First, a story:
In August of 2002, nearly a year after the events of 9/11, an article in the American Free Press cited multiple sources in confirming the existence of molten steel at the site of the wreckage. To this day, the molten steel issue has been a linchpin of 9/11 Trutherism, confirmed by multiple reports and defended by people with Ph.Ds.
That's the charitable version. The less charitable version is that one of the two sources for AFP had seen no such thing, and the references to molten steel range from experts like a reporter paraphrasing a spokeswoman for the New York Department of Sanitation to Ph.Ds in unrelated fields, like public health and archaeometry.
But it doesn't matter. The important thing, if you're inclined toward doubting the official record, is that inconsistencies exist. If you're a conspiracy theorist, inconsistencies are like catnip, and no matter how much these reports have been clarified - note the people in that link above who now claim they were misrepresented - the other version has legs.
1. CREATING STEEL IN REAL TIME:
It's worth remembering how the information got to us in the first place. I'm not talking about the President's remarks on Sunday night, which were slim on details, but the flurry of headlines that began that night and have extended, sometime without correction, to today. It takes only a minor journalistic slip to ignite a conspiracy theory.
Just how bad did the media flub the initial reports? One egregious example: the now-famous photo showing members of the Administration allegedly watching the operation live. Or not. The original caption to the photo, offered on the White House's photostream, is pretty clear (emphasis mine):
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011.
The BBC has a tortuously passive sentence explaining that the President "is understood to have seen real-time footage of the approach to the compound but no direct video feed from the operation itself." That may closer to the truth, but no less frustrating for the way it avoids sourcing its information: notice how elsewhere the BBC takes comments by Leon Panetta that the operation was "monitored" in real time - he even explains that they were receiving regular updates, and refuses to answer questions related to alleged video feeds - but provides a caption saying that the President watched the raid in real time anyway. In turn, outlets like the Huffington Post repeated the same information with the same error in the headline.
Feel free to bang your head on the nearest wall, ladies and gentleman, because that's how the molten steel begins.
Salon has an excellent roundup of the debate over the photo that launched a thousand theories: as they suggest, "the single thing we can be sure of, according to all these accounts, is that Obama was not watching bin Laden die in the picture." Or saw him die at all.
2. THE INCONSISTENCIES GROW
And, to quote that Salon article again, this is where things get really muddled:
People care about the Situation Room photo, and are drawn to it, because the debate about this photo has become a microcosm of the debate about the Abbottabad raid itself. In both cases, it's not actually clear what went on; in both cases, the official explanation offered has been substandard. And the strange thing is that, in both cases, the White House controlled the story from the beginning -- so there is no good reason for the inconsistency of its response.
The original narrative of Sunday’s raid, provided on Monday afternoon by John Brennan, was not exposed as flimsy because any individual journalist was able to bring up proof that it was false; bizarrely, it was backtracked by the White House itself.
Here's where Mustich and I part ways: yes, this is a bizarre situation, but not the backtracking, which is exactly what should happen if the information is wrong. The bizarre part is why Brennan had different information in the first place, as did Carney in his mid-week clarifications.
Here it's worth looking at this in-depth article from the AP. I want to highlight this point because it's likely the single source of post-Bin Laden confusion, the inability of the White House and the media apparatus to juggle two opposing tendencies, the desire to have an accurate narrative and the desire to rush stories to print as quickly as possible:
It's taken as inevitable in military circles that initial reports of combat operations are almost always imperfect. Sometimes major details are wrong in the first telling, due either to misunderstandings or errors. As a result, the armed forces generally take the time necessary to double check key pieces of the story before making it public.
In the bin Laden case, the Pentagon was not the lead provider of information for an operation led by the CIA and followed in real time by the national security team and by Obama, who gave the order to proceed late last week. And the bin Laden killing stood head and shoulders above most other military operations in the demand for fast details.
