9/11 - Key Issue of our Time
Corrs Guitarist - "9/11 was an inside job"
Each time a major entertainer steps out on the side of 9/11 truth there is ripple in the media blackout. Jim Corr is clearly very committed, and we can expect more ripples to come.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPfszpqq2o4
By Richie Taylor
Friday May 30 2008
www.independent.ie/national-news/corr-brother-says-911-an-inside-job-1391867.html
CORRS guitarist Jim Corr has claimed that there was overwhelming evidence that the 9/11 attacks in America were carried out by "rogue elements" of US President George Bush's "neo-con administration".
In a rare intervention into the political arena, the male singer with The Corrs band came out against the Lisbon Treaty claiming that it is "tip-toe totalitarianism in the West".
In an interview with Matt Cooper on Today FM's 'Last Word', Corr made the case for voting 'No' to Lisbon, claiming it could introduce the death penalty to Ireland and contribute to a "new world order".
Corr's opposition is based on his three years "studying the New World Order which the European Union is a part of".
He said "the EU is a stepping stone towards a world government, they will merge it with the Asia Pacific Union, the African Union and the North American Union". The Lisbon Treaty itself will introduce "a scientific technocracy" to Europe which will erode national sovereignty.
Corr claimed that The Charter of Fundamental Rights allows for the introduction of the death penalty.
"It makes provision for the introduction to law for the death penalty in times of war or imminent threat of war.
"What we are seeing is tip-toe totalitarianism in the West with 9/11 the key to understanding this.
"When you study 9/11 it becomes very apparent... it was a staged terrorist attack, what they call a false flag operation."
Corr said overwhelming evidence suggests 9/11 "was carried out by rogue elements in the Bush neo-con administration".
The Philosophy of Conspiracy - by David Coady
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2251734.htm
From the ABC:
In our final installment on conspiracy theories, David Coady looks at the philosophy of conspiracy...
22 May 2008, 10:00
People in the "9/11 truth movement" are often dismissed as "conspiracy theorists". They typically respond by saying that there's nothing wrong with being a conspiracy theorist, since, after all, conspiracies do happen. This is a reasonable response.
But a little reflection reveals the expressions "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist" do not deserve their bad reputation.
After all, "a conspiracy" is simply a secret plan by a group of people to bring about some shared goal, "a conspiracy theory" is just a theory according to which such a plan has occurred or is occurring, and "a conspiracy theorist" is just a person who is disposed to believe conspiracy theories.
Most people can cite numerous examples of conspiracies from history books, the media, or their own personal experience. Hence most people believe numerous conspiracy theories, and so are, to one degree or another, conspiracy theorists.
But very few people would actually describe themselves as conspiracy theorists, nor would they describe any of the things they believe as conspiracy theories.
When asked to identify examples of conspiracy theories most people immediately think of theories that are clearly irrational.
Some will refer to theories involving conspirators who are virtually all-powerful or omniscient. Others will mention theories involving alleged conspiracies that have been going on for so long or which involve so many people that it would implausible to suppose that they could have remained undetected. Others cite theories involving conspirators who appear to have no motive to conspire - unless perhaps the desire to do evil for its own sake can be thought of as a motive. The theory that the United States' government planned the September 11th attacks appears to be irrational in each of these ways.
This theory, and others like it, are irrational conspiracy theories, but it does not follow, and it is not true, that they are irrational because they are conspiracy theories.
Thinking of such irrational theories as paradigms of conspiracy theories is like thinking of numerology as a paradigm of number theory, or astrology as a paradigm of a theory of planetary motion. The subject matter of a theory does not generally determine whether belief in it is rational or not.
But conspiracies not only exist, they are widespread. Most people conspire some of the time (think of the things we tell our children about Santa Claus) and some people conspire most of the time (think of the intelligence organizations of any country).
Furthermore, many events cannot be explained without appealing to a conspiracy. The only question in such cases is "Which conspiracy theory is correct?"
In the case of 9/11 the question is "Who are the conspirators, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, or George Bush and the American security services?" The correct answer to this question is so well established by now that nothing further I can say here could be expected to convince the 9/11 truthers.
The problem with the 9/11 truthers is that they are committed to an irrational and false theory (a theory which happens, like its true rival, to be a conspiracy theory).
Of course it seems strange to think of the "official" explanation of 9/11 (or the official explanation of any event) as a conspiracy theory. We are accustomed to contrasting conspiracy theories with the official non-conspiratorial version of events, but quite often, the official version of events is just as conspiratorial as its rivals.
When this is the case, it is the rivals to the official version of events that are inevitably labeled dismissively as "conspiracy theories". So, "conspiracy theory" has come to refer to virtually any belief which conflicts with an official version of events.
It should be clear what is wrong with using the expression in this way. It allows politicians, bureaucrats, and more generally defenders of officialdom the world over to abuse and ridicule anyone who doubts their truthfulness.
