Brainster
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- May 26, 2006
- Messages
- 21,987
Here is a lecture that I delivered to two high school classes this morning. A friend of mine teaches history to teens (my impression is that the youngsters in this class were about 15 years old or so).
I tried to weave in some multimedia and was able to use Google Video to good effect. YouTube is a little more picky if you want to skip ahead to a particular point in a video. I had the entire presentation on a CD Rom, with the text in Word format, and a set of a couple dozen photographs. I had copied all the links from the lecture over to a Word document file so I could quickly go to the websites that I needed to show the information.
It's geared more towards innoculation than anything else; I'll cheerfully admit that I was not trying to give a balanced presentation.
Feel free to make suggestions and use the material. I will probably be giving this presentation again in the future. I'd love to get more amusing stuff in here as well; the kids definitely loved Sophia's clunkety-clunk bit and the South Park clip (the segment I showed was the White House scene where President Bush explains the plot). It ran about 40 minutes, which allowed 10 minutes for questions.
Greetings, fellow guardians of history. I hoped to get a little laughter out of that line, and to be honest with you, a year and a half ago, I would never have considered myself to be a guardian of history either. But life has many surprises for us along the way, and that’s turned out to be one of my duties.
Let’s talk about some famous dates in recent history:
December 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor Attacked
November 22, 1963: President Kennedy Assassinated
September 11, 2001: Terrorist Attacks on New York and Washington DC
Famously disastrous days in the history of the United States.
Also famously days subject to conspiracy theories.
Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory: That FDR knew the Japanese plan and allowed the attacks to happen to draw us into war.
JFK conspiracy theory: There are many but most say that JFK was killed because he was standing in the way of something that Lyndon Johnson did, with escalation of the Vietnam War a common belief.
9-11 conspiracy theory: Bush administration planned and executed the 9-11 attacks or allowed them to happen without planning them.
Common aspects of all three conspiracy theories:
All claim that the government is an all-knowing and all-powerful force, which cannot have failed without failing intentionally.
All seize on minor differences between official reports and newspaper accounts at the time, while ignoring similarities.
All seek to absolve the real perpetrators and to blame others, usually political or other opponents.
Let’s focus on 9-11-01. I’m sure that most of you can remember where you were and what you were doing that day a whole lot better than you can remember 9-21-01 or 9-1-01. This is because 9-11-01 was an extraordinarily significant day in world history, and you witnessed it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJig1wj7oLI
(Cut at 50 seconds)
There is a basic story of 9-11 as most of us understand it. We know that 19 hijackers who were members of Al Qaeda took over four passenger jets and directed them at targets including the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and succeeded in hitting those buildings. The fourth jet, which was intended to crash into another landmark, but this plan was foiled by the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93.
But there is also another story out there that may be more compelling to some. It says that 9-11 was an inside job, that the US government under President Bush and Vice President Cheney either orchestrated the attacks or allowed them to happen. Their goals were to convince the American people to support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Now, I want to emphasize here that you can be opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without believing in the conspiracy theory. You can believe that Bush and Cheney planned to attack Iraq all along and that 9-11 gave them an excuse, without believing in the conspiracy theory. In fact, some of the fiercest opponents of the Bush Administration do not believe in the conspiracy theories. Not a single Democrat currently in Congress who has endorsed the claim that 9-11 was an inside job.
Let’s talk very briefly about the difference between legitimate investigations and conspiracy theories. If you’re legitimately interested in investigating responsibility for 9-11, you’d pretty quickly come to the conclusion that it was Al Qaeda based on the following facts:
1. Phone calls from passengers reported Arabic-looking men had hijacked the planes.
2. 4-5 men with Arabic-sounding names on each flight.
3. One man with an Arabic-sounding name and a pilot’s license on each flight.
4. Ties between the men with Arabic-sounding names and each other and Al Qaeda.
5. History of Al Qaeda terrorist attacks against US targets including USS Cole bombing in 2000 and US embassy bombings in Africa in 1998.
