Rushkoff on 9/11 conspiracies
In the new issue of Arthur, Douglas Rushkoff calls bullshit on alternative theories about 9/11. Not only that, he argues that the endless speculation is bad for the counterculture. From Doug's column:
Yes, I believe that 9-11 theorizing debilitates the counterculture. It robs us of some potentially creative thinkers. It replaces truly important questions with trivial ones. It marginalizes more constructive investigation of American participation in the development of Al Qaeda as well as its subsequent aggravation. And perhaps worst of all, it is precisely the sort of activity that government disinformation specialists would want us to be involved with.Link
9-11 theorists are unwittingly performing as the unpaid minions of the administration’s propaganda wing. (At least most of them are unpaid; no doubt, some of the loudest are working as contractors for the same agencies whose activities they pretend to deconstruct.) That’s why, instead of nodding along with their long-winded, preposterous yarns under the false belief that any critique is better than no critique, we—the informed, intelligent, and reasonable members of the war resistance—must instead disassociate ourselves from this drivel. In other words, we must draw the line between the kind of analysis done by Greg Palast and that done by Pilots for Truth. If we don’t apply discipline to our thinking, we risk falling into the trap that even some of our best intellectuals have—like Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, who on reading a bit too much 9-11 conspiracy, has concluded that it all has some merit.
I’m all for supposing. It’s how the best science fiction gets written, the best science gets speculated, the best innovations get developed, and the wildest thoughts get hatched. But forensics is a different beast. As any detective will tell you, the most straightforward solution is usually the right one...
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The real government conspiracy is the government conspiracy! This seems to be along the mindset that the best way for a government to protect itself is to invent its own enemy which it can control from behind the scenes. But what if the real conspiracy is the government conspiring to create its own government conspiracy? Then the real enemy is the original conspiracy theorists themselves! Would it not be logical for those conspiracy theorists to create Al-Qaeda just so that they could make their conspiracy theories? Well probably not, but it isn't any more crazy than the rest of this nest of theories.
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David: Good piece. I'm sorry to hear Lewis Lapham's taken the plunge into conspiracy theory. His heart is often in the right place, but he's never been the most rigorous of thinkers.
Bzishi, you're experiencing what intelligence people call "the hall of mirrors": endless semi-binary flip-flops between trusting and untrusting states.
Rushkoff's right. Alternate theories about the WTC being blown up with bombs instead of commercial airplanes and jet fuel, or how something other than an airplane must have hit the Pentagon because the wings didn't slice through the walls, are a big waste of brain cells.
Sure, there are things about 9/11 I'd like to see investigated. I'd like to know why George was the only person I know of who, on hearing the news, was neither surprised nor scared nor anxious to hear more. But I'm not going to get that, so I might as well spent my mental energy in other places where it'll do some good.
The internet has not been kind to paranoid schizophrenics.
I think the idea that someone somewhere allowed 9-11 to happen is plausible but I don't "believe" in it. And I also think it isn't much of a stretch to think they might encourage some of the worst 9-11 crap just to cover up their own monumental incompetence. I'm sure the first reaction of many in the gov. was "Holy shit we fucked up, heads are gonna roll!" Only they didn't.
On the other hand, a LOT of sci-fi comes straight out of the lunatic fringe. Stargate SG-1 (among many others) is one example that follows David Icke's reptilian delusions almost word for word. And Phillip K Dick had at best a tenuous hold on the real world.
Somehow this reminds me of the scene with the Sicilian in Princess Bride.
This site was always good enough for me:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html
Basically debunks the biggest 9/11 theories.
Sure, you could suppose that the debunkers are lying, but then, why use the internet at all if you're only going to believe the bits that agree with you? In that case, you clearly already know all the answers and can safely sign off.
While I tend to agree wholeheartedly with the gist of Mr. Rushkoff's piece, I feel the over all impact of his message is hampered by his own hang up on the 9/11 event and its strange impact on the cultural psyche.
