Over at “Harry’s Place, Gene picks up”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/10/13/social_forum_preview.php on the priorities of the European Social Forum, which is about to meet in London. I surfed over to “the programme of events and workshops”:http://www.fse-esf.org/en/programme/list.shtml and was disturbed to find that there’s a session devoted to promoting 9/11 revisionism:
bq. Members of the UK 9/11 network will be speaking including Ian Neal and Simon Aronowitz, editor of www.thoughtcrimenews.com plus a screening of 911 In Plane Sight 50 min short film followed by a question and answer forum…..Presenting the evidence supporting US government complicity in the 9/11 attacks, growing 9/11 truth movement and its implications for global peace and development.
I had a conversation last week with a very smart and likeable man from a Middle Eastern country who believes all this nonsense, and assures me that many of his fellow citizens do too. European leftists giving it further exposure, credence and legitimacy is the last thing we need.
{ 23 comments }
Jor 10.13.04 at 11:29 am
It would be so much easier to feign outrage if 40% of American’s didn’t believe Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 (60% of republicans).
Ray 10.13.04 at 11:42 am
The Social Forums don’t exercise a lot of control over what’s discussed. Its very easy for a group to organise a meeting as part of the forum, which doesn’t mean that the ideas expressed there have any support among the organisers. So they may be getting exposure, but not credence or legitimacy.
Mill 10.13.04 at 12:30 pm
You’re right, Jor. Two wrongs DO make a right.
Rich Puchalsky 10.13.04 at 1:20 pm
Clearly the Bush administration wouldn’t hesitate to kill 3000+ to secure its reelection. So the story is quite believable in that aspect.
The only place the conspiracy theory falls down is competence. While the Bush adminstration would like to be able to carry out something like 9/11 on a regular basis, it isn’t competent enough to do so without being caught.
abb1 10.13.04 at 1:22 pm
…Presenting the evidence supporting US government complicity in the 9/11 attacks, growing 9/11 truth movement and its implications for global peace and development.
Depends on what they mean by ‘complicity’. On August 6, 2001 the US president received daily national security briefing entitled “Bin Laden is determined to strike within the United States.” That’s a fact. He ignored the briefing and went fishing. Couldn’t this be called ‘complicity’ – even if only rhetorically? Of course it’s complicity.
mona 10.13.04 at 2:02 pm
The ESF is a grassroots NGO thing uniting a whole lot of groups from the reasonable to the ideologically extremist, I’m surprised at the surprise. Anti-global protesters aren’t exactly well known for their moderacy, for better or worse.
Personally, I’m happy to have all kinds of views out in the open. Everyone has their ideological taboos, but who decides where to draw lines? short of advocating violence all is fair game in debates and talks. I’m far more disturbed by the US governemnt complete lack of accountability for the actual policies it took before and after 9/11 in regards to terrorism. I don’t find it surprising some take the leap and infer bigger and crazier nastiness than that under everyone’s eyes.
bob mcmanus 10.13.04 at 2:28 pm
I don’t think it is useful to simply dismiss that conspiracy theory out of hand, on faith as it were. Arguing with an average Egyptian that this conspiracy theory is ridiculous because Bush is just too nice a guy like decreases credibility and the possibility of dialogue.
However, the Pentagon attack and the nature/identities of the terrorists strikes me as compelling, because circumstances appear too uncontrollable for the US Gov’t, or any part of it, to have confidence in the outcome.
jet 10.13.04 at 3:04 pm
abb1, your extreme right wing idealogy is completely crazy. Those people who say Bush should have taken decisive action based on a report, the likes of which he (and Clinton) received all the time, is crazy.
abb1, can only be inferring one of two things. Either abb1 is saying Bush should have read that report, started gaming the media with fear-mongering to create such a stir against terrorism that it forced congress to act (and given congress’s actions after 9/11, I think this option was impossible). Or abb1 is saying Bush should have read the memo and taken military action against Afghanistan.
Given the propensity of congress to put off till next decade what it should do today, the first option is out. Bush running around with his hair on fire claiming terrorists are falling from the sky and that congress needs to fix the FBI, even if successful, would not have changed anything in time to stop the attacks (he only had 8 months to act). And the second option of pre-empting Afghanistan, while also not stopping the attacks, would have made Bush look like an insane crusader and got him impeached.
