Modulator

Conspiracy Theories

On Saturday nights ABC replays episodes of Monk, the entertaining USA series. Tonight's is a repeat but my wife has not seen it so it is on while she falls asleep reading and I browse a few blogs (I should have done some links for you...there is, as usual a lot of good stuff out there).

A key clue that Monk has focused on the right person as the culprit is that the guy sat quietly at his desk (he was proctoring a Saturday morning SAT exam) as all the students jumped up an ran to the windows when a car alarm went off. This was unnatural behavior and would be for you and I in similar circumstances.

At the same time this was playing on Monk I was reading the following?:

...while the 9/11 attacks were occurring, the entire top of the chain of command of the most powerful military in the world sat at various desks, inert.

Well, my reaction each time I have read about this has been incredulity. That is not how I would expect them to behave. Is this proof that they knew in advance about the attacks? No. But, please then, explain their behavior.

Susan at Suburban Guerilla asks whether Michael Hasty's call to paranoia in the above article is persuasive. He certainly lines up a long series of allegations and evidence and but the lack of citations, while perhaps not appropriate to the medium in which the article appeared, would make his arguments hard to accept by someone not familiar with all the items.

Especially when some of his arguments include things like:

...the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was "probably" the result of "a conspiracy,"

and then fails to tell us that the committee was referring to a conspiracy involving Oswald and a few others and that:

In terms of its implications for government and society, an assassination as a consequence of a conspiracy composed solely of Oswald and a small number of persons, possibly only one, and possibly a person akin to Oswald in temperament and ideology, would not have been fundamentally different from an assassination by Oswald alone.

So, he doesn't appear to have everything just right and he would have been much more persuasive if he had ended with a bold Wake Up People before he takes his argument over the edge by rolling out the Bush as Hitler meme.

Posted by Steve on January 17, 2004