Beingism: Rational Means to Emotional Ends, for the Benefit of All.

...and neither were any other terrorist attacks.These are my personal thoughts on the matter, and should not be confused with official views of Beingism.

I recently received a message from an associate in the impeachment movement claiming the following:

For those of you who have yet to unveil the truth about what has been happening around the world, almost every terrorist attack that has happened since Oklahoma city has been perpetrated by government intelligence agencies. Lets go down the list shall we. OK city, 1st World Trade Center bombing, 911, London bombing, train bombing in Spain, Bali bombing, Pakistan hotel bombing, and the latest botched goverment sponsored terrorist act.........................Mumbai. That's a pretty big statement eh? I am prepared to defend it. I will deliver a documentary on any of the above mentioned topics if anyone dare know the info.

Now, I don't know for sure. But it seems to me that this is not at all plausible, and without going into actual specific claims made by the folks who espouse these kinds of ideas (which would have us bickering indefinitely), here's why.

You would need an incredible level of secrecy needed to carry out something like this, especially in a society that is as open as ours is. Whatever you think of mainstream news, it is not capable of covering up a story about a government conspiracy to kill people. Most reporters would, if given half a chance, blow the top off such a conspiracy in a heartbeat, and any such conspiracy would require getting a lot of people involved. Dick Cheney can’t just get on the horn and bark an order to blow up a couple of towers. It would require intricate planning, expenditure of resources, and involvement of countless people to plan it, implement said plan, somehow stop everyone who knew about it from talking, and hide the disappearing resources. Most people—whatever their political views, and regardless of how greedy they may personally be—are just not going to comply with something that blatantly evil. People need to have some way to justify these kinds of behaviors to themselves. When soldiers go to war against other countries, for example, they do it (for example) because they’ve been trained to think about it as a noble crusade to free the people from the terrible dictator there, or because they have vague notions about how it's noble to serve your country in the military. I don’t believe for a moment, however, that the huge number of ordinary people you would need to involve to pull off a massive conspiracy like this could justify to themselves the direct murder of thousands of American citizens, no matter how greedy or neoconservative those people are. They’d expose the conspiracy long before it happened.

Even if we assume that the people supposedly conspiring could justify doing something this horrible to themselves, the chances of getting caught doing it would be extremely high. For one thing, if this is something governments routinely do, surely when doing something this risky, the truth would have come out at least once before. Yet never once has this become generally known about any terrorist attack.

Even if 9/11 was the only attempt to do this, we need to consider that the penalty for getting caught conspiring for everyone involved would almost certainly be death. If it were the Republican leadership who was responsible, failure would also mean ending the Republican Party forever (if not the entire government), because the public would never forgive such a terrible thing. No person with even a grain of sense who wanted to preserve her or his own life, or the organization s/he worked for, would seriously consider undertaking such a task. Anyway, if the supposed government conspirators were going to frame someone for a terrorist attack, I should think that framing Iraqi terrorists for 9/11 (rather than Al Quida) would have provided a better justification for the Iraq invasion and an equally good motivation for the so-called war on terror.

For that matter, there’s really no reason to go through all the trouble to mastermind a terrorist attack on your own country when you’ve already done many things to alienate the Islamic world. All you would need to do is allow an actual attack to happen. Yes, there actually are real terrorists out there who want to hurt America. They’d be happy to kill lots of Americans and provide the powerful with spurious justifications for invasions, civil rights abuses, and so on. There isn’t any motivation for the government to attack the country itself when there are others who already want to do it!

There are a lot of engineers in the world. The overwhelming consensus among them is that the towers collapsed due to planes hitting them. Naturally there are some scientists who dispute everything, including many clear scientific facts such as evolution, the holocaust, or the moon landing, and so it’s natural that there would be some who dispute the real cause of 9/11, which is more ambiguous than the previously mentioned things. If 9/11 had been a conspiracy, why would groups of engineers (who for the most part have no vested interest in holding any particular position on the matter) not cause an outcry? Instead, engineers who have investigated the matter have generally not found evidence that the official explanation is inaccurate. Unless most engineers are in on the conspiracy, or most of them aren’t very good at engineering, or most of them find it so difficult to believe that the official story isn’t true that they’re ignoring the real data—they probably know what they’re talking about. Frankly, I trust engineers to tell me about building structures more than I trust the physics-intuitions of a bunch of untrained people who are highly critical of government.

Are there unexplained aspects of most terrorist attacks? Of course. When any unusual thing happens, we’re naturally not going to understand every aspect of the situation. An unusual or remarkable situation is by definition something with which we have limited experience. In a complex situation such as a terrorist attack,weird stuff is going to come up, and some of it will be hard to explain.

To make matters worse, we’re all working with insufficient facts when we’re talking about these kinds of events. I don’t have firsthand information about what happened, so I have to take other people’s word for it. For every "9/11 Truth" documentary, there’s another report out there explaining what’s wrong with it or saying that they’ve got their facts wrong. It’s often impossible to tell who’s right in these kinds of situations without going to have a look yourself, devoting your life to studying engineering, and so on. Given this, I have to accept that I’m just not that sure about some things. So what do I conclude?

