Conspiracy Theory
Conspiracy Theory
“Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: ‘Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?’ For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it ‘planning’ and ’strategizing’ – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists.”
~ Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths, City Lights Books, 1996
Parenti’s reply to those strict structuralists who claim an almost autonomous power for social systems is critical nowadays, because apologists for the ruling class have taken to baiting anyone who identifies actual conspiracies as “tin-hat” conspiracy theorists. As with any good disinformation tactic, conspiracy-theory baiting is effective because there are people out there who pose some demonstrably insupportable theories of society in which longstanding, multi-epochal conspiracies by a handful of “special” people are seen as the secret motive force in history.
I myself became the darling of some conspiracy theorists after 9-11 when I sent a long post to a listserve questioning the official narratives about it. I did not claim that the US government engineered the attacks (and do not believe that today), but I did suggest (and continue to suggest) that there was some significant foreknowledge that *something* was afoot… hence some prophylactic covering-up of embarrassing connections to many of the perps’ backers. This rant was not in any way written for general publication, but another list member hit that damned send-key and the listserve post found the internet to be a warm Petri dish where it could reproduce itself geometrically and in short order. Suddenly, I had a steady stream of supportive and-or interrogative emails from conspiracy-populists.
This was not a multi-ephocal conspiracy theory, but one which was and is characterized by what I believe are some very unlikely assumptions and by the problematic tendency of many (not just “conspiracy theorists”) to ascribe near omniscience and omnipotence to particular memebers of the ruling class — what are not seen as a class, but a cabal.
First, a conspiracy as large as one necessary to choreograph 9-11 from inside the US government and keep it quiet is quite simply NOT possible. I say that as someone who worked for some time inside that government, and inside a very secretive part of the military establishment. Someone is going to leak. Second, the government that everyone wants to blame — the Bush government, which is a cabal in many respects — is not competent to organize a simple cover-up over the Plame affair, much less a very well-planned and nearly flawlessly executed attack against key strategic and symbolic targets inside their own country, conducted by foreign operatives. The Bush government couldn’t organize a competent chicken fight. Their appearance of success at anything in every case has been based on high-dollar perception management and the disingenuity and cravenness of the capitalist “press.”
Wikipedia has a good account of some features of questionable conspiracy theory.
One of the most popular books out right now, soon to be made into a film, is “The Da Vinci Code,” in which Opus Dei, the ultra-conservative personal Prelature of the Catholic Church (open to both clerics and laity), is the secret cabal behind this mystery-thriller that begins — really — with Jesus of Nazareth and ends more or less today.
Other popular multi-epochal conspiracy theories include those propagated by Lyndon LaRouche and his acolytes, Bilderberg theories, and others, with a good deal of overlap between each of them.
These conspiracy theorists publish web sites that are often packed with bold-faced links and the equivalent of internet shouting. Some even suggest that JFK was assassinated in a plot concocted by the Masons.
Beginning with the premise that history is driven along by conspiracies developed by small groups of powerful men (almost always men, because conspiracy theorizing is a predomiantly male enterprise), these theorists (using this term very loosely) seek the presence of particular groups that enmerge and re-emerge in (decidedly Eurocentric) history. This almost inevitably leads many of them to cast their paranoid eyes on Jewry, one of the more durable and well-documented genaeologies in Eurasian history that remained until very recently outside the construction of Euro-American whiteness. This has developed over time into a recurrent theory of a multi-generational Jewish cabal that is aiming for the development and conquest of a world government. This is often referred to as the “world Jewish conspiracy,” and was even eagerly adopted by such American luminaries as Henry Ford the father of US industrial Talyorism and of our insanely expensive, dangerous, and unsustainable car culture. (This was a World Anglo-Saxon Conspiracy.)
This anti-Semitic bent in conspiracy theorizing is further complicated by the identification of Zionism with Judaism, the former seen as an outgrowth of the master plan of the latter. In fact, Zionism is a very controversial political movement among Jews. Zion-ISTS, however, have actually jumped on this bandwagon in a mirror-image kind of way. They, too, have taken to identifyinig Judaism and the “interests of all Jews” with Zionism as a way of branding critics of Zionism anti-Semitic. Zionism, in fact, is a relatively new POLITICAL philosophy that is very fascistic in its content — characterized by racial nationalism and devoted to conquest, dispossession of others (Palestinians), and expansion. Many orthodox Jews have oppoosed and still oppose Zionism, which is in any case a secular movement. Many secular Jews are also deeply critical of Zionism.
This is not always anti-Jewish conspiracy theorizing. In fact, there are good examples out there right now of what began as legitimate inquiry into the war in Yugoslavia that have turned into pro-Zionist, islamophobic conspiracy theoires, like the rantings of Jared Israel.
The question then becomes how do these paranoid ideations flower out of impulses that are often reactions to very real injustices?
Any time we on the left see a populist current emerge in progressive movements, it is important that we intervene with a deeper analysis. These multi-ephocal conspiracy theories and many of the more strident contingent conspiracy theories are at one far end of a spectrum where devotees have adopted a world view that looks alarmingly like a psychotic break.
What is the basis, then, for what begins as a serious inquiry into “the way things work” that determines whether the provisonal answers to this question take one down the path of system critique on the one hand and conspiricism on the other? And how do we effectively explain the fact that while the system — as Michael Parenti points out — actually does breed one real conspiracy after another, these conspiracies are more often an attempt by varous components of the ruling class to deal with the exigencies of deeper trends and contradictions within which they themselves are caught and unable to control?
Conversely, how do we reconcile the contradictory patterns on the left itself of declaring without any evidence that the fear of bird flu is a plot to impose martial law (the bird flu threat is very very real), or of denying peak oil as a “conspiracy” of oil companies to raise prices, even as they accuse those who accept peak oil as a demonstrable reality as tin-hatters and “catastrophists”? (Anti-peak-oil polemicists argue that peak-oil theorists claim oil is “running out.” Of course, we make no such claim.)
This tendency of some leftists to want to have their structuralist cake and eat it too is grist for another longer post at some future date, so I want to return to the more immediate question of where that fork in the road is that determines whether the inquiry into cover-ups and ruling class crimes leads to a systemic analysis or to paranoid notions of ominscient cabals.
The quick answer by anti-conspricists like Chip Berlet is populism; and to some degree this is correct.
