Do journalists have a brain?

Do journalists have a brain?

Unseen video of the WTC and
Low-grade journalism

October 3, 2007

Today, a reader alerts me to the emergence of yet another video regarding the attack on the twin towers.

http://www.blacklistednews.com/view.asp?ID=4391

You will see the sequence of unfortunate people who prefer to jump into the void rather than burn alive. They seem to emerge always from the same spot, where the wind would have directed the fire, completely surrounding them and preventing them from reaching the emergency stairwells at the center of the building. Suffocated by smoke and burned, they are left with only suicide.

One of many suicides shown in this video

In passing, you will notice several things already abundantly emphasized by experts:

• The very localized nature of the fires – modest fires. There is only one spot where flames are visible. Everywhere else, there is gray smoke evoking difficult combustion at moderate temperatures.

After the first plane impact. Limited and localized fire. All the jet fuel burned within seconds. Gray smoke (limited combustion temperature)

Experts’ opinions appear to be confirmed. The bulk of the fuel contained in the aircraft tanks burned immediately after the impacts. The plane, shattered in flight, created numerous holes through which the fuel could gush outward, producing large red flames and black smoke—exactly what was observed and filmed. But all this resolved within seconds. Afterwards, what continued to burn were the contents of the floors—the partitions, furniture, flooring, and furnishings. Enough to suffocate and burn men and women, certainly, but not enough to soften the massive steel columns forming the buildings' structural framework. Moreover, these fires were localized to part of a floor, not spread across the entire surface. It seems that, well supplied with water, New York firefighters could have easily contained such modest fires—modest compared to other skyscraper fires, many of which have been extensively filmed and shown. The sudden, free-fall, strictly vertical collapse of the World Trade Center towers irresistibly evokes a controlled demolition. I had seen a report on television, always on ARTE, where the architects of the twin towers spoke. They said, "We calculated the buildings to withstand the impact of the largest commercial aircraft available at the time, the Boeing 707, but we did not anticipate the consequences of jet fuel fires." This doesn't hold water.

At one point, one of these specialists attempts to demonstrate why the towers collapsed. He uses a model made of steel rods and plywood pieces. But when he makes the gesture meant to demonstrate the feasibility of such a collapse, his model veers off to the side. The image is then quickly cut.

Years have passed. Now, month after month, the "conspiracy rumor" grows. More and more people are questioning, even though there remain journalists who shrug at the mere idea of asking such a simple question. Nowhere can one find the full version of the ARTE broadcast from April 2004 in which journalist Daniel Lecomte denounced the absurdity of conspiracy theories, supported by Philippe Vial, editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo, and other participants whose names I cannot recall at the moment but which readers will remind me of &&&. There was a German journalist from Spiegel, one Gunther, and essayists, authors of books. Of course, there was the usual disinformation agent, the "sociologist" Pierre Lagrange, who still hasn't received his doctorate, through a thesis defense (on what subject, for heaven's sake?!). Today, Daniel Lecomte and Philippe Vial are silent, refusing to address these questions about which they spoke so decisively in 2004.

Below is an article published in December 2006 by Le Monde Diplomatique, written by American journalist Alexander Cockburn. In blue is the "headline" added by the newspaper's editorial team, presenting this "reply from a prominent figure on the American radical left," without likely having read the article, I imagine...

Regardless, Mr. Charles Spinney, who left the Pentagon after years exposing the defense department’s budgetary extravagances, told me: "Photos of the plane hitting the Pentagon exist. They were taken by surveillance cameras at the helipad located just next to the impact point. I've seen them—both still and in motion. I didn't witness the crash myself, but the driver of the vehicle from which I exited at that moment saw it with such precision that he even distinguished the terrified faces of passengers at the windows. And I know two people who were on board. One was identified through dental remains found in the Pentagon."

Will conspiracy believers object that Mr. Spinney once served the state, that dental identifications were falsified, that the Boeing 757 was diverted to Nebraska for a rendezvous with President Bush, who then shot down the passengers, burned the bodies on the tarmac, and handed the teeth of Mr. Spinney's friend to Mr. Cheney so he could later drop them from his torn pants during an inspection of the Pentagon debris...?

Setting irony aside, hundreds of people saw the plane, and they know how to distinguish a commercial aircraft from a missile. And why would those injured that day, or those who lost friends or colleagues, be participating in such a staged performance today? Besides, why use a missile when you have an airplane—and if we follow the conspiracy theory, you've already managed to crash two planes into much harder-to-hit targets, the twin towers, using remote control?

J.P. Petit's Note:
How do you guide the plane to its target in the hands of pilots with minimal training? This isn't journalism—it's nonsense.

