Friday, September 14, 2007

9/11 - the big cover-up?

Interesting points raised in the article. Follow the link or click here
Posted by Assed Baig at 11:44 PM

3 comments:

RWA said...

I feel it's time the veil was pierced somewhat don't you?


I hope the following is of some interest...

http://www.ukwatch. net/article/ britains_ 9_11_truth_ movement_ whos_responsible _0

Britain's 9/11 "Truth Movement" – Who's Responsible? As the sixth anniversary of the September 11th attacks passes the 9/11 conspiracy industry shows no sign of decline. While most adherents to the various conspiracy theories reside in the United States and the middle east, the conspiracy circus - or "the 9/11 truth movement" as it styles itself -is an increasingly visible presence in the UK. Initially an internet based affair, the UK conspiracy advocates have developed national and local campaigning groups who organise public meetings, teach-ins and film showings and they have become a visible and vocal presence at anti-war demonstrations. Their most high-profile supporter and organiser in the UK is David Shayler, the former Mi5 operative and recent converts to the cause include the widely respected journalist and Middle East expert Robert Fisk and prominent gay rights and anti-war activist Peter Tatchell.
As with most conspiracy theories of this type a wide range of scenarios regarding the events of September 11th 2001 are proposed (the most disturbing being an anti-semitic variant according to which Jewish employees at the WTC had prior knowledge of the attack and did not turn up to work on 9/11). The most popular theory and the one advocated by the "mainstream" of the 9/11 truth movement alleges that the attacks were perpetrated by the Bush administration in order to advance the imperial designs of the neo-con cabal. They allege that the planes that struck the towers were not sufficient to bring down the two towers, but that the towers were instead brought down by controlled explosions. They further allege that the Pentagon was not struck by American Airlines Flight 77, but was instead hit by a cruise missile launched by the American military. Putting to one side the fact that the theory appears to indicate a tremendous desire on the part of the conspirators to get
caught red-handed (what kind of evil masterminds decide to vastly increase their chances of being found out by planting explosives in the twin towers and launching a missile in broad daylight at the Pentagon?), there is no serious evidence that contradicts the standard account of what occurred on September 11.
The advocacy works in the way standard to other such supposed conspiracies, (JFK, Bilderberg, the faked moon landings etc.) – by cherry picking evidence, elevating minority accounts that support the theory while completely ignoring the voluminous testimony that backs the standard picture, and lying about the credentials of the "experts" that support the conspiracy theory. To date there is not a single peer-reviewed study in any scientific or engineering journal that butresses the conspiracy theory. It is telling that doubters are usually not pointed in the direction of any scholarly work but instead towards a slickly produced home made video called "loose change", which it is claimed has been watched by over 100 million people. The theory relies substantially on the "who benefits" question: the US government benefited tremendously from the attacks – therefore they must have carried it out themselves. But the Bush administration were hardly the only people to benefit from
the attacks – the attacks were a gift to repressive regimes the world over. (Russia and China conspicuously used the attacks to justify clampdowns on their Muslim populations - were the attacks therefore a Sino-Russian conspiracy?)
The theorists are at a loss to explain how the Bush administration succeeded in covering up an operation that would have required the involvement of thousands of people when the US governments have been unable to cover-up scandals of peripheral interest to the US population (Iran-Contra, Watergate, the "secret" bombing of Cambodia etc). Nor do they explain why, if it was indeed an inside job, the Bush administration so severely mis-managed the media side of the operation. Why in the immediate aftermath was George Bush scurrying from airbase to airbase rather than striking heroic poses – unlike Mayor Giuliani? Nor do the theorists explain why, if the US administration was capable of carrying out and covering up such an elaborate plot, they did not bother with the relatively simple task of planting WMD in Iraq.
Many of the conspiracy theory advocates also believe the 7/7 London tube bombings to have been an "inside job", and their reasoning is no better in this case – doubt is cast on the perpetrators by pointing out that one of them was a teaching assistant and that the bombers were well thought of within their communities (in the same vein one could perhaps argue that Hitler could not have known what his armies were doing in eastern Europe in the 1940s, since he was a vegetarian who was known to be kind to animals and children). In the case of suicide bombers the conspiracy theorists happen to be in total agreement with the mainstream media in depicting suicide bombers as near-psychopathic monsters devoid of all humanity, motivated only by hatred and bereft of any legitimate grievances. In reality such authentic monsters are few and far between.
The various 9/11 and 7/7 conspiracies are so ludicrously devoid of sense that, as Diana Johnstone notes, one has to consider a "psychological explanation" . George Monbiot has suggested that the theory is in effect a displacement activity, a flight into fantasy by people too terrified to confront the myriad problems humanity faces:
"Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the "truth" movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don't exist, they can't fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow."
