Quassim Cassam: Cranks, Conspiracies, and the Hidden Self

Cranks, Conspiracies, and the Hidden Self

transcribed by Winter Patriot in August of 2015

NOTE: "Cranks, Conspiracies, and the Hidden Self" was Professor Quassim Cassam's Mind Lecture for 2014, marking the end of his tenure as Senior Research Fellow of the Mind Association. It was presented at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, England, in February of 2014.

You can click here to listen to the lecture courtesy of the University.

The following transcript is not (yet) complete, but I have done my best to present Professor Cassam's ideas as he presented them.

I have added a few notes [in square brackets], mainly section headings and time stamps.

[Introductions]

[0:00] [MODERATOR]

OK. Good evening, everyone. What an absolute pleasure it is for us to welcome back to the PPE [Philosophy, Politics, and Economics] Society Professor Quassim Cassam, who this evening will be giving a very special lecture.

This evening's lecture is the Mind lecture, bringing to a close Professor Cassam's tenure as Mind Senior Research Fellow. The title of the talk is "Cranks, Conspiracies, and the Hidden Self".

Professor Cassam has had a prolific career in Philosophy. Since 2009, he has been a professor here at Warwick, and from 2010 to 2012 was Head of Philosophy Department.

Like many of us here this evening, he originally studied PPE starting at Keble College, Oxford, before continuing on to do a B. Phil. and then a D. Phil. in Philosophy, which was supervised for the most part by Sir Peter Strawson.

He was a fellow and a lecturer at Oxford's Oriel and Wadham Colleges, spending 18 years there, and he has subsequently been a professor at UCL [University College London] , King's College, Cambridge, and from 2007 to 2008 was Cambridge's Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy, which is the senior professorship at the University.

From 2010 to 2011, he was also President of the Aristotelian Society.

With an interest in Kantian themes, in 1997 his first book, "Self and World," was published, in which he argued for the importance of bodily awareness for self-awareness.

In 2007, his second book, "The Possibility of Knowledge," was published which focused on how-possible questions in Philosophy, and in particular, how knowledge of particular kinds is possible, despite the apparent obstacles to such knowledge.

He now has two forthcoming books, "Berkeley's Puzzle," which was co-authored with John Campbell, and "Self-Knowledge for Humans."

So, without any further hesitation, you will please join me in offering a very warm round of applause to Professor Quassim Cassam.

[2:18] [APPLAUSE]

[2:32] [PROFESSOR CASSAM]

Ok well thanks very much for that introduction. Thanks also to Louis and the PPE Society for organizing this event so brilliantly. I also need to thank the Mind Association, whose Director is here today, for giving me a whole year in which to write a book on self-knowledge.

Paraphrasing the philosopher Barry Stroud, Mind made the book possible. All I had to do was to make it actual.

[3:01] Ok so what I want to do is to start off by telling you a story. Now as I tell you this story, it might not be apparent to you what its philosophical significance is. However what I want to suggest once I've told you this story that it's significant actually not just for philosophy but also for Psychology and for Economics.

So the ultimate target of this lecture will be a position in Philosophy which I call "Harvard Rationalism," a position in psychology which is often called "Situationism," and a particular version of Behavioural Economics.

I'll also have something positive to say, hopefully, but mainly I just want to rattle a few cages here, just make trouble for these views.

[Oliver and His Theory]

[3:54] Ok So here's the story. The story is about a fictional character who I'm going to call Oliver. Now Oliver spends a lot of time surfing the Internet and reading about the events in New York on September the 11th, 2001. Oliver indeed regards himself as something of an expert in the field of what he calls "9/11 Studies".

Now the thing about Oliver is that he has a theory about what actually happened on 9/11. And his theory is this: that the collapse of the Twin Towers on that day was not in fact caused by aircraft impacts and the resulting fires. Oliver thinks that the Twin Towers collapsed as a result of a controlled demolition. His theory is that government agents planted explosives in the building in advance, detonated those explosives just as the aircraft were approaching, and that's what resulted in the collapse of the Twin Towers.

[5:05] That's Oliver's theory.

Now, as many of you will be aware, Oliver's theory about what happened on 9/11 is actually not that unusual. There was a global opinion poll done in 2008, ten thousand respondents. And fewer than half of them believed that al-Q'aeda was responsible for the events on 9/11. Fewer than half of them believed that.

So he's not alone. Oliver's not alone. But there's one problem. The problem is that Oliver's beliefs about 9/11 are complete rubbish.

[5:48] Of course, aircraft impacts could, and indeed did, bring down the Twin Towers, and the events on 9/11 were the responsibility of al-Q'aeda. There's overwhelming evidence of that.

So a natural reaction to the case of Oliver would be to say, Well, so what? So what? He has a strange view, a conspiracy theory about what happened on that day.

His conspiracy theory happens to be shared by many people across the world. There are many Olivers -- depressingly many Olivers in the world. Perhaps there are even some in this room.

[LAUGHTER]

I mean, statistically, it seems quite likely that there are a few people here who believe Oliver's theory.

[Philosophical Significance]

So what's the philosophical significance of this phenomenon? That's my question.

Well, things start to get interesting, I think, when we ask the following question about Oliver. Why does Oliver believe what he believes about 9/11? Why does he believe it?

[7:03] Now, if you think, as Descartes thought, that we have privileged access to our own minds, then the best possible way of answering the question: "Why does Oliver believe these things?" is to ask Oliver. Who could possibly be better placed to explain why he believes these things than the subject himself?

So you ask Oliver, "Why do you believe this?" So this is how the conversation goes, ok.

As a philosopher, I'm afraid I can't resist using P's and Q's, ok.

And the relevance of this will become clear, but supposing Q is the proposition: "The collapse of the Twin Towers was caused by controlled demolition". That's Q.

And supposing P is the proposition: "Aircraft impact could not have brought down the Twin Towers, and eyewitnesses on the day heard explosions before the towers collapsed."

So you ask Oliver "Why do you believe that Q?"

[8:08] And he says, "Well, I believe that Q because I believe that P. I believe that aircraft impacts couldn't have caused the towers to collapse. That's why I believe that they were brought down by a controlled explosion. I believe that Q because I believe that P."

[8:27] Of course you can ask him further questions, "Well, why do you believe that P?" And he gives you reasons why he believes that P. Now the story that Oliver has, the explanation that Oliver has just given you of his beliefs, is what philosophers call a "rationalizing" explanation.

It's a rationalizing explanation in the sense that Oliver explains his beliefs by reference to his reasons. He represents himself as reasoning from a premise, P, to a conclusion, Q.

[9:03] And his reasoning is not obviously incompetent. His reasoning is not obviously incompetent. He takes P to provide evidence for Q.

Now of course, the problem with that is that most of us realize that he doesn't have any good reason to believe that P, right, but given that he believes that P, he infers that Q. So that's the kind of explanation that Oliver gives. He gives a rationalizing explanation for his beliefs.

[Is Oliver Irrational?]

[9:31] Now if that's right, then I think there's one temptation which we need to resist when we think about cases like Oliver. The temptation that we need to resist is to say, "Oliver is irrational."

Here's why I think we shouldn't say that. I mean, obviously a lot depends on what you take "rational" to mean. There's a kind of very broad, loose conception of "irrational" on which "irrational" just means something like "foolish" or "stupid".

[10:04] That's one reading of "irrational" so that's actually [...] it's something that Derek Parkin says: Foolish, stupid, and crazy.

Well, maybe Oliver's belief is irrational in that sense, but there's a much stricter, and I think, more useful notion of irrationality, on which Oliver's beliefs are not irrational.

So this stricter notion of irrationality is one that, for example, Scanlon defends, in his book, "What We Owe To Each Other".

So the basic idea is this:

[10:38] An attitude of yours is irrational, if and only if you hold it despite recognizing reasons -- good reasons -- for not holding it. Ok, so "irrational" in this strict sense means "contrary to your own reason".

[10:57] Ok, so that can apply not just to beliefs but to actions, intentions, and so on, So supposing you recognize that there are extremely powerful and compelling reasons for you not to smoke, but you still smoke. That might be a case of irrationality. But that's irrationality because it's a kind of inconsistency, right, it's a kind of inconsistency

[11:20] Now of course in that sense Oliver isn't irrational. It's not that Oliver believes things which by his own lights he doesn't have good reason to believe. He's certainly not irrational in that sense. There are in fact rational linkages between the various propositions that he believes. He believes that Q because he believes that P. He takes himself to have good reasons to believe that Q. And he believes that Q on the basis of those reasons.

[11:51] So he's not believing something in the face of his own reason. He's not believing something that is contrary to his own sense of what he has reason to believe. So in that sense of "irrational", Oliver is not irrational. He might be foolish, but he's not irrational. His belief might be foolish but it's not an irrational belief.

It's a false belief. Of course it's a false belief. But saying that a belief is false is not the same as saying that it's irrational. So what is going on with Oliver, in that case? How do we make sense of Oliver if not by saying that he's irrational?

[Intellectual Character]

[12:40] Well, supposing now the conversation continues, and you discover that Oliver not only believes that al-Q'aeda was not responsible for 9/11, he also believes that Lee Harvey Oswald was not solely responsible, or possibly responsible at all, for the assassination of President Kennedy. He believes that Princess Diana was killed by a hit squad hired by Prince Phillip. So he has a whole lot of conspiracy theories.

Then you talk to Oliver's friends, and you say, "Well, you know, what's this Oliver character like?" And they tell you a whole lot of stuff about Oliver.

[13:23] They tell you a whole lot of stuff about his character. They say things like "Well, he's a bit sloppy, he's quite gullible, he's careless in his thinking." Ok.

Now, of course, what Oliver believes about 9/11 starts to make some kind of sense. It makes sense because you can now see what Oliver believes about 9/11 as part of a pattern -- a pattern of beliefs or belief-formation that Oliver exemplifies. So one way of capturing this would be to introduce the notion of character. Of character.

Now of course when people talk about character, sometimes they mean "moral character", so they mean things like, you know, generosity and kindness, something like that. I'm not talking about character in that sense. I'm talking about what is sometimes called "intellectual character" or "epistemic character". So here's the suggestion:

[14:26] One way of making sense of cases like Oliver is to draw on this notion of intellectual character. So what do I mean by this?

By "intellectual character" I mean "dispositions to form beliefs and reason and enquire in particular ways".

Now intellectual character traits can be good or they can bad. So the distinction we need is the distinction between on the one hand, what I'm gonna call "epistemic virtues," and on the other hand, "epistemic vices." [...]

[15:04] So epistemic virtues would include open-mindedness, intellectual humility, tenacity, thoroughness, carefulness, fair-mindedness, determination, intellectual courage, and inquisitiveness.

[15:25] Epistemic vices would include things like negligence, idleness, cowardice, conformity, carelessness, rigidity, gullibility, prejudice, obtuseness, lack of thoroughness, and closed-mindedness.

[15:38] So the proposal is this, that at least in this particular case, and maybe in other cases too, it's genuinely illuminating to explain why Oliver believes what he believes about 9/11 in terms of his intellectual character, right, so crudely you might say: He believes these things because he's gullible. He believes these things because he's careless. He believes these things because he's intellectually negligent. Ok.

