Actually I haven’t. I thought it was a good enough example to cite because the BBC are not known to be a bunch of cranks. Sounds like you recommend it, and I was leaning toward checking it out, so maybe I should see it soon.
As for operating with the tacit approval of the Taliban- well, in terms of the civil war, sure. A guy with experience fighting the Soviets might help us unify Afghanistan? Neato! But so far I haven’t seen any evidence that the Taliban knew what Bin Laden was up to regarding 911. Heck, the hijackers themselves didn’t know the plan until the day it happened! If he is directing armed maniacs against the Northern Alliance, that is one thing. He could do that without the Taliban once seeing him or even knowing where he is. IF he even did that much.
He could have been in Pakistan for all we know. If we’d known where he was, we would have killed him ourselves.
As for Rumsfeld being stupid, personally I never believed that. It is easier to believe he is highly Machiaveillian (sp?). Cite?
Good question! It is relevant because, if regime x wants to attack regime y, but regime x does not want to look like a bunch of Nazis, regime x needs an excuse to attack regime y. So. If regime x says to y, ‘You MUST do z, or it means war!!!’, and if z is impossible, then x gets the war it wants, but it appears that y are the bad guys.
If the Taliban really couldn’t turn over Bin Laden, it supports the conjecture that the war was precipitated by some other motive than… z.
I don’t think it would affect whether the US made a move to attack AQ. Assuming AQ exists of course. If it doesn’t even exist, it makes z a sure bet.
Maybe the ‘AQ doesn’t exist’ argument is at least slightly semantic. Apparently Bin Laden was over there somewhere (cite?), and he had to have some kind of team to pull off 911. So there is someone to attack. But what if it is just 10 guys? Grab 'em and it’s all over by 10/31/01.
Well. If there is any benefit at all to attacking Afghanistan during this period, now is the time to take advantage of the situation. Bush has a record of taking advantage of 911 to start major wars, no? Couldn’t the War on Terror in Afghanistan be the same philosophy?
In my favor-
Taliban militarily wimpy. Low chance of defeat.
Taliban are kind of a result of Cold War CIA behavior.
Borders Iran- member of the ‘Axis of Evil’.
No way we’re going to war with Saudi Arabia.
Bush famously starts any war because of 911.
Afghanistan is located roughly between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf.
Meet Peak Oil.
I would not catergorize starting two wars as having a “record” as though he had actually started eight or ten. He did not start a single war in the years prior to 2000, for example. He did not start a single war following April, 2003.
The Taliban was not wimpy. They were able to face down and drive out multiple warlords in many different places in the country and hold power for almost ten years until driven out by groups with the support of the world’s most powerful nation.
The Taliban are the result of Cold War activities–which says absolutely nothing about why the U.S. might want to throw them out of power when it had ignored them from the moment they seized power until the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon.
The “Axis of Evil” was not invented until after the invasion of Afghanistan had already been set up, although this is the one point you’ve made that might have a shadow of plausibility regarding a reason to conquer Afghanistan.
There is no reason why we would want to start a war against Saudi Arabia. We do not go to war with nations simply because some of their citizens have harmed our citizens, particularly when there is no evidence that the Saudi nation had any participation in the event.
The “war for oil” rumors were seriously debunked on this message board before we even invaded Afghanistan. There was no serious plan to re-route a pipeline through Afghanistan by any government, NGO, or business. Afghanistan has no oil. Had there been a pipeline proposal, it would probably have been easier to deal with the (cash starved) Taliban than dozens of warlords, anyway.
Are you familiar with the principle of Occam’s Razor?
[QUOTE=Try2B Comprehensive]
Taliban militarily wimpy. Low chance of defeat.
[/QUOTE]
What do you base this on, exactly? The Taliban are still out there fighting us after nearly a decade. Wimpy? They are basically holding their own atm, and very nearly took down Pakistan too boot! Where do you get the idea they are ‘wimpy’??
No…they are the kind of result you get out of a multi-year civil war when no outside country gives a shit what happens to you. The CIA was, at best, tangentially responsible for the Taliban coming to power. I REALLY wish you’d try and absorb at least a minimum of the historical context that brought them to power…and allied them with AQ.
