The standard critique of the government's official story of major events in which people die, from Pearl Harbor to the assassination of Kennedy, to flight 800, to the four planes that crashed on 9/11, is this: there are contradictions in the official story.
People who make this initial criticism then offer a few examples of aspects of the story that do not add up. The official account does not make sense. They therefore reject the official story.
The problems here are many. The first and most important problem is this: unless you have been trained as a professional historian, or unless you have taught yourself the basics through several thousand hours of research on a particular event, you do not understand what professional historians live with all their lives. As they develop their research skills, they learn that history is a series of stories that do not add up. The official government explanation does not add up. But then, if you carefully examine several of the alternative versions, you will find without exception that they also do not add up. This is why, when we come to a major event, there are so many conflicting versions of what happened that the government maintains general control over people's opinions regarding the event. Why? Because it got there first. It got there with an official story before all of the facts were in. Fact: all of the facts never come in. There is an indefinite number of facts associated with every event, no matter how deep we look. It's like everything else in the universe. "There is more where that came from."
Several government committees work together to get out an official version. This happens fast. A voter, not wanting to devote 1,000 or more hours of research, accepts the story, and then moves on.
TEXTBOOK ACCOUNTS WIN BY DEFAULT
Almost no one cares enough to investigate the vast number of stories that get into the textbooks. He does not investigate each of these the stories in detail in the way that the government and its dispersed, unorganized critics have investigated a particular story. Even if ten times as many written documents and other bits of evidence of a particular story were available, investigators would find the same versions. The government would stick by its version. Textbook writers would stick by their version. The narratives would not change much.
Historiography is the writing of history. It is based on hundreds of specialists who have made decisions about narratives that do not add up. None of these narratives adds up. None of them is without contradictions. All of them can be criticized for not solving contradictory issues.
What gets into the textbooks is what the historical guild has concluded are the least contradictory stories, and most historians have to take the specialists' opinions regarding the latest version of the story.
Revisionist historians go back to the original source documents, assuming they are still available, and they also go back to early secondary accounts that attempted to connect the famous dots. But the documents are highly limited. Very few of them get saved. Some plans of some people are not written down. Of those documents that are saved, some of them may have been produced by self-interested people with a hidden agenda.
The weighing of evidence is a lifetime occupational challenge for the handful of historians who devote their lives to one or two major events. The guild conforms to a Pareto distribution. Most professors of history produce only one detailed study, their Ph.D. dissertation. They don't ever again devote that much time and effort to studying any event. They may read secondary accounts. They may occasionally read a collection of primary sources related to a topic that interests them, but they don't put in 1,000 hours, which is what it takes to become a journeyman historian on a particular story. We then get to the specialist who puts in 5,000 hours. Almost nobody does this on any particular topic unless it is something like the Kennedy assassination. Then there are virtuosos who may put in 10,000 hours. They are also very good storytellers. They don't agree with other virtuosos. Few independent historians devote 10,000 hours to studying an event to verify the establishment's story. Some do; most don't. But they don't agree with rival revisionist experts
Every narrative is based on the suppression of, ignorance of, or dismissal of contradictions in the evidence on which the historian bases his narrative. If you ever get the below the surface version in a textbook, you will find out what the anomalies are that the official story does not deal with successfully. But that is only the beginning. You then have to pursue the anomalies. You try to find a way to reconcile them. Every narrative has these anomalies. You will also have to read dozens of other narratives that also suppress anomalies, but these narratives are based on the anomalies that exist in the official story, or perhaps in a rival revisionist account.
Almost never will you find a detailed book written by somebody who has invested 5,000 hours who has gone through the official story and maybe half a dozen rival accounts, which points out dozens of anomalies in each of the narratives. Almost nobody wants to do this kind of work. There is no market for a book like this: nothing but lists of anomalies, but with no conclusion about what really happened.
This is why myths persevere. For example, there is no first-hand evidence that Luther ever nailed or even glued his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg. Yet you will find this account in virtually every textbook. There is zero evidence from an eyewitness that he did this. The secondary evidence comes from years later. Yet we all love the narrative of the church door. Luther changed Western civilization. Nailing the theses to the door probably did not. Something big happened around October 31, 1517. We just don't know what. Yet this was a crucial event. It had far more impact on the history of the West than some piddly event like the assassination of Kennedy. But the basic story is probably fake: fake old news. Yet it took until 1961 for some careful researcher to blow the whistle on the official version. You can read about this here.
The only reason that we do not have revisionist accounts of the overwhelming majority of the textbook stories is this: historians are just not interested enough to go back and dig into any of these stories. But occasionally they do. The researchers always find anomalies.
The textbook accounts of the assassination of Lincoln have all been based on anomalies. A nonprofessional historian, Otto Eisenschiml, dug into the stories two generations ago and found them wanting. He was ignored or dismissed as a crackpot. A professional historian, Prof. John Chandler Griffin, has also raised major objections to the official story. His book was published in 2006: Abraham Lincoln's Execution. It was published by an obscure press. It has no footnotes. It is a strange book. But a serious historian of the assassination should use it as a kind of treasure map.
What we need is the missing section of John Wilkes Booth's diary which was torn out by some unknown person before it was made available to the public. That section might have told us a great deal. Professional historians of the event know about this, but the general public does not. There were lots of eyewitness accounts of the immediate event after the assassination of Lincoln. We all know the story. Booth leaped to the stage and shouted "Sic semper tyrannus!" But there really is no strong evidence that Booth shouted this.
