Obama conspiracy theories debunked

Yesterday I received an email that contained yet another argument that Obama's birth certificate (the PDF'd scan of the "long form" certificate) was a fake, based on erroneous claims about the name of Kenya in 1961 and the name of the hospital which were already debunked at Snopes.com four months ago.  But this prompted me to see if there were any more advocates of wild claims about the birth certificate, and I came across Douglas Vogt's alleged analysis of the birth certificate and, more importantly, a very well-done, detailed debunking of that analysis by Kevin Davidson (known on his blog as "Dr. Conspiracy"), who has done a great job of responding to numerous Obama conspiracy claims.

Check out his "The Debunker's Guide to Obama Conspiracy Theories."

Vogt, the author of the analysis which Dr. Conspiracy debunks, is also an example of "crank magnetism"--he is the author of Reality Revealed: The Theory of Multidimensional Reality, a 1978 book which looks like a classic work of crackpottery.  Vogt bills himself as a "geologist and science philosopher" who:

has funded and directed three expeditions to the Sinai desert where he was the first person since Baruch (Jeremiah’s grandson) to discover the real Mount Sinai. He discovered all the altars that Moses describes in the Torah. In addition he was the first person since Moses to see the real Abraham’s altar also located at Mount Sinai and not in Jerusalem. He has discovered the code systems used by Moses when writing the surface story of the Torah, which enabled him to decode the Torah and other earlier books of the Hebrew Scriptures.

His book features:

The first information theory of existence. explains many of the hardest phenomena in the Universe such as: the causes of the ice ages, polar reversals, mass extinctions, gravity, light, pyramid energy, kirlian photography, psychic phenomena, and more!

So in addition to a self-proclaimed expert on typography, conspiracy theorist, and "birther," Vogt is apparently a creationist, pseudo-archaeologist, Bible code advocate, and promoter of a wide variety of pseudoscience claims.

The two religious conversions of George W. Bush

Russ Baker's new book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces that Put it in Power, and What Their Influence Means for America, states that George W. Bush's conversion to evangelical Christianity was staged as a way to wipe the slate clean of his past record of misbehavior. It further makes the case that his story of a conversion after a visit from Billy Graham was his *second* conversion, the first coming a year earlier after a meeting with evangelist Arthur Blessit, who was determined to be too controversial for the story Bush wanted to convey:

... what was a starchy, Episcopalian heir to a blue-blooded Yankee political pedigree to do? And what of his reckless, apparently non-religious, playboy son? These were the intertwined questions faced by Vice President Bush and George W. in the 1980s as they planned Poppy Bush's run for president in 1988--and W.'s political future.

Baker's chapter titled "The Conversion" features startling revelations that challenge the well-known narratives of the Bush family's religious history-- including the way they crafted a strategy for winning over the religious right, and the creation of a conversion legend for George W. Bush. The purpose of the latter was not only to position him as a religious and political man of his time, but to neutralize the many issues from his past that threatened to undermine his future in politics (and possibly that of his father as well). The plan probably worked far better than anyone could have hoped. "I'm still amazed," Doug Wead, a key architect of the Bush family's evangelical outreach strategy told Baker, "how naïve so many journalists are who have covered politics all of their life."

Under [Doug] Wead's tutelage, Poppy would learn the ins and outs of the evangelical world. But Poppy and W. had a problem in common. Baker writes that they knew that W.'s "behavior before becoming governor [of Texas in 1994] his partying, his womanizing, and in particular his military service problems--posed a serious threat to his presidential ambitions. Their solution was to wipe the slate clean--through religious transformation."

A Tale of Two Conversions

For this to work they needed "a credible conversion experience and a presentable spiritual guide." And so the legend goes that none other than Billy Graham paid a visit to his longtime friends at the Bush family estate in Kennebunkport, Maine. This led to the famous walk on the beach that George W. Bush says "planted a mustard seed in my soul," and to his supposed rebirth as an evangelical Christian. That was the accepted narrative in the media and throughout the evangelical world for years. But Graham later told a journalist that he does not remember the encounter; and to another said he does remember a walk on the beach--but not, apparently, any kind of spiritually meaningful conversation. Whatever the facts of the Graham episode, there are actually two conversion stories. The second was deep-sixed in favor of the Graham story, and only emerged after George W. was elected president.

The itinerant evangelist Arthur Blessitt, famous for dragging (mostly on wheels) a 12-foot cross around the world, posted the story on his Web site in October 2001, noting that he met with George W. Bush a full year earlier than Graham. "Mr. George W. Bush," wrote Blessitt, "a Midland oilman, listened to the radio broadcast and asked one of his friends `Can you arrange for me to meet Arthur Blessitt and talk to him about Jesus?' And so it came to pass."

Wead, Baker reports, "had warned the Bushes that they had to be careful how they couched their conversion story. It couldn't be seen as something too radical or too tacky. Preachers who performed stunts with giant crosses would not do. Billy Graham, `spiritual counselor to presidents,' would do perfectly." And that was the story that speechwriter Karen Hughes wove into Bush's 1999 campaign book, A Charge to Keep. There was no mention of Blessitt.

(Via Frederick Clarkson at Talk2Action.)

I'm not sure how credible Baker's book is. The link I've just given also includes a quote from the book claiming that Bush helped a Texas girlfriend procure an illegal abortion prior to Roe v. Wade, and I think this is the book that I've heard suggests George H.W. Bush and the CIA had involvement in the JFK assassination, which I find wildly implausible.

Not-pology from Holocaust-denying bishop reinstated by the Pope

Orac at Respectful Insolence shows the deception from Bishop Richard Williamson, the formerly excommunicated Holocaust-denying Catholic bishop who was recently reinstated by Pope Benedict XVI. Williamson created a recent media firestorm because of his Holocaust denial, and has now apologized--not for his Holocaust denial, but for the fact that there was a media reaction to it. It's a not-pology.

Orac debunks some of Williamson's falsehoods about the Holocaust, and points to some of the best sites for responding to Holocaust denial: Nizkor, The Holocaust History Project, and Holocaust Denial on Trial.

The Hound of Mons

In the January 2009 issue of Fortean Times, Theo Paijmans reports the following story of "The Hound of Mons," quoted from the Ada Evening News, Ada, Oklahoma, 11 August 1919:

That weird legend of No Man's Land, the gruesome epice of the "hound of Mons," has, according to F.J. Newhouse, a returned Canadian veteran, been vindicated throughout Europe as fact and not fiction. For four years civilian skeptics laughed at the soldiers' tale of a giant, skulking hound, which stalked among the corpses and shell holes of No Man's Land and dragged down British soldiers to their death. An apparition of fear-crazed minds, they said. But to the soldiers it was a reality and one of the most fearful things of the world war.

"The death of Dr. Gottlieb Hochmuller in the recent Spartacan riots in Berlin," said Capt. Newhouse, "has brought to light facts concerning the fiendish application of this German scientist's skill that have astounded Europe. For the hound of Mons was not an accident, a phantom, or an hallucination--it was the deliberate result of one of the strangest and most repulsive scientific experiments the world has ever known.

Teeth Marks in Throats.
What was the hound of Mons? According to the soldiers, the legend started in the terrible days of the defense of Mons. On the night of November 14, 1914, Capt. Yeskes and four men of the London Fusiliers entered No Man's Land on patrol. The last living trace of them was when they started into the darkness between the lines. Several days afterward their dead bodies were found--just as they had been dragged down--with teeth marks at the throats.

Several nights later a weird, blood-curdling howl was heard from the darkness toward which the British trenches faced. It was the howl of the hound of Mons. From then on this phantom hound became the terror of the men who faced death by bullets with a smile. It was the old fear of the unknown.

Howl is Heard.
Patrol after patrol, during two years of warefare, ventured out only to be found days later with the telltale marks at their throats. The ghastly howl continued to echo through No Man's Land. Several times sentries declared that they saw a lean, grey wraith flit past the barbed wire--the form of a gigantic hound running silently. But civilian Europe always doubted the story.

Then after two years, while many brave men lost their lives with only those teeth marks at the throat to show, the hound of Mons disappeared. From then on the Germans never had another important success.

"And now," says Captain Newhouse, "secret papers have been taken from the residence of the late Dr. Hochmuller which prove that the hound of Mons was a terrible living reality, a giant hound with the brain of a human madman."

Hound Had Human Brain.
Captain Newhouse says that the papers show that this hound was the only successful issue of a series of experiments by which Dr. Hochmller hoped to end the war in Germany's favor. The scientist had gone about the wards of the German hospitals until he found a man gone mad as the result of his insane hatred of England. Hochmuller, with the sanction of the German government, operated upon him and removed his brain, taking in particular the parts which dominated hatred and frenzy.

At the same time a like operation was performed on a giant Siberian wolfhound. Its brain was taken out and the brain of the madman inserted. By careful nursing the dog lived. The man was permitted to die.

The dog rapidly grew stronger and, after careful training in fiendishness, wa taken to the firing line and released in No Man's Land. There for two years it became the terror of outposts and patrols.

Back before the Internet, the local newspapers met our needs for fabulous hoaxes, and many of them applied, at least periodically, the journalistic standards of the Weekly World News--you only need one source.

UPDATE (April 25, 2009): Fortean Times reader Alistair Moffatt writes in a letter in the May 2009 issue (p. 73) to point out that while F.J. Newhouse did exist, there was no Captain Yeskes of the London Fusiliers and Yeskes is an American or Canadian name, not a British one, suggesting a local origin for the above tale. He also notes that the Battle of Mons took place in August 1914, not November. He suggests that the tale may have originated from a propagandized and heavily distorted account of Captain Max von Stephanitz's breeding of the German Shepherd.

