Prior to joining CNN as a contributor, Stallworth was hired by the Huffington Post, now known as HuffPost, to cover national security issues. His hiring caused backlash, not because Stallworth plead guilty to DUI manslaughter, but after his comments about being a 9/11 truther surfaced.
"Gggrrrrrrrrrrrrr @ ppl who actually believe a plane hit the pentagon on 9/11… hole woulda been ASTRONOMICALLY bigger, God bless lost lives," Stallworth wrote in one tweet.
"NO WAY 9/11 was carried out by ‘dying’ Bin Laden, 19 men who couldn’t fly a damn kite. STILL have NO EVIDENCE Osama was connected, like Iraq," he added in another tweet.
But in 2014:
Credit goes to James Bamford, whose great book disabused me of that stuff and showed what a disastrous intelligence failure 9/11 was.
The book referred to is probably Bamford's "A Pretext for War" (2004), which is highly critical of the US intelligence leading up to 9/11, and the actions of the US after 9/11, but does not say that the US government orchestrated 9/11.
This seems to relate to the idea that to debunk a false theory you need a detail debunking which provides a sufficiently detailed true narrative that can replace the false one. Here Bamford's book provides details as to how this could have had happened - and it's still a complex story, just more about the very real failings of US intelligence and (arguably) US foreign policy - and not some highly improbably plot with remote controlled planes and impossible rigged controlled demolitions.
It also seems that the new narrative struck a chord with him because it was also critical of the government. Which shows that debunking and counter-narrating works better if you have (or find) a common ground to start from.
The book referred to is probably Bamford's "A Pretext for War" (2004), which is highly critical of the US intelligence leading up to 9/11, and the actions of the US after 9/11, but does not say that the US government orchestrated 9/11.
This seems to relate to the idea that to debunk a false theory you need a detail debunking which provides a sufficiently detailed true narrative that can replace the false one. Here Bamford's book provides details as to how this could have had happened - and it's still a complex story, just more about the very real failings of US intelligence and (arguably) US foreign policy - and not some highly improbably plot with remote controlled planes and impossible rigged controlled demolitions.
Not having read the book, I can offer summaries from broadly reliable sources - Amazon and Wikipedia. These suggest that Bamford's narrative goes like this:
(1) The top layers of the US administration and intelligence agencies were caught off guard by 9/11.
(2) But once 9/11 happened, they formed an effective, large-scale conspiracy to take advantage of the significant opportunities the attack presented to fulfill pre-existing geopolitical aims.
From the Amazon description:
In A Pretext for War James Bamford builds his case against America's intelligence agencies from the ground up, which makes for devastating reading not only for his subjects, but for anyone concerned with the nation's security or simply smart use of taxpayer dollars. Indeed, one can't help but cringe as the veteran journalist records the alarming post-Cold-War floundering of the CIA, NSA, Defense Department and succeeding administrations in the face of burgeoning terrorist threats that culminate with the attack on 9-11. Seemingly caught flatfooted by the demise of the Soviet Union, the US intelligence community stumbles through the 1990s as it becomes institutionally hidebound and sluggish. During relatively peaceful times, its shortcomings, while not unnoticed, remain largely unaddressed.
That is number (1) established.
Amazon:
As Bamford sees it, with the arrival of George W Bush the situation goes from bad to worse. With the neocons in power, intelligence gathering is corrupted and politicised to create the grounds for going to war with Iraq.
Wikipedia:
The events of 9/11, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the accusation of Iraq having near-nuclear capabilities, the ties of Saddam and Al-Qaeda were all based on bogus, or very weak intelligence reports, and exaggeration. The Rendon Group, paid handsomely by the Bush Administration, was also allegedly involved in liberally spreading propaganda to the American public to persuade people into believing that Iraq was an imminent threat. This part of the book can be summarized as the abuse of America's intelligence agencies in order to fabricate a pretext for the war in Iraq, and achieve political goals on behalf of America and the Israeli government in the process. The third part of the book is heavily backed with personal accounts and stories from personnel within the CIA, NSA and associated groups. One notable remark by an unidentified figure in the CIA exclaimed to his employees that if the President wanted a war, then their jobs were to produce the justification and reasons.
That is number (2) established.
There are problems with using a narrative like this (which I imagine is a reasonable approximation to Bamford's) to try to 'debunk' 9/11 truth arguments. Firstly, Bamford-esque narratives draw attention to the question of pre-9/11 intelligence, on which the truth movement is quite strong. See David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor, also first published in 2004, particularly the chapters in Part 2:
Ch 5 Did US Officials Have Advanced Information about 9/11?
Ch 6 Did US Officials Obstruct Investigations Prior to 9/11?
Ch 7 Did US Officials Have Reasons for Allowing 9/11?
Secondly, and obviously, the Bamford narrative provides support for a key contention of the truth movement, which is that there was a large, concerted, high-level effort after 9/11 to exploit the opportunity 9/11 presented. Bamford-esque conspiracy theories encourage the view that the US administration and intelligence services fraudulently mischaraterized the terror threat as coming from Iraq, when there was little evidence of an Iraq connection to 9/11. This dovetails with the truther contention that the US exaggerated and held on to the 'threat' of bin Laden as long as possible, tying OBL to WMDs and Saddam Hussein to maintain support for the invasion of Iraq. Take The New Pearl Harbor again, Ch 8: Did US Officials Block Captures and Investigations after 9/11? This chapter argues that yes, they did, even allowing OBL safe passage to Pakistan, so that he would remain a useful enemy. Bamford-esque conspiracy theory meets truther conspiracy theory.
Given that the Bamford-esque and truther arguments to a certain extent run parallel in terms of the events after 9/11, we inevitably ask ourselves whose version is more plausible pre-9/11. Is it more plausible, at face value, that US officials were a disparate, uncoordinated, lumbering, and ineffectual bunch in the 1990s and on the day of 9/11, but unified, coordinated and concertedly immoral after 9/11? Or does skepticism over wrongdoing after 9/11 bleed into doubt over the official account of before 9/11?
Similarly, several of the main objections to truther conspiracy theories can also be applied to Bamford-esque narratives. For example, it would take the silence of tens of thousands of people. The president would not agree to it. There would be wistleblowers. The government would not be capable of successfully organizing such large-scale military endeavors, etc.
The fact is that honest efforts to investigate, analyse and report on the political and military context of 9/11 will ultimately converge on the reality behind those events. This is why there is overlap between truther and Bamford-esque narratives: they both have a piece of the puzzle.
