The Paranoid Tendency in American Life

It is striking how much more convincing the claim is when presented that way. I’d never given it much thought before.

The thing that always makes me wonder is that why do people always seem keen to support/create conspiracy theories that don’t even stand up to cursory inspection – in this example if the theory was just that the president/CIA or whoever knew about the planned attack in detail and ignored it (or made the success slightly more likely with minor actions at most) to create their ‘new Pearl Harbor’ that would hard to refute comprehensively, and while I wouldn’t believe it myself, I also wouldn’t think of those proposing it as nutjobs.

When the theory seems to concentrate on things like planting demolitions charges in buildings for no clear reason, that no longer applies. What about bringing down the building after an hour or two of burning fits into any logical plan that multiple plane crashes, iconic buildings burning for days (if they didnt collapse) and so on wouldn’t have been able to achieve? Adding the demolitions (and equally the Pentagon missile stuff) adds a massive risk of discovery/leaks without giving a commensuate advantage to make it worth the risk.

“Adding the demolitions (and equally the Pentagon missile stuff) adds a massive risk of discovery/leaks without giving a commensuate advantage to make it worth the risk.”

That’s what they want you to think Stuart.

Clinton said on Fox, at the time they were trying to nail him on Bin Ladin, that intel given bush clearly outlined the threat of al Qaeda. When an American diplomat quits flying on account of highjacking being predicted, you’d think a more alert defensive posture would have been ordered up. Regardless of any idea of American participation, the whole scenario was allowed by what, exactly ? It would seeem a good thing to know.

…if the theory was just that the president/CIA or whoever knew about the planned attack in detail and ignored it […] that would hard to refute comprehensively, and while I wouldn’t believe it myself, I also wouldn’t think of those proposing it as nutjobs.

Hey, how is this a “theory”, and what’s there not to believe? The fact is that they told Bush that Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. and he went bass fishing.

You’re right, of course, that their state of mind (negligence or malice) can’t be determined, but the facts are clear.

Then there’s the theory that Muslim schoolkids in New York were in on the plot. This theory was retailed by, among others, Mark Steyn in the Telegraph, reproduced here by Winds of Change.

“The thing to remember when considering a conspiracy theory is the fuck up factor. As the number of people involved gets higher and the complexity of the tasks they are to carry out gets larger, the probability that someone will fuck up approaches 1.”

Also, as the number of people appointed by Bush involved in the conspiracy gets higher, the probability of a fuck up approaches 1.

a healthy aversion to conspiracy theories sometimes leads to an uncritical adoption of the official version of events

The problem is that you need a conspiracy theory to explain why funding sources reward research on global warming. The standard one is that climate scientists collectively promote scary ideas because this gains more money for their field.

But, if so, why aren’t other scientists (apart from a few brave souls fortified by ExxonMobil cash or appointments at rightwing thinktanks) objecting to the money being diverted from their own fields. Compare how they came down on the cold fusion guys.

“The problem is that you need a conspiracy theory to explain why funding sources reward research on global warming.”

Do conspiracy theories have real explanatory power ? ( is their explanans true or well confirmed and so on? ) if they don’t work as explanations why would you need them accept for bit of fun ?

god, mark steyn is such an unmitigated asshole. I had forgotten about that; thanks john.

Your Chronicle link is broken.

The thing that always makes me wonder is that why do people always seem keen to support/create conspiracy theories that don’t even stand up to cursory inspection…

They don’t have to; that’s the beauty of conspiracy theories. All they have to do is raise doubt about the ‘official’ version and keep the focus on those ‘inconsistencies’. And let’s face it: you can make anything sound implausible or sinister if you try hard enough.

But what about the Iran-Contra thing, does it stand up to a cursory inspection? I mean – selling weapons to the Islamic Republic with Israel being the intermediary? Are you nuts?

Well, I’m definitely a conspiracy theorist when it comes to 9/11: it was all a plot by al Qaeda members . . .

We still do not know what the Administration was doing on counterterror before 9/11, other than pushing Clarke out of the loop — read through statements in the 2002 Congressional hearings linked at http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/index.html and you’ll find a lot of yada-yada about how the intelligence community wasn’t coordinated, but nothing on what the Administration was doing. That is carefully circumscribed.

Now we know that when the Bush Administration came in, old Security Advisor Berger lectured new Security Advisor Rice that al Qaeda had become the number one counterterrorism priority. The Bushies promptly sidelined the main expert, Richard Clarke, as well as George Tenet on al Qaeda, and ignored repeated warnings throughout a huge threat-spike in that summer, (which caused government officials to alter their flight schedules,) and it was even reported that Senator Feinstein went into Cheney’s office on 9/10 (!) to complain about the Administration’s paltry efforts on counterterrorism, which by then worried the Senate Intelligence Committee. (Cheney wasn’t there and she was shown the door out by Scooter Libby.)

So explain this? Either (1) they are very nearly the stupidest people on Earth (in Clarke’s book, Wolfowitz showed up at the few briefings that Clarke was allowed to give, saying some things that might support that thesis,) or (2) they DIDN’T CARE if a hijacking happened, since the plan from the start, as we now know, was to invade Iraq, and anything else that happened could be forgotten in the confusion, or (3) they WANTED TO ALLOW a hijacking to happen, (and got more than they bargained for in the results,) for nearly the same reason: to incite the American people, as the Project for a New American Century suggested would be required.

