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minicivan · 11-10-2010, 10:48 AM

Journalism is never perfect. Early accounts of any major event are studded with minor errors and omissions. As Washington Post publisher Philip Graham famously noted, "Journalism is the first draft of history." In future drafts, errors are corrected, so anyone honestly attempting to understand an event relies more heavily on later investigations. Conspiracy theorists tend to do just the opposite. For example, the conspiracy Web site www.total911.info includes the headline "Video: CNN reported no plane hit pentagon." The item includes a clip from the morning of the attack, in which reporter Jamie McIntyre says, "There's no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon."

Today, we know why very little wreckage was visible from McIntyre's vantage point: Flight 77 didn't crash near the Pentagon. It crashed into the Pentagon. Traveling at 780 feet per second, it struck with such force that virtually the entire aircraft and its contents continued into the building. Investigators recovered the shredded remnants of the plane, including the black box, and established exactly how Flight 77 struck the building. Through forensics they have identified all but five of the 64 passengers and crew and Pentagon fatalities. (All five hijackers were positively identified.) Though a few conspiracy theorists attempt to reckon with that vast accretion of evidence, many more prefer to turn back the clock to the earliest possible moment, when hard facts were at a minimum.

Some errors are so simple they are almost laughable. After the Popular Mechanics report was published, numerous critics wrote to object to our explanation of why NORAD was poorly prepared to intercept off-course commercial aircraft (see "Military Intercepts," page 22). Many pointed to the 1999 case of golfer Payne Stewart's private jet, which was intercepted and followed after losing pressurization and failing to respond to radio calls. "Within less than 20 minutes fighter planes were alongside Stewart's plane," one letter claimed. In fact, the widespread idea that a fighter was able to reach Stewart's aircraft within minutes is based on a convenient misreading of the flight records. According to the National Transportation Safety Board report on the incident, controllers lost contact with Stewart's jet at 9:30 a.m. eastern daylight time; the flight was intercepted at 9:52 a.m. central daylight time--that is, the intercept took an hour and 22 minutes, not 22 minutes. (Not surprisingly, such errors always seem to break in favor of the conspiracists' views and never the other way around.)

Repetition
The Web site www.rense.com, which is edited by conspiracy oriented radio talk-show host Jeff Rense, includes an article by Bollyn discussing the seismic data recorded by Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at the time the two towers fell. "These unexplained `spikes' in the seismic data lend credence to the theory that massive explosions at the base of the towers caused the collapses," Bollyn concludes. This claim, which originally appeared in the American Free Press, was decisively debunked in the Popular Mechanics magazine article (and is addressed here in "Seismic Spikes" in Chapter 2, "The World Trade Center"). The truth on this issue isn't hard to find: Lamont-Doherty's research is available to the public. Nonetheless, this claim from Bollyn's piece is repeated verbatim on more than 50 conspiracy sites today.

In the early days of the Internet, some commentators worried that material posted online would be ephemeral. In fact, the opposite is true. On the Internet, errors can last forever--repeated, cross-referenced, and passed from site to site in an endless daisy chain. The essentially nonchronological nature of the Internet contributes to this phenomenon. Many postings don't have dates, so it is difficult for readers to see what information has been disproven or superseded. Mainstream journalism makes at least an attempt to correct mistakes and prevent them from being repeated in later stories. The conspiracy movement prefers a see-what-sticks approach: Throw everything against the wall, and keep throwing.

Circular Reasoning
In archaeology, researchers are often reminded that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In the world of 9/11 denial, even the tiniest gaps in the evidence record are seen as proof that the mainstream view is incorrect. Case in point: the widespread claim that the government was hiding incriminating evidence because it refused to release video footage from security cameras outside the Pentagon. The footage had been entered into evidence at the trial of Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty in May 2006. Later that month the government released the material in response to a Freedom of Information request by the conservative watchdog organization Judicial Watch. The footage from two of those cameras, however, didn't show the cruise missile or small aircraft predicted by author Thierry Meyssan and others. Nor did it show a Boeing 757 streaking toward impact. In fact, the security cameras in question recorded data at the glacial rate of one frame per second. The odds of picking up a clear image of a jet moving at 780 feet per second were slim indeed. But that didn't stop an online commentator from concluding: "There's no plane at the Pentagon at 9/11, plain and simple."

But among 9/11 theorists, the presence of evidence supporting the mainstream view is also taken as proof of conspiracy. One forum posting that has multiplied across the Internet includes a long list of the physical evidence linking the 19 hijackers to the crime: the rental car left behind at Boston's Logan airport, Mohamed Atta's suitcase, passports recovered at the crash sites, and so on. "HOW CONVENIENT!" the author notes after each citation. In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic of conspiracism, there is no piece of information that cannot be incorporated into one's pet theory. Like doctrinaire Marxists or certain religious extremists, conspiracists enjoy a worldview that is immune to refutation.

