Ignorance Alert!

Another opportunity to educate: Here's what "mainstream media" is saying about us. You might want to dust off one of your best LTE's and post on this page and/or contact Joshua Holland and let him know that the 9/11 truth movement is very large.

There are very many very distinguished, intelligent people — architects, engineers, scientists — and they point out all kinds of problems with the "Official 9/11 Commission Report."

Please remind AlterNet that we're Truth Seekers - not Conspiracy Nuts:

"How Easy it Is to Reinforce People's Conspiracy Paranoia"

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on December 14, 2009, Printed on December 16, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/144537/

Over the weekend, I deleted a comment left by a 9/11 Truther.

It was typical of the genre: AlterNet is covering up the real crimes of 9/11 because we get a portion of our funding from liberal foundations, and liberal foundations are obviously natural supporters of a fascist coup attempt by Dick Cheney. So while we -- like the folks at The Nation and Democracy, Now! -- have the incontrovertible evidence that could wrap up this whole 9/11 controversy tucked away in a file-cabinet, we simply refuse to publish it (we don't want to rock the boat!).

Of course, that reader will now think that he or she is being "censored" by AlterNet because we have some terrible fear of this damning truth being revealed (the fact that I am myself repeating it on our blog is neither here nor there -- that's limited hang-out). He or she might even write a lengthy blog post about the injustice of it all. And the whole thing will only reinforce his or her self-image as an intrepid truth-seeker persevering against a murky but massively powerful machine that exists solely to obscure the real story behinds the events of that terrible day.

But here's the thing, and I swear this is just the plain, boring truth. It was the most benign, inoffensive comment in the world. In fact, it was exactly the same as thousands of others that have appeared, and remained, on this site over the years.

And the simple fact is, I wouldn't have dreamed of deleting it if it were attached to an article about 9/11, or the Bush administration, or the intelligence services, or the war on terror, or the occupation of Iraq -- if the comment had had anything even remotely to do with the topic at hand.

But it appeared in "response" to a piece about state-based medical marijuana laws, and there is simply no readily apparent tie-in. The only connection one could make -- and this is apparently what motivated the commenter's venom -- is that 8 years after the attacks of 9/11, we actually dare to run articles about other topics.

So I didn't delete the comment because of its substance. I ditched it because the way it works is this: 9/11 Truther leaves a comment, which motivates 9/11 anti-Truther to leave a nasty retort, which motivates 9/11 Truther #2 to weigh in, and etc. Soon, you have 80 comments bickering over 9/11 theories and nobody's discussing medical pot. And for what? Are they going to resolve that whole 9/11 debate once and for all in the comments of that Drug Reporter piece?

Anyway, the person whose comment got zapped probably slept the sleep of the righteous, thinking he or she made a small cog in the conspiracy squirm. But the reality is that his or her comment was just deleted as spam -- when I hit that button, I was killing yet another ad for Ugg boots rather than, you know, doing some kind of zealous left gate-keeping.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/144537/