{"id":2180,"date":"2016-01-05T09:13:11","date_gmt":"2016-01-05T09:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/?p=2180"},"modified":"2025-09-25T09:45:28","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T08:45:28","slug":"incontrovertible-the-truth-about-911","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/2016\/01\/05\/incontrovertible-the-truth-about-911\/","title":{"rendered":"Incontrovertible – the “truth” about 9\/11"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dylan Avery made four versions of Loose Change<\/strong><\/a>, setting out the ‘Truther’ case for 9\/11 as an inside job to legitimate Bush-Cheney’s middle east capers. I saw the first cut twice, thought it tripe and still do. Why? False flag attacks are hardly unheard of. The Northwoods Proposal of 1962 sought Kennedy’s approval for a CIA strike on Florida or Guantanemo, to be blamed on Castro prior to bombing Havana. Kennedy turned it down flat and had its key\u00a0advocate, [\/ezcol_1half_end] Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Lyman Lemnitzer, kicked side\u00adways; though that didn’t prevent his resurrection a year later as NATO supremo.<\/p>\n

For obvious reasons a recurring feature of conspiracy theories is their invoking of earlier, proven conspiracies. The Daily Mail’s Zinoviev Letter is one example, the Proto\u00adcols of the Elders of Zion another. But while it doesn’t do to underestimate human nast\u00adiness, there’s a clue in the ‘human’ part – it doesn’t do either to grace our indisputably cynical leaders with superhuman powers. Those proven conspiracies were simple and opportunistic, especially where the motive was to fake a casus belli. <\/em>The Tonkin Incident, allowing LBJ to throw US forces into Vietnam, springs to mind, as do Saddam’s non existent WMDs.<\/p>\n

While we’re linking casus belli\u00a0 <\/em>with conspiracy, did FDR know in advance of Japan’s tactically brill\u00adiant – but strat\u00adeg\u00adically inept – attack on Pearl Harbour, and see in it a way of sur\u00admounting domestic resistance to America being “dragged into yet another European quarrel”? Available evidence, though greater than that for saying Bush did 9\/11, is less conclus\u00adive than devotees of a Pearl Harbour conspiracy like to believe. Another recurring feature of conspiracy theories is the overegging of anomalous detail which, in our messy world, can always be found if we look hard enough while studiously disregarding far greater volumes of counter evidence. It goes hand in hand, since the epistemological naivity of even degree educated Brits and Americans is topped only by our species dufferdom at assessing probability, with the elevation of remote possibility to cast iron certainty.<\/p>\n

(There’s a clue too in ‘remote possibility’. No one can ever prove that Bush-Cheney did not<\/em>\u00a0 do 9\/ll, that MI6 did not<\/em>\u00a0 do for Diana or that planet earth is not\u00a0<\/em> ruled by those extra-terrestial lizards David Icke – who by the way writes with wit, intelligence and a disarming semblance of sanity – is so worried about. Just as good epistemologists leave room for the outlandish possibility that God not only exists but, with time on his hands after creating the universe, is aware of and aggrieved by your sexual fantasies and mine, so too should we leave a scintella of space for the even more outlandish possibility that Dubya, having for years cunningly passed himself off as a half-wit, did indeed gather round him a thousand or two fellow conspirat\u00adors to do the dirty on 9\/11. Proving a negative is tough.)<\/p>\n

9\/11 Truthism takes three broad forms. The strongest is that the strikes were text\u00adbook false flag, the mildest that official accounts leave unanswered questions. In between, though closer to the ‘strong’ form, is the argument that while Bush did not plan the attacks he had foreknowledge yet allowed them to proceed. The less stubborn of strong-form Truthers tend to shift under well informed challenge to the more easily defended view that Doubts Remain. Indeed, Dylan Avery seems to have made that shift himself. This from an interview based feature<\/a><\/strong> of April 2014:<\/p>\n

[Avery’s] new film is grounded in fact-based stories, not theories, about people abused by the police. And though questions linger about 9\/11, such as why, on Sept. 6, 2001, the daily average for put-options on United Airlines stock quadrupled, he no longer tortures himself with speculation. \u201cIn my truly angry times, in 2005 or 2006, if you asked if the Bush admin- istration planned the attacks, I would have said, \u2018Fuck yeah\u2019.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But now?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think Bush could plan a bowl of cereal.”<\/span><\/p>\n

As a matter of fact the put-options issue, like WTC 7 freefall and ‘expert’ opinions that Boeing 707s could not have brought down WTC 1 and WTC 2, has been comprehensively addressed.<\/a><\/strong> Another recurring feature of conspiracy theories is the coexistence of shrill demands that Our Questions Be Answered with stone-deafness to empirical and logical answers convincing to all but the True Believer.<\/p>\n

Again we can draw a theistic parallel. Here’s Richard Dawkins<\/a><\/strong>, his inalienable human right not to be tortured by stupid people serially breached by creationist and Formidably Stupid Person, Wendy Wright. Her debating style,\u00a0undeniably effective, is a step up – but just the one – from finger in each ear and ‘la-la, la-la’<\/em> . “I don’t see any evidence for evolution”, she keeps saying, and even as the good professor supplies it\u00a0in spades she’s still at it. “Where’s the evidence? I just don’t see it.”\u00a0 (Postmodernism has much to answer for. Its useful suspicion of positivism in social science, but frequently half-baked grasp of challenging findings in particle physics, led it to the self contradictory claim that there is no truth and science – history too – is ‘just another narrative’, enlarging the space not only for climate change and holocaust denialism but 9\/11 Truthism and Voodoo Studies to boot.) And\u00a0because she is<\/strong> stupid, Wright\u00a0does a disservice to an analogy that tightens if we drop our dissonance-driven attachment to the idea that only stupid people hold stupid views. I know Truthers and<\/em>\u00a0 theists who are highly intelligent and great company – just so long as you steer clear of the elephant in the room.<\/p>\n

Indeed, a hallmark of the real adept – as with the clinically paranoid – is the ability to go one better than mere imperviousness to counter-evidence. A 24-carat Truther, in for the long haul, will with consummate ease accommodate such evidence within an expanded version of the theory. One set of 9\/ll Truthers concedes that Loose Change is shot through and through with factual and logical howlers, only to argue that that\u00a0 <\/em>just shows Avery to be himself party to the conspiracy, deliberately making a crap film to discredit their case. Scary, huh? With Dylan Avery and George W. Bush in cahoots we’re looking at super-villainy of fiendish intricacy.<\/p>\n

But for all of that, it’s not my aim here to dissect and rebuff 9\/11 conspiracy theories. That job’s been done, thoroughly and to my mind decisively, by those better placed than me. (For the unconvinced, this site<\/a><\/strong> is as good a start as any.) Nor am I much concerned with psychological traits allegedly predisposing some of us to buy into conspiracy theories. I do, however, have some interest in their epistemological aspects, which tend to include:<\/p>\n