People are never going to get over 9/11.
Ever.
And honestly, we don't need them to. What we need is to start steering these people towards the later events that can be proven that help justify their claims of vast shadow conspiracies. Can't find proof of that Pentagon bomb? Well why not shore up your missing weapon theory by pointing out that the U.S. also claimed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and couldn't find those after the fact. Don't understand how some "tiny" man took on a big bad American he-man pilot? Well just look at how some virtually unknown private organization called the TSA is now the single most powerful agency of the government - despite not being an actual government agency.
Etc.
We don't need to stop speculation about 9/11 amongst the thinkers, we just need them to start using the evidence we have and can prove (ad nauseum in some cases) to shore up their own special theories. After all, in politics, like forensics, whoever benefits the most from an action almost certainly had a hand in it. And no one has benefitted more from the chaos of 9/11 then the current politcial regime.
Rushkoff's totally right. If you make the perfectly valid claim that the Reagan-Bush administration's support of the Mujahideen contributed, if not inspired the later terrorism problems of Al Qaeda, you're immediately lumped in with the people who believe the people on board Flight 93 are living incommunicado in a bunker in Alabama.
Conspiracy theories are compelling narratives, but don't always reflect a scientific (or even rational) approach.
Not quite FreeTibet, the idea is that you distract people from the real conspiracy by encouraging the more outlandish ones. So if all you really did was you looked the other way while Atta and his cohorts boarded planes you just find someone gullible and feed them crap about "it was a missile that struck the pentagon" or whatever. Then you show them up for the fools they are and you have successfully poisoned that well.
It's like watching a magician, you don't pay attention to the hand that is the focus of attention, you watch the other one.
And we know from FOI requests that they have in the past infiltrated activist organizations and then used their influence to discredit and defuse from within.
Your government considers you it's property.
I doubt the government is behind the Sept. 11 conspiracy theories, it would be like them being behind the boy band craze of a few years back.
That is, why would the government be behind something that is full well and capable of getting itself going without anyone outside a dedicated core of devotees putting any effort into helping it along?
In an event as scrutinized as the Sept. 11 attacks, it's inevitable that ironies, suspect coincidences, and contradictory sets of evidence exist. Reality is messy, and the more you look at it the messier it gets. However, Occam's Razor indicates that the official story is in fact the correct one. Unless new evidence comes to light that indicates that the official story is no longer plausible, I'd recommend acting as though it holds the water that it seems to hold.
Anyway, to get to the actual topic of the original post, I also don't agree with Rushkoff's argument that these alternative theories are any particular threat to anything. There are always going to be people who doubt the veracity of a narrative. This is a very good thing. Without that impulse, there would be a lot more superstition and irrationality going around (and if you ask me, there's still too much these days). Remember that we had to have someone think up phlogiston before we could understand the way things really work in the universe. Also Rushkoff's claim that these theories are what "they" want you to be thinking doesn't hold up. Always think of who benefits from a conspiracy. In the case of a cartel, it's the members who collude to set prices. In the case of Iraq, it's the government contractors that have (quite openly) ransacked the reconstruction budget, as well as those who are allowing them to do so. In the case of Sept. 11 conspiracies, the US government does not benefit from encouraging people to think that they're being lied to by the US government.
Something that looms as large in the collective consciousness as the attacks of Sept. 11 still does is bound to have a lot of people doubting the official story, just as JFK and Hitler and Elvis can all tell you. ;) But any faulty reasoning that results is always preferable to unquestioned dogma.
However, I do also understand that there can be a desire to believe in anything but the official story that takes over (becomes dogmatic), that's when this situation becomes unfortunate for everyone involved -- there was a episode of This American Life recently about a conflict between a witness of the London mass transit bombings and the conspiracy theorists for that event that made this very clear. And I abhor how the GW Bush administration took advantage of the Sept. 11 attacks to promote an agenda that is unamerican to the core, as well as how they have wrapped this core in a cloak of patriotism.
