***************Inquiry into 9-11***************
I was watching C-Span today and saw Alex Jones heading a conference of scholars for investigating the truth of 9-11. Most or all of the scholars were convinced that 9-11 was an inside job. There are numerous sites to look at to read the theory that 9-11 was perpetrated either with the foreknowledge of or assistance of elements within the
One point that will emerge as you begin to dig into the points and counterpoints of this issue is that there is substantial disagreement among those who disbelieve the official story of 9-11 about what actually happened. There is also a lot of suspicion about “disinformation” coming from videos like Loose Change. Two of the sites that claim the
I am raising this issue because when a friend of mine first approached me a couple of years ago and told me he thought that 9-11 was an inside job, some little alarm bell went off in me. It wasn’t that I thought the idea was preposterous. In fact, the day 9-11 occurred, I lost interest in watching the news. I just didn’t believe it anymore and began to wonder if I should have ever believed it. I could feel the thick climate of propaganda in the reporting and the editorializing and I knew that something else had happened and it would take a long time before there was substantial agreement on what it was.
I reacted with the same suspicion to the detailed certainty of my friend that 9-11 was such-and-such an inside job conducted in such-and-such a way by such-and-such scoundrels for such-and-such reasons. When I met his claims with as much skepticism as I met the claims of the media and the “official story”, he responded that I was in denial because I couldn’t process the idea that my government would do something so awful, and that everything I was being told was a lie. He said that anyone who saw the evidence would see it was self-evident.
I am not a believer in self-evident evidence. If you think the evidence is self-evident, you probably haven’t thought carefully enough about alternative explanations. I am more paranoid, I think, than the most paranoid “conspiracy theorists.” (I put that denigrating phrase in scare quotes because any judge who ever tries someone for conspiracy is a conspiracy theorist, but that doesn’t make the judges crazy). My paranoia makes me quite aware that most of the things I am told are lies, because I find myself lying to myself all the time, inadvertently lying to others as well, and it is not beyond my imagination that everyone is regularly and gravely distorting the truth about many crucially important things.
I do, however, have faith in inquiry--especially shared inquiry conducted in a spirit of open-mindedness, with reliable norms of argument-making and fact-determining--to chip away at the lies and reveal critical fragments of the truth. All inquiry is conducted by natural liars, however. Thus, at any one point in its unfolding, the product of inquiry may be as misleading as the worst garden variety propaganda. Still, over the long run the process of inquiry certainly gets us closer to truth than shunning inquiry altogether and just bludgeoning each other with incompatible opinions until the one with the biggest truncheon wins.
Thus there is a part of me that is happy to see even the most potentially “disinforming” 9-11 skeptics get their 15 minutes of fame—and this attention may last seriously longer than 15 minutes. I hope that this attention will give rise to serious inquiry into the official story, inquiry that considers all the evidence according to the stringent criteria by which judicial and scientific investigation and judgment is usually made. While this process will be uncomfortable and may ultimately shake up the contours of American politics, the sharpening of
There is another part of me, however, that fears the media parade of 9-11 skeptics at this crucial moment in history is designed to serve a purpose that the 9-11 skeptics would be horrified to be a part of. I can’t help noticing that Alex Jones and at least two or three of those he gathered for the C-Span conference have an Al Sharpton-like penchant for buffoonery (though Charlie Sheen—who opened up mainstream media coverage of the issue--is somewhat more respectable, for a TV sitcom star).
I also noticed that a few of those on the panel repeatedly stressed three things that disturb me for different reasons. The first is that a few 9-11 skeptics are running for congress—as Democrats. The second disturbing thing was the identification of various individuals and news organizations—like Noam Chomsky, Democracy Now, the Nation, Mother Jones—as “left gatekeepers”, i.e. left wing forces for suppressing the “truth” that 9-11 was an inside job. This list of uncooperative progressives was publicized with the exhortation to pummel these organizations with articles and videos about the 9-11 cover up until they finally agreed with the “inside job” version. The third disturbing thing was the claim that the
9-11 skeptics running for Congress as Democrats is disturbing because generally those drawn to the 9-11 truth movement are paranoid inquirers of both conservative and liberal-left varieties. Some of the delegates, for instance, made conservatively-slanted remarks pertinent to the immigration debate, condemning the wide openness of borders and highways from
Going after “left gatekeepers” is disturbing because these progressives probably honestly just don’t buy the whole package of 9-11 skepticism in the unpalatable form in which it is sold. Bombarding the fragile progressive media with hostile demands to tell the “truth” about the 9-11 coverup could mean that these important counterweights both to the Republican hard right and the Democratic soft right will end up being distracted from more important tasks. One of these tasks is keeping us up to date on what the Bush administration is doing to us right now and encouraging our participation in democratically eliminating that regime. It is hard enough to keep progressives together—let’s not turn 9-11 truth squabbles into a litmus test of either progressive sanity or progressive authenticity. I can’t talk I suppose, since I wasted about 24 single space pages blasting the left for jumping too glibly on the anti-Israel train. Still, the central purpose of that post was to strip the Left of its handicapping hostility towards a nation that is only somewhat heinous on the list of heinous countries index. I was trying to help the Left out, not make things more difficult. The bottom line is progressives need to cut each other some slack, and form a united front against 3rd millennium fascism.