Any other possibilities? –If not, if that’s it, then: you have a conspiracy of sorts to incite a war, OR merely the stupidest people on the planet, OR both. This should make anybody paranoid.

P.S. If you want to get angry, read Wolfowitz’ comments thoughout Clarke’s book, then Wolfowitz’ PDF to the joint hearing at http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/091902wolfowitz.pdf

P.P.S. Speaking of that unbelievable character, the World Bank is dithering on the enforcement of a deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo to protect the world’s 2nd-largest remaining rainforest, now being traded away for little sacks of sugar and a few cases of beer — I kid you not — to tribal peoples who don’t even get to see those payments. Do not miss:

NEW SCIENTIST April 11, 2007: “Protected Congo Forest is Logged Regardless”
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn11585-protected-congo-forest-is-logged-regardless.html

and:

GUARDIAN April 11, 2007 “Vast Forests With Trees Each Worth £4,000 Sold for a Few Bags of Sugar –Congo village chiefs not told value of concessions; World Bank blamed over deals causing ‘catastrophe'”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/congo/story/0,,2054203,00.html

(Found at Metafilter)

The ‘Al Qaeda’ in this case would have to represent what’s called “the official story”. Like “a third-rate burglary” in the Watergate incident. One can accept the official story or reject it, either completely or to some extent. Rejecting the official story makes one a conspiracy theorist.

Hey, how about a Kennedy assassination thread?!!!

I just can’t believe the lone gunman theory. Too many loose ends with both Oswald and Ruby.

“The problem is that you need a conspiracy theory to explain why funding sources reward research on global warming.”

No you don’t. People tend to pay more attention to perceived threats to find out if they are real or not and if they are what should be done about them.

Imagine that we have a government and a set of funding sources that are motivated only by the public good. Now take the situation back at the start of research into global warming, when this was being identified as a hypothesis with some support, and a hypothesis that if true would have significant impacts on human welfare. Wouldn’t you expect a government motivated by the public good to pay attention to this hypothesis and divert funding to further investigation?

Now take a real government. Perhaps not so motivated by high and mighty ideals, but more motivated by the media – which loves paying attention to threats and potential threats (because they’re what we all pay attention to). So the media reports, probably exaggerates, the threat of global warming, people write to the government and demand it does something, plus the government is made up of people too who probably pay more attention to the media and are equally alarmed by the implied threat, and diverts funding to global warming.

As for scientists objecting to money being diverted from their own fields, in my experience scientists are reasonably polite to each other and simply respond to reduced funding in their own area by arguing for greater funding for science in general. I say this as someone who has worked for government on funding issues on science – this is my observation of what actually happens. For another example, I don’t recall every coming across a scientist arguing that less money should go into AIDs research and more into cancer research – they just want more money for their research. I presume it’s much easier socially to say that taxpayers in general should pay more for science than to argue that your mate Dr Schfield’s funding should really go to you. Dr Schfield might take that personally while every taxpayer has so many hands reaching for our pockets that we just can’t get upset at all of them. In my experience, if you come across a scientist arguing there should be less research spending on AIDs or on global warming or any other topic you can think of, they’re an economist (and a few commentators here would argue that economists are not scientists anyway).

So to explain funding authorities diverting money to global warming, all we need is:
1. people pay more attention to threats and possible threats than neutral events.
2. scientists prefer to argue for increased funding for science overall rather than taking money away from their colleagues to give to them.

No conspiracy theory required.

Katherine,

Taken seriously, your notion would mean that all complex social organization is beyond human competence. Yes, as size and complexity increase, so does the potential for error, but so also does the robustness. In a large organization like Coca-Cola, for example, one can be sure that thousands of errors are committed every day. Few are of consequence largely *because* of Coke’s size and complexity: it is rich in feedback loops and redundancy. People who want to make arguments like this have to demonstrate how human beings lose competence in organizing and executing conspiracies that they clearly possess in other areas.

Then there’s the theory that Muslim schoolkids in New York were in on the plot.

Well, the claim that a couple of Muslim schoolkids in New York said some very scary things (in retrospect) right before 9/11 is absolutely true. (Further investigations didn’t come up with anything, though. I guess kids really do say the darndest things, sometimes.) What Steyn was pointing out–quite legitimately, I think–was the extreme reluctance of the vast majority of the press (the “MSM”, as it were) to look into what seemed at first blush to be something very newsworthy.

A spark in a fuel-tank was just too mundane for some.

The missile stuff was thoroughly discredited, of course. But did anyone ever take a post-Richard Reid look at TWA 800, to consider whether a small “shoe bomb” could have achieved the effect investigators ultimately attributed to a spark of unknown origin?

#42. What about the Israeli kids celebrating in NJ as they watched the towers fall? One could say “-quite legitimately, I think—” that the story there “was the extreme reluctance of the vast majority of the press (the “MSM”, as it were) to look into what seemed at first blush to be something very newsworthy.”

What about the Israeli kids celebrating in NJ as they watched the towers fall?