On the other hand, if you’re a conspiracy theorist, you start with the conclusion (Bush/Cheney did it) and sift backwards through the evidence looking for information that supports that “theory”.
This is an extremely difficult task, if you think about it for a second. We can believe that radical Islamic militants would be willing to kill themselves for their cause as there are many examples of them doing that: Palestinian suicide bombers, the July 7, 2005 London subway bombers, etc. But what would motivate the pilots of four US airliners to crash themselves into buildings, thereby killing not only lots of other people, but themselves?
So the theorists concoct elaborate theories. Maybe the US military hijacked the planes with commandos disguised as Arabs, rendered the passengers and pilots unconscious, set the planes on remote control, and parachuted to safety. Or they might propose that the original planes were landed at an Air Force base and substitute unmanned planes were sent to the targets. Here’s a good summary of a conspiracy theory from the show South Park:
(start at 14:41)
You can see how elaborate the scheme has to be to get around the actual facts. And, that is only one “theory” among many. The so-called 9-11 Truth Movement has more flavors than Baskin-Robbins. Some people think the Israelis did it, some say that there were no planes used at all, just computer graphics inserted into our TVs that looked like planes. Some say there were Arab hijackers, but they were just fall guys for the real plotters.
A particularly popular conspiracy theory movie right now is Loose Change. Loose Change claims that all four planes were diverted to an Air Force base somewhere and the passengers were all loaded onto Flight 93, which was diverted to Cleveland, where the passengers were herded into a NASA building and presumably executed. The World Trade Center Towers were hit by Air Force refueling tankers made to look like passenger planes, the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile, and the cellphone calls were faked using voice morphing software.
This is pretty crazy stuff, but Loose Change has a catchy, hip-hop soundtrack, some interesting computer animation, and it throws supposed facts at you so quickly that you don’t have time to think much about what they’re saying. It’s also blatantly dishonest and manipulative. Let’s take a look at one particularly outrageous example. Talking about Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 crashed, Dylan Avery, the filmmaker, tries to make it sound like the local coroner didn’t believe that a plane had crashed there:
(Show LC2 at 57:50)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2301934902458285549&q=Loose+Change&hl=en
However, if you look at the article this quote was pulled from, you get quite a different impression:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A56110-2002May8
Miller was among the very first to arrive after 10:06 on the magnificently sunny morning of September 11. He was stunned at how small the smoking crater looked, he says, "like someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch and dumped all this trash into it." Once he was able to absorb the scene, Miller says, "I stopped being coroner after about 20 minutes, because there were no bodies there. It became like a giant funeral service." As a funeral director, Miller says, he is honored and humbled to preside over what has become essentially an immense cemetery stretching far into the scenic wooded mountain ridge. He considers it the final resting place of 40 national heroes.
Now, would you agree that the movie created a false impression of what Wally Miller felt, by carefully snipping out that last part of his quote about “It became like a giant funeral service.”? This is a technique the conspiracy theorists use known as quote-mining.
Here’s another trick used in Loose Change. When discussing the size of the hole in the Pentagon (to show that it was hit by a cruise missile):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2301934902458285549&q=Loose+Change&hl=en
(Show LC2 at 21:44-22:05, pause at that point)
Note that the fire truck spraying foam in this shot obscures the entire first floor of the Pentagon. When we look at pictures showing the Pentagon before the fire truck arrives, we get a very different idea:
(Show Pentagon Hole Photograph)
Note as well (flip back to LC2E) that the fire truck appears to be spraying foam on the fire. Why is that significant? Because firemen use foam on gasoline and jet fuel fires, not on the kind of fire you’d get from a cruise missile hit, which would be battled with water.
If you take the time to examine all the claims in Loose Change as I have done, you will see these types of dishonest tricks used over and over again.
What’s it all about?