Mr. Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks? We're told he's paid by the CIA. And so on... Ultimately, what is the goal here? To prove that Messrs. Bush and Cheney are capable of anything? The problem is they've never demonstrated the level of competence required to carry out such a sophisticated operation. After the U.S. military victory in Iraq, they couldn't even manage to transport a few crates marked "ADM" (for "weapons of mass destruction") to the scene. It would have almost sufficed to show them to an enchanted press for a photograph to go viral worldwide—and for "proof" of the war's justification to be established.

The upcoming Democratic electoral victory will soon remind us that Messrs. Bush and Cheney are not so different from the foreign policy leaders who preceded or will follow them. A bipartisan consensus exists on issues concerning Israel, Iraq, etc. By trying to convince us of the unprecedented danger posed by the current administration, conspiracy theorists contribute to fueling the fantasy that a new administration—Clinton, Gore, or another—would pursue much more humane policies than the current one.

We're told the towers didn't collapse at an unexpected speed because they were poorly built (due to corruption, incompetence of construction firms, or lax regulations), and because they were struck by large fuel-laden planes. They fell like a layered cake because agents of Mr. Cheney—many of them!—had planted explosives throughout the floors in the days preceding September 11. This was an enterprise involving thousands of people, all complicit in a mass murder and all silent ever since.

J.P. Petit's Note:
Always the same argument (or lack thereof): "I have no other technically viable explanation to offer. But I reject yours because I can't believe such a thing could happen."

Yet we know from Machiavelli that a conspiracy is all the more likely to be exposed the more accomplices it requires (4). Moreover, in the case of the 9/11 terrorists, many of them had already expressed their intentions. It's likely precisely the idea that armed Arabs with box cutters could never carry out such an attack explains why they weren't taken seriously—and why the secret was preserved.

J.P. Petit's Note:
Another aspect making this version hard to believe is its monstrosity. If the Nazis had had enough time to erase all traces of the extermination camps, few people would have believed such things. If the traces of Stalin’s atrocities and his mass graves hadn’t been found, who would have believed that he cold-bloodedly liquidated millions of men and women? And so on.

A 14th-century British Franciscan logician taught us that when a fact can be explained in multiple ways, the most plausible explanation is the one requiring the fewest assumptions (the "principle of Occam's Razor"). In the case of 9/11, there is absolutely no need to invoke explosive charges to understand the accelerated collapse of the towers—including Tower 7, which was not hit by a plane. An engineer has thoroughly analyzed the practical reasons making the explosive theory so improbable as to be absurd (5).

J.P. Petit's Note:
Which engineer? Where? How? This journalist is remarkably discreet about his sources and the basis of his argument. This is anything but journalism.

There are indeed many real conspiracies in the United States. Why fabricate fake ones? Every year, major property owners and New York authorities "conspire" to reduce the number of fire stations so that neighborhoods burn more easily, pushing poor residents out so developers can build luxury housing more easily. We see this phenomenon in Brooklyn, but also in San Francisco, where the remaining Black population lives in a district covering 900 hectares with an unobstructed view of the bay. Why not focus instead on such "conspiracies"?

It was said the Russians could never have built an atomic bomb without communist traitors serving them. Hitler had already fallen victim to a similar betrayal; otherwise, his troops would never have been defeated by the Red Army. John F. Kennedy couldn't have been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald—this was clearly a CIA operation. And we can count countless such explanations "proving" that neither the Russians, nor the Arabs, nor the Vietnamese, nor the Japanese could have accomplished what was always achieved by Christian white cabals. This kind of analysis saves time and lightens the burden of thought. In the 1950s, wasn't the fear of nuclear war responsible for UFO hallucinations?

J.P. Petit's Note:
This reminds me of Pravda’s position, echoed by the French communist newspaper L'Humanité: "UFOs take off from the pages of bourgeois newspapers to divert workers from their just demands."

Some American left-wing activists believe every rain is a prelude to a rainbow. One of them, although mocking the idea of an "inside conspiracy" on September 11, 2001, told me: "What interests me in this affair is discovering how many people are willing to believe that Bush either orchestrated the attacks or knew they would happen and let them unfold. This suggests that a very large number of Americans no longer trust their leaders. And that's what matters." "I'm not sure," I replied, "that such cynicism brings any advantage. It demobilizes and distances the public from political struggles that could be productive." For the conspiracy theory arises from despair and political infantilism. Imagining it could lead to progressive energy is like believing a ranting lunatic shouting on a street corner will inevitably reveal great oratorical talent.