(The problem with Berlet and others is that many who are in aposition to critique this kind of activity are themselves funded by what conspiracy theorists call the “gatekeepers of the left,” that is, huge foundations that determine the limits of left-leaning discourse through the implicit threat of lost finding streams to groups like Berlet’s Public Research Associates. These major liberal foundations include Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, Carnegie, and George Soros’ Open Society Institute. They are not under the sway of the Trilateral Commission, or whatever, but are the natural outgrowth of a system of capitalist rule that contains dissent within safely demarcated activity as NGOs sanctioned by the Internal Revenue Serivce. They are, in fact, not gatekeepers of the left, but gatekeepers of liberalism to keep the revolutionary left out. But that, too, is another post…)
The anti-conspiracism of Berlet is a very academic kind of venture — professional anti-conspiracism — that has a limited audience and is generally framed as a warning to “progressives” not to have anything to do with conspiracy-populists, who I believe he has somewhat essentialized. His foundation funding has docked his language, so when he refers to the vagaries of Zionism, for example, he will imply a “good” and “bad” Zionism, by referring to “aggressive” Zionism… as if there is another kind. But I’m quibbling.
There is a hyper-alertness in this kind of singularly focused research that will conflate many who may adhere to a particular conspiracy theory for particular reasons with those who have completely gone over to the”World Jewish Conspiracy,” or LaRouche’s All Powerful Oz version of the Trilateral Commission.
Two points seem important to make here.
First, “progressives” (you may infer from my quote marks that I find this term weaselish and imprecise) should not avoid these folks. On the contrary, people on the left need to intervene early, unite with the outrage that people feel about the circumstances they are in, and be available to provide an alternative framework for understanding what they read, hear, and experience.
If that task is left to liberals, these people will be lost. The reason is, Larouche has a more coherent explanation for things than equivocating shitbirds like Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and Chuck Schumer. I didn’t say correct, but coherent. If the problem is capitalism, pro-capitalists cannot mount a serious critique. This is distinctly uncomplicated.
It is only those with a clearly anti-capitalist framework for understanding who can describe the system that produces the offenses to which populists respond. The conspiricist worldview is NOT a mental illness. It is a misapprehension of social reality, based on the application of dominant ideological frameworks to the analysis of cracks in the dominant ideology. More on that later.
Second… there are plenty of people who remain unconvinced by official explanations of events, who sense that some conspiracy was involved, and who do not tumble into the generalized view that the world runs on conspiracies. I do not, for example, for one second believe that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. The whole idea that this poor schmuck who wasn’t even successful at petty larceny had the intelligence, resources, and planning skills to assassinate Dr. King with such perfect precision and timing is too ludicrous a notion to even entertain. Ray once attempted a robbery, and when the victims refused to give him any money, Ray fell out of a window during the attempt to take it.
That does not mean that I believe the US government is omniscient or omnipotent. I am on record to the contrary again and again.
This is really the essence of the difference between the conspiracies described by Parenti, and the conspiracy-populism decried by Berlet. The attribution of almost supernatural powers to the alleged conspirators. One very good example of this is the notion that the World Trade Towers were dropped by secretly planted “building implosion” charges. Anyone who knows the least thing about explosives or about what a complicated and laborious process it is to do actual building implosions know perfectly well that setting such charges can not be done in a crowded building and hidden. It is quite simply not possible.
Berlet does have a good analysis of how populism can be co-opted by right-wing forces and easily rerouted into a fascist project. The trick, however, is to understand the class nature of populism in order to dfferentiate it from an actual popular movement.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, for example, has been consistently and incorrectly labeled a populist, when in fact he has navigated a popular movement for radical democracy in Venezuela with consummate skill.
Populism is really a description of a stage in a social movement when sectors of the population perceive that they are oppressed by social elites. In and of itself, in the abstract, this is not a problem for leftists. The crossroads where populist sentiment becomes regressive or progressive is where the mobilized masses are conscientized to the dynamics of a social system and take up a struggle against a structural dominant class or for national liberation, or the masses are redirected through the manipulation of popular prejudices and atavistic ideas to believe that the elites are a racialized Other. Given that the racialized Other is NOT in actual power, how then can the case be made that the [free blacks, Jews, etc.] racialized Other is really the oppressor? The answer is that they are exercising their power secretly, through a vast, often multi-epochal, conspiracy.
So the queston is not whether conspiracies exist, but whether the conspiracy theory in front of us reflects a real conspriacy or an imagined one. I will insist right now that Scooter Libby was involved in a conspiracy, first to fabricate evidence for an Iraqi nuclear program, and later to give Dick Cheney cover when the fabrication became public knowledge. The evidence is not even all in, and I feel perfectly safe in making that presumption. And I have in no way abandoned my belief that the underlying problem is a crisis created by capitalism which is operating beyond the ultimate control even of the system’s dominant class. These are NOT mutually exclusive propositions. They are differences in scope. The proximate facts of any conspiracy matter, and in fact the story of these conspiracies is the entryway to a deeper analysis… and one that is not detached from regular people by abstraction.
Leftists who obsessively avoid dealing with anything having to do with conspiracies are being intellecutal elitists. Yes, that is exactly what I said!
You cannot simultaneously claim to be a partisan of the working class and refuse to engage in the public discourse that has itself engaged the working class. I might also say the same thing about the so-called “middle class.” This comparatively privileged layer in metropolitan societies is the very class that most enthusiastically embraces fascism. The irony is that if and when they embrace fascism — which will proceed from right-wing populism — they embrace it exactly when they are being destabilized and hurled back into the proletariat.
Finally, some food for thought, from Niran Abbas:
“On the one hand, conspiracy theory is often characterized as illegitimate, pathological, and a threat to political instability; on the other hand, it seems an entertaining narrative form, a populist expression of a democratic culture that circulates deep skepticism about the truth of the current political order throughout contemporary culture.
“Despite the masculinist implications of this tradition, it is essential to see that a similarly gendered conception of social control has also been mobilized for progressive, feminist purposes. One reason the masculinist tradition encodes social control as feminization is that feminization is a pervasive and tangible form of disempowerment.”
You knew I’d go here, right?
So here is a final excerpt, which I will leave out there as a tantalizer, from Selya Benhabib:
“The traditional distinction in moral and political theory betweeen justice and the good life does not only reflect a cognitive concern, but has been a means of legitimizing the split between the public and private spheres, as these reflect the sexual division of labor current in our societies. The public sphere, the sphere of justice… is regarded as the domain where independent male heads of households transact with one another, while the private-intimate sphere is put beyond the pale of justice and restricted to the reproductive and affective needs of the bourgeois pater familias…”
Given how the dominant ideological framework is the male framework of what Hartsock calls the “agonal universe,” a place full of enemies against which we men test our mettle, how surprising is it that men whose masculinities have been destabilized in the turbulence of late capitalism, a system whose cracks are widening in an era when there is a staggering amount of information available to anyone with a computer… how surprising is it that conspiricism — ther application of the dominant male conceptual framework to instabilites in the system — would take root?