Yes? And? Have you noticed something? We haven’t attacked or invaded Iran. AFAICT the whole ‘we are about to invade Iran!’ meme was purely a left wing fantasy…it was never in the cards.
No…why would we? The government of Saudi Arabia never supported AQ either directly or indirectly afaik. Private citizens did…but you can’t go to war with a country because some of their citizens did bad things to you. Once again…there isn’t any parallel between the Taliban’s stance wrt AQ and SA’s stance. The Taliban OPENLY supported AQ…SA didn’t. It’s really that simple.
I disagree. Bush famously started a war with Iraq that was un-necessary. He most certainly used 9/11 and the window of opportunity it gave him to exploit an existing condition between the US and Iraq, a window enabled both by our history with Iraq, by the history of various UN mandates against Iraq, and Saddam and his idiot actions. He played chicken with the US for nearly a decade, and then a perfect storm came up and sunk him. The war with Afghanistan though wasn’t something Bush started…it was inevitable given the severity of AQ’s attack on the US and the Taliban’s support for AQ. The Taliban weren’t going to give up AQ, and the US couldn’t back down from such an attack. It was going to mean war, no matter what. About the only other course Bush would have had was a purely air and missile war against the Taliban…and I doubt that was ever seriously in the cards.
My WAG is that Bush probably NEVER wanted to really go to war with Afghanistan…especially after it became apparent that ObL wasn’t going to be easy to capture in some of the most rugged and hostile terrain on earth. I think, post-9/11 Bush set his sights on Iraq, and Afghanistan was simply a distraction. This is pretty apparent if you look at our own military commitment to Afghanistan vs the military commitment we made against Iraq. IMHO, Bush had no choice but to go to war with Afghanistan and the Taliban.
Seriously…look at a topographical map of the region sometime. This is on par with someone suggesting that putting in an undersea tunnel between Alaska and Chukotsky is feasible.
And yet, despite years of being in Afghanistan we have neither met Peak Oil, nor have we built an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Seriously…shouldn’t we be getting busy on that sometime soon? If it’s so important and all…well, were’s the beef??
Up thread you’ve noted that the BBC is a reasonable source so try this articleon Al Qaeda. Hopefully it will give you a better feel for the sort of organisation AQ was and is.
What was clear pre-9/11 was that AQ (call it what you will, an organisation taking its lead from ObL) maintained training camps in Afganistan. No secret, US forces under Clinton attacked them in August 1998 after the East African bombings, AQ did not deny they were there. Assume that there is no massive conspiracy and accepting for the moment that ObL provided the directing mind and AQ the organisation for the 9/11 attacks, the US response in Afganistan seems to me reasonable. They required the de-facto government - the Taliban - to take action to hand over those involved.
The Taliban did not did not do so, nor did they offer to cooperate with US attempts to do so. So the US government, who could not possibly let an event like 9/11 go unanswered, uses military force (initially special forces and air power) to remove the Taliban from power and close down the training bases. They had great initial success but they failed to capture ObL - established as the evil villain in the western (US) media. So they send in more ground troops to try and capture him - Tora Bora etc. Then they go and invade Iraq…
What they don’t do in Afganistan is put in the forces needed to completely destroy the Taliban (now on the run), pacify the country, and start building an oil pipeline. Personally I’m not sure committing all the forces that went to Iraq would have succeeded in this goal (history is against it) but the Bush government did not even try. They let the situation drift while their attention was on Iraq such that, depite the best efforts of the in country US forces and their allies (British, Canadian, Dutch), large areas of the country again became lawless and the Taliban was able to make a comeback - again offering Islam and stability.
Does this not suggest to you that the motivations for involvement in Afganistan were just as stated: to kill or capture the Al Qaeda leadership, to destroy the training infrastructure , and disrupt their ability to mount further attacks? What it does not suggest is a master plan to control the country and build a pipeline.
Having gone through this line of reasoning I have to come back to: What is your theory? It might help if you could define in simple language where you are **now **coming from. Try2B Comprehensive, do you believe any of these statements is true:
The US Government planned the events of 9/11.
The US Government knew in advance of the events of 9/11.
If either 1) or 2) is true, the motivation for action or inaction was to have an excuse to attack Afganistan.
One or more of the four aircraft supposed to have been hijacked was empty and flown by remote control.
