation. Even the man with a smoking gun may have a genuine alibi, but does this mean that you do not perform a criminal investigation against him? Of course not. So the standards that are being demanded of the TM do not really represent a serious analysis of the situation on the part of any of its detractors.
Professor Niels Harrit, whose paper illustrating the presence of the military grade incendiary nano-thermite in the dust of the World Trade Center, has been published in a peer reviewed academic journal
A priori reasoning is also something that doesn’t hold. It is useless, logically speaking, to state, “It’s impossible, since there would have had to have been x thousand people involved”. Or, “It’s impossible, since there’s no way a US government would do that to its own people”. Or, “Bush isn’t smart enough to have pulled off such a complex plot- he couldn’t even plant WMDs in Iraq”. It is not a problem to employ such axioms if you can prove them to be axiomatic. But how can you do such a thing with the above 3 comments- 3 of the most common a priori rejoinders to any TM argument? Since none of them hold axiomatically, they cannot be employed as axioms. Thus any serious analysis of the situation would have to avoid such prima facie arguments.
Deductive vs. Cumulative reasoning
Structurally therefore, the position of the TM is one that is essentially impossible to refute. Given that there are probably around 100 different pieces of serious evidence that point to government complicity, the job of an opponent is not just to prove that they each might be wrong, as has been the stance until now, but that each of them stand so little chance of being right, that the sum total of all of the 100 or so accusations’ probabilities of having actually occurred is lower than the probability necessary for the overall accusation to warrant criminal investigation. This becomes mathematically impossible. To take an example, if the chances that NORAD’s inactivity was not indicative of criminal complicity on the behalf of the government were, for the sake of argument, ¾ and then you apply the same reasoning to just 20 arguments that the TM has proffered- very easy to list- then your combined probability of the weight of the evidence not being indicative of criminal complicity on the part of the government is 1/300. So in essence, the debunkers, once they have understood what the debate actually is, cannot but lose. This is because the arguments are structurally different. The TM argument relies on cumulative reasoning, which is to say that only one argument has to be true for the argument to carry. At the same time, the weight of the case is reflected by the combined probabilities of the total accusations. On the other hand, the government case is based on deductive reasoning, which means that only one element in the chain has to be wrong for the entire story to fold. If, for example, it was indeed the case that Dick Cheney told the young man in the Presidential Emergency Operating Center not to shoot the plane down, as Transport Secretary Norm Mineta intimated, then the entire rest of the government story (that is not contingent on that piece of the jigsaw of course) may well be true, but it would not make a bit of difference- the government story would be wrong, and criminal complicity would be proven. If one can illustrate that that piece of testimony is sufficiently serious that it deserves a criminal investigation, then the reasoning of the TM carries. And if you are not sure about that one piece, for whatever reason, then it is simply a matter of numbers, since there are so many serious accusations of holes in the government story, that the combined probability of these accusations makes any acceptance of the need for criminal enquiry essentially impossible to hold off.
Norm Mineta, the US Transportation Secretary, who intimated that Dick Cheney ordered no shoot down to happen on the hijacked planes on the morning of 911
The need to rebuild America’s defences
To look at how this works in detail, let us take what I feel to be one of the strongest examples, and that is the policy statements of the neo-conservatice think tank, the Project for a New American Century. Now one thing that startles me about 9/11, is that if it is so simple for an amateur pilot to hijack a plane and fly it into the Pentagon, one of the most secure buildings in the world, well then why don’t terrorists fly planes into less secure buildings- surely this should be easier? Why don’t Algerian terrorists fly into the Algerian Parliament building, or some other such building? Why don’t Sri Lankan terrorists fly into an important building in Sri Lanka? These buildings do not have a fraction of the protection of the Pentagon- why has it so far proved impossible to pull off? Why has this never happened in the history of mankind, given that on one day it occurred with relative ease, on not one, but 3 such buildings? The simple answer is that even in a tinpot security infrastructure, pulling off such an attack is very hard to do. So how did it happen in the US? In our quest for an answer to that question, it is useful to start with the neo-conservative policy white paper that was published in September 2000, exactly 1 year prior to the attacks. The document is called “Rebuilding America’s Defences”.
