Not a Conspiracy Theorist

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.

Is Rand Paul A 9/11 Denier? Probably Not

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.

Two new pieces at 9/11 Studies blog!

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?