Conspiracy and Epistemology

As a fervent conspiracy theorist, amateur historian and philosopher I've read masses of material on 9/11, both official and alternative versions. As David Ray Griffin said several years ago, there are essentially four dominating views of 9/11 and the resultant war on terror:

1) It was an attack from outside that couldn't be stopped, the war on terror is justified
2) It was an attack from outside that could have been stopped but wasn't due to incompetence, so the war on terror may or may not be justified
3) It was an attack from outside that the US defence establishment allowed to happen as a pretext, so the war on terror is not justified
4) It was a wholly complicit attack by the US on itself, so the war on terror is not justified

The 9/11 Commission itself broadly accepts the second version, that the attacks were by outside agents, Al Qaeda, and that they could have been stopped either while the hijackers were in the US or on the very morning had the FAA not been so horrendously incompetent. Ultimately, the success of the attacks is explained by a 'failure of imagination'. Now, I'm not going to get into refuting the Zelikow Commission's version of events and the questions of alleged hijackers sometimes still being alive or having trained on US military bases or having behaved very unlike Salafist terrorists, or of the failure of military intercepts, the ever-changing account of what happened in the skies that morning, of NORAD drills preparing for this exact sort of attack or war game exercises duplicating the attacks on the very day they happened. If you want to read a direct refutation the best I know about is David Ray Griffin's 'The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions'.

However, despite there being abundant justification at the very least for scepticism about the Commission's version (or any variant on the official version) and in some places evidence of wilfull negligence or even worse, the treatment of 9/11 'conspiracy theories' by the mainstream and progressive media is a risible farce. We'll start with Mark Kermode's review of Zero: An Investigation into 9/11. Kermode largely works for the BBC where he has a slot on BBC Radio Five and so on, I've followed his work for years. He's not a bad film reviewer, at least has some knowledge and enthusiasm for his field. However, his review of Zero is pathetic. After showing a clip of the movie where academic Nafeez Ahmed is being interviewed, Kermode dismisses all the authoritative people interviewed in the movie as 'celebrity talking heads'. A quick search of Ahmed's name on google would yield a plethora of information about who he is, what he's done, and the numerous books he's published on the topic. This is also the first documentary I've seen that's interviewed him, so he's hardly a celebrity.

Kermode then describes the theories discussed in Zero with a tone of incredulity, before saying that none of this (namely the ideas that the WTC buildings were destroyed with explosives, that no commercial boeing hit the Pentagon and so on) will come as any surprise to people who've watched other 'conspiracy theory documentaries' such as Loose Change Second Edition. That he mentions one of the most-criticised and easily the most famous 9/11 movie illustrates his fleeting appreciation of the sheer range of documentaries and views on the subject. He then talks of Loose Change (not a particularly good documentary in research terms, but very watchable) as 'something of an internet hit', when it has been watched over 10 million times.

Kermode then asks rhetorically 'why do people believe this nonsense?' before declaring 'there's a very simple answer'. The answer? 'It's a lot more reassuring' to believe that the government was somehow in control of a massive conspiracy than to believe the 'awful truth' that they were caught completely 'on the hop'. He then makes a comparison with people who said that the government blew up the levees in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina because it's nicer to believe that the government did something than believe the truth that they did nothing. This sort of argument is common among those who while themselves seeking to adopt the status of the popular alternative are unwilling to actually engage in any sort of evidence-based discussion of 9/11 or any related issue. Socialist author George Monbiot and TV critic Charlie Brooker, both well-respected men in the realm of British journalism, have both adopted similar lines of argument. You can watch Kermode's review here.

So, what does this argument boil down to? Firstly, a metaphysical view of the world as essentially too random to sustain any such large-scale conspiracy. No one was in control, because no one could be in control because the world doesn't work that way. For one, this is largely a matter of perspective and semantics. Whether one classifies the ruling elite as an aristocracy, a corporatocracy, a conspiracy, an oligarchy, or any other similar word you're still talking about a small group of very wealthy and powerful people making decisions in secret and then lying about it. Call it what you will, it amounts to the same thing. However, such a refutation doesn't necessarily work, because it is an analytical claim and so can readily ignore any evidence you put against it. Gladio, for example, was a politically-motivated conspiracy that spanned several decades, involved hundreds if not thousands of people, was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of people and was essentially kept quiet or politely ignored. The likes of Kermode (a Catholic, if I'm not mistaken) can simply repeat their metaphysical twaddle about the world as a matter of logic, not proof. However, not everyone works like this, so it remains important to counter analytical nonsense with historical evidence, partly so the dogma does not go unanswered, and partly so people learn to distinguish between evidence and mere collections of words.

