Gregg Roberts

Published January 8, 2011

“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”

        Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 191

        German philosopher (1844 - 1900)

This article is a response to “Is Leading 9/11 Truth Site Working For The Other Side?”, credited to “staff writers” at the Rock Creek Free Press, November 2010 edition, available at:

http://www.rockcreekfreepress.com/CreekV4No11-Web.pdf

The “leading 9/11 Truth site” being referred to is 911Blogger.com. The authors of the article critiqued here chose to remain anonymous, and the article’s title doesn’t lend itself to an easily pronounceable acronym. Therefore I will refer to the article’s authors, along with their vocal message board sympathizers and Barrie Zwicker, as The Complainers. We will abbreviate Citizen Investigation Team as “CIT” and their video National Security Alert as “NSA” (noting the irony).

Re: "Paranoid Style" How conspiracy theories become news. by Nicholas Lemann. Published in the October 16, 2006 issue of The New Yorker

A regular visitor to 911blogger has been bugging me to write about this piece in last week's The New Yorker magazine. (I've written a couple other online bits, critical of the establishment scribes who scuttle out of their cubicles on cue; eager to do the obligatory leap through the fiery hoop for rewards that vary from agenda perpetuation to simple personal gain.) (1)

There is no serious analysis of 9/11 skepticism in Lemann's article, but there are the familiar, obligatory swings at Loose Change, and a torpid blind faith in the "official story", which itself is the crucial Conspiracy Theory begging to be examined. Of course, this doesn't happen either, but we are treated to a sort of overview of a bunch of stuff, from pooh-pooh-ing election fraud, to a mini-review of "Hijacking Catastrophe".

In his survey of contemporary and historical conspiracism, Lemann fails to note scientific surveys which show a growing number of Americans who do not buy the "official story", and lumps so many different flavors of documentary together with his FFWD>> through Loose Change that the reader is left with an immovable weight of blandness crushing down upon his shoulders that could only be bestowed by a History Professor with little to no interest in the subject matter he or she is writing about. Lemann is a Professor at, and Dean of, the Columbia Journalism School, and I guess that's different than being a History Professor. Yet, I feel like I read a clockwork dissertation on the general relativity of all conspiracy theories viewed through a camera lens smeared with Vaseline and then treated to a pass of Gaussian Blur, just to make sure you don't walk away with anything tangible.