The wounded leader of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, left the country over the weekend for Saudi Arabia. The opposition is thrilled. But the country might still descend into chaos, and the biggest beneficiary may be the local al Qaeda chapter.
Or, at least, I believe that Saleh left and the opposition is thrilled. I'm not in Yemen at the moment. I didn't see Saleh get on the plane. I didn't see him arrive in Saudi Arabia. I haven't interviewed anyone in the opposition.
Like pretty much everyone outside of Yemen and many people inside the country as well, I'm relying on second-hand information provided in newspapers and on the Internet. I feel relatively confident that Saleh left the country -- this account has been confirmed by multiple sources. However, some sources note that he might simply seek medical care in Saudi Arabia and then return to Yemen. Many reports suggest that the opposition is delighted with Saleh's departure, and since his ouster has been a primary demand, I don't see any reason to doubt this conclusion.
The part about al Qaeda is much more difficult to verify. The U.S. government has certainly played up the threat of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and the group has claimed responsibility for several failed terrorist attacks, including the attempted Christmas bombing of an airliner by a young Nigerian, Farouk Abdulmutallab. On the other hand, according to The Washington Post, "some in the opposition to Saleh have expressed skepticism about even the existence of" AQAP. Somewhere in the middle is Max Rodenbeck, who writes in The New York Review of Books that al Qaeda has become little more than a brand name and marginal offshoots like AQAP "have been relegated to merely proving their existence by killing now and then, or blowing something up." I'm inclined to side with Rodenbeck's interpretation, not because he lies in the middle but because it corresponds to my own understanding of the decline of al Qaeda over the last decade.
Now let's wade into even murkier waters. Conspiracy theorists have argued that the Christmas bomber was actually a plot designed by the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service. No, wait, the plot was hatched by Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security chief, in order to sell his body scanners to a petrified nation. Whoops, I miswrote: it was actually a rogue team inside the U.S. government that was running the Nigerian as one of their own agents. Or maybe, like in a Dan Brown thriller, it was all three!
Somehow, in this account of what's going on in Yemen, I've gone from the verifiable to the debatable to the downright nonsensical.
Scratch the surface of any story and you'll find rumors, hoaxes, and conspiracies. The conspiracy theory is the most intriguing of them all, for it combines total skepticism with total credulity. The same person will challenge every assertion made by the government or the mass media about Roswell or the Kennedy assassination, and then proceed to embrace the most cockamamie theory without even doing a minimum of legwork to test it.
Cyberspace is the perfect place for this contradiction to thrive, for it is both "the Petri dish for paranoids" and also the home of Snopes and other scam trackers. Wikipedia is a battleground between conspiracy hounds and the thousands of amateur sleuths who aspire to do at least as good a job as the fact-checkers at conventional encyclopedias (whether they do so is a matter of considerable debate, including within Wikipedia itself). The Internet is full of bunkum and debunk 'em. Like matter and anti-matter, they should cancel each other out. But the relationship more aptly resembles that between bacteria and antibiotics. Develop an effective tuberculosis vaccine, and the TB bacterium will develop a stronger resistant strain. The American body politic, weakened by successive waves of government lies, media oversights, and the relentless repetition of demagogues, is susceptible to these highly infectious theories.
Most toxic of all perhaps are the myths generated by 9/11. Over the years, I've received lots of letters about 9/11 and why it was an inside job. One recent letter insisted that Osama bin Laden was not behind the 2001 attacks, that an Israeli firm in the Twin Towers "received a fax warning them about the 911 attack that would come in a few hours" (which presumably allowed it to warn Israelis and/or Jews to evacuate the building), and that it was not a plane that struck the Pentagon on that fateful day.
Although bin Laden initially denied responsibility, an overwhelming amount of evidence surfaced that linked al Qaeda to the attacks (including, of course, bin Laden himself eventually claiming responsibility). As for the Israeli firm, Odigo, it did receive such a warning, but it was an instant message, not a fax. The message arrived at its office in Israel, did not identify the location of the attack, and was hostile rather than friendly. It in no way demonstrates that the firm, which didn't even have offices in the Twin Towers to evacuate, was part of a U.S.-Israeli plot to bring down the buildings. As for Flight 77, there were lots of eyewitness reports of its crash into the Pentagon in addition to calls made by people on board. And where exactly did the flight go if not into the Pentagon? I could go on -- about the misrepresentations of the size of the hole in the Pentagon, other hoaxes involving advanced warnings of 9/11, and all the other fanciful theories about who was behind the attacks.
