Michael -- You raise some good issues.
1) I think the fact that Americans were attacked on American soil on 9-11 is crucially different from other "conspiracy" stories about the CIA, Contras, drug smuggling, etc. The emotional impact on average Americans was far larger, and thus the payback from exposing it as a false flag attack, if that be the case, would be far greater. I venture to say that if this conspiracy theory (and I use that term non-prejucially) came to be widely belived it would bring our society to a tipping point politically. People simply would not accept a government believed to have done such things to its own citizens. 2) Personally, I think that a stronger challenge to the "official conspiracy theory" can be made on other grounds than the problem of flying large airplanes. I like physical evidence that proves that the official story cannot be true: for example, the fact that Flight 93 had debris scattered over 8 miles and, therefore, couldn't have crashed intact. Ergo, the American patriot vs. Muslim terrorist heroics shown in the film Flight 93 is fictional and, possibly, propaganda. Or the evidence that the WTC towers collapsed in 10 seconds, an impossibility if the lower floors were intact, obstructing and slowing the descent of the upper floors. Or, consistent with this, a whole range of evidence from eyewitnesses who heard explosions, the presence of yellow-hot and molten metal (impossible in a diffuse fire of jet fuel and office furnishings), the presence of flashes and horizontally-ejected materials around the buildings' perimeter, seismograms recording large shockwaves preceeding the collapses, the fact that the buildings fell into their own footprint, etc., all consistent with a controlled demolition and impossible in the official story. There is plenty enough evidence here, at least for me, to conclude that the official story is wrong. Very likely, the buildings were brought down in controlled demolitions and doing this would have required some sort of inside job. An inside job might have also been required to assure that our air defenses would have been effective on that day, but this is more of a conjecture. There is quite a lot of evidence here and I think it should be brought before the American public. Peter Hollings -----Original Message----- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michael Perelman Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2006 11:29 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Hijacking and controlling planes into targets on 9-11-2001 Paul, I think the question here is one of tactics. It is far easier to shows that the US with aiding the Contras or that the government lied to go to war with Iraq. We have a good deal of information about what goes on there. When we get to question about the CIA, Contras, and drug smuggling things get murkier. Even here, we have considerable information, in part thanks to John Kerry. Nonetheless, when Gary Webb put the information together he got hammered. His work was still important, but it could not have the same political force as explaining about the Contras or Iraq because the information was necessarily fuzzier. When we get to the part about the government blowing up the Pentagon or the World Trade Center, any supporting information is necessarily so weak and the emotional forces surrounding the attack so strong that even if you had fairly good evidence, I'm not sure how far you would get. On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 12:16:47PM -0400, Paul Zarembka wrote: > > This is a good question. I was involved in trying to expose the role of > the U.S. government (contras) in El Salvador. Was I wrong to try to help > uncover that hidden history? > --- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