[Two Kinds of Explanation]

[16:09] Those are "character" explanations of his beliefs, Ok, and the point I want to make is this: Character explanations are not rationalizing explanations. They're not rationalizing explanations, so right so if you go back to the belief that Q, that the Twin Towers were brought down as a result of controlled demolition:

If the question is: "Why does Oliver believe that Q?" you now have two very different answers to that question. The rationalizing answer says: Oliver believes that Q because he believes that P, and because P supports Q. That's the rationalizing answer.

The non-rationalizing answer says: Oliver believes that Q, and indeed believes that P, because he's gullible, because of the kind of person that he is. He's that kind of person.

[17:05] That's a non-rationalizing explanation because, of course, being gullible is not a reason to believe anything, right. Being gullible explains why you believe what you believe, but it's not a reason for you to believe what you believe. Ok.

So you have these two kinds of explanation: character explanations, which are non-rationalizing, and rationalizing explanations. And the interesting thing about these two explanations is the following:

[17:32] The rationalizing explanation is, of course, the one that Oliver himself gives. Of course, of course Oliver will say, "I believe that Q because of other things I believe that support that belief."

The non-rationalizing explanation is not one that Oliver gives. It's one that we give, right, from the outside. It's a third-person explanation rather than a first-person explanation.

[Oliver's Self-Ignorance]

[17:59] And this brings me to the next point I want to make. The explanation of Oliver's beliefs in terms of Oliver's own character is not an explanation which Oliver himself could possibly accept.

I mean, think about it, right? You might say, "Oliver believes that Q because he's gullible." But Oliver is presumably not going to say, "I only believe that Q because I'm gullible."

Ok, so those of you who do philosophy will recognize it as a version of Moore's Paradox. This is a version of Moore's Paradox.

Ok, the thought is this: that with respect to the character determinants of his belief, Oliver is himself ignorant. Oliver doesn't realize that he's gullible. Oliver doesn't realize that he believes these things because he's gullible. Oliver doesn't realize that he's negligent, or careless. He doesn't realize that he believes these things because he's negligent, or careless.

Oliver is not going to think, "I only think these things because I'm useless."

[19:13] Oliver's just not gonna think that. He's not gonna think, "I only think these things because I'm negligent."

Ok, so in a certain sense, Oliver is self-ignorant. He's self-ignorant. He's self-ignorant in the sense that there is an answer to the question, "Why does he believe what he believes?" There's an answer to that question that he doesn't know.

[19:37] You might know he believes what he believes because he's gullible. He doesn't know that.

Now this is an example of a particular kind of self-ignorance. Ok, now when I talk about self-ignorance, let me just explain what I mean. Sometimes, indeed very often, when philosophers talk about self-knowledge, they mean knowledge of what you believe, knowledge of what you want, knowledge of what you hope, knowledge of what you fear.

Now I'm not suggesting that Oliver lacks self-knowledge in that sense. Oliver knows perfectly well what be believes about 9/11, right, I mean, Oliver knows perfectly well that he believes al-Q'aeda didn't do it. So he's not self-ignorant in that sense.

The self-ignorance which Oliver exemplifies is not ignorance of what he believes, but ignorance of why he believes what he believes, right. And it's a particular kind of explanation which Oliver doesn't know or accept, an explanation in terms of his character traits.

Now ignorance in this sense, self-ignorance in this sense, is a pervasive phenomenon, as those of you who've read any empirical psychology will know. So let me just give you a couple of other nice examples of self-ignorance.

[Empirical Examples of Self-Ignorance]

[20:59] So here's one example. The bystander effect. The bystander effect. So the bystander effect is this: people are increasingly less likely to help others in distress, as the number of bystanders increases. That's the bystander effect.

There are all these studies of people in a room, being played the sounds of what sounds like someone having an epileptic fit in the next room, right. And the studies show conclusively that the likelihood that you will go and help that person varies according to how many other people there are in the room with you, right. The more people there are in the room with you, the more bystanders, the less likely you are to go and help the person in the next room.

So that's an interesting phenomenon, right. Because if I'm trying to explain, "Why didn't she go and help?", I might say, "Well, she didn't go and help because actually there were all these other bystanders around." That's what explains why she didn't help.

But if I ask you, "Why didn't you help?" that's not the answer that you give. In these studies, everyone who was asked denied that the number of bystanders had any impact on their decision to help or not help. Right, so that's a form of self-ignorance. People are being influenced by something, in this case the number of bystanders, without realizing they're being influenced.

Here's another case:

[22:27] This is the famous pantyhose experiment done by Nesbitt and Wilson, several years ago. So in the pantyhose experiment, Nesbitt and Wilson went off to a shopping mall and asked people to assess the quality of items of clothing, right. So people were presented with four identical pairs of nylon stockings. Identical pairs of nylon stockings. And they were asked to say which one they thought was the best pair. Which one did they think was the best pair. So let me read to you what Nesbitt and Wilson say about this:

[23:04] "Subjects were asked to say which article of clothing was the best quality. And when they announced a choice, they were asked why they had chosen the article they had. In fact, there was a pronounced left-to-right position effect, such that the right-most object in the array was heavily over-chosen."

Don't forget, the stockings were identical.

[23:29] "For the stockings, the effect was quite large, with the right-most stockings being preferred over the left-most by a factor of almost 4 to 1. When asked about the reasons for their choices, no subject ever mentioned spontaneously the position of the article in the array. And when asked directly about the possible effect of the position of the article, virtually all subjects denied it, usually with a worried glance at the interviewer, suggesting that they felt that either they'd misunderstood the question, or were dealing with a madman."

Classic example, classic example of self-ignorance. Not knowing why you made the choice that you made, but you make up this story about the supposed unique qualities of the pair that you chose, even though the pair that you chose is absolutely identical to all the other pairs. The thing that was influencing you was the position. The position. But when asked, "Well, is that what you think was influencing you?" they all deny it.

[Self-Ignorance / Oliver Summary]

Now of course these cases of self-ignorance are slightly different from the case of self-ignorance I was discussing.

[24:43] What I've just told you about, in the pantyhose case and the bystander case, these are cases where your beliefs or your choices are being influenced by what you might call external factors of which you have no knowledge.

In the Oliver case, to the extent that his beliefs are being influenced by his character, it's not external factors but internal factors. Internal factors. Nevertheless, the basic phenomenon is strikingly similar. The basic phenomenon is self-ignorance.

[25:22] You make choices, you have beliefs, you have desires. You know what your choices are, you know what your beliefs are, you know what your desires are, but in a certain important sense you don't know why they are as they are. That's what I mean by self-ignorance.

[25:39] Ok so let me just sum up the three main features of the Oliver case, Ok, and then move on to what the significance is. [...]

The first feature of what I'm saying is that Oliver is certainly not irrational in the strict sense. He's not irrational in the strict sense.

Second feature: Oliver's beliefs about 9/11 are to a significant extent a reflection of his intellectual or epistemic character.

And thirdly, he knows what he believes, but in an important sense, he doesn't know why he believes what he believes.

[26:22] Now those claims strike me as obviously correct -- you should never say that in a philosophy lecture -- but they strike me as obviously correct, or, failing that, at least highly plausible.

[Re: Harvard Rationalism]

So why do I think that these claims cause problems for positions in Philosophy, Psychology, and in Economics? So let me now expand a little bit on that.

[26:48] So my philosophical target is a position which I call "Harvard Rationalism". It's Harvard Rationalism because it's a position made famous by a couple of people who are currently teaching at Harvard, someone called Richard Moran who published an extraordinarily influential, and indeed, I think, brilliant, book called "Authority and Estrangement," published in 2001, and Matthew Boyle, who's a younger person at Harvard, who's recently been publishing some great papers -- some great papers -- on this topic.

[27:23] The sense in which Harvard Rationalists are Rationalists is this: they think of us, they think of human subjects, as fundamentally in the space of reasons. They think of our beliefs and other attitudes as an expression of our reasons, as an expression of our rationality, right, so the basic idea that they have is that our beliefs and other attitudes are, on they whole, as they rationally should be -- a rather optimistic assumption, you might think.

Now there's a particular claim that Harvard Rationalists make which I want to focus on. And the particular claim they make is that reasoning, or what they sometimes call deliberation, is, for us, a fundamental source of self-knowledge. Reasoning, or deliberation, is a fundamental source of self-knowledge.

Ok now here's a quotation from Boyle that encapsulates that view, Ok so I'm going to read you this quotation and as I read it, I want you to think about Oliver, Ok.

Think about Oliver as I read this: [...]

[28:31] Boyle says,

"If I reason 'P, so Q,' this must normally put me in a position not merely to know that I believe that Q, but to know something about why I believe that Q, namely, because I believe that P and that P shows that Q. Successful deliberation normally gives us knowledge of what we believe and why we believe it."

That's the claim: Successful deliberation normally gives us knowledge of what we believe and why we believe it. So in the case in which you reason, "P, therefore Q," the thought is, that in that case, you know that you believe that Q because you believe that P, right, in the normal case.

[29:25] Now, of course, if you apply this to Oliver: Oliver reasons "P, so Q." Oliver reasons in exactly the way that Boyle is describing. Oliver is making just the kind of rational transition that Boyle characterizes.

But does that give Oliver knowledge of why be believes that Q?

Well, I'm not completely dismissing the force of rationalizing explanations. But there's a very important aspect of the Oliver case which is completely missing from the Harvard Rationalists' story.

What's missing from this is the influence of non-rational factors on Oliver's beliefs. In particular what's missing is any reference to the role of Oliver's character in determining what he believes, or, indeed, other internal or external factors.

[30:22] So the story you get from the Harvard Rationalists is the story of this perfect calculating machine, making rational transitions from one proposition to another, and thereby knowing why he thinks what he thinks, in terms of these rational transitions.

What completely goes missing from this is any reference to non-rational influences on belief formation. These Harvard Rationalists are in a way rather Cartesian, right. What they think is that the mind is in a certain sense transparent to yourself. They think that, insofar as you are able to engage in reasoning, you are thereby able to know why you think what you think.

[31:06] Ok, and cases like Oliver seem to put pressure, seem to put pressure on that view. Now of course you might say, "Oliver's just a freak, Oliver's just a kind of freak, hence, why should we, I mean Boyle says "normally" in his formulations.

It's not clear to me that that's right. It's not clear to me that that's right at all. It seems to me that actually a realistic account of human belief formation is going to be one that has to recognize the influence of a wide variety of non-rational influences on our beliefs.

Not just Bystander effects and positional effects but like character, for example, things like emotions. Think about role of the emotions, the influence of emotions on belief formation. Hoping, believing, fearing, are all tied, are all connected with one another, actually as Spinoza recognized.

So it seems to me that Harvard Rationalism is problematic at least in part because it misses out on these very important non-rational aspects of attitude formation.

[32:18] I mean historically, I think, among the great dead philosophers, I think the one who has, and this is based on my cursory knowledge of him, the one who has put the greatest emphasis on this was Nietzsche. I mean Nietzsche had a lot to say about the non-rational influences on our beliefs and desires, particular case of desires.