As to the main charge, that is 'more reassuring' to believe the alternative conspiracy theories - this is just gobshite. A horrible crime has been committed, and one version of events has all those people now dead, and most of their co-conspirators either dead or captured and being tortured in a country of Obama's choice, while the other version has the people responsible not only loose on the streets but largely in a position of power to do exactly this sort of thing again if they so choose. Which is the more comforting view? Unless Kermode is being incredibly subtle, he's outright lying for the sake of maintaining his status and reputation. I say he could be being incredibly subtle, because given the Bush administration's record of telling the truth, i.e. one that's essentially non-existent, it is arguably more reassuring to believe the opposite of what they say about 9/11, because how could one possibly believe that having lied about almost everything that happened for 8 years they were telling the truth about the most significant event of that period?

One rather amusing aspect to advocates of this notion that no one was in control on 9/11 was Kermode's radio review of United 93. In it, he discusses alternative versions of what happened to the plane, primarily whether it was shot down by the USAF. Again, Kermode sought to refute such theories with the argument that people believe the plane was shot down because it is more 'reassuring' to think that the government was somehow in control or did something that to believe the truth that they did nothing. He would go on to say that one moment in the film United 93 brought this home to him, when a military official sees the strike on the South Tower and says to the person he's talking to on the phone 'was that the plane you were dealing with'.

This man was a Canadian, Captain Mike Jellinek who was in command at NORAD's operations center at Cheyenne Mountain. This comment supposedly illustrates the chaos and disorder in the response that day and thus in the world in general and is a knockout punch to those fighting the corner for conspiracy theories. However, there's one massive problem, of which Kermode is evidently completely unaware. According to the 9/11 Commission, the military didn't respond to United 175 (the second hijacking that struck the South Tower, at least officially) because they didn't know about it until after it had crashed. So this conversation between Captain Jellinek at Cheyenne Mountain and someone at NEADS (the North Eastern Air Defence Sector, a division of NORAD) could not have taken place, as no one at NEADS knew about or was 'dealing with' that plane. That the producers of United 93 (one of which, Michael Bronner, wrote an article seeking to refute 9/11 alternative conspiracy theories) would leave in a reported conversation that officially never happened shows that they, along with Kermode, haven't a fucking clue what they're talking about, as they're trying to advocate a version of events they don't even understand.

However, film producers and reviewers and journalists are not, or at least not very often, particularly intelligent people, adept at using logic and evidence to form conclusions so perhaps we can forgive their complete incompetence when it comes to these sorts of issues. The same, however, cannot be said of the National Institute of Science and Technology, NIST, who investigated the demolition of the two WTC towers and, eventually, WTC 7. Again, I'm not seeking to refute NIST's version of events or discuss the questions about how a gravity-driven collapse throws vast steel sections of a building hundreds of feet laterally, or where the energy came from to break up so much steel and pulverise the concrete, or how bone fragments were embedded into nearby buildings or how kerosene and office material fires produced molten steel. Again the best critiques I know of NIST's reports are those written by Steven E Jones and Jim Hoffman.

What does concern me is that the same disregard for evidence and diversionary arguments used by Kermode and his ilk dominate the much more technically qualified and supposedly authoritative people at NIST. In seeking to explain how the fires caused by the plane strikes eventually led to the collapse of the buildings NIST wanted to claim that the steel columns in the towers lost all or most of their fireproofing, thus leaving them more exposed to the potentially crippling effects of an office fire. In the absence of any precedent for a building of this type suffering total collapse caused by fire they resorted to somewhat unorthodox scientific reasoning. To illustrate the affect of a plane crash on fireproofed steel, for example, they fired shotguns at fireproofed steel plates in plywood boxes. Likewise, when they tested models of WTC floor assemblies, subjecting them to considerably greater fires that affected the buildings on 9/11, they did not collapse, so NIST proceeded to develop increasingly ludicrous computer simulations until they found one that got the building to start collapsing. Without any material evidence, they simply increased the numbers they put into the simulation until they got a version that collapsed.