Sarah Palin and the John Birch Society

Orcinus has an interesting article about Sarah Palin, prompted by the finding of a 1995 photograph of Palin at her Wasilla city council desk with an article from the March 1995 issue of the John Birch Society's New American in front of her. Ben Smith at Politico has a more balanced piece on the same subject, which points out that there were lots of copies of that particular article sent out, and that Birchers themselves don't appear to be particularly impressed with Palin.

Left-wing conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theorists like to make arguments of the form "A is linked to B, B is linked to C, therefore A and C are in cahoots," where the links between each entity may be extremely tenuous.

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula, following dogemperor at the DailyKos, maintains that "Sarah Palin's home church is dominionist, with connections to Joel's Army," for which the evidence dogemperor provides is the following:

A look at the home website of Palin's church tends to be revealing. Among other things, a particular Assemblies buzzword associated frequently with Hillsong A/G and New Zealand Assemblies churches shows up ("Destiny", here, is a buzzword for "Joel's Army", and is being preferred even as the phrase "Joel's Army" is getting enough negative spin that even the Assemblies is now having to do some rather massive spin control); cell churches are promoted (of the same sort that are linked to short-term and longterm psychological damage and are among the most coercive tactics ever documented in spiritually abusive groups). The church, like a number of other large Assemblies churches, is the center of a dominionist broadcast TV center whose programming is carried across multiple channels in Alaska.

In a trend that has been recently documented by no less than Southern Poverty Law Center (in its recent report on the Joel's Army movement), the church operates a Seven Project-esque targeted recruitment campaign aiming at teens (this is common across the Assemblies and across "Joel's Army" groups in general; fully a third of the documented national-level front groups operated by the Assemblies target teens).

And...believe you me, Palin's church is definitely "Joel's Army".

But hold on a minute here--the article on "Joel's Army" that Myers initially points readers to is a reasonable article at Alternet that points out that "Joel's Army" is a minority of Pentecostals that has been explicitly rejected by the Assemblies of God:

Not every five-fold ministry is connected to the Joel's Army movement, but the movement has spurred an interest in modern-day apostles and prophets that's troubling to the Assemblies of God, the world's largest Pentecostal church, which has officially disavowed the Joel's Army movement.

In a 2001 position paper, Assemblies of God leaders wrote that they do not recognize modern-day apostles or prophets and worried that "such leaders prefer more authoritarian structures where their own word or decrees are unchallenged." They are right to worry. Joel's Army followers believe that once democratic institutions are overthrown, their hierarchy of apostles and prophets will rule over the earth, with one church per city.

Yet dogemperor's evidence of a link to Joel's Army is:

1. The Juneau Christian Center website uses the word "Destiny." They have a link on the front page labeled "Building for Destiny," which links to a web page that says:

Destiny has begun! The new youth center for children through high school youth is taking shape.

The purpose of The Hub is reach out to youth and parents in Juneau, giving kids a positive place: to grow in safety, build strong relationships, be encouraged to learn in surroundings that match their interests, acquire confidence and prepare for fantastic futures...

The technology in these 21st century centers will encourage kids to enjoy learning in academics, sports, music, art, finances, computers, health, and life skills. From IPOD/study stations and video game terminals to a pool tables and plasma screen TV's there is something of interest for everyone. Oh yes, The Hub also provides a hip cafe serve smoothies, drinks and light food to encourage fellowship.

Sounds pretty scary, doesn't it?

2. The church is "the center of a dominionist broadcast TV center whose programming is carried across multiple channels in Alaska." This links to a page on the Juneau Christian Center website which says:

Pastor's [sic] Mike and Deenie Rose have been the senior Pastors of Juneau Christian Center since 1987. The theme of their ministry is to win the lost and make disciples. Pastor Rose's preaching inspires people to live the abundant life by receiving and using their God given authority, gifts and talents to advance God's Kingdom. Pastor Rose has daily television and radio programs which are broadcast throughout the state of Alaska, and throughout much of the lower 48.

All this says is that he preaches on TV and doesn't know how to use apostrophes. It doesn't say anything at all to support a claim that he's teaching dominionist theology or has any connection to "Joel's Army."

3. The church "operates a Seven Project-esque targeted recruitment campaign aiming at teens (this is common across the Assemblies and across "Joel's Army" groups in general; fully a third of the documented national-level front groups operated by the Assemblies target teens)."

Dogemperor's parenthetical remark undermines his claim that this supports a link to Joel's Army--if this is something common across the Assemblies of God, which rejects the authority of "Joel's Army," then it stands to reason that "Joel's Army" adopted it from the AOG, rather than the reverse. And targeting teens is common for all churches. None of that says anything about the Juneau Christian Center's theology or suggests a connections to "Joel's Army."

This is very weak and poorly reasoned "guilt by association" reasoning of the sort that justifies all sorts of lunatic claims, including fringe Christian arguments about secular humanists trying to take control of the U.S. government.

If Sarah Palin is an advocate of dominionist theology or Christian reconstructionism, I expect a lot better evidence than this to demonstrate it.

UPDATE: The "Secular Apostate," a retired psychophysicist who converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult, criticizes dogemperor's post as a "truthiness parfait." Note carefully what he says about the very term "dominionism"--it didn't used to be synonymous with or a superset of theocracy, theonomy, or Christian reconstructionism, and it appears to be a term applied as such only by its critics, not by those who actually hold any of those positions.

UPDATE: Commenter "raven" at Pharyngula shows clearly that he's applying the term "dominionist" in a very fast and loose fashion. He wrote:

Pretty much all the fundies are Doms. I'd never even heard of xian Dominionists a year or so ago. The difference between reconstructionists and dominionists is...nothing.

To which I replied:

If you're claiming that all fundamentalists are reconstructionists are dominionists, that is nonsense on a par with saying that all atheists are secular humanists are Marxists.

This was apparently sufficient for him to identify me as a dominionist! He responded with this:

Just stating a fact. There might be one or two who lie about it.

You are one, obviously. The tipoff is the raging hatred of everyone especially those coreligionists who differ in minute details of theology. A liberal Dom is one who might let the Jews live if they keep a low profile and all convert to fundie Death Cultism. The other Doms all hate them as blashemous heretics and apostates, of course.

So who is on your "To Kill" list? You all have them. Gays, Catholics, Episcopalians, Democrats, atheists, scientists, MDs, so many people to murder and so little time. The old record is Rushdooney, the founder of modern Dominionism who wanted to kill 297 million of the 300 million US residents alive today. The modern record is the "Nuke 'em all now and let god sort it out" crowd. Sounds like you want to stop that fooling around with armies of religious fanatics with automatic rifles and just go for the quick clean kill.

At this point, P.Z. Myers stepped in and let him know he was drawing some unwarranted inferences.

Raven has supplied a perfect example of the kind of erroneous reasoning that I'm trying to warn against with this post.

UPDATE: After raven learned he was mistaken about my views, rather than recognize that he's gone wrong somewhere and make an effort to learn from his mistake, he simply proclaimed me to be "an idiot" and went off on a rant. It's sad to see that kind of irrationality.

UPDATE: Here are some quotes at the Harper's Magazine blog from sermons of Pastor Mike Rose of Palin's current church and Pastor David Pepper of her previous church. Looks like standard evangelical Christianity, to me--nothing overtly political apart from a statement by Pepper that "I don't care what the ACLU says," though there's some anti-evolution. There's a claim here that Rose has "ties to Hagee's Christians United for Israel," without specifying what those ties are. Pepper, it is stated, "is outspoken on slavery, racism, and the massacres of Native Americans, all of which he terms 'sins' that still cast a long shadow on minority communities." The Harper's blog has links to "many hours of Mike Rose's sermons" and "numerous sermons of David Pepper's," so if there is anything to the dominionist claims, this is the place to look.

UPDATE (September 1, 2008): Although Palin sometimes attends the Juneau Christian Center and considers her home church to be The Church on the Rock in Wassila, both of which are members of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God of America, she does not consider herself to be a Pentecostal, according to Christianity Today, and her profile in the Wall Street Journal identified her as a Lutheran.

Another story, in the Boston Herald, says that Palin's home church is Wasilla Bible Church, headed by Pastor Larry Kroon. This has also been reported by Time magazine. The above claim about The Church on the Rock is a second-hand report by an Associated Press reporter, Eric Gorski, who heard it from Pastor Paul Riley of the Wasilla Assembly of God church, as also reported in the Christianity Today piece. It appears to be false, though no doubt she's visited that and other churches. If Wasilla Bible Church isn't Pentecostal (and it doesn't appear to be), that weakens the allegations of dogemperor even further.

In a Time interview, Palin stated that she attends "A non-denominational Bible church. I was baptized Catholic as a newborn and then my family started going to non-denominational churches throughout our life."

UPDATE (September 7, 2008): Yesterday's New York Times reports on Sarah Palin's church attendance:

One of the musical directors at the church, Adele Morgan, who has known Ms. Palin since the third grade, said the Palins moved to the nondenominational Wasilla Bible Church in 2002, in part because its ministry is less “extreme” than Pentecostal churches like the Assemblies of God, which practice speaking in tongues and miraculous healings.

I don't think the theocracy/reconstructionism/dominionism charge sticks at all. There are lots of good reasons to oppose Palin as vice president, but the idea that she wants to impose theocracy isn't one of them.

UPDATE (September 26, 2008): Palin's certainly a religious kook, as the video of her being blessed with a protection from witchcraft from a Kenyan minister and her subsequent touting of that blessing as a reason she's been selected for public office demonstrates:

The video shows Palin standing before Bishop Thomas Muthee in the pulpit of
the Wasilla Assembly of God church, holding her hands open as he asked Jesus
Christ to keep her safe from "every form of witchcraft."

"Come on, talk to God about this woman. We declare, save her from Satan!"
Muthee said as two attendants placed their hands on Palin's shoulders. "Make
her way my God. Bring finances her way even for the campaign in the name of
Jesus....Use her to turn this nation the other way around!"

