In a recent interview for a radio show called 9/11 Free Fall (already off to a great start), Jeremy Sagan—the younger son of Sagan senior and his first wife, fellow scientist Lynn Margulis—went off on all us closed-minded sheeple. In response to a prompt asking when he first “woke up,” Sagan remarks:

Well, on first seeing it—anyone seeing it can see that there’s something suspicious about it. I think it was New Year’s 2002, I was at a friend’s house, and they were saying Bush could never do something like this because he was incompetent. But in retrospect, now that I think about it, it’s true. I don’t think Bush could really do it, but that’s why they had him skirted off into Florida, to get him a little bit out of the way. In retrospect, you look at that and its obvious it was a controlled demolition.
Obvious indeed. But what evidence does Sagan, a computer programmer, have to support these supposedly manifest claims? Little more than the usual inside job truther fare, saying, “I think the visual evidence is the most compelling. You have molten steel coming out of the building. Obivously, also the evidence of thermite is very compelling. The other thing I should say, if you look at building 7, the way everything was known before it happened. And the way it was reported in the media before it happened, that doesn’t happen. You know?”

In the latter case, Sagan is referring to an aspect in the “controlled demolition” conspiracy that asserts some people had prior knowledge that the buildings were about to fall. This idea is supposedly supported by the fact that a BBC reporter announced the building at 7 WTC’s collapse 20 minutes before it actually happened. Of course, the BBC reporter referred to it as a “very honest mistake,” and news stations have a rich and vibrant history of getting facts very, very wrong in high stress situations.

Perhaps even more surprising than Jeremy Sagan aligning with the paranoid ranters of the world is the fact that, apparently, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. No, not Carl Sagan (dear god not Carl Sagan). We’re talking about his mother. Yes, Lynn Margulis, Jeremy Sagan’s mommy dearest herself was also a crusader for 9/11 Truth.

CONTINUED

The post Gizmodo Trashes Carl Sagan’s Son As 9/11 Truther appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

For the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack, the mainstream media has offered an unprecedented level of apparent bias against reasonable people invested in justice for the victims of 9/11. The majority of articles below imply that “truthers” are driven by a fear of chaos and uncertainty to draw comfort from misdirected rage. Most of the articles make sweeping generalization about those involved while others are outright insulting.

The post 10th Anniversary 9/11 Truth Hit Piece Roundup appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Cyberspace is the perfect place for this contradiction to thrive, for it is both “the Petri dish for paranoids” and also the home of Snopes and other scam trackers. Wikipedia is a battleground between conspiracy hounds and the thousands of amateur sleuths who aspire to do at least as good a job as the fact-checkers at conventional encyclopedias (whether they do so is a matter of considerable debate, including within Wikipedia itself). The Internet is full of bunkum and debunk ’em. Like matter and anti-matter, they should cancel each other out. But the relationship more aptly resembles that between bacteria and antibiotics. Develop an effective tuberculosis vaccine, and the TB bacterium will develop a stronger resistant strain. The American body politic, weakened by successive waves of government lies, media oversights, and the relentless repetition of demagogues, is susceptible to these highly infectious theories.

Most toxic of all perhaps are the myths generated by 9/11. Over the years, I’ve received lots of letters about 9/11 and why it was an inside job. One recent letter insisted that Osama bin Laden was not behind the 2001 attacks, that an Israeli firm in the Twin Towers “received a fax warning them about the 911 attack that would come in a few hours” (which presumably allowed it to warn Israelis and/or Jews to evacuate the building), and that it was not a plane that struck the Pentagon on that fateful day.

Although bin Laden initially denied responsibility, an overwhelming amount of evidence surfaced that linked al Qaeda to the attacks (including, of course, bin Laden himself eventually claiming responsibility). As for the Israeli firm, Odigo, it did receive such a warning, but it was an instant message, not a fax. The message arrived at its office in Israel, did not identify the location of the attack, and was hostile rather than friendly. It in no way demonstrates that the firm, which didn’t even have offices in the Twin Towers to evacuate, was part of a U.S.-Israeli plot to bring down the buildings. As for Flight 77, there were lots of eyewitness reports of its crash into the Pentagon in addition to calls made by people on board. And where exactly did the flight go if not into the Pentagon? I could go on — about the misrepresentations of the size of the hole in the Pentagon, other hoaxes involving advanced warnings of 9/11, and all the other fanciful theories about who was behind the attacks.