Just as the IPCC's conclusion was in fact already assumed by the Framework Convention on Climate Change, NIST's investigation was nothing more than a political showpiece and a bastardisation of science, an abuse of scientific authority. This is particularly obvious in their 'Answers to FAQs'. Replying to the question of why they didn't consider a controlled demolition hypothesis they essentially admit to the corruption of the scientific process evident in everything they did.

NIST conducted an extremely thorough three-year investigation into what caused the WTC towers to collapse, as explained in NIST’s dedicated Web site, http://wtc.nist.gov. This included consideration of a number of hypotheses for the collapses of the towers.

Some 200 technical experts—including about 85 career NIST experts and 125 leading experts from the private sector and academia—reviewed tens of thousands of documents, interviewed more than 1,000 people, reviewed 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs, analyzed 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage, performed laboratory tests and sophisticated computer simulations of the sequence of events that occurred from the moment the aircraft struck the towers until they began to collapse. - NIST answers to FAQs

All this is just an appeal to one's own authority without providing any sort of direct answer to the question. It's like asking a child who wants to eat chocolate why they think they shouldn't eat some fruit and root vegetables in between the chocolate and them responding 'I'm right lalalalalala I'm right'. You wouldn't accept this behaviour from a 6 year old, yet we accept it from government-funded scientists. The response goes on to explain the 'probable collapse sequence', which fails to explain about 95% of the evidence of what happened before stating:

NIST’s findings also do not support the “controlled demolition” theory since there is conclusive evidence that:

• the collapse was initiated in the impact and fire floors of the WTC towers and nowhere else, and;

• the time it took for the collapse to initiate (56 minutes for WTC 2 and 102 minutes for WTC 1) was dictated by (1) the extent of damage caused by the aircraft impact, and (2) the time it took for the fires to reach critical locations and weaken the structure to the point that the towers could not resist the tremendous energy released by the downward movement of the massive top section of the building at and above the fire and impact floors. - NIST Answers to FAQs
  

So, after ladling out some statistics to make themselves look authoritative and completely failing to answer the question of why they didn't even consider the controlled demolition theory, they flatly state that their findings do not support this theory. Then the kicker:

In summary, NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to Sept. 11, 2001. - NIST Answers to FAQs

In summary, NIST's answer as to why they didn't consider the controlled demolition hypothesis is 'we're right, lalalalala, we're right', 'we didn't find that to be true' 'we found no evidence for that'. This is basically a confession that they didn't even look for such evidence and that they don't have to give logical answers to such questions because of their status and position. A full critique of this NIST article is available on wtc7.net. This particular corruption of the scientific process was evident not only in the NIST investigation, but in the days immediately after 9/11. Despite the dust covering Manhattan containing lead, asbestos, mercury, glass and a host of other materials toxic to human life, particularly when breathed in, the Environmental Protection Agency told the public that the air was safe to breath, the water was safe to drink. In 2006, a study by the Mount Sinai Medical Center of nearly 10,000 rescue and clean-up workers found that 70% of them had trouble breathing. Hundreds have already died, though few have been added to the official list of 9/11 victims. This is presumably to avoid admitting culpability for those deaths, because it was the White House who changed the EPA press releases in the immediate aftermath of the attacks so they could re-open Wall Street. At the very least, that's criminal negligence and manslaughter.

The BBC have run two shows on this subject, technically three since the updated 'Mystery of the Third Tower' show was a recut version of an earlier show. All three shows have been broadcast under the 'Conspiracy Files' label, all three have been utterly terrible documentaries. I'm not just saying that because of their failure to investigate the important questions, but because of the amount of time they devote to encouraging interviewees to slag off alternative conspiracy theorists.

