"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made. Thank you, thank you. Now excuse me I've got an inquest to run..."
Years ago, shortly after 9/11, I was arguing with a work colleague about the blatant inconsistancies in the Official Narrative of that particular atrocity.
The miraculous fire-proof passports were high on my list of bullshit, as was the suggestion that the hijackers had been cramming 767 flight manuals in the airport car park on the morning of 9/11. I also had big issues with the story that at least some of alleged Muslim fanatics had got lagered up in the Pink Pony titty bar the night before their 'martyrdom operation'
My colleague explained to me in the most patronising tone he could muster...
'But what you don't understand is that these Al Qaeda operatives are trained to blend in seamlessly into Western Culture'
Now, as it happens, he was the kind of seedy old sod who did frequent titty bars on business trips and probably does consider them to be the epitome of Western Culture, but that's by the by
My response to my colleague was
'Is there anything those men could have done that would have disproved that they were Al Qaeda terrorists?'
His answer was that they shouldn't have destroyed the Twin Towers
Basically, he already knew that they were guilty (because he had been told by the media that they were), and the details of anything they did before the attacks, however banal or contradictory to the notion that they were religious fanatics, was to be interpreted in that light
Once you adopt that kind of mindset absolutely anything a person you've identified as a criminal does will be damning proof of their guilt
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Critical thinking clearly isn't as popular as it once was but, even so, it should still be fairly clear that theories which are phrased in a way that they can't ever be disproved, even if they are wrong, are not very useful theories at all
They are, however, the basis of much top quality comedy - including many a Marx Brothers routine, huge chunks of Catch-22 and the scene in Life of Brian where Brian denies that he's the Christ and is then informed that 'Only the True Messiah denies his divinity'
That which makes for top quality comedy does not, however, make for top quality inquests...
From the afternoon session on the 11th:
13 There is no evidence at all that we have seen to
14 suggest that the bombers were duped in some way so that
15 they did not know that they were going to die or, even
16 more absurdly, that they did not know that they were
17 carrying explosives at all. Indeed, such claims run
18 entirely contrary to all the evidence that I have
19 summarised so far.
20 It is right to say that the bombers were
21 surprisingly effective, it would seem, in concealing
22 their intentions from those around them. Tanweer played
23 cricket in the evening before putting the terrible plot
24 into effect and seemed more concerned, according to his
25 family, by the loss of his mobile phone.
You could write a longish essay exploring how many different flavours of intellectual dishonesty feature in the above extract from the 7/7 Inquest proceedings
but the short answer is, 'a lot'
A slightly longer answer can be found on the J7 Forum...
"This is utterly circular, and a complete nonsense.
The conclusion that there is no evidence that the alleged bombers were duped or otherwise unknowing suicide bombers is based on the assumption that they were entirely knowing. One piece of evidence that Tanweer was not a knowing, intentional suicide bomber (his playing cricket) is dressed up as evidence of the alleged 'concealing their intentions from those around them'. But this presumes that they were knowing, intentional suicide bombers, so the conclusion that there's no evidence of them being dupes or patsies is an implicit premise in analysing the very evidence that they were dupes or patsies.
When your conclusion is actually an implicit or explicit premise in your argument then your argument is circular. It also engages a certain degree of doublethink - evidence they weren’t guilty isn’t evidence they weren’t guilty, because we know they were guilty, and hence there’s no evidence they weren’t guilty.
This is a bloody pantomime. It not only presumes a desired conclusion, but seeks to refute 'conspiracy theories' by merely repeating the very thing the 'conspiracy theories' are questioning. It's like they've let the BBC's Conspiracy Files crew loose to carry out the inquests."
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