Conspiracies R Not Us

Anthony Shaffer Is A Con Artist

2011-10-15T12:31:00.000-07:00

The guy that built his career telling lies about Able Danger is trying to make a comeback by telling lies about the Administration. He says that the Obama Administration invented the Iranians suspected of plotting to assassinate the ambassadors of Israel and Saudi Arabia.

This same guy, who claims to be up to his eyeballs in "FBI informants," also claimed he was a key founding member on a secret project where his entire real contribution seemed to be carrying documents to meetings.

It goes without saying that he invented his claims whole cloth: The FBI was a key part of the the case. Robert Woloszyn, an FBI agent, filed the actual charges on behalf of the FBI team that lead the investigation. Shaffer's claims about what his "insiders" are saying reads like the unfounded speculation of a tabloid magazine. "Sources close to the victim say..." "The craziest thing happened to a friend of a friend..."

His claims would also imply some very interesting things about the U.S.-Iran relationship. Given that most conspiracy theorists believe the Administration is looking for an excuse to go to war, wouldn't the Presidents of Iran and the U.S. need to be pretty damn buddy-buddy for Ahmadinejad to come along and offer up a few of his elite special forces for a foiled terror plot that would result in retaliation against his own government? Come on, guys. Conspiracies have an end-stage, but they have a beginning, too, and this one doesn't quite pan out.

Shaffer is a career con who hits his conspiracy theorist mark every time. Everyone who has ever worked in the public sector is evil, but every two-bit half-wit with a rumor to peddle gets vaulted to the front stage. Impeccable logic, guys. Impeccable.

Barbara Slavin Takes Iran's Word For It

2011-10-13T18:06:00.000-07:00

Barbara Slavin has decided the Iranians arrested under suspicion of plotting to assassinate the Saudi and Israeli ambassadors to the US seem innocent. She's writing for one of my favorite new alternative media outlets, so imagine my disappointment that her bland and factless scribbling made its front page.

To begin with the obvious: Her arguments wrong. She says that Iran, taken as a whole (a rather naïve way to view an ethnically diverse theocracy/democracy) would never try to target the U.S. because it is “focused on political dissidents and theatres of war closer to home” – an odd thing to say about a government responsible for terrorist attacks on three continents that has styled itself as a regional power for decades. She wrongly says that “Iran has not been behind a political assassination in the United States since a year after the 1979 revolution,” which is wrong – it subsidized the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. It also raised a $2.1 million bounty for Salman Rushdie, so it’s not like they aren’t trying.

She quotes someone who has decided Iran is innocent because its agents might have contacted people who are Mexican, and Iran never contacts Mexicans:

"Iran does not use non-Muslim groups or people who are not trusted members or associates of the Quds force," Katzman said. "Iran does not blow up buildings in Washington that invites retaliation against the Iranian homeland."

Though it does blow up Americans in New York, Kuwait, Iraq, and over the ocean.

Here’s an odd one made by this same Katzman:

Katzman speculated that Arbabsiar, a former used car salesman who was apparently in financial difficulties, may have come up with the idea on his own... Mr. Arbabsiar was said to have wired nearly 100,000 dollars to the informant's bank account from Iran in September and to have promised 1.5 million dollars to do the deed.

One of the suspects was in such dire financial straits that he, acting alone, gave a stranger $100,000 just to listen to his idea. Kenneth Katzman seems like a smart guy, and given Barbara Slavin’s knowledge of the world around her demonstrated thus far, I’ll assume she’ll simply forgot what he said in the space between him saying it and her putting her pen on the paper.

Her logic is wrong. She argues that Iran must be innocent because “the timing would be extremely awkward for Iran, which is already facing growing isolation because of its nuclear program and domestic abuses of human rights.” How has “growing isolation” (whatever that means) ever stopped a regime from exercising its muscle? Does anyone remember the Cheonan, or Venezuela’s neighbors?

Her final attempt at an argument, dug out of her Katzman interview, seals it:

It is possible that the Iranian cousin "agreed to support him in some way but was doubtful he could pull it off", Katzman said. "This was not a thoroughly vetted and approved terrorist plot."

I don’t understand the conspiracy theorist obsession that just because a government hatches a plot that it’s going to be a good plot. Iran is not well-governed: who would deny that? Who would argue that the Iranian government is particularly competent at anything other than mere survival?

But at least she has the integrity to admit that “the U.S. government” isn’t just making things up:

Several U.S. intelligence experts expressed scepticism about the expertise of the DEA in evaluating such a sensitive case.

It’s not a very good U.S. government conspiracy if there’s external and internal disagreement, after all – this is the fact that refutes 9/11 denial, so she was wise to ignore it here.

However, Slavin does unquestioningly support and believe the government – Iran’s:

Riedel noted that the complaint refers to "elements" of the Iranian government, "which suggests that the administration doesn't think that all elements of the Iranian government were involved".

An Iranian source, speaking with IPS on condition he not be named, said that the Quds force would investigate the Iranian alleged to have participated in the plot "to find out if there is any personal interest" involved, suggesting an element of freelancing.

"It seems the Americans and Saudis need this propaganda to promote their policy against Iran at this time, given that they have occupied three Muslim countries in the world – Iraq, Afghanistan and Bahrain," the source added.

Of course! Equally expected is that, because all bad things are the President’s fault, that it is his fault, too, for daring to be angry that Iran would try to assassinate some fairly important international civilian personnel:

Both Katzman and Riedel said they were troubled by the way in which the Obama administration has jumped on the case, with a news conference by the attorney general and high-profile statements by the president and secretary of state.

The record skips back to the same un-funny joke, again.

Government Continues to Brutally Silence Scientists in Bruce Ivins Case

2011-10-12T18:20:00.000-07:00

Just kidding, it's suggesting scientists might have succesfully implicated him in a broader conspiracy.

three scientists argue that distinctive chemicals found in the dried anthrax spores — including the unexpected presence of tin — point to a high degree of manufacturing skill, contrary to federal reassurances that the attack germs were unsophisticated.

Both the chairwoman of a National Academy of Science panel that spent a year and a half reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work and the director of a new review by the Government Accountability Office said the paper raised important questions that should be addressed.

Or not.

But other scientists who reviewed the paper said they thought the tin might be a random contaminant, not a clue to complex processing. And the Justice Department has not altered its conclusion that the deadly letters were mailed by Dr. Ivins, an Army anthrax specialist who worked at Fort Detrick, Md., and killed himself in 2008 as prosecutors prepared to charge him.

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said the paper provided “no evidence whatsoever that the spores used in the mailings were produced” at a location other than Fort Detrick. He said investigators believe Dr. Ivins grew and dried the anthrax spores himself.

Or maybe so.

“It indicates a very special processing, and expertise,” said Martin E. Hugh-Jones, lead author of the paper and a world authority on anthrax at Louisiana State University. The deadly germs sent through the mail to news organizations and two United States senators, he added, were “far more sophisticated than needed.”

In addition to Dr. Hugh-Jones, the authors of the new paper are Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a biologist, and Stuart Jacobsen, a chemist; both have speculated publicly about the case and criticized the F.B.I. for years.

In 2008, days after Dr. Ivins’s suicide, the bureau made public a sweeping but circumstantial case against him. Last year, the bureau formally closed the case, acknowledging that some scientific questions were unanswered but asserting that the evidence against Dr. Ivins was overwhelming.

Or not.

Investigators found that the microbiologist had worked unusual late-night hours in his lab in the days before each of the two known anthrax mailings in September and October 2001; that he often mailed letters and packages under assumed names; that he had a history of homicidal threats and spoke of “Crazy Bruce” as a personality that did things he later could not remember.

Dr. Ivins had hidden from family and friends an obsession with a sorority — Kappa Kappa Gamma — with an office near the Princeton, N.J., mailbox where the letters were mailed. The F.B.I. recorded Dr. Ivins’s speaking ambiguously to a friend that he did “not have any recollection” of mailing the letters, that he was “not a killer at heart” and that “I, in my right mind, wouldn’t do it.”

Yet no evidence directly tied Dr. Ivins to the crime.

Before we dive into the evidence here, let's discuss one incontrovertible fact: This case refutes the 9/11 denier article of faith that "the government" can ever act in perfect concert on anything.

Kurt Haskell Testifying in Underwear Bomber Case

2011-10-11T21:17:00.001-07:00

9/11 deniers are rejoicing that a conspiracy theorist might wind up on the jury for Umar Abdulmutallab, the "Underwear Bomber." Unfortunately for them, Haskell has done a poor job sticking to the conspiracy theorists' handbook. On his family blog he paints an unflattering portrait of the accused, as he saw him on the day of his jury selection questioning:

Yesterday, I went to the first day of jury selection in the underwear bomber case. I was the only passenger from the flight present. Lori could not attend as she had a hearing in Mt. Clemens that she could not get out of. The process involved picking 40 potential jurors to bring back on October 6, 2011. The selection of the jury will be made that day from the remaining 40 potential jurors. The process I witnessed involved the judge asking questions of each juror, then the prosecution asking questions and finally the defense asking questions. The prosecution and the defense were given 6 minutes each to question each juror. Only one juror was allowed in the courtroom at a time. I was in the courtroom when Umar arrived. When he entered he said "Great Mujahideen, Anwar is alive" referring to Anwar Al Awlaki and his reported recent death. He then said "We will wipe out the U.S., the cancer that is the U.S." Judge Edmunds had not yet arrived. When Judge Edmunds got there, she told Umar he should dress better to make a better impression on the jurors. He was dressed in a white t-shirt as he always is. Umar said "I wanted to wear a Yemeni belt with a dagger, but nobody would let me". Judge Edmunds then said "I don't think you'll be bringing a dagger into my courtroom". Umar then said that he wanted to change and the court went into recess. Umar returned shortly thereafter and was dressed in a tan collared shirt and a black suit coat. When he entered the court this time he said "Allah Akbar Anwar is alive".

Obviously the pleas for mercy of an innocent patsy.

Quick primer: Eyewitness recollection of an event is useless.

As Promised: 9/11 Truthers Attempting to Co-Opt Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-04T17:01:00.000-07:00

If this happens, I'll be correct and Alex Jones might have to stop writing about Occupy Wall Street (see previous post). As with so many petition-based protest movements, 9/11 deniers are attempting to hijack the Occupy Wall Street protests to forcibly insert their beliefs. Evidently they couldn't be part of the movement organically - I have yet to see any sizeable contingent of deniers actually doing any of the legwork - so conspiracy theorists need to activate their entire activist network just to try to get on the leaderboard. Link to the petition here.

So far it doesn't seem to be going very well. As of 20:00est today it has one of the highest rejection rates, at just over 25%:

which is a pretty high rate for this particularly permissive (and, by no coincidence, as-yet ineffectual) protest. One grammatically nonexistent item simply marked "Office of the Citizen" without further description only has about a 16% rejection rate, and even the particularly insipid, useless non-item "restore true democracy to the government" (which is also a historical fail, as our Founding Fathers imagined less democratic practices when it came to most things, from the election of Senators to who wasn't property) only gets rejected by about 17% of these charmers.

I think the movement is fundamentally a good idea. Its core tenants are too banal to be anything but. And here is how it could easily be destroyed. Let's see if there be skeptics among them.

Alex Jones' acolytes thunder: 'Occupy Wall Street is a Communist plot'

2011-10-02T16:58:00.000-07:00

This weekend Prison Planet and Infowars embodied that spirit of attacking and lying about people conspiracy theorists degree with rather than actually challenging their ideas.

Between opposing popular revolutions in Libya and opposing efforts to improve standards of living around the world, Jones places himself squarely on the side of suffering on most issues. This is the statistical cost of being a reactionary: Revolutionaries need powerful friends to overthrow powerful enemies, and so every uprising becomes a "power grab" by foreigners. Technology spreads as it effectively solves daily problems, and so people become "sheeple" as they come to rely on science to make life better rather than suffer quotidian inconveniences of old. Unexpected horrors force people to realign their worldview and understanding of the world around them, and so the die-hards must assume that the enemies they're used to fighting are really at the heart of terrorist attacks, rather than the new breed of global terrorism we're really dealing with. The anti-intellectual identity forces one to constantly recode the good and the new as the cynical and the bad. Alex Jones' livelihood depends on his idiotic ideas from thirty years ago, the ones he has been parroting ever since, on being immutable and correct, and so the banal truth that there are worse entities out there than the U.S. government becomes anathema to the faith of Alex Jones.

So this week, when protestors took to the streets pointing out that democracy has a role to play in preventing future crises, Alex Jones' acolytes went into action: They branded the protestors as "puppets" and "communists." Another popular uprising Jones has to ignore, because it seeks to refute his belief that democracy doesn't work.

The lies to be rattled off feel almost too obvious: The Occupy Wall Street protestors are not employees of George Soros (I'm pretty sure he pays better, and his actual employees dress better); they are not "communists;" and so on down the line. Hell, the story on infowars on the matter links to a sign that it describes as "being held" that is just laying on the ground.

I'm not particularly fond of George Soros, Warren Buffett, or Ron Paul, so I sympathize with anyone who has difficulty picking an ideological figurehead with whom to align everyone in this debate. So here was my solution: Don't. Let their arguments stand on their own. This, of course, has thus far been much too much to ask of the Infowars crowd and its herd of unquestioning readers.

Jones has nothing useful to contribute to the financial reform protests in the US. His bloggers have randomly taken the side of both Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul, in the hopes that he can be remembered for supporting whichever side gets him more Google hits at any given time. His life is a cynical scheme designed to profit off the gullibility of his readers, and hopefully by forcing him to take a side now, he can be called on his bullshit later.

So, let's have it: Alex Jones, does government have a role to play in solving this problem, or not?

Tee-hee

2011-09-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

From MSNBC.

Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has long been renounced for his conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which he has called "mysterious."

His latest fiery rant at the United Nations blamed the U.S. government for the 2001 attacks, and suggested the killing of Osama bin Laden was a coverup .

Now he has new detractor: al-Qaida.

It seems the terror network doesn't like someone else taking credit for its work, which its English-language magazine, Inspire, calls "The Greatest Special Operation of All Time."

An opinion piece in the latest issue takes aim at Ahmadinejad and his 9/11 conspiracy theories.

"So we may ask the question: why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?" author Abu Suhail asks, going on to accuse the Iranians of collaborating with the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"For them, al-Qaida was a competitor for the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised Muslims around the world. Al-Qaida, an organization under fire, with no state, succeeded in what Iran couldn’t," Suhail wrote.

"Therefore it was necessary for the Iranians to discredit 9/11 and what better way to do so? Conspiracy theories.

And 9/11 deniers have no valid reason to be suspicious of al Qaeda's motives, right?

Squibs and thermite, take 2: “Rocket projectiles” at WTC2

2011-09-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

I’m eager to see all the video that comes out of the Toronto Hearings, because it sounds like it’s going to be a riot. First up: David Chandler and Niels Harrit discussing rocket-propelled explosives shooting out of the Towers after they’re already collapsing.

Around second thirty-three (coincidence?!) of this video, the narrator talks about seeing an object falling faster than some of the smoke coming from the collapsing WTC2. In his mind it is a piece of super-thermite, and confirmation kicks in when, as it falls past the camera, a puff of air and debris shoots out of one of the floors of the tower – you know, one of those normal things that happens when something collapses and pushes air out of the lower floors.

In order:

The debris falling out of the tower faster than other debris falling out of the tower is probably heavier than the median piece of debris. Most of the cloud is shards and pieces of office, things that are much more subject to air resistance than a much heavier piece of debris (which the author seems to concede is what it probably is around minute two second thirty). The puff of air ejecting out of one of the caving floors is just that. As a building collapses, its caving mass forces out air and debris from wherever it will escape: elevator shafts, broken windows, vents, you name it. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is: this is a rehashing of the “squibs” claim originating from around 2005. Debunked around 2006.

In the video the narrator claims to have controlled for the motion of the camera, but even in this endeavor he fails. He may try to correct for the x-y jitter of the camera, but not the x-y-z artifact arising from the annoying fact that vision happens in three dimensions. The apparent “change of motion” of the object looks more like the object moving towards the camera as it falls – that is, pushed out of the tower by the ejection of air and debris. You can artificially halt the jitter of a camera, but it’s much more complex to flatten an image beyond how flat video makes an image, and that is not something for which the notoriously sloppy David Chandler corrected. Go figure.

This one’s barely worth the bandwidth. I repeat the same challenge I proffered at my Denkfest talk: 9/11 deniers, come up with a claim that can’t be debunked with evidence proffered over half a decade ago. Yeesh.

“Psychological Aspects of 9/11 Truth”

2011-09-25T09:55:00.000-07:00

It appears to be edited to be as unwatchable as possible, but 9/11 deniers have slapped together another appeal to authority in the form of a video called “Psychologists help 9/11 truth deniers.” Only two of the eight people in the video are actual psychologists, and each have oddly unrelated licenses. At least one is a New Age quack who runs a scam site (read on).

I worked in a behavioral sciences laboratory as an undergrad and have a few certifications of my own under my belt, so with that pointless appeal to authority, let me offer some of these people some actual data that the literature in their (nominal) field suggests about their statements.

Namely, that they’re all full of bullshit.

To the first interviewee, Marti Hopper: The evidence from the psychological literature demonstrates that trauma makes someone more, not less, susceptible to conspiracy theories. Oh, also that those effects sink in right around the time of the trauma, so a Commission Report that comes out years later is immune to the types of cognitive traps that a conspiracy theory peddled within months of the event isn’t.

To the second interviewee, Frances Shure: The evidence from the behavioral literature shows that flashbulb memory is crap, and that eyewitness testimony is wildly unreliable (in case you happen to base your beliefs on, say, “the sounds of explosions” or the words of, say, BBC journalists).

To Robert Hopper: For someone who points out that “fear and anxiety” are the most common reactions to cognitive dissonance (they probably aren’t, by the way), you sure are doing a lot of defending of a violent, aggressive movement of conspiracy theorists.

To Danielle Duperret: Your trauma therapies are crap. Stop telling people who to deal with tragedies; you’re hurting them. Oh also, don’t sell magic and tell people it’s science.

To Dorothy Lorig: David Ray Griffin lies for a living.

To David Ray Griffin: See above.

To John Freedom: Your own theories about how to change someone’s mind are wrong. “Open-ended questioning” doesn’t cut it, either.

To Robert Griffin: For someone who has accused people who know better than you of engaging in “a lack of humility,” you sure are fond of parroting the beliefs of those you agree with without providing a shred of reasoning.

Ugh, how sad. Please do check out Danielle Duperret’s website; nothing screams “fraud” louder (or with as gaudy a color scheme!). “Energy medicine,” homeopathy, and using magic vibrations to cure trauma? This sounds actively dangerous to people with legitimate problems. At the risk of shocking you: the 9/11 denier movement is employing scientific frauds to sell you something. Gasp.

Potentially Fascinating Trial Averted

2011-09-24T16:09:00.000-07:00

A New York judge has tossed out a case alleging Larry Silverstein should've foreseen 9/11 and thus should've forbade occupants of WTC7 from installing gas-fueled generators. The burning gas was a likely contributor to the building's collapse.

If only the judge hadn't done that.

One of the most stable findings in psychology is the hindsight bias, which is precisely what it sounds like: Now that 9/11 has happened, people tend to think that 9/11 was eminently foreseeable. They're wrong, and they're especially wrong if their point is that some partial leaser of property near the sight of an unprecedented terrorist attack with no responsibility for national security (or even, technically, the protection of the building's occupants from terrorism).

Seeing a court case paper trail detailing precisely what it means to be unable to foresee something would be fascinating, to me anyway. I love risk. It is my specialty. As concepts, risk and uncertainty are my bread and butter (this is rather ironic, as I'm such a boring guy generally). Having documentation on hand to demonstrate to people the vast chain of improbabilities disconnecting Larry Silverstein's liability from the tragedy would have been very interesting. I love reading the intellectual non-entities in the 9/11 denial movement asserting that person X should've foreseen event Y given some vastly skewed probability distribution. Norman Mineta should've had flashbulb memory. The USAF should've had a fully fueled, fully armed squadron of fighter pilots armed and hot on the tarmac to shoot down a civilian aircraft at a moment's notice. Give me a break.

Not a Conspiracy Theorist

2011-09-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

Tony Bennett thinks America deserved 9/11.

The legendary Tony Bennett appeared on Howard Stern’s radio show and talked about his antipathy to war, borne out of having served in WWII.

“But who are the terrorists? Are we the terrorists or are they the terrorists? Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Bennett said...

“They flew the plane in, but we caused it,” Bennett responded. “Because we were bombing them and they told us to stop.”

We must assume, of course, that he meant "planes."

I'm too young to give a shit about this particular musician's opinion, but I do find it curious that his views are being parroted on 911blogger. Let's be clear: He thinks 9/11 deniers are wrong. He thinks that several thousand American civilians deserved to be murdered by religious psychopaths, but that is a moral failing unrelated to the intellectual failings of 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

I suppose this lateral move to near-friends should be expected. 9/11 conspiracy theorists don't require you to be an engineer to say you're an engineer, and they don't require you to have published an academic paper to say you have published an academic paper, so why should being quoted on a blog dedicated to advancing 9/11 conspiracies be anchored to advancing 9/11 conspiracies?

There is no intellectual argument going on among 9/11 deniers, so it's little surprise this is the best they can do. Before long we'll see Tony Bennett on some "Has-Beens For 9/11 Truth" site; his quotes will be passed around alongside screenshots of the Northwoods memos; his name and music unfairly confiscated by 9/11 deniers and associated with their celebrity-baiting ad campaigns. The only way I will be wrong is if this rests on overly generous assumptions about the movement to continue to generate any such campaigns.

Gullibility in Action

2011-09-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

Why did conspiracy theorists just side with the Bush Administration, mega-corporations, and tyrants the world over?

9/11 deniers have fallen for exactly the kind of conspiracy they pretend to be speaking out against. The movement has come out against the Libyan revolution, saying that an alliance of global humanitarian forces, a unified NATO pact including regional powers and an indigenous, popular rebel movement opposed to a savage dictator and his army of private mercenaries is just another puppet of "Them." Ironically, "They" were clearly on Qaddafi's side all along. Al-Jazeera reports:

I found what appeared to be the minutes of a meeting between senior Libyan officials – Abubakr Alzleitny and Mohammed Ahmed Ismail – and David Welch, former assistant secretary of state under George W Bush. Welch was the man who brokered the deal to restore diplomatic relations between the US and Libya in 2008.

During that meeting Welch advised Gaddafi's team on how to win the propaganda war, suggesting several "confidence-building measures", according to the documents. The documents appear to indicate that an influential US political personality was advising Gaddafi on how to beat the US and NATO.

The documents read: "Any information related to al-Qaeda or other terrorist extremist organisations should be found and given to the American administration but only via the intelligence agencies of either Israel, Egypt, Morroco, or Jordan… America will listen to them… It's better to receive this information as if it originated from those countries..."

On the floor of the intelligence chief's office lay an envelope addressed to Gaddafi's son Saif Al-Islam. Inside, I found what appears to be a summary of a conversation between US congressman Denis Kucinich, who publicly opposed US policy on Libya, and an intermediary for the Libyan leader's son.

It details a request by the congressman for information he needed to lobby US lawmakers to suspend their support for the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) and to put an end to NATO airstrikes.

According to the document, Kucinich wanted evidence of corruption within the NTC and, like Welch, any possible links within rebel ranks to al-Qaeda.

The document also lists specific information needed to defend Saif Al-Islam, who is currently on the International Criminal Court's most-wanted list.

(Emphasis added)

In response, PrisonPlanet has attacked al-Jazeera as a "the prolific propaganda house out of Qatar." In a fact-free screed against one of the best sources of journalistic coverage of the Maghreb, Madison Ruppert pathetically argues:

The alleged minutes claim that Welch advised the Gaddafi regime to use Israel to funnel intelligence that could impede the uprising.

Why on Earth would Israel have any interest in setting back a group of rebels that openly supports them?

When confronted with the fact that al Qaeda operatives are among the rebel forces, the rebel spokesman Ahmad Shabani told Haaretz that “Al-Qaida activists have been working for Gadhafi, among them Libyans and, according to reliable intelligence reports, foreigners who infiltrated the country’s porous borders.”

Shabani pointing out “foreigners who infiltrated the country’s porous borders” is laughable as well, seeing as the rebels have been working side-by-side with foreign intelligence agencies and covert operatives before the United Nations Security Council Resolution was even put on the table.

