Page By Category
Blogs - Conspiracies - Page 8
Users that have been posting for a while can create their own articles on the fly by using our built-in blogging service. Below are the most recent entries.
George Orwell's 1984: Conspiracy Theorists' Favorite Book
Author: Muertos
Date: May 31, 2010 at 20:01
By Muertos (muertos@gmail.com)
In previous blogs I've dealt with the fundamental failure of most conspiracy theorists to understand science, their ignorance of the hierarchy of sources and basic epistemology, and their contempt for intellectualism and the academic process. In this blog I'm going to examine why their appreciation of literature is equally faulty, by looking into the distortions that conspiracy theorists commit when discussing their favorite novel, that being Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. (Note: the title is usually spelled out, but for ease of writing I'm going to use the numerical title, 1984).
What the Book Is
1984 is one of the most famous pieces of literature in the English language. Originally published in 1949, it was written by George Orwell, a democratic socialist, not long before his death from tuberculosis. The novel is a classic dystopian story set in what was for Orwell the future. Depicting a grim life under a totalitarian state, ruled by a possibly nonexistent figurehead leader called Big Brother, the novel is the story of Winston Smith, with roughly the first half of the book chronicling his life in a bleak London where history is routinely rewritten to validate predictions of the ruling Party and most human emotions are discouraged. In the second half of the book Smith falls in love with a woman, Julia, and joins what he thinks is a resistance movement to the Party, but what turns out to be merely a deception to capture and brainwash him into mindless subservience to the state.
Why Conspiracy Theorists Love It
References to 1984 or the word coined after its author--Orwellian--are ubiquitous in popular culture today, but if a conspiracy theorist throws something from 1984 at you, chances are he (or, rarely, she) is a believer in various "puppetmaster" conspiracy theories, chief among them the New World Order or Illuminati, supposedly a cabal of powerful people who are secretly trying to rule the world. CTs of this stripe are often, but not always, fans of radio talkshow host Alex Jones, who routinely decries that American society is proceeding inexorably toward a future that resembles the bleak world of Orwell's book. Conspiracy theorists love to point out things from 1984 that they assert are happening today, and most of them who cite the book believe that by successfully identifying Orwellian features of real life, that this somehow bolsters their claims about a totalitarian future looming on the horizon, usually imminently.
Why They're Wrong
Citing anything from 1984 to support a conspiratorial viewpoint is emotionally appealing, but it's based on two assumptions: first, that 1984 was intended to be a prediction of the future; and second, that proof of anything in the book coming true necessarily means it is more likely that all of the book's predictions will eventually come true. As we will see, both assumptions are baseless.
1. 1984 Was Not Intended to Predict the Future!
1984 was not and never was intended to be predictive of the future. It's easy to understand why it is assumed to be predictive, however: even upon its original release the book was marketed as science fiction, and it took place in a time nearly forty years ahead of when Orwell wrote it. Any writer or creative artist who tries to envision the future, especially if he or she picks a specific point in the future to describe, will naturally be judged by how good those predictions turn out to be. Case in point: Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey was not originally offered as a specific "I believe this will happen" prediction when it was made in 1968, but it contained a great deal of predictive elements, such as Pan-Am Airlines offering commercial flights to the moon and Ma Bell providing picture-phone services. 1984, on the other hand, was offered as a cautionary tale, with Orwell saying in effect, "This is one possibility of where unregulated state power might lead."
It is also important to put this statement in context. Orwell was a socialist--something Alex Jones will not tell you--and believed heavily that Great Britain and the United States should adopt a political system based on the ideal of economic and social equality. Writing in the 1940s, when Stalin was in power in the USSR and World War II had largely decimated European leftist movements, Orwell was frustrated that an experiment that should have turned out well, the Russian Revolution, had been betrayed by totalitarian mindsets. (That's exactly what his other famous book, Animal Farm, is also about). He was not arguing for American-style democracy and capitalism, and he was certainly not arguing for the type of neo-conservative or Libertarian-leaning principles espoused by people like Alex Jones. If anything Orwell wanted to return socialism to its idealistic roots.
I first read 1984 actually in the year 1984, when I was 12 years old. Of course I didn't understand it, and I thought it was science fiction intending to predict the future. I still have my very first copy of 1984, which I've read and loved so much it's literally falling apart. Curiously, my version--put out by Signet Paperbacks in 1959--reinforced the illusion that 1984 was predictive. Here's the write-up on the back of the book:
Somehow I doubt Orwell would have approved of this synopsis, which, much like conspiracy theorists do, totally misses the ideological context of how and why he wrote the book in the first place. In fact Orwell himself wrote this shortly after the publication of the book:
Add to this the fact that the nature of the world and of politics has changed radically since 1949, rendering the political criticism of the book largely moot. Socialism and classic leftist politics departed the scene for the most part in the 1989-91 collapse of the Soviet bloc, so 1984's main point is no longer contemporary. That means that what people who read it today are most likely to get out of it are things that they think are intended as predictive.
Naturally, context and intent is totally absent in the world of conspiracy theories. For conspiracy theorists 1984 is a very simple book to understand: Orwell was gazing into a crystal ball and predicting a totalitarian future that, to conspiracy theorists, looks alarmingly like their own New World Order fantasies.
2. Pointing To Something In 1984 That You Think "Came True" Does Not Mean The Totality Of The Book's Vision Is More Likely To Happen.
Once conspiracy theorists are done mischaracterizing 1984 as a crystal ball prediction and Orwell as some sort of futurist soothsayer, the quote mining begins in earnest. Conspiracy theorists love to plumb the depths of Orwell's book and unearth gems that they claim are either true today in our society or are in the process of becoming reality, and somehow these quote-mined items are supposed to prove them correct that a New World Order is coming. The most common elements of 1984 misused by conspiracy theorists include:
These are by no means the only tropes claimed by conspiracy theorists to be "true" or "coming true," and I'm quite sure I'll get comments or hate mail on this blog from conspiracists saying, "Yeah, but what about this..." and the like. This list is intended to be illustrative, not comprehensive.
The point is this: even if any item supposedly "predicted" in 1984 has become true today--which is usually not the case anyway--that does not mean that we are headed for the grim totalitarian future that Orwell describes in the book! Believing so is absolutely absurd, but it makes sense to conspiracy theorists because they are passionate believers in the "slippery slope" argument. Any incremental step down a particular road must and always will, by definition, lead to the most extreme consequence of that step. Conspiracy theorists never accept the possibility that if a heavy-handed law happens to be passed, that one day it might be repealed or overturned by a court decision, or, if it's left in place, that it might not be subsequently followed by more heavy-handed tactics. To them, step one of the process of totalitarian control is tantamount to the completed process itself.
Two real-world examples illustrate the idiocy of this belief. First, in 1798, four bills called the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President John Adams. The law authorized the President to deport or detain certain persons without due process, and also forbade publication of writings critical of the government. Clearly these were heavy-handed acts that scandalously violated the Bill of Rights. How come Obama isn't throwing Tea Partiers in jail today as a result of this law? Because it expired on March 3, 1801, and was never re-enacted; furthermore, the acts became a huge political issue in the elections of 1800 and would have been politically impossible to resurrect.
Second: during World War II the administration of Franklin Roosevelt interned thousands of people of Japanese descent, many of them American citizens, in internment camps on the West Coast. The Japanese internment was one of the most egregious and shameful actions ever undertaken by the U.S. government and remains a serious blight on the historical record of Roosevelt, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, which found the detentions legal in the decision Korematsu v. United States. (323 U.S. 214 (1944)). Why didn't the Japanese internment lead to totalitarianism across the board? Because the practice was discontinued in 1945 when the war ended. In fact, the U.S. government has paid reparations to people who were interned and their families--ironically a process begun (albeit shamefully late) by the first President Bush, who conspiracy theorists universally identify as an architect of the "New World Order" mainly because of his use of those words in a speech in 1991.
In a democratic society--and even in non-democratic ones--government power and the relationship of the populace to its government is constantly changing. In the United States, despite the frequent and loud cries to the contrary, the Constitution is still law, and the government still respects it; every single day, federal courts decide against the government in multitudes of criminal and civil actions. In a few minutes I'll post this blog without having to vet it through any government (or non-governmental) process whatsoever, and the conspiracy theorists who will reply angrily to it and send me hate mail about it (my address is muertos@gmail.com) will not have to have their incendiary comments approved either. Even in highly repressive societies, such as Iran, political discourse and checks and balances against government power occur all the time, sometimes violently. The "slippery slope to totalitarianism" argument is, like nearly all arguments made by conspiracy theorists, totally and willfully ignorant of how the world really works. It's insultingly simplistic, as well as offensively shallow. But, because it's easy and has emotional appeal, conspiracy theorists continue to resort to it.
Have They Even Read It?
Conspiracy theorists are usually very lazy when it comes to real learning and knowledge. They cut and paste their arguments from conspiracist websites, they parrot Alex Jones reflexively, and they think YouTube is a reliable source to back up their claims. It's not surprising, then, that many conspiracy theorists who are out there claiming "1984 is coming true!" haven't actually read the book, or, if they have, didn't understand what they read.
Case in point: the ConspiracyScience forum was, a few months ago, visited by a young person who was obviously a firm believer in the New World Order conspiracy theories, and he occasionally mentioned 1984 or Orwellian concepts in his arguments that these theories are true or are coming true. When questioned as to how he got his conspiratorial mindset, the young man replied that he was heavily influenced by his older brother, who he claimed watched the movie version of 1984 every day. (There have been two movie versions of the book, but I assume he means the one directed by Michael Radford which starred John Hurt and Richard Burton, which was released in the actual year 1984). I don't know whether the brother had actually read 1984 or just seen the movie, but it's a fair assumption that a lot of people who claim "1984 is coming true!" are familiar only with adaptations or excerpts from the book, and haven't actually read the real thing.
1984 is not an easy read. I didn't get it when I first read it at age 12, and it was not until years later and repeated readings that I began to understand what the real message of the book is and why Orwell wrote it. It's a lot more subtle than just "totalitarianism is bad." Like all good literature, 1984 is very deep and rich with meaning, and a full understanding of it is not possible without delving beneath the superficial qualities to which our popular culture has reduced it. The simple truth is, many of the people citing 1984 don't really understand it.
Another example: do you remember this famous ad from the 2008 Presidential campaign, created by an Obama supporter while he and Hillary Clinton were dueling for the Democratic nomination? That ad was a cultural phenomenon, but even many of the people who enjoyed it probably didn't realize that it was a mashup of a real TV commercial for Apple's Macintosh computer. This was a very famous commercial, directed by Alien and Gladiator director Ridley Scott (here it is) which is clearly intended to evoke Orwell's book. (It was also actually produced in the real year 1984). When you hear 1984, it is probably these images, or ones like them, that spring immediately to mind, not the intricacies of the novel itself. So here we have Orwell's original complicated message being diluted as a tool to sell a computer, and then diluted again as a campaign stunt to support a political candidate. What is it that you think you remember about 1984: the original, or the various dilutions?
Conclusion
Conspiracy theorists love to cite 1984 as supposed "proof" that their predictions of a grim totalitarian future are either already true or are likely to become true. However, their use of Orwell's novel betrays a grotesque misunderstanding of the book, a complete ignorance of its true context and purpose, and a fundamental abortion of logic in the form of the "slippery slope to totalitarianism" argument. As with everything else conspiracy theorists do, it's a botched job from start to finish.
So the next time a conspiracy theorist tries to throw 1984 at you, ask them first, "Have you actually read it, or did you just see the Apple commercial?", and then ask them to back up their assertions with fact and with logic. As the conspiracy theorist tries and utterly fails to provide fact and logic, you may hear a rhythmic pounding sound in the background, which is undoubtedly the sound of a horrified George Orwell hammering on his coffin in outrage.
[ Please discuss this post on the forums. ]
In previous blogs I've dealt with the fundamental failure of most conspiracy theorists to understand science, their ignorance of the hierarchy of sources and basic epistemology, and their contempt for intellectualism and the academic process. In this blog I'm going to examine why their appreciation of literature is equally faulty, by looking into the distortions that conspiracy theorists commit when discussing their favorite novel, that being Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. (Note: the title is usually spelled out, but for ease of writing I'm going to use the numerical title, 1984).
What the Book Is
1984 is one of the most famous pieces of literature in the English language. Originally published in 1949, it was written by George Orwell, a democratic socialist, not long before his death from tuberculosis. The novel is a classic dystopian story set in what was for Orwell the future. Depicting a grim life under a totalitarian state, ruled by a possibly nonexistent figurehead leader called Big Brother, the novel is the story of Winston Smith, with roughly the first half of the book chronicling his life in a bleak London where history is routinely rewritten to validate predictions of the ruling Party and most human emotions are discouraged. In the second half of the book Smith falls in love with a woman, Julia, and joins what he thinks is a resistance movement to the Party, but what turns out to be merely a deception to capture and brainwash him into mindless subservience to the state.
Why Conspiracy Theorists Love It
References to 1984 or the word coined after its author--Orwellian--are ubiquitous in popular culture today, but if a conspiracy theorist throws something from 1984 at you, chances are he (or, rarely, she) is a believer in various "puppetmaster" conspiracy theories, chief among them the New World Order or Illuminati, supposedly a cabal of powerful people who are secretly trying to rule the world. CTs of this stripe are often, but not always, fans of radio talkshow host Alex Jones, who routinely decries that American society is proceeding inexorably toward a future that resembles the bleak world of Orwell's book. Conspiracy theorists love to point out things from 1984 that they assert are happening today, and most of them who cite the book believe that by successfully identifying Orwellian features of real life, that this somehow bolsters their claims about a totalitarian future looming on the horizon, usually imminently.
Why They're Wrong
Citing anything from 1984 to support a conspiratorial viewpoint is emotionally appealing, but it's based on two assumptions: first, that 1984 was intended to be a prediction of the future; and second, that proof of anything in the book coming true necessarily means it is more likely that all of the book's predictions will eventually come true. As we will see, both assumptions are baseless.
1. 1984 Was Not Intended to Predict the Future!
1984 was not and never was intended to be predictive of the future. It's easy to understand why it is assumed to be predictive, however: even upon its original release the book was marketed as science fiction, and it took place in a time nearly forty years ahead of when Orwell wrote it. Any writer or creative artist who tries to envision the future, especially if he or she picks a specific point in the future to describe, will naturally be judged by how good those predictions turn out to be. Case in point: Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey was not originally offered as a specific "I believe this will happen" prediction when it was made in 1968, but it contained a great deal of predictive elements, such as Pan-Am Airlines offering commercial flights to the moon and Ma Bell providing picture-phone services. 1984, on the other hand, was offered as a cautionary tale, with Orwell saying in effect, "This is one possibility of where unregulated state power might lead."
It is also important to put this statement in context. Orwell was a socialist--something Alex Jones will not tell you--and believed heavily that Great Britain and the United States should adopt a political system based on the ideal of economic and social equality. Writing in the 1940s, when Stalin was in power in the USSR and World War II had largely decimated European leftist movements, Orwell was frustrated that an experiment that should have turned out well, the Russian Revolution, had been betrayed by totalitarian mindsets. (That's exactly what his other famous book, Animal Farm, is also about). He was not arguing for American-style democracy and capitalism, and he was certainly not arguing for the type of neo-conservative or Libertarian-leaning principles espoused by people like Alex Jones. If anything Orwell wanted to return socialism to its idealistic roots.
I first read 1984 actually in the year 1984, when I was 12 years old. Of course I didn't understand it, and I thought it was science fiction intending to predict the future. I still have my very first copy of 1984, which I've read and loved so much it's literally falling apart. Curiously, my version--put out by Signet Paperbacks in 1959--reinforced the illusion that 1984 was predictive. Here's the write-up on the back of the book:
"Which One Will YOU Be in the Year 1984?
PROLETARIAN--Considered inferior and kept in total ignorance, you'll be fed lies from the Ministry of Truth, eliminated upon signs of promise or ability!
POLICE GUARD--Chosen for lack of intelligence but superior brawn, you'll be suspicious of everyone and be ready to give your life for Big Brother, the leader you've never even seen!
PARTY MEMBER, MALE--Faceless, mindless, a flesh-and-blood robot with a push-button brain, you're denied love by law, taught hate by the flick of a switch!
PARTY MEMBER, FEMALE--A member of the Anti-Sex League from birth, your duty will be to smother all human emotion, and your children might not be your husband's!
Unbelievable? You'll feel differently after you've read this best-selling book of forbidden love and terror in a world many of us will live to see!"
Somehow I doubt Orwell would have approved of this synopsis, which, much like conspiracy theorists do, totally misses the ideological context of how and why he wrote the book in the first place. In fact Orwell himself wrote this shortly after the publication of the book:
"My recent novel is not intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter), but as a show-up of the perversions . . . which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism."
Add to this the fact that the nature of the world and of politics has changed radically since 1949, rendering the political criticism of the book largely moot. Socialism and classic leftist politics departed the scene for the most part in the 1989-91 collapse of the Soviet bloc, so 1984's main point is no longer contemporary. That means that what people who read it today are most likely to get out of it are things that they think are intended as predictive.
Naturally, context and intent is totally absent in the world of conspiracy theories. For conspiracy theorists 1984 is a very simple book to understand: Orwell was gazing into a crystal ball and predicting a totalitarian future that, to conspiracy theorists, looks alarmingly like their own New World Order fantasies.
2. Pointing To Something In 1984 That You Think "Came True" Does Not Mean The Totality Of The Book's Vision Is More Likely To Happen.
Once conspiracy theorists are done mischaracterizing 1984 as a crystal ball prediction and Orwell as some sort of futurist soothsayer, the quote mining begins in earnest. Conspiracy theorists love to plumb the depths of Orwell's book and unearth gems that they claim are either true today in our society or are in the process of becoming reality, and somehow these quote-mined items are supposed to prove them correct that a New World Order is coming. The most common elements of 1984 misused by conspiracy theorists include:
- Government information control. Almost any instance of information control or "spin" by the U.S. or other governments is pointed to as "Orwellian." A good example is the Bush II administration's policy of not allowing photographs to be taken of flag-draped caskets of dead soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, or even something innocuous as a White House press release spinning events in a politically advantageous way. To conspiracy theorists, this is Orwell's Ministry of Truth become real, totally censoring everything and leaving no stream of information untouched by the Party line.
