Re: [Marxism] Marxism and Conspiracy

["Tony Lawless" <lifesunquietdream@xxxxxxx>]

Louis wrote: "Well, the controversy is not over there was foreknowledge. It is 
whether the American government, or some cabal within it, orchestrated the 9/11 
attacks. If we can get past the idiocy of the "controlled demolitions" crowd 
and agree that our differences are over that, we would be making progress as 
the psychiatrists say."
 
Why are you trying to set yourself up as a psychiatrist and other people in 
this debate as patients? What credentials do you have for this type of work? 
What inside information do you have about 9/11? 
 
At any rate, I think the problem with what you are saying is that in trying to 
debunk certain kinds of conspiracy theories about 9/11, you tend to give the 
impression that you endorse the official version. But the official version is 
just another story of what might have taken place on that day, in many respects 
a rather implausible one. (If you read the Report, you will note that it begins 
with the day of the attack itself -- it does not attempt to contextualize the 
attack in the history of US imperialist intervention in the Middle East in the 
twentieth century, for example, the way I suspect most of us on this list would.
 
At any rate, Louis is now on record as saying that the collapse of three 
buildings into their own footprints on a single day, two of which were hit by 
planes and one of which WAS NOT, is not remarkable. Fair enough.
 
For others, I would suggest that they check out the YouTube video of Building 7 
collapsing. The parallel with the similar collapse of the Twin Towers will be 
obvious enough, I should think.  I would also suggest that they read over the 
peculiar testimony of Larry Silverstein, the man who bought the Twin Towers 
from the New York and New Jersey Port Authority in June 2001, which is 
contained in Paul Craig Roberts’s useful discussion below.
 
Like Roberts, I think we will probably never know what happened that day. But 
there are enough peculiarities that we should not attack those who want to 
investigate them. Many of those who question the official version of 9/11 agree 
with us that the event was used as a pretext to launch new wars in the Middle 
East. They are not our enemies; they are not wrong to question strongly the 
possible hidden motives of the US government.
 
