OMG! Break Out The Tinfoil Hats! The Government Got To Them
Too!
By ANN Senior Correspondent Kevin "Hognose" O'Brien
If you have to research any recent
major air disaster on the internet, the signal to noise ratio of
that global village is depressing. Nowhere is that more true than
when you're trying to gather facts on the September 11th terrorist
attacks. Despite the best-selling Commission Report, as well as the
release of lavishly footnoted documents on the web, most of the
sites on the net that address this cowardly crime purvey one barmy
conspiracy theory or another.
Whether it's the dishonest maunderings of Thierry Meissen, the
agenda-driven anti-Semitism of Justin Raimondo, or the rampant
paranoia of Michael Rivero, you can expect that a bunch of glib,
fanciful -- and false -- explanations of the events of that grim
Tuesday are so readily at hand that they're practically
unavoidable. Some are clearly the crude work of unhinged minds;
others are slicker -- there are even books and videos. Any one of
these sites would have been a delight to my Jesuit "Introduction to
Logic" professor, because most of them display a panoply of logical
fallacies.
There hasn't been any one place that gathers some sixteen of
these curious arguments, ranging from "no plane hit the Pentagon"
to "a mysterious white fighter shot down Flight 93" to "the evil
ZOG dynamited the buildings," and gives them the dope-slap
they've got coming -- a forehand-backhand of cold logic and hard
truth. Now, thanks to... of all magazines... Popular Mechanics,
there is.
"In the end, we were able to debunk each of these assertions
with hard evidence and a healthy dose of common sense," the editors
write. "We learned that a few theories are based on something
as innocent as a reporting error on that chaotic day. Others are
the by-products of cynical imaginations that aim to inject
suspicion and animosity into public debate. Only by confronting
such poisonous claims with irrefutable facts can we understand what
really happened..."
Conspiracy theories have a certain appeal because they apply a
simple explanation that ties up complex, horrifying, or even
inexplicable events in a neat bow. Since the conspiratroids do not
base their concepts on hard fact, they can easily twist and turn
them to encompass any changes. One professor who was misquoted
found that his demand for a correction did not make the
conspiratroids understand that he did not say what they wanted him
to say; instead, they concluded that -- cue creepy organ music --
"they" got to him.
"It's been an albatross on my neck," the professor complains. So
no doubt this latest counterattack will soon be countered, ignored,
or dismissed by the sort of minds who think the actual perpetrators
were not a gang of terrorists who want us all to submit to their
religion or die.
Kudos to the PM editors for taking on the distressingly large
lunatic element, and for giving the rest of us ammo that we can use
when well-meaning friends are seduced by these nutty ideas.
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