It was a long time ago, and my memory could be playing tricks on me, but as I recall, the “celebrating Israelis” story was covered–and debunked–much more quickly and thoroughly than the “prescient Muslim schoolkids” story.

You people are all fools!!

That’s what they want you to think.

And Henry had the audicity to call
ME a troll in another thread.

You nappy-haired Brits
are all a bunch of wankers.

The global-warming conspiracy theories I’m talking about don’t say that the climate scientists are just overemphasizing scary possibilities to ride a wave of media-generated sentiment. They often don’t even claim that climatologists are self-deluded. They say that the scientists are *lying*, flat-out faking studies and cooking fraudulent computer models to produce predetermined results, so they can get more research money–to fund even more fraud, I guess, since according to the theory it’s not as if they do any real research.

The claim is that the whole field of study of anthropogenic global warming is a hoax–often described as the greatest hoax in the history of science–google “global warming hoax” and maybe “Stephen Schneider” (who was quote-mined to support this claim in the early years) if you don’t believe me. If the claim were true, it would require massive collusion. The accusations are *extremely* serious, they are popular enough to pop up eventually in most web discussions of climate, and, as far as I can tell, they have no basis in evidence.

Stewart Rowe: The “FDR knew” theory was passed around as rumor and generally believed in my high-school history classroom as late as the 1980s. I think the kids were getting it from their (usually very conservative) parents.

“Only unimportant people like Senator James Inhofe of the great state of Oklahoma (until recently chairman of the US Senate Environment Committee) believe that paranoid global warming conspiracy theories McIrvin mentioned.”

Well they would want you to think that wouldn’t they?

Good to see Dan Simon backing up Steyn. I like having my priors confirmed.

Well Martin, that is certainly true. My hypothesis relates more to whether or not a conspiracy theory will go beyond a theory and be actually found out.

The basic premise of a good old fashioned lunatic theory is that (a) many powerful people were involved, (b) those powerful people pulled many strings but no one on the ends of those strings either knew it, or messed up, or told anyone about it (c) there will never be any concrete evidence in favour of the theory because all of the people involved with either keep it secret or kill anyone who doesn’t keep it secret.

Given the plethora of tasks and requirements to both carry out the dastardly deed AND be never found out, I think that the probability of a fuck up (ie getting found out) approaches 1 the more people there are to either get things perfectly right and/or never tell anyone and/or execute anyone mysteriously efficiently should they display any signs of telling anyone.

Ah no, when something does come out, then I’ll be obliged to look at it as real evidence. The trouble is that most conspiracy theories define “something coming out” as, say, the death of one of the conspirators for trying to bring “something” out – the conspiracy therefore self-perpetuates.

What I am trying to get to is that any conspiracy theory that relies on the superhuman abilities of the conspirators simply cannot have any substance because human beings are not superhuman.

That’s where the fuck-up factor differs in a conspiracy theory to Martin’s example of Coca-Cola employees making mistakes. Coca-Cola employees make a mistake but they are not required to be superhuman in order to work for Coca-Cola and the success of their project does not requirement them to never ever make mistakes.

People do make mistakes – that is the whole point. A conspiracy theory that relies on people NOT making mistakes – because of the fuck up factor – cannot be realistic.

I dunno, think of the Watergate story, for example. Security guard noticed a piece of tape and the whole thing unraveled – with its ‘plumbers units’, ‘slush funds’, the whole nine yards.

Now, on one hand this might look like something that supports your argument: way down the chain someone made a mistake and ruined a whole big project.

On the other hand, one could argue that it’s the unraveling itself that was a highly unlikely freaky one-off event that required a lot of energy and dedication and a number of lucky breaks.

No, Michael, the interwebs are hiding things from you in places only the initiates can go, the secret places where the truth is finally revealed:

I notice that the link Peter Ramus tried to provide me was deliberately broken by the National Security Agency. Why? What was in there, Peter? Did someone finally tell the truth about the “mysterious” death of Warren G. Harding? (I love the line in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo: “They can’t use the lone psychopath emerging suddenly as the President’s party enters the train station. They used that with Garfield.”)

I continue to think that the truth with the Bush/Cheney administration and 9/11 is primarily of the “didn’t care” sort. We know they already had war with Iraq on the books, and that they have a more or less pathological hatred of Clinton’s legacy. I would guess that the more Clinton officials tried to get their attention, the more firmly they felt that this whole terrorism thing just couldn’t matter, with a few seconds’ worth of “y’know, if it did, we could probably use it for PR”. But mostly they simply didn’t think about it.

No Dan Simon, the ‘celebrating Israelis’ story was not only not debunked, there is a new article about it by Cliff Ketchem in Counter-Punch (behind the firewall). Using, for the most part, public documents. See also the Israeli ‘art students’ DEA adventure that saw, curiously enough, said students living on the same block, or within close proximity to some of the hijackers, in the months prior to 9/11.

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/05/07/students/index.html

I am not claiming to be able to precisiely say what, if anything, all this smoke means. But it was by no means “debunked. Basically, calling someone a conspiracy theorist is the same thing as declaring that the conversation has ended. It casts a social pall, if you will. Over the person. And it is a favorite tactic of the coincidentalists.

Sorry, I mean “it is impossible to know what the alternative might have been had the initial information NOT COME to light..”