Arguing against the suggestion that the public's readiness to believe the 9/11 theories is in a sense rather hopeful – revealing as it does the public's open contempt for elite figures and institutions - Alex Cockburn argues that:
"9/11 conspiracism stems from despair and political infantilism. There's no worthwhile energy to transfer from such kookery. It's like saying some lunatic shouting to himself on a street corner has the capacity to be a great orator."
Manuel Garcia Jr, who has done as much as anyone to rebut the conspiracy theories, takes Cockburn's despairing position to its logical conclusion:
"What I have come to realize from my entire 9/11 experience.. . is that the public is basically irrational.. .
"We are doomed. When I began writing for a public audience, my naive technical idea was that if people understood the facts, they would move out of superstition, and we "all" could agree on the nature of "the problem" and then it would be almost obvious what actions to take to fix it. But, people live for their superstitions. We are no better than the caricatures of natives in 1930s jungle movies, hopping about in crazed deadly frenzy because of our "ju-ju"."
Cockburn is no doubt correct regarding the "political infantilism" of the 9/11 cult. The decline of orthodox marxism, while welcome in many ways, has unfortunately allowed the most extreme forms of irrationality to proliferate amongst the organised left. As with the rise the of the susperstitious grab bag of new age spiritualism following the decline of organised christianity, the gap left by orthodox marxism has to a large extent been filled by various paranoid creeds – in particular a primitivist form of lifestyle-anarchism (a trend in anarchist thought that would have been profoundly alien to the Spanish "anarcho-syndicalis ts," say).
As for despair it is probably significant that the numbers of conspiracy advocates in the UK swelled following the invasion of Iraq. Many no doubt took the message (consciously or otherwise) from the failure of the February 15th demonstration and the subsequent demonstrations to stop the invasion that the public is politically impotent and incapable of derailing the so-called war on terror. Unlike Cockburn and Garcia, I can't agree that the conspiracy theorists are simply irrational imbeciles incapable of valuable political action, (one has to wonder why Garcia believes he is immune to the generalised insanity he describes). It seems to me that while many left critics have been quick to criticise the conspiracy theorists, they have not asked how the saner sectors of the organised left have contributed to the rise of such paranoid fantasies. It is in fact hardly surprising that many took the message from the Iraq protests that the hard slog of political activism is a waste
of time, since strategic and tactical issues are so rarely debated on the left, and the achievements of the anti-war movement and dissident activism more generally are so poorly articulated.
In Regime Unchanged, writer and activist Milan Rai notes that just prior to the February 15th demonstration, the MOD, rattled by the scale of domestic opposition, hastily put together contingency plans for the withdrawal of British troops from the invasion force. How many of those who demonstrated are aware of this? How many of them are aware that while Britain's involvement was not prevented, protest did work in other countries – most conspicuously in Turkey, usually a steadfast ally of the United States, but which refused to accede to US requests to allow an invasion of Northern Iraq from Turkish territory. How many of those demonstrators are aware that, while they did not prevent the invasion, the protests and the continuing dissidence since may have affected the way in which the war has been waged? The Iraq war has been monstrously brutal – hundreds of thousands of people, maybe more, have been killed, and the worst refugee crisis in the history of the middle east -
even surpassing the flight of the Palestinians in 1948 - has been created. Nonetheless, despite the escalation of the air war the USAF have not resorted to carpet bombing urban centres (Fallujah excepted), as they did in Indo-China in the 1960s and 70s.
It is important to note that the worst bombing campaigns in history – against Cambodia, South Vietnam and Laos - occurred in large part because of the absence of public protest, which was mostly confined to the bombing of North Vietnam; the lesson being that when the public is exercising no control over the government, the brutality of the western powers is essentially limitless. For instance, it has recently been discovered that a greater tonnage of explosives was dropped by the USAF on the peasant society of Cambodia than were dropped by the western allies in all theatres during WWII including the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, making Cambodia perhaps the most heavily bombed country in history. Again how many are aware of these matters? How many are aware that there is good evidence that the American anti-war movement may well have averted the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam by the Nixon administration? How many understand that while tens of thousands may
have been slaughtered by the US-backed Latin America terror states during the 1980s, that slaughter was nonetheless in a certain sense a victory, since the protest movements succeeded in preventing the US government from intevening with direct military force - which would have led to casualties on a par with Vietnam.
Most disturbingly, the concrete achievements of humanitarian dissidence are not only unknown to those new to activism (as a great many on the February 15th demonstration were) but also to many committed activists. A year after the invasion, frustrated by the failure to discuss such matters, I attempted to start a debate on the issue within the university anti-war group I was involved in. I began by asking other members of our group why we were still organising, despite what was widely perceived to be our failure to stop the Iraq invasion. The answers I got were for the most part along the lines of "we have to make a stand – we have to be seen to be still to be protesting" and other variations on the "fight the good fight" theme. Few of us, it seemed, really believed we were going to effect meaningful change, few even were aware that we had achieved anything at all. It is hard to see how someone new to activism or someone disillusioned in the post-invasion period would be