- Government surveillance. In 1984, two-way televisions called telescreens spy on the population all the time, reporting their activities to government agents. Conspiracy theorists will often cite security cameras or police photo radar setups at intersections as "evidence" that Orwell's "predictions" of ubiquitous surveillance have already come true or are rapidly becoming so. The PATRIOT Act and warrantless wiretapping of terrorism suspects are also often cited in this category.
- War. In 1984, the world is split between three major super-nations who are always engaged in a war of some type, though who is allied with whom frequently changes. In the book, the war is supported by the government as a means to consume industrial resources and also keep the population patriotic and united. Conspiracy theorists love to cite the Bush II administration's fervor for the Iraq War, and especially the false rationale of Saddam's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, as "evidence" that the eternal war depicted in 1984 is becoming reality. This is done totally without reference to or understanding of the true reasons either behind the fictional war in 1984 or the real ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Detention without due process and torture. Needless to say, in the world of 1984 there is no such thing as due process, and a large portion of the book details Winston Smith's brutal detention and torture at the Ministry of Truth. Conspiracy theorists will almost always cite Guantanamo Bay and waterboarding as "evidence" that this is also coming true. The denial of due process for enemy combatants is a serious political and legal issue, but the use of this example to try to "prove" that 1984 is coming true (or already is true) is totally disingenuous. There is not a single real world example of ordinary people in the street vanishing into Homeland Security dungeons or (a conspiracist favorite) "FEMA camps." Conspiracy theorists' exaggerations and intellectual dishonesty in this regard is particularly egregious.
These are by no means the only tropes claimed by conspiracy theorists to be "true" or "coming true," and I'm quite sure I'll get comments or hate mail on this blog from conspiracists saying, "Yeah, but what about this..." and the like. This list is intended to be illustrative, not comprehensive.
The point is this: even if any item supposedly "predicted" in 1984 has become true today--which is usually not the case anyway--that does not mean that we are headed for the grim totalitarian future that Orwell describes in the book! Believing so is absolutely absurd, but it makes sense to conspiracy theorists because they are passionate believers in the "slippery slope" argument. Any incremental step down a particular road must and always will, by definition, lead to the most extreme consequence of that step. Conspiracy theorists never accept the possibility that if a heavy-handed law happens to be passed, that one day it might be repealed or overturned by a court decision, or, if it's left in place, that it might not be subsequently followed by more heavy-handed tactics. To them, step one of the process of totalitarian control is tantamount to the completed process itself.
Two real-world examples illustrate the idiocy of this belief. First, in 1798, four bills called the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President John Adams. The law authorized the President to deport or detain certain persons without due process, and also forbade publication of writings critical of the government. Clearly these were heavy-handed acts that scandalously violated the Bill of Rights. How come Obama isn't throwing Tea Partiers in jail today as a result of this law? Because it expired on March 3, 1801, and was never re-enacted; furthermore, the acts became a huge political issue in the elections of 1800 and would have been politically impossible to resurrect.
Second: during World War II the administration of Franklin Roosevelt interned thousands of people of Japanese descent, many of them American citizens, in internment camps on the West Coast. The Japanese internment was one of the most egregious and shameful actions ever undertaken by the U.S. government and remains a serious blight on the historical record of Roosevelt, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, which found the detentions legal in the decision Korematsu v. United States. (323 U.S. 214 (1944)). Why didn't the Japanese internment lead to totalitarianism across the board? Because the practice was discontinued in 1945 when the war ended. In fact, the U.S. government has paid reparations to people who were interned and their families--ironically a process begun (albeit shamefully late) by the first President Bush, who conspiracy theorists universally identify as an architect of the "New World Order" mainly because of his use of those words in a speech in 1991.
In a democratic society--and even in non-democratic ones--government power and the relationship of the populace to its government is constantly changing. In the United States, despite the frequent and loud cries to the contrary, the Constitution is still law, and the government still respects it; every single day, federal courts decide against the government in multitudes of criminal and civil actions. In a few minutes I'll post this blog without having to vet it through any government (or non-governmental) process whatsoever, and the conspiracy theorists who will reply angrily to it and send me hate mail about it (my address is muertos@gmail.com) will not have to have their incendiary comments approved either. Even in highly repressive societies, such as Iran, political discourse and checks and balances against government power occur all the time, sometimes violently. The "slippery slope to totalitarianism" argument is, like nearly all arguments made by conspiracy theorists, totally and willfully ignorant of how the world really works. It's insultingly simplistic, as well as offensively shallow. But, because it's easy and has emotional appeal, conspiracy theorists continue to resort to it.
Have They Even Read It?
Conspiracy theorists are usually very lazy when it comes to real learning and knowledge. They cut and paste their arguments from conspiracist websites, they parrot Alex Jones reflexively, and they think YouTube is a reliable source to back up their claims. It's not surprising, then, that many conspiracy theorists who are out there claiming "1984 is coming true!" haven't actually read the book, or, if they have, didn't understand what they read.
Case in point: the ConspiracyScience forum was, a few months ago, visited by a young person who was obviously a firm believer in the New World Order conspiracy theories, and he occasionally mentioned 1984 or Orwellian concepts in his arguments that these theories are true or are coming true. When questioned as to how he got his conspiratorial mindset, the young man replied that he was heavily influenced by his older brother, who he claimed watched the movie version of 1984 every day. (There have been two movie versions of the book, but I assume he means the one directed by Michael Radford which starred John Hurt and Richard Burton, which was released in the actual year 1984). I don't know whether the brother had actually read 1984 or just seen the movie, but it's a fair assumption that a lot of people who claim "1984 is coming true!" are familiar only with adaptations or excerpts from the book, and haven't actually read the real thing.
1984 is not an easy read. I didn't get it when I first read it at age 12, and it was not until years later and repeated readings that I began to understand what the real message of the book is and why Orwell wrote it. It's a lot more subtle than just "totalitarianism is bad." Like all good literature, 1984 is very deep and rich with meaning, and a full understanding of it is not possible without delving beneath the superficial qualities to which our popular culture has reduced it. The simple truth is, many of the people citing 1984 don't really understand it.
Another example: do you remember this famous ad from the 2008 Presidential campaign, created by an Obama supporter while he and Hillary Clinton were dueling for the Democratic nomination? That ad was a cultural phenomenon, but even many of the people who enjoyed it probably didn't realize that it was a mashup of a real TV commercial for Apple's Macintosh computer. This was a very famous commercial, directed by Alien and Gladiator director Ridley Scott (here it is) which is clearly intended to evoke Orwell's book. (It was also actually produced in the real year 1984). When you hear 1984, it is probably these images, or ones like them, that spring immediately to mind, not the intricacies of the novel itself. So here we have Orwell's original complicated message being diluted as a tool to sell a computer, and then diluted again as a campaign stunt to support a political candidate. What is it that you think you remember about 1984: the original, or the various dilutions?
Conclusion
Conspiracy theorists love to cite 1984 as supposed "proof" that their predictions of a grim totalitarian future are either already true or are likely to become true. However, their use of Orwell's novel betrays a grotesque misunderstanding of the book, a complete ignorance of its true context and purpose, and a fundamental abortion of logic in the form of the "slippery slope to totalitarianism" argument. As with everything else conspiracy theorists do, it's a botched job from start to finish.
So the next time a conspiracy theorist tries to throw 1984 at you, ask them first, "Have you actually read it, or did you just see the Apple commercial?", and then ask them to back up their assertions with fact and with logic. As the conspiracy theorist tries and utterly fails to provide fact and logic, you may hear a rhythmic pounding sound in the background, which is undoubtedly the sound of a horrified George Orwell hammering on his coffin in outrage.
[ Please discuss this post on the forums. ]
Why Conspiracy Theorists Love YouTube
Author: Muertos
Date: May 28, 2010 at 23:49
Conspiracy Theorists, YouTube and Anti-Intellectualism
By Muertos (muertos@gmail.com)
If you argue with conspiracy theorists on the Internet for even a short period of time, you'll notice one thing very quickly: they love YouTube. It's extremely rare to carry on any sort of "debate" with a conspiracy theorist of any stripe--9/11 Truther, moon hoaxer, global warming denier, what-have-you--and not see the CT post at least one, and usually more, links to videos on YouTube supposedly validating their position. In fact, in terms of sheer volume of the "evidence" posted by conspiracy theorists, YouTube appears to be their primary source of information. Furthermore, most of them simply can't understand why not everybody is immediately persuaded by something on YouTube, and if you push back against their arguments, you'll invariably get still more YouTube links. In the paranoid world of conspiracy theories, YouTube is evidently the ultimate oracle of all knowledge. This blog will attempt to examine why conspiracy theorists love YouTube so much, and how their passion for this website relates to a strong and disturbing undercurrent in the conspiracist worldview: anti-intellectualism.
Don't get me wrong, YouTube is a great communication tool. With the ubiquity of video cameras these days, it's a fine way to connect with people, get the word out about various things, and also have fun. (ConspiracyScience has a YouTube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/conspiracyscience and I have a personal YouTube channel myself, here: http://www.youtube.com/user/buffalofetus) But while most people use YouTube for light entertainment, more often than not involving cats doing funny things (such as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J---aiyznGQ), conspiracy theorists are watching stuff like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POUSJm--tgw) and this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwSc7NPn8Ok), full of "free fall collapses," quotes taken out of context, and other so-called "evidence" that they use to "prove" that various events were in fact massive conspiracies. For conspiracy theorists, YouTube isn't fun at all. It's deadly serious business. Also, for them, bizarrely, it is the first line of information. Despite the vast information resources that are out there, not just on the Internet, conspiracists usually turn to YouTube before they go anywhere else--almost as if other sources don't exist. In fact, conspiracy theorists usually credit YouTube videos as more credible than other forms of evidence.
Take, to wit, this recent conversation on the ConspiracyScience forum (in this topic: http://conspiracyscience.com/forums/topic/woow-im-not-banned/page/3) in which this exchange occurs between "Casey," a conspiracy theorist and 9/11 Truther, and various debunkers including myself:
And so forth and so on. In this case, the CT specifically asked for evidence rebutting the controlled demolition theory. When three peer-reviewed studies were presented, he admitted he had not read them and continued to argue based on YouTube links, and cited as the centrality of his argument "I have seen footage of the bombs going off" and because he has seen this any evidence to the contrary must be erroneous. Where did he see this footage? YouTube, of course!
Why do conspiracy theorists love YouTube so much? There are a number of possible answers, all of which interlock to one extent or another. But in analyzing conspiracy theorists' passion for YouTube we must get to a deeper core of the conspiracy mindset, and that is a desperate need to explain away contrary evidence, usually by denying its legitimacy (because its accuracy is usually much harder to attack).
So, why do conspiracy theorists love YouTube?
1. In most cases, it's honestly the best they can do.
Conspiracy theories are, by definition, fringe beliefs. The most common shopworn theories these days--9/11 was an inside job, global warming is a hoax, the Illuminati is out to impose a "New World Order" on us, etc., etc.--are completely unsupported by empirical evidence. No reputable scientists or engineers believe that 9/11 was a "controlled demolition." (Steven Jones and Judy Wood are not a reputable scientists, and Richard Gage is not a reputable engineer). The only studies "showing" that climate change is not happening or is not caused by humans are tainted by association with energy lobbies or other political agendas, and the supposed scientific bases for these viewpoints are not accepted in mainstream science. Therefore, by definition, you will not have pieces of peer-reviewed scholarship to point to that support conspiracy theories. The only support you can find is from some source where content is user-contributed, and thereby not vetted by any type of editorial process whatsoever--meaning, an open and unregulated community of ideas, which is the definition of what YouTube is.
Example: you can't find a legitimately peer-reviewed scientific paper claiming that the World Trade Center towers were blown up. Papers of that nature simply don't exist. But type in "9/11 controlled demolition" into YouTube and you'll bring up thousands of hits. Anybody can put up a YouTube video about anything. Unless it flagrantly violates the terms of service enough to be taken off the net, it will remain there for as long as the contributor wants it there, with no factual vetting of any kind. This is great if you think your cat playing the piano is really funny; chances are others will find that funny too. It's not great when you're trying to prove a scientific or factual point. Conspiracy theorists don't have much "evidence" to choose from, and the richest bed of that sort of material is going to be an open source, user-contributed interface. Ergo, YouTube is custom-made for them.
2. Most conspiracy theorists are unaware of, or do not appreciate the importance of, non-Web-based, factually vetted sources of information (put another way, the difference between primary sources, secondary sources and tertiary sources).
It sounds like a cliché, but it is largely true that most conspiracy theorists, at least those active on the Internet, are white males between the ages of 18 and 30 who either don't have or are not yet finished getting college degrees. Let's face it, the term peer-reviewed journal doesn't come up much in this demographic, and far be it from most of these people to set foot into a respected university library. For these people, the Internet with its ease of information retrieval is the paradigm source of knowledge. Need to find something? Google it. Need to learn something about a particular subject? Type it into Wikipedia. That's not to say that Google, Wikipedia and other web-based sources are not fantastically useful. Clearly they are. But they are indices of information--not information itself. This is an important difference.
Let's take an example. It is accepted fact that George Washington was the first president of the United States, and was sworn into that office on April 30, 1789 in New York City. In the real world, long before the Internet existed, this historical event was established by (among other things) the eyewitness accounts of the thousands of people who witnessed Washington's swearing-in, the multitudes of documents dating from 1789 documenting the event, papers that Washington signed as President, letters, correspondence, paintings, financial records, oral stories from people who knew him, etc. The conclusion that George Washington was the first President of the United States is inescapable and absolutely unimpeachable--and those sources I described, which are primary sources, are definitive on the subject.
You can also find numerous history books that reference George Washington's presidency. These books, whose authors have researched the primary sources and verified the conclusions drawn from them, are themselves secondary sources--you, the reader, decide to take their word for the fact of George Washington's presidency because they can demonstrate that they have looked at the primary sources and interpreted them correctly. (This is the entire point of history as an academic process). Secondary sources are usually reliable, but they can sometimes be faulty; in almost all cases, though, secondary sources have gone through some sort of factual vetting and verification, such as through the editorial process of book publication, or in the academic realm, peer-review.
Then you have materials that cite secondary sources, collect them, restate them or otherwise work from them. These are tertiary sources, and their main function is to organize information, not to present it as fact. Classic example: Wikipedia. Look up the Wikipedia page on George Washington (it's here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington). After the statement that George Washington was the first President of the United States, you'll see three footnote links, 4, 5 and 6. At the end of the article those footnotes read:
These footnotes are all citing secondary and other tertiary sources: a book about the Articles of Confederation published in 1959, a Library of Congress website, and a PBS website. This is not original research, or even secondary research. It's a rehash of work others have done. In fact, Wikipedia doesn't even allow you to post original research! This is extremely different than going to the National Archives and looking up the official electoral vote ballots from 1789 that indicate George Washington was elected president in that year.
Note, however, that even Wikipedia has a gatekeeping function. There are editors and moderators who constantly view and vet the articles that are posted there. So even a tertiary source like Wikipedia has some editorial control.
Here's the point: open-sourced Web services like YouTube don't even rise to the level of tertiary sources! YouTube lacks even the minimal gatekeeping functions that Wikipedia has. I can post a video claiming that Ringo Starr was the first President of the United States. As long as it doesn't violate the terms of service, which have nothing to do with factual accuracy, no one will take it down.
Conspiracy theorists, however, typically don't understand the hierarchy of various source materials. The difference between YouTube and the National Archives is completely lost on most of them. Consequently, YouTube is a "source" as equally credible as the National Archives--in fact, possibly even more credible because the gatekeeping function of source materials is often mistaken, in conspiracy theorists' eyes, with conspiratorial meddling or other chicanery.
3. Conspiracy theorists cannot distinguish between credible and non-credible sources.
This point is closely related to the above one. Because there's no difference in a conspiracy theorist's eyes between any two sources based upon the nature of those sources, they have no way of telling whether a source is true or false. David McCullough, a respected academic historian with decades of credentials, is no more reliable a source than David Icke, an ex-football player who believes that the world is controlled by reptilian shape-shifting aliens. John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists in recent history, is no more credible than bloviating radio talkshow host Alex Jones on matters of economics. This is why conspiracy theorists generally interpret any questioning of the credibility of their sources as an "ad hominem" attack, because to them credibility is irrelevant. Taken to an extreme, this idea results in the bizarre belief that a YouTube video can be just as true and credible as a peer-reviewed scientific paper published in a nationally-respected journal.
However, because the world (and especially the Internet) is filled with tidal waves of contradictory information, as human beings we must necessarily have a mechanism that separates truth from bullshit. No one believes absolutely everything they hear, even people who are extremely gullible; it's just that the truth-versus-bullshit mechanism of gullible people is out of whack compared to that of the non-gullible. In evaluating the credibility of a particular piece of information, conspiracy theorists do not ask the questions that most of us would ask--"Where did this information come from? Who did it start with? What supports it? Is the source credible?"--because their shallow understanding of epistemology does not result in that sort of analysis. Too often, conspiracy theorists' thought processes center around the content or outcome of a particular piece of information--"Does it support the 'official story' or does it support my theory?"--or a set of associations, usually negative, with the disseminator of the information itself--"Is it a government spokesperson saying this?"
The first process, the discrimination by content or outcome, usually far more powerful than the second. Simply put, conspiracy theorists will generally treat as credible any piece of information that supports their conspiracy theory or undermines a conclusion they dislike, regardless of its source. Popular Mechanics is telling you that 9/11 conspiracy theories are unsupportable; therefore, because the magazine is telling you this, it must be an unreliable source. (Sometimes conspiracy theorists will search for a reason to discredit a particular source, such as the oft-repeated but false claim that Popular Mechanics's editor was related to a Bush administration appointee, but this is all post-hoc justification). Because Steven Jones says that thermite was used to destroy the World Trade Center towers, Steven Jones must be credible. See? Discrimination by content, not by credibility.
