-Caveat Lector-
From: preston peet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi all,
Here's yet another insulting article coming out since US Rep. Cynthia
McKinney made her public statements wondering what in the hell happened
Sept. 11. There've been a whole series of articles in mainstream US press
outlets implying that those of us asking questions as to why the Pentagon
is missing $2.3 trillion of US taxpayer money, and why after giving so
much money to the US intelligence and military agencies something like the
attacks on Sept. 11 could take place, and myriad other questions that
should be addressed, well, we questioners are all nuts to be critically
thinking.
Peace,
Preston Peet
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/conspiracy020417.html
What Consensus?
Conspiracy Theorist Immune to the Widespread Support for War on Terror
By Dean Schabner
April 17 - In the days immediately after Sept. 11, while most of the country
was reeling from shock, some people out there were wondering what really
happened.
When the government said evidence pointed to Islamic fundamentalist
terrorists, other voices wondered why investigators weren't looking in
other directions. Couldn't those supposed Arabs seen on airport security
videos checking onto flights just as easily have been Israelis? Couldn't
it all have been a Jewish plot to trick the United States into a war
against Israel's enemies?
In the months since, more and more evidence has been produced by
investigators in the United States and around the world linking Osama bin
Laden's al Qaeda network to the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people
in New York, Washington and western Pennsylvania.
But it hasn't put an end to the conspiracy theories - they have just changed
direction - and new ones keep popping up. And these are not the usual voices
of doubt and dissent calling on the government to reconsider its foreign
policy, or pick its allies more carefully, or even those who say the U.S.
government bears a kind of moral responsibility for what happened on Sept.
11 because of the mistakes of the past.
There are voices popping up on Internet Web sites, in chatrooms and making
the rounds in e-mail chains - even some conspiracy theorists who are packing
hundreds of people into lecture halls - saying that evidence points to some
direct level of involvement in the attacks by the U.S. government. And this
at a time when an unprecedented numbers of Americans have rallied behind the
government.
Where's the Plane?
There is no smoking gun in any of the theories, but plenty of innuendo in
schemes that run the gamut. Here is just a small sampling:
Bush's decision to go ahead with an announced public appearance on the
morning of Sept. 11, after he must have been informed that planes had been
crashed into the World Trade Center, shows he knew of the attack plans
before that morning and knew he would not be a target for the hijackers.
Photographs of the Pentagon that morning and of the cleanup afterwards
show that no plane crashed into the building because there was no debris
from a jet and the damaged area of the building was too small - it had to
have been a bomb planted inside to destroy the Office of Naval Intelligence,
which would never have accepted the administration's story about who was
behind the attacks in New York.
Or maybe an unmanned fighter jet, radio controlled and flying at a low
angle, crashed into the Pentagon. (In these scenarios it's never clear what
happened to American Airlines Flight 77 and the 64 people on board.)
The reason the tapes from the cockpit recorders of the four hijacked
planes have not been released is because the voices they record are not
human, but the voices of aliens.
Even a congresswoman seems bitten by the bug, and wants an investigation
into what President Bush knew and when he knew it - because so many of his
friends have profited so handsomely from the resulting U.S. actions.
The National Character
Though at first glance it may seem strange that there should still be people
looking for Sept. 11 villains besides bin Laden and his al Qaeda network,
people who have studied conspiracy theories over the years say it is
perfectly natural, and even a fundamental part of the American character.
"These are shattering experiences, when people's confidence and faith is
shattered and their everyday routine is disrupted," Boston University
sociology professor Daniel Monti said. "This is going to bring out the best
we have to offer from some people, and from others it's going to bring out
the worst."
Some scholars who study conspiracy theories say American ideals, such as the
belief in free speech and an underlying distrust of power, make this country
a natural breeding ground for alternate readings of momentous events such as
the terror attacks of Sept. 11.
"Richard Hofstadter made this argument as long ago as the 1960s [in his book
The Paranoid Style in American Politics]," said Michael Barkun, a political
science professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University and the
author of nine books on domestic terrorism and extreme right-wing groups.
"There is a long conspiracist strain in American history from the Colonial
period on."
"Part of the price we pay for living in a more open society is that human
beings of all stripes and sizes feel they have not only the right but also
the responsibility to speak up," Monti said. "Sometimes we hear a lot of
gibberish and uninformed gossip and lies. That's part of the price we pay."
American Plots
Conspiracy theories are nothing new, of course. It is hard to think of a
major incident in U.S. history that is not the subject of at least one
alternate reading by people who refuse to accept the "official version."
And the possibility that the government could be involved in something that
seems to run counter to national interests and the principles of democracy
have been borne out by such incidents as the Watergate break-in and the
Iran-Contra plot.
University of Maine at Machias professor Marcus LiBrizzi sees a thread of
conspiracy theorizing running through American history, from even before the
Salem witch trials. The Puritans came to the New World with a "world view
that they were persecuted by agents of Satan" in the Catholic church, he
said.
Among other early American conspiracy theories was the so-called New York
Plot in 1741, in which fears of a slave uprising led to 34 people, both
white and black, being executed, including 16 who were burned at the stake.
The plot was later disproved.
In the 1820s anti-Masonic conspiracy theories gained strength in the United
States when investigative journalist William Morgan disappeared when he was
working on a story about the influence of Masons in American politics.
Masons, who figured prominently among the Founding Fathers, have continued
to be the villains in conspiracy theories to the present day.
The distrust of government that fuels much of the thinking was not alien to
the framers of the Constitution themselves, LiBrizzi maintained. He said the
concern the framers had about creating checks and balances and ensuring that
power not be centered in one branch was indicative of a feeling that
government was a necessary evil and had to be limited.
