On 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

They’re more common than you may think. Widespread belief in 9/11 conspiracy theories is a symptom of our fractured political condition.  They show just how suspicious many Americans have become. It’s a long way from the sense of national unity Americans felt immediately after September 11, 2001.

Opinions about alleged 9/11 conspiracies can be passionate.  Although some people aren’t sure what to think, many others are very sure. To those who believe, the theories are obviously true. To those who don’t, it’s just as obvious that the theories are full of holes.

Is there any validity to these 9/11 conspiracy theories? How people respond to such questions seems to depend largely on pre-existing attitudes about authority and evidence.

Many  believers of 9/11 conspiracy theories seem to already inclined to be cynical about the government more generally. They are skeptical of Washington’s pronouncements and often suspicious of the motives of government, as well as big business and the media.

On the other side are the people who are certain that the whole 9/11 story has already been told. They seem to be more trusting of America’s institutions and accept the official accounts of that horrible day. To them, people who believe 9/11 conspiracy theories are either misguided or on the lunatic fringe.

What all this suggests is that what a person thinks about 9/11 conspiracy theories is often a reflection of beliefs people already have about American government and institutions.

But in many ways this is not surprising.  The U.S. government has been its own worst enemy in refuting conspiracy theories. Washington’s unfortunate history of selectively disclosing facts — or worse, sometimes covering them up  – has led some Americans to discard almost all official declarations. From the revelations in the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War to some of the embarrassing material in WikiLeaks in recent months, the government’s efforts to be secretive have sometimes undermined its credibility.

Still, 9/11conspiracy theories often seem to be very complicated ways of addressing such doubts. They seem to be extremely complex answers to real questions that have more straightforward explanations. For example, they tend to propose that an enormous number of people were “in” on the plot and that events witnessed by many people were not at all as they appeared. Some of the theories are technically possible, but they tend to be very complicated. Are they really a better explanation than the “official” explanation?

When trying to sort out competing explanations for events, it is sometimes wise to remember the advice of Occam’s Razor. This is the ancient principle that recommends when faced with a choice between competing explanations, usually the one requiring the fewest assumptions is best. Simpler explanations are usually better, in other words.

With this in mind, the official account of the 9/11 tragedy seems mostly credible: A few men boarded and commandeered commercial jetliners and intentionally crashed them. As shocking as the events were, in hindsight the attacks were actually rather crude in conception and all too easy to accomplish. It was a relatively simple plan that exploited the security systems that were then in place. (One summary of the science behind the standard account was published in Popular Mechanics here.)

Still, this does not mean that the official account has correctly identified every fact or revealed everything that is known. And it does not mean that some of the questions posed by 9/11 conspiracy theories do not warrant further examination. Quite obviously, there are mountains of small details, and governments seldom reveal everything they know. It’s reasonable to wonder about the details we may not know. Yet, even allowing for these, the main thrust of the official explanation seems correct. A more complicated, conspiratorial explanation does not appear to answer questions about 9/11 questions better than the more common explanation.

But 9/11 conspiracy theories have a life of their own and are unlikely to go away anytime soon. Conspiracy-oriented thinking has been a fixture in American politics for a long time. In our world of polarized politics and skepticism about Washington, it’s hard to imagine they will fade away in the immediate future.

-G.A.

Image (above): Public domain photo, WikiCommons

Shelter from the Past

Back in the days of the Cold War, the understandable anxieties felt by Americans found many forms of expression. A common question was: How does one plan for a dangerous and uncertain future in which nuclear annihilation seemed a distinct possibility?

Building your own bomb shelter was one frequent answer to that question. The government gave advice about how best to accomplish this, and many people took advantage of it.

We tend to think those days are over. Let’s hope so. But in the globalized world, it’s hard to know if we can ever really stow away the doomsday fears that were once more out in the open.

Here’s one of the images distributed by the U.S. government in the late 1950s.

