My little meditation on our Commander in Thief's odd behavior on the morning of 9/11/01 generated more than the usual quota of comments (keep those cards and letters coming, folks!). Several people seemed miffed by what they saw as my flip dismissal of conspiracy as an explanation for various 9/11 oddities.
I admit: I'm a solid skeptic about most conspiracy theories. I was a newspaper reporter long enough to understand that the longer and harder you look at ANY event, the more genuinely weird and improbable things you're likely to find.
That's why my favorite book about the Kennedy Assassination, by the British journalist Anthony Summers, is simply called "Conspiracy." I thought it was out of print, but I just found out it's been republished under a new title, Not in Your Lifetime.
The book (or at least, the version I read) actually has no particular conspiracy theory, and does a good job of knocking down some of the more outlandish ones -- of the "somebody pressed a dead Lee Harvey Oswald's fingerprints onto the murder weapon" variety. (Oliver Stone, please call your planet)
But Summers also does a good job of cataloging the army of bizarre and improbable facts that surround and permeate Dealey Plaza, making any honest account of the case read like a cross between Lewis Carroll and Robert Ludlum on acid (which is also how my favorite Kennedy assassination novel, Libra, by Don Delillo, reads.)
If you take ALL this "evidence" at face value, you'd have to conclude President Kennedy was murdered by several small armies of contract killers, with at least a dozen on the grassy knoll, twenty or thirty more behind the stockade fence, one at every window of the Texas School Book Depository, and probably a couple more hiding in the presidential limousine.
Some were sent by the CIA; others by the Mafia; others by Castro; still others by the Hunt Brothers -- and still others by the the Book-of-the-Month Club, which (as evidence later presented to the House Select Committee on Assassinations showed) was still angry at Kennedy for joining the club and then not paying for any of the books they sent him.
Now people can believe whatever they want to believe -- and usually will. But for me, the lesson of the Kennedy assassination is that reality has a depth and texture to it, which can make reality appear pretty damn surreal if you stare at it long enough.
Ordinarily we DON'T look at it that long, but when a brief moment in time (Like the 26 seconds or so captured on the Zapruder film) becomes the focus of intense, almost Talmudic scrutiny, then "conspiratorial" evidence starts to pile up -- even though it usually doesn't lead anywhere specific, except in the minds of those who already know where they want it to lead.
The problem, I think, is that the human mind is either hard-wired or conditioned (nature vs. nurture, take your pick) to see patterns in just about everything -- stars in the sky, entrails of goats, I Ching sticks, stock prices, Alan Greenspan's public comments -- even though the data they are peering at happens to be completely random.
People also tend to pay close attention to coincidences, and much less attention to the statistical odds of those coincidences. Jung called this phenomenon "synchronicity" (Carl was a big Police fan). Start looking for coincidences, and I guarantee, you'll start seeing coincidences everywhere.
For example, did you notice that the last paragraph used the word "coincidences" four times? What are the odds of that?
Pretty high, actually, since the entire paragraph was about coincidences. Which is also why the fact that I saw a green car ahead of me at the light the past five days in a row isn't a meaningful pattern (the green cars are out to get me!) but rather a random, but fairly high probability, event (there are lots of green cars on the road.)
Even very low probability shit does happen from time to time. Believe it or not, when you ran into your Aunt Mabel in the airport in Chicago that time on your way back from L.A., it wasn't a conspiracy, even if she DID hit you up for a loan.
Here's another way to look at it: Suppose you got 100,000 people together to watch a football game, but instead of having the referee flip a coin at the start of the game, you pair the fans off and have them flip coins. Each winner is then paired against another winner, and the winners of that round paired against other winners, and so on.
In the end, only one person would be left -- and probably would elect to receive. More importantly, though, that winner would have correctly called the toss something like 16 times in a row. A very low probability event. But not a conspiracy. It would have had to have happened, since somebody had to win the contest, and that was the only way it could be won.
All that said, however, I'd be the first one to admit that real conspiracies do happen -- Watergate, Iran-contra, Fox News. So I am willing to consider conspiracy theories, if the evidence is reasonable, and not of the "I KNOW that filling my dentist put in my molar is actually a radio transmitter" variety.
As always, Occam's Razor -- the logical principal of not making explanations more complicated than is strictly necessary -- applies.