On a visit to the church in June 2008, Palin spoke fondly of the Kenyan
pastor and told a group of young missionaries that Muthee's prayers had
helped her to become governor.

UPDATE (January 1, 2009): dogemperor now argues that Pastor Rick Warren is "connected to" Joel's Army--on the grounds that he once spoke at a 1997 conference of David Yonggi Cho, head of the largest Assemblies of God megachurch in South Korea, and that Cho has argued for Pentecostal revival. Uh, so what are the actual connections between Warren and the "Joel's Army" movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, the Five-fold Ministry, or the "latter rain" movement? What's key to all of these is that they are Pentecostal/charismatic movements that argue that there are new prophets and apostles coming who can perform miracles, signs, and wonders. Rick Warren isn't an advocate of speaking in tongues or performing healing miracles, rather, he relies on modern-day marketing techniques, modern music, and technology. This isn't to say he's not about using Christianity for political influence--he obviously is.

A Christian critique of the "Joel's Army" movement which explains it far better than dogemperor is Jewel Grewe's "Joel's Army." Also worth reading is this AlterNet article by Casey Sanchez of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Some people who really are advocates of the "Joel's Army" movement include Todd Bentley, John Crowder, Paul Cain, Mike Bickle, and Rick Joyner.

De-fact-o

A new peer-produced skeptical website, De-fact-o, has popped up to provide skeptical, fact-based evaluation of claims of history, politics, science, health, environment, religion, pop culture, conspiracy theories, questionable quotes, fake photos, and more. There's a page per claim, and the claim is rated true, false, mostly false, probably false, or unknown. The site is reminiscent of (and not yet as comprehensive as) Snopes.com, but I hope to see it grow substantially with member-produced content.

The articles I've checked out appear to be well-done. Those who register on the site can comment on articles, vote on their accuracy, and write new ones, but unlike Wikipedia, approval from the site owners is required before new articles get posted. All articles on the site are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). I would have preferred a Creative Commons license, myself, due to some oddities of the GFDL (see the Wikipedia article on the GFDL, which is where the term is linked to from this paragraph).

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

That's the title of Vincent Bugliosi's latest book, which just reached #14 on the New York Times bestseller list on Sunday despite having virtually no mainstream media attention. It has sold 130,000 copies, but ABC Radio refused to allow an advertisement for the book on the Don Imus show, and both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report declined to show any interest in having Bugliosi on as a guest.

The book sets out a legal case for a criminal prosecution of George W. Bush as being criminally responsible for the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Bugliosi, the former Los Angeles County prosecutor with a perfect record of murder prosecutions, including the prosecution of Charles Manson which he recounted in his book Helter Skelter 30 years ago, most recently authored the book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a massive 1,612-page book that responds in detail to conspiracy theorists. That book is being made into a 10-hour miniseries by Tom Hanks for HBO. A shorter book, drawn from the content of Reclaiming History, has been published under the title Four Days in November.

9/11 - The Third Tower

BBC's "The Conspiracy Files" investigative report on the collapse of WTC 7 will air on Sunday, July 6. They have some promotional videos on the web, including an explanation of their reporter's statement that WTC 7 had collapsed before it did.

The conspiracy theorists claim that it had to be a controlled demolition, because WTC 7 was not hit by a plane and was virtually untouched. But the latter claim is false--WTC 7 was heavily damaged by the collapse of the twin towers, with a giant hole in the southwest corner about 20 stories high. There were raging fires in a building full of diesel fuel and backup generators.

The BBC investigation will no doubt report in more detail on the facts that the conspiracy theorists like to pretend don't exist.

The Amazing Meeting 6 summarized, part two

This is part two of my summary of The Amazing Meeting 6 (intro, part one, part three, part four, part five).

Friday, the conference gets started
More skeptics from around the world began to show up on Friday. Checking in at the registration desk entitled each person to a name badge, a folder of materials, a laser pointer/reading light (which many put to use during the conference, sometimes to the irritation of a speaker or emcee Hal Bidlack), and a copy of An Objectivist Secular Reader, edited by Dr. Edward Hudgins. The book argues for common cause between skeptics and Objectivists "and the often-related libertarian perspective." I happened to sit next to Hudgins through part of the conference, and spoke to him a bit between sessions, and found that we have some common friends and acquaintances. He said that he thinks the libertarian viewpoint does fit well with skepticism, which was a point made later in the conference by Michael Shermer by drawing an analogy between anti-authoritarianism in the religious sphere to anti-authoritarianism in the political sphere--but of course governments actually exist, so the real underlying question is what legitimizes or justifies authority, which is a question also relevant in the scientific sphere. I'll say more about this later when I summarize Shermer's talk.

Hudgins was working on a presentation for an upcoming speaking event which included statistics about changes in U.S. religious demographics over the last several decades, showing a rise in nonbelief. I asked to look at one page that showed a breakdown of U.S. religious adherents by sect, and pointed out the huge growth among Pentecostals (something I've previously written about here). This growth indicates to me that there's more to religion than dogma and doctrine, and that a purely intellectual critique of beliefs and practices that are held for reasons that involve emotion and community is doomed to failure.

I think that one of skepticism's strengths is that it is a method, not a doctrine, and that turning it into dogma or trying to link it to a specific set of conclusions about religion or politics (or science, for that matter) is an enormous mistake that serves only to limit its appeal. Skepticism is at its best when it teaches people to think critically for themselves and at its worst when it tells people what to think. I'll have more to say on this subject when I summarize Sunday's talks, which included one by Don Nyberg railing against "religious pseudoscience."

Friday morning I sat down to breakfast with a young couple from Texas, whose names unfortunately escape me. He had just completed a semester of medical school in Guadalajara, Mexico, and she had finished a degree in neuroscience. We were soon joined by Tony, an Australian who had been living with his partner in Mexico City for the last several years and was now on his way back to Australia by way of a trip around the world. There was a strong international presence at the conference, with dozens of Australians in particular, probably due to the strength of the Australian Skeptics organization.

After breakfast, I went up to the conference room to hear the end of the recording of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast which was being recorded live in the room, but somehow I completely failed to meet Steven Novella, one of the podcast's hosts, through the entire conference. I had hoped to at least say hello and introduce myself, since we were cosigners of a letter to Skeptical Inquirer back in 1999.

Hal Bidlack opens the event
The conference officially kicked off with an introduction by Hal Bidlack, who is running for Congress in Colorado Springs, CO, a part of the country which would be greatly helped by a critically thinking legislator. He mentioned that two prominent skeptics have died since the last conference, Arthur C. Clarke and Jerry Andrus. Andrus was a regular attendee of Skeptics Society conferences and JREF conferences, known for setting up his optical illusions and his willingness to explain them patiently to all.

Randi's welcome
Hal then introduced James Randi, who was looking more frail than the last time I saw him in person, though he said that his health is much better than it has been in the recent past. Randi pointed out that a light, a chair, and a table commemorating Jerry Andrus and his illusions was set up in the back corner of the conference room, and will be set up at future Amazing Meetings as well--while noting that this is for us to remember Jerry.

Randi announced that the JREF library is up to 2282 books, that this conference had about 900 attendees, and that it attracts more women and young people than any other skeptics conference. My impressions supported that conclusion. He also stated that there are UK and Dutch skeptical TV series in the works, and ended by saying that he wanted everyone at the conference to come up, greet him, and shake his hand (which I had already done on Thursday when I ran into him by the registration desk).

Ben Goldacre on homeopathy
The first official conference presentation was by Ben Goldacre, M.D. of www.badscience.net, who spoke about "squabbles about homeopathy." Goldacre described the basic arguments against homeopathy. The main argument against it is that its extreme dilutions are so extreme that a single molecule of a 30C diluted substance would be found in not an Olympic-sized swimming pool, but in ten thousand million million million million pools. A 55C dilution would be equivalent to a universe-sized sphere filled with water with a single molecule of the diluted substance in it. Goldacre observed that a label of a homeopathic remedy that says it is safe because it contains "less than 1 ppm" of the diluted substance is quite an understatement. The homeopaths respond that this is irrelevant; what makes the homeopathic remedy work is that "water has memory," and its structure has somehow changed to reflect being in contact with the diluted substance. But, Goldacre asked, why does it remember the remedy and not, say, having been in Nelson's colon or the Queen's bladder, or in contact with countless other substances? The homeopathic answer to that is that the memory only comes into effect through "succussion," when the remedy is in the water and the container is banged ten times firmly against a wooden striking board (for instance).

As homeopaths do want to present their work as scientific, they have been willing to engage with skeptics. Goldacre reported that his website was given permission to reprint papers from the journal Homeopathy on water memory, which were then critiqued in the JREF Forums, and the critiques assembled into a response which was submitted to and published in the same journal.

But Goldacre points out that the standard anti-homeopathy arguments have been made at least since John Forbes, Queen Victoria's physician, made them in 1846, but they have proven ineffective in persuading homeopaths and users of homeopathic remedies from giving them up. He says the arguments are "irrelevant," because homeopaths are persuaded that their remedies actually work. But that's just not so, he argued. While one might think that homeopathy is like anesthetics where we don't know how it works but it does, with homeopathy we have no good explanation for how it could work and we also have evidence that it doesn't work any better than a placebo.

He then went on to talk about how the placebo effect is a genuinely fascinating scientific anomaly far more worthy of interest than homeopathy. In pain relief, four sugar pills are more effective than two, salt water injection is more effective than sugar pills, and commercial packaging make placebos more effective. He argued that the extent to which homeopathy works is indistinguishable from the placebo effect, as demonstrated by a proper meta-analysis of homeopathic trials, reducing the weight of those which have flaws such as poor randomization and poor blinding.