And so it goes, event by event.
INESCAPABLE COMPLEXITY
What very few people understand who have not been trained as historians is this: there is an inescapable complexity of all historical events. Investigators run out of available documents long before they get very deep into this complexity, but that complexity never goes away. The deeper you dig, the more complex the account is. There are more dots to connect. The more complex the account is, the more there will be anomalies in the evidence and also in every story that attempts to put together the evidence into a coherent account.
Historical facts are unique, yet connected. There are lots of facts that are unique to every event. History is a series of unique events. The problem is this: compiling a handful of unique events into a narrative that makes sense. Most people don't understand that everything they have read about history is based on somebody's covering up of anomalies in the evidence. I don't mean a few events. I mean every account of every event in every book is based on the suppression of, de-emphasis of, or deliberate falsification of documentation. There are no exceptions to this. This process of selection is called "weighing the evidence."
The reason why there is agreement in the textbooks is that most historians don't want to waste time or effort or money in order to research a particular event in order to identify the underlying anomalies. There is no market for a book on anomalies unless you are challenging an official account with a better narrative. It is almost unheard of for a revisionist account to be substituted for the standard textbook account in less than about a 30-year period. The historians who agreed on the textbook version either die or retire. Younger researchers come in and substitute a different version for one event. Then another group selects another event. These multiple revisions are not initially connected. Textbooks are revised, one subnarrative at a time.
We see the same process in science. We see the same process in most knowledge because most knowledge is controlled by one guild or another. This control and subsequent loss of control over a widely accepted narrative is what Thomas Kuhn's classic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), is all about: temporary control by guilds over the official narrative in the face of anomalies.
The textbook accounts of Pearl Harbor have not changed since 1942. I have surveyed the major revisionist accounts here. The basic story of the anomalies in the establishment's version, which point to FDR's knowledge in advance of the attack that an attack somewhere in the Pacific was coming, was made clear in George Morgenstern's 1947 book. The revisionist account was set by this book. You can read it here. Subsequent debates between establishment historians and revisionists after the Pearl Harbor hearings in 1946 have been based on pretty much the same evidence. Robert Stinnett's Day of Deceit (1999) did rely on previously ignored documents that were rotting in a warehouse in Maryland. Nobody has made photocopies of them to post on a website. But he was no more successful in getting his account accepted in textbooks than all of the other revisionist historians have been. The revisionist account makes FDR look like a manipulating President who sacrificed the lives of 2400 people for the sake of getting the United States into World War II.
Here is a revisionist anomaly. FDR could not get the United States into World War II in the four days after Pearl Harbor. He did not even attempt to do it. He didn't mention it. Only Hitler did that on Thursday, December 11. There is no way that Roosevelt could have known prior to Pearl Harbor that events would unfold in such a way that Hitler would declare war on the United States. So, this becomes a problem with the revisionist historians' narrative. It is difficult to account for Roosevelt's motivation if you are a revisionist historian. You probably should focus on his concern over developments in Asia, not events in Europe. But this is not how the standard narrative of the revisionist historians of Pearl Harbor has gone.
HARD SLOGGING
Writing history is a slow, excruciating, and costly operation in terms of the time it takes to investigate the documents. It is getting far easier to investigate documents today because of the Web, but this has not led to any agreement among revisionists on which narrative should be substituted for the government's narrative.
This is why most people remain vaguely skeptical about the Warren Commission's report, but it really doesn't make any difference in their lives. Most people do not devote 1,000 hours to studying this. My friend William Marina did. He was an eyewitness in Dealey Plaza. He was the only eyewitness who had a Ph.D. in history. He studied this event for thousands of hours. He taught courses on it for over 30 years. He came to the conclusion that the Warren Commission's report was closer to the truth than any of the revisionist accounts. He should have written his long-promised book, but he was traumatized by an automobile accident. He was moving his papers from Florida to his new residence in North Carolina. An 18-wheeler hit his car from behind, and his papers were scattered. He never recovered emotionally from this.
CONCLUSION
It is not enough that someone has read a few accounts in online media regarding an event, and has concluded that the official account of 9/11 by the government is bogus. This event is at least four events involving four hijacked airliners. It has to be covered in four different sections in order to deal with four different airplanes. Shanksville makes no sense. There was no plane in the hole. The collapse of WT7 makes no sense. It was not hit by a plane. The plane that crashed into the Pentagon makes no sense because of the flight skill required to execute the maneuver.
How did these pilots accomplish all this? Asking this raises more problems. Detailed, dedicated, and fearless research is needed on each of the four planes. Maybe somebody has done this in one book, but I have yet to see it. I would like to see it. But it's going to require a website with enormous quantities of information on each plane in order to begin to verify a summary one-volume account. That at least can be done today, and preliminary steps have been taken to do it. But it would take certainly a 30-year career to begin to put the pieces together.
What academic historian would want to do this? He would probably not get tenure if his peers thought he was working on a project like this. If he began after he received tenure, he might get away with it, but he would be pilloried by his peers for the rest of his life. In a cost-benefit analysis, a man who doesn't have to publish anything after he is tenured probably is not going to indulge himself in this kind of suicidal operation.
Skepticism is good. Skepticism can also be paralyzing. It can be used to justify inaction. If there is nothing true about most people's assessments of the world, then there is nothing worth committing to. Once you go down several of these revisionist rabbit holes, you may not get your sanity back. This is the price of becoming a revisionist historian of those events that were sufficiently important politically to have generated an official government version.
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