1. Go to google.com
2. Click on Maps
3. Click on “Get directions”
4. From New York
5. To Paris
6. Read line # 23.

Swampy,

Here:
https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/29/how-long-would-it-take-to-swim-across-the-atlantic-ocean/

Now go ‘way.

Shelby, it would have been more logical to say *you should hang around more often* than *go away*
Nevertheless, thank you for the link. I was out of town visiting my daughter that day.

abb1, truth is: I was visiting my daughter. She is a Captain in the military and has just received orders to go to Iraq, her third rotation. I spent the last two weeks visiting her before she leaves. In truth, this is not a happy time; I was merely looking for a little levity to bring myself out of the blahs.

Thank you Swampcracker and Martin Bento, and best wishes to SC’s daughter.

I should add that people who say “Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence” (or the like) are just plain idiots. It sounds so snappy and smart and worldly-wise, but it’s dumb, dumb, dumb. There’s really an enormous amount of malice and meanness out there.

The bad guys have all worked out little playing-dumb incompetence routines to get themselves off the hook, and stupid people swallow the bait automatically.

Thanks, Shelby. Finding myself to be in a confused state, I did not mean to be off topic.

I think Katherine’s point about fuckups is valid, but martin bento and others are making me rethink it a bit.

The contra/cocaine/CIA story and the October Surprise story are examples of scandals that, if true, are probably too large for the MSM to want to touch. In fact, that’s my application of Chomskyan media criticism to the world of scandals. They’ll cover scandals up to a certain level of seriousness, but no higher. Iran/contra was about as high as they’ll go. That was portrayed as a noble effort to free American hostages or to fund the heroic Nicaraguan freedom fighters, so you could still put a noble motive to it (true or not) while pontificating about the unconstitutionality of it all. But if the CIA actually allowed drug smuggling into American ghettos or if the hostages were kept in Iran for longer than was necessary for political gain, that’s Benedict Arnold level treachery. Too big to touch. It casts the whole system into doubt, if people at the very top do those sorts of things.

I think some variant of the contra/cocaine story is true. I don’t know enough about the October Surprise theory to have a strong opinion.

No Dan Simon, the ‘celebrating Israelis’ story was not only not debunked, there is a new article about it by Cliff Ketchem in Counter-Punch (behind the firewall).

Well, I can’t respond to an article I have no access to, but I note that the Salon article to which you link says absolutely nothing about the five Israelis famously arrested in New Jersey for allegedly “celebrating” as they filmed the attack on the WTC. (Am I wrong in describing them as famous–far more so, anyway, than the Muslim schoolkids who allegedly predicted 9/11?)

I am not claiming to be able to precisiely say what, if anything, all this smoke means. But it was by no means “debunked.

It was “debunked” in the sense that no concrete evidence ever emerged of anything objectionable, beyond the well-known (pre-9/11) phenomenon of lots of young Israelis working illegally in the US. If that’s not a “debunking”, then the story of the Muslim schoolkids predicting 9/11 wasn’t “debunked”, either.

Basically, calling someone a conspiracy theorist is the same thing as declaring that the conversation has ended.

Ah, if only that were true….

Good to see Dan Simon backing up Steyn. I like having my priors confirmed.

Of course you do. That’s why there’s never any danger of it not happening.

(By the way, I consider Steyn’s main thesis these days–that Europe is doomed to be overrun by Islamist radicals–wildly implausible. But I’m sure you’ll have no trouble reconciling that with your “priors”.)

“Am I wrong in describing them as famous—far more so, anyway, than the Muslim schoolkids who allegedly predicted 9/11?”

The stories seemed about equally noisy to me.

Re: 89

If you get a big enough sample, you’ll find at least one instance of a very low probability event. I mean this IS where superstions came from, lack of understanding of causality and what probability actually is.

Except for the thing about dogs eating grass and rain. That one’s for real.

According to Katherine, humans are so incompetent that any conspiracy of significant size or complexity is bound to fail or be exposed. According to Ed, the elite is so competent and a slick move, David’s usual counter to Goliath. powerful that their conspiracies cannot be exposed by the hoi polloi and only come to light when one faction of the elite struggles against another, creating a clash of the titans situation.

Oddly, I find myself in the middle position.

As a counterexample to Ed, I would offer Gary Webb. He was clever enough to work with a defense lawyer to pose certain questions to Blandon while the latter was under oath. It was David’s usual counter to the Goliath, a slick move.

As for Katherine, I find no basis for your assertion that conspiracy theories necessarily attribute superhuman abilities to the conspirators. It doesn’t help that you speak only in vague generalities. I have discussed some of the most prominent conspiracy theories of recent decades in terms of specific facts. You blithely generalize about “most” conspiracy theories while showing no specific knowledge of any of them. Your argument reeks of straw. I’m sure you could cherry-pick something to support your position if pressed, but we all know what cherry-picking proves.

Why would it be true that conspiracies cannot survive mistakes? If we do accept the conventional narrative of 9/11, al queda made mistakes. They had no superhuman abilities, and far less resources at their disposal than agencies of the US government would. They nonetheless were able to achieve, or largely achieve, their objectives. If you think such things require superhuman abilities, you have too low an estimation of human competence, which is what I was getting at with the Coke example.

