Howard Johnson Should Have This Many Flavors

There's not a week goes by that we don't get a commenter or an emailer saying, "Yeah, you can debunk Loose Change, but what about [insert favorite conspiracy film/book/website here]". To a certain extent, this is a fool's errand, as there are as many varieties of the 9-11 "Truth" as there are "Truthers", but they all more or less use the same methods--quote mining, acceptance of dubious sources, reliance on the one witness who saw something different....

But I did think I'd take up at least one of the challenges. I was able to download a copy of Webster Tarpley's Synthetic Terror and will be reading it over the next week or so to give you an idea of my thoughts on it.

Tarpley begins with his initial thoughts as 9-11 happened:


(click pix to enlarge)

Note particularly that Tarpley knew "immediately". This is a common theme of a fair percentage of the Deniers; our buddy Gypsy Taub, for example said in USA Today:

"Oh yeah, absolutely. On the day it happened, I thought it was the government that did it," she said.

And the second part, about what the "intention of its planners" is just plain weird.

Tarpley then delves into his claims that terrorist groups in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s were run by NATO. As evidence he points to this:



And if France had seen an upsurge in terrorism, that would also have proven that NATO was behind it, right?

Tarpley goes on to claim that Aldo Moro (a former prime minister of Italy) was killed by NATO intelligence, not the Red Brigades terror group that claimed responsibility at the time. I don't intend to get into the Moro case here; it's peripheral and even if we accept Tarpley's convoluted conspiracy theory, it amounts to the old, "If they would do X, why wouldn't they do Y" argument, which is not evidence.

There is one bit that seems a bit bizarre here:



In fact, Negri was pretty quickly cleared of being involved in the Red Brigades, and appears to have been sentenced more on the basis of his writings than on any actual actions he had undertaken; note in particular that France refused to extradite him to Italy for fourteen years. I'm not a big fan of revolutionary Marxists, but I'm also not a big fan of imprisoning them for their writings.