The first question is resting on a false assumption about Welch's competence as an advisor, and came before there was even any remote suspicion that the NTC would even recognize Israel. To the second point, it seems odd to argue that the NTC is in al Qaeda hands when Qaddafi's loyalists are fleeing to Islamist-friendly hideouts in Niger on a daily basis. And the third point is simply attempting to strike a blow at the legitimacy of popular revolt itself: With the rebels backed by an international force seeking to topple a dictator and aid a popular revolution, Ruppert loathes the mere idea that "foreigners" can work together at all and make the notion of "human rights" meaningful, it seems.

9/11 deniers are joined in their defense of Qaddafi by the dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela, right-wing nationalists in Serbia fond of the old Milosevic regime, and the vast propaganda network this implies.

Sadly, this network includes peace activists like Alexander Cockburn, whose drastically, laughably wrong prognostications for the shakeout in Libya have all but discredited him.

It requites no great prescience to see that this will all end up badly. Qaddafi’s failure to collapse on schedule is prompting increasing pressure to start a ground war, since the NATO operation is, in terms of prestige, like the banks Obama has bailed out, Too Big to Fail. Libya will probably be balkanized.

Whoops. Though this dim view has already been discredited by current events, it would already be read as total nonsense by anyone familiar with the history of Libya, who knows that without Tripolitania, there is no viable state. This is a geopolitical fail akin to arguing that, say, oil-rich Alaska could secede and easily rise to superpower status without the rest of the United States.

And yet the most disappointing part of the pro-Qaddafi chorus is yet to come. Cockurn has one last, most insidious argument to make, and with it he lays bare his forfeiture to be taken seriously.

In four decades, Libyans have gone from being among the most wretched in Africa, to considerable elevation in terms of social amenities.

This is precisely the argument used by sympathizers of Pinochet and Hussein, Franco and Suharto, Chung-Hee and Basher.

We have no "control 20th century" to compare these dictators who ruled during the modernization period to, but there is extensive economic reasoning arguing against the proposition that dictatorship is in any way useful for an economy. Those who credit iron-fisted autocrats for strong growth are overstepping their bounds. Never mind the costs of enduring such tyranny.

So, why? What has happened? Why has the conspiracy movement aligned itself with the Bush Administration, a psychotic dictator, and huge private paramilitary corporations? Why is it employing its enemies' arguments in favor of tyranny and subjugation? What has happened?

Total Reversal Impending

2011-09-09T21:47:00.000-07:00

The planes were prevented from scrambling! The planes were prevented from scrambling! ...Oh, wait. The planes were scrambled too soon! The planes were scrambled too soon!

Kamikaze: F-16 pilots planned to ram Flight 93

When the pilots of the 121st Fighter Squadron of the D.C. Air National Guard got the order to intercept Flight 93, the hijacked jet speeding toward the nation's capital, they figured there was a decent chance they would not come back alive.

That's because the F-16 jets they were rushing to get airborne were largely unarmed, recalls one of the pilots, then-Lt. Heather Penney, leaving them one option to take out the wayward plane: a kamikaze mission.

"We wouldn’t be shooting it down. We would be ramming the aircraft, because we didn’t have weapons on board to be able to shoot the airplane down," Penney told C-SPAN.

If only the mainstream media would pay attention. Story on MSNBC.

The "First Claim" Test

2011-08-28T17:50:00.000-07:00

ae911truth has slapped together a pdf of old claims against the exhaustive NIST report. Readers of this blog are familiar with our approach to the glut of old information posing as new information 9/11 deniers pour out: The first claim is a smell test. It's their first stab at trying to convince you of something, so it's got to be good. If it isn't, the rest of the piece isn't going to be any better.

Here's the first claim from "How NIST Avoided a Real Analysis of the Physical Evidence of WTC:"

The 236 pieces of structural WTC steel that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) “catalogued” 2 for its WTC investigation included 55 columns that NIST discuss in paragraph 4.1 “CORE COLUMNS” in NIST NCSTAR 1-3C.4 NIST analyzed only four of these 55 columns for damage and failure modes. The remaining 51 columns were excluded from being examined for damage and failure modes based on the argument that only columns with a known as-built location in or near the impact and fire areas were of interest for the WTC investigation.

Wouldn't you know it, this claim's completely false. First, from page 118 of the NIST report:

NIST performed confirmatory tests on samples of the 236 pieces of recovered steel to determine if the steel met the structural specifications. Making a definitive assessment was complicated by overlapping specifications from multiple suppliers, differences between the NIST test procedures and the test procedures that originally qualified the steel, the natural variability of steel properties, and damage to the steel from the collapse of the WTC towers. Nonetheless, the NIST investigators were able to determine the following:

There were 14 grades (strengths) of steel that were specified. However, a total of 32 steels in the impact and fire floors were sufficiently different (grade, supplier, and gage) to require distinct models of mechanical properties.

The steels in the perimeter columns met their intended specifications for chemistry, mechanical properties, yield strengths, and tensile properties. The steels in the core columns generally met their intended specifications for both chemical and mechanical properties.

[…]

The mechanical properties of steel are reduced at elevated temperatures. Based on measurements and examination of published data, NIST determined that a single representation of the elevated temperature effects on steel mechanical properties could be used for all WTC steels. Separate values were used for the yield and tensile strength reduction factors for bolt steels.

So one, tests were performed on their entire sample. Possibly not for impact effects, but that would have been wildly inappropriate as not all of those columns were from a sample of the area directly impacted.

The only excuse I can think of is that ae911truth did not quote from the latest version of the final report; indeed, their cited text doesn't appear anywhere in the NIST final report. So, they're either lazy and incompetent, or outright dishonest.

What'll it be, ae911?

Government Brutally Silences Yet Another Dissident

2011-08-14T19:33:00.001-07:00

Just kidding. His name is Richard Clarke, and he's taking the CIA to task for what appears to be his own incompetence.

His complaint is old: The CIA and the FBI, because of their parochialism and the great walls of red tape, were unable to effectively coordinate the trailing of al Qaeda members in 2000 and 2001. It goes unnoted that the dismantling of this great wall was a chief aim of the CIA and the Bush Administration immediately after 9/11 – nor that the sudden appearance of what looks an awful lot like an effective if monolithic intelligence community is also a chief complaint of 9/11 deniers, and yet here they are trotting out the existence of such as an indictment of the Bush and Obama Administrations.

We know 9/11 deniers already latched onto this claim and needed only a Federal official with a book coming out to hit the press circuit and defrost it.

Yet this version was particularly baffling to me, as they seem to point to Clarke’s own staggering incompetence on the issue. Around minute three:

Every morning I come in and I turn on my computer, and I get a hundred to a hundred-fifty CIA reports. ..You have to intentionally stop it, you have to intervene and say, ‘No, I don’t want that to go.’ And I never got a report to that effect.

So, as we are all grizzled Microsoft Outlook users, let’s assess this claim: The intel chief didn’t get an automatic update, and wasn’t sure how to go about getting it when it didn’t just land in his inbox.

I’m baffled as to how this claim is spreading back over the 9/11 denier community. Richard Clarke, whose real and valiant work in the name of intelligence reform has certainly saved many lives (and led in no small part to the much-bitched-about “drone war” focus of intelligence strikes), is a godsend to 9/11 deniers. He throws out complaints until they stick and, among them, quotes are mined that point to malfeasance. I’m hearing nothing even bordering on malfeasance. I’m hearing about an intelligence chief who was not proactive in digesting intelligence.

For those keeping score, this further adds to the tally of “people to blame” saddling already-sagging 9/11 denier claims: “Forty-eight CIA officials” who could have forwarded him those reports, but didn’t.

We therefore conclude that there was a high-order decision within the CIA ordering people not to share this information. I think it would have to be made by the director.

Ah, scratch that. Given that reports migrate upward, this may wind up in the hundreds.

Also, come on guys: Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a great band. Let’s not abuse their music in this fashion.

Clarke claims that this is the one species of report that was suddenly redacted from his daily clips. I call shenanigans. What was the through rate on those reports? Given that he could recall “100 to 150” reports landing in his box every day, how did this reporting fluctuate? From where? Just on Al Qaeda, or were there other reports Clarke about which never felt sufficiently motivated to call up his “friends” at the CIA and inquire?

Whose intern didn’t hit which “send” button? How were they ‘kept quiet’ after 9/11? Who was reprimanded on Clarke’s staff for the failure? And why is this being repackaged as a complaint against the CIA? Anyone? Please.

Hatemail Sundays

2011-08-07T17:41:00.000-07:00

A couple of e-mails came in last week bleeting the same tired tropes all true believers have to hurl against their detractors. Every skeptical blog you read gets them, so I’ll quote and refute with brevity.

“You, like Screw Loose Change and Mark Roberts, are asserting that all conspiracy theories are bunk.”

No, we aren’t. Or at least, I’m not. Iran-Contra was a conspiracy that was not bunk, for example.

My second complaint stems from the fact that you, like Mark Roberts, state that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was obviously the work of a lone nut

It was.

After reading Vincent Bugliosi’s vast and worthy tome on the subject I made this point in a previous post that this person obviously took exception to. In order to buttress this complaint a link is provided to a particularly pathetic defense of lunatic theories. I’ll be brief.

Part one is dedicated entirely to whining about “name-calling” in the book. Time for an important lesson: Ad hominem is only ad hominem if it is the entirety of the complaint. “You’re stupid,” is an ad hominem. “You’re stupid, and here’s why you’re wrong” is merely rude. Including footnotes, Bugliosi gives you 2,000 pages of reasons why every single conspiracy theory is false. Because this is a 9/11 denier blog and not a JFK denier blog I don’t want to dwell on this too much. As I breezed through this site I scrolled through for the key points, and so here is essentially a random sample of the lies this site tells, which, coincidentally, seemed to be the case with every sentence I read:

In this long Introduction Bugliosi … states that the critics have always written that no rifleman has ever duplicated Oswald's feat at the Texas School Book Depository on 11/22/63. That is firing three shots, and getting two hits in the head and shoulder areas in less than six seconds. He says that this charge is not accurate. He then points to an example in the Warren Commission of a mysterious soldier named Miller (no first name given) who a commanding officer said actually bettered Oswald's feat. Now, Bugliosi's implication here is that this has been out there for years and the critical community has ignored it since it would undermine their arguments…

Because when you examine the testimony completely it does not undermine the critic's case at all. Three "master marksmen" took two tries at duplicating what Oswald was supposed to have done. Now what does this qualification of "master marksman" mean exactly? As Meagher explains it, they were rated at the very top of the scale, not by the Marines, but by the NRA. In other words they were even better than the top shooters in the armed services by a level of two or more classes. In fact, they were so proficient they qualified for open competition and even the Olympic Games! Now compare this to Oswald who was one point above the minimum class possible when he left the Marines in 1959. Fair comparison right?

Bugliosi writes quite explicitly in his book that each of these riflemen were at precisely the same class as Oswald. Indeed it may be true that they are highly rated by the NRA as well, but as we have no idea as to what Oswald’s NRA rating would be, this constitutes systematic bias. Of course, the exact same feat – in which other Marines replicated Oswald’s supposed “perfect shooting” – was shown in a Discovery Channel special a few years ago, but conspiracy theorists aren’t exactly in it for the truth.

And so as not to bore you guys, here’s another shorter one. In a debate between Bugliosi and conspiracy theorist Gerry Spence filmed for London Weekend Television as a “mock trial” between “the Warren Commission” and JFK deniers, the audience and “jurors” sided with Bugliosi. The author of this site drags up a claim so silly I just had to share it here:

Finally, the trial never moved out of London. This was not a good idea. The actual evidence is located at the National Archives in Washington. So the attorneys were never allowed to present this material and the jury was never allowed to see it. This is quite important in a case where there is much indication of evidence tampering. It is a theme I will return to later.

Because, you see, there was no such thing as a fax machine or authorized copies or any such thing in the 1980s.

JFK and 9/11 conspiracy theories bear a lot of similarity in their penchant for dishonest de-contextualization and simple lying. Case in point.

9/11: Explosive Evidence – Experts Speak Out: Appeal to Authority – The Movie

2011-07-30T15:21:00.000-07:00

A new AE911truth video is coming out later this year and its trailer has been released. The trailer begins with the trail of burning paper that 9/11 deniers wrongly assumed was molten metal, and moves right along to footage of WTC 7 collapsing that begins after
the collapse of the rooftop penthouses - the collapses that refute virtually every conspiracy theory requiring WTC 7 to have been "pulled" from the inside.

The music is overwrought, the "experts" are self-righteous blowhards, and no mention is made of the dozens of AE911truth.org "signatories" who have rescinded their signatures or claimed they never signed in the first place. The original studies about "nanothermite" are still bunk. This is simply another attempt to reset the 9/11 denier movement: recut the exact same mediocre documentary with different people, and hope it lends your movement credibility it has never had.

The Norway Terrorist's Conspiracy Theorists

2011-07-26T16:27:00.000-07:00

Someone 9/11 deniers are unlikely to agree with has posited a textbook conspiracy about the Norway terrorist attack. It is a piece posted on a young website called Right Side News, and the reason mold-cut deniers are unlikely to agree with the author is because her conspirator of choice is the monolithic, homogeneous group known as “Muslims.”

Right from its opening sentence, you know what’s going to be said:

"Speaking the Truth in Times of Universal Deceit is a Revolutionary Act." George Orwell

And from there is heads straight to the classic conspiracy theorist move: the faux-careful scrutiny of the timeline:

—3:26 p.m.: A car bomb explodes outside the prime minister's office in central Oslo.
[…]
—By 6 p.m.: The team arrives at the lake, but it struggles to find a boat to cross over.

—6:20 p.m.: The SWAT team arrives on the island.

So, basically it took 3 long hours for the Norwegian SWAT team to take control of the situation, after over 90 dead...?

Because given Norway’s long-running problem with domestic terrorism (/sarcasm), it is clearly “suspicious” that its ersatz SWAT teams had a hard time responding to this terrorist attack in particular.

Initial media reports that are of course 100% accurate:

However, despite the fact that supporters of the “Global Jihad” terror group had claimed responsibility for the act, authorities and media seemed reluctant to accept that and have rather come with unique information about the perpetrator:

This is wrong on two counts. One, the New York Times of all places was the first source I found initially attributing the attack to “Movement of the Global Jihad,” retracting the story only later. Two, so far reporting on the actual terrorist almost unanimously references the one source of insight into his psyche, his enormous anti-liberal screed posted online years ago. So there isn’t much original reporting going on, and media were exactly as quick to rush to blame as they’ve been so criticized for doing.

The author then begins to build the rather pathetic case that Norway is actually secretly target number one for religious extremists worldwide:

Other important issues touching a nerve within the Muslim world are the Oslo accords between Israel and Palestinians, signed in 1993.

But Norway also has troops in Afghanistan -and because of that, Ayman al-Zawahiri made threats against Norway then.

Mullah Krekar, founder of the Al Qaeda-linked-terror-group Ansar al-Islam had issued death threats against Norwegians politicians if they chose to deport him.

To add one more ingredient to this melting pot: A Norwegian newspaper re-printed the infamous Propher Mohammad cartoons -those that were first published in Denmark.

I do not believe for a second, that Muslim extremists and Muslim terrorists who knew and planned the massacres of 9/11 in America, have stopped wanting to inflict serious damage to Western civilization.

While I have no tangible proof right now, there are symbols and signs that appear throughout the Oslo attacks, such as the use of an American “detail”: the Oklahoma City bombing style -used for the first part of the attack against the government building.

Metrics by which Denmark, the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. score much more highly on the “threat to fundamentalist Islam” list.

In the past, in Israel, some Muslim terrorist bomb attacks have been committed on some few occasions by Muslims disguised as Israeli policemen or as Orthodox Jews.

So, I am wondering what would stop the school of evil 9/11 planners to engineer an attack by a local man from Norway, to perform this massacre and give it enough appearance that it’s a Christian fundamentalist -when in reality it may all well have been as perfectly planned as those airplanes that hit the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center, 10 years ago.

This is exactly as duplicitous, dishonest, and context-free as any conspiracy theorist claim about Israel or Donald Rumsfeld when it comes to 9/11. It operates along the exact same logic: weak induction, speculation, and obviously a pre-destined conclusion.

I’m no fan of Islam. This blog is equal-opportunity critical of extremists, however: it seems as reasonable to me that a fundamentalist, overtly-bigoted unstable person who happens to be from country X could be inspired to commit acts of violence as one from country Y. This author has provided no reason to believe her except by pivoting in a direction that will appeal to her audience.

My challenge to 9/11 deniers is thus. I suspect you are motivated not to believe that there is any such thing as Islamic terrorism, and are indeed motivated to find the NATO strings at the top of the Norwegian puppet. But why do you reject this conspiracy theory? What is it doing wrong? What’s the underlying logical fault with its reasoning that is absent from your own theories? I’m genuinely curious to hear what Eliana Benador is doing wrong, in your minds.

Prediction: Truthers Will Ruin October2011

2011-07-25T17:16:00.000-07:00

In the run-up to the Iraq war, 9/11 Truthers hurt the peace movement. I know this because I was a student, running around to share my anger at what was going to happen with pretty much anyone I could find. And every time I could get a conversation going, it would inevitably begin with, "So you think Bush was responsible for 9/11?"

Kind of hurts your case when the first words you get have to be, "Well, no... I don't think he's that bad..." This was just the beginning of the impact the tiny, noisy contingent of burgeoning 9/11 deniers had on the American peace movement, both its right and left wings.

Now it looks like they're out to ruin another protest movement.

Every time you see a whiny-pitched, snarky college stoner and a depressed monotonite wearing a "Capitalism Is Organized Crime" pin, pour one out for the American left.

The "October 2011 movement" is a shameful act of bravado parodying the Arab Spring, with a reminiscent Octoberist/Decembrist reference thrown in for good measure. Their decision to protest Afghanistan is particularly odd. Isn't Iraq the lower-hanging fruit? Isn't it the clearer foreign policy bungle?

The 9/11 denial movement has ruined every form of legitmate protest with which it has made contact - by hijacking, infesting, and finally rendering irrelevant its every voice, from Amy Goodman to Ron Paul. And does this movement make good points? Sure. The defense budget is bloated. Massive ground troop presence in Afghanistan can probably be curtailed. The middle class is in a bind. How will they help? They won't.

Is Rand Paul A 9/11 Denier? Probably Not

2011-07-17T20:56:00.000-07:00

Rand Paul issued a summons to coincide with FBI Director Robert Mueller's re-confirmation that 911blogger seems to be using to imply that he's a Truther. Part of it is posted almost entirely without comment, though the implication of their choice of which part of the summons to post is clear:

Why did FBI supervisors and lawyers block the search warrant sought by field agents in Minnesota who believed that Zacarias Moussaoui was a terrorist who might use a commercial airplane as a weapon in the weeks before September 11th? Why did the so--called "Phoenix memo," written by FBI agent Kenneth Williams in July of 2001, which warned of an unusual number of young Arab men seeking flight training in the U.S., never reach the highest levels of the FBI? Was anyone ever disciplined, fired, or their career ended for these errors in judgment?"

The rest of the memo is quite telling of Rand Paul's own ideological blinders. He is apparently baffled as to why the FBI has an interest in protecting people who work at abortion centers, and can't understand why one of the criteria used in detecting likely political extremists is outspoken support for 3rd-party, right-wing candidates.

Paul's intent is obvious - the last decade has given many Americans reason to believe the FBI is both run by incompetents and a danger to the freedoms guaranteed by American law, and his goal is to politicize that fact for his supporters. He has chosen an idea that appalls right-wingers and Christians (the idea that the FBI has a vested interest in safeguarding the lives of people who provide and assist in performing abortions) and an idea that appalls those who vote on national security issues (that the FBI was incompetent in detecting foreign radicals who emmigrated to Rand Paul's home state).

These are contradictory in implication. The first implies that the FBI is an overreaching, politicized depriver of legitimate political rights that needs to be scaled back, while the second implies that its ability to track radicalized immigrants desperately needs to be improved and possibly expanded. These are all parts of the contradictions of Paul's personal political philosophy - pro-personal freedom except at the border and the pulpit, anti-government except in its capacity to deprive rights to people unlike him - but overall they make only a weak case that Paul is a Truther. His beliefs happen to quite closely align with the median Truther, but he has bigger fish to fry than that. A group to whom he is sympathetic is clearly just taking one of his statements out of context for political purposes - the bread and butter of the 9/11 denier movement.

Rockefeller Goes After Right-Wing Megacorporation: Truthers Fail to Get Joke

2011-07-14T18:52:00.000-07:00

911truth.org is straight-facedly reporting Senator John Jay Rockefeller's impending investigation of Rupert Murdoch's media mega-empire, which for years has been illegally bribing and stealing to get what it wants through one its many corporate entities, News of the World. So far it is rumored to be in for fines of at least $100 million.

This is good news because Rupert Murdoch his American news networks are quite lousy and his organization is probably guilty, and because of the hysterical things 911truth.org's and others' totally unselfconscious reporting of this event say about the movement. Their story is crossposted from freepress.net and economicpopulist.org:

There are some crimes so universally offensive that even mentioning the suspected crime has devastating effects. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) raised just such a question yesterday. In a brief press statement, the Senator said:

"The reported hacking by News Corporation newspapers against a range of individuals - including children - is offensive and a serious breach of journalistic ethics. This raises serious questions about whether the company has broken U.S. law, and I encourage the appropriate agencies to investigate to ensure that Americans have not had their privacy violated. I am concerned that the admitted phone hacking in London by the News Corp. may have extended to 9/11 victims or other Americans. If they did, the consequences will be severe." Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, July 12

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has used voicemail hacking and other forms of privacy intrusion in the United Kingdom as far back as 2002. The goal is to get the most intimate insider information, stay ahead of the news cycle, and beat the competition. Where better to get information than the voicemails and other electronic data belonging to those in the news. The News of the World, Murdoch's flagship paper, hacked the voicemails of a kidnapped 12 year old, the widows of fallen soldiers, and even the powerful. In 2006, the Murdoch papers invaded the private medical records of former Labour Party leader Gordon Brown.

Fun fact: The second most popular Google search term for Rupert Murdoch is "Rupert Murdoch Jewish." (He's Christian, by the way) I wonder which movement is responsible for that!

Anyway, consider the things 911truth.org has previously written bout Rockefeller. They're not crazy about him or his family, who are apparently indistinguishable from the Bushes or even the bin Ladens:

Come on, a lot of you are hip. A lot of you KNOW whatlies [sic] we are all sold, every day. Are you going to let the Scaifes, Mellons,Rockefellers, Olins etc. keep setting their reactionary little agendasfor the world? Not to mention the Binladins, the Bushes, the Royal Families,the Moons, the Fords, all the other Multi-Jillionaire Nuts?

and apparently is a co-founder and lead funder of one of the "right-wing organizations" that has taken over "the Left:"

Leslie Cagan's Pacifica Foundation is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which was recently taken over by what has been described as a "Right Wing coup"), the Rockefeller-funded Working Assets group, and the ubiquitous George Soros. Like PBS, the Pacifica Network recently went through a takeover drama where a cabal of Board members attempted to sell the station off to center-mainstream corporate interests. Cagan is also reportedly connected to the right-wing Ford Foundation, which funnels money to her through a Lesbian advocacy group known as Astraea.

And now, here he is, leading the fightr against right-wing megacorporations - along with the FBI and MI5, two organizations key to complicity in virtually every 9/11 conspiracy theory, along with Fox News.

Time to draw up a new flowchart, guys.

No 9/11 Conspiracy Theory Can Survive Thirty Seconds of Google Searching: Episode 346

2011-07-05T16:29:00.000-07:00

Blogger Paul Schreyer made a positively exhausting attempt to demonstrate that the United States Air Force “stood down” on 9/11. Sound familiar?

Given the vast quantity of 9/11 denier absurdity out there I usually give their videos until the first big bogus claim, and then I tune out (of course, this tends to mean tuning out after the first claim, period – but so far it doesn’t look like I’ve missed any shockers). I had some extra time today, so I gave it its first two.

You know precisely where it’s going from the start. It builds a cast of characters – in this case, a sort of caricature of the U.S. military’s chain of command, with Bush at the top and some of the staff at NEADS at the bottom – and begins with the claim that “the top of this chain of command was empty on 9/11” – this is false. President Bush spent the morning doing what all presidents are always doing – photo ops. What does it even mean to “stay out of the loop of military orders,” as the speaker intones? Let’s think of a counterfactual: how much weirder would it have been if the President was actually giving military orders on 9/11? That’s something that essentially never happens, and when it does, it makes headlines.

The barely grammatically coherent second claim falsely reads:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld abandoned his post and was not available for his air defense subordinates during the attack.

This is false as well – Rumsfeld was at the Pentagon during the attacks.

Marr tried to “obstruct” the process. Right. Let’s see what he means.