(Show Money 1 and Money 2 )
For the people at the top, it’s all about money. There is a lot of money to be made in conspiracy theories these days. For the successful movie director or book author there are direct sales of the video or book, additional sales of tee shirts and other items. There are conferences where the attendees may spend up to $60 a day just to attend.
That’s not to say that everybody’s motivation is purely greed. There are many members of the so-called “Truth Movement” who sincerely believe that exposing 9-11 as an inside job will get rid of other things they may not like, like the Bush/Cheney Administration, the Iraq War, the Patriot Act and other things that have come about as a result of 9-11.
Do these people really care about the victims of 9-11? I’ll let you judge for yourselves. Here’s radio talk show host Alex Jones talking about how respectful they’re going to be at Ground Zero last September 11.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1287461440043399975&q=Mark+Iradian&hl=en
(start at 1:24)
As you can see, their rhetoric fell a little short of reality. Thousands of people were at the WTC site to pay their respects to family members who died in the buildings. Shouting over a bullhorn at those people was completely inappropriate.
Let’s take a look at some of the sillier ideas that 9-11 Conspiracy Theorists have come up with.
One experimenter decided to try to replicate the fires in the World Trade Center, but since he didn’t have a 110-story building handy, he had to make do with what was available:
http://www.democraticunderground.co...w_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=56836&mesg_id=56836
As you can see, he cut the fencing to simulate the plane crashing into the building, poured some kerosene on an old newspaper, and burned it as part of his “scientific” approach.
Another 9-11 Conspiracy Theorist, this one actually a professor at a major university, compared the two towers to a tree:
“And recently I gave a talk at an engineering conference where I showed some diagrams of the buildings being built and I showed, “If this were a tree and the Keebler elves cut out this big chunk out of the side here, for their little house, where their dwelling is. Would that affect the towers?” And everyone in the room could see, that no, the way the structure is designed, it can’t bring it down.”
(show Keebler photo)
But perhaps my favorite crazy thing said by a 9-11 Conspiracy theorist was by a movie director named Sofia who came up with this explanation for why the Twin Towers should not have collapsed so quickly:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6243624912447824934
(start at 2:34:00)
Why she thinks she should be able to say clunkety clunk for every floor collapsing is not explained.
Let me conclude here by noting that you have to be very careful when doing your own research into 9-11. The conspiracy theorists have been around for a long time and so their websites commonly come up first when you Google 9-11 related material. For example, here’s a sign that the 9-11 people use to entice people into the movement:
(show Google WTC 7 picture)
Why do you think they suggest people Google WTC-7? Because when you do, 9 of the top 10 and 17 of the top 20 websites that Google gives you belong to conspiracy theory proponents. Always be a careful consumer of information. The internet is terrific if you want to quickly look up who was the 26th president of the United States, but on any issue with any kind of controversy, you need to be very cautious about which sites you accept information from. Of course, sometimes books are no better; here’s a book I found in the Phoenix Public Library called “Flight 93 Revealed”. One of the things I like to do with these conspiracy theory books is see how long it takes them to make a major mistake or lie. This one might just set the record with a glaring error in the very first sentence:
“The official story of Flight 93 tells of four men who checked in at the United Airlines ticket counter at Boston Logan airport on 11 September 2001 bound for Los Angeles on United 93, a Boeing 757 airliner.”
Of course, if they did the person at the ticket counter would have informed them, “I’m sorry sirs, but your plane isn’t leaving from Boston Logan, it’s leaving from Newark, New Jersey.”
I have a handout sheet that lists some reputable websites where you can learn more about these topics.
Now, let’s go to questions and answers. (Wing it!)
Quick wrap-up: I talked a little bit at the beginning about how we’re all guardians of history. Each of us makes our own conclusions about what to believe happened on 9-11 based on what we’ve seen, what we’ve read, and what we’ve watched. I hope that all of you will reach the right conclusion, because that conclusion will guide you in making other decisions about the future as you get older and become involved citizens. Thank you.