Keynote by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was clearly the rock star of skepticism at the reception on Thursday night, surrounded by adoring fans (perhaps it was his hat, as P.Z. Myers suggests), gave the keynote address to the conference. When he began, many people had been shining their laser pointers on the wall above the stage, and Tyson informed the audience that he would express his "geek dominance." He instructed everyone to point their laser pointers above the door on the opposite side of the room. Once everyone had done so, he pulled out his laser pointer--shining from farther away than anyone else, since he was up on stage--and shined a large green dot that outshone all of the red dots.

Tyson's talk was called either "Adventures in Science Illiteracy" or "Brain Droppings of a Skeptic" (a title cribbed from George Carlin). He began by saying that he had something to do with Pluto's demotion from being a planet, and that anybody who didn't like it should "get over it." The rest of his talk wandered over a large range of topics that have come up in the Q&A sessions of his lectures:

UFO Sightings: When people say they've seen a UFO, be sure to remind them what the "U" stands for. Typically, those who claim they've seen a UFO start by saying it was unidentified, then end up "inventing knowledge of everything" about it being an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Alien Abductions: Tyson said that eyewitness testimony is the lowest form of evidence in science (though it's certainly not worthless, and even the scientific literature is a form of testimony about the results of experiments). He pulled out his iPhone and said that if he had one of these 10 years ago, he'd have been burned at the stake. If you get abducted by a UFO, you should take something not of this earth in order to prove your alien contact. He showed a slide of a cover of the book "How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction" and said that "I bought it, read it, and heeded its advice--and I have not been abducted."

Inept Aliens: They travel trillions of miles to get here, then crash.

Conspiracy Theory: They tend to tacitly admit insufficient data. If an argument lasts more than five minutes, both sides are wrong.

Astrology: If you read a horoscope to a group of people and ask if it describes them, approximately 2/3 will agree that it fits them. Most Scorpios are actually Ophiuchans.

Birth Rates and Full Moons: Average human gestation is 295 days; the lunar cycle is 29.5 days. Full moon birth = full moon impregnation.

Behavior and Full Moons: The pressure of an extra pillow is a trillion times greater than the tidal force on a cranium.

Surviving Terminal Cancer: If someone gets three diagnoses from physicians giving them 5-7 months to live, then lives for five years, they credit God for their survival, rather than blaming doctors for a poor diagnosis.

Swami Levitation: Tyson suggest 1,000 cans of baked beans would generate sufficient flatulence to become airborne.

Moon Hoax: Modern technology is so advanced that some people can't believe it. But if you learn the rocket equation and look at how much fuel was in the Saturn V, if the launch was fake, what was all that fuel for?

Mars "Virus": In 2003, the Earth was the closest it had been to Mars than in the previous 60,000 years, which led to multiple stories (including in subsequent years) that some virus would jump from Mars to Earth. Tyson pointed to the side and said "Japan is that way." He jumped a few feet to the side in that direction, and then said he is now as much closer to Japan as Mars came to the Earth from its average distance.

Fear of Numbers: 80% of building on Broadway in NYC have no 13th floor, due to an irrational fear of the number 13. (Yet who actually does fear 13?) And why don't we use negative numbers on elevators for subfloors? Or negative numbers in financial ledgers, instead of parentheses? (Actually, I suspect that's to avoid ambiguity with hyphens in dollar ranges, rather than a fear of negative numbers.)

Naming Rights: Tyson pointed out countries that put scientists on their money--Isaac Newton on the English one-pound note, Einstein on Israeli money. The U.S. has only one scientist--Ben Franklin--on money, on the $100 bill, but with no symbolism to represent his scientific work--no kite, no key, no lightning rod. He also pointed to Gauss and the Gaussian distribution on British money as British support of science, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in The Black Swan, points out that the financial field goes grossly astray by trying to using Gaussian distributions to describe phenomena that are not Gaussian. Taleb points to Gauss on British money as ironic and inept rather than pro-science.

Tyson also looked at the names of the elements, with slides of the periodic table that showed which ones were discovered when, and by which countries. While the U.S. was not the top country, it has discovered nearly all of the most recent elements. Tyson explained that Sweden has discovered so many elements because Ytterby cave was rich in undiscovered elements, and yielded the names of the elements Yttrium (39, 1795), Terbium (65, 1843), Erbium (68, 1843), Ytterbium (70, 1878), and Scandium (21, 1879).

Jury Duty I: Tyson described being called for jury duty. He was asked what he did, he said that he was an astrophysicist. When asked what he teaches, he said "a course on evaluating evidence and the unreliability of eyewitness testimony," at which point he was promptly dismissed.

Jury Duty II: Tyson was called for jury duty again, and made the first cut of jurors. The facts of the case were described--the defendant was charged with the possession of "2000 mg" of cocaine. When the jurors were asked if they had any questions, Tyson asked, "why did you describe it as 2000 mg instead of 2 g, about the weight of a postage stamp? Aren't you trying to bias the jury by making it sound like a large quantity of drugs?" At which point he was promptly dismissed.

Math?: Tyson pointed out a headline bemoaning the fact that "half the schools in the district are below average." He also pointed out an article that pointed out that 80% of airplane crash survivors had studied the locations of the exit doors upon takeoff as a suggestion that this is a good idea--but it didn't give the percentage of the nonsurvivors that had done the same. If 100% of the nonsurvivors had also studied the exit locations, would that be an argument not to do so?

Tyson responded to the common observation that the lottery is a tax upon the poor, saying that no, it's a tax on the innumerate. Similarly, he pointed to the subprime mortgage mess as a mathematical illiteracy problem.

Bayer ad in Physics Today: Tyson described an advertisement that Bayer placed in Physics Today asking how to get students interested in "why heavy things fall faster than lighter things." The ad was later changed to "why heavy things fall as fast as lighter things."

George W. Bush: Tyson said that he lives closer to Ground Zero in Manhattan than the height of the WTC towers, and showed some photographs he took on September 11. He attended a science medal presentation at the White House since he was on the presidential advisory committee; at that event Bush stated that "Our God is the God who named the stars." However, 2/3 of all stars with names have Arabic names, because from 800-1100 Islam was very supportive of math and science, giving us the names of algebra and algorithm, and the Arabic numerals. But in the 12th century, Imam Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111), the St. Augustine of Islam, stated that "manipulating numbers is the work of the devil."

There are 1.2 billion Muslims, yet they've only earned 2 of 579 Nobel prizes (one in physics, one in economics), while Jews, who are 1/80 as numerous, have earned 143 Nobel prizes, and thus have had 6,400 times the impact of Muslims on modern science. He wondered how much more contribution they would have made if it had not been for al-Ghazali's position of influence on Islam.

Intelligent Design: A 2004 SUV ad said, "In the world of SUV's, it's the survival of the fittest." In 2005, it was changed to "Its features are nothing short of a miracle."

Tyson argued that the intelligent design idea--stopping investigation with "God did it"--has historically stopped scientific inquiry. He argued that Newton could have developed Laplace's perturbation theory if he had not stopped his inquiry and appealed to God for the explanation of planetary movements that conflicted with his theory.

Stupid Design: Leukemia, vision loss with age, Alzheimer's, exhaling most oxygen we inhale, our inability to smell CO or CO2, the fact that we eat, drink, and speak through the same opening (vs. dolphin design--dolphins can't die laughing). Tyson also mentioned the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which killed 70,000 people, mostly Christians who had gathered in churches that Sunday mornings.

Religious People in the U.S.: Tyson observed that most people in the U.S. are religious--about 90% believe in God. When you look at educated people, holding a master's or Ph.D. degree, it drops to about 60%. When you look at scientists, it's about 40%. The most elite scientists--Nobel prizewinners, National Academy of Science members, etc.--it drops to 7%, with physicists and biologists as the least religious. But he pointed out that the 7% is still a substantial number of people--you cannot blame the general public for being religious if we don't understand why 7% of the most educated elite people are religious and pray to a personal God.

Bible in Science Classroom: He observed that there aren't scientists picketing in front of churches demanding equal time for science, referred to Matthew LaClair's confrontation with his history teacher for proselytizing in the classroom (a story broken by this blog), and read his letter to the editor of the New York Times about the case:

To the Editor:

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs.

This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
New York, Dec. 19, 2006

Albert Einstein and God: Tyson pointed out the content of the recently published 1954 letter from Albert Einstein, and how religious believers who have claimed Einstein as one of their own have been in error.

Cosmic Perspective: Tyson went through a series of numbers with examples to clarify their magnitude: 1, or 10**0, a clear one. 1,000, a thousand, 10**3, kilo. 1,000,000, a million, 10**6, mega. 10**9, a billion, giga. There are 6,000 astrophysicists in 6 billion people, so astrophysicists are one in a million. (But someone observed that there were 3 astrophysicists present among the 900 attendees of the conference.) McDonald's has sold 100 billion hamburgers--which could encircle the globe 52 times, and then be stacked to the moon and back. At age 31, you will have lived for one billion seconds. 10**12, trillion, tera. 10**15, quadrillion, peta. The number of sounds emitted by all human beings who have ever lived. 10**18, quadrillion, exa. The number of grains of sand on an average beach. 10**21, septillion, zetta. The number of stars in the universe.

Tyson then made a list of the most abundant elements in the universe--hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen--and observed that, minus helium, these are also the same as the key ingredients of life.

He quoted the Bible's "and the meek shall inherit the earth and live in a world of peace"--and suggested that the correct translation should have been "geek" instead of "meek."

APS Conference in Vegas: Tyson closed by referring to a Las Vegas newspaper headline that said, "Meeting of physicists in town, lowest casino take ever."