Two fighter pilots at Otis Air Force Base, 300 km northeast of New York, were alarmed [?] and sat in their jets ready to start their engines at around 8:42, even before any hijacked plane had hit the World Trade Center towers.

But than [sic] they had to wait.

Colonel Marr, who could have ordered them to take off immediately, chose not to do that. He made an unnecessary phone call with his boss, General Arnold, instead. In effect the order to take off was delayed for a crucial 3 to 4 minutes.

Without that delay the pilots could have intercepted the second hijacked plane, which crashed at 9:03.

Could Marr have ordered those planes to intercept a civilian aircraft? No. it would have been literally illegal for him to have done so – additionally, at 8:42 it was still unclear that any planes had been hijacked. Indeed, it wasn’t 8:42 that Flight 93 even took off, and Flight 175 wasn’t even actually hijacked until about 8:46.

And what was that “unnecessary call?”He was telling him about the possibility of a hijacking and the need to scramble planes.

Doesn’t this bullshit sound familiar? Haven’t 9/11 deniers made very similar claims before? Oh yes – just like the ones refuted years ago in Popular Mechanics’ great little books.

Claim: "It has been standard operating procedures for decades to immediately intercept off-course planes that do not respond to communications from air traffic controllers," says the Web site oilempire.us. "When the Air Force 'scrambles' a fighter plane to intercept, they usually reach the plane in question in minutes."

9/11 deniers must be absolutely fucking exhausted by now. They’ve been making the same demonstrably false claims since 2003, and still have to pretend to each other that this shit isn’t already out there.

The "#1 Pick" at AboveTopSecret

2011-06-28T16:12:00.000-07:00

Call me a masochist, but every so often I like to breeze on over to the AboveTopSecret forums to see what's out there. AboveTopSecret is essentially the hivemind of the conspiracy world - every daffy idea has its own dedicate pages, threads, and fervent readers. Today's front page advertised the thread for those who believe "The Gog/Magog War Prophesied In Ezekiel 38-39 Is Beginning," but of course I was most interested in what was "new" in the 9/11 denier forums. As I've repeatedly written there is little new under the sun in the land of 9/11 denial - the faith has had only minor tweaks since 2003 in most cases, with primary tenets about thermite added later in a desperate bid to revive the movement - and this proved to be no exception.

Here were the two threads that made the front page of AboveTopSecret: The "Most Read" and the "User Favorite" are partially presented below. All you need are the first few sentences of each thread (though I'll link to them as well) to get the gist.

Number one:

most focus about 911 is put on the towers, but the big proof of an inside job comes from the pentagon

911review.org...

the US refused to release anything about the pentagon and it was very hidden from the media
but any picture of the actual hole in the pentagon proves that it was not hit by a plane<
its simply not big enough, and does not resemble a collision at all but actually resembles explosive damage!

what more evidence do you need?

it would be impossible to fly a huge Boeing in at the angle it hit, especially with limited flight training

And number two:

I am calling all 9/11 official story believers:

This thread will either change your mentality and prove to you once and for all that 9/11 was an inside job, or you will remain in the dark believing in a flawed sequence of events. Hopefully an in depth investigation of most of the evidence which goes against the official story is enough to convince you.

The 'Loose Change Final Cut' which is available on YouTube completely debunks the official 9/11 story from top to bottom...

And, in case it wasn't obvious: One is either a deliberately lie or the obvious error of a dundering incompetent, and two is as well. But if you've been following us these past few years, you're so busy groaning and hitting your head against the desk with the obviousness of that fact that you probably already have those data sources memorized.

And just to be clear, my ordering was arbitrary: Either of these could've easily won the "number two" slot for content.

You Must Read This 9/11 Poll

2011-06-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth released a poll claiming "48% of New Yorkers Support Building 7 Investigation." You can smell the desperation in their press release.

Following the launch of the TV ad campaign on Monday June 6, Remember Building 7 released the results from a new poll we commissioned, conducted by the Siena Research Institute, on what New Yorkers believe about 9/11.

The poll produced several findings that will be very useful as we continue to raise awareness about Building 7 and build public support for a new investigation. Among them:

• 1 in 3 New Yorkers were unaware of Building 7’s collapse, only 25 percent have ever seen video footage of the collapse, and 86 percent were unable to name the building;

• Of those aware of Building 7’s collapse, 24 percent believe it was a controlled demolition, 23 percent are unsure, and 49 percent believe it was caused by fires.

• Summarizing what New Yorkers know and believe about Building 7, roughly 1 in 6 are aware of Building 7 and believe it was brought down by controlled demolition, roughly 1 in 6 know about it and are unsure, roughly 1 in 3 know about it and believe the collapse was caused by fires, and 1 in 3 don’t know a third building collapsed;

• 28 percent – more than 1 in 4 – believe the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives or some other demolition devices in addition to being hit by airplanes.

Here's why even those pathetic numbers don't add up.

• Question 3 of their poll asks, "How satisfied are you that the government of the United States has provided a full and honest account of what happened that day? Do you think the government has told the whole story, most of the story, only some of the story or that in reality the government has tried to hide the truth about what happened
that day?" The responses: Whole story (18%), most of the story (35%), only some (25%), "has tried to hide the truth" (15%), and the DK/Ref (8%). One, it should be obvious that "all the facts" are not out there, so the "true," non-"alternative theory" answer is somewhere between "most" and "some" of the story. Far more people believe they have a reasonable idea of what happened than those who think there's a cover-up.

• This response biases the final point 9/11 deniers were going for; that is, the final question designed to tease out the key claim that "48% of New Yorkers support a new investigation." The final question asks,

Many have signed a petition calling for a NEW investigation into Building 7's collapse. Others consider the case closed and do not think a new investigation is warranted. Would you be in favor of or opposed to a local government agency like the New York City Council or Manhattan District Attorney opening a
new investigation into the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7?

This presents the false dichotomy of "case closed" or "new investigation" - as it is obvious that "the whole story" is not yet a matter of public record, and that the only options are either "stop talking about it" or "support a new investigation." Indeed, the fact that only 1/6 of respondents actually said "case closed" in Question 3 yet 44% said "case closed" in this penultimate demonstrates that even with dishonest framing, 9/11 deniers can not drum up support for their position.

• The question about WTC7's collapse does not allow participants to provide the right answer. It asks what they thought the most likely cause was, and the first response (the evidence-based or "official story" response) is "Fires, that were a result of the impact of debris from the Twin towers, that burned throughout the day, leading to the failure of the building's steel frame." This is not what happened to WTC 7.

• A minor phraseology point, from my survey methodology days (disclaimer: author previously worked at a political polling firm): Why is the "official story" response phrased in a meandering, "laundry list" style while the conspiracy theory response is a simple, direct statement? So there's this thing in question phraseology called "framing"...

• The question about the Twin Towers' collapse does not allow participants to provide the right answer, either. Its response options forced participants to choose between "Two planes only," "two planes and explosives," or "don't know." "Two planes only" is a wildly inaccurate response that essentially forces participants to lie in saying that structural effects played no role.

So even when they try to lie, 9/11 deniers get some pretty pathetic results. But to me, the worst part is that this poll seems to have deliberately targeted an unrepresentative sample of New York...

This survey managed to find almost twice as many college grads, five times as many unemployed people and ten times as many independents as New York City actually has to offer (For New York: Source, Source, Source) - who were able to answer a home telephone landline during the day (oddly, this survey didn't have the problem of upward age skew that most surveys have...). 40% of survey-takers were college grads compared to 27% of New Yorkers; 40% were unemployed vs. 8.6% of New Yorkers, and 23% vs. 2.3% were "registered independent/other."

Though almost certainly just an accident of lazy sampling, this survey looks an awful lot like it did something specifically to target unemployed grads with alternative political views. The prototypical 9/11 denier, anyone?

This survey produced unflattering results when the most dishonest measures were taken to make them flattering. Their third-rate pollster drummed up the biggest joke of a sample and could barely return pathetic support for 9/11 denial. They'll find a way to trump up what paltry results they can scrape out of their crosstabs: send 'em here to remind them what the numbers really say.

Starting to crack

2011-06-22T16:25:00.000-07:00

Something happens to successful movements about the time people start calling them “successful.” In poli-sci speak they start to develop institutions and organizations. Institutions are rules, organizations are groups (mnemonic go: “The Constitution is an institution, while the nation is an organization”). 9/11 denial could only be college kids passing around Loose Change for so long. Alex Jones, Disinfo and others who profit from gullibility smelled cash in the water, and 9/11 denial had some organizations behind it. Along came Prisonplanet then the wave of “(appeal to authority X) for 9/11 Truth” sites, and we were off to the races.

This is a familiar story. The cottage publishing industry that rose up around President Kennedy’s assassination and the mini-movement of modern-day UFO hunters tell the same story: Once enough people with enough money are engaged in promoting an idea – any idea, a bad idea, a good idea – that idea is probably going to stick around. Today nobody really seems to give a shit if the Bavarian Illuminati secretly controls the world or if aliens crash-landed at Roswell, but we all immediately know what I’m talking about. Truthers have their own versions of dedicated sources of content and attention that keep their movement going.

But lately, those organizations have started to break down. Infowars and Prisonplanet can barely be troubled to cover 9/11 denial these days. Alex Jones has a lot more to be wrong about concerning fluoride and the President’s birthplace. Skeptics are literally running out of content about 9/11 denial because there is so little by way of new absurdity actually being produced. Indeed, we’re generating more books about them these days than they are. And 9/11 deniers are starting to turn on those who have wandered from the path. For example, 9/11 deniers now generally believe one of their own founding fathers is now clearly a "disinformation agent."

Yet its “institutions” – its norms and rules – remain. 9/11 deniers still must believe everything they’re told by the higher-ups. It is still unpatriotic to the 9/11 denial community to admit that the thermite theory chapter of conspiracy theories has failed and must be closed. The cargo-cult approach to science remains: veteran deniers are trapped at the table bobbing their heads at each other about laughable hypothesizing, embarrassing “data collection” techniques and non-analysis. Newcomers have nowhere to start: by starting to rely on nonsensical jargon, the cult has eliminated most of its ability to initiate new acolytes.

This is just the beginning of a larger theory about conspiracies I’m just starting to think about, but it seems that the institutions can greatly outlive the organizations. Organizations that thrive on conspiracy theory talk can easily hop from subject to subject, and so those theories are unstable: their primary clearing-houses can abandon them at any time. 9/11 denial is starting to look so sloppy and silly because it has no organizations to forward its institutions: it is rules without rulemakers and, like any unenforced legal system, has come to just look sad, silly and empty.

A Different Person Making The Same Claim Is Not A New Claim

2011-06-17T18:02:00.000-07:00

Another appeal to authority has made a blog post at AE911.

Try to guess who made headlines in the 9/11 denier community for this quote:

“Looking at the building, it wouldn’t be a problem once you gained access to the elevator shafts… a team of loading experts would have access to all the core columns and beams.”

“The story that just a few column failures can cause a synchronized global collapse – an implosion – well, that’s just nonsense.”

“What I saw was a classic implosion. People on the ground reported exactly what I would have expected: waves of explosions going off, not one massive big boom.”

If you guessed "well shit, I mean, that could be Richard Gage, Frank Legge, Doug Plumb, Charlie Sheen,... the possibilities are endless!" you're absolutely right! Today's mouthpiece was an employee at a demolitions company named Tom Sullivan, who you should believe uncritically because he, uh, knows a lot about breaking into skyscrapers and secretly packing them full of explosives. Or something.

Dear 9/11 denial community: This is not "explosive evidence" [and puns aren't funny]. Just because a different person is making the same, demonstrably false arguments about impossible quantities of explosives, and nonexistent ninja teams in the World Trade Center doesn't mean you have "new facts" to deal with. Indeed, you seem to have someone who blindly accepted a Richard Gage DVD, began parroting it, and became an AE911 front-pager for his capacity to blindly parrot. Brah-fraking-vo.

He's got a pretty considerable mustache, though.

Now That's Just Lazy

2011-06-16T16:55:00.000-07:00

When we don't have anything to update about (9/11 deniers don't have much going for them these days), we don't update. When PrisonPlanet doesn't have anything going on, it accuses Facebook of censoring stories. And steals stories from Redditors.

You know the story before they can even finish secreting it: They're saying Facebook "censors" stories from, say, conspiracy-minded blogs. Isn't that just somehow exhausting? I don't know, but my eyelids got dim at the mere suggestion.

Facebook is what they call a "network good:" it becomes higher-quality the more people use it, like telephones. One telephone user is useless. Six billion telephone users make a global network of semi-insant communication. The more content and clickthroughs Facebook can generate, the more useful it is as a site. Besides, aren't these the same people who bleet that Facebook is a "tool of the CIA?" Wouldn't they want users posting "subsersive" content so they know who to, I don't know, sic the dogs on?

By the by, check out the pathetic posting that these guys claim is being "censored:"

Because power shutdowns across North America and Europe are *exactly* what happened on Wednesday... Oy.

Alex Jones’ Incredibly Lame Bilderberg Coverage

2011-06-12T21:13:00.000-07:00

Alex Jones is a study in self-parody. His spittle-flecked bluster about the end of the imminence of global catastrophe at the hands of the bogeyman of the day has been soggying microphones for decades. Since 1996 the world has been within mere hours of being conquered by the UN, the Bilderbergs, the Illuminati, China, the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration, the FDA, the NIS, the Fed, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission… anyone who can fit in the conspiracy clown car is welcome. The point is, he’s been around long enough to play chicken little for the blooming and falling of many acorn trees, to be a broken clock yet to strike a correct second.

His hordes of dutiful and obedient followers have, with minor exception, never turned on him or questioned how he manages to be completely wrong about most everything. There are no signs of mass fluoride poisoning in the U.S.; our state borders are not controlled by foreign soldiers; the U.S. still has a national border; George Bush did not stay in power beyond two terms; Barack Obama has not deployed behavioral-science experiments at every TSA checkpoint (probably). A gold fetishist who weathered the collapse of gold prices last month without batting an eyelash; a paleoconservative who has witness the U.S. become less, not more, beholden to the U.N., he’s not one to obsess much over details. Right, wrong – they all sell DVDs. His fans have proven this.

Jones’ prognostications about the world and the actual unfolding of world events have absolutely no relationship, a statistically significant and negative relationship between prediction and outcome brought on by Jones’ insistence that everything in the headlines is his personal enemy. That is why WikiLeaks is mere sockpuppetry, Osama bin Laden is alive and well, and the border guard secretly work for the UN: Jones requires his gullible followers to believe the world is constantly getting smaller, that nothing changes except for the worse, and that they must always be afraid of anyone who tells them anything other than what Alex Jones wants them to believe.

Usually this bullshit parade is a blusterous, hysterical show: He oozes comically bad DVDs portraying marching UN troops in gas masks and soundtracks that would make the Ghost Hunters blush. He yells through a microphone to disinterested strangers mere feet away, as interns in black t-shirts write fellatory bravado about every psi of hot air he releases. He calls on luminaries like Charlie Sheen and Dylan Avery to show off his serious-scholar side. Overall, it is a fireworks display of dying brain cells worthy of the DC Fourth.

Thus, imagine my disappointment at his coverage of the Bilderberg Conference. The event is usually surrounded by more desperate idiots with videocameras than attendees, and its every second is covered from every angle like a hidden-cam show for drooling conspiracy theorists. Every possible rumor and innuendo surfaces un-sourced, each taken with more severity and gravitas than the last. Usually, twerps like Jones are in full form.

This time, though, something was missing. A protestor or two tussled with the cops. A Swiss MP said Henry Kissinger should be arrested. Clinton might have mentioned unrest in the Middle East, probably. Yawn.

There were no breakthroughs. No “bombshell” has yet been dropped, perhaps for the first time in years, about any particular insane conspiracy. The idea of arresting Kissinger is the closest they got. How could it possibly have gotten this lame? Is Jones really so bored?

I’m sure on some level Jones knows it is time to be bored. He has been wrong, loudly, often. His crusades on behalf of stupidity have been against windmills and hillsides, and well-funded by thousands of proudly-gullible conspiracy theorists who may finally have to admit after this ho-hum Archmeeting of the Global Elite that they really don’t have as much to bullshit about as they thought. Should Kissinger be arrested? I don’t really care. I don’t like the guy, and I don’t like his ideas. They have nothing about 9/11 yet. Nobody got drunk and blabbed about the condo he bought bin Laden to live out his days in. Nobody from the UN twirled his waxed black mustache and drew a map with a single Israeli flag on it. No word on the infant content of the hors d’ouevres.

Jones is an idiot that survives on the cleverness required to invent a new archenemy every few weeks, as each bleating of doom and gloom fails to come to fruition with ironically predictable regularity. He seems to be out of steam on this one. Could it be that the dunces’ Jefferson Davis has finally realized he has nothing to believe in?

Webster Tarpley, the floor is yours

2011-06-06T17:45:00.000-07:00

Infowars has posted some nutty stuff in its day, but few made me immediately laugh as quickly as a video they posted of Webster Tarpley. Tarpley is just one among many desperate screed-peddlers on the 9/11 denial carnival-of-the-damned lecture circuit, and watching him doing his insane lying thing to the tune of what sounds like beats copped from a 1960's sci-fi movie is just too much.

Notoriously trollable blogger Paul Joseph Watson sets the stage with the run-onniest sentence that ever ran on:

In a bombshell new video interview, historian and author Webster Tarpley exposes how White House science czar John P. Holdren, who infamously co-wrote a 1977 textbook in which he advocated the formation of a “planetary regime” that would use a “global police force” to enforce totalitarian measures of population control, including forced abortions, mass sterilization programs conducted via the food and water supply, as well as mandatory bodily implants that would prevent couples from having children, is a Malthusian fanatic in the tradition of the arcane anti-human ideology that originated amongst British aristocracy in the 19th century.

And thus, the stage is set.

"Ultra-Hitlerian genocidalist:" Worst screen name ever. (Best?)

Tarpley is such a notorious fraud that even fellow deniers try to distance themselves from him, declaring him a "disinformation agent," a "plant" and, worst of all, "nothing like Ron Paul." What he's saying is purely false, of course - Holdren explicitly stated he doesn't endorse coercive population control measures and was doing what good scientists do, namely, proposing thought experiments without actually trying to advocate them, which he doesn't - but that much is obvious. The cult isn't about truth. It will be interesting to see if this level of stupidity finally gets Tarpley jettisoned from what remains of the denial community. I certainly doubt it, but if anyone in the cult has a remaining interest in legitimacy, ignoring its lunatic fringe (sic, in this case?) is its only hope.

No wonder they don't source their stories

2011-06-05T06:42:00.001-07:00

Infowars has uncovered the smoking gun: a top-secret memo proving upper echelons of America's, Mexico's and Canada's governments are currently working in concert to create a North American Union.

Or six years ago a diplomat said it would be cool if taxes were lower. You know, either way.

Infowars sets the stage:

A newly leaked U.S. diplomatic cable originally written over six years ago confirms that the agenda to merge the United States, Canada and Mexico into an integrated North American Union has been ongoing for years, debunking claims made consistently by the corporate media and establishment talking heads that the NAU is a baseless “conspiracy theory”.

And then throw in a semi-racist cartoon:

"But what do you think of all this, Latino caricature?"

Their story never actually links to the cable, or says who wrote it. That's up to the site they copied their story from almost word-for-word in some places. The National Post ruins the stage:

The document states Canadian economists point to labour markets as one of the areas which could have the greatest benefit for all three countries.

“They advocate freeing up professional licensing laws, and developing a quick, simple, low-cost work permit system, at least for U.S. and Canadian citizens,” the cable said.

It goes on to say North America would be well served by implementing a single, continent wide, tariff or a customs union arrangement.

The proposed customs union would eliminate the North American Free Trade Agreement’s “restrictive” rules of origin.

“NAFTA’s (rules of origin) are so restrictive that importers often prefer to pay the tariff rather than try to prove North American origin,” the cable said.

The cable concludes with a caveat: “There is little basis on which to estimate the size of the ‘upside’ gains from an integration initiative concentrating on non-tariff barriers of the kind contained in NAI. For this reason we cannot make the claims about how large the benefits might be on a national or continental scale.”

Isn't the cult that nigh on blindly supports every word that falls out of Ron Paul's mouth supposed to be happy lowers tariffs and taxes? Isn't this an example of an attempt to de-bloat governments - not even in explicit coordination, just in a way to make people better off? Has the cult really so completely run out of things to complain about?

AE911T Tries To Debunk Judy Woods

2011-05-23T18:54:00.000-07:00

If anyone wants insight into cognitive dissonance, you're in for a treat. AE911 has tried to debunk Judy Woods' energy weapons conspiracy theory.
They have precisely one basis of criticism and that is that their insane conspiracy theory generates marginally fewer decibels of laughter from the rest of us than Woods.' Their version - where a fictional, Roland Emmerich movie-version of the low-explosive material thermite was invisibly installed on what would've had to be thousands of building columns by the metric ton, and then ignited out of order by nonexistent people, oh and also the whole "radical Islamist" thing is a hologram - apparently pales in comparison to Judy Woods' theory that lasers from space destroyed the World Trade Center. You know, one's crazy. The other. Um.

Check out how close AE911 gets to admitting that its own theory is utter absurdity. When comparing the ability of Judy Woods' theory and their own to explaining the "collapse profile" of the Towers, this nugget drops:

In order for the core column breaks to be so straight and horizontal, DEW technology would have to have the following features:

• Be capable of a sufficiently sharp focus for it to attack all or most of the columns at a given level at the same time, but only the ends of those columns;

• Be capable of having its target level move down the building without changing the angle at which it cuts the columns;

• Be capable of having its target level move down at two-thirds of freefall acceleration (as measured by David Chandler), and perhaps other acceleration rates;

• Be capable of having multiple target levels, so that it could destroy the falling upper section of each tower while also destroying the lower section, to create the illusion that the upper section is crushing the lower section, even though that upper section is in itself being destroyed; and

• Be capable of destroying only those connections between steel columns that still form part of the buildings’ structures, leaving untouched the hundreds or thousands of steel assemblies and steel pieces that can be seen flying out of each tower in huge clouds.

In addition to all these features, Wood's alleged secret DEW technology would have to be able to pulverize most of the concrete in both Towers and Building 7, and in the case of the Twin Towers, fling 90% of the buildings' mass outside their footprints. such technology would also have to be able to account for the evidence relating to molten iron, nano-engineered energetic material, and the sights and sounds of explosions described below. Why posit sophisticated secret technology to explain these observations, when some combination of thermitic incendiaries and explosives placed throughout the buildings can explain them much more simply, without making wild assumptions?

I couldn't not laugh at that last sentence. Yes, wild assumptions. Which procurement officer was in charge of shipping in that thermite for Bush, by the way?

This is insanity at its finest. It is either deeply cynical condescension to AE911's reader(s), or mere stupidity. I can't tell. I just can't tell.

Natural News and Infowars' Hilariously Bad Fearmongering

2011-05-22T18:44:00.000-07:00

We all know the running joke of 9/11 deniers decrying the “doublespeak” and fear-mongering they see in “the media” and coming from “the government” (whoever they are). 9/11 deniers are extremely intolerant of dissenting views and contrary evidence; they stifle criticism, attack their critics personally rather than intellectually and, of course, thrive on bogus scare tactics and dishonest use of fear.

Consider by way of example a post on Infowars that insinuates Bill Gates want to kill a billion people:

…Gates has given conflicting information concerning the agenda behind his vaccination push. In his most recent speech, he claims vaccines will save lives. But in a speech he gave at a TED conference last year, Gates clearly stated that vaccines and health care were part of an equation to reduce the world’s population by 15 percent (http://www.naturalnews.com/029911_v…).
“The world today has 6.8 billion people … that’s headed up to about nine billion,” he said to his audience. “Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps ten or 15 percent.”
You can watch the actual clip of Gates saying this at the following link:
http://www.naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=A…

I decided to keep their horrible internal citation formatting (does no one over at Infowars know how to use href?) to demonstrate the point. They talk about Bill Gates. They talk about a TED talk. They cite an equally bad piece on the website of serial bullshit peddler Mike Adams, naturalnews.com instead, one with the headline, “Bill Gates says vaccines can help reduce world population.” Is that true? Of course not. You can watch the video here. Gates was presenting an equation for global CO2 output where, basically, the equation could theoretically be balanced by a lower human population. Nothing was said about vaccine’s role in that uninteresting theoretical aside. Basically, Bill Gates was saying that CO2 output is a problem, and that new energy technology needs to be developed to face that problem – from there, 9/11 deniers decided he actually said, “let’s use medicine to kill a billion people.”

You might’ve had to reread that sentence a couple of times. Let me clarify: Infowars has lied to you.