The WTC towers were destroyed by pre-planted demolition charges, not by the impact of the hijacked aircraft.
For whatever reason the investigation into the events of 9/11 was a sham and the conclusions deliberately falsified.
The US Government did not know in advance of the events of 9/11 and these happened as generally accepted but the US Government used them as an excuse to attack Afganistan.
and I suppose I ought to include:
8) If either 1) or 2) is true, the motivation for action or inaction was to have an excuse to attack Iraq.
9) The US Government did not know in advance of the events of 9/11 and these happened as generally accepted but the US Government used them as an excuse to attack Iraq.
Lots of other possible statements I could try but these are the ones that seem to have come up on this thread. If you could just say if you agree with any of these we would know where your doubts lay.
Would it be fair to say that your framework for categorical debunking means that for a given event, any and every explanation should be entertained until such explanation is shown to be either precluded by some proven aspect of the event or is shown to be impossible?
If this is the case, how can we eliminate scenarios that have no supporting evidence?
Let’s say a lumberjack cuts down a tree. This occurs in the middle of a multi-day clear-cutting operation, surrounded by other men felling other trees. We have videotape and eyewitnesses. The tree is in a forest owned by a timber company and we have copies of the company’s internal paperwork going back months that show that the clear-cutting was supposed to be going on at that time and place. We have the chainsaw that was used, it is shown to be in good working order. We have the tree and it’s stump, bot appear to have been cut with a chainsaw.
Somebody on the internet says that, in fact, the tree was not cut down by the lumberjack, with the chainsaw. He says that a CIA black ops team did it, using a quantum tunneling x-ray laser, while making it appear that this was just another normal guy cutting down a tree.
You see, as the blade was advanced through the tree, the laser cut away the wood, a millimeter at a time, a fraction of a second before the saw contacted it. The lumberjack felt resistance to the blade identical to what is normally felt, because of subatomic interference waves produced by the laser ablation, so he is none the wiser.
The laser was set up in a nearby tree and fired down at an angle through the cut tree. It left the intervening wood unscathed because of a complex quantum tunneling effect. It’s designed to do that.
The CIA operatives don’t appear on camera because it wasn’t pointed at the right place, plus they are really good at hiding and anyway they were wearing nanotech stealth suits. They carried out this whole operation because their superiors thought it would be good training.
Is there any evidence for any of this? No. Is this scenario wildly implausible (and silly)? Of course. But by your standard of categorical debunking:
it must remain under consideration as possible explanations until somebody can PROVE the ‘official story’ (only if such case excludes the alternative) or PROVE some part of the alternative story is impossible.
The latter sounds like proving a negative.
How can one prove the offical ‘lumberjack and chainsaw’ story such that it excludes the alternate story, when people can claim that any evidence for it is the product of a secret effort to create false evidence? How can one disprove the unofficial ‘CIA and laser’ story when it has no testable parts?
The example is intentially ridiculous, I am not mocking anyone here, merely pointing out what appears to be a problem that makes your categorical debunking idea unworkable. You seem to not be immune to reason, so please explain how to:
A. Make an explanation that excludes possibilities, including those which produce identical evidence.
B. Prove that something did not happen or is impossible.
Let me know if this doesn’t answer your post- I’m trying to answer all your questions.
Things can be proven to be impossible. Say Joe is sleeping with Jane, Jack’s wife. Unbeknownst to them, Jack is on the other side of town holding up a convenience store. Jack is later arrested. Jack looks remarkably like Joe and blames the crime on him. Upon hearing the story, Jane knows it is impossible. Jack’s story is categorically debunked. Now- proving it? Since Jane already knows, it is proven to her. Could she prove it to everyone else? If enough people tried hard enough, why not?
If the examples are going to extend even into the intentionally absurd, I think it is only fair to grant me a similarly increased degree of comprehensives with the evidence-gathering and analysis. Maybe someone got a shot of the agents on his cameraphone. They might have left footprints, or the video reveals strange laser phenomena. Your example as-is magnifies the conspiracy while limiting perception. No fair! Or theoretically, for different things to produce the exact same evidence violates the Identity Principle, and so is a priori impossible. Still, if you want to limit the ability to collect sufficient evidence then people can be literally fooled.
