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August 22, 2006
Alex Jones - Terrorstorm
Have been watching this film bit by bit - and the really striking thing about this documentary is that they don't seem to have bothered to 'fact check' the film with any particular rigour. To be blunt, I find this offensive - if people want to construct all kinds of creative stories about the moon landings, I'm not going to worry too much, but to produce such sloppy work about mass murder is much more ethically problematic. Not only that, but to accuse so many people in government and public service of complicity in mass murder without any convincing evidence - and even without being clear who you are accusing - is really insulting.
Anyway, watching the film (especially the part on the 7/7 attacks) annoyed me enough that I made a note of some of the errors I found. I'll list them below, in case they're of interest to others, and will add more when I've got time to type up some more of the problems with Terrorstorm.
Errors in Terrorstorm's Account of 7/7
Terrorstorm alleges that the government planned the bombings to boost Tony Blair's electoral chances. However, bombings occurred 2 months *after* national UK elections which Blair's Labour Party had won, and national elections only need to be held once every five years. The film claims that "national polls showed that [Blair’s] pro-war party was sure to lose". However, as well as having just won an election, Labour were showing a slight lead in the polls [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/vote2005/polltracker/html/polltracker.stm].
Terrorstorm claims that the 7/7 “explosive devices” were “military-grade”. It does not say what it means by 'military grade', or provide any evidence for this claim. The best available evidence shows that the bombs were relatively crude 'home made' devices, and that the terrorists had a 'bomb factory' which they used to construct these devices [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/11_05_06_narrative.pdf],p.23.
Terrorstorm alleges that the #30 bus which was bombed in the attacks is the only bus that the police “take special control of” and redirect on 7/7. However, Transport for London have confirmed that Euston Rd. was closed on that day. Because the #30 bus route normally goes along Euston Rd, all #30 buses (not just that one) were therefore redirected.
Terrorstorm refers to "the London Police Department" as being involved in the 7/7 attacks. However, there is no such thing in London, England (the film presumably was not referring to the London Police Department in Kentucky).
The film claims that a special army unit killed Jean Charles de Menezes. It does not say which unit they mean, but if Terrorstorm is referring to the Special Reconnaisance Regiment then these troops had some role in the operation, but did not shoot de Menezes: it was police who shot him [http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1542080,00.html]
Terrorstorm states that de Menezes was shot more than ten times in the head. He was actually shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4713753.stm]. 11 shots were fired in total [http://www.guardian.co.uk/menezes/story/0,,1691537,00.html].
Terrorstorm claims that claims de Menezes bought a Metro paper when he entered the tube station in which he was shot. However, the Metro is free (and the film shows a picture of the Metro masthead, with ‘FREE’ written very clearly on it and highlighted in red)
The film states that de Menezes paid for his ticket with a Metro OysterCard – but these are issued by Transport for London (not the Metro newspaper) and, instead of using them to pay for tickets, one uses this card instead of paper tickets.
Posted by jon_mendel at 11:57 PM | Comments (3)
August 21, 2006
Conspiracy Theories, again
Firstly, the Glenn and Helen Show podcast's latest episode has David Dunbar and Brad Reagan - editors of Popular Mechanics - debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. They say some of what I was trying to say in my last post about these theories, much better than I did - arguing that the Internet is a non-chronological medium, allowing already-discredited ideas to proliferate indefinitely. Well worth a listen (or two).
Secondly, have just watched bits of Alex Jones' Terrorstorm video (sadly not all - will be a while till I've got time/energy to watch this 2hr film from start to finish). The first things that jump out at me are that the production values look much better than other conspiracy theory videos, and it also looks like they've spent a lot of time watching Jarecki's (excellent) film Why We Fight. Terrorstorm combines details of past (alleged) government-sponsored terrorism with theories about the events of September 11 and the 7/7 bombings. So far as I can tell (as I said, I've only skimmed through the video) there's nothing terribly new or convincing in the actual content of the conspiracy theories it contains, but the presentation is a hell of a lot better than in the other videos of the genre that I've seen. Compare Terrorstorm to Loose Change, for example, and you can really see how far the 9/11 denial movement has come on in terms of the quality of its productions.
