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Nine Years On: September 11, The Anniversary, and the Deluded Deniers.
Author: Clock
Date: Jun 28, 2013 at 14:55
Written by Muertos
Tomorrow is September 11, 2010, the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania. On this occasion, we should stop and remember those who died on that terrible day and their families, and especially the heroic first responders--firefighters, police, EMTs and others--who gave their lives to save others. Never in the history of America will this anniversary ever pass without a solemn remembrance of who and what we lost.
There are those, however, who will not be granting respect to the victims of 9/11, to our firefighters, police officers, military and civilian officials, and ordinary citizens who did heroic things on that day. The group who will not be doing so is a small, and thankfully dwindling, population of hard-core conspiracy theorists who refuse to believe the facts of what happened on September 11, instead using the event to push an agenda of paranoia, fear, and often of anti-Semitism and intolerance. If you're at Ground Zero tomorrow, you may see a few of them--a very few--chanting through bullhorns, passing out flyers and wearing "Investigate 9/11" T-shirts.
These are the people who will tell you that, despite Osama bin Laden's confession to 9/11 and those of his cohorts who planned and executed this terrible act, "a bunch of guys with box cutters couldn't have done this." As if people from Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan are too stupid and backwards to do anything right. Yes, this racist view is common among 9/11 deniers.
These are the people who will tell you that it had to be a "controlled demolition" because "jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel." Never mind that there was a lot more burning than jet fuel, that the steel was weakened (not melted), and that independent scientific analysis has proven exactly how the World Trade Center towers collapsed--9/11 deniers breeze past all of this in their zeal to pin the crime on an enemy they dislike, which is usually the U.S. or Israeli governments or an imaginary group called "the Illuminati" or "the New World Order."
These are the people who will tell you that "the people" (meaning the victims of the planes hijacked on 9/11) "are secondary," meaning, they don't believe they really died, or, if they did, they don't care. "The people are really secondary" is a direct quote from conspiracy theorist Dylan Avery, who created the 2005 documentary Loose Change and who believes the passengers may have been in on it.
These are the people who will look at a photo of a woman standing in the burning maw of the World Trade Center where the plane struck and will remark that "her clothes aren't even singed." This is a direct quote, again from Dylan Avery, regarding Edna Cintron, who died in the World Trade Center disaster.
These are the people who will tell you that Barbara Olson, who called her husband from Flight 93 to say goodbye, wasn't really on that plane, and that her voice was "morphed" through some super-secret technology. Barbara Olson was a real woman who really died on September 11. Conspiracy theorists don't care about her.
These are the people who will tell you that Todd Beamer, a genuine American hero who led the passenger revolt that prevented Flight 93 from crashing into the Capitol or the White House, was a government plant and that his "Let's roll!" statement was a jingoistic slogan trumped up to have emotional effect. Conspiracy theorists aren't impressed by what Todd Beamer did. They don't care about the people whose lives he helped save.
These are the people who will tell you that New York City firefighters are under some sort of "gag order" to prevent them from telling the world what they supposedly know about "controlled demolition." This despite the fact that many of the firefighters' friends and co-workers died on 9/11. Conspiracy theorists don't care about the firefighters. They slander them instead.
These are the people who will tell you that Osama bin Laden, who confessed in an authenticated video message in October 2004 to personally masterminding the 9/11 attacks, is innocent. Yes, conspiracy theorists think this man, who has the blood of thousands of innocent people on his hands, was "funded by the CIA" and was totally blameless--despite the fact that he confessed. Conspiracy theorists don't care about justice for Osama bin Laden. They celebrate him instead.
These are the people who will tell you that there were no bodies at the Pentagon--ignoring the horrific carnage there that is well documented, such as this [WARNING: graphic image].Conspiracy theorists don't care who this person was or the horrific manner in which they died.
These are the people who will tell you that the "alleged" hijackers are still alive--despite all evidence to the contrary. Yet, ask a conspiracy theorist why no one has tried to contact one of them, all you'll get is excuses. Conspiracy theorists don't care about these supposedly innocent people.
These are the people who will tell you there were no planes at all and that what flew into the World Trade Center towers were holographic projections because the towers were blown up with beam weapons. Yes, there are many 9/11 deniers who really believe that.
These are the people who will tell you that Larry Silverstein, a totally innocent man, is not only guilty of blowing up World Trade Center 7, but that he "admitted" it on a scripted PBS documentary made a year later. Conspiracy theorists don't care about smearing the reputations of innocent people.
These are the people who will tell you that the confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was one of the operational planners of the attacks, is invalid because it was tortured out of him, despite the fact that Mohammed detailed his role voluntarily for an Al-Jazeera documentary that was made before he was even captured by U.S. forces. Conspiracy theorists don't care that he's guilty. They won't even mount a campaign for his legal defense in his upcoming trial. Why? They don't care.
These are the people who will tell you that because George W. Bush read a storybook to children in a classroom right after being told about 9/11, that must prove that he did it. Conspiracy theorists don't care about logic or reason. They care about fingering Bush for 9/11 despite all evidence to the contrary.
These are the people who will tell you that 9/11 was part of a Jewish world conspiracy--the same conspiracy, some of them claim, that involved the faking or deliberate exaggeration of the Holocaust. Yes, many 9/11 Truthers are Holocaust deniers. Conspiracy theorists don't care how hateful, hurtful or toxic this sort of thing is, and how it offends every rational thinking person.
It's astonishing that, nine years after the disaster, these asinine beliefs are still out there and still command adherents. But they do. 9/11 denial will probably never die away totally. Conspiracy thinking is notoriously difficult to stamp out, and it's corrosive to logic and reason everywhere it appears. I've been battling 9/11 deniers for years. No matter how many times you show them the NIST report, or photos of bodies at the Pentagon, or try to get them to care about the real people with real families who died in this tragedy, they persist in droning on about melting points and free-fall speeds, about how the Project for a New American Century supposedly predicted a "new Pearl Harbor," or how Bush and Cheney are war criminals and Obama is no better. These people won't listen to reason. No amount of evidence will convince them. They're allergic to evidence. It will never convince them.
I am contemptuous of 9/11 deniers, that's undeniable. But at the same time I pity them. What must it be like to live in a world so ruled by fear and paranoia that you see conspiracies everywhere you turn, where public service is synonymous with corruption and evil, and where evidence means nothing? What is it that drives these people to reject so totally the dictates of logic and critical thinking--and ignore the human cost of a tragedy as vast as 9/11? I couldn't live in the conspiracy theorists' world. I wouldn't want to.
But, as sad and pathetic as 9/11 deniers are, let us never forget that human cost. Every person who died on 9/11 had a family, had friends. Many of the innocent victims had young children whose parent will never come back. Many of the survivors have trauma and scars that last to this day. The shadow of the tragedy of 9/11 will be cast over American society for many decades to come. Despite the shrill calls of the deniers who refuse to accept what really happened, our focus on this anniversary should be to remember the dead, the sacrifices of the heroes, and try to move forward in a way that validates and makes sense of what has happened.
My heart goes out to everyone who lost a loved one or a friend on September 11, 2001. Let us never forget or never lose sight of the truth of that day.
Tomorrow is September 11, 2010, the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania. On this occasion, we should stop and remember those who died on that terrible day and their families, and especially the heroic first responders--firefighters, police, EMTs and others--who gave their lives to save others. Never in the history of America will this anniversary ever pass without a solemn remembrance of who and what we lost.
There are those, however, who will not be granting respect to the victims of 9/11, to our firefighters, police officers, military and civilian officials, and ordinary citizens who did heroic things on that day. The group who will not be doing so is a small, and thankfully dwindling, population of hard-core conspiracy theorists who refuse to believe the facts of what happened on September 11, instead using the event to push an agenda of paranoia, fear, and often of anti-Semitism and intolerance. If you're at Ground Zero tomorrow, you may see a few of them--a very few--chanting through bullhorns, passing out flyers and wearing "Investigate 9/11" T-shirts.
These are the people who will tell you that, despite Osama bin Laden's confession to 9/11 and those of his cohorts who planned and executed this terrible act, "a bunch of guys with box cutters couldn't have done this." As if people from Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan are too stupid and backwards to do anything right. Yes, this racist view is common among 9/11 deniers.
These are the people who will tell you that it had to be a "controlled demolition" because "jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel." Never mind that there was a lot more burning than jet fuel, that the steel was weakened (not melted), and that independent scientific analysis has proven exactly how the World Trade Center towers collapsed--9/11 deniers breeze past all of this in their zeal to pin the crime on an enemy they dislike, which is usually the U.S. or Israeli governments or an imaginary group called "the Illuminati" or "the New World Order."
These are the people who will tell you that "the people" (meaning the victims of the planes hijacked on 9/11) "are secondary," meaning, they don't believe they really died, or, if they did, they don't care. "The people are really secondary" is a direct quote from conspiracy theorist Dylan Avery, who created the 2005 documentary Loose Change and who believes the passengers may have been in on it.
These are the people who will look at a photo of a woman standing in the burning maw of the World Trade Center where the plane struck and will remark that "her clothes aren't even singed." This is a direct quote, again from Dylan Avery, regarding Edna Cintron, who died in the World Trade Center disaster.
These are the people who will tell you that Barbara Olson, who called her husband from Flight 93 to say goodbye, wasn't really on that plane, and that her voice was "morphed" through some super-secret technology. Barbara Olson was a real woman who really died on September 11. Conspiracy theorists don't care about her.
These are the people who will tell you that Todd Beamer, a genuine American hero who led the passenger revolt that prevented Flight 93 from crashing into the Capitol or the White House, was a government plant and that his "Let's roll!" statement was a jingoistic slogan trumped up to have emotional effect. Conspiracy theorists aren't impressed by what Todd Beamer did. They don't care about the people whose lives he helped save.
These are the people who will tell you that New York City firefighters are under some sort of "gag order" to prevent them from telling the world what they supposedly know about "controlled demolition." This despite the fact that many of the firefighters' friends and co-workers died on 9/11. Conspiracy theorists don't care about the firefighters. They slander them instead.
These are the people who will tell you that Osama bin Laden, who confessed in an authenticated video message in October 2004 to personally masterminding the 9/11 attacks, is innocent. Yes, conspiracy theorists think this man, who has the blood of thousands of innocent people on his hands, was "funded by the CIA" and was totally blameless--despite the fact that he confessed. Conspiracy theorists don't care about justice for Osama bin Laden. They celebrate him instead.
These are the people who will tell you that there were no bodies at the Pentagon--ignoring the horrific carnage there that is well documented, such as this [WARNING: graphic image].Conspiracy theorists don't care who this person was or the horrific manner in which they died.
These are the people who will tell you that the "alleged" hijackers are still alive--despite all evidence to the contrary. Yet, ask a conspiracy theorist why no one has tried to contact one of them, all you'll get is excuses. Conspiracy theorists don't care about these supposedly innocent people.
These are the people who will tell you there were no planes at all and that what flew into the World Trade Center towers were holographic projections because the towers were blown up with beam weapons. Yes, there are many 9/11 deniers who really believe that.
These are the people who will tell you that Larry Silverstein, a totally innocent man, is not only guilty of blowing up World Trade Center 7, but that he "admitted" it on a scripted PBS documentary made a year later. Conspiracy theorists don't care about smearing the reputations of innocent people.
These are the people who will tell you that the confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was one of the operational planners of the attacks, is invalid because it was tortured out of him, despite the fact that Mohammed detailed his role voluntarily for an Al-Jazeera documentary that was made before he was even captured by U.S. forces. Conspiracy theorists don't care that he's guilty. They won't even mount a campaign for his legal defense in his upcoming trial. Why? They don't care.
These are the people who will tell you that because George W. Bush read a storybook to children in a classroom right after being told about 9/11, that must prove that he did it. Conspiracy theorists don't care about logic or reason. They care about fingering Bush for 9/11 despite all evidence to the contrary.
These are the people who will tell you that 9/11 was part of a Jewish world conspiracy--the same conspiracy, some of them claim, that involved the faking or deliberate exaggeration of the Holocaust. Yes, many 9/11 Truthers are Holocaust deniers. Conspiracy theorists don't care how hateful, hurtful or toxic this sort of thing is, and how it offends every rational thinking person.
It's astonishing that, nine years after the disaster, these asinine beliefs are still out there and still command adherents. But they do. 9/11 denial will probably never die away totally. Conspiracy thinking is notoriously difficult to stamp out, and it's corrosive to logic and reason everywhere it appears. I've been battling 9/11 deniers for years. No matter how many times you show them the NIST report, or photos of bodies at the Pentagon, or try to get them to care about the real people with real families who died in this tragedy, they persist in droning on about melting points and free-fall speeds, about how the Project for a New American Century supposedly predicted a "new Pearl Harbor," or how Bush and Cheney are war criminals and Obama is no better. These people won't listen to reason. No amount of evidence will convince them. They're allergic to evidence. It will never convince them.
I am contemptuous of 9/11 deniers, that's undeniable. But at the same time I pity them. What must it be like to live in a world so ruled by fear and paranoia that you see conspiracies everywhere you turn, where public service is synonymous with corruption and evil, and where evidence means nothing? What is it that drives these people to reject so totally the dictates of logic and critical thinking--and ignore the human cost of a tragedy as vast as 9/11? I couldn't live in the conspiracy theorists' world. I wouldn't want to.
But, as sad and pathetic as 9/11 deniers are, let us never forget that human cost. Every person who died on 9/11 had a family, had friends. Many of the innocent victims had young children whose parent will never come back. Many of the survivors have trauma and scars that last to this day. The shadow of the tragedy of 9/11 will be cast over American society for many decades to come. Despite the shrill calls of the deniers who refuse to accept what really happened, our focus on this anniversary should be to remember the dead, the sacrifices of the heroes, and try to move forward in a way that validates and makes sense of what has happened.
My heart goes out to everyone who lost a loved one or a friend on September 11, 2001. Let us never forget or never lose sight of the truth of that day.
The Truth About 9/11 Truth...And Debunking.
