“The Terror Conspiracy” by Jim Marrs (Disinfo Company)
Review by Kent Manthie
Well, all you 9/11 buffs out there – here is another tome to add to your ever-growing collection of pseudoscience, speculation, conjecture and just plain made up stuff.
First off, I don’t take anything that Jim Marrs writes, says or does. He believes in UFOs, for chrissakes – I mean, even in the text of this book he finds a reason to throw in a reference to the validity of space-alien crackpot theories, debunked a long, long time ago. But at least Marrs isn’t quite as obnoxious as Alex Jones, (I won’t give him any PR by listing his website) a real ass who goes around making stuff up, spreading rumors and harassing public officials with his brand of ambush pseudo-journalism.
OK, I’ll admit, there are a lot of interesting facts and figures in “The Terror Conspiracy” – certain anomalies here and there, but all too often these so-called smoking gun evidences Marrs cites are just coincidences, information from suspect sources or just flagrant speculation masquerading as documentary proof; hearsay and conjecture galore.
In one chapter, he talks about the knowledge of the people who were selling short airline stock options, something that’s done every day, based on many factors, not necessarily “insider trading” – what was Marrs saying? That everyone who makes speculative bets, basically, are terrorists or terror supporters? As was mentioned earlier, according to many intelligence agencies and other sources, a terrorist event seemed looming ever since the Bush coup d’etat in December 2000 and warning after warning was ignored or discounted, at least by the people who were in a position to do something about it but didn’t. So I can easily see how savvy, perceptive investors could make a killing (NPI).
I’ll tell you this though: reading through at least the first half, I started to get intrigued, even knowing it was written by this kook who believes that space aliens crashed in Roswell, NM in 1947, believes that another UFO crashed into a farm silo in some (forgotten to me, sorry) rural area and that the property owners are covering up alien findings by refusing any of these kooks on their property, like any other sane persons would do, so there is a lot of little bits here and there that add up to one big credibility gap. For one thing, the Taft-Hartley Act was not a union-busting act; witness the fact that the parties involved were only subjected to a “cooling off” period, they weren’t fired and the union was not “busted”. Plus, he misspelled Khun Sa, whom Marrs accuses of having certain knowledge about Richard Armitage, with knowledge of certain military plans of covert operations dependent on heroin profits. A familiar story that puts a twist on the age old myth, this time with the specter of terrorism in this Shakespearean drama, one gets fantastic story after wild speculation after near-libelous accusations here, all interwoven into a tale that is portrayed as a plausible narrative with the journalistic device of posing certain unanswerable innuendoes as hypotheses and rhetorical questions.
I’ll give “The Terror Conspiracy” this much – it is a meticulously detailed, indexed book with plenty of names, dates, facts, figures, quotes, and data, data, data. There’s something that drives people like Marrs to devote their lives to expending much effort and money and time into researching deep into the minutest facts and figures to support whatever it is they are trying to uncover, expose, get to the bottom of, et cetera.
I give Jim Marrs kudos for his seeming sincerity and his unwillingness to give up on what he believes is the truth, even though he is way off base on a number of points. I did find the book a page-turner of a book – I couldn’t put it down and all the interesting conjecture kept me thinking. The good thing about that aspect of “The Terror Conspiracy” is that it raises many questions and points to new angles and sheds light on disparate elements and people that are woven into a web. While the answers Marrs purports to give are far-fetched and wrongheaded in a lot of respects, the questions raised bring to light interesting and important clues for real researchers and journalists whose open minds can lead to real investigations.
I must find fault with Marrs on many counts; but his obsession with the CFR borders on the obsessive-compulsive. When reading through “The Terror Conspiracy” I’d be following along some theory or explanation, etc, of some angle or other, reading a mention of some figure connected to the case somehow, when all of a sudden, in a total non sequitur Marrs starts ranting and raving about the Council on Foreign Relations. He has this totally wrongheaded obsession with the CFR – he thinks that they are some sort of devious, secret, powerful cabal that is currently plotting to install a one-world government. This is a laughable premise to anyone who is at all familiar with the council. The CFR is a benign group of very intelligent people – academics, many journalists, diplomats, politicians, et cetera. In other words, it’s just a think-tank. A prestigious, exclusive clubby group of left-leaning types, like Sidney Blumenthal, Barbara Slavin, of USA Today, Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Bill Clinton (natch) and other like-minded intelligent people. I’ll tell you this: I’d rather have people from the CFR in high government much more than the current batch of incompetent, cronyists who are ruining the country right now!
