As a brief note introducing this, let me confess that I have harbored some sympathy to the conspiracy theorists on this one. And recently I have felt quite ashamed about this. Yet I think the arguments against the conspiracy theory are by now overwhelming.
NJK


Controversy and conspiracies III
Mike Rudin 2 Jul 08, 09:00 AM
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/07/controversy_conspiracies_iii.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/conspiracy_files/7483700.stm

The mystery of the missing tapes didn't last that long. One very experienced film librarian kindly agreed to have another look for us one night. There are more than a quarter of a million tapes just in the Fast Store basement at Television Centre. The next morning I got a call to say the tapes had been found. They'd just been put back on the wrong shelf - 2002 rather than 2001. Not so sinister after all.

Tags: 9/11, Conspiracy

09/20/2007
RUSHKOFF on 9/11 conspiracy theorists
Posted by arthur magazine staff   
CONSPIRACIES OF DUNCES by Douglas Rushkoff (from Arthur No. 26)

9-11 theorists are unwittingly performing as the unpaid minions of the administration’s propaganda wing. (At least most of them are unpaid; no doubt, some of the loudest are working as contractors for the same agencies whose activities they pretend to deconstruct.) That’s why, instead of nodding along with their long-winded, preposterous yarns under the false belief that any critique is better than no critique, we—the informed, intelligent, and reasonable members of the war resistance—must instead disassociate ourselves from this drivel. In other words, we must draw the line between the kind of analysis done by Greg Palast and that done by Pilots for Truth. If we don’t apply discipline to our thinking, we risk falling into the trap that even some of our best intellectuals have—like Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, who on reading a bit too much 9-11 conspiracy, has concluded that it all has some merit.

And...

And that’s where I suspect all this theorizing really takes us: to the heart of a racist jingoism worse even than the triumphalism justifying our foreign policy to begin with. They can’t bring themselves to accept that our big bad government can really be so swiftly outfoxed by a dozen relatively untrained Arab guys. And rather than go there, they’d prefer to maintain the myth of American hegemony. On a certain level, it feels better to believe that we are only vulnerable by our leaders’ sick choice—not by our adversarsies’ increasing strength and prowess.

Tags: 9/11, War on Terror, Terrorism