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Source: National Archives

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Oil stories

In the United States, oil has long been the source of profit and problems.

This image (a government photo) was introduced as evidence in a Texas court case in 1929. It shows an oil rig that was constructed to deceive land purchasers.

Oil, it seems, is the stuff of dreams and deception.

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Image source: National Archives

Consider the year 1979, which is not exactly ancient times. Even though many of the problems from that year continue to exert some influence in the world today, we tend to not think much about them. But there was a lot going on back in 1979: The revolution in Iran swept the Ayatollah Khomeini into power; Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq; the Three-Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania had a partial meltdown; the USSR invaded Afghanistan. And, interstingly enough there was a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

On June 3, 1979, the Ixtoc I oil well blew out. The rig burned down and huge amounts of oil leaked into the open water. The incident was widely reported at the time. It was later one of the topics investigated during preparaton of the Oil Pollution act of 1990, which came as a response to the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.

Over the duration of the Ixtoc spill, many approaches to solving the problem were tried. But it took months before the leak was capped. The total result was that about 475,000 metric tons [emphasis added] of oil spilled into the Gulf, according to “Ixtoc I: A Case Study of the World’s Largest Oil Spill” (a paper published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; find it here). The authors of this paper conclude that of this amount, “approximately 24,000 metric tons of oil landed on Mexican beaches, about 4000 metric tons landed on Texas beaches.”

Apparently, there are more than a few similarities between the 1979 incident and the problem in the Gulf today. But so far, other than a mention on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC and a few other sources, there seems to be little awareness of the Ixtoc incident, or of other major oil spills. The way government officials speak about the BP spill of 2010, moreover, makes it unclear whether they are even aware of the past history of this type of incident. Surely, one cannot learn from something if one is unaware of it or if one has only a passing familiarity with it.

The entire history of major oil spills prompts many questions that could help us understand better how these sorts of situations develop an how best to prevent them. The whole business certainly makes a person wonder about a lot of things.

Our culture has long subscribed to the theory that “bigger is better.” Sometimes, the evidence suggests this can be true. What this expression fails to note, however, is that it isn’t better if the bigger thing breaks. And we’ve had plenty of evidence in recent times to suggest we have a long way to go in the reliability department for many “big” things.

Much of the time, large-scale systems can work fine and have only minor glitches that are easily fixed. Such successes bolster our confidence, which can be a positive thing. But large-scale systems are also susceptible to system-wide failure sometimes. When this happens, the results can be catastrophic.

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is our most recent reminder of this fact. For a time, the oil rig performed well and caused little concern. Yet, when it did break down, it quickly became evident that the problem would not easily be contained. (Read a report about this incident here.) As of this writing, it is still too soon to tell how much damage will be done, or what the long-term consequences to the environment and the economy will be. But it appears to be a grave situation with the potential for major, long-term negative effects.

The Gulf oil spill follows closely on the heals of Hurricane Katrina, which led to disaster in the region. It’s easy to see these as different sorts of phenomena, with one being a technological failure and the other being an unavoidable act of nature. Yet we now know that human engineering and development decisions played a large part in the Katrina disaster. The system of levees devised for the region was not up to the task, as became all too apparent  when Katrina hit. (See a report about the levee failure here.) And the large-scale systems in place to address a catastrophe were chaotic disasters themselves, inflicting mayhem on much of the population in New Orleans and elsewhere. Indeed, it is hard not to conclude that the Katrina disaster was as much the result of poor human decision-making as it was an uncontrollable outburst from Mother Nature.

In a different arena, we have witnessed a series of problems with the food supply, as flaws in centralized production facilities fan out to affect — and sometime infect — people from across the country. Contamination or cross-contamination in a small facility, with a small market is still a serious matter, of course, but it is by definition of a smaller scale, which should be easier to contain. When a mega-facility is distributing its product over a wide area, the potential problems also have the capability of being scattered across a wide swath of the population. (See a report on that topic from Science Daily here.) The large-scale and resulting centralization of production, it turns out, not only can be a solution to one set of problems, but also the source of new large-scale problems.

