Matt

I bought the book a while back and only skimmed it. My general impression is that he raises many inconsistences in the offical account. But he seems to waistes to much space on things that are irrelevant, like public opinion poles and past conspiracies involving the military. By rehashing "operation Northwoods" and various other conspiracies, he seems to weaken rather than strengthen his case. One of these days I will actually read the whole book.
alain | 05.23.05 - 12:21 pm | #

Well his recent talk was acute, well-received, and didn't stray much (but then, the vid I saw was edited, so..) There is a tendency to get carried away, when there's such a salivating market for carried-away thoughts, yeah.
Matt | Homepage | 05.23.05 - 12:33 pm | #

I gotta say, not having read the book -- there's a high standard that has to be crossed to prove that the crew of incompetents that we have in power could achieve a conspiracy to order a pizza. Almost everything that happened on 9/11 looks like what you would expect -- the inability of Bush to get the whole thing through his head, the paranoia of Cheney, the inability of the military to figure out what was going on while their window of time ran out. There is a famous article by Karl Weick, The Collapse of Sensemaking, which examines a forest fire in which 13 men were burned to death -- the Mann Gulch fire. The pattern of response in that article fits the pattern on 9/11. Before we interpret activities as signs of conspiracy, we might want to compare them to what we've seen happen in other catastrophes, so that we have a normal set to work from. It has always puzzled me that conspiracy theorists don't do this. In any case, Charles Perrow has done a lot of work in this area (Normal Accidents, for instance), too.
roger | Homepage | 05.25.05 - 6:11 pm | #

Yes, that sounds wise to me Roger. But they're certainly playing a dangerous game, when myths such as "the dirty bomb" for instance are propagated so abundantly, and the greatest threat remains, by leaps and bounds, is that people will panic. A delicate business manipulating the public paranoia, anyway.

Maybe it took them a while to realize what a political gift had just fallen into their laps, to carry out old plans otherwise inconceivable. But like I said, Griffin raises some interesting questions yet (and alas, unlikely) to be answered in any substantive manner. The sheer number of outright, unchallenged lies in the official report, for one thing.
Matt | Homepage | 05.25.05 - 11:55 pm | #

There's also the obvious way in which the outward appearance of incompetence consistently gets them off the hook, of course. Make no mistake, many of the real players in this administration are pros, hardened criminals, their nostalgia for another, less enlightened era runs deep and wide.

But I feel like I'm belaboring the obvious here, so I'll shut up.
Matt | Homepage | 05.26.05 - 12:00 am | #