So far, I haven't seen anything about 9/11 that can get by my razor -- on the American end, I mean. The Al Qaeda end is another story. At times it does seem like the entire Middle East is one big conspiracy (a real, not a Jungian one). So there's absolutely no way to tell who was on first, second and third base when bin Laden went into his windup.
This is one of the reasons for my intense, visceral distrust of the neocons. Psychologically, and in some cases, literally, they are knee deep in the Middle East and its dirty little games.
But I still don't think they stage-managed 9/11. For one thing, they don't have the balls. These are just think-tank nerds, after all. What they are good at are Beltway conspiracies -- manipulating the intelligence and working the more obscure levels of the policymaking process to get what they want.
As for the more traditional cast of conspirators -- CIA, FBI, NSA et al -- my sense is that as of 9/11/01 they weren't in any shape to fight their way out of wet paper bag, much less organize a diabolically clever criminal conspiracy against their own country.
The intelligence agencies -- what the Soviets used to call the organs of state security -- really only work in times of crisis, when bodies and resources get thrown at problems en masse, as they have since 9/11. It's a kind of "human wave" approach to covert ops, which is possible in war time, but not otherwise. In peace time, the would-be James Bonds are usually too wrapped up in their own internal bureaucratic wars to worry much about the world outside. Unless, of course, you think the Bay of Bigs fiasco was actually a diabolically clever criminal conspiracy to make JFK look bad.
So if you ask me whether 9/11 was a conspiracy (an American or an Israeli one, I mean) I'd have to say no -- strongly, if not quite definitively. And I'd still say that, even if I didn't have this little plug in the back of my head that connects me to the Matrix.
On the other hand, if you ask me whether Gulf War II was a conspiracy, I'd say definitely yes. A neoconservative Beltway conspiracy, organized by a relatively small number of people with a semi-secret agenda: the preservation of Greater Israel and the taming of the Arab world, paid for with other people's money and other people's blood.
Why is the Matrix telling me this? Who knows? Maybe it's just anti-Semitic. Those Israeli cyborg networks can be so goddamn pushy.
The amazing thing is that the GW II conspiracy was carried out almost in plain public view. Which just shows, I guess, that when democracies decay, the line between policy and conspiracy can start to blur. When the tools of politics -- mass communications, in particular -- become tools of centralized control, conspirators can operate more freely. Who needs assassinations when you've already got Fox News?
Now if anyone wants to argue these points, flame on. But as you can see, the Matrix has me pretty well programmed to disbelieve conspiracy theories. And if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my feeding tube. I'm behind on my electrical output.
Sorry, my bad. I fixed.
Just as some context - are there any outlandish conspiracy theories that turned out to be true?
Here is a good summary of the unanswered questions surrounding the atrocities committed on Sept. 11. Although it does not necessarily point to a "conspiracy," it does suggest the disturbing possibility of high level collusion. Let us not forget thet Sept. 11 has functioned for us in ways that are not unlike the Reichstag fire. Mindy Kleinberg is the widow of one of the victims.
First public hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
Statement of Mindy Kleinberg to the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
March 31, 2003
http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing1/witness_kleinberg.htm
Look at it this way: The version of the attack the US government tells us is also no more than a conspiracy theory. This bin Laden guy says to some other guys living in Germany "let's hijack some planes and ram them into some buildings in the US. You all go to the US and train flying in Florida, but you tell them that you don't want to train for landing. Oh, and before you hijack the flight you leave back your Quaran, a testament, flight instructions and some other evidences."
At least it is until we get a proper committee of inquiry looking into the whole thing (which we won't get). As long as there is none, this theory is imo not more valid than the "insurance fraud" one.
Just as some context - are there any outlandish conspiracy theories that turned out to be true?
The details of Iran-contra always seemed pretty outlandish to me: the cake baked in the shape of a key (maybe if they'd taken the Iranians flowers . . . ) the use of third rate GOP fundraisers as cutouts for a major covert op; Fawn Hall (remember her?); Bob Woodward supposedly doing the deathbed confession bit with Bill Casey (here's a little oil for your feet, Bill).
And Ollie North was like some bizarre bad guy called up from liberal central casting -- Gen. Jack D. Ripper without the authoritative voice, or Alfred E. Neumann sent through Marine boot camp.