Yet it is vital to any open society that there are respected sources of information which are independent of official sources, and which can freely contradict them and not be dismissed without argument. The widespread view that conspiracy theories are always, or even typically, irrational is not only itself irrational, it is dangerous.
It promotes complacency in the face of official or institutionally endorsed versions of events, which makes it easier for conspirators in positions of power to remain undetected.
I am not denying that there are people who have an irrational tendency to see conspiracies everywhere. And we could restrict the expression "conspiracy theorist" in such a way that it only referred to such people.
But if we do this, we should also remember that there is another widespread form of irrationality, namely the failure to believe in conspiracy even when confronted with powerful evidence for it.
We need a name for people who irrationally reject evidence of conspiracy, to give our political discourse some much needed balance. The expression "coincidence theorist", which has gained some currency on the Internet, goes some way to meeting this need.
A coincidence theorist fails to connect the dots, no matter how suggestive of an underlying pattern they are.
A hardened coincidence theorist can watch a plane crash into the second tower of the World Trade Centre without thinking that there is any connection between this event and the plane which crashed into the other tower less than an hour earlier.
Similarly, a coincidence theorist could be aware that all 175 editors of Rupert Murdoch's publications around the world endorsed the invasion of Iraq, without seeing any connection between their expressed views and those of their boss.
Coincidence theorists are just as irrational and at least as widespread as conspiracy theorists. They are equally prone to error, though their errors are of different and opposing kinds. The errors of the conspiracy theorist, however, tend to be less dangerous than the errors of the coincidence theorist.
The conspiracy theorist usually only harms himself. The coincidence theorist can harm us all by making it easier for those in power to conceal their conspiratorial machinations.
ABC "Unleashed" Publishes a Rebuttal to Hereward Fenton & the 9/11 Truth Movement
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2250663.htm
Conspiracy theory lunacy
by Hugh Tobin
21 May 2008, 10:00
The September 11 terrorist attacks were arguably the most watched event in human history. As a result, the facts about what happened seem indisputable. We have all seen the footage of planes flying into the World Trade Centre towers over and over.
Yet, a group of conspiracy theorists continue to claim that the official account of what happened that day amounts to the greatest cover up in the history of modern civilisation.
ABC Unleashed last week published the claims of Hereward Fenton of the 9/11 Truth Movement in Australia, a movement which disputes the official story and claims that the World Trade Centre did not actually collapse as the result of planes hitting the towers, but rather as the result of a controlled demolition.
When I last wrote about the lunacy of this theory in March 2007 my opinions were later attacked on the website that Fenton is a researcher for. Anonymous posts on the website www.911oz.com accused me of being a Mossad agent, telling me to go "back to Israel and fortify your bunkers". These comments highlight some of the prejudices that can often fuel these theories.
The 9/11 Commission set up in 2002 interviewed over 1,200 people in 10 countries and reviewed over two and a half million pages of documents before releasing a 571-page report explaining how and why the World Trade Centre buildings collapsed.
The report found 'no corroborating evidence' for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001.
So why do these theories continue to have support in the community? The theories are motivated from a variety of factors sometimes relating to anti-Americanism and most commonly from a psychology of mistrust and paranoia.
Those involved establish their conclusions first, and gather their evidence later. Contradictory evidence is either ignored or discredited.
Popular Mechanics, who have debunked the theories surrounding the attacks, argue that conspiracy theories 'share a basic thought pattern: great tragedies must have great reasons'.
In the most watched documentary promoting the conspiracy theories, Loose Change, which has been viewed by millions of people on Youtube, the narrator reflects … 'That 19 hijackers are going to completely bypass security and crash four commercial airliners in a span of two hours, with no interruption from the military forces, in the most guarded airspace in the United States and the world? That to me is a conspiracy theory.'
We all wondered on September 12, 'How could this happen?' But just because something seems implausible does not provide evidence of a conspiracy. It's strange that the moon and the sun appear to be exactly the same size from the earth, but so what?
The conspiracy theories have been able to gather a strong following because they explain elements of the story that the official account is unable to explain easily to a lay person.
The main concern of those in the 9/11 Truth Movement is that they think it would be impossible for the World Trade Centre to fall in the uniform fashion that we all witnessed without it being the result of a controlled demolition. It is true that the temperatures inside the towers would not have reached levels that would have melted the metal, thus causing the buildings to collapse.
Steel's melting temperature is 1,500°C and there is consensus that temperatures inside the World Trade Centre would not have likely exceeded 1,100°C. However, the theorists fail to mention that steel that is heated to over 1,000°C softens to such an extent that its strength is reduced by up to 90 per cent.
They also fail to look at factors such as the internal damage to the building support structures and fire-proofing insulation which inevitably led to the col