9/11 Conspiracies

At a time when so much is going wrong with the US comprehensively, it's hard to bear the amount of energy that is being devoted to saying that 9/11 was an inside job. 9/11 was not an inside job. I mean, maybe it was an inside job. It was as much an inside job as George Bush and his cabinet are the most competent criminal masterminds in the history of our species. In reality, they are merely criminal. We know this from the things they take credit for -- torture, wiretapping, and taking more time to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan than it took Hitler to conquer all of Europe. These people are not masterminds, just brazenly and belligerently self-serving, and not particularly capable even by that standard.

Governments often benefit from external threats, real or perceived. And it often happens that they generate them when such threats are in short supply, as a pretext for whatever actions they hope to pursue. But this usually amounts to provoking a small scale incident which can then be fed to the media as an act of war. For instance, this month the US press reported that Iranian speedboats acted "aggressively" towards large, heavily armed American naval vessels in waters outside of Iran. The original story was that the speedboats approached the Naval fleet at high-speeds, with radio-communication of a voice saying, "You will explode in a few minutes." They dumped "boxes" in the water -- who knows what they were, nobody asked, including the US media -- and sped away. The Pentagon later released video of the incident, boxes not included, in which they admit to having combined the audio and video after the fact, leading to charges of fabrication by the Iranians, who said the encounter was a routine ID check, and subsequently released a video confirming this. The Navy now claims it doesn't know where the source of original transmission came from. Hilarious and incompetent, as high-stakes propaganda attempts often are, though obviously dire for the people put at risk by such stunts.