“The public sphere, the sphere of justice… is regarded as the domain where independent male heads of households transact with one another…”
Just some loose ramblings. Do as you may with them.
Cheers.
Pick an alias:
Stan,
Another great post. Are you doing speaking engagements, etc. in the SF Bay Area anytime soon?
1 November 2005, 11:23 pmLaurent:
I mostly agree with you Stan, I’d like to add this to your impressive analysis: I think most of us make two mistakes, first to think that ruling classes have good intentions, second that they know what they’re doing. As you point out in other words, the idea of an epochal all powerful elite controlling absolutely everything is macho infantilism at its best, and the best illustration of the powerlessness these people experience.
2 November 2005, 7:51 amStan:
For a good example of the integration of the proximate facts of history with a systemic analysis is linked on this site — that is Peter Gowan’s essay on the Dollar-Wall Street Regime.
Go along the green band on the right, follow down alphabetically to “Gowan,” and click. It’s a pdf.
2 November 2005, 9:30 amjay taber:
I think you cut to the chase when describing conspiracism as entertaining narrative–the political equivalent of National Enquirer. Anyone who’s spent time around LaRouchites understands that mental illness is often a factor, especially for those lacking in judgment or analytical skills.
But while your comments about philanthropies are almost trite truisms, I’m not sure where you’re headed with the Parenti-Berlet split. One’s an orator, the other a facilitator, and both excel in their own ways at popular education.
Perhaps Berlet’s greatest contribution is in illuminating the methods and dangers of demonizing in social conflict, which often contributes to pseudo-research that frequently surfaces as unsubstantiated conspiracy theory. While he may hang with a less vociferous crowd than Parenti, I think Parenti himself would be the first to recognize the necessity of working with mainstream Christians in maintaining a tolerant, pluralist system–something few do better than Berlet.
2 November 2005, 1:03 pmJon Flanders:
I visited Italy earlier this year. I read a bunch of books on Italiam history, which turned up a few good conspiracies. A classic case of a ruling class conspiracy gone wrong is the Pazzi Conspiracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazzi
Notable about this conspiracy, in light of current events, is the public reaction and what happend to the conspirators. It wasn’t pretty.
Of course there is the conspiracy to murder Julius Caesar which Parenti covers in his excellent book ” The Assassination of Julius Caesar” http://www.michaelparenti.org/Caesar.html
which is a must read in light of the current HBO series “Rome.”
“Rome” appears to be making the case that the assassination of Caesar can be explained by a personal vendetta between his former mistress and Octavian’s mother. Which is a good example of bourgeois conspiracy theory.
Thanks for another interesting post Stan.
2 November 2005, 1:36 pmJosiah:
You know, it’s funny you should bring up “conspiracy theories”, Stan, because I found out about this blog through http://www.fromthewilderness.com. I know you do freelance writing for them, so I won’t pick on Mike Ruppert too much, but a friend gave me a copy of “Crossing the Rubicon” about a year ago, and I fell for a great deal of it. Maybe that’s because I’m 21 and still a little bit impressionable. While it is no Behold a Pale Horse, Crossing the Rubicon is a radically speculative work of conspiracy theory, going much further than The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffith or The War on Freedom by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, books that discuss the “M-2″ meetings with the Taliban, the Bush administration and Unocal in Summer 2001, the history of the CIA in Central Asia, etc. Unlike Griffith and Ahmed, Ruppert claims that 9/11 was entirely an “inside job”. Here are some of his claims:
1) That the Pentagon planned a series of “war games” on the morning of 9/11 to jam air force radar, enabling the hijackers to hit their targets.
2) That the planes that hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were piloted by remote control and, because some of Cheney’s buddies own patents to remote-piloting technology, Cheney himself was directly involved somehow. He even speculates (without claiming to know, thankfully) that Cheney presided over the “piloting” of the planes into their targets in the Situation Room. No comment on that one.
3) That 9/11 was planned as the opening shot of a “sequential energy war” to secure the last, dwindling reserves of oil on earth before petro-collapse.
Now, I think you’re right that we shouldn’t condescend to conspiracy theorists. They aren’t involved in conspiracies themselves, although many are opportunistic. Most are concerned people trying to make sense of events, if a bit too simplistically. Although I find Ruppert’s lines of reasoning totally implausible, the dots he is connecting with them are real: covert U.S. support for Islamic fundamentalists during the Cold War and after; the power of the arms and energy lobbies to shape policy; the problem of peak oil; and the history of the U.S.S. Maine, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, and Operation Northwoods. These issues are all salient for the left. The question is, how can we discuss them while avoiding the pitfalls of both conspiracy theorizing and state/corporate whitewashing?
2 November 2005, 7:15 pmStan:
I do write for FTW, as do many others from various perspectives and political traditions. The checks clear. They do not try to censor or edit my content.
Mike and I disagree about 9-11, openly.
The way to avoid the pitfalls is twofold, I think. Subject every hypothesis to a rigorous critique, and continue to look for the systemic trends and contexts.
The first rule must always be, correlation does not prove causation.
The second rule I suggest is remember that even the most powerful forget their keys and believe in ghosts and shit. Hell, George W. Bush thinks he’s a rancher.
2 November 2005, 7:55 pmDeAnander:
The best essay on conspiracy theory I ever read was an Appendix, iirc, to Harry S Truman and the War Scare of 1948 (Kofsky). It is short enough that perhaps I can type or scan it or something, to make this excellent piece of work more widely available… Kofsky’s dead so it doesn’t do him much good if you buy the book; nevertheless, it’s a great book and well worth a read — both for Kofsky’s sparkling prose and wry wit and for his painstaking documentation of a corporate/government scam that could have come out of today’s newspapers. The US military, Boeing, the revolving door, the Mighty Wurlitzer: it’s all there.
What I usually think about conspiracy theories is that they are, like most folk literature, overly simplified. Real conspiracies for high stakes tend to be very complicated, crowded with minor characters, conflicting interests, struggles for control, miscommunications and screwups, near misses, incredibly stupid notions, and so forth (”Comedy Tonight!”). Whereas popular conspiracy theories tend to come down to cartoonish images like “Cheney remotely controlling the WTC planes from his office” — an identifiable larger-than-life Bad Guy red-handedly doing Bad Stuff, without all the bewildering layers and layers and layers of middlemen and cutouts and obfuscation that characterises even picayune misdeeds like money laundering and stealing elections.
