USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011107.1710 (On Screen via long range sensors): And now for your perusal, a demonstration that there exist at least some members of the anti-war left who have gone over the line to hallucination. You got your scare quotes. You got your conflation of coincidence and correlation and causation. You got your innuendo. You got your flights of fantasy. You got your Post Hoc fallacy. You got your selective quotations from questionable sources.

What you got is something that reads like a Kennedy Assassination Theory. Or more to the point, like one of the many attempts to prove that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor and deliberately let it happen.

For example, it cites an intelligence report from India which tried to prove a relationship between Pakistan and al Qaeda in the aftermath of the attack. Folks, in the aftermath of the attack all kinds of intelligence reports got forwarded to the US by friendly allies which sought to prove that their deadliest enemies were involved and thus should become enemies of the US as well. (For example, Israel claimed that Iraq was involved.) It's hardly surprising that India said Pakistan was involved; India and Pakistan have been at each other's throats for fifty years. That doesn't mean it's true.

But this article then takes that bouillon cube and makes a stadium full of soup out of it. It shows the "possibility" of contacts between ISI (Pakistan's intelligence service) with the guy who lead the bombing, and that the US government "might" have known about it all ahead of time. And out of all this hazy mist he derives the following conclusion:

Whether this amounts to the complicity of the Bush Administration remains to be firmly established. The least one can expect at this stage is an inquiry. What is crystal clear, however, is that this war is not a "campaign against international terrorism". It is a war of conquest with devastating consequences for the future of humanity. And the American people have been consciously and deliberately misled by their government.

Ultimately the truth must prevail. The falsehoods behind America's war against the people of Afghanistan must be unveiled.

It's amazing that anything "crystal clear" can emerge out of this murk -- unless it was a priori. And that's the point. This guy knows the answer; he's simply on a hunt to find evidence for it. Regardless of what he finds, he's sure he's proved something because the answer is so obvious. To him, anyway.

Sadly, it also seems to be obvious to other people. I'd love to report that the person who posted this on MetaFilter recognized the absurdity of it, but I cannot. She was quite serious; she thought it was profound. She actually defended it in the resulting discussion. I by no means think that all leftists swallow this kind of rubbish whole; we're talking lunatic fringe here -- 8 sigma out, at least. (discuss)