But it was all true. Outlandish isn't outlandish anymore when its real . . .
My favorite anomaly was the hijacker's passport found on the street in NYC. It appears towards the bottom of of the page at this link.
Anyone want to take a crack at my question from the other thread?
Graham claims he has the goods on Bush and 9/11 and claiming that a foreign state helped the hijackers = Bush's special relationship with Prince Bandar?
I don't think it requires a conspiracy theory to conclude that Cheney and co. had a pretty good idea that something was about to happen, and that they were prepared to cross their fingers and hope it wouldn't be too bad, knowing than a major terror attack would allow them to carry out their plans to crack down on civil dissent and launch a war against Iraq. It couldn't have turned out better for them if they had planned it themselves.
Glad to be back on this thread. First, regarding the blufive post.
Blufive wrote:
"the timeline has two items stamped "8:40" One describes the goings on at NORAD, the other at Otis AFB. The latter can't have started until the former finished, or was at least well under way. "
But of course, the timeline also says there are discrepencies in the stories of when NORAD was told. So this merely reinforces the notion that the most widely-reported time is false. This particular time is extensively sourced, however, so if you find the time implausible your quarrel is with NORAD and the media, not with the site. In any case, you are citing a failure to comprehend of a couple of minutes to explain away a 20 minute delay.
Here is their quote:
8:40 a.m.) Boston flight control supposedly notifies NORAD that Flight 11 has been hijacked (another account says it happens earlier (see 8:31 a.m.). [8:38, CNN, 9/17/01, 8:38, Washington Post, 9/12/01, 8:40, NORAD, 9/18/01, 8:40, AP, 8/19/02, 8:40, Newsday, 9/10/02] This is about 20 minutes after traffic control noticed the plane had its transponder beacon and radio turned off. Such a delay in notification would be in strict violation of regulations.
blufive wrote:
"At NORAD, the phone call from Boston was taken by a Tech Sgt, who hands over to a Lt. Col, who hands over to a Col, who calls the Big Boss Major General [in Florida], who gives the scramble order. That's four conversations, each of which has to take at *least* 10 seconds, probably more like 20-30, or even longer. It would probably take a similar chain to get the word to Otis AFB to scramble.
That up-down traversal of the Chain of command has to have taken at least 2 minutes, probably more like 5-7 minutes, maybe longer still. It's not factored into the timeline, and it could easily account for several of the minutes they're "missing". "
Doesn't NORAD have conference calls? Pagers? The above is all pure supposition. Compare this to the commercial media, some of whom had reports of the crash on the air within two minutes. NORAD is designed for quick reaction.
blufive wrote:
"Also, at this point, no-one had reason to suspect a threat to Washington "
What could be a more obvious target than Washington?
blufive wrote:
"at least one of the F-16s could have returned to Washington within 10 minutes and started patrolling the skies well before 9:00 a.m Those F-16s which were fitted out for an air-to-ground training mission? They quite possibly didn't have any live Air-to-air missiles on board."
which would not have stopped them from patrolling the skies, and trying to force the plane down, a particularly apt tatic since, by *your* reasoning, the military still thinks of this as a routine hijacking at this point. Notice how all missing and in-doubt information is interpreted to defend the adminitration. The planes "possibly didn't" have air-to-air ammo, is treated the same as though they definitely did not. No conspiracy theorist could get away with arguing like this.
blufive wrote:
. It sounds to me like the fighters took off from Otis at about 8:52, expecting to make a fairly routine intercept, and initially flew at their maximum peacetime speed (650-700mph, just subsonic).
A routine intercept? By 8:52, everyone near a television set heard a plane had crashed into the WTC! True, the public didn't know it was hijacked plane that did it, but the military did. And it knew at least two other planes were simultaneously hijacked, an unprecedented event.
blufive wrote:
"They're neglecting to allow for the time it actually takes two people to exchange information with each other via a telephone."
This is not the 1930's or even the 80's. This process can be very efficient now, and obviously it would be at NORAD for emergency situations.
blufive wrote:
Yes. Firstly, no-one knows ALL the facts, so everyone has to guess some things. Secondly, I think that, in terms of aircraft procedures, I'm better educated than the person writing the timeline.
