Because of the time limit, the focus was more on 9/11 than the broader theme of how certain events and issues cause cognitive dissonance, selective blindness or confirmation bias. The more that the issue touches on something essential to one's world view, the more we all tend to experience the tension or discomfort that cognitive dissonance describes. I wish I could have explored the issue as does this excellent video interviewing psychologists about CD and 9/11. It was suggested to me afterward that perhaps I needed more examples of where CD comes into play. 9/11 in such a hot button issue that you end up debating its many obscure facts.
Two questions came up that I want to explore without the spotlight on me. One was that I had cherry picked facts that suited my preferred narrative of 9/11. We all at times suffer selective blindness and confirmation bias in the way we see events. To defend myself, my background in journalism instills in me the practice of both fact checking and also to test a controversial claim with the best, most effective counterclaim. This is what I have always tried to do in relation to the claims of 9/11 'truth'. Thanks to the wonders of the internet and Google, one can always find the 'truth debunkers' case against 'truthers' in the first page of Google searches. I have also contacted primary sources in journalism, the law and intelligence services. Yes, they were mostly those who did not accept the official line, but I was interested in what mainstream journalism had failed to pick up. Mainstream journalism has done such a poor job on 9/11 that rather than cherry picking it's a case of picking up a huge number of cherries left to rot.
9/11 is not so clear cut that you can easily find out 'who did it' - as in the way that WMDs in Iraq were proven to be a false claim by the US and Britain. With 9/11 we have an official account and literally thousands of pieces of journalism and amateur inquiries into the myriad facts surrounding the event. However, the really good sources such as History Commons are works of peer-reviewed citizen journalism with a high standard of sources, overwhelmingly mainstream media and primary sources.
The difficulty with 9/11 is also that because of the massive propaganda of 'us and them' that began on 9/11 itself, any questioning of the official narrative became tantamount to heresy. The conspiracy theory label shuts down rational examination. What this results in is not blanket refusal to publish any facts that fall outside the official narrative - but rather a failure to put these together into a coherent explanation of what happened. New leads just tail off to nowhere. This is where citizen journalism and amateur sleuthing come in. This is an honourable practice, now seen, and causing much controversy, in the Syria conflict.
In truth a lot of journalism is moving in this direction. Investigative journalism has been in decline for years, as shown by Nick Davies' work in Flat Earth News. Davies is living proof of what dogged investigation can achieve - his work on phone hacking eventually broke the scandal in 2011 with the Millie Dowler story. For years before that, going back at least to Operation Motorman in 2006, evidence of hacking and police bribery was put down to a couple of rogue individuals. Now phone hacking is accepted as going to the top of news organisations. If there had been dogged investigative journalism on 9/11 we could see the exposure of official foreknowledge or complicity in the attacks. But of course the stakes on 9/11 are much bigger than those of phone hacking and police corruption. Journalists and editors have careers to think of.
The second question that I did not answer as fully as I wanted was 'how many people do you think were involved in this conspiracy?' which is a variation on the claim that for the CIA or any other government agency to be involved in 9/11 would inevitably be exposed. The answer to this is twofold. First, government complicity HAS been exposed! There are any number of whistleblowers from Richard Clarke downwards, unexplained contradictions in official accounts, clear signposts to government complicity from Dick Cheney down. It's just that mainstream media never chose to put a spotlight on this. The plot is hiding in plain sight. The 'coverup' failed!
The slip ups and inadvertent revelations by the likes of GW Bush and Binyamin Netanyahu suggest hubris and a sense of inevitability about what was happening, and confidence that they would not be pursued by the fourth estate. And yes, there was a cell of terrorists in Germany planning attacks on America. The question is, who knew what they were doing and had they been infiltrated by one or more intelligence services.
Further, compartmentalism of tasks and roles across any agent or official involved in the events of 9/11 means that only those at the centre of a plot need know what is actually going on. A criminal network working within government agencies is not the same as a civil servant with a pension and desk job. We also have subcontracting to shady black ops specialists with a need to know professionalism. Perhaps even those at the top took it on assurance that others would do what needed to be done, without knowing exactly how they would do it. If the goal was 'catastrophic terrorism' that would change America forever, as outlined by Philip Zelikow in 1997, the specialists who were responsible for making this happen would know what to do. America's black budget is called that for a reason - it is opaque and beyond scrutiny. Billions get spent, and who knows on what exactly.
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