J.P. Petit's Note:
These remarks echo those of communists who criticized questioning about Stalinist camps, arguing "this might demobilize the left electorate." People of my generation lived through that.

In his book on British intelligence services, Richard J. Aldrich describes how a Pentagon report recommended posting recently declassified documents about Kennedy’s assassination onto the Internet. The goal? "To appease the public's endless desire to know 'secrets' by providing them with diversionary material." And Aldrich adds: "If investigative journalists and contemporary historians spend all their time on tangled, worn-out questions, we'll see them less in places where they aren't welcome (6)." Can we then imagine that the White House is pleased with the obsession over the "9/11 conspiracy," which diverts attention from the thousand and one real machinations of the current system of domination? More fundamentally, philosopher Theodor Adorno argued in Minima Moralia (7) that "a penchant for occultism is a symptom of the regression of consciousness."

Alexander Cockburn.

J.P. Petit's Note:
These remarks echo those of communists who criticized questioning about Stalinist camps, arguing "this might demobilize the left electorate." People of my generation lived through that.

J.P. Petit's Note:
These remarks echo those of communists who criticized questioning about Stalinist camps, arguing "this might demobilize the left electorate." People of my generation lived through that.

The readers’ reactions mentioned by the newspaper were quite strong.

The 9/11 Conspiracy Will Not Happen

Alexander Cockburn’s article, “”, published in our December edition, has provoked a large number of responses, often very detailed, dissecting each element of the investigation into that day's events. We can only publish a few excerpts from some of these letters.

Mr. Max Guérin writes to us:

This article is insulting to those whose only fault is asking for the reopening of an investigation into 9/11. In the book by David Ray Griffin, criticized by Alexander Cockburn, the astonishing non-intervention of U.S. military aircraft constitutes just one of many elements casting doubt on the official version of events. Regarding the claim in the article author’s argument that it's impossible for a large number of accomplices (or witnesses) to have remained silent about the attacks they participated in—or about which some of their close ones were victims—it is enough to observe the media blackout and disinformation surrounding the demand to reopen the investigation to understand that this hypothesis is entirely feasible.

Finally, contrary to what Mr. Cockburn claims, those who believe in a 9/11 conspiracy are capable of placing it within a broader context marked by the crisis of capital accumulation or inter-imperialist rivalries. Indeed, the global repercussions and shockwaves of an independent investigation would sweep away everything, including these general mechanisms of domination. On the contrary, refusing such an investigation is what "demobilizes and distances the population from political struggles that could be productive"...

Mr. Dominique Larchey-Wendling, researcher at CNRS, is no less critical:

I was deeply shocked by Alexander Cockburn’s article. His position didn’t surprise me, given that I read his Counterpunch letter daily. He censors the description of the events of 9/11 there, and doesn't hide it. The text you published contains gross inaccuracies along with insults directed at the 9/11 Truth movement ("Truth about 9/11").

For example, how can one repeat Mr. Spinney’s testimony that his driver saw the passengers’ faces through the windows of the plane crashing into the Pentagon (Flight AA77)? Even at rest, you’d have great difficulty distinguishing anything through the windows of a 757 from 100 meters away. Note here that I am not taking a stance on whether Flight AA77 actually crashed into the Pentagon.

Those who have opposed the official version and demanded a genuine investigation include: Messrs. Paul Craig Roberts (Treasury Secretary in the Reagan administration), Daniel Ellsberg (who revealed the "Pentagon Papers" on U.S. involvement in Indochina), Scott Ritter (chief UN inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998), Michael Meacher (former UK Health Minister under Blair), Andreas Von Bullow (former German Defense Secretary), Leonid Ivashov (former Russian Chief of Staff), and Hosni Mubarak (President of Egypt).

I am disappointed. On the issue of 9/11, you position yourselves as guardians of the temple, which is not what I expect. I expect insights and analyses based on facts and investigations—I expect better than what one can read elsewhere in the press. Your credibility rests on your readers’ loyalty and trust in your independence, not on your alignment with the dominant ideology of your shareholders.

Mr. Christophe Delliere is no more convinced by our article:

Thus, a single word from a sentence in a book over three hundred pages long [by David Ray Griffin] would be enough for you to conclude that anyone who believes the Bush administration was totally incompetent (as were the involved civilian and military agencies), and that everything resulted from unfortunate circumstances, is reasonable and perceptive—while someone questioning whether such a series of disasters is plausible is an idiot... Mr. Cockburn knows an engineer who analyzed the technical aspects of the towers’ collapse. But why drown us in an avalanche of inaccessible technical data? Other engineers have also analyzed these data and reached clearer conclusions. The only solution would be to confront both hypotheses and hold a real debate.

