In a light-on-substance article on Mother Jones, David Gibson reviews a few of the 9/11 Truth Movements’ films, Loose Change, Able Danger and The Reflecting Pool. What drew me in, however, was the chuckle-worthy caption: In search of intelligent life among the 9/11 tinfoil-hatters. As a Skeptic Society member, I’ve already read quite a few rebuttals of the 9/11 Truth dogma, but I decided to give Gibson’s a quick read because the caption was so deserving. After skipping over the boring movie reviews, I located the relevant opinion I share:
But the most annoying thing about the movies—and the Truthers—is that the actual truth, in all its awful complexity, isn’t enough for them. No matter that 3,000 Americans died because of bungling and blowback, or that the Bush administration twisted their deaths into pretexts for unnecessary war and executive power run amok. The Truthers want more. They’ve missed the real lesson of the Bush administration, which is not that a secretive cabal runs the White House, but that its diabolic intent has been trumped by its staggering incompetence. Seven years on, the neocon notion that imperial power can reshape reality has been fully exposed as a fantasy. Yet the Truthers cling to the myth of official omnipotence, making them some of the last Americans who still believe that this administration could successfully pull off anything bigger than T-ball on the South Lawn.
To be sure, the Bush administration has made it all too easy to succumb to conspiratorial thinking. Due to official stalling and stonewalling, the full story of September 11 remains a work in progress. The 9/11 Commission’s official account glossed over uncomfortable questions but read like a page-turner. Fittingly, a nation hungry for answers gobbled it up; nearly 9 million copies of the report were sold or downloaded, and it enjoyed a second life in comic-book form. The 9/11 skeptics have tapped into this desire for answers—a common Truther refrain is that they’re “just asking questions.” But that’s like proponents of intelligent design saying they don’t know how the universe was created. The Truthers aren’t filling in the gaps in our reality; they’re already living in an alternate one.
We ignore the 9/11 Truthers because they seem so silly and have no answers – only questions. But opposing quackery wherever it may hide is especially important in this world where misinformation proliferates freely and rapidly.
POLITICAL BLIP 