Alec Jason on Peter Popoff and criminal forensics
Alec Jason, an independent forensic photographer and investigator, described how he helped James Randi in his investigation of the faith healer and televangelist Peter Popoff, who claimed to use the "word of knowledge" to obtain detailed information from God about the people he was healing. In fact, Popoff's wife Elizabeth was collecting the information from people before the show and transmitting it to Popoff via radio to an earpiece receiver he was wearing. Jason described how he went to Brooks Hall a day prior to the Popoff healing event to determine the normal background radio frequency broadcasts, and then scanned for traffic during the event while posing as a janitor at the facility. The device he used was an early Scanlock device, and although Popoff could have used countermeasures ranging such as frequency hopping, codes, spread spectrum, or encryption, none of these were in use and they quickly picked up the sound of footsteps and then Elizabeth Popoff saying, "Hi, Petey. I hope you can hear me, becasue if you can't, you're in trouble."

Randi exposed Popoff on the Tonight Show, and Popoff's career seemed to have been derailed, though it took months for his followers to get the message. But now Popoff is back--and while he was making $12 million a year before, he's reporting over $24 million a year today. The message was a demoralizing one for skeptics--even the exposure of a blatant fraud like Popoff's is not sufficient to keep him from continuing to take money from the gullible and live a life of luxury.

There were some technical difficulties during the first part of Jason's talk, and I found it mostly to be old hat--I've read Randi's The Faith Healers, seen his Tonight Show appearance, and viewed multiple presentations about the Popoff exposure.

The remainder of Jason's presentation was about his work in some criminal cases. In a case in Africa, a body was found with a SIG Sauer P226 pistol on its chest. The question to resolve was whether this was a suicide or a homicide--after firing, the gun remains cocked and has to be manually decocked. A photo of the crime scene was too fuzzy to see clearly whether the gun was cocked, but Jason was able to compare reflectivity hot spots of a cocked vs. a decocked gun to determine that the gun was decocked. As it turned out, this didn't show that it was a homicide, as the first officer on the scene said that he had picked up the gun and turned on the safety--there is no safety on the pistol, and what he had actually done is decocked it, and thus the gun was shown to have been still cocked when the body was found.

Jason also went into a lot of detail in the Frank Zupan case, where Zupan was found at the scene of a vehicle accident where his wife was behind the wheel of their car and dead with gunshot wounds to the head. Zupan testified that they were driving at 25-30 mph when an oncoming car approached, and he thought rocks came through the window and hit his wife, which he then attributed to gunshots. Jason showed that a gun cannot be shot at faster than 10 rounds per second, and if gunfire came from a car approaching at 20 mph, there would be 3 feet of movement per shot. Since Zupan's wife was shot twice in the head and there was no damage to the front windshield, there's no way Zupan's account made sense.

Penn & Teller Q&A session
Penn and Teller had no prepared material, but simply answered questions from the audience. They talked about a wide-ranging variety of subjects, including Penn's radio show (which may come back in a different form), Teller's short film that appears on George A. Romero's "Diary of the Dead" DVD, and the fact that their show Bullshit! is "fair and extremely biased." In response to a question about what they may be wrong about, Penn said that he has symptoms of a believer with respect to his views on art and his libertarian politics. When asked what's the line between reasonable concern for the environment and environmentalist nuttery, Penn answered "I don't know," and Teller said, "carbon credits are bullshit, modeled on indulgences."

Penn stated that he thinks Obama is very classy and positive, but that he doesn't agree with him about anything.

Teller showed a video made by Jeff Levine about cold reading, called "The Cold Reader," based on a story by Matthew Simmons.

George Hrab's music
George Hrab came onstage briefly to play a couple of songs, one titled "God is Not Great" inspired by Hitchens' book, and another about being a skeptic.

P.Z. Myers on bat wings
P.Z. Myers gave a talk that presented some actual science--he first gave a brief description of his field and his own work, and then a summary of work by Chris Cretekos on the genes that control the development of bat wings, and what happens when they are put into rats. Rather than attempt to summarize this myself, I'll point the interested reader to Stephen Matheson's description of the same work.

Richard Saunders on himself and educational materials for kids
Richard Saunders of the Australian Skeptics, author of 17 books on origami, creator of the origami Pigasus for JREF, founder of the Sydney Skeptics in the Pub group, former president and current VP of the Australian Skeptics, chief spoon bender for the Australian Skeptics, and producer of the TANK vodcast, said that he's about to be the most famous TV skeptic in Australia. He will be the skeptical judge on "The One: The Search for Australia's Most Gifted Psychic" show. After spending a lot of time talking about his past and coming achievements, he did a nice demonstration of a dowsing investigation for use by educators to teach children scientific methods. He had six volunteers from the audience as dowsers to try to find a bottle of water placed under one of six plastic bins. First he found the best dowser at detecting the bottle when it was out in the open, then did trials first blind and then double-blind.

Panel discussion on identifying as a skeptic
The day's events concluded with a panel discussion between James Randi, P.Z. Myers, Michael Shermer, Margaret Downey, Phil Plait, Hal Bidlack, and a member of the NYC Skeptics (I didn't catch the name) about skepticism and identifying as a skeptic. Shermer began by saying that we start by assuming everything is false and require evidence to demonstrate that anything is true. I'm not sure that's actually a sound methodology--it's a lot easier to dig yourself into a philosophically skeptical hole where you doubt the existence of an external world and other minds than it is to get out. Our actual belief methods start out with trust--trust in our own senses and in the testimony of others as we learn language and concepts--not with Cartesian skepticism. In my opinion, something like "trust but verify" and "determine the limits and faults in belief-forming methods, and avoid them" is a better procedure than trying to build up all knowledge from nothing or from indubitable foundational premises. In answer to a question about various kinds of deniers referring to themselves as skeptics, Phil Plait observed that skeptics demand evidence, while deniers deny evidence. Those who deny the Holocaust or that man landed on the moon are not skeptics, they are deniers.

At one point, Margaret Downey made a statement that testimony from individuals who claim remarkable experiences are not relevant because "first-hand reports are just hearsay." But this is a mistake--they may be characterized as hearsay to others, but not to those who are making the reports who have actually had the experiences. Further, reports themselves may be collected and correlated with other objective evidence and used to draw scientific conclusions. I think it's a huge mistake to reject individual experience out of hand in the manner suggested; it's generally possible to take a report of an experience and identify possible explanations for what could cause the experience (or the report of an experience and the false belief in an experience).

There was an excellent audience question about how those of us with limited scientific knowledge can come to conclusions about complex scientific topics where we lack expertise to evaluate the evidence ourselves--aren't we taking results on faith? Randi responded to the question, but I don't think he really got the point. I went and spoke with the questioner afterward, and she agreed that he seemed to be answering a different question. I made the point that in such a case we need to determine who are the reliable experts, the trustworthy authorities, and that we have a number of clues we can use to help identify them.

On to TAM6 summary, part three.

The real 9/11 conspiracy

Readers of Gerald Posner's Why America Slept know that there has been evidence of Saudi royal family connections to the al Qaeda 9/11 terrorism plot. The final chapter of that book, titled "The Interrogation," is about the capture and interrogation of al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan on March 28, 2002 by a team that included American Special Forces and FBI SWAT teams as well as Pakistani police and military. After he was captured, Zubaydah was subjected to interrogation by the CIA in a real "false flag" operation, where he was made to believe he had been transported to a country with a reputation for brutal interrogation. While in fact he was in Afghanistan, he was made to believe he was in a Saudi jail, and two Arab-Americans with U.S. Special Forces played the role of his interrogators.

To their surprise, Zubaydah didn't display fear, but relief. While previously he hadn't even been willing to reveal his identity, he now gave his name, said he was happy to see them, and asked the interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family, for whom he provided private home and cell phone numbers from memory. That man was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, a nephew of King Fahd, owner of the Research and Marketing Group, and owner of the Kentucky Derby winning horse War Emblem.

Zubaydah claimed that bin Laden had made a cooperative arrangement with Pakistani air force chief Air Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir, a military official with close ties to the pro-Islamist members of ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, and that this arrangement had the blessing of Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia. Also according to Zubaydah, Turki had made a deal to provide aid to the Taliban in Afghanistan and would not ask for extradition of bin Laden, so long as his activities were directed away from Saudi Arabia.

Zubaydah also implicated Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud and Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir as supporters of al Qaeda, and stated that Mir and Prince Ahmed had advance knowledge that there would be terrorist attacks against the U.S. on 9/11.

His interrogators were skeptical of his claims, even though information from him was successfully used to capture Omar al-Faruq, a senior al Qaeda operative in Southeast Asia. And when U.S. personnel (not posing as Saudis) confronted Zubaydah about his claims, he denied it all and said that he had made it up. CIA investigation of his claims found nothing to refute them, however, and some corroborating evidence. A report on his claims was submitted to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, each of which responded that the claims were entirely false.

On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 43, and on July 23, 2002, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud was killed in a car accident at the age of 41. A week later, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir was found dead, having "died of thirst" at the age of 25. Prince Turki was fired from his position as head of Saudi Intelligence on September 1, 2001, and became the Saudi ambassador to Great Britain in 2002.

On February 20, 2003, Pakistani air force chief Mir, his wife, and fifteen others were killed in a plane crash.

None of this appeared in the 9/11 Commission Report, though it might have been planned for that document. This is because the Bush administration censored 28 pages of material about Saudi connections to 9/11 from the report on the grounds of national security.

In 2004, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Bob Graham, published a book, Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America's War on Terror, in which he claimed that Bush covered up evidence that the Saudi government was aiding at least two of the 9/11 hijackers via Omar al-Bayoumi, which Graham discussed in an interview with Salon.com.

More recently, New York Times reporter Philip Shenon's book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, raises the same point about the Saudi government's ties to Omar al-Bayoumi.

I think the full story of Saudi and Pakistani involvement in 9/11 has yet to be told.

