Ted Gunderson, fake whistleblowers, and the “Patriot movement”

In the TruthMove forum, Mark has called attention to the news story Secret camps and guillotines? Groups make birthers look sane by Steven Thomma, McClatchy Newspapers, Friday, August 28, 2009.

This story mentions Ted Gunderson, who, back in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, was also a major proponent of the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” scare.

9/11 – The Saudi connection?

The two aspects of 9/11 I now think are most worth looking into further are:

1. Statements by whistleblowers such as Sibel Edmonds. (See various links in my April 21 post U.S. government foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.)
2. The relationship between the U.S. government and Saudi Arabia.

U.S. government foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks?

As I’ve said in the past two posts, what I personally find suspicious about 9/11 is not the story of the hijackers, but rather the claim that the attack could not have been prevented.

It seems to me that the FBI and the CIA had no good excuse not to have known about the plot in advance, in detail, given that the plot had been hatched way back in 1995 or so, and given that the FBI and the CIA had indeed been spying on al-Qaeda for lo these many years, except that the FBI sometimes refused, for no good reason, to follow up on obvious leads.

U.S. government sponsorship of Islamist terror

A topic I’ve been reading up on lately is the history of U.S. government sponsorship of Islamist terror.

I highly recommend the Cooperative Research site’s pages on The use of Islamist militants by American and Israeli militarists. (See especially the more recent stuff on page 2.) One caveat: Some items here are well-sourced, others aren’t. However, even if one confines one’s attention to the better-sourced items, the picture that emerges is still quite disturbing.

Common a priori objections by “debunkers,” including arguments from authority and the “someone would have talked” and “too many people” arguments

Every now and then I get a wave of “debunkers” visiting this blog. They’re welcome to post here; I’ve learned a lot from them. But, in the future, I would like to try to avoid certain repetitious arguments, or at least confine those particular arguments to relevant threads such as this one.

There are some a priori arguments they almost always bring up in an effort to prove that there could not have been any government complicity in the attacks of 9/11. In recent debates here, those arguments got jumbled together with other, meatier issues in comment threads.

To avoid such jumbling in the future, I’ve decided to devote this post to the more common a priori arguments. I’ll then add a rule to my comment policy requiring that, in the future, these and similar a priori arguments be discussed only in comments below this post (or other posts on these same topics), rather than jumbled together with other, more substantive discussions.

In this post I’ll also provide a brief review of my debates with “debunkers” in general, for the benefit of “debunkers” visiting this blog for the first time. Some of the discussions we’ve had here have been very worthwhile.

Screw Loose Change – reply to some recent posts

I’ll now comment on an assortment of recent posts at Screw Loose Change.

• Priorities at Ground Zero
• FBI’s investigation of hijackings
• WTC 7 collapse zone testimonies
• “Proof by silence”
• Good satire on guilt-by-association
• Weird smear against Frank Morales
• The “Franklin coverup” allegations
• “Blood sacrifice”

Identifying disinformation agents?

The online 911 Truth movement seems to have gotten caught up in an orgy of agent-baiting, with people on both sides of various divides either outright calling each other “disinformation agents” or, at the very least, insinuating that the leaders of the other side are probably disinformation agents.

The main divide is between what I think of as the saner and wackier branches of the movement. Admittedly my terminology is far from objective and makes clear where I stand.

By the wackier branches, I mean advocates of things like no-planes theories (especially WTC no-planes theories), video fakery, Star Wars beams, etc,. Many (though not all) of these folks also advocate claims about some vast, generations-old conspiracy that controls and micromanages the entire world, usually “the Illuminati.” (See The recent growth of anti-Illuminism: Dreadful ideology about the dreaded Illuminati and More about anti-Illuminism.) Some of their claims are blatant physical impossibilities. For example, a “Star Wars beam” powerful enough to “dustify” the towers would probably also ionize the air, causing the beam itself to glow like a lightning bolt. Obviously we didn’t see anything like that on 9/11.

By the saner branches, I mean those who (at least for the most part) reject stuff like the above, and who recognize the need for critical thinking and careful research.

But even some people in the saner branches seem to me to be way, way, way too quick to think of people on the other side as “disinformation agents.”

Now, it is indeed likely that there are government agents of various kinds among us, given the past history of COINTELPRO, and given more recent legislation such as the PATRIOT act. But, it seems to me, some of the kinds of behaviors that have been identified as “agent-like” behaviors are very commonplace among other people too, with other, more commonplace motives. So, it seems to me, these behaviors are far from a reliable way to spot an agent, although many of them are bad behaviors in their own right.