The second process, associations with the disseminator of the information, comes into play only where it doesn't conflict with the first process. Example: when speaking in generalities, conspiracy theorists will usually claim that the "mainstream media" is not reliable, because generally mainstream media outfits like CNN, ABC, BBC, etc. do not regard conspiracy theories as fact. However, if a mainstream media outlet happens to report something that conspiracy theorists think supports their claims, suddenly that specific report is treated as unimpeachable. The prime example of this is a September 2001 story on the BBC website reporting on mistaken identity of the 9/11 hijackers (link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1559151.stm), which is the main item cited by conspiracy theorists who want to believe that the 9/11 hijackers are still alive (the subject of a ConspiracyScience article here: http://conspiracyscience.com/blog/wiki-911-hijackers-still-alive/). Normally, conspiracy theorists would denounce BBC as an unreliable source. But if BBC says something they like, suddenly it is a reliable source, at least on that specific point.
How does this relate to YouTube? Conspiracy theorists' opinions of YouTube videos will always follow these two rules. They will always like videos that support conspiracy conclusions. If their videos happen to contain clips from mainstream media sources, as they often do, conspiracy theorists will suspend their disdain for mainstream media because they think a particular item supports them. The inconsistency between these two rules is simply ignored. The only good source is one that supports a conspiracy theory; a bad source is, by definition, one that does not. Hence, David Icke is more credible than David McCullough, and Alex Jones is a better economist than Maynard Keynes. Such are the twisted thought processes of conspiracy theorists.
4. Presenting an argument in video format is much more emotionally satisfying than presenting an argument in any other way.
Motion pictures have been used for propaganda purposes since the technology was invented. The phenomenal success of movies to make a political, social or racial statement was demonstrated first with D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, and the extraordinary power of movies to persuade people continues today. The two greatest booms to the conspiracist movement in the latter half of the 2000-2009 decade were both movies: Dylan Avery's Loose Change and Peter Joseph Merola's Zeitgeist: The Movie. It's not surprising that the power of the motion picture to make a point is harnessed quite naturally and completely by conspiracy theorists using YouTube.
Let's face it, movies get noticed. If I made this blog as a vlog on YouTube (which isn't a bad idea), it would probably get more hits than the written page will. Packaging an argument in a video format, especially if it has interesting visuals and a good soundtrack, will carry your argument further and faster than it would travel by any other means. Conspiracy theorists are always recruiting, and using video is one of their most powerful tools. Consequently, it makes sense that their weapon of choice would be YouTube.
To a large extent, conspiracy theorists probably don't even realize the immense power of the medium that they seem to choose (unconsciously, perhaps) as their preferred means of communication. Witness the exchange with Casey above. He claims the "bottom line" is that he has personally seen footage of "bombs going off" on 9/11. Thus, it is video alone which seems to have convinced him that 9/11 was a conspiracy. Since he probably honestly believes this is the truth and wants to "save" people from being "sheeple," he will attempt to use the same medium that evidently swayed him--YouTube videos--to convince others that conspiracy theories are true. He doesn't care about the NIST report or peer-reviewed papers because they aren't interesting, flashy, attention-grabbing and can be digested in 30 seconds or at most a few minutes. It was YouTube that convinced him, and as far as he's concerned, there is no need to look farther than YouTube for that damning evidence.
5. Conspiracy theorists often exhibit an anti-intellectual bias, and because of their positions are forced to attack, ignore or explain away the legitimacy of expertise. YouTube plays into these biases perfectly.
Here is the real meat of this blog: conspiracy theorists are usually anti-intellectual. They have no patience for the opinions of experts--usually because those experts do not support conspiracy theories--and they're often contemptuous of credentialed experts in the first place. Consequently, conspiracy theorists invest a tremendous amount of thought and effort into denigrating or explaining away the views of those who know more about the subjects they're talking about than they do.
Anti-intellectualism is the ugly truth in the conspiracist underground, but it's extremely pervasive. Sometimes it's more overt than others. Just this week we had an exchange on the ConspiracyScience Facebook forum, from a conspiracy theorist named Joe Lowes who posted the following:
This conspiracy theorist is heavily interested in economic collapse scenarios, which he predicts with regularity. When confronted with the fact that no economists support these claims, Lowes denounces the possibility that any economists know what they're talking about. Here is an exchange in this regard:
Anti-intellectualism at its finest: economics is here equated with alchemy, the implication being that it is worthless and its practitioners just charlatans. With his atrocious spelling and proletarian contempt for the educated Joe Lowes is obviously small potatoes, but anti-intellectualism finds its way even into the "big guns" of the conspiracy movement. For example, Peter Joseph Merola, creator of the Zeitgeist films and leaders of the pro-conspiracy Zeitgeist Movement, recently denounced "the credentials argument" in a video documentary about himself and his positions (posted, guess where, on YouTube! It's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIINgQ1TooE). In this video, Merola identified as the number one argument people use against him the fact that he has no official academic credentials in the fields he opines on (economics and sociology, chief among them). He's right--Merola is an art school drop-out--but more important is the vein of anti-intellectualism that he is tapping into quite consciously. This is carefully calculated to appeal to both the prejudices and the vanity of conspiracy theorists, and it's a key reason why YouTube is their preferred medium.
Conspiracy theorists hate experts and intellectuals mainly because they are forced to. Few if any real experts in anything--engineering, economics, metallurgy, political science, or history--agree with conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theorists know that this is a major obstacle in their attempts to gain mainstream acceptance. Honestly, if one structural engineer with questionable credentials says that the World Trade Center towers were dynamited and 99 real structural engineers say that theory is bullshit, which side are most people going to believe? Consequently, conspiracy theorists have to tear down experts. They do this mainly by denigrating the real value or relevance of expert opinion, which usually means casting aspersions on expert status in the first place. This has two effects: first, they think it blunts the attacks of experts on their theories, and second, it elevates non-expert opinion into the same realm as expert knowledge.
This is closely related to the other reasons conspiracy theorists like YouTube. Because they can't tell good sources from bad, and because credibility attacks are usually lost on them or misinterpreted as "ad hominems," they tend to view the cachet of academic credentials or expert consensus as misguided, arbitrary or (at worst) deliberately deceptive. In the world of conspiracy theorists, you get to be an "expert" on something solely by being a member of the club, pressing palms and saying things that your peers like. Training, education, and demonstrable competency are not part of this equation so far as conspiracy theorists are concerned. Because they're ignorant of the processes by which someone becomes an expert, they see it as largely a symbolic gesture: you put on a cap and gown and go for a diploma and that alone makes you an "expert," where "real people" who aren't so easily "duped" can do just as well in any field without having to shell out the money for a diploma or demean themselves to get into an "old boys' club." This cuts another way too. Those who do decide to go through the meaningless ritual to become an "expert" are cast by conspiracy theorists as gullible dupes who are willing to sell their souls, and thus their positions are easily criticized or explained away by claiming, "Well, they have to say that if they don't want to piss off the Powers That Be."
However anti-intellectual they are, however, deep down conspiracy theorists are in fact desperate for expert endorsement. If that was not the case, charlatans like Steven Jones or Richard Gage would not be nearly so lionized in the 9/11 Truth movement as they are, because they are seen as figures who can plausibly pass for "experts" that are willing to endorse conspiracy theories regarding 9/11. So conspiracy theorists are being hypocritical in the final analysis. They hate experts because most of them won't agree with them, but deep down they really wish the experts would agree because they know it would translate into convincing gains for their side. Out of one side of their mouths conspiracy theorists damn experts to hell, and out of the other they whisper how much they wish they could persuade some.
Again, how does this relate to YouTube? Because YouTube is open-sourced and there is no editorial control on content, it's uniquely attractive to people who want to look like experts but who are not. A former pest control technician in a suit and tie giving a Power Point presentation on how the WTC towers were destroyed by thermite bombs looks no different than a credentialed peer-reviewed structural engineer in a suit and tie giving a Power Point presentation on why the towers fell from airplane impacts combined with fires. Again, the production values are the main thing: if you look and sound like you know what you're talking about, many people will assume that you do. Peter Merola is a master at giving lectures on his Zeitgeist Movement ideology, and he looks extremely credible while doing so. Do you care that he's not a real sociologist or has no training in economics or ancient history, two subjects that he opined on at length in his Zeitgeist films? No. All you care about is that he looks good and speaks well. YouTube and Google Video made him a star. That's the whole game. Content is secondary.
Furthermore, YouTube provides conspiracy theorists with sort of a home-field advantage. There really aren't that many anti-conspiracy videos available on YouTube. Occasionally debunkers will get into the act and try to fight fire with fire (here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs5jWvu4tR8) but those videos don't get nearly the hits that conspiracy videos do, and they usually get denounced in the comments by conspiracy theorists who claim debunkers are spreading "disinformation" or "lying." There aren't a lot of credentialed, peer-reviewed experts out there making YouTube videos, probably because they've got more important things to do. Therefore, YouTube looks like friendly territory for conspiracy theorists, which for the most part it is. It's one of the few arenas of public discourse where they can spout their claims and not be immediately hammered down, denounced and ridiculed. Therefore it's natural that they'd want to preserve that advantage.
Conclusion
Conspiracy theorists suffer from a number of profound misconceptions regarding how the world works, how knowledge is gathered and verified, and what constitutes proof and evidence. If they did not suffer from these misconceptions, they would not be conspiracy theorists, because the fantastic and unsupportable nature of their theories would be self-evident upon careful review of the real evidence. YouTube, being open-sourced user-generated content with no editorial or "gatekeeping" function, has become conspiracy theorists' prime source of information precisely because it's open-sourced with none of the gatekeeping functions, such as peer review or editorial processes, that make other sources of information reliable. This coupled with an inability to tell good sources from bad ones plays directly into conspiracy theorists' conceits that they have "special" knowledge, that expert opinion is overrated or irrelevant, and that they can "change the world" simply by spreading a couple of YouTube links and "opening people's eyes."
YouTube is not going away, nor should it. I like YouTube. And, for all my criticism here, I'm actually glad that conspiracy theorists rely on YouTube as much as they do, because it makes their spurious arguments much easier to spot and debunk. But conspiracy theorists' reliance on YouTube is yet another illustration of why their worldview is intellectually bankrupt and incapable of attracting serious mainstream attention. When your "evidence" regarding something is a YouTube video from Prison Planet or Infowars, you're telegraphing to the world that you've got nothing better to support your position. Don't be surprised when people don't take you seriously.
By Muertos (muertos@gmail.com)
If you argue with conspiracy theorists on the Internet for even a short period of time, you'll notice one thing very quickly: they love YouTube. It's extremely rare to carry on any sort of "debate" with a conspiracy theorist of any stripe--9/11 Truther, moon hoaxer, global warming denier, what-have-you--and not see the CT post at least one, and usually more, links to videos on YouTube supposedly validating their position. In fact, in terms of sheer volume of the "evidence" posted by conspiracy theorists, YouTube appears to be their primary source of information. Furthermore, most of them simply can't understand why not everybody is immediately persuaded by something on YouTube, and if you push back against their arguments, you'll invariably get still more YouTube links. In the paranoid world of conspiracy theories, YouTube is evidently the ultimate oracle of all knowledge. This blog will attempt to examine why conspiracy theorists love YouTube so much, and how their passion for this website relates to a strong and disturbing undercurrent in the conspiracist worldview: anti-intellectualism.
Don't get me wrong, YouTube is a great communication tool. With the ubiquity of video cameras these days, it's a fine way to connect with people, get the word out about various things, and also have fun. (ConspiracyScience has a YouTube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/conspiracyscience and I have a personal YouTube channel myself, here: http://www.youtube.com/user/buffalofetus) But while most people use YouTube for light entertainment, more often than not involving cats doing funny things (such as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J---aiyznGQ), conspiracy theorists are watching stuff like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POUSJm--tgw) and this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwSc7NPn8Ok), full of "free fall collapses," quotes taken out of context, and other so-called "evidence" that they use to "prove" that various events were in fact massive conspiracies. For conspiracy theorists, YouTube isn't fun at all. It's deadly serious business. Also, for them, bizarrely, it is the first line of information. Despite the vast information resources that are out there, not just on the Internet, conspiracists usually turn to YouTube before they go anywhere else--almost as if other sources don't exist. In fact, conspiracy theorists usually credit YouTube videos as more credible than other forms of evidence.
Take, to wit, this recent conversation on the ConspiracyScience forum (in this topic: http://conspiracyscience.com/forums/topic/woow-im-not-banned/page/3) in which this exchange occurs between "Casey," a conspiracy theorist and 9/11 Truther, and various debunkers including myself:
Casey: "point me in the direction of these scientific rebuttals...but not this load of shit please (http://www.debunking911.com/pull.htm) or anything like it...Somthing actually scientific, i might be dyslexic but i do have a chemistry degree, and i do like my physics"
Muertos: "Casey, you want something "actually scientific" that proves that the WTC was not a controlled demolition? Here you go. (http://wtc.nist.gov/NCSTAR1/PDF/NCSTAR%201.pdf) Another one: (http://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/Bazant_WTC_Collapse_What_Did__Did_No.pdf) And another: (http://www.911-strike.com/BazantZhou.htm) All scientific peer-reviewed materials. Enjoy your reading."
Edward: "lol, collapsed into their own footprint, as if that even happened, only conspiracy theorists claim it did, no one else does."
Casey: "this is bone totally bone! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POUSJm--tgw) (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa5m8b_wtc-7-falls-symetrically-into-its-o_news) The vidio footage on this one is pretty good (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W0N-qH0ac4)"
Muertos: "Casey, I posted 3 scientific rebuttals of the controlled demolition theory. It seems you did not read them, even though you specifically asked us for them. If that's true, why did you not read them? If you did read them and found them persuasive, please say so. If you did read them and did not find them persuasive, please tell us exactly what portions of them were faulty, in your view."
Casey: "In fairness chick i havent read them all thu yet... Muertos but you do know it didnt happen the way thay explained it dont ya?"
Casey: "Muertos: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POUSJm--tgw) [Note: the same video he's posted before) Muertos Watch it and look for more real evidence!! its out there!!
welll i was sitting in a school house in floria.... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlWSv0NZBRw&feature=related)... The bottom line is i have seen footage of the bombs going off in the base of the buildings there is documented reports by fire fighters police and civilians of bombs going off!! People that were caught in the blasts were treated at hospital!!! So a plane hitting the top of the building made that happen!!! Not fucking likely!! Wake up and smell the coffee, its not dificult its not rocket science!! Alot off people have over complicated this thing to death, but its simple...."
And so forth and so on. In this case, the CT specifically asked for evidence rebutting the controlled demolition theory. When three peer-reviewed studies were presented, he admitted he had not read them and continued to argue based on YouTube links, and cited as the centrality of his argument "I have seen footage of the bombs going off" and because he has seen this any evidence to the contrary must be erroneous. Where did he see this footage? YouTube, of course!
Why do conspiracy theorists love YouTube so much? There are a number of possible answers, all of which interlock to one extent or another. But in analyzing conspiracy theorists' passion for YouTube we must get to a deeper core of the conspiracy mindset, and that is a desperate need to explain away contrary evidence, usually by denying its legitimacy (because its accuracy is usually much harder to attack).
So, why do conspiracy theorists love YouTube?
1. In most cases, it's honestly the best they can do.
Conspiracy theories are, by definition, fringe beliefs. The most common shopworn theories these days--9/11 was an inside job, global warming is a hoax, the Illuminati is out to impose a "New World Order" on us, etc., etc.--are completely unsupported by empirical evidence. No reputable scientists or engineers believe that 9/11 was a "controlled demolition." (Steven Jones and Judy Wood are not a reputable scientists, and Richard Gage is not a reputable engineer). The only studies "showing" that climate change is not happening or is not caused by humans are tainted by association with energy lobbies or other political agendas, and the supposed scientific bases for these viewpoints are not accepted in mainstream science. Therefore, by definition, you will not have pieces of peer-reviewed scholarship to point to that support conspiracy theories. The only support you can find is from some source where content is user-contributed, and thereby not vetted by any type of editorial process whatsoever--meaning, an open and unregulated community of ideas, which is the definition of what YouTube is.
Example: you can't find a legitimately peer-reviewed scientific paper claiming that the World Trade Center towers were blown up. Papers of that nature simply don't exist. But type in "9/11 controlled demolition" into YouTube and you'll bring up thousands of hits. Anybody can put up a YouTube video about anything. Unless it flagrantly violates the terms of service enough to be taken off the net, it will remain there for as long as the contributor wants it there, with no factual vetting of any kind. This is great if you think your cat playing the piano is really funny; chances are others will find that funny too. It's not great when you're trying to prove a scientific or factual point. Conspiracy theorists don't have much "evidence" to choose from, and the richest bed of that sort of material is going to be an open source, user-contributed interface. Ergo, YouTube is custom-made for them.
2. Most conspiracy theorists are unaware of, or do not appreciate the importance of, non-Web-based, factually vetted sources of information (put another way, the difference between primary sources, secondary sources and tertiary sources).
It sounds like a cliché, but it is largely true that most conspiracy theorists, at least those active on the Internet, are white males between the ages of 18 and 30 who either don't have or are not yet finished getting college degrees. Let's face it, the term peer-reviewed journal doesn't come up much in this demographic, and far be it from most of these people to set foot into a respected university library. For these people, the Internet with its ease of information retrieval is the paradigm source of knowledge. Need to find something? Google it. Need to learn something about a particular subject? Type it into Wikipedia. That's not to say that Google, Wikipedia and other web-based sources are not fantastically useful. Clearly they are. But they are indices of information--not information itself. This is an important difference.
