On Paranoia

There's been a dust-up over at BSB concerning the group 9/11 Truth. It started with assertions along the lines of 'those loonies ruined Progress Ohio and they'll take down the whole progressive movement if we don't stop them,' and overall it has gotten somewhat less civil since then.

As a side note, the "ruined PO" statement was retracted, and I concur that the 9/11 truth bunch didn't "ruin Progress Ohio," but at the same time I have to say that PO's RSS was only hanging by a thread in my reader for a while. It's a nifty site with some pretty cool tools, but the community blog... let's just say that the 911T folks certainly had help in engendering my loss of interest. The number of posters has recently gone way down, with most posts coming from PO administrators, and as a result, quality is way up. I guess I'm just a reactionary sucker for a moderator.

Anyway, the upshot of the criticism is that the 911T folks are paranoid conspiracy theorists who feed into the right wing narrative of loony lefties who would accuse W of anything and don't recognize the threat of groups like Al Qaeda.

For what it's worth, I tend to agree with a lot of the criticism. And for whatever else it's worth, even if I were to be convinced that there are some questions that need to be answered, I would not hesitate to guess that none of the answers will involve planted explosives. As Richard Clarke said on Maher's show: You have to assume the government is both competent and able to keep a secret. But, in the end, I can't really climb on the 911T -bashing-bandwagon.

The Bush administration has put together the largest database of private communications ever assembled. They have monitored the phone calls of U.S. citizens without a warrant. They have held suspects for years without trial. They have flown prisoners on secret flights to places where they could be legally tortured. They have tortured prisoners themselves. They have thrown Americans into jail for merely wearing slogans in their presence that they disapproved of. They've used the FBI to spy on anti-war groups. They've manipulated intelligence to create a case for a war that has killed tens of thousands of civilians, including a lie in the State of the Union Address that eventually led to them outing an undercover CIA operative and her front company for political reasons.

This administration has significantly raised the bar for dismissing accusations with the statement that "they just wouldn't do that." There are a lot of things that the evil government agents do in cynical thrillers that used to be easily recognized as fiction. Things like the list above. That list, however, does not link to Robert Ludlum novels, it links to the mainest of mainstream news outlets. This administration is not the first to go out of bounds. Internment camps, the Bay of Pigs, the Shah, Iran-Contra... There are plenty of historical events where I still have a hard time believing that my country did what it did, but the current crop of folks at 1600 almost seem to be on a campaign of systematic desensitization to illegal abuses of executive power. It's almost as if they're trying to make the black helicopter crowd socially acceptable.

So, do I think that the evidence is in any way compelling for the MIHOP or LIHOP worldviews? Not at all. Do I think that vocally pushing the "What Really Happened" meme is a lifeline tossed to the Right Wing Noise Machine? Actually, I do. But I have some sympathy.

In a world where where Wal-Mart "had a long-haired employee infiltrate an anti-Wal-Mart group to determine if it planned protests at the company's annual meeting," and we are encouraged to think of "bean festivals, car dealerships, small-town parades and check-cashing stores" as potential terrorist targets, a culture of paranoia is inevitable. Remember when the phrase "or the terrorists will have already won" was bandied about? You don't hear it anymore.