Conspiracy theories are fun!
Last night Bad Taste, a local Bozeman music and movie shop, put on a showing of Alex Jones’s Terrorstorm at the Procrastinator theater on campus. I’ve mentioned Jones before; he’s a conspiracy theorist about all manner of things, 9/11 most famously. The whole documentary is online here.
It was somewhat interesting. Jones decided to give a history of what he calls “false flag” operations by the U.S., in which we lied about or fabricated events in order to justify some policy. He goes through non-controversial Cold War-era ones like the 1953 coup in Iran and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, but also includes the attack on the USS Liberty. Jones considers more recent incidents like the London bombings of last year and 9/11 to also be “false flag” operations.
Honestly, I’d never heard of anyone claiming the London bombings were a government plot. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Jones is, as usual, rather unconvincing. To start off, he dwells on the fact that the London police initially claimed it was a power failure that was causing the disturbance. How this fits into a government conspiracy is ignored; if the plan was to use the attacks for political gain, covering them up does no good. Just before that, Jones discussing the Madrid bombings claims there was no connection to al Qaeda. Again we have to ask, what was the point? The Spanish government tried to say it wasn’t al Qaeda at first and were kicked out for it. They were replaced with a government that pulled out of Iraq. How this is part of a globalist conspiracy is beyond me. Next up, Jones tries to insinuate that the diverted bus that blew up is somehow connected? Why? We don’t know. The newspaper highlighted in the documentary says it was diverted to avoid the disruption. Jones thinks it’s weird that that was the only bus disrupted. Perhaps it was the only bus that needed to be diverted during the time frame in question? And considering it was going to the area being targeted, I don’t think it’s that odd that of all the buses, it was targeted. Especially if it was the only one going to that area at that time.
Jones goes on to make more mistakes. He notes that police said the bombers didn’t find the M.O. of suicide bombers – buying two way tickets, playing games, having families, having jobs, etc. Except, that is the M.O. of suicide bombers. They’re not misanthropic deviants. I would guess that two-way tickets are less suspicious than one-way tickets and can be explained as the bombers being careful.
It goes on and on. There’s a lot innuendo and claims of odd occurrences, but none of them make sense in light of the idea that it was a conspiracy by the government. The subject of 9/11 is largely avoided, but no true conspiracy theorist can leave it alone. They have Steven Jones on claiming the towers were demolished with some kind of thermite, proved by chemical analysis. More egregiously, Jones has the clip of Larry Silverstein talking about “pulling” before WTC-7 collapsed. We’re supposed to believe that means demolish, not pull the contingent of firefighters from the area. We’re also supposed to believe that he admitted WTC-7 was demolished on national television, when this is supposed to be a cover up. Asinine.
Jones goes through other, less controversial, criticism of Bush, such as his expansion of executive power. Of course, Jones plays this as alarmist as possible, but he’s at least close.
Probably the best and worst aspect of this documentary is Jones’s use of valid criticisms of our government, interspersed with fantastically paranoid and illogical criticisms. It’s good to see some truth in there, but I suspect anyone who sees it will end up dismissing all of it because of the lunacy of many of Jones’s positions. Or they’ll accept it all and become paranoid wingnuts like Jones. No good will come of it.