Ok, so that's the point I want to make about Oliver-type, Oliver-type cases, Ok what I hope to have persuaded you is that in those cases, and indeed in many other cases, there are all sorts of factors that are influencing our beliefs which go well beyond anything that a Harvard Rationalist can explain. You can't explain everything just in terms of reason.

[Re: a Position in Situationalism]

What about Situationism in Psychology? What's that?

[33:05] So Situationism: actually a good illustration of Situationism is the Bystander Effect. Situationists think the following: that if you want to explain why we behave in the ways that we behave, the best explanation will be one in terms of the situations in which we find ourselves. It's no good explaining our behaviour by reference to our character. That's Situationism.

Ok so Situationists would say things like this: If you're trying to explain why in a given situation you assisted someone in distress, whereas the person next to you didn't, the explanation is not in terms of some character trait that you have that your neighbour doesn't have. The best explanation is likely to be something much more prosaic: the number of bystanders who were present, for example.

Or there's the famous Milgram experiment, where people were conned into believing they were administering electric shocks to an unseen victim in the next room. So there was this device with buttons on it marked "100 volts", "150 volts", "extreme pain", "extremely dangerous", and then "XXX' at the top of the dial, right. And they were played sounds of someone apparently in excruciating pain as they went up, as they went up the dial.

So they were encouraged by the experimenter to go higher, to deliver greater and greater electric shocks to this unseen victim in agony in the next room. And in the Milgram experiment, basically everybody, I mean some very large proportion, I think 68 percent of subjects were willing to go all the way up to the top scale, right, in fact to the point where the screaming person in the next room fell completely silent.

[35:00] So Situationists are people who say, "Well why did all those people do that? Did they do that because of some character trait that they all had in common? Well, well no," right. The explanation that Situationists offer is that they behaved in these ways because of the situation that they found themselves in.

So the basic idea of Situationism is that explanations of action in terms of character are no good. Character is explanatorily redundant. It' s always the situation.

And from that, some Situationists have concluded, "There is no such thing as character." They think that the whole idea of character is just a myth. Ok so here's a clear statement of that thesis.[...] This is actually a philosopher, not a psychologist, but it's a philosopher who's very sympathetic to Situationism, so Gil Harmon, who's a professor at Princeton, says:

[35:58] "There is no reason to believe in character traits, as ordinarily conceived. We need to convince people to look at situational factors and stop trying to explain things in terms of character traits."

That's Situationism.

Now I think that Situationism has considerable force. It's a serious position, I think, in psychology, and many of the points that Situationists make are points that deserve to be taken extremely seriously.

However, when you think about something like Oliver, someone like Oliver, it's actually very hard to make sense of what's going on in Oliver-cases, without positing explanatory character traits.

So if you look at the list of Epistemic Vices, to say that there is literally no such thing as character would be to say that there is no such thing as negligence, or idleness, or gullibility; right, these things aren't real because they don't explain anything.

But that view now starts to -- I hope you'll agree -- starts to look ludicrous. It's very hard to make sense of what's going on in Oliver-type cases without supposing that he does have character traits, distinctive character traits, which do help to explain why he believes what he believes.

[37:29] So I think Situationists are right to this extent: they're right to be suspicious of blanket explanations of human actions in terms of moral character traits. I think that's right.

But when it comes to these sorts of rather fine-grained intellectual character traits, it's very hard to do without them when we try to explain what's going in cases like this. That's why I think the Oliver case, and similar cases, are a challenge for Situationists in Psychology.

Ok. Lastly I want to say something about Behavioural Economics. This is the PPE Society, so I feel I need to say something about Economics.

[Re: a Position in Behavioural Economics]

So what is Behavioural Economics? What is is?

Well I think I can no better than to quote two very distinguished Chicago economists, Levitt and List, in an article which they published in Science, three of four years ago. [...] So this is the Levitt and List characterization of Behavioural Economics.

[38:36] "The discipline of Economics is built on the shoulders of the mythical species Homo Economicus. Unlike his uncle, Homo Sapiens, Homo Economicus is unswervingly rational, completely selfish, and can effortlessly solve even the most difficult optimization problem.

This rational paradigm has served Economics well, providing a coherent framework for modeling human behaviour. However, a small but vocal movement has sought to dethrone Homo Economicus, replacing him with someone who acts more human.

This insurgent branch, commonly referred to as Behavioural Economics, argues that actual human behaviour deviates from the rational model in predictable ways. Incorporating these features into economic models, proponents argue, should improve our ability to explain observed behaviour."

Right, so the basic idea is this: that there's a contrast between this ideal, this mythical, this super-rational, super-selfish Homo Economicus and real human beings. Right, so if you're trying to figure out what's wrong with Economics, one thing that's wrong with it, on this view, is that it's historically focused, really, on Homo Economicus. It hasn't tried to explain human economic behaviour, bearing in mind all the respects in which Homo Sapiens are different from Homo Economicus.

[40:00] Now that seems to me to be a very powerful and intellectually respectable position in economics. I'm not especially competent to comment on it, but it seems to me to have quite a lot going for it. However, as some of you will be aware, there's a further, there's a further step which some Behavioural Economists have taken.

And that further step is to claim not just that human beings are not Homo Economicus but to claim that human beings are actually irrational. Ok so some of you will have come across what Amazon assures me is a best-seller by a Behavioural Economist called Dan Ariely.

The book is called "Predictably Irrational" and you can guess what the thesis of the book is. Humans are predictably irrational. And of course if you approach things from this kind of Ariely perspective, you might think, "Well, Oliver-cases are the perfect illustration of this. Perfect illustration of human irrationality." However, however, it seems to me that we shouldn't say that at all.

The respects in which Homo Economicus and Homo Sapiens are different from one another do not constitute respects in which humans are irrational. Not being Homo Economicus does not make you irrational, it just makes you not Homo Economicus.

And indeed when you read, when you read books like "Predictably Irrational," I mean, when I first read that, I thought, "Well, obviously the first thing I want to know is, "What does he mean by irrational?" right and that turned out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer, despite reading the book fairly carefully, and in the end it turned out, it turns out that what people like Ariely really mean by "irrational" is actually "self-ignorant". That's actually what they mean.

[42:05] So the subtitle of "Predictably Irrational" is "The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" and that's actually Ariely's thesis. His thesis is that in fact our decisions are shaped by and influenced by all sorts of factors of which we are unaware.

[42:22] Right so one of the examples that he gives is a subscription for "The Economist" right where you've got "Internet Only", a certain percentage, "Print" a certain percentage, and "Print and Internet" a certain price. Right and then it turns out that we were being influenced by one of these three choices in ways that we weren't aware of. But that doesn't make us irrational, right. Being self-ignorant does not make you irrational.

So it seems to me that these rather exaggerated populist versions of Behavioural Economics need to be resisted. They represent themselves as talking about irrationality but what they're actually talking about is self-ignorance.

Self-ignorance is a genuine and important phenomenon, but it's not the same phenomenon as irrationality.

[What Philosophy has to Learn from Behavioural Economics]

However I do think, I do think that Philosophy actually does have something very important to learn from Behavioural Economics, and I want to end by saying just what I think Philosophy has to learn from it.

One of the ideas that I explore in the book that I've just been writing is the following idea: that just as neo-Classical Economics has concentrated on Homo Economicus, Philosophy has in fact concentrated very much on what I call Homo Philosophicus.

Right so when Philosophers try to explain human knowledge, or some other phenomenon, they very rarely consider human beings as we actually are.

Rather, what they have in mind is an incredibly Epistemically well-behaved citizen.

Right so Homo Philosphicus is a model Epistemic citizen who only believes what he has reason to believe, when he encounters evidence against his beliefs, he abandons his beliefs, and so on.

[44:16] Right, well, we're not like that. We're not like that.

There's a large number of disparities between Homo Sapiens and Homo Philosophicus which correspond to the disparities between Homo Sapiens and Homo Economicus, and one of the things I try to do in the book is to look at these disparities and try to consider what their significance is for Philosophical accounts not just of self-knowledge, but Philosophical accounts of all sorts of other things.

So the basic idea is this: if you want to give a Philosophical account of self-knowledge, you need to make sure that the account that you give is not an account of self-knowledge for Homo Philosophicus, right, who can come to know his beliefs by engaging in rational deliberation.

It would be nice if that were true of us and no doubt it is true of us some of the time, but it's also not true of us a lot of the time.

[Conclusion]

So what the Philosophy of Self-Knowledge should be trying to do give an account of what I call "A Theory of Self-Knowledge for Humans."

And when you try to think about the human predicament, I think the thing that is striking is the very opposite of the thing that struck Descartes.

The starting point for Cartesian accounts of self-knowledge is the ease with which we get self-knowledge, almost the unavoidability of self-knowledge. That's the Cartesian view of self-knowledge.

On that view, self-ignorance is just not a problem. It's just not an issue. I mean self-ignorance is not an issue in the Cartesian tradition partly because, I guess, in that tradition, there isn't even the possibility of self-ignorance.

What I've been talking about in this lecture is the prevalence and importance and depth of particular forms of self-ignorance which require considerable work to overcome, and that's really what the Philosophy of Self-Knowledge for Humans should be focused on.

What it should be doing is recognizing that self-knowledge is for us a major and difficult cognitive achievement and it requires considerable cognitive effort to achieve it.

So we need to get away from this idea that important interesting self-knowledge is easy to get.

It isn't. It's hard. That's it.

[46:46] [APPLAUSE]

[Questions from the Audience]

[Maybe Oliver Doesn't Know what an Explanation Is]

[MODERATOR]

Ok so Professor Cassam has agreed to take just a few questions. So who would like to go first?

[AUDIENCE]

Yeah, thank you for the talk. That was very interesting. One thing I'd like to quiz you a little more on is on the Oliver situation.

How much do we really need to refer to these kind of intellectual virtues or deficiencies as you refer to them? Could we not explain in terms of Oliver not having an understanding of what an explanation is and what constitutes an explanation, in the same way as if I'd watched a video about global warming denial, for instance, if I had no idea what an explanation is, I might believe it. It's got nothing to do with our ability or otherwise [unintelligible]

[48:03] [PROFESSOR CASSAM]

Ok well it's a very interesting question. I don't know if you've come across this but there's a book by the journalist David Aaronovich. The book is called "Voodoo Histories." It's a discussion of a whole range of conspiracy theories. Now one of the conspiracy theorists whom he discusses is a philosopher called Richard Popkin.

Now Popkin wrote an incredibly influential, and important, and indeed good book, on the history of philosophy. the history of philosophy since Descartes. Now one of Popkin's side interests was the assassination of JFK, right, so three or four years after the JFK assassination, Popkin published a book, the title of which is, "The Second Oswald."

[48:50] Right, so in that book Popkin defends the view that in fact Oswald wasn't the lone assassin of JFK. Or in fact I think he thinks that Oswald didn't fire the fatal bullets at all. In fact, there was someone physically similar to Oswald, the second Oswald, who was responsible.

Now, that's a ludicrous theory, right, about the JFK assassination. But if you were to say, "Why, Professor Popkin, do you believe these things?" or if we were trying to explain why he believes these things, I think it would be a bit of an ask to say, "Popkin doesn't really understand what an explanation is."