Author: Clock
Date: Jun 28, 2013 at 14:46
Written by Muertos
Republished by Clock
Once in a while you read something that puts a complicated subject into such clear and perfect perspective that it instantly becomes, by virtue of its cogency, virtually the last word on the subject. I had that experience recently with a paper by Ryan Mackey, a former debunker from the JREF (James Randi Educational Foundation) forums, on the subject of 9/11 conspiracy theories. I'm devoting a blog post specifically to bring this article to the attention of my readers because I believe it's that important and it deserves to be highlighted.
Mackey has written a paper called The Great Internet Conspiracy: The Role of Technology and Social Media in the 9/11 Truth Movement. Currently the paper is available as a .PDF file here. (http://www.911myths.com/tgitc_1_0_final.pdf) It's 83 pages long, including footnotes and sources. This paper should be required reading, both for the misguided souls out there who are still unfortunate enough to believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories, but also--and even more importantly--for those of us who have devoted considerable time and effort to refuting and debunking these theories. Mackey's paper shines a very interesting light on us, our motivations, and our actions, and it does so in a way I have not seen before.
Why Did 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Take Off?
Mackey's main point in the paper is to analyze how and why 9/11 conspiracy theories rose and eventually fell in the public consciousness. His main thesis is that the short-lived popularity of conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks was largely due to a "perfect storm" of converging factors, chief among them the changing role of the Internet in peoples' social lives and identities.
Some of the main related points that Mackey makes are:
He argues that "9/11 Truth" peaked in 2006 and has been on a steady decline since then. He backs this up with observations on how popular Truther activism has been since 2006 (not much), how many people are still out there talking about 9/11 conspiracy theories (not many), and what the general public's view of "Truthers" is today (most people think they're nuts, or simply ignore them).
He argues that the brief surge in popularity of "9/11 Truth" is not an effect of the content of the conspiracy theory. He gets there by analyzing 9/11 conspiracy theories in the context of other conspiracy theories that have been popular over the past 30 years, such as the "Apollo moon hoax" or Columbine school massacre conspiracies.
He argues that what made "9/11 Truth" seem to have more importance than it did was the activist nature of some of its purveyors--such as Richard Gage, whose tactics of taking the conspiracy theory to the public differ greatly from previous pre-9/11 conspiracy theorists who are mostly content with talking about conspiracy theories in small insular groups that don't reach out to others.
This is a key point. Mackey says:
"So that is it in a nutshell - there we have the secret ingredient that distinguished the 9/11 conspiracy theories from others. It had somehow mutated from the traditional, imaginative, individual realm of personal fantasy into an aggressive strain of misguided activism. In so doing it had insulted the public and made itself look far more fearsome than it actually was. My Internet-based metric of "popularity" was detecting something different than I had expected. I was not measuring an increase in the number of conspiracy theorists or in their coherent mobilization behind a single cause. Instead, I was only finding the volume and rancor of the arguments between a few noisy Truthers and everyone else. "
The reason for this misguided activism? Social media, says Mackey. The heyday of "9/11 Truth" was also the heyday of MySpace, the first real social networking site to take off. It was also the time when YouTube burst into the public consciousness. I've written before about how and why YouTube is uniquely attractive to conspiracy theorists. The convergence of these factors, says Mackey, meant it was suddenly easy for misguided Truthers, most of whom are too lazy to go out and do any activism in the real world, to pretend to be activists by forwarding links to YouTube videos supportive of the conspiracy theory. This, combined with the ferocity of how Truthers argue with people who don't support their theories, made it look as if legions of tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists were having a real impact on public consciousness--when in fact their decline had already begun.
Is The Truth Movement Dead? Yes.
The refreshing thing about Mackey's paper--and one that comes as welcome news to me, as it should to other debunkers--is its confirmation of what I think most of us have suspected for quite a while now: the 9/11 Truth movement is dead. By that I mean, it is not totally extinct, as you can see from a few hard-core dead-enders out there still preaching the faith, but it's basically "as dead as it's going to get." Mackey has this to say:
"With its best days behind it, the Truth Movement is once again just another ordinary conspiracy theory. But there is no reason to assume it will totally disappear. Of the thirty popular conspiracy theories we examined earlier, almost all can still gather attention and spawn debate today, usually in strange corners of the internet such as the David Icke Forum or Above Top Secret. On rare occasions, they may even be seen in real life. I'm betting, however, you won't catch even a glimpse of the Truth Movement. "
This is entirely consistent with my own observations. The websites that trafficked in 9/11 Truth in 2005/06 are now either gone or just about dead. Loose Change, which Mackey credits with being a huge boon to the Truth movement, is discredited now--including by its own creator Dylan Avery, who has disavowed most of it. Mark Roberts, the "Obi-Wan Kenobi of debunkers" who ran the single best website to debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories on the entire Internet, hasn't updated the site in almost three years. The ten-year anniversary of 9/11 saw virtually no organized activity by Truthers. Indeed, there is little reason to think that 9/11 Truth is going anywhere but into the dustbin of history.
Mackey is also right that it won't ever totally disappear. My latest, and possibly, last debunking effort is against a new Internet conspiracy theory film called Thrive, which mentions (in passing) 9/11 conspiracy theories. I still occasionally get angry responses from Truthers on Twitter who don't like when I say something that supports the "official story." But the chances of 9/11 Truth having a major resurgence are virtually nil. It's just not going to happen.
That is, frankly, a relief.
Is Debunking Worthwhile? Yes, and no.
Some of the most startling issues in Mackey's paper, at least to me, regard his views of debunkers--of which he admits he was (and possibly still is) one. Early in the paper he tackles the very thorny question about whether systematic opposition to 9/11 conspiracy theories--arguing with Truthers on the Internet, basically--has any real point. After concluding that a small portion of his time spent since 2005 pushing back against 9/11 conspiracy theories was worthwhile, Mackey says:
"The majority however was clearly wasted, or more accurately of no value beyond simple entertainment. Like many others, I would often self-justify my involvement with the notion that other readers, those with a less technical background who might be swayed by the Truth Movement, would read my comments and learn from them. Over the years I have received messages and e-mails from a few people who were convinced by my efforts, but only a very few - around ten. Many more (in the hundreds) were those who wrote simply because they too were irritated by Truthers, or engaged in their own arguments against Truthers, and found my contributions useful or amusing. And, of course, there were the Truthers themselves, numbering about forty, who wished only to argue with me on a private channel in addition to the public debate. Some even wrote just to issue vague threats about what would happen to "traitors" and "collaborators" once they achieved their Utopia. There were also a few who were so incoherent that I wondered how they'd managed to operate a computer in the first place. But that's all - a very small group indeed."
This also mirrors my own experience exactly. I do occasionally receive messages of thanks from former conspiracy theorists who have read my stuff and taken from it some useful information with which to change their worldview--such as the fellow who recently thanked me for helping him get out of the pro-conspiracist Zeitgeist Movement. But Mackey's observations about how few these really are, and especially about self-justifying, also ring true.
This may be something that debunkers don't really want to hear. I mean, we spend a lot of time pushing back against these idiotic theories, demonstrating why they're wrong and explaining why people shouldn't believe in them. It's sobering to have someone tell us that most of this time is wasted. But Mackey may have a point. Whether you agree with him or not, you have to admit it's worth serious consideration.
Who Are Debunkers? Why Do We Do What We Do?
Even more startling than Mackey's views on the usefulness of debunking, however, is his description of who debunkers are and why we do what we do. This may also be unpopular in the skeptic crowd, but it's worth taking a look at what he has to say:
"[T]he "debunkers" opposing the Truth Movement do not merely correct misinformation invented by Truthers, but go further, opposing the mindset and social mechanisms that gave the Truth Movement a place to form. The modern debunkers view the Truth Movement as a defective world view that somehow escaped summary judgment and gained acceptance on the Internet, defying the "system" of the Marketplace of Ideas and thereby requiring a systematic response. Unfortunately, a permanent solution is not actually achievable. There is no way to stamp out all Truthers, particularly not while preserving the spirit of open exchange the Internet supposedly represents.
As a result of this frustration, many debunkers have noticed a reactionary, obsessive behavior appearing in their ranks, one that occasionally manifests with fervor reminiscent of anti-Communism. And strangely, these incidents seem to be increasing, even though the Truth Movement is in full retreat. I uncovered signs of this myself in a small 2009 opinion poll on the JREF Forum, where a plurality of respondents indicated not just willingness, but actual desire, to continue arguing with Truthers to the bitter end."
Again, my own experience has confirmed absolutely what Mackey has said. I recognize this behavior even in myself. There is no question that I believe conspiracy theorists in general, and 9/11 Truthers in particular, have a defective worldview that should be stamped out if at all possible. If deconstructing this worldview is not possible--as I concede it is not--the next best thing is to relegate conspiracy theorists to a permanent status of marginalization, a lunatic fringe with such immediate negative associations that it can never, and will never, achieve any sort of mainstream acceptance. I've certainly directed a lot of effort toward this end, and I believe my efforts have been successful, at least to the limited extent that success is realistically possible in this realm.
In his (and our) defense, Mackey goes on to say:
"But while this kind of determined retaliation is counter-productive, it is understandable. After all, if the free market of ideas seems to be failing, many will rush to shore it up. A Utopian Internet that only educates, never misleads, is certainly a worthy goal. It just isn't realistic."
This is also probably true. My own personal motivations for debunking do not stem from a "Utopian" vision of the Internet--I have always accepted, and still do, that the vast majority of the Internet is polluted with worthless crap, and in such an environment toxic mindsets such as conspiracy theories will undoubtedly flourish. I don't take a very philosophical approach to the Internet in general. However, one of my main motivations in debunking is to make sure that there is at least some factually accurate and logically supportable information out there next to the crap--to make sure that someone who Googles "Thrive movie" or "Zeitgeist Movement" at least gets some genuine information instead of propaganda spun to support a conspiracy theorist viewpoint. So, to this extent, I agree with Mackey's observation again.
One thing that should be made clear-and one thing that is in danger of being misinterpreted by conspiracy theorists-is the idea that agreement with Mackey's points regarding the pathology of debunkers implies that any arguments made by debunkers in that context are in any way invalid. Every criticism I have ever made about conspiracy theories, conspiracy movements or cults, or the conspiracy theory worldview is 100% correct so far as I know it, and one of the major tenets of skepticism is to approach things of this nature with facts that can be verified and reasoning that is logically sound. People's reasons for debunking may vary. Whatever they are, it does not affect the content of the arguments they have presented. This is what separates debunkers from conspiracy theorists. Debunkers employ true arguments and cogent reasoning to destroy conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists will not shirk at deploying demonstrably false arguments to support their views, because in their minds the end justifies the means. This point must be clearly understood in order for this evaluation of Mackey's thesis to make sense, but it's a point I suspect will be completely lost on conspiracy nuts.
Do We Have To Worry About Conspiracy Theories?
In the final sections of Mackey's paper, he makes a very interesting argument. He claims that in today's rapid-fire Internet environment, dominated by instant social media like Twitter, the rise and fall of a conspiracy theory which in 2005/06 might have taken years can instead now take weeks, days, or even hours. He gives two interesting examples: the Obama birth certificate conspiracy theory, and the supposition, promoted primarily by Truthers, that Osama bin Laden was not killed by U.S. forces on May 1, 2011.
About the first, Mackey says:
"The Birther conspiracy theory...made the jump into the mainstream very quickly. Unlike the Truth Movement, it seems to have begun its runaway growth phase in only a matter of months, steeply increasing in popularity from mid-2009 through April 2011. It peaked with something like 30% of Americans believing the conspiracy theory (there is a lot of scatter in the polls), but then rapidly slipped to a stable support level of about 10%. Overall, this trajectory is comparable to the Truth Movement's popularity, except for the greatly accelerated leap into public view.
This behavior is consistent with our theory of Internet-fueled growth: Unlike the Truth Movement, the Birther conspiracy already had activists and an argumentative public, courtesy of an unusually contentious period in politics, and already had social media to spread its message. However, the type of information being discussed was much less engaging - one might spend hours poring over a .GIF image of an old birth certificate...but there just wasn't anything as shocking as 9/11 to be found this time. It thus comes as no surprise that it would enter the mainstream more quickly, attract a significant number of low-commitment supporters as before, and then dissipate once the conspiracists had exhausted their argument."
About the Osama bin Laden conspiracy theory--the "Deathers"-he says this:
"We see a similar pattern in the Deather conspiracy theory, except here the timeline is compressed even further. This conspiracy theory exploded into the mainstream at the same speed as the news story it challenged, reaching the media almost instantly. One amusing note comes from David Wiegel of Slate, who referred to "Osama bin Trutherism" in an opinion piece on the very day bin Laden's death was announced. A few polls showed a sudden spike of believers, as high as 20% to 30% in various hastily-conducted media surveys, but after only a week it was clear that the conspiracy theory was already in decline. As Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling described it on 10 May 2011, only half-joking, "we've got more voters who think the President is the Anti-Christ than think Osama bin Laden is still alive."
From the standpoint of debunkers, I was on the front lines during the rise and fall of the "Deather" theory. Mackey points out that this theory was spread primarily by Twitter. I am a very heavy Twitter user. On the morning after bin Laden's death was announced, I was already responding to angry @ replies by conspiracy theorists--many of them undoubtedly Truthers--who had begun to argue that bin Laden wasn't really dead, or that the circumstances of his death were very different than reported, etc. Within 12 hours of the announcement of bin Laden's death, I was already armed with links to news stories and other sources that indicated the true circumstances behind bin Laden's death and especially his hasty burial at sea, and I was deploying them against the "Deathers" who used the same sort of spurious arguments that Truthers used to try to show that 9/11 was an inside job. However, I remember being surprised that "Deatherism" died out (no pun intended) within a week. Now it is extremely rare for me to be directly confronted with a bin Laden death conspiracy theory, on Twitter or anywhere else. This conspiracy theory is also dead.
Is there hope in these examples? Mackey seems to think so. The Internet now moves much faster than it did in 2005/06, and even much faster than in early 2009 when Orly Taitz was out there pushing her Birther garbage. Now, Mackey argues, it is possible to witness the entire life-cycle of a major conspiracy theory in a matter of days. His observations about how conspiracy theories peak among people with "low commitment" to them, and then fade to about a 10% support rate, is extremely interesting. 9/11 Truth is now at about this level, and most of us (debunkers) think 9/11 Truth is the biggest and baddest conspiracy theory on the block. If Birtherism and Deatherism can rise, peak and fade so quickly, do we need to be concerned about future conspiracy theories?
