9/11 conspiracy theorists responded to refutations by alleging more cover-ups.

By Jeremy Stahl

Updated Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2011, at 7:31 AM ET

It’s difficult to pinpoint a precise moment when the popularity of the 9/11 conspiracy theory peaked, though it was probably sometime in 2006. In tracking its decline, however, three dates stand out: July 22, 2004, when the 9/11 Commission released its final report; Feb. 3, 2005, when Popular Mechanics published its 5,500-word article dismantling the movement’s claims; and Aug. 21, 2008, when the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued the final portion of a $16 million study investigating the cause of the collapse of the Twin Towers and a third World Trade Center skyscraper that was not hit by a plane.

Facts alone are insufficient to destroy a conspiracy theory, of course, and in many ways a theory’s appeal has more to do with the receptiveness of its audience than the accuracy of its details. The popularity of the 9/11 conspiracy theory would continue to ebb and flow after each of these reports. But their responses to these challenges show how followers of the 9/11 conspiracy theory changed their emphases and arguments—or, more often, did not—when presented with new information.

A majority of French people believe IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn is “the victim of a plot,” an opinion poll said Wednesday.

Asked if was Strauss-Kahn was “the victim of a plot,” 57 per cent of respondents said yes.

For example, some people believe that if you read Coke’s Arabic logo backwards, it says: “No Muhammad, No Mecca”. Others insist that the company is owned by Jews, or that it bankrolls Israel. These rumours are one reason why Coke does worse than Pepsi in Arab countries. Yet they are all false, as Coke’s website explains in painstaking detail.

Such rebuttals are unwise, argue Derek Rucker and David Dubois, of the Kellogg School of Management, and Zakary Tormala, of Stanford business school, three psychologists. By restating the rumours, Coke helps to propagate them. Its web page is a magnet for search engines. And people who read rebuttals tend to forget the denial and remember only the rumour, says Mr Rucker.

As information is passed around, important qualifiers are lost. A rumour may start as “I’m not sure if this is true, but I heard that…” Then it evolves into: “I heard that…” Finally it becomes: “Did you know that…?” Even when no one intends to spread falsehoods, they spread.

In several experiments, Mr Rucker and Mr Dubois planted rumours among undergraduates. They found that with each repetition, scepticism diminished. The rumours themselves did not change; only the likelihood that the students would believe them. These findings were published in a report called “The Failure to Transmit Certainty”.

Conspiracy theorists have begun developing their own ideas about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange after he said in a recent interview that he is “annoyed” at “false” conspiracy theories surrounding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

“I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud,” Assange told The Belfast Telegraph in an interview published July 19.

When asked about whether he believes in conspiracy theories, Assange said, “I believe in facts about conspiracies. Any time people with power plan in secret, they are conducting a conspiracy. So there are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It’s important not to confuse these two. Generally, when there’s enough facts about a conspiracy we simply call this news.”

Last November, Wikileaks released several thousand pager and text messages that were sent on September 11, 2001.

That move was widely applauded by most within the so-called “9/11 Truth Movement.” Assange’s latest comments, however, have gotten another reaction.

“Very disappointed with Mr. Assange lately,” wrote citizenx on Alex Jones’ Prison Planet forum. “Beginning to think the people who say he is/was CIA are right. Not just the 911 thing.”

“This casts further doubt on that whole ‘I cracked AES 256bit encryption and was able to walk into a marine base with a writable CD-ROM in hand, walk up to the CD-RW writer and burn a copy of all the files’ excursion….,” wrote another “Truther,” squarepusher.

911Blogger.com, one of the most established websites on the subject, wrote that “Mr.Assange seems to have conveniently forgotten that 9/11 may be, in a very concrete sense, a ‘conspiracy for war’, leading directly to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the permanent “War on Terror”.”

Another established 9/11 conspiracy website, cryptogon.com, which has been highly skeptical of Assange for some time now, wrote that the Wikileaks founder is either “profoundly ignorant” of the evidence, picking his battles, or running a honeypot operation.

Assange has not responded to the reaction to his statements.

http://www.therightperspective.org/2010/08/04/wikileaks -founder-annoyed-at-911-theories/

Why does a crazy set of beliefs in one field seem to migrate into unrelated subjects?

By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 21st September 2010

I’ve often been struck by the way in which people who subscribe to one set of baseless beliefs are susceptible to others, in fields that are not obviously related. The internet is awash with sites that explain how the US government destroyed the twin towers – and how alien landings have been covered up by the authorities. Many of those who insist that Barack Obama is a Muslim also believe that sex education raises the incidence of unwanted pregnancies.

A rich collection of unfounded beliefs is a common characteristic of those who deny – despite the overwhelming scientific evidence – that manmade global warming is taking place. I’ve listed a few examples before, but I’ll jog your memories.

Lord Monckton, whose lecture asserting that manmade climate change is nonsense has been watched by 4 million people, also maintains that he has invented a cure for HIV, multiple sclerosis, influenza and other incurable diseases.

Nils-Axel Morner, whose claims that sea levels are falling are widely cited in the Telegraph and elsewhere, also insists that he possesses paranormal abilities to find water and metal using a dowsing rod, and that he has discovered “the Hong Kong of the [ancient] Greeks” in Sweden.

Peter Taylor, the Daily Express’s favourite climate change denier, has claimed that a Masonic conspiracy has sent a “kook, a ninja freak, some throwback from past lives” to kill him, and insisted that plutonium may “possess healing powers, borne of Plutonic dimension, a preparation for rebirth, an awakener to higher consciousness”.

Ozone, by the way, causes cancer, emphysema, asthma, and diabetes. Some of those clusters are in areas of high levels of ozone. Like the whole state of New Jersey!

A map like that is a lot like the side of the sharpshooter’s barn, and presuming there must be a cause for cancer clusters is the same as drawing bullseyes around them.

More often than not, cancer clusters have no scary environmental cause.

“A community that is afflicted with an unusual number of cancers quite naturally looks for a cause in the environment – in the ground, the water, the air. And the correlations are sometimes found: the cluster may arise after, say, contamination of the water supply by a possible carcinogen. The problem is that when scientists have tried to confirm such causes, they haven’t been able to. Raymond Richard Neutra, California’s chief environmental health investigator and an expert on cancer clusters, points out that among hundreds of exhaustive, published investigations of residential clusters in the United States, not one has convincingly identified an underlying environmental cause. Abroad, in only a handful of cases has a neighborhood cancer cluster been shown to arise from an environmental cause. And only one of these cases ended with the discovery of an unrecognized carcinogen.”

The Cancer Cluster Myth, The New Yorker, Feb. 1999

There are many agents at work. People who are related tend to live near each other. Old people tend to retire in the same areas. Eating, smoking and exercise habits tend to be similar region to region. And, after all, one in three people will develop cancer in their lifetime.

To accept something like residential cancer clusters are often just coincidence is deeply unsatisfying. The powerlessness, the feeling you are defenseless to the whims of chance, can be assuaged by singling out an antagonist. Sometimes you need a bad guy, and The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy is one way you can create one.”