The third show, released shortly after NIST published their long overdue report into the collapse of building 7, interviewed Dr Shyam Sunder, one of the lead investigators. He claimed that they 'now know' that fire primarily caused the collapse, and that their science told them 'in great certainty' what happened. Overlooking the fact the man can't even use the prepositions 'in' and 'with' properly, the science that NIST used to explain the collapse is far from certain, in that it entails a process, called thermal expansion, which has never been observed as the cause of a building collapse in any other building fire anywhere, ever. Essentially the theory is that some of the building's steel columns are said to have expanded, causing critical buckling of others, triggering the collapse. One of the problems with this is that the expanding column, in order to significantly displace a connected column, would have to be firmer than the connected column, i.e. cooler. As steel is an excellent conductor of heat, particularly when we're talking about limited fires over a long period of time, this is unlikely. It seems that the steel beam doing the warping of others would both have to be hotter, in order to cause the expansion, and colder, in order to maintain the integrity to damage the connected beam. So it isn't really surprising that until August 2008, not a single comparable building had been thought to have collapsed due to office-fire induced thermal expansion.

As I've discussed before, scientific theories have to be testable, and falsifiable in order to be properly considered scientific. A theory that in effect has been tested (we've had dozens of comparable skyscraper fires) and falsified (only building 7 collapsed) and that is based almost entirely on computer simulations isn't scientific. It's barely even a theory.

The show goes on to interview Mark Loizeaux of Controlled Demolition Inc., the firm who were given the major contracts to clean up after the WTC attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing, and who acted as consultants on the investigation into building 7. In response to Steven Jones's theory about thermite (or a variant) being used to help demolish the WTC towers and building 7 Loizeaux responds,

"I saw thermite once, in high school. It was very impressive. But I've never seen anyone who uses a material which melts steel for demolition purposes." - Mark Loizeaux, BBC Conspiracy Files

Now, either our Mark is poorly informed regarding his specialist field or he's not telling the truth, because in 1994 a patent was filed for the process of using plasma ARC and thermite to demolish concrete. In 1996 a patent was filed for a 'thermite destructive device'. In the description of the device the patent filing explicitly states:

For unconventional warfare activities requiring the destruction of machinery and metallic structures, an operational need exists for a device of such simple construction that the user has only to place it in position, start his time delay, and leave. From a tactical standpoint, high heat flux materials such as thermite have the greater advantage of silence; in contrast, high explosives would, without fail, arouse attention in the vicinity of the target area. From an operational and logistic standpoint, a device that is smaller and lighter is a must to assist in lightening the load carried by the soldier and to reduce the number of resupply missions. - Patent

Also, in 2006 a patent was filed for a linear thermite charge, 'useful for structure entry or demolition'. Either Mark Loizeaux is not the expert he claims to be, or he's a liar.

"It's not real, the materials and technologies just aren't there. If they were, I'd know." - Loizeaux, BBC Conspiracy Files

Even worse for Loizeaux, NIST and thousands of gravity+fire collapse theorists is the recent conclusion of independent researchers analysing dust samples from the WTC.

By early 2009, the residue testing that NIST refused to do had been done by independent researchers, and published in a chemistry journal. Small bi-layered chips, found consistently in dust samples, have layers of red nano-engineered material that is clearly aluminothermic: it has sub-micron-diameter particles of largely of elemental aluminum, and smaller crystalline grains of primarily Fe₂O₃. On ignition, the chips produce temperatures above the melting point of iron, leaving tiny iron droplets matching the residues of commercial thermite pyrotechnics. - Jim Hoffman, Wake up and Smell the Aluminothermic Nanocomposite Explosives

Once again, independent and committed scientists who believe in the principles of empirical investigation are doing the work the $20 million government institutes deemed unnecessary. Indeed, when the Hartford Advocate spoke to Michael Neuman, the man who was the PR contact for the first NIST WTC report he engaged in delightfully circular reasoning.

The first thing we mentioned was Jones’s claims of finding explosive residue in the debris.
“We examined over 200 pieces of steel and found no evidence of explosives,” Neuman said.
We know, we said (even more apologetically), but what about that letter where NIST said it didn’t look for evidence of explosives?
“Right, because there was no evidence of that.”
But how can you know there’s no evidence if you don’t look for it first?
“If you’re looking for something that isn’t there, you’re wasting your time." - Hartford Advocate

Back to the either stunningly ignorant or just plain lying BBC, they include an interview with journalist Ron Wieck, who hosts a NY radio show seeking to debunk conspiracy theories.

