I just finished watching the BBC's 9-11: The Conspiracy Files in preparation for our first open discussion on Sunday. Overall I thought it was an excellent program and gave a broad overview of the state of 9-11 conspiracism. The only thing left out were the more whack-a-doodle theories such as dustification (although they're all whack-a-doodle, some are more whack-a-doodle than others). Dylan Avery, James Fetzer and Alex Jones were good choices to feature as being among the most prominent voices of the 9-11 Truth movement and each was shown to be equally intellectually dishonest. I just can't see this as a hit piece as the troofers do. Avery, Fetzer and Jones' assertions were examined, often stated in their own words, and then factually countered. Moreover, this program came off as highly critical of the U.S. government and devoted a large chunk of the show to detailing the ways in which our government acted to coverup after the fact.

More and my notes after the fold.

Going in I thought this was going to be a sensationalistic and breathless show of the type often seen on The Discovery Channel or The Learning Channel here in the U.S. but the reality is that it was a reverent and thoughtful look at those who would term themselves skeptics yet never do the real work required to earn that name. Highly recommended. The YouTube videos are embedded at the link I gave above.

What follows are the notes I took as I was watching the program. They're raw and unedited so don't expect a masterpiece of the English language (or even passable spellling). Just thought I'd post them here for everyone else. Hey, at the very least, you can laugh at my notetaking abilities.

Notes on the BBC's 9-11: The Conspiracy Files.

 

• More than 50 different conspiracy theories about 9-11
• Dylan Avery: "They should stick to tractors. Popular Mechanics is the last company that should be investigating 9-11." Well then, what makes Dylan Avery, a college dropout, more qualified than Popular Mechanics with its' access to experts, qualified to investigate 9-11? Why should we believe him over Popular Mechanics?
• Secret command bunker in WTC7? WTF!? Why? Why would the 9-11 attacks need to be coordinated from so close by? If the U.S. government is powerful enough to pull off such a complex conspiracy, involving technologies unknown to the rest of the world, why couldn't they do this all remotely from Cheyenne Mountain?
• The collapse of WTC7 does look similar to Controlled Demolition (CD) but if we laught at Bill Frist for "diagnosing" Terri Schiavo by videotape, then why do we not laugh at conspiracists with no engineering training diagnosing the collapse of WTC7 from videotape, without any recourse to the physical evidence?
• Lack of transparency has fueled speculation. Secrecy breeds conspiracists.
• Purdue computer modeling, Pentagon. Chris Hoffman. Jet fuel did most damage. Research not funded by U.S. government. Independent project. Horrid blowback from conspiracist community!
• C130 controlling the plane that hit Pentagon -- James Fetzer. Idiocy! Steve O'Brien piloted the C130 and became woven into the conspiracists' paranoid fantasies. Yet Fetzer says O'Brien is lying!
  
• Alex Jones behaves like a televangelist. Richard Hofstadter noted the similarities to religion for conspiracists. Michael Barkun notes the intermingling between premillenial dispensationalism and conspiracism in recent times.
  
• Dylan Avery: "Would we be where we are right now if it weren't for 9-11?" Probably. The Bush Administration lied about WMD in Iraq (or was eager to believe faulty intelligence) and I doubt that the Bush Administration wouldn't have resorted to lying in the abscence of 9-11 when they had the perfect opportunity to blame it all on Iraq in the first place. {{THIS IS CONFUSED REASONING ON MY PART -- I NEED TO REPHRASE THIS}}
• Flight 93 (Penn Crash): Conspiracists like to claim Indian Lake is 6.9 miles from Shanksville. Conspiracists like to claim because debris was found nearly 7 miles away in Indian Lake that Flight 93 must have been shot down by the U.S. military. This is idiocy of the first order!!! The conspiracists arrive at the 6.9 mile number by typing the two locations into Google Maps. But the road winds around nearly 330 degrees of a circle to get from one location to the other. The fact of the matter is that Indian Lake is only 1 miles from the crash site "as the crow flies". BUT IT GETS WORSE!! The conspiracists claim sizable debris, but when in fact what was really reported by Indian Lake residents was only scraps of paper and insulation that had BLOW THERE ON THE WIND! Is Barry Lichty, the Mayor of Indian Lake, in on the conspiracy too? I wouldn't be surprised if the conspiracists claim so. {{THIS IS ALL NEW INFO TO ME -- I HAD NO IDEA THEY WERE BEING THIS INTELLECTUALLY DISHONEST -- WHY AM I SURPRISED?}}
• BBC interviewer explaining the term 'simile' to Dylan Avery is a riot!
• James Fetzer: "There's no evidence of a plane there!" (Flight 93). Yet photographic and physical evidence from the site suggest otherwise.
• Dylan Avery thinks UA93 was diverted to Cleveland, but it was really Delta89 that landed at Cleveland because of a bomb threat. Simple confusion, and one that has been countered many times by the passengers on D89 but the conspiracists cling to an inaccuracy in a newspaper report shortly after it was learned that a plane believed to be hijacked had landed at Cleveland International as if newspapers never make errors. Then in the same breath Avery will accuse the NY Times or other papers of record as being Bushco shills!
• 4,000 Jews stayed away from work at the WTC on 9-11, presumably because Mossad tipped off the Jews. Blatant anti-semitism! Hours after the attack the Jerusalem Post reported that ~4,000 Israelis were believed to living or working in NY and Washington (just people in the vicinity). Al Manar TV, Hezbollah's mouthpiece, then twisted the story to the rumor that quickly spread across the Mid-East, the world and anti-semitic websites {{ NOT IN DOCU: (notably La Voz de Aztlan, the revanchist Mexican group, and then holocaust denier David Irving's website republished the Aztlan piece). Anti-semitic sources continue to be prime sources for the conspiracists. For instance, Dylan Avery's Loose Change sources much of its' material from far right wing anti-semitic bigot Willis Carto's American Free Press. This lends credence to Chip Berlet's notion that conspiracism is primarily a narrative form of scapegoating.}}
• Michael Barkun has noted the tendency for conspiracists to twist fiction into fact and fact into fiction. We see this in the 9-11 Truth movement where The Lone Gunmen pilot (a spinoff of The X-Files) which has a plot remarkably similar to the actual events of 9-11 is taken as a coded warning by the show's creators.
• {{ MY OPINION: American public is skeptical of their leaders which is good. Suspicion of authority is always good. But merely asking questions, merely being suspicious is not enough. Just because we believe that the government is up to no good does not excuse us from critical thought. There were real failures on 9-11 and before. Real conspiracies afer to cover up those failures on the part of the U.S. government but the conspiracists only cloud those issues by continually throwing out myths, lies, rumors and hateful, bigoted assertions that have been debunked over and over. Meanwhile the corruption and incompetence rampant in American government continue as before and anyone who questions such is painted with the same broad brush as the conspiracist loons. The conspiracists are harmful. They spread anti-semitism and hate, they give cover to the conspiracy that happened after 9-11, not before.}}
• Cites:
  Richard Hofstadter: The Paranoid Style In American Politics
  Chip Berlet of Public Research Associates: Conspiracism portal
  Michael Barkun: A Culture of Conspiracy - Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America
  
  (Note: I really recommend Barkun's book)

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