Matt Taibbi and AlterNet team up to "put down" the 9/11 Truth Movement
From AlterNet:
If Cheney & Co. Had Really Plotted the 9/11 Attacks ...
By Matt Taibbi, Spiegel & Grau. Posted May 19, 2008.
Matt Taibbi's hilarious re-enactment of the secret govt. conspiracy (that never happened) to conduct the attacks.
The following is an adapted excerpt from Matt Taibbi's new book, The Great Derangement" (Spiegel and Grau, 2008).
The 9/11 Truth movement is really distinguished by a kind of defiant unfamiliarity with the actual character of America's ruling class. In 9/11 lore the people who staff the White House, the security agencies, the Pentagon and groups like PNAC and the Council of Foreign Relations are imagined to be a monolithic, united class of dastardly, swashbuckling risk-takers with permanent hard-ons for Bourne Supremacy-style "false flag" and "black bag" operations, instead of the mundanely greedy, risk-averse, backstabbing, lawn-tending, half-clever suburban golfers they are in real life. It completely misunderstands the nature of American government -- fails to see that the old maxim about "the business of America is business" is absolutely true, that the federal government in this country is really just a lo-rent time-share property seasonally occupied by this or that clan of financial interests, each of which takes its 4-year turn at the helm tinkering with the tax laws and regulatory code and the rates at the Fed in the way it thinks will best keep the money train rolling.
The people who really run America don't send the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney to the White House to cook up boat-rocking, maniacal world-domination plans and commit massive criminal conspiracies on live national television; they send them there to repeal PUCHA and dole out funds for the F-22 and pass energy bills with $14 billion tax breaks and slash fuel efficiency standards and do all the other shit that never makes the papers but keeps Wall Street and the country's corporate boardrooms happy. You don't elect politicians to commit crimes; you elect politicians to make your crimes legal. That is the whole purpose of the racket of government. Another other use of it would be a terrible investment, and the financial class in this country didn't get to where it is by betting on the ability of a president whose lips move when he reads to blow up two Manhattan skyscrapers in broad daylight without getting caught.
But according to 9/11 Truth lore, the financial patrons of democratic government were game for exactly that sort of gamble. According to the movement, the Powers That Be in the year 2000 spent $200 million electing George Bush and Dick Cheney because they were insufficiently impressed with the docility of the American population. What was needed, apparently, was a mass distraction, a gruesome mass murder that would whip the American population into a war frenzy. The same people who had managed in the 2000 election to sell billionaire petro-royalist George Bush as an ordinary down-to-earth ranch hand apparently so completely lacked confidence in their own propaganda skills that they resorted to ordering a mass murder on American soil as a way of cajoling America to go to war against a second-rate tyrant like Saddam Hussein. As if getting America to support going to war even against innocent countries had ever been hard before!
This idiocy continues here:
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/85723/
Please come over and flood the comments section with your favorite physics, facts and logic supporting the need for new investigations into the crimes of 9/11/01.
The truth shall set us free. Love is the only way forward.
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Tragic
At first I enjoyed a few chuckles for some clever dialogue. But reading Taibbi's lengthy and ultimately pointless diatribe eventually just made me depressed, because in the hours it must have taken Taibbi to write this farce he could have interrogated several actual omissions and distortions of the 9/11 tale.
Is this the quality of the progressive movement these days? Instead of actual reportage, Taibbi approaches a pivotal moment in American history with bloviated parody.
The Mighty Wurlitzer
The curious may wish to check out Hugh Wilford's 2008 book from Harvard UP, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America.
Wilford writes about CIA front groups operating between 1947 and 1967. On the payrolls were witting and unwitting intellectuals, artists, students, and journalists.
the heart of the matter
"in the hours it must have taken Taibbi to write this farce he could have interrogated several actual omissions and distortions of the 9/11 tale."
Yes, were Taibbi an actual "investigative journalist" rather than a vulgar, self-promoting hipster-to-power, he could no doubt have written many competent analyses by now.
From "MacCruiskeen" on the RigInt forum:
"Which is more shameful and relevant:
a) the fact that many people have noticed the inadequacy of their government's account of the Crime That Justifies Everything, while some of those people noisily embrace bad arguments against that account;
OR
b) the fact that a prominent, well-paid journalist chooses to snigger at the perceived deficiencies of some handpicked unspeakable proles, rather than honestly examining the Crime itself and the government's account thereof?"
“On the altar of God, I swear eternal hostility against all forms of tyranny over the mind of man."--Thomas Jefferson
Actually
it's not tough to beat. The entire article is a great big Straw Man argument.
The basic tactic here is to take the most ludicrous possible version of events (making them impossible) and then to present them as ludicrous. I don't believe Cheney cooked up 9/11, and I certainly don't believe he held a meeting with Wolfowitz, Feith, etc., to hash out the details.
If we were to employ the same tactics to attack Taibbi, we would infer that Taibbi is defending Bush & Co. because he is defending their deeply compromised 9/11 Commission.
Cheney, Bush, Rummy, et al, don't (and probably couldn't)
plan all the details of operations like 9/11. That's what certain elements in the CIA, NSA, Mossad, etc., are assigned to do.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Consider mass emailing truth messages. More info here: http://www.911blogger.com/node/13321
Yes
It's obviously straw-man, but straw-man arguments are generally effective if put the right way. This article shouldn't be downplayed.
Clearly, we don't share the same sense of humor
but this does demonstrate their tactical retreat toward ridicule from frontal assault, where they were losing ground rather quickly. I fully expected this, btw.
One has to wonder how much time they spent writing this, as Mr. Taibbi promised a response to the scientific arguments long ago.
Apparently, he just couldn't contrive one to anyone's satisfaction.
Truly pathetic, if you ask me.
The truth shall set us free. Love is the only way forward.
Is there a better blackmail target around than Bill Maher?
"...What this in the trunk of your Prius, Bill? It's a bong, Bill. Wow. And it's full of pot. Geee... pot's not legal in the United States, Bill. What are we gonna do about this, Bill?..."
Not a big stretch to think Maher's close friends and associates would tend to be just as vulnerable. Birds of a feather, and all that rot.
Wasn't it Robert Baer (former CIA op, author of Syriana) that described the current state of United States governance is best currently described as a big tangled web of blackmail plots?
Watergate, Iran/Contra, stolen 2000 Election
And who's to say our Great American Military isn't capable of producing some kinds of bomb experts capable of carrying out orders such as those obeyed by your Oliver North or your G. Gordon Liddy?
The scandals grew by seriousness:
Watergate> Iran/Contra> September 11.
Very tidy.
My take
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/05/new-rules-dont-talk-about-...
Let's not confuse ourselves with the facts
A basic difficulty with Taibbi's commentary is that he doesn't address the disturbing facts surrounding the events on 9/11.
Instead his method for countering those who dispute the OTC is to assert a priori that the OTC can only be true. He assures us that anybody is a fool who would believe that elements of the Bush administration would perpetrate something like 9/11.
No evidence, just assertion of a theory.
Taibbi thereby doesn't have to deal with any contradictory evidence. And if you're silly enough to argue from the evidence, then you're just naive and laughable.
As the old song says: Listen to the mockingbird.