Wieck asks why the government would murder its own citizens, which for anyone who has looked into the EPA actions in the weeks after the attacks is a redundant question. Sadly, none of the truthers he was shown talking to were articulate enough to point this out. Next up is Richard Clarke, former counter-terrorism advisor under Clinton and Bush. He says that no such conspiracy could happen, and that in almost thirty years of having top secret clearances he knows of 'almost nothing' that hasn't come out. This specifically implies that there are some things that in his near thirty years never came out, which invalidates his point. Once again I refer you to Gladio, a conspiracy running across governments for decade after decade which involved governments murdering their own citizens. Clarke assures us that 'everyone in government' will say the same as him. Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, a man who was involved with Gladio at several stages, publicly stated in December 2007 his belief that 9/11 was perpetrated by the CIA and Mossad, and that this was common knowledge.

The only thing that truly differs between 9/11 and any other everyday conspiracy that is widely accepted as such is the scale of what happened. Take the recent death of Ian Tomlinson, the man who died during the G20 demonstrations last week. Footage made available to the Guardian clearly shows Tomlinson, a newspaper salesman who had nothing to do with the protests, being attacked from behind by at least one policeman without any justification or provocation. Tomlinson collapsed a few minutes later from a heart attack which soon killed him.




Recall that in all the initial coverage the police were putting out the story that as they tried to help the stricken man they were being pelted with bottles by protestors. However, eyewitnesses contradict this version of events, saying that one bottle was thrown, nowhere particularly near the police, and that the crowd instantly turned and explained there was a collapsed man over there, after which nothing was thrown. So, the protestors behaved responsibly, with a sense of compassion and respect for someone who was in trouble, and were willing to put aside their day-long struggles with the police so they could help. The police, by contrast, forcibly pushed away one protester who was giving first aid to Tomlinson, failed to listen to her when she tried to explain what had happened to him and then proceeded to anonymously lie to the press. Now we find out they actually had a direct hand in his death. Whether or not Tomlinson would have died had the police not assaulted him is ultimately for coroners and the authorities to determine, but there's no evidence that the police are bothered about having potentially killed someone for absolutely no reason or having been utterly negligent in their duty to protect and help him when it became clear he was seriously ill. To then lie about events to try to make themselves look responsible rather than negligent and like victims instead of the perpetrators of a series of crimes is nothing short of a conspiracy. No one in the mainstream press will actually call it that, but whatever you call it, a lot of people will acknowledge that in effect that's what has happened.

Not so with 9/11. In discussing the question of what hit the Pentagon in their original Conspiracy Files show on 9/11 the BBC interviewed Allyn Kilsheimer, who said:

"What I usually say is 'that's bullshit' but what I will say is it's just flawed people who have to have something to dream about to make a name for themselves." - Kilsheimer, BBC Conspiracy Files

What emerges from the following voiceover is that Kilsheimer, an engineer, was one of the people who were on the scene after the crash. So rather than interview, for example, police officers William Lagasse or Chadwick Brooks, both of whom say a plane hit the building but from quite a different trajectory to the damage path of light poles and so on (as covered in The Pentacon) or April Gallop, who was in the building when the attack happened and crawled out through the hole with her months-old son and is now pursuing a lawsuit saying no airliner hit the building, they find one guy who turned up after the fact and whose contribution is nothing more than a bunch of insults and cod psychology. April Gallop and her son Elisha were both seriously injured by the attack, yet such was the BBC's desire to put down any notion of there being anything suspect about any aspect of 9/11 that they just conveniently ignored such victims and their statements. In a moment of truly outrageous hypocrisy they go on to show images of a tearful Jewish woman who lost her brother in the WTC attacks and make out that conspiracy theorists are heartless fiends who lack basic sympathy and decency. Indeed, some are, they work for the BBC and they made this show.