Who needs 9/11 conspiracy theories?
The neo-cons had already publicly stated that they WANTED a Pearl Harbour-type event that they could use as a smokescreen to invade Iraq. Well, they got one.
It doesn't really matter if there was any conspiracy or not, does it? The one thing we can be fairly sure of is, if the Bush administration did know that the attack was coming, they sure wouldn't have wanted to stop it. It was exactly what they'd asked Santa to bring them for Christmas.
So I can't see that it makes a whole lot of difference whether they knew it was coming or not.
Rushkoff sez:
"I believe that 9-11 theorizing debilitates the counterculture. It robs us of some potentially creative thinkers.
It replaces truly important questions with trivial ones.
It marginalizes more constructive investigation of American participation in the development of Al Qaeda as well as its subsequent aggravation."
Well, looking into the 9-11 attacks was what made me aware of the development of Al Quaeda among a lot of other things.
The nerve of some people!
" People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." - James Baldwin
Greg Palast doesn’t need no stinkin’ 9-11 to prove that the Bush Junta is one sorry bunch of criminals. On the other hand, anybody (as Rushkoff) who buys their 9-11 narrative is at least guilty of childish angelism.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too !
The whole 9-11 question is destined to go the way of the Kennedy assassination investigation. The rabble will never know for sure but a certain doubt will remain. A growing mistrust in our institutions will follow, resulting in a general disinterest in the democratic apparatus thus leaving the field wide open to organized minorities to take over the political agenda.
Bottom line, we all loose while our masters go on their merry way…
Gonzo nailed it for all of us to realize : "We have become a monster in the eyes of the whole world – a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us… No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you." – Hunter S. Thompson
" We are watching a poorly staged rendition of Wag the Dog, interpreted for the morbidly stupid and performed by the criminally insane." - Jules Carlysle
Brainsturbator makes what is essentially IMHO Rushkoff's point in a far superior fashion:
http://www.brainsturbator.com/site/comments/plain_and_simple_fuck_9_11/
I keep telling this to conspiracy theorists (a group of which I am not a member):
Let's say they are absolutely right, that it is a conspiracy created by the Bush administration, let's say, even, that the craziest conspiracies are right- that they were remote controlled drone planes that crashed and then they also blew up the buildings... just assume for a second that it's all true-
What difference does it make?
A) Even if it's true, most people won't believe it.
B) The damage has already been done.
C) There's nothing us peons could do about it anyway.
D) A government powerful enough to orchestrate an attack like that already has so much in control that they ain't goin' anywhere.
So I am not going to attack the conspiracy theorists' beliefs, I simply don't see what difference it makes if they're right. We'd still be in Iraq, we've already gotten rid of Haebas Corpus and legalized torture, etc.
So let's say you're right. Good for you. You know THE TRUTH(tm)... I'm sure all the soldiers that are going to die over the years we'll be stuck in Iraq will really care.
"If we don’t apply discipline to our thinking, we risk falling into the trap that even some of our best intellectuals have—like Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, who on reading a bit too much 9-11 conspiracy, has concluded that it all has some merit."
Lewis Lapham left his role as editor of Harper's Magazine in 2006.
Pedantically yours,
-- SCAM
You know what he's right, we shouldn't question our leaders, we should all follow like little sheep and believe whatever they told us because governments never lie to the goverened.
I don't believe that missiles or bombs took down the WTC. But I think it is equally plausible as the official explanation, that a rogue elements of one or more of our intelligence agencies with or without the direction of someone higher up (ie: Cheney), let it happen if not prodded it along. Nothing has been suggested that disproves that scenario.
However assuming the official theory is correct, there is clearly a case for negligence and misjudgement, really there is no reason that it should have happened. The fact that we gave everyone in charge a free card is beyond me.