Are we ever going to get another conspiracy theory like 9/11? A theory that is prominent enough to create social movements and cults, like the Zeitgeist Movement? Hopefully an event like 9/11 will never happen again, but even if it does, there is some suggestion in Mackey's analysis that perhaps the conspiracy theories that would inevitably result from it might have much less public saturation and staying power than 9/11 theories. We can only hope.
Conclusion
9/11 conspiracy theories are utterly untrue. They are asinine, insulting, brain-corroding garbage. That is beyond question. In analyzing why these ridiculous theories took hold--among conspiracy theorists and debunkers alike--Mackey has given us, I think, some very valuable insights not only into the pathology of conspiracy theories, but into the minds of those who believe them and those who push back against them.
I am certainly what Mackey would consider a "high commitment" debunker, meaning, I feel it is particularly important to push back against conspiracy theories. I am also quite possibly a product of my times. I came to the debunking community in 2005, just about the time 9/11 Truth theories were exploding, and my first real forum of debunking was on MySpace, the first serious social networking website. MySpace, of course, is dead. No one goes there anymore. 9/11 Truth is virtually dead; almost no one believes it anymore. We now live in an age of Twitter, Google Plus and communications that move at a speed impossible to believe even in 2005. Perhaps, lurking behind Mackey's fascinating analysis, is an argument that exactly the thing that propagates conspiracy theories in the modern world--the Internet--can also serve as a limitation on their reach. I sincerely hope that is true.
Thanks for reading.
Republished by Clock
Once in a while you read something that puts a complicated subject into such clear and perfect perspective that it instantly becomes, by virtue of its cogency, virtually the last word on the subject. I had that experience recently with a paper by Ryan Mackey, a former debunker from the JREF (James Randi Educational Foundation) forums, on the subject of 9/11 conspiracy theories. I'm devoting a blog post specifically to bring this article to the attention of my readers because I believe it's that important and it deserves to be highlighted.
Mackey has written a paper called The Great Internet Conspiracy: The Role of Technology and Social Media in the 9/11 Truth Movement. Currently the paper is available as a .PDF file here. (http://www.911myths.com/tgitc_1_0_final.pdf) It's 83 pages long, including footnotes and sources. This paper should be required reading, both for the misguided souls out there who are still unfortunate enough to believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories, but also--and even more importantly--for those of us who have devoted considerable time and effort to refuting and debunking these theories. Mackey's paper shines a very interesting light on us, our motivations, and our actions, and it does so in a way I have not seen before.
Why Did 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Take Off?
Mackey's main point in the paper is to analyze how and why 9/11 conspiracy theories rose and eventually fell in the public consciousness. His main thesis is that the short-lived popularity of conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks was largely due to a "perfect storm" of converging factors, chief among them the changing role of the Internet in peoples' social lives and identities.
Some of the main related points that Mackey makes are:
He argues that "9/11 Truth" peaked in 2006 and has been on a steady decline since then. He backs this up with observations on how popular Truther activism has been since 2006 (not much), how many people are still out there talking about 9/11 conspiracy theories (not many), and what the general public's view of "Truthers" is today (most people think they're nuts, or simply ignore them).
He argues that the brief surge in popularity of "9/11 Truth" is not an effect of the content of the conspiracy theory. He gets there by analyzing 9/11 conspiracy theories in the context of other conspiracy theories that have been popular over the past 30 years, such as the "Apollo moon hoax" or Columbine school massacre conspiracies.
He argues that what made "9/11 Truth" seem to have more importance than it did was the activist nature of some of its purveyors--such as Richard Gage, whose tactics of taking the conspiracy theory to the public differ greatly from previous pre-9/11 conspiracy theorists who are mostly content with talking about conspiracy theories in small insular groups that don't reach out to others.
This is a key point. Mackey says:
"So that is it in a nutshell - there we have the secret ingredient that distinguished the 9/11 conspiracy theories from others. It had somehow mutated from the traditional, imaginative, individual realm of personal fantasy into an aggressive strain of misguided activism. In so doing it had insulted the public and made itself look far more fearsome than it actually was. My Internet-based metric of "popularity" was detecting something different than I had expected. I was not measuring an increase in the number of conspiracy theorists or in their coherent mobilization behind a single cause. Instead, I was only finding the volume and rancor of the arguments between a few noisy Truthers and everyone else. "
The reason for this misguided activism? Social media, says Mackey. The heyday of "9/11 Truth" was also the heyday of MySpace, the first real social networking site to take off. It was also the time when YouTube burst into the public consciousness. I've written before about how and why YouTube is uniquely attractive to conspiracy theorists. The convergence of these factors, says Mackey, meant it was suddenly easy for misguided Truthers, most of whom are too lazy to go out and do any activism in the real world, to pretend to be activists by forwarding links to YouTube videos supportive of the conspiracy theory. This, combined with the ferocity of how Truthers argue with people who don't support their theories, made it look as if legions of tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists were having a real impact on public consciousness--when in fact their decline had already begun.
Is The Truth Movement Dead? Yes.
The refreshing thing about Mackey's paper--and one that comes as welcome news to me, as it should to other debunkers--is its confirmation of what I think most of us have suspected for quite a while now: the 9/11 Truth movement is dead. By that I mean, it is not totally extinct, as you can see from a few hard-core dead-enders out there still preaching the faith, but it's basically "as dead as it's going to get." Mackey has this to say:
"With its best days behind it, the Truth Movement is once again just another ordinary conspiracy theory. But there is no reason to assume it will totally disappear. Of the thirty popular conspiracy theories we examined earlier, almost all can still gather attention and spawn debate today, usually in strange corners of the internet such as the David Icke Forum or Above Top Secret. On rare occasions, they may even be seen in real life. I'm betting, however, you won't catch even a glimpse of the Truth Movement. "
This is entirely consistent with my own observations. The websites that trafficked in 9/11 Truth in 2005/06 are now either gone or just about dead. Loose Change, which Mackey credits with being a huge boon to the Truth movement, is discredited now--including by its own creator Dylan Avery, who has disavowed most of it. Mark Roberts, the "Obi-Wan Kenobi of debunkers" who ran the single best website to debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories on the entire Internet, hasn't updated the site in almost three years. The ten-year anniversary of 9/11 saw virtually no organized activity by Truthers. Indeed, there is little reason to think that 9/11 Truth is going anywhere but into the dustbin of history.
Mackey is also right that it won't ever totally disappear. My latest, and possibly, last debunking effort is against a new Internet conspiracy theory film called Thrive, which mentions (in passing) 9/11 conspiracy theories. I still occasionally get angry responses from Truthers on Twitter who don't like when I say something that supports the "official story." But the chances of 9/11 Truth having a major resurgence are virtually nil. It's just not going to happen.
That is, frankly, a relief.
Is Debunking Worthwhile? Yes, and no.
Some of the most startling issues in Mackey's paper, at least to me, regard his views of debunkers--of which he admits he was (and possibly still is) one. Early in the paper he tackles the very thorny question about whether systematic opposition to 9/11 conspiracy theories--arguing with Truthers on the Internet, basically--has any real point. After concluding that a small portion of his time spent since 2005 pushing back against 9/11 conspiracy theories was worthwhile, Mackey says:
"The majority however was clearly wasted, or more accurately of no value beyond simple entertainment. Like many others, I would often self-justify my involvement with the notion that other readers, those with a less technical background who might be swayed by the Truth Movement, would read my comments and learn from them. Over the years I have received messages and e-mails from a few people who were convinced by my efforts, but only a very few - around ten. Many more (in the hundreds) were those who wrote simply because they too were irritated by Truthers, or engaged in their own arguments against Truthers, and found my contributions useful or amusing. And, of course, there were the Truthers themselves, numbering about forty, who wished only to argue with me on a private channel in addition to the public debate. Some even wrote just to issue vague threats about what would happen to "traitors" and "collaborators" once they achieved their Utopia. There were also a few who were so incoherent that I wondered how they'd managed to operate a computer in the first place. But that's all - a very small group indeed."
This also mirrors my own experience exactly. I do occasionally receive messages of thanks from former conspiracy theorists who have read my stuff and taken from it some useful information with which to change their worldview--such as the fellow who recently thanked me for helping him get out of the pro-conspiracist Zeitgeist Movement. But Mackey's observations about how few these really are, and especially about self-justifying, also ring true.
This may be something that debunkers don't really want to hear. I mean, we spend a lot of time pushing back against these idiotic theories, demonstrating why they're wrong and explaining why people shouldn't believe in them. It's sobering to have someone tell us that most of this time is wasted. But Mackey may have a point. Whether you agree with him or not, you have to admit it's worth serious consideration.
Who Are Debunkers? Why Do We Do What We Do?
Even more startling than Mackey's views on the usefulness of debunking, however, is his description of who debunkers are and why we do what we do. This may also be unpopular in the skeptic crowd, but it's worth taking a look at what he has to say:
"[T]he "debunkers" opposing the Truth Movement do not merely correct misinformation invented by Truthers, but go further, opposing the mindset and social mechanisms that gave the Truth Movement a place to form. The modern debunkers view the Truth Movement as a defective world view that somehow escaped summary judgment and gained acceptance on the Internet, defying the "system" of the Marketplace of Ideas and thereby requiring a systematic response. Unfortunately, a permanent solution is not actually achievable. There is no way to stamp out all Truthers, particularly not while preserving the spirit of open exchange the Internet supposedly represents.
As a result of this frustration, many debunkers have noticed a reactionary, obsessive behavior appearing in their ranks, one that occasionally manifests with fervor reminiscent of anti-Communism. And strangely, these incidents seem to be increasing, even though the Truth Movement is in full retreat. I uncovered signs of this myself in a small 2009 opinion poll on the JREF Forum, where a plurality of respondents indicated not just willingness, but actual desire, to continue arguing with Truthers to the bitter end."
Again, my own experience has confirmed absolutely what Mackey has said. I recognize this behavior even in myself. There is no question that I believe conspiracy theorists in general, and 9/11 Truthers in particular, have a defective worldview that should be stamped out if at all possible. If deconstructing this worldview is not possible--as I concede it is not--the next best thing is to relegate conspiracy theorists to a permanent status of marginalization, a lunatic fringe with such immediate negative associations that it can never, and will never, achieve any sort of mainstream acceptance. I've certainly directed a lot of effort toward this end, and I believe my efforts have been successful, at least to the limited extent that success is realistically possible in this realm.
In his (and our) defense, Mackey goes on to say:
"But while this kind of determined retaliation is counter-productive, it is understandable. After all, if the free market of ideas seems to be failing, many will rush to shore it up. A Utopian Internet that only educates, never misleads, is certainly a worthy goal. It just isn't realistic."
This is also probably true. My own personal motivations for debunking do not stem from a "Utopian" vision of the Internet--I have always accepted, and still do, that the vast majority of the Internet is polluted with worthless crap, and in such an environment toxic mindsets such as conspiracy theories will undoubtedly flourish. I don't take a very philosophical approach to the Internet in general. However, one of my main motivations in debunking is to make sure that there is at least some factually accurate and logically supportable information out there next to the crap--to make sure that someone who Googles "Thrive movie" or "Zeitgeist Movement" at least gets some genuine information instead of propaganda spun to support a conspiracy theorist viewpoint. So, to this extent, I agree with Mackey's observation again.
One thing that should be made clear-and one thing that is in danger of being misinterpreted by conspiracy theorists-is the idea that agreement with Mackey's points regarding the pathology of debunkers implies that any arguments made by debunkers in that context are in any way invalid. Every criticism I have ever made about conspiracy theories, conspiracy movements or cults, or the conspiracy theory worldview is 100% correct so far as I know it, and one of the major tenets of skepticism is to approach things of this nature with facts that can be verified and reasoning that is logically sound. People's reasons for debunking may vary. Whatever they are, it does not affect the content of the arguments they have presented. This is what separates debunkers from conspiracy theorists. Debunkers employ true arguments and cogent reasoning to destroy conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists will not shirk at deploying demonstrably false arguments to support their views, because in their minds the end justifies the means. This point must be clearly understood in order for this evaluation of Mackey's thesis to make sense, but it's a point I suspect will be completely lost on conspiracy nuts.
Do We Have To Worry About Conspiracy Theories?
In the final sections of Mackey's paper, he makes a very interesting argument. He claims that in today's rapid-fire Internet environment, dominated by instant social media like Twitter, the rise and fall of a conspiracy theory which in 2005/06 might have taken years can instead now take weeks, days, or even hours. He gives two interesting examples: the Obama birth certificate conspiracy theory, and the supposition, promoted primarily by Truthers, that Osama bin Laden was not killed by U.S. forces on May 1, 2011.
About the first, Mackey says:
"The Birther conspiracy theory...made the jump into the mainstream very quickly. Unlike the Truth Movement, it seems to have begun its runaway growth phase in only a matter of months, steeply increasing in popularity from mid-2009 through April 2011. It peaked with something like 30% of Americans believing the conspiracy theory (there is a lot of scatter in the polls), but then rapidly slipped to a stable support level of about 10%. Overall, this trajectory is comparable to the Truth Movement's popularity, except for the greatly accelerated leap into public view.
This behavior is consistent with our theory of Internet-fueled growth: Unlike the Truth Movement, the Birther conspiracy already had activists and an argumentative public, courtesy of an unusually contentious period in politics, and already had social media to spread its message. However, the type of information being discussed was much less engaging - one might spend hours poring over a .GIF image of an old birth certificate...but there just wasn't anything as shocking as 9/11 to be found this time. It thus comes as no surprise that it would enter the mainstream more quickly, attract a significant number of low-commitment supporters as before, and then dissipate once the conspiracists had exhausted their argument."