Motivations in popular conspiracy theory tend to be either childishly simple (”to control the world”) or arbitrary (”because Jews [Masons/Catholics/CEOs/Trilat members…] are Evil”). In fact, Dubya is a prime peddler of classic pop conspiracy theory in his assertion that the entire Muslim world is Out To Get Us because They Hate Our Freedoms. Al Qaeda is hiding under your bed, Boo!
Real conspiracies are as exhausting to read about as, well, the detailed household politics of a European court circa 1850, with all its cousins and ministers and ambassadors and lesser gentry and spies and illegimiate scions. You need scratch paper or cue cards just to keep track of the dramatis personae. Even Kofsky’s delightful book is hard going at times; anyone without a background in case law probably has difficulty keeping the plot of the Pentagon Papers straight in their head a week or two after reading it (or even while reading it).
Real conspiracies are, frankly, boring in their stupidity (the coup against FDR? puh-leeze!), their byzantine complexity, and the bewildering tangle of unintended consequences and flailing quick-fixes they generate. Moreover, they all reduce in the end to one of two plots: (1) someone has screwed up badly and needs to cover it up, or (2) someone has seen an oppo for illegitimate profiteering and means to take it w/o getting caught. Everything else is merely elaboration on these themes. Sometimes the “someone” is an entire regime or ruling family or the ruling echelons of an entire corporation; sometimes it’s just a couple of penny-ante crooks getting their story straight after a failed gas station heist….
Iraq invasion: two themes intertwined. Cheney and Co see enormous oppos for illegitimate profiteering by gaining forcible control of Iraqi oil reserves, PLUS there is embarrassing history with Saddam (past screwups) that maybe they can bury with him. Bingo, conspiracy to invade Iraq. Usual cast of thousands going along for the ride for all sorts of private complicated reasons. Invasion a fiasco, screwup needs coverup, Bingo, conspiracy to distract the public, conspiracy to falsify results, blah blah.
Conspiracy is when two kids plan to break a window or rob an old lady, and then again when they plan how to lie about it afterwards. The high-dollar kind is the same thing, only on a huge cumbersome confusing scale. imho.
2 November 2005, 8:35 pmMiguel:
Stan,
Whatever actually happened on 9/11, the official story does not stand to scrutiny in so many ways that one has to wonder.
Something I have found extremely puzzling from day one is the way that the FAA and NORAD lost four planes over a period of 2 hours, and especially how NORAD failed to scramble interceptors until is was too late, violating standard operating procedures. I distinctly remember Cheney giving some sorry, false excuse to the effect that scrambling implies authorization to shoot down.
Then, one of the arguments for the WTC towers being demolished that I find most compelling is that “no steel-frame building has ever collapsed as a result of a fire”. The Twin Towers collapsed after barely 90 minutes of a low-temperature, black-smoke kerosene fire. On the other hand, the Windsor Building in Madrid burned like a torch for about 18 hours and did not collapse. I understand the scale of the logistics involved in secretly setting up demolition charges in such huge buildings, but physicists and materials scientists have also said that is not the way a steel and concrete building collapses under its own weight.
So I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what the truth is, but I am pretty confident that we have been told a pack of lies about the way 9/11 unfolded. Not that anything we’ve heard since from the US Government has been true either.
Anyway, thank you for your consistently brilliant writing here.
2 November 2005, 9:14 pmGlenn Goldman:
I generally agree with the analysis, and I’m reluctant to go in this direction, but the truth of 9/11 is so important for so many reasons that I feel it’s necessary to comment specifically on the issue.
The only evidence that Stan provides to back his assertions that shadow government insiders had nothing to do with the attacks is the supposed impossibility of the planting of explosive devices and the extreme unlikelihood of the ability to maintain secrecy and a successful cover-up. Yet more unlikely and impossible is the suspension of the laws of physics.
When someone can explain to me a) why tower 7 (a nearly 50 story office building), that had NOT been hit by an airplane, collapsed in the afternoon of 9/11 in a perfectly vertical implosion-type collapse, b) how the main towers managed to collapse at nearly the same rate as a free-fall object (when presumably there would have been resistance from the lower floors, thus slowing down the collapse), and c) how burning jet fuel, which is combustible at hundreds of degrees less that the melting point of structural steel, is supposedly responsible for the collapse of the main towers, then I may be willing to entertain the unlikely possibility that explosives were NOT used.
It’s interesting to me that intellectually sophisticated leftists have a reluctance to seriously consider the evidence, and I have not come up with a clear understanding as to why. My only guess is that there is an emotional component that prevents them from seriously considering the most disturbing possibilities.
3 November 2005, 1:09 amStan:
One cannot prove a negative.
Prove that there is no god.
This is a very common fallacy used in conspiracy theroies.
Steel need not melt to become structurally incapable of bearing weight.
On the failure to scramble, anyone who believe the miltiary’s claims about their ability to react has not spent much time IN the military. Public claims about military capabilities by the military itself are designed as deterrents. The actual military seldom can meet its own standards without prior warning and practice.
My claims about implosion charges are based on knowing something about setting explosives. Such charges are incredibly time-consuming and complex, and impossible to conceal. They turn the entire interior of the building into a spaghetti of Nonel, squibs, and det-cord (probably newer stuff these days - it’s been some time since I did explosives). What did people do? Live inside the wall spaces for weeks, while they spidermanned around laying tons of charges?
This notion is too ludicrous to entertain.
3 November 2005, 8:57 amGlenn Goldman:
I won’t belabor the point here. There are many reputable people who raise legitimate questions about the official story, and their arguments are available online for those who are intersted.
I just think it’s intersting that your impulse is not to entertain one supposedly ludicrous notion (i.e, that the buildings were rigged with explosives) in favor of another (i.e. that fires brought down tower 7 in a picture-perfect implosive collapse.)
Can anyone point to another historic example of a steel-structure modern skyscraper collapsing as a result of fire? There may be, but I’m not aware of one.
[By the way, we can’t examine the remnants of the steel because it was quicky shipped off to India and China and melted down before independent forensic studies could be done]
The fact that I’m made to feel defensive about this says a lot about the approach that leftists typically have toward this type of thing. There are many theories out there about 9/11 that I do not embrace because I believe they are unproven. I’ve seen no believable evidence to support a “remote control” theory, for example. But I’m not going to ridicule someone who believes that. We live in a society that is so full of bullshit and most people don’t have the time to sort through it all, yet they know that there are forces beyond their control that don’t act in moral and ethical ways.