The arguments about eyewitnesses and whether small scraps of what may or may not be American Airlines fuselage prove what hit the Pentagon may well be rendered obsolete by the NTSB flight data/animation released in 2007. This flight data, analysed by Pilots for 9/11 Truth, confirms what the animation shows - the plane in question is flying too high (by around 200 feet) to hit the Pentagon, it is flying on the trajectory described by Lagasse and Brooks (among others) which is not the trajectory of the damage path to the light poles and then the building itself, and strangest of all the data/animation stop short of the Pentagon by around 2 seconds. The plane at that stage is in a position where if it even tried to dive into the building to strike the outer wall this wouldn't have been possible.

As shown by this excerpt of the last few minutes of the animation provided by the NTSB, the plane also makes an inexplicable 330 degree downward spiral, descending several thousand feet in a high-speed turn, in effect giving potential interceptors several minutes longer to try to stop the plane from hitting the Pentagon. If the desire had been simply to hit the Pentagon and cause massive casualties then it would have been far easier, and less likely to allow an intercept, to just nose dive into the roof, which is nearly 30 acres in size.



Indeed, even Hani Hanjour, widely known as a terrible pilot, might have been able to manage that. Still, the question remains, is this flight data genuine? The implications, either way, are not good for the US government. Either the flight data is genuine, came from a real plane that flew on this trajectory, just over the Pentagon but low enough and fast enough that eyewitnesses might be convinced it had actually hit the building, in which case it must have been planted at the crash scene to have been found three days after the crash. On the other hand, if the data is fake, then it proves nothing about what did or didn't hit the Pentagon, but proves that the government are willing to fake evidence. I suspect the data is real, because if they'd faked it then they would have done a better job. But this entails Flight 77 not hitting the Pentagon, not being piloted by Hani Hanjour and the government planting evidence after the attack with the intention of deceiving everyone not 'in the loop'.

The BBC show then interviews Professor Chris Hoffman, from Purdue University in Indiana, who was involved in making an animation to apparently try to understand what caused the damage at the Pentagon. However, the animation is an absolute joke, and could only have been produced by either total incompetents or people seeking to deceive.



As you can see in this clip, released as part of the American Society of Civil Engineers Pentagon Building Performance Report, it is the same abuse of the name of science to try to give authority to that which is simply untrue. The plane enters at an angle very different to the one shown in the NTSB animation, the Pentagon has no outer wall, the vertical stabiliser of the plane simply enters the building intact while the wings disintegrate and, perhaps most significantly of all, the plane striking the building has no engines. Given that the engines are the densest, most indestructible part of such a plane and therefore could be expected to do significant damage in striking a building at over 500mph, leaving them out is unforgivably stupid or deceitful. That scientists would happily kiss their credibility goodbye by not only producing such work but also lending their names, faces and voices to documentaries seeking to outright lie to people shows how little interest some scientists have in truth, and how much they are driven by fame and doing what is expected of them.

To be fair, in the BBC's show they do have a slightly more detailed version of the same animation, but the Pentagon still has no outer wall, the vertical stabiliser still manages to penetrate the building intact and though the plane has engines they conveniently disappear just before the plane enters the building. Engineers pretending that magic can happen is not a sound basis for any sort of inquiry, yet the BBC just ignored the details.



Chris Hoffman describes in the interview how after they'd released this animation they got e-mails accusing them of being government agents and having prostituted themselves as part of a cover-up and says they didn't really understand that. Given the blatant flaws in their work, which any decent scientist or just an observant and sensible person could see within moments, this provokes the worrying thought that the intellects working in our academic institutions are not all they are cracked up to be and that they lead such an isolated life free from genuine criticism that they're incapable of understanding how some people might not be happy with their lies and nonsense.

In a truly bizarre moment the BBC interviewed two people at Indian Lake, a site close to where Flight 93 supposedly crashed. In discussing whether debris from the plane was found there, one of the interviewees pulls scraps of something out of a plastic bag and shows them to the camera, apparently attributing them to UA93. Something the BBC clearly forgot to ask is why the FBI, the NTSB and other agencies investigating 9/11 have allowed people to just pick up evidence from one of the greatest crimes in US history and wander about showing it to journalists. The implications of this for the quality of the investigation being done by the FBI and others is devastating.