About the Osama bin Laden conspiracy theory--the "Deathers"-he says this:
"We see a similar pattern in the Deather conspiracy theory, except here the timeline is compressed even further. This conspiracy theory exploded into the mainstream at the same speed as the news story it challenged, reaching the media almost instantly. One amusing note comes from David Wiegel of Slate, who referred to "Osama bin Trutherism" in an opinion piece on the very day bin Laden's death was announced. A few polls showed a sudden spike of believers, as high as 20% to 30% in various hastily-conducted media surveys, but after only a week it was clear that the conspiracy theory was already in decline. As Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling described it on 10 May 2011, only half-joking, "we've got more voters who think the President is the Anti-Christ than think Osama bin Laden is still alive."
From the standpoint of debunkers, I was on the front lines during the rise and fall of the "Deather" theory. Mackey points out that this theory was spread primarily by Twitter. I am a very heavy Twitter user. On the morning after bin Laden's death was announced, I was already responding to angry @ replies by conspiracy theorists--many of them undoubtedly Truthers--who had begun to argue that bin Laden wasn't really dead, or that the circumstances of his death were very different than reported, etc. Within 12 hours of the announcement of bin Laden's death, I was already armed with links to news stories and other sources that indicated the true circumstances behind bin Laden's death and especially his hasty burial at sea, and I was deploying them against the "Deathers" who used the same sort of spurious arguments that Truthers used to try to show that 9/11 was an inside job. However, I remember being surprised that "Deatherism" died out (no pun intended) within a week. Now it is extremely rare for me to be directly confronted with a bin Laden death conspiracy theory, on Twitter or anywhere else. This conspiracy theory is also dead.
Is there hope in these examples? Mackey seems to think so. The Internet now moves much faster than it did in 2005/06, and even much faster than in early 2009 when Orly Taitz was out there pushing her Birther garbage. Now, Mackey argues, it is possible to witness the entire life-cycle of a major conspiracy theory in a matter of days. His observations about how conspiracy theories peak among people with "low commitment" to them, and then fade to about a 10% support rate, is extremely interesting. 9/11 Truth is now at about this level, and most of us (debunkers) think 9/11 Truth is the biggest and baddest conspiracy theory on the block. If Birtherism and Deatherism can rise, peak and fade so quickly, do we need to be concerned about future conspiracy theories?
Are we ever going to get another conspiracy theory like 9/11? A theory that is prominent enough to create social movements and cults, like the Zeitgeist Movement? Hopefully an event like 9/11 will never happen again, but even if it does, there is some suggestion in Mackey's analysis that perhaps the conspiracy theories that would inevitably result from it might have much less public saturation and staying power than 9/11 theories. We can only hope.
Conclusion
9/11 conspiracy theories are utterly untrue. They are asinine, insulting, brain-corroding garbage. That is beyond question. In analyzing why these ridiculous theories took hold--among conspiracy theorists and debunkers alike--Mackey has given us, I think, some very valuable insights not only into the pathology of conspiracy theories, but into the minds of those who believe them and those who push back against them.
I am certainly what Mackey would consider a "high commitment" debunker, meaning, I feel it is particularly important to push back against conspiracy theories. I am also quite possibly a product of my times. I came to the debunking community in 2005, just about the time 9/11 Truth theories were exploding, and my first real forum of debunking was on MySpace, the first serious social networking website. MySpace, of course, is dead. No one goes there anymore. 9/11 Truth is virtually dead; almost no one believes it anymore. We now live in an age of Twitter, Google Plus and communications that move at a speed impossible to believe even in 2005. Perhaps, lurking behind Mackey's fascinating analysis, is an argument that exactly the thing that propagates conspiracy theories in the modern world--the Internet--can also serve as a limitation on their reach. I sincerely hope that is true.
Thanks for reading.
An Open Letter to a 9/11 Truther. (UPDATED!)
Author: Clock
Date: Jun 28, 2013 at 14:21
This blog, originally posted February 1, 2012, was updated February 3. Scroll to the end for the update.
Dear Visibility911: (old user on his blog)
This blog is in response to a debate we had on Twitter shortly before Christmas. In exchange for looking at a scientific peer-reviewed paper, http://www.civil.northwestern.edu/people/bazant/PDFs/Papers/476%20WTC%20collapse.pdf">by Zdenek P. Bazant, Jia-Liang Le, Frank R. Greening and David B. Benson entitled What Did and Did Not Cause Collapse of WTC Twin Towers in New York, I agreed to answer ten questions put to me by you regarding the September 11 attacks. In this blog, I present my answers.
First, before I get into the answers, I'd like to explain a few things, including my rationale both for responding to you and for presenting 9/11 debunking material on Twitter in the first place. I have been debunking conspiracy theories for over 6 years now, and I've come to realize that, for the most part, arguing with 9/11 Truthers is a waste of time. Not only is there not a shred of evidence that 9/11 was an "inside job," but to believe that it was a government conspiracy-whether of the MIHOP or LIHOP persuasion-requires an abrogation of logic and critical thinking so total that it becomes quite clear that "9/11 inside job" is essentially a faith-based proposition, like religion. I have no realistic hope of convincing you to abandon a basically religious belief. Therefore, I am not answering these questions in an attempt to convince you that 9/11 was not an "inside job." I cannot do that. Only you can decide that you want to abandon conspiracism, and it's clear you're not there yet.
Why, then, do I occasionally post factual material debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories on Twitter under the hashtag "#911Truth"-the activity which seems to have angered you? It is because I don't want conspiracy theorists to monopolize the subject. You may not believe what I'm about to say, but 9/11 Truth, as a movement, is dying. Far fewer people believe that "9/11 was an inside job" than they did in 2005-06, the high water mark of this conspiracy theory. People simply don't care about it anymore. They ignore it, because Truthers are a fringe community with nothing relevant to offer. As a result, the high-commitment conspiracy theorists-the activists who still firmly believe that 9/11 was an "inside job" and want to "wake up" the world to it-have a virtual monopoly on the subject, which the rest of the world considers closed. Almost everyone who uses the hashtag "#911Truth" is a conspiracy theorist. I use it to make sure that a person who is just now beginning their investigation of these issues doesn't see a wall of conspiracy links, unadulterated by truth and fact, which might convince them that there is no credible anti-conspiracy information out there about 9/11. But if they do a search for "#911Truth" and find 9 links to ridiculous Prison Planet articles and one link to 911myths.com, at least they'll know that factual information about 9/11 does exist, and maybe-just maybe-they'll be motivated to click that link. Since I cannot realistically hope to "convert" Truthers, which I readily concede, this is the best I can hope to do.
Does this approach work? Surprisingly, yes, it does. You and your fellow conspiracy theorists' eyes may glaze over when they see links from me to 911myths, debunking911 or ScrewLooseChange. You may (and I suspect do) think I am some sort of "government agent" simply "shilling" the "official story," either because I'm paid to or because I'm too stupid to have "done my research" and realized that 9/11 was an "inside job," which seems self-evident to you. (Incidentally, I have been accused of being a "disinformation agent" on many occasions). But presenting the real facts does help people recover from conspiratorial thinking.
Why did I engage you in debate?
My main goal in engaging you in debate was to get you to look-at least look-at peer-reviewed science that demonstrates that 9/11 could not have been an "inside job." Despite the fact that you were extremely resistant to even glancing at this material-hiding behind the fiction that downloading a .PDF of this paper was somehow dangerous, as if I could go into the web servers of the places that host the Bazant paper and plant viruses as a means of guerilla warfare against 9/11 Truthers. Contrary to the vast majority of Truthers, however, you did at least look at some credible peer-reviewed material challenging the conspiracy viewpoint. Accepting it is another matter-and I know you won't accept it under any circumstances-but at least you've seen it, which is more than the vast majority of Truthers can say, almost all of whom are so intellectually lazy that they simply refuse to acknowledge the existence of any relevant information that's not on YouTube or which pops up after a perfunctory Google search.
So, therefore, my main goal in our interaction has already been accomplished. I do not expect the Bazant paper to convince you. In fact, I'm virtually certain you'll find some basis on which to discredit it; you've already tried to claim, falsely, that it is not peer-reviewed. Barring that, you've probably spent the last 40 days in a daze of crunching physics equations in an attempt to find one that you think is incorrect so you can denounce the paper as a fraud. I expected that. But at least you've seen it. My job is essentially done.
A New Approach to Thinking About 9/11?
At the end of this blog I'll answer your questions. Before I do, however, let me state that I find them all disappointing. All of your questions are points that were brought up by Truthers years ago, and which have been answered and debunked many, many times before. If you are still asking, in 2012, why NORAD supposedly "stood down," that tells me that your investigation of the subject of 9/11 has been shockingly superficial. It is not hard to find answers to these questions. The only way you could pretend to not already know the answers to these questions is if you have seen them answered, but you just rejected them and pretended as if they hadn't been addressed. This is what I suspect has happened.
Your questions also miss the basic point. They illustrate why your approach to the subject of 9/11 doesn't work. Like most conspiracy theorists, you focus your attention on perceived discrepancies or "unanswered questions" that you think impeaches the "official story." However, all you are doing is nibbling around the edges. Some of your questions-for example, "who wrote the PATRIOT Act"-have no relevance to the question of whether 9/11 was or was not an "inside job." By that I mean, whatever the answer to that question is, it cannot affect the basic analysis of what happened on 9/11. You ask it as a means to raise speculations that you think will eventually lead people to jump to the conclusion that 9/11 was an "inside job," but this is not a very effective means of getting to the finish line. Thus, at the risk of helping you become a "better Truther," let me suggest that you take a different approach to thinking about 9/11.
If you think you disagree with the "official story," first, make sure you know what the "official story" actually is. A surprising number of 9/11 Truthers do not, or they get key aspects of it wrong. For example, a common Truther claim is, "Jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel!" But the "official story" is not that the steel in the World Trade Center towers melted. It never was. What happened was that the impacts of the planes knocked loose a great deal of fireproofing insulation on key support beams in the towers. The fires caused by the plane strikes-which involved a lot of things burning, not just jet fuel, but things like wood, paper, carpet, etc.-structurally weakened the steel, which is quite different than "melting." First of all, it occurs at a much lower temperature. Secondly, the fact that the plane strikes tore loose much of the insulation in the buildings is important, because it explains why the 9/11 fires were different than, say, the 1975 World Trade Center fire, which did not involve significant structural damage. So the "official story" has nothing to do with melted steel. That means that the Truther argument, "Jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel!" is simply irrelevant.
Secondly, and more importantly, instead of trying to poke holes in the "official story" with "unanswered questions" or perceived discrepancies, instead try reconstructing the problem from the ground up. Once you understand what the "official story" is, ask yourself: if this were true, what is the minimum amount of evidence that would be required to prove it? For example, we can agree that the "official story" involves Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacking planes. Okay. Is there evidence that this actually happened? Yes, clearly there is-we have their boarding passes, proving they were on the plane, we have recordings of their voices talking to the control tower, etc. We can agree that the "official story" involves these hijacked planes striking the towers. Okay. Is there evidence that this actually happened? Yes, there is-eyewitness reports, pieces of wreckage being found from the planes, etc., etc. Make a list of all these key links, and decide whether evidence supports them. Then determine if the questions you want to ask-about stand-downs, about Bush's behavior at the Sarasota elementary school, etc.-can reasonably impact these key links.
This is how to go about evaluating the "official story."
About a year and a half ago I wrote an article that attempts to put together what happened on 9/11 with the minimum amount of evidence necessary to reach logical conclusions. Here is the article You will see it has very little to do with the PATRIOT Act, Bush at Booker Elementary, secret plans for Afghan wars, etc. You will also see within it no citations to the 9/11 Commission Report or the NIST Report. Instead, the article focuses on what really happened, and how we know what really happened, constructed from sources not derived from official investigations (and the sources that are used are each carefully scrutinized to determine how credible they are, and if there is any evidence out there that they're faked). Again-I do not expect this article to convince you, but I present it in the hopes that its methodology might be of use to you.
You do not have to take "the government's" word for it.
This is one of the hardest things for 9/11 conspiracy theorists to understand, and the statement I often make that engenders the most criticism from Truthers. You do not have to take the government's word for it! We know what we know about 9/11 not because the government told us so, but because objective facts from non-official sources amply support the basic narrative of 9/11.
This is why it's pointless for Truthers to attack the 9/11 Commission Report, as I have seen you do. The 9/11 Commission Report is a handy compendium of facts, but it is hardly the definitive source, or even in the top 10 most important sources, that explain what happened that day. It is not true that Commission members have recanted or impugned its basic conclusions-the statements you've seen to that effect are cherry-picked and taken out of context, and refer to disputes that do not involve the basic narrative of 9/11-but even if it was true, it wouldn't matter. The basic facts of 9/11 speak for themselves.
Example: the confessions of Al-Qaeda terrorists Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh to planning and carrying out 9/11. Most Truthers dismiss Al-Qaeda confessions as untrue because they were supposedly extracted by torture. But did you know that both Mohammed and Binalshibh confessed to planning 9/11, on international television no less, a year before they were ever in U.S. custody? They boasted about it on a program created by Al-Jazeera in 2002, which obviously the U.S. government, or whoever you think was behind 9/11, could not control. Most Truthers do not know this, and they persist in stating that the Al-Qaeda terrorists confessed only under U.S. torture. They didn't. Thus, you don't need to take the government's word for it that Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh did it. They told the world they did it totally independently of anything the government did. The government is simply not the source of this information.
Answers To Your 10 Questions
And now, your questions. You will notice I don't spend much time on them. The other things I had to say to you in this article are, in my view, much more important. But, since I pledged to answer your questions in exchange for your perusal of the Bazant article, here we go.
"1) Apparent Military stand-down"
I take it from this that you question why the U.S. air defenses did not intercept the hijacked airplanes before three of them reached their targets. The simple answer is, they had no idea what was really happening, because it had never happened before. There was no military stand-down. The judgment that the failure to intercept the planes before reaching their targets points to some sort of "inside job" is based on two faulty assumptions: (1) that you understand what NORAD's procedures were in the event of plane hijackings, and (2) that such procedures would and should have been carried out flawlessly, to the letter, when the situation presented itself. Neither assumption is tenable.
9/11 myths deals with this issue at length,and I refer you to their analysis.
"2) Why no SS move Bush?"
