Doug wrote: The WSWS is often pretty good. I emailed them to ask how they explain the hostility of some lefter-than-thou leftists towards the film. Looking forward to an answer. __________
The 'leftier-than-thou leftists' as you call them are critquing F911 from an entirely different perspective. Indeed, F911 wades into a debate that the so-called Leftitier than thous have been engaging in for quite some time. The liberals are dismissing Moore's thesis as being off the wall, while the leftier than thous are saying that Moore is on the right track, but are pointing out problematics in his thesis - and even when they are attacking Moore, it is from a completely different standpoint that WSWS would certainly be sympathetic too especially given their ealier contrbution to one of the issue raised in F911, that of oil and Afghanistan:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/sep2002/oil2-s21.shtml
Below is the concluding part of a two-part article replying to a recent commentary attacking so-called “conspiracy theories” about the US response to the September 11 terror attacks, including an article posted last November on the World Socialist Web Site. The first part appeared Friday, September 20.
Ken Silverstein begins his article with what he presents as a summation of the conspiracy theories about September 11 and the war in Afghanistan now circulating on the Internet:
“The war in Afghanistan is a sham. The Bush administration had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks but took no action, using the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as an excuse to topple the Taliban regime and legitimize the takeover of Afghanistan. Well-placed government insiders, knowing of the impending attacks, made fortunes by betting on a huge fall in airline stocks. The war is not about terrorism but about America’s desire to control energy in Central Asia and promote corporate plans to plunder the region’s reserves. The chief US concern all along has been to help Unocal Corporation build a pipeline across Afghanistan, which would carry natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan.”
The first sentence is a puzzle, since no one denies that there is a real war going on and that real Afghan men, women and children are dying. Presumably he means that opponents of the war in Afghanistan regard the Bush administration’s rationale for waging war in Afghanistan as a sham. Whether you agree or disagree with that assessment, it is hard to see how this could be characterized as a “conspiracy theory.”
Imperialist governments lie, especially about war. The Johnson administration utilized an alleged North Vietnamese attack on American PT boats to gain passage of a congressional resolution authorizing intervention in Vietnam. It later emerged that the Tonkin Gulf incident was manufactured to provide a pretext for war—in other words, it was a sham.
Silverstein recites these charges as though they were self-evident absurdities, only discussing the oil issue at any length, as we have seen. He avoids any detailed examination of what must be the main element of any “conspiracy theory,” the claim that the Bush administration had extensive foreknowledge of the September 11 terrorist attacks, but allowed them to take place anyway.
The popularity of conspiracy theories about September 11, circulated through such web sites as www.rense.com, www.tenc.com, www.fromthewilderness.com and others, reflects the instinctive and healthy distrust among millions of working people of the US government and the American media. This distrust, however, falls well short of political consciousness, which requires the development of a scientific understanding of the social and class basis of the actions of the US government. This neither the muckraking sites nor repentant ex-radicals like Silverstein are capable of providing.
It is not necessary to believe that the American government planned every detail of the terrorist attacks or anticipated the scale of the destruction and loss of life to conclude that the most important unexplored aspect of September 11 is the behind-the-scenes role of the American intelligence agencies. As the WSWS article of November 20, 2001 observed: “[T]he least likely explanation of September 11 is the official one: that dozens of Islamic fundamentalists, many with known ties to Osama bin Laden, were able to carry out a wide-ranging conspiracy on three continents, targeting the most prominent symbols of American power, without any US intelligence agency having the slightest idea of what they were doing.”
This assessment has since been proven true, in the flood of revelations, beginning last May, about advance warnings provided to US intelligence agencies, not only from other countries, but from many of their own personnel who believed, however wrongly, that Washington was actually interested in preventing a major terrorist attack on the United States. Instead, as has since become clear, top FBI and CIA officials blocked any serious effort against Al Qaeda until after September 11.
Both bureaucratic inertia and incompetence, and the longstanding personal and business ties between the Bush and bin Laden families may have been involved. But the lack of a response to clear warnings of impending terrorist attacks using hijacked airplanes goes beyond what can be explained by such considerations. There were elements within the state that welcomed a major atrocity—perhaps without imagining its full extent—in order to provide the necessary pretext for a long-planned US military intervention in Central Asia and the Middle East.
Would the US government kill its own citizens?
Prior to Silverstein, the best example of what we might call conspiracy denial was an article by David Corn, the Washington correspondent of Nation magazine. Corn employed the same method as Silverstein: selecting the most bizarre and unconvincing examples of conspiracy theories to block any questioning of the official account of the September 11 attacks.
Corn expressed outrage over the widespread circulation of conspiracy theories about September 11 on the Internet. He declared openly that, in his opinion, the US government was not morally capable of organizing and carrying out the mass murder of thousands of its own citizens.
He wrote: “I won’t argue that the US government does not engage in brutal, murderous skullduggery from time to time. But the notion that the US government either detected the attacks but allowed them to occur, or, worse, conspired to kill thousands of Americans to launch a war-for-oil in Afghanistan is absurd.... Simply put, the spies and special agents are not good enough, evil enough, or gutsy enough to mount this operation” (Nation, March 4, 2002).
Corn concedes that the US government engages in murder “from time to time”—a remark that he does not appear to have thought through, since it describes the conduct of a serial killer. But it is not “evil enough” to kill 3,000 Americans, he claims. This is disingenuous, to put it mildly, given the bloody record of American imperialism in the twentieth century, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the wars in Korea and Vietnam, to atrocities in Guatemala, Indonesia and dozens of other countries.
Nor is there any reason to believe that the American ruling class and its police and spy agencies develop conscience qualms when their victims are American citizens rather than foreign nationals. Tens of thousands of Americans were sent to their deaths in Korea and Vietnam, mainly youth from the working class, sacrificed to the strategic interests of US imperialism. American corporations routinely kill thousands of workers each year through industrial accidents, chemical poisoning and other workplace and environmental hazards. American police shoot and kill several thousand people every year. And the American government leads the world in its willingness to execute its own citizens.