But the site doesn't premise its argument on information that it just supposes. The facts used for its argument are richly sourced. Ultimately, deciding whether conspiracy or incompetence is the more logical explanation requires interpretation (for either possibility, it is not just the conspiracy theorists who are interpreting here), but the facts they give are not speculations. As for your personal authority, maybe so, but I have no way of verifying it, nor of verifying that you've presented what you know fairly, given that you are arguing a case, and therefore have a bias. Since I am also arguing a case, I also have a bias, but I am not arguing from personal authority.
Can someone tell me if it is usual in so called regular hijackings that the transponder and radio are turned off?
"The problem, I think, is that the human mind is either hard-wired or conditioned (nature vs. nurture, take your pick) to see patterns in just about everything -- stars in the sky, entrails of goats, I Ching sticks, stock prices, Alan Greenspan's public comments -- even though the data they are peering at happens to be completely random. "
Alan Greenspan's public comments are random? You must have meant that as a joke, but it undermines your argument. The human mind is hardwired to look for patterns because pattern recognition is the foundation of *any* understanding of the world, most emphatically including a scientific understanding, which seeks out strong patterns it calls "laws". If one's hostility to conspiracy theory is grounded in a hostility to pattern recognition, then one's quarrrel is with thought itself.
It is true that not all perceived patterns indicate the operation of consciousness, which is what I think you are trying to say. But many do. In fact, if you are not willing to infer that there are other minds than yours in the universe on the basis of pattern recognition (coherence in the speech and behavior of apparent other people), you have no basis for inferring it at all. If a conspiracy theorist is one who postulates the existence of consciousness direction in the sense data of the universe on the basis of pattern-recognition, then you are either a conspiracy theorist or a solipsist - that exhausts the possiblities. If you know there are other minds, you know it *because* other minds are part of the best explanation you have found for the sense data the universe has presented to you. The speech of others *could* all be random babbling that you just *think* is meaningful; if you believe otherwise, if you think this possibly random data is, in fact, consciously orchestrated, you accept the basic premise of conspiracy theory, and the only question is its applicability to a particular case.
"People also tend to pay close attention to coincidences, and much less attention to the statistical odds of those coincidences. "
What in the argument we have been talking about does this? This is a complete strawman. Indeed, conspiracy theorists often calculate odds, but then they are told that "million-to-one shots happen everyday". But if you can't argue from improbablity, what is the point of paying attention to odds?
And then we get this talk about Aunt Mabel etc. This is not at all germane to arguments about 9-11 unless you want to argue that everything in the universe is completely random. If there is order as well as randomness in the universe, and in human behavior, then one has to look at particular cases, not hide in these impossibly vague mystical arguments against the possiblity of seeing patterns as meaningful at all.
Finally,
As always, Occam's Razor -- the logical principal of not making explanations more complicated than is strictly necessary -- applies.
The conspiracy theorist can explain all the anomalies presented in this thread with a single thesis: the defense establishment stood down. On the other side, there are a multiplicity of explanations: the planes from Andrews didn't have air-to-air missiles, Bush was too petrified to react sensibly, even after the WTC crash, the military interceptors at first thought of their mission as a routine intercept, etc. Occam says the explanation requiring the least postulates is most likely correct. In this case - and frequently - Occam favors conspiracy.
But, of course, conspiracy opponents have a catch-22 argument handy. Occam favors the simplest explanation. But by vague invocation of the "complex texture of life", conspiracy opponents can, and do, argue that attributing complex events to single causes is too simple. Hence, conspiracy arguments can be neither simple nor complex. The latter violates Occam, and the former is "simplistic".
Just as some context - are there any outlandish conspiracy theories that turned out to be true?
Some of the important are still disputed. Did the Nazi's set the Reichstag fire? Did Nero order Rome burned? These issues are still debated among reputable historians.
On the other hand, most scholars regard the assasination of Lincoln as a conspircy, though, as with Kennedy the specific nature of the conspiracy is still disputed. Most members of the public do not believe this about Lincoln, but most members of the public are doing good if they remember that Lincoln was assasinated. I think this shows that the popular prejudice is the reverse of what is commonly assumed.
The Tonkin incident was a conspiracy. As was the Spartacus uprising. As was the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia (the communists had infiltrated the Social Democrats and took over Parliment that way).