Some of the members of the Project for a New American Century, who openly stated the usefulness to policy of a "new Pearl Harbor". Many of these people who be responsible for protecting the US from an attack that they openly viewed as propitious to policy
Basically speaking, this document, signed by a significant number of the men and women who would be charged with defending the US from a catastrophic terror attack on and up to 9/11, detailed that such an attack would in fact be propitious to US policy. This is because the document cites the need to create a new paradigm that will allow for a decades long shift in military and strategic radicalisation. With the threat of the Cold War gone, the US can no longer rest on its laurels as it did under Clinton- it needed to invade Iraq, overthrow Saddam, develop the capacity to fight 2 major wars at the same time, utilise space as a defence mechanism, utilise cyberspace as a defence mechanism, secure radical upheavals in defence spending etc. This, it stated, would be very hard to achieve “absent a catastrophic and catalysing event like a new Pearl Harbor”. Now given that such an event is close to impossible to occurring in a country with a tinpot security infrastructure like Sri Lanka or Algeria, the chances that it should happen within a trillion dollar security infrastructure, like the US, without government involvement, moreover when the same government- in fact the people charged with preventing such an attack within said government- had effectively advocated such an occurrence only 12 months prior, are very slim indeed. So the case against the TM, bearing in mind our precisions about burdens of proof necessary as stated at the top, is already looking pretty tough. What the administration did when it came to power- the lengths the administration went to to secure its election victory over Gore in 2000 now making more sense- was, within 6 days, to demote the main guy who was charged with preventing a terror attack who was not one of them- head of counter terrorism, Richard Clarke. He was demoted, incidentally, one day after handing Condaleeza Rice a document entitled “Strategies for eliminating the threat of Al Qaeda”. And this 3 months after the bombing of the USS Cole, by Al Qaeda. As has been outlined in overwhelming detail by Paul Thompson, this pattern of warnings being ignored, and safeguards against threats being defused, was very much par for the course on a regular basis leading up to the attacks. Even the 9/11 Commission Report states that Bush was given 40 Presidential Daily Briefs that warned him that Al Qaeda was plotting to attack the US. 40 times he did nothing. We are told that George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, stated that the threat level was “unprecedented”, and that he was running around “with his hair on fire”. And yet nothing was done in response.
There is only so far that apathy can go before it ceases to become something passive and transforms into something active, and there is one evident way to explain the active apathy of the Bush administration prior to 9/11 faced with daily warnings of a catastrophic terror attack against them- and that is, as we know, that the occurrence of such an attack was effectively openly stated policy. Once viewed in this light, the insouciance becomes perfectly normal, and things make sense again. Otherwise there is no explanation why an administration made up of some of the most hawkish figures in recent American political history, would not violently react to the idea that there was anything threatening national security- a rare legitimate use of the term.
Let’s just pull back for a second and analyse this data in the light of our earlier expounded framework of reasoning. It could well be the case that the pieces of evidence I have cited do indeed lead nowhere. It could well be that it was just a coincidence that a once in a lifetime event should occur 12 months after it was more or less wished for by the people- undeniably ruthless and unscrupulous people at that- who were in a position to make it happen. This I don’t deny. But it’s irrelevant. The point is that one cannot look at that evidence and state that this is not sufficiently indicative of criminal complicity to warrant an investigation into such. That cannot be said, in any serious way. And this is merely one of dozens of such pieces of evidence.