Jim Hoffman sums up this worldview nicely in one of his pieces attacking the original Popular Mechanics investigation of conspiracy theories. "[The article] purports to debunk conspiracy theorists' physical-evidence-based claims without even acknowledging that there are other grounds on which to question the official story," he writes. "Indeed many 9/11 researchers don't even address the physical evidence, preferring instead to focus on who had the means, motive, and opportunity to carry out the attack." This is a stunning burst of honesty: Since we've already decided who's to blame, Hoffman is saying, evidence is optional.

Demonization
The 9/11 conspiracy theorists have an eternal problem: In every field where they make claims, the leading experts disagree with them. The only solution is to attack these authorities early and often.

Van Romero, an explosives expert from New Mexico who was quoted in the Albuquerque Journal on September 11, 2001, as saying that it looked like explosives brought down the World Trade Center towers, saw this firsthand. Eleven days later, the Journal ran a follow-up story stating his opinion that "fire is what caused the buildings to fail." Predictably, conspiracists view that clarification as proof that somebody "got to" Romero. "Directly or indirectly, pressure was brought to bear, forcing Romero to retract his original statement," claimed www.emperors-clothes.com.

It is in the nature of conspiracy theories that they must constantly expand as they try to absorb and neutralize conflicting information. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, a conspiracy theorist might have imagined a compact plot involving a corrupt White House and a few renegade military officers. But as the months went by, committees were organized by Congress, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and others. News organizations conducted detailed investigations. Reports and studies piled up, none of them helpful to the conspiracist viewpoint. For conspiracy theorists there was only one answer: All of these people must be in on the plot, too.

One of the chilling things about 9/11 denial is how blithely its adherents are able to accuse their fellow citizens of complicity in evil. They think nothing of suggesting that Romero would keep silent about an enormous crime, that hundreds of researchers involved in 9/11 investigations were participants in a cover-up, or that journalists from Popular Mechanics, The Nation, the New York Times and hundreds of other publications would willingly hide such a plot. Many critics of Popular Mechanics complained that some of the sources we quoted work for the U.S. government. The assumption--explicitly stated by many--was that anyone connected with the government should be seen as implicated. Point of reference: Not including the U.S. Post Office, the federal government has more than 1.9 million employees.

