9/11 Conspiracies (cont.)

Now take the example of 9/11.

In order to believe that the Bush administration orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and presumably the White House, one has to explain why people in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House would attack their own institutions in order to accomplish any policy objective, foreign or domestic (the WTC representing Wall Street, who largely staff the executive branch). It stands to reason that if the Pentagon wanted to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld would have found some other means to do it besides flying a plane -- or firing a rocket, depending on what conspiracy theory you like -- into his own offices.

Secondly, one has to believe that multiple officials in multiple agencies thought that attacking themselves was a good idea, and that the murder of American civilians and personnel was worth whatever objective they sought to achieve.

Thirdly, not one of them had second thoughts -- or first thoughts, for that matter -- that this was fucked up when it was proposed to them, nor took the obvious hero's route at exposed it all to the press, making it the biggest story of all time. Nor did they expose it afterwards -- not even when the lucrative 9/11 conspiracy industry was born. This alone would have been worth an appearance on Oprah or Larry King.

Nor did any of the 9/11 conspirators reflect on the fact that they might get caught anyway -- hence the end of the Republican party -- or that the planes might not hit their intended targets, or that huge, high-risk projects of these kinds tend to be unpredictable, with too many variables to be easily controlled -- so why not stick to what has always worked in the past?

Finally, you would have to discount over a decade of Islamic fundamentalist rhetoric and action targeting the US for its military presence in Saudi Arabia and for supporting corrupt regimes throughout the Middle East -- in other words, that the same groups who tried to blow up the World Trade Center and large portions of New York City in the mid-90's were also part of this conspiracy, and by extension the Clinton administration as well.

As much as large institutions like the government deserve to be questioned, they should not be credited with a level of competency in their classified actions that can not be similarly observed in any of their public affairs. It is inexplicable to me that the same people who have failed so miserably in every undertaking they have conceived since 9/11 -- again, failing by their own standards -- can somehow be plausibly held up as masterminding a project far more risky and complicated than even the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which have not exactly yielded the desired outcomes.

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.