Put yet another way, gathering evidence can be analagous to plotting out Pascal’s Triange. Plot enough points and pretty soon you can see the picture. Given the Identity Principle, plot enough points and you can always discern between fakes.
Again given your example as-is, your story is more than intentionally absurd, it is impossible to begin with. So, it isn’t just debunked, it is a priori categorically debunked. (I hope my tone doesn’t come across as harsh- I think this is a good question!)
In the real world the evidence really will be limited. It could be pretty good, but there isn’t an exact simulacrum of the situation available, ever. At some point people may have to make a judgment without having arrived at a state of categorical certainty. Try for a high standard and you should get a good judgment, no?
So what about the remote-controlled planes theory? There is no evidence for that either. Except, well, planes flying off-course and into buildings. Technically I suppose it could be done. Someone posted a link upthread to an article about a technology developed before 911 that could fly a jetliner by remote control. But still, proceeding further into the evidence there soon seems no reason to think it was a remote-control operation. No comprehensive account seems to point at that specifically, but instead specifically at something else. Categorically debunked? Maybe not.
Furioius Marmot:
Well… technically I could have an evil twin. But with no sign of him/her, ever, there is no reason for me to think so. So the scenario isn’t considered in the first place.
If the example in question is a really big deal, like the justification for entry into a major war or something, maybe it is appropriate to entertain scenarios for which there is no evidence. It shouldn’t take long. Want to entertain the idea that a magical unicorn brought down the towers? Ok… um, I don’t think so. No wait, it was actually a magic dwarf! Ok… I don’t think so. Without any evidence in the first place to support either one, even the absurd examples quickly fall into categories. Even in a world where we allow the possibility of magical unicorns, unless you think there are an infinite number of categories of absurd explanations, you should be able to knock them all off pretty quickly.
Whew! Tough crowd! I’ll get to the other questions soon.
Justification for entry into the war was pretty straightforward. We had enough evidence to show AQ was responsible for the attacks. They were in Afghanistan. The government of Afghanistan was actively supporting them, or at minimum interested in preventing us from going in after them. So we took them out, using the tools at our disposal.
What further justification are you looking for? This isn’t really rocket science.
Rather than waxing philosophical, please give us one concrete thing that you don’t believe is fully explained. Up until now you’ve been saying “what if”. Everything you’ve wondered about has been shown to be off base. How many of these do we have to go through?
It’s been 8 years, things have been pretty thoroughly researched. It didn’t take long.
Try2B Comprehensive…instead of dancing about, I would really like you to simply answer (in as straight forward a way as possible) MarcusF’s multiple choice questions on where you stand…so that we will all know what exactly we are arguing about here, and where exactly you stand. Here, this is what he asked:
Myself, I’m firmly in the #9 camp…I think the US government did now know about 9/11 and was caught completely by surprise, but used the events and the historical situation wrt Iraq (public perceptions of Saddam and Iraq, previous UN mandates, fear and anger over 9/11, cherry picking of data enhance the supposed threat of Iraq, etc etc) in order to build a case for war that was compelling enough to convince a large percentage of people to support the invasion. I think that Afghanistan was pretty demonstrably simply a side show, something that Bush et al felt compelled to do, but was never a focus. I don’t see how anyone could look at the actual history, especially events that have transpired after our invasion of Afghanistan, and see how it could have ever been anything more than a side show.
I liked the article you linked to, and I like your explanation too.
I still have the same question after reading the BBC article that I had before- granting that I don’t have a reason to think the BBC are just making this up. That is, what is the evidence that the Taliban and AQ were linked? The article says they were, so they must have based that on something. Some people might want to call me out on my insistence on this point, but- can I see that evidence myself?
You’re right- it doesn’t look like they put in the forces to pacify the country. That doesn’t add up to pipeline project, does it? I could respond with the kind of views Bush and Rumsfeld et al advanced before the war, namely that the oppressed people of horrible regimes would welcome our troops as liberators once their regimes were toppled. Others on this thread say they believe these high officials really believed that. So… maybe they believed the country would be easy to pacify. That doesn’t seem to make sense considering the history of the region, but they said the same thing about Iraq and it didn’t make sense in that case either.