Or maybe abb1 is saying that upon getting that memo that Osama was intent on attacking the US (which is kind of like getting a memo that fish breath using water), Bush should have gone on a secret mission to Cambodia?
john b 10.13.04 at 4:52 pm
Jet: some of the reports that the Bush briefing was based on talked about using aeroplanes to attack high-profile targets. Moussaoui was arrested before the attacks; his flight school instructor had previously notified the FBI that he thought something weird was going on.
I don’t work in counter-terrorist inteligence, and nor do you. But it’s pushing it to claim that the executive branch had no power to strengthen airline security, to check flight schools for dodgy Arabs or to investigate Mr Moussaoui’s previous movements. These could’ve been done and would’ve made the attacks less likely.
cs 10.13.04 at 5:01 pm
Unlike jet, I don’t claim to know what would have happened or not happened in an alternative reality. I always find such arguments the weakest and most intellectually vacuous of all.
“Conspiracy Theory” is a catagory deliberately created to dismiss whole lines of empirical investigation and theoretical inquiry. Rigorous skepticism in the required approach to all forms of productive research. No reasonable person can argue that there are no serious unanswered questions surrounding the events of 9/11. Why would anyone dismiss the entire realm of inquiry as “nonsense”?
Pollie Anon 10.13.04 at 6:15 pm
OK, so now we see clearly where a lot of the regular posters are coming from.
It’s not pretty.
Shelby 10.13.04 at 6:17 pm
cs: Why would anyone dismiss the entire realm of inquiry as “nonsense�
Probably because it’s often presented in so extreme a fashion. When you start claiming that the US government was behind 9/11, you’ve entered la-la land. That makes you less credible when you say, “or maybe they just didn’t fully explain their failures.”
I think the people pushing these arguments together are paranoid conspiracy-heads (and not, say, brilliant wielders of the straw man). Unfortunately the paranoid approach swamps the reasonable one.
abb1 10.13.04 at 6:29 pm
Jet,
read this:
One of the attacks they apparently prevented in 1999 was planned for Boston.
I lived 15 miles from Boston in 1999, worked in Cambridge – but I don’t remember any gaming the media with fear-mongering nor any military action against Afghanistan at the time.
It’s simple: in 1999 people who were responsible for preventing these attacks did prevent them and they acted like professionals.
In 2001 people who were responsible went fishing. And then after the attacks happened they bought flags, talked tough and bombed and killed some peasants half the world away. At the very least they are a bunch of liars and pathetic losers, that’s a fact. And if some people suspect they might also be criminals – who can blame them.
jet 10.13.04 at 6:48 pm
abb1, and while Richard Clarke is probably a huge partisan grinding an ax, you are making it sound like Bush was doing nothing. The first draft of a major realignment of how the US dealt with terrorism was completed the beginning of September.
But I guess revamping the entire US paradigm for dealing with terrorism only counts as “going fishing”. And maybe Bush should have told the FBI to focus on airlines, and maybe Bush thought he’d have time for his changes to be in place. I’d say that maybe the Dem’s shouldn’t have crushed intelligence in 94 and 95 and this probably wouldn’t have happened because somebody’s cousin, who has an uncle, who has a son, who smuggles drugs, would have been on the CIA pay roll and tipped us off. So as long as we are playing the “what if” game, let’s use Occam’s Razor and start at the top. Saying Bush should have magically fixed 8 years of CIA hamstringing in 9 months is a bit ridiculous.
But either way the government failed us. But to think Gore would have given the incredibly un-PC order to start investigating “suspicious Arabs” is a bit disingenuous. Even though it probably would have made you feel better after 9/11 to know the US wasn’t going to do anything rash like invade the country who trained the terrorists, I guess you’ll have to live with Bush’s actions ;)
dsquared 10.13.04 at 7:05 pm
I’m the CT member with the greatest degree of sympathy toward parapolitics and what is perjoratively called “conspiracy theory” research. There certainly are a number of anomalies in the official account of 9/11 (the miraculous flameproof passports of the hijackers being the most glaring example). But the theory that the US government in some way planned the attacks is a “conspiracy theory” in the perjorative sense; it’s an unwarranted piece of speculation with nothing to recommend it other than that it helps some people find a congenially simple explanation of a complicated world.
abb1 10.13.04 at 7:31 pm
But I guess revamping the entire US paradigm for dealing with terrorism only counts as “going fishingâ€.
