Soccer Mom: Unplugged

If you search the internet with any regularity, you know that there appear to be a myriad of reasons to support the idea that our own government perpetrated 9/11 to lead us into a war with Iraq.  Of course, you can also discover that Elvis is alive and that aliens have impregnanted a man in northeastern London, but, I digress.  The fundamental flaw with this conspiracy is simple:  it doesn't pass the reasonable man test.

The reasonable man test is a diametrical opposite to Dr. Ian Malcolm's chaos theory.  Instead of suggesting that the same exact action could produce an unlimited number of widely varying and unpredictable results, the reasonable man argument suggests that there are reasonable courses of action for a given circumstance.  In the case of law, an attorney might ask, "What would a reasonable person of ordinary prudence have done in the defendant's situation?"  This presupposes that there are a limited number of reasonable behaviors for each circumstance.  It is basically, Occam's razor applied to human behavior. 

entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, or  entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

When predicting behavior, the reasonable man test implies that human action will follow a logical and fairly predictable course within the defined paradigms of its subject, and, according to Occam's razor, generally, the simplest, most reasonable expectation is the most accurate explanation. 

Even Palestinian suicide bombers are predictable within the paradigm of a certain set of beliefs as are serial killers.  Certainly, profilers predict characteristics of suspects by adapting the parameters of 'normal' behavior.  I'm not suggesting that we are unthinking robots rather that we nearly always act within reasonable and defineable parameters. 

When a behavior defies all the bounds of reason it is invariably either inaccurate or a readily apparent abberation.  This is why cases like that of Andrea Yates hold so many people fixated upon them - because the human behavior is so unpredictable.  Contrast the Yates case with the largely ignored case of any one of a number of liquor store robberies - the latter being cases where human behavior is driven by a self-interested need or addiction - a predictable and patterned course of action.

Back to 9/11. I sat through Loose Change in its entirety today (thanks to a scheduled teacher work day) and was consistently underwhelmed by both the science and the logic.  The piece relies heavily on fundamentally flawed premises such as the eyewitness accounts of emotionally involved observers,  film and photograph scrutiny of the same sort that felled Pierre Salinger, and the constant innuendo of a shadow conspiracy with weak motives, lurking like Dorothy's wizard, just behind the curtain.  

After watching this engaging bit of filmography and listening to various parts of the narration multiple times, it became apparent that the writers of the film were stringing together large compilations of unrelated and in many cases unsubstantiated bits of information.  The last three minutes were the most troubling, frankly, when there were references to trucks packed with gold under the trade center being evacuated.  The suggestion that all this was done for money is intrinsically flawed. 

If a reasonable man, and in this case very powerful, influential and wealthy, reasonable men wanted the gold, why wouldn't they just steal it?  If they were after oil,  couldn't they have manufactured more readily available disinformation?  They could have simply used that 'voice changing apparatus' to create false statements issued by Saddam.  Wham! Bam! Thank you, M'am.  It would've been a done deal.  They could have created tapes of him making threats and discussing dirty bombs with Osama.  That would've been so much more believable than the subsequent scramble for intelligence that has left the President and the entire Federal government looking foolish and incompetent. 

The film also indicates that the passengers of the hijacked flights were removed from the planes and are being held somewhere.  This begs the question, why such deferential treatment when nearly 4000 lay dead in the uptown rubble?  Perhaps, they are Lost on some deserted south Pacific island...(recently reunited with "survivors from the tail section")

Conspiracy ideas are being popularized and endowed with increasing legitimacy as the internet becomes a more respectable news source. Theories like the 9/11 myth are reaching a larger audience and becoming more and more commercial.  But that still doesn't make them reasonable or truthful.

It isn't that I don't believe in conspiracies, secret societies, or evil people working in league.  It's just that in this case, it is much more reasonable to believe that a group of dedicated conspiracy lovers who delight in uncovering sinister plots are fascinated with the nearly unbelievable and strange happenings of that September morning than that thousands of people are involved in keeping silent the murder of almost 4000 of their own neighbors, friends, and family members.  And in sending into war their sons and daughters and brothers at arms.  That just isn't reasonable.  There are so many opportunities for failure in a conspiracy of that size and scope that the odds of successfully carrying off an event of the magnitude of 9/11 have about the same chances of my winning the lottery - without ever buying a ticket.

And then there's the issue of the increasingly available stream of information that justifies the administration's choice to wage war with Afghanistan and Iraq. 

I will admit that President Bush and his administration have been hawkish and have changed American foreign policy in ways that I don't altogether agree with.  A preemptive strike position opens a veritable Pandora's box of problems with respect to intelligence and human rights - the worst case scenario is Minority Report on a national scale.  Nevertheless, the information slowly trickling out of the Middle East and reaching the masses via mainstream media at a dismally, and arguably, intentionally, lethargic rate corroborates the initial reasons for entering Iraq three years ago. And the strength of that position also undermines the 9/11 myth, if for no other reason than that the same outspoken critics of the war in Iraq are the among those adherents of the conspiratorial claims.