motivated by such sentiments, or inspired by people with so little faith in the possibility of retarding or halting war crimes. It is surely unsurprising that many drifted into the comforting arms of the 9/11 truth movement.
There is a more general point here. While much of the public is profoundly distrustful of the elite sectors of our society, their understanding of social realities is in many respects profoundly distorted. In particular, though the public to a large extent perceives that it is lied to and manipulated, the methods of social control are not widely understood. An obvious example is the role of the mainstream media. There is deep distrust of the media in the UK – many are aware that the media was a handmaiden to the invasion of Iraq – continually accepting and boosting government assertions regarding Iraq's imaginary WMD programme. But while the public may be aware that they are lied to, the mechanics of the media's institutionalised deceit largely elude them. The prime example regarding the media is the fact that the public for the most part totally misaprehends what the economic function of the commercial media is - believing as they do that the corporate press is in the
business of selling newspapers to readers, when in reality they are in the business of selling audiences to other businesses. Newspapers do not make their profits from their circulation – in fact they don't even break even on sales alone – their profits are made from, and thus their orientation is towards, their advertisers. Knowing this factor – along with others – it becomes rather less surprising that a "free press" caters so obediently to the demands of power and privilege. But without such knowledge, it is not surprising that many instead grope towards other explanations – and the most obvious one that arises is the notion of powerful shadowy figures deciding amongst themselves what the press will say.
Another method of social control that the left does not do enough to expose is the manipulation and distortion of history. Mainstream historical narratives present history for the most part as the plane on which Great Men (and the occasional woman) decide the course of history. The nature of the dominant institutions of our society and the efforts of ordinary people to resist and change them is for the most part obscured; our culture instead reduces major historical change to a game of great personalities far removed from grassroots struggle (so Martin Luther King was the civil rights movement, Emily Pankhurst was the suffragete movement, etc). Of what little the public do learn about popular movements is a hopelessly distorted picture, the recent celebrations of the abolition of slavery being a conspicuous example – attention being focussed on famous individuals such as William Wilberforce rather than the countless participants in slave revolts and grassroots dissidence
whose names we will for the most part never know. One might expect that one of the more important tasks of the left would be to counter mainstream narratives of this type. In reality, while the picture is complex, the left to a large extent reinforces this emphasis on prominent individuals. Most recently the anti-war movement has surely not done enough to emphasise the essential continuity of the Blair and Bush governments. The groups surrounding these two figures may have distinguished themselves by their extreme contempt for public opinion and international law, but again these are matters of degree – the Clinton and Major administrations, for instance, presided over the murderous sanctions regime against Iraq, which led to perhaps a million deaths above the normal; it is therefore only relatively recently that the Bush and Blair governments have approached the body count attributable to their more "reasonable" predecessors.
Britain's imperial violence and internal failings are not the products of particular individuals - the internal structure of the dominant institutions of our society makes the appearance of murderous figures such as a Blair or a Thatcher an inevitablity, and these individuals are essentially interchangeable. Had Neil Kinnock or John Smith become prime minister, there would it is true have been discernible differences in the policies pursued – and given the power concentrated in the executive, even small differences can have profound consequences for those at the sharp end of government policy. Nonetheless, such differences remain a matter of emphasis. Regardless of who had won the 1992 election, Britain would have retained its neo-imperial foreign policy, maintaining the economic drain from the third world to the first (or rather, from the third world to a tiny minority in the first). Economically Britain would have remained a deeply unequal society, in thrall to the
narrow sector of the population that is currently experiencing unheard of levels of wealth whilst one in four children are born into poverty -and as for notions of economic democracy and Self-management these would have seemed just as exotic and unlikely under a Smith or a Kinnock as under Blair and Brown. And yet despite the fact that the problems we face are fundamentally the problem of institutions that reward cruelty, dishonesty and violence, the left continues to focus its attention on the iniquities of specific individuals. If we persist in ascribing institutional violence and deceit to individual actors, we can hardly plead innocence if many, as in the case of 9/11, come to view history as the interplay of various shadowy conspiratorial cabals intriguing against publember of the ukwatch.net collective.

