[Peace-discuss] Re: solution to a non-problem (fwd)

[Jim Buell]

>But many conspiracy theories are
>inherently conservative and, one might say, anti-political -- at best a
>distraction from the real political tasks, at worst a (conspiracy of)
>misdirection...
>
>And that may be true of some speculations about 9/11.  Regards, Carl

You may well be right, Carl. I guess I'm just a little mystified by why the 
debate on the left seems to be tending toward 
conspiracy-versus-structural-factors (such as class, wealth and power 
concentration). It strikes me that most often in popular discourse, 
theories that posit some sort of secretive collusion come in contrast to 
official explanations of the one-lone-nut variety (that Oswald, Sirhan 
Sirhan, McVeigh, Ray, etc. did it, all alone, because they were crazy). 
Unless we're to believe that at least 19 and more likely closer to several 
hundred crazy people each acted independently and without collusion to 
bring about 9-11 (infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters producing 
Shakespeare), then obviously some sort of collusion and conspiring went on 
- the remaining questions are, who all was involved and on what level, who 
knew on some level what was going on, and who was actively working for 
whatever reasons to keep the information from being known? Official 
accounts tell us these events were all masterminded by a lone nut in a 
cave, with a Svengali hold over some other lone nuts who in turn fooled a 
few others into helping them out. Well, maybe. But I don't see why pointing 
out the extreme unlikeliness of this sort of explanation, and actively 
searching out evidence for more plausible ones, is tantamount to letting 
structural factors off the hook.

Structural-factors explanations point a finger toward why some dramatically 
discontinuous events may have occurred, and what needs to be done to 
improve matters - e.g., what might have led individuals and groups to have 
acted as they did and do, before, during and after 9/11, and how those 
things need to be changed. Agreed, grand-conspiracy notions that set up 
Freemasons, space aliens, Rockefellers, Bilderburgers, Discordians, Jews, 
Catholics, British royals or the Trilateral Commission as all-powerful are 
just plain wacky. But little conspiracies happen all the time, with 
conscious intent and intentional covering-up. The closer that we all can 
get to the details of those little conspiracies as they converged to create 
the Sept. 11 events, the better we'll understand just what happened and is 
continuing to happen, and the better shot we'll have at transforming social 
and economic structures to move closer, in Green parlance, to relations 
built on social justice, ecological wisdom, nonviolence and grassroots 
democracy. And even if we can't quite achieve that, we'll be able to get 
the goods on some very dirty players in the corridors of power, stand a 
fair chance of getting them tossed out and saving the skins of many good 
people in the process, and earn the opportunity to start over with a new 
crop of villains not quite so well entrenched. (If a nuclear armageddon 
doesn't come first, as too many of the current villains seem to be 
half-looking for.)

Salim Muwakkil, in the cover story in this week's In These Times 
(http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/26/15/feature1.shtml), has a much more 
favorable opinion of those who are currently derided as conspiracy-mongers 
than David Corn, Michael Albert and Norm Solomon have evidenced in recent 
weeks. At the conclusion of this piece, he recommends "following the money" 
as the most promising line for investigation - "When found, that money is 
likely to be drenched in oil and politically flammable." That prediction is 
very much in line with what can be found in some of the items at various 
"conspiracy" sites - www.copvcia.com, www.globalresearch.ca, www.rense.com, 
etc. - and some of the better-sourced information that originates on sites 
like those does, thankfully, make its way at some point to the Common 
Dreams site, the Nation, In These Times, and the occasional corporate-media 
piece like the ABC and NBC items I cited last night.

By the way, a key source in all this continues to be Greg Palast, the 
American journalist who works for the BBC and whose work gets nearly no 
play in the US. (He's also broken major stories on Enron and on the Florida 
election fraud, both recounted in his current book, The Best Democracy 
Money Can Buy.) Palast was a guest this spring on Bob McChesney's WILL-AM 
show and on Focus 580, and he appeared just this afternoon on Democracy Now 
with some startling and well-researched information about precisely how the 
Bush crew (and Clinton people before them) stomped on investigations into 
the financing of bin Laden's terror network, in the months leading up to 
Sept. 11. Unfortunately, I just found out that WEFT screwed up and didn't 
get the show today - they're running a cart of Radio Nation right now 
instead! (No, I'm sure it wasn't a conspiracy ;-).) Today's DN is available 
on www.democracynow.org as an mp3 file (and in RealAudio format), and I've 
also made a copy of it as an audio CD that I can leave over at the IMC if 
people are interested.

jb