The “9/11 truthers” are as resistant to rebuttal as the right-wing “birthers.” They both draw strength from their deep-seated distrust of government and the mass media. They believe not in Occam’s Razor, which argues for building a case on the fewest new assumptions, but in Occam’s Hairball, a partially digested lump of every new assumption that has stuck in their craw.

Long before the Internet, historian Richard Hofstadter warned of the “paranoid style” that periodically grips the American body politic and directs the crowd’s fury at Masons or Jesuits or Jews or Communists. In his recently updated book on conspiracy theories, legal scholar Mark Fenster takes a more benign view. Such theories reflect populist suspicion about the concentration of economic and political power, a suspicion “that can have violent, racist, and antidemocratic effects (as well as salutary and democracy-enhancing ones) on the political and social order, but a strain that is neither independent from nor necessarily threatening to the country’s political institutions or political culture.”

I agree that conspiracy theories do not threaten the status quo, for they usually distract attention from more serious and systemic problems (for instance, bridges and highways and buildings are collapsing all over the United States because of the defunding of infrastructure, and the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth focus all their energies on explaining how an exploding plane could never make the Twin Towers collapse?). And yes, before you prepare your flaming emails, some conspiracies turn out to have a basis in fact (the Iran-Contra affair, for instance, or the right-wing mobilization to bring down Bill Clinton).

The danger of conspiracy theories lies not so much in whether they are right or wrong but in how they erode our democratic institutions. Instead of democratizing the state, conspiracy theorists tend toward a libertarian downsizing of government; instead of breaking the corporate control of the media, conspiracy theorists create their own dogmatic blogs and websites. Conspiracies sap our will, for who except Jesus or Keanu Reaves can stand up to The Matrix? In fact, conspiracies are the exception to the rule of big institutions, which err on the side of incompetence more often than not. Conspiracies overstate the power of the powerful. As the Iran-Contra affair demonstrated, even authentic conspiracies are fairly inept.

I fear that conspiracies have become the only way for us to organize the unruly flow of information that assaults us daily. We create all-encompassing, quasi-religious explanations to make sense of the supernova of our post-modern experience.

The post The Bunkum of John Feffer appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Kay’s book is half reportage and half evidence. Both halves demonstrate that mistrust in institutions—which aren’t doing the best job of running things right now—is driving a wave of conspiracy-mongering. To a man, the leading 9/11 Truthers that Kay interviews say that they found their obsession because they didn’t trust the government and they sought out information from some samizdat source. …

Look at the 9/11 conspiracy. Some of Kay’s sources have tenuous connections to reality. Most of them got interested in the conspiracy because something else seemed … wrong. As Kay points out, “Trutherism” didn’t really take off until 2003, when it was clear there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. If you were already inclined to think that George W. Bush had been unfairly put into office in 2000, if you had read the Project for a New American Century’s letters from the end of the Clinton years, well, this was enough to drive you nuts.

The post David Weigel Reviews "Among The Truthers" appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

(Last October, I angered some on the Left by noting that the four previous examples of progressives trying to punish Democrats by sitting out elections or supporting third parties – 1968, 1980, 1994 and 2000 – didn’t work out very well, either in the short- or long-term. I meant the piece to be a historical review of these tactics but it apparently touched some raw nerves.)

Similarly, my brief criticism of the “truthers” prompted a wave of angry e-mails and blog postings. In part, I was accused of showing inadequate respect for the “truther” research and was scolded for not delving deeply enough into the intricate arguments behind their claim that 9/11 was an “inside job.”

But the truth is that I have devoted way more time to these preposterous notions than they deserve. And, since time is a zero sum game, every hour wasted on this strange parlor game means that real crimes and government wrongdoing get neglected. Still, there may be lessons to be learned here, though not the ones the “truthers” would want.

