Jun 9, 2008
Refuting "Truther" Nonsense
by Liberty and Power
Libertarians rightfully question the trustworthiness of the Bush administration.
Unfortunately, a few have carried this skepticism to the ridiculous extreme of accepting harebrained theories that 9/11 was an"inside job" and, even more unbelievably, that our bungling federal bureaucrats would be capable of pulling off this imagined vast conspiracy.
Few are better at refuting Truther hogwash than Scott Horton. Here, he systematically demolishes their claims.
Andrew D. Todd -
6/10/2008
Truthers tend to maintain an uneconomical hypothesis. They insist that the World Trade Center was prepared for demolition, even though airliners flying into the buildings were a sufficient cause for them to collapse, and the airliners' flight was witnessed by thousands of people. This means that the Truthers get caught up in arguing with obviously qualified engineering opinion. I think it is useful to think of Truthers as primitive rebels, in Eric Hobsbawm's sense of the term, that is, people who want to put the clock back to an idealized past. Airport security is the largest intersection between the national security state and the average citizen. It is not as intrusive as the process of getting a government security clearance, of course, but that applies only to a minority of the population. Since 9/11, airport security has not been run according to actual risk analysis (see the writings of Bruce Schnier), but as "security theater." That is, it has been used as a kind of device of forced indoctrination. This gives the Truthers a kind of counter-investment in insisting that an airliner could not possibly be a flying bomb. Here's where the primitive rebel aspect comes in. The Truthers do not start promoting high-speed electric trains, which are much more inherently safe, and don't use oil, besides. Instead, they keep trying to put the clock back.
Economical Trutherism would assert that Mohammad Atta was really a Cuban-American Special Forces sergeant named Gonzales or Hernandez or whatever, and that the CIA had murdered the actual Mohammad Atta in order to borrow his identity. Economical Trutherism would further assert that this "Manchurian Candidate" was given a floppy disk to put in the airplane's computer; that he expected the disk to cause the airplane to fly to a secret base ("Area 51") and land there; but that his double-crossing bosses had actually programmed the disk to take over the airplane's controls, computer virus fashion, and cause it to fly into the World Trade Center instead. This scenario is loosely drawn, in technologically updated form, from the plot of an old James Bond novel, Ian Fleming's _Thunderball_, a proven media success. That kind of argument would be much harder to refute.
The Truthers would be better advised to look at the Anthrax Attacks, which might legitimately be called "Anthraxgate." The basic undisputed facts are that the anthrax in question came from a government laboratory, and that the intended targets were the president's political opponents and critics. Further, it is more or less self-evident to any reasonable person, though not of course to the official FBI investigators, that the purpose was to secure the passage of the USA Patriot Act. All but one of the persons killed were random innocent bystanders, because the perpetrators were so incompetent that they couldn't even aim properly. Bob Stevens, the sub-editor at the National Enquirer, was an intended target, apparently for lese-majestie in publishing scandal about the president's daughters. The combination of recklessness, dishonesty, and incompetence found in the Anthrax Attacks is utterly characteristic of the Bush II administration. Probably, millions of people were frightened, and their anger, properly fanned, might be very much to be feared. However, Anthraxgate does not appeal to the "primitive rebel" mentality of the Truthers. Like everyone else, they like e-mail just fine, and don't feel any compulsion to go back to snailmail. The fact that snailmail letters to congressmen get routinely sent through a zapping machine is of no political consequence-- on the contrary, the congressmen all decided to start accepting e-mail. How can you hang nostalgia on an institution with such an undignified name as snailmail?
Justin A Bowen -
6/10/2008
I have to second Francois' position. It is unlikely that we would ever know if the government actually was involved in the acts of 9/11. At the very least, we would not find out until the children being born today were senior citizens. As such, the position of people who argue that the government was involved is indefensible.
At the same time, however, the position of people who say that our government would never do something like this can be immediately demolished by pointing to the "Operation Northwoods" papers as well as the countless acts of deception and corruption. One would not even have to go out on a limb to suggest that a government has a vested interest in terrifying the citizens under it.
As for whether the government is capable of perpetrating such an act, this position assumes that everything that we have been told is in fact the truth and that there isn't much more evidence than what we have been allowed to see.
Francois Tremblay -
6/9/2008
His arguments are pretty pitiful for a "systematic demolishment" as you claim...
I certainly mistrust anyone who argues that the US government had nothing to do with it, and like all other "debunkers" he fails to address that fundamental problem.