I mean, I mean, Popkin is not a stupid man, right. I mean, Popkin writes about all sorts of abstruse philosophical topics, indeed writes about topics like explanation, right, so saying that it's that kind of failure, that kind of failing, which explains what's going on, at least in his case, seems manifestly inadequate.

[49:53] Right so I'm not sug-- I'm not denying that there are, that there may indeed be, people whose defects can be explained in the way that you're suggesting. What I'm saying is that that can't be the whole story.

There are, as the Popkin case illustrates, other things going on in those cases.

[Obstacles to Self-Knowledge]

[AUDIENCE]

Yes I wanted to ask if you could talk about the nature of the difficulty that's involved in self-knowing. Because it seems to me from what you said there are two possible sources of difficulty. One is just the nature of character, that character is intrinsically difficult.

But then you connected character with the third-person perspective, so the other possible difficulty is coming to know ourselves as others know us. And I wonder if you could say a bit: Do you think they're connected in some way?

[50:52] Is character the kind of thing that we can only know in and through others? Or just if you could turn some light on the relation between those two.

[PROFESSOR CASSAM]

So one distinction that I want to draw, just to fill out the story a bit is the distinction between what I call "trivial self-knowledge", right, knowing that you believe that you're wearing socks, a perfectly trivial piece of self-knowledge, versus what I call "substantial self-knowledge" which would include knowledge of such things as your character, perhaps knowledge of some of your emotions.

So the positive account of self-knowledge that I want to defend is that self-knowledge in those cases in inferential. And it's based on evidence, ok. It's based on evidence.

So when you think about why someone might fail to have self-knowledge, knowledge of his character in these cases, you actually have a range of explanations. Ok so one explanation would be a kind of motivational explanation, where you say, "Perhaps there are aspects of your character, as it were, you avert your eyes from, because they're embarrassing or distressing to you.

[52:02] Another explanation is that you don't have, you don't have sufficient evidence to draw those conclusions, right. Maybe you've never been put in a situation where certain aspects of your character are manifested.

Yet another explanation is that maybe you're self-ignorant in these cases because, although you have the right evidence, you draw the wrong conclusions from it. So these are all examples of particular kinds of obstacle or cognitive failing which might prevent you from coming to know why you are, coming to know what kind of person you are.

[still some work to be done here!]

[...]

[If Oliver was Giving a Lecture ...]

[AUDIENCE]

[1:02:12] It it at all worrying that if Oliver was giving a lecture, he could have given almost exactly the same lecture and accused you of the epistemic vices of being gullible and believing everything the government tells you and etc. and etc. and make almost exactly the same points as you do?

[PROFESSOR CASSAM]

Well the answer is yes and no. It's not worrying in the sense that if Oliver were to do that, he would certainly be going in for the same style of explanation that I was going in for, right, and to that extent he would be right.

I mean to that extent he would be right and of course this is what's so threatening about threatening about these cases right that actually, I mean, for any of us, if you step back and ask yourself, "Well why do I fundamentally think that?" right, and somebody says, "Well, you know, there's all these non-epistemic explanations," and that's a sense that's a sense in which asking these questions about why you believe what you believe can be such an an undermining can be such an an undermining exercise.

[1:03:06] So insofar that Oliver runs the, does the same number on me, I don't have any objections, right, at least insofar as he's going in for that style of explanation. My objection is of course that he's wrong!

[One of the Things That's Actually Really Mysterious]

[AUDIENCE]

[1:03:19] [inaudible] ... [unintelligible] ... I mean you can't be a good mathematician without being rigorous ... [inaudible] ... [unintelligible] ... could require an addition ... [unintelligible] ... [inaudible] ...

[PROFESSOR CASSAM]

[1:04:02] I think that's exactly right and I think that's a really really important point. I mean one of the things that's actually really mysterious about actual conspiracy theorists is that, as you say, many of them are highly educated, highly intelligent, highly competent individuals who don't display any of these epistemic vices in lots of the areas in which they live their lives, right, so so clearly someone who says, "Well, you know, he's gullible" or "He's obtuse" or "He's careless" is going to have to contend with the fact that he isn't, all the time, right.

So it might be that one's going to have to, even if one's going in for these character explanations, one's going to have to come up with a much more fine-grained explanation, in those terms. I mean, I don't myself have a developed theory of that to offer, beyond just making that concession. But it is very very instructive actually, reading more about people who have these belief systems. And actually, just saying, just saying blankly, "Well, they're gullible or stupid," is just not gonna cut it, right.

[Isn't There a Danger?]

[AUDIENCE]

Isn't there a danger in seeking to explain the views of people other than your own based on these epistemic virtues and vices in the sense that you might look at someone else's reading of the evidence and compare it to your own world view, find it deficient and therefore fail to actually engage with their arguments if you can write them off as "They're gullible" which is manifestly wrong.

[PROFESSOR CASSAM]

[1:06:09] Well I think that not engaging with their arguments is not something that I'm recommending. I mean I think that actually, if you were if you were if I were if I was confronted with a real live Oliver, it wouldn't be enough just to say to him, "Well, you're gullible." right I mean clearly clearly you'd have to look have to try to draw his attention to the evidence, the very strong evidence that in fact it was al-Q'aeda that did it, and it was the fires and the aircraft impact that brought the towers down.

Now of course it might be I guess I guess what he's going to do is to run the same number on me that Colin was suggesting, saying "Well, you're the one who's gullible. Well you believe the 9/11 Commission Report but that's all part of the grand conspiracy." And in a way there's no answer to this, there's no, I mean, the only thing you can ever do with someone like that is to just continue the conversation up to the point where it seems useful to do so.

[1:07:07] But it would come a point when it's no longer useful to do so. And at that point, really, all you can do is to walk away. right and then you can say to someone else, "Well, look, I just gave up on that person because, you know, what do you do with someone like that?" right. and that of course is what we very often say about other people: "What do you do with someone like that?" But that's not a substitute for engaging with their wacky views, I mean it's actually quite important that people who go around spouting these things, that they're actually challenged.

[One Final Question]

[AUDIENCE]

I have a question. I was wondering about your response to the questions about real conspiracy theorists. [...] you might think that a Situationalist would be able to come in and say "They do have all these epistemic [vices], but you can explain in terms of their situation [...] you often get the feeling that they're trying to rationalize how their government could have gone to war in Iraq. Well, that was an evil thing to do, and our government was evil. Then everything makes more sense, in a way rather than an explanation [...]

[PROFESSOR CASSAM]

[1:08:22] Yeah, I'm not sure that that's what Situationists mean by situations, right I mean what you're describing is the pursuit of a certain kind of rational intelligibility that these people are after, I mean I'm sympathetic to what you're saying to this extent: I think that Situationists are onto something very important. right I mean what they're onto is the idea that we are actually prone to try to explain things in terms of character when very often there's a better explanation in terms of situations.

To that extent I think they're right so this is certainly the famous fundamental attribution error of always trying to explain things in terms of character traits when very often the situation will explain. Just, uh, explain better.

But Situationists at least in the sort of Harmon mold then take the further step of saying there is no such thing as character. That further step is just unnecessary and just seems to me completely bizarre, right. I mean a sensible position in this area will be a position that combines the good insights of Situationism with the good insights of what I call Vice Epistemology in coming up with an explanation of what's going on.

I mean it's no more acceptable to dismiss the importance of situations than it is to say there's no such thing as character. Clearly they're both part of a part of a complete explanation.

[MODERATOR]

Ok then Professor Cassam then it just remains to say that on behalf of the PPE Society and all of us here this has been an absolute pleasure, so thank you very much indeed.

[APPLAUSE]

L A Times : Could data collection have stopped 9/11? White House thinks so

Could data collection have stopped 9/11? White House thinks so

But critics of the National Security Agency's program to track Americans' phone data strenuously dispute the idea that it could have prevented the terrorist attacks.

By Christi Parsons and Ken Dilanian | January 13, 2014

WASHINGTON — Many of President Obama's closest advisors have embraced a controversial assessment of one of the National Security Agency's major data collection programs — the belief that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks could have been prevented had government then possessed the sort of vast trove of Americans' telephone records it holds now.

Critics of the NSA program, and some scholars of America's deadliest terrorist attack, strenuously dispute the view that the collection of phone data would necessarily have made a difference or that the possibility justifies the program now. The presidential task force that reviewed surveillance operations concluded last month that the program "was not essential" to preventing terrorist attacks.

But as the president finalizes plans for a speech on Friday announcing his proposals to change intelligence operations and oversight, the widespread agreement at the most senior levels of the White House about the program's value appears to be driving policy. As a result, the administration seems likely to modify, but not stop, the gathering of billions of phone call logs.

In recent White House meetings, Obama has accepted the "9/11" justification, aides say, expressing the belief that domestic phone records might have helped authorities identify some of the skyjackers who later crashed passenger jets in New York, the Washington area and Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.

He believes the main problem with the program is one of perception: Many Americans don't trust the NSA, one of the most secretive of spy agencies, to respect civil liberties.

In Friday's speech, the president is expected to propose steps that he hopes will make Americans more comfortable with the program, but not greatly reduce its scope as a counter-terrorism tool. One such change would be to shift the assembling and archiving of telephone "metadata" from NSA servers in Ft. Meade, Md., back to the telephone companies, or to a private third party. But aides say he is unlikely to end the program altogether.

Under the current program, the government collects and stores metadata — numbers dialed and call times — involving virtually all telephone calls in or through the United States. The program does not collect the contents of conversations.

"This capability was put in place after 9/11 for a good reason," said a senior administration official who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive deliberations. "The question we have to examine is whether the perception of privacy intrusion outweighs the operational value. It's possible we could get that same information … in other ways, but it's slower."

Shifting the NSA archive to private control would be "tricky," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a member of the Judiciary Committee. If the NSA can access the data too easily, Durbin said, "there's an assumption that it's partly created or controlled by government, and that doesn't change people's skepticism."

Privacy and civil liberties activists say the government has overstated the utility of amassing billions of phone call logs. They argue that it is too far-reaching and too intrusive, and that other effective counter-terrorism tools exist.

The "big question … [is] whether our government is going to spy on Americans," said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the ACLU.

Over the last half-year, government officials have had to abandon several of their claims about the effectiveness of the metadata collection program. When former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began disclosing classified documents to the news media, intelligence officials initially said the ability to secretly trace a suspect's network of calling partners had helped prevent scores of terrorist attacks.

Pressed for details by members of Congress and others, officials steadily backed away from those assertions.

In the end, they cited only one U.S. case in which they still say the NSA archive played a crucial role: A San Diego cab driver and three others were convicted in November of sending about $8,500 to the Shabab, the extremist group in Somalia that has launched deadly attacks across East Africa, in part because of clues collected from the phone logs.

Whether U.S. authorities would have used similar data to identify any of the 19 hijackers before Sept. 11, and whether that would have stopped others in the plot, is impossible to know. The presidential commission that investigated the 2001 attack blamed more fundamental problems, including the CIA's failure to inform the FBI that several suspected Al Qaeda members had entered the United States and were living in San Diego.

The strongest argument for how the program might have helped, one cited in White House discussions, involves Khalid al Mihdhar, a Saudi who helped fly an American Airlines jet into the Pentagon.