Let's take an example. It is accepted fact that George Washington was the first president of the United States, and was sworn into that office on April 30, 1789 in New York City. In the real world, long before the Internet existed, this historical event was established by (among other things) the eyewitness accounts of the thousands of people who witnessed Washington's swearing-in, the multitudes of documents dating from 1789 documenting the event, papers that Washington signed as President, letters, correspondence, paintings, financial records, oral stories from people who knew him, etc. The conclusion that George Washington was the first President of the United States is inescapable and absolutely unimpeachable--and those sources I described, which are primary sources, are definitive on the subject.
You can also find numerous history books that reference George Washington's presidency. These books, whose authors have researched the primary sources and verified the conclusions drawn from them, are themselves secondary sources--you, the reader, decide to take their word for the fact of George Washington's presidency because they can demonstrate that they have looked at the primary sources and interpreted them correctly. (This is the entire point of history as an academic process). Secondary sources are usually reliable, but they can sometimes be faulty; in almost all cases, though, secondary sources have gone through some sort of factual vetting and verification, such as through the editorial process of book publication, or in the academic realm, peer-review.
Then you have materials that cite secondary sources, collect them, restate them or otherwise work from them. These are tertiary sources, and their main function is to organize information, not to present it as fact. Classic example: Wikipedia. Look up the Wikipedia page on George Washington (it's here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington). After the statement that George Washington was the first President of the United States, you'll see three footnote links, 4, 5 and 6. At the end of the article those footnotes read:
"^ Under the Articles of Confederation Congress called its presiding officer "President of the United States in Congress Assembled". He had no executive powers, but the similarity of titles has confused people into thinking there were other presidents before Washington. Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation (1959), 178-9
^ "George Washington". Library of Congress. Retrieved June 27, 2009.
^ "Rediscovering George Washington". Public Broadcasting Service. Retrieved June 27, 2009.
These footnotes are all citing secondary and other tertiary sources: a book about the Articles of Confederation published in 1959, a Library of Congress website, and a PBS website. This is not original research, or even secondary research. It's a rehash of work others have done. In fact, Wikipedia doesn't even allow you to post original research! This is extremely different than going to the National Archives and looking up the official electoral vote ballots from 1789 that indicate George Washington was elected president in that year.
Note, however, that even Wikipedia has a gatekeeping function. There are editors and moderators who constantly view and vet the articles that are posted there. So even a tertiary source like Wikipedia has some editorial control.
Here's the point: open-sourced Web services like YouTube don't even rise to the level of tertiary sources! YouTube lacks even the minimal gatekeeping functions that Wikipedia has. I can post a video claiming that Ringo Starr was the first President of the United States. As long as it doesn't violate the terms of service, which have nothing to do with factual accuracy, no one will take it down.
Conspiracy theorists, however, typically don't understand the hierarchy of various source materials. The difference between YouTube and the National Archives is completely lost on most of them. Consequently, YouTube is a "source" as equally credible as the National Archives--in fact, possibly even more credible because the gatekeeping function of source materials is often mistaken, in conspiracy theorists' eyes, with conspiratorial meddling or other chicanery.
3. Conspiracy theorists cannot distinguish between credible and non-credible sources.
This point is closely related to the above one. Because there's no difference in a conspiracy theorist's eyes between any two sources based upon the nature of those sources, they have no way of telling whether a source is true or false. David McCullough, a respected academic historian with decades of credentials, is no more reliable a source than David Icke, an ex-football player who believes that the world is controlled by reptilian shape-shifting aliens. John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists in recent history, is no more credible than bloviating radio talkshow host Alex Jones on matters of economics. This is why conspiracy theorists generally interpret any questioning of the credibility of their sources as an "ad hominem" attack, because to them credibility is irrelevant. Taken to an extreme, this idea results in the bizarre belief that a YouTube video can be just as true and credible as a peer-reviewed scientific paper published in a nationally-respected journal.
However, because the world (and especially the Internet) is filled with tidal waves of contradictory information, as human beings we must necessarily have a mechanism that separates truth from bullshit. No one believes absolutely everything they hear, even people who are extremely gullible; it's just that the truth-versus-bullshit mechanism of gullible people is out of whack compared to that of the non-gullible. In evaluating the credibility of a particular piece of information, conspiracy theorists do not ask the questions that most of us would ask--"Where did this information come from? Who did it start with? What supports it? Is the source credible?"--because their shallow understanding of epistemology does not result in that sort of analysis. Too often, conspiracy theorists' thought processes center around the content or outcome of a particular piece of information--"Does it support the 'official story' or does it support my theory?"--or a set of associations, usually negative, with the disseminator of the information itself--"Is it a government spokesperson saying this?"
The first process, the discrimination by content or outcome, usually far more powerful than the second. Simply put, conspiracy theorists will generally treat as credible any piece of information that supports their conspiracy theory or undermines a conclusion they dislike, regardless of its source. Popular Mechanics is telling you that 9/11 conspiracy theories are unsupportable; therefore, because the magazine is telling you this, it must be an unreliable source. (Sometimes conspiracy theorists will search for a reason to discredit a particular source, such as the oft-repeated but false claim that Popular Mechanics's editor was related to a Bush administration appointee, but this is all post-hoc justification). Because Steven Jones says that thermite was used to destroy the World Trade Center towers, Steven Jones must be credible. See? Discrimination by content, not by credibility.
The second process, associations with the disseminator of the information, comes into play only where it doesn't conflict with the first process. Example: when speaking in generalities, conspiracy theorists will usually claim that the "mainstream media" is not reliable, because generally mainstream media outfits like CNN, ABC, BBC, etc. do not regard conspiracy theories as fact. However, if a mainstream media outlet happens to report something that conspiracy theorists think supports their claims, suddenly that specific report is treated as unimpeachable. The prime example of this is a September 2001 story on the BBC website reporting on mistaken identity of the 9/11 hijackers (link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1559151.stm), which is the main item cited by conspiracy theorists who want to believe that the 9/11 hijackers are still alive (the subject of a ConspiracyScience article here: http://conspiracyscience.com/blog/wiki-911-hijackers-still-alive/). Normally, conspiracy theorists would denounce BBC as an unreliable source. But if BBC says something they like, suddenly it is a reliable source, at least on that specific point.
How does this relate to YouTube? Conspiracy theorists' opinions of YouTube videos will always follow these two rules. They will always like videos that support conspiracy conclusions. If their videos happen to contain clips from mainstream media sources, as they often do, conspiracy theorists will suspend their disdain for mainstream media because they think a particular item supports them. The inconsistency between these two rules is simply ignored. The only good source is one that supports a conspiracy theory; a bad source is, by definition, one that does not. Hence, David Icke is more credible than David McCullough, and Alex Jones is a better economist than Maynard Keynes. Such are the twisted thought processes of conspiracy theorists.
4. Presenting an argument in video format is much more emotionally satisfying than presenting an argument in any other way.
Motion pictures have been used for propaganda purposes since the technology was invented. The phenomenal success of movies to make a political, social or racial statement was demonstrated first with D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, and the extraordinary power of movies to persuade people continues today. The two greatest booms to the conspiracist movement in the latter half of the 2000-2009 decade were both movies: Dylan Avery's Loose Change and Peter Joseph Merola's Zeitgeist: The Movie. It's not surprising that the power of the motion picture to make a point is harnessed quite naturally and completely by conspiracy theorists using YouTube.
Let's face it, movies get noticed. If I made this blog as a vlog on YouTube (which isn't a bad idea), it would probably get more hits than the written page will. Packaging an argument in a video format, especially if it has interesting visuals and a good soundtrack, will carry your argument further and faster than it would travel by any other means. Conspiracy theorists are always recruiting, and using video is one of their most powerful tools. Consequently, it makes sense that their weapon of choice would be YouTube.
To a large extent, conspiracy theorists probably don't even realize the immense power of the medium that they seem to choose (unconsciously, perhaps) as their preferred means of communication. Witness the exchange with Casey above. He claims the "bottom line" is that he has personally seen footage of "bombs going off" on 9/11. Thus, it is video alone which seems to have convinced him that 9/11 was a conspiracy. Since he probably honestly believes this is the truth and wants to "save" people from being "sheeple," he will attempt to use the same medium that evidently swayed him--YouTube videos--to convince others that conspiracy theories are true. He doesn't care about the NIST report or peer-reviewed papers because they aren't interesting, flashy, attention-grabbing and can be digested in 30 seconds or at most a few minutes. It was YouTube that convinced him, and as far as he's concerned, there is no need to look farther than YouTube for that damning evidence.
5. Conspiracy theorists often exhibit an anti-intellectual bias, and because of their positions are forced to attack, ignore or explain away the legitimacy of expertise. YouTube plays into these biases perfectly.
Here is the real meat of this blog: conspiracy theorists are usually anti-intellectual. They have no patience for the opinions of experts--usually because those experts do not support conspiracy theories--and they're often contemptuous of credentialed experts in the first place. Consequently, conspiracy theorists invest a tremendous amount of thought and effort into denigrating or explaining away the views of those who know more about the subjects they're talking about than they do.
Anti-intellectualism is the ugly truth in the conspiracist underground, but it's extremely pervasive. Sometimes it's more overt than others. Just this week we had an exchange on the ConspiracyScience Facebook forum, from a conspiracy theorist named Joe Lowes who posted the following:
Topic title: "I Like This Guy." Joe Lowes: "This guy tells the truth about the scam that is known as college. Watch some of the vid. and learn the truth. (http://www.youtube.com/user/DontGoToCollege#p/u/17/T8lcADCW6ew)"
This conspiracy theorist is heavily interested in economic collapse scenarios, which he predicts with regularity. When confronted with the fact that no economists support these claims, Lowes denounces the possibility that any economists know what they're talking about. Here is an exchange in this regard:
Joe Lowes: "We are going to crash this year and it will be bigger then the last one. And all these econimists who cleam that this is not to happen are idiots or are being paiod to lie."
Muertos: "So, you're trashing the entire discipline of economics, which is a very complicated science."
Joe Lowes: "They said the same thing about Alchmy. But you can't turn lead into gold."
Anti-intellectualism at its finest: economics is here equated with alchemy, the implication being that it is worthless and its practitioners just charlatans. With his atrocious spelling and proletarian contempt for the educated Joe Lowes is obviously small potatoes, but anti-intellectualism finds its way even into the "big guns" of the conspiracy movement. For example, Peter Joseph Merola, creator of the Zeitgeist films and leaders of the pro-conspiracy Zeitgeist Movement, recently denounced "the credentials argument" in a video documentary about himself and his positions (posted, guess where, on YouTube! It's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIINgQ1TooE). In this video, Merola identified as the number one argument people use against him the fact that he has no official academic credentials in the fields he opines on (economics and sociology, chief among them). He's right--Merola is an art school drop-out--but more important is the vein of anti-intellectualism that he is tapping into quite consciously. This is carefully calculated to appeal to both the prejudices and the vanity of conspiracy theorists, and it's a key reason why YouTube is their preferred medium.
Conspiracy theorists hate experts and intellectuals mainly because they are forced to. Few if any real experts in anything--engineering, economics, metallurgy, political science, or history--agree with conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theorists know that this is a major obstacle in their attempts to gain mainstream acceptance. Honestly, if one structural engineer with questionable credentials says that the World Trade Center towers were dynamited and 99 real structural engineers say that theory is bullshit, which side are most people going to believe? Consequently, conspiracy theorists have to tear down experts. They do this mainly by denigrating the real value or relevance of expert opinion, which usually means casting aspersions on expert status in the first place. This has two effects: first, they think it blunts the attacks of experts on their theories, and second, it elevates non-expert opinion into the same realm as expert knowledge.
This is closely related to the other reasons conspiracy theorists like YouTube. Because they can't tell good sources from bad, and because credibility attacks are usually lost on them or misinterpreted as "ad hominems," they tend to view the cachet of academic credentials or expert consensus as misguided, arbitrary or (at worst) deliberately deceptive. In the world of conspiracy theorists, you get to be an "expert" on something solely by being a member of the club, pressing palms and saying things that your peers like. Training, education, and demonstrable competency are not part of this equation so far as conspiracy theorists are concerned. Because they're ignorant of the processes by which someone becomes an expert, they see it as largely a symbolic gesture: you put on a cap and gown and go for a diploma and that alone makes you an "expert," where "real people" who aren't so easily "duped" can do just as well in any field without having to shell out the money for a diploma or demean themselves to get into an "old boys' club." This cuts another way too. Those who do decide to go through the meaningless ritual to become an "expert" are cast by conspiracy theorists as gullible dupes who are willing to sell their souls, and thus their positions are easily criticized or explained away by claiming, "Well, they have to say that if they don't want to piss off the Powers That Be."
However anti-intellectual they are, however, deep down conspiracy theorists are in fact desperate for expert endorsement. If that was not the case, charlatans like Steven Jones or Richard Gage would not be nearly so lionized in the 9/11 Truth movement as they are, because they are seen as figures who can plausibly pass for "experts" that are willing to endorse conspiracy theories regarding 9/11. So conspiracy theorists are being hypocritical in the final analysis. They hate experts because most of them won't agree with them, but deep down they really wish the experts would agree because they know it would translate into convincing gains for their side. Out of one side of their mouths conspiracy theorists damn experts to hell, and out of the other they whisper how much they wish they could persuade some.
Again, how does this relate to YouTube? Because YouTube is open-sourced and there is no editorial control on content, it's uniquely attractive to people who want to look like experts but who are not. A former pest control technician in a suit and tie giving a Power Point presentation on how the WTC towers were destroyed by thermite bombs looks no different than a credentialed peer-reviewed structural engineer in a suit and tie giving a Power Point presentation on why the towers fell from airplane impacts combined with fires. Again, the production values are the main thing: if you look and sound like you know what you're talking about, many people will assume that you do. Peter Merola is a master at giving lectures on his Zeitgeist Movement ideology, and he looks extremely credible while doing so. Do you care that he's not a real sociologist or has no training in economics or ancient history, two subjects that he opined on at length in his Zeitgeist films? No. All you care about is that he looks good and speaks well. YouTube and Google Video made him a star. That's the whole game. Content is secondary.
Furthermore, YouTube provides conspiracy theorists with sort of a home-field advantage. There really aren't that many anti-conspiracy videos available on YouTube. Occasionally debunkers will get into the act and try to fight fire with fire (here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs5jWvu4tR8) but those videos don't get nearly the hits that conspiracy videos do, and they usually get denounced in the comments by conspiracy theorists who claim debunkers are spreading "disinformation" or "lying." There aren't a lot of credentialed, peer-reviewed experts out there making YouTube videos, probably because they've got more important things to do. Therefore, YouTube looks like friendly territory for conspiracy theorists, which for the most part it is. It's one of the few arenas of public discourse where they can spout their claims and not be immediately hammered down, denounced and ridiculed. Therefore it's natural that they'd want to preserve that advantage.
Conclusion
Conspiracy theorists suffer from a number of profound misconceptions regarding how the world works, how knowledge is gathered and verified, and what constitutes proof and evidence. If they did not suffer from these misconceptions, they would not be conspiracy theorists, because the fantastic and unsupportable nature of their theories would be self-evident upon careful review of the real evidence. YouTube, being open-sourced user-generated content with no editorial or "gatekeeping" function, has become conspiracy theorists' prime source of information precisely because it's open-sourced with none of the gatekeeping functions, such as peer review or editorial processes, that make other sources of information reliable. This coupled with an inability to tell good sources from bad ones plays directly into conspiracy theorists' conceits that they have "special" knowledge, that expert opinion is overrated or irrelevant, and that they can "change the world" simply by spreading a couple of YouTube links and "opening people's eyes."
YouTube is not going away, nor should it. I like YouTube. And, for all my criticism here, I'm actually glad that conspiracy theorists rely on YouTube as much as they do, because it makes their spurious arguments much easier to spot and debunk. But conspiracy theorists' reliance on YouTube is yet another illustration of why their worldview is intellectually bankrupt and incapable of attracting serious mainstream attention. When your "evidence" regarding something is a YouTube video from Prison Planet or Infowars, you're telegraphing to the world that you've got nothing better to support your position. Don't be surprised when people don't take you seriously.
Conspiracism Explained
Author: Dave Sorensen
Date: May 23, 2010 at 15:14
By Dave Sorensen
Conspiracy theories stem from a complex web of ideas, which is constructed over many years, revolving around important historical events and political issues. There are many psychological factors and logical fallacies at work when devising a conspiracy theory and this is what I will try and cover in this essay. First we must go over what a "theory" actually is and why the term "conspiracy theory" has been coined. A theory in science is essentially a body of facts and knowledge used as an explanatory model for a set of phenomena. History uses similar methods but rarely ever refers to events like the Holocaust to be a theory.
We can infer that the holocaust happened because of an extraordinary amount of physical evidence, eyewitness testimony, letters, documents and differences in population demographics from the affected regions in Europe. When there are conflicting accounts of a historical event, we will recognize that there are two or more competing theories each with their own arguments. To contrast with the geological sciences, there was a debate over how the dinosaurs went extinct. While there are more than just two explanations, I will narrow it down for simplicity's sake. You have one camp arguing that an asteroid took out the dinosaurs, and another saying a volcano did. Both have submitted their findings to peer reviewed journals in which they are examined and critiqued by other scientists. A conspiracy theory is played off by true believers as if it's an alternative view that is both reasonable and evidence based. They would probably agree that it's another serious theory that needs to be considered, just like the volcano theory mentioned above. This then seemingly separates their belief from unfounded or weakly-based speculation, and gives them more recognition just because it is called a theory. But this is just a play on words.