Shortly after the planes hit the towers, the entire WTC 7 was evacuated. Barry Jennings and Michael Hess, 2 high level city bureaucrats, happened to enter the Mayor’s Emergency Command Center on the 23rd floor, found it deserted, and were told by emergency staff to leave the building. On their way down, there was an explosion within the building that blew up part of the 6th floor. This was, according to Jennings, a significant time before either Twin Tower had collapsed. They made their way down to the ground floor, where Jennings describes how it was “in total ruins”, as if from explosions, and saying that in the lobby, he was told “not to look down” by a firefighter, and that, walking through the lobby, he was “stepping over people”- the suggestion being, of course, dead people.
Jennings was interviewed for the excellent Loose Change Final Cut, but then asked for his testimony to be removed, due to threats he was receiving, and then shortly after, being interviewed for the BBC Conspiracy files debunking attempt, he reneged on his testimony. Shortly after that he was dead, in his early-mid 50’s.
The events he relayed all happened on the morning of 9/11. The building collapsed later in the day. There is, in fact, little need to go into the specifics of something so simple- watch the collapse for yourself, and you can witness that it is as much of a controlled demolition as you are likely to see.
Official explanations of the building’s demise, initially evaluated by FEMA as having “a low probability of occurrence” evolved into the notion that that due to the fires that were set off by falling debris from the twin towers, and the water supply being cut off for the firefighters, the metal beams in the building underwent “thermal expansion”, making the building unsteady, and causing its collapse. Were this explanation one taken seriously by even its formulators, there is something very evident that we would see, namely a revision of fire and building codes for skyscrapers all over the world, since if a fire can cause a building to collapse at the speed of gravity, we had better all go and work in bungalows. Since this is not a serious explanation, there have been no such revisions that I am aware of anywhere in the world- the notion that a fire can cause a building to collapse on itself in the manner of WTC7 is clearly not one that makes any sense.
More sense is provided by first responder witnesses to the collapse. Along with Craig Bartmer, Kevin Mcpadden who was one of the first responders that day, gives testimony that is devastating to the official story, stating that there was a countdown leading up to the collapse of the building.
First responder Indira Singh also states that they were told to evacuate the area, since with regards to WTC7, “(they) were going to have to bring it down”.
To add further fuel to the fire, the leaseholder of the World Trade Center complex, Larry Silverstein, who had purchased the lease weeks prior to the attacks, interviewed for a PBS special on the attacks, stated the following:
“I remember getting a call from the Fire Department Commander, telling me that they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire. I said, you know, we’ve had such a terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is, is, pull it. They made that decision to pull, and we watched the building collapse.”
Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder on the WTC complex
Now, there has been a great deal of misunderstanding by both sides of the debate surrounding this comment. Some members of the TM initially stated that “to pull” is industry jargon for “to implode”, which is not correct. Opponents of the TM sided with Silverstein’s later clarification attempt, when he put out a statement saying that by “pull”, he meant in fact “pull the firemen out of the building”. The debate has centred around the first interpretation, which is, in my eyes, totally misguided- given that Silverstein is not a demolition professional, the idea that he would be using demolition jargon, especially in a reported conversation with a fireman, for a public television show, is not very well thought through. The position from which one should be interpreting this comment, is that of a layperson- i.e. a non demolition industry insider, since this is the standpoint from which Silverstein is coming. If such a person were to hear, or indeed make that comment, it is fairly clear what their interpretation of it would be- that the building was brought down intentionally, by one means or another. Hence the consecutive nature of “making the decision to pull- watching the building collapse”. There is only one thing that pull could be referring to, realistically, and it certainly is not firemen. So Silverstein’s comment, when analysed intelligently, is another piece of evidence indicating insider complicity in the attacks.
This is not to state, as I have emphasised above, that the evidence given rules out all possibility of an alternative explanation. It may well have been the first time in history that a building collapsed by fire, while coincidentally exploding on the inside and its owner subsequently making suspect comments as to its demise; but it is this very fact that renders the probability of its veracity so unlikely, and screams for the need for an investigation into the attacks.
