Two articles taking on the spam merchants.
From a fringe that once made a name for itself distributing truth dollars to more succesfully pushing viral videos on the youtubed and googled vidiot ciruit, 9-11 conspiracy theories have taken on a fast and furious popular growth in recent months. The successive releases of Loose Change, Terror Storm and a host of less competent productions has seen the 9-11 truth types quickly come to accumulate a louder and louder voice within the international anti-war community.
From a position of being able to ignore these cranks because of their association with christian fundamentalists like Alex Jones who maintain that successive world leaders secretly signal to each other by making as many 'devil sign' gestures as Temple Bar kids at a Korn gig, sections of the left have recently responded to their crass parasitical attempt to ride on anti-war sentiment. Perhaps this is remains an international problem with little of the effect taking hold here, however there are some murmourings - some examples of this can be seen at the swamp that is the IAWM discussion forum, vandalised as it is with 9-11 conspiracy theory cut and pastes. Many other Indymedias are also lost under the growing signal of noise generated by these paranoics, this online effect obviously has repurcussions for the left.
When conspiracy loons that ignore all hopes of substantiating fact and condense unrelated co-incidences into sequenced pulling of the strings become one of the most visible groups explaining the events of the 'war of terror' it means the room for anti-capitalist arguments that challenge social relationships instead of cabals of devil worshipping elites is harder to hear against the rest of the noise. Thankfully Cockburn provides a useful artical that demolishies these conspiracy nuts that share so many left wing themes as engaging in a socialism for the thick, while Schnews takes them on in its own wonderful 'in yer face' style by advising them to 'WAKE UP! IT'S YER PLANE CRAZY...' Let's just hope these nuts don't find this Indymedia or this thread through Google.
Cockburn in Counterpunch
"... the actual corrupt conspiracies on Giuliani’s watch: the favoritism to Motorola which saddled the firemen with radios that didn’t work; the ability of the Port Authority to skimp on fire protection, the mayor’s catastrophic failure in the years before 9/11/2001 to organize an effective unified emergency command that would have meant that cops and firemen could have communicated; that many firemen wouldn’t have unnecessarily entered the Towers; that people in the Towers wouldn’t have been told by 911 emergency operators to stay in place; and that firemen could have heard the helicopter warnings and the final Mayday messages that prompted most of the NYPD men to flee the Towers.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09092006.html
From Schnews
But in reality, whether or not 9-11 was orchestrated, we should be concentrating on the broader US-led capitalist agendas, and their catastrophic consequences. 9-11 was a symptom rather than a cause of a ‘big picture’ which doesn’t need science fiction to explain it. World power is not a neat pyramid structure with aliens, Jews or a cabal of men with a secret handshake at the top. It makes more sense to see a range of competing power blocks, alliances and cartels in a shifting, perpetual power play – with governments, nationalist and business interests doing what they’ve always done, battling for control of land, resources, workforces and populations. There is one conspiracy that doesn’t lurk in smoky rooms behind closed doors – it’s called global capitalism.
http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news559.htm