Although the official report – “The 9/11 Commission Report” was definitely not any great work of independent investigation and it obviously left most questions unanswered as well as raising many more at the same time, that doesn’t mean that the government did it.
I was fascinated by the set of questions that the collapsing of “WTC Building 7” that did seem quite mysterious. Apparently, NYC’s office of emergency management (OEM) was housed in the 47–story building, along with 25,000 gallons of diesel fuel in order to run the huge emergency power generators also housed in the doomed building.
Then there is the mystery that still surrounds the Pentagon crash. Did an airplane really fly into the Pentagon? What happened to all the security camera videotapes from the surrounding businesses and establishments? They were all confiscated immediately following the “incident”. So, yeah, I believe there was something odd about the whole set of events surrounding the Pentagon “attack”, for one thing the weird lack of airplane debris around the “crash site”. Ever since I first heard about this supposed ‘fact’-that according to numerous eyewitnesses in and around the Pentagon, even accounting for the high-velocity impact, whereupon the airplane was pulverized into a million little tiny pieces and so it became almost impossible to ID a reconstructable amount of wreckage, de rigeur in airplane crashes. That intrigued me wherever it was I first heard about it.
Unfortunately, all that abounds in “The Terror Conspiracy” are theories, conjecture and wild speculation as to interpretation of the actual incontrovertible facts. I’d be surprised if it’s been reviewed in any major news outlet, like the NY TIMES, TIME, THE NEW YORKER, et cetera. Certainly there are myriad mysteries surrounding the 9/11 attacks. What is the worst thing about the attacks is that it was just what those evil neocons were praying for (literally!) in order to justify nullifying the US Constitution, which is exactly what has happened, piece by piece. But you know what? It was no conspiracy; nothing that was done in some backroom somewhere, although there is plenty of that. No, the evisceration of our Bill of Rights has been done right in front of us, before the American public’s apathetic eyes. Americans get exactly what they deserve because they have abdicated all responsibility: 1) due to laziness and apathy and a sheeplike mentality and 2) out of an appallingly bad education system, designed to inculcate a dehumanized vacuousness that literally makes me nauseated. The US philosophy of education of its kids is to make them just barely functional – just enough education to create a big-spending consumer.
Remember that, far from being a credible, honest (to himself if no one else) serious journalist Marrs thinks that extraterrestrials actually crash-landed in the New Mexico desert in 1947, even though the truth has been finally declassified that it was a top-secret high-altitude balloon with sensitive sensing equipment to be able to detect what would’ve been Soviet nuclear testing – remember this was just after Klaus Fuchs had given the Russians the atomic secrets for the reason that it wasn’t fair to lock up such dangerous and world-changing technology to one sovereign entity. But Marrs still doesn’t buy it. He also continues to believe in other discredited conspiracy theories, still clinging to the hope that the proof otherwise is just a smokescreen or a lie. No matter how much whatever crackpot theory he clings to has been incontrovertibly proved otherwise Marrs still desperately hangs on. The problem with these kinds of minds is that you can’t argue with them, all the irrefutable evidence that shows they’re wrong means nothing to them; it’s like a tautology whereby sanity, truth, etc, just can’t prevail because whatever proof or explanations you offer up to them is rejected out of hand because – naturally – that is just a smokescreen; a cover up; obfuscation meant to lull the public into a false sense of closure, hence safety or at least security. Marrs is like the kid you knew in your youth who, when faced with the fact of being wrong, instead of listening to the truth, plugs his ears with his fingers and go “lalalalalala”, so as to show you that they can’t hear you. (“nyah nyah, nyah nyah nyah!)
Come on, man, give it up; it’s time to face the facts and come back to earth. People like Marrs are constantly complaining that people aren’t keeping an open mind about it all, but when you rebut some specious claim with facts and/or evidence it’s the conspiracy theorists that end up with a closed mind. (http://www.disinfo.com) – KM.