There are multiple definitions of the word theory, one which defines most scientific theories, and another version that simply means: "An assumption based on limited information or knowledge."(1) Most researchers who look at CT claims would agree that what they are doing is just weak speculation, and would therefore be considered the latter definition of theory. Their "theory" is said to be reasonable because of a set of arguments used to establish that some form of government conspiracy took place, and in order to justify this you would need some form of evidence. But when a skeptic questions the narrative of a particular CT, it seems that the true believers lack any real answers or have been misinformed about the evidence. One of the main reasons why conspiracy theories prosper is because the true believers think that their view is rational and evidence based. By reading some of the many articles on this site, you will find out that this is not so. From time to time I will hear the line: "If we had any good evidence it would be a conspiracy fact!" But this classic form of conspiracy thinking is contrary to all of their beloved forums and websites, containing lists and videos outlining all of their "smoking gun" evidence.
Whenever it comes to the point of presenting positive evidence for their claims they fail to deliver. They are seemingly ignorant to any of the countless counter arguments and dodge any important questions that they should know the answers to. An example would be Dylan Avery (loose change filmmaker) who when asked 'what happened on 9/11', responded, 'I don't know'. You would think that investigating a historical event for 9 years would lead to some kind of knowledge. Their problem is that they use the wrong kind of skepticism to evaluate evidence, which is something I will get back to later. Not only is lack of any good evidence a problem for an alternative theory, but a good argument also needs to be logically sound. After all it's possible though highly unlikely for a conspiracy to be played out so well that there are no fingerprints left behind, but there needs to be some good reasons for believing an alternative theory to make up for the lack of evidence. This is where argumentation comes into play. The standard rules for argument building consist of first establishing a set number of premises composed of facts and then ending with a conclusion. An oversimplified example would be:
1. Autism rates are rising
2. Vaccines Contain Mercury
3. Mercury is Unsafe and can cause neurological damage
4. Therefore Vaccines cause autism
The problem with this argument is that one of the premises is just wrong and the other two are very misleading. (2) A recent study suggests that autism is found amongst 1% of all age groups which Is not what you would predict if the cause of autism was from thimerosol. The increase in autism comes from better surveillance and a widening of the definition of autism to include Asperger's syndrome and other behavioral disorders. Mercury is safe in small dosages and it's important to note that vaccines use Ethyl mercury. Methyl mercury is the kind found in fish, and this can be harmful if you eat too much. Ethly mercury is much safer and leaves the body after 1-3 days of consumption. Study after study the link between autism and vaccines has failed to show up, even when removing the feared ingredient thimerosol. This conspiracy theory is one of the few that you can actually make solid, testable predictions from. If thimerosol caused autism in infants, removing it from vaccines should show a decrease in autism rates. This prediction was wrong and in fact no alteration to the rates occurred at all. Once you understand why these premises are terribly flawed, the argument falls apart.
The same can apply to the vast majority of conspiracy theories out there. What makes up the premises must be examined with careful scrutiny. You have to weed out any biased or dubious sources and get a simple understanding behind the history and science of the event. Both historians and scientists use peer review, which is the best method in pursuing the truth. One of the reasons why conspiracy theorists have so many websites and books is because they can't make it past other experts without someone questioning their premises. They target people who are unfamiliar with the facts and the science. They also use a reverse scientific method, where they reach their conclusions and then try and jam the "puzzle pieces" together. And their style of argument should stand out as very questionable if you are familiar with common logical fallacies and how science and history actually work.
Authors of "Alternative History" like to attract new people to their works by utilizing a series of techniques. The first is what I like to call the "Long list effect". In almost any conspiracy book you will find somewhere a list of their smoking gun evidence. Sometimes this list gets ridiculously long to a point where the reader stops and begins to think the author must be on to something. As the old saying goes "Its quality not quantity." If they ever had good quality evidence they would be able to convince a lot more people including large political activist groups and also be able to convince lawyers and take these things to court. The attempted lawsuits so far by the truth movement are laughable at best. (Judy Wood and the space beams). David Ray Griffin is a good example of an author who uses such the long list technique. Now I'm not saying that these authors are knowingly deceiving people by using this technique. I'm just describing what it is they do and why it convinces people. Another technique is the argument from historical precedent or the "The complex question fallacy". The CQF is committed when a question is asked (a) that rests on a questionable assumption, and (b) to which all answers appear to endorse that assumption. (3) This is a common tactic used by the 9/11 truth movement. They use Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin and the Reichstag fire as all examples of historical precedents of false flag terror, when anyone who reads up on the events will know that at best they are controversial at worst they have been debunked. (See false flag wiki)
Next up is the "Magic Bullet Argument". "Alternative historians" will often employ this argument to ridicule the official story. "JFK couldn't have been hit by a swerving, dancing bullet. Therefore the official story is false." But no one seriously believes that the bullet behaved that way. There are simple straight lines of trajectory that Oswald's bullet could have taken to kill JFK and injure Governor Connolly, thus eliminating the need for such a ridiculous alternative. Authors also use a variety of non-sequiturs (doesn't follow) , ad hominem insults, and the argument from ignorance. "We don't know what happened on 9/11, therefore we need a new investigation." In other words, they don't know anything about 9/11 because of their unjustified mistrust of any source other than conspiracy sites, books and other like-minded people. The only way someone could be so clueless about 9/11 is if they are using a faulty "Descartian" type of skepticism. This is an extreme form of skepticism which requires us to doubt everything from experience and just rely on words and emotion. But they ignore logic and critical thinking so all that's left is emotion, which is completely unsuitable for scientific inquiry. If you ignore what any disagreeing scientist says, you are not being skeptical at all. A true skeptic would take on any challenges to his belief system and pin point where others who disagree went wrong.
After reading the arguments constructed by conspiracy authors we end up with a jungle of claims. How can one sort through them all knowing which ones are true and false? If the argument is logically fallacious then it's probably not a good argument. If it's not being discussed amongst scientists and historians in the peer review process, it's probably not true. This may seem like an argument to authority, but it is really just showing that having 99% consensus on a single issue must require extraordinary evidence or a really good argument to compensate. The reason why most people subscribe to conspiracy theories is a simple lack of knowledge in the related areas and unfamiliarity with logic. There is also the psychological need to find purpose in one's life, and the preference to believing wildly imaginative myths over otherwise boring accounts. JFK being gunned down by multiple government sponsored mobsters is much more appealing than a lone nut. People often prefer fantasy for truth because sometimes the truth can take the fun out of things. I don't agree with that statement, but I happen to be in the minority.
Individuals who have a general mistrust of others and people who are overly paranoid can use conspiracy theories to explain the world's problems away. In some cases they use them to explain why they themselves cannot succeed in life. The third factor is the appealing notion of possessing secret knowledge that most people lack. This makes individuals feel important and more intelligent than others, giving their life meaning. This also ties into a sort of "rebel complex" where the individual feels like the ultimate bad ass for not buying into the government's lies. But this is where most conspiracy theorists come to a hault. You would think that if foiling the government's evil plans gave them a purpose in life they would go out and do something about it. It seems as if most CT's just like to complain about these delusions to other like minded people constantly using the government as a scapegoat for all their problems. This is unlike any other kind of political activist group. Cognitive dissonance, cognitive closure and hindsight bias are other important psychological effects that play a part in this kind of belief as well.
Lastly, conspiracy theorists hold onto their beliefs, even when thoroughly challenged by skeptics because of what I call the "expanding web theory." Whenever a claim is knocked off their web, another one fills in that spot. "Moving the goalposts" is another popular way to describe this defense mechanism. Even when every claim has been addressed, there is still the cognitive illusion that there is so much counter-knowledge and so the true believer will just continue to be duped, or they will admit they were wrong and become a skeptic. The latter case is extremely rare.
On skepticism
How do conspiracy skeptics manage to sort through the vast information highway that's out there and find out what's true? Skepticism is a methodology, not a belief system so it's not as easy as just hopping aboard the Skeptic's society train and listening to their experts blindly. Although I ended up agreeing with most of mainstream skeptics believe, I arrived at my conclusions by investigating the material on my own. It's important to be open minded, but not so open that your brain falls out. A good way to test this is to write up a narrative of whatever you currently believe happened during a historical event. Sometimes you can only catch the inconsistencies when you put everything together. If you find contradictions in your narrative, you went wrong somewhere. When you come across an extraordinary claim, or even a claim your just not sure about, see what other qualified experts have to say. Do these scientists have an agenda or bias? If they do then compare them to some neutral scientists, who have written papers about something related. An example would be the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. There were plenty of foreign scientific papers written by China, Japan, the UK and Norway that all arrived at the same conclusion as the NIST scientists. Some papers disagreed with technical details but there were no credible teams of scientists that came to the conclusion that there were bombs in the building, and this is a problem that the CT crowd has not solved.
Just to clarify, it would be logically fallacious to assume that all of the NIST scientists, AIA engineers and American Physical Society scientists were all biased because they either work for the government or work in the United States. But this is a common claim made by the truth movement and other conspiracy groups. Anyone who agrees with the official story is either dumb or part of the conspiracy. This is also a classic example of the false dilemma logical fallacy. There is a third option not mentioned because of their cognitive closure, or closed mindedness. But sometimes this argument needs to be broken down in order to understand why it really fails.
If someone makes the claim that a group of scientists or even an entire society of scientists are in on the conspiracy, they presuppose that a conspiracy went down. This presumptuousness can lead to their claim being unfalsfiable, which as philosopher of science Karl Popper always said, isn't scientific. An important question to ask believers in CT is "What would falsify your belief?" Or what evidence would convince you otherwise? If they can't answer these questions they can no longer consider themselves skeptics of the official story. They are cynics. Whenever I'm ever accused of being cynical I always say that my beliefs CAN be falsified. And this isn't just true for conspiracy theories but for any kind of claim. Show me a part of the saucer, or get ONE of your claims right! I cannot stress this enough. The one thing conspiracy theorists are competent at is getting claims wrong as I have yet to see them get one significant claim demonstrably right. For people who are stuck in the middle undecided, the best way to understand whether a group of scientists is being paid off is to do a bit of research and then using critical thinking and logic decide what's more probable. If there is no good reason to believe someone is part of a conspiracy, or that a conspiracy even took place, it is more probable that the scientist is just doing his job. Familiarizing oneself with both sides of the argument is probably the best advice I can offer. You get to understand why each side has its set of beliefs and from that you decide which is more convincing, which makes more sense, and all while building up critical thinking skills usable for other belief systems and everyday life.
1) http://www.thefreedictionary.com/theory
2) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=9
3) http://www.theskepticsguide.org/resources/logicalfallacies.aspx
Conspiracy theories stem from a complex web of ideas, which is constructed over many years, revolving around important historical events and political issues. There are many psychological factors and logical fallacies at work when devising a conspiracy theory and this is what I will try and cover in this essay. First we must go over what a "theory" actually is and why the term "conspiracy theory" has been coined. A theory in science is essentially a body of facts and knowledge used as an explanatory model for a set of phenomena. History uses similar methods but rarely ever refers to events like the Holocaust to be a theory.
We can infer that the holocaust happened because of an extraordinary amount of physical evidence, eyewitness testimony, letters, documents and differences in population demographics from the affected regions in Europe. When there are conflicting accounts of a historical event, we will recognize that there are two or more competing theories each with their own arguments. To contrast with the geological sciences, there was a debate over how the dinosaurs went extinct. While there are more than just two explanations, I will narrow it down for simplicity's sake. You have one camp arguing that an asteroid took out the dinosaurs, and another saying a volcano did. Both have submitted their findings to peer reviewed journals in which they are examined and critiqued by other scientists. A conspiracy theory is played off by true believers as if it's an alternative view that is both reasonable and evidence based. They would probably agree that it's another serious theory that needs to be considered, just like the volcano theory mentioned above. This then seemingly separates their belief from unfounded or weakly-based speculation, and gives them more recognition just because it is called a theory. But this is just a play on words.
There are multiple definitions of the word theory, one which defines most scientific theories, and another version that simply means: "An assumption based on limited information or knowledge."(1) Most researchers who look at CT claims would agree that what they are doing is just weak speculation, and would therefore be considered the latter definition of theory. Their "theory" is said to be reasonable because of a set of arguments used to establish that some form of government conspiracy took place, and in order to justify this you would need some form of evidence. But when a skeptic questions the narrative of a particular CT, it seems that the true believers lack any real answers or have been misinformed about the evidence. One of the main reasons why conspiracy theories prosper is because the true believers think that their view is rational and evidence based. By reading some of the many articles on this site, you will find out that this is not so. From time to time I will hear the line: "If we had any good evidence it would be a conspiracy fact!" But this classic form of conspiracy thinking is contrary to all of their beloved forums and websites, containing lists and videos outlining all of their "smoking gun" evidence.
Whenever it comes to the point of presenting positive evidence for their claims they fail to deliver. They are seemingly ignorant to any of the countless counter arguments and dodge any important questions that they should know the answers to. An example would be Dylan Avery (loose change filmmaker) who when asked 'what happened on 9/11', responded, 'I don't know'. You would think that investigating a historical event for 9 years would lead to some kind of knowledge. Their problem is that they use the wrong kind of skepticism to evaluate evidence, which is something I will get back to later. Not only is lack of any good evidence a problem for an alternative theory, but a good argument also needs to be logically sound. After all it's possible though highly unlikely for a conspiracy to be played out so well that there are no fingerprints left behind, but there needs to be some good reasons for believing an alternative theory to make up for the lack of evidence. This is where argumentation comes into play. The standard rules for argument building consist of first establishing a set number of premises composed of facts and then ending with a conclusion. An oversimplified example would be:
1. Autism rates are rising
2. Vaccines Contain Mercury
3. Mercury is Unsafe and can cause neurological damage
4. Therefore Vaccines cause autism
The problem with this argument is that one of the premises is just wrong and the other two are very misleading. (2) A recent study suggests that autism is found amongst 1% of all age groups which Is not what you would predict if the cause of autism was from thimerosol. The increase in autism comes from better surveillance and a widening of the definition of autism to include Asperger's syndrome and other behavioral disorders. Mercury is safe in small dosages and it's important to note that vaccines use Ethyl mercury. Methyl mercury is the kind found in fish, and this can be harmful if you eat too much. Ethly mercury is much safer and leaves the body after 1-3 days of consumption. Study after study the link between autism and vaccines has failed to show up, even when removing the feared ingredient thimerosol. This conspiracy theory is one of the few that you can actually make solid, testable predictions from. If thimerosol caused autism in infants, removing it from vaccines should show a decrease in autism rates. This prediction was wrong and in fact no alteration to the rates occurred at all. Once you understand why these premises are terribly flawed, the argument falls apart.
The same can apply to the vast majority of conspiracy theories out there. What makes up the premises must be examined with careful scrutiny. You have to weed out any biased or dubious sources and get a simple understanding behind the history and science of the event. Both historians and scientists use peer review, which is the best method in pursuing the truth. One of the reasons why conspiracy theorists have so many websites and books is because they can't make it past other experts without someone questioning their premises. They target people who are unfamiliar with the facts and the science. They also use a reverse scientific method, where they reach their conclusions and then try and jam the "puzzle pieces" together. And their style of argument should stand out as very questionable if you are familiar with common logical fallacies and how science and history actually work.
Authors of "Alternative History" like to attract new people to their works by utilizing a series of techniques. The first is what I like to call the "Long list effect". In almost any conspiracy book you will find somewhere a list of their smoking gun evidence. Sometimes this list gets ridiculously long to a point where the reader stops and begins to think the author must be on to something. As the old saying goes "Its quality not quantity." If they ever had good quality evidence they would be able to convince a lot more people including large political activist groups and also be able to convince lawyers and take these things to court. The attempted lawsuits so far by the truth movement are laughable at best. (Judy Wood and the space beams). David Ray Griffin is a good example of an author who uses such the long list technique. Now I'm not saying that these authors are knowingly deceiving people by using this technique. I'm just describing what it is they do and why it convinces people. Another technique is the argument from historical precedent or the "The complex question fallacy". The CQF is committed when a question is asked (a) that rests on a questionable assumption, and (b) to which all answers appear to endorse that assumption. (3) This is a common tactic used by the 9/11 truth movement. They use Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin and the Reichstag fire as all examples of historical precedents of false flag terror, when anyone who reads up on the events will know that at best they are controversial at worst they have been debunked. (See false flag wiki)
Next up is the "Magic Bullet Argument". "Alternative historians" will often employ this argument to ridicule the official story. "JFK couldn't have been hit by a swerving, dancing bullet. Therefore the official story is false." But no one seriously believes that the bullet behaved that way. There are simple straight lines of trajectory that Oswald's bullet could have taken to kill JFK and injure Governor Connolly, thus eliminating the need for such a ridiculous alternative. Authors also use a variety of non-sequiturs (doesn't follow) , ad hominem insults, and the argument from ignorance. "We don't know what happened on 9/11, therefore we need a new investigation." In other words, they don't know anything about 9/11 because of their unjustified mistrust of any source other than conspiracy sites, books and other like-minded people. The only way someone could be so clueless about 9/11 is if they are using a faulty "Descartian" type of skepticism. This is an extreme form of skepticism which requires us to doubt everything from experience and just rely on words and emotion. But they ignore logic and critical thinking so all that's left is emotion, which is completely unsuitable for scientific inquiry. If you ignore what any disagreeing scientist says, you are not being skeptical at all. A true skeptic would take on any challenges to his belief system and pin point where others who disagree went wrong.
After reading the arguments constructed by conspiracy authors we end up with a jungle of claims. How can one sort through them all knowing which ones are true and false? If the argument is logically fallacious then it's probably not a good argument. If it's not being discussed amongst scientists and historians in the peer review process, it's probably not true. This may seem like an argument to authority, but it is really just showing that having 99% consensus on a single issue must require extraordinary evidence or a really good argument to compensate. The reason why most people subscribe to conspiracy theories is a simple lack of knowledge in the related areas and unfamiliarity with logic. There is also the psychological need to find purpose in one's life, and the preference to believing wildly imaginative myths over otherwise boring accounts. JFK being gunned down by multiple government sponsored mobsters is much more appealing than a lone nut. People often prefer fantasy for truth because sometimes the truth can take the fun out of things. I don't agree with that statement, but I happen to be in the minority.