At this point I am reasonably sure that 9-11 was simply allowed to happen. It was planned and executed by Al Qaeda, but the details became known to intelligence, and someone made the decision to not do anything about it.
Now, if they were smart, they would have stopped with that idea, waited for the attack, picked up the pieces afterwards and gotten on with their global war profiteering just like they are now. But two dumb things happened:
1. Someone decided to run all those military exercises on 9-11 to occupy the domestic armed forces that might have responded. I'm not sure why, because I think shooting down the airliners before they hit their targets would have caused just as much panic as the actual event. They wouldn't have the dramatic performance art piece of the towers burning and falling to replay 1000 times to program the masses correctly, but they still would have gotten their war out of it.
2. Someone inside got greedy and played the stock market the few days before 9-11. Again, I'm not sure why, because the coming war would guarantee anyone correctly positioned in the market would profit in the long term.
And I think that's the extent of it.
As for all the rest, the people who go on about false flag attacks and thermite on WTC steel and Dick Cheney crouched down behind a console in WTC 7 flying planes by remote control - please. You only need to look back on the last 6 years to realize these people can't run a war, much less pull off something so elaborate and keep everyone quiet about it. And it's pretty clear to me that they don't even want to run the war correctly, they want it to go on indefinitely, thus competent war-waging is discouraged.
This is all about middle-east hegemony and making money, and always has been. So far it seems to be working, but for how long is anyone's guess.
The one thing we can be fairly sure of is, if the Bush administration did know that the attack was coming, they sure wouldn't have wanted to stop it.
Is this just proof by assertion, or do you have evidence? You're saying that Bush knew that thousands of Americans would be killed (on 9/11, it looked more like it was going to be tens of thousands), that the stock market would probably drop like a stone, and he held back from stopping it? He wanted a mass murder of civilians so that he could start a war? This from the guy who sometimes breaks down in tears when he talks about fallen soldiers? Are you basing your claim on a general feeling that he's an evil warmongering monster, or actual facts? Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but your claim basically puts him on the same level with a Hitler or a Pol Pot, and lefty paranoia aside, he's not even close.
You know what he's right, we shouldn't question our leaders, we should all follow like little sheep and believe whatever they told us because governments never lie to the goverened [sic].
We should definitely questions our leaders, and we should also question paranoid conspiracy theories, especially when they have little or no factual support. I'll take Occam's Razor over emotionally-based "logic" any day.
Hats off to Rushkoff for having the courage to break from the herd -- I'm sure he'll be widely criticized for daring to do so. Rove must have got to him!
Excellent points, Phasor3000. I've said something similar for ages- if Bush did 9/11 because he wanted to go to war, why didn't he pin it on Saddam? It would have been a far better justification than non-existent WMDs
In my #18:
"definitely questions" --> "definitely question"
ugh!
Thanks again, Doug. Always enjoy another perspective.
You are correct phasor3000, that is "proof by assertion".
You're saying that Bush knew that thousands of Americans would be killed
Well, he was warned in a PDB that Al Qaeda was determined to strike, with planes, and he ignored it. He ought to be impeached on that basis alone.
This from the guy who sometimes breaks down in tears when he talks about fallen soldiers?
Those are staged tears, just as his famous malapropisms are also staged. Bush is in fact a fairly intelligent man who has read over 60 books recently and also reads newspapers. His public personae is carefully managed by Machiavelli student Carl Rove.
your claim basically puts him on the same level with a Hitler or a Pol Pot
No, that would be Dick Cheney.
I want to agree, but it sounds just like the argument that queers would be accepted if it weren't for those pesky drag queens and leathermen. Except it was the drag queens and leathermen who started the gay liberation movement. It's always the nutjobs who get things rolling. Then the "rational" group comes in, takes over and disassociates from the nutjobs. Successful movements always have a very broad range of views and interest groups, each of whom plays a vital role at a given point in the movement's history. The conspiracy theorists have been the vanguard of the truth-in-government movement. They may become irrelevant at some point, but we shouldn't devalue their seminal contributions.