Daniel Ellsberg said that what shocked him into going public about the Pentagon Papers was the realization that much he had attributed to incompetence was, in fact, malice. The government was not screwing up; it was deliberately lying.
The conspiracy theorist can explain all the anomalies presented in this thread with a single thesis: the defense establishment stood down.
I don't see how that is any more simple than saying "the defense establishment never stood up" -- i.e. never grasped the reality of what was happening until it was too late.
And in any case, saying NORAD (or whoever) "stood down" isn't really an explanation. The defense establishment isn't an it, it's a them. So you have explain (or at least ask) why the various actors did what they did.
Who told whom to stand down? What exactly did they order them to do? And what were the motives?
In the end, I think, you end up with a chain of causation that's actually quite complex. And you have to explain why a conspiracy that potentially involved so many people in the murder of thousands of innocent American citizens has remained completely under wraps for more than a year and a half.
I'm sorry, but that's a pretty tall order.
Not to belabor all this, but my point about pattern recognition was that people tend to see patterns in just about everything, even random noise. And yes, the Greenspan crack was my feeble attempt at humor.
Although if you've ever had to sit through a couple of hours of Big Al's testimony, then rush back to your office to write up some kind of a story making sense out of it (as I have) you might not find it so funny.
But the problem, as understand it, is that in the presence of huge and complex data sets, people have a tendency to fall back on some specific mental habits, known as heuristics that may or may not (depending on which social psychologist you're talking to) be inherited from our distant ancestors.
These mental shortcuts often lead people to (among other things) overestimate the odds of unlikely events, exaggerate their own past record of predictive success, and read to much meaning into specific pieces of data that have emotional significance to them.
I'm more familiar with the literature on how behavorial psychology can influence financial decisions. But I'm guessing it can play a role in conspiracy theories as well.
I agree with Billmon -- it's easy to fall into the conspiracy theory trap. Just because Bush and Co. have reaped a political advantage from the terrorist attacks does not mean that they orchestrated the events. I don't like these guys very much, but I think it's truly cruel (even for them) to suggest that they'd murder, or allow the murder, of thousands of Americans for political advantage.
Billmon's original link, however, raised some interesting (too many to comment on here) issues. I'll mention two:
1. The Middle Eastern TV crew: Is this confirmed? If these guys showed up at Bush's hotel trying to get an unscheduled interview (just like the approach to the Northern Alliance leader just two days before), would it suggest that OBL and al Qaeda were planning a Michael Corleone-style [Today I settle all al Qaeda business] move? Remember, the fourth plane was possibly headed for the Capitol -- with the intent of taking out our Congress. The Pentagon plane was probably intended to do much more damage than it did. It's entirely possible that the al Qaeda conspiracy [they might call it an operation, but it was a plot] was larger than we've been told or led to believe. They could have been trying, however naively, for a decapitation of the US government.
2. Wouldn't the Secret Service have planned for this kind of scenario? I'm sure there are types or sequences of events [such as multiple hijackings under way with airplanes being used as missiles] that would trigger a Secret Service take over of the President's schedule from his staff. Why was Bush left to sit there in that classroom? And, wouldn't you love to have a photo of Ari holding up that "Don't Say Anything Yet" sign?
Mr. Bento: I think you're coming down just a tad hard on Blufive. Blufive never pretended to be an expert on the 9-11 situation. He read the timeline on NORAD's response for the first time because I asked him to when I realized he had flight experience. I was interested in his impressions and specifically asked him if he'd do me this favor. The opinions he gave me were strictly his impressions as a flier on that first reading ... they were not meant to be taken as absolute, incontrovertible gospel. I was grateful for his time and his insights.
I'm inclined to agree with you on hardwiring causing a tendency to see patterns in everything. The current wave of psychiatric medicine, for example, is showing that a great deal of mental illness is caused by hardwired deficiencies in brain chemistry.
But I would also add that the government has a long and pervasive pattern of lying to us. From the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to the WMDs in Iraq, it has felt the need to lie and to lie big. The result is that if George Bush went on TV tomorrow and said "My fellow Americans, it is now 10 AM", I'd look at my watch. That ain't hardwiring, that's "won't get fooled again".
In the absence of 'believable truth' is it any wonder folks make up their own.