Very often, people point to official reports as support for their argument that the government was not involved. This is clearly erroneous, as since the government is the entity that is suspected of misdemeanour, pointing to a report issued by one of its agencies that defends its point of view is not an impartial way of viewing things. A useful thought experiment to do if one wants to analyse the situation impartially, is to consider if this event had happened in the country of a “designated enemy”, say Iran, and a building containing its secret service and other secretive agencies had collapsed in the same manner as WTC7, with the same background and motives for the attacks as the US had for 9/11, and what our reaction would be when Iranian government scientists came out and said that no, there is no conspiracy, nothing to see here. People just wouldn’t take it seriously. Yet when the shoe is on the other foot, and it is us who are the potential suspects, a government agency’s defence of the government is seen as being something representing serious academic rigour. This is a level of double standards that needs to be bypassed if any progress is to be made in our analysis of such situations. One prima facie refutation that is often given cited above is that the US Government would never kill its own people. But it is not a stretch to believe that the US government would kill 3,000 of its own for imperial grand strategy. After Hurricane Katrina, it is widely accepted that government apathy in the face of spending money to save poor black people led to the death of close to 2,000 there. So if that is accepted to be the case, is it really inconceivable that they would engineer the deaths of a similar number to ensure lasting power and hegemony for the foreseeable future? Not at all. We are aware that the US will willingly sacrifice lives of millions of foreign civilians, and thousands of its own military, to ensure its own global power, so when viewed in this light, and in the stark light of events in New Orleans, it becomes hard to accept the idea that 9/11 is indeed a step that the US Government would not go beyond.
If the government could look the other way while 2,000 poor people died in New Orleans just to save money, it is little stretch to suggest that they would be complicit in the deaths of 3,000 americans to achieve global hegemony
The financing of the attacks
The attacks, according to the co-chair of the 9/11 Commission Report, Tom Kean, cost $400,000-500,000 to carry out. A critical question therefore, though Kean inexplicably deemed it to be “of little practical significance”, is where did this money come from. As has been reported in The Guardian, The Times of India, Asia Times, as well as the Wall Stree Journal, the Australian, and other media outlets from France to India, Indian Intelligence were informed by the FBI that $100,000 of this came from Mahmoud Ahmed, who was the head of the ISI- the Pakistani Intelligence Service- via renowned terrorist Saeed Sheikh. In any normal circumstances, Ahmed would surely be living in hiding having been labelled as a sponsor of state terrorism. But this is not the case. Ahmed, the man who is widely reported to have financed 20-25% of the worst ever terrorist attack on the US, spent the week of those attacks in Washington, meeting with senior government and intelligence officials of the country whose people he was helping to attack. This included breakfasting on the morning of 9/11 with Porter Goss and Bob Graham, the heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as well as meetings with George Tenet, the Director of the CIAon the 9th September.
Mahmoud Ahmed, the former head of the ISI. He is also one of the alleged financers of 9/11, at which time he was tightly allied to US intelligence and government
Given the historical links between the CIA and the ISI, going back to US rapprochement with China under Nixon-Kissinger, and then the adding to that equation of the Taliban during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, it is unsurprising that revelations should surface linking the CIA and the ISI to attacks that are purported to have come out of Afghanistan. What is manna from heaven from anyone suspecting government involvement in the 9/11 attacks, is that such a link should have been made so explicit, with such wide reports regarding the financing, and then such an obvious connection manifested between the financer and US intelligence. Once more, if we apply these inputs to the framework of reasoning that is outlined above, the case for 9/11 Truth becomes increasingly hard to reject.
Some of the other issues
As stated at the top, the strucural strength of the movement comes from the fact that there are so many areas of improbability in the government report, and only one of them has to turn out to be false and indicative of government complicity for the TM argument to carry. Due to this nature of the argument, I will not be able to list all of the issues in this piece, but an excellent list of 50 key points is provided here by Jon Gold. To deal with some key questions:
- This is the crash sight of United 93 in Shanksville.
