Conspiracy?!

(originally written September 2011)

With the 10 year anniversary of 9/11 we will be reminded of the horrific events that changed America a decade ago, retold firsthand accounts of heroism, unthinkable pain and in some cases, unbelievable luck. However this anniversary also grants, if only by default, a soap box to many political groups, op-ed columnists, and the ever popular conspiracy theorists. While some look at the claims of this last group and wonder if a local psych ward is missing a few residents, we shouldn't be surprised that this group exists, and at least for a time, was far more popular than many think. The lone gunman theory has never sat well with us Yankess. Here in America it's difficult to conceive that lives here can be taken so easily, so capriciously, and without regard for what we hope is the best defense system in the world. Pearl Harbor. JFK. The Twin Towers. We refuse to accept the answers we've been given. There simply had to be more to it than that. Ironically this is the lone instance where many people who regularly berate the government for their stupidity and inability to accomplish anything do a 180 and claim that not only is the government intelligent and proficient, it is stealthy and thorough enough to somehow fabricate an incredible hoax that the majority of thinking citizens accept. I mean, come on. Either G.W. is a fumbling dunce or an evil genius. You can't really have it both ways.

Fast forward to today, where I read an article with interview snippets from several leading conspiracy theorists, including David Ray Griffin, Kevin Barrett, and Dylan Avery, a young New Yorker who produced a "documentary" that became a focal point of the conspiracy theorist's movement and promptly much mainstream press in the process. The creative process he describes is telling:

"It was just so easy to believe anything terrible about your government because you were seeing all of these terrible things. They were doing all of these terrible things right on front of our faces, so why wouldn't they do terribloe things behind closed doors?"

Why not, indeed? Avery's initial offering cost $2000 and was widely criticized, even by those in his own camp, for factual errors. Incidently, Webster defines a documentary as "employing documentation in literature or art; broadly: FACTUAL, OBJECTIVE ". After trimming out some the the more outrageous claims, he re-cut and released his film in 2005 at "the perfect time". The perfect time being the lowest approval rating Bush had enjoyed to that time. People were foaming at the mouth. Wanting revenge, an outlet for their anger. And by twisting the facts in his film (which has since been re-cut twice more to remove further inaccuracies), Avery granted them the thing they wanted most: an illusion of righteous indignation. Any of this starting to sound familiar?



In subsequent years these movements went through a precipitous decline in popularity, and Avery decided to do some homework. Not on the reasons his movement is losing speed, mind you. No, he did actual homework on the events of 9/11.

"Since 2006 Avery has re-cut the film twice more, removing some of the more outrageous accusations, like the claim that Flight 93 had been diverted to Cleveland Hopkins Airport rather than crashing in Pennsylvania and that calls made from the plane had been faked using "voice-morphing" technology. After interviewing some of the Pentagon witnesses in person, Avery has even backed away from the stance that it was a missile and not a plane that hit the Pentagon. "It's easy to come to conclusions when a) you don't have a lot of information at your disposal and b) you haven't had a chance to actually talk to people who were there," Avery says."
I'm sorry, what was that last part? For a minute it sounded like...

"It's easy to come to conclusions when a) you don't have a lot of information at your disposal and b) you haven't had a chance to actually talk to people who were there."

Now, I'm no filmmaker, but I would have thought that both of those items would be pretty high up on the list of pre-requisites to do a documentary. Avery now says his keen insight is that the organization of these attacks had to go beyond the Bush administration (i just can't...even...ahh, see the end of paragraph 1), and the fact that the government had warning and should have been able to prevent these attacks. Sounds strangely like...what sane people have been saying all along. In retrospect, Avery admits getting "sucked into a hardcore mentality that it was almost too easy to get into back then, because the war had just started and everybody was just so pissed off." Doesn't sound like conspiricist propoganda, sound more like...an apology. Well, apology accepted. But it's not me you should be apologizing to.