I tried to weave in some multimedia and was able to use Google Video to good effect. YouTube is a little more picky if you want to skip ahead to a particular point in a video. I had the entire presentation on a CD Rom, with the text in Word format, and a set of a couple dozen photographs. I had copied all the links from the lecture over to a Word document file so I could quickly go to the websites that I needed to show the information.
It's geared more towards innoculation than anything else; I'll cheerfully admit that I was not trying to give a balanced presentation.
Feel free to make suggestions and use the material. I will probably be giving this presentation again in the future. I'd love to get more amusing stuff in here as well; the kids definitely loved Sophia's clunkety-clunk bit and the South Park clip (the segment I showed was the White House scene where President Bush explains the plot). It ran about 40 minutes, which allowed 10 minutes for questions.
Greetings, fellow guardians of history. I hoped to get a little laughter out of that line, and to be honest with you, a year and a half ago, I would never have considered myself to be a guardian of history either. But life has many surprises for us along the way, and that’s turned out to be one of my duties.
Let’s talk about some famous dates in recent history:
December 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor Attacked
November 22, 1963: President Kennedy Assassinated
September 11, 2001: Terrorist Attacks on New York and Washington DC
Famously disastrous days in the history of the United States.
Also famously days subject to conspiracy theories.
Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory: That FDR knew the Japanese plan and allowed the attacks to happen to draw us into war.
JFK conspiracy theory: There are many but most say that JFK was killed because he was standing in the way of something that Lyndon Johnson did, with escalation of the Vietnam War a common belief.
9-11 conspiracy theory: Bush administration planned and executed the 9-11 attacks or allowed them to happen without planning them.
Common aspects of all three conspiracy theories:
All claim that the government is an all-knowing and all-powerful force, which cannot have failed without failing intentionally.
All seize on minor differences between official reports and newspaper accounts at the time, while ignoring similarities.
All seek to absolve the real perpetrators and to blame others, usually political or other opponents.
Let’s focus on 9-11-01. I’m sure that most of you can remember where you were and what you were doing that day a whole lot better than you can remember 9-21-01 or 9-1-01. This is because 9-11-01 was an extraordinarily significant day in world history, and you witnessed it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJig1wj7oLI
(Cut at 50 seconds)
There is a basic story of 9-11 as most of us understand it. We know that 19 hijackers who were members of Al Qaeda took over four passenger jets and directed them at targets including the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and succeeded in hitting those buildings. The fourth jet, which was intended to crash into another landmark, but this plan was foiled by the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93.
But there is also another story out there that may be more compelling to some. It says that 9-11 was an inside job, that the US government under President Bush and Vice President Cheney either orchestrated the attacks or allowed them to happen. Their goals were to convince the American people to support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Now, I want to emphasize here that you can be opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without believing in the conspiracy theory. You can believe that Bush and Cheney planned to attack Iraq all along and that 9-11 gave them an excuse, without believing in the conspiracy theory. In fact, some of the fiercest opponents of the Bush Administration do not believe in the conspiracy theories. Not a single Democrat currently in Congress who has endorsed the claim that 9-11 was an inside job.
Let’s talk very briefly about the difference between legitimate investigations and conspiracy theories. If you’re legitimately interested in investigating responsibility for 9-11, you’d pretty quickly come to the conclusion that it was Al Qaeda based on the following facts:
1. Phone calls from passengers reported Arabic-looking men had hijacked the planes.
2. 4-5 men with Arabic-sounding names on each flight.
3. One man with an Arabic-sounding name and a pilot’s license on each flight.
4. Ties between the men with Arabic-sounding names and each other and Al Qaeda.
5. History of Al Qaeda terrorist attacks against US targets including USS Cole bombing in 2000 and US embassy bombings in Africa in 1998.