A big problem is that there tends to be an overwhelming amount of “noise” that emerges from dramatic historical events like 9/11 or the JFK assasination. It’s always a task to separate the static from the music. Some people are going to come up with or embrace what I would consider to be unprovable fantastic theories. I would hope that we would have some compassion for these people who could eventually come around to a healthy class-analysis. These are people who at least are not inclined to accept all of authority’s offical decrees. What they need is a supportive and understanding left that won’t do to them what everyone else in their life probably does: marginalize them.
3 November 2005, 12:23 pmChris Daniels:
A great - and I mean great - book about the ruling elite/power elite and the way they operate is “YOU Call This a Democracy?”, by Paul Kivel (The Apex Press, 2004). Kivel lays it all aout very simply and clearly. I’m halfway through the book, and there’s not a whiff of wild speculations.
It seems to me that the ruling class has little need to conspire in secret. The system is stacked in their favor, after all.
Perhaps one of the reasons “conspiracy-theorists” get into all of it, is because they simply cannot or will not believe that our rulers do not have our best interests at heart, and that therefore all the evil in the world MUST arise from dark conspiracies?
3 November 2005, 3:39 pmTimothy R. Anderson:
Thank you, Mr. Goff. Do you ever visit the comments at http://www.davidcorn.com ? ? I do. Please consider this as an invitation to drop by any old time. Thanks , Timothy R. Anderson
PS I am at # 102 on the ” Improve the US Constitution ” signature-collection at http://www.warisaracket.org
3 November 2005, 4:28 pmm.c.:
On the question above about why NORAD didn’t act according to Standard Operating Proceedure, I have a couple of ideas. I think the Air Force’s Tactical Air Command is out of Colorado Springs?(or it used to be) and the Pentagon has a daily duty officer? My hypothesis is that these people are 2-3 star generals who can call the SecDef’s office or the WH ready room?(i.e. the Natl. Sec.. Advisor’s office) directly.
Now in the real world on that tuesday morning, the general might have said, its a nice day, I’m gonna play a round of golf this morning & turn my cell phone off; or if they were married they might have gone over to their girlfriend’s for a while before going to work ‘banker’s hours’. I believe that during the critical minute or two during the battle of waterloo, Napoleon was constipated or something and was in the latrine when the courier from one of his field marshal’s came to ask for the imperial guard reserves to plug a gap in the line or something.
Shit happens, but only within limits. Otherwise its serious incompetence.
3 November 2005, 10:32 pmchris:
“1) That the Pentagon planned a series of “war games†on the morning of 9/11 to jam air force radar, enabling the hijackers to hit their targets.”
Whether or not the war games were planned in order to enable the events of 9-11 they did in fact occur. They even included fake hijacked planes. It seems reasonable to draw the conclusion that whomever did plan the attacks knew about these war games. It’s no less plausible than the assumption that this was blind luck.
4 November 2005, 8:50 pmFor my money the official story is among the more unbelievable conspiracy theories about that day’s events. On the other hand I’m in no position to offer an ironclad explanation of what happened either.
The idea that there is an over-arching conspiracy running everything is akin to the theory of ‘Intelligent Design’ and is probably equally comforting to those who embrace the idea as a way of satisfying their need for everything to make sense. That such a theory is malevolent as opposed to benevolent reminds me of a battered wife (or child, husband, etc.) who seeks comfort in the discomfort of beatings because it is familiar; even going so far as to deliberatly trigger the abuse.
Also, some esoteric teachings such as kabbalah (more spellings than Ghadaffi) bombard the student with so many connections that one can fall prey to an overdeveloped sense of significance (self importance) leading to paranoia and a fear that everything that happens is aimed at the student. Ideally the student would eventually evolve beyond that mindset and realize that while everything is connected the individual bits and pieces aren’t particularly significant.
Hopefully we can emerge from conspiranoia into a greater awareness. Can’t say I’m quite there though.
Linda Shaw:
Thought-provoking post, Stan. But I have to agree with Glenn Goldman. Building #7 doesn’t make sense. I also have a place in my heart that believes some kind of missle hit the Pentagon, rather than an airplane.
Also, has it been disproven that the “Cheney war games” the morning of 9-11 actually took place? If the games took place, isn’t that just a little “too cute?”
I don’t know the conspiracy surrounding JFK, either. But there was one. I mean, Kennedy didn’t die of natural causes, did he?
5 November 2005, 7:40 amStan:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html
http://urbanlegends.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/2002/03/14
5 November 2005, 1:01 pmm.c.:
Slap me for being overly cynical, but the Bush Team isn’t gonna come down only by the progressives: It’s gonna be Dick Cheney’s downfall that he gave too much of the pie to Haliburton & KBR & not enough to their archrivals Bechtel & Parsons. The proxies of the latter will eventually get theirs.
I’ve had a couple of beers so far this evening but you guys have to realize this: the powers that be(at least in the U.S. & Wall St.(which has a church at one end and a cemetary at the other for those familiar with downtown Manhattan) will do their best not to allow another Abe Lincoln get into the WH. Although he resigned his commission as Captain in the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk War because he wasn’t up to killing innocent indians, he was a successful pro-business railroad lawyer and liquor selling tavern owner before getting into politics.
Why do you think Robert LaFollette was marginalized, & Eugene Debs put in prison? Comrades, The Matrix wasn’t sci-fi, the whole 9 yards is paid for….
5 November 2005, 10:56 pmm.c.:
A little local color. Molly Broad, the current UNC president is on the Parsons board of Directors. How the hell did higher education just run up and jump right in bed with big bidness?
5 November 2005, 11:28 pmMike S:
Re: “…and is probably equally comforting to those who embrace the idea as a way of satisfying their need for everything to make sense.”