Wait a sec, it was only a couple of years ago and you’ve already forgotten. They were revamping for the missile defense, that was the big thing at the time – remember? They wouldn’t give a fuck about terrorism, they were worried about ‘rogue states’ with missiles.
Sane people were saying that it doesn’t seem to make much sense to spend billions on missile defense when it’s so easy to smuggle a bomb into the US, but the Bushies were steaming ahead with their big plans – breaking out of the ABM treaty and so on.
Well, missiles or no missles they sure managed to turn it back to blaming the evil ‘rogue states’ virtually in no time. One thing these guys certainly do have is focus – on world domination.
yabonn 10.13.04 at 9:10 pm
I’d be suprised if there weren’t conspiracy theories, given the handling of the 9/11 related information by this administration.
The passport, the blackboxes, the mini boeing in the pentagon. All this conspiracy theorist red meat from the top of my head, and i am not specially interested in the subject.
Come to think of it, i’m surprised too that there’s no more of an outcry about this, ah, discretion.
Windhorse 10.13.04 at 11:05 pm
With the stigma surrounding “conspiracy theories” it is difficult to discuss them in a balanced way. The tendency is either to dismiss them out of hand or embrace them with open arms. I wonder if it’s not because CT’s are considered somehow beneath rational analysis, and anyone attempting such an analysis leaves themselves open to ridicule, so most of us instinctively avoid it. But the CT’s aren’t going anywhere and still beg some sort of judgment, so we’re left with only an emotional or gut-level method to approach them. Consequently the discourse around them tends to be more emotionally charged, with people relying on intuitions about “what seems probable” to evaluate the validity of the CT’s one way or another. The problem with that approach is that plenty of improbable situations exist.
But as for dismissing large-scale government shenanigans out of hand, there’s plenty of documented evidence of the military subjecting unknowing soldiers and civilians alike to radiation dosing, diseases, and chemical weapons, resulting in many injuries and fatalities. And while it’s almost trite to bring it up, Operation Northwoods does show that at least once the military considered slaughtering U.S. citizens and scapegoating an enemy to advance a military agenda.
Martin Wisse 10.15.04 at 7:28 am
What windhorse said.
What I find disappointing is that the first time the SF is brought up, it immediately is discredited here by focusing on one particular event and putting it in the most unfavourable light possible.
I’d expect that from the fake left at Harry’s place, not from you lot.
Gary Farber 10.15.04 at 5:17 pm
The amount of distance between the screened movie (and the book it derives from) and its specific accusation that the Pentagon was blown up by a bomb — there was no plane at all, let alone a hijacked one — and the anodyne, yet accurate, observation that the Bush Administration was lax and irresponsible in counter-terrorism, is measurable in light-years.
I know a bunch of people who saw the plane fly overhead in Washington. Speculation that we should keep “open minds” about this not having happened should be filed by people kidnapped by aliens and put where they were anally probed. Ditto that there was a plane, but it was remotely controlled.
More general speculation as to where precisely to draw the line between irresponsibility and deliberate intent in the U.S. government regardin September 11th, I’ll leave to each of you to decide for yourselves. I’m big that way.
Pet peeve by the way: pejorative. Pejorative. Pejorative. One “r.”
Gary Farber 10.15.04 at 5:29 pm
Here, incidentally, is a typical defense that the thoughtcrimenews site cited in your post, Chris, provides for this theory. Decide for yourselves how credible it is.
dsquared 10.15.04 at 9:23 pm
I am aghast. “Perjorative”, for fuck’s sake. I don’t even have the excuse of having been drunk. It’s absolutely inconciounable.
Keith Mothersson 10.19.04 at 8:32 pm
To get back to the original concern which inspired this thread, the disapproval chris expressed concerning a presentation about US government involvement in 9-11:
first: everybody who accepts a version (for the story keeps morphing) of the ‘official story’ has already accepted a story or theory involving a conspiracy by Bin Laden from a cave or house in Afghanistan.
