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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:. "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.
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?