Anybody ever read Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”? A leit motiif, the major theme really of that entertaining novel is paranoia. It’s just an extreme on the spectrum between things making sense and nothing making sense (nihislism, foucault). Of course when everything makes sense, absolute conspiracy, there’s too much shit to contend with, so believers might as well be nihilists. We have enough shit to worry about with Patriots I & II, let alone that we’re all being watched all the time and the conspirators are always one step ahead of us. Bush and his intellect usually straggle in a few paces behind himself. (of course his folksy “charm” [evil bastard] is play acting–ever notice him mess up on purpose to appear like a regular guy?) But the point is, these guys are proven idiots. I’m sure Rumsfeld blew his 1950’s SATs out of the water, but he’s still a fucking idiot. The real conspiracy is business, the traditional enemy of the left, who conspire to keep people out of politics and happy with their Walmart Trinkets, McDonalds Cuisine, and for a chosen few, their tidy all-encompassing reason not to act (Kissinger/Trilateral/Opus Dei) while every business sector robs us blind through the good offices of their fat bought and paid for agents in government, known collectively as democrats and republicans. If big business fires them (and why else would it be that the main stream press suddenly actually started reporting, on like Wednesday of last week), then they’ll be replaced with the next line-up of business lackeys. (Leftists like to call people lackeys).
6 November 2005, 8:11 amMike S:
Continuation . . .
One thing about Ruppert’s book that’s undeniable is Peak Oil. Given their longstanding ambitions in Iraq and the middle East (there was a document I saw in Harpers a couple of years ago where Cheney and Rumsfeld put Iraq in front of Ford in like ‘74 because of concerns about Peak oil), they sure had a stroke of good luck and a wild winning streak, with 9/11 and the chance to fulfill all of their dreams of war and control of oil and people. And they sure have been able to transmute everything about their dispicable dogshit selves into gold, with the help of the US media of course.
One memorable quote from Ruppert’s book, he purely speculatively attributes to Kissinger:
“The problem isn’t not enough oil; the problem is too many people.”
6 November 2005, 8:38 amEd:
Stan,
In another post I said that I agreed with more of your writing than you might think. This post is a good example of that. Just about everything you say in this piece is dead on (except for the socialist babble, of course).
In particular, I’d like to second your assertion that the US government is neither competent nor capable of mounting secret conspiracies on the scale of 911.
People outside the government tend to personalize government action to the small group of prominent leaders at the top of the pyramid. It’s easy and satisfying to imagine Cheney or Rumsfeld pulling some string that leads directly to action. The truth is less sexy and more cluttered. In reality, a huge bureaucracy overlays every serious capability within the national security community, even (especially!) the highly classified ones. This bureaucracy enables our most powerful government leaders to employ military and intelligence capabilities, but at the same time it usually constrains them, and sometimes stymies them completely.
There are a couple of features of this bureaucracy worth noting. First, the bureaucracy is by nature highly risk averse. At every level, it is populated by people who aspire to climb to the next level, and who know that the way to do that is to avoid anything bad happening on their watch. This is the zero-defect leadership with which you are surely familiar from your days in the Army. If you think it somehow dissipates at levels above battalion, you’re mistaken. Quite the opposite. It gets worse at flag officer levels, and almost overwhelming at senior civilian levels.
Second, the bureaucracy is impossibly leaky. As you say, someone WILL leak. This is primarily a function of numbers. Because of the multiple nodes in the command and control network, and the Byzantine process of interagency staffing, even the most secret and small scale of actions will be made known to hundreds of people at a minimum. Complex actions, no matter how compartmented, may involve literally thousands of people with some degree of awareness. While each of these people have a security clearance and may be constrained by non-disclosure agreements, they are all individuals with their own loyalties and beliefs, and a certain percentage of them can be counted on to vehemently disagree with what is being done. Given a sufficiently objectionable action, someone will follow their conscience and reveal it. Even if not revealed intentionally, never discount the ability of human stupidity and laxness to expose things. There’s always some idiot with a digital camera and a website.
Finally, in practical terms there is no way to bypass the bureaucracy. Presidents don’t call troop commanders or Station Chiefs and give them missions; they go through the chain of command. Doing anything of significance requires operational planning, coordination, logistics, communications, funding, and other support. Doing all that requires a standing C2 structure. The only way to bypass that structure is to create a new C2 structure, and then you have the same thing all over again.
All these features combine to form a powerful restraint on our ability to execute the kinds of operations that are fodder for conspiracy theorists. For starters, any serious conspiracy is unlikely to make it through the process to approval. Second, any such conspiracy that is approved is unlikely to remain hidden for long. Virtually every secret organization and operation that the US has ever done has been an open secret, and oftentimes a joke.
For that reason, I’d like to propose a key test for any proposed conspiracy theory: the likelihood of a conspiracy being successful is inversely proportional to the number of people required to implement it. Anything requiring greater than a handful of people, or a few dozen at most, has little to no chance of remaining secret. This is nothing new, but it’s worth spelling out as deliberate criteria when evaluating suspicions of government conspiracies.
To fabricate a conspiracy on the scale of 911 would have required the involvement of thousands of people. Firing a missile into the Pentagon alone would have required thousands of people to be complicit. For starters, think of the logistics and personnel involved in making a jetliner and 64 people disappear without a trace. Then consider all the rescue workers, ATC personnel, eyewitnesses, and recovery workers involved. Then consider all the military people involved in targeting and firing the missile, and preventing anyone from detecting it. All those people would have to be deceived, or kept silent. It boggles the imagination. (To the reader with a “place in your heart that believes a missile hit the Pentagon†… might I suggest you think with your brain instead?)
Another reader raises an interesting discussion on why people embrace wild conspiracy theories that fly in the face of logic. One big reason is cognitive dissonance (wiki). When events and facts conflict with one’s strongly held beliefs, people will do what they must mentally to resolve the conflict. If unable to reconcile the facts to their beliefs or change their beliefs, some people will invent new thoughts or beliefs to bridge the gap. For those with a paranoid bent and the need to blame someone, these new beliefs will take the form of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. In such a mental environment, a person will latch onto any small tidbit of evidence as proof, inflate the reliability and significance of that evidence, and make wild logical leaps to discredit more rational explanations. We see this clearly in the tenuous evidence seized upon by proponents of a 911 government conspiracy.
It’s important to note that wild conspiracy theory is not a partisan issue; “paranoid notions of omniscient cabals†are embraced with equal foolishness by both the left and right. Clearly the vehemence of one’s beliefs are an indicator of their susceptibility to taking that fork in the road. If you think the other side is always evil and wrong, while your side is always good and right, then you are a candidate for paranoid conspiracy theory. The only antidote to such a tendency is to consider all viewpoints, and to scrutinize information that supports your beliefs even more skeptically than you scrutinize information that contradicts them.
