Not all hypotheses should be entertained. If we stopped to consider every existing conspiracy, we could spend a lifetime in stasis. So let’s untangle some of the garbage from theses that actually show promise.
Consider the thesis that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange et al. are Pro-American establishment operatives–government pawns, if you will.
It seems absurd. Yet 9/11 Truth activism also seemed absurd until innumerable discrepancies surfaced in the official recounting of events. Now, it is reported that the majority of New Yorkers, for instance, reject the official story. There are variations in views about what the actual facts might be, but the common denominator is the rejection of the official story. In sum, many Americans believe that the truth has been intentionally distorted.
It is likely that no one believes the whole truth has been revealed, or that no lies were told. Such is the nature of government and media. If one is capable of entertaining the possibility that the war on Bin Laden has been largely fictional, then one is also capable of entertaining the possibility that that there are other fictional villains in this tale. Is Wikileaks one of them? Tynos seems to think so. Here are his 9 primary reasons.
On Saturday 4th September 2010, @tynos9 said:
1) 9/11 and the War On Terror
On this issue alone one can safely conclude that the Wikileaks docs are a psyop. The most salient clue that Wikileaks is a psyop is its relation to 9/11.
9/11 is the litmus test – Establishment versus reality. No one truly independent non-Establishment with a functioning intellect believes the government’s 911 conspiracy theories or is hostile to 9/11 Truth.
Wikileaks fails this one. Big time.
Despite his anti-Establishment profile Assange is hostile to 9/11 Truth. He says he finds it an annoying conspiracy.
(See the full set of comments here)
I agree with a weaker version of this thesis. No independent and reflective thinker believes that the government’s tale is entirely true, and many intelligent individuals even believe that key components of the story are false. Of course, there are also large numbers of reflective thinkers who believe that Osama Bin Laden was the true culprit. If you happen to be one of these individuals, you might very well reject alternative theories often referred to as conspiracy theories. (The conspiracy label tends to discredit views prematurely, prior to proper analysis and investigation.) You might even believe that these theories focus our attention on pseudo-puzzles and distract us from more pressing, more important issues. This could explain the dissent and resistance to truth-seeking 9/11 theorists. Yet does it explain the hostility? Perhaps. This question remains open and might even deserve further scrutiny; a rational thinker does not discredit a hypothesis on the basis that it has been labeled a conspiracy. A rational thinker is even less likely to aggressively reject a hypothesis on such a basis. So the question appears to be legitimate: Why the hostility?
The hostility becomes even more suspect in light of the number and caliber of 9/11 truth-seekers. See, for instance,
- http://www.ae911truth.org/
- http://patriotsquestion911.com/engineers.html
- http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/911architectsfortruth_32509.html
- http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20100429123004302
- http://stj911.org/ (Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice)
- http://www.youtube.com/user/STJ911 (Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, Youtube)
- http://www.journalof911studies.com/ (peer-reviewed Journal of 9/11 Studies)
Massive numbers of firefighters, scholars, architects, engineers and other respected professionals have firmly rejected the mainstream recounting of the attacks as scientifically implausible and even impossible. The official story is rejected on the basis of simple physical laws and well-known facts about the dynamics of impact and demolition, as well as peer-reviewed lab analyses of World Trade Center rubble. When our best science falsifies our weakest theories, a rational thinker has a responsibility to consider the data, at the very least. Hence it is only natural to ask, why the hostility?
You might think that ignoring the scientific data doesn’t imply that someone like Julian Assange is pro-government; after all, human emotional factors can get in the way of rational thinking for even the most rigorous minds. Perhaps Assange and other hostile dissenters do not wish to be plagued by the skeptical atmosphere that conspiracy theories tend to inspire from the public: Guilt by association damages perceived credibility, and if there’s one thing Wikileaks can use right now, it’s the perception of legitimacy. No one wants to be hunted down and questioned by a government that sub-contracted torture to Syria and put Guantanamo on the map.
On the other hand, you might think, with Tynos, that hostile resistance to truth-seekers (who push for further investigation into 9/11) reveals an implicit and yet relatively obvious tendency to support the boldest of government lies. Perhaps, then, this hostility is about as revealing as the denial of Evolutionary Theory from someone who claims to be a Darwinian.
I offer no conclusive answers but there are 2 basic facts we must concede.
- Hostile resistance to legitimate scientific inquiry reveals either an error in logical reasoning or a conscious lie;
- The evidence is not presently sufficient for purposes of determining which of these two possibilities is the truth.
For now, reason dictates that we remain open to both possibilities in the case of WikiLeaks. And of course, the demand for further evidence coincides nicely with the WikiLeaks framework itself, which encourages us to abstain from forming beliefs on the basis of heresy and mainstream media content. Research, evidence and cogent arguments are in order.
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