Individuals who have a general mistrust of others and people who are overly paranoid can use conspiracy theories to explain the world's problems away. In some cases they use them to explain why they themselves cannot succeed in life. The third factor is the appealing notion of possessing secret knowledge that most people lack. This makes individuals feel important and more intelligent than others, giving their life meaning. This also ties into a sort of "rebel complex" where the individual feels like the ultimate bad ass for not buying into the government's lies. But this is where most conspiracy theorists come to a hault. You would think that if foiling the government's evil plans gave them a purpose in life they would go out and do something about it. It seems as if most CT's just like to complain about these delusions to other like minded people constantly using the government as a scapegoat for all their problems. This is unlike any other kind of political activist group. Cognitive dissonance, cognitive closure and hindsight bias are other important psychological effects that play a part in this kind of belief as well.
Lastly, conspiracy theorists hold onto their beliefs, even when thoroughly challenged by skeptics because of what I call the "expanding web theory." Whenever a claim is knocked off their web, another one fills in that spot. "Moving the goalposts" is another popular way to describe this defense mechanism. Even when every claim has been addressed, there is still the cognitive illusion that there is so much counter-knowledge and so the true believer will just continue to be duped, or they will admit they were wrong and become a skeptic. The latter case is extremely rare.
On skepticism
How do conspiracy skeptics manage to sort through the vast information highway that's out there and find out what's true? Skepticism is a methodology, not a belief system so it's not as easy as just hopping aboard the Skeptic's society train and listening to their experts blindly. Although I ended up agreeing with most of mainstream skeptics believe, I arrived at my conclusions by investigating the material on my own. It's important to be open minded, but not so open that your brain falls out. A good way to test this is to write up a narrative of whatever you currently believe happened during a historical event. Sometimes you can only catch the inconsistencies when you put everything together. If you find contradictions in your narrative, you went wrong somewhere. When you come across an extraordinary claim, or even a claim your just not sure about, see what other qualified experts have to say. Do these scientists have an agenda or bias? If they do then compare them to some neutral scientists, who have written papers about something related. An example would be the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. There were plenty of foreign scientific papers written by China, Japan, the UK and Norway that all arrived at the same conclusion as the NIST scientists. Some papers disagreed with technical details but there were no credible teams of scientists that came to the conclusion that there were bombs in the building, and this is a problem that the CT crowd has not solved.
Just to clarify, it would be logically fallacious to assume that all of the NIST scientists, AIA engineers and American Physical Society scientists were all biased because they either work for the government or work in the United States. But this is a common claim made by the truth movement and other conspiracy groups. Anyone who agrees with the official story is either dumb or part of the conspiracy. This is also a classic example of the false dilemma logical fallacy. There is a third option not mentioned because of their cognitive closure, or closed mindedness. But sometimes this argument needs to be broken down in order to understand why it really fails.
If someone makes the claim that a group of scientists or even an entire society of scientists are in on the conspiracy, they presuppose that a conspiracy went down. This presumptuousness can lead to their claim being unfalsfiable, which as philosopher of science Karl Popper always said, isn't scientific. An important question to ask believers in CT is "What would falsify your belief?" Or what evidence would convince you otherwise? If they can't answer these questions they can no longer consider themselves skeptics of the official story. They are cynics. Whenever I'm ever accused of being cynical I always say that my beliefs CAN be falsified. And this isn't just true for conspiracy theories but for any kind of claim. Show me a part of the saucer, or get ONE of your claims right! I cannot stress this enough. The one thing conspiracy theorists are competent at is getting claims wrong as I have yet to see them get one significant claim demonstrably right. For people who are stuck in the middle undecided, the best way to understand whether a group of scientists is being paid off is to do a bit of research and then using critical thinking and logic decide what's more probable. If there is no good reason to believe someone is part of a conspiracy, or that a conspiracy even took place, it is more probable that the scientist is just doing his job. Familiarizing oneself with both sides of the argument is probably the best advice I can offer. You get to understand why each side has its set of beliefs and from that you decide which is more convincing, which makes more sense, and all while building up critical thinking skills usable for other belief systems and everyday life.
1) http://www.thefreedictionary.com/theory
2) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=9
3) http://www.theskepticsguide.org/resources/logicalfallacies.aspx
wiki 911 hijackers still alive
Author: Muertos
Date: May 21, 2010 at 23:26
"Alleged 9/11 Hijackers Still Alive" Conspiracy Theory
Author: Muertos
The Claims:
This specific claim is a subset of 9/11 conspiracy theories in general. Believers in the general 9/11 conspiracy theory ("9/11 Truthers" or simply "Truthers") claim that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 against the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Shanksville, PA were either caused by some nefarious agents--usually the Bush Administration, Israel, or the New World Order--or deliberately permitted to take place. The "hijackers still alive" subset is a claim that one or more (9 is the most common number, but 7 is often heard) of the men identified by the FBI and the 9/11 Commission as the hijackers of the four planes are in fact still alive somewhere, thus supposedly proving or tending to indicate that the "official story" of 9/11 is false.
"The hijackers are still alive!" is not in and of itself usually used by Truthers as a primary argument at the core of the conspiracy, but it is often thrown in as an extra. For example, after spinning the usual controlled demolition claims or attacking the "official story" in one way or other, Truthers will often add, "And, by the way, several of the hijackers are still alive," as if this last bit is supposed to convince those of us who are not immediately won over by their theories about exploding paint or space beams.
The reason this claim is being treated individually apart from other 9/11 material on this site is because of its unique status as having virtually 100% acceptance by all 9/11 Truthers--and also because it's an interesting example of a conspiracy theory that arose from one single source as opposed to a myriad of origins. Ironically, Truthers often disagree on the core basics of the 9/11 conspiracy mythology--witness, for example, the public and visible split between advocates of Steven Jones, who believes the towers were brought down by some incendiary compound hidden in the paint used at the World Trade Center, and Judy Wood, who believes "directed energy weapons" were used. However, virtually all Truthers believe the hijackers are still alive. (I say "virtually" because while I have never met a Truther who does not believe the hijackers are still alive, I can't categorically state that there isn't one lonely LIHOP'er out there who concedes that they're dead). Suffice it to say that "the hijackers are still alive!" is one of the least controversial claims in the 9/11 conspiracy mythos.
Conspiracy Theorists Who Promote This Claim:
As stated, almost all Truthers believe the hijackers are still alive, so you can find dozens of repetitions of the claim with a simple Google search. These are only a few representative examples.
Rebuttal Part One: Facts
All of the 9/11 hijackers are deceased. Not one of them has been seen alive since September 11, 2001, much less conclusively proven to be alive. Not one.
The "hijackers are still alive" meme seems to have started from one single source: a BBC article run on September 23, 2001, barely two weeks after the disaster. (The article is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1559151.stm) In relevant part, the BBC stated:
The problem, however, is that the FBI was "referring" to several people named "Waleed al-Shehri," and it was clear from the very beginning that there was more than one person with that name that the FBI was interested in, if only to narrow the list down to the one who did 9/11. A press release dated September 14, 2001 (available here: http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/091401hj.htm) shows that the FBI was tracking up to three men possibly named "Waleed al Shehri," one from Hollywood, one from Orlando and one from Daytona Beach:
As it turned out, the Waleed M. Alshehri who sat in seat 2B on American Airlines Flight 11--the one who was born in 'Asir Province, Saudi Arabia on December 20, 1978--had not trained at a flight school in the United States. He was a "muscle" hijacker. (Source: http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/profiles/waleed_al-shehri.htm) But there was also a man called Waleed A. Alshehri who had graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 1997, and he was identified by the FBI and later cleared. In the early days of the investigation, before Waleed A. Alshehri was cleared, Embry-Riddle reacted to the inclusion of its alumnus on the FBI list, stating "The fact that one of the perpetrators of this massive crime may have once been here is appalling." (Source: http://www.erau.edu/er/newsmedia/newsreleases/2001/link.html) The "Waleed al-Shehri" quoted in the September 23 BBC article was that Waleed al-Shehri, who was totally different than the one who boarded American Airlines Flight 11. Indeed the innocent (and alive) Waleed al-Shehri quickly contacted American authorities in Morocco, and later gave an interview (transcript available here: http://www.ncmonline.com/content/ncm/2001/oct/1005identities.html" target="_blank">http://web.archive.org/web/20040707010907/http://www.ncmonline.com/content/ncm/2001/oct/1005identities.html</a>) in which he stated:
Because they figured (rightly) that most of the hijackers had some sort of flight training, the FBI was looking for men with this credential, which was why they focused, quite naturally, upon Waleed A. al-Shehri who they knew had trained at an aeronautical university. Media outlets picked this up, found a picture of the innocent Waleed al-Shehri and ran it, which was why his photo appeared. When they realized he was not the guy, the FBI moved on, and no action was ever taken against Waleed A. al-Shehri--who, of course, had done nothing wrong.
So what about the Waleed M. al-Shehri who the FBI eventually realized was their man? Neither he nor his brother, Wail al-Shehri (interesting; the Waleed A. Al Shehri who graduated from Embry-Riddle in the 1990s did not have a brother named Wail) have been seen anywhere since September 11, 2001. Their families certainly have not seen them. Members of the al-Shehri family--the right al-Shehri family--haven't seen them since 2000, and when interviewed by a British newspaper (see here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1407285/The-six-sons-of-Asir.html) their cousin seemed not only to accept that they were involved in 9/11, but in fact he was proud that his relative had committed mass murder:
Okay, so al Shehri was clearly a case of mistaken identity. What about the other hijackers mentioned in the September 23 BBC story...
...such as Abdulaziz al-Omari? Mistaken identity, compounded by possible identity theft (as reported shortly after the attacks here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/1341391/Revealed-the-men-with-stolen-identities.html). The Abdulaziz al-Omari who protested he was sitting at his desk in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on 9/11/2001--the one who works for the Saudi phone company--is a totally different guy than the Abdulaziz al-Omari whom the Saudi government identified as being one of the 9/11 hijackers (source here: http://www.arabianews.org/english/article.cfm?qid=12&sid=6" target="_blank">http://web.archive.org/web/20031026101720/http://www.arabianews.org/english/article.cfm?qid=12&sid=6). That Abdulaziz al-Omari has, not surprisingly, never been seen anywhere since September 11, 2001.
...such as Saeed Alghamdi? Mistaken identity. The Saeed Al-Ghamdi who was a pilot for Saudi Airlines, and protested his innocence, was clearly not the Saeed Al-Ghamdi who made a suicide tape shortly before 9/11 (story here: http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/09/12/hijack.tape/index.html) in which he warned Americans, "God will punish you in a big way. And we promise the United States of America that we will stop you, that we will hurt you."
...such as Khalid al Midhar? Mistaken identity, compounded by identity theft. A radiologist from Texas named Badr Mohammed Hamzi was detained by the FBI in 2001 because he used the name "Khalid al Midhar." (Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/21/afghanistan.september112) He was later released when it was discovered he had nothing to do with the attacks. (Source: http://multimedia.belointeractive.com/attack/investigation/0927vaman.html) He is presumably still alive. One of the other people in the world who happened to have that name--the Khalid al Midhar who was born in Saudi Arabia in 1975 and arrived in the US in Los Angeles in January 2000 (source: http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/DCI_18_June_testimony_new.pdf)--eventually wound up on American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon. There have been no reports of him turning up alive later on either.
When the BBC realized that its infamous September 23 report was being used by conspiracy theorists to bolster their claims, it issued a statement in October 2006:
There you have it. All clearly cases of mistaken identity and same or similar names. So much for these four guys. What about the other hijackers that conspiracy theorists insist are still alive?
Mohammed Atta, the remorseless, steely-eyed killer who was the operational leader of the 9/11 attacks and who evidently shouted "Allah is great!" gleefully as the plane he hijacked was about to slam into one of the WTC towers, is often claimed by Truthers to still be alive. Why? Probably because Atta's father gave an interview to a British newspaper (here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/02/september11.usa) in which he claimed:
"September 12 at around midday" would have been about 5AM September 12 in New York, so clearly if this happened, it occurred after the attacks. This sounds like conclusive proof that Atta must have been alive at that time, doesn't it?
Not quite. First, Atta's father kept changing his story. A week after the attacks, he told a Saudi newspaper that he had not heard from Mohammed since the attacks (here: http://archive.arabnews.com/?page=1&section=0&article=9482&d=19&m=9&y=2001)
Note: as you'll see from that article, he is "confident" not because he claims to have seen his son after 9/11 or knows that he had an alibi, but simply because the father couldn't believe that his son would do something so horrific. Sorry, Dad. He did. In addition to all the other evidence of his guilt, the man caught on a security camera boarding Flight 11 (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atta_in_airport.jpg) is very clearly the same man issued a visa in 2000 (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MohamedAttaVisa.jpg) and who was also the same man identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers (his most famous picture, file: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mohamed_Atta.jpg).
Second, Mohammed Atta was never seen again after September 11, 2001, anywhere in the world. As years went by and Mohammed didn't call or come home, the elder Atta eventually accepted that his son was one of the hijackers and that he was dead, prominently hanging a picture of his son on his front door, and went to CNN praising the July 7, 2005 London terror attacks and demanding $5,000 for an interview, which CNN declined to pay him. (Source here: http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/07/19/atta.father.terror/index.html)
Okay, scratch Atta then. What about the other four? (Truthers have had no luck quote-mining or obfuscating about some of the hijackers, so nine is their limit). Unfortunately for them the Truthers have already expended the best of their ammunition.
Mohand al-Shehri? Dead. The suggestion that he was alive was raised by the Saudi embassy shortly after the attacks, and subsequently dropped; an interview with his father indicates that he accepted from the beginning that his son was involved. (Source: http://911myths.com/index.php/Mohand_al-Shehri_still_alive%3F) In addition to no other Mohand al-Shehris claiming they were falsely accused, the real Mohand al-Shehri has never been seen anywhere in the world since September 11, 2001.
Salem al-Hazmi? Dead. Confused initially with a Salem al-Hamzi (different spelling) who was a Saudi petrochemical worker whose whereabouts in Yanbou on September 11, 2001 can clearly be accounted for. (Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/1341391/Revealed-the-men-with-stolen-identities.html) Salem al-Hazmi has never been seen anywhere in the world anywhere since September 11, 2001.
Ahmed al-Nami? Dead. Mistaken identity, compounded by likely identity theft. The Ahmed al-Nami who was 33 in 2001 and worked for Saudi Airlines clearly was not involved in the 9/11 attacks. (Source: same as in the above paragraph). The Ahmed al-Nami who was 23 in 2001--and who fought in Chechnya and was last heard from by his family in June 2001--was on United Airlines Flight 93. That Ahmed al-Nami has never been seen anywhere in the world since September 11, 2001. (Source: http://911myths.com/index.php/Ahmed_al-Nami_still_alive%3F)
Wail al-Shehri, the brother of the Waleed M. al-Shehri discussed above? Dead. The suggestion of Wail al-Shehri still being alive is due entirely to the association with his brother, about whom, as you saw above, there was considerably more confusion than with any other 9/11 hijacker. Wail al-Shehri appears on a martyrdom video recorded in Afghanistan (source: http://www.webcitation.org/5bTYljW3y) and was last seen by his parents in December 2000 (source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1407285/The-six-sons-of-Asir.html). Wail al-Shehri has never been seen anywhere in the world since September 11, 2001.
As if this all was not evidence enough, the bodily remains of 13 of the 19 hijackers have been found and identified by the FBI in the rubble of the attacks they caused. (Source: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/79402/Exclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-found) Yes, 13 of 19. That means that the conspiracy theorists must be wrong on no fewer than three of their claims, since they claim nine are "still alive." But the fact that three remain unidentified doesn't mean that they're not there--there are still hundreds of victims of the 9/11 attacks whose remains are also unidentified. The fact that (A) those victims are conclusively established to have been at the WTC, the Pentagon or on Flight 93 at the time of the disaster, combined with (B) they have not been seen anywhere alive since, means that they must have died in the disaster. Even Truthers don't generally claim that Barbara Olson or Todd Beamer are still out there walking around (I say "generally" because I vaguely recall some Truther nimrod claiming that Barbara Olson is alive and living in Mexico. I'm sure Ted Sorenson would be interested to know that).
Therefore, it is clear that since all of the hijackers were conclusively placed aboard the flights and none of them have been seen alive since September 11, 2001, this means that all of them died in the attacks. There is no other possibility. Not 10 of them. All 19.
Rebuttal Part Two: Logical Analysis
Truthers make a great many ridiculous claims. But "the hijackers are still alive!" is probably one of the stupidest--which makes it all the more astonishing that it has 100% acceptance in Truther circles, even among those who are thought to be the "intellectuals" of the movement. In fact, even a perfunctory examination of the logic (or lack thereof) involved indicates strongly that, even without the evidence presented above, the 19 hijackers are dead, and that belief otherwise is self-delusion on the highest order.
In evaluating conspiracy theories it's always helpful to look at the theory, step back and imagine what would have to happen in order for the theory to be true. Here, the Truthers want you to believe that all of the following must be true:
Does this make any sense at all? The Truthers called "no-planers," who believe that aircraft did not strike the WTC or the Pentagon in real life at all, are forced to explain the fact that the passengers and crews of the un-hijacked (according to them) planes never came home by suggesting that they must have been killed (usually gassed) or otherwise silenced. But to believe that "nine hijackers are still alive!" you must necessarily believe that, whatever was done to get the passengers of the four planes out of the way, it was not done with respect to the hijackers! No, according to Truthers, they're still out there leading perfectly normal lives. Why would the perpetrators do this? They're willing to kill 3,000 innocent Americans to prop up the hijack story, but they care so much about 19 random Saudis that they're willing to give them a total pass?
Logically, it is much easier to prove that a particular person is alive than it is to prove that he or she is dead. First of all, assuming there is an official record of our existence (such as a birth certificate, driver's license etc.), we are presumed to be alive until proven otherwise. (If I were to vanish today with no trace or explanation, legally I could not be declared "dead" until 2017!) Secondly, if a person is mistakenly believed to be dead, all he or she needs to do is show up and say, "No, here I am." If there's some question about mistaken identity, then a living person could provide numerous different types of evidence--fingerprints, DNA, paper-trail records like credit card receipts or mail, photographs, etc.--to either clear up the mistake or to establish conclusively that the judgment that they were dead is erroneous.