After arriving in San Diego in January 2000, Mihdhar made several phone calls to an Al Qaeda safe house in Yemen. U.S. intelligence was monitoring calls made to the safe house, then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told Congress last summer, but didn't realize the caller was in America.

If the telephone archive had existed at the time, Mueller said, the NSA could have linked the numbers in Yemen and San Diego, identified Mihdhar and "derailed" the plot. Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, made a similar argument.

According to the Sept. 11 Commission, however, the NSA already had learned Mihdhar's name in 1999 in a call that linked him to Al Qaeda, but did not pass his name or that of his friend Nawaf al Hazmi, another future hijacker, to the FBI.

In December that year, the CIA broke into Mihdhar's hotel room in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and photographed his passport, which had a U.S. visa. The CIA didn't warn the State Department to revoke the visas, didn't ask immigration authorities to bar Mihdhar or Hazmi at the border and didn't inform the FBI that suspected terrorists were in California.

If the FBI had been warned, agents already had ample legal authority to review Mihdhar's telephone records or get a warrant to tap his phones, read his emails and track his movements.

The FBI missed other opportunities to thwart the 2001 plot that it probably would pursue today.

In summer 2001, agents had arrested Zacarias Moussaoui, another Al Qaeda member, who aroused suspicion at a flight school in Minnesota. But they failed to obtain a search warrant for his computer. And FBI managers ignored a warning by a field agent in Phoenix that Osama bin Laden might be sending pilots to train at U.S. flight schools.

Today, as part of the initiatives implemented since 2001, federal watch lists bar suspected terrorists from boarding U.S.-bound aircraft or entering the country, and U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies share more information and work far more closely in counter-terrorism cases.

James R. Thompson, a former governor of Illinois who served on the Sept. 11 Commission, said the value of the bulk data collection was "a given" for counter-terrorism efforts even if it might not have prevented the 2001 attacks. He also said the concerns about abuse were overblown.

"We don't have any examples of how the average American citizen's privacy is being harmed by the collection of this data," he said.

NSA officials say they authorize analysts to access the database only a few hundred times a year, and only to determine whether suspected terrorists or spies overseas are in contact with people in the United States. In 2012, NSA analysts looked into calls involving 288 telephone numbers, John Inglis, the NSA's top civilian official, said in a recent interview with NPR. Examining the numbers that were in contact with those initial 288 as well as those in contact with that second tier meant the agency looked at about 6,000 phone numbers in total that year, he said.

To date, Snowden's disclosures have produced no evidence to suggest the NSA or other agencies have sought to search details about the personal lives or activities of Americans other than terrorism suspects.

christi.parsons@latimes.com

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

VOR : Len Bracken Interview

The following is a transcript of an interview of Len Bracken by John Robles for Voice of Russia.

The interview was posted on the VOR website in three parts:

Part 1, November 13, 2013 : 9-11 was an Indirect Defensive Attack

Part 2, November 21, 2013 : 9/11 hijackers had addresses on Pensacola Naval Air Station