In following the curious twists and turns of the “truther” movement over the past nine years, I have become concerned that the anti-empiricism which has long infected the American Right has now spread to some quarters of the Left (although I realize that many on the Left reject the “truther” allegations as nonsensical and that some on the Right have embraced them.)

Indeed, if you were to teach a course on sophistry, you might wish to make a case study of the “truther” movement, which has deployed nearly every imaginable example of false logic, from the use of endorsements as a substitute for evidence to insistence that any miniscule doubt on one side of an argument requires its rejection while even the thinnest possibility on the other must be accepted as serious, if not true.

This kind of evidentiary game-playing is what I had grown accustomed to in dealing with the neoconservatives, such as their exaggerations of foreign threats, from the 1980s (when Nicaragua’s Sandinistas were a danger to the Panama Canal and Texas) through George W. Bush’s presidency (over Iraq’s WMD) and even to today (with worries about Iran’s nuclear program).

For instance, when Vice President Dick Cheney and the neocons were arguing for war with Iraq, they insisted that even a one percent possibility that they were right about Iraq sharing WMD with terrorists meant that their fear must be accepted as certainty, while the counterpoint that Iraq had no WMD had to be proven to some impossible 100 percent level. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “One Percent Madness.”]

Using such imbalanced – and irrational – constructs, in effect, predetermine the outcomes, since you can never prove something to 100 percent certainty and there is always a chance for some one percent feasibility on the other side. These loaded-dice arguments can lead nations into ill-conceived wars or persuade people of arguments that otherwise would be dismissed as crazy.

‘Truther’ Narrative

Though many “truthers” shy away from an explicit recounting of their presumed narrative – favoring instead “poking holes” in the official story – here is some of what they seem to believe:

Operatives working for President Bush wired 100-plus floors of the World Trade Center towers with explosives as well as the support structure of nearby Building Seven. They did all this – a complicated process that would have taken a large team of experts weeks and would have required extraordinary access to the buildings – without anyone seeing anyone doing any of this.

Then, when the two planes crashed into the towers on 9/11, Bush allowed them to burn for a while before deciding that the maximum psychological effect required that the buildings be brought down. So, the explosive charges were detonated remotely in sequential order from the top down.

After the fire and devastation spread next door to Building Seven, Bush’s team also detonated explosives there to bring down that smaller tower, presumably with the motive of destroying government documents that were located in offices there.

Meanwhile, in Washington, a third plane was approaching the Pentagon. Passengers onboard made frantic phone calls describing the hijacking. Plus, since the Pentagon is not in some secret location – it sits next to Interstate-395 and can be viewed from high-rises across the highway in Crystal City – some hundred or so people reported seeing the plane head into the Pentagon.

Some of the plane’s wreckage was strewn across the Pentagon grounds, and authorities later reported recovering the plane’s black box inside the Pentagon. But “truthers” insist that no plane hit the Pentagon; that Bush’s team attacked it with a missile.

However, nobody saw a missile. Nor would there be any way to explain the plane wreckage on the grounds, since nobody saw more Bush operatives driving around the Pentagon grounds planting fake pieces of the plane – even as emergency personnel and others rushed to the crash site.

To label the “truther” version of the 9/11 events nutty would seem an understatement – and there are other parts, including stuff about fabricated voice messages, that are arguably crazier. Indeed, the “truther” account has sometimes struck me as a parody meant to bring ridicule on more serious conspiracy investigations such as those into the JFK assassination.

As I pointed out in the earlier story – the one focused on Palin’s victimhood – there has not been a single witness (or document) emerging from the ranks of Bush’s supposed operatives to suggest that any of the “truther” narrative happened – even though the scope of this conspiracy would have required scores, if not hundreds, of participants.

Having covered many real government conspiracies in my career, I can assure you that there are always witnesses who speak for a variety of reasons: a guilty conscience, a boast to a girlfriend, a plea bargain when they get in legal trouble on something else.

In writing about Oliver North’s secret Iran-Contra network in the 1980s, our team at the Associated Press had two dozen sources. For our first Contra-cocaine story in 1985, Brian Barger and I had a similar number of sources, including documents from Costa Rica and a White House official describing a CIA analytical report on a Contra helicopter purchased with drug profits.

