Samizdata

It has been a while since I tripped over one of these. Let me state up front that I have no reason to think Richard Poe is a member of the tinfoil hat and black helicopter brigade, so I read his stuff with rather more respect that I do on some other sites I could mention. Thus I will try to examine his thesis without the usual clothespeg-on-the-nose I use when looking at conspiracy theories. He has written an article called The 9-11 Conspiracy: We Need a Truth Commission, in which he suggest that that:

Though cautiously worded, Judge Baer’s decision has implications beyond the 9-11 case. Dissident experts ranging from former CIA director James Woolsey to Yossef Bodansky, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, have long alleged that America may be under “low-intensity” or “asymmetric” attack by foreign powers hiding behind “false flag” operatives such as bin Laden.

[…]

Through the Clinton years, Big Media and Big Government systematically suppressed evidence of foreign involvement in such operations as the 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the downing of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 (probably by a missile). But the evidence continues to grow.

[…]

Moreover, the number of America’s enemies abroad may be larger than we have been led to believe. The alliance which George Bush named the “Axis of Evil” — minimally defined as Iran, Iraq, North Korea and their “terrorist allies” — may itself be a false flag operation under whose cover such envious powers as Russia, China — and perhaps even the European Union, under French and German domination — may have secretly cooperated to oppose what they see as the threat of U.S. global hegemony.

I will not even attempt to address Richard’s domestic issues as I cannot get to grips in my mind with his theory on why both the previous and current US governments would cover up what he is suggesting they are covering up, so I will just look at the other main thrust: the asymmetric attack by foreign powers.

It is very unclear what the objective of these shadowy people behind the ‘false flag’ gig would be, given the nature of the actual and putative attacks. Blowing up a US government building in Oklahoma City, of all places, would gain what for whom? For a born-in-the-USA individual such as Tim McVeigh, who may feel Oklahoma City actually features in the grand scheme of things, perhaps the attack made perfect sense as a strike against tyranny and day-care centres. But who outside the USA could find Oklahoma State on a map without considerable squinting, let alone Oklahoma City, or see attacking it as a stepping stone to overthrowing the hated hegemonic power? Did mission planners in Moscow, Paris or Peking know something about the importance of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to the global geo-strategic balance of power that is hidden from the untutored eye? I cannot see how blowing up a bunch of run-of-the-mill bureaucrats was going to bring Oklahoma to its knees, let alone the United States. → Continue reading: Ah, conspiracy theories!