Part 3, December 8, 2013 : 9-11 was carried out by US/Saudi/Israeli intelligence

Part 4, January 6, 2014 : 'Why?' is always fraught with epistemological dilemmas

I have fixed some of the spelling and punctuation errors. [WP]

~~~

Part 1, November 13, 2013 : 9-11 was an Indirect Defensive Attack

States have used terrorism in various ways to advance their own interests for hundreds of years, including the use of terrorist attacks as a means to justify acts of war, crackdowns and Draconian laws such as the US Patriot Act. According to research on the matter by Len Bracken who granted an interview to the Voice of Russia, there are different types of state sponsored terrorist attacks which he has classified and that have been used by NATO, the US and other states in the past. Mr. Bracken is a specialist on the attacks of 9-11 and has done extensive research and interviewed witnesses including police who knew about Anthrax being stored by "Israeli Agents" in the US who were allowed to go free.

Robles: Hello, this is John Robles. I'm speaking with Mr. Len Bracken. He is the author of six books including The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror, he is also a specialist in international affairs and international relations and an accredited journalist. This is part one.

Robles: Hello, sir.

Bracken: How do you do? Thank you for having me.

Robles: And thanks for agreeing to speak with us. It's a pleasure. My first question is regarding the motivations for your book The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror – can you give us a little bit of background: why you wrote it, what led you to write it?

Bracken: Well, when 9-11 happened I was in Riga, Latvia for an activist event to sort of protest consumerism. It took place throughout the entire city.

On the day of the event I knew better than to jump to any conclusions and I was very reluctant of course to say one way or the other who had done it. But after about six-months time and looking at some of the evidence and of course this was the same year that James Bamford published Body of Secrets that contained the information and reproductions of documents about Operation Northwoods.

For your listeners who may not know – Operation Northwoods was proposed in the early 60s prior to the beginning of the Vietnam War and Gulf of Tonkin just before that.

Robles: That was the one, I'm sorry, that was the one to blow up a done civilian aircraft and start a war with Cuba, right?

Bracken: Exactly, right.

Robles: Tell us about that plan. It was actually turned down for the extreme quality of it, but…

Bracken: Yes, sure. It was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer who proposed the plan to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

And so the idea was to have a covert attack upon America. So the idea that they would attack America and this would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.

I guess that they had planned some bombings in Miami and Washington DC and blowing up an American ship in Cuban waters. That was what the plan had as sort of its stratagems. The kind of a tactics that would be used to provoke an attack.

I have a theory that I have developed, it's not just my theory but I've advanced it somewhat and we call this the "Indirect Attack". You know, this is always an attack pretending be someone else.

So the idea was that the attack would be staged and would make it look like the Cubans had done it and that would justify the attack.

We can see throughout history that this has taken place. You had Cuba in fact, you have the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 to get the United States into the Spanish American War, and then in 1915 you have the sinking of Lusitania to bring the United States into WWI, in 1939 you have the provocation by Hitler, he staged the raid on the Gleiwitz radio station to begin war with Poland. And of course Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Operation Northwoods was in 1962, then in 1964 was the Gulf of Tonkin.

So at the same time the assassinations, and of course were coming up, the anniversary of Kennedy assassination – these events were well-known and were accepted as having involvement of the States. These other things were also taking place and of course these two now are becoming increasingly more accepted.

Robles: You just mentioned Pearl Harbor as being a false-flag attack. Can you give us little background on why you are saying that was a false-flag?

Bracken: You can look into some of the books that have come out- the one that I drawn a great deal is called Others Unknown, it's by Stephen Jones.

I think that the evidence has come out that there was advanced knowledge on the part of the US military and the US Administration, at the time the Administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

And the idea was that they would send out the newer ships so that the older ships would be blown up and it would look like the Japanese had in fact attacked us without our knowledge when in fact there was advanced knowledge and the people on the ground in Hawaii were denied the information that was being held in Washington.

There are some documents that were missing from the archives that point to this, it's the implication.

One of the things about the book which is The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror in addition to some detailed synopsis of these events we also have a chronology.

Robles: I recently wrote an article regarding 9-11 etc. And I found a mention of your book, I was researching actually something that I had read years ago from the project for New American Century.

It was very interesting that when I started researching this, the project for New American Century website was up and within like 5 hours of my beginning digging there, this site went down and disappeared and it has not come back up.

Regarding 9/11 state terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism and in particular the Project for New American Century – can you give us some background?

Bracken: Sure. I'm also the author of the first biography in any language on the French theoretician and filmmaker named Guy Debord.

He was part of what was called the Situationist International– the radical Marxist group that went from 1956 into the early 70s. And he stayed together with one of the members of the group whose name Gianfranco Sanguinetti and the two of them developed a theory of terrorism – sort of offensive-defensive theory of terrorism, saying there is offensive terrorism,, there is defensive terrorism, and it can be either direct or indirect.

And I have been working with that theory. I'm trying to develop and trying to advance it because, as I said, I wrote the biography on Debord and I also translated a book by Sanguinetti.

Sanguinetti's book is called On Terrorism and the State and this is where this theory was presented for the first time.

So with my book what we set out to do initially was to prove what we called the State Terror Thesis. And this is to recount many of the instances in which it's well known or fairly well-known and there is some reasonable evidence to support the idea that states use terror.

The big thing that influenced me in writing the book was the fact that in 2001 Jim Bamford published Body of Secrets about the NSA and other things which talked about the Operation Northwoods.

A more recent example was actually spoken of by Zbigniew Brzezinski in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in February 2007 in which he referenced a leaked document that said that George W. Bush had considered shooting down a UN plane in order to justify attacking Iraq.

So there is a lot of instances of this, with regard to Sanguinetti and his theory on Terrorism and the State. This involves the assassination in May of 1978 of Aldo Moro, who was the Christian Democratic Party leader, who was trying to reconcile some of the different political factions in his country.

And of course Sanguinetti's book was published in the next year 1979 and then again in 1980 they had the Bologna railway bombing which killed a lot of people. And a lot of the evidence has pointed back to, I hate to say this, but it pointed back to NATO and this Operation Gladio, it's called.

And there are several books published in Europe that have gone to great detail. One is by Philip Willan it's called Puppet Masters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, another one is called NATO's Secret Armies by Daniel Ganser. Of course, there are books in French and Italian on the subject.

In fact the European Parliament has tried to go back to NATO and say: "What is the chain of command on this? How could you have justified these attacks, pretending to be the Red Brigades in Italy and yet having infiltrated these groups?" And NATO refused to respond.

Robles: What was the purpose of Gladio?

Bracken: The original idea of Gladio was these were going to be stay-behind armies that after WWII the US and NATO would leave caches of weapons in countries such as Greece and Italy and Turkey and set up networks that could be used in the event of a Soviet invasion or Soviet takeover or Communist Party takeover and then invitation of the Soviets, any eventuality. That was the purported idea behind these "stay-behind" armies but in the end they ended up being engaged in provocations and according to Philip Willan, a lot of it goes back to the CIA base in Paris, the Hyperion Language School and that a lot of the people who were the Red Brigades who were doing the liaison, the sort of "fake" Red Brigades, they were doing the liaison with the CIA at the Hyperion Language School in Paris at that time. In any case, that is sort of briefly.

It turns out that the man who was most suspected of having pulled the trigger on Aldo Moro is free at this time. He did some prison time but he is actually a free man right now.

Robles: I see. Back to your book The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror, what were the motivations behind your book?

Bracken: People knew about my work in developing a chronology for The Strategy of Tension, this is called The Strategy of Tension in Italy, the idea would be that they would create so much social tension that masses would want to have the state protect them and it would justify any kind of police actions, it would justify a crackdown on the left, for example.

I've done a lot of work on that, I worked out the chronology of the Situationist International in Italy and of The Strategy of Tension in Italy – it's in my book called The Arch Conspirator, it's a collection of essays, and in fact I associated it with an open letter to the citizens of Poland in which I warn them that if they were to join NATO, that they would potentially have some negative repercussions along these lines, of course it turned out to be different, they were used more as these kind of "rendition centers" if my understanding of that is correct.

Robles: The "Black Sites"?

Bracken: Yeah, exactly.

So the idea is that you could have Direct Defensive Terrorism. So this goes back to the terror of the French Revolution.

So that the terror was used by the revolutionary regime to defend itself. And this was done directly, they said: "Ok, we are going to go out, we are going to have a 'Scorched Earth Policy', we are going to just terrorize everyone and they will fall in line with our revolutionary dictate". That would be a Direct Defensive Attack.

And then you have a Direct Offensive Attack.

So these categories are a little but muddy -the example used by Sanguinetti would be the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization. But of course we know that there were probably infiltrators there and that this is not so clean.

But just this whole idea that you could have the IRA, the PLO these groups would be involved in Direct Offensive Attacks against the established power, a minor group against the state.

So then you come to the category of the Indirect Defensive attack and this is the example that we could use from Italy where the Red Brigades are infiltrated, they are militarized and a Defensive Attack is staged. But it's done indirectly in order to justify the established power going on the offensive or for other reason.

So basically it allows a Draconian crackdown or it allows the Patriot Act for example in the case of the United States.

And then there is a forth category which is the Indirect Offensive Attack which has not been developed by Sanguinetti and I've done some unpublished work in that area.

But consider for example that maybe the British were caught in Iraq dressed as Muslims and carrying bombs and that kind of thing. So this would be an Indirect Offensive Attack, they are pretending to be someone else but they are doing it in a foreign country in an Offensive Attack.

Robles: There were reports out of Libya when all that was going on, there has been reports out of Syria as well, of officers being caught with British accents and Turkish accents and foreign languages being spoken.

Bracken: It could very well be this forth category –this Indirect Offensive Attack is where everything is gone since 9-11 which was an Indirect Defensive Attack although it was never really purely an Indirect Defensive attack because you probably had Israeli and Saudi involvement as well.

So it wasn't just the United States, there were other regimes.

Robles: Recently Prince Bandar, or "Bandar Bush", as he is commonly called, threatened President Putin and the Russian Federation with terrorist attacks during the Olympic Games if Russia didn't pull its support for Syria.

He also admitted that they control Chechen terrorist groups, they control AL Qaeda in Syria. What can you tell us about that - the Saudi connection to Syria, to 9-11, to the Bush family etc. if you could?

Bracken: With regard to 9-11 I can say that there was the report of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence – this is joint inquiry into intelligence agency activities before and after the terrorist attacks in September 11th, 2001.

This was released in December 2002. And quite often when you get a report like this, that is conducted right after the fact it's going to be much more accurate than the 9-11 Commission Report, which we understand was more novelistic than historical.

So with regard to the Senate report they are missing I believe 24-28 pages and our understanding is that Senator Robert Graham has indicated in his novels and in other places, he sort of implied, that these missing pages relate to Saudi involvement in 9-11.

Of course there was a plane that ushered out, when all other flights were halted, the Saudis were escorted out of the country.

We understand that there was also a plane maybe even before the Saudi plane that ushered out Israeli nationals.

Robles: And the Bin Laden family…

Bracken: But the most damming evidence in my opinion goes to the Israelis, because, I have made the trip to Weehawken New Jersey where they had Urban Moving Systems and the only people arrested on the day of 9-11 were Israeli citizens, some of them tied to Mossad.

We know that with regard to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that the "Safe House" in New Jersey at that time was run by a Mossad Agent, probably working with the United States.

In 2001 Urban Moving Systems, they had the white vans, the vans that Dan Rather said: "Hey the police have stopped a white van on the George Washington Bridge" and it had thousands of pounds of explosives and of course the people were arrested, there was a massive "Spy Dragnet" but they were all allowed to go back to Israel.

And our understanding is that the person who was running the operation in Weehawken, at Urban Moving Systems is back in the United States and is actually living here now.

What the law enforcement officials that we spoke to, we went back to Weehawken years after the attack, they said that they were livid because they knew what was in there, there were bombs, there were detonators and there was even supposedly Anthrax there! Is what they told us.

This is John Robles. You are listening to an interview to Len Bracken. He is the author of several novels including The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror. That was Part 1 of an interview in progress, you can find the rest of this interview in our website at Voiceofrussia.com.

Part 2, November 21, 2013 : 9/11 hijackers had addresses on Pensacola Naval Air Station

The events of 9-11-2001 are still cause for research and questioning and this will not go away until the truth is known. Among the thousands and thousands of inconsistencies in and around 9-11 are facts such as the US Government Anthrax that was used in the Anthrax terror attacks, the fact that two of the planes that were reportedly involved in 9-11 are still sighted today and the way the WTC buildings came down in obvious controlled demolitions. Len Bracken, who has written extensively on the matter spoke to the Voice of Russia on some of the more stunning questions that have never been answered.

Robles: Hello, this is John Robles, I'm speaking with Mr. Len Bracken, he is the author of six books including the "Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror", he is also a specialist in international affairs and international relations, and an accredited journalist. This is part 2 of an interview in progress.

Bracken: When we went back to Weehawken years after attack, they said that they were livid because they knew what was in there, there were bombs, there were detonators and there was even supposedly anthrax there, is what they told us.

Robles: Anthrax?

Bracken: Yes, inside of the moving systems. Yes, the FBI supposedly cordoned off the area around Urban Moving Systems systems in Weehawken, NJ, came in with what are called moonsuits, these biological hazard suits because of the existence of anthrax there.

Robles: I have seen credible work done pointing to the fact that the anthrax was actually US Government grade military anthrax

Bracken: That's my understanding as well and I should mentioned that Andrews Smith was a contributor on the book and he did some valuable research on my book with regard to the anthrax chapter and of course, this whole idea that Mr. Ivins would have been culpable and I just don't believe it, you know, I think he was framed. I can say that based on some information that I have, people who knew him well and the evidence points to other people.