You know right away that something’s up when you go to watch the clip and see that the supposed quote ("The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent!" – which no one ever says at any point in this video) arises in a three-minute long video. Usually when Infowars needs to make a point, it shaves things down to the second. No, Infowars wants you to watch. It doesn’t doctor or graft text over the video in any way. It simply rolls a three-minute clip of a thirty-minute talk, without commentary. In fact, there is no story attached to the video clip to begin with. There is simply no story.

A fictive quote has been grafted onto a truncated video unrelated to the claim the author wants to make so that his own worldview can profit. This is the definition of being a “shill.” An absurd claim about a vaccine proponent – not about vaccines themselves, science, medicine, or facts of any kind – is being grafted onto an unrelated speech in a laughably dishonest fashion. Meet Infowars and Natural News – liars for profit who want you to be afraid. Funny, that’s exactly how they describe their skeptical detractors.

Idiots like Mike Adams and the author of the Infowars piece Jon Benson (who officially works for Adams, of course) want you to be afraid because they have an agenda to push. That much is mundane. What’s particularly troublesome about this piece is that it proves Adams and Benson want you to be as stupid as they are, too. They want you to click through the echo chamber of Infowars and NaturalNews rather than actually get the quote, the context and the truth. They want you to read and live in a tiny bubble where bad ideas and absurd lies get shouted at each other without a moment to stop and think or seek confirming evidence for those beliefs.

Wow, they're really going for it

2011-05-17T17:17:00.000-07:00

Skeptics shouldn’t ruin the fun when it comes to bin Laden’s “Deathers”

Prisonplanet returned to the 9/11 denial world today after a protracted silence on the issue, posting a couple of clips of people claiming the American raid on Abottabad was ‘botched.’ Of course those claims are contradictory, nonsensical and so far appear to be essentially baseless, which makes them right at home on PP.

According to a close neighbor who watched the alleged US raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound from his rooftop, the operation was almost immediately aborted because of a helicopter crash that killed several people, eyewitness testimony that completely contradicts the official narrative put out by the White House.

Mohammad Bashir lives a stone’s throw away from the purported Bin Laden compound that was raided on May 1. In an astounding interview with Pakistani news channel Samaa TV, Bashir describes how he watched men land in the helicopter and enter the compound. However, in contrast to the official story, Bashir then claims the helicopter exploded and killed the men as they were re-entering the chopper to leave.

The fraud is obvious – was the raid “immediately aborted,” or did the helicopter explode “as they were preparing… to leave?” – and of course editorial content to this effect is entirely absent in the post itself. A couple of the commenters seem suspicious, but the hivemind shouts them down, as always. The author of that post gets extra props for adding in a fourteen minute clip of a news report with no translation and no context whatsoever. From the first clip, the author blindly parrots its narrator: “now if Osama was in that helicopter he must have died and got burnt in that helicopter too, then how they took him?”

So far we’ve gotten a few e-mails asking why we haven’t “bothered” with The Next Big Thing in 9/11 denial: bin Laden death denial (Deatherism?). We’re not getting into it for the same reasons we didn’t get involved in the Judy Wood nonsense about laser beams from space blowing up the World Trade Center. If merely writing out your belief induces a giggle, you’re probably not doing the conspiracy movement with which you’re associated any good.

“Osama bin Laden is alive and well… he’s just not interested in showing it.” “He was killed years ago, Obama was just waiting for a completely random time way too far before his election and way too far after the disastrous midterms to show it.” “He’s a fiction of the New World Order. You can tell because his death so far seems to be presaging the expulsion of American forces from Pakistan.”

Unfortunately for deniers they’re apparently stuck with Deatherism. It is the only way out of the logical trap bin Laden’s death imposes on them. His death was clearly not politically timed. It is not being used to advance American interests – indeed, it is fueling claims that it’s time to leave Afghanistan and Pakistan. It proves that America is interested in hunting and killing terrorists. It demonstrates that there is a genuine war on terrorists, with concrete and achievable objectives. It’s not going perfectly, but it is going.

I’m not interested in refuting the obvious lunacy that Deathers are spewing. Heck, I want them to shout it from the rooftops – and I want skeptics to point out that all 9/11 deniers are logically obligated to agree with them! At this point, few things could help kill the movement faster.

Alex Jones’ hysterical lunacy

2011-05-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

Forget world-class liar. Alex Jones is just an idiot

I started watching a tragicomically predictable new Alex Jones video heralding bin Laden’s death as “Another Gov’t Lie” expecting some good meat for a post. Turns out I didn’t even make it that far. The video begins with what skeptics call a “Gish Gallop:” a debate tactic that involves making a series of statements so inane and obviously false that your opponent simply saps his/her allotted time in refuting them. I’m not accusing Jones of that level of cleverness; rather, I think he is both so stupid and so visibly intoxicated on the Kool-Aid that he just can’t help himself. As always Jones would rather float stupid statements rather than make evidence-based claims, and here they come:

-Initial media reports about Jessica were the doing of “the government.”

Except that it was The Pentagon that first spoke out against the initial, farcical Washington Post story that began the firestorm. And whose investigation was finally reported by WaPo in their self-praise-showered retraction. So this is just Jones being stupid about the who’s who: he’s confused “the government” with “the media,” one journalist from some sort of black ops media whiteout operation, and one shitty newspaper with a fictional government fraud campaign.

-…And those reports were scripted by Jerry Bruckheimer.

Okay, this one is clearly a lie on Jones’ part, so I guess there’s room for that, too. He outright says that Bruckheimer was “called in to script the story” about Lynch’s rescue. The admittedly hype-happy Guardian clarifies:

Back in 2001, the man behind Black Hawk Down, Jerry Bruckheimer, had visited the Pentagon to pitch an idea. Bruckheimer and fellow producer Bertram van Munster, who masterminded the reality show Cops, suggested Profiles from the Front Line, a primetime television series following US forces in Afghanistan. They were after human stories told through the eyes of the soldiers. Van Munster's aim was to get close and personal. He said: "You can only get accepted by these people through chemistry. You have to have a bond with somebody. Only then will they let you in. What these guys are doing out there, these men and women, is just extraordinary. If you're a cheerleader of our point of view - that we deserve peace and that we deal with human dignity - then these guys are really going out on a limb and risking their own lives."

It was perfect reality TV, made with the active cooperation of Donald Rumsfeld and aired just before the Iraqi war. The Pentagon liked what it saw. "What Profiles does is given another in depth look at what forces are doing from the ground," says Whitman. "It provides a very human look at challenges that are presented when you are dealing in these very difficult situations." That approached was taken on and developed on the field of battle in Iraq.

The Pentagon has none of the British misgivings about its media operation. It is convinced that what worked with Jessica Lynch and with other episodes of this war will work even better in the future.

So Jones’ timeline is backwards, his claim seems to be lifted from a metaphor being made in a Guardian piece and – oh, forget it. He wasn’t stupid here; he was dishonest.

-…And members of her unit who “blabbed” were killed by the government

Oh, did I mention that it was an active-duty deputy commander at CentCom who first called out the media on their story? Jones seems to be basing this point on the notion that members of Lynch’s unit began “dying in car crashes” and “getting shot in the head.” You know, classic government black ops. This seems to be Jones simply being stupid about statistics, as he fails to realize that returning veterans tend to have a higher young-life death rate than the general population. It may also be him being stupid about history, as many of those “outspoken” members of her unit were showered in awards and accolades by the military, even as they were speaking out about the media treatment of Lynch. This could also involve Jones being stupid about simple logic: Not only did members of her unit seem to pass away with no correlation to their speaking to the media, but they seemed to do so well after “the damage” was already done (again, “damage” direct at the media, not the military).

-…And “the government” told Lynch to lie about her story.

And it obviously didn’t work, due to, you know, that time she called out both the media for their horrific reporting and the military for later promoting the rescue operation, not the reports about Lynch herself. Oh, also that memoir she wrote.

-…Just like Pat Tillman, who “they” killed because he “was about to go home and speak out against the war.”

And without even giving Jones time to further raise my blood pressure on this one, let’s just make sure to point out that Tillman was an active and vocal critic of Iraq before he died. Hell, Jones had to have known that one – he had to lift Tillman’s own anti-Iraq invasion quotes from somewhere. And hell, afterwards, “the government” was pretty terrible at taking out the members of Tillman’s unit, the friends of Tillman, and Tillman’s family members who actively spoke out about what really happened to him. To say nothing about how bad “the government” is at covering up cases for which it dutifully hands out self-damning evidence. Okay, there’s little room for Jones’s defense there. I guess he’s a liar, too.

Jones is not known for subtlety; neither are his fellow stupid people. I think if he were pressed to discuss the obvious fraud he spews on a daily basis he would admit that he has no interest in reality, for he has already spun his own. It is one in which everyone who doesn't follow him religiously is his enemy, everyone who disagrees with his politics is a Satanic monster and there is no room for facts in a war of volume. This is a small blog representing a small community of dedicated skeptics; Alex Jones is a loud, aggressive blowhard with a horde of gullible followers at his back. It's time to stop pretending that all nonsense is equally worth serious inquiry. Jones's viewers are stupid enough to believe him, and that's their own fault. Until they start making an actual case that goes somewhere, they have given the rest of us nothing to address.

"International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001"

2011-05-08T12:11:00.000-07:00

For what may be the third or fourth consecutive year the denier movement won’t be able to get enough attention in America to host a full-scale event and so is hosting its big conference in Toronto. I cut my teeth in Toronto at a CFI event debating AE911truther Doug Plumb. Toronto is the hub of 9/11 denial, and it makes sense in a lot of ways. The movement is driven by a handful of obscure postmodern academics – the staple of Canadian academia’s history departments.

This one looks to be pretty dull. The usual round of faces will headline the event – David Chandler, Richard Gage, Steven Jones… No new “whistleblowers” or fresh faces, unless you count the shockingly lame 9/11 newcomer du jour Niels Harrit.

In case you couldn't tell, this event won't actually include "hearings," in the technical sense of the word (though technical accuracy was never the movement's strong suit). Judging by the lineup its going to be yet another PowerPoint parade that takes itself far too seriously and accomplishes far too little except in terms of repeating the same hashed-out arguments about shoddy thermite research and since-refuted attacks on NIST and "the American government" (whoever that is) in general.

I base my cynicism purely on the event’s thus-far announced objectives, which read like a how-to guide for creating an echo chamber:

(1) To present evidence that the U.S. government’s official investigation into the events of September 11, 2001, as pursued by various government and government-appointed agencies, is seriously flawed and has failed to describe and account for the 9/11 events.
(2) To single out the most weighty evidence of the inadequacy of the U.S. government’s investigation; to organize and classify that evidence; to preserve that evidence; to make that evidence widely known to the public and to governmental, non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations.
(3) To submit a record and a summary of the Hearings, together with signed Statutory Declarations by witnesses, to relevant governments, groups and international agencies with the request that a full and impartial investigation be launched into the events of September 11, 2001, which have been used to initiate military invasions and to restrict the rights of citizens.
(4) To engage the attention of the public and media through witness testimony as well as through public talks and media events during the four day event.

Guesses: The event is going to be well-attended but not sold out. We will hear at least one presentation about “molten steel.” The movement will continue not to recognize its complete failure to gain a foothold in the mainstream. No one will present a case for bin Laden’s innocence. It will go largely unnoticed.

Ahem...

2011-05-05T16:16:00.000-07:00

One: We're not going to say anything about the death of bin Laden. You have news sources that say much more than we could. You can already draw the necessary inferences about how the mere circumstances of the chase for bin Laden itself prove his role in global terrorism. To go on about bin Laden's death would be to reach for the low-hanging fruit of skeptical inquiry.

Two: Speaking of low-hanging fruit...

The author of the blog Killtown has announced "a challenge" to 911myths.com concerning some of his claims about Shanksville. He doesn't specify which - his link to his "challenge" is simply a link to his "Shanksville"-tagged posts - and says he'll settle for "anyone" addressing "any" of this claims.

This is odd, because we not only demonstrated the fallacious thinking in the very first post that comes up in his "Shanksville" list, but we commented to that effect on the post itself - it has since been deleted.

Killtown, that challenge was accepted weeks ago. Why are you destroying the evidence?

Niels Harrit - Copypasta Chef du Jour

2011-03-13T19:09:00.000-07:00

The 9/11 denial community has been passing around an interview with Dr. Niels Harrit. At the outset of the interview he says that he was convinced to become a 9/11 denier by three Steven Jones DVDs. Sounds like a hell of a rational thought process. Here’s that interview.

It actually takes Harrit about two solid minutes of talking to commit his first error. Around the four thirty mark (he begins talking only at the end of his interviewer’s own charming little monologue) he says that three building collapsed “as a result” of the plane impacts. He makes the point that “two planes” caused “three skyscrapers” to collapse, a reference to the collapse of World Trade Center 7, which was not hit by a plane. This claim is actually false: In total, almost a dozen buildings were heavily damaged by falling debris in the same way that WTC 7 was, and most of them were eventually razed due to that damage.

But from there, he really picks up the momentum. He says that WTC 7 “fell straight down” (false), and even incredibly says that there is “no believable reason” WTC 7 collapsed. Obviously, 200,000,000 pounds of debris is insufficient for Dr. Harrit.

Dr. Harrit: 200,000,000 pounds of debris is INSUFFICIENT.

And then, of course, not only does he state that “the official report says that [all three] of these buildings collapsed due to office fires” (false) and then that such a thing “has never happened before” (false – irrelevant, but still false, dammit).

Here comes a doozie. Here comes one that’s going to get us some criticism from the deniers, always eager for an excuse to hold onto their faith. Here comes the part where I tell you that this is where I turned off the video, and stopped caring about what this guy has to say. I get it. I’m open-minded, I’m open to new claims and evidence, but that is not what Dr. Harrit was offering. Harrit was brainlessly parroting the same errors and falsehoods perpetrated by this dying cult for the past eight years, breathlessly committing the same simple factual errors. If Dylan Avery had taken out a copyright on his laundry list of idiotic statements about 9/11, he’d be a wealthy man by now – thanks in part to Dr. Harrit.

Guys, you’ve been caught telling too many lies. Too many of your key articles of faith have been exposed as obvious errors. You’ve fallen too far, and faced too many long-ignored refutations to think that the bullshit parade can continue to march apace. If your new mouthpiece is exactly as credulous and fact-ambivalent as the rest, he’s already forfeited his right to be taken seriously. Dr. Harrit: I yawn at you. You have nothing for me. You’re exactly as intellectually lazy as your dubious forebears. Don’t expect to be treated differently.

AE911T's push for a "major LA PR firm"

2011-02-28T05:12:00.000-08:00

They don't mention which firm, the length of the contract they're seeking, how they're going to get it, or what that firm could plausibly do to improve the public image of "The Movement," but AE911T appears to have successfully raised enough money to accomplish its stated goal of "hiring a major LA PR firm."

Meanwhile, skeptics will continue to go unpaid for their magazine articles, blog in their spare time, meet up just for fun to express their share interest in lower case-t truth, not try to rule by media blitz, and not live in constant wealth-extraction mode for want of the sorts of semi-slick ad campaigns 9/11 deniers seem to salivate. At the same time, said deniers will continue to accuse all skeptics of being paid agents of the U.S. and/or Israeli governments, Satan and the Sirusian space-lizards, Walt Disney and the Ninja Turtles. And they will keep forking over meager sums for meager ad campaigns that have nothing to do with intellectual argumentation because they do not get the joke.

Numerology Makes a Comeback at Killtown

2011-02-19T08:47:00.000-08:00

Killtown brings up an excellent point: Because there are thirty-three levels in the hierarchy of Freemasonry, the government did 9/11. No, really.

In the "I'm just sayin'" style that characterizes every statement of sheer lunacy announced cautiously to a readership that might-just-might be as crazy as the author, KT explains explains that we should all be suspicious that "thirty-three cars' worth of debris" lies below the crater of the plane that crashed in Shanksville. Give that one a second.

Out of habit, if nothing else, the logic the author uses to decide on the numer thirty-three bears a little refuting.

I wanted to show people how much 80% of a Boeing 757 roughly is so people can understand just how much plane debris would have come out of the Shanksville ground as officials claim. I chose to compare it with average weight of an average sized automobile, a compact sedan, of a year closest to when 9/11 happened that I could find and wouldn't you know it, the total came out to the infamous number 33.

In the post the author uses to come up with 33, he doesn't actually use the measurement he says he does. He claims that he based this on "the weight of an average sized automobile, a compact sedan, of a year closest to when 9/11 happened." That's actually the opposite of what he meant. He has decided to measure "the average compact sedan built in a year close to 9/11," not "the average car." What is the average mass of cars? What are we counting as a car - anything with tires and a combusion engine? Just in the U.S., or elsewhere? The "average vehicle's" weight is probably skewed by things like military jeeps. And why "the year closest to 9/11?" The laws of conjunction practically demand that the number of cars sold in either 2000 or 2001 would be, in September of 2001, drastically lower than the number of all cars sold in all years prior. So, as should go without saying, KT's measurement is bogus and he doesn't actually have a claim here.

But, really, who gives a shit? Even if KT knew anything about data measurement, his point is still hey look, the number thirty-three. That's his argument - oh, and a little "nuh uh!" at the end.

But let's not overlook my original intent of this comparison. The government is trying to tell us that 33 cars-worth of debris was supposedly underneath this shallow crater and they dug it all out.

Yeah, right.

You know it can't be true, because the numerologists don't want it to be true.

Two new pieces at 9/11 Studies blog!

2011-02-17T18:32:00.000-08:00

Just in time to beat the "no articles in over a year" record for which it was headed, the blog called the Journal of 9/11 Studies released two new posts, one at the tail-end of January and another just recently in February. 911blogger brags, "Two new papers have been published..." I'm sure the review process was rigorous.

Especially considering the highly-relevant subject matter, at least of the first one: "Why Australia's Presence in Afghanistan is Untenable." In that paper, the notion that "the government" (whatever that means) is just an aside - its already taken as a given. Its an advocacy piece that flows forth from the conclusion that the world is against the author, and that the invasion of Afghanistan was based on the fraudulent notion that 9/11 was done by the same people who "get to" invade countries.

Fine. This blog is not designed to combat the idiotic notion that the United States has no legitimate interest in defending itself from its enemies. If you don't think something needs to be done about the horrific crimes the Taliban inflicts on its subjects, or that its clear and enduring terrorist presence doesn't pose a threat to the stability of the Western world, this blog is only tangentially here to counter that notion. You want out of Afghanistan? Okay, cool - maybe Australia doesn't face the same sorts of imminent threats other countries do, in your world. I suppose the most famous slaughter of Australians by religious terrorists was an accident of their presence in a "Muslim state" at the time. You're okay with that, fine. The ballot box has already ruled against you.

The second paper is a more clear-cut story. The January post is titled "Review of Analysis of Observed and Measured In-Flight Turns Suggests Superior Control of 9/11 Aircraft." So we know what its about - the planes being "hard to fly."

"Although human control of UA 175 cannot be ruled out, small margins for error are evident in the number of available degrees of bank that could generate impact with WTC 2 via a constant radius turn from approximately 1.5 miles distant. An error of 5 degrees of bank left or right seems largely indiscernible to an observer, but would generate substantial distances from a given target. To achieve impact via a mile-long plus constant radius banked turn, within an acceptable margin of error would seem to be a substantial challenge to a reportedly inexperienced pilot without aid. The CWS function would apparently provide an in-flight automated stability that would permit a pilot to apply greater attention to the course of an aircraft and consider whether additional maneuvers would be required."

Of course, this is base on a statistical falsehood. In nerdspeak, the false Bayesian prior of prior-determined plane pathway subject to natural error. In English, the false assumption that if the hijackers, say, swerved this way or that, they'd have totally missed the Towers. Please. We all see the glaring holes in this argument: One, planeside computers make it difficult to get off course at all, and easy to get back on course if you do; and if they did get "off course," course correction is possible. Commenters - is there more to this, or that really all there is to this paper? This is what passes for "academic" in Denier circles these days?

"9/11 Deniers"

2011-02-10T05:57:00.000-08:00

The other day I received an e-mail asking me about skeptics’ use of the term “9/11 Denier,” which is synonymous with Truther, 9/11 CT, etc.:

My interpretation is that this is a blatant attempt to equate alternative 9/11 theories with Holocaust Denial. As I'm sure you are aware, Holocaust Denial is the belief that the Holocaust simply did not take place, that the event did not occur. You are also entirely aware that proponents of alternative 9/11 information are not stating that the event did not occur, they are instead questioning who was responsible, and bringing specific aspects of the event under scrutiny. In this context, then, might the term "9/11 Deniers" seem like something of a misnomer?

To be clear, I did not start using this term to equivocate between 9/11 Deniers and Holocaust Deniers.

I started using this term because virtually every 9/11 denier falls outside the criteria our e-mailer suggests. I have never had a conversation with a 9/11 denier who was devoid of his or her own theories about “who did it,” “why they did it,” and “how they did it.” In my experience the usual culprits are Israel, some variation on an Illuminati-esque elite cabal (itself often synonymous with Israel), and/or key figures in the Bush Administration – sometimes armed with an elite posse of anonymous government agents. But in no case have I met someone who denies that 9/11 happened the way the evidence indicates it did without at least an “inkling” of who they really wanted to blame. So no, virtually no 9/11 deniers are just “questioning who was responsible” – an activity our co-skeptics over at Screw Loose Change refer to as “JAQing off.” Whether a denier chooses to present their beliefs as merely taking shots at established theory is fine; read them on their own Facebook groups or listen to them at the bar after a debate and you get a very different picture.

Of course, if 9/11 deniers were actually interested in “Truth” this is how they would it to be, anyway. Approaching a true understanding of reality through un-biased scientific inquiry involves the proposal of competing hypotheses and testing their ability to explain the evidence. As a statsy guy I tend to add the caveat that these hypotheses should always be compared to a null hypothesis, even if that hypothesis is something as mundane and obvious as “there’s nothing going on,” but in the absence of reliable priors that needn’t necessarily be the case. Deniers reject the concept, anyway. However, if they were really interested in something more than selling Alex Jones DVDs, they would not shy away from the obvious need to advance positive theories.

And finally it is important to note that 9/11 deniers are denying key aspects of what happened on September 11th. After all, hundreds of people, dozens of books, and countless articles document the motivations, actions, plans and intentions of the people who actually carried out the attacks. 9/11 Deniers are required to believe in the impossibility of organic terrorism. They’re required to believe that religious and ethnic extremists who happen to be Arab or Muslim are either incapable or unwilling to act on their beliefs (and have been so for hundreds of years). The millions of people around the world who have interacted with, been affected by, or have been in al Qaeda either don’t exist or are in on it. Abrudahman Khadr, the boy from an impoverished family that grew up alongside bin Laden’s Afghanistan operations? Obviously a fiction. Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, whose name is on thousands of accounting documents for al Qaeda? Clearly a Zionist tool. Maha El-Samnah and Zaynab Khadr, whose son died as a suicide bomber – leaving them proud of his martyrdom, but ashamed of his affiliation with al Qaeda? Probably paid actors.

Organizations like al Qaeda leave their indelible mark wherever they go. 9/11 deniers are required to pretend that those marks are just Western operatives covering their own tracks – an obvious delusion to everyone who has seen it in action, knows its members, and knows those who are tempted by it and any other extremist organization. To me, this is the key – 9/11 deniers flatly deny virtually every relevant event in the lead-up to 9/11. They deny that centuries of geopolitical events ever occurred. To them, history begins at the Balfour Declaration, crescendos when Ronald Reagan begins supplying anti-Communist rebels in Afghanistan, and ends when George Bush plants bombs in the North Tower and scampers off in a black helicopter. Between these pockmarks on the historical landscape there are thousands of religious ideologues, millions of oppressed victims of colonialism, and countless strategic opportunists struggling to guide human affairs to their own ends. 9/11 denier history is the shallowest history of all, one that requires them to reject the needs, desires, machinations and schemes of billions of people across centuries. 9/11 denial is reality denial.

That’s why I call them 9/11 Deniers.

There's No Such Thing As Terrorism, Denmark Edition

2011-02-04T05:37:00.000-08:00

The point that most quickly riles 9/11 deniers' feathers is the point that 9/11 deniers must believe that there is no such thing as terrorism. The mere thought is so absurd that it begs contrition - until deniers realize that, unfortunately for them, the point must be true. To them, there is no such thing as valid, organic home-brewed extremism. Everything is at the very least a foment of U.S. aggression, and in most cases, actively supported by America (and/or Israel). Can you find a headline-making terrorist attack that has not received such treatment by 9/11 deniers?