Murder is not beyond human abilities either, by the way. Anyone posting here is competent enough to do it. Psychological capability is another question, of course, but there are obviously those who have that too.

Donald, here’s a URL to more on the October Surprise. Robert Parry is the journalist who broke the Iran/Contra story back when he wrote for associated press:

http://consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile.html

I think you make a good point about there being an implicit and deep resistance to scandals that threaten the legitimacy of the system itself. I don’t think it’s just the media, though. I think many liberals share this bias, which is why there is so much resistance to conspiracy theory in liberal quarters. Someone who is committed to government as partly a solution to problems is in a difficult situation if the government’s legitimacy is seriously undermined, and will be biased against accounts that do that.

Thanks for the link, martin.

Katherine (if this is the same person I see at other places) has done very good work on human rights issues (torture in particular), so it’s a little painful to see her dissed here. I think she’s thinking of the 9/11 conspiracy theory, with explosives in the buildings and no plane hitting the Pentagon and probably hundreds of people in on the conspiracy, not one of them a patriotic American horrified at what was being planned. It’s totally whacky.

The contra/cocaine/CIA thing, on the other hand, is entirely plausible because the CIA has a history of dealing with very unsavory groups. And the October Surprise thing, from what I remember (haven’t read the link yet) is really a natural extension backwards from the Iran Contra scandal. Just juicier, because if true it can’t be spun as a well-intentioned endeavor.

The interesting thing about the arms to Iran business via Israel is that Chomsky was writing about it in 1983 in “The Fateful Triangle”, a few years before the Iran Contra scandal broke. He in turn was only citing a Boston Globe interview with Moshe Arens, where Arens said that Israel had provided arms to the Khomenei regime with the approval of the US government at the highest levels. There was also a 1982 BBC documentary about this-Israel’s goal was to link up with elements in the Iranian military in hopes of staging a coup. So there’s all this known activity involving Israel and Iran with US approval (though denied at the time) and yet we were all supposed to be shocked in 1986 when it came out. But it was already out. (Well, not the contra link, which presumably came later.)

When Donald johnson says
“I don’t believe the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks, because of the fuckup factor Katherine refers to, which puts that idea in the wildly implausible category.”
I have an immediate surge of empathy – go team, yeah. It takes a lot of strength to maintain a rational view of all this nightmare junk. Endurance. Faith. Hope.
But my next thought is, what’s he mean by “the US government”?
Bush? Cheney? Rove? Did they put themselves into those powerful positions? That’s the default view, right? Arrogance, ambition, and a ruthlessness that will spin its own lies into gold, carrying these little men with their tiny hearts into the hive’s central chamber.
Yet Bush is so obviously a puppet for something, and Rove for all his maggoty demi-humanity doesn’t seem like genius enough to have done it solo. Cheney? The whole thing? I don’t think so. But even so, even if George Bush – a man who couldn’t even run a baseball team, somehow ditty-bopped his way through all the obstructions and sidetracks, and ended up babbling at the top of the heap – it was still a conspiracy. He didn’t get there fair and square, and certainly not on his own. Feith and Wolfowitz are long gone, and Perle’s off the radar, so we’re not supposed to link them to anything. But somebody’s got to have been driving that train. Some eminences grises, non?
What I mean is, you have to admit there’s something behind the US government, so that when you say “the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks” what you’re really saying is “Whatever’s behind the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks”.
Whether that means they engineered it, or just did some tricky matador moves and stepped out of the way of its inevitability, doesn’t matter as much as finally having to admit there’s no moral reason they wouldn’t have done it, because they’ve proved that a thousand times since.
They’ll obviously stop at nothing, morally, to get what they want – so the question is, what do they want?
The answer is this. This locked-down locked-up scared-to-mumble terrified-of-getting-out-of-line nation of irritable overfed sheep. Somebody wanted this, and 9/11 helped them get it.
The rationalist faith says there’s a wide bright line between volition and happenstance. Maybe not, though. Maybe this is sitting right in the middle between choice and coincidence, not one nor the other, but both and neither. And it just happens to work to the interest of the evilest men in the world.

Dan Simon,

My original point stands….the story has not been debunked. Nor, has it been fully explained. You don’t have the article…you don’t have it. What can I say? Other, than, perhaps, knowing that an article exists out there you my throw a caveat or two into your conversations on the matter.

As to the the article I did send you I noticed you offered no comment on the substance. Which may be a comment in a passive manner I suppose. Yes, Dan, yes, another coincidence. That’s all folks, step along, nothing to see here.

In a correction to #34 way up there, a commenter to Brad DeLong’s site argues that Greenpeace’s allegation against the World Bank is misplaced. The last forests are in jeopardy certainly.

The Bush administration is famously competent at pulling of big jobs after all.

Some 9-11 conspiracy theorists explain the need for the demolition charges. Apparently the World Trade Center was a financial liability, but couldn’t be demolished legally to make way for another development, because of asbestos issues. The theory is that the attacks were staged as a diversion from the demolition, allowing Silverstein to collect the insurance money, and for new development on the site.

I have to say I find it more plausible that New York real estate interests would be able to organize something like this than the Bush administration.