On a regional, but still revealing scale, the metropolitan water system in the greater Boston area was disrupted for 2 million people yesterday, as a huge pipe sprung a leak at the rate of 8 million gallons per hour at one point. The section of the pipeline in question was relatively new. (According to press accounts, it was maybe less that 10 years old.) It is highly doubtful that its makers thought it break down in such a spectacular fashion in less than a decade. (See a related story from Boston.com here.) But although some back-up systems were in place, this episode revealed how reliant the area has become on a large, single solution to an ongoing human need.

The list of large-scale projects with unanticipated consequences goes on and on. Sometimes these huge endeavors seem too perfect to fail. Yet, like the Titanic, they sometimes do. The point is not to completely shy away from big projects, but rather, to note that we often do not choose such projects wisely and don’t make the necessary plans in case things don’t work out. Beyond that, the “bigger is better” culture seems to blind us too frequently to smaller, more localized solutions to problems that may be quite viable if  only we were to investigate them more to find out.

For the most part, however, people seem not to question the “bigger is better” philosophy that has provided material comforts for the past several generations. Confidence is often a good thing, of course. But as systems, of all different sorts, get larger and larger, questions of confidence seem increasingly a concern. Humans are fallible, and so are the systems they devise. Grandiosity has an allure in many aspects of life. But it’s not always worth the price.

–G.A.

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Image (above): Lifeboat with survivors of the Titanic, in the collection of the National Archives

Among the world’s most unlikely library fans, we should apparently include Keith Richards of the aging Rolling Stones rock ‘n’ roll band. In his autobiography, Richards says not only that books were his first love, but that public libraries are “a great equaliser.” (The Richards story appeared in The Guardian, which can be accessed here.)

Indeed, public libraries remain one of our most important institutions. They’re still revolutionary experiments in the sharing of resources and ideas. With a mission to serve everyone in a community, they provide enormous value, regardless of a person’s wealth, or status, or level of education.

Libraries of all sorts are in the midst of a potentially radical transformation as the result of the Internet age. Indeed, some of what libraries can provide is now freely and directly available via the Internet. To be sure, for many people, Google is the new card catalogue. But libraries, and the professionals staffing them, provide more than simply access to information and data files. The level and variety of services available in modern public libraries far exceeds the stereotyped picture that many people still have in mind.

Despite their clear value, the current economic crisis is creating quite a challenge for public libraries almost everywhere. (See, as only one example, a story about funding cuts in West Virginia here.) They’ll need increased public support in order to continue providing service to their communities.

Don’t take my word for it. If you haven’t visited your library lately– whether its physical building or Internet presence — take a moment to check it out. You might be pleasantly surprised.

You can also read a story about public libraries in The Huffington Post here.

–GA

Although mired in nuclear controversies with North Korea — about overt weapons development — and Iran –about suspected nuclear weapons development — the United States has reached an accord about the peaceful use of nuclear energy with its one-time foe, Vietnam. As recently announced, the former adversaries signed a Memorandum of Understanding that will guide Vietnam’s development of nuclear energy options in the future. (Read more about the agreement in the English language version of the

For many Americans, the word “Vietnam” still evokes memories of a divisive war in which more than 58,000 U.S. troops perished. That war ended two years after American troops were withdrawn under a peace accord with North Vietnam in 1973. Vietnam, which was split in two during the war years, was reunified into a single country in 1975. For many years following, the United States and Vietnam did not maintain any diplomatic relations. It was not until 15 years ago that full diplomatic ties were established.

Surely one of the more interesting and important aspects of any war’s history lies in the story of what follows it. Since the war, strains between the The U.S. and Vietnam persisted for a long time, and for some citizens the trauma will never fully heal. However, evidence that  the two former enemies can now work together in a peaceful way provides something of a hopeful note.