Today a court in Denmark sentenced the man who attacked cartoonist Kurt Westergaard to nine years. The attacker broke into his house with an axe, on the morning of New Years' Day, with the intent to kill him (the attacker claimed it was "just to scare him" - bullshit).

9/11 deniers, the ball is now in your court: What immediate policy ends did this attack serve? Cui bono? How many "Zionists" had the man met with prior? Who was his "handler" on the way to the attack? Every terrorist attack is based on the ulterior motives of rich white men, right? Come on kids, let's hear it.

No, It’s Not

2011-02-02T10:43:00.000-08:00

“A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words” is the new post over at AE911T that appears to argue that the debris that fell from the Towers on 9/11 “accelerated” as it penetrated the surrounding buildings, and that engages in some classic confirmation bias (and/or lyin’ with photographs!). Its nothing new, and the only reason it feels worth commenting on is because its stated aim is to “open the minds of skeptics.” Hey, we’re all skeptics here, so let’s see what we’re in for!

Another way to open the minds of skeptics – without getting technical at all – is to compare the other WTC buildings that did not actually collapse to the three that collapsed completely. Show the following photos to your stubborn interlocutor. Ask him or her to notice how severely damaged these other buildings were by the debris from the Twin Towers, yet substantial portions remained upright. And ask “Why?”

[img]http://www2.ae911truth.org/images/infoitems/WTC3.png[/img]

Ergo, “why did one of the peripheral buildings suffer a full collapse, while others only mostly collapsed (and had to be torn down later due to irreparability)?” Stunning, guys. Let’s break it down further: “I know 9/11 was an inside job because some buildings were damaged more than others.” My skeptical faculties, they cannot cope with the genius.

Here’s the thing. When there a lot of something happens in a measurable (“localized”) area, that something tends not to happen evenly. People who read this blog already know what stats geeks we are but, hey, 9/11 deniers, there’s this thing called a distribution. (For the rest of us, there are also these things that influence the spread of falling debris like initial impact point, wind speed, wind direction…)

This particularly vapid argument does not require getting down into brass tacks; it is enough to point out its statistical naivety and its obvious disingenuousness (I mean, do we really think Michael Cook doesn’t know this?) and to remind people about the macro-level apparent disorder that characterizes our universe. People who are better-qualified to address the engineering and technical specifics of why, say, WTC 7 outright collapsed and WTC 3 only mostly collapsed are welcome to, but to me this is a non-argument.

And besides, what did 9/11 deniers expect? For every tower in the complex to collapse? Why is one peripheral collapse more or less “suspicious” than two? Would five collapses have been more plausible? Why? What is the argument here?

Briefly consider with these questions in mind the next act of their shtick.

Consider the impact that WTC 3 must have sustained for it to have been damaged as it was. Material from the Twin Towers was coming down with enough force to penetrate as many as about sixteen floors of this building. Yet, the lower floors stopped the debris, and a total collapse, well before ground level, and most sections stopped the damage far higher than that. How could any “collapse” in Building 7 – which would have had nowhere near the momentum that the falling Twin Towers material did – have continued through the entire structure of WTC 7? How could any such destruction (regardless of what started it) possibly have kept accelerating, through scores of heavy, mostly undamaged columns and hundreds of structural interconnections? Shouldn’t Building 7’s collapse have decelerated and stopped even sooner than the free-falling heavy structural steel members that were stopped by the lower portions of WTC 3?

This one took me a couple of re-readings to digest fully. Mostly because Cook apparently seems to barely know what the word “accelerating” means (or is at least using it dishonestly in the hopes that you don’t know that acceleration can be both negative and positive), but also because of the transparent falsity of his argument. Why do we expect the steel kicked out of the main towers to have “more momentum” than the falling WTC 7? p=mv, anyone? Sure the building didn’t have as far to fall, but WTC 7 itself was order of magnitude heavier than the debris that crippled it structurally – all we need to know why it eventually collapsed.

Cook pointlessly references “acceleration” to make a misleading point about the falling steel “falling at a rate that was changing” – enough to warrant the word in the Cook book – and then blatantly messes up his physics concerning the “momentum” of various falling objects. I don’t foresee this claim getting too far into the “Movement” and there should be no mystery as to why.

Sweden’s JFK?

2011-02-01T16:27:00.000-08:00

I never even knew this is how the life of one of Sweden’s most respected statesmen ended, but apparently the assassination of Olaf Palme is as plagued by conspiracy theories as the assassination of John F. Kennedy:

In the course of my year traveling around Sweden, I often asked those whom I met what was there view of the assassination, and what I discovered was that the responses told me more about them than it did about the public event. Some thought it was a dissident faction in the Swedish security forces long angered by Palme’s neutralist policies; some believed it was resentment caused by Palme’s alleged engineering of Swedish arms sales to both sides in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s; some believed it was the CIA in revenge for Palme’s neutralism during the Cold War; some believed it could have criminals in the pay of business tycoons tired of paying high taxes needed to maintain the Swedish maximalist version of a welfare state; and there were other theories as well. What was common to all of these explanations was the lack of evidence that might connect the dots. What people believed happened flowed from their worldview rather than the facts of the event—a distrust of the state, especially its secret operations, or a strong conviction that special interests hidden from view were behind prominent public events of this character.

This quote comes to us, unfortunately, from blithering doofoid Richard Falk, who seemingly breathlessly transitions straight from this, to a critique of such a mindset, right to 9/11 denial:

In a way, this process of reflection is natural, even inevitable, but it leads to faulty conclusions. We tend to process information against the background of our general worldview and understanding, and we do this all the time as an efficient way of coping with the complexity of the world combined with our lack of time or inclination to reach conclusions by independent investigation. The problem arises when we confuse this means of interpreting our experience with an effort to provide an explanation of a contested public event…

The arguments swirling around the 9/11 attacks are emblematic of these issues. What fuels suspicions of conspiracy is the reluctance to address the sort of awkward gaps and contradictions in the official explanations that David Ray Griffin (and other devoted scholars of high integrity) have been documenting in book after book ever since 2001. What may be more distressing than the apparent cover up is the eerie silence of the mainstream media, unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al Qaeda operation with no foreknowledge by government officials. Is this silence a manifestation of fear or cooption, or part of an equally disturbing filter of self-censorship? Whatever it is, the result is the withering away of a participatory citizenry and the erosion of legitimate constitutional government…

Of course, the proposition that David Ray Griffin’s absurd claims have gone unaddressed is by now so obviously false that it seems fair to call it a lie. And it is no longer a source of debate to say that every single JFK conspiracy theory is transparently false.

As skeptics tend to understand, conspiracy theories arise at the drop of the hat and they don’t really leave the public conscience. It’s just another part of forming an identity to make enemies out of people who are dislike you, and even slightly paranoid people have no trouble doing just that. Falk, himself a rabid bigot, probably doesn’t even get the joke he just told.

Good Question – Well, Bad Question, But…

2011-01-23T22:44:00.000-08:00

A comment on our last post proposed an interesting question:

warm cow plot wrote:
I love it...you counted how many people could possibly have been in on the largest caper in the planet's history. Now engage your self in something more practical--just for fun, mind you. Try to figure out the least people needed to pull it off. I will wait for your results. When you are done, I will compare to the number that I think could have done it. What neat fun we will all have with this.

Here’s the gist of the question: 9/11 deniers require an outrageous number of conspirators – but that’s okay, because all of those people were necessary anyway. 9/11 deniers seem to believe that a clandestine network of non-white people were unable to do it themselves. I like this question. I like this question because it helps define a key difference between the mindset of a conspiracy theorist and the mindset of a rationalist.

This question is based on the notion that we should predefine the range of possible events based on what we at the outset consider to “make sense to us.” Of course, we do this all the time – when you throw a ball upwards, you should probably behave as if it were going to fall back down – but only reasonably with events for which we have priors. We have a lifetime of experience with things going up and subsequently going down. History provides us with insufficient 21st-century large-scale terrorist attacks involving the use of commercial planes as suicide weapons. What is the “minimum number” of people required to conduct such an attack? With what authority could anyone possibly claim to have that answer?

Consider the two absurd extremes: One person with near-superhero status remote-controlled all three planes vs., say, a million people put together tiny, minute necessary steps. I could write a suspense novel detailing how either could happen. I could easily devise something that was within orbit of a plausible narrative of events. Just as Ayn Rand invented a fictional rendition of mid-century American industry to have a fantasy-land in which she could make her own philosophy come true, 9/11 deniers must reinvent the landscape of available evidence under presuppositions that will allow them to be right. Errant statements by politicians confronted by a herd of camera-wielding conspiranoids subsume the mountain of forensic evidence under a paradigm that allows 9/11 deniers to be right.

I have no idea what the “minimum number” of conspirators required to pull off 9/11 would have been. Philosophically the question is a misnomer exactly akin to asking the color of Thursday or the taste of seven. Its distance from a planet on which it is possible to have evidence-based reasoning is so great that it allows all answers, and requires them all to be equally right. So, “warm_cow_plot,” I don’t know the answer, I don’t care, and neither should you. We have reason, evidence, and standards of truth - those will do just fine.

"Who Did It?"

2011-01-19T15:20:00.000-08:00

One of the first big projects I did for our Facebook group was to sit down and watch Loose Change with my hand waiting on the spacebar, pausing to jot down details every time the movie explicitly laid blame on someone for the September 11th attacks – who they were, what group they were part of, and so on. In the end, I reached a conservative count of 578,212 people – politicians, policemen, engineers, academics, soldiers, firefighters… heck, everyone from every profession from President of the United States to voiceover artist. Americans, Brits, Saudis, Israelis, Chinese, citizens of Dubai… you get the idea.

Slowly but surely, it looks like 9/11 deniers are starting to wake up to the depths of absurdity their claims lead them to, such as my count was meant to illustrate. At least, that’s what the new site whodidit.org demonstrates. They’ve already got 103 people – and that number logically must mushroom enormously.

The site has nothing new to offer, nothing provocative or intellectually consequential in any way, but it does have the names of 103 people that would have to be at the “top” of the conspiracy. Keep that in mind: at the top. These are not the guys who designed the demolition regime; they didn’t put in the orders for the electronic equipment designed to fake air-phone calls or fool black boxes; they’re not the ones who bought the fake uniforms worn by the agents who planted the explosives, and so on. They’re just the leaders. Even super villians need interns, dontchaknow.

Not only does this site offer nothing in the way of new evidence, novel claims, etc., it is a site dripping with such pure absurdity that I would seek to promote it actively. No hardcore denier can look at this list without realizing their religious faith requires the concerted actions of hundreds of thousands of enemies, strangers, people with competing interests, language barriers, worldviews, and so on to coordinate in what would be the most dangerous, ill-formed, absurd conspiracy in history.

So tell your friends all about it!

Early Reports of Gabby Giffords Shooting: A Study in Trusting Early Media Reports

2011-01-15T16:04:00.000-08:00

A key part of 9/11 deniers' faith is that all media reports are either 100% accurate, or inaccurate in ways designed to deliberately obfuscate the truth. Here, for example, that belief is plainly stated as a "cover-up
of the truth."

Just to contextualize the obvious lunacy of that belief, here are some links to "initial media reports" about the shooting in Arizona:

Democracy Now!/Huffpo: Gabrielle Giffords Dead
G-E news: Giffords Dies
SkyNews: Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords Dies After Being Shot In The Head
FOX News, NPR, and Reuters all had to retract false reporting that Giffords died
ABC News issues apology for false Gabrielle Giffords death report
New York Daily News issues apology for false Giffords death report
CNN erroneously reported on Giffords' death

I thought Huffingtonpost.com's follow-up about "mainstream media's" false reporting was particularly galling - it was one of the first to falsely report Giffords' death and issued some of the most vociferous finger-wagging afterward, yet posted literally dozens of stories including references to the "fact" of Giffords' death, quickly de-linking all of them:

This is because, of course, Huffington Post is a terrible blog masquerading as a news site that no one should take seriously. The shooting was almost certainly perpetrated by a by a 9/11 denier.

AE911Truth's Pathetic Response to Ted Goertzel

2011-01-12T04:51:00.000-08:00

In response to the Skeptical Inquirer article by Ted Goertzel on the durability of conspiracy theories, written up in the most recent issue of the magazine. The article is pretty long and at least worth glancing through - frankly, in my view it didn't say much that Michael Shermer didn't already cover in the classic Why We Believe Weird Things - but ae911truth.org's response, predictably, leaves something to be desired.

The author of the piece complains that Goertzel "lumps the 9/11 Truth movement in with the “faked Moon landing,” and “AIDS was a government plot to kill gay people." Frankly, this is a point so banal, so obvious and so plainly true that to deny it is an insult to your readers. We've commented on this recently. No 9/11 denier, I don't think, believes in only one unproven (or in this case unprovable) conspiracy theory, and to say that 9/11 denial is being "lumped in" with other theories is to disingenuously deny a key aspect of the conspiracy mindset. As we've also noted before, the 9/11 denier mindset makes it impossible to parse conspiracy theories. This is a point both Goertzel and Shermer have made, implicitly - the intellectual path to arriving at 9/11 denial leads with equal cognitive discrimination and evidential accuracy to every conspiracy theory.

Oh, and the author complains that Goertzel supposedly engages in "ad hominem" attacks - lawl.

My favorite part of the ae911truth piece is the hysterical pedantry required to argue against one of Goertzel's main points. To be fair, its a point we have to make all the goddamn time: That the 9/11 denier's argument against "molten steel" is essentially fraudulent because the claim that any steel melted on 9/11 is nowhere to be found in the investigation into what happened on 9/11. Here, claims ae911truth.org, was Goertzel's mistake: He said "no one" instead of "no one on the investigation" made that claim. Which is obvious, of course, if you're in any way intellectually honest.

Perhaps Mr. Goertzel should have done some actual skeptical inquiry of his own. If he had, he surely would have found numerous quotes making precisely the false claim that office and jet fuel fires can melt structural steel:

Stanford University Professor Steven Block: “The intense heat could have melted the buildings’ cores, allowing for the collapses, he suggested.” [Not part of the investigation.]

Structural engineer Chris Wise: “It was the fire that killed the buildings. There’s nothing on earth that could survive those temperatures with that amount of fuel burning. The columns would have melted, the floors would have melted and eventually they would have collapsed one on top of each other.” [Not part of the investigation.]

Engineer Hyman Brown: “Structural steel is fireproofed to last between one and two hours, which it did, and then steel melts.”

Structural engineer Richard Ebeltoft: “Richard Ebeltoft, a structural engineer and University of Arizona architecture lecturer, speculated that flames fueled by thousands of gallons of aviation fuel melted the building’s [sic] steel supports.” [Referenced by 9/11 Commission - but not regarding this admitted "speculation."]

NewScientist.com: “Eventually raging fires melted the supporting steel struts, but the time delay allowed hundreds of people to escape.” [Written one day after 9/11 by non-experts in the period before any empirical evidence was available.]

Editor's comments on the inanity of this point in bold, obviously.

The piece reads like a sloppy press release about the sloppy research done by groups like ae911truth - for example, the author of the ae911t piece complains that Goertzel didn't fall for 9/11 deniers' fraudulent rendition of statements made by firefighters about "explosions" and "molten steel." He probably didn't mention them because 9/11 deniers have lied about them. And as a sociologist, Goertzel probably also knows how useless eyewitness testimony is, anyway.

And Jim Cirile concludes with the line, "Let’s turn this feeble smack-down into an effective opportunity." You've got a long way to go, kids.

That Was Fast

2011-01-10T03:41:00.000-08:00

It's an easy enough formula: "Something happened, therefore the government did it." From the winners over at Inforwars.

The FBI and local law enforcement in Pima County, Arizona, are looking for a second man wanted in connection with the shooting of Rep. Giffords and the murder of a federal judge and five others...Fox News reported early Sunday that the man may have given the accused assassin, Jared Lee Loughner, a ride to the supermarket. Is it possible he acted as Loughner’s handler in a larger assassination plot?"

Face, meet palm.

Diffusion of a Mission

2011-01-07T10:13:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons that the 9/11 denier movement has essentially failed in its present form is because it has been unable to agree upon any sort of concrete policy proposals, focus on any particular type of concerted political action (street protests are technically not such), or even maintain coherence of mission. The ostensible goal of a "New 9/11 Commission" seems to have been lost in a cacophony of internal squabbling, absurd tangents (looking at you, Judy), and general disorganization.

This lack of focus is crippling to any movement seeking concrete change. After almost eight years of organizing attempts deniers have been unable to agree on what legislative arena they want to work in (courts? Popular votes on the state or Federal level? Agency lobbying?), how they want to get that work done (ballot initiatives? Arrests of the "perpetrators," whoever they are? Violent uprisings?), and how that's going to happen (consider the schizophrenic fundraising strategy of every such organization). The movement has produced no evidence that any of its donors or proponents should expect any forward progress whatsoever.

Deniers themselves have quickly diffused into other movements. They've moved on to other conspiracy theories, becoming anti-vaxxers, chemtrailers, birthers, etc.; other political movements, like the anti-Israel, right-libertarian, and peace movements, and so on. As evidence of this, consider a random screencap taken today of the only functional 9/11 denier Group on Facebook, the "9/11 Truth Library." This screencap is of the Group's Discussions page, which supposedly allows for more in-depth, long-form topics than appear on the Wall.

Anti-vax, environmentalism, chemtrails, anti-GE, 9/11ish, 9/11, anti-Israel, skepticism, black-ops theories, 9/11 - in that order. The "9/11 conspiracy theories" thread, like I said, was actually a thread started by a skeptic that has gone unaddressed for days. This movement is disaffected, bored, and unorganized. The 9/11 denier movement may rematerialize at some point in the future, but it can not succeed in its present form (consider that they wouldn't even be able to tell you what "succeed" means as regards their goals). Its financiers and proponents have no reason to expect any forward progress from its current leadership, organization or methodology. Might just be another "reset" year for the deniers.

Legitimately Curious

2011-01-04T10:05:00.000-08:00

Our brief little message to the BuildingWhat? campaign, hopefully to be received in the diplomatic spirit in which it was intended:

Something I've never seen addressed is the fact that the penthouse suites on top of WTC 7 collapsed first when the tower collapsed. This particular part of the building was particularly small (it's marked by a red circle in the third photo down: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x68086) and doesn't really seem like it would require the use of explosives to "bring down." The fact that it collapsed first seems like evidence of the capacity of the falling debris from the Towers to cause damage to peripheral buildings. I was wondering what your thoughts were on that.

I've never seen anything lamer than "well, they imploded too!" (the excuse of the authors at Democratic Underground I linked to), so I'm genuinely curious to know what they come up with.

Anyone know if this actually happened?

2011-01-03T17:38:00.000-08:00

I was literally digging around the AE911T website for some new content to comment on when I came across this gem the "press releases" section. Two questions: (1) Did this actually happen? I can find no news about it and (2) Did anyone catch it with a cell phone or anything?

Was there a third light beam on Sept. 11, 2010?

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers thought they saw a third light beam emanating from Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2010. Two light beams have shown skyward on the 9/11 anniversary for several previous years, memorializing the lives lost in the Twin Towers. But this year, thousands were astounded to see a third beam. Many called their local media, asking about it. They generally were told it stood for the third building that collapsed, Building 7.

A news release was issued to the New York City metro area by "Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth" through PRNewswire on Sept. 11, 2010. The explanation stated the third beam was to shine light "on the fact that the official story of what happened at Ground Zero simply cannot be true and that a new, truly independent investigation is needed. This new investigation is needed both as a matter of national security and as the key to real justice for the victims of the Twin Towers" (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/1280-architects-and-engineers-launch-third-light-beam-into-nyc-night-skyline-on-9th-anniversary-of-september-11th-102706039.html).

PRNewswire reported later this news release received the second highest number of viewers on their website that day. Yet mainstream media said not a word about this the next day. If the media didn't report it, does that mean it didn't happen?

Dwain Deets
Encinitas

And just as an aside, we all recognize Dwain Deets (whose corpus of work has been roundly refuted on great sites like Boloboffin's), but searching around for him on Google has revealed no evidence that anyone actually saw this publicity stunt! It took place way back in October so perhaps it has been forever buried in the ethereal mountain of Internet data, but if it was half as shitty a display as its dearth of documentation suggests, it has to be worth seeing...

Getting attention in the CT World

2011-01-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

I have yet to see anyone describe 2010 as anything but a terrible year for 9/11 denial. Screw Loose Change is already working on a wonderful month-by-month of the "movement's" ill-attended conferences, absurd internal squabbles, and multiple failed publicity attempts. All I can say is that its two big "victories" that I noticed were the "BREAKTHROUGH" that Colorado Public Access Television planned to broadcast one of the versions of Loose Change, and the BuildingWhat? ad campaign. If any New Yorkers have actually seen any evidence of this campaign thus far let me know, because so far I have been literally unable to find the ad content outside of YouTube.

9/11 deniers should be unsurprised at this long, tortuous turn of events. The movement has been unable to generate a new, truly argument-worthy claim in years. Witness today's top "9/11 News" on Infowars: That someone who calls himself an engineer thinks that

“WTC 7 is the Achilles’ heel,” he said. “That (building) did come down at free-fall acceleration.”

Apparently, it is sufficient to copy-paste the mission statement of AE911 onto a blog post to make headlines in the cult these days. I e-mailed him and the Infowars webmaster once again with the same, simple question ("Why did the penthouses on top of WTC 7 collapse first?") - no response, once again, is expected.

The front page news in the cult community has been the same for five years. The last time something new was tried - the Judy Wood insanity comes to mind - the movement fractured and hemorrhaged a few thousand more members.

2010 was a year of closed doors and shrunken rooms for 9/11 denial. The problem is obvious: They have nothing convincing, nothing that truly invigorates the grassroots now that the current retinue of faith has been long-refuted by the likes of 911myths, Screw Loose Change and Popular Mechanics. They need new claims, and to jettison the old ones, pronto. Otherwise, I will soon find myself out of blog fodder!

Sentence of the Day

2011-01-01T19:50:00.000-08:00

From the penultimate post of the year at STJ911:

Careful examination of the evidence, however, shows that it cannot be conclusively proved that no 757 hit the Pentagon.

Hooray for proving a negative!

A “Free Fall” Piece? Really, Guys?

2010-12-27T20:08:00.000-08:00

This week saw the appearance of a WTC 7 free-fall post over at AE911. The post contains prime examples of everything that is wrong with your average Truther post.

I’m surprised that skeptics have made less light of the incredibly mediocre nature of the average 9/11 denier’s screed. Tell me if the apparent flow of each such “big-claim” type article, each “final proof” disseminated from bobbing head to bobbing head is a mutually assured annoyance, or if I’m just crazy:

1. The meandering, banal prologue.

The post I’m griping about begins with the groan-inducing phrase, “Galileo was the first to describe the amazing fact that…” Does anything make you reach for the scroller faster? Does anything prompt more urgent zoning out of the eyes in desperate search of valuable keywords like “gravity,” “data,” or “the goddamn point of all this?”

This introduction reminds me of an epically bad blog post from the cargo-cult version of an academic organization, the Journal of 911 Studies. The post was as useless as one must come to expect from frauds like Frank Legge, and it managed to open with a

It has been said that the world is one continuous Rorschach inkblot test: we see what we expect to see based on our fears and desires.

The hinge on my laptop lid just rusted a little. Can’t we just get to the point? Can’t your evidence and your reasoning speak for itself?

It has been said that the world is one continuous Rorschach inkblot test: we see what we expect to see based on our fears and desires. All sides of the World Trade Centre (WTC) collapse issue can see definitive corroboration in the same photos and videos, the same laboratory tests and the same reports. In this way both authors of this paper initially accepted the official explanation for the collapse of the buildings, as set out in the technical report of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),[2] but they now undeniably approach the report from a skeptical perspective.

So we first get a post-modern statement that everything is a mere matter of interpretation, then a passive assertion that the authors have got it all figured out. That is, after all, one of the apparent points of the droning intro:

2. The in-your-face appeal to authority.

We all recognize this. Not a post goes by these guys where it isn’t asserted with resolute failure to get the joke that the “authors have studied this issue for year.” They have “thought hard about the evidence.” They have “carefully considered all sides of the issue.” When making his shocking and novel claims about free-fall collapse speeds, the author of this post asserts in describing his methodology,

I used a video analysis tool to carefully measure the velocity profile of the falling building using CBS video footage from a fixed camera aimed almost squarely at the north wall. A video detailing this measurement is available at YouTube/user/ae911truth. I calibrated my measurements with the heights of two points in the building provided in the NIST Building 7 report released in August 2008, so I know the picture scale is good.