Article by Alex Doherty

10:55 AM
RWA said...

Here's the view of another respected public intellectual - George Monbiot - dealing with 911 conspiracism. The article presents the countervailing view, although several months old it merits review. I hope it is of interest:

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/02/12/short-changed/

SHORT CHANGED


Posted February 12, 2007
9/11 conspiracism is dragging activists away from the real issues

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 6th February 2007

There is a virus sweeping the world. It infects opponents of the Bush government, sucks their brains out through their eyes and turns them into gibbering idiots. First cultivated in a laboratory in the United States, the strain reached these shores a few months ago. In the past fortnight it has become an epidemic. Scarcely a day now passes without someone possessed by this sickness, eyes rolling, lips flecked with foam, trying to infect me. The disease is called Loose Change. It is a film made by three young men which airs most of the standard conspiracy theories about the attacks of September 11 2001. Unlike the other 9/11 conspiracy films, Loose Change is sharp and swift, with a thumping soundtrack, slick graphics and a calm and authoritative voiceover. Its makers claim that it has now been watched by 100 million people.The Pentagon, the film maintains, was not hit by a commercial airliner. There was “no discernable trace” of a plane found in the wreckage, and the entrance and exit holes in the building were far too small. It was hit by a Cruise missile. The twin towers were brought down by means of “a carefully planned controlled demolition”. You can see the small puffs of smoke caused by explosives just below the cascading sections. All other hypotheses are implausible: the fire was not hot enough to melt steel and the towers fell too quickly. Building 7 was destroyed by the same means a few hours later.

Flight 93 did not crash, but was redirected to Cleveland Airport, where the passengers were taken into a NASA building and never seen again. Their voices had been cloned by the Los Alamos laboratories and used to make fake calls to their relatives. The footage of Osama Bin Laden, claiming responsibility for the attacks, was faked. The US government carried out this great crime for four reasons: to help Larry Silverstein, who leased the towers, to collect his insurance money; to assist insider traders betting on falling airline stocks; to steal the gold in the basement; and to grant George Bush new executive powers, so that he could carry out his plans for world domination.

Even if you have seen or read no other accounts of 9/11, and your brain has not yet been liquidised, a few problems must occur to you. The first is the complete absence of scientific advice. At one point the presenter asks “So what brought down the Twin Towers? Let’s ask the experts.” But they don’t ask the experts. The film makers take some old quotes, edit them to remove any contradictions, then denounce all subsequent retractions as further evidence of conspiracy.

The only people they interview are a janitor, a group of firemen and a flight instructor. They let the janitor speak at length, but cut the firemen off in mid-sentence. The flight instructor speaks in short clips, which give the impression that his pupil, the hijacker Hani Hanjour, was incapable of hitting the Pentagon. Elsewhere he has said the opposite: he had “no doubt” that Hanjour could have done it(1).

Where are the structural engineers, the materials scientists, the specialists in ballistics, explosives or fire? The film makers now say that the third edition of the film will be fact-checked by an expert, but he turns out to be “a theology professor”(2). They don’t name him, but I would bet that it’s David Ray Griffin, who also happens to be the high priest of the 9/11 conspiracists.

