There were fatal misstatements of fact and key omissions in the BBC's programme on the nine eleven "conspiracy theories" which aired last night.
As opposed to the excellently sourced material for even
one of the Truther claims.
The programme highlighted the most sensational and lurid allegations including a bizarre anti-semitic rumour which can only increase tensions in the Middle East.
Well, it was the one programme covering the issue, so it really had to pick and choose its targets. And in fact it hardly touched on the
really lurid allegations, including laser weapon demolition, no planes (holograms) in NYC, complicity of the Vice President, complicity of firemen and policemen on the ground and any number of others - published in other disappointed lists of what the programme didn't cover, in fact.
It ignored more widely held theories that rogue elements in the CIA facilitated the 911 attacks to help establish the war on terror.
Actually I'd never heard that one, and I've been reading the theories here and on the 9/11 sites for a year or two. So I think we'll forgive the BBC this one lapse.... It
did mention the conspiracy theory that laid the blame on the Bush Administration itself, and for the reasons stated - to justify the war on terror etc. Slightly more important than that it was just rogue elements in the CIA.
1. The programme claimed that the Washington's official 911 investigation found no conspiracy. However it was built in to the terms of reference of the 911 Commission that no individual in the US should be singled out for blame, even accusations of incompetence were not allowed. When commission chair Thomas Kean commented that heads should have rolled there was a storm of protest in Washington and Kean withdrew his remarks.
erm, but the programme mentioned the 9/11 Commission in the context of the opposition to which the conspiracy theories have begun. In addition there is a difference between deciding that "heads should roll" - a phrase which implies negligence or incompetence rather than criminal responsibility - and an actual conspiracy, so even if Kean had been allowed to name the people he thought should have been fired, this would not amount to him discovering a conspiracy in the sense of the conspiracy theories being promulgated.
2. The programme claimed that the official NIST investigation of the collapsing towers confirmed the official story. However the evidence produced by NIST did not support the NIST conclusions. NIST also made it clear that it had made no attempt to explain the most suspicious elements of all: the speed of collapse and the total destruction of the central core down to ground level. This canard has been repeated across the mainstream media most recently by George Monbiot in a bizarre article in the Guardian comparing "conspiracists" to a virus.
Why do I remember seeing explanations for the fast collapse in the NIST report?
3. The programme suggested that the "conspiracy theorists" were causing grief to the relatives of the victims. They failed to mention that it was the relatives of the victims whose pressure led to the creation of the 911 Commission and that a large number of victims relatives angrily dispute the official story. Indeed one victim, William Rodriguez, an eyewitness who claims the bombs were set in the basement of the buildings, is touring Britain at the moment. The BBC has refused to interview him on any of its programmes.
Evidence for this refusal? Of course
some victims' families called for the 9/11 commission, and
some victims' families "dispute the official story" (which is not the same as believing the government actually murdered their loved ones. However,
some victims were FDNY officers (just for example) and conspiracy theorists have specifically maligned many of those firemen.
4. The programme stated that the debris trail from flight ninety three was consistent with a crash rather than a shoot down. It closely examined the weakest evidence and failed to mention the strongest evidence.
Which is? As has been pointed out many times, the debris from a shot down aircraft which broke up in mid-air would spread far more than the 8 miles that light material is recorded as having travelled.
It appeared to misunderstand the allegations that a mystery plane landed in Cleveland airport.
Not as far as I recall. The mystery plane was due to a mis-statement by the Mayor of Cleveland based on inaccurate reports in the first hour. That is what the programme investigated and revealed, as well as the true identity of that Cleveland flight. Is there some other understanding we're supposed to have of this?
5. The programme stated that there "happened to be" a "routine defence training exercise" on the morning of the nine eleven attacks. It failed to mention that these "routine" exercises contained a hushed up "anti-hijack exercise" which only came to light with the unofficial release of secret tapes from NORAD. The BBC must have been aware of the contents of these tapes because they ran an excerpt on the programme.
But the substance of the 9/11 conspiracy theories do not rest upon the fact that there was an anti-hijack exercise going on, that that exercise was a secret because it was part of the National Defence, and that those participants failed to do the actual thing they were exercising. The
programme was pointing out the failures of the very people supposed to be protecting New York from the attack it suffered when it mentioned the anti-hijack exercise. As I recall, the programme
did mention that it was an exercise for exactly this sort of thing, and here's another clue - sometimes you don't spell out in narration something that is made clear in the taped evidence you are broadcasting.
6. The programme falsely stated that the Pentagon "gave inaccurate information" to the official inquiries due to "human error in the fog of war". But the inquiries took place some years later. In fact 911 Commission officials determined that the falsehoods from the Pentagon were not due to the fog of war and there were grounds for bringing criminal prosecutions against Pentagon officials.
Wow. Something that has some basis in fact, at last.
7. The programme failed to mention the blocking of FBI officials in Minnesota who correctly suspected that Zacharias Moussaoui was involved in a plot to fly planes into the World Trade Centre weeks before the attacks. Despite sixty memos to FBI headquarters these officials were refused permission to examine Moussaoui's laptop on legally spurious grounds. However the programme had a murky and confusing description of a second similar incident.
One of only a number of items that there was presumably simply not time to include. Give them a break, or make a better sixty minutes yourself.
Ian Henshall is the UK's leading author on the subject with 911 Revealed favourably reviewed in The Daily Mail and the Sunday Times and letters carried in The Guardian. However the programme makers made no attempt to contact him.
Diddums.
Is there a conspiracy across the media to spread canards and misinformation? No.
Is there shoddy research, incompetence and a refusal to admit newsrooms bought a lemon from the CIA? Yes.
Is there any evidence that any mainstream media outlet relied
at all on CIA source material, as opposed to talking to many of the people involved from all points of view and walks of life?
Is there a policy to smear dissenters as "conspiracy theorists" approved by top management at the BBC? Presumably, after all the official story is a conspiracy theory too, and a widely discredited one at that.
Ian Henshall
No, there is no policy to "smear dissenters". In fact the programme demonstrated considerable dissent on its own part, in promoting the idea that the Government was involved in a cover up of the failings of the CIA, the FBI and the military.
"Discredited" does not mean "disbelieved by loons", if you are referring to the concept that US-hating Islamist suicide terrorists actually did this thing. A mountain of evidence has been made public, that Muslim men in their 20s to their 40s, recorded as having boarded the planes, were discovered to have been associated with Islamist movements, had trained as pilots, had trained in Al Q'aeda camps, had appeared in videos extolling their operation and their spiritual leader Osama Bin Laden, had left wills and otherwise dealt with their affairs, and have disappeared, presumed vaporised. I've read many CT theories about 9/11 - regarding demolition, regarding foreknowledge and put options. But other than "Are you stupid enough to believe that 19 guys with box cutters could do this thing?" I've never read anything that actually
discredited the "official story".