Noen, every President gets tons of memos and briefings warning of various possible threats and threat tactics, with varying degrees of probability. In hindsight, it's easy to sit and back and say "he saw it coming but he intentionally let it happen." I'm sure there were lots of other possible threats that they heard about in chatter, which never materialized; if Bush increased security with respect to those threats, and nothing happened, the "totalitarian Bushnazi police state" folks would be screaming bloody murder about draconian security measures "and nothing bad has happened anyway," e.g. when they started cracking down on security in the NYC subway system. This is just another case of Bush being damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
Do you really believe that Bush is an evil genius who fakes being inarticulate? Again, I'd like to hear the evidence, since we have vast amounts of evidence that he's inarticulate and not exceptionally intelligent.
The main problem I have with 9/11 conspiracy theorists is that there are so many things that the current administration has ADMITTED to doing, why do we need to focus on some conspiracy to dislike them? Why not take all the time and energy people focus on 9/11 conspiracies and try to do something about warrentless wiretaps, going to war on inaccurate and/or flimsy intelligence, putting American citizens in military brigs for years without charging them with anything, no-bid contracts for companies close to the administration, or any number of other things that they have freely admitted to doing?
He is best at he part about the waste of energy and focus -- much more than an usable excuse for Iraq, 9/11 have proven to be the perfect surrogate for a much worse conspiracy that did in fact include thousands of people that were actually in the know; the 2004 election. Alex Jones "work" have penetration in mainstream press in placed like Scandinavia, while the Conyers report still doesn't exist even in the intellectual papers here.
There are little logic to his strawman 9/11 conspiracy counter argument -- there is no basis to the idea that a conspiracy to take down the towers would have to include tens of thousands of people, something that is underlined by the fact that his theory is that what was needed was zero people from government assisting the hijackers.
It generally isn't such a problem with leaks from the intelligence ("") community -- can you think of a lot of them? Compared with the amount of shady business going on, on a wide scale. Could it be that there are whistleblowers that end uå with not such a great amount of success? And what about consequences for conspiracies that are more or less uncovered down the road? Was a lot of people really burned by the Contras scandal? Where are those people now?
And what would happen to a person saying today that yes, I was part of it and this is what happened in the little part of it that I saw? how would you identify him as genuine? Would he get lumped together with "pod"?
Likewise, he doesn't go into the need for all demolition of buildings to be so controlled that it takes weeks to set up -- while it is common knowledge that a hick almost managed with a single bomb in the cellar. Clearly no one is arguing that the towers went completely clear of adjacent buildings, the type of demand to noraml controlled demolition projects that makes them rocket science. It makes my brain hurt to hear people present this particular sieve of a fact as the genius occams razor -- their own theory being that zero explosives where needed.
While it is debatable, it is not self evident that the planes alone would take down the buildings. NISTs modelling of the fires as an example goes to illustrate this pretty well; many of the scenarios (temperature values etc) put into their model didn't give the correct result of the towers falling down. For wtc 7 it is even more complicated, then there is no need for the twin towers to have been rigged or for someone to take the independent decision to add to both the insurance claim and the newly gained piece of real estate in one blow, wtc7 made zero difference before its conspiracist fame. The whole connection with a larger conspiracy hinges again on the idea, now from the other side of the fence, that it is impossible to bring down buildings in relatively but far from orderly fashion without long planning and weeks of rigging, both sides of the debate in reality arguing against this ludacris concept.
On the other hand, the more likely they did it and the more likely someone could actually prove it, the weaker a hammer the whole story is. It would obviously trigger more or less of a revolution, said concept having the effect of threatening any position anyone have in societey. This mean that in order to hit the people responsible for 9/11 with their 9/11 crimes, you would also be hitting the sane people in government, the people of the country relaying on its stability and so on.