Tony
 
 
Five Years After and We Still Don’t Know
By Paul Craig Roberts
09/07/06 "Information Clearing House " -- -- In the five years since three 
World Trade Center buildings collapsed into their own footprints in virtually 
free fall time, the convincing power of the official explanation of that day’s 
events has evaporated.  Polls show that 36% of Americans do not believe the 
official account. As Lev Grossman writes in Time magazine (September 3, 2006), 
“Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe 
phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.”
Grossman acknowledges that alternative explanations of 9/11 are more compelling 
than the official explanation.  Grossman offers a psychological explanation for 
the success of alternative explanations: “a grand disaster like Sept. 11 needs 
a grand conspiracy behind it.”
However, Grossman’s psychological explanation fails on its own terms.  Which is 
the grandest conspiracy theory? The interpretation of 9/11 as an orchestrated 
casus belli to justify US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the 
interpretation that a handful of Muslims defeated US security multiple times in 
one short morning and successfully pulled off the most fantastic terrorist 
attack in history simply because they “hate our freedom and democracy”?  
Orchestrating events to justify wars is a stratagem so well worn as to be 
boring. Indeed, it is the fantastic conspiracy of the official explanation that 
makes it unbelievable.
The scientists, engineers, and professors who pose the tough questions about 
9/11 are not people who spend their lives making sense of their experience by 
constructing conspiracy theories.  Scientists and scholars look to facts and 
evidence.  They are concerned with the paucity of evidence in behalf of the 
official explanation.  They stress that the official explanation is 
inconsistent with known laws of physics, and that the numerous security 
failures, when combined together, are a statistical improbability. 
The call by 9/11 skeptics for an independent investigation by an international 
panel of experts is not a conspiracy theory.  In principle there is nothing 
wrong with such an investigation.  In practice, it might be difficult to create 
a truly independent panel.  How many physicists, for example, have careers 
independent of government grants, and how many engineering firms would risk 
being branded “unpatriotic” and lose business by coming down on the “wrong” 
side of the issue?
Nowhere is there a surfeit of brave men.
I do not know what happened on 9/11, and I don’t expect to ever find out.  
Neither government nor media show any interest in providing us with anything 
except a political commission’s report.
9/11 skeptics have pointed out a large number of problems with the 9/11 
Commission Report.  Here is a very short list:
(1) There appears to be a very large energy deficit in the official explanation 
of the collapse of the two WTC towers, and no explanation for the collapse of 
WTC 7.  What is the source of the energy that brought down the three buildings?
In the PBS documentary, “America Rebuilds,” broadcast in September 2002, Larry 
Silverstein, who had the lease on the World Trade Center, said that WTC 7 was 
brought down by a decision of the authorities on the scene: “I remember getting 
a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not 
sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such 
terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it.’ And they 
made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.”
Two striking facts jump out from this quote.  One is that fire was not raging 
in WTC 7. The other is that “to pull” a building means to bring it down by 
engineered demolition.  For WTC 7 to be pulled on the late afternoon of 
September 11, it would already have had to be wired for demolition.  Why was 
WTC 7 wired for demolition?  
Brigham Young University Professor of Physics Steven Jones has suggested that 
thermite, or some other powerful, high temperature, high explosive capable of 
slicing the powerful steel columns that comprised the WTC towers central core, 
provided the energy missing in the official account.  
In a September 1, 2006, New York Times article, “U.S. moves to debunk 
‘alternative theories’ on Sept. 11 attacks,” Jim Dwyer reports that the 
National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Dept. of 
Commerce, disputes Professor Jones’ suggestion. NIST believes that such 
“enormous quantities of thermite would have to be applied to the structural 
columns to damage them” that engineered demolition is not feasible.  
Gentle reader, note what NIST is saying.  If no reasonable quantity of the 
explosive thermite, which is used for engineered demolition, could damage the 
powerful buildings, the measly energy from an airliner, a bit of jet fuel, and 
gravity could not have collapsed the buildings. 
The fact of the matter is that there has been no investigation of why the three 
buildings collapsed.  Bill Manning, the editor-in-chief of “Fire Engineering” 
got it right when he wrote in the January 2002 issue of that publication that 
“the ‘official investigation’ blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society 
of Civil Engineers is a half-baked farce that may already have been 
commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie 
far afield of full disclosure. . . . As things now stand . . . the 
investigation into the world Trade Center fire and collapse will amount to 
paper- and computer-generated hypotheticals.”
Manning complained about the “destruction of evidence . . . of the largest 
fire-induced collapse in world history” and wrote that nowhere in the ”national 
standard for fire investigation” is there “an exemption allowing the 
destruction of evidence.”
Obviously, we were not meant to know why the buildings collapsed.  
This conclusion does not automatically lead to the conclusion that some 
elements of the US government and/or Israeli intelligence destroyed the 
buildings, using airliners as cover, in order to justify invasions to achieve 
US/Israeli hegemony in the MIddle East or US control of oil supplies. No doubt, 
neoconservatives in the Bush administration used 9/11 for this purpose.  
However, perhaps the buildings failed for reasons that involve enormous 
liabilities, and those liabilities were covered up with a bogus explanation.
According to news reports, insurance payments to Silverstein for the buildings 
were many multiples larger than the price he paid for the lease. If the reports 
are correct, perhaps money explains the story.
(2) The belief that Muslims pulled off the attacks is based on the concreteness 
of the 19 names identified as the hijackers by the FBI. The fact that the FBI 
attests to the identity of the hijackers is the source of the official story’s 
credibility.  
Considering the official story’s dependence on the identity of the hijackers, 
how is it possible for the official story to survive for 5 years after the 
BBC’s report (September 23, 2001) that a number of the alleged hijackers are 
alive and well?  
According to BBC News World Edition, “Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was 
one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines 
flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September.  His photograph was 
released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the 
world. Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco. He told 
journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and 
Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both 
the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports. He 
acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the 
United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been 
referring.”
Obviously, Waleed Al Shehri would not be alive if he had crashed an airliner 
into the World Trade Center.  It would appear that the FBI’s confidence in the 
identity of the hijackers is more public relations than reality.  As the FBI 
has been proven wrong about the identity of a number of the hijackers, how do 
we know the FBI is right about any of them?
There are many holes in the official 9/11 story and very little evidence in its 
behalf.  Did the government, terrified by possible public reaction to the 
catastrophe and expected to have an explanation for the terrifying event, 
simply concoct a story?  
The reason so many people doubt the 9/11 story is not because they have 
psychological needs for conspiracies, but because the 9/11 story is not 
believable.
Paul Craig Roberts , was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan 
Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's 
Account of Policymaking in Washington ; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and 
Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. 
Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats 
Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice

 
_________________________________________________________________
Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail.
http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism