conspiration theories & such...

[solitary_summer]

ah damn. my boss being on vacation & business being rather slow due to the heat (yes, it's still hot...) i get to read a lot.. so there was A. von Bülow, 'Die CIA und der 11. September' and G. Wisnewski, 'Operation 9/11'.

:: shakes head :: i'm not quite sure what to think... those conspiration theory conspiration theories are like an alternative universe.

on the one hand i understand that there might be a psychological need to make the meaningless meaningful, the accidental less so, because apparently the human mind doesn't like to accept to what extent we're still subject to chance, major and minor accidents and failures and any likely or unlikely combination thereof.

we can't blame gods or demons any longer, we don't believe in fate, oracles or omens, so we can only point the finger at each other. we need to believe we can control our lives, or, in default, that someone we can blame for anything that goes wrong controls them. there has to be some slightly perverse satisfaction in the belief / knowledge that we're subject to powers we're helpless against, and apparently a well orchestrated conspiracy is a much more emotionally satisfying explanation than the possibility of a rather random combination of events that needed a lot of chance, luck and human failure to happen as they did.

maybe conspiration theories are our way of coping, just as people in ancient times suddenly 'remembered' all kinds of omens having happened before what later turned out to be great or catastrophic events.


on the other hand, though, some of the questions the authors (and their sources) raise, i'd been asking myself after 9/11, only at some point stopped thinking about and more or less accepted the official version. still, the way evidence suddenly turned up right after the attack seemed a little too convenient even than, and i had been asking myself why, especially given the span of time between the attacks, none of the planes had been intercepted. especially that the Pentagon should be so undefended seemed to stretch credibility at the time, but then i'm not american & thought maybe this impression was a result of me watching too many movies. now both authors claim that there's an international standard procedure for cases when a plane leaves its course and doesn't react to calls for a few minutes, which was disregarded in all four cases. true ? false?

a plane full of military and ex-military persons (the one that allegedly crashed into the Pentagon) & they couldn't overpower a couple of guys with box-cutters?

planes and bodies that were more or less vaporized in defiance of the laws of physics? again, true?, false?

why would a terorist chose to limit the damage and go out of his way in order to crash into a mostly unoccupied wing of the Pentagon? chance? all lies?

the utterly idiotic and certainly less than inconspicuous behaviour and apparent incompetence of the terrorists...


what about the 'Operation Northwoods' file Wisnewski quotes in his book, are they genuine or forgery?