Why the 9-11 Denial Movement Has Failed

Here's a discouraged Denier.

There's a simple flaw that he proceeds from right in the beginning:

We began this movement to convince the American public and the world that the official story of 9/11 was a lie, and that ruling factions within our own government were the real perpetrators. This we accomplished. Opinion polls conducted over the last two years show that the majority of Americans believe the US government was complicit.

Now, if you start from the assumption that the majority of Americans believe in 9-11 nuttery, then you will absolutely be discouraged by the results. Nobody's revolting? The media are ignoring you? The Democrats are specifically denying talk of impeachment? However, if you realize that 9-11 Denial is still a kooky fringe movement (not likely for a Denier of course), you'd be encouraged by the (quite evident) signs of growth.

But I gotta snicker at much of the rest of the post. For example, he talks about the disinfo agents:

One lesson the shadow government has learned over the last 40 years is that the best way to defeat your opposition is to become your opposition, and like many of those phony socialist and anti-war groups on college campuses that suck rebellious student energy and dissipate it ineffectively, preventing the formation of a legitimate, effective opposition, so have they taken over a large part of the 9/11 Truth Movement itself, channeling new skeptics (and old) into endless debates around physical evidence and other ineffective actions. During my entire time within the movement, I never once named publicly any individuals or websites I thought were intentionally promoting disinformation, or leading us down useless avenues, nor will I now. (This is to protect myself from reprisals, to avoid the further disruption caused by the endless cycle of "snitch jacketing," and because you can never really prove who is an agent and who is simply duped by the disinfo itself, much of which is easily believable on the surface.) But to prove that agents are among us, and that they have succeeded in taking over the bulk of the movement, one needs to go no further than compare the number of people who believe no plane hit the Pentagon with the number of people who know about the simultaneous wargames that were taking place on the morning of 9/11, and that prevented NORAD from intercepting the planes before they hit their targets.

You see, the no-planers at the Pentagon are proof that the movement has been infiltrated. Yep, it's time to 'fess up: James and I aren't agents of the New World Order, Dylan Avery is.

And when it come time for this Denier to tell us what his private theory is... well, let's just say that he's the first one I've heard propose this:

In my two years of 9/11 truth activism, I never emphasized the physical evidence. I always knew it was a dead end that would suck the movement's energy and accomplish nothing. But let me be straight up for a moment, if a bit speculative, because thinking about these things is helpful. They demolished the World Trade Center towers with explosives. I have no doubt about this, just as I have no doubt that the planes were flown by remote control. I also believe that hijackers did, in fact, board the planes (despite the articles claiming some of those named are still alive). I think the hijackers were trained US operatives (patsies), and that they likely did not know they were going to die. I also think the most probable explanation for the shoot-down of flight 93 is that the passengers did, in fact, storm the cockpit, only to discover that the plane was being flown by remote control. And so in order to prevent any of them from calling their loved ones and blabbing (yes, phones can work on planes), they had to shoot it down. Or perhaps the hijackers themselves learned their real fate and allowed the passengers into the cockpit to try to regain control of the aircraft. We'll never really know, and this is the idea. "Anything can be believed," and so it is equally plausible, as others have speculated, that the shoot-down of Flight 93 was planned from the beginning.

Really?

This hints at the real problem: The lack of a coherent story. Indeed, the success of Loose Change is, in my opinion, largely due to its ability to tie together the disparate elements of the CT into a reasonably tight narrative. Yeah, it's filled with errors, myths and downright lies, but at least it takes a stand. A few months ago there was a debate on RU Sirius about 9-11 Denial. The Denier declined to spell out his theory on the basis that specifying a story had the tendency to split the movement into factions. Well, DUH!

And even when the Deniers do start to seal off certain theories (e.g., no planes at the WTC) as too nutty, the line that they've drawn is hard to justify. No planes is nutty, but a Star Wars Beam Weapon from space is not?

He does bring in one argument that I've not heard before, that tends to "explain" why there's so much "evidence" for the Deniers' case:

But the World Trade Center demolition is obvious, which leads to an important question: why did they do it? Wouldn't simply crashing the planes into the buildings have been enough? Why bring them down completely? The typical responses here apply: They needed their "New Pearl Harbor," a mass casualty event to shock the public into supporting a retaliatory war. They also needed a spectacle that wouldn't be easily forgotten. These explanations are true enough. Another often cited and plausible one is that they needed to make the lie obvious enough that the people who mattered (government, corporate, and military leaders, for example) would know that they--the secret government within the government--did this and got away with it. This sends a powerful message of invincibility to anyone who might be thinking of opposing them. And the fact that they demolished building 7 later that evening in a classic-style demolition sure seems to support that argument. It's as if they were saying, "just in case you didn't get it the first time, we'll show you one even more obvious."