on the same page

Dr. Hodges at Gypsy Scholar writes regarding the 9/11 attacks:

I can recall many different emotions from that confusing time. Some fear and anxiety. A lot of sadness. A great deal of anger.

But I don't remember many Americans worrying about economic or financial collapse, though Bin Laden seemed to believe that his terrorists had struck at this 'soft' spot, for I recall other statements by him urging further attacks on the U.S. economy, which he thought was tottering.

Bin Laden seemed to assume that the U.S. economy was centrally directed and that all one need do was knock out its center, which he apparently thought had been accomplished. I suppose that he's learned something since then, namely, that modern economic and financial systems are not centralized but are widely decentralized systems highly resistant to attacks.

This dovetails with something I had written to a friend in May of 2006 regarding that silly 9/11 video titled "Loose Change," which accuses the US government of having perpetrated the WTC attacks. I wrote:

Actually, the video does provide a reason for hitting the Twin Towers: the narrator claims that, just before the attacks, trading and insurance activity increased. The narrator's point is that the Towers contained all the financial records of that illict activity, so they had to go.

The problem is this: while the American economy did suffer a blow when the Towers were destroyed, the records for most companies were very likely stored in more than one physical location. What corporate head is idiot enough to forget to make backup records? In an info-tech-driven economy like America's, a few minutes is all it takes to download humongous reams of data (including scanned versions of paper documents) to a server somewhere outside New York. That shit is traceable. The [putative US] criminals would have had to consider how much data needed to be destroyed, and they'd have had to blow up more than just what was in the WTC.

If this video maker is such a supersleuth, he'll track down leads on the major companies involved in the illegal trading and get back to us with a new video about how these folks are living the high life (or how they've left the country to live the high life elsewhere). They can't hide forever, those people: our guy was smart enough to uncover a sinister government plot!

If the people planning the attack were really Americans looking to make quick money and then disappear beneath the rubble of the WTC, they should have thought about how decentralized the American economy truly is: it's like killing the hydra. Again, the idea that the criminals were motivated by money doesn't strike me as realistic.

I also think that Islamist ideology hasn't backed up the narrator's claim. Wahabist Muslims really are bent on reestablishing a Dar al-Islam (House of Islam)-- first in the Middle East, then in Europe, then in America and perhaps the rest of the world. Their ideology is no secret: even the most leftist newspapers all over the globe report it daily. There really is an anti-West campaign going on, right now-- it had been going on since even before the 1990s bombing of the WTC, back when Clinton was president and the world supposedly loved us.

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