A few more thoughts on conspiracy theory

Since the previous piece on conspiracy theories received a fair amount of feedback, I suppose a few words of follow-up won't hurt.

First, I should clarify: I never set out to be one of those non-conformists who speak only to other non-conformists. I confess to being a partisan -- a fellow who combines (mostly) mainstream Democratic convictions with a few ideas that are, y'know, odd.

Second, many worry that "odd" speculations could discredit the larger cause. Will speculations injure those convictions? I'm not so sure.

During the 1990s, ultra-conservatives did very little aside from engage in conspiracy theories. For the most part, those theories were crap. Consider: Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, Ron Brown, Vince Foster, the Clinton Death List, Satanic Ritual Abuse, the ever-imminent Great Gun Round-Up, the Russian soldiers massing on the Mexican border, and the incineration of seventeen little children at WACO as the first stage in KKKlinton's insidious Project TATTERTOT.

Remember those days? On the radio, in the bookstores, in various magazines, it was all conspiracy all the time.

Question: Did these theories -- bogus as they mostly were -- hurt the Republican Party? Or did they pave the way for the right-wing takeover of Congress?

Indulging in a certain amount of speculation cannot hurt Democrats. But I advise others to follow five provisos:

1. Speculation must be clearly labeled as such.

2. We must make an effort to seek better evidence than our rightist counterparts proffer for their theories.

3. Try to impact the larger culture. Many plot-besot theorists stay happily mired within an intellectual ghetto, which means they rarely speak to more than a few thousand of their fellow oddballs.

4. We should apologize when wrong.

The admission of simple human fallibility: That's our secret weapon. Psychologically, we can do that; the folks on the opposite team can't. If a guy steps on your foot and, instead of saying "I'm sorry," blames you for having your foot there, you can bet the rent money that he voted for Bush.

My last suggestion is the most important:

5. Stay human.

Cook up a pot of really good beef stew. Read scary stories to your kids. Watch the pooch piddle on a redwood. Go for a midnight stroll in the park with your lover. That's the important stuff. Yes, doing research is important, politics are important, writing is important, trancing out on the internet can be important -- but none of those things should ever become the pivot point of any human life.

Otherwise, you may end up acting very much like poor old Fintan Dunne -- who has not, I'm sorry to say, yet seen fit to include me on his list of CIA internet fakes. C'mon, Fintan. I'm waiting.

There's a phrase which used to have some currency among real spooks: Sick think. "Normal" paranoia leads people to suspect the worst of their enemies; a sick-thinker suspects allies of having a nefarious hidden agenda. Sick think is, in short, paranoia raised to DEFCON 4. In the Agency, the term was used to describe James Jesus Angleton, counterintelligence chief and sick-thinker extraordinaire. Many anti-CIA activists became fascinated with Angleton, perhaps because his psychological malaise mirrored their own demons.

Readers raised a few other points about 9/11. Perhaps I should respond.

My dismissive stance toward the "controlled demolitions" theorists angers many, but so far, I've seen no evidence to turn me around. One respondent put the matter well:

To the person who suggests that al qaeda members who rented offices at the WTC could have brought explosives up the freight elevators and installed them, why then did they bother with the hijacking of commercial airliners with the intent to fly them into the buildings?

To which I'll add: We have detailed information as to who rented which offices in that complex, and no-one -- to my knowledge -- has identified an al Qaida front group.

If a group other than al Qaida -- neocons, Mossad, the Illuminati, whatever -- planted bombs, what need of airplanes? Simply let the buildings go down and blame Osama. I still say that the horrific image of airliners hitting those buildings gave Bush (inadvertently or otherwise) sufficient cause for war in Afghanistan and Iraq; the collapses did not really help his cause.

Yes, the architects of the Twin Towers did attempt to create structures that would withstand the impact of the largest aircraft of the day. They knew all about the famous crash into the Empire State Building. But their calculations took into account only the direct force of a physical object's impact, not the additional explosive power of all that jet fuel. The fireproofing of the structural beams was, by all accounts, quite poor.

As for Building Seven: As it happens, one of the chapters I did complete (in 2003) addressed that very subject. I may post the piece somewhere, even though it is now a little out of date. The collapse initially seemed very suspicious to me. But there was much explosive material stored in several massive tanks within that poorly-designed building; any rupture of the gas lines could have caused all of that stuff to burn. (In recent times, reports have surfaced that owner Larry Silverstein said, shortly after the disaster occurred, that he "may have to pull" Building Seven. But did he mean to "pull it" that very day?)

A similar scenario may explain reports that some people heard subsidiary explosions within the Twin Towers.

For some reason, right-wingers have a special fondness for what I call "physical" theories, as opposed to "investigative" theories. For example: After Oklahoma City, right-wing conspiracists ballyhooed General Partin and his controlled demolition claims -- and they paid very little attention to McVeigh's links to Elohim City. Lefty researchers were more interested in the latter than in the former. Much the same history played out after 9/11. I'm not sure why this dichotomy exists, but I do note the pattern.