To the "long and pervasive pattern of lying to us" should be added the story of Pearl Harbor, a so-called "surprise attack." (See the book DAY OF DECEIT by Robert B. Stinnett, based on FOI requests for Navy documents and published in 2000). They "allowed the murder of thousands of Americans" at Pearl Harbor, Mr Conner.
And the 1941 circumstances seem similar to Tonkin Gulf and 9/11: A desire to wage war faraway held back by lack of public support, finally overcome by either a real attack (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) or a phony attack (Tonkin Gulf) on the US.
I don't see the evidence yet for neocon culpability in 9/11, but my mind is open.
I agree that a healthy dose of skepticism around conspiracy theories is, uh, healthy. I just want to point out that "Oh, that's just a conspiracy theory" is not a refutation.
I'm not inclined to believe any major conspiracies about the US government allowing or deliberately facillitating 9/11, but the info provided certainly raises serious questions about what our various defense, intelligence, and air traffic control agencies were doing that morning. And why the president was so slow to respond.
Oh, and Billmon, that was cheap shot at Stone. I'm disappointed. He's one of the most thoroughly misunderstood filmakers working today, and his willingness to take the mickey out of himself (see his cameo in "Dave") should protect him from cheap jabs like that, IMO.
This may seem off-topic but it explains something that I couldn't get my mind around before.
Incompetence alone didn't seem to be adequately explain how such an enormous intelligence failure as 9/11/01 came about. The alternative explanation is that incompetence and complicity on the part of US intelligence services contributed to 9/11. People usually make reference to "Operation Northwoods" when they get around to the idea of complicity. (Google it if you haven't heard of it before.)
The scenario always broke down for me here. How could someone knowingly participate in the murder of fellow citizens and feel they were doing the "right" thing? It's abhorrent and just plain wrong.
Here's a story that's begun to get some play in the US media. A highly placed mole in the IRA participates in operations including assassinations. He reports back to British Intelligence which uses his information and sanctions his actions.
Apparently they believed he perhaps saved more lives than he took and thus achieved a greater good.
Maybe what happened with 9/11 was the inevitable result of an seamless web of bad decisions, badly managed assets, and bad luck. When matters of national security are involved, we'll probably never know the truth. The best we can hope for is to consider the range of possibilities, try understand them the best we can, and try to make intelligent decisions based on them.
citizen Able - good point because that is exactly what TalkRadio is pitching now with their "the people of Iraq prefer the deaths and injuries and hunger from US invasion and the current anarchy to the death and hunger they would have experienced under Saddam because now they have hope for a better tomorrow that they didn't have under Saddam."
Let me take this one first:
Billmon wrote:
"But the problem, as understand it, is that in the presence of huge and complex data sets, people have a tendency to fall back on some specific mental habits, known as heuristics that may or may not (depending on which social psychologist you're talking to) be inherited from our distant ancestors.
These mental shortcuts often lead people to (among other things) overestimate the odds of unlikely events, exaggerate their own past record of predictive success, and read to much meaning into specific pieces of data that have emotional significance to them. "
I don't know what the studies you are citing are intended to prove. But you seem to be using them to try to prove that people see more patterns than are there. Any serious attempt to assess this has to look at false negatives as well as false positives. How many patterns are present that people do not see? Do people occassionally attribute psychic significance to coincidences? Sure. But any close reading of Checkov will give an idea of how many layers of subtext and unstated meaning lie undetected behind even the most banal conversation. Conversations you have every day, not the psychic experiences of now and then. And if you want to move into more abstract "data sets", giving people sequences of numbers that are perfectly ordered mathematically in ways they could not recognize by observing the sequence is trivial. You can prove anything looking only at errors on one side. It is as though you studied how people estimate the values of cars. You count the number of times the guess accurately and the number of times they guess too high, ignoring the number of times they guess too low, and solemnly conclude that homo sapiens have an innate tendency to overestimate the value of cars.
Now for this:
Billmon wrote:
"I don't see how that is any more simple than saying "the defense establishment never stood up" -- i.e. never grasped the reality of what was happening until it was too late.
Let's take the passport. The accident theorist has to postulate that the passport on Atta's person survived being directly in the point of impact between a jet and a building, said impact leading immediately to a fireball and shortly after to collapse. This without significant damage.
