9/11 "alternative" theories and "conspiracies" [View all]

[eridani]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by MerryBlooms (a host of the General Discussion forum).

The various HOP levels are

--our government is behind 9-11, that is to say MIHOP=Made It Happen On Purpose.
--LIHOP= Let It Happen On Purpose.
--The third option is incompetent negligence due to having other priorities like the missile defense shield boondoggle, cutting taxes for the rich and planning the invasion of Iraq.

Personally, I’m somewhere between negligence and LIHOP, and highly skeptical about the theories presupposing controlled demolition. The reason for this is mainly living in Seattle, witnessing the controlled demolition of the Kingdome, and reading all of the related stories about it at the time. Most of the people reasoning about controlled demolition on 9-11 are working from strictly theoretical calculations—channeling Rene Descartes. Actual professionals who do controlled demolitions channel Francis Bacon; they can’t afford to rely solely on theoretical calculations because they don’t want to die in the process of doing their work. They know they need to do some empirical testing. Several weeks before the final implosion, the demolition crew did an extensive series of test blasts. There is no such thing as a demolition crew that would agree to skip this step, period. No amount of money is worth being killed or maimed.

As the articles widely available in the press at the time explained, the crew could not assume that the plans they were given on the structure of the Kingdome were completely correct. Just because a designer specifies a certain grade of rebar or concrete doesn’t mean that the actual building contains exactly what is specified. Do contractors never pull substitutions because they had a stash of something similar to what was specified on hand? Never make a guess that some less critical areas might get by with concrete to which extra sand was added to save a bit of money? That’s why demolition experts do test blasts—to check their assumptions about material strength in various areas of the building to be demolished.

MIHOP requires far too many things that would have had to go exactly right concurrently. LIHOP explains how foreknowledge doesn’t necessarily require complete information about operational details. This is in fact what the interrogation of Zubaydah (before the torture) indicated.


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030908-480226,00.html

Without charging any skullduggery (Posner told TIME they "may in fact be coincidences&quot , the author notes that these deaths occurred after CIA officials passed along Zubaydah's accusations to Riyadh and Islamabad. Washington, reports Posner, was shocked when Zubaydah claimed that “9/11 changed nothing” about the clandestine marriage of terrorism and Saudi and Pakistani interests, “because both Prince Ahmed and Mir knew that an attack was scheduled for American soil on that day.” They couldn't stop it or warn the U.S. in advance, Zubaydah said, because they didn't know what or where the attack would be. And they couldn't turn on bin Laden afterward because he could expose their prior knowledge. Both capitals swiftly assured Washington that “they had thoroughly investigated the claims and they were false and malicious.” The Bush Administration, writes Posner, decided that “creating an international incident and straining relations with those regional allies when they were critical to the war in Afghanistan and the buildup for possible war with Iraq, was out of the question.”

The fact that I don’t necessarily agree with everyone in the 9-11 truth movement certainly doesn’t mean that I agree with the official stance, which is to deride anyone who suspects that our government hasn’t told us the truth about what they know. To criticize “conspiracy theorists” is to blame the victim instead of taking on the perpetrators. There is a reason why people come up with conspiracy theories—they happen to be a normal and healthy response to the experience of being forbidden access to relevant information and being constantly lied to by the people who do.

The radical therapist Claude Steiner once said that paranoia is actually a heightened state of awareness, in which the paranoid put together narratives that make sense of the only information they have available. He gave an example of a woman he treated who believed that her husband was engaged in several elaborate plots on her life. What Steiner did was to interview the husband, who was disturbed by his wife's narrative. The husband was in fact thinking of having her permanently committed to the funny farm, but he always responded to his wife's questions about what was wrong between them by saying “Nothing, honey.”

That was the crux of the problem. The wife was in a heightened state of awareness and knew only that “Nothing, honey” was a pile of steaming bullshit. Not having access to real information about what was going on in her husband's head, she invented it. Steiner's ultimately successful therapy was simply to convince the husband to stop lying and withholding information. In this case, the husband did not exactly lead the examined life, and was unaware of the harm that social “white lies” can sometimes cause. Being genuinely concerned about his wife, he agreed to try to be more introspective and commit to being honest about his feelings. The wife agreed to acknowledge this effort, and to be more persistent about asking for information instead of automatically assuming the worst. Of course members of our imperial government have no such commitment to making it all better for the rest of us—see the classic Ingrid Berman/Charles Boyer movie Gaslight for a psychological take on their game.

The bottom line here is that it is a basic requirement of sanity to be able to make sense of one's information environment, to be able to put it into a coherent and meaningful picture, and if those people who know what is going on behind closed doors constantly lie to the public and withhold information, the inevitable result is that people will naturally want to fill in the blanks by any means possible. This process is analogous to the effects of sensory deprivation—float in one of those tanks long enough to deprive your brain of sensory input, and it will quickly start inventing some.

Current official explanations of 9-11 are like a picture puzzle with half the pieces missing. Many people have been taking magic markers and extrapolating from what is visible to fill in the missing spaces in an attempt to put together the entire picture. They are constantly ridiculed for this, and opinion makers who wish to be taken seriously always bog the discussion down in disputes about whether or not the colored-in parts really look like the original pieces. Some will be closer approximations than others, of course; a few may well be wildly off. But the really important issue (which remains for the most part unaddressed) is “What in bleeding hell gives our government the right to hide the pieces in the first place?”

Attacking people who are trying to make sense of their information environments with limited data is highly unethical, no matter how nutty their theories may sometimes sound. It's exactly like putting a rape victim on trial for her previous sexual history instead of going after the rapist. Theories may fall anywhere on a continuum from plausible to seriously off-base, just as women's prior sexual histories may vary from none to very experienced. By any objective analysis, some unofficial theories of what happened on 9/11 are prim virgins in high-collared white lace blouses, and some are prancing around in tight red spandex streetwalker outfits. But either way, it just plain should not matter—critics should focus on calling rapists, liars and secret-keepers to account rather than slandering their victims.

“Conspiracy theorists” are commonly dismissed as irrational or unscientific. It's true that scientific training helps people to cope with not having certain and final answers, and that only a minority of the population has such training. However, one important part of scientific training is learning to avoid speculating beyond the data, but this requirement of the scientific process depends critically on the assumption (which is almost always valid) that scientists will present all relevant data and methodology to their research community as accurately and as completely as they can. Since this condition is not currently met by our government (and most certainly not by the 9/11 Commission), it is outrageous to attack as “unscientific” people who express concern about a government that insists on keeping secrets from them, especially when those secrets threaten the foundation of our democracy. The attacks should be directed instead toward those who are keeping what should be publicly available information from them.

How long will the official arbiters of “reality” continue to defend the rapists, the liars, the secret-keepers who conceal information that in a real democracy ought to be made available to the public? If we could spend $40 million investigating a blow job, surely we could spend more than $15 million on finding out what really happened on the day of the worst attack on our soil. I hope that more people will join with those who are demanding honesty and transparency in the public sphere. The urge to be accepted as a real member of the elite class of reality creators, those who claim the right to lie and withhold information on the grounds that they alone are entitled to decide what the public should know, can be very tempting. Any person who gives in to this temptation badly fails our democratic republic. What is tyranny but a system in which rulers assert the right to know everything about their subjects while keeping their own operations strictly undercover?