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Image (above): E.P.A. photograph of Gamma radiation counters, 1972. Public domain photo in the collection of the National Archives.

On the Difficulty of Fighting a War Against Behavior

As the United States wages its abstract War on Terror (or Terrorism, as it is called sometimes), it’s useful to remember the other  war on a behavior that it has been waging, and not really winning, for the past  four decades. That other troublesome, abstract conflict is the War on Drugs. It’s hard to see how anyone could claim that a victory is at hand there. Yet, the difficulty that the War on Drugs presents may have important lessons for thinking about the  War on Terror, as that conflict continues into the unknown future.

The more old-fashioned war in Vietnam was still ongoing when Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. (See a timeline of the War on Drugs in an National Public Radio entry here.) In reality, American policies prohibiting, regulating, and criminalizing drugs had started at the beginning of that century. But with the rise of drug culture and its spread to the middle class in the 1960s, a new sense of unease prompted additional vigilance. But as we now know, drug use is a behavior that is not easily stamped out. And so while there are many instances of progress — and many individuals have broken free from drug addiction — it’s hard to say that the War on Drugs has been won.

As much as the War on Drugs may have taken a back seat to the War on Terror in recent years,  it still continues. Yet it does not seem, to the layperson, as though a successful end to it is anywhere in sight. And in Afghanistan, the two wars now intersect. Opium fields, which provide a way of life in much of rural Afghanistan and are therefore entwined in the military operations there, would not exist were there not strong demand for the opiates they provide the raw materials for.  Even now, American military leaders face a difficult choice: Should they help eradicate poppy fields when they come across them, thereby perhaps angering the local farmers who rely on them for income. Or should they leave the fields alone, which would help flood the global heroin market?  For the moment, US officials have cautiously chosen the second option. (See a recent New York Times story about that here.)  It remains to be seen how that will play out in the future.

Closer to home, the American appetite for illicit drugs continues to motivate vast and violent international criminal activities.  In recent years, the Colombian drug cartels have focused their attentions on the European market, where profits are high and there are multiple points of entry. (See a related Boston Globe story from a few years ago here.) That’s left much of the American cocaine market up for grabs. This has fueled the escalation of deadly violence in neighboring Mexico, where the death toll continues to soar. (See a recent story in The Guardian here.)

With any luck, the War on Terror will turn out better than the War on Drugs has, at least so far. In the meantime, it might be a good idea to think about these apparently different kinds of war in terms of what they can show us about stamping out an enemy that transcends national borders or interests and continues to attract new “recruits” as the years pass.

–G.A.

Image (above): U.S. Army soldiers with Bear Troop, 8th Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment fortify an Afghan Highway Police checkpoint in Robat, Afghanistan, March 19, 2010. United States Department of Defense photo.

The farewell address of President Dwight Eisenhower is one of the few political speeches to not only retain its timeliness over generations, but arguably to have grown in importance over those same years. In that speech from January 17, 1961, Eisenhower famously warned of the dangers of a permanent “military-industrial complex” and its “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” As Eisenhower observed,  ”Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Yet, the address contains other importance messages that remain surprisingly relevant. On the topic of science, for example, he noted that “holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Considering the contentious debates about climate change, evolution, and biological research, we can imagine similar words being written today.

Eisenhower also spoke tellingly of challenges ahead in international relations, which is all the more interesting since he was speaking at the height of the Cold War, when the super powers of the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to control the world’s destiny (at least in their own eyes). Yet, his words offer advice for the post-Cold War world of decentralized power and multilateralism. Indeed, he quite insightfully observed that “this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength.”

Eisenhower’s presidency receives less attention than is directed toward those of the more colorful holders of that powerful office. But he led the nation at a pivotal time in its history. Regardless of your own political beliefs, Eisenhower’s words are still worth reading and considering.

You can listen to the entire Farewell Address here, courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library. The full text is also available here.

–GA

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Image credit: National Archives, public domain photo