"In matters of science, the authority of thousands is not worth the humble reasoning of one single person."
- Galileo Galilei

The mainstream official story holds that 9/11 was an attack by outsiders (in the form of fanatical Islamists) on the U.S. and by association also on all free democratic nations.

The MIHOP ("make it happen on purpose") alternative view holds that 9/11 was an attack by insiders on the same.

Let's call the official story the OMIHOP version ("O" standing for Osama). In the OMIHOP scenario we have fanatics lead by Osama who “hate our freedoms” bent on an irrational campaign of punitive justice based on a distorted interpretation of Koranic Law.

In the MIHOP camp we have a variety of views which center on the idea that a cabal of business men, industrialists, generals, intelligence agencies and politicians conspired to engineer a “New Pearl Harbour” - effectively a coup d’etat which allowed them to seize executive control of the U.S. government and military machine - to invade and occupy the Middle East as anticipated in the PNAC documents, and enforce a "New World Order" over numerous other countries.

A third position, the LIHOP view, involves a mixture (of varying proportions) of MIHOP and OMIHOP elements.

All of these scenarios are largely speculation and require conspiracies. The question an impartial observer would ask is not “are the 9/11 conspiracy theories true?”, but rather “which 9/11 conspiracy theory best matches the known facts?”.

Which Conspiracy Theory Best Matches the Facts?

I am often asked if I "believe" the "conspiracy theory". I find this question perplexing. The question implies so many assumptions that are clearly wrong, such as:

• there is one unambigious mainstream version of events
• the mainstream version of events does not involve a conspiracy
• the 9/11 Truth perspective is based on "belief"
• the 9/11 Truth perspective is represented by one unifying alternative theory

When a friend asks this question in good faith it is best seen as an expression of their confusion and ignorance - and we need to be patient with our friends. We need to politely sit them down and explain the complexities to them slowly and carefully. The question itself needs to be deconstructed. When a journalist poses the same question we don't need to be so gentle however. Journalists are paid professionals. They make a joke of their profession and fools of themselves when they project simplistic "flatland" interpretations of the 9/11 Truth movement. They deserve to be reprimanded severely.

The alternative theories address gaps and contradictions in the official account, while the official theory stands like a monolith, dismissing alternative views with a wave of the hand and casual remarks about "nutty professors", "idiot paranoia" or the "vile and poisonous effects of trutheriness" (see below for more delightful quotes). The alternative theories appeal to our capacity to look at the evidence intelligently, to use inductive and deductive reasoning, while the official theory merely says “trust the government, we are here to protect you - only a fool (or a traitor) would believe otherwise”.

The alternative theories appeal to those of us who have outgrown a naive belief that governments are fundamentally committed to protecting their own people. They make sense of many anomalies and odd coincidences in the official story, such as the simultaneous war games on the morning of 9/11, the failure of NORAD to follow its normal, routine procedures, the ignoring of warnings, and the fact that Hani Hanjour was refused permission to rent a Cessna. These points of fact are addressed in the MIHOP/LIHOP alternative theories - while the official story ignores or minimises them. I offer these points as examples - the goal of this essay is not to catalogue evidence for alternative 9/11 theories but to try to express why it is that the alternative theories are more satisfying to thinking people.

For quite a while I myself was unwilling to accept the possibility that a modern, democratically elected government would murder thousands of its citizens. This cognitive dissonance is the biggest barrier for many now as they try to grapple with 9/11 alternative theories. Cognitive dissonance works like a weapon in the hands of the State. It threatens our self esteem to believe that the State may want to hurt us. It is like discovering you were abused as a child. The immediate tendency is to suppress the awareness so as to maintain one’s familar self image.

The reality of childhood abuse is that the damage was done long ago, and the same goes for all of us who have been abused by the propaganda of the “war on terror”. The terror attacks, followed by promotion of lies and disinformation via the mass media, damaged us emotionally and psychologically - just as a parent or a priest who abuses a child and then publicly denies it (or worse, blames it on someone else) damages that child.

We live within a framework which includes an implicit social contract between the citizens and the State:

U.S. government representatives may have been behind the attacks, or may have simply lied about their lack of knowledge, or a bit of both. Either way, Locke's social contract (ie. to provide protection to the citizenry) was violated, and the damage of that is incalculable. You could say that the contract is null and void. The citizens are now entitled to rebellion. The alternative would be to lie down and suffer the consequences, which in this case, I suggest, will be to intellectually/emotionally cripple a whole generation.

Imagine yourself a teenager trying to form a sensible picture of the world over the past few years. Think about how all the phony terrorism would affect your brain. The lies and disinformation surrounding the war on terror are poorly constructed - the gaps in logic are huge, the flaws in the facade easily seen. The only way to avoid becoming suspicious would be to dumb yourself down to the point you could believe that two plus two make five if the mass media tells tells you so. The other option is to become an outsider - a weirdo who can't fit in. This is the choice facing young people right now.