The “video analysis tool” is unnamed, the video is unidentified and relies on you to use a broken hyperlink, and the provision of the calibration points is completely unexplained. Which part did he rely on? Why did he use the wrong version of the report (the NIST Building 7 report has been updated multiple times – heck, updates to the report were released the very next day)? What’s worse is that this is one of the more “subtle” appeals to authority 9/11 deniers make – especially when they clothe themselves in the rank condescension of wannabe academic seriousness.

Make your point and be done with it. I don’t care where you worked for twenty years. I don’t care where you got your BS, your MD, your PhD. You don’t impress me.

3. The seemingly overt disrespect for the viewership.

This is the point that inspired this post in the first place: 9/11 deniers condescend to their readers and insult their intelligence. (And yes, it goes without saying, they lie to them as well – that’s a separate point) Why does David Chalmers just expect his readers to take his calibration method on faith? Why does he expect they will just believe him because he told them to do so? I think its because he really doesn’t give a shit about his audience anymore. He doesn’t expect to “convert” anyone anymore. He may very well understand that his cult has failed. Sloppy science is allowed because, well… because who cares?

This blog operates under the possibly naive premise that such technicalities are actually at the core of why conspiracy movements succeed or fail. The Internet has allowed arguments to play out rapidly and thoroughly, with near-instantaneous back-and-forths of links, citations, and back-up claims. The side with the most hyperlinks wins, and the other side has stopped bothering altogether. I think it goes beyond the mere fact that the 9/11 denier blogosphere is an echo chamber for people who already agree with its creators – because that’s true of every blogosphere to some extent (including the skeptical one). I think it goes to the fact that the 9/11 deniers are uniquely unequipped to handle serious refutations of their work – they fundamentally don’t know the science, and unless they’re the OPs, they can’t check the post or the author’s previous works for backup. In a world where everyone who disagrees with you is a CIA spook, your theories get little wiggle-room – it seems hard for 9/11 deniers to recalibrate their refuted ideas without making their audience raise their pitchforks and cry “heretic!” After all, in a world where Dylan Avery, Amy Goodman, Judy Wood, and Sibel Edmonds have all been variously accused of being “plants,” it is unlikely that people are going to be willing to leave their camps. The movement, as Faulkner once wrote, is fucked.

Oh and, just to be clear, the free-fall theory is bullshit – not that Chandler gives us a specific claim of any kind to refute.

Another bumper year

2010-12-24T14:19:00.000-08:00

911truth.org is the only one of the major 9/11 denier sites that actually lets people know how its fundraising is going year to year, to wit. We don't mean to keep mocking it in every year-end section, it just... keeps letting us.

Just past the $2,000 mark... a steep decline, even from last year's incredibly paltry effort. The cult is fading fast.

Trollfeed, The Blog Post

2010-12-15T19:10:00.000-08:00

The Facebook group recently got a post showing a "whistleblower's" talk about how the United States used, and continues to use, depleted uranium in combat zones. I found the talk rather interesting and I've re-posted it below.

Here's why I put "whistleblower" in quotes: I didn't know this was an unknown issue in 2010. I thought it was more or less common knowledge, at least among people who follow news about America's adventures abroad, that depleted uranium was part of the American arsenal. Bushflash did a few videos about it many years ago. It never occurred to me that people could hear phrases like "bunker buster" every day and not wonder what made bunker busters such effective busting devices.

Here's the thing that I think a lot of visitors to our group and this blog from "the other side" don't understand:

Not being a 9/11 denier =/= Support for the actions of any particular politician.

This point is often understated by skeptics, because I think we lack the gene for seeing issues in black and white that 9/11 deniers rely on to make their assumptions about the way the world works. Anyone who has been having the argument for long enough knows that words like "shill" and "spook" are the adjectives of choice 9/11 deniers use for those who refute their ideas. On their planet, it seems, they are part of a golden Crusade, where everyone around them is the unwashed masses, the political sheep who need only be anointed in the homeopathic magic-water of their grainy YouTube videos and fatuous echo chamber of a blogosphere. On their planet, you are either with the 9/11 deniers or you are a die-hard defender of the status quo, 100% copacetic with the proclamations of America's majority party du jour.

The similarities with religious fanaticism have already written themselves in your mind, I'm guessing.

To this video all I can say is, Yep, sounds like depleted uranium is a horrific weapon. 9/11 deniers have to live in a world where it isn't common knowledge that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake (an opinion that at least half this blog's authors have shared since 2003, by the way), for example. No, empirical evidence should not get balled up with your politics. No, not everyone who has a substantive disagreement with you is your enemy on 100% of fronts. I feel this has to get addressed every time I see a 9/11 denier or two hijacking a peace protest or something, but they keep doing it and not getting the un-funny joke they have been spinning this whole time.

"Depleted uranium is a horrific weapon, therefore the government committed 9/11" is a non sequitur. They're unrelated issues, at best part of some epic tu quo que fallacy, spanning decades and continents in some desperately contradictory effort to indict all on all things for an evil utterly unrelated to the debate at hand. The person who posted this video has, at best, conducted a logical fallacy. At worst, he is committing implicit intellectual fraud against his "opponents."

Okay, “911debunkers,” Let’s Walk You Through It

2010-12-14T10:01:00.001-08:00

Looks like we really managed to ruffle some feathers over at the debunker-wannabe blog, apparently un-ironically named “Debunking the Debunkers.” Get out your violins:

While repeatedly calling us '9/11 deniers', 'wannabes' and 'cargo-cult skeptics', and mocking me for quoting more of Shermer than I needed to, NR oversimplifies my arguments and engages in the usual fact-free straw man attacks.

And thus follows the usual moaning of those unable to defend a position: They claim that we characterized their arguments in an unfair fashion, that we portrayed their worldview unfavorably, and didn’t define terms in a way that makes their position look good – essentially. For reference, here is the post that got them in such a fuss – and now here’s the next refutation.

D911D starts right off by attempting to backtrack and re-characterize their stance on the “maneuvers” Hani Hanjour “pulled off” on 9/11. The author initially simply gives us

Hani Hanjour would need to have been superhuman to pull off the maneuvres he did. So number 2 definately [sic] applies to the hijackers.

While linking to one of his prior posts that includes, after an impromptu rant about some sort of unemployment difficulties he’s facing,

"Hani Hanjour, a man who was incompetant [sic] in a single engine Cessna, then executed a complex 330 degree downward turn, descending 6000 feet in two and a half minutes. He then entered a steep dive and descended a further 2000 feet in 40 seconds, pulled out of this steep dive at 500mph, overcame enormous G-Forces and knocked down five light poles in less than a second while maintaining the perfect trajectory required to hit the ground floor of a conveniently reinforced section of the Pentagon without touching the lawn. And he accomplished all this without being caught on any of the eighty plus cameras surrounding the Pentagon and without attracting the attention of the US air defence."

I think on some subconscious level I was being charitable by not trotting this out in the original post, because this generally speculative characterization of the plane’s maneuvers was pathetic. Hani Hanjour dipped the nose and the plane descended at a jaw-tearing 45 miles per hour (why, human beings themselves should fly apart at that speed!), then descended again at a face-melting 34 miles per hour and somehow managed to tip the plane back up to overcome the enormous pressure. Things are a lot less scary in perspective, I think. Hani Hanjour tipped the nose twice, and is thus a miracle pilot?

And, as usual, I think it goes without saying that the claim that Hanjour is naught but a flight-school dropout who was “incompetent in a single engine Cessna” is a lie by omission - he was, until he wasn’t.

In 1996, Hanjour returned to the United States to pursue flight training,after being rejected by a Saudi flight school. He checked out flight schools in Florida, California, and Arizona; and he briefly started at a couple of them before returning to Saudi Arabia. In 1997, he returned to Florida and then, along with two friends, went back to Arizona and began his flight training there in earnest. After about three months, Hanjour was able to obtain his private pilot's license. Several more months of training yielded him a commercial pilot certificate, issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in April 1999... Settling in Mesa, Hanjour began refresher training at his old school,Arizona Aviation. He wanted to train on multi-engine planes, but had difficulties because his English was not good enough.The instructor advised him to discontinue but Hanjour said he could not go home without completing the training. In early 2001, he started training on a Boeing 737 simulator at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Mesa.An instructor there found his work well below standard and discouraged him from continuing.Again, Hanjour persevered; he completed the initial training by the end of March 2001.

(source, quoting page 225 of the 9/11 Commission Report)

His instructor described him as “a very average pilot,” and, from the source cited above,

One 9/11 Commission footnote (to Chapter 7) is relatively positive. 170. FBI report, "Summary of Penttbom Investigation," Feb. 29, 2004, pp. 52¬57. Hanjour successfully conducted a challenging certification flight supervised by an instructor at Congressional Air Charters of Gaithersburg, Maryland, landing at a small airport with a difficult approach.The instructor thought Hanjour may have had training from a military pilot because he used a terrain recognition system for navigation. Eddie Shalev interview (Apr.9, 2004).

And, from pentagonresearch, "Despite Hanjour's poor reviews, he did have some ability as a pilot, said Bernard of Freeway Airport. "There's no doubt in my mind that once that [hijacked jet] got going, he could have pointed that plane at a building and hit it," he said."

So this is just a battle of the scare quotes.

In 9/11 denier land, this argument breaks even: “They” have quotes saying the maneuvers were undoable for Hanjour, “we” have quotes saying they were doable for Hanjour. By the denier standard of evidence, this argument is a draw. We have to throw up our hands (ed. note: Wrote “throw up in our hands” the first time. Viva Freud!) and walk away from the table. Fortunately, as a skeptic, I can do better: this kind of crap don’t matter. Who cares what various semi-authorities think about the relative talents of the pilots? Are we meant to conclude that there should’ve been something “likely” about 9/11? Should 9/11 have been a day without the weird, without the inevitable deviations from the mean? This entire line of reasoning is hogwash. What we know is that the positive evidence helps us establish who the pilots were.

Here, in fact, let’s play a thought experiment and grant the 9/11 deniers a premise. Let us falsely render Hanjour a doddering incompetent who couldn’t have flown a paper airplane over his desk. This changes nothing about what we almost certainly already know about Hani Hanjour’s life. 100% of the remaining evidence singles him out as a hijacking pilot, even if we let the 9/11 deniers escape with the obvious lie that he couldn’t have tilted a plane slightly for a brief period. The positive evidence - the records of his training, of his travels, his presence on the plane, his consorting with the fellow hijackers, the many people who came forward to volunteer information about his life (and those who were captured and forced to…) all stand. We know 9/11 deniers are deluding themselves when they make this particularly absurd argument. But even if they weren’t, they’d still be in a very deep hole.

So yes, D911D, you’re wrong on this point. In our previous post, in fact, you were merely wrong; now you’re dishonest.

He next attempts to use the highest form of standard of evidence in 9/11 denier circles – shite YouTube videos – to address the fact that he doesn’t understand how probabilities work. This was in response to a little aside I made about his hypocrisy in saying that skeptics “don’t bother to run the numbers.” Here’s the video he used:

This video is hysterical, so I recommend you give it a view. The presenter begins, in what appears to be a fully honest deadpan, with the following:

“What is the probability of the BBC predicting an unknown event in advance? …100,000.” We can scrap this one because the BBC didn’t predict jack in advance. And yes, it goes without saying, this guy didn’t calculate jack, either. No numbers were “run” here – but by now, it should be obvious we aren’t dealing with the most intellectually rigorous of folks here.

Next up, he asks, “what are the chances of cell phones working at high altitude in 2001?” This entire claim is a non sequitur, as SLC has addressed here. In general, this guy dishonestly calls air phones “cell phones” for most of his claim. Yawn. 2003 called, they want their arguments back.

And in claim three he simply lies. The majority of 9/11 Commission Report members did not “go public saying the investigation was a fraud.” Many members of the Commission complained that the Bush Administration was unhelpful and intrusive, but this guy simply lies about the substance of those complaints. And then he simply decides, “the probability of this one is less than one in a thousand.” That of course is a non sequitur response to the stated question, “how many public enquiry’s have [sic] had a majority of its members go public about fraud?” That question doesn’t even demand a probabilistic answer.

Oh, and have we mentioned, two of the three claims made so far don’t even have anything to do with the actual mechanics of 9/11? The implied theory in number one – of foreign journalists being paid off to start telling “the official story” even before it happens, because apparently the world’s most clever conspirators don’t know what a time zone is – would be completely unrelated to actually pulling off 9/11, and number three is even more obviously so – even if it weren’t a lie.

D911D, you’ve been lied to by people who want you to believe them. Isn’t this the sort of thing you should be angry about? Going to move on now, let me know if you need hand-holding through the remaining five claims.

After all, we now have something more fun to address: D911D’s truly tragic attempt at defending the “thermite” hoax, perpetrated once again by demonstrable frauds whom this author should be dead-set on refuting. He’s a “debunker” after all, dontchaknow.

I’m confused as to why we got the first link he provides, which doesn’t have a lot to say about our case for why the big thermite article is a fraud. It provides one particularly egregious overstep early on: It quotes an article saying that “Nanosized thermitic materials are being researched by the U.S. military with the aim of developing new types of bombs that are several times more powerful than conventional explosives” to argue that nanothermite “IS an incendiary and an explosive,” even though it is literally chemically impossible for that to be true unless you add something else to the thermite (Debunking 911 maths it out here). I’m honestly unsure how to address this claim but with the self-evident fact of how thermite behaves when it “goes off” – a process you can watch here and here). Thus, clearly, its “use in incendiary devices” is the exact same as its use in fireworks – as a pyrotechnic initiator.

Starting off your blog post with an obvious lie is not a good way to get taken seriously, and then trying to quote your way around the serious issues preventing your point from being taken seriously is at least as bad. The entire crux of their argument rests on the appeal to mediocre authority contained in the author’s quote of Jim Hoffman’s article, which reads thus:

These are all features of a nano-engineered material. It is not possible that such a material was formed as a by-product of the destruction of the Twin Towers...
Although these elements -- aluminum, iron, oxygen, and silicon -- were all abundant in building materials used in the Twin Towers, it is not possible that such materials milled themselves into fine powder and assembled themselves into a chemically optimized aluminothermic composite as a by-product of the destruction of the Twin Towers.

And when we go to the article itself, the evidence we find for Hoffman’s claim is… nonexistent. The author claims that the “particles” used to build the case were “very small” without saying how much larger or smaller they were than, say, the average particle found in the wreckage, or the size of other particles of similar chemical composition. You know, the only two things you would want to know to empirically verify that claim. He next says that “the particles are highly uniform in size and shape,” running into the exact same problem, plus another one: he doesn’t bother to provide any metric of uniformity! So no, they are not highly uniform in size and shape – there, an equally valid claim to Jim’s, per unit volume of empirical evidence. I think the closest Hoffman comes to trying to do original science in this regard is to try to come up with the chemical composition of his samples.

As such, it is scientific dishonesty to reject the fact that these are the normal components of the collapse site of a skyscraper. It is an impossible claim to make – and doesn’t even move an inch in the direction of our refutation.

They hint at what to me is the most important point – the ridiculous way in which the sample was gathered – in the second link, but only dig themselves deeper. To be clear, Jones did not gather any samples. People mailed him things, and he took them at their word. From the article itself:

It was learned that a number of people had saved samples of the copious, dense dust, which spread and settled across Manhattan. Several of these people sent portions of their samples to members of this research group. This paper discusses four separate dust samples collected on or shortly after 9/11/2001. Each sample was found to contain red/gray chips. All four samples were originally collected by private citizens who lived in New York City at the time of the tragedy.

And, even better, the original article gives us a map of where the samples were (supposedly) collected, showing that three of the four were uh, well, let’s just say they wouldn’t be the residue of a beam-melting job, that’s for sure:

At least this time they tried to be skeptics, unlike their other two claims. Okay, D911D, 2,300 words later, I have not reduced your fraudulent, dishonest, and/or downright absurd claims to “straw men.” Here they are, and there is why they are wrong. There is why your worldview is still, in fact, utterly false.

"Debunking the Wannabes"

2010-12-12T15:38:00.000-08:00

This is my new phrase for people who operate under the stated mission of "debunking the debunkers" - i.e., those who defend the faith against skeptical inquiry: Wannabes. Perhaps cargo-cult skeptics. At any rate, check out the incredibly tepid response of the 9/11 deniers to Michael Shermers' now-viral smackdown of Anthony Hall.

Michael Shermer has responded to Anthony Hall's confronting of him in his usual way.

After listing several NWO theories, Shermer writes...
Nevertheless, we cannot just dismiss all such theories out of hand, because real conspiracies do sometimes happen. Instead we should look for signs that indicate a conspiracy theory is likely to be untrue. The more that it manifests the following characteristics, the less probable that the theory is grounded in reality:

1. Proof of the conspiracy supposedly emerges from a pattern of “connecting the dots” between events that need not be causally connected. When no evidence supports these connections except the allegation of the conspiracy or when the evidence fits equally well to other causal connections—or to randomness—the conspiracy theory is likely to be false.
2. The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy would need nearly superhuman power to pull it off. People are usually not nearly so powerful as we think they are.
3. The conspiracy is complex, and its successful completion demands a large number of elements.
4. Similarly, the conspiracy involves large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets. The more people involved, the less realistic it becomes.
5. The conspiracy encompasses a grand ambition for control over a nation, economy or political system. If it suggests world domination, the theory is even less likely to be true.
6. The conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true to much larger, much less probable events.
7. The conspiracy theory assigns portentous, sinister meanings to what are most likely innocuous, insignificant events.
8. The theory tends to commingle facts and speculations without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability or of factuality.
9. The theorist is indiscriminately suspicious of all government agencies or private groups, which suggests an inability to nuance differences between true and false conspiracies.
10. The conspiracy theorist refuses to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he or she has a priori determined to be the truth.
Same old incredulous nonsense. But I found 2, 8 and 10 interesting as they could equally apply to the official conspiracy theory and Shermer's own beliefs.

Hani Hanjour would need to have been superhuman to pull off the maneuvres he did. So number 2 definately applies to the hijackers.

Defenders of the official story mix facts and speculation, and they don't ever calculate the improbability or assess the factuality. If they were to calculate the improbability of all the coincidences surrounding 9/11 being 'just coincidences', they'd probably get a value greater than the number of electrons in the universe. And with regards to the explanation for the towers destruction, the debunkers take computer models over hard evidence. So the official conspiracy theory also ticks number 8.

Finally, the debunkers, including Shermer himself, "[refuse] to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he or she has a priori determined to be the truth". I couldn't have put it any better myself, Shermer!

Why they choose to spell out all of Shermer's points and only address three of them is beyond me - especially when their three attempts only make themselves openly look worse. First of all, their point about Hani Hanjour's "maneuvering" is false. Even other 9/11 deniers concede that Hani Hanjour's "maneuvering" was nothing special. Their second attempt is a particularly glaring internal contradiction:

Defenders of the official story mix facts and speculation, and they don't ever calculate the improbability or assess the factuality. If they were to calculate the improbability of all the coincidences surrounding 9/11 being 'just coincidences', they'd probably get a value greater than the number of electrons in the universe.

"Skeptics don't bother to run the numbers... I didn't bother to run the numbers, but they'd probably get some kinda CRAZY number!" They really give nothing meatier here than an underhand-pitch for an amusing aside. The mere phrase "calculate the improbability of all the coincidences" makes my statistics background start to ache. Did they mean "calculate the probability, given their priors?" Let's give them the benefit of the doubt on that one.

For their third and final attempt at substance, they trackback to one of their own previous posts where they attack Shermer for daring to refute their beliefs from the standpoint that they lack logical coherence and the mere presence of empirical data. In attempting to rebut him, the author(s) of 911debunkers.blogspot.com seem to have repeatedly fallen back on the perpetually resurfacing fraud of "thermate incendiary" [sic] being found at the WTC sites. For their own edification, in case they are as yet unaware (and they seem to be so, as they trotted out that pathetic claim as if it were still relevant to the debate), CrNU has refuted those claims here and here. Thermite was not found at the WTC site, guys - you've been duped.

Wannabes? Cargo-cult skeptics? Whichever they are, they managed to give it their full 30% at rebutting Shermer this time, and even came up 0 for 3 overall.

NIST Tested Bomb, Demolition Hypotheses!

2010-12-11T09:48:00.000-08:00

The torrent comes in at a massive forty GB, but if you're interested, 9/11 deniers have epically shot themselves in the foot by obtaining the NIST burn video database, much of which includes video of the various computerized tests NIST ran while trying to assess how the buildings collapsed on 9/11. In theory, this dataset includes virtually every test NIST engineers ran in devising their explanation for what happened.

Kind of makes you wonder why this wasn't bigger news in the conspiracy theory echo chamber.

These videos are just nails in the coffin of an already-defunct movement. Rather than vindicating the faith, this archive proves that not only were the NIST and 9/11 Commission reports based on rigorous testing, but that engineers, academics and scientists working for the government explicitly tested conspiratorial claims. We have gigs and gigs of video proof that NIST and its affiliates considered every possible angle of the event, and were able to rule out the kinds of hypotheses that today guide what remains of the faith's holy writ.

The 9/11 Datasets Project is run by The "International Center for 9/11 Studies" and apparently all of its content was freely obtained by FOIA suit. Has anything ever so beautifully refuted anti-government paranoia? Maybe its the afternoon coffee kicking in, but I'm positively giddy that this has happened. IC911 has destroyed the 9/11 truth movement.

In fact, searching for "International Center for 9/11 Studies" on PrisonPlanet returns the incredibly flaccid response deniers had to actually surveying the footage: All that they cared to report about were things like 'CBS reporters heard explosions on ground floor before collapse' and 'CNN reported third explosion on 9/11' and 'firefighters heard explosions!' All that they really seemed able to deal with was the same old laughably tired fact that mainstream journalists suck at their jobs, and turns out 9/11 was a confusing day. They apparently have no interest in the substantive evidence. There's really no question as to why.

At the very least, we now have definitive proof that NIST didn't "whitewash" jack when it came to their investigation. There is terabytes of data here to deal with. These guys worked damn hard. As 9/11 deniers have themselves demonstrated, anyone who calls the 9/11 investigation a bogus effort is either lying or stupid. We now have a few weeks of video with which to address that claim.

I downloaded one of the archives, "42A0016," which is about 300mb of video and photographic depictions of NIST laboratory activity and photographs of the buildings. One video shows the hours of construction that went into recreating just one of the sections of the tower for a NIST in-lab test, and another shows a theoretical bomb blast on another such in-lab rendering. The files are too big to upload to Blogger and, for some reason, aren't in the uploads the deniers have been making to YouTube...

There really are too many photos, bits of video, and other such stuff to deal with, but make sure to check out the data yourself. Nothing I've seen to date stands as a better refutation of 9/11 denial than the evidence they themselves are presenting here.

Oops, I called it "new"

2010-12-09T17:31:00.000-08:00

In my last post I made the mistake of calling "The Red Flags of 9/11" a "new" series. Its first page contains everything from the Norman Mineta testimony to the shocking revelation that the 9/11 Commission didn't send assassins after Mahmud Ahmed. They get bonus points for mentioning that the Big Evil Corporate Media was their #1 source of information, information that they credulously repeat verbatim. Super bonus points: They base their version of the Mahmud Ahmed claim on a CNN story that doesn't even mention him as a money source. That's good journalism, boys.

They do admit that on 9/11 the hijackers probably did turn off their transponders when the 9/11 Commission reports they did. However, for them, this isn't good enough because apparently they think the U.S. military should have used... satellites designed to monitor orbiting debris?

The 9-11 commission failed to consider the fact that the US military has more than just ground radar at their disposal. In 2006 a golf ball was hit off the International Space Station. New Scientist magazine reported that the ball was too small to be tracked by ground radar, but noted that,

“US military radar can track space debris as small as 10 centimeters across, and can sometimes see things as small as 5 centimeters wide if it is in just the right orbit.”

Man, five years of slow news days have taken a real turn on these guys.

Bob McIlvain's interview

2010-12-08T19:36:00.000-08:00

The echo chamber has cross-posted ad nauseum this utterly unremarkable with Bob McIlvain who, as with so many 9/11 speakers, seems to rest the "novelty" of his case solely on his own son's tragic death. He repeats the mantra that "the book is closed" on 9/11 for 9/11 deniers because they are, of course, privy to The Golden Truth, but doesn't really make any specific claims about any particular parts of the day that made him "suspicious." He makes a few typical errors - he says that the hijackers were "all from Saudi Arabia" while their identifies had them from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the UAE, and Egypt. Almost as an aside, the interviewer kept referring to the Zapruder Film as the "Zapata Film."

Utterly unremarkable interview, but one of its sponsors, 9/11 Truth News, has released a new special (read: special hobbled together from bogus claims beginning around 2003) that will earn us some lols in the coming days.