You don’t have to be a nutjob to embrace paranoid conspiracy theory. All it takes is a need to reconcile something you can’t resolve with available facts and beliefs. Nor does it have to be epochal and cataclysmic. It can be short-term and trivial bordering on absurd. I once personally heard Daniel Ellsberg say at a rainy anti-war demonstration that “the CIA seeded the clouds to keep turnout low.†Maybe he was joking, but you couldn’t tell it from his voice, nor from the reaction of the crowd.
Stan, I do want to ask you about two paranoid conspiracy theories you seem to have endorsed in our debates over Iraq. I’m referring first to your support for the notion that US special operations troops were deliberately targeting journalists for assassination, and second to your suggestion that the vehicle bombing campaign against Shiites was actually being perpetrated by coalition troops. Specifically, why did you not apply the same critical thought process and self-skepticism to those events as you do to 911 conspiracy theory now? If considered in light of the number of people required to be involved, the probable success, the possibility of getting exposed, and the consequences of exposure weighed against the gains from success, both those conspiracies are wildly implausible. Yet you embraced them, or at least passed them on. That puzzles me.
Ed
6 November 2005, 2:10 pmm.c.:
On the subject of higher education differences in say the U.S. & England; Harvard, Yale, Princeton(HYPe) are all private, expensive universities. True, there is financial assistance/loans for students who gain admission. In contrast, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Univ. of London(including the London Scool of Economics & Political Science), are elitist, exclusive universities but publically subsidised by the government. Bias in admissions does occur but its rare for a high school student who gains admission to one of these institutions to decline and attend a local college because they couldn’t afford the tuition. This seems a rather simplistic observation but in England class differences are less based entirely on income than here. A French journalist was quoted a few years ago saying one of the biggest differences between France and the U.S. is that in France a rich man is known as a rich man and a wise man is known as a wise man, where in the U.S. a rich man is automatically considered wise and a poor man is usually considered un-wise.
I believe this is one reason people elsewhere in the world are afraid of globalization=free-trade, that their cultures will lose out to the worst commercialistic/ materialistic/ mass-production/ quantity over quality/ junk food/ junk movies/ to hell with tree hugging environmentalism/ biggest SUV on the block, etc…. aspects of American life.
6 November 2005, 8:10 pmm.c.:
Look, its not impossible, but the working class in the U.S. doesn’t have the clout it had 50 years ago. John L. Lewis, Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace, Harry Truman(for all his faults), Adlai Stevenson, Jack Kennedy, M.L.K., Malcolm X, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern…. In ‘64 Barry Goldwater was considered a nut, if he was around today, he might win the national election.
Remember, Winston Churchill lost to Clement Attlee from July 1945-October 1951 as P.M. The working class in the U.K. might’ve been happy to beat the Nazi’s, but they wanted return on their tax Sterling.
6 November 2005, 10:48 pmm.c.:
William S. Lind has a good column in the 11/04 Counterpunch. I got a good laugh as I read it because I worked as an intern for 3 different non-profits in the nations capital & can attest to the fact that not only do Members of Congress not walk around in purple robes like Roman Senators or Patricians, they’re definitely not as smart either. A Mensa group meeting they are not.
Some recent congresspeople are now claiming they were mislead by the White House’s Intel. My brain wants to tell me they are liars, but my gut tells me most of them ate that shit with a tablespoon.
6 November 2005, 11:37 pmchris:
“…When events and facts conflict with one’s strongly held beliefs, people will do what they must mentally to resolve the conflict. If unable to reconcile the facts to their beliefs or change their beliefs, some people will invent new thoughts or beliefs to bridge the gap. For those with a paranoid bent and the need to blame someone, these new beliefs will take the form of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. In such a mental environment, a person will latch onto any small tidbit of evidence as proof, inflate the reliability and significance of that evidence, and make wild logical leaps to discredit more rational explanations. We see this clearly in the tenuous evidence seized upon by proponents of a 911 government conspiracy…”
-I would argue that this same thought process is what led to war in Iraq. Even our leaders seem to believe in conspiracies so long as they are the target and not the perpetrators. Is it true that only The West is incapable of conspiracy?
7 November 2005, 8:13 pmComandante Gringo:
Tower 7 fell like you could’ve held a ruler up alongside it. Smooth as glass (and who would’ve thought it’d be caught on video?)
That’s THREE towers, TWO planes.
Never in the history of the world, before and since, have towers like these collapsed like this: spontaneously; neatly — as has already been pointed out here, more or less.
And I thought the vital central section of each floor in the WTC towers had off-limits utility access rooms — which connected all the way up and down the buildings; and which were accessible nights and weekends…
So I dunno Stan. Things just don’t add up otherwise.
Maybe it’s a conspiracy, or sumthin’.
That’s *three* towers, BTW.
8 November 2005, 8:04 amStraight down.
jonathan:
re: Stan’s comment, “On the failure to scramble, anyone who believe the miltiary’s claims about their ability to react has not spent much time IN the military.”
Retired Air Force Col Robert Bowman:
re: what they changed them to- June 2001 there was a DoD order that all interceptor (shoot down?) orders had to come from the Sec of Def, and where was Rumsfeld that morning- MIA until after the last plane went down.
8 November 2005, 11:10 amm.c.:
This in itself is not conclusive but new info from Rep. Curt Weldon’s office. Go to Google and search “able danger”. News Results for “able danger”; from Center for Research on Globalization-Canada:
· Former FBI Director Louis Freeh appeared on Meet the Press on October 16, 2005, and told program host Tim Russert: “We have now very honorable military officers telling the United States, Tim, that in 2000, not only had Mohamed Atta had been identified by photo and name but was earmarked as an al-Qa’ida operative in the United States. Apparently this information was brought to the 9/11 Commission prior to their report. There’s no reference to it. That’s the kind of tactical intelligence that would make a difference in stopping a hijacking… We’re very interested in what the 9/11 Commission didn’t do with respect to Able Danger.â€
· Able Danger identified threat data in Yemen related to the Aden port in a brief given on October 10, 2000. The attack on the USS Cole in Yemen occurred two days later and may have been preventable. 17 people died as a result of the attack.
· Commander Kirk Lipold, the commanding officer of the USS Cole at the time of its attack, told Weldon that he had three options for refueling venues, was never briefed on any intelligence indicating that there might be danger at the port of Aden for an American naval vessel, and that had he been told, he would have refueled elsewhere.