So the real question is what is the evidence for this or that conspiracy theory. Let’s leave aside possible MOTIVE (such as Project for a New American Century plans to dominate the world following a ‘catastrophic and catalysing event such as a New Pearl Harbour’) and CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE (such as that for several years up to June 2001 Marvin Bush was a director of the security company with the contract to protect the WTC).
Let’s also bracket the swirling cloud of conspiracy theories and allegations and counter theories and allegations about the relationship between the CIA, the Pakistani security service (ISI) and Bin Laden and some real or alleged entity called Al-Qaida.
Instead let’s focus on the most concrete class of evidence: the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE conserning the 3 (sic) buildings at the World Trade Centre.
These were the first steel-framed sky-scrapers ever to collapse – others have survived aircraft hits and much, much hotter fires blazing for much longer. Yet the rubble and oddly short lengths of steel were shipped out under armed guard and destroyed despite protests from the editor of ‘Fire Engineering’, and from some architects, engineers and relatives.
The firemen attending the first blaze didn’t think their building was about to behave in an unprecedently lethal way: they initially radioed back, ‘we’ll only need two hoses, the fires are isolated and dying down’.
Firemen and survivors report a series of explosions within the buildings, which is born out by a) the seismographic record; and b) close frame by frame video-analysis of the floors coming down with a burst of energy preceding the collapse of each floor, NOT a burst of dust after each floor hits the next.
I’m no expert but I find it absurd that 110 floors in WTC buildings 1 and 2 (or 47 in building 7) should allegedly pancake into each other with so little resistance that the overall collapse takes only 1.8 (or 1) second more than gravity freefall.
And either in the scenario of bendy-out pillars or in the alternative case of the even and simulataneous breaking of the brackets attaching the horizontals to the verticals I would expect there to be a stack of compressed floors at the bottom dwarfed by the verticals remaining mostly intact above them.
Many people who have bought Clash of Civilisation/neo-Con or Neo-Crusader disparagement of Islam may unconsciously believe Muslims to be evil bastards. But presumably they can’t actually defy the laws of physics. Now the laws of physics state that for any fire to achieve a given result (e.g. destroy huge steel beams and pulverise a huge quantity of concrete) there must be an input of x amount of energy. Add up the quanta of energy derivable from a) impact of plane at 450 mph or so); b)maximum 8,000 gallons of aviation fuel; and c) gravity. You are still nowhere near the quantum of energy which you would need if you wanted to plan such-like destruction of such huge well-built buildings. In other words we are compelled to assume the presence of sdome other energy-source (such as dynamite strapped to the pillars) to balance the energy equations.
Now consider that the owner of the WTC complex admitted a year later that after talking with the NY Fired Dept he had agreed for WTC building 7 to be ‘pulled’ (the phrase used for controlled demolition)- despite the presence of s few pathetic little fires, incidentally. You can’t wire one of these huge building up in an afternoon. If WTC7 was pre-wired for internal demolition, why not WTC 1 and 2?
If the WTC buildings did collapse because of explosions then I think one needs to be a fanatical devotee of ostrich-theories not to want to consider various alternatives to the official ‘conspiracy theory’ – including the one I presently favour that this inside job was part of an effort to frame Islam and manufacture a pretext for an aggressive war for world control.
As for Rich Puchalsky and many others who take the line that the Bush-Cheney group couln’t have done it because they weren’t competent enough to do so without getting caught, I would reply that they have cocked up, the loose ends and unaswerable anomalies and hugely suspicious pointers are all around! The real question is whether right-thinking liberals want to descend from losfty disdain and roll up our sleeves and help investigate the crime (with an open, skeptical mind and good heart – to be sutre) in order that the crime can be accurately described in the reports of successive high-powered and authoritative INDEPENDENT TRUTH COMMISSIONS so that in the end thre is full accountability by the perpetrators and societal solidarity for the victims, both the immediately bereaved family members and the Islamic world more generally.
I write as a skeptical Buddhist, but even if I were a militant Islamist the phsical evidence assembled on http://www.physics911.org and other sites (as well as books such as The New Pearl Harbour by theologian David Ray Griffin) would have to be effectvely addressed and debunked by those who wish to continue the easy bully-boy policy of sneering and ridicule instead of argument and evidence.
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