"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.

There's No Such Thing As Terrorism, Denmark Edition

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

“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?

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…

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?"

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

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.