The real reason for the focus on the demolition is that the conspiracy theorists badly want real, uncontradictable proof of their theories, that would be admitted as evidence in a court of law. Of course, no such thing exists. So its a necessary part of the theory to have forensic evidence, because of course everyone believes forensic evidence. I blame too many crime shows. The same phenomena is behind the “magic bullet” in the JFK conspiracy theories

j thomas wrote:

“The official answer appears to be that they were all off on a training mission/simulation exercise.”

Oh, that’s the alibi now? That used to be part of the conspiracy theory. There is, at this point, a history of accounts of 9/11, both mainstream and conspiratorial, and it is useful to look at the evolution, rather than simply the current snapshot. The original mainstream theory of the failure of air defense was something like what you later suggest – just pure incompetence, heavily laced with the Repub talking point of “of course, we screwed up. We’re the government”. Frankly, that level of incompetence is absurd. How on Earth did the US ever win the Cold War? Unsurprisingly, the government has been forced to abandon this line.

The training exercises were first uncovered by the conspiracy theorists, specifically by Mike Ruppert, who dug out passing reference to them in obscure sources like the military press. According to Ruppert,it was not “some kind of training exercise”; it was at least five separate exercises simulating terrorist attack or war involving multiple government agencies, all scheduled for September 11th. One of these involved sending a huge portion of America’s fleet to Canada to simulate air defense against a Soviet, er, Russian bomber attack. In this day and age. Another involved similation of an attack on America using, yes, hijacked jets. Ruppert looked at the kind of exercise the latter was – this exercise involved the FAA and, I believe, NORAD – and concluded that it would involve the use of “implants” – false images implanted on radar screens as part of the simulation. Ruppert speculated that the air traffic controllers were confused by not knowing which were real jets and which were implants. When partial FAA tapes were later released, they did indeed show that there were such implants, as Ruppert had predicted, and that the controllers were confused by them. Shortly before the first impact, one controller looked at the jet on his radar and said “I hope that’s an implant”. If it were not so tragic, it would be hilarious.

Now, for all the noise that has been made about how the Bush administration did not take terrorism seriously before 9/11, there were an awful lot of exercises scheduled, and there was a major reorganization of terrorist response the May before 9/11. The administration decided to centralize training and simulation of terrorist attacks in one point in the government. What point would that be? Why our newly-discovered fourth branch, of course: the Office of the Vice_President. Cheney was in charge of four of the five exercises, mediated through the secret service. The fifth was an NYC exercise being conducted in World Trade Center 7 under the auspices of Rudy Giuliani (Note: I don’t have my copy of Crossing the Rubicon handy to check that I got all the particulars right in the preceding. If not, it’s pretty damn close).

It is worth noting that this scenario is fairly immune to “fuck ups”. Cheney’s job in this situation would be to spread chaos. It is hard to “fuck up” chaos.

Roy, there is nothing “rational” about the refusal to acknowledge the role of conspiracy in the world; it is just dogmatic and, I would say, autistic, though I’m not going to take the time to unpack that now.

Ed, If you’re going to talk about this stuff, you should at least get the nomenclature straight. There is no “magic bullet” in JFK conspiracy theories. The “magic bullet” is a derisive term conspiracists use for the accepted theory, which requires multiple wounds to two people from a single, relatively undamaged, bullet. The main support for the magic bullet theory – that is to say, the official version – had been that forensic analysis showed that various bullet fragments had come from the same bullet batch and therefore, through some fairly reasonable inferences, from the same bullet. However, the type of forensic analysis done has since been shown to be entirely invalid – a number of criminal convictions have been reversed in consequence – and a retesting of the fragments found no support for the assertion that they necessarily came from the same batch.

But the JFK assasination is not one of the conspiracy areas I know much about. Probably better to talk to John.

Speaking of coverups.

link

One of the things that is interesting to me about No Gun Ri is what we consider an atrocity that needs to be covered up. It’s not controversial among historians that American bombing in the Korean War killed somewhere between “hundreds of thousands” and 2 million civilians. I’ve seen the smaller number in, I believe, Max Hastings’s book. Curtis LeMay claimed we killed over a million people. This is one of those historical facts that is out in the open, yet at the same time there is sufficient unease about it so that it isn’t well-known. On those few occasions when the Korean War comes up in discussions I virtually never see this mentioned in the mainstream press.

That said, I don’t think Americans would get too upset if they did hear it, because in our culture strategic bombing is a semi-respectable civilized way to kill inocent people. One does it and then mournfully admits that war is hell or else one has yearly ritualized discussions about whether Hiroshima was justified.

However, in our culture for an infantryman to take aim at civilians with a rifle or machinegun and kill them in that fashion–well, ithat’s supposed to be worse for some reason. So you’ve got this Bateman (in your salon link) doing his best to scale down the likely death toll (35, not 350) and trying to argue that there were no orders from on high to do this. Though the same high-ranking people were apparently just fine with bombing North Korea (and much of South Korea) into rubble.

We live in a very weird morally twisted culture, one that presumes to lecture Muslims on their hypocrisy, but anyway, I have one other point.