The next evident flaw is that the plot they propose must have involved tens of thousands of people. It could not have been executed without the help of demolition experts, the security firms guarding the World Trade Centre, Mayor Giuliani (who hastily disposed of the remains), much of the US Air Force, the Federal Aviation Administration and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the relatives of the people “killed” in the plane crashes, the rest of the Pentagon’s staff, the Los Alamos laboratories, the FBI, the CIA and the investigators who picked through the rubble.

If there is one universal American characteristic it is a confessional culture which permits no one with a good story to keep his mouth shut. People appear on the Jerry Springer Show to admit to carnal relations with their tractors. Yet none of the participants in this monumental crime has sought to blow the whistle - before, during or after the attacks. No one has volunteered to tell the greatest story ever told.

Read some conflicting accounts, and Loose Change’s case crumbles faster than the Twin Towers. Hundreds of people saw a plane hit the Pentagon. Because it collided with one of the world’s best- defended buildings at full speed, the plane was pulverised: even so, both plane parts and body parts were in fact recovered. The wings and tail disintegrated when they hit the wall, which is why the holes weren’t bigger(3).

The failure of the Twin Towers has been exhaustively documented by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Far from being impossible, the collapse turns out to have been inevitable. The planes cut some of the support columns and ignited fires sufficient to weaken (but not melt) the remaining steel structures. As the perimeter columns buckled, the weight of the collapsing top stories generated a momentum the rest of the building could not arrest. Puffs of smoke were blown out of the structure by compression as the building fell(4).

Counterpunch, the radical leftwing magazine, commissioned its own expert - an aerospace and mechanical engineer - to test the official findings(5). He shows that the institute must have been right. He also demonstrates how Building 7 collapsed. Burning debris falling from the twin towers ruptured the oil pipes feeding its emergency generators. The reduction in pressure triggered the automatic pumping system, which poured thousands of gallons of diesel onto the fire. The support trusses weakened and buckled and the building imploded(6). Popular Mechanics magazine polled 300 experts and came to the same conclusions(7).

So the critics - even Counterpunch - are labelled co-conspirators, and the plot expands until it comes to involve a substantial part of the world’s population. There is no reasoning with this madness.

People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil which runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos which really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose. This neat story draws campaigners away from real issues - global warming, the Iraq war, nuclear weapons, privatisation, inequality - while permanently wrecking their credibility. Bush did capitalise on the attacks, and he did follow a pre-existing agenda, spelt out, as Loose Change says, by the Project for a New American Century. But by drowning this truth in an ocean of nonsense, the conspiracists ensure that it can never again be taken seriously.

The film’s greatest flaw is this: the men who made it are still alive. If the US government is running an all-knowing, all-encompassing conspiracy, why did it not snuff them out long ago? There is only one possible explanation. They are in fact agents of the Bush regime, employed to distract people from its real abuses of power. This, if you are inclined to believe such stories, is surely a more plausible theory than the one proposed in Loose Change.

www.monbiot.com

References: 1. Thomas Frank, 23rd September 2001. Tracing Trail Of Hijackers. Newsday. Viewed at: http://www.pentagonresearch.com/Newsday_com.htm 2. Ed Pilkington, 26th January 2007. ‘They’re all forced to listen to us’. The Guardian.3. Benjamin Chertoff et al, March 2005. Debunking The 9/11 Myths. Popular Mechanics.http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html4. National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2006. Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions. http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm5. Manuel Garcia, 28th November 2006. We See Conspiracies That Don’t Exist: The Physics of 9/11.http://www.counterpunch.org/physic11282006.html 6. Manuel Garcia, 28th November 2006. Dark Fire: The Fall of WTC 7. http://www.counterpunch.org/darkfire11282006.html7. Benjamin Chertoff et al, ibid.

11:09 AM
RWA said...

And a follow-up article by Monbiot discussing the response to his original piece, enjoy:



9/11 fantasists pose a mortal danger to popular oppositional campaigns
George Monbiot, Tuesday February 20, 2007, The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2017006,00.html

'You did this hit piece because your corporate masters instructed you to. You are a controlled asset of the new world order ... bought and paid for." "Everyone has some skeleton in the cupboard. How else would MI5 and special branch recruit agents?" "Shill, traitor, sleeper", "leftwing gatekeeper", "accessory after the fact", "political whore of the biggest conspiracy of them all".

