9/11 conspiracy theories
"Conspiracy theory" is always a dirty word. It conjures up the image of people who think the CIA are listening to their thoughts through the fillings in their teeth. Just because "conspiracy theory" is a dirty word though doesn't mean that conspiracies--groups of people getting together secretely to cause trouble--don't happen. They do. All the time. Heck, most politics happens behind closed doors or out in the corridors while the legit meeting is going on elsewhere. Not everything gets decided in well-lit rooms around beautiful oak tables. Politics is dirty.
So why don't we give more credibilty to conspiracy theories? Why won't the mainstream media do its job and investigate more fully the leads that are out there? Well, thankfully, CBC Sunday Morning did (and I'm not usually one to praise CBC, but this time I am). Yesterday, they actually discussed Loose Change and the various conspiracy theories about 9/11. Today, I read a Reuters news story that 1 in 5 Canadians do believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy orchestrated by powerful U.S. businessmen and govt officials. That's 20%, but it jumps to 26% for "young Canadians" and a whopping 32% for Québécois (more proof that Québec is a distinct nation with different values and viewpoints than the rest of Canada). I'm part of that 32% who agrees that it's a lot more logical to believe the conspiracy theory (in which many of the facts *do* add up) than to believe the official explanation (in which many of the facts of that day simply *don't* add up).
Everyone should see Loose Change before forming an opinion one way or the other about this affair, and follow the CBC Sunday links to the 9/11 sites out there, including one called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Can the physicists really be wrong? (One has lost his job even for researching the issue.) Certain facts, like the temperature at which steel melts, just don't change no matter how many times we couch the debate in terms of empty rhetorical terms like "liberty" and "freedom". On September 11th, shouldn't we scholars be celebrating (what's left of) our academic freedom and the liberty to investigate thorny issues to the fullest extent?
Pantagruelle published so as not to perish @ 15:15
5 marginalia
5 Marginalia:
My problem with conspiracy theories is that I find they tend to individualize issues that cry out to be seen as products of very complex, historically rooted dynamics. I worry that focusing on a notion of small groups conspiring to do dreadful things, obscures the very large - and, importantly in this case, global - machinations that get us to where we are, i.e. the political economy that Why we Fight unearths. In many instances, I think conspiracy theories are easy ways out - ones that don't ask us to think about, for example, the history of US interventions in the Middle East and Afghanistan (which would seem to have a great deal to do with 9/11).
That said, I think the Project for a New American Century, or whatever it's called, functions something like a conspiracy...and their closeness to the whole post-9/11 situation should give us pause.
I haven't seen Loose Change, but I keep hearing about it these days. I should take a look. Cause you're right - this isn't a closed book.
I was going to say something very similar to Hilaire--I tend to be impatient with conspiracy theories because, as complex and complicated as they may be, they seem to me to offer what are, ultimately, overly simplified and tidy pictures of events that are actually much more complex and contingent (and frankly scarier) than the conspiracy theorists posit. In a way, conspiracy theories seem to me to be more comforting (because *someone* was in control, pulling the strings, even if it's a diabolical someone or someones) than the actual or probable course of events.
Moreover, focusing on conspiracy theories in which the U.S. government somehow caused or was involved in 9/11 runs the risk of obscuring what is to me much a more appalling reality: that the government was a) caught totally by surprise by the attacks, because b) it wilfully ignored clear signs of danger (and had hamstrung its own agencies). . . and then c) used those thousands of deaths, in hideously opportunistic fashion, to consolidate its power, KEEP itself in power through fear, and attempt to impose its military will on a large part of the rest of the world, killing tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the process.
All that being said, I haven't read or seen much about these alternate 9/11 histories (except the general denial circulating in parts of the Muslim world that Muslims could have been involved), and so I can't pretend to speak to the specifics there; I might indeed find them compelling, and I'd be interested in checking them out.
On the "steel melting temperature" canard, see here.
It's just not true:
"In an article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society and in subsequent interviews, Thomas Eagar, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains why: steel loses 50 percent of its strength at 1,200 degrees F; 90,000 liters of jet fuel ignited other combustible materials such as rugs, curtains, furniture and paper, which continued burning after the jet fuel was exhausted, raising temperatures above 1,400 degrees F and spreading the inferno throughout each building. Temperature differentials of hundreds of degrees across single steel horizontal trusses caused them to sag--straining and then breaking the angle clips that held the beams to the vertical columns. Once one truss failed, others followed. When one floor collapsed onto the next floor below, that floor subsequently gave way, creating a pancaking effect that triggered each 500,000-ton structure to crumble. Conspiricists argue that the buildings should have fallen over on their sides, but with 95 percent of each building consisting of air, they could only have collapsed straight down."
It's true that "certain facts ... just don't change," but the problem with the conspiracy theories is that the facts are just not on their side.
Yeah, I'd heard about the "pancaking effect", but the conspiricist sites all point to some way in which the advocates of that idea contract themselves. Unfortunately, the science of it is too complex for me to rearticulate off the top of my head.
That should be "contradict", not "contract". Why does blogger only let you delete your comments but not edit them?
Scribble in my margins
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