You proved it, what then? The whole process to 9/11 truth victory goes through the natural resistance of the largest bureacracy in the world, either pushing the whole mountain manual labour or blowing it up, both avenues likely accomplishing mostly collateral damage and serving the agendas of both the perpetrators and the real enemies of the US, pushing the western world at large towards tyranny.
Hurting these people and their interests effectively boils down to a single issue no matter how you flip it -- the US election system. This is their line of supply, this is where they make their ballsiest and riskiest scams, and this is where there are effective countermeasures to dirty tactics, where the silent crowds matter.
2004 elections is were they still are at their most vulnerable -- thats where they have the leaks from the thousands of people, and thats where they can't stand a continual pressure and investigations from the international press. Instead we got the mormon cold fusion professor with thermite. It up to grown up people to correct the situation.
However the Big Ugly package arrived six years ago, it's more productive to understand how that was used to turn on the big milking-machine that is busy bankrupting a nation.
We've been pwned.
Counterculture? What counterculture? Don't make me laugh. The Reagan and Bush years made sure that can't happen again. The "counterculture" spent those years shopping.
The American revolution is finally over. King George won.
seriously, didn't i just see this on south park a couple of months ago? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_of_the_Urinal_Deuce
south park did it!
It sounds like we've come full swing. Instead of Bush being an idiot and a puppet of the oil corporations, he's now an evil genius, master of all he surveys! I guess he is whatever works best in each individual person's conspiracy theory.
If you're having to adapt facts to fit your theory, then your theory is probably wrong.
Current editor of Lapham's Quarterly (thank you SCAM for the pedantic correction) was quoted on CNN as saying:
"As to the question of what happened at 9/11, I am reading at the moment a book by a man named David Griffin, on the debunking of the 9/11 debunking, and he raises a number of sharp questions... which I think deserve further questioning and investigation, but I am not as yet prepared to think that the bringing down of the... trade towers was the work of the Bush administration."
Rushkoff can spin it however he likes, but I'm not biting.
Infotainment and the New Mythology
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
Albert Einstein
Even though the 9/11 debate has become cliché and highly polarized, there are still a lot of good questions based on facts that have been left unanswered, too many to simply condemn all dissenting views to the same category as the infotainment tabloid conspiracies. I think (read as hope) the overall message here is that individuals should strive to make intelligent decisions based on the information at hand. However, its not the same thing to say intelligent people should have “right views” and we should talk about "more important" things, but I’m right and to prove it let’s avoid major issues and focus on small absurdities with racist jingoisms added for emphasis:
“What, exactly, is this supposed to mean? …Or was the hijacker bigger than his passport suggests? Or is it implausible that a small dark man from an undeveloped country was able to overpower a big, trained, white man from a Superpower?”
I’m not trying to say that the article is wrong, bad or even that I disagree with it. In fact a lot of very important points are made. However, the incendiary tone will only serve to polarize factions of belief instead of encouraging benevolence and productivity. I agree with Antinous that “Successful movements always have a very broad range of views and interest groups, each of whom plays a vital role at a given point in the movement's history.” To lump all views different from yours into one category and then attempt to debunk its legitimacy based on the weakest links is foolish. The challenge here is to be able to hold more than one opinion in your mind at the same time.
As Squashy points out, “The neo-cons (have) already publicly stated that they WANTED a Pearl Harbor-type event that they could use as a smokescreen to invade Iraq.” That as well as tighten the screw on freedom in the “totalitarian tiptoe”.
"Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."
Rudy Guiliani
By definition, not all theories are correct theories. Profiteers and political agendas have infiltrated counterculture. But you won’t improve the situation by ridiculing the mythologies of the alleged ignorant. We have too much at stake here to be infighting!
Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote:
"I'm sorry to hear Lewis Lapham's taken the plunge into conspiracy theory. His heart is often in the right place, but he's never been the most rigorous of thinkers."
Ah, perhaps not as rigorous as you and I, but still pretty damn rigorous. Perhaps you can share your superior rigourousness with us on this topic?