Yet for the “truther” conspiracy theory, more than nine years have passed and not a single witness has emerged who participated in planting the explosives floor by floor in the Twin Towers or carrying out the missile attack on the Pentagon or any other capacity that the conspiracy would have required.

Manufacturing a Case

Lacking any real evidence, like a knowledgeable witness or a government document, the “truthers” have built their case on alleged anomalies in the collapse of the buildings and on the shape of hole left in the side of the Pentagon. Though in all cases scientists and engineers have provided plausible explanations for these events, the “truthers” have tried to counter by marshalling their own supporters who are willing to challenge these analyses.

For instance, the “truthers” have long claimed that the collapse of Building Seven is the prima facie case for their conspiracy theory, especially, they say, its drop at near freefall speed. However, the speed of the collapse should not be all that surprising because Building Seven had a large atrium. Once the atrium’s supports were breached by the shock of the Twin Tower collapse and a resulting fire, Building Seven would logically fall into the open space at near freefall speed.

Similarly, the structure of the Twin Towers, with interlocking beams allowing them to have height without the weight of older skyscrapers, would have produced the falling in on itself effect once the beams were weakened by the impact of the planes and the heat from the fires.

However, since the events of 9/11 were unique – i.e. no one had tested flying fuel-laden passenger jets into buildings identical to the Twin Towers or the Pentagon – it is impossible to assess the various factors with 100 percent certainty. Thus, under the rules of the “truther” parlor game, the official analysis must be dismissed and a contrary analysis – however implausible – must be taken seriously.

On other points, the “truthers” have simply stretched the truth. For example, one “truther” claim was that they had discovered a residue of explosive thermite in the World Trade Center wreckage. However, when I checked their source, I saw that the claim was actually that the residue was consistent with thermite, not that it was thermite.

Much residue found after a major fire can be “consistent” with thermite, but beyond that, scientists noted that thermite doesn’t provide the explosive force for a building demolition. So, the “truthers” transformed their discovery into “nano-thermite,” a claim that is still making the rounds.

As for the Pentagon attack, the “truthers” claim that the aluminum wings of the plane would have cut a horizontal gash in the reinforced concrete walls of the Pentagon. Scientists, however, have explained that the angled-back wings actually would have compressed against the sides of the plane creating the more circular hole that was left.

But the “truthers” have claimed that the circular hole proved that Bush’s team had fired a missile into the Pentagon (though no one had seen such a missile.)

Similarly, evidence that al-Qaeda actually carried out the attack – that it was as Jon Stewart has said “an outside job” – must be rejected. Even confessions (or boasts) from al-Qaeda leaders must be thrown out because, the “truthers” insist, these admissions only resulted from torture (for those in U.S. custody) or from CIA fabrications (for those not in U.S. custody).

So, when Ayman al-Zawahiri issues one of his videos seated in front of a poster of the burning Twin Towers or when Osama bin Laden praises the hijackings, those statements must have been faked by the CIA – and you can’t prove to a 100 percent certainty that they weren’t, can you?

A Disinformation Campaign

My concern about the “truther” movement dated back to almost its origin. Because of the position of Consortiumnews.com as an Internet site which has investigated real conspiracies since 1995, I was in on many of the early e-mail exchanges regarding the 9/11 case.

Essentially, the discussion broke down this way: Some participants felt that Bush had demonstrated his arrogance and incompetence when he brushed aside warnings about a likely al-Qaeda attack. (This is the position that I personally feel is best supported by the available evidence).

A second group, however, took the same evidentiary frame and gave it a nasty twist, that Bush knew the attack was coming and “let it happen.” (Though I don’t believe there is sufficient evidence to support this conclusion, this analysis at least has the benefit of some factual foundation.)

But there was a third group, which maintained that something more dramatic was needed, that Bush had so bamboozled the American people that they needed to be shocked out of their trance – and to do that required convincing them that “Bush made it happen.”

Perhaps, because of its splashier allegations, the “Bush made it happen” crowd — with claims about “controlled demolitions” and a “missile hitting the Pentagon” — emerged as the dominant force in the “truther” movement, eclipsing those who favored more targeted investigations into such areas as 9/11 funding and the role of Bush’s allies in the Saudi royal family.

