Gullibility in Action

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?

Prediction: Truthers Will Ruin October2011

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.

"9/11 Deniers"

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.