The Dangers of Doublethink

There are so many questions to be answered about what happened on 9/11, including such details as the real perpetrators, their main objective, the means by which this was achieved, and their underlying motives etc… I doubt we’ll ever get satisfactory answers, but what is most important is that we strenuously reject attempts to force us into “doublethink” and subvert universally recognised principles of science and reason.

If we allow the State (or its agents) to persuade us there there were no explosions at the World Trade Center or that Newtons’s laws of motion don’t apply to its collapse, we are surrendering to a type of tyranny which George Orwell described only too well:

Orwell’s vision of the future seems exaggerated and a little silly these days, but it depicts a type of pathology which, sadly, seems to be endemic to human societies. It has emerged in plain sight at various points in history. It made its presence felt in the first half of the 20th century, then receded. Its central characteristic seems to be the subjugation and denial of the value and power of the individual, and the promotion of the State to a wrathful godlike status, ie. the “boot stamping on a human face”, as Orwell puts it.

Now it appears to be on the rise again.

I can’t help being reminded of 1984 every time I read a media hit-piece on the 9/11 movement. And it amazes me, because these journalists are university educated, they probably read Orwell or at least are aware of the themes expressed in his books. Yet they talk and act exactly like the fictional “Party intellectuals” satirized above. They mould their perceptions to match any version of reality fed to them as fact by their masters, and they are able to effortlessly gloss over logical contradictions, errors of fact and the evidence of their own senses. This worries me.

Sandbox Journalism

So far, the media apparatchiks are confining themselves to ridiculing the leaders of the 9/11 Truth movement. At some point they may well accuse them of something worse. I would like to put my hands around their throats and choke them (figuratively) until they cough up their hidden agenda. The thing that worries me most is that perhaps they wrote these articles without any coercion at all, that they internalised the doublethink so well that this prose flows effortlessly from their brains.

The Australian Lifestyle - Relaxed and Comfortable ..?

On the whole, life is still pretty free and easy here in Australia, however it may surprise some visitors to this page to know that the War on Terror is a big deal here, and that we have recently passed into law some of the most extreme security measures of any western democracy. The government can detain our citzens indefinitely without charging them with any offence, or they can place them under “control orders” even after the legal process has exonerated them of comitting any crime.

Till now the application of these laws has been limited, and we are being lulled into believing that our freedom is not really under threat. However, it should be noted that there has been no terrorist attack on mainland Australia as yet, either. This can all change overnight. With the new laws, people can be routinely detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure if the State security apparatus determines that they pose a threat.

One of the provisions in the new anti-terror legislation concerns the crime of sedition.

As currently drafted there are “good faith” defences which provide protections for a person who:

My understanding of current legislation is that websites such as 911oz.com can be defended against charges of sedition, since they are attempts in good faith to point out errors or defects in the Government and the administration of justice. However, were I to openly support the armed resistance in Iraq (which I do not) I would instantly be guilty of sedition and liable to a prison term of 7 years.

This is a serious situation.

Everyone who questions the “war on terror” needs to see this and realise that the power elite is quite capable of declaring us to be its enemies.

A New Investigation ?

Increasingly, members of the 9/11 Truth movement have been calling for “a new investigation”. I wonder whether this is the right approach. The real criminals are trying to buy time for themselves right now, and a new investigation would do just that. It would take at least a year to get started, and another two or three years to run.

The lesson from the first 9/11 Commission is clear: both sides of politics are tainted, and there appears to be no part of the executive government which is trustworthy. The new investigation therefore would probably end up being merely a cover-up of a cover-up.

The dangers of a new, government-run, 9/11 investigation are threefold:

• it may cause the 9/11 truth movement to lose steam just as it becomes a truly mainstream force.
• it may fail in its mission
• it may waste years in the process.

Meanwhile, the false flag terror operations will continue, and the real truth seekers will be, once again, marginalised. I think that the better solution is to continue to pressure for release of vital information under FOI requests, to continue to publicise the information that we have and to allow the normal process of law enforcement to follow its course.

9/11 was an event of global proportions. The globalists’ strategy to disempower us requires an equally “global” strategy to counter it.

Perhaps the most serious problem with a “new investigation” is that it will tend to isolate, regionalise and thereby disempower the movement.

Remember, Australia and the U.K have been fully recruited into the war on terror. We have been the target of terrorist attacks (in Bali and London), we have seen a rising tide of racist anti-Muslim polemic, an increasingly paranoid state security apparatus coupled with the passing into law of draconian anti-terrorism measures.

We need to understand that our commmon enemy is not the Bush regime or any specific political grouping. It is far more diffuse - apparently without borders. We need therefore to work beyond our geographical limitations, and counter its subversive strategies with equally sophisticated (non-violent) strategies.