Well, I know there’s a lot of reason to doubt at least some of the people who claim that the official explanation is bogus.I’ve heard (among many other preposterous things) that that 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy, and I’ve heard people cite what they claim are facts to support this which (if they were true) would sound pretty convincing. My guess is that in this case, the supposed “facts” are just made up in a semiconscious way (often based on a partial truth) by someone down the line and passed on by others who have biases that support something like a Jewish conspiracy. If bias about 9/11 happens to these folks with Anti-Semitic prejudices, I have to believe it’s likely to be affecting other folks as well.

I also know that people are in general highly prone to inventing conspiracy theories about these sorts of things. Take the JFK assassination, or the picture of a face on Mars. When NASA revealed a picture of the surface of Mars that looked like a face from one angle in a certain light but denied that it represented an actual face (it was just a function of the light hitting the mountains at a certain angle), they were accused of covering up life on Mars. People love to invent conspiracy theories to explain almost anything that seems strange or hard to accept, and they tend to do it in ways that support their existing worldviews. That’s why conspiracy theories crop up so consistently around major national or world events. Of this we can be sure: Even if the government had nothing whatever to do with 9/11, conspiracy theories would have cropped up soon after claiming that the official explanation was bogus.

One of the biggest thing that works against all these conspiracy theories for me is that none of many different objections critics have of the official story adds up to a single general theory of what might have happened. Conspiracy theorists can point to a whole bunch of “why the hell did this happen?” kinds of questions, but when you put them all together, they don’t add up to anything that makes sense together. If the government demolished the WTC themselves after planes hit it, what does the collapse of Building 7 have to do with it? Sure, you can come up with theories about this or that particular thing, but there’s no point of view that explains all of the facts any better than the official explanation. Conspiracy theories offer a whole bunch of disparate questions that seem meaningful individually but don’t lend themselves to any particular overall explanation (and different facts lend themselves to different explanations which might contradict each other). This is part of why it’s hard to debunk them—in order to actually find the flaws in a theory, you have to have a defined theory. When theorists can only talk about what’s wrong with other the official story and not present an alternative of their own, you can’t really say much to disprove it.

I don’t question any of this because I’m some kind of gullible fool who thinks that mainstream news is especially comprehensive or unbiased. The mainstream news sources are owned by corporations and—though I would argue that there are definitely serious limits to how much they can do this given that individual reporters make choices—they narrow the range of discussion in this county to a very disturbing and dangerous degree. There’s no conspiracy here, mind you; this is all very straightforward, verifiable, noncontroversial stuff, even though it’s rarely discussed publicly because obviously corporations have an interest in not letting people know about it. When things go wrong in society, it’s rarely conspiracies that are to blame. Instead, it’s often the result of chains of causal effect of many people making decisions that individually may seem innocuous, but collectively add up to very unpleasant ends; it’s also a result of inherent, systemic conflicts of interest.

The other thing to remember is that while mainstream news definitely has serious problems, alternative media sources have them, too. Not only do they lack of resources for investigation by comparison, but they also have their own set of biases. Trusting alternative media sources without a healthy measure of skepticism would be just as foolish as trusting the mainstream media to give you a full and balanced report about what’s going on in the world. Frankly, I don’t trust any news source completely (or even mostly), but you have to work with what you’ve got, so you muddle through with multiple sources.

Even if 9/11 or other terrorist attacks were perpetrated by out government, there are a few things that are pretty much undeniable: Mainstream culture is not going to accept that, probably no matter how much advocates bring up the issues, and those who advocate conspiracy theories are going to be looked at as crackpots by most people. This is likely to cause progressives (who, let's face it, are a lot more likely to buy into this kind of thing than others) to be looked at as crackpots. Therefore, 9/11 conspiracy theories (even if true) trivialize real (if unpublicized) concerns that we all know are realities; genocide, torture, war/terror. Bringing everything back to these conspiracy theories, we ignore these other issues and marginalize the progressive movement—and more people suffer.

-ineptsegue

Appendix A: Questions that 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists need to answer
(Yes, my blog entry has an appendix. Vestigial, but nifty.)

1) Most importantly: What is the testable hypothesis that you are putting forward for what happened (as opposed to the official story)? When looking backward and cherry picking the results, it’s easy to find apparent flaws in an account of something. The accountability comes into play when you put forward a testable alternative theory.

2) If Al Qaeda isn't responsible for 9/11 (or if, as my friend above claimed, it was created by the government itself), what are all the real terrorists created as a result of U.S. imperialism doing?

3) What is the motive for creating a fictional terrorist attack, given that real terrorists actually do exist who would be happy to do it for them?

4) How could such a thing be done, given how difficult it would be and the freedom in our society to investigate such things?

5) Why would so many people be willing risk their lives, the organizations in which they believe, their overwhelming prosperity, and the U.S. government itself in order to create the appearance of a terrorist attack in America?