11-10-2010, 10:48 AM
minicivan Confirmed User Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 943	Journalism is never perfect. Early accounts of any major event are studded with minor errors and omissions. As Washington Post publisher Philip Graham famously noted, "Journalism is the first draft of history." In future drafts, errors are corrected, so anyone honestly attempting to understand an event relies more heavily on later investigations. Conspiracy theorists tend to do just the opposite. For example, the conspiracy Web site www.total911.info includes the headline "Video: CNN reported no plane hit pentagon." The item includes a clip from the morning of the attack, in which reporter Jamie McIntyre says, "There's no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon." Today, we know why very little wreckage was visible from McIntyre's vantage point: Flight 77 didn't crash near the Pentagon. It crashed into the Pentagon. Traveling at 780 feet per second, it struck with such force that virtually the entire aircraft and its contents continued into the building. Investigators recovered the shredded remnants of the plane, including the black box, and established exactly how Flight 77 struck the building. Through forensics they have identified all but five of the 64 passengers and crew and Pentagon fatalities. (All five hijackers were positively identified.) Though a few conspiracy theorists attempt to reckon with that vast accretion of evidence, many more prefer to turn back the clock to the earliest possible moment, when hard facts were at a minimum. Some errors are so simple they are almost laughable. After the Popular Mechanics report was published, numerous critics wrote to object to our explanation of why NORAD was poorly prepared to intercept off-course commercial aircraft (see "Military Intercepts," page 22). Many pointed to the 1999 case of golfer Payne Stewart's private jet, which was intercepted and followed after losing pressurization and failing to respond to radio calls. "Within less than 20 minutes fighter planes were alongside Stewart's plane," one letter claimed. In fact, the widespread idea that a fighter was able to reach Stewart's aircraft within minutes is based on a convenient misreading of the flight records. According to the National Transportation Safety Board report on the incident, controllers lost contact with Stewart's jet at 9:30 a.m. eastern daylight time; the flight was intercepted at 9:52 a.m. central daylight time--that is, the intercept took an hour and 22 minutes, not 22 minutes. (Not surprisingly, such errors always seem to break in favor of the conspiracists' views and never the other way around.) Repetition The Web site www.rense.com, which is edited by conspiracy oriented radio talk-show host Jeff Rense, includes an article by Bollyn discussing the seismic data recorded by Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at the time the two towers fell. "These unexplained `spikes' in the seismic data lend credence to the theory that massive explosions at the base of the towers caused the collapses," Bollyn concludes. This claim, which originally appeared in the American Free Press, was decisively debunked in the Popular Mechanics magazine article (and is addressed here in "Seismic Spikes" in Chapter 2, "The World Trade Center"). The truth on this issue isn't hard to find: Lamont-Doherty's research is available to the public. Nonetheless, this claim from Bollyn's piece is repeated verbatim on more than 50 conspiracy sites today. In the early days of the Internet, some commentators worried that material posted online would be ephemeral. In fact, the opposite is true. On the Internet, errors can last forever--repeated, cross-referenced, and passed from site to site in an endless daisy chain. The essentially nonchronological nature of the Internet contributes to this phenomenon. Many postings don't have dates, so it is difficult for readers to see what information has been disproven or superseded. Mainstream journalism makes at least an attempt to correct mistakes and prevent them from being repeated in later stories. The conspiracy movement prefers a see-what-sticks approach: Throw everything against the wall, and keep throwing. Circular Reasoning In archaeology, researchers are often reminded that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In the world of 9/11 denial, even the tiniest gaps in the evidence record are seen as proof that the mainstream view is incorrect. Case in point: the widespread claim that the government was hiding incriminating evidence because it refused to release video footage from security cameras outside the Pentagon. The footage had been entered into evidence at the trial of Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty in May 2006. Later that month the government released the material in response to a Freedom of Information request by the conservative watchdog organization Judicial Watch. The footage from two of those cameras, however, didn't show the cruise missile or small aircraft predicted by author Thierry Meyssan and others. Nor did it show a Boeing 757 streaking toward impact. In fact, the security cameras in question recorded data at the glacial rate of one frame per second. The odds of picking up a clear image of a jet moving at 780 feet per second were slim indeed. But that didn't stop an online commentator from concluding: "There's no plane at the Pentagon at 9/11, plain and simple." But among 9/11 theorists, the presence of evidence supporting the mainstream view is also taken as proof of conspiracy. One forum posting that has multiplied across the Internet includes a long list of the physical evidence linking the 19 hijackers to the crime: the rental car left behind at Boston's Logan airport, Mohamed Atta's suitcase, passports recovered at the crash sites, and so on. "HOW CONVENIENT!" the author notes after each citation. In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic of conspiracism, there is no piece of information that cannot be incorporated into one's pet theory. Like doctrinaire Marxists or certain religious extremists, conspiracists enjoy a worldview that is immune to refutation. Jim Hoffman sums up this worldview nicely in one of his pieces attacking the original Popular Mechanics investigation of conspiracy theories. "[The article] purports to debunk conspiracy theorists' physical-evidence-based claims without even acknowledging that there are other grounds on which to question the official story," he writes. "Indeed many 9/11 researchers don't even address the physical evidence, preferring instead to focus on who had the means, motive, and opportunity to carry out the attack." This is a stunning burst of honesty: Since we've already decided who's to blame, Hoffman is saying, evidence is optional. Demonization The 9/11 conspiracy theorists have an eternal problem: In every field where they make claims, the leading experts disagree with them. The only solution is to attack these authorities early and often. Van Romero, an explosives expert from New Mexico who was quoted in the Albuquerque Journal on September 11, 2001, as saying that it looked like explosives brought down the World Trade Center towers, saw this firsthand. Eleven days later, the Journal ran a follow-up story stating his opinion that "fire is what caused the buildings to fail." Predictably, conspiracists view that clarification as proof that somebody "got to" Romero. "Directly or indirectly, pressure was brought to bear, forcing Romero to retract his original statement," claimed www.emperors-clothes.com. It is in the nature of conspiracy theories that they must constantly expand as they try to absorb and neutralize conflicting information. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, a conspiracy theorist might have imagined a compact plot involving a corrupt White House and a few renegade military officers. But as the months went by, committees were organized by Congress, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and others. News organizations conducted detailed investigations. Reports and studies piled up, none of them helpful to the conspiracist viewpoint. For conspiracy theorists there was only one answer: All of these people must be in on the plot, too. One of the chilling things about 9/11 denial is how blithely its adherents are able to accuse their fellow citizens of complicity in evil. They think nothing of suggesting that Romero would keep silent about an enormous crime, that hundreds of researchers involved in 9/11 investigations were participants in a cover-up, or that journalists from Popular Mechanics, The Nation, the New York Times and hundreds of other publications would willingly hide such a plot. Many critics of Popular Mechanics complained that some of the sources we quoted work for the U.S. government. The assumption--explicitly stated by many--was that anyone connected with the government should be seen as implicated. Point of reference: Not including the U.S. Post Office, the federal government has more than 1.9 million employees.