Robles: Who was that, who was framed? What was his role?

Bracken: There was the initial person of interest and then it came to a somewhat troubled man, forget his first name was, I believe it was "Bruce" Ivins, I think he committed suicide, one of those instances where it is very unlikely he would have done it and now he is gone and we can't really say one way or the other definitively

Robles: Back to the Saudi connection and I'm interested in Bandar-Bush and Al-Qaeda again, there was this rich Saudi family living in Florida where these pilots were training, (not to land, not to take off) but just to fly aircraft. Can you tell us what happened with them? There was a big scandal about them, they just disappeared and they left their homes, their cars and their televisions on and everything and they just disappeared.

Bracken: Yes, I talked to some people who knew them and other than what you have just said, I really don't know any details. It sounds like they were given a warning and they left, I don't have anything more for you on that.

I can tell you about my research into Mohammed Atta, also sort of an interesting fact about some of the drivers' licenses of the alleged hijackers, they were said to have lived at Pensacola Naval Air Station and when this came out in the news, one of the Florida Senators issued a press release and said he was going to get to the bottom of this and find out why was that hijackers would have driver's licenses with addresses on Pensacola Naval Air Station and when I called his office, I was told later that they were not going to look into that.

Of course there is incredible evidence about Mohammed Atta and his being trained by the US Government. They say that he was in officer training school in an Air Force base in Alabama, in Montgomery, Alabama.

Now I called the base and I spoke with a press officer there and she said that there was a Mohammed Atta there but she couldn't tell me whether or not it was the Mohammed Atta in question and eyewitness accounts said that it very obviously was, numerous eyewitness accounts have come forth saying it was the Mohammed Atta.

So I hate to tell you this but I was actually in Riga Latvia, I live in Washington DC but I was in Riga, Latvia on the day of 9/11 so I had no ability to get there and check things out for myself but friends and family were nearby, they saw the plane go overhead, I subsequently went to the Sheraton Hotel with other researchers, with Ken Thomas from Steamshovel press, and with John Judge with the coalition of political assassinations, I am a Spanish speaker, I was able to talk with maids, talk with management there, and just based on friends and family and those people that were in the Sheraton hotel, which is right next to the flight path.

Now I just wanted to say that I put myself into category of 'we really don't know exactly what happened', and I don't think we will probably ever really know and I think we should be satisfied with the idea that we will never know.

I would say that it is possible that the plane was shut down or the plane was allowed to fly away and that a missile hit the Pentagon, I don't see any markings on the wall from the wings.

Robles: That is exactly what I am talking about that is evidence that's right in front of your eyes, it was in front of my eyes, it was in front of world's eyes. What does a Rolls Royce engine jet weigh? I mean the kind that are on a Boeing 767. They would have pulverized the windows, the walls, there would have been a massive hole, the lawn was untouched, that was clear, the second and third story windows were still intact, all the windows where the wings should have been were still intact, I mean, come on.

Bracken: There was some wreckage, so it would imply that something could have been shot, right before it hit and then maybe a second bomb hit the Pentagon.

I agree with you there is all this evidence that looks like it just wasn't a plane, but on the other hand I've looked at a compilation of roughly 90 pages of Times New Roman, single space print, paragraph after paragraph of eyewitnesses that said that they saw people in the planes, they could see their faces, they saw the plane going into Pentagon.

You know, whether it could have been some kind of optical illusion and the plane then actually flew away. At this point in our technological existence, anything is possible, I would say. So they could have seen something and then not have seen what they thought they saw.

Robles: I have heard that theory being put forward by some credible people that it was just a massive psychological operation. I mean people were shocked and they were immediately told what they saw and they believed what they were told.

Bracken: There was certainly a plane there. It does seem very difficult that the plane could have come down over that ridge.

I grew up around here and I used to skateboard under the underpass right there, between the Sheraton and the gas station, there is a big underpass and we used to skateboard those walls, I have been back over there, I looked at it.

Basically there is a highway called 395, you look at the flight path and the planes come right along straight, you know, they could have lined themselves with that and then pushed the nose down. I am told that that would have been very difficult and one eye-witness supposedly saw a pilot standing up in the cockpit with all the force of his body pushing down on the rudders to get it to dive.

Robles: Somebody said that they saw that from the ground?

Bracken: Yes, I've read it.

Robles: Have you ever tried to see a pilot in a 767 when it is just parked on the runway? I seriously doubt you will be able to see him standing up and you certainly wouldn't be able to see the flight yoke.

Bracken: Oh yeah, obviously not that. Well, all I'm just saying is that there are these accounts.

Robles: I've heard this and I've read about this and it's been documented: the plane that supposedly, that I would say the plane that never hit the Pentagon and a plane that never crashed or disappeared into a hole in field of Pennsylvania, their registration numbers are still current.

They haven't been annulled and those planes have been sighted several times since 9-11-2001. What can you tell us about the planes?

And another interesting fact was the pilot of the plane that supposedly hit the Pentagon, he came from the Pentagon. He was a US air force pilot and he disappeared of course after 9/11? Have you heard any reports about those planes still being active?

Bracken: Yes, I've heard that. And of course you have these plane watchers everywhere around the world nowadays, so you would think that they would have covered their tracks a little bit better? But that does appear to be the case.

I can say that my friend and colleague Wayne Madsen did travel to Shanksville, Pennsylvania. He interviewed numerous people there, including I believe the mayor of the town. The debris spreading for miles, and other evidence makes people believe that that plane was actually shot down. And that it didn't come down on the basis of some kind of passenger intervention.

That sounds more plausible as well. Why won't they tell that story if that's the true story I don't understand. There were also reports that that plane had landed in Ohio, I believe in Cleveland. I think it was channel 7 ABC news or something – they had a live report, and apparently this plane had landed and had been taken to a NASA hanger and everybody was evacuated.

I think there was 184 people I believe on it. And they disappeared within 20 minutes that the plane was evacuated and those people were never heard from again. Have you heard that?

Bracken: I have and I've heard some accounts of people and I've heard those accounts as well.. Those surfaced after my book published and I was not able to include those in my book.

Robles: What's your theory with that?

Bracken: I think that all of the scenarios..I think most of the scenarios have some degree of plausibility especially when you talk about the buildings up in New York, that's a big subject of controversy, the Pentagon as well, all of it. It's just sort of controversial.

And I wrote my book and I did a couple of interviews, after ten years I made a few more interviews, and I just don't want to get into a lot of the disputes about this. I don't have any definitive answers, I don't want to argue about it.

I wrote an article about Judy Wood just because I thought that this directed energy weapons should be at least examined and I got a lot of flak for it, trying to be objective and say 'Hey, at least hear the woman out'.

Anyway, any or all of the above is the way we should keep our minds open.

Robles: It's interesting you mentioned the directed energy weapons because I recently (listeners can go back and find an interview with ex-MI5 officer David Shayler) that's what he said they used at 9-11.

He said they were directed energy weapons, there was no way that the cement in those buildings would have been just been pulverized into dust.

OK, the planes. What happened? Maybe there was no crash and the plane was landed in Cleveland. Everyone was taken off, they were killed, those planes are still active apparently.

Back to WTC, the most obvious thing that we could talk about is Building 7.

How long would you say it would take to plan a controlled demolition of two of the highest skyscrapers in the world so they would fall directly into their own footprint, I mean as neatly and at free-fall speed as they did ?

Bracken: Yeah. It seems like it would have taken years, seems like they had something like this in mind.

I can remind your listeners about the events around the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in which an Egyptian Intelligence Agent working with the FBI was taken off the case a couple of weeks before the vans were parked there and exploded.

After the event he called his FBI handlers, the FBI handlers said that a decision was made to allow the attacks and he said 'Yeah, but we were gonna put something other than real explosives' and they said ' Yes, we are sorry, but that's what happened'.

Those interviews were printed verbatim in New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and Law School professors were standing on the steps of their law schools and saying 'Hey, this is a provocation'.

So, there is real strong evidence, that they'd done this kind of thing before.

Now of course we know that in weeks before the 9-11 there were these electricity shut downs, there were reports of people coming in with all these cables, the same thing happened around the time of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Robles: 24 hours before the event all the security and all the dogs were pulled off, remember that?

Bracken: Right. Yeah. So it's very damming for anybody who wants to support the establishment claims when you look at this.

One of the things that I found that was particularly interesting was the existence of this "art group" that lived in the World Trade Center Towers for several months and they had all these boxes, wires and it's still uncertain exactly what they did.

But what they were doing is that they actually took out a window and built a little balcony and they had a helicopter come by and photograph them. And that's one hell of an avant-garde art project, if you blow up the World Trade Center.

Personally I think it could have been directed energy, it could have been some small nukes, it could have been all of the above – many things could have been used.

Robles: There was that film-evidence and everybody saw it and it's there. And it's out there and it's still out there – the evidence of the molten steel – even 5 or 6 days after 9-11 it was Still Molten- they filmed blasts, like 25 blasts or something. I forgot, I sat one time and counted them. It was bam-bam-bam and then the building came down.

Bracken: Right and you can see some of these I-beams that are just sliced in perfect straight lines. It doesn't look like the kind of thing that would happen from some pancaking collapse. As improbable as even that is given the speed with which they came down.

Robles: And I think the most elementary thing is that any, even a two-year old child will know, say, you've got a pencil standing on its end, if you knock it on its side, it's gonna fall over, it's not gonna collapse into itself, right?

That is just the most obvious lie in the whole thing and it is so unbelievable –it's right in front of everybody's eyes, but everybody wants to believe what they were told, because they were in so much shock.

I mean, it is shocking to think and I'd like to comment on this – do you think is really possible that a government could kill 3,000 of its own citizens as a pretext to bring about a hyper-security state in condition of endless war

Bracken: Right. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security which probably will make the Gestapo look some kind of Utopian Paradise when it's all over

Robles: You think it's possible, you think that's realistic?

Bracken: Yeah, I do think it's possible, I think that, you know, you had people like Samuel Huntington with his book 'The Clash of Civilizations', there seems to be have been this idea that they would start their "War on Terror" to pick up where the Cold War left off. And of course a lot of this all goes back to the thing that you brought up before which is the Project for a New American Century.

That was part 2 of an interview in progress Len Bracken. You can find the rest of this interview on our website at Voiceofrussia.com. Thanks for listening and as always I wish you the best wherever you may be.

Part 3, December 8, 2013 : 9-11 was carried out by US/Saudi/Israeli intelligence

The events of 9-11-2001 continue to be the subject of intense debate and speculation due to the US Governments failure to provide the people of the world with a plausible or believable explanation namely: why two steel framed skyscrapers collapsed and were pulverized into dust as they imploded into their own footprints at free-fall speed from a lateral impact that they were designed to withstand, why building 7 also collapsed due to "office fires" and how a 767 disappeared into a two meter in diameter hole in the Pentagon without damaging the lawn or even second floor windows. Attacks of this nature have been classified as "an indirect defensive attack" by author Len Bracken and in this case saw the United States attacking itself. For those who think these are all "conspiracy theories" Len Bracken cites Machiavelli as one figure who actually documented such tactics man many years ago. He spoke to the Voice of Russia about these matters and more blaming 9-11 on a group originally calling itself the Safari Club.

Robles: Do you think is really possible that a government could kill 3,000 of its own citizens as a pretext to bring about a hyper-security state and a condition of endless war?

Bracken: Right. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, which probably will make the Gestapo look like some kind of Utopian Paradise when it's all over.

Robles: You think it's possible, you think that's realistic?

Bracken: Yeah, I do think it's possible, I think that, you know, you had people like Samuel Huntington with his book 'The Clash of Civilizations', there seems to be have been this idea that they would start this "War on Terror" to pick up where the Cold War left off.

And of course a lot of this all goes back to the thing that you brought up before, which is this Project for a New American Century. And of course, Bamford came back in another book called "The Pretext for War" where goes into a great detail about how misleading it was for the Bush Administration to try to link 9-11 to Iraq, and of course, a lot of this goes back to the thing that you brought up before which is this Project for a New American Century, so many of the people that were a part of that, are tied to (How can I put it?) neoconservatives around Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, who believe in the "noble lie" that can justify any kind of action.

Robles: Len, I was wondering if you could tell me anything about an article which appeared, I believe it was in Newsweek, somewhere around the 15th of September (2001), and they said that the Pentagon had been forewarned, somewhere in this article, which went into… tied into other warnings that were apparently received by other officials and, for example, Condoleezza Rice and the Mayor of San Francisco and some other officials who apparently did not fly that day. Do you know anything about that?

Bracken: Right, the article in the September, 15th issue of Newsweek talked about many of the hijackers receiving training at secure US military installations but it also mentioned that senior Pentagon officials were told not to fly, and to cancel all airplane travel reservations on the day before the 9-11 attacks.

This was in the article and when fellow researchers of mine spoke with one of the authors of the article, a very senior journalist, he denied that this information was actually in the article. And then my friend in turn said: "Hey, it's right here, you can see with your own eyes that this is what it says" and then he said "Well, then that's not true". So he denied the veracity of his own article.

Now with regard to some of the training, probably the most notorious example involves a 24th year air force veteran, by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Steve Butler who was essentially the Dean of Students at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California and he said that one of the hijackers and its, this Saeed Alghamdi (difficult name to pronounce) was actually trained at his institute and main others as well and that this Saeed Alghamdi was actually one of the three hijackers who took flight trainings at the Pensacola Naval Air Station.

Then, of course, Colonel Butler was actually chastised and given some kind of disciplinary action on the basis of having made accusations, disciplinary measures were taken against him because he accused President Bush of knowing about the impending attacks and doing nothing.

Here is a quote from the letter that he wrote on May, 26th 2002 in the Monterey County Herald: "Of course President Bush knew about the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism."