Is this just proof by assertion, or do you have evidence? You're saying that Bush knew that thousands of Americans would be killed (on 9/11, it looked more like it was going to be tens of thousands), that the stock market would probably drop like a stone, and he held back from stopping it? He wanted a mass murder of civilians so that he could start a war?
Nope, I'm not saying that people in the Bush admin. knew about the attacks beforehand. I'm just saying that, since so many high-level Bush people were PNAC signatories, who had publicly said that an event like this was exactly what they were hoping for, that we can be pretty sure that they wouldn't have done anything if they did know about it.
So either they knew, and allowed it to happen, or they just got really lucky and had it happen without anyone needing to get their hands dirty at all. But I don't see that it makes a whole lot of difference either way.
It's on the public record that they wanted this to happen. It's on the public record that they intended to use it as a smokescreen to invade Iraq when it did happen. The only thing that surprises me is that they were able to do all of this right out in the open, having already said exactly what they intended to do, without people seeming to mind particularly much.
The suggestion of conspiracy theories is rather quaint and comforting, really. As if they needed to do these things in secrecy. As if someone would have stopped this from happening if only we'd known.
How does forensics explain finding the hijackers' (many of whom are still alive) passports at a crash site where fires were supposedly hot enough to make a steel frame skyscraper collapse in on itself as if by controlled demolition?
"Oh read Popular Mechanics, har har."
Phasor (18), Bush generally does and says whatever will get him the reaction he wants. You can't assume any meaning beyond that. If he returns to some subject repeatedly, invests time and resources in the pursuit of it, and uses disparate sets of logic and facts to arrive at it as a conclusion (the economy is strong and we have a budget surplus, therefore we should cut taxes on the rich; the economy has taken a dive and we have a major budget shortfall, therefore we should cut taxes on the rich), then you can start to believe he actually means something by it.
For instance, Bush may get teary-eyed over our Iraq War casualties while he's making a televised speech, but he has very conspicuously failed to visit the wounded in hospital, which every other chief executive has done during wartime. His few visits to Iraq have largely consisted of staged photo shoots, using soldiers handpicked for their willingness to go along with it.
His administration has cut the already tightfisted benefits for the families of serving military. Instead of giving generous public recognition and honor to those who have died in the war, as has been done in every other confict in our history, they've insisted that coffins come home secretly, at night, and have taken legal action against anyone photographing them. And just this week, they deep-sixed by threat of filibuster a bill that would have limited the amount of time soldiers could be kept in Iraq, and specified how much time they had to be allowed to remain in the States before they could be shipped back over again -- nothing special, just minimum decent treatment.
When Bush isn't in front of a camera, there's not a lot of evidence that he gives a damn about our serving military.
As for (24) the "tons of memos and briefings warning of various possible threats and threat tactics, with varying degrees of probability" he gets: First, his staff doesn't read all that many of them, and they'd quickly lose their jobs if they tried to tell Bush about them. He set things up that way, knowing as he did so that it meant stuff would get past him. He works far fewer hours than his predecessors in that job, when he's on the job at all, and the amount of vacation time he takes is completely unprecedented.
Second, the memo in question wasn't some "we assign a significant probability yadda yadda will take some undetermined action yadda in the foreseeable future yadda yadda blah" memo. It said 'we know that Osama bin Laden is planning something fairly soon.' Bush & Co. blew it off.
Being in command means you're responsible, even if it's a tough job and you're neither competent nor motivated. If you take the job, the buck stops on your desk.
Third, it's widely known and documented, practically a matter of public record, that Bush and the crew around him intended from the beginning to have a war with Iraq. Really. You can look it up. And on the afternoon of 9/11, when the fires were still burning and the blood hadn't yet dried on the rubble, when they didn't yet know who'd done it and what the attack portended, they were already trying to figure out how they could pin it on Saddam Hussein in order to have the war they wanted.