I don’t doubt the US government is perfectly capable of morally depraved actions. They’ve shown this on countless occasions. But because of the culture in which we live, some forms of depravity are easier to excuse than others. It’s sort of a joke with many Americans that we supported both sides of the Iran/Iraq war. It”s okay to kill foreigners by supporting dictators or terrorists–we have no choice, ya know, because it’s a tough world out there. T It’s also okay to bomb them. It’s less okay to shoot them, and there you have coverups. Torture is also a borderline case, but as it turns out, so long as you do it to people you claim are terrorists a great many Americans will excuse it, or even applaud.

Deliberately targeting ordinary Americans, though, is a big no-no. There might be people in the government depraved enough to do it, but they know they are a tiny minority in this culture. It’s an enormous risk they’d be taking, not at all like ordering an assassination overseas or supporting some genocidal thug or starting up a torture program for Muslim prisoners or starting a war on trumped up evidence of WMD’s. People would get, you know, really upset if it turned out Cheney planned 9/11 and Cheney knows that. So I find it’s intrinsically harder to believe 9/11 conspiracy theories than it is to believe that the US government has tortured or murdered 10 to the Nth power foreigners.

Lordy lordy lordy – I look away from the computer for two days and I appear to have kicked of a general boxing match on the veracity of various conspiracy theories.

Well, I don’t know who said I said something about “most” conspiracy theories, or where it was that someone thought that I must think that people are entirely incompetent and unable to sustain a conspiracy, but you have misunderstood me. Or alternatively, I explained by semi-flippant opening theory badly. The latter is at least as likely. Martin, in particular, seems to think that I despise all conspiracies and think that none exist – no such thing. It is you that has created a strawman out of what you think I said.

I don’t think that humanity as a whole is incompetent, particularly. I just think that perfect competency is preposterous. And I don’t think that “most” conspiracies are bunk. What I said was that when considering (ie assessing) a conspiracy theory I keep the fuck up factor in mind.

Simply, if a particular theory requires overall competency, superhuman levels of influence and a large, complex network of perfectly and secretly executed tasks, I tend to look on it askance. And further, if the theorists then insist that members of the conspiracy who have tried to reveal “the truth” have died because of perfectly executed murder, then that bumps the theory further down into the realms of “tin foil hat”.

For the record, I think that the idea that 9/11 was the direct responsibility of Bush et al is preposterous, because of all the above. I’ve heard the so-called “evidence” and it doesn’t even deserve the name. The others mentioned, I actually have no opinion because I have no knowledge.

PS Thanks for sticking up for me Donald. I hope I’m the Katherine you think I am.

Katherine,

I think you put your finger on my specific area of disagreement with you. While I consider it highly unlikely that the Bush et al ACTIVELY planned, and executed, the events of 9/11, I do not consider the possibility “preposterous’ given that I believe they would do whatever they believe they have to do to advance their agenda.

Therefore, I certainly would not rule their accomplice status, if only in a passive sense. IOW….they knew something was coming. Specifically knew, and yet allowed, and in some cases, perhaps, facilitated it coming about. And for the sake of intellectual consistency, if not, some may argue, accuracy, I think this was the same dynamic behind Pearl Harbor.

My point here is less about 9//11 than about the state of mind of the people ruling America right now. And what they are capable of. And for the record I think fear, professional and/or physical,and very short attention spans, in a world where lots of ‘images’ and ‘sounds’ are constantly bombarding the general population, are much more effective at covering up things than “competence” is.

Katherine, I think Abb1 was making the point that that conspiracy lasted for 12 years before it was found out, and it was only found out by a group of radicals. When I first heard of cointelpro I didn’t believe it, and I have had conversations with others who poo poo the idea out of hand. Usually on the basis of the incompetence of government agencies. But it did happen. I think hiding a program of destabilisation of political activity (which, you recall, included some assassinations) for 12 years could indicate a fairly great degree of competence. The organisation which could blow up those Earth First activists and get away with it would generally be considered competent, right? Although, that said, it’s pretty easy to get away with government sanctioned murder in the US (eg McCarthyism), so maybe the bar is lower there.

If one of your reasons for not believing conspiracy theories is that they are hard to hold together, then Abb1 pointing out a conspiracy which was held together for 12 years and is still very poorly publicized would seem to me to constitute a reasonable argument against your position, as opposed to mere contrarity.

“to be sceptical of people who tell me about shadowy groups of mysterious power-wielders who secretly control the world without slipping up, except to reveal their presence to networks of dedicated foil hat wearers by means of disguising murders as heart attacks”
Or, put another way, to maintain my comfort levels come what may. Because there’s obviously no bright line between “tinfoil hat wearers” and people with scary inside info and nowhere safe to deliver it. And that, in anyone with a functioning conscience, requires you to get involved, emotionally if nothing else once you hear the news. Or get rid of your conscience.
As Donald Johnson said it:
“It casts the whole system into doubt, if people at the very top do those sorts of things.”
and Martin Bento reiterated:
“I think you make a good point about there being an implicit and deep resistance to scandals that threaten the legitimacy of the system itself.”
And, if there’s any truth in all the crazy conjecture, that there were and are levels of treachery and guile far more complex than just these little piles of incompetence and venality, then they’re very likely still in place, aren’t they?
And that would be the most disturbing aspect wouldn’t it?
Everything from, taking an arbitrary kickoff date out of the hat, Arbenz to Kennedy to Letelier to El Mozote to Gary Webb to…now let’s go back through the timeline and talk about Fred Hampton and a whole bunch of other less visible but equally threatening figures in that crucial period between ’65 and ’73.
If there’s a scoreboard somewhere the bad guys are getting away with everything pretty much – and the good guys have what?
Plame? Did we win that? Not yet? What else? Iran-Contra? Did we win that? Oliver North is in jail still, right?
The two operant pressures on sensible people are the aforementioned “casting the whole system into doubt”, and the awful chaos on the other side of acceptance of the strange.
Because once the weirdness erodes that comforting selective vision, you can all too easily end up in a nightmare of predatory shadows, where there’s no gravity and no direction home, and no authority to turn to for protection.

