for the record.

my initial hypothesis of the world trade centre attack was that it was an inside job. what i mean when i say that is that my initial feeling when living through the attacks was not "the united states is under attack", but instead "the united states military is launching a coup". so, that was my starting point, my initial condition, my base assumption.

however, i have never been involved with, organized with or even really communicated with any kind of "truther" movement. further, the minimal amount of information i've sorted through from these groups has largely struck me as a series of red herrings. broadly speaking, even if they could make their arguments convincingly, it wouldn't actually prove anything.

what are the actual facts, here?

1) the united states government has never released any kind of evidence that bin laden or al qaeda were involved in the attacks. strictly factually and legally speaking, the official position of the united states government - the hypothesis, stated without any proof, that a shady terrorist group called al qaeda blew up several buildings in downtown new york - is actually the most fully developed conspiracy theory in the history of conspiracy theories. no conspiracy theory has produced more media, or generated more speculation. but, there is absolutely no proof at all, whatsoever, for this claim.

2) while there are some inconsistencies in the government's story, it's hardly enough to prove they're lying.

3) the "truther movement" appears to be more interested in distracting from meaningful questions than generating meaningful answers. to state that they have failed to present a compelling alternate hypothesis would be an understatement.

4) the failure of the "truther movement" to articulate their argument compellingly does not mean they're wrong.

i am not going to kneejerk against "conspiracy theorists", or tarnish the concept of alternative research. i do not have a religious epistemology but a scientific one, meaning that i am not looking for absolute truth anywhere in existence, but rather for a series of constantly changing, constantly shifting approximations to reality. as we study and learn more about things, our understanding of them changes. historians, too, are constantly reevaluating evidence to uphold or deny the historical record, to try and figure out what is propaganda and what is actually true. the historical constant is not in any concept of absolute truth, but in the fact that governments are constantly lying to advance their own interests, meaning that the role of the historian is to question what a government says, not to accept it on face value. there is consequently a proper role for conspiracy theory in academic discourse, so long as it is approached using the scientific method. and, i'm actually going to label you a mindless idiot and slam the door in your face if you disagree with me about that. einstein, darwin, gallileo, marx - these were all conspiracy theorists in their day. understand that before you sharpen your knives; we need to collectively be more proactive in our critical thinking skills, to learn how to weigh evidence on our own, and not to rely on the dictates of official media and government narratives. our existence as a free thinking, scientifically-inquiring culture relies upon it.

so, in my mind, you don't win the argument by yelling "conspiracy theory". you need to be more rigorous than that - you need to cite evidence, you need to cite proof.

but, my analysis of the situation right now is that neither side of the debate has done that. the government's official conspiracy theory is no more convincing to me than the one presented by the truthers. neither argument passes basic scientific scrutiny, and neither argument would hold up in a court of law. it follows that the correct position to take on the topic is agnosticism; an honest observer would have to state that it is not at all clear who was responsible for the attack, and either hypothesis is equally valid until such a time comes as more evidence is revealed by the government to properly scrutinize.

the truthers have made a rather dramatic error, though, in trying to gather positive evidence that the government was responsible. short of finding direct electronic communication documenting the attacks - and if it was done from inside the government then these documents would exist in the proper agency - there was never going to be any convincing way to prove the government did this. these documents would need to be declassified before you could even have a meaningful conversation about the topic, and they will be one day, and we will no doubt learn that the truthers had a few decent insights, even if the smoking gun remains redacted. there are periods of byzantine history where the best way we can describe the existing historical record is to state that we know that records were destroyed and rewritten for that period; we can know that the history is wrong, without knowing what the actual history was, and therefore know that we can't know what actually happened. this may end up being the correct academic perspective in the long run - we may have to accept we'll never actually know.

i would recommend waiting for the government to actually release an unredacted version of their dossier before commenting further.

until then, both unproven hypotheses are equally valid - if you believe in science and evidence, and uphold critical thinking, and won't be intimidated by the senseless bully pulpit that is the corporate media.