Joseph Wanzala wrote:
Joe W: I totally reject the right wing efforts to shoot down Churchill, to censor him over *anything*. But his position is really bad on two accounts. First, He supports the official story, ie that 9/11 was an attack from the outside on America, only he celebrates it, much as the article by the Retort Group (my friend Iain Boal & Co.) in the New Left Review from last Summer did. Such people WANT to believe 9/11 was an attack on America, because such a view corresponds to their ideological needs. Two, his branding of the
ChuckO: No, it reflects the facts and the evidence. I'm willing to be skeptical of the official story, but I've found little if anything to be credible in the arguments of the 9-11 conspiracy critics. Truth be told, our friends on the Left have a tendency to believe elaborate theories that fit what they want to believe.
JoeW: It is one thing to look at a set of facts and come away with different conclusions. It is another thing to denigrate conclusions different from yours as 'conspiracy theory'. Any view of 9-11 is necessarily a conspiracy, since the events were secretly planned by more than one person. Any attempt to come up with an explanation of how the attacks were carried out is necessarily a conspiracy theory. It is really a matter of which conspiracy theory you buy into, not whether or not you 'believe conspiracy theories'. One thing I don't understand is how people, mainly on the left have put little to no intellectual labor into interrogating the official story. At the very least, in order to carry out the planning, the alleged hijackers *had* to have had some level of infiltration into or complicity from, even if just a matter to bribing or paying people off, to do what they are alleged to have done. Just as drug traffickers rely on corrupt law enforcement and banking officials to smuggle drugs and launder money. These people's actions are jut as criminal as the the actions of the drug cartels. So the question becomes, why has there been no formal investigation and even some symbolic head rolling. Instead, we are led to believe that the entire operation within the United States (i.e. 'the conspiracy') pretty much began and ended with the alledged 19 hijackers and a couple of stragglers like Moussawi, coordinated by Osama in a cave in Afghanistan. The left buying into such a simplistic scenario is racist to the extent it ascribes almost supernatural powers to 'Arab terrorists', a major compoent of racism has to do with ascribing superhuman powers to people of a particular race and creating myths around them, and anti-Arab racism already ran deep in the American psyche long before 9-11.
ChuckO: It's also no surprise that the people who were involved in the 9-11 truth movement instantly flipped over into yelling about the "stolen election" last year. This is all pseudo-intellectual nonsense that is not much diferent than right wing theories we laugh at, like "intelligent design."
JoeW: In fact, the people making the loudest noises about the stolen election in 2000 and 2001 were not the 9-11 Truth Movement but MoveOn, Howard Dean Fan Club types. To be sure, there was overlap between these groups, but in the main, MoveOn Democrats are as hostile to the 9-11 truth movement as you, Doug, and Co. are. Thus, the Cockburn declaration, which you echo, that "the 9-11 truth movement instantly flipped over into yelling about the "stolen election"" is a careless and inaccurate reading of what happened. In fact, 9-11 researchers, like myself, are much more likely to agree with Cockburn's (and presumably your) view that the elections have been stolen for a long time and that as Gore Vidal is fond of pointing out, the United States is a Republic, not a democracy, and voting does not make any real difference.
ChuckO: I believe that these conspiracy theorists are engaged in a racist reframing of the 9-11 events which aren't much different than what the UFO-Art Bell crowd think about the origin of the pyramids in Egypt. In case you don't follow these theories, they can't accept the fact that a bunch of brown people living in Egypt several thousand years ago were smart enough to build these great mountains of rock. They argue that these structures are so complex that aliens from outer space must have built them.
The conspiracy theory that the U.S. government organized the 9-11 attacks isn't much different. They refuse to accept Occam's Razor when it comes to what happen. A well-organized conspiracy to attack America was executed by a global network of people who took advantage of America's arrogance. The U.S. government didn't organize the attacks nor did they let them happen. The attacks were successful because the American ruling class was arrogant and complacent about their superpowers. Sure, they were aware that the attacks were a possibility, but being the racist, arrogant pricks that many Americans are, they thought that nothing on the level of 9-11 could ever happen to the U.S. In many ways, the American arrogance about it's power and impregnability are similar to other follies in world history such as the Maginot Line.
JoeW: As I have argued, it is people who buy into the 9-11 official story who are buying into racism by ascribing supernatural powers to a global network of Arabs to penetrate the US formidable security defenses - without complicity from within. i.e.: letting the white establishment off the hook by allowing them to say 'we were too arrogant' while avoiding raising questions of accoutability. In fact I *am* saying that a global network of people managed to outwit US security apparatus (see my post re Ptech, the Saudis, Cheney etc.), but they could only have done it with inside access and collaboration. It is not a matter of saying that 'brown people could not have done it' it is a matter of wondering precisely *how* they were able to do it, beyond vague references to Al Qaeda and Osama. You have offered no information as to how this global network carried out the attacks that is different from the official fairy tale version. Your theory about 'arrogance' being the reason why the attacks were succesful is an assumption not backed up by any evidence. Evidence shows that they KNEW OPERATIONS TO ATTACK THE US WERE UNDERWAY not that they did not believe any attacks to be possible. The only question is why did they not intervene to stop them?
ChuckO: These are some of the reasons why I find Churchill's arguments so compelling. He is also articulating what many of the Left believe, but won't admit in public. 9-11 was the chickens coming home to roost after two centuries of American empire and imperialism.
JoeW: This view is hokey, atavistic, left wing romanticism about a 'strike against imperialism' and it is a very flawed view.
Chuck