9/11 Conspiracy Crossfire [VIDEO]

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 12:50 PM on October 23, 2006.

A wise man once said that:

The difference between someone with a healthy dose of skepticism and a conspiracy theorist is this: the former looks at the official version of events and when it doesn't add up, she says: "Hey, that doesn't add up." The latter looks at those same events and says: "Hey, that doesn't add up, but I'll tell you what really happened.

The following videos are more complementary than contradictory; the first being a condemnation of conspiracism and the second being a rational and open-minded quest for an honest assessment of what the U.S. government knew and when.

Watch Penn and Teller unleash their pent-up bile and invective on 9/11 conspiracy theorists who claim that 9/11 was planned by the government. Referring to them as a**holes and idiots, they do tend to choose the looniest of the batch, without interviewing, say, professors Jim Fetzer and Steven Jones of Scholars for 9/11 Truth; but they manage to make the excellent point that in many case, to peddle these is to completely ignore the pain and suffering of those who were directly effected by the heinous crime.

The second is the trailer for 9/11 Press for Truth, which follows "The Jersey Girls" -- a group of women who lost their husbands on 9/11 and who aren't satisfied that the government did everything it could, based on the information it had prior to the attacks.

Skepticism=good. The whole truth has not been revealed.

Paranoia and accusation=bad. The unfortunate reality is that finding the facts is extremely tedious and delicate, and we undermine the capital-T Truth when we get loosey goosey with our explanations...

Tagged as: 9/11, conspiracy

Evan Derkacz is an AlterNet editor. He writes and edits PEEK, the blog of blogs.