I thought we had a thread on Noam Chomsky and a thread on 9-11 but I could find neither. Please feel free to move this post if I missed something.
Anyway.
I dug up this video of Noam Chomsky on 911 and would like to give it my analysis. So I'm just going to let the video play in the background and see what comes to mind.
In part 1 Chomsky admits that all the authoritarian power systems in the world loved 9-11. He admits governments are using 9-11 as a pretext to exploit their agenda on to the population.
In part 2 he says that it is extremely unlikely that the Bush administration knew anything about 9-11. This is where I usually start to jump up and down. So ok. Lets' hear this out. He says the Bush administration would have been insane to try anything like that. No argument from me there. He also claims that it would almost be certain that it leaked out. Hmm. I'd say that it did leak out and continues to do so till this very day but that all governments have so much to gain by covering it up that they extend every resource to make sure that it does not.
So first he proclaims that all the governments in the world have much to gain from 9-11 but then he changes his words slightly and says that if the Republican party were (the word solely is implied) responsible that all the rest of government forces would get together and expose them. This is a masterful spin because you can't argue with what he is saying. You can only argue with what he is implying. After that he spins back the other way and claims that the risk of the "Bush administration" pulling off a 9-11 is insane and implies that they would have nothing to gain by taking such a huge risk.
I love this quote from him in the video. "If you look at the evidence. anybody that knows anything about the sciences would instantly discount that evidence" . When I listen to him say that he says it as if he just disproved something by saying it. But when I stop and think about it I have to scratch my head. Can anybody honestly tell me what that means?
Here is another one. "When somebody carries out a controlled experiment at the best laboratories at the end there are lots of things that are unexplained". On and on and on without ever mentioning what he is talking about.
He finally wraps it up with. "Even if it were true, which is extremely unlikely, who cares?" I wish I knew what he was talking about but he has flip flopped back and forth so many times that I have to admit. He lost me. At this point in the video he appears to have switched to talking about conspiracy nuts. So he begins his argument by saying that governments had a lot to gain by 9-11 but then I think he switches to taking about the bush administration, that the bush administration exclusively would have been crazy to try and pull it off alone and then somehow then goes from talking about 9-11 and begins talking about conspiracy nuts in general comparing it to JFK and then ends his talk saying that this is all about is personal opinion (and not the evidence of which he never offers). I really can't argue with any of the fact he brought up. (what were they again?) And I certainly believe the man is entitled to his own personal opinion.