Or… I could respond with the kind of things Dick Cheney and friends said about new oil discoveries in the region. Consider it in the context of just a single quote from Wiki on Peak Oil:
There is suggested a motive to secure Caspian oil by military means. In the context of the peak oil quote, new oil discoveries are very important- without them the world economy has to face the consequences of peak oil. Elsewhere Cheney says that the Caspian and the deserts of Iraq hold the worlds largest deposits of what I’m calling ‘new oil’.
So. In light of my quotes there appears to be a motive to occupy Afghanistan for the sake of oil. But in light of your story- which isn’t so unconvincing- the situation isn’t unfolding as if that is the plan.
Maybe the two stories can co-exist? The plan flopped?
I still haven’t seen serious evidence of a link between AQ and the Taliban. Without the evidence it is just an assertion- surely you’ll grant me this much?
Regarding our military ops- I don’t think I can disprove your account. But I also have very little information about the history of our military ops over there. Where should I look?
The pipeline idea is a subcategory of the more general idea that the issue of war was forced. There could be other motives besides oil for the invasion. I think some key cites could reinforce your position, no?
Really puts the ‘remote’ in remotely possible. Maybe if Bin Laden is a CIA agent. Other scenarios seem even more preposterous. Answer: no.
Not really. Apparently some guy at the FBI tried to get his supervisor to allow searches into KSM’s computer, but it went nowhere. Nothing like Brzezinsky telling Carter that intervention would precipitate a Soviet invasion. No.
If 1 or 2 is true, sure, maybe.
I don’t think that.
No.
Hm… the 911 Commission Report was delayed wasn’t it? By more than 100 days? Compared to just a few days for other big events? And some things appear to have been deliberately left out. People question the way the cleanup was handled, but I guess I don’t have an opinion either way on the last one. So, some fishy things, but I’m open to an explanation. This scenario raises the question, given all the other evidence, what actually could be covered up.
Maybe.
seems more plausible than in the case of the Afghanistan invasion, considering the, um, pre-emptiveness of the Iraq invasion.
Quotes I’ve posted way upthread suggest that Bush attempted to push this line, but other officials wouldn’t go along with it. The link was suggested in speeches, but ultimately WMDs were the motivation for the Iraq invasion IMHO.
What fishy things? Be specific. I think you’ll find that most if not all your questions have pretty straightforward answers that you just aren’t aware of.
Try2B: I won’t go through your post in detail - leave that to others with more time - but I feel there is a bit of muddled thinking in responses to my numbered points. You have said “No” to both 1) and 2) but then for 3) you say “If 1 or 2 is true, sure, maybe”. If you say no to 1) and 2) you **have **to reject 3) and go to 7) and state what you think there.
On one specific point:
I don’t think anyone has ever suggested there weren’t links between the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda either before or after 9/11. That is not to say one group controlled the other or they were integrated or anything of that sort. AQ was always a network rather than a tight knit group and the Taliban were never a hard, coherent organisation.
After being expelled from the Sudan ObL moved to Afganistan and set up jihadist training camps and a time when the Taliban were the effective government (whether formally recognised or not) of Afganistan. In the late 90’s the Taliban were repeatedly pressed to expel ObL and close the camps by Western governments. They prevaricated, talked about trials by Islamic scholars, claimed to have closed the camps, etc. but refused to hand over or expel ObL. At no time did they claim he was not there! Post 9/11 - as I said before - the Taliban refused to cooperate in killing or capturing the AQ leadership and closing the training camps.
Think about it, why wouldn’t there be links? The Taliban took their whole purpose from militant Islamic, jihadist, thought they had learned in the madrassas of nothern Pakistan during the Soviet occupation. ObL’s and AQ’s viewpoint and philosophy sprang from the same roots. Having said that it is always important to remember they are not the same thing and they do not always have the same objectives and interests. The Taliban are a specifically Afgan, (actually mostly from just one ethnic group in Afganistan, the Pashtuns) organisation with the aim of making Afganistan into an Islamic state. AQ is a is a widespread, dispursed network of individuals and small groups united by a militant Islamic philosophy. As much as they have common objectives they are defined globally as opposition “the West” (and in particular the US ) and support for the rise of a new Caliphate.