These more extreme “truthers” started out with their “made it happen” conclusion and then assembled their case. That is the opposite of how real truth-seeking occurs (with the evidence first assembled and then objectively analyzed before any indictment is made).

Some on the Left have defended the “truthers” as at least well-meaning, since Bush’s administration was seen at the time as assaulting the U.S. constitutional republic and possibly creating an American-style fascism. The ends of disrupting Bush justified the means of spreading disinformation.

There was a sentiment, too, that Bush, Cheney and the neocons (who seemed to wish for something like another Pearl Harbor to justify their military interventions abroad) deserved a taste of their own medicine, even if the “truther” narrative was wildly implausible.

As the years went by, I would occasionally cross paths with “truthers” and listen to other arguments they made for their cause. Some felt that their movement was the “only” approach that was getting “traction” against Bush. Others claimed “9/11 truth” could be the impetus to get progressives to invest in media (something that I have long advocated).

Yet, these pitches were about achieving political ends, not about meeting the evidentiary needs of a serious investigation.

Indeed, at times, “9/11 truth” has taken on the feel of a political movement, if not a cult. One elderly historian told me that he had felt “pressured” by “truthers” to give them something that they could cite as an endorsement of their position. Other notable people on the Left have described meetings with “truthers” as akin to “recruitment” sessions.

So, despite the latest rash of angry e-mails, I repeat my advice in the wake of the Tucson massacre – that just as one would hope the Right would rein in some of its crazy allegations about President Barack Obama’s birth and its violent rhetoric against members of Congress, one might also expect that the Left would show similar care in its propaganda attacks on President Bush.

Update: On Sunday, in a profile of alleged Tucson gunman Jared L. Loughner, the New York Times reported that as “a curious teenager,” Loughner “became intrigued by antigovernment conspiracy theories, including that the Sept. 11 attacks were perpetrated by the government. …

“His anger would well up at the sight of President George W. Bush, or in discussing what he considered to be the nefarious designs of government.”

Given how a mentally disturbed young person can process information (or disinformation), it is incumbent on all of us who speak in today’s public square to be responsible, especially when we make serious allegations like suggesting that Bush and the U.S. government “made” 9/11 happen.

The need for this careful behavior is true for the Right and it is true for the Left. The Center (including the mainstream press) also has a deep responsibility to examine suspicions of government wrongdoing when there is credible evidence and to have the courage to speak truth to power regardless of the pressures and consequences.

For the Center to renege on that duty (such as when the mainstream press attacked Gary Webb’s Contra-cocaine reporting in the mid-to-late 1990s) may be rationalized as “good for the country” in the short-term (by discrediting ugly truths) but whitewashing only feeds the public’s appetite for conspiracy theories on the Right and the Left.

In other words, to help avert future tragedies like the one in Tucson, all parts of the U.S. political/media system need to work better and take their responsibilities to the public more seriously. That would include not spreading wild accusations with weak or non-existent evidence, but it also would require holding Bush and his associates accountable for what they actually did.

Surely, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to decry (and investigate) what Bush did in office: his use of torture, his misleading the nation to war, his reckless tax cuts for the rich, his botched economic policies, and, yes, his failure to protect the country from the 9/11 attacks.

However, it doesn’t help the cause of accountability to make unfounded allegations against Bush – indeed it hurts. By floating unsubstantiated and bizarre claims about “controlled demolitions” and a “missile hitting the Pentagon,” the “truthers” actually make it harder to proceed with investigations into important areas of doubt about 9/11, like the financing and the Saudi role.

As for the crazy stuff, enough is enough.

Related Article: Robert Parry Decoupling From Reality

The post Robert Parry's 9/11 'Truth' Parlor Game appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

In our modern lives we only have access to tiny slivers of information. Where the government is concerned, that sliver becomes increasingly narrower as information is usually redacted for “security” reasons. All this begs the question; why do we follow the government’s or the corporation’s conclusions in lockstep given the massive amount of information that we just don’t know?