The administration's mistake here was the rush to provide details of an operation that has not yet fully debriefed and double-checked its own facts. Carney has dismissed this as "fog of war", when it's really the scramble in the aftermath that's created - and fed - the confusion.
In fact the media's flubbing of basic facts makes more sense than the White House's, given that the President is under no obligation to meet deadlines or compete with other outlets for unique page views. No single fact is likely to have more problematic long-term repercussions than this.
3. NO BODY - NO PROBLEM
Of course they didn't have to dispose of the evidence, did they? Isn't that convenient?
Another story: in the aftermath of 9/11, one of the decisions that really stirred up the hornet's nest of conspiracy theory was the decision to remove the debris from the site rather than leave a gaping wound of twisted metal where the towers had stood. Or if you're a truther: obstruction of evidence.
So it goes with Bin Laden. Whatever the pros and cons of the administration's choices re: Bin Laden's body, there's no doubt that one of the cons is the extra boost it gives to conspiracy theorists who will refuse to believe the official story until they can stick their thomasian fingers into the bullet holes. And since that's no longer an option...
Enter the "Deathers".
This has even quicker legs because of the number of times Bin Laden has been accused of death in the past. Enormously unhelpful has been propagation of the now-infamous interview with Benazir Bhutto in 2007 claiming that Bin Laden had been murdered by Omar Sheikh, despite the fact that Bhutto referred to him frequently as alive in subsequent interviews. Of course if you're keeping count, Bin Laden also died of typhoid fever in 2006.
Why should this week's events be any different? Well, one enormous factor for the skeptically inclined should be the statements by members of Bin Laden's immediate family to the effect that he died in the course of this raid, just as the Administration claimed. While they dispute certain specifics, like whether Bin Laden was held down before being shot, there is no longer any reasonable disputing of his death.
4. SKEPTICISM OR CONSPIRACY THEORY?
Or rather: where does one end and the other begin? What is legitimate skepticism and what is irrational conspiracy theory? Who determines those boundaries? What is sensible?
I won't pretend to have a clear-cut answer to this, especially in a world where the government has been known to tell bald-face lies when so inclined. But there's no doubt that some opinions are better informed than others, and I take issue with - and wrote this diary in response to - comments that those who aren't casting a wide net of speculation on the whole story are, in a favorite word of CTers everywhere, "sheeple".
Bin Laden is dead, shot in the head on May 2, 2011. If our conversation can't begin with this basic statement, then we're not going to get very far, no matter your variety of molten steel. Any claims to the contrary have to clear an enormous wall of counter-evidence, and until that unlikely threshold is met, I reserve the right to refer to such contrary claims as conspiracy theory, and as "deatherism".
The official story will always have inconsistencies, because there's no backtracking what Brennan and Carney have said earlier in the week, no matter what their motivation may have been. What's more, the full debriefing will likely not be made public, given what they say about the tactics of one of our most elite military forces - so we will never have a story that we can feel 100% behind in terms of detail and reliability.
But let's be clear on one thing: this is not Pat Tillman all over again, this is not Jessica Lynch, this is not "Iraq has WMDs". Unless and until the official story becomes a rallying point for a wildly irresponsible policy, like invading Pakistan for allegedly knowing Bin Laden's whereabouts, there is no comparison between events that were carefully manipulated to serve policy goals, and the sloppy presentation of facts we've gotten from the White House over the past couple of days, especially since those corrections are coming from the White House itself.
The most likely scenario is so much more banal. In the elation over the death of Bin Laden and the rush to make it public, officials in the administration grasped onto incomplete versions of what they heard and let their mouths get ahead of their brains. As those reports are being clarified, the narratives are proving hasty and have to be backtracked.
It's a big mistake that the President didn't keep these details more under-wraps until a better and more consistent report came through. He will have to deal with some fallout from this, from both wings of the voting population.
But let's be reasonable here, and draw as clean a line as we can between healthy skepticism and irresponsible conspiracy theory.