A criticism of the Meacher article

David Aaronovitch has an article in today's Guardian that raises a number of questions about the article by Michael Meacher that I posted about yesterday. While he does offer some solid criticism, there are some aspects of his rebuttal that I think should be explored.

Regrettably, Aaronovitch doesn't provide much indication of what sources he used for his information, so, unlike I did with Meacher's post, I can't really go through and look at the actual context of the comments and statistics he quotes. This doesn't mean that he doesn't have any, that his information is necessarily bogus or even that I couldn't find similar information elsewhere. It just means that I can't review his actual sources the way I could with Meacher.

In addition, he roughly dismisses all questios about whether the war was predicated on a desire for oil in order to fulfill the neo-cons desire for a global American hegemony. "The oil and PNAC arguments in points one and two are so complex and recondite that I'll begin at about point three, in which the US may create a pretext for attacks."

While he does address a couple of specific issues (including the quote from Richard Myer's that "the goal has never been to get bin Laden", which Myer did actually say, but as part of a larger comment about the overall goal of the war on terrorism, which I tried to convey in my quotes from Meacher's sources below), he seems to focus a bit more on how Meacher presented his theory than addressing the specific information Meacher provides. He also criticizes Meacher's response when asked on ITN Saturday about the article.

Questioned on ITN on Saturday Meacher denied that he was a conspiracy theorist, citing the "I'm only raising questions" defence. His information, he said, "comes from the collection of data that I have been doing meticulously. It comes from websites across the world."

The ones that suggest that the American agencies wanted an attack, so deliberately ignored the activities of terrorists in the US, and stood down their own air defences, in order to allow the worst terrorist atrocity in history to take place - all to secure oil and gas supplies. This act of treachery was accomplished with the complicity of military people, politicians and civil servants of all ranks, some of whose family members were on the planes and in the buildings.

While Meacher may well have gotten his information by reviewing websites, I think its important to note that the information itself is the product of the websites themselves or the people who run them, but are all from articles, originally published in the mainstream press, that were simply rebublished or quoted on the websites Meacher visited. In other words, Aaronovitch tries to make it sound like Meacher was getting his actual information from crackpots, when the information itself came from what most people consider to be reasonably reliable sources, even if they're published on sites run by crackpots.

As I said before, none of this means that Aaronovitch is necessarily wrong, just as the thorough source referencing Meacher provided doesn't automatically guarantee that he's right. I just think that Aaronovitch's article is perhaps a bit weak on which to base a denouncement of Meacher's article, lacking, as it does, any attempt to address the questions Meacher raised about the PNAC, the desire for oil being at the root of this whole escapade and America's imperial aims, and without further, sourceable information.

As I noted in a comment to Jan from Secular Blasphemy, I have serious doubts about the Bush administration's ability to pull off the kind of massive conspiracy Meacher said they did. Their incompetence in how they've handled everything else they've tried (and it's getting bad enough that even the invenerate conservatives and neo-cons over at Free Republic are taking pot shots and making complaints about how Bush is running the country) leads me to conclude that they'd never be able to pull something this intricate off.

By the same token, however, I do think that there's a lot more that's going on behind the scene's - both in terms of actions and motivations - than we might even suspect, and I do think that there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. I'm trying to approach the whole thing cautiously, though, because I think this is far too important of an issue to just be lightly glossed over or embraced as the greatest (or worst, depending on how you're defining the terms) conspiracy in American history.

Posted by thorswitch at September 9, 2003 03:37 AM | TrackBack