Even worse, we all fall in love and in line with the narrative we create using our ideas, and- inevitably – our actions follow our most dominant narratives. Many of us never challenge the narratives that we write to fit our own perspective. If we did, we’d find that one narrative is not necessarily any more or less true than any other. But where conspiracy theories are concerned, most people are eager to mock those who adopt an outlook which drastically diverges from the prevailing meaning ascribed by the national mob.

It follows that the marginalization of conspiracy theorists is the marginalization of ideas. Somewhere along the way in America we began to discount ideas which were out of line with the majority’s thinking. The same Republicans who don’t believe in hate crimes because they regulate and punish people for the thoughts behind their actions condescendingly lord themselves over the domain of relevant thought when they dismiss conspiracy theorists as loons and crazies.

But again, how can you know what’s true if you don’t know what’s false? Rightly or wrongly, many conspiracy theorists are among a narrowing group of critical thinkers.

Where conspiracy theorists diverge from ordinary thinkers is in their cognitive process; they look closely at what they don’t know and build a theory around that vast emptiness while more mainstream minds build theories around the little they do know. Conspiracy thinkers understand that what they don’t know can be more relevant, and more impactful, than what they do know. They listen to the silence. They hear what’s not being said. They are, in a word – skeptics.

And in this era of imaginary WMD’s, where handouts to the insurance companies masquerade as health care reform, skeptics are essential to the functioning of our democracy.

I would go even further to suggest that it would be a net positive if schools offered classes in conspiratorial thinking where students would be required to create as many scenarios as possible to explain how a particular event could’ve unfolded. The more flexible and nimble a mind, the better. Followers don’t grow up to become investigative reporters or creatives. To teach people to cling to sameness in the depth and variety of their ideas encourages complacency and recycles drone-like behavior.

Take for example Peter Schiff who, in the days, months, and years leading up to the current mortgage crisis and recession that followed, was sounding the alarm bell for anyone who’d listen. Schiff, President of Euro Pacific Capital, was ridiculed by market cheerleaders on FOX and CNBC as – you guessed it- a conspirator and a dangerously pessimistic thinker. They mocked him, asking him such inconsequential and condescending questions as “are you fun at parties?” or “do you carry blades to cut your own wrist?” Schiff turned out to be right. The peanut gallery was wrong.

Knowing that most people are wrong most of the time creates mental space for alternative theories. Going along to get along, or worse, shouting down those who do not share your sense that a dynamic universe produces a set of human events which are utterly predictable, shrinks human thought. And as evidenced by Peter Schiff, sometimes a small, quiet prediction grows into a big and dangerous truth. You’ll never notice the tipping point though if you’ve spent the vast majority of your time and intellectual energy jeering those whose charge it is to warn you.

The post In Defense of Conspiracy Theory, Support of Critical Thought appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

What if the government, with its omnipresent eyes and ears, discovered the plotting of Mideast terrorists some time before and decided to let it happen — and even enhance the destruction — to make use of it as a justification for its “War on Terror”? The Truthers admit that they can’t fully explain what actually took place, but they argue that they are not obliged to do so; that they have exposed the government lies and that the fact of these lies proves that it was an inside job. The Truthers have done great work, but I say that for me, and I’m sure for many others, to accept the idea of an inside job I have to indeed know what actually took place, or at least a lot more than I know now. It is, after all, an incredible story, and I need to know how the government pulled it off. I need to have certain questions answered, amongst which are the following:

1. Were the planes that hit the towers hijacked?
2. Did they contain the passengers named amongst the dead?
3. Were they piloted or were they flying via remote control?
4. If piloted, who were the pilots?
5. Did a plane crash in Pennsylvania? If so, why? What happened to the remains of the plane and the passengers?
6. Did a plane crash into the Pentagon? What happened to the remains of the plane and the passengers?
7. Why do Truthers say that some, or many, of the named Arabic hijackers have been found alive living abroad? Why couldn’t their identity have been stolen by the hijackers?

If the Truthers can’t answer any or most of the above questions, are they prepared to consider the possibility of 9/11 being a “let-it-happen” government operation?

The post William Blum Supports Basic Premises Of 9/11 Truth appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.