The "9/11 truthers" are as resistant to rebuttal as the right-wing "birthers." They both draw strength from their deep-seated distrust of government and the mass media. They believe not in Occam's Razor, which argues for building a case on the fewest new assumptions, but in Occam's Hairball, a partially digested lump of every new assumption that has stuck in their craw.
Long before the Internet, historian Richard Hofstadter warned of the "paranoid style" that periodically grips the American body politic and directs the crowd's fury at Masons or Jesuits or Jews or Communists. In his recently updated book on conspiracy theories, legal scholar Mark Fenster takes a more benign view. Such theories reflect populist suspicion about the concentration of economic and political power, a suspicion "that can have violent, racist, and antidemocratic effects (as well as salutary and democracy-enhancing ones) on the political and social order, but a strain that is neither independent from nor necessarily threatening to the country's political institutions or political culture."
I agree that conspiracy theories do not threaten the status quo, for they usually distract attention from more serious and systemic problems (for instance, bridges and highways and buildings are collapsing all over the United States because of the defunding of infrastructure, and the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth focus all their energies on explaining how an exploding plane could never make the Twin Towers collapse?). And yes, before you prepare your flaming emails, some conspiracies turn out to have a basis in fact (the Iran-Contra affair, for instance, or the right-wing mobilization to bring down Bill Clinton).
The danger of conspiracy theories lies not so much in whether they are right or wrong but in how they erode our democratic institutions. Instead of democratizing the state, conspiracy theorists tend toward a libertarian downsizing of government; instead of breaking the corporate control of the media, conspiracy theorists create their own dogmatic blogs and websites. Conspiracies sap our will, for who except Jesus or Keanu Reaves can stand up to The Matrix? In fact, conspiracies are the exception to the rule of big institutions, which err on the side of incompetence more often than not. Conspiracies overstate the power of the powerful. As the Iran-Contra affair demonstrated, even authentic conspiracies are fairly inept.
I fear that conspiracies have become the only way for us to organize the unruly flow of information that assaults us daily. We create all-encompassing, quasi-religious explanations to make sense of the supernova of our post-modern experience.
This desire can distort the compass of even that most skeptical of skeptics: the investigative journalist. The latest example is Annie Jacobsen. In her new book on that black hole of conspiracy theories, the top-secret military base in Nevada called Area 51, she tries to tie together UFO sightings, CIA black ops, Nazi scientists, and Soviet shenanigans in one neat package. The first part of the book, as Richard Rhodes assesses it in The Washington Post, does "an adequate if error-ridden job" of covering military history. Then, on the basis of a single unnamed source she spins a yarn in which "Auschwitz butcher Dr. Josef Mengele, the German aircraft-designing brothers Walter and Reimar Horten and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin conspired back in the late 1940s to scare America silly with a Nazi-Soviet flying saucer crowded with wobbly 13-year-olds with large, surgically altered heads. Except that the thing crashed. In a barren corner of New Mexico. Really." It's not just the Internet that generates crazy stuff.
Unbelievable things do happen. The Arab Spring. The earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown in Japan. The persistence of climate change denial. The political career of Sarah Palin. But even as our world edges into the fantastical, our explanations for these exceptional events should stay as close to the ground as possible. Everything else, to quote the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is "nonsense on stilts."
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http://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/someoftheagencies%2Corganizationsandindivi
Maybe you could explain it to them.
1509 Architects and Engineers say so.
Is there any way you can address this fact without resorting to telling us that we are somehow anti-semitic for agreeing with it ?
How do you make the leap ?
As for buildings imploding the way they do, can you give me any other examples of jet liners crashing into skyscrapers and exploding? What's the data set that allows you to say that such an implosion "CAN'T happen" and "never happens"?