Being too hasty in labeling the Bush administration a dictatorship is bad because it’s a little like calling a massacre a genocide. Genocide is such a big word that there are some understandably strict criteria about its proper application. The same is true of dictatorship. Jews, Darfurians, Tutsis, Armenians, East Timorese, etc. would be understandably upset if you called the occupation of
When I say we are called to fight against 3rd millennium fascism I am mindful that elements of fascism can coexist with electoral democracy and freedom of speech, the press, assembly, etc. I think that to the extent it is possible to be fascistic in a constitutional democracy, the Bush regime is fascist. That is, the Bush regime is about as fascist as an American administration can be while still keeping up free and democratic appearances. However, if you have ever seen a real dictatorship, one that practices fascism without the counterweight of largely free elections and a largely free, if money-biased, media, it makes Bush administration fascism look like, well, freedom. To survive in a real dictatorship, we would have to do what most people in dictatorships have to do: stop talking politics altogether and just try to scratch together enough money to bribe the apparatchiks for the rest of our lives or leave.
I think the 9-11 skepticism movement is generally (albeit understandably) afflicted with cynicism and cynicism is bad for democracy (even if it is justified). It is true that the polls can be rigged, and that the best candidate rarely wins, and it might even be true that we live under a dictatorship and have been living thus for decades, even centuries. Nevertheless, one of the major indicators of an American state’s quality of life is its voter turnout, even independent of red-state blue-state status. Check it out yourself: voter turnout in 2004 is here, and the State by State Quinto Livability index for 2004 is here. Put the data in excel and do the correlation—it should come out as .63, an extremely strong correlation. When more people vote, it means more of the people are paying attention, and then the evil oligarchs inclined to tyrannize us will start to feel some weight of accountability.
Even if we are living under a dictatorship, I think that voting is an important act of psychological warfare against the dictators who rule us. High voter turnout does not legitimize a government any more than low voter turnout, nor does it guarantee the election of better representatives. But the government of a political entity with low voter turnout knows that it can get away with a lot more shenanigans and atrocities because fewer people are paying attention. A government with high voter turnout feels the eyes of the people on them, and so that government will find it harder to work up the confidence and enthusiasm to rob, murder and oppress those people. I see voting—even in an undisputed one party dictatorship like
So, in sum, I’m all for an investigation by skilled inquirers with time on their hands and prestige on their resumes into the various claims from the 9-11 truth movement, including the claims of those who accuse each other of “disinformation”, “Zionism”, being “Cointelpro”, etc. In the meantime, however, I think that it is important to realize that there are many reasons to vote against Bush’s Republicans this coming fall. There is no need to antagonize anti-Republicans who think that Democrats will run the “war on terror” with less egregious inhumanity and bloodthirsty fanatical madness than Republicans do. It is not necessary to be complicit in the spin, moral compromise and pseudo-rightist posturing by Democrats hoping to pull another Clinton-like landslide against Republicans. Nor, though, is it necessary to expend great energy on convincing Democrats and the left-of-Democrat “gatekeepers” that 9-11 was an inside job. Getting the country on board with that idea is not really the most urgent matter of business right now, but rather rebuilding democracy from the ground up.
I think there is little disagreement on the Left that this rebuilding project would be aided immensely if the Republicans lost power, even though the Democrats are simply more graceful avatars of empire. The Democrats believe that grass roots democracy and empire can co-exist. God love them for believing that: it means they will be more reluctant to crush grass roots democracy with spies, tear gas and billy clubs as democracy rises to assert itself.
As for whether 9-11 was indeed an inside job, it will take much more sophisticated and rigorous inquiry than has so far been pursued to settle this issue beyond most people’s reasonable doubt. From what I’ve looked at, I’m intrigued, but not convinced. Also, I think there is some reason to rejoice at the resilience of the spirit of freedom in the
Those who believe that 9-11 was an inside job should speak the truth about what they believe and furnish what evidence and arguments they have in an inquiry-friendly way. However, they do not need to undermine the efforts by those who disagree with them to unseat the government that carried out that murderous inside job. It is possible, though difficult, to speak your truth without corruption or omission and yet to make the best use of whatever residual pragmatism is left in the wake of such honesty.
posted by Satyagraha at 9:24 PM
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