911review.com takes a look at the "big tent" [View All]

[KJF]

www.911review.com has a new(ish) section concerning the "big tent" strategy that has been used by the 9/11 truth movement.

Needless to say, I like the article a lot. It begins:

The Big Tent refers to strategy of inclusiveness to grow the 9/11 Truth Movement. Big Tent emphasizes tolerance of diverse ideas and theories over quality of evidence and reasoning. The strategy has long been reflected in websites and books that uncritically endorse the gamut of materials purporting to disprove the official story, as if the authors never met a theory of official complicity they didn't like.

and continues

This website demonstrates in a number of ways that the primary weapon of the cover-up in the information war is the showcasing of unfounded and absurd theories purporting to disprove the official story. Represented as typifying the work of 9/11 "conspiracy theorists", such theories serve to create a false dialectic with the effect of overshadowing challenges to the official story based on evidence and reason.

To the extent that all of the work of 9/11 skeptics can be successfully portrayed as belonging to the same ball of wax, it can be dismissed as the work of conspiracy theorists with deficient critical thinking skills, the quality of the better work notwithstanding. The Big Tent strategy thus plays into the primary tool of the cover-up.

And I like this bit too:

Rather than growing the 9/11 Truth Movement, the Big Tent strategy promises to limit it by facilitating straw man attacks such as Popular Mechanics', and by discouraging the peer-review that the work of 9/11 skeptics desperately needs. Any investigation, to be taken seriously, must have a means of distinguishing between baseless and substantial claims. The progress of science is a result of the application of the scientific method, which subjects theories to a repeated process of observation, hypothesis, experiment, and revision, enforced by peer review. Theories not supported by or invalidated by observation are discarded. The 9/11 Truth Movement's Big Tent has functioned in a way that is antithetical to the process of science, as it does not admit any process for invalidating theories.
http://www.911review.com/denial/bigtent.html

I suppose one could criticise the website and its sister site http://911research.wtc7.net for sometimes supporting arguments it really shouldn't - hijackers still alive springs to mind. I think there is quite a bit of argument inside the movement, but it mostly seems to focus on the endless debates between planers and no-planers, whereas some of the other stuff gets missed out.

A random list of stuff we should drop:
(1) Hijackers still alive;
(2) No Arabs on Flight 77;
(3) Osama had nothing to do with it and is a nice man really;
(4) "Hi mom, this is Mark Bingham";
(5) Mohamed Atta's passport was found on 9/11;
(6) Oil pipeline in Afghanistan, although this hasn't actually been mentioned for ages;
(7) I would also encourage all you no-planers out there to read Jim Hoffman's essay "The Pentagon Attack: What the Physical Evidence Shows", which you can find here:
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pentagon/index.html