- Is it normal that a plane, flown by an inexperienced pilot, should be able to crash into the walls of a 6 storey building, at 500mph, leaving no mark on the lawn, and leaving a 20 foot sized hole in the wall? Or that for a building which had dozens of security cameras around it, not one piece of serious footage has been released of the impact- footage that would put any qualms regarding this instance to rest?
The unmarked lawn of the Pentagon
The initial 16 foot hole in the Pentagon (shortly before the roof collapse)
Absent government complicity, how can it be, as is now peer reviewed science, that traces of a military incendiary that can be used to slice through steel girders, have been found in the dust from the World Trade Center Collapse?
Is it normal that there should be molten metal for weeks after the event on the site of the collapse of the building, “running like lava”, when there was, according to the official story, no elements that could have caused such a phenomenon?
Molten metal at Ground Zero on the day of 9/11
Red hot metal 3 weeks after the attacks
Conclusion
If we return to our original proposition, which is that there is sufficient evidence of government complicity in the attack, I think it is hard to conceive that even given the limited number of instances I have been able to look at into depth here (given time and space considerations), that this is not the case. This is not at all to say that there is not a conceivable scenario under which the government’s story could hold. As I have been at pains to underscore, the validity of the TM’s case is not contingent on it offering judge, jury and executioner proof of the guilt of the US Government in the attacks. This is the job of an official investigative body, whose pursuits will be catalysed by the evidence that the TM is, and has been able to bring to light. The job of the TM, and one that has been rendered very easy, given the evident facts of the day, is simply to illustrate the instances that point to likely criminal conduct on the part of the US Government. This serves as the basis for an investigation to be conducted.
Engaging in belief and understanding
The reaction of many people I meet to whom I explain some of these basic facts, is one of what I would call disengaged belief. That’s to say that they understand the facts, they are convinced by them, but the engagement in the belief is not there. This fact also explains the discrepancy between poll numbers- which show that around 40% of Americans are convinced by the TM’s overall case- and the fact that such numbers are not out on the street in open revolt against what they have understood to be their criminal government. To actually engage in the belief means to fully comprehend its implications. It means to fully comprehend the nature of government, industry and other power centres, and the lengths to which these entities will go to to preserve their own power. It would mean the drastic reevaluation of the images that we see on television and the internet of the leaders that we elect, and an utterly unpalatable realisation of our own implication and responsibility in the crimes our government commits. Such a radical reevaluation of world affairs is difficult for almost all people to swallow. As J Edgar Hoover said, “The individual is handicapped confronted with a conspiracy so monstrous, he cannot believe it exists”. This was precisely the phenomenon he was referring to. What handicaps the individual is the dichotomy between his current world view where leaders and power centres are essentially benign, if occasionally misbehaving individuals, and a reality where such “monstrous” conspiracies, implemented to further the true interests of power centres, are possible, logical, and do happen. They are indeed all the more likely to happen given the handicap of general members of the public, and their inability to engage in their belief in a monstrous conspiracy. It is just simple fact that if 40% of the US, 120 million people, engaged in their belief that the government needs to be investigated for possible criminal connections to 9/11, life in that country would become unrecognisable- precisely what it must become if justice is to be served.
It is essential that when reading this article, the belief that gets engendered must be engaged upon- it is no use just believing it and setting it aside, and becoming another one of the 120 million who believes, but does not act. If you do this, you become part of Hoover’s handicapped public, that allows for future conspiracies to unfurl. This in turn allows for future murders, wars, and repressions. The issue of government connivance in the murder of 3,000 of its own citizens to launch a fraudulent war, the War on Terror, is not one that needs to be explained. Engage in the belief, actively demand a new investigation, and that way, not only will you be on the side of justice for the over 1 million who have died as a result of that day, but you will be involved in the effort to make such a catastrophic event less likely in the future.