The government itself has even occasionally been snared by conspiracist
thinking, such as during the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s, when communist
agents were seen in every corner of American society.
Old News with a New Spin
These days, conspiracy mongers have a new and potent allies in the Internet
and e-mail, which allow them to grab hold of and instantly spread any new
nuggets that fits their construction.
Michael Ruppert, a former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics officer,
has filled auditoriums in California, Texas, Oregon and Canada to explain
what he sees as evidence that wealthy American interests were behind Sept.
11 - and he advertises those talks and the ideas on his Web site.
Then there's a best-selling book published in France that falls into the
no-plane-hit-Pentagon school, and says the story was rigged to cover up a
bombing targeting the new U.S. Naval Command Center that was carried out by
people with classified access to the building.
The author, Thierry Meyssan, who had made a name for himself in France with
exposés of the right-wing National Front, says in L'Effroyable imposture
(The Horrible Fraud) that there was a secret CIA office in the World Trade
Center that was carrying out illegal activities, and that the Bush
administration was in negotiation with bin Laden on Sept. 11 itself, to work
out an agreement to make him a scapegoat. The book has gotten little
coverage in the United States, but it's worn a deep path in cyberspace.
Similarly, conspiracy theorists noticed quickly last week when U.S. Rep.
Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., said in an interview on a Berkeley, Calif., radio
station that she wanted an investigation into what the Bush administration
knew about the 9/11 attacks - before they occurred - suggesting that his
friends are getting rich from the fallout.
Only hours after a story about her suggestion appeared in The Washington
Post, the story was making the rounds in mass mailings on the Internet.
In one of the mailings, the link to the Post story appears with a headline
that indicated the story went further than it does: "Mainstream News Article
Stating Bush New [sic] Before 9/11." In the newspaper, the story bears the
headline "Democrat Implies Sept. 11 Administration Plot."
McKinney's office did not return a call requesting an interview, but she
issued a statement saying: "I am not aware of any evidence showing that
President Bush or members of his administration have personally profited
from the attacks of 9/11. A complete investigation might reveal that to be
the case."
Whispers in Cyberspace
The way the story was spread shows how the Internet has given a new vitality
to the theories, not only because of the ease it provides for disseminating
ideas, but because of the very way the ideas can be presented.
"In a way the message becomes separated from the source on the Internet,"
said John Pavlik, a Columbia University journalism professor and executive
director of the Conference for New Media. "You go online and you don't see
the people making the Web site, all you see is the site, and if it's at all
well done, it can seem credible."
"Everything on the Internet looks the same - the site for The New York Times
and the site for some bizarre conspiracy theorist both look the same,"
Barkun said. "The differentiation that exists in print publications between
the establishment and these fringe elements isn't there on the Internet. And
the fact of multiple postings can make something seem more authoritative
than if it were only up there once."
LiBrizzi, who has been teaching a class on conspiracy theories in American
life for three years both in the classrom and through an online
correspondence course, said that working on the Internet feeds the
conspiracist's way of thinking.
"The architecture and the structure of it, with the ability to hyperlink and
cut and paste kind of mirrors conspiracy thinking," he said. "The medium
mirrors the mindset. Everything is interconnected."
Two Kinds of Thinking
Between the ceaseless churn of cyberspace, and the desire of conspiracy
theorists to construct their elaborate scenarios, it can be extremely
difficult to debunk their creations, and often presents dilemmas for
government officials and journalists.
When left-leaning intellectuals such as Susan Sontag, Edward Said and Noam
Chomsky were critical of U.S. policy in the weeks after Sept. 11, saying
that it fueled understandable anger against America in developing countries,
there were cries of outrage. Even measured criticism of administration
policies and questions about the progress of the war on terror from Senate
leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., drew fire as being unpatriotic.
The conspiracy theorists have gone much further than any of those critics,
but except for some snide editorials regarding the French taste for
anti-Americanism and Meyssan's book, they have been largely ignored by
mainstream media.
One journalist who appeared on a televised panel discussion with Meyssan,
Jean-Bernard Cadier, the Washington bureau chief of the French news and talk
radio network, Europe 1, crystallized the difficulty of facing some of these
theorists head-on when he said, "I had the feeling that the more we tried to
go into his arguments, the more we helped him, because we were not fighting
with the same weapons he was."
Meyssan, for instance, discounts eyewitness accounts of the airliner hitting
the Pentagon, and even says the government may have put beacons on the World
Trade Center towers to ensure that the hijacked jet would hit them and
planted explosives in the buildings so they would be sure to collapse.
"We tried to stick to some kind of truth and reality, and he obviously was
not," Cadier said. Some of the arguments contained in conspiracy theories
are often hard to dispute, giving them the kernel they need for resilience,
but just as often there is some leap, a break in the chain of logic from a
series of facts to the conclusion, such as Meyssan ignoring the
disappearance of an entire plane with its passengers and crew.
Other times the thinking seems to work backwards, such as in arguments that
if Bush himself or his associates profited from the attacks in some way -
through increased defense spending or from the opening of Afghanistan for
the construction of a pipeline - then he or someone in the administration
must be to blame for the events of Sept. 11.
"You have to distinguish between functionalist thinking - looking at who
benefits - as opposed to causal thinking - looking at what led to an event
rather than at who gains from it," LiBrizzi said.
That kind of thinking has fueled questions about possible conspiracies from
his own students. He said such issues as moves by the Justice Department to
gain more power for investigators and prosecutors and to curtail individual
rights, and the request by the Pentagon for the largest spending increase in
two decades have caused some of his students to begin to question whether
the administration could have had a hand in Sept. 11.
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