None of this involves munitions used to collapse buildings, unmanned drones, missiles hitting the Pentagon, or the innocence of Osama bin Laden, like the crazy 9/11 truth movement's claims. It does involve U.S. political relations with nations that have been key allies in the war on terror, both of which have governments which have been close to collapse, and one of which (Pakistan) is a nuclear power and one of which is the source of most foreign oil imported by the U.S. It's clear why the U.S. would treat relations with these countries gingerly even if they did have members of their governments directly involved in 9/11, and why those countries would want to quietly dispose of the problem.

UPDATE (July 16, 2009): Greetings to Talking Points Memo readers, here because of a link in the comments from a story about a Bush/Cheney CIA assassination program apparently permitted to operate domestically. That commenter seemed to suggest that the CIA might have been behind the deaths described in the above post, which I think is highly unlikely in comparison to the speculation that the Saudis themselves might have taken care of matters.

UPDATE (April 13, 2015): Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, claimed in February 2015 that members of the Saudi royal family helped fund the 9/11 attacks. He specifically named Prince Turki al-Faisal Al Saud and Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

Phoenix 9/11 truther on hunger strike

Blair Gadsby, a 45-year-old adjunct religious studies professor at Chandler-Gilbert Community College, has gone on hunger strike until John McCain agrees to meet with him about 9/11 conspiracy theories. Gadsby thinks that the U.S. government destroyed the World Trade Center towers and Building 7 with explosives, even though he's apparently read the Popular Mechanics book on Debunking 9/11 Myths, for which McCain wrote the foreword.

In how many different ways is this guy an idiot?

1. He's bought into nonsensical conspiracy theories--his version has both Islamic terrorists flying planes into the WTC and explosives put there earlier, so he must believe something like this.
2. He apparently can't understand the refutations of them.
3. He thinks a hunger strike is a good way to meet John McCain.
4. He's an adjunct professor of religious studies.

Feel free to add to the list.

Zeitgeist: The Movie

Last night I attended an event at which one of the attendees promoted "Zeitgeist: The Movie." I was prompted to finally watch this piece of pernicious nonsense back in January when a commenter at this blog made reference to it, and I forced myself to sit through the whole thing. The movie is in three segments--the first is on the origins of Christianity, in which it argues that Jesus was a myth derived from Egyptian myth, based on the work of Acharya S. The second is 9/11 conspiracy theory. The third is an argument that the U.S. Federal Reserve is a scam. It's almost entirely garbage, dependent on crackpot sources.

I posted a series of comments about the movie as I watched it, but I'll summarize those here and add a bit more.

The first part argues that Christianity is derived from Egyptian myth, primarily by pointing out parallels between them. The arguments are apparently derived from the self-published "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Acharya S (Dorothy M. Murdock) and perhaps also from Tom Harpur's The Pagan Christ, both works of pseudoscholarship based on the work of other pseudoscholars like 18th century archaeologist Godfrey Higgins, 19th century amateur Egyptologist and poet Gerald Massey, and Alvin Boyd Kuhn, a high school language teacher and promoter of Theosophy) and entirely ignores actual work in Egyptology. For example, the film draws a list of comparisons between Horus and Jesus that is just fabricated--Horus wasn't born of a virgin, he was the child of Isis and Osiris, though Isis was impregnated by Osiris through some magic after he was dead. There have been parallels drawn between Isis and Mary that are more plausible (especially in iconography), but the movie exaggerates them, too, and fails to note the considerable areas of dissimilarity. A quick look at the Wikipedia entries on Horus and Isis is sufficient to show that the comparison is strained. The significance of a December 25 birthdate is nonexistent--Christianity did acquire attributes of pagan religions later in its history, and it has clearly been a syncretistic religion, but while this is evidence of falsehood in Christian traditions, it is not a clue to its origin.

For accurate information about Christianity and the formation of the Christian tradition, virtually any mainstream academic work will be more reliable. There has been a lot discovered since the work of 19th century Theosophists, both in the form of document manuscripts and archaeology, that sheds light on the early history of Christianity. In discussions at the James Randi Educational Foundation Forums, poster GreNME wrote:

Oh, those people were mostly made of of the beginnings of the Theosophist movements (Blavatsky and the like) or people with similar stated motivations but not the same organizational structure (like Graves). Yeah, Dorothy [Murdock] cites regularly enough from these people (especially Graves and Massey), but the thrust or crux of her writing tends to be more similar to those like Allegro-- taking the message into a realm of New-Age-y attempts to center on mid-20th-century discoveries about the mystery schools.

That's why I mentioned Ehrman, by the way. I had the opportunity to send him a question on the topic of the "out of Egypt" mystery school centric literature coming out about by those like Dorothy, and his response was essentially that people who stick to that thin and shallow an interpretation of the mystery schools really don't understand the materials they're trying to work with in the first place.

I've read a few very well-worded academic arguments against a historical Jesus, but none of them rely on the mystery schools, Egyptian mythology, Krishna, or Mithras. They tend to focus on the culture of the region at the time and the unreliability of the few Roman authors who are used by apologists today. For me, all said and done, I don't much care because I'm not a Christian anyway. It's only reliably traceable back to Paul anyway, in my opinion.

So read some Bart Ehrman for a more accurate picture. The best case I've read for Jesus being a myth is in the books of G.A. Wells, though I'm not inclined to buy it. (Earl Doherty's The Jesus Puzzle has also been recommended as a strong case for Jesus being mythical, but I've not read it.) I think the Arabic text of Josephus' reference to Jesus in Antiquities of the Jews provides strong evidence that Josephus did refer to a historical Jesus and that his text was altered by later Christian interpolation rather than an insertion completely made up out of whole cloth.

Some of the same kind of errors (via dependence on sources like Harpur and Kersey Graves) that are in "Zeitgeist" are also in Brian Flemming's "The God Who Wasn't There," for which you an find a nice fair-minded critique, along with responses from Flemming and Richard Carrier, in "God Who Wasn't There: an Analysis."

The second part is standard 9/11 conspiracy theory that has been refuted in previous posts at this blog. It completely ignores radical Islam and the actual events that led up to September 11, 2001, and like all such conspiracy theories, completely fails to provide a coherent explanation that incorporates the level of detail in the 9/11 Commission Report. That report is a flawed document, to be sure, but it is still far, far more comprehensive, detailed, and accurately sourced than anything the 9/11 truthers put out. The right way to investigate 9/11 is to start with the 9/11 Commission Report, with accounts of the movements and actions of the 19 terrorists, and going back farther to the 1993 WTC bombing, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and the Alkifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, the murder of Emir Shalabi, the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane by El-Sayyid Nosair, the killing of Rashad Khalifa in Tucson in 1990 and the role of James Williams and Wadih el-Hage (secretary for Osama bin Laden in Sudan), and so on.

The U.S. government's connection is that it funded the mujahideen insurgents in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, and then walked away after the Soviets were defeated, allowing rich Saudis to step in. There's no question that "blowback" has played a major role, and I'll also agree that the Bush Administration has hugely exploited the 9/11 attacks to its advantage and to expand presidential power (as the PBS Frontline on "Cheney's Law" documents, which I highly recommend watching and you can see online).

The right way to investigate 9/11 is to stick to reliable sources and accounts that attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, not bullshit stories made by collecting a few bits of data from unreliable sources and constructing elaborate fantasies of speculation. Some reliable sources I recommend are Gerald Posner's Why America Slept, James Bamford's A Pretext for War, and James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans. Specifically on 9/11 conspiracy theory, read the book of critiques published by Popular Mechanics and visit websites like 911myths.com and Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.

Instead, Zeitgeist relies on crackpots like Michael Ruppert and Ted Gunderson, both former police officers who have a long history of promoting nonsensical conspiracy theories. Ruppert is best known for his claims to have found that the CIA was peddling drugs (itself a plausible claim, even if not well substantiated by him) while he was a narcotics detective for the LAPD; after being removed from the force in 1978, he has gone on to argue for Peak Oil and 9/11 conspiracy theory. In 2006, after facing charges of sexual harassment from a former employee whom he admits he paraded around the office in his underwear in front of, he fled to Venezuela, then moved to Canada, and then to New York and Los Angeles. Gunderson spouted nonsense about satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and has endorsed the accuracy of phony psychic Sylvia Browne, as well as promoting wild claims of child sexual abuse by "some of America's leading politicians" including George W. Bush, which makes him sound like the crazy mind-control sex slave claimants, "Brice Taylor" (Susan Ford), Cathy O'Brien, and Kola Boof (the last of whom makes the sex slave claims without the mind control claims).

The film provides no good sources for any of its claims, and seems to contradict itself. It claims there's no evidence connecting Osama bin Laden to the attacks (despite the fact that we have people like al Qaeda member Ramzi Binalshibh, who attempted to enter the U.S. to enter a flight school but was denied a visa, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, head of al Qaeda's media committee and main plotter of the attacks, in custody), yet turns around and suggests that there's something suspicious about the Bush family connections to the bin Laden family and that two members of the bin Laden family lived in Falls Church, Virginia "right next to CIA Headquarters." Why would that connection be relevant or suspicious if Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with it?

Osama bin Laden's father had 55 children and 22 wives, and there are currently about 600 bin Laden family members--most appear to be law-abiding citizens who have disowned Osama. The two Falls Church residents, however, were two of Osama's sons, Abdallah and Omar, the latter of whom was a member of al Qaeda.

The charge of the FBI being told to "back off" from bin Laden investigations from the White House is now known to have been approved by counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, not exactly a fan of George W. Bush, whose testimony on the issue has been somewhat inconsistent. While Clarke originally claimed the plan came from top officials in the White House and was approved in consultation with the FBI, he subsequently said that he took personal responsibility for the decision to allow the bin Laden family members to leave the U.S., and that he didn't think it was a mistake, and that he'd do it again.