From this I assume you mean, why was President Bush, when informed of the attacks while reading a book to children at Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, FL, not immediately moved out of the place by Secret Service agents? This is another "unanswered question" that is entirely irrelevant to the issue of conspiracy, because, if you review the facts concerning Bush's presence at Booker School, you will see that they are all completely consistent with a surprise attack about which nobody knew anything beforehand. Assume just for the sake of argument that Bush didn't know the attack was coming. Is it possible or likely that he and the Secret Service would have acted the way they did? Yes, clearly it is; this means that this question is not relevant to whether 9/11 was an "inside job" or not.
"3) Excessive Stock Trading + CIA connection"
I presume this question refers to the "put options" placed on the stock of various airlines prior to 9/11. This is indeed a mystery, and a question that remains unanswered. However, before you seize upon this as "evidence" of a conspiracy, consider this: again, just assuming for the sake of argument that 9/11 was not an "inside job," how unlikely is this?
Answer: not unlikely at all. The U.S. economy had already slipped into recession by the time of the 9/11 attacks. Financial traders were often betting that various stocks would go down (and that is what a put option is-a hedge that a particular stock will decline rather than rise). The only reason these sorts of trades would have seemed suspicious is in hindsight-that is, if the attacks had not happened, they would have appeared completely normal.
Take this hypothetical. Assume that I'm a day trader of stock. On Friday, just on a whim, I decide to sell a bunch of shares of Acme Corp. that I happen to own. On Sunday, a huge industrial accident occurs at an Acme Corp. plant. When the market opens Monday, Acme Corp. stock starts plummeting. Does the fact that I sold Acme on Friday indicate that I must have known the industrial accident would occur? No. If the accident hadn't occurred, the fact that I sold Acme on Friday would be meaningless.
As for the "CIA connection," that is spin from conspiracy theorists. Visit the link highlighted above and you'll see discussion of that issue.
"4) Wash meeting ...with ISI who gave Atta 100 Grand"
The "fact" that Mohammed Atta was given $100,000 by an official of the Pakistani ISI is by no means href="http://911myths.com/index.php/ISI_funding_of_the_attac ">a fact. If you investigate that issue you'll see that there is considerable controversy over whether the meeting took place, and if so, when it took place. Again, assume just for the sake of argument that 9/11 was not an inside job. We know from subsequent events that the Pakistani ISI supported Al-Qaeda in the past. They were protecting Bin Laden up until the very day (May 1, 2011) that U.S. forces assassinated him-in Pakistan. How strange would it have been that a pro-Al-Qaeda agency might have wanted to fund an active member of Al-Qaeda plotting a terrorist attack against the United States? Could this have happened exactly the way you claim it happened even if 9/11 was not an "inside job"? Answer: yes, quite easily.
This is another question that does not help you advance your case that 9/11 was an "inside job," because, whatever the answer is, it doesn't make that conclusion any more (or less) likely to be the truth.
"5) why Aphgan war plan on Bush's desk on 9/10/2001″
There is no evidence that the United States was planning to attack Afghanistan prior to 9/11. What possible strategic interest would the United States have had at stake in Afghanistan prior to September 11? If you think 9/11 was a pretext to attain some other objective, what was that objective, and why is it so hard to find? Furthermore, if it was planned, why wait until October 7 to put the plan into action-and then, why rely on the Northern Alliance to do the heavy lifting?
We have been at war in Afghanistan for 10 years now. To my knowledge, with the exception of the assassination of Bin Laden, the United States has achieved no significant strategic objective in the entire 10 years we've been at war there. Afghanistan is the poorest country in the world. It has no oil. It has no wealth. It has no resources. It is not a strategic location for bases. It's a bunch of rocks and inhospitable mountains. Great place for terrorist camps, but little else. The "pipeline" stuff was debunked in 2002, but even if it wasn't, how come, after 10 years of war there, this supposed "objective" has not yet been accomplished?
"6) when/why was PATRIOT act written "
This question is completely irrelevant to whether 9/11 was or was not an "inside job." Technically, the answer is, it was written by Congressional staffers, who write the vast majority of bills. The question is irrelevant, though, because, like many of your questions, whatever the answer is makes it no more or less likely that 9/11 was an "inside job." By asking the question you want to invite the conclusion that it must have been written beforehand and 9/11 was some sort of "pretext" to pass it. But you have no actual evidence that this occurred; you're just hoping someone connects the dots and reaches the conclusion you want.
For the record I think the PATRIOT Act is a terrible law that should be repealed. It should never have been passed, and I believe many of its key parts are unconstitutional. It may surprise you that this is my opinion of the PATRIOT Act. Truthers often have a difficult time reconciling statements such as this with their religious belief that because I don't believe 9/11 was an "inside job" that I must therefore unthinkingly accept everything the government does.
"8) why did Military lie (see Keane's book)"
Former 9/11 Commission member Thomas Keane does not, and never did, make the claim that anybody was covering up anything that could have altered the basic narrative of 9/11. Yes, he claimed military aides lied about certain things. But how do you get to the conclusion that what he thinks they were lying about must have been a conspiracy to "do" 9/11? There is no evidence of that. What were they lying about? Things much more petty than the underlying truth that Al-Qaeda did 9/11, I'm afraid. Bureaucracies don't like investigations showing up their incompetence, and there was a great deal of incompetence in the government regarding 9/11. This is what military officials were lying about-not whether Osama did or did not do it.
Furthermore, as I stated above, the propriety of the 9/11 Commission investigation is not very relevant to what we know about what happened on September 11. This question is a red herring.
By the way, you skipped number 7, but you have two question 9′s.
"9) why was evac proc not followed at Pentagon"
This is another silly question, irrelevant to the key facts of 9/11. I cannot confirm that it is even true-which leads me to suspect it's not-but even if it is, it falls in the same category as the imaginary "NORAD stand-down," insofar as, it can only point to something suspicious if (1) you understand correctly what the Pentagon's evacuation procedures were, and (2) you can trust, that in the confusion and chaos of the day, the only way those procedures could not have been followed is by a deliberate decision to impede them. If you want some more specific info on Pentagon responses that day, try this, about NORAD's scrambling of fighters to protect the Pentagon or this about the activities of Pentagon officials.
"9) why Able Danger destroyed?"
Another wasted question whose answer, regardless of what it is, does not and cannot affect the key pieces of evidence upon which our conclusions of 9/11 rest. The counterintelligence "Able Danger" project most likely did not, as many conspiracists believe, identify 9/11 hijackers before the disaster.yMore importantly, anything involving "Able Danger" is a rabbit hole-like your other questions, it's not very relevant. In order for it to be relevant, the same two untenable assumptions you've made in questions 1, 2 and your first question 9-that you understand what procedures should have been followed, and your certainty that the only reason they would not have been followed in this case was because of deliberate orders-must again support the weight of all the malfeasance you are trying to heap upon them. This is simply faulty reasoning.
I don't really care why Able Danger files were destroyed, if they were. How can that affect what happened on 9/11?
"10) why FBI never charge bin Laden w/ 911 or update poster even after death."
The answer to this question is so easy to find that I'm not even going to type it out. Go here (http://www.911myths.com/index.php/Connecting_bin_Laden_to_9-11) for a full explanation of this issue. This is another faulty question because it's a "sacred list" argument. (http://screwloosechange.blogspot.ca/2009/06/brand-new-sacred-list.html) It's silly to pin your hopes that 9/11 was a conspiracy on this flimsy reasoning, when you could be investigating the actual facts and conclusions upon which the narrative of 9/11 relies.
Conclusion
As I stated earlier in this article, my point in engaging you in this open letter is not to convince you that 9/11 was not an "inside job." I don't believe I can do that. I'm quite certain that you'll latch on to something in the Bazant article that you can trumpet as indicia of its unreliability, or perhaps you'll just claim that Bazant and the other authors are just government shills. However, I did get you to at least engage with a piece of scholarly peer-reviewed evidence that challenges the conspiracy claims-and in doing so, you've done more than most Truthers will ever do. I also explained why I present 9/11 material on Twitter and what I hope to accomplish by doing so. Most likely you'll disagree, or perhaps holler about this blog being some form of trickery or other evidence of my depravity, but that's fine-I get that a lot. As I've said on this blog before, debating 9/11 Truthers is largely a waste of time. The marginal benefits that may come as an indirect result of these debates, however, do have value.
You may be surprised to learn that I am myself a former conspiracy theorist. Virtually all "high-commitment" debunkers-meaning, people who, like me, expend considerable effort in refuting conspiracy theories-are former conspiracy theorists who realized how silly their beliefs were. I guess underlying all these words is a hope, distant and speculative to be sure, that maybe someday as priorities in your life change you will realize that some of the positions you once held are untenable. Maybe then you'll remember you once read a scientific article refuting controlled demolition, and you'll do a search for it to look it up again. It only takes one piece of factual information, one logical or incisive question, to crack the facade of conspiracist thinking.
To that end I will leave you with a video that I think encapsulates this phenomenon. Made by a former conspiracy theorist, it explains cogently and emotionally how and why he left the snake pit of "9/11 Truth." Again, you may not see much in this video now, but perhaps someday you will.
Dear Visibility911: (old user on his blog)
This blog is in response to a debate we had on Twitter shortly before Christmas. In exchange for looking at a scientific peer-reviewed paper, http://www.civil.northwestern.edu/people/bazant/PDFs/Papers/476%20WTC%20collapse.pdf">by Zdenek P. Bazant, Jia-Liang Le, Frank R. Greening and David B. Benson entitled What Did and Did Not Cause Collapse of WTC Twin Towers in New York, I agreed to answer ten questions put to me by you regarding the September 11 attacks. In this blog, I present my answers.
First, before I get into the answers, I'd like to explain a few things, including my rationale both for responding to you and for presenting 9/11 debunking material on Twitter in the first place. I have been debunking conspiracy theories for over 6 years now, and I've come to realize that, for the most part, arguing with 9/11 Truthers is a waste of time. Not only is there not a shred of evidence that 9/11 was an "inside job," but to believe that it was a government conspiracy-whether of the MIHOP or LIHOP persuasion-requires an abrogation of logic and critical thinking so total that it becomes quite clear that "9/11 inside job" is essentially a faith-based proposition, like religion. I have no realistic hope of convincing you to abandon a basically religious belief. Therefore, I am not answering these questions in an attempt to convince you that 9/11 was not an "inside job." I cannot do that. Only you can decide that you want to abandon conspiracism, and it's clear you're not there yet.
Why, then, do I occasionally post factual material debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories on Twitter under the hashtag "#911Truth"-the activity which seems to have angered you? It is because I don't want conspiracy theorists to monopolize the subject. You may not believe what I'm about to say, but 9/11 Truth, as a movement, is dying. Far fewer people believe that "9/11 was an inside job" than they did in 2005-06, the high water mark of this conspiracy theory. People simply don't care about it anymore. They ignore it, because Truthers are a fringe community with nothing relevant to offer. As a result, the high-commitment conspiracy theorists-the activists who still firmly believe that 9/11 was an "inside job" and want to "wake up" the world to it-have a virtual monopoly on the subject, which the rest of the world considers closed. Almost everyone who uses the hashtag "#911Truth" is a conspiracy theorist. I use it to make sure that a person who is just now beginning their investigation of these issues doesn't see a wall of conspiracy links, unadulterated by truth and fact, which might convince them that there is no credible anti-conspiracy information out there about 9/11. But if they do a search for "#911Truth" and find 9 links to ridiculous Prison Planet articles and one link to 911myths.com, at least they'll know that factual information about 9/11 does exist, and maybe-just maybe-they'll be motivated to click that link. Since I cannot realistically hope to "convert" Truthers, which I readily concede, this is the best I can hope to do.
Does this approach work? Surprisingly, yes, it does. You and your fellow conspiracy theorists' eyes may glaze over when they see links from me to 911myths, debunking911 or ScrewLooseChange. You may (and I suspect do) think I am some sort of "government agent" simply "shilling" the "official story," either because I'm paid to or because I'm too stupid to have "done my research" and realized that 9/11 was an "inside job," which seems self-evident to you. (Incidentally, I have been accused of being a "disinformation agent" on many occasions). But presenting the real facts does help people recover from conspiratorial thinking.
Why did I engage you in debate?
My main goal in engaging you in debate was to get you to look-at least look-at peer-reviewed science that demonstrates that 9/11 could not have been an "inside job." Despite the fact that you were extremely resistant to even glancing at this material-hiding behind the fiction that downloading a .PDF of this paper was somehow dangerous, as if I could go into the web servers of the places that host the Bazant paper and plant viruses as a means of guerilla warfare against 9/11 Truthers. Contrary to the vast majority of Truthers, however, you did at least look at some credible peer-reviewed material challenging the conspiracy viewpoint. Accepting it is another matter-and I know you won't accept it under any circumstances-but at least you've seen it, which is more than the vast majority of Truthers can say, almost all of whom are so intellectually lazy that they simply refuse to acknowledge the existence of any relevant information that's not on YouTube or which pops up after a perfunctory Google search.
So, therefore, my main goal in our interaction has already been accomplished. I do not expect the Bazant paper to convince you. In fact, I'm virtually certain you'll find some basis on which to discredit it; you've already tried to claim, falsely, that it is not peer-reviewed. Barring that, you've probably spent the last 40 days in a daze of crunching physics equations in an attempt to find one that you think is incorrect so you can denounce the paper as a fraud. I expected that. But at least you've seen it. My job is essentially done.
A New Approach to Thinking About 9/11?
At the end of this blog I'll answer your questions. Before I do, however, let me state that I find them all disappointing. All of your questions are points that were brought up by Truthers years ago, and which have been answered and debunked many, many times before. If you are still asking, in 2012, why NORAD supposedly "stood down," that tells me that your investigation of the subject of 9/11 has been shockingly superficial. It is not hard to find answers to these questions. The only way you could pretend to not already know the answers to these questions is if you have seen them answered, but you just rejected them and pretended as if they hadn't been addressed. This is what I suspect has happened.