You might be interested in this articleon the Taliban (again from the BBC) written ten months before 9/11!
1) The US Government planned the events of 9/11.
If by “US Government” you mean members within it, I believe this is possible.
**
2) The US Government knew in advance of the events of 9/11.**
As above.
3) If either 1) or 2) is true, the motivation for action or inaction was to have an excuse to attack Afganistan.
Nah, it’s not that simple.
4) One or more of the four aircraft supposed to have been hijacked was empty and flown by remote control.
Unlikely, but possible.
5) The WTC towers were destroyed by pre-planted demolition charges, not by the impact of the hijacked aircraft.
Well, apart from WTC7. The planes were a cover for the sabotage of 1 and 2, and the expected damage from their collapse was the cover for 7.
6) For whatever reason the investigation into the events of 9/11 was a sham and the conclusions deliberately falsified.
Obvious. They didn’t even investigate the possibility of sabotage, from all I’ve read.
7) The US Government did not know in advance of the events of 9/11 and these happened as generally accepted but the US Government used them as an excuse to attack Afganistan.
If someone within or working for the US Government hadn’t anticipated it, they were failing in their duty, at the very least, and need holding to account for that.
Hmm, I think I wasn’t clear. The question is what could be covered up in all this that would be important enough to change opinions. Some things about the investigation look fishy, like other things in the situation, but I’d need more than that to worry much about this.
My point is that your own definition for what constitutes a categorical debunking is easily deafeated by nonsense explantations. If you insist on using this standard for debunking, it needs work.
It is likely that any event/phenomena in need of debunking will attract people who argue in bad faith and make ludicrous claims that have no supporting evidence or are claimed to produce evidence identical to what has been observed. Your standard has no defense against such claims because it relies on declarations of ‘proven’ or ‘impossible’.
By this example, your standards for ‘impossible’ and ‘proven’ appear to be ‘somebody believes that they saw something’. You have excluded all possibilities which involve a person being mistaken or deliberately deceived (clones, holograms, a wizard did it, etc.).
Such evidence could only exist if the bogus explanation was the correct account of the event. Even then, the evidence might not exist or be preserved. For you, me, and the majority of rational people, it is sufficient to say “There is no evidence for that, so it can be dismissed.” However, for a comprehensive debunking, lack of evidence is not good enough. A possibility can only be dismissed through exclusion by a proven event or by being shown to be impossible.
Who said anything about fair? This is about the deficiencies in your categorical debunking framework that need to be fixed before it can withstand silly conspiracy theories put forward by people who are not interested in what we consider impossible.
No argument from me on this, in theory. It’s not that I want to limit the ability to collect evidence, it is that evidence is not always preserved. In reality, non-unique solutions resulting from insufficient data are commonplace. The capacity for people to be ‘fooled’ by incomplete evidence is critical here. The history of science is full of incorrect ideas, that fit the available data, which have subsequently been replaced as new data become available. See geocentric vs. heliocentric models, geosynclinal vs. plate tectonic models. It is a bit harsh to say someone has been fooled when they reach a conclusion that is not contradicted by any extant information.
More to your point, it is necessary to recognize the possibility of deliberate deception.
Again, no argument from me on this, in theory. However, for a useful, rigorous framework for categorical debunking, you need to take incomplete evidence into account.
For this example, for most people, it is enough to say “Impossible!”, but that is not always the case. Your definition of categorical debunking contains no standard of evidence for declarations of ‘possible’/‘impossible’. This needs to be addressed otherwise a debunking may devolve to “It’s impossible!” “No it’s not!”.
Exactly how I would treat these sorts of discussions. The problem is that your definition of categorical debunking relies on certainty regarding ‘proven’ and ‘impossible’. It needs to be reworked to take into consideration all of the good points you make in this paragraph.
Not by your current definition.
This all relies on good judgement, which you do not mention anywhere in your definition of categorial debunking. What constitiutes ‘no sign of’ an evil twin? What’s a really big deal? What’s absurd? Our opinions on these are probably nearly identical, but a priori dismissal of possibilties as ‘absurd’ or ‘not a big deal’ based solely on one person’s judement is going to lead to more acrimonious and futile debate, not a better approximation of the truth.
In short, categorical debunking needs further work.
I’ll get to the other questions soon.