Mr. Yann Kindo, on the other hand, argues:

To the theoretical weaknesses of those supporting the "9/11 conspiracy" thesis, highlighted by the author, I would add the emptiness of their strategic thinking. Basically, the mechanism seems to be this: when one feels crushed and powerless to develop a credible perspective to resist the adversary’s crushing force, one retreats into fantastical explanations of its power. These offer both the intellectual comfort of "the one who understands hidden mechanisms that others, intoxicated by dominant ideology, fail to grasp," and the advantage of not having to define long, arduous tasks—such as building an anti-war movement—when it's so much more pleasant to endlessly discourse on the internet.

Alexander Cockburn’s article, “”, published in our December edition, has provoked a large number of responses, often very detailed, dissecting each element of the investigation into that day's events. We can only publish a few excerpts from some of these letters.

Mr. Max Guérin writes to us:

This article is insulting to those whose only fault is asking for the reopening of an investigation into 9/11. In the book by David Ray Griffin, criticized by Alexander Cockburn, the astonishing non-intervention of U.S. military aircraft constitutes just one of many elements casting doubt on the official version of events. Regarding the claim in the article author’s argument that it's impossible for a large number of accomplices (or witnesses) to have remained silent about the attacks they participated in—or about which some of their close ones were victims—it is enough to observe the media blackout and disinformation surrounding the demand to reopen the investigation to understand that this hypothesis is entirely feasible.

Finally, contrary to what Mr. Cockburn claims, those who believe in a 9/11 conspiracy are capable of placing it within a broader context marked by the crisis of capital accumulation or inter-imperialist rivalries. Indeed, the global repercussions and shockwaves of an independent investigation would sweep away everything, including these general mechanisms of domination. On the contrary, refusing such an investigation is what "demobilizes and distances the population from political struggles that could be productive"...

Mr. Dominique Larchey-Wendling, researcher at CNRS, is no less critical:

I was deeply shocked by Alexander Cockburn’s article. His position didn’t surprise me, given that I read his Counterpunch letter daily. He censors the description of the events of 9/11 there, and doesn't hide it. The text you published contains gross inaccuracies along with insults directed at the 9/11 Truth movement ("Truth about 9/11").

For example, how can one repeat Mr. Spinney’s testimony that his driver saw the passengers’ faces through the windows of the plane crashing into the Pentagon (Flight AA77)? Even at rest, you’d have great difficulty distinguishing anything through the windows of a 757 from 100 meters away. Note here that I am not taking a stance on whether Flight AA77 actually crashed into the Pentagon.

Those who have opposed the official version and demanded a genuine investigation include: Messrs. Paul Craig Roberts (Treasury Secretary in the Reagan administration), Daniel Ellsberg (who revealed the "Pentagon Papers" on U.S. involvement in Indochina), Scott Ritter (chief UN inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998), Michael Meacher (former UK Health Minister under Blair), Andreas Von Bullow (former German Defense Secretary), Leonid Ivashov (former Russian Chief of Staff), and Hosni Mubarak (President of Egypt).

I am disappointed. On the issue of 9/11, you position yourselves as guardians of the temple, which is not what I expect. I expect insights and analyses based on facts and investigations—I expect better than what one can read elsewhere in the press. Your credibility rests on your readers’ loyalty and trust in your independence, not on your alignment with the dominant ideology of your shareholders.

Mr. Christophe Delliere is no more convinced by our article:

Thus, a single word from a sentence in a book over three hundred pages long [by David Ray Griffin] would be enough for you to conclude that anyone who believes the Bush administration was totally incompetent (as were the involved civilian and military agencies), and that everything resulted from unfortunate circumstances, is reasonable and perceptive—while someone questioning whether such a series of disasters is plausible is an idiot... Mr. Cockburn knows an engineer who analyzed the technical aspects of the towers’ collapse. But why drown us in an avalanche of inaccessible technical data? Other engineers have also analyzed these data and reached clearer conclusions. The only solution would be to confront both hypotheses and hold a real debate.

Mr. Yann Kindo, on the other hand, argues:

To the theoretical weaknesses of those supporting the "9/11 conspiracy" thesis, highlighted by the author, I would add the emptiness of their strategic thinking. Basically, the mechanism seems to be this: when one feels crushed and powerless to develop a credible perspective to resist the adversary’s crushing force, one retreats into fantastical explanations of its power. These offer both the intellectual comfort of "the one who understands hidden mechanisms that others, intoxicated by dominant ideology, fail to grasp," and the advantage of not having to define long, arduous tasks—such as building an anti-war movement—when it's so much more pleasant to endlessly discourse on the internet.

The content of Cock