Your questions also miss the basic point. They illustrate why your approach to the subject of 9/11 doesn't work. Like most conspiracy theorists, you focus your attention on perceived discrepancies or "unanswered questions" that you think impeaches the "official story." However, all you are doing is nibbling around the edges. Some of your questions-for example, "who wrote the PATRIOT Act"-have no relevance to the question of whether 9/11 was or was not an "inside job." By that I mean, whatever the answer to that question is, it cannot affect the basic analysis of what happened on 9/11. You ask it as a means to raise speculations that you think will eventually lead people to jump to the conclusion that 9/11 was an "inside job," but this is not a very effective means of getting to the finish line. Thus, at the risk of helping you become a "better Truther," let me suggest that you take a different approach to thinking about 9/11.
If you think you disagree with the "official story," first, make sure you know what the "official story" actually is. A surprising number of 9/11 Truthers do not, or they get key aspects of it wrong. For example, a common Truther claim is, "Jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel!" But the "official story" is not that the steel in the World Trade Center towers melted. It never was. What happened was that the impacts of the planes knocked loose a great deal of fireproofing insulation on key support beams in the towers. The fires caused by the plane strikes-which involved a lot of things burning, not just jet fuel, but things like wood, paper, carpet, etc.-structurally weakened the steel, which is quite different than "melting." First of all, it occurs at a much lower temperature. Secondly, the fact that the plane strikes tore loose much of the insulation in the buildings is important, because it explains why the 9/11 fires were different than, say, the 1975 World Trade Center fire, which did not involve significant structural damage. So the "official story" has nothing to do with melted steel. That means that the Truther argument, "Jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel!" is simply irrelevant.
Secondly, and more importantly, instead of trying to poke holes in the "official story" with "unanswered questions" or perceived discrepancies, instead try reconstructing the problem from the ground up. Once you understand what the "official story" is, ask yourself: if this were true, what is the minimum amount of evidence that would be required to prove it? For example, we can agree that the "official story" involves Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacking planes. Okay. Is there evidence that this actually happened? Yes, clearly there is-we have their boarding passes, proving they were on the plane, we have recordings of their voices talking to the control tower, etc. We can agree that the "official story" involves these hijacked planes striking the towers. Okay. Is there evidence that this actually happened? Yes, there is-eyewitness reports, pieces of wreckage being found from the planes, etc., etc. Make a list of all these key links, and decide whether evidence supports them. Then determine if the questions you want to ask-about stand-downs, about Bush's behavior at the Sarasota elementary school, etc.-can reasonably impact these key links.
This is how to go about evaluating the "official story."
About a year and a half ago I wrote an article that attempts to put together what happened on 9/11 with the minimum amount of evidence necessary to reach logical conclusions. Here is the article You will see it has very little to do with the PATRIOT Act, Bush at Booker Elementary, secret plans for Afghan wars, etc. You will also see within it no citations to the 9/11 Commission Report or the NIST Report. Instead, the article focuses on what really happened, and how we know what really happened, constructed from sources not derived from official investigations (and the sources that are used are each carefully scrutinized to determine how credible they are, and if there is any evidence out there that they're faked). Again-I do not expect this article to convince you, but I present it in the hopes that its methodology might be of use to you.
You do not have to take "the government's" word for it.
This is one of the hardest things for 9/11 conspiracy theorists to understand, and the statement I often make that engenders the most criticism from Truthers. You do not have to take the government's word for it! We know what we know about 9/11 not because the government told us so, but because objective facts from non-official sources amply support the basic narrative of 9/11.
This is why it's pointless for Truthers to attack the 9/11 Commission Report, as I have seen you do. The 9/11 Commission Report is a handy compendium of facts, but it is hardly the definitive source, or even in the top 10 most important sources, that explain what happened that day. It is not true that Commission members have recanted or impugned its basic conclusions-the statements you've seen to that effect are cherry-picked and taken out of context, and refer to disputes that do not involve the basic narrative of 9/11-but even if it was true, it wouldn't matter. The basic facts of 9/11 speak for themselves.
Example: the confessions of Al-Qaeda terrorists Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh to planning and carrying out 9/11. Most Truthers dismiss Al-Qaeda confessions as untrue because they were supposedly extracted by torture. But did you know that both Mohammed and Binalshibh confessed to planning 9/11, on international television no less, a year before they were ever in U.S. custody? They boasted about it on a program created by Al-Jazeera in 2002, which obviously the U.S. government, or whoever you think was behind 9/11, could not control. Most Truthers do not know this, and they persist in stating that the Al-Qaeda terrorists confessed only under U.S. torture. They didn't. Thus, you don't need to take the government's word for it that Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh did it. They told the world they did it totally independently of anything the government did. The government is simply not the source of this information.
Answers To Your 10 Questions
And now, your questions. You will notice I don't spend much time on them. The other things I had to say to you in this article are, in my view, much more important. But, since I pledged to answer your questions in exchange for your perusal of the Bazant article, here we go.
"1) Apparent Military stand-down"
I take it from this that you question why the U.S. air defenses did not intercept the hijacked airplanes before three of them reached their targets. The simple answer is, they had no idea what was really happening, because it had never happened before. There was no military stand-down. The judgment that the failure to intercept the planes before reaching their targets points to some sort of "inside job" is based on two faulty assumptions: (1) that you understand what NORAD's procedures were in the event of plane hijackings, and (2) that such procedures would and should have been carried out flawlessly, to the letter, when the situation presented itself. Neither assumption is tenable.
9/11 myths deals with this issue at length,and I refer you to their analysis.
"2) Why no SS move Bush?"
From this I assume you mean, why was President Bush, when informed of the attacks while reading a book to children at Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, FL, not immediately moved out of the place by Secret Service agents? This is another "unanswered question" that is entirely irrelevant to the issue of conspiracy, because, if you review the facts concerning Bush's presence at Booker School, you will see that they are all completely consistent with a surprise attack about which nobody knew anything beforehand. Assume just for the sake of argument that Bush didn't know the attack was coming. Is it possible or likely that he and the Secret Service would have acted the way they did? Yes, clearly it is; this means that this question is not relevant to whether 9/11 was an "inside job" or not.
"3) Excessive Stock Trading + CIA connection"
I presume this question refers to the "put options" placed on the stock of various airlines prior to 9/11. This is indeed a mystery, and a question that remains unanswered. However, before you seize upon this as "evidence" of a conspiracy, consider this: again, just assuming for the sake of argument that 9/11 was not an "inside job," how unlikely is this?
Answer: not unlikely at all. The U.S. economy had already slipped into recession by the time of the 9/11 attacks. Financial traders were often betting that various stocks would go down (and that is what a put option is-a hedge that a particular stock will decline rather than rise). The only reason these sorts of trades would have seemed suspicious is in hindsight-that is, if the attacks had not happened, they would have appeared completely normal.
Take this hypothetical. Assume that I'm a day trader of stock. On Friday, just on a whim, I decide to sell a bunch of shares of Acme Corp. that I happen to own. On Sunday, a huge industrial accident occurs at an Acme Corp. plant. When the market opens Monday, Acme Corp. stock starts plummeting. Does the fact that I sold Acme on Friday indicate that I must have known the industrial accident would occur? No. If the accident hadn't occurred, the fact that I sold Acme on Friday would be meaningless.
As for the "CIA connection," that is spin from conspiracy theorists. Visit the link highlighted above and you'll see discussion of that issue.
"4) Wash meeting ...with ISI who gave Atta 100 Grand"
The "fact" that Mohammed Atta was given $100,000 by an official of the Pakistani ISI is by no means href="http://911myths.com/index.php/ISI_funding_of_the_attac ">a fact. If you investigate that issue you'll see that there is considerable controversy over whether the meeting took place, and if so, when it took place. Again, assume just for the sake of argument that 9/11 was not an inside job. We know from subsequent events that the Pakistani ISI supported Al-Qaeda in the past. They were protecting Bin Laden up until the very day (May 1, 2011) that U.S. forces assassinated him-in Pakistan. How strange would it have been that a pro-Al-Qaeda agency might have wanted to fund an active member of Al-Qaeda plotting a terrorist attack against the United States? Could this have happened exactly the way you claim it happened even if 9/11 was not an "inside job"? Answer: yes, quite easily.
This is another question that does not help you advance your case that 9/11 was an "inside job," because, whatever the answer is, it doesn't make that conclusion any more (or less) likely to be the truth.
"5) why Aphgan war plan on Bush's desk on 9/10/2001″
There is no evidence that the United States was planning to attack Afghanistan prior to 9/11. What possible strategic interest would the United States have had at stake in Afghanistan prior to September 11? If you think 9/11 was a pretext to attain some other objective, what was that objective, and why is it so hard to find? Furthermore, if it was planned, why wait until October 7 to put the plan into action-and then, why rely on the Northern Alliance to do the heavy lifting?
We have been at war in Afghanistan for 10 years now. To my knowledge, with the exception of the assassination of Bin Laden, the United States has achieved no significant strategic objective in the entire 10 years we've been at war there. Afghanistan is the poorest country in the world. It has no oil. It has no wealth. It has no resources. It is not a strategic location for bases. It's a bunch of rocks and inhospitable mountains. Great place for terrorist camps, but little else. The "pipeline" stuff was debunked in 2002, but even if it wasn't, how come, after 10 years of war there, this supposed "objective" has not yet been accomplished?
"6) when/why was PATRIOT act written "
This question is completely irrelevant to whether 9/11 was or was not an "inside job." Technically, the answer is, it was written by Congressional staffers, who write the vast majority of bills. The question is irrelevant, though, because, like many of your questions, whatever the answer is makes it no more or less likely that 9/11 was an "inside job." By asking the question you want to invite the conclusion that it must have been written beforehand and 9/11 was some sort of "pretext" to pass it. But you have no actual evidence that this occurred; you're just hoping someone connects the dots and reaches the conclusion you want.
For the record I think the PATRIOT Act is a terrible law that should be repealed. It should never have been passed, and I believe many of its key parts are unconstitutional. It may surprise you that this is my opinion of the PATRIOT Act. Truthers often have a difficult time reconciling statements such as this with their religious belief that because I don't believe 9/11 was an "inside job" that I must therefore unthinkingly accept everything the government does.
"8) why did Military lie (see Keane's book)"
Former 9/11 Commission member Thomas Keane does not, and never did, make the claim that anybody was covering up anything that could have altered the basic narrative of 9/11. Yes, he claimed military aides lied about certain things. But how do you get to the conclusion that what he thinks they were lying about must have been a conspiracy to "do" 9/11? There is no evidence of that. What were they lying about? Things much more petty than the underlying truth that Al-Qaeda did 9/11, I'm afraid. Bureaucracies don't like investigations showing up their incompetence, and there was a great deal of incompetence in the government regarding 9/11. This is what military officials were lying about-not whether Osama did or did not do it.
Furthermore, as I stated above, the propriety of the 9/11 Commission investigation is not very relevant to what we know about what happened on September 11. This question is a red herring.
By the way, you skipped number 7, but you have two question 9′s.
"9) why was evac proc not followed at Pentagon"
This is another silly question, irrelevant to the key facts of 9/11. I cannot confirm that it is even true-which leads me to suspect it's not-but even if it is, it falls in the same category as the imaginary "NORAD stand-down," insofar as, it can only point to something suspicious if (1) you understand correctly what the Pentagon's evacuation procedures were, and (2) you can trust, that in the confusion and chaos of the day, the only way those procedures could not have been followed is by a deliberate decision to impede them. If you want some more specific info on Pentagon responses that day, try this, about NORAD's scrambling of fighters to protect the Pentagon or this about the activities of Pentagon officials.
"9) why Able Danger destroyed?"
Another wasted question whose answer, regardless of what it is, does not and cannot affect the key pieces of evidence upon which our conclusions of 9/11 rest. The counterintelligence "Able Danger" project most likely did not, as many conspiracists believe, identify 9/11 hijackers before the disaster.yMore importantly, anything involving "Able Danger" is a rabbit hole-like your other questions, it's not very relevant. In order for it to be relevant, the same two untenable assumptions you've made in questions 1, 2 and your first question 9-that you understand what procedures should have been followed, and your certainty that the only reason they would not have been followed in this case was because of deliberate orders-must again support the weight of all the malfeasance you are trying to heap upon them. This is simply faulty reasoning.
I don't really care why Able Danger files were destroyed, if they were. How can that affect what happened on 9/11?
"10) why FBI never charge bin Laden w/ 911 or update poster even after death."
The answer to this question is so easy to find that I'm not even going to type it out. Go here (http://www.911myths.com/index.php/Connecting_bin_Laden_to_9-11) for a full explanation of this issue. This is another faulty question because it's a "sacred list" argument. (http://screwloosechange.blogspot.ca/2009/06/brand-new-sacred-list.html) It's silly to pin your hopes that 9/11 was a conspiracy on this flimsy reasoning, when you could be investigating the actual facts and conclusions upon which the narrative of 9/11 relies.
Conclusion
As I stated earlier in this article, my point in engaging you in this open letter is not to convince you that 9/11 was not an "inside job." I don't believe I can do that. I'm quite certain that you'll latch on to something in the Bazant article that you can trumpet as indicia of its unreliability, or perhaps you'll just claim that Bazant and the other authors are just government shills. However, I did get you to at least engage with a piece of scholarly peer-reviewed evidence that challenges the conspiracy claims-and in doing so, you've done more than most Truthers will ever do. I also explained why I present 9/11 material on Twitter and what I hope to accomplish by doing so. Most likely you'll disagree, or perhaps holler about this blog being some form of trickery or other evidence of my depravity, but that's fine-I get that a lot. As I've said on this blog before, debating 9/11 Truthers is largely a waste of time. The marginal benefits that may come as an indirect result of these debates, however, do have value.
You may be surprised to learn that I am myself a former conspiracy theorist. Virtually all "high-commitment" debunkers-meaning, people who, like me, expend considerable effort in refuting conspiracy theories-are former conspiracy theorists who realized how silly their beliefs were. I guess underlying all these words is a hope, distant and speculative to be sure, that maybe someday as priorities in your life change you will realize that some of the positions you once held are untenable. Maybe then you'll remember you once read a scientific article refuting controlled demolition, and you'll do a search for it to look it up again. It only takes one piece of factual information, one logical or incisive question, to crack the facade of conspiracist thinking.