Posted by jon_mendel at 12:17 AM
August 18, 2006
The value of human life
Was almost stopped dead in the gym today, listening to Radio Open Source's wonderful episode on the value of human life. Aside from being horribly inappropriate listening when you're on a cross-trainer, this episode featured Feinberg, Singer and Hirschfield discussing what value can be placed on a human life. They all argued eloquently - and often movingly - but one consensus that they seemed to reach was that (whether or not human life is of infinite value) there is no value outside or 'above' it.
Maybe it was cause I was struggling with the pointless task of lifting heavy weights for no reason at the time, or maybe cause I'd just been listening to Alabama 3 singing about Power in the Blood* , but I couldn't help thinking about values that might go beyond human life (certainly, values that go far beyond my life).
The first, 'obvious' empirical point that springs to mind is that millions of people believe value springs from the will of a God, or something else that transcends human life. I don't believe in any kind of God, though, so for me this is a more ambiguous normative issue. To put the question in a provocative way - for all the bad terror that has taken place and is taking place in the world at the moment, for all the slaughter of innocents in New York, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Lebanon, and Israel and Palestine and far too many other places, is it still worth following Slavoj Zizek in arguing that what we need is the 'good terror', the kind of terror that is a key part of any radical political act. Is it still worth seeking a value that goes beyond my life, to seek a 'good terror' which (instead of the slaughter of countless innocent civilians) brings us radical political change? Is there an argument that we should focus not just on the value of life, but the value of living, and struggling, and sometimes dying, or have we now moved 'beyond' such values?
I'm not sure what the answer would be; I'm also not sure what it should be. At any rate, I'm grateful for a podcast that made me think about so many different questions.
* With the nice catchy chorus 'I don't mind dying/when my calling comes I will be ready for the war'...It is catchy, honest.
Posted by jon_mendel at 12:10 AM
August 15, 2006
Conspiracy Theories and 10 August Attempted Bombings
There seems to have been something of a merging between US and UK conspiracy theories: using the Internet to respond to the recent reports of a foiled plot to bomb UK planes, the British 9/11 Truth Campaign began arguing that this was also a government conspiracy impressively quickly after events were made public. Similar US campaigns are taking similar positions.
Conducting their campaigns online allows activists in different states to work together and communicate effectively, and to find common causes. The announcement of the foiled attacks also seems to have rekindled UK interest in the Loose Change video: certainly '9/11 truth' campaigners here in the UK seem to be re-energised and, to draw from a very unscientific sample, since the 10th August I've had e-mails from a few different people telling me to watch the video. I haven't seen these e-mails circulating for a while.
There's an interesting mix of speed and anachronism here: new technologies allow very quick responses to political events; however, one response is to publicise a video which has been around long enough to be pretty effectively torn apart by its critics. Virtual technology, getting discredited information to us more quickly than ever before...
Posted by jon_mendel at 06:15 PM
August 10, 2006
Terrorist attack on UK planes disrupted
At the time of writing, it looks like the security services in the UK (working with those from other countries as well) have prevented a planned terrorist attack on flights from the UK. Though this may change as more information becomes available, it currently looks like this was another suicide attack - but using a somewhat different approach to those on September 11: bombs were to have been smuggled onto the flights in hand luggage. Arrests have been made, and there's a lot of disruption of flights leaving the UK (the US has also issued an alert re. flights to/from the UK). I'm sure that more information will emerge as time goes by; at the moment, though, it's just fortunate that the attacks appear to have been stopped.
I've just been reading some of John Mackinlay's work - where he argues that the virtual dimension of conflict today allows its 'vital ground' to comprise a range of geographically diverse areas. This certainly brings home some of the potential implications of this.
Posted by jon_mendel at 12:19 PM