Katherine–

Roy talks that way to everyone.

What’s missing around here is some barely left of center type who laughs at the notion that high-ranking American officials could be war criminals and dismisses any radical critique of American foreign policy as “conspiracy theorizing”. There aren’t any such folks left in this thread (if there were any) and so you’ve been drafted by a couple of people to serve as strawman.

Ah, I’m having mouse problems. First paragraph again:

sg, quite so and abb1 made a good point. After all, Katherine seems to want to argue that “I hesitate to say, for fearing of starting the whole think off again, that the fact that you know about cointelpro tends to support my theory.” She doesn’t hesistate to say this because it is ill-supported, but just because she, for some reason, does not like the debate. But in fact if Katherine were to take this position, she would have to argue that it is somehow inevitable that a bunch of hippie radicals are going to always break into the FBI office, steal all the files, and publish the good bits – that’s the only reason we know about Cointelpro. And, of course, this conspiracy will have no fuck-ups. Good luck with that argument.

Katherine, Agreed that you never said you would disbelieve whistleblowers. You did, though, point to the likelihood of whistleblowers as a reason large or complex conspiracies would be unlikely to remain secret. My response was that even when whistleblowers emerge, if what they report is something people are disinclined to accept, they are simply disbelieved, even if they themselves the are highly credible, and I offered examples of this.

This gets to a point about how people maintain world views. Donald said that he simply does not believe the necessary portion of the American elite is morally capable and bold enough to do something like 9/11. I pointed to Northwoods as an example of exactly that, and I frankly consider it a strong refutation. Though I don’t know, my guess would be that Donald already knew about Northwoods, at least in a general way, but had not integrated that knowledge into his general world view. It is a sort of cognitive dissonance. There is this general view about the government elite, and then there is this specific fact that contradicts it. Why is the general view not revised in light of the fact? After all, Northwoods dates from a time when the military and government were not full of the types who actively pray for Armageddon and may therefore be more inclined to extreme actions. If the elite were capable of such a thing then, it seems it would be even more capable now.

Sigh. I seem to have become a totem for some kind of credulous, conspiracy-denying paradigm. I don’t recognise it, but then I’ve rather lost track of the various assumptions, inferences and innuendoes that people have assigned to me. I’m not even going to bother to track where people have quoted me and expanded what they think is my point beyond all original context. I rather think that they’ve stopped talking to me, or whoever they think “me” is, and have just started yelling into the echo-chamber of their own certainties.

So here we go – my last attempt. Feel free to have the last word after me boys, I won’t feel that my manhood has been inpugned if the very last syllable is not mine.

At the risk of repeating myself, I don’t doubt that conpiracies exist, or that they can be wide ranging and dangerous. I also know that some conspiracies don’t exist, except in the fevered brains of people who want desperately to see a pattern because otherwise all there is is randomness and chaos that is too frightening to deal with. Frankly, most of the shit that goes on the world is somewhere between the two.

And here is something that I do object to (more than having my words manipulated and misinterpreted) – where crazy theories mask an underlying wrong doing. I will point over to Rachel in North London (http://rachelnorthlondon.blogspot.com/), the blog of a woman who was on a tube train on 7 July 2005 and got blown up. She has been campaigning for a proper inquiry into that day and the events leading up to it. She is being seriously hindered (and harrassed) by tin foil hat conspiracy theorists, who try to persuade her that because the forensics teams looked under the trains, that must mean that “they” know something “we” don’t know about the position of the bomb. Her attempt to get something sensible and necessary is being pulled down by the ramblings of those who really really want the world to be run by sinister cabals of power-weilding maniacs, because they really couldn’t handle the truth.

Martin Bento-
Cheers for speaking the language of the greater audience so fluently.
Katherine says-
“by tin foil hat conspiracy theorists, who try to persuade her ”
And never pauses to consider that the tinfoil may actually be chaff, not hats. Absurdities scattered in the wake of egregious covert wrong. So that sensible people turn away in disgust at the time-wasting nonsense they have to fight through, to get nowhere.
It goes without argument, or should, that if there is an official cover-up concerning the London train bombings, that a barrage of gibberish-spouting paranoids would be effective and useful. Much more effective than official denials alone.
Any weirdness around 9/11 will be protected from exposure by frantic and hysterical obsession with unprovable minutiae. But any weirdness there will still be weird, and knee-jerk scorn for any “conspiracy theory” plays right into that.