On the other hand, if I were to vanish today with no trace or explanation, how could you prove that I'm dead? You could do it with, (A) my body, which can furnish conclusive evidence (fingerprints, DNA, dental records) or, (B) barring that, some pretty unimpeachable circumstantial evidence that I'm dead, such as, an eyewitness report of me jumping off Victoria Falls, combined with a suicide note in my own hand, and the fact that I have never been seen anywhere again since the date and time this supposedly happened.
Applied to the 9/11 hijackers, in category (A), we have the remains of 13 of them, and for the remaining six, there is evidence in category (B), most unimpeachably the fact that they were established to have been on the planes and have never been seen again, thus proving that all 19 are dead.
But if just one of them was really alive--not a different man with the same name, not a different man whose identity might have been stolen years before--if just one of the hijackers really was still alive, it would be very easy for that person to conclusively establish this fact. If Waleed M. al-Shehri really is alive, why doesn't he call a press conference to trumpet his innocence, fax his fingerprints and dental records to Al-Jazeera, and lodge an official protest with the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia?
Conspiracy theorists will say, "It's because he knows the U.S. government will rub him out if they know where he is, dummy!" But that makes no sense either. If the U.S. government falsely claimed that Waleed M. al-Shehri was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, and then the selfsame Waleed M. al-Shehri walks into an Al-Jazeera TV studio in 2010 (or on September 15, 2001) carrying a file of his fingerprints and dental records, that would conclusively prove the U.S. government is wrong. If the gubbermint rubbed him out after the story was out, what good would that do? You could still conclusively prove that Waleed M. al-Shehri was not aboard American Airlines Flight 11, and that the government hit him for blowing the whistle on their story. It'd be easier to leave him alive. So Waleed M. al-Shehri would have absolutely no incentive not to go public--particularly considering that a genuine and provable "9/11 Hijacker Still Alive!" story would be the scoop of the century and he could command millions of dollars for interviews across the Arab world, if not the West.
Furthermore--and this may be the most damning point of all--if any of the hijackers were still alive, how come not a single 9/11 Truther has ever interviewed one?
Assume for the sake of argument that Waleed M. al-Shehri is still alive, and that nobody in the mainstream media cares (which is ludicrous, but just assume it). If it's so obvious that he's alive and walking around just fine, why doesn't Alex Jones, Peter Joseph Merola, David Ray Griffin, Dylan Avery or Jason Bermas hop a flight to Riyadh, get an exclusive interview and shout from the rooftops that this is conclusive evidence that the "official story" is fake? Or at the very least try to email him and get an official statement? If 9/11 was an inside job, wouldn't al-Shehri and his family have a vested interest in proving that? Even if no one in the mainstream media gives a damn--which again is a silly assumption--there are plenty of conspiracy outlets on the Internet that would slash each other's throat to get an exclusive on that story.
But not one 9/11 Truther has ever claimed to have spoken to or contacted one of these "alive" hijackers, and none of the "alive" hijackers have tried to contact them. Not one. Not a single instance. Zero. Trust me, I've looked. There's not a one.
Ask a Truther, "If you believe the hijackers are still alive, why don't you try to contact one?" and, if you get an answer at all, what you get will be some sort of excuse, brush-off, or frontal attack. No Truther has ever explained why their movement has no interest in contacting any real hijackers--unless of course it has been tried, and whatever gullible Truther tried it discovered in short order what the rest of us already know: that the 9/11 hijackers are dead. All 19 of them.
Summary
"The hijackers are still alive!" is a totally 100% false claim, demonstrably deceptive, as well as insulting to the intelligence to maintain. All of the media reports that Truthers point to as "proof" of this claim are reports of confusion regarding mistaken identity. None of the hijackers identified in the 9/11 Commission Report or established by the FBI more than a few months after the disaster have ever been seen alive again. None of them. Try as they might, Truthers cannot produce a single accused hijacker who is still alive. Furthermore, U.S. authorities have recovered and identified physical remains of at least 13 of them (as of January 2009).
Belief that any of the hijackers are still alive requires an abrogation of logic so total that it leaves the believer open to a serious question of their cognitive abilities. In order to accept this claim you have to believe that the 9/11 conspirators were so careless or incompetent as to leave alive and completely unimpeded at least 9 people who can easily and conclusively prove that they're still alive and obviously did not die in the 9/11 attacks. That the conspirators would have done so is ridiculous. Furthermore, the complete failure of the 9/11 Truth movement to produce even one of these men, or even to try to interview them or contact them in any way, indicates that even Truthers, deep down, cannot seriously maintain that they are still alive--and that their shouting to the contrary means either they haven't investigated the facts, or haven't thought about them deeply enough to realize how moronic this claim actually is. This in itself demonstrates that the Truthers who make a big deal out of trumpeting how thorough and well-sourced their claims are--Peter Joseph Merola, David Ray Griffin and Dylan Avery all fall into this category--are in fact either inexcusably sloppy in their scholarship, or deliberately deceptive in the claims they choose to present to the public hoping you'll buy them.
The hijackers are dead. Every single one of them.
Author: Muertos
The Claims:
This specific claim is a subset of 9/11 conspiracy theories in general. Believers in the general 9/11 conspiracy theory ("9/11 Truthers" or simply "Truthers") claim that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 against the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Shanksville, PA were either caused by some nefarious agents--usually the Bush Administration, Israel, or the New World Order--or deliberately permitted to take place. The "hijackers still alive" subset is a claim that one or more (9 is the most common number, but 7 is often heard) of the men identified by the FBI and the 9/11 Commission as the hijackers of the four planes are in fact still alive somewhere, thus supposedly proving or tending to indicate that the "official story" of 9/11 is false.
"The hijackers are still alive!" is not in and of itself usually used by Truthers as a primary argument at the core of the conspiracy, but it is often thrown in as an extra. For example, after spinning the usual controlled demolition claims or attacking the "official story" in one way or other, Truthers will often add, "And, by the way, several of the hijackers are still alive," as if this last bit is supposed to convince those of us who are not immediately won over by their theories about exploding paint or space beams.
The reason this claim is being treated individually apart from other 9/11 material on this site is because of its unique status as having virtually 100% acceptance by all 9/11 Truthers--and also because it's an interesting example of a conspiracy theory that arose from one single source as opposed to a myriad of origins. Ironically, Truthers often disagree on the core basics of the 9/11 conspiracy mythology--witness, for example, the public and visible split between advocates of Steven Jones, who believes the towers were brought down by some incendiary compound hidden in the paint used at the World Trade Center, and Judy Wood, who believes "directed energy weapons" were used. However, virtually all Truthers believe the hijackers are still alive. (I say "virtually" because while I have never met a Truther who does not believe the hijackers are still alive, I can't categorically state that there isn't one lonely LIHOP'er out there who concedes that they're dead). Suffice it to say that "the hijackers are still alive!" is one of the least controversial claims in the 9/11 conspiracy mythos.
Conspiracy Theorists Who Promote This Claim:
As stated, almost all Truthers believe the hijackers are still alive, so you can find dozens of repetitions of the claim with a simple Google search. These are only a few representative examples.
- Peter Joseph Merola, creator of the conspiracy film Zeitgeist: The Movie (Link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-594683847743189197# [ffwd to 47:07; shows David Ray Griffin making this claim)
- David Ray Griffin, retired theologian (Link: http://davidraygriffin.com/articles/the-911-commission-report-a-571-page-lie/)
- Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas, creators of the conspiracy film Loose Change (Link: http://www.loosechangeguide.com/lcg5.html#Are some alive? Note: this link is to the debunking "viewer's guide" which contains a written transcript of the movie, produced here to show where in the film this claim is made)
- Alex Jones, conspiracy radio talk show host, frequently makes the claim (Example from his website: http://www.prisonplanet.com/seven_of_the_wtc_hijackers_found_alive.html)
- "Killtown," notorious Truther (Link: http://killtown.911review.org/911smokingguns.html#patsies See item 256)
Rebuttal Part One: Facts
All of the 9/11 hijackers are deceased. Not one of them has been seen alive since September 11, 2001, much less conclusively proven to be alive. Not one.
The "hijackers are still alive" meme seems to have started from one single source: a BBC article run on September 23, 2001, barely two weeks after the disaster. (The article is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1559151.stm) In relevant part, the BBC stated:
"Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well. The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt. Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September. His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world. Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco. He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports. He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring."
The problem, however, is that the FBI was "referring" to several people named "Waleed al-Shehri," and it was clear from the very beginning that there was more than one person with that name that the FBI was interested in, if only to narrow the list down to the one who did 9/11. A press release dated September 14, 2001 (available here: http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/091401hj.htm) shows that the FBI was tracking up to three men possibly named "Waleed al Shehri," one from Hollywood, one from Orlando and one from Daytona Beach:
"2) Waleed M. Alshehri - Dates of birth used: September 13, 1974/January 1, 1976/ March 3, 1976/ July 8, 1977/ December 20, 1978/ May 11, 1979/ November 5, 1979; Possible residence (s) : Hollywood, Florida/ Orlando, Florida/ Daytona Beach, Florida; Believed to be a pilot."
As it turned out, the Waleed M. Alshehri who sat in seat 2B on American Airlines Flight 11--the one who was born in 'Asir Province, Saudi Arabia on December 20, 1978--had not trained at a flight school in the United States. He was a "muscle" hijacker. (Source: http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/profiles/waleed_al-shehri.htm) But there was also a man called Waleed A. Alshehri who had graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 1997, and he was identified by the FBI and later cleared. In the early days of the investigation, before Waleed A. Alshehri was cleared, Embry-Riddle reacted to the inclusion of its alumnus on the FBI list, stating "The fact that one of the perpetrators of this massive crime may have once been here is appalling." (Source: http://www.erau.edu/er/newsmedia/newsreleases/2001/link.html) The "Waleed al-Shehri" quoted in the September 23 BBC article was that Waleed al-Shehri, who was totally different than the one who boarded American Airlines Flight 11. Indeed the innocent (and alive) Waleed al-Shehri quickly contacted American authorities in Morocco, and later gave an interview (transcript available here: http://www.ncmonline.com/content/ncm/2001/oct/1005identities.html" target="_blank">http://web.archive.org/web/20040707010907/http://www.ncmonline.com/content/ncm/2001/oct/1005identities.html</a>) in which he stated:
"[I]n the morning of Sunday last my friend called me to say that CNN had shown a picture of me. I was dumbfounded. I decided then to go back to Casablanca and get in contact with the Saudi embassy. The ambassador Dr. Abd-ul-Azeez Khoja received me on Tuesday last and showed great concern about what was happening. He said that the foreign minister Prince Sa'ud al-Faisal was personally investigating the situation. Then I went to the American embassy in Rabat and told the people there what my situation was. I told them I was quite alive though I was reported as dead. I was supposed to have died in the suicide attack against the World Trade Center. They apologized to me for the confusion that had occurred. They were interested in flight schools in Florida that trained pilots."
Because they figured (rightly) that most of the hijackers had some sort of flight training, the FBI was looking for men with this credential, which was why they focused, quite naturally, upon Waleed A. al-Shehri who they knew had trained at an aeronautical university. Media outlets picked this up, found a picture of the innocent Waleed al-Shehri and ran it, which was why his photo appeared. When they realized he was not the guy, the FBI moved on, and no action was ever taken against Waleed A. al-Shehri--who, of course, had done nothing wrong.
So what about the Waleed M. al-Shehri who the FBI eventually realized was their man? Neither he nor his brother, Wail al-Shehri (interesting; the Waleed A. Al Shehri who graduated from Embry-Riddle in the 1990s did not have a brother named Wail) have been seen anywhere since September 11, 2001. Their families certainly have not seen them. Members of the al-Shehri family--the right al-Shehri family--haven't seen them since 2000, and when interviewed by a British newspaper (see here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1407285/The-six-sons-of-Asir.html) their cousin seemed not only to accept that they were involved in 9/11, but in fact he was proud that his relative had committed mass murder:
"'When we read their names we were very proud because the black hand of Americans are in everything,' said their cousin. 'I don't think my cousins were exploited. I think they did it out of their own convictions.'"
Okay, so al Shehri was clearly a case of mistaken identity. What about the other hijackers mentioned in the September 23 BBC story...
...such as Abdulaziz al-Omari? Mistaken identity, compounded by possible identity theft (as reported shortly after the attacks here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/1341391/Revealed-the-men-with-stolen-identities.html). The Abdulaziz al-Omari who protested he was sitting at his desk in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on 9/11/2001--the one who works for the Saudi phone company--is a totally different guy than the Abdulaziz al-Omari whom the Saudi government identified as being one of the 9/11 hijackers (source here: http://www.arabianews.org/english/article.cfm?qid=12&sid=6" target="_blank">http://web.archive.org/web/20031026101720/http://www.arabianews.org/english/article.cfm?qid=12&sid=6). That Abdulaziz al-Omari has, not surprisingly, never been seen anywhere since September 11, 2001.
...such as Saeed Alghamdi? Mistaken identity. The Saeed Al-Ghamdi who was a pilot for Saudi Airlines, and protested his innocence, was clearly not the Saeed Al-Ghamdi who made a suicide tape shortly before 9/11 (story here: http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/09/12/hijack.tape/index.html) in which he warned Americans, "God will punish you in a big way. And we promise the United States of America that we will stop you, that we will hurt you."
...such as Khalid al Midhar? Mistaken identity, compounded by identity theft. A radiologist from Texas named Badr Mohammed Hamzi was detained by the FBI in 2001 because he used the name "Khalid al Midhar." (Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/21/afghanistan.september112) He was later released when it was discovered he had nothing to do with the attacks. (Source: http://multimedia.belointeractive.com/attack/investigation/0927vaman.html) He is presumably still alive. One of the other people in the world who happened to have that name--the Khalid al Midhar who was born in Saudi Arabia in 1975 and arrived in the US in Los Angeles in January 2000 (source: http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/DCI_18_June_testimony_new.pdf)--eventually wound up on American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon. There have been no reports of him turning up alive later on either.
When the BBC realized that its infamous September 23 report was being used by conspiracy theorists to bolster their claims, it issued a statement in October 2006:
"A five-year-old story from our archive has been the subject of some recent editorial discussion here. The story, written in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was about confusion at the time surrounding the names and identities of some of the hijackers. This confusion was widely reported and was also acknowledged by the FBI.... The confusion over names and identities we reported back in 2001 may have arisen because these were common Arabic and Islamic names."
There you have it. All clearly cases of mistaken identity and same or similar names. So much for these four guys. What about the other hijackers that conspiracy theorists insist are still alive?
Mohammed Atta, the remorseless, steely-eyed killer who was the operational leader of the 9/11 attacks and who evidently shouted "Allah is great!" gleefully as the plane he hijacked was about to slam into one of the WTC towers, is often claimed by Truthers to still be alive. Why? Probably because Atta's father gave an interview to a British newspaper (here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/02/september11.usa) in which he claimed:
"He is hiding in a secret place so as not to be murdered by the US secret services... My son called me the day after the attacks on September 12 at around midday. We spoke for two minutes about this and that. He didn't tell me where he was calling from. At that time neither of us knew anything about the attacks."
"September 12 at around midday" would have been about 5AM September 12 in New York, so clearly if this happened, it occurred after the attacks. This sounds like conclusive proof that Atta must have been alive at that time, doesn't it?
Not quite. First, Atta's father kept changing his story. A week after the attacks, he told a Saudi newspaper that he had not heard from Mohammed since the attacks (here: http://archive.arabnews.com/?page=1&section=0&article=9482&d=19&m=9&y=2001)
"Atta's father, a lawyer, said he had not heard from his son since the attack, but was confident he had nothing to do with the carnage."
Note: as you'll see from that article, he is "confident" not because he claims to have seen his son after 9/11 or knows that he had an alibi, but simply because the father couldn't believe that his son would do something so horrific. Sorry, Dad. He did. In addition to all the other evidence of his guilt, the man caught on a security camera boarding Flight 11 (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atta_in_airport.jpg) is very clearly the same man issued a visa in 2000 (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MohamedAttaVisa.jpg) and who was also the same man identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers (his most famous picture, file: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mohamed_Atta.jpg).
Second, Mohammed Atta was never seen again after September 11, 2001, anywhere in the world. As years went by and Mohammed didn't call or come home, the elder Atta eventually accepted that his son was one of the hijackers and that he was dead, prominently hanging a picture of his son on his front door, and went to CNN praising the July 7, 2005 London terror attacks and demanding $5,000 for an interview, which CNN declined to pay him. (Source here: http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/07/19/atta.father.terror/index.html)
Okay, scratch Atta then. What about the other four? (Truthers have had no luck quote-mining or obfuscating about some of the hijackers, so nine is their limit). Unfortunately for them the Truthers have already expended the best of their ammunition.
Mohand al-Shehri? Dead. The suggestion that he was alive was raised by the Saudi embassy shortly after the attacks, and subsequently dropped; an interview with his father indicates that he accepted from the beginning that his son was involved. (Source: http://911myths.com/index.php/Mohand_al-Shehri_still_alive%3F) In addition to no other Mohand al-Shehris claiming they were falsely accused, the real Mohand al-Shehri has never been seen anywhere in the world since September 11, 2001.
Salem al-Hazmi? Dead. Confused initially with a Salem al-Hamzi (different spelling) who was a Saudi petrochemical worker whose whereabouts in Yanbou on September 11, 2001 can clearly be accounted for. (Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/1341391/Revealed-the-men-with-stolen-identities.html) Salem al-Hazmi has never been seen anywhere in the world anywhere since September 11, 2001.