These are a few of the measured responses to my article, a fortnight ago, about the film Loose Change, which maintains that the United States government destroyed the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Having spent years building up my leftwing credibility on behalf of my paymasters in MI5, I've blown it. I overplayed my hand, and have been exposed, like Bush and Cheney, by a bunch of kids with laptops. My handlers are furious.

I believe that George Bush is surrounded by some of the most scheming, devious, ruthless men to have found their way into government since the days of the Borgias. I believe that they were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence about a potential attack by al-Qaida, and that they have sought to disguise their incompetence by classifying crucial documents.

I believe, too, that the Bush government seized the opportunity provided by the attacks to pursue a longstanding plan to invade Iraq and reshape the Middle East, knowing full well that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush deliberately misled the American people about the links between 9/11 and Iraq and about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. He is responsible for the murder of many tens of thousands of Iraqis.

But none of this is sufficient. To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the twin towers with explosives without attracting attention and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes and induce them all to have kept their mouths shut, for ever.

In other words, you must believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their pals are all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful, despite the fact that they were incapable of faking either weapons of mass destruction or any evidence at Ground Zero that Saddam Hussein was responsible. You must believe that the impression of cackhandedness and incompetence they have managed to project since taking office is a front. Otherwise you are a traitor and a spy.

Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements some of us have spent a long time trying to build. Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues - climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality - are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress, that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy, that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish.

The obvious corollorary to the belief that the Bush administration is all-powerful is that the rest of us are completely powerless. In fact it seems to me that the purpose of the "9/11 truth movement" is to be powerless. The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward's fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don't have the stomach to engage in real political fights.

Let me give you an example. The column I wrote about Loose Change two weeks ago generated 777 posts on the Guardian Comment is Free website, which is almost a record. Most of them were furious. The response from a producer of the film, published last week, attracted 467. On the same day the Guardian published my article about a genuine, demonstrable conspiracy: a spy network feeding confidential information from an arms control campaign to Britain's biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems. It drew 60 responses. The members of the 9/11 cult weren't interested. If they had been, they might have had to do something. The great virtue of a fake conspiracy is that it calls on you to do nothing.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a displacement activity. A displacement activity is something you do because you feel incapable of doing what you ought to do. A squirrel sees a larger squirrel stealing its horde of nuts. Instead of attacking its rival, it sinks its teeth into a tree and starts ripping it to pieces. Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the "truth" movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don't exist, they can't fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.

Many of those who posted responses on Comment is Free contend that Loose Change (which was neatly demolished in the BBC's film The Conspiracy Files on Sunday night) is a poor representation of the conspiracists' case. They urge us instead to visit websites like 911truth.org, physics911.net and 911scholars.org, and to read articles by the theology professor David Ray Griffin and the physicist Steven E Jones.

Concerned that I might have missed something, I have now done all those things, and have come across exactly the same concatenation of ill-attested nonsense as I saw in Loose Change. In all these cases you will find wild supposition raised to the status of incontrovertible fact, rumour and confusion transformed into evidence, selective editing, the citation of fake experts, the dismissal of real ones. Doubtless I will now be told that these are not the true believers: I will need to dive into another vat of tripe to get to the heart of the conspiracy.

The 9/11 truthers remind me of nothing so much as the climate change deniers, cherry-picking their evidence, seizing any excuse for ignoring the arguments of their opponents. Witness the respondents to my Loose Change column who maintain that the magazine Popular Mechanics, which has ripped the demolition theories apart, is a government front. They know this because one of its editors, Benjamin Chertoff, is the brother/nephew/first cousin of the US homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff. (They are, as far as Benjamin can discover, unrelated, but what does he know?)

Like the millenarian fantasies which helped to destroy the Levellers as a political force in the mid-17th century, this crazy distraction presents a mortal danger to popular oppositional movements. If I were Bush or Blair, nothing would please me more than to see my opponents making idiots of themselves, while devoting their lives to chasing a phantom. But as a controlled asset of the new world order, I would say that, wouldn't I? It's all part of the plot.



Monbiot.com

11:55 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)