He also has to postulate that it landed on top (more or less) of the huge pile of rubble that took weeks to clear up.
He also has to postulate that despite the fact the rubble was mostly burning and at least hot, the passport did not burn.
He also has to postulate that a firemen, mostly concerned with pulling out possibly still-living bodies, somehow intuits that this particular little booklet, of all the millions of personal items among the debris, is important enough to bring to someone's attention.
The conspiracy theorist has to postulate that the passport was planted. It is a much simpler explanation and requires no virtuostic massaging of the laws of physics.
Of course, I cannot prove that the sequence of accidents did not happen. As I argued before, you cannot *prove* that anything besides accident exists in the world.
Billmon wrote:
"And in any case, saying NORAD (or whoever) "stood down" isn't really an explanation. The defense establishment isn't an it, it's a them. So you have explain (or at least ask) why the various actors did what they did."
But so do you. Why were so many standard procedures not followed? How did NORAD miss obvious things? Like flying well below speed even after the first plane hit? Or defending the Pentagon with jets from Langely rather than Andrews? Or not moving Bush to a safe location for the press conference? After all, your own mini-me postulate, at best, can only explain the behavior of Bush, not those around him.
Billmon wrote:
"Who told whom to stand down? What exactly did they order them to do? And what were the motives?"
You have no right to ask me to specify my scenario in greater detail than you will specify yours. Exactly which parties in NORAD screwed up? Where precisely did the procedures break down? You couldn't possibly answer questions at this level, so you have no right to ask it of me.
Billmon wrote:
"In the end, I think, you end up with a chain of causation that's actually quite complex. And you have to explain why a conspiracy that potentially involved so many people in the murder of thousands of innocent American citizens has remained completely under wraps for more than a year and a half.
I'm sorry, but that's a pretty tall order."
There is lots of precedent for much larger conspiracies remaining secret and for much longer times. Many Italian intellectuals used to maintain that the Mafia was just folklore or history, until the investigations of the early nineties showed that mafia dominance of Italian business and government for several decades if anything exceeded what was held by the popular imagination. Also, in the early nineties, the Economist pointed out that political integration had been the agenda of the EEC all along - and that the political elites of Europe through several decades kept this fact under wraps until they figured the people were ready to accept it. Personally, I like the EU, but that doesn't change the fact.
And, looking at evolutionary psychology, this is what you'd expect. If humans could not solve Prisoner's Dilemna situations fairly optimally - that is, using tit-for-tat, but usually arriving at cooperation - we could not form complex societies, which, in fact, we do rather well. But solving the Prisoner's Dilemma well means being able to keep secrets even under pressure.
Macaulay Connor wrote:
"I agree with Billmon -- it's easy to fall into the conspiracy theory trap. Just because Bush and Co. have reaped a political advantage from the terrorist attacks does not mean that they orchestrated the events. "
No, it just means they had motive to. But my argument has hardly been limited to that.
"I don't like these guys very much, but I think it's truly cruel (even for them) to suggest that they'd murder, or allow the murder, of thousands of Americans for political advantage."
One way to address this question is to look for precedents. This is where Operation Northwoods comes up. That was a scheme under the Kennedy administration, in case you hadn't heard, to blow up a US airliner and blame it on the Cubans as an excuse to invade that country. The military command structure approved of this entirely, but McNamara said no. If not for that one person, it would have happened. Rumsfeld is no McNamara.
Evolutionary psychology teaches that we have a deep prejudice to seeing ourselves as more virtuous than we are: we can deceive others better if we deceive ourselves, so we do (see Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, for example). We tend also to extend this to others of our "tribe", because the tribes function on the basis of trust (Prisoner's Dilemma again).
Pat K.
I'm sorry if you think I was rude to blufive. I did not intend to be and don't see where I was. He offered arguments; I offered counter-arguments: that's how debate works. It was also my first time seeing this particular timeline, though, like blufive, I had seen others. For that matter, I don't claim to be an expert on 9-11 either.
I do reserve the right to argue forcefully on this issue. This argument matters.
Emmm, I'm not sure about your coin-flipping example. If you and I make it to the Championship Game of the Coinflippers, and (as you say), heads wins, tails loses, and tails is flipped, do we both lose? I don't see how anyone would have to necessarily, inexorably flip heads 16 times in a row.