Ahmed al-Nami? Dead. Mistaken identity, compounded by likely identity theft. The Ahmed al-Nami who was 33 in 2001 and worked for Saudi Airlines clearly was not involved in the 9/11 attacks. (Source: same as in the above paragraph). The Ahmed al-Nami who was 23 in 2001--and who fought in Chechnya and was last heard from by his family in June 2001--was on United Airlines Flight 93. That Ahmed al-Nami has never been seen anywhere in the world since September 11, 2001. (Source: http://911myths.com/index.php/Ahmed_al-Nami_still_alive%3F)
Wail al-Shehri, the brother of the Waleed M. al-Shehri discussed above? Dead. The suggestion of Wail al-Shehri still being alive is due entirely to the association with his brother, about whom, as you saw above, there was considerably more confusion than with any other 9/11 hijacker. Wail al-Shehri appears on a martyrdom video recorded in Afghanistan (source: http://www.webcitation.org/5bTYljW3y) and was last seen by his parents in December 2000 (source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1407285/The-six-sons-of-Asir.html). Wail al-Shehri has never been seen anywhere in the world since September 11, 2001.
As if this all was not evidence enough, the bodily remains of 13 of the 19 hijackers have been found and identified by the FBI in the rubble of the attacks they caused. (Source: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/79402/Exclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-foundExclusive-Remains-of-9-11-killers-found) Yes, 13 of 19. That means that the conspiracy theorists must be wrong on no fewer than three of their claims, since they claim nine are "still alive." But the fact that three remain unidentified doesn't mean that they're not there--there are still hundreds of victims of the 9/11 attacks whose remains are also unidentified. The fact that (A) those victims are conclusively established to have been at the WTC, the Pentagon or on Flight 93 at the time of the disaster, combined with (B) they have not been seen anywhere alive since, means that they must have died in the disaster. Even Truthers don't generally claim that Barbara Olson or Todd Beamer are still out there walking around (I say "generally" because I vaguely recall some Truther nimrod claiming that Barbara Olson is alive and living in Mexico. I'm sure Ted Sorenson would be interested to know that).
Therefore, it is clear that since all of the hijackers were conclusively placed aboard the flights and none of them have been seen alive since September 11, 2001, this means that all of them died in the attacks. There is no other possibility. Not 10 of them. All 19.
Rebuttal Part Two: Logical Analysis
Truthers make a great many ridiculous claims. But "the hijackers are still alive!" is probably one of the stupidest--which makes it all the more astonishing that it has 100% acceptance in Truther circles, even among those who are thought to be the "intellectuals" of the movement. In fact, even a perfunctory examination of the logic (or lack thereof) involved indicates strongly that, even without the evidence presented above, the 19 hijackers are dead, and that belief otherwise is self-delusion on the highest order.
In evaluating conspiracy theories it's always helpful to look at the theory, step back and imagine what would have to happen in order for the theory to be true. Here, the Truthers want you to believe that all of the following must be true:
- Someone decided to "do" 9/11 and make it look like hijackers took over the four planes.
- Whoever did this evidently chose Arab names at random, or selected as the "hijackers" at least nine real people who had nothing to do with Al-Qaida.
- The perpetrators identified these (at least) 9 innocent people to the FBI as the hijackers.
- The perpetrators of 9/11 persisted in their identification of the (at least) 9 fake hijackers despite the fact that every one of them would presumably be able to come up with an airtight alibi.
- The perpetrators went to the time and trouble of faking martyrdom videos of several of the innocent people that they intended to claim were responsible for 9/11.
- After 9/11, the perpetrators were so unconcerned about the possibility of the real persons whose names they used as "hijackers" coming forward to claim they were alive that the perpetrators did absolutely nothing to stop them. They let the nine innocent people accused of being the hijackers carry on with completely normal lives and made absolutely no attempt to silence, intimidate or assassinate them.
- None of the people involved in the perpetration of this fraud either got cold feet and blew the whistle, or screwed up and inadvertently allowed evidence of their deception to leak out.
Does this make any sense at all? The Truthers called "no-planers," who believe that aircraft did not strike the WTC or the Pentagon in real life at all, are forced to explain the fact that the passengers and crews of the un-hijacked (according to them) planes never came home by suggesting that they must have been killed (usually gassed) or otherwise silenced. But to believe that "nine hijackers are still alive!" you must necessarily believe that, whatever was done to get the passengers of the four planes out of the way, it was not done with respect to the hijackers! No, according to Truthers, they're still out there leading perfectly normal lives. Why would the perpetrators do this? They're willing to kill 3,000 innocent Americans to prop up the hijack story, but they care so much about 19 random Saudis that they're willing to give them a total pass?
Logically, it is much easier to prove that a particular person is alive than it is to prove that he or she is dead. First of all, assuming there is an official record of our existence (such as a birth certificate, driver's license etc.), we are presumed to be alive until proven otherwise. (If I were to vanish today with no trace or explanation, legally I could not be declared "dead" until 2017!) Secondly, if a person is mistakenly believed to be dead, all he or she needs to do is show up and say, "No, here I am." If there's some question about mistaken identity, then a living person could provide numerous different types of evidence--fingerprints, DNA, paper-trail records like credit card receipts or mail, photographs, etc.--to either clear up the mistake or to establish conclusively that the judgment that they were dead is erroneous.
On the other hand, if I were to vanish today with no trace or explanation, how could you prove that I'm dead? You could do it with, (A) my body, which can furnish conclusive evidence (fingerprints, DNA, dental records) or, (B) barring that, some pretty unimpeachable circumstantial evidence that I'm dead, such as, an eyewitness report of me jumping off Victoria Falls, combined with a suicide note in my own hand, and the fact that I have never been seen anywhere again since the date and time this supposedly happened.
Applied to the 9/11 hijackers, in category (A), we have the remains of 13 of them, and for the remaining six, there is evidence in category (B), most unimpeachably the fact that they were established to have been on the planes and have never been seen again, thus proving that all 19 are dead.
But if just one of them was really alive--not a different man with the same name, not a different man whose identity might have been stolen years before--if just one of the hijackers really was still alive, it would be very easy for that person to conclusively establish this fact. If Waleed M. al-Shehri really is alive, why doesn't he call a press conference to trumpet his innocence, fax his fingerprints and dental records to Al-Jazeera, and lodge an official protest with the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia?
Conspiracy theorists will say, "It's because he knows the U.S. government will rub him out if they know where he is, dummy!" But that makes no sense either. If the U.S. government falsely claimed that Waleed M. al-Shehri was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, and then the selfsame Waleed M. al-Shehri walks into an Al-Jazeera TV studio in 2010 (or on September 15, 2001) carrying a file of his fingerprints and dental records, that would conclusively prove the U.S. government is wrong. If the gubbermint rubbed him out after the story was out, what good would that do? You could still conclusively prove that Waleed M. al-Shehri was not aboard American Airlines Flight 11, and that the government hit him for blowing the whistle on their story. It'd be easier to leave him alive. So Waleed M. al-Shehri would have absolutely no incentive not to go public--particularly considering that a genuine and provable "9/11 Hijacker Still Alive!" story would be the scoop of the century and he could command millions of dollars for interviews across the Arab world, if not the West.
Furthermore--and this may be the most damning point of all--if any of the hijackers were still alive, how come not a single 9/11 Truther has ever interviewed one?
Assume for the sake of argument that Waleed M. al-Shehri is still alive, and that nobody in the mainstream media cares (which is ludicrous, but just assume it). If it's so obvious that he's alive and walking around just fine, why doesn't Alex Jones, Peter Joseph Merola, David Ray Griffin, Dylan Avery or Jason Bermas hop a flight to Riyadh, get an exclusive interview and shout from the rooftops that this is conclusive evidence that the "official story" is fake? Or at the very least try to email him and get an official statement? If 9/11 was an inside job, wouldn't al-Shehri and his family have a vested interest in proving that? Even if no one in the mainstream media gives a damn--which again is a silly assumption--there are plenty of conspiracy outlets on the Internet that would slash each other's throat to get an exclusive on that story.
But not one 9/11 Truther has ever claimed to have spoken to or contacted one of these "alive" hijackers, and none of the "alive" hijackers have tried to contact them. Not one. Not a single instance. Zero. Trust me, I've looked. There's not a one.
Ask a Truther, "If you believe the hijackers are still alive, why don't you try to contact one?" and, if you get an answer at all, what you get will be some sort of excuse, brush-off, or frontal attack. No Truther has ever explained why their movement has no interest in contacting any real hijackers--unless of course it has been tried, and whatever gullible Truther tried it discovered in short order what the rest of us already know: that the 9/11 hijackers are dead. All 19 of them.
Summary
"The hijackers are still alive!" is a totally 100% false claim, demonstrably deceptive, as well as insulting to the intelligence to maintain. All of the media reports that Truthers point to as "proof" of this claim are reports of confusion regarding mistaken identity. None of the hijackers identified in the 9/11 Commission Report or established by the FBI more than a few months after the disaster have ever been seen alive again. None of them. Try as they might, Truthers cannot produce a single accused hijacker who is still alive. Furthermore, U.S. authorities have recovered and identified physical remains of at least 13 of them (as of January 2009).
Belief that any of the hijackers are still alive requires an abrogation of logic so total that it leaves the believer open to a serious question of their cognitive abilities. In order to accept this claim you have to believe that the 9/11 conspirators were so careless or incompetent as to leave alive and completely unimpeded at least 9 people who can easily and conclusively prove that they're still alive and obviously did not die in the 9/11 attacks. That the conspirators would have done so is ridiculous. Furthermore, the complete failure of the 9/11 Truth movement to produce even one of these men, or even to try to interview them or contact them in any way, indicates that even Truthers, deep down, cannot seriously maintain that they are still alive--and that their shouting to the contrary means either they haven't investigated the facts, or haven't thought about them deeply enough to realize how moronic this claim actually is. This in itself demonstrates that the Truthers who make a big deal out of trumpeting how thorough and well-sourced their claims are--Peter Joseph Merola, David Ray Griffin and Dylan Avery all fall into this category--are in fact either inexcusably sloppy in their scholarship, or deliberately deceptive in the claims they choose to present to the public hoping you'll buy them.
The hijackers are dead. Every single one of them.
ConspiracyScience.com Addresses Global Warming Denial
Author: Muertos
Date: May 18, 2010 at 17:12
By Muertos (muertos@gmail.com)
One of the things this site is known for is Edward Winston's very detailed refutations of deceptive conspiracy films, most notably the Zeitgeist films and various Alex Jones movies. Because of this, we've gotten several requests from people who believe that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a "hoax" to include Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth on ConspiracyScience.com as a "deceptive" conspiracy film in the same vein as Zeitgeist or The Obama Deception. In investigating the movie and the phenomenon of climate change hoax allegations in general, we have come to the conclusion that not only is An Inconvenient Truth NOT appropriate to be listed as a conspiracy film, but in fact "global warming is a hoax" claims themselves qualify as a conspiracy theory that should be debunked on this site.
As of late last week, therefore, we now have an article available in our Wiki section that addresses "global warming is a hoax" conspiracy theories in general, and the claims of deception in An Inconvenient Truth in particular. (Link: http://conspiracyscience.com/blog/wiki-global-warming-denial/)
As the Wiki article explains, AGW is not a hoax. It is based upon science that has been thoroughly researched and vetted. The vast majority of the world's scientists, including (poll results) 97.5% of climatologists who have published research on climate change, agree that climate change is really happening and that it's caused primarily by human activity. The claims to the contrary--that somehow AGW is a "fraud" cooked up by (take your pick) Al Gore, the International Panel on Climate Change, a cabal of greedy scientists, or even anthropologist Margaret Mead--are false.
The article is not intended as a comprehensive debunking of every claim made by AGW deniers and conspiracy theorists. (If you want that, you should go here, here or here). In our article, I address a few of what I've encountered as the most representative and favorite claims of the "global warming is a hoax" conspiracy theorists:
The sources supporting our refutations of these arguments are in the Wiki article. If you're an AGW denier conspiracy theorist, don't write to me saying "You didn't source anything!" because this blog is not the refutation--the Wiki article is the refutation that contains the sources.
Because AGW is a political issue, I'm sure there will be some people out there who claim that our posting of this article constitutes ConspiracyScience.com taking a political position, for instance, that we must "love" Al Gore or that because we have debunked "global warming is a hoax" conspiracy theories that we must support carbon taxes or cap-and-trade legislation. This is not true. The purpose of this article is not to endorse one or another position regarding climate change policy or what should be done to mitigate climate change. The purpose of this article is to answer three specific factual, not political, questions:
For the record, speaking only for myself, I'm not a huge fan of Al Gore. I didn't vote for him and I don't think he would have made a good president. That's my personal opinion, not the opinion of ConspiracyScience.com, which neither endorses nor denounces politicians--unless they happen to promote conspiracy theories, as some do. But, as our article explains, the issue of climate change does not center around Al Gore's political beliefs, carbon taxes, cap-and-trade or the Kyoto Accords. As a factual matter, climate change is happening. What we should do about it is beyond the scope of what we're trying to do here at ConspiracyScience.com. We debunk conspiracy theories. "Global warming is a hoax!" is a conspiracy theory. Consequently, we have debunked it, and we believe our facts are sound.
So, in short, quit asking us to "debunk" An Inconvenient Truth. It has errors but it is not a conspiracy film, certainly nothing even close to Zeitgeist or The Obama Deception. For a fuller and more in-depth analysis of AGW denial as a conspiracy theory, please go to the Wiki article.
One of the things this site is known for is Edward Winston's very detailed refutations of deceptive conspiracy films, most notably the Zeitgeist films and various Alex Jones movies. Because of this, we've gotten several requests from people who believe that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a "hoax" to include Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth on ConspiracyScience.com as a "deceptive" conspiracy film in the same vein as Zeitgeist or The Obama Deception. In investigating the movie and the phenomenon of climate change hoax allegations in general, we have come to the conclusion that not only is An Inconvenient Truth NOT appropriate to be listed as a conspiracy film, but in fact "global warming is a hoax" claims themselves qualify as a conspiracy theory that should be debunked on this site.
As of late last week, therefore, we now have an article available in our Wiki section that addresses "global warming is a hoax" conspiracy theories in general, and the claims of deception in An Inconvenient Truth in particular. (Link: http://conspiracyscience.com/blog/wiki-global-warming-denial/)
As the Wiki article explains, AGW is not a hoax. It is based upon science that has been thoroughly researched and vetted. The vast majority of the world's scientists, including (poll results) 97.5% of climatologists who have published research on climate change, agree that climate change is really happening and that it's caused primarily by human activity. The claims to the contrary--that somehow AGW is a "fraud" cooked up by (take your pick) Al Gore, the International Panel on Climate Change, a cabal of greedy scientists, or even anthropologist Margaret Mead--are false.
The article is not intended as a comprehensive debunking of every claim made by AGW deniers and conspiracy theorists. (If you want that, you should go here, here or here). In our article, I address a few of what I've encountered as the most representative and favorite claims of the "global warming is a hoax" conspiracy theorists:
- There is no scientific consensus that climate change is happening or that it's caused by humans. (Sorry, there is--an overwhelming consensus).
- The "hockey stick" (meaning graphs of projected global temperatures showing a marked upward swing in recent years) is broken. (It's not--every study shows exactly the same thing).
- CO2 can't be a pollutant because far greater levels of CO2 are emitted by natural processes such as oceans and vegetation than by human activity. (Misses the point--it's about the rate of absorption, which cannot keep up with human-generated CO2 emissions).
- Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth is deceptive and fraudulent. (Sorry, it isn't--the errors in the film are minor and do not affect the scientific basis for its conclusions regarding AGW).
- The hacked emails from East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit are proof of a conspiracy by climatologists to fabricate AGW evidence. (No, they're not--every single one of these claims involves a statement taken out of context or misunderstood, and in fact the CRU has been exonerated by a recent investigation).
- Over 31,000 scientists have signed a petition stating that they disagree with AGW conclusions, which indicates a serious lack of consensus. (The petition is fraudulent, and even if it wasn't, 31,000 is a tiny minority of the scientists out there).
- AGW can't exist because the idea of the greenhouse effect violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (Sorry, but that's ridiculous--a total misapplication of thermodynamics and climate process in general).
- It's cold today. Therefore AGW is a hoax. (Ignorant and ridiculous--there's a difference between weather and climate).
The sources supporting our refutations of these arguments are in the Wiki article. If you're an AGW denier conspiracy theorist, don't write to me saying "You didn't source anything!" because this blog is not the refutation--the Wiki article is the refutation that contains the sources.
Because AGW is a political issue, I'm sure there will be some people out there who claim that our posting of this article constitutes ConspiracyScience.com taking a political position, for instance, that we must "love" Al Gore or that because we have debunked "global warming is a hoax" conspiracy theories that we must support carbon taxes or cap-and-trade legislation. This is not true. The purpose of this article is not to endorse one or another position regarding climate change policy or what should be done to mitigate climate change. The purpose of this article is to answer three specific factual, not political, questions:
- Is climate change really happening? (Yes).
- Is it caused primarily by human activity? (Yes).
- Are allegations that global warming is a hoax or conspiracy true? (No).
For the record, speaking only for myself, I'm not a huge fan of Al Gore. I didn't vote for him and I don't think he would have made a good president. That's my personal opinion, not the opinion of ConspiracyScience.com, which neither endorses nor denounces politicians--unless they happen to promote conspiracy theories, as some do. But, as our article explains, the issue of climate change does not center around Al Gore's political beliefs, carbon taxes, cap-and-trade or the Kyoto Accords. As a factual matter, climate change is happening. What we should do about it is beyond the scope of what we're trying to do here at ConspiracyScience.com. We debunk conspiracy theories. "Global warming is a hoax!" is a conspiracy theory. Consequently, we have debunked it, and we believe our facts are sound.
So, in short, quit asking us to "debunk" An Inconvenient Truth. It has errors but it is not a conspiracy film, certainly nothing even close to Zeitgeist or The Obama Deception. For a fuller and more in-depth analysis of AGW denial as a conspiracy theory, please go to the Wiki article.