kenoma wrote:Jeff wrote:swindled69 wrote:Jeff wrote:
That is often the final word in these threads. Whatever - it was cd.
That might be the last thing said but there is plenty of "whatever.....it wasn't CD" attitudes as well and in the end they are two sides to the 9/11 coin.
The metal that makes up that coin is the devil in the details. Find out the composition of such and you have your circumstantial evidence and a case for CD.
I think that's a false equivalency. I'd say instead that the 9/11 gold has been tin-plated.
What then is the 9/11 gold, or what was it, or what might it have been? Remind us.
Everyone knows these CD threads are boring and unproductive, and usually it is the alleged pigheaded dogmatism of 'CDers' that gets the blame for this: the repetitive posting of images and articles that everyone has seen a thousand times before, allegations of obfuscation or worse etc.
But it's not really all that which makes these threads so stiflingly familiar. It's these repeated allusions to a golden age of what Jeff once dubiously called "Classic Truth", delivered with a world-weary nostalgie de la boue, not only by Jeff (who may have a right to feel some degree of weariness with this subject), but by many others who have never contributed an iota of research to the history of 9/11.
What's intolerable about this is that those who denounce "CDers" by gesturing vaguely to the Real Thing of Deep Politics have been living off the same capital for about five years now. They are rarely asked - and still more rarely do they offer - to articulate the substance of the supposedly profound Classic Truth. That truth, substantially collated about midway through the Bush era, has rarely been revised or revisited. Its proponents have rarely sought to relate their accumulated data on the "deep" politics of the 9/11 period to subsequent events in Pakistan, India, Iraq, Grant Park or Wall Street to see whether they might cast a different light on that narrative.
When any attempt is made to articulate the truth of Classic Truth, we usually end up with the 8bit-esque tourette's posting: you know, that PTech-ISI-Atta-Indira Singh-Saudis-Frankfurt-Sibel Edmonds-Khashoggi-Taliban-Frankfurt-Florida flight schools-occult numerology-Osama thing.
Everything but the kitchen sink and Mossad.
The problem here isn't with the complexity of this thing; complexity's fine. The problem is with its incoherence. And what's worse, what coherence it has is supplied by nothing more than our shared vocabulary of bog-standard Hollywood cliches: the Rosetta-stone technology, the brave but vulnerable whistleblowers, the late night rendezvous at backwater airports, clandestine wire transfers - and of course the big-nosed brown guy scheming in the shadows. (The sudden emergence of the sinister Arab from the thicket of acronyms and seemingly disconnected wire stories is an absolutely crucial narrative device of the post 9/11 'deep politics' genre. The moment when it is revealed that such-and-such company is owned by a guy with an Arab name is the moment when everything is clarified, when we know we're through the looking glass. That's how the genre works, those are the buttons it pushes).
The 'depth' of deep politics is all affectation, then, but it is quite singleminded in its constant insinuation that contemporary power is decentered, diffuse, unknowable, and that its analysis is incompatible with those dusty old histories of colonialism, uneven development, client states, racism...
It's a kind of bargain basement postmodernism, presenting the crudest old political paradigms as the Latest Thing (hence the constant references in the genre to the 19th century Octopus metaphor, still refusing to sing its swan song).
This fetish of the nexus is becoming tiresome, where a deliberately cultivated complexity is loved for its own sake and anyone who points the finger at the USG as the sole significant perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks is dismissed as 'crude' or 'simplistic'. One can certainly see the political usefulness of this attitude, though I think many who hold to it do so for aesthetic reasons, which is somehow even more depressing than the more cynical motive.
Anyway, I'm not so convinced the proponents of deep politics are so immune from the kind of dogmatism of which they accuse the "CDers". A good while ago, in this thread, I raised what I think were very serious questions about the sources and plausibility of the claim that the ISI director wired $100,000 to Atta before 9/11. It's a well-known and fairly indispensable part of deep political lore regarding the hijackers and the multinational nature of the conspiracy. It's also single-sourced to Indian intelligence, who had a certain interest in implicating Pakistan.*
Jeff, you responded:
Anyway, like I've said, I think there's a there there to the ISI connection, but that doesn't mean there isn't also an Indian deep politics
Which sounds a lot like whatever.
*Loose ends: I never responded to bks in that thread, but he suggested the Pakistani journalist Amir Mir independently corroborated the wire transfer story. Not true, he used the same sources as everyone else, which all go back to the same source in Indian intel.
Brilliant. And timely.
RigInt has been taken over by grad students!