Likewise the interview with the Mayor of Indian Lake, Barry Lichty, who claims that '92 or 93%' of the remains of the aircraft and the people on it were still in the ground where the plane apparently crashed. Though he talks in somewhat mocking tones of 'people who will never change their mind', encouraged by the BBC interviewer, they never bothered to ask him about his initial reaction to hearing what he believed, as a Navy veteran, to be a missile. I can only presume they opted not to interview Ernie Stull, the Mayor of Shanksville, due to ongoing controversy over his comments that fighters jets were close by (according to the 9/11 Commission they didn't even know about UA93 until it crashed), that people heard a missile and that on visiting the site of the alleged crash that there was 'no plane there'.

Then they talk to a woman who was a passenger on Delta 89, which on 9/11 was diverted to Cleveland after being suspected of having a bomb on board. Despite the woman's story not actually contradicting claims in Loose Change Second Edition that United 93 also landed in Cleveland, the interviewers act as though it does, and then ask her where she thinks such theories come from. Being a passenger on a plane on 9/11 does not qualify someone to talk about the genesis of conspiracy theories, but keen to get as many people to make disparaging comments as possible the BBC includes her response which is yet more insulting bargain basement psychological analysis saying people 'struggle to believe' that such an operation could be done by a small cadre of Al Qaeda members and so 'have to believe in something more elaborate'.

Next up is Frank Spotnitz, a writer and producer on the X-Files and spinoff show The Lone Gunmen (the pilot edition of which shows a plot to hijack a passenger plane by remote and crash it into the WTC to help start a war in the Middle East). His attempt at insulting conspiracy theorists, accusing them of a sort of 'God of the gaps' logic, is slightly more sophisticated but essentially just another attempt by the BBC to encourage undecided watchers that if they become conspiracy theory advocates (or just those who want a proper investigation) that they open themselves up to a range of insults and attacks. It isn't subtle, it isn't clever, and it comes from people who themselves know almost nothing about 9/11, and have no desire to seek out the details. Spotnitz even claims

"I don't believe that anyone in the US government is a mass murder. That to me is just preposterous." - Spotnitz, BBC Conspiracy Files

Being interviewed in 2006, Spotnitz is again someone who is either stunningly ignorant of the reality of the world, in which billions have died as a direct result of US government activities (and others, obviously), or is openly seeking to deceive people. Either way, the BBC once again failed to pick up on the obvious, all in the name of seeking to insult, disparage, attack, undermine and criticise anyone with any significant question about our political system.

The BBC's initial Conspiracy Files show on 9/11 concludes with a section on possible intelligence failures, calling it the one area where the evidence 'does stack up' on the side of the conspiracy theorists. The content of this section, a mere 7 minutes in length, is patchy and dull, but the programme's makers knew that the thing people most remember from documentaries is the end. In repeating some nonsense about possible failures by incompetent FBI or CIA agents the BBC reaffirms the overarching worldview implicit in Kermode's hitpiece on Zero, that bad stuff happens not because bad people plan it that way, but because ordinary people make mistakes. They include another quote from Spotnitz talking about how 'the truth is painful' and so people 'have to' come up with fictitious conspiracy theories. The same lines are repeated over and over, giving the watcher no choice but to hear the message that alternative conspiracy theorists are psychologically deficient and that's the reason they believe what they do. Absolutely no credence is given to the possibility mentioned only at the very end of a BBC article on 'the psychology of conspiracy':

It does not mean belief in a conspiracy theory is delusional. At the end of the day there can be a simple reason - the theory itself could be true. - BBC

I for one do not believe anyone could come up with a comprehensive account of 9/11, because there simply isn't enough hard evidence to confirm any particular version. On balance, I think the 'inside job' conspiracy theorists probably have something closer to the truth than the 9/11 Commission conspiracy theorists, though without further disclosure it's hard to say anything conclusive. However, what is conclusive to me is the abundant failure of scientists, government officials and the majority of journalists to discuss the evidence in anything like as broad and careful a way as researchers and the independent media have done. The wanton abuse of scientific and other investigative institutions is what indicates a larger conspiracy, or at least widespread corruption. The only antidote to this is honest investigation by people who, regardless of their persuasion, are willing and able to look for the truth.