Robles: Len, can you tell us a little bit of the background about the.. I believe, what was the official name of this school in Monterey? This was the school where they used to train spies. Can you give us some details on that?

Bracken: It was founded in 1946 with the first name being the Military Intelligence Service Language School, now it is called the Defense Language Institute, Foreign Language Center in Monterey, most people refer to it as the Defense Language Institute.

Robles: How many of these terrorists were there and what were they studying? English?

Bracken: My understanding is that there was at least one, this Saeed Alghamdi, could have been more and they were studying English as a second language.

Robles: Why would they need it?

Bracken: You know, that's a good question. I guess that they probably spoke some English but not well enough to further their fight training or whatever else they were doing.

Robles: Do you think it is still possible that these people are still around today? Do you think any of the hijackers are still alive?

Bracken: It is entirely possible but certainly the idea that people they said who committed these attacks probably were not the ones who did it. Because many of these people have been found still alive, yet the government said that they died in the attacks.

Robles: So who did it then?

Bracken: I go back to what I said before; I think it was a massive operation, massive intelligence operation involving several governments.

Robles: Do you think it is possible they were drones?

Bracken: I take all of the above approach to the technical questions; I think we should consider everything. I don't think we are not going to get definitive answers on any of them. That's not very satisfying but I think that that's the reality.

I just go back to sort of my theory, I think it was an indirect defensive attack with United States attacking itself.

It's a very interesting thing about conspiracies, in his discourses Machiavelli talks about six types of conspiracies and he says that an attack against one's own country is actually very easy to do and so you have it from a figure no less than Machiavelli, saying that, you know, someone in a position of power decides to attack his own country, that he certainly would be able to do that with relative ease.

It might be interesting to include, you know, when people talk about conspiracy theories and try to dismiss this type of thinking. These things have been around for a long time and you have political analysts of the stature of Machiavelli presenting his classifications of types of conspiracies actually.

Robles: Back to the language school, I believe the person you mentioned wrote a letter to some newspaper.

Bracken: Right. It was in May 26, 2002 in Monterey County Herald, I have portion of it here at hands and he said: "Of course President Bush knew about the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism."

So that was written by a 24-year veteran of the air force, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Butler who was the Dean of Students at the Defense Language Institute who said that Saeed Alghamdi, and perhaps other hijackers were students at the Institute.

Robles: He "needed this war on terrorism", why do think that is?

Bracken: I think its feeling the vacuum created by the end of the Cold War, you had to have something to sustain the Defense Industrial Complex, which is sort of, to say it more accurately, it's probably a Military Intelligence Complex at this point, you might even call it a Military Intelligence Pharmaceutical Complex because a lot of drugs are being given to people that are involved in those operation, I believe.

Robles: Whether they are branch outing the pharmaceuticals or intelligence or military, I don't think it's important, it is the same shadow government, if you want to call them that.

Bracken: That was the title of book but unfortunately, I don't have the definitive list of those responsible, we can always keep looking but it's hard to really know exactly who is pulling the strings, who are the puppet masters?

Robles: Now, Len, your theory. What is your gut feeling, what is your theory who is behind this? What do you think really happened? In your gut, in your heart? Who do you think really did this?

Bracken: I think it's a group, a sort of amorphous group, called the Safari Club. And this Safari Club started back in the 70s when they had the Church Committee looking into activities of the CIA.

It comprises Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States primarily, could bring in other intelligence agencies, conceivably Pakistan in this event.

So the Safari Club came into being in order to prosecute just these kinds of things that would never be allowed by the parliaments and the Congress of the United States, the legislative bodies.

So that's my gut, that it was some kind of group, we'll call it the Safari Club, go back to the historical precedent, maybe it's no longer called that, probably it has another name, it is very easy to change names. But I think it was an alliance of intelligence forces in Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States.

Robles: This is even beyond Black operations, isn't it? I don't even think that Black Operations Command would allow something like that to happen?

Bracken: I think it's in part a Black Opbut then it has a broader strategic… tactically a Black Op but strategically starting a massive war against terror.

Of course, you mentioned Al-Qaeda, and it was not long after the 2005, 7/7 bombings in London, that Robin Cook who was the former Foreign Secretary of Great Britain said that Al-Qaeda doesn't really exist, and that it is just a database for the CIA and then he passed away shortly after saying that.

Robles: I have heard that recently Al-Qaeda stands for "CIA Terrorist Database", isn't that correct?

Bracken: Well, that's what Robin Cook said. The former Foreign secretary of Great Britain said that.

Robles: Well, Al-Qaeda was begun, we know, in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union, Osama bin Laden got his start in that war, Osama bin Laden had a CIA code name of Tim Osman when he toured US military installations and was privy to weapons demonstrations and things like that. Many people probably don't know that.

The man who came up with that information Orlin Grabbe, he is no longer with us, he was forced to live in South America or some place after publishing that information, he died a few years ago.

So Saudi controlling Al-Qaeda, the US funding controlling Al-Qaeda and now let's look at Syria, 426 children killed as a pretext for another aggressive military attack. What do you think about Syria?

Bracken: It's just a crime; it's like a slow motion crime. My heart goes out to everyone who is faced with this "foreign intervention", I wrote a general theory of Civil War, I would say that this is not a Civil war; this is most clearly a foreign intervention using the irregular troops to do it.

Robles: Non-state actors, right?

Bracken: Right.

Robles: President Assad, he said himself there are tens of thousands, he said, there are "tens of thousands" of imported foreign mercenary quote/unquote "jihadists", I don't know if you want to call them jihadists because, I mean, obviously they have economic interests and they are in their being paid, he said tens of thousands, it's almost beyond belief. And most people don't believe it, most people say, "Ah, it's some conspiracy theory, it can't happen", especially with what they are fed in the US media. The US media, even if they know this, many US reporters, they know this information but they can't talk about it because they will lose their jobs.

Bracken: There is an interesting connection… and we do depend on Russian media to a large extent to bring us some news, but there is an interesting tie-in between 9-11 and Syria and that is in the person of Thierry Meyssan who wrote the "Big Lie", which was probably the first book about 9-11 saying that it was an inside job and he has been doing some great reporting as well with his Voltaire Network about the events in Syria.

Robles: Len, let me ask you a question, a personal question, do you ever get afraid for your safety? Have you been threatened, have you been watched?

Bracken: Yeah, yeah. I get some warnings. And I try my best to walk a fine line, and we say what we can say, of course, here in the United States we have libel laws for the most part, I just addressed my accusations towards the collective statesmen, you know, you have to be very careful, well this is verbatim, my warning was that: "I had to be very careful with what I write", and I try to be very careful.

Robles: Who gave you that warning? Can you tell us?

Bracken: I can tell you that the same verbatim words were spoken to me twice by two different people in the course of one week when I was writing the book in the summer of 2002 and my apartment was opened, I would come home two days in a row and the front door would be open.

So I was given these very direct, but not too ominous messages, I would have to say that (How can I put it?), I was scared but, you know, I survived. I don't think I'm particularly brave, I'm not particularly brave, I would not be the first one to say that there is a lot of other people out there who have gone further with all of this and I think about somebody like a family member named Beverly Eckert who died in a plane crash herself, and she was one of those people who did not accept the money, and was trying to get to the bottom of what really happened.

That was part 3 of an interview in progress Len Bracken. You can find the rest of this interview on our website at Voiceofrussia.com. Thanks for listening and as always I wish you the best wherever you may be.


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Part 4: 'Why?' is always fraught with epistemological dilemmas

There are different categories of state sponsored terrorist attacks, but almost all of them are carried out with one goal in mind, namely as a pretext by a state for the beginning of a war. The events of 9-11 are no different and if one looks at all of the evidence that exists related to the events of 9-11, it is clear that statesmen were involved. Author, researcher and expert on state-sponsored terrorism, Len Bracken, who lost a relative who was also seeking the truth as to the events of 9-11, spoke to the Voice of Russia about the events of 9-11 and the different types of state sponsored terrorism.

Hello, this is John Robles, I'm speaking with Mr. Len Bracken, he is the author of six books including the "Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror", he is also a specialist in international affairs and international relations and an accredited journalist. This is part 4 of an interview in progress.

Part 1, November 13, 2013 : 9-11 was an Indirect Defensive Attack

Part 2, November 21, 2013 : 9/11 hijackers had addresses on Pensacola Naval Air Station

Part 3, December 8, 2013 : 9-11 was carried out by US/Saudi/Israeli intelligence

Robles: Who gave you that warning? Can you tell us?

Bracken: I can tell you that the same verbatim words were spoken to me twice by two different people in the course of one week when I was writing the book in the summer of 2002 and that my apartment was opened, I would come home two days in a row and the front door would be open.

So I was given these very direct, but not too ominous messages, I would have to say that (How can I put it?), I was scared, but you know, I survived.

I don't think I'm particularly brave, I'm not particularly brave, I would be the first one to say that. There are a lot of other people out there who have gone further with all of this and I think about somebody like a family member named Beverly Eckert who died in a plane crash herself, and she was one of the people who did not accept the money, and was trying to get to the bottom of what really happened.

For me I just tried to make an early case and sort of pulled back and only very rarely do I speak about this publicly and just I look to others who have done, probably better work than I have.

I don't want your readers, I mean excuse me, your listeners to get the wrong impression; that my book has the last word on 9-11 and that I know exactly what happened at World Trade Center. It deals a lot more with the diplomatic history and the circumstances that would have led up to
justify the attack.

Robles: Don't detract from yourself, everybody is doing a small part, everybody is covering certain angles. I mean, it is so big. I think it is impossible for someone to cover everything: the technical, chemical angle, the structural engineering angles, I mean, everything together, points to the fact that this was a very carefully staged and planned event. And it wasn't planned by some Islamic terrorists in a cave in Tora Bora.

Bracken: We certainly agree on that. There was a report in the summer of 2002 coming out of France, Le Figaro, that said Osama bin Laden was being treated in the American hospital in Dubai in the summer of 2001.

Robles: That is true, he was there. I think he was, if I'm correct, the day before and the day after he was still in the hospital and the CIA came in there, he was being operated on and there was like five CIA doctors or something, if I remember right.

Bracken: Yeah, and of course there was a denial from the CIA.

Robles: Do you remember, it lives only in memory I think now, there might be some references somewhere on the Internet I don’t know, do you remember Osama bin Laden's initial statement?

Bracken: There was a denial! It was issued in a paper in, I'll probably butcher the name, “Rawalpindi”.

Robles: Right, he said: “I had nothing to do with this! Al Qaeda had nothing to do with this”.

Bracken: Exactly and yet that would never be repeated. So; you would think that just for the sake of fair journalism, that the denial (and you can sort of dispute the denial or you could rebut the denial) but you would at least allow the other side to have their say. But instead what do we get? We get these doctored videos.

Robles: Right, he is wearing a US army coat, I think he has a wedding ring on his right hand or on his left hand, which Muslims wouldn't have, and in the videos I think he was left-handed and in the video he was right-handed, etc., etc., all kinds of things like that.

The main thing that I think that your message could be… one thing I’d really like you to talk about because you are one of the few people that I've heard that is willing to even broach this topic: “governments using terrorism and shadow governments using terrorism. Can you expand a little on the so called ”war on terror”?

Bracken: Historically it's demonstrably been the case and it's been used predominantly to bring about wars. I think that there was even an admission by the National Security Agency regarding the Gulf of Tonkin to justify the war with Vietnam, this was in 1964.

So you even have the government coming out and saying: 'Hey, at least in this one instance there was a provocation'.

Robles: What would you say to people who’d say: “Why do this, why to start a war on terror? I mean, that is not a reason to kill 3,000 people. To start as hyper security state and strip away civil rights; that is not a reason.” What would you say to people who say that?

Bracken: You know, it is a great question and it is a great question because I always say that the question “why?”, is always fraught with epistemological dilemmas and danger. We are never going to know why.

You know, you can tell me why you called me today and that might be the real reason why and there might be some other reason that you don't even know, some subconscious reason why.

The whole question “why?” is one of these things that I say: “Don't ask why”. There is The Doors' song “Don't Ask Why”. But I mean, of course, you can ask why, but you never really are going to know. That is not satisfying but I think that is the reality.

Robles: With 9-11 and all these events would you agree with the premise that when there is a crime you look who benefits from it and you will find the guilty party? Would you agree with that?

Bracken: I would say it would give probably the best indication.

You know, I was engaged in Marxist debates and we had this dialectical logic for many years, now I'm working in legal journalism, and I appreciate legal logic and it is the logical application. And what is the logical application of all of this evidence that we've talked about now and, of course, you and I both know there is much more. The logical implication is that statesmen were involved.

Robles: Who benefited from 426 children being cold bloodily murdered in Latakia Syria? Who would have benefited from that in your opinion?

Bracken: Well it’s the people who want to topple Assad, the people that have blood on their hands and they’re blood-thirsty killers and they’re aiming to kill Christians and Alawites and people that are different from them even if it's just in the slightest degree. Madmen…

Robles: Would you say that this would be the perfect surrogate for carrying out like these… let's call them black operations?

Bracken: I think that you are getting into this area, this forth category I mentioned, this indirect offensive attack. I'm working on that now, I'm trying to develop it, I see a lot of problems with it, because it requires that you have a lot of subcategories and it gets to the point where I really even ask myself – is this type of categorization really useful and beneficial in terms of the theory of terrorism? I'm working on it but I recognize the limitations, even of my own, research.

Robles: Indirect offensive attack would be exactly what?

Bracken: For example, the Brits dressed as Muslims that were found in Syria. They were pretending to be someone else and they are staging these attacks, making it look like Assad's troops had done it, for example, or people who are sympathetic to Assad, it is sort of my conception.

Robles: I see. I like the way you divide things up into different categories, it makes much more sense, it is more logical to my mind. Thanks a lot, take care, buddy.

That was part 4 of an interview in progress. You can find the rest of that interview at our website Voiceofrussia.com. Thanks for listening and as always I wish you the best wherever you may be.