On the other hand, if you’re a conspiracy theorist, you start with the conclusion (Bush/Cheney did it) and sift backwards through the evidence looking for information that supports that “theory”.
This is an extremely difficult task, if you think about it for a second. We can believe that radical Islamic militants would be willing to kill themselves for their cause as there are many examples of them doing that: Palestinian suicide bombers, the July 7, 2005 London subway bombers, etc. But what would motivate the pilots of four US airliners to crash themselves into buildings, thereby killing not only lots of other people, but themselves?
So the theorists concoct elaborate theories. Maybe the US military hijacked the planes with commandos disguised as Arabs, rendered the passengers and pilots unconscious, set the planes on remote control, and parachuted to safety. Or they might propose that the original planes were landed at an Air Force base and substitute unmanned planes were sent to the targets. Here’s a good summary of a conspiracy theory from the show South Park:
(start at 14:41)
You can see how elaborate the scheme has to be to get around the actual facts. And, that is only one “theory” among many. The so-called 9-11 Truth Movement has more flavors than Baskin-Robbins. Some people think the Israelis did it, some say that there were no planes used at all, just computer graphics inserted into our TVs that looked like planes. Some say there were Arab hijackers, but they were just fall guys for the real plotters.
A particularly popular conspiracy theory movie right now is Loose Change. Loose Change claims that all four planes were diverted to an Air Force base somewhere and the passengers were all loaded onto Flight 93, which was diverted to Cleveland, where the passengers were herded into a NASA building and presumably executed. The World Trade Center Towers were hit by Air Force refueling tankers made to look like passenger planes, the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile, and the cellphone calls were faked using voice morphing software.
This is pretty crazy stuff, but Loose Change has a catchy, hip-hop soundtrack, some interesting computer animation, and it throws supposed facts at you so quickly that you don’t have time to think much about what they’re saying. It’s also blatantly dishonest and manipulative. Let’s take a look at one particularly outrageous example. Talking about Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 crashed, Dylan Avery, the filmmaker, tries to make it sound like the local coroner didn’t believe that a plane had crashed there:
(Show LC2 at 57:50)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2301934902458285549&q=Loose+Change&hl=en
However, if you look at the article this quote was pulled from, you get quite a different impression:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A56110-2002May8
Miller was among the very first to arrive after 10:06 on the magnificently sunny morning of September 11. He was stunned at how small the smoking crater looked, he says, "like someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch and dumped all this trash into it." Once he was able to absorb the scene, Miller says, "I stopped being coroner after about 20 minutes, because there were no bodies there. It became like a giant funeral service." As a funeral director, Miller says, he is honored and humbled to preside over what has become essentially an immense cemetery stretching far into the scenic wooded mountain ridge. He considers it the final resting place of 40 national heroes.
Now, would you agree that the movie created a false impression of what Wally Miller felt, by carefully snipping out that last part of his quote about “It became like a giant funeral service.”? This is a technique the conspiracy theorists use known as quote-mining.
Here’s another trick used in Loose Change. When discussing the size of the hole in the Pentagon (to show that it was hit by a cruise missile):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2301934902458285549&q=Loose+Change&hl=en
(Show LC2 at 21:44-22:05, pause at that point)
Note that the fire truck spraying foam in this shot obscures the entire first floor of the Pentagon. When we look at pictures showing the Pentagon before the fire truck arrives, we get a very different idea:
(Show Pentagon Hole Photograph)
Note as well (flip back to LC2E) that the fire truck appears to be spraying foam on the fire. Why is that significant? Because firemen use foam on gasoline and jet fuel fires, not on the kind of fire you’d get from a cruise missile hit, which would be battled with water.
If you take the time to examine all the claims in Loose Change as I have done, you will see these types of dishonest tricks used over and over again.
What’s it all about?
