Conspiracy theory
From Bwtm
A conspiracy theory attempts to explain the ultimate cause of an event (usually a political, social, or historical event) as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance of powerful people or organizations rather than as an overt activity or as natural occurrence.
Related to conspiracy theory is propaganda, disinformation and misinformation. When used for political purposes this may become a Smear.
Contents |
Conspiracy theory
Loose Change
This film alleges that the attacks on 9/11 were not the result of terrorism but a series of cleverly executed events carried out by the US government.
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/pentagon.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_Change_(video)#Factual_inaccuracies
Enough of the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories, Already
We have enough proof that the Bush administration is a bunch of lying evildoers. We don't need to make it up.
At almost every progressive gathering where there's a question and answer session, someone or other vehemently raises 9/11 and espouses a grand conspiracy theory. If you haven't had the pleasure of enduring these rants, please let me share.
Here's what the conspiracists believe:
9/11 was an inside job. Members of the Bush Administration ordered it, not Osama bin Laden. Arab hijackers may not have done the deed. On top of that, the Twin Towers fell not because of the impact of the airplanes and the ensuing fires but because the Bush Administration got agents to plant explosives at the base of those buildings. Building 7, another high-rise at the World Trade Center that fell on 9/11, also came down by planted explosives. The Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines Flight 77 but by a smaller plane or a missile. And the Pennsylvania plane did not crash as a result of the revolt by the passengers but was brought down by the military. I'm amazed at how many people give credence to these theories. Everyone's an engineer. People who never even took one college science course can now hold forth at great length on how the buildings at the World Trade Center could not possibly have collapsed in the way they did and why the Pentagon could not have been struck by that American Airlines jet.
Problem is, some of the best engineers in the country have studied these questions and come up with perfectly logical, scientific explanations for what happened.
The American Society of Civil Engineers and FEMA conducted an in-depth investigation of the World Trade Center. The team members included the director of the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the senior fire investigator for the National Fire Protection Association, professors of fire safety, and leaders of some of the top building design and engineering firms, including Skidmore Owings & Merrill in Chicago, Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire in Seattle, and Greenhorne & O'Mara in Maryland.
It concluded that massive structural damage caused by the crashing of the aircrafts into the buildings, combined with the subsequent fires, "were sufficient to induce the collapse of both structures."
The National Institute of Standards and Technology did its own forty-three volume study of the Twin Towers. "Some 200 technical experts . . . 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, [and] performed laboratory tests and sophisticated computer simulations," the institute says.
It also concluded that a combination of the crash and the subsequent fires brought the towers down: "In each tower, a different combination of impact damage and heat-weakened structural components contributed to the abrupt structural collapse."
Popular Mechanics, first in its March 2005 cover story and now in its expanded book, Debunking 9/11 Myths, after interviewing scores of other experts in the engineering field, takes apart the most popular contentions of the conspiracists. "In every case we examined, the key claims made by conspiracy theorists turned out to be mistaken, misinterpreted, or deliberately falsified," the book says.
http://www.alternet.org/story/41601/
9/11 conspiracy theories persist, thrive
Kevin Barrett believes the U.S government might have destroyed the World Trade Center. Steven Jones is researching what he calls evidence that the twin towers were brought down by explosives detonated inside them, not by hijacked airliners.
These men aren't uneducated junk scientists: Barrett will teach a class on Islam at the University of Wisconsin this fall, over the protests of more than 60 state legislators. Jones is a tenured physicist at Brigham Young University whose mainstream academic job has made him a hero to conspiracy theorists.
Five years after the terrorist attacks, a community that believes widely discredited ideas about what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, persists and even thrives. Members trade their ideas on the Internet and in self-published papers and in books. About 500 of them attended a recent conference in Chicago.
The movement claims to be drawing fresh energy and credibility from a recently formed group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth.
The organization says publicity over Barrett's case has helped boost membership to about 75 academics. They are a tiny minority of the 1 million part- and full-time faculty nationwide, and some have no university affiliation. Most aren't experts in relevant fields. But some are well educated, with degrees from elite universities such as Princeton and Stanford and jobs at schools including Rice, Indiana and the University of Texas.
"Things are happening," said co-founder James Fetzer, a retired philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, who maintains, among other claims, that some of the hijackers are still alive. "We're going to continue to do this. Our role is to establish what really happened on 9/11."
What really happened, the national Sept. 11 Commission concluded after 1,200 interviews, was that hijackers crashed planes into the twin towers. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency, filed 10,000 pages of reports that found fires caused by the crashing planes were more than sufficient to collapse the buildings.
The scholars' group rejects those conclusions. Their Web site contends the government has been dishonest. It adds: the "World Trade Center was almost certainly brought down by controlled demolitions" and "the government not only permitted 9/11 to occur but may even have orchestrated these events to facilitate its political agenda."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Sept_11_Conspiracies.html
http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/
'Popular Mechanics' Tackles Sept. 11 Theories
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5782277
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=1&c=y
Kennedy assassination theories
In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated the President alone and without the assistance of others. Almost immediately, critics began to question the official government conclusions and wrote books attacking the Commission and its findings. Among them was Mark Lane, a lawyer who represented Oswald's mother, who authored the critical book Rush to Judgment. In the decades that followed, a dedicated group of independent researchers would develop dozens of different, contradictory theories and publish their findings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_assassination_theories
Elvis is Alive
American singer and rock star Elvis Presley died in August 1977.
Elvis Presley was born in January 1935, so his projected age would not preclude the possibility that Elvis is still alive (as of 2006, he would be 71 years old). Critics of this would state that a number of Elvis impersonators can easily be mistaken for Elvis and that Elvis' fans merely don't want to believe he is actually dead.
Most people who believe Elvis is still alive believe that Elvis is spending the remainder of his life in solitude somewhere in the United States and to back this up they have suggested that Elvis' middle name is spelled incorrectly on his death certificate [1]. Others believe in extraterrestrial involvement, although these conspiracy theories may simply be an exercise in self-parody.
Former bass back-up singer J.D. Sumner was one of the pallbearers at Elvis' burial service in 1977. He claims that Elvis' body was in the casket.
One meta-theory holds that stories of Elvis sightings are circulated by the CIA to discredit in advance stories of secret government weapons and activities. "Yeah, you saw a black plane that left regular puffballs of smoke behind it, and, by the way, Elvis just bought a doughnut in Kenosha."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_sightings
Propaganda, Disinformation and Misinformation
Iraq WMD
Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD.
Do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"? Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?
Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.
People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.
The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Iraq_Believing_WMD.html