The third section of the movie is about the U.S. Federal Reserve, which appears to be derived from John Birch Society propaganda, with a bonus argument that the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and thus federal income tax is invalid. It argues that the Panic of 1907 was caused by (rather than, as was actually the case, ended by) J.P. Morgan, and makes no mention of the Knickerbocker Trust. It argues that the Federal Reserve Act was put into effect by a conspiracy of international bankers and the Rockefellers through Sen. Nelson Aldrich, and claims that the Federal Reserve is entirely private. But the Fed's head and board of governors is appointed by the president, which isn't mentioned by the film. Wikipedia gets theFed's legal status right, it's part of the federal government but with a fair degree of independence so that politicians can't directly manipulate monetary policy. Its status is accurately described in Bill Woolsey's October 2004 article in Liberty magazine, "Who Owns the Fed?". A number of other Federal Reserve conspiracy claims are debunked here.

It then goes off into tax evader craziness, claiming that the 16th Amendment wasn't properly ratified, but without actually discussing the evidence. That argument is made in William J. Benson and Martin J. Beckman's book The Law That Never Was, which documents errors in the ratification documents, such as typos, alternate capitalization, alternate pluralization, etc. Courts have ruled that Benson's argument doesn't work and that his selling his book as part of a tax evasion defense package constitutes fraud, and he's served time in jail for tax evasion.

As an aside, while reviewing the above I came across an even more interesting argument against income tax (not in Zeitgeist) discussed by Cecil Adams in his "Straight Dope" column. The argument states that the 16th Amendment is invalid because Ohio was not a state at the time of ratification, and William H. Taft, who was president, was therefore not legally president since he was not a U.S. Citizen. Everybody thought Ohio was made a state in 1803, but in 1953 when Ohio was preparing for its 150th anniversary of statehood, they found that Congress had defined its boundaries and approved its constitution, but failed to admit it to statehood. Ohio made an appeal for statehood (delivering it to Congress by horseback) and Congress passed a resolution granting it retroactively. Cecil Adams' description and commentary about it is worth reading.

Tax protestor claims more generally are refuted at this GWU law professor's website, and a nice case study refutation is Sheldon Richman's three-part "Beware Income-Tax Casuistry."

"Zeitgeist: The Movie" was apparently put out by "GMP, LLC", which is a company based in Port Chester, NY registered to a James Coyman, who has been claimed to be the person behind the pseudonym "Peter Joseph" credited for the writing, producing, directing, and editing of the film. Other documents online associate GMP, LLC with John Giura, former vice chairman of north Chicago company CGI Holding Corporation (now Think Partnership, Inc., traded on AmEx under the symbol THK), a company with a subsidiary, WebSourced, Inc., which is "a leader in search engine marketing (see www.keywordranking.com) and on-line dating (see www.Cherish.com)." A John Giura has directed a music video for the Nashville, TN band Clem Snide, and a John P. Giura from New York City directed a 20-min short film called "Inside Trip" shown at the 2002 Maryland Film Festival, as well as some other videos found online attributed to him and his JPG Studio in NYC. The short festival film stars former Olympic wrestler John P. Giura, who has apparently lived in Oak Park, IL and New York City. In 1986, a John Giura of Oak Park, IL who was a partner in the firm of Stein, Roe, and Farnham, was charged by the SEC for participation in a complex "kickback and payoff" scheme which victimized Teamster union pension funds in upstate New York. It's not clear which, if any, of these is associated with the GMP, LLC that put out Zeitgeist. [See update below.]

There is a movie at Google Video titled "Zeitgeist Refuted" that appears to be itself filled with bad arguments promoting Christianity. Though I've only watched a small part of it, it doesn't seem to actually respond to the claims of "Zeitgeist: The Movie."

Other responses to "Zeitgeist: The Movie" include:

The criticism section of the Wikipedia article on "Zeitgeist: The Movie"
The Web Skeptic wiki entry on "Zeitgeist: The Movie"
The site "Zeitgeist, the movie Debunked"
Jay Kinney's review of "Zeitgeist" at boingboing
Tim Callahan's, "The Greatest Story Ever Garbled," a debunking of part I of "Zeitgeist" for Skeptic magazine's e-skeptic newsletter

Henry Makow's site, which amusingly takes issue with part one but swallows whole the nonsense in parts two and three and concludes that Zeitgeist is itself the product of a conspiracy, is worth a laugh.

UPDATE (August 6, 2009): I decided to add to the main post the text of my comment from October 30, 2008 below, about "Zeitgeist Addendum":

I watched a little bit (the first 30 minutes) of the "Zeitgeist Addendum," which looks to be largely derived from "Money is Debt," another video floating around the Internet. I skimmed through much of the rest.

It's somewhat more accurate than the previous parts, but has the same flaws as "Money is Debt," most seriously in its discussion of interest. The creators of both films do not seem to understand the time-value of money, or that the expansion of the money supply doesn't create problems so long as non-monetary wealth is also expanding. No matter what you use as money, there will always be a system of credit that rides on top of it, of the sort that has been contracting rapidly in the current financial crisis. (This contraction has been *increasing* the value of the U.S. dollar this year.)

The idea that money creates slavery and that if we just got rid of fractional reserve banking, nobody would be forced to work for a living is a bit ridiculous.

Looks like part 2 of the film is based on John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which is a book I've read. His book was entertaining, but mostly unbelievable, and he's not a credible source. Note that he claims that we all have the shamanic ability to shapeshift and become invisible, for example.

Some of the stuff he talks about is correct, such as U.S. intervention using the CIA in the Middle East and South America, the history of which is told in Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes.

In part III, the film suggests that we only need money because of scarcity, and that scarcity is a fiction. But scarcity isn't a fiction, scarcity exists because there is no limit to what people can want and desire--there can be scarcity even when a resource is abundant.

My impression is that the "Addendum" is just as bogus as the first three parts--it's largely lifted from other sources, and those sources are unreliable.

UPDATE (January 5, 2010): Better speculation by salvorhardin at Democratic Underground says that "Peter Joseph" is Peter J. Merola. This appears to be a correct identification if the Animation World Network's announcement of a multimedia event from May 29-June 3, 2007 is accurate:

ZEITGIEST is a unique and ambitious multimedia, musical event by P.J. Merola. This event is free and not for profit. It runs from May 29 - June 3, 2007 at 8:00-9:30 pm.

ZEITGEIST is an abstract, aesthetic exploration of personal belief and social myth -- told through a multimedia work of live solo percussion, stereo video displays and electronic music. Using animation, live performance, drama, humor, and narrative, ZEITGEIST attempts to bring its audience to a place that most likely counters what they believe as true.

Please visit http://www.zeitgeistnyc.com for a video preview and to make reservations.

The "GMP" is then "Gentle Machine Productions," as reported here. Gentle Machine Productions released a CD GMP001 titled "J.S. Bach on the Marimba," arranged by P.J. Merola, with P.J. Merola playing the marimba.

The Village Voice ran a story in 2004 about P.J. Merola and his brother Eric.

Dave Palmer's review of Legacy of Ashes

Dave Palmer recently finished reading Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, and sent the following review to the SKEPTIC list on May 23. I liked it so much that I asked him if I could republish it here, and he agreed.

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So back in April, I was in a bookshop, and my eyes fell on a meaty, red-covered book called Legacy of Ashes, the History of the CIA. "Huh, that looks interesting," sez I. Then a more rational voice in my head pops up. "Are you frakking nuts? You already know a bit about that spook house, reading a book like that will only piss you off." But it was my birthday, so I HAD to have me a little something.

Man, does it get tiresome being right ALL the time...

This is an appalling, sickening, infuriating book, particularly since its impeccable scholarship requires one to take it seriously. Unlike your average innuendo-and-hearsay CIA book, this one is based entirely on historical and declassified government documents and on-the-record interviews with named (and heavily-footnoted) sources, usually with the most senior personnel. The author, Tim Weiner, is a Pulitzer-winning NY Times reporter who has been covering US intelligence agencies for 20 years. He's the kind of guy who just pops out for lunch with current and past CIA Directors.

Like a lot of people, I had always assumed that the CIA might have a few massive public screwups (such as the Bay of Pigs), and there were surely times when Presidents ignored or twisted the CIA's intelligence to political ends (witness the current misadventure in Iraq), but underneath it all, there was at least SOME small bit of competence at work in the agency; there were people there who at least knew how to gather useful intelligence. Like the old quote about the CIA goes, their failures are all public, their successes are all secret.

OK, so maybe I'm not right ALL the time.

Turns out, the CIA is in fact a Mongolian clusterfuck of staggering, breathtaking proportions. And they always have been, all the way back to their founding in 1947 (and even the OSS, the agency's WWII precursor, wasn't quite as swift as they're made out to be on The History Channel). If the guy who coined the term "epic fail" had read this book, he wouldn't have bothered, there is no point in describing the ocean with teaspoon-sized words. As far as I can tell, they have had NO significant successes at all. Ever.

From the very start, they were constructed for failure. The main idea in founding the CIA was "to prevent another Pearl Harbor" by keeping a close eye on other nations and to distill those observations into a keen understanding of what those nations were actually up to. That notion (or at least, the actual practice of it) was pretty much tossed in the dumpster the day the doors opened. Instead, they jumped on the anti-Commie bandwagon like the rest of the government, and there they stayed until chunks of the Berlin Wall actually started falling on their heads some 30 years later. The black-or-white thinking that so characterizes the neocons of today was the CIA's one and only mode of thought. The rules that set the entire tone for the CIA were simple:

-There is ONE enemy in the world: the Commies.
-The Commies want to destroy us.
-If you're not with us, you're against us, and hence a Commie.
-The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And that's it. No shades of gray, no questioning of those basic principles, no consideration of other possibilities (apparently, not even that the recently-defeated Axis powers might be a threat again). This thinking would blind the intelligence-gathering division almost until the 1990s.