To that end I will leave you with a video that I think encapsulates this phenomenon. Made by a former conspiracy theorist, it explains cogently and emotionally how and why he left the snake pit of "9/11 Truth." Again, you may not see much in this video now, but perhaps someday you will.
AUTISTIC SKEPTIC: The Great Seal Demystified
Author: Clock
Date: Jun 10, 2013 at 19:07
******IMPORTANT*********
BY AUTISTIC SKEPTIC
I am Clock, I am not the author of this article, I am simply reposting it as the authors blog went down.
Repeat, I am not Autistic Skeptic
Please enjoy,
Clock
****************************************
The great seal demystified.
[img]http://images.unurthed.com/Campbell-Great-Seal-of-the-United-States-127.jpg [/img]
Conspiracy beleivers will often point to the latin words on the reverse of the US $1 for evidence of a NWO. However, Let us use translations to debunk this.
1.annuit coeptis-agreed to undertakings
Details: It was Taken from the
Latin words annuo (third-person singular present or perfect annuit), "to nod" or "to approve", and coeptum (plural coepta), "commencement, undertaking", it is literally translated, "He approves (has approved) of the undertakings". Nothing to do with a NWO.
2.novo ordo seclorum- A new order of the ages.
The phrase Novus ordo seclorum (Latin for "New Order of the Ages") appears on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, first designed in 1782 and printed on the back of the United States one-dollar bill since 1935. The phrase also appears on the coat of arms of the Yale School of Management, Yale University's business school. The phrase is also mistranslated as "New World Order" by many people who believe in a conspiracy behind the design; however, it does directly translate to "New Order of the Ages"
The phrase is taken from the fourth Eclogue of Virgil, which contains a passage (lines 5-8) that reads:
Latin English
Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis ætas; Now comes the final era of the Sibyl's song;
Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo. The great order of the ages is born afresh.
iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna, And now justice returns, honored rules return;
iam nova progenies cælo demittitur alto. now a new lineage is sent down from high heaven.
The forms saecla, saeclorum etc. were normal alternatives to the more common saecula etc. throughout the history of Latin poetry and prose.
The form saeculorum is impossible in hexameter verse: the ae and o are long, the u short by position. For the medieval exchange between ae, æ and e, see Æ; the word medieval (mediæval) itself is another example.
Medieval Christians read Virgil's poem as a prophecy of the coming of Christ. The Augustan Age, although pre-Christian, was viewed as a golden age preparing the world for the coming of Christ. The great poets of this age were viewed as a source of revelation and light upon the Christian mysteries to come. The word seclorum does not mean "secular", as one might assume, but is the genitive (possessive) plural form of the word saeculum, meaning (in this context) generation, century, or age. Saeculum did come to mean "age, world" in late, Christian Latin, and "secular" is derived from it, through secularis. However, the adjective "secularis," meaning "worldly," is not equivalent to the genitive plural "seclorum," meaning "of the ages.Thus the motto Novus ordo seclorum can be translated as "A new order of the ages." It was proposed by Charles Thomson, the Latin expert who was involved in the design of the Great Seal of the United States, to signify "the beginning of the new American Era" as of the date of the Declaration of Independence. Now, The conspiracy believers will scramble the word definitions to make evidence for their case, However, Their supposed translation is highly innacurate. Here are the differences in translation.
World-mundi
Seclorum-ages
ACTUAL ENGLISH TO LATIN TRANSLATION OF NEW WORLD ORDER.
New World Order-mundus ordinem
I found no resources where mundus ordinem is found on the great seal at all. And, The eye on the Pyramid is NOT a masonic symbol nor has it ever been one.
Conclusion.
There is no dark subliminal mystery behind the Great seal, nor does it point towards a NWO.
BY AUTISTIC SKEPTIC
I am Clock, I am not the author of this article, I am simply reposting it as the authors blog went down.
Repeat, I am not Autistic Skeptic
Please enjoy,
Clock
****************************************
The great seal demystified.
[img]http://images.unurthed.com/Campbell-Great-Seal-of-the-United-States-127.jpg [/img]
Conspiracy beleivers will often point to the latin words on the reverse of the US $1 for evidence of a NWO. However, Let us use translations to debunk this.
1.annuit coeptis-agreed to undertakings
Details: It was Taken from the
Latin words annuo (third-person singular present or perfect annuit), "to nod" or "to approve", and coeptum (plural coepta), "commencement, undertaking", it is literally translated, "He approves (has approved) of the undertakings". Nothing to do with a NWO.
2.novo ordo seclorum- A new order of the ages.
The phrase Novus ordo seclorum (Latin for "New Order of the Ages") appears on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, first designed in 1782 and printed on the back of the United States one-dollar bill since 1935. The phrase also appears on the coat of arms of the Yale School of Management, Yale University's business school. The phrase is also mistranslated as "New World Order" by many people who believe in a conspiracy behind the design; however, it does directly translate to "New Order of the Ages"
The phrase is taken from the fourth Eclogue of Virgil, which contains a passage (lines 5-8) that reads:
Latin English
Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis ætas; Now comes the final era of the Sibyl's song;
Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo. The great order of the ages is born afresh.
iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna, And now justice returns, honored rules return;
iam nova progenies cælo demittitur alto. now a new lineage is sent down from high heaven.
The forms saecla, saeclorum etc. were normal alternatives to the more common saecula etc. throughout the history of Latin poetry and prose.
The form saeculorum is impossible in hexameter verse: the ae and o are long, the u short by position. For the medieval exchange between ae, æ and e, see Æ; the word medieval (mediæval) itself is another example.
Medieval Christians read Virgil's poem as a prophecy of the coming of Christ. The Augustan Age, although pre-Christian, was viewed as a golden age preparing the world for the coming of Christ. The great poets of this age were viewed as a source of revelation and light upon the Christian mysteries to come. The word seclorum does not mean "secular", as one might assume, but is the genitive (possessive) plural form of the word saeculum, meaning (in this context) generation, century, or age. Saeculum did come to mean "age, world" in late, Christian Latin, and "secular" is derived from it, through secularis. However, the adjective "secularis," meaning "worldly," is not equivalent to the genitive plural "seclorum," meaning "of the ages.Thus the motto Novus ordo seclorum can be translated as "A new order of the ages." It was proposed by Charles Thomson, the Latin expert who was involved in the design of the Great Seal of the United States, to signify "the beginning of the new American Era" as of the date of the Declaration of Independence. Now, The conspiracy believers will scramble the word definitions to make evidence for their case, However, Their supposed translation is highly innacurate. Here are the differences in translation.
World-mundi
Seclorum-ages
ACTUAL ENGLISH TO LATIN TRANSLATION OF NEW WORLD ORDER.
New World Order-mundus ordinem
I found no resources where mundus ordinem is found on the great seal at all. And, The eye on the Pyramid is NOT a masonic symbol nor has it ever been one.
Conclusion.
There is no dark subliminal mystery behind the Great seal, nor does it point towards a NWO.
MUERTOS BLOG: Albert Turi and 9/11
Author: Clock
Date: May 03, 2013 at 17:13
Ever heard of Albert Turi? Whether you have or not, he's a celebrity. He was formerly chief of the New York City Fire Department Bureau of Training. Here's what he looks like:
http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/NHYrWTxDbdw/mqdefault.jpg
Turi is most famous in the 9/11 conspiracist underground. On September 11, 2001, he evidently made a comment to NBC reporter Pat Dawson that has made him virtually Exhibit A in the conspiracists' claims that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by controlled demolition. Dawson's report goes something like this:
"....The Chief of Safety of the Fire Department of New York told me
that...er...shortly after 9 o'clock here had roughly 200 men in the
building trying to effect rescues of some of those civilians who were in
there...er... and that basically he received word of the possibility of
a secondary device, another bomb going off. He tried to get his men out
as quickly as he could but he said that there was another explosion
which took place and then an hour after the first hit here, the first
crash that took place, he said there was another explosion which took
place in one of the towers here."
This quote by a single NBC reporter is so ubiquitous and so central to the conspiracists' claims that, if you do a Google search for "Turi, Dawson, 9/11" you'll bring up hundreds of hits--almost all of them conspiracist web sites. The usual chicanery that passes for analysis of the issue holds that Turi's alleged statement, plus the real and genuine reports of numerous WTC survivors who reported hearing "explosions" in the towers after the plane strikes and before the tower collapses, is a convincing case of "controlled demolition." Alex Jones uses these claims as a central tenet of his film 9/11 Martial Law: Rise of the Police State, and his web site, www.prisonplanet.com, which is a home base for many net-based conspiracists. Time and time again I've had conspiracists direct me to these quotes and videos and then claim victory, that it is conclusive proof of a 9/11 conspiracy.
This belief is, to say the least, misplaced. In fact, the Turi quote and "bombs in the towers" testimony is nothing more than smoke and mirrors--here's why.
1. What did Albert Turi actually say?
If you pick apart what the conspiracists are actually relying on--and what little we know about what Albert Turi actually said--it's evident that the Turi quote is a very slender hook upon which to hang a massive conspiracy theory. First of all, Turi's statement comes to us through Dawson's report. Try this: do a Google search for "Albert Turi," as a phrase. Today I brought up 632 hits. Now try "'Albert Turi' -Dawson" (go to the Advanced Search page and look for "Albert Turi" but exclude pages containing the word "Dawson"). I got 156 hits. This off-the-cuffand unscientific analysis shows that 76% of the time his name is mentioned on Google-searchable engines, Turi's name appears in conjunction with Dawson's. Even most of the 24% of the remaining hits that I sampled randomly make reference to Turi in conjunction with being quoted--but never a direct quote. This demonstrates that, overwhelmingly, Turi's "testimony" comes from a single statement, made to a single reporter (Dawson), who did not even quote him directly.
The conspiracists are thus relying not on what Turi said--or even what they think Turi said--but what they think Pat Dawson thought Turi said, on one occasion, on one channel, once.
I've spent quite a long time over the past few days researching this matter, trying to find some account of Turi's exact and direct words. I was able to locate a badly-transcribed (probably OCA scanned) transcript of an interview of Mr. Turi with Tom McCourt, NYC Fire Department, on October 23, 2001. [1] This appears to be the only public statement in which Mr. Turi speaks for himself--i.e., not being quoted by Pat Dawson. Here is what that transcript reveals that he said about the matter of "explosions" (emphasis added):
"Then Steve Mosiello, Chief Ganci's executive assistant, came over to the command post and he said we're getting reports from OEM that the buildings are not structurally sound, and of course that got our attention really quick, and Pete said, well, who are we getting these reports from? And then Steve brought an EMT person over to the command post who was I think sent as a runner to tell us this and Chief Ganci questioned him, where are we getting these reports? And his answer was something, you know, we're not sure, OEM is just reporting this...
"The next thing I heard was Pete say what the f*ck is this? And as my eyes traveled up the building, and I was looking at the south tower, somewhere about halfway up, my initial reaction was there was a secondary explosion, and the entire floor area, a ring right around the building blew out. I later realized that the building had started to collapse already and this was the air being compressed and that is the floor that let go. And as my eyes traveled further up the building, I realized that this building was collapsing and I turned around and most everybody was ahead of me running for the garage, and I remember thinking I looked at this thing a little bit too long and I might not make this garage. But I did."
There you have it--Turi in his own words. "My initial reaction." And the crucial qualifier: "I later realized that the building had started to collapse already." This is the great hook upon which hangs the conspiracists' claims of controlled demolition. If you read the full interview, you'll see that nowhere does Albert Turi ever make the allegation that there were bombs in the World Trade Center. Nor is his story inconsistent with what he appears to have told Pat Dawson. If he was reporting his initial reaction to Dawson, that would fit squarely with his interview on October 23, 2001. Ignoring the obvious question--why do the conspiracists trust an NBC reporter, Pat Dawson, to quote Turi accurately--it becomes even more bizarre when you realize that Turi was not even talking about controlled demolition, nor does he seem to have had that feeling on the morning of 9/11.
Adding insult to injury, the conspiracist website www.911review.com twists and mangles this exact quote from this exact same interview. [2] To hear 911review.com tell it, Turi said this:
"And as my eyes traveled up the building, and I was looking at the south tower, somewhere about halfway up, my initial reaction was there was a secondary explosion, and the entire floor area, a ring right around the building blew out."
But you can see from my own more expansive quote from the interview (click here to read it again if you need to), Turi did not say that--the crucial words "I realized that the building had started to collapse already" have been carefully excised. Why is 911review.com playing spurious games with quotes? Could it be because Turi's "testimony" is at the very center of the controlled demolition claim, and to reveal that he doesn't seem to support that view would be to strike at one of the very sacred cows of the 9/11 conspiracist movement?
2. Why hasn't Turi spoken up more forcefully?
As you can see from my own investigation of Turi's presence on the web, Mr. Turi himself has evidently not exerted himself to any great degree to clarify or reinforce his comment to Mr. Dawson on the morning of 9/11/01. I had to search pretty hard to find the full McCourt-Turi interview, and recognizing it among the chaff of the oft-repeated Dawson story was a tedious task. Why hasn't Mr. Turi spoken up--either to clarify that he did mean to suggest there were bombs in the WTC towers, or that he did not mean that at all?
The conspiracists will likely attribute Mr. Turi's reluctance to come forward to sinister motives: Alex Jones, in fact, in 9/11 Martial Law makes the claim (which he does not substantiate) that firefighters' comments about "controlled demolition" have been suppressed by some shadowy arm of officialdom. This, however, is speculation, not fact. If Turi did believe in the "controlled demolition" theory, and the powers-that-be wanted to suppress him, why then was he allowed to be interviewed by Mr. McCourt, and why was the transcript of that interview published by the New York Times? There is not a shred of evidence that Mr. Turi has been threatened or otherwise silenced--in the absence of any such hard evidence, a claim of "official suppression" only makes sense if you already believe there is a conspiracy. Since belief in the conspiracy departs largely from the Turi misquote in the first place, this strikes me as an example of circular reasoning.
