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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I can't believe that the home turf of the most powerful military force on the planet is watched by one video camera.
I was under the impression that the video was taken from a store across the street from the Pentagon..
Which would mean that there are *no* video cameras watching the Pentagon, eh?
Unless it had a nuclear tip, I don't think one missile would matter very much against a building the size of the World Trade center.
Now, one 767 going about 500 knots & loaded down with JP4 I can wrap my head around (it being the primary cause of the building's collapse).
When the German Reichstag in Berlin burned in 1933, the Nazi Party told the German people that it had been the work of Communists, and proceeded to use the "threat" of Communist sabotage to curtail civil liberties and round up members of the political opposition. Neocon operatives under Dick Cheney and George Bush took a page out of the Nazi playbook and carried out the biggest psychological operation event in history. They knew that people in shock will look to their leaders for reassurance and an explanation. They had me fooled for over two years, I am ashamed to say. That the Official Conspiracy Theory promulgated in the wake of 9/11 by the Bush Administration is still believed by the majority of Americans is no mystery but due to the skillful way in which the corporate-controlled media has ignored, denigrated, and marginalized those with the courage and perspicacity to point out its glaring evidentiary and logical flaws.
I just want to point out that the truther theories may serve a different psychological need than just dissent and anti-authoritarianism--if the government planned it, then maybe we are not vulnerable to actual attacks of this nature and a simple regime change at home will mean we are not vulnerable.
Gestalt Psychology, developed in the first half of the 20th century, was devoted to this concept- "The whole precedes the parts." We want to believe that we can contruct a picture of the world, but neurologically, this is not how our brains are wired. We are wired to see patterns and then fits the pieces we observe later into the patterns we carry with us all the time. Thus, the whole precedes the parts, we see what we have always seen. Real change, therefore, comes not from seeing some new fact. It comes from accepting a new whole, a new pattern. No one ever convinces someone else of something with one new fact. But we can learn, we can accept new things. It is just very hard.
There's nothing terribly surprising in the phenomenon Mr. Manjoo describes; it shows up across the spectrum of human activity, from differing eyewitness descriptions of traffic accidents to blog posters convinced that only people on the other side engage in invective and distortion. It might be more interesting to examine WHY so many people are inclined to see missiles in 9/11 photographs. Might it have something to do with our government's addiction to secrecy and seeming inability to tell the truth?
Mr. Manjoo has been quietly keeping us informed on the latest technology leaps and he has done an excellent job at this but now, as he did a few years ago, he has found another hornets nest to kick around as he did over the contested 2000 and 2004 elections (well documented to the contrary by RFK, Jr., Greg Pallast and many others).
Bias is certainly not something exclusive to the conspiracists as Mr. Manjoo has a heap load of his own it seems, publishing a book about his view of things as if it is the last word. Spinning it now by using digital photography as the scapegoat for all he does not agree with. Doesn't anything about the amount of information being suppressed by the media and current, super secretive, administration have any play as to the possible reason why so many conspiracies abound, or does he think that's a load of hooey as well?
Other than Mr Manjoo's wallet, what does this book do to benefit anyone let alone advance logical and reasonable discourse? When investigations are stopped by the individuals being investigated, when buildings that were not hit by an airline, free-fall as only a properly set-up demolition would do, when all warnings, we could find out about, were ignored by the people elected to protect us, what is one to think. So what does one do when the questions millions around the world want answered are being ignored or discounted? Oh, just point out that you can't tell from the blurry photo so what the newspapers report must be the truth.
Wrong. For something as important as 9-11, we need REAL investigations by unbiased, un-bribable individuals. A football game is fine in the context of Farhad's argument but not our national security which we know, as our Constitution has been whittled down to a wisp of it's former self by this power hungry administration, is only being used now as a political excuse to destroy their opposition. Maybe Americans are too close to this to be good judges and foreign investigators should examine the evidence, but whatever the case, using 9-11 as a spring board for why this theory of blurry photography being useless as evidence, which any 8 year old would tell you, is just plain incendiary and smells of of hype to get a book noticed.
words really are the best way to convey information, because we have to think about them. Doesn't stop people from trying to make them say what they wanted them to say, but at least they have to work at it a little.
Nope, not even close.. Go and read Glenn Greenwald's articles here on Salon and you will see examples every single day of people wildly misreading what he has said.
I can assure you that those people put no effort at all into misreading Greenwald..
you're about to ram the building, why would you need to fire a missile? in case you miss with the airplane? even if the warhead wouldn't arm unless the missile was fired, it would be easier to bypass that than to engineer something to fire the missile from the plane.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