Then it got worse. Almost immediately, the veterans of Wild Bill Donovan's he-man OSS corps elbowed their way to the table and decreed that clandestine operations should be the REAL focus of the CIA. Screw this reading other people's mail stuff, we've got to go and blow shit up, shoot people and sabotage the spread of communism wherever it shows its head. From that day on, the intelligence-gathering division was relegated to a barely-tolerated afterthought.

The major problem with this plan was that the CIA really sucked at it. No, I mean REALLY sucked...and I mean both the clandestine and the intelligence-gathering. From the start, the agency was run by smugger-than-thou Yalies and uppercrust preppies who felt they didn't need to actually KNOW about any of this stuff they were blowing up, it was Commie stuff, so it just needed blowing up. The willful ignorance and stupidity practiced by the CIA was just staggering.

Over and over and over again, the book lays out details of CIA foreign stations where not a single officer there spoke the local language, knew anything about the history of the region, or ever made any effort to learn anything that was going on outside of what could be picked up over cocktails at the country club. The CIA guys in Laos who were arming and training Hmong tribesmen to fight the North Vietnamese didn't even know the name "Hmong." They called them by a term that the author says was somewhere between "barbarian" and "nigger." In the 70s-80s, the agency's TOP Soviet expert spoke not a single word of Russian. And he had never even set foot there. The way the CIA learned that the Berlin Wall was falling--and I'm NOT making this up--was when somebody at headquarters happened to tune into CNN.

Over and over and over again, the book tells of CIA directors and top officers who were drunks, liars, con men. One CIA director was eventually committed to the happy home, and the guy who ran the counterintelligence division for years was widely regarded to be certifiable for most of his tenure.

Over and over and over again, the author details clandestine operations that went horribly, disastrously wrong. Massive clusterfucks like the Bay of Pigs were far more the rule than the exception. For years, the CIA was supplying money and weapons to a Polish resistance group fighting the Soviets. The only problem was, it didn't exist. It had been wiped out years earlier by the KGB, and the whole operation was just a scam on the CIA run by the Soviets. They even donated some of the CIA's money to the Italian Communist Party as a final dig.

One side aspect of the story is that any JFK conspiracy theories that claim the CIA planned the assassination have had a stake decisively hammered through them. If the CIA had planned the JFK assassination, the only result would have been that a goatherd in a small Congolese village would have become the village's head man when all seven other contenders for the job suddenly perished in a freak bobsled accident. And a baker in Skipros, Greece would have received a shipment of German anti-tank missiles in crates labeled in Linear B, and an envelope with 2 million Romanian Lei inside.

And speaking of presidents and murder plots, the book suggests that the famous plot by Saddam to kill Papa Bush might not have been what it appeared. The "confession" of the plotters that they were working for Saddam was tortured out of them by the Kuwaitis, and the author notes that the alleged conspirators were really just a bunch of hash smugglers and other low-level criminal types.

Meanwhile, over in the intelligence-gathering division (and of course, the two divisions did frequently overlap), things weren't going any better. Over and over and over again, we read of utter and complete failure to plant spies in Commie countries. Not a single one of the dozens and dozens of spies dropped into North Korea during the Korean war was ever heard from again. The same was true for just about every other spy dropped into every other country. In one case, after dozens of spies disappeared without a trace, it was discovered later that the clerk who typed up the orders for the insertion was working for the Commies, so the KGB was there to meet them when they hit the ground. Although the CIA managed to recruit a handful of low-level spies in the Soviet Union (one was a high school teacher, another a roofer), in the entire cold war, they only ever managed to recruit three--count em--THREE spies of any consequence. All were arrested and shot.

When they did gather intelligence, it was ludicrously wrong FAR more often than it was right. Indeed, I don't think the book details a single case where the CIA got its intelligence right on a major issue. In 1961, they reported that the Soviets had 500 nukes pointed at the US. They were just a tad high. 496 high, to be precise. The Soviets had a grand total of FOUR nukes pointed at us. Nonetheless, that report set of a frenzy of weapons building that brought us to the brink of nuclear war and economic collapse. Over and over again, the book tells of the CIA reporting that <X> will never do <Y>. And then two days later, <X> doing <Y> was on the front page of the daily paper. They confidently predicted the Russians wouldn't have a nuke for years just about 2 weeks before the Russians tested their first one. They said that Saddam was just bluffing when he massed tens of thousands of troops on the Kuwaiti border.

The few times they did score on a piece of correct intelligence, they got it from the spy agencies of other countries. In a 1956 speech to the Congress of the Communist Party, Khruschchev delivered a scathing denunciation of Stalin. The CIA had to get a copy of the speech from the Israeli secret service.

Even the things that the CIA defined as "successes" were questionable at best, particularly in the long run. What the CIA did have a fair record at was overthrowing democratically-elected governments and replacing them with right-wing despots. When the democratically-elected PM of Iran suggested to the Brits and Americans that maybe Iran should get a little more of all that oil money that they were taking out of his country, they laughed and told him to STFU/GBTW. So he suggested that maybe he might just nationalize the oil fields. WELL, that's your actual commie talk, of course, so the CIA overthrew him and put a puppet Shah in his place...and then trained and outfitted a brutal secret police to keep the sheeple in line. That is the chief reason why a lot of Iranians hate our guts today. The CIA considered their arming and training of Afghan Muslim fanatics to kill Russians to be a *spectacular* success...and I think we all know how that turned out in the third act.

That was the norm for the CIA. That "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing led them into bed with every kind of lying, thieving, murdering drunken thug in the sewer, just as long as they were anti-Commie.The CIA cheerfully funded openly unrepentant Nazis just after the end of WWII, and actually went downhill from there. I can't think of any case where the CIA helped overthrow a government and then replaced it with a fair, lawful one.

And the thing is, they weren't even any good at overthrowing governments, they were just lucky. It wasn't a case of skillful psychological warfare and precisely-timed black ops, they basically just paid goons to start shooting people in the streets. At least one operation, an attempted coup in Indonesia, ended with the US military shooting at the CIA's own hired thugs.

Now, even though no President in the CIA's history comes off looking very good in this book, it wasn't as if nobody noticed how bad the CIA's record was. Over and over and over again, blue-ribbon panels, inspectors general, and even internal CIA reviewers were commissioned to report on the effectiveness of the agency, and like the reports were Xeroxed, they all reached the same conclusion: the CIA is seriously, SERIOUSLY broken, and probably the best thing we could do is just torch the place. These reports were all either just buried, or tut-tutted over in the press for a couple weeks, and then everything returned to incompetence as usual.

The punchline to all this is it really appears now that the Commies just weren't that much of a threat, even when Stalin was in power. Khruschchev himself wrote that the concept of an all-out war with the west terrified Stalin, and then later Khruschchev was making tentative peace feelers with the US when the CIA sent "just one more" U2 flight into Russian airspace, and that slammed the door for years. Sure, the Soviets were out to flatter, bribe, steal, or bully influence in countries all around the world that had oil, minerals, or a strategic location. Just as we were. Just as every other world power has done in history. I think that a great deal of the fault for the cold war has to be laid at the CIA's feet.

And since "the only enemy in the world" up and vanished, the rudderless ship of the CIA has been even more adrift. After the 9/11 attacks, the command structure of the agency was changed (think re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic), and the former position of CIA director was more-or-less replaced by the position of Director of National Intelligence. The last actual CIA director was Porter Goss, and his main contribution to the fun was to systematically sack everybody in the agency who disagreed with Dubya's policies. That got rid of the last people who might actually know something useful. After that, some 50% of the employees were so new as to be classified as "trainees." And then it got worse. Today, a number of private intelligence agencies have sprung up like weeds, and they all pay much better than the CIA. So the current career track there is to join the CIA, get the training, put in five years or so, quit, join Spooks R Us for double the pay...and then show up for work the next day at the CIA wearing a contractor badge instead of an employee badge.

Reading this book was a gut-wrenching, eye-opening experience. For the first couple hundred pages, I was outraged. Then, it just kept coming, it didn't let up, and I was eventually left with just a numb shock, and even a kind of disgust at being an American. The book really gives you a better perspective of what's been going on in the world for the last 60 years, and why we are where we are and why the people who hate us came to that opinion. The book has just been released in paperback, and it should be required reading in high school.

My opinion now (and I mean this with almost no sarcasm) is that one of the greatest threats--perhaps THE greatest threat--to America since 1947 has in fact been the CIA. They have spent uncounted billions of dollars, caused uncounted thousands, hundreds of thousands, of deaths, put America in bed with a staggeringly long list of murderers, liars, goons, rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, ...well, lots of bad guys. And through all that, they failed to predict even a SINGLE event of significance to the US (there have been a couple of cases where they got something right, but nobody listened because they were usually wrong). Instead, they tarnished our reputation around the world, and led us to the brink of both nuclear and conventional war too many times to comfortably recount. And so far, every single President has gotten disgusted with them, decided they weren't worth the powder and shot to put them down, and then increased their budget and left them as a mess for the next President to clean up. But the CIA HAS demonstrated a cheerful willingness to spy on Americans (they've been doing it at least since the 60s), and to do any vile thing they're called upon to do. So with the current neocon push for an Imperial President and a Big Brother state, they are in a perfect position to step up and become our very own KGB or Gestapo...but minus the competence.

[Previously at this blog on Weiner's book:
"Abolish the CIA"
"A Brief History of the CIA: 1945-1953 (Truman)"
"A Brief History of the CIA: 1953-1961 (Eisenhower)"
"The CIA in Venezuela in 2002"
Also Rottin' in Denmark has a review of the Weiner book similar in some respects to Dave's.]