AE911's "Global Effort" Reaching Seven Towns

2010-12-06T09:48:00.000-08:00

I really don't like to pick on street protesters because they exercise a fundamental human right that is endangered around the world at the moment... but the bombastic windbaggery of my old friends at AE911Truth.org simply can't go un-highlighted.

This month, AE911T is apparently beginning a monthly series of "action events," coordinated protests and public actions to draw attention to their cause.

We meet each month on a conference call to decide what actions the various groups will take. For this month, December, we decided that we would do “tabling” events in cities throughout the US on the same day - Saturday Dec 11 (on the 11th of course in commemoration of the loss of life on the 11th of Sept 2001). Most of the groups will be setting up information tables with AE911Truth literature at flea markets, or town squares, college campuses, or even in front of the their congressperson’s office. Here’s an example of serious tabling by accomplished AE911Truth activists. You don’t have to be that fancy if you want to join us in this nation-wide (and soon… world wide) effort. But another option, for the advanced supporters among you would be to set up a large TV monitor on the table and show the continuous video loops (found in the Resources Section of AE911Truth.org) of the explosive evidence in the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7. Be prepared to actively hand out literature to passers-by and answer their questions as best you can. The AE911Truth brochures, evidence cards, and, 911 Investigator newspapers are your best bets for initial leafleting. For those that seem particularly interested you can then hand them the enveloped DVD’s. (better actually to sell them for $2 because they will be more likely to actually watch it – and… you can replenish your supplies with the proceeds). Some may be interested in purchasing the $20 special DVD’s in the full presentation plastic cases – which you may at least want to have on hand for display.

"...worldwide." DUN DUN DUN. The only problem? So far, they only have seven action groups, in Phoenix, San Jose, Atlanta, Chicago, Rochester, Houston, and Seattle. That none of these are in, say, New York City or central Pennsylvania appears to be of no concern.

In my experience in the non-profit world, one coordinated action per month is pretty mediocre, especially if your group is small enough that phone conference calls are a viable coordination method. And if your organization has an institutional framework built up over years, even more so. By any reasonable measure AE911T is a failure as an advocacy organization - and I'm curious to see what takes its place.

Don't Know Much 'Bout That There Noam Chomsky

2010-12-05T18:16:00.000-08:00

Yes, Noam Chomsky is a complicated fella. His writing is as erudite as it is neat-o. But when "World for 9-11 Truth" runs a piece making this explosive claim:

Noam Chomsky: No Evidence that Al-Qaeda Carried Out the 9/11 Attacks

It is the ultimate Yes, But.

First of all, here is what Dr. Chomsky actually thinks of the level of intellectual shallowness required to be duped by 9/11 denialism.

So right away, we know this claim is rather fishy. What did Chomsky actually say, that this website used to essentially lie about Chomsky's stance on 9/11? They quote this PressTV interview write-up.

“The explicit and declared motive of the [Afghanistan] war was to compel the Taliban to turn over to the United States, the people who they accused of having been involved in World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist acts. The Taliban…they requested evidence…and the Bush administration refused to provide any,” the 81-year-old senior academic made the remarks on Press TV’s program a Simple Question.

“We later discovered one of the reasons why they did not bring evidence: they did not have any.”

The political analyst also said that nonexistence of such evidence was confirmed by FBI eight months later.

“The head of FBI, after the most intense international investigation in history, informed the press that the FBI believed that the plot may have been hatched in Afghanistan, but was probably implemented in the United Arab Emirates and Germany.”

Chomsky added that three weeks into the war, “a British officer announced that the US and Britain would continue bombing, until the people of Afghanistan overthrew the Taliban… That was later turned into the official justification for the war.”

“All of this was totally illegal. It was more, criminal,” Chomsky said.

Ah, so his view of the evidence is that the attacks were "implemented" in countries other than Afghanistan, rendering the Afghanistan invasion illegal. That's a question of geographic location, not organization responsible. Worldfor911Truth lies to its readers - it's up to them to decide what to do about that fact.

Diminished Expectations: Colorado Local Access To Air Loose Change

2010-12-04T18:33:00.000-08:00

The station in question has a contact form here.

The Only Claim I Saw More Than Once During Our Hiatus

2010-11-30T23:12:00.000-08:00

CrNU hasn't been updating for a few months as its authors all decided to enter the working world of adulthood all at once (and yet we've still held a better record than the "Journal of 9/11 Studies" blog). Now that we've started to settle into new jobs, schools, etc., we'll have more time to talk about ridiculous claims... like this one. Warning, link will cause crappy music to ensue, but that'll be the least of your headache.

The claim is thus: Someone interviewed on 9/11 by a Fox affiliate spoke really articulately, therefore the government did 9/11. No, really.

And so, because of the witness' precise claims - such as "the plane came from nowhere," and "the towers fell, one after the other" - 9/11 deniers engaged in a six-month search for the identity of this mystery man, dubbed "Harley Guy" by the deniers.

This claim bears a little thinking through. Someone at Fox News hired an actor to start spouting lines that mostly-kinda-sorta ended up accurately describing what happened; that actor was, in turn, somehow kept quiet, by someone, on behalf of Fox News and/or "The Government." As was the reporter. And the camera crew. And the person who hired the paid actor. And that person's secretary. And the secretary's friends. And so on.

One of the reasons why we've been remiss in updating this blog is because the 9/11 deniers never give us anything new to work with. My thoughts on this issue pertain entirely to the same type of analysis I provided for Loose Change:

This claim just adds a few dozen more people to this list.

The sheer bizarreness of the claim only dawned on me as I started on this post. The sole reasoning behind 9/11 deniers leaping in so typically gullible fashion onto this claim seems to be because the guy spoke clearly and articulately, even though he only said some pretty obvious things. The claim that a guy who speaks clearly and slowly must be a paid actor says more about the fantasy-world paranoia of 9/11 denial than any novel accusations I could level against them.

So it looks like their first official guess was that The Daily Show's Rob Riggle was, in fact, the "Harley Guy."

If any of you are familiar with the John Stewart show "The daily show" on that show named Rob Riggle.

I believe that is who this man is. A paid actor who in 2001 was unknown.

What an awkward IMDB profile that would be. Obviously did great things for his career. Sure, the guy is too short by about two feet, they sound nothing alike and any Daily Show actor would probably take the chance to bring down the Bush government after the fact, for God's sake, but it's probably better than who the kids finally settled on:

Actor Mark Humphrey. No, really. That's who they think it is. And how do they know? Well, allow me to demonstrate what appears to be the sole analysis done to date demonstrating the argument:

According to the blog where the claim broke, that's it. Come on, I can't be the only one thinking, "ummm... they look nothing alike..."

Apparently not, because debate has gotten started over whether this claim is correct. Truthaction disagrees, as do 9/11 Blogger and some ATS users. Here's the CrNU prediction: In six months, the people who believe the government recruits C-list television actors and trusts them with case-making tasks will have the same sort of obscurity as those in the faith who believe Judy Wood's theory about space laser beams. They'll be as "obscure" as one can be in a movement where refutation is impossible because science doesn't matter. None of these theories can actually be refuted because 9/11 deniers aren't in the habit of ruling out absurdities. However, they'll reach as close to that state as pseudo-scientists can imitate, and the faith will bleed a few more members.

Trolling as an official policy?

2010-04-19T15:28:00.000-07:00

"I encourage people who post here to also post on the facebook group "9/11 conspiracy theories are BS." It takes only a second to join, post, and leave the group, but it will reach people who are in desperate need of real information."

Well, I guess it's easier for them to run away from their stated beliefs than defend them. Oh, well - guess this means they don't intend to be taken seriously?

And we think they're irrelevant: 9/11 deniers to hold OKC bombing event

2010-04-06T16:35:00.000-07:00

Next: 9/11 deniers for U.S.S. Maine truth? From 911truth:

Well documented information contradicting the patently false, official account of the Oklahoma City bombing of April, 19, 1995 as offered by the U.S. Department of Justice and the F.B.I. will be reviewed. Why should any one of us be asked to remember the deaths of the Oklahoma City bombing victims in a lie?

Guest Speakers including Pat Shannan – Independent journalist with American Free Press, Washington, DC., Wendy Painting - Graduate student at NY University – Buffalo, V.Z. Lawton – OKC bombing survivor and several others will be in attendance.

Words fail to describe (or appear on) Pat Shannan's startlingly hideous website - an amalgam of broken links ostensibly assaulting your sense of grammatical correctness with titles like "Read more about FDNY Chief of Safety Reported Bombs in WTC/Planes" (link broken) and "New Article! Bush and Republicans Continue to Make 9/11 Probe Difficult" (link, alas, also broken). Real star-studded cast you've got there. "What if... what if we threw a party and the designer of the world's ugliest website, a grad student, a living appeal to emotion, and several others showed up?"

One of the nice things about the Internet for champions of unpopular causes is that websites are easier to paint a shiny veneer on more so than, say, an ill-attended event or marketing campaign designed on a shoestring budget. Though 9/11 denial has a lucrative DVD business associated with it, apparently its big conspiracy-rehashing parties can't get much behind them, even from their peers. Another day, another conference by greedy conspiracy theorists on one of their long-refuted tokens of faith.

How to Destroy the Peace Movement In One Easy Step

2010-03-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

From the "oh, for the love of God" files.

In advance: You can realize that the War in Iraq was probably a bad idea and not believe 9/11 conspiracy theories. You can agree with the general consensus of foreign policy experts just fine and not be one of these lunatics.

John Patrick Bedell: 9/11 denier, fanatic, suicide martyr

2010-03-07T08:54:00.000-08:00

The next in the line of bearded anti-American engineering students who become suicide attackers was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Shocking. His entire belief set was 100% compatible with those of your average Tea Partier, and the ideological right has already leaped to their own defense. Just because he bought every right-wing belief about the monetary system, Barack Obama, gun rights, drugs, and the American legal system doesn't mean he... well, the excuse-making is up to them.

Predictably, Stormfront has eagerly endorsed the violence in the name of traditional conservative values, while others have demanded that Bedell shouldn't be labeled as right-wing because he smoked pot. For the record, only one presidential candidate vocally favored marijuana legalization in the last election.

The particular brand of nutjobbery fostered and nurtured by the cult of 9/11 denial has inevitable consequences. Like virtually every die-hard acolyte we meet, these people are disconnected from their families, mistrustful of everyone around them, and in favor of violent retaliation of everyone who disagrees with them. Whether it's a Facebook troll promoting eugenics on public websites, or someone actually going out and making good on your beliefs as Bedell did, 9/11 deniers fall on the same continuum. After all, if you truly, honestly believed that the world was run by a secret sect of greedy, murderous overlords, waiting in the wings to destroy everything you love... why wouldn't you lash out against innocent people like this?

Please, oh please...

2010-02-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

Dear 9/11 deniers: Please, oh please, accuse the government of complicity in the recent Teabagger suicide martyrdom. First props goes out to Killtown, which provides trenchant insights such as, "people heard a loud noise," and "jee, I heard a sort of bomb-like boom when that plane hit!"

The quotes they pull include those from a dazed man in a CBS news story who initially said the plane impact "felt like a bomb went off;" FOX News' reporting that "several witnesses are reporting they first thought it was a bomb," and an Australian news organization owned by the notorious inside trader Conrad Black quoting a nearly-victim in saying that he also thought a bomb exploded.

Two points.

One, in the Muslim world, it is common knowledge that the American and Israeli governments are responsible for everything from 9/11 to the burned toast at breakfast. The Zionists are the reason someone can't get a job, why the price of gas is so high, why its so damn hot out. 9/11 deniers' ideological allies in violent Muslim organizations were evidently so shocked at the American response to 9/11 that many have actually begun promoting 9/11 as an inside job even as al Qaeda proudly claims responsibility for it. Though most Muslims believe violence in the name of Islam is justified, many appear so horrified at the logical conclusion of their beliefs that some Muslim leaders have decided it is easier to rewrite history than to face it.

9/11 deniers must remain allied with religious extremists on this point to whatever end. They are ideologically forced, as are the Muslim fascists who rule daily life with the whip and the sword in most of the Muslim world, to concoct excuses for every indication that something bad has happened for which the West is not responsible. This is why, in large part, both have lost so much credibility so quickly (yes, sorry to cite my own work...what can I say?). It is to their own downfall to be forced into such a position, and for that us skeptics are glad.

Second: Everywhere else, your sources of information are supposedly actively working against you to suppress "the truth, remember? You guys think the media is engaged in a "blackout," remember? The mainstream media is being unfairly mean to every public official who believes evidence rather than conspiracy theories, aren't they? These insane claims against everyday journalists are yours to begin with. They're just trying to silence Rosie!

No, you can't have it both ways. Either your habitual quote-mining of the Zionist Media for ways to support your farcical worldview is valid, or everything professional journalists say is a lie. Your ridiculous personal slanders against everyone who disagrees with you can go un-punished because unlike the religious nutjobs to whom you are ideologically wed you live in a country that values free speech, but they don't go unnoticed.

Either everyone working in a media organization is a fraud, or your worldview is a fraud. Either there is no such thing as organic opposition to the United States, or your worldview is a fraud. Take your pick. This is why I'm glad the conspiracy theories have begun to burble: it brings 9/11 deniers one step closer to having to sit and ask themselves, "do I really believe this nonsense?"

A telling argument

2010-02-15T16:06:00.001-08:00

Great comment from reader angrysoba the other day:

I like this picture and coincidentally I was arguing with someone who insisted that the first plane that struck the towers may well have been "a small plane" because there had been numerous news reports that said so.

When I pointed out that there can be no doubt the second plane was a passenger jet, he agreed. I said, "what the Hell is the point of the first plane being faked and not the second?"

The answer: "Because it proves the official story's a lie!"

That's the weird world of Truthers!

Demonstrating once again that the Truthers are their own un-funny joke, being told over and over on a broken record. The picture is the famous webcomic xkcd, which regularly gets passed across the Internet, so I'm positive the picture is copyable.

Something you might want to ask this guy, angrysoba, is, "would an error in the 9/11 Commission Report count as a lie in your world?" I think the answer given his logic here would have to be yes.

A thought experiment for truthers

2010-01-26T19:36:00.000-08:00

Question: How do you know this isn't the cover-up of a crashed, hijacked plane?

"Course all the neighbors ran out into the street. We didn't know what was going on," said Paul Williams, who heard the explosion.

Some people said they thought it was a plane crash, others, a house explosion.

It has everything 9/11 deniers need. Bystanders hearing the sounds of explosions. A quick attempt at a cover-up. Media shills - both with 'Eastern European'-sounding last names.

Truthers, spell out your line of reasoning about this and see if you get the joke.

XKCD: rarely funny, sometimes hilarious

2010-01-25T16:19:00.000-08:00

Remarkably close to the beliefs of actual 9/11 deniers, many of whom admit that the United States really does have enemies abroad, but still insist that George Bush had to concoct the most elaborate hoax in history in order to invade a couple of third-world countries, such as the United States invades every couple of years or so.

"The Weird Factor," or, spot the logical fallacy

2010-01-21T13:56:00.001-08:00

Answers after the block. Hint: The "better name" rhymes with "shmallacy from schmincredulity." From antiwar.com, posted over at 911truth.org.

What I call the Weird Factor, for lack of a better name, seems to have become a permanent feature of our post-9/11 world, a dark and sinister leitmotif that plays in the background. On 9/11, of course, the Factor was on full display as a whole string of unusual events and unexplained phenomena were visited on us. The 9/11 Commission did little to clear these matters up, for the most part because they didn't address them. Just a few for the record: Bush reading My Pet Goat to schoolchildren after being told of the attacks, the sudden appearance of the "Israeli art students" – and their buddies, the "laughing Israelis" – in the months and weeks leading up to the attacks, and the apparent passivity of US air defenses on that fateful day.

I mean, how is it possible that the terrorists actually hit the Pentagon, the symbolic fortress of America's alleged military supremacy? After spending untold trillions on "defense" over the years, a sum that never declines in real terms, and driving ourselves into near-bankruptcy on account of it, how in the name of all that's holy did nineteen men armed with box-cutters manage to drive Don Rumsfeld stumbling into the street, literally running for his life?

The most glaring logical error the author of 911truth.org's blog post committed here is called the fallacy from incredulity. This fallacy is committed when one argues that because one is surprised by an event, that event could not have happened.

1. 9/11 was surprising to me.
: The government did it.

Could this "logic" replicate in any way, to any other situation? Of course not. The fact that something surprised you has nothing to do with whether or not that something did in fact happen. 911truth and antiwar.com require you to believe that if you think something is unlikely, it is therefore obvious that "the government" (whoever that is) was responsible. Here are a few examples of this fallacy being committed by the author of that post in just the first couple of paragraphs.

Fallacy from incredulity: People from Israel were in New York City in September of 2001. Shocking. Some of them came to the United States to go to college, and some even came as (gasp) tourists! Because the "five dancing Israelis" were such good secret agents, here they are on national television talking (and laughing) about the conspiracy theories that have been born to justify their existence in the minds of 9/11 deniers. Hey, wouldn't people cheering the deaths of Americans be people 9/11 deniers could naturally associate with? The founders of the religion of 9/11 denial did find 9/11 rather humorous, after all.

Fallacy from incredulity: "A plane hit one of the biggest buildings on the Potomac? Impossible! 2003 called, they want their arguments back."

Fallacy from incredulity:. "Having an international military presence means the Pentagon should've been armed with missile banks eager to be fired onto hijacked civilian jetliners. Because in the few minutes between the hijacking of Flight 77 and its impact into the Pentagon defense officials weren't miraculously granted the authority to rewrite American national defense rules to allow the shooting down of American civilian jetliners, the hijacking of which in every case prior to 2001 was for ransom purposes rather than suicide attack purposes, the government did 9/11."

As you can tell from my sarcastic interpretation of this author's claims, I think his assessments of the relative probabilities of certain things happening is patently false. But even if they weren't, the mere logic of the author's statements gets him laughed out the door. His only argument is that he personally thought the United States was invulnerable to terrorism, and that any deviation from his fantasy world is therefore a stochastic impossibility short of necessitating what would be by far the most elaborate hoax in history.

A conspiracy-minded blogger thinks something unlikely happened, therefore everyone who works for the US government is a terrorist. Does that statement not ring true to you? No? Congratulations, you know more about writing, rhetoric and argumentation than the editorial staff of antiwar.com.

Next up: The rest of his post!

Well, its official

2010-01-19T10:27:00.000-08:00

Cindy Sheehan, the activist who once thought she could beat Nancy Pelosi in a primary election, is on the speaker list for a "Treason in America: the Wars & Our Broken Constitution" Conference."

Because all 9/11 deniers must be anti-war, and must believe that everyone who isn't a 9/11 denier must be a gullible, warmongering hawk. That's how cults work, don'tcha know.

Heads it was the US, tails it wasn't the Taliban (cont.)

2010-01-18T09:12:00.000-08:00

An elaborate plan by Taliban soldiers was carried out in Kabul today, with multiple timed suicide strikes on the capital's downtown, coupled with urban squad tactics on the part of the Taliban. MSNBC has more.

When the Flight 253 hijacking was foiled by a Dutch film-maker - who 9/11 deniers think was a trained CIA spook along with would-be terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now facing two consecutive life sentences barely into his twenties - deniers argued that the plan was so shoddily-crafted that it proves African and Middle Eastern people are too stupid to have carried out the 9/11 attacks. 9/11 deniers are convinced that non-Westerners are simply stupider than the rest of us, and to them the failure of the Flight 253 hijacking, though a black op of course, is final proof of their beliefs.

Here we have a coordinated tactical strike with military and symbolic significance. Twenty militants devastated a country's (ostensible) capital city. The Taliban, which 9/11 deniers also believe is run by the U.S. government, attempted to destroy the U.S.-backed center-left government and nearly succeeded.

Listening to the twits over at 911blogger and 911truth, one comes to realize that 9/11 deniers legitimately don't think terrorism exists. Right now they're trying to cook something up over at 811truth connecting Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to - you guessed it - Mossad. Sometimes, the jokes write themselves.

9/11 deniers have some answering to do. Does your bigotry against non-Westerners hold up in the face of the obvious? Does terrorism not exist? Does the U.S. have no real enemies, only its own creations come home to roost? Is there no such thing as an organic foreign opposition to U.S. interests abroad... or has your worldview failed?

This guy loves himself. Also labels. But not his friends.

2010-01-17T09:02:00.000-08:00

Killtown's mad about being banned on TruTV's forums. I don't know the guy or why he was, but I find his post-ban griping quite amusing.

One, his post drips with ego, as his posts do generally. This is pretty much in line with the vast cranial expansion of most 9/11 deniers, who regard themselves as "the truth seekers" who are "going deeper" to ask questions that us "sheeple" wouldn't dare ponder. Of course, that they uncritically glean answers to said questions from shoddily-made YouTube videos full of Garage Band house beats and grainy Bitmaps posted by people lacking basic grammar and critical thinking skills is beside the point. The point is, we're sheep because we get our information from people who have fancy college degrees and stable sources of income, and they're privy to mystical sources of knowledge such as only CrystalSeeker99 can provide. Apparently he was banned from TruTV because he was spamming. The response he gives himself on his personal blog is that, well, his spamming was popular and it ain't spam if a lot of people click on it. Trolling is allowed when someone as smart as me is doing it. Right.

Two, he doesn't seem to get the joke when he refers to people who dare challenge his faith as "skeptics" in a derogatory fashion. Consider his passive-aggressive anger at us blasphemous interlopers in his post:

And what's really funny is right before they banned me, I just reported two posts from skeptic trolls for -- guess? -- that's right, them starting trouble (as to be expected from your average JREF skeptic troll).

Getting banned there is harsh. They delete all of your posts. Just ask skeptic troll "Deelite." =)

Three sentences. Three usages of the phrase "skeptic troll." Cute. So do 9/11 deniers just not bother calling themselves "skeptics" or "alternative theorists" anymore, at this point? Have they just admitted that they're a religion?

It pleases me to no end to see that "skepticism" has become a sin in the denier world. There is no better way to further reduce your cult to a broken record player repeating an un-funny joke than to take a synonym for "person who thinks a lot" and use it as an insult. Right on, Killtown. You tell your frontal lobe who's boss. "Starting trouble" will sow dissent amongst the proletariat.

Third, the denier infighting is about to reach ridiculous levels. Remember when they decided that Amy Goodman was a government spook? Remember when they decided that Dylan Avery was a government spook? If you decide to take a peek over at any of these hysterical dens of woo-woo known as a 9/11 forum, you'll see what I mean. Everyone is an enemy, and everyone is scared of everyone else. Its almost not funny. Almost.

Killtown: You go, girl. Fight the man/each other/your impulse to think critically.

"The government wants to make us THINK!"

2010-01-15T08:36:00.000-08:00

As someone who works in behavioral econ and mathematical psychology I was pumped to see one of my intellectual heroes Cass Sunstein appointed to a post in the Obama Administration. His bibliography spans politics, economics, and psychology, and his work in the academic literature is required reading in most courses in behavioral studies. A true polymath of the social sciences, and a pretty nice guy to boot.

And 9/11 deniers have just started comparing him to Hitler.

Got Fascism? : Obama Advisor Promotes 'Cognitive Infiltration'
Cass Sunstein is President Obama's Harvard Law School friend, and recently appointed Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

In a recent scholarly article, he and coauthor Adrian Vermeule take up the question of "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures." (J. Political Philosophy, 7 (2009), 202-227). This is a man with the president's ear. This is a man who would process information and regulate things. What does he here propose?

[W]e suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity. (Page 219.)

Read this paragraph again. Unpack it. Work your way through the language and the intent. Imagine the application. What do we learn?

Rarely does the failure to get the joke resound so epically.

People who oppose the government have legitimate concerns. During the Bush Administration, police and military organizations engaged in illegal or at least immoral infiltration of peaceful protest organizations. And it was wrong.

Cass Sunstein is advocating showing up to a group of people and asking them to explain why they believe what they believe. This is what every group should voluntarily be seeking, anyway. To their cries of "got fascism?" I ask, "got group-think?" If your beliefs are true, Sunstein's argument that the government should seek open debate with you should be a blessing. You should be looking forward to having hordes of converts.

Instead, what do they fear?

Put into English, what Sunstein is proposing is government infiltration of groups opposing prevailing policy. Palestinian Liberation? 9/11 Truth? Anti-nuclear power? Stop the wars? End the Fed? Support Nader? Eat the Rich?

It's easy to destroy groups with "cognitive diversity." You just take up meeting time with arguments to the point where people don't come back. You make protest signs which alienate 90% of colleagues. You demand revolutionary violence from pacifist groups.

