Uncautious Skepticism

Posted on September 7, 2003 in Journalists & Pundits

Jeremy of Fantastic Planet and Digby of Hullabaloo are enjoying a good chortle over the fact that snopes.com was proven wrong by the New York Times. For those who didn’t hear:

“Top White House officials personally approved the evacuation of dozens of influential Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, from the United States in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when most flights were still grounded, a former White House adviser said today.”

Though it has issued a partial apology to Michael Moore, snopes.com continues to insist that certain aspects of the flights as reported in the New York Times didn’t happen. It’s a spin more worthy of saucer cultists than of an honest skeptic that leads Barbara Mikkelson to defend the gathering of the Saudis, to insist that they weren’t flown out of the country while the airport ban was in effect, and to write off any testimony which confounds the facts as reported in a selected series of articles.

One of two things is possible: either snopes.com is clueless about the potential for intrigues surrounding 9-11 or they are being out and out apologists for the Bush Administration. The fact is that good questions remain about the role that the Saudis played in 9-11. The fact is that the situation remains murky. By basing her assumptions on newspaper reports, Barbara Mikkelson is falling into the classic trap of conspiracy theorists: she is relying on hearsay evidence, consciously or unconsciously modified to fit a personal perspective on the issue.

It wasn’t so long ago when leading skeptics pronounced Global Warming to be a wacko theory. The scientists who proclaimed it stuck to their guns and as gigantic icebergs broke off the Ross Ice Shelf, glaciers retreated miles, fires broke out in dehydrated rainforests, and Chicago experienced summer temperatures in February, 99% of those who doubted global warming decided that maybe there was merit in the hypothesis after all.

The predictive power of good science triumphed over prejudice against environmentalists in that one. (For the record, I hand one to skeptics on the so-called “Gaia Hypothesis”. They rightly pointed out that this was not testable scientific theory but a compelling metaphor. The Earth isn’t a living organism: it can merely be characterized one as a persuasive act of explanatory poetry.)

I contend that we lack enough evidence on the flights episode to decide what happened here. Instead of relying on various “newspapers of record”, we should demand the actual documents and base our assumptions on those. What we know now is that there are “official” versions floating about, that there are insiders (Richard Clarke who led the White House 9-11 crisis team and Dale Watson of the FBI) who present alternative views, and that Barbara Mikkelson is desparately trying to maintain her authority as one of the nation’s leading pundits on the issue of what is and isn’t the truth. A smart skeptic would say “Wait.”

Given what 9-11 has drawn us into, the questions deserve a more serious investigation than a review of newspaper articles and a broad jump to conclusions.