Letters to the Editor
-
@amity
As a non-sequitor, I'm watching the "Padre de Familia" episode of Family Guy, which lampoons the 9/11 attacks. Ironically, Seth MacFarlane is in a unique position to discuss it, having been saved from certain death on American Airlines flight 11 by a hangover.
At the risk of stretching my analogy, suppose that the in-house security guy tells you that there was no way of knowing about the exploit, and refused to answer any questions about how the patch that used to be there had been removed — or whether there was any connection to the huge budget increase and sweeping new authority he was demanding to fight future intrusions.
At the very least, you'd have to consider the possibility that he was grossly negligent and attempting, with breathtaking audacity, to turn his own fuckup into an opportunity for self-advancement.
And you'd have to at least think about whether he'd been willfully negligent.
Gross fuckups, audacity and negligence are the rule in the computer security world. That's why, to this day, obvious security holes remain unclosed.
One need not dig too deep into the security world to see that this is true. One needs to merely scratch the surface.
9/11 is the classic example of someone turning their own fuckups into an opportunity for self-advancement.
According to the official story, al-Qaeda has at least two successful attacks against American interests using different methods each time than those used on 9/11.. the Kenyan embassy attacks and the US Cole.
Anyway, never underestimate your opponent's ability to fuck themselves by being lazy, stupid or just greedy.
That's what happened on 9/11/2001.
-
Don't forget the "smoke screen" concept
When looking at conspiracy theories don't forget that there is a concept in spy (i.e. "intelligence") circles of the "smoke screen".
The idea is that when you launch a secret operation you should expect that people will be curious, and you should prepare several storylines ("smoke screens") in advance for the curious to pursue. The curious will get busy investigating the false leads you planted. Even if they do later stumble on part of the truth, it won't be distinguishable from the "smoke screens".
The beauty of the "smoke screen" concept is that you might not even have to create the false leads yourself -- the more paranoid observers will often do it for you.
Consider that old classic, the JFK assassination. For generations everyone heard about the grassy knoll, the magic bullet and the extra shot. Who knows how much time has been wasted on these issues. And while everyone focused on whether Oswald was the only shooter, they mostly ignored the core question: who hired him? Whether or not Oswald was the lone shooter, there is no evidence that he would have undertaken an assassination on his own. There is plenty of evidence of groups who wanted to see Kennedy replaced with Johnson.
You see? A smoke screen. The important question was ignored while everyone focused on distractions.
Similarly, on 9/11 the key question is not whether there were explosives in the towers or whether the Pentagon was hit by a plane or a missle. It's "who knew enough in advance to make the massive short sells of American and United Airlines". Answer that and you are on the trail to answering the rest.
-
smoke screens
introducing specious and hard to verify claims is another good way of distracting people from the issues at hand.
if action A causes event B, but introducing coincidence X, Y an Z take the attention off action A, then the real cause can get confused.
better to just confine yourself to the issues at hand, and then work outward.
-
@CMN
If you ask yourself the question: "who benefits?", and you ask it honestly, then the answer must be Islamic extremists.
How? How on earth did they benefit from 9/11?
-
Though
The real question is, why would you need to shoot a missile at a building from the huge commercial jetliner you are about to ram into it?
Seems redundant to me.
-
Hmmmm...Sounds Strikingly Familiar
....They asked the students to act as unbiased referees, marking down all infractions they could spot. The results were remarkable: The Dartmouth fans mainly noticed Princeton's errors, while the Princeton fans concentrated on Dartmouth's......This was a matter of visual perception: Each side, that is, really did "see" a completely different game. When one Dartmouth alumnus was shown a film of the game, he decided it must have been badly edited. He'd heard that his side had played dirty, but where were those parts on the movie? He simply could not see them."
Sounds just like supporters for each side of our Democratic Presidential campaign. Just substitute Princeton for Clinton and Dartmouth for Obama, mix up a bit and, voila! Instant bias.
Freudian slip, Manjoo?
-
Brian Schlosser on astronomical numbers
But I can not for a single second entertain the idea that [Bush] could have set up 9/11.
Why would anyone have to set it up? By the late 1990s, al Qaeda actions were as regular (if not as frequent) as the tide — so much so that Clinton had his national security advisors draw up the plan for invading Afghanistan as the only way to be sure to put an end to them.
All one would have to do is drop the Afghan plan, stop listening to field reports, and shelve a few national intelligence estimates — and the outcome would be foregone.
Let's look at your own (quite valid) point about the "Tower 7" speculation, only in reverse: for it to be an accident that the Bush regime totally failed to stop the inevitable (and, as it turned out, well-predicted) knock on the door by al Qaeda, the number of people all "missing the memo" at the same time would have to be astronomical.
Whether Bush and his regime were criminally negligent or just criminal may be debated — whether it "just happened" may, rationally speaking, not be.
-
Superficial article
Farhad Manjoo's articles often come across to me as "writing that wants to grow up and be real journalism some day."
Manjoo brings up a very controversial and touchy subject -- conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 -- and then barely does anything with it.
Manjoo's primary example, some crap about the plane shooting missiles before colliding, is hardly representative of most 9/11 conspiracies, which are based on a cumulative set of facts rather than any one outlandish, subjectively interpreted observation.
I don't "believe" any of the 9/11 conspiracy theories, but they do establish that the question should be left open, rather than just "believing" the official story. 9/11 is one of the most significant national events of the past 50 years, and it doesn't make sense for anybody to pretend we've got it all figured out just a few years later. In fact that is foolhardy and destructive. If people are asking questions and re-examining evidence, that's healthy. They shouldn't go overboard and pretend they've got all the answers, but nor should they be summarily dismissed.
I am a believer in the usefulness of Occam's Razor, which posits that the simplest, most direct explanation is often the correct one. But there are exceptions, and sometimes what seems simplest and most direct is anything but.
As circumstantial evidence, I do think it is important to look at how brazenly and frequently the Bush Administration has lied to the public about many other important matters.
Anyway, this thread looks like it will turn into just another 9/11 debate thread. I guess it's better than the threads about Manjoo's last few columns, which were glorified links to Ashley Dupre/Eliot Spitzer call-girl material.