10 November 2005, 8:30 pmjames q:
you question here that the collapse of the world trade centre could have been done by way of a controlled demolition b/c, you argue, setting up such a procedure in a cvrowded building is impossible. well i have a question for you: how is it possible that three skyscrapers collapsed in their shadow in a pile of pulverised dust in a freefall motion that, if the official expnanation is to be believed, defies the laws of physics? how is it possible that the cause of these extraordinary collapses are said to be, in the case of the two main towers, an aeroplane hitting the building causing localised fires on the top floors; and in the case of building 7, simply contained fires on two floors with no aeroplane even hitting the builing?
i do not know how a controlled demolition might be achieved: done at night? done with nuclear powered explosives that were placed at several strategic points in the building structure (as opposed to on every floor)? i have no real idea but the fact that i don’t know does not negate the truth of the evidence.
i think you need to consider that some ppl harbour grave doubts and suspicions concerning the official explanation of events and these ppl do not subscribe to ANY conspiracy theory whatsoever, but rather base their scepticism on an observation of the patent facts. what did occur that day can only be determined by a proper, independent inquiry of some kind. this is the only likely way that the truth will ever out. in the meantime your theory that controlled demolition is not posible is added to the long catalogue of all the other conspiracy theories out there that thrive in the absence of the truth.
11 November 2005, 7:04 pmjames q:
sorry, my posting is a bit old hat. what i say has already been argued above by others (didn’t see them)
11 November 2005, 7:26 pmStan:
Nothing can happen that defies the laws of physics.
11 November 2005, 9:52 pmRandy Morris:
“Y.[physics] professor thinks bombs, not planes, toppled WTC”
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635160132,00.html
12 November 2005, 1:06 amm.c.:
from huffington post today:
Robert Scheer
11.11.2005
On Leaving the LA Times (97 comments )
On Friday I was fired as a columnist by the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, where I have worked for thirty years. The publisher, Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point, but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher.
Starting Wednesday morning, my column will be appearing here on the Huffington Post.
12 November 2005, 9:21 pmm.c.:
From Today’s AP:
Vice President Dick Cheney jumped into the fray Wednesday by assailing Democrats who contend the Bush administration manipulated intelligence on Iraq, calling their criticism “one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.â€
(Rep.D-PA)John Murtha, a Marine intelligence officer in Vietnam, angrily shot back at Cheney: “I like guys who’ve never been there that criticize us who’ve been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don’t like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done.â€
17 November 2005, 6:37 pmJennie Johnstone:
I honestly wouldn’t put anything past these bastards running the show. It’s been warned against, by Eisenhower, Lincoln, General Smedley Butler, and probably a lot more, the MIC, the military industrial complex are a ruthless, astonishingly wealthy and powerful, enough to buy big stock in the media even, to better control the “rationale” of the public. I believe that there is an effort to squelch the plentitude of evidence of the complicity of this war profiteering cabal running our country. I found David Ray Griffin’s book excruciatingly dry and detailed, but I came away believing he scrutinizingly did his homework. I actually read a book review by ex CIA agent Robert Baer that prompted me to buy it. He of course believed it. There were 53 warnings given (quite
20 November 2005, 4:18 amdetailed I might add)to this administration. I’d heard that from the mainstream media even. A quote from Hitler “The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one”. Does every one here know that Bush’s grandpa helped in financing for Hitler. Look it up if you doubt it. Hitler claimed “attack of terrorists” when he and his set it ablaze, getting the masses behind him. Richard Clarke, the terrorist czar over and over tried to get the administration to meet and counter the impending, and he was continuosly told to get lost. I’m assuming everyone here, being well informed probably knows, but in case you don’t, the Bush family is heavily invested into the war machine financially. See, we were warned about the dangers of the military industrial complex, but now instead of them manipulating members of our government with whatever means they used, they ARE the government. They’ve showed no respect for life, but their own and their fat cat crony buds. These men and women fighting over there are but like cattle to a rancher, an opportunity to make huge amounts of money. It’s so craven and dirty, it’s inconcievable. Remember, Henry Kissinger actually said,”Soldiers are but dirty animals used for foriegn policy” I may be off a word or two on the quote, but that is the jest of it.
Jennie Johnstone:
On my above comment, I missed finishing a line regarding Hitler. He set ablaze the Riechstag to claim an attack upon Germany, to start a war. Gee, torture, Hitler connections in Bush’s family background, lawlessness in his rule. Considering Geneva Conventions obsolete and “quaint”. Fascism is in place, in case anyone hasn’t noticed. NOT a conspiracy theory. Why wouldn’t these pricks do what ever it took to start the war they wanted from many years back. The lies are almost funny, if they weren’t so tragic, they are so plentiful. Okay, enough, honestly, I could go on and on, the criminality and power and danger this bunch is about. I hope every one here has investigated the PROJECT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY (PNAC)funded by the Bradley Corporation among others. It all starts to make sense. The ridiculous “strategies” in the war, that actually only perpetuate it. Yeah, I believe these guys are not nice people at all, that have our dear country in mind. Enough of my rant.
20 November 2005, 4:34 amm.c.:
FYI:
Traprock Peace Center(www.traprockpeace.org) hosted Scott Ritter on 11/17 in Amherst. Audio & Transcript both available on their website.
28 November 2005, 9:10 pmspencer:
Stan Stan Stan,
3 December 2005, 1:55 amIts probably too late to get a response from you re: this old post of yours, but what the hell.
I’ll keep it simple: you contend that the U.S. military industrial complex could not keep this operation secret? That means, basically, that 19 Arabs coordinated via laptop from a hole (backed by, I don’t know, pick any State besides, per your musings, ours) could? Why pick this logic? Manhatten Project ring a bell?
What the fuck happened to you?
Jorge:
Re: What the f…happened to you? Simple. Stan is now a “name.” He has his axe to grind, his little walls to stay in. Nothing too dangerous. Stay behind the laws of physics. Stan knows about physics, you know.
14 June 2006, 3:53 pmDeAnander:
Recommended Viewing: “The Power of Nightmares” three part BBC documentary, available in the US only via ISO download and burn your own DVD.
The main point of this video is not to contend with or support or decry 911 conspiracy theories, but to document the biggest and weirdest conspiracy theory of all — the myth of the new Fu Manchu, the “global terror network of Al Qaeda”, and to show how it has replaced the damn-near-identical myth of the all-powerful USSR (whose threat potential was being wildly exaggerated by none other than the young Donnie Rumsfeld even as it was collapsing from internal rot, mismanagement, external harassment etc). The biggest conspiracy theorists around are Perle/Wolfie/Rummie/Cheney and the PNAC boys and girls; and yet the media obediently repeat their looneytunes bogeymen tales 24×7. Go figure.
15 June 2006, 3:07 am