Only one of those things Sunstein lists is a conspiracy theory, making this blogger's paranoia look more than a little silly - and to that second paragraph, its not like 9/11 deniers, you know, already do all of that themselves.

Never has a group ever so resolutely opposed such a banal policy that would be beneficial in the long run to any group that wasn't fundamentally afraid of having its beliefs challenged.

Abdulmutallab probably would've failed anyway

2010-01-13T11:56:00.000-08:00

Beware journalists trying to play engineer, but this piece at msnbc.com is quite interesting.

In theory at least, seat 19A would seem ideal. It is positioned exactly over the center of the wings, and under it is a tank capable of holding 41,559 liters of fuel. Video demonstrations of a similar amount of the same explosive being detonated in the open show a powerful blast, and that power would be magnified in a restricted space like an airplane cabin.
...
But it’s not so simple. That center fuel tank is part of what is called the wing box, a structure that anchors the wings to the fuselage and absorbs the greatest stresses of flight. For this reason, it is one of the strongest parts of the airplane. Also, Northwest Flight 253 was in the last phase of a long trans-oceanic flight and the main fuel tank would have been by then very light in fuel. It’s true that even a small amount of fuel would still have been enough to ensure the success of the bomber’s mission, but only if that tough wing box had been penetrated.

And where was this guy who supposedly helped him get through security? Is Jasper Schuringa, a Dutch filmmaker who is certainly no Amereican sympathizer, also now supposed to be a CIA agent? Abdulmutallab is facing life plus ninety years, and can't point the finger anywhere else to lessen his sentence? Considering it was going to fail anyway, what about this exactly reeks of "false flag?"

The 9/11 denier noise machine has some approaching tanks in the background to deal with.

Other 9/11 deniers trying to jump in on flight 253 conspiracy theories

2010-01-12T12:39:00.000-08:00

911blogger imported its post from dissidentvoice.org attempted to join the "GOV DID 253" bandwagon and, I have to say, it is quite a lark. They have absolutely nothing that wasn't reported in that "mainstream media" they love to hate... they just use it to come to the conclusion that there's no such thing as terrorism and Britain (or possibly America or Yemen) did the flight 253 hijacking.

Let’s take a look at those informational “snippets” and summarize what is quickly emerging as growing evidence of U.S. foreknowledge of an imminent attack on an American passenger plane:

* May: the British government withdrew its student visa for Abdulmutallab, a graduate of the prestigious University College London and placed him on a watchlist, barring his entry into the UK. MI5, and presumably their MI6 military intelligence colleagues in Yemen, compiled a dossier on the would-be bomber, citing his “political involvement” with “extremist networks” that have enjoyed on-again, off-again ties with NATO military intelligence organizations across the decades. This information, as Brown government spokesperson Simon Lewis, who let the cat out of the proverbial bag, was shared with their American counterparts.

* August: U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA, intercepted cell- and satellite phone traffic which revealed that a Yemeni affiliate of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets, also known as al-Qaeda, were finalizing preparations for an operation that would utilize a “Nigerian.”

* October: Newsweek revealed in their January 11 issue, that the dodgy cleric, the American-born Anwar al-Awlaki, who communicated extensively with the disturbed Ft. Hood shooter, Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan, posted “a provocative message on his English-language Web site: ‘COULD YEMEN BE THE NEXT SURPRISE OF THE SEASON?’” According to Newsweek, “Al-Awlaki seemed to hint at an upcoming attack that would make Yemen ‘the single most important front of jihad in the world’.” The Washington Post reported in 2008 that al-Awlaki had extensive contacts with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, and Hani Hanjour and was suspected of having assisted the 9/11 plot. According to the Post, “three of the hijackers had spent time at his mosques in California and Falls Church.” Despite, or possibly because, of these dubious connections “he was allowed to leave the country in 2002.” According to the History Commons, it is only in 2008 that the U.S. government concludes that the shady imam “is linked to al-Qaeda attacks.” However, Al-Awlaki’s provenance as a new “terrorist mastermind” should be viewed with suspicion, given well-documented links known to have existed amongst the 9/11 hijackers and American, Saudi and Pakistani secret state agencies.

* October: the same month Al-Awlaki was hinting at a “surprise,” Newsweek revealed that John O. Brennan “received an alarming briefing at the White House from Muhammad bin Nayef, Brennan’s Saudi counterpart. Nayef had just survived an assassination attempt by a Qaeda operative using a novel method: the operative had flown in from the Saudi-Yemeni border region with a bomb hidden in his underwear. The Saudi was concerned because he ‘didn’t think [U.S. officials] were paying enough attention’ to the growing threat.” A familiar trope we’ve heard in the aftermath of other terrorist strikes.

* Early November: Newsweek published an exclusive report January 4, that two U.S. “intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security circulated a paper within the government last fall that examined in some detail the threats that bombs secreted in clothing–or inside someone’s body cavities–might pose to aviation security.” According to information leaked to the newsmagazine by anonymous “national-security officials,” the report “was prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center in conjunction with Homeland Security and the CIA,” and that “one principal point of discussion in the document was whether the detonation of a bomb hidden in clothing on an airliner would have a different explosive effect than the detonation of a bomb secreted in a body cavity under similar circumstances.” (emphasis added) This chilling report, prepared in the wake of intelligence information provided U.S. security agencies by Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism czar, should raise provocative questions. No other media outlet however, has followed the trail.

* November 19: Abdulmutallab’s father, a prominent Nigerian banker and former high state official, visits the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, telling State Department and CIA officials he believes his son is a threat. A cousin tells The New York Times that the father told U.S. officials, “Look at the texts he’s sending. He’s a security threat.” Although Embassy personnel promise “to look into it,” the cousin told the Times that “they didn’t take him seriously.”

* November 20: the CIA prepares and files a report on Abdulmutallab that is sent to agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia “but not disseminated to other intelligence agencies,” unnamed “officials” tell the Times. Embassy staff also wrote and sent a cable known as a “Visa Viper,” to the State Department and National Counterterrorism Center and a security file is opened on the suspect.

* December 9-24: Abdulmutallab travels to Ghana from Ethiopia and pays cash, $2,831 to be precise, for a ticket on a Northwest Airlines flight from Lagos through Amsterdam to Detroit, landing on Christmas Day. “It is now known” The Independent on Sunday reported January 10, “that the Ghanaian hotel he listed on his immigration form was not the one where he was actually staying.” According to IoS, although the FBI “has officers on the ground in Ghana and believe it is likely the terrorist may well have had his final al-Qa’ida briefing, and supplied with equipment and explosives, there,” no steps are taken to apprehend the suspect. “All this” IoS comments, “was more than a month after his father, a wealthy Nigerian banker, had met officials at the US embassy in Abuja to share concerns about his son.”

* December 22: during a White House Situation Room briefing Newsweek reports that “a document presented to the president titled ‘Key Homeland Threats’ did not mention Yemen, according to a senior administration official.”

* December 25: Abdulmutallab boards Flight 253 in Amsterdam with only a carry-on bag for his international flight; the would-be lap bomber holds a 2-year entry visa into the United States. As is standard procedure, the Department of Homeland Security is notified an hour prior to departure that he is a passenger on the plane.

* December 25: the Los Angeles Times disclosed January 7 that “U.S. border security officials learned of the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day jetliner bombing attempt as he was airborne from Amsterdam to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed.” Homeland Security officials “declined to discuss what information reached the U.S. border officials in Amsterdam on Christmas Day.” Despite suspicions by Customs and Border Protection agents, who had accessed NCTC’s TIDE database, the flight crew is not notified of Abdulmutallab’s presence aboard the airliner and additional security precautions therefore, are not made.

Once you lop off the daffy leap of faith required to next assert that "therefore, Barack Obama wanted Flight 253 to be hijacked," nothing more elegantly makes my point that the United States has many enemies, tracking all of them is hard, coordination amongst interdepartmental and international intelligence agencies is hard too, and many but not all terrorist plots are foiled.

That's some fine work, boys. Even disregarding that almost their entire case is built on political hearsay, if you haven't drunken the Truther Kool-Aid you actually have quite elegant proof of the fact that the government did not hijack this flight right here.

Heads it was the government, Tails it wasn't the terrorists

2010-01-10T10:26:00.000-08:00

Still more from 911truth.org's version of a 12/25 conspiracy theory:

What are we to make of the failed Underwear Bomber plot, the Toothpaste, Shampoo, and Bottled Water Bomber plot, and the Shoe Bomber plot? These blundering and implausible plots to bring down an airliner seem far removed from al-Qaida's expertise in pulling off 9/11.

If we are to believe the U.S. government, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged al-Qaida "mastermind" behind 9/11, outwitted the CIA, the NSA, indeed all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies...

And so on.

Consider the logic of this line of argument. If a terrorist plot is successful, it couldn't have been terrorists, because terrorism against the United States is hard to pull off. It is difficult, therefore impossible. Apparently, 9/11 deniers are convinced that Middle Eastern Muslims can not possibly be as clever as white Westerners.

If a terrorist plot fails, 9/11 deniers say, it is because terrorists are incompetent dolts, uneducated foreigners who could not possibly possess the capacity for tactical action required to pull off this sort of thing. I mean, just look at how many ridiculous plots have been foiled!

It never seems to occur to 9/11 deniers that recent events prove that there are many, many attempts made on the lives of Americans at home and abroad on a constant basis, and that the probability of a terrorist attack succeeding is positively correlated with the amount of planning that went into it. With many attempts tiny probabilities stack, and those who plan win. Those would be those snippets of obvious statistical reality that are just too inconvenient for deniers to pay attention to.

Well, it took about two weeks, but...

2010-01-08T22:14:00.000-08:00

9/11 deniers have finally started slapping together an excuse for themselves about the would-be flight 253 hijacker. From today's 911truth.org post, unironically called "Is Anyone Telling Us the Truth?"

Could the Underwear Bomber have been one of the Israeli terrorist recruits? Certainly Israel has an interest in keeping the US fully engaged militarily against all potential foes of Israel's territorial expansion.

The thought brought back memory of my Russian studies at Oxford University where I learned that the Tsar's secret police set off bombs so that they could blame those whom they wanted to arrest.

Of course. Hundreds of years ago the Russian monarchy engaged in subterfuge, therefore The Jews Did 12/25.

Who benefits? Clearly, attacking Iran is on the Israeli-U.S. agenda, and someone is creating the "evidence" to support the case, just as the leaked secret "Downing Street Memo" to the British cabinet informed Prime Minister Tony Blair's government that President Bush had already made the decision to invade Iraq and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Of course, the classic cui bono fallacy. It'd been days since a 9/11 denier used that one. The military-industrial complex might in some long term, crassly utilitarian sort of way benefit from a failed terrorist plot, therefore the military-industrial complex engineered a hijacking. Just like how I personally benefited from the invention of wireless Internet, therefore I helped invent it. Have you met my buddy, Al?

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had been posting his views online since at least 2005, and had been a practicing proselytizer for Islam since high school. He never went to the U.S. until 2004, meaning he'd have to become a CIA agent really quickly. While being trained as a CIA spook he had time to attend college in London and noisily announce his worldview via Internet on multiple occasions.

This insinuation is no more pathetic than any other set of 9/11 denier beliefs, but it really makes one want to get inside the head of the person who wrote this. Being a 9/11 denier forces an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance on someone - they have to turn people like this into patriotic American CIA agents who are willing to give their lives to temporarily alarm the civilian population. This kid's going to rot for "life in jail plus ninety years," and the author of this pitiful article has to convince himself that he's doing it at the behest of the Zionist conspiracy.

Kind of saddening, actually.

NYCCAN's Pathetic Claims

2010-01-04T14:00:00.000-08:00

"NYCCAN" is the 9/11 denier front that has so far failed a number of times to convince members of one of America's most politically diverse cities (including its margins...) to support their vague, ill-defined notion of a "new 9/11 Commission." Considering that 911truth.org only raised about 20% of the $50,000 it needs last year and has failed to even reset its counter for 2010, NYCCAAN's claim that it can "self-fund" its fictive investigation is a laughable, transparent farce, considering their bleating that the last one was "underfunded," clocking in at $15 million. As last year saw another failure on their part to actually do what they said they would do, their latest message to the troops reads like a Lehman Brothers sales pitch, only with slightly more lies by omission.

December 31, 2009

Dear Friends and Fellow Advocates for Answers and Accountability,

As we look ahead to 2010, we at NYC CAN would like to offer our deepest thanks to everyone who contributed to a remarkable and historic [failed]campaign, and we would like to take a moment to celebrate the achievements that give us much to build upon in 2010.

2009 was a year of tremendous progress for our cause. Among a long list of successes, a peer-reviewed paper was published in a mainstream scientific journal documenting the discovery of active thermitic material in the World Trade Center dust [that forced that journal's editor to resign in shame when it was discovered that the paper wasn't reviewed and was a shoddy joke unfit for a Blog post]; the petition of architects and engineers calling for a new investigation into the WTC destruction has leaped to nearly 1,000 signatories [most of whom aren't actually architects or engineers]while founding member Richard Gage, AIA travels the world delivering his analysis of the buildings' demise to thousands of concerned citizens and leaders [at a massive financial net loss]. The increasing strength and credibility of our message is evidenced by the ever greater frequency of media breakthroughs casting a positive light on the questions we pose.

And it ends with the most pitiful attempt at a claim of "forward progression" I've ever heard:

Because only 25 signatures are required for the insertion of an article on New Hampshire town ballots, Vote For Answers New Hampshire has set an ambitious goal of placing its article on 40 town ballots across the state at local elections this spring. The article reads:

Shall New Hampshire's Congressional Delegation be instructed to pursue a new and independent investigation to address thoroughly all of the evidence and unanswered questions related to the events of September 11, 2001? (The record of the vote on this article shall be transmitted by the Town of ________ to New Hampshire's Congressional Delegation.)

Already, petitioning efforts are underway in 21 towns, and several Town Halls have confirmed the wording is appropriate to be placed on their ballot.

So they claim they were able to get 52,000 signatures in New York (almost certainly a lie), and now want to move forward by aiming for 1,000 signatures in one of America's most libertarian states? They've lied about their capacity to accomplish tasks thousands of unpopular causes have in the past, so lets see if they can summon the almighty pillar of science and engineering expertise in the New Hampshire State Legislator on their daffy beliefs.

Out with the old, in with the - oh, right, its the same thing over and over again...

2010-01-03T08:55:00.001-08:00

From a kid who posted on a blog called, I kid you not... jewishcrimenetworkdid911.

Its going to be a long year for 9/11 deniers. Also note that 911blogger has yet to actually post a new donations counter. Must be the dread effect.

Great 2009 for skeptics, and here's to 2010!

2009-12-31T12:25:00.000-08:00

911truth.org fell about 80% short of its year-end goal; Killtown's only yearly wrap-up came in the form of a desperate reposting of its own content; Prisonplanet appears to have jumped the 9/11 denier ship completely; the promised second attempt (or third, depending on who you ask) at a New York ballot initiative never happened. Eleven people RSVP'ed online to this year's big 9/11 rally; Michael Keefer failed to uphold his acceptance of a written debate with us; our awesome Facebook group grew by about a hundred people; and best of all, the skeptical community kept supporting our blog and our Facebook group! See y'all next decade!

More on the unbearable lightness of being a denier

2009-12-30T09:12:00.000-08:00

This blog is simply a gold mine for news about terrorism in Africa, reporting today about a man who was caught in Mogadishu trying to board a plane with a syringe and various powdered and liquid chemicals.

"We don't know whether he's linked with al-Qaida or other foreign organizations, but his actions were the acts of a terrorist. We caught him red-handed," said Barise.

A Nairobi-based diplomat said the incident in Somalia is similar to the attempted attack on the Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day in that the Somali man had a syringe, a bag of powdered chemicals and liquid — tools similar to those used in the Detroit attack. The diplomat spoke on condition he not be identified because he isn't authorized to release the information.

Barigye Bahoku, the spokesman for the African Union military force in Mogadishu, said the chemicals from the Somali suspect could have caused an explosion that would have caused air decompression inside the plane.

This is nothing major, but its always worth pointing out the degree to which 9/11 deniers have to shut themselves out to reality. There is daily proof that there is organic, home-grown terrorist sentiment out there, people all over the world who are willing to do the open society harm.

Either you believe that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and every twit like him on earth is secretly a Zionist agent, or you've come to grips with reality.

Bomb in Pakistan kills 43

2009-12-29T13:21:00.000-08:00

Rescue teams have established a death count of forty-three from a bomb that went off last night in Pakistan, according to a blog operating out of Pakistan.

Monday's bombing struck at the start of a procession of Shiites marking Ashoura, the most important day of a monthlong mourning period for the seventh-century death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussein. Minority Shiites have suffered frequent attacks by Sunni extremist groups who regard them as heretical.

"I fell down when the bomb went off with a big bang," said Naseem Raza, a 26-year-old who was marching in the procession. "I saw walls stained with blood and splashed with human flesh."

Not relevant to 9/11 denial, you say? Think again. One of the main points I try to push in every debate I have against a denier is that they are not actually fighting just against the laws of physics, a damning body of forensic evidence against the hijackers, and overwhelming evidence against the current leadership of Al Qaeda. They are literally pretending that decades of history never happened. In their world, Ronald Reagan built Osama bin Laden out of old T-1000 parts, he fought the Communists until we were done with him, and then he lay dormant in a warehouse in Area 51 until we needed him again. Their view is false.

They have to pretend that there are no deep ideological rifts in the Muslim world. They have to pretend that there is no cultural backdrop to the terrorism we see in the world today. Their worldview forces them to believe that there are not millions of people around the world, with their own livelihood, personal beliefs, plans and connections willing to do harm in the name of their faith. For them, Muslim cultural evolution literally must stop in the 1880s.

9/11 deniers are often accused of living in a fantasy land, a world of black and white where there is essentially one homogenous group of bad people (mostly composed of the kinds of people we were really, really annoyed by in high school, I think!) and everyone else - everyone else - is just a puppet.

A big part of why the denier movement has completely fallen apart is because they're forced to find a conspiracy theory in basically every violent action that happens in the world. Though there is a damning silence on their part over the obviously organic 12/25 incident aboard Flight 253, their attempts to conjure a fantasy world around every act of obvious terrorism, which their faith requires them to make, are probably a big part of the reason why none of them really appear to believe themselves anymore.

The government did 12/25?

2009-12-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

Because 9/11 denial requires that there be no such thing as genuine terrorism, you can bet that places like PrisonPlanet is having a field day. 911truth.org is tellingly silent. No word yet from our Facebook friends!

For those living under a rock on Mars 3,000 years in the past, yesterday aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit, MI Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was disarmed by two passengers, neither of whom were apparently flight marshals. The nature of the explosive he brought and assembled on board is still being investigated.

So, 9/11 deniers? There's no such thing as terrorism, right? Obama orchestrated this because he's slightly more popular at the end of his first calendar year than Reagan was at the same time and that means he's in electoral danger, right? He needs to help justify sending more troops to Afghanistan which he already did a month ago, right?

Lets see what kind of malarkey has already surfaced out of this one. Taken straight from the comments at prisonplanet's articles, each more pathetically vaguely implicative than the next (the terrorist seemed strangely 'stunned,' mumbles one). Plenty of readers of Alex Jones' personal money shed are happy to chime in on his behalf:

yo Says:
December 26th, 2009 at 7:46 am

manchurian candidate 10000000000000%

Huggles Reply:
December 26th, 2009 at 9:54 am

Probably not a manchurian candidate but some guy quietly sitting on his chair and something been thrown on him that ignited.

Aidan Monaghan reply:
December 26th, 2009 at 2:50 am

The first in a series of stage-setting events before the next major false flag event? (like the interantional bombings that preceded 9/11)

Or just a carefully timed holiday “reminder” of a western-manufactured threat (Al Qaeda) with a guaranteed large audience of at-home holiday celebrants watching TV, tens of millions of whom will be “re-reminded” at more scrutinized airport security screening points upon their return flights.

“Attacking” the aviation industry is a fabulous means of conditioning tens of millions of the public to the presence of the “Big Brother” apparatus at your conveniently located local airport.

Charles Reply:
December 26th, 2009 at 6:08 am

Isn’t it funny that the man is claiming the device its from Yemen, only now as the offensive of the war on terror is moving to Yemen?

candleinthecave Reply:
December 26th, 2009 at 7:26 am

Or more likely he could be a Manchurian candidate type brainwashed patsy.

Mike Adkison Says:
December 25th, 2009 at 7:55 pm

NO ONE can come forward and claim to work for Al Queda, because Al Queda is a term invented by counter terrorism coordinator Richard Clark. It means “the base”, coming from a data base aquired that had names of perceived terrorists. There is no organization, per se, named Al Queda. This story is totally hokey, same goes for the arms bound for Iran story. Their lies are becoming totally transparent. They are fooling no one but the fools. Are they quite proud of themselves for that?

MIKE Says:
December 25th, 2009 at 10:16 pm

ABSOLUTE BULLs---….This is another false flag..to get the amerikan sheeple yet again..to be driven to the pavement like pigs as they now must endure demonic searches of their person at the airp[orts during this holiday season..THEY MAY EXPLODE…WHICH WILL CAUSE MARTIAL LAW…YOU HEARD IT HERE..mj ssg usa ret

BA911Truth Says:
December 26th, 2009 at 5:35 am

IT’S ALL STAGED BY THE CIA! WE ALL KNOW THAT! AL-QAEDA EXISTS ONLY IN THE MINDS OF BILDERBERGERS LIKE ZBIGNIEW BRZENSKI!

And, of course, the most trenchant insights thus far:

wolf56 Reply:
December 25th, 2009 at 10:01 pm

Charlie Sheen getting arrested sounds like a setup!

fromtheoutsidein Reply:
December 26th, 2009 at 4:45 am

SET-UP!!!

See? I'm not kidding when I say that 9/11 deniers are forced to argue that there's literally no such thing as terrorism to support their religion.

Oh, those poor voices of reason

2009-12-25T21:43:00.001-08:00

First of all, happy holidays to all our readers from CRNU! Too many holidays to go around, but, whichever one(s) you're celebrating... enjoy!

Second, check out what happens when someone curious member of "the movement" dares ask why most 9/11 deniers are obsessed with promoting blind bigotry than that whole, you know, capital-T Truth business. This is from one of the few remaining 9/11 denier Facebook groups.

"Hey guys... every stupid thing you have to say about Jewish people is embarrassing and has been debunked since 2003."
"Oh yeah, shill? What about all these nonsensical claims from 2002?"
"She's one of them!"

Present as always is one of our former regular trolls, who lists as his "home page" this unbelievable website, who hails as one of its heroes the openly racist, post-successful Henry Ford. Pleading its readers to "please hear what he had to say" in his screed The International Jew, iamthewitness demonstrates Ford buying everything from the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the belief that Jews caused alcoholism.

Demonstrating that, between 1921 and 2009, nothing has changed about how rabid bigots see the world. All that has changed are their excuses.

Just a real quick one here

2009-12-19T14:34:00.000-08:00

In case you guys aren't yet members of our awesome Facebook group, this is something you've been missing out on. One of our more particularly rude trolls wanders in and posts a wall of links that he himself had apparently never read a word of; said links get systematically refuted, and a tantrum ensues.

Come along, and bring the popcorn!

What? Sloppy research at Killtown? Never!

2009-12-19T12:51:00.001-08:00

The most recent Killtown post has finally found the smoking gun in that one newspaper reported that the flight recorders had been found before other newspapers did.

CNN reported finding the Flight 93 black box on the 13th, and cockpit voice recorder was found "late Friday," the 14th.

Killtown in its desperation has compared this to the notorious 9/11 deniers' goof of thinking that "the government" (whoever that is) gave away their "master plan" because a reporter from the BBC announced that WTC 7 was probably going to collapse when WTC 7 was in fact probably going to collapse. Of course, that neither the dozens of people on the BBC staff who could've come forward to agree with how suspicious that would be nor the staff of my own current residence's newspaper - nor that this would mean indicting the freakin' BBC and the Post-Gazette in 9/11 - has apparently phased the increasingly desperate denialist movement.

I find that with troubling regularity 9/11 deniers refuse to engage in second-order cognition. This piece starts and ends with, "one newspaper said something before other newspapers did," but refuse to consider that, when they get their day in court (broken link unintentional... get it?), their evidence here will be, "one newspaper said something different than what another newspaper said, therefore... rest my case!"

No, Killtown. First of all, it is ambiguous which day your first link is even referring to, because it simply gives a time, not a day, and believing WaPo's "government source" as the paragon of journalistic virtue is almost as ridiculous as, well... believing WaPo when it writes pretty much anything. In any other world, these guys are your "Zionist-owned media shills," so please, don't pretend you accept them uncritically now.