(Show Money 1 and Money 2 )
For the people at the top, it’s all about money. There is a lot of money to be made in conspiracy theories these days. For the successful movie director or book author there are direct sales of the video or book, additional sales of tee shirts and other items. There are conferences where the attendees may spend up to $60 a day just to attend.
That’s not to say that everybody’s motivation is purely greed. There are many members of the so-called “Truth Movement” who sincerely believe that exposing 9-11 as an inside job will get rid of other things they may not like, like the Bush/Cheney Administration, the Iraq War, the Patriot Act and other things that have come about as a result of 9-11.
Do these people really care about the victims of 9-11? I’ll let you judge for yourselves. Here’s radio talk show host Alex Jones talking about how respectful they’re going to be at Ground Zero last September 11.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1287461440043399975&q=Mark+Iradian&hl=en
(start at 1:24)
As you can see, their rhetoric fell a little short of reality. Thousands of people were at the WTC site to pay their respects to family members who died in the buildings. Shouting over a bullhorn at those people was completely inappropriate.
Let’s take a look at some of the sillier ideas that 9-11 Conspiracy Theorists have come up with.
One experimenter decided to try to replicate the fires in the World Trade Center, but since he didn’t have a 110-story building handy, he had to make do with what was available:
http://www.democraticunderground.co...w_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=56836&mesg_id=56836
As you can see, he cut the fencing to simulate the plane crashing into the building, poured some kerosene on an old newspaper, and burned it as part of his “scientific” approach.
Another 9-11 Conspiracy Theorist, this one actually a professor at a major university, compared the two towers to a tree:
“And recently I gave a talk at an engineering conference where I showed some diagrams of the buildings being built and I showed, “If this were a tree and the Keebler elves cut out this big chunk out of the side here, for their little house, where their dwelling is. Would that affect the towers?” And everyone in the room could see, that no, the way the structure is designed, it can’t bring it down.”
(show Keebler photo)
But perhaps my favorite crazy thing said by a 9-11 Conspiracy theorist was by a movie director named Sofia who came up with this explanation for why the Twin Towers should not have collapsed so quickly:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6243624912447824934
(start at 2:34:00)
Why she thinks she should be able to say clunkety clunk for every floor collapsing is not explained.
Let me conclude here by noting that you have to be very careful when doing your own research into 9-11. The conspiracy theorists have been around for a long time and so their websites commonly come up first when you Google 9-11 related material. For example, here’s a sign that the 9-11 people use to entice people into the movement:
(show Google WTC 7 picture)
Why do you think they suggest people Google WTC-7? Because when you do, 9 of the top 10 and 17 of the top 20 websites that Google gives you belong to conspiracy theory proponents. Always be a careful consumer of information. The internet is terrific if you want to quickly look up who was the 26th president of the United States, but on any issue with any kind of controversy, you need to be very cautious about which sites you accept information from. Of course, sometimes books are no better; here’s a book I found in the Phoenix Public Library called “Flight 93 Revealed”. One of the things I like to do with these conspiracy theory books is see how long it takes them to make a major mistake or lie. This one might just set the record with a glaring error in the very first sentence:
“The official story of Flight 93 tells of four men who checked in at the United Airlines ticket counter at Boston Logan airport on 11 September 2001 bound for Los Angeles on United 93, a Boeing 757 airliner.”
Of course, if they did the person at the ticket counter would have informed them, “I’m sorry sirs, but your plane isn’t leaving from Boston Logan, it’s leaving from Newark, New Jersey.”
I have a handout sheet that lists some reputable websites where you can learn more about these topics.
Now, let’s go to questions and answers. (Wing it!)
Quick wrap-up: I talked a little bit at the beginning about how we’re all guardians of history. Each of us makes our own conclusions about what to believe happened on 9-11 based on what we’ve seen, what we’ve read, and what we’ve watched. I hope that all of you will reach the right conclusion, because that conclusion will guide you in making other decisions about the future as you get older and become involved citizens. Thank you.
Last edited:
)