“After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.”- Bertrand Russell
Yann Arthus Bertrand, pictured above, is a French photographer, renowned for his unique style of work. What he does he very simple, in essence. He rides in a light aircraft, far above the earth’s surface, and takes pictures of dramatic looking landscapes.
The power of this is twofold. Firstly, it grants the viewer a unique, and previously unseen view of the world in which he lives. The images are all the more striking, bereft as they are of signs of human activity, that with which we are surrounded and inundated day after day. From this unique vantage point, the Earth is depicted as an independent entity, something with its own character and traits, its own life force, and as an entity that exists independently from, and indifferent to the race of humans that happen to be living on it. The force behind the Russell quote that I put above is precisely that- it is the awakening to the notion that the planet is not contingent on human existence, but rather that the reverse is true, and we are but a violent blink of an eyelid in the lifespan of the planet.
This brings us to the second key to the power of his work, which is that once the viewer has come to the realisation of the autonomy of the planet from Man’s inhabitation of it, he then, through Bertrand’s photographs, understands the damage that is being wrought upon the planet by Man. This damage is exacerbated in the viewers eyes, as he has understood the Earth as an independant and peaceful entity, and so the effects of Man upon it are essentially an assault; an assault by one entity that is dependant upon the survival of another, on that other. Furthermore, Bertrand is able to underscore this notion by depicting the harmony with which other organisms live on Earth, and contrasthing this with Man’s drastic inabilty to do the same.
Although his pictures convey his message very well, he goes a step further with his recent film, “Home”. This is essentially a videography of his work, narrated in order to give a greater structure and clarity to his message. The genius of it is his ability to track the development of the planet using current images and locations, for instance images of volcanoes and certain types of landscapes effectively communicate the idea of the birth of the planet; his depiction of the explosive nature of Man’s last 50 years on the planet is very well illustrated through the violent rupture of the natural by the urban that Bertrand constantly employs.
Whilst observing the young children of a family belonging to an orthodox religious sect not too long ago, it was hard not to be struck by a pretty sad thought. The life of those children is, in all probability, mapped out in front of them already. It was as soon as they came out of the womb. What schooling they are going to have, what ideologies they are going to subscribe to, what beliefs they are going to propagate, the sorts of people they are going to associate with for the rest of their lives- it’s been decided for them. No matter what the rationality or reason behind any of these factors, the critical faculties that would have allowed such infants to one day put these elements in the light and analyse them calmly for what they are will inevitably be disabled, and thus their life will trundle on, following the same prescribed lines that their parents did, and their fellow infant-soon-to-be-religious-co-ideologues will do.
A Mormon elder. Was it ever going to have been any other way?
Prescribed thought and values is the limiting factor here. If one considers the spectrum of human potential, the ability for a person to reach such potential will correlate positively not only with the physical and logistical freedoms he may have- i.e. the ability to have a good education, good healthcare, a safe environment in which to grow up etc. It will also correlate positively with the freedom of his ideological spectrum- if this is limited, then by necessity his chances of achievement are going to be limited too. The belief that the world was created 6,000 years ago is one that has placed ideological constraints on researchers for centuries; the notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun is another such example. So when one is bound by ideological constraints, then ones ideological spectrum is limited, and thus one’s potential achievements are limited too.
Copernicus, who formulate the heliocentric theory of the universe that underpinned much scientific progress that followed. Absent ideological constraints, such breakthroughs would have occurred much earlier in human history, and the progress we would have witnessed subsequently would be amplified accordingly
Such constraints can be either explicit or implicit- the final result is essentially the same. An explicit constraint is one that is explicitly imposed by some outside force. The interdiction on research that may be anti-theistic, for instance, is one constraint that has been imposed by the Church in centuries gone by. Or in Communist Russia, the labelling of people who opposed certain state policies as insane, along with sending them to a suitable mental institution, is another example of such. In 1983, a Russian broadcaster named Vladimir Danchev was taken off the air, and sent to a psychiatric hospital, for having called on the Afghans to resist the Russian invasion. Since according to Soviet doublethink there was no invasion, he was evidently insane. He was returned to his position several months later, with a state official stating: ““he was not punished, because a sick man cannot be punished.” In a similar vein, when Rosie O’Donnell, at the time one of the most popular TV personalities in the US, alleged that the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11 appeared to be like a controlled demolition, she was unceremoniously booted off the air, following an uproar on other networks, including the call for her to be hanged. These are examples of explicit ideological constraints on what can and cannot be said or thought.