Poweroid (34), lots of unburnt bits from the airplanes were found at the crash site -- for instance, a flight attendant's still-handcuffed hands. The exploding fireballs caused by the planes' nearly full fuel tanks blew some stuff out and away from the buildings as well as incinerating stuff inside them.
The demolition-style collapse of the towers was a huge piece of luck. Otherwise, we'd have had far more casualties. Another piece of luck is that the towers kept standing as long as they did, which allowed many people to escape.
The reason the towers collapsed the way they did was that each floor was a unified structural unit, a big unbroken open space attached only to the central support-and-services column and the building's sturdy outer skin. The jet fuel fires burned so hot that some floors' connections to the inner and outer support structures were compromised. The lack of intervening supports between the central column and the skin meant that when floors collapsed, they fell straight down as a unit. Their falling weight tore loose the floor underneath them, and the floor under that, and so on. That's why the buildings fell straight down in that extraordinary fashion.
7 Wall Street wasn't built that way, which is why it collapsed in a giant heap like a normal building.
What plotters could be so brilliant as to manage to plant demolition charges throughout a busy office building that had had a major bombing incident only a few years before, and yet so abysmally stupid that in the interests of faking a terrorist attack, they'd take down two buildings with demolition-style collapses?
Teresa Nielsen Hayden:
The demolition-style collapse of the towers was a huge piece of luck.
The lack of intervening supports between the central column and the skin meant that when floors collapsed, they fell straight down as a unit. Their falling weight tore loose the floor underneath them, and the floor under that, and so on. That's why the buildings fell straight down in that extraordinary fashion.
What about the center? What brought that down? That had been standing for more than 30 years, holding the same amount of weight. I don't have a problem "believing" that the floors would've stripped straight down, like the wrapper of a straw, but what about the central support columns of the building?
(This, however, is just wishful thinking:)
7 Wall Street wasn't built that way, which is why it collapsed in a giant heap like a normal building. ....you forgot to add "that has been purposefully explosively demolished."
A recent example was right here a few days ago. An article was quoted that made it sound like Germany was enacting a terrible new law against copying any type of media, and it turns out that the quoted article was almost entirely wrong. Media lives or dies based on readership and sometimes I think the need to be dramatic ends up trumping the need to be accurate. That website surely benefited from the BoingBoing linkage, but they got all that extra web-advertising money through dishonesty (or poor reporting, which is just dishonesty with an excuse).
I understand the BB editors don't have time to deeply research everything they post -- they're relying on the trustworthiness of their media sources. It's something we all have to help guard against: that incendiary tones and creative interpretations aren't allowed to trump basic truthfulness.
Always read these stories with a grain of salt and an eye towards manipulative wording.
Mujadaddy, were you there? Did you see the towers burning? That was an uncontrolled jet-fuel-plus-office-furnishings blaze that triggered a previously unrecognized structural property of the buildings.
Building demolitions are tightly controlled. Fires aren't. You wouldn't trigger a demolition by starting a fire; there are far too many variables. Or rather: if someone had the engineering savvy to figure all that out in advance and make it work perfectly the first time, we should give up right now, because their science is well ahead of our own. Their planners would have had to know more about the WTC than any of our own architects, engineers, and actuaries.
You still haven't answered my question about why the supposed plotters would have taken the towers down via explosive demolition in a way that looked like explosive demolition. For that matter, why did they take down the WTC via demolition-style demolition, but take down 7 Wall Street in a chaotic fashion that looked like a conventional building collapse.
As for what took down the central core of the building, which had stood for more than thirty years: I suspect it had something to do with the almost unimaginable concussion, heat, and pressure generated by the collapse. A normal building demolition or collapse turns concrete into rubble. This one reduced it to finely powdered particles, along with the furnishings and people trapped between the collapsing floors.
I'm sorry. I know you have trouble believing it. But those towers fell down because hijackers crashed big commercial jets into them.