I am aware of 1500 architects and engineers who are doing just this via ae911truth (dot) org. These architects and engineers don't have a conspiracy theory. But rather, they have disturbing questions concerning the application of physics to quality of collapse. And they also claim to be in possession of evidence which was ommited, or otherwise, overlooked, by NIST and 9/11 Commission Report.
The "truther" issue that I find most upsetting is the subject of a published and peer reviewed paper concerning the proven existence of vast quaintites of active thermitic material in the dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe (The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009, 2, 7-31).
After reading this paper, it occured to me that there may be a quick and effective way to test the veractiy of content. The authors of the paper claim that explosive residue found in several different samples of World Trade Cetner dust is a product of nanotechnology – the product of a very sophisticated and highly technological manufacturing process which is presumably beyond skill and resource level of most people. It follows, if the scientests who authored this paper are in possession of this very rare, technologically exclusive and highly explosive material then perhaps these particular strain of "bacteria" deserves a hearing.
Perhaps you could provide some of this overwhelming evidence, and then forward it to the FBI, who lacked the evidence needed to formally charge Bin Laden with 9/11. I'm sorry, but a DoD translated video of some arab talking about the 9/11 attacks does not justify 2 middle eastern wars and countless lives lost. Also, if you want to actually debunk the conspiracy theorists, you're going to have to explain how every single perimeter column over 13 stories failed in a perfectly precise sequence, sending the building crashing symmetrically into its own footprint at free-fall acceleration.
http://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/the-terrorist-threat-confronting-the-united-states
No WTC hi-rise crashed "symmetrically into its own footprint at free-fall acceleration," and NCSTAR 1A's modeling shows why WTC 7's facade did for ~2.25 seconds from t=1.75 to t=4 seconds. Since ~170,000 tons were already moving at a slower acceleration as a result of the Probable Collapse Sequence NIST posited, the global collapse was already inevitable, even without your imaginary, evidence-free explosives.
Perhaps you could provide a plausible motive for this alleged C/D at ~5:22PM?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4646091253905495376#
Unfortunately, our government lies with great regularity, and shows a remarkable ability to belittle and cover up some of its conspiracies, or put all blame on enemies while denying its significant contributions. (See another aspect of Iran/Contra--government supported cocaine importation.) Furthermore, the domestic drug war is fought by police who "testi-lie" as a standard operating procedure, both in preparing cases and prosecuting them. They even coined the term.
In the David Koresh/Waco incident, the encircling agents clearly fired upon the compound before watching it burn. The Branch Davidians died, mostly, from their own fire, and perhaps suicides, but the government went so far to claim the total innocence of its “rescue” attempt that a full scale model of the compound was built and burned down as a test. The official investigating commission, chaired by a retired senator who is also an ordained minister, exonerated the FBI of all guilt. A defense contractor was hired to do the key thermal image testing and explain away the clearly evident automatic weapons fire from the government’s attack. The official history now states that the repeated bursts from the barrels of FBI guns were just “sunlight reflections.” So some conspiracies work very well indeed, and carry the imprimatur of our most respectable men.
A perceptive reader might think your phrase "the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth focus all their energies on explaining..." would seem like deliberate mischaracterization and misdirection of the very sort that leads so many into paranoia.
As for intelligence agencies, if they aren't stirring up trouble, are they worth the trouble of having? Think of all the movies that could not be made, at least.
B. they weren't "unsophisticated Middle Easterners." Mohamed Atta was an architectural engineer. Several other hijackers had engineering degrees.
C. Occam's Razor is not a scientific law. It is not an absolute. It is simply a useful principle that says if you're going to come up with a theory that goes against overwhelming eyewitness, video, and forensic evidence, you have to come up with something more compelling than the half-truths and insinuations that you've offered.
Phrase of the month!!!
What I have also done is be one of the biggest advocates on the planet for the 9/11 First Responders to get health care.
http://911truthnews.com/jon-golds-official-911-justice-start-up-kit/
The day that created the "Post-9/11 World" deserves a real criminal investigation. The families and the people of the world both require and deserve real justice for what happened that day. Not the kind you find at GITMO either.
Please take the time to learn.