The Russian invasion of Afghanistan- not an invasion, according to Soviet newsspeak
Implicit constraints are possibly even more pernicious. In such circumstances, the proponents of such beliefs will be such because they have been brought up in an environment in which something- even the most ridiculous idea imaginable, such as a scientific basis for the Bible- is such commonly accepted currency that to think otherwise is tantamount to lunacy. Thus the mind will automatically shut out any other thoughts that do not correspond or agree with such pre-conceived concepts. This can be true of individuals, but more importantly it will be the case with entire scientific, academic, political etc communities. This, equally, restricts the progress that humanity can make since ideological constraints are self imposed upon the subject. The children of the extremist religious family mentioned at the start will be unlikely to grow up to be pioneering stem cell researchers, allowing diseases to be cured, or evolutionary psychologists, allowing us to better understand ourselves, or even artists with the ability to speak to the world, since their spectrum of potential output has been reduced so drastically that their lives can to a great extent be already mapped out from the womb.
What is the upshot of all this? Simple- whenever there is an imposed ideology, either one that is explicitly externally imposed, or elicited internally by more subtle outside pressures, then the potential for humans to reach their full potential either as individuals, or collectively as a society, gets restricted massively. And the consequences of this are unimaginable. If organised religion had not been imposed upon societies from since way back when, can you imagine where we would be now as a human race? If women had been allowed to work, if there had been greater equality and mobility between rich and poor, if all humans had had equal rights from the get go- by what factor would the human talent pool have been increased? How unfettered would the potential of humanity have been for how many centuries? The fact is that up until very recently, and still to a great extent now, it is more or less as if humanity has been progressing in first gear, so handicapped has it been by these ideological constraints. If these constraints had been removed, and people had been free to explore and propound theories and ideas without unconscious self censorship, or without external censure, then in many respects, humanity would have reached the stage of scientific progress that it is at today a very long time ago. Further, in terms of ideological and intellectual progress, if the frame of debate had not been so hampered by deference to inherited ideologies with no substantive basis, would humanity not be on a more ideologically sound footing? Were there not the need to pay lip service to established power centres, would human thought not be able to gravitate more towards what is good for people, and thus ideological progress would follow in that vein? I think this would surely be the case.
This is not to say that the ideologies that get imposed do not have a place in society. If someone wants to follow Scientology texts, or believe that capitalism is the answer, then that is their business. This is not so much of a problem. The only issue is when these ideologies get imposed- either on a collection of individuals, or an individual, even if that individual is the child of the proponent- that one starts to run into problems. No human being has the right to limit the potential output or the spectrum of achievement of any other person, even one’s own child- surely this is the greatest disservice one can do to one’s child? Surely they should be left free to flourish and find their own ideological path, rather than having one foisted upon them- is that not what a child’s potential is all about?
Scientology- believe it if you want, but don't expect others to have to
And is this concept, writ large, not what all of humanity’s potential is all about? Drastically denied the freedom to pursue what he might deem to be best, he is deprived of attaining his full potential. Thus the progress in scientific and other academic areas, as well as in ideological enlightenment has been so radically constrained in the course of human history, that what we have today as the manifestation of human accomplishment in any domain is but a pale imitation of what it could and should be, were it to be availed of the ideological constraints that put such a hamper on its progress.
Posted by mjd1982 
Posted by mjd1982 
Posted by mjd1982 