From what limited information I was able to gather about him on the web, Mr. Turi is now retired from public service. I have no doubt that he has probably received hundreds of letters from conspiracy researchers asking him to elaborate on his statements to Mr. Dawson. If he's one of their golden boys, surely somebody has tried to get him to go on record to support their case. It seems fair to guess that if Mr. Turi had ever granted an interview or public statement to a researcher on this matter, and his response supported the notion that his comment to Mr. Dawson meant that he was talking specifically about controlled demolition, you would find that statement commanding prominent attention on sites like www.prisonplanet.com. I wish to ask the conspiracists, then, if it is at least possible that maybe he has declined to answer any such queries because he doesn't want to bother feeding speculation, and that he said everything he had to say to Mr. McCourt in October 2001? To the extent we can or should read anything into Mr. Turi's low profile, is this not at least as fair a guess as the "suppression" claim?
3. What about all that other "explosion" testimony?
The conspiracists' love "explosion" stories, and the fervor with which they've repeated and misattributed Turi's alleged quote to Pat Dawson seems to bear this out. I would not be surprised if a criticism of this blog turns out to be, "Well, what about all those other witnesses who claim to have heard 'explosions' prior to the towers' collapse?" I am, in fact, preparing a separate blog on that very subject, but in a nutshell the argument is this: how do you know that these witness reports are inconsistent with the "official story"?
Let's assume Mr. Turi did hear what he thought was an explosion in the South Tower before its collapse, and that he intended to convey that message to Mr. Dawson. Under the circumstances that were then occurring in the burning and almost-ready-to-collapse South Tower, is it logical to maintain that the only possible source of any sound that could be described as an "explosion" is, in fact, a demolition charge? This is the fatal error, isn't it? The conspiracists wish us to believe that there is no possibility that a 1000+ ft burning skyscraper, which has been struck by a jetliner and has been raked by fire and damage up and down its height (particularly through the elevator shafts), is an environment in which either (a) explosions cannot actually occur from some cause other than demolition charges, and (b) that no other sounds can occur which witnesses can reliably describe as "explosions." In fact, the "explosion" testimony is incredibly consistent--witnesses say over and over again "I heard an explosion" or "it sounded like an explosion" or "it sounded like a bomb went off." Indeed, if you heard a big bang in a tall building, how else would you describe what it sounded like?
If the towers were standing still--if they had not been struck by airplanes, if they were structurally stable and there were no fires or other structural traumas to the buildings--it would be eminently logical to assume than an explosion-like sound may come from a bomb or some other explosive device. But the towers were not standing still. They had been struck by planes. They were on fire. Debris was collapsing from the top, both internally and externally. Their structural integrity was in serious question--as Turi's full October interview shows was very apparent. The conspiracists insist that, even under these extreme conditions, an explosion (or any sound that witnesses can interpret as an explosion) would not have occurred--but they do not explain why, because they can't. When you make the error of assuming that, for purposes of determining the likely cause of an explosion, a burning structurally-unsound skyscraper is the same as a building to which there has been no such trauma, it's easy to conclude that the "explosion" testimony can point to nothing but controlled demolition. This is the mistake every believer in the controlled demolition theory has made--and the mistake that few of them realize they've made. This will be covered in more depth in a future blog.
Albert Turi is not the spokesman for a conspiracy; while we may never know, it seems likely that he does not believe there was a conspiracy to blow up the World Trade Centers. Yet it's likely he will remain prominent in 9/11 conspiracy lore for years to come. As usual I expect to make no converts with this blog, and I may likely make even more enemies. But it seems to me that somebody should be standing up to protest how grotesequely this man's words have been twisted to serve as support for a bizarre adventure into the netherwords of illogic and paranoia.
Mr. Turi, my hats off to you, and thank you for your service to New York and the nation.
***********
Sources
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/Turi_Albert.txt
[2] http://www.911review.com/coverup/oralhistories.html
http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/NHYrWTxDbdw/mqdefault.jpg
Turi is most famous in the 9/11 conspiracist underground. On September 11, 2001, he evidently made a comment to NBC reporter Pat Dawson that has made him virtually Exhibit A in the conspiracists' claims that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by controlled demolition. Dawson's report goes something like this:
"....The Chief of Safety of the Fire Department of New York told me
that...er...shortly after 9 o'clock here had roughly 200 men in the
building trying to effect rescues of some of those civilians who were in
there...er... and that basically he received word of the possibility of
a secondary device, another bomb going off. He tried to get his men out
as quickly as he could but he said that there was another explosion
which took place and then an hour after the first hit here, the first
crash that took place, he said there was another explosion which took
place in one of the towers here."
This quote by a single NBC reporter is so ubiquitous and so central to the conspiracists' claims that, if you do a Google search for "Turi, Dawson, 9/11" you'll bring up hundreds of hits--almost all of them conspiracist web sites. The usual chicanery that passes for analysis of the issue holds that Turi's alleged statement, plus the real and genuine reports of numerous WTC survivors who reported hearing "explosions" in the towers after the plane strikes and before the tower collapses, is a convincing case of "controlled demolition." Alex Jones uses these claims as a central tenet of his film 9/11 Martial Law: Rise of the Police State, and his web site, www.prisonplanet.com, which is a home base for many net-based conspiracists. Time and time again I've had conspiracists direct me to these quotes and videos and then claim victory, that it is conclusive proof of a 9/11 conspiracy.
This belief is, to say the least, misplaced. In fact, the Turi quote and "bombs in the towers" testimony is nothing more than smoke and mirrors--here's why.
1. What did Albert Turi actually say?
If you pick apart what the conspiracists are actually relying on--and what little we know about what Albert Turi actually said--it's evident that the Turi quote is a very slender hook upon which to hang a massive conspiracy theory. First of all, Turi's statement comes to us through Dawson's report. Try this: do a Google search for "Albert Turi," as a phrase. Today I brought up 632 hits. Now try "'Albert Turi' -Dawson" (go to the Advanced Search page and look for "Albert Turi" but exclude pages containing the word "Dawson"). I got 156 hits. This off-the-cuffand unscientific analysis shows that 76% of the time his name is mentioned on Google-searchable engines, Turi's name appears in conjunction with Dawson's. Even most of the 24% of the remaining hits that I sampled randomly make reference to Turi in conjunction with being quoted--but never a direct quote. This demonstrates that, overwhelmingly, Turi's "testimony" comes from a single statement, made to a single reporter (Dawson), who did not even quote him directly.
The conspiracists are thus relying not on what Turi said--or even what they think Turi said--but what they think Pat Dawson thought Turi said, on one occasion, on one channel, once.
I've spent quite a long time over the past few days researching this matter, trying to find some account of Turi's exact and direct words. I was able to locate a badly-transcribed (probably OCA scanned) transcript of an interview of Mr. Turi with Tom McCourt, NYC Fire Department, on October 23, 2001. [1] This appears to be the only public statement in which Mr. Turi speaks for himself--i.e., not being quoted by Pat Dawson. Here is what that transcript reveals that he said about the matter of "explosions" (emphasis added):
"Then Steve Mosiello, Chief Ganci's executive assistant, came over to the command post and he said we're getting reports from OEM that the buildings are not structurally sound, and of course that got our attention really quick, and Pete said, well, who are we getting these reports from? And then Steve brought an EMT person over to the command post who was I think sent as a runner to tell us this and Chief Ganci questioned him, where are we getting these reports? And his answer was something, you know, we're not sure, OEM is just reporting this...
"The next thing I heard was Pete say what the f*ck is this? And as my eyes traveled up the building, and I was looking at the south tower, somewhere about halfway up, my initial reaction was there was a secondary explosion, and the entire floor area, a ring right around the building blew out. I later realized that the building had started to collapse already and this was the air being compressed and that is the floor that let go. And as my eyes traveled further up the building, I realized that this building was collapsing and I turned around and most everybody was ahead of me running for the garage, and I remember thinking I looked at this thing a little bit too long and I might not make this garage. But I did."
There you have it--Turi in his own words. "My initial reaction." And the crucial qualifier: "I later realized that the building had started to collapse already." This is the great hook upon which hangs the conspiracists' claims of controlled demolition. If you read the full interview, you'll see that nowhere does Albert Turi ever make the allegation that there were bombs in the World Trade Center. Nor is his story inconsistent with what he appears to have told Pat Dawson. If he was reporting his initial reaction to Dawson, that would fit squarely with his interview on October 23, 2001. Ignoring the obvious question--why do the conspiracists trust an NBC reporter, Pat Dawson, to quote Turi accurately--it becomes even more bizarre when you realize that Turi was not even talking about controlled demolition, nor does he seem to have had that feeling on the morning of 9/11.
Adding insult to injury, the conspiracist website www.911review.com twists and mangles this exact quote from this exact same interview. [2] To hear 911review.com tell it, Turi said this:
"And as my eyes traveled up the building, and I was looking at the south tower, somewhere about halfway up, my initial reaction was there was a secondary explosion, and the entire floor area, a ring right around the building blew out."
But you can see from my own more expansive quote from the interview (click here to read it again if you need to), Turi did not say that--the crucial words "I realized that the building had started to collapse already" have been carefully excised. Why is 911review.com playing spurious games with quotes? Could it be because Turi's "testimony" is at the very center of the controlled demolition claim, and to reveal that he doesn't seem to support that view would be to strike at one of the very sacred cows of the 9/11 conspiracist movement?
2. Why hasn't Turi spoken up more forcefully?
As you can see from my own investigation of Turi's presence on the web, Mr. Turi himself has evidently not exerted himself to any great degree to clarify or reinforce his comment to Mr. Dawson on the morning of 9/11/01. I had to search pretty hard to find the full McCourt-Turi interview, and recognizing it among the chaff of the oft-repeated Dawson story was a tedious task. Why hasn't Mr. Turi spoken up--either to clarify that he did mean to suggest there were bombs in the WTC towers, or that he did not mean that at all?
The conspiracists will likely attribute Mr. Turi's reluctance to come forward to sinister motives: Alex Jones, in fact, in 9/11 Martial Law makes the claim (which he does not substantiate) that firefighters' comments about "controlled demolition" have been suppressed by some shadowy arm of officialdom. This, however, is speculation, not fact. If Turi did believe in the "controlled demolition" theory, and the powers-that-be wanted to suppress him, why then was he allowed to be interviewed by Mr. McCourt, and why was the transcript of that interview published by the New York Times? There is not a shred of evidence that Mr. Turi has been threatened or otherwise silenced--in the absence of any such hard evidence, a claim of "official suppression" only makes sense if you already believe there is a conspiracy. Since belief in the conspiracy departs largely from the Turi misquote in the first place, this strikes me as an example of circular reasoning.
From what limited information I was able to gather about him on the web, Mr. Turi is now retired from public service. I have no doubt that he has probably received hundreds of letters from conspiracy researchers asking him to elaborate on his statements to Mr. Dawson. If he's one of their golden boys, surely somebody has tried to get him to go on record to support their case. It seems fair to guess that if Mr. Turi had ever granted an interview or public statement to a researcher on this matter, and his response supported the notion that his comment to Mr. Dawson meant that he was talking specifically about controlled demolition, you would find that statement commanding prominent attention on sites like www.prisonplanet.com. I wish to ask the conspiracists, then, if it is at least possible that maybe he has declined to answer any such queries because he doesn't want to bother feeding speculation, and that he said everything he had to say to Mr. McCourt in October 2001? To the extent we can or should read anything into Mr. Turi's low profile, is this not at least as fair a guess as the "suppression" claim?
3. What about all that other "explosion" testimony?
The conspiracists' love "explosion" stories, and the fervor with which they've repeated and misattributed Turi's alleged quote to Pat Dawson seems to bear this out. I would not be surprised if a criticism of this blog turns out to be, "Well, what about all those other witnesses who claim to have heard 'explosions' prior to the towers' collapse?" I am, in fact, preparing a separate blog on that very subject, but in a nutshell the argument is this: how do you know that these witness reports are inconsistent with the "official story"?
Let's assume Mr. Turi did hear what he thought was an explosion in the South Tower before its collapse, and that he intended to convey that message to Mr. Dawson. Under the circumstances that were then occurring in the burning and almost-ready-to-collapse South Tower, is it logical to maintain that the only possible source of any sound that could be described as an "explosion" is, in fact, a demolition charge? This is the fatal error, isn't it? The conspiracists wish us to believe that there is no possibility that a 1000+ ft burning skyscraper, which has been struck by a jetliner and has been raked by fire and damage up and down its height (particularly through the elevator shafts), is an environment in which either (a) explosions cannot actually occur from some cause other than demolition charges, and (b) that no other sounds can occur which witnesses can reliably describe as "explosions." In fact, the "explosion" testimony is incredibly consistent--witnesses say over and over again "I heard an explosion" or "it sounded like an explosion" or "it sounded like a bomb went off." Indeed, if you heard a big bang in a tall building, how else would you describe what it sounded like?
If the towers were standing still--if they had not been struck by airplanes, if they were structurally stable and there were no fires or other structural traumas to the buildings--it would be eminently logical to assume than an explosion-like sound may come from a bomb or some other explosive device. But the towers were not standing still. They had been struck by planes. They were on fire. Debris was collapsing from the top, both internally and externally. Their structural integrity was in serious question--as Turi's full October interview shows was very apparent. The conspiracists insist that, even under these extreme conditions, an explosion (or any sound that witnesses can interpret as an explosion) would not have occurred--but they do not explain why, because they can't. When you make the error of assuming that, for purposes of determining the likely cause of an explosion, a burning structurally-unsound skyscraper is the same as a building to which there has been no such trauma, it's easy to conclude that the "explosion" testimony can point to nothing but controlled demolition. This is the mistake every believer in the controlled demolition theory has made--and the mistake that few of them realize they've made. This will be covered in more depth in a future blog.
Albert Turi is not the spokesman for a conspiracy; while we may never know, it seems likely that he does not believe there was a conspiracy to blow up the World Trade Centers. Yet it's likely he will remain prominent in 9/11 conspiracy lore for years to come. As usual I expect to make no converts with this blog, and I may likely make even more enemies. But it seems to me that somebody should be standing up to protest how grotesequely this man's words have been twisted to serve as support for a bizarre adventure into the netherwords of illogic and paranoia.
Mr. Turi, my hats off to you, and thank you for your service to New York and the nation.
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Sources
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/Turi_Albert.txt
[2] http://www.911review.com/coverup/oralhistories.html