Agylen

Having evidently nothing better to do—or, more probably, being too tired to do any kind of mentally engaging activity—I’ve been watching some late night talk shows on the TV lately. One of them, called Matrix, recently dedicated at least three episodes to a debate between 9/11 conspiracy theorists and believers in the official version, the one contained in the 9/11 Commission Report.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll call the former “skeptics”, even though I am actually more skeptic of the skeptics than of the official “truth”, but they were the first to raise doubts, so they deserve the title. Likewise, I’ll doubt the latter “believers”, which is a sweeping generalization, of course, but please bear with me.

After having given ample time in the first issues to the skeptics for them to try to poke holes in the conclusions of the 9/11 report, in the last episode the host presented various counter-arguments, using excerpts from the book Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts. I had never heard of this book before, even though it’s not new, but I plan to pick it up sooner or later, as it sounds interesting.

I will abstain myself to comment on the arguments presented in the book until I’ve had the occasion to read it and, more generally, I will not discuss here about the single issues that are cause of debate between the skeptics and the believers. There are hundreds of websites, book, articles and movies dedicated to that already.

What I would like to do is try to see things from a 64,000ft height perspective. As I see it, the problem with the talk shows I’ve been watching and most of the other debates between skeptics and believers is that both sides of the issue tend to focus on single questions, almost exclusively.

They will argue indefinitely about the size of the hole in the Pentagon wall, the fall velocity of the twin towers or what Silverstein really meant when saying “Pull it!”. Now, these are all very important issues to settle if we really want to know the truth, but if we focus on them only, we risk missing the forest for the trees.

What I see when I try to look at things from a wider perspective is, on one side, an official report that is certainly incomplete and probably wrong in some minor and maybe also major details. After all, nobody ever smashed a jetliner into a 400 meters high steel tower before, so we don’t really have good models to see if reality fits predictions.

But even with many details missing or wrong, we have a history that is plausible, at least in my humble opinion, after having heard many of the possible explanations for how things went the way they did.

On the other side, the skeptics’ side, we only have holes. What I mean by this is that skeptics are only able to try to find holes in the official theory, but when it comes to providing an alternative one, the only thing they can come up with is a non-coherent set of factoids, the majority of which raise more questions than the ones that are supposedly left unanswered by the other side.

For instance, they believe it was a missile that hit the Pentagon, because the airplane version does not explain a number of questions. However, the missile theory does not explain the numerous witnesses that saw the plane, the lamp poles that were struck by the plane’s wings, the pieces of debris clearly belonging to a plane that were left on the lawn, and—most importantly— where did the real plane and all its passengers end up?

I’ve even heard one of the skeptics declare with absolute certainty that it wasn’t flight 93 that crashed to the ground in Pennsylvania. When pressed for an answer to the question: “Where is flight 93, then?”, he simply replied: “I don’t know, but I am certain it didn’t crash and it’s them who have to tell us where it is.”

What we have here is a tentative to reverse the burden of the proof. But I think that, this time around, it is “skeptics” who are suggesting an interpretation of the facts that, if it were true, would require some extraordinary proof, not only the swiping of questions under the rug by saying “we don’t know”.

Otherwise they risk sounding like so many creationists, who don’t have any good theory of origins, and are only able to cry foul over evolution and point at supposed “holes” in the fossil record.