[Public lecture sponsored by the UW 9/11 Research Group, University of Waterloo, 11 March 2010.

Video
available at 911 Blogger.com (12 October 2012), http://www.911blogger.com/news/2012-03-12/prof-michaelkeefer-critical-thinking-911-war-terror-university-waterloo. The text of this lecture has not previously been
published.]

[Do not post--incomplete]

Critical Thinking on 9/11 and the War on Terror

Michael Keefer

1
I'd like to thank the Waterloo 9/11 Research Group for the invitation to speak here
and also to say how pleased I am to be addressing an audience in one of Canada's
leading research institutions, a university especially celebrated for its research in
computer science and mathematics, and in engineering and related sciences.
Now I know this is meant to be a secular occasion, but I hope you won't take it
amiss if I begin tonight with a brief religious ritual. The religion in question is ancestorworship. And the form my ritual will take is that of a public confession.
What I want to confess to you is that I am the black sheep of a family all of whose
sons have for the past five generations been engineers or scientists. One of my greatgreat-great grandfathers was an engineer on the Lachine and Rideau canals in the 1820s;
during the same decade another triple-great grandfather became the first President of the
Welland Canal Company. One of his sons built the first suspension bridge over the
Niagara Gorge, as well as managing the engineering work on the Canadian Parliament
buildings. Another one, my great-great grandfather, designed Montreal's and Hamilton's
waterworks, and was President of the Canadian and American Societies of Civil
Engineers, as well as President of the Royal Society of Canada. His son and grandson
were bridge and hydraulics engineers, and my father was a mining engineer. My two

older brothers both took engineering degrees, followed by PhDs in, respectively, physics
and control theory; my younger brother is a scientist and inventor.
Some people are born with silver spoons in their mouths; in my family, it was
slide-rules. But I spat mine out.
My parents knew something was wrong when I proved unable to make little
locomotives and Eiffel towers with those horrible Meccano sets that my genius brothers
and I were given for Christmas and birthdays. I took up poetry and street-hockey instead.
There had been one earlier deviant in the familymy great-uncle Harold, who
instead of engineering, went in for fast women, fast horses, and fast airplanes. During
World War One, he discovered a talent as a fighter pilot, but all the fast and expensive
living came to an end in 1918 when he flew his SE5 fighter plane into a stand of trees. I
must have resembled my great-uncle Harold, because when I was married in 1972, my
great-great aunt Elsie, who was then ninety-five years old, forgot all about that fatal crash
a half-century earlier and got the two of us confused. She announced in a loud, tremulous
voice at the wedding dinner how happy she was, how very happy she was, that young
what's-his-name had married into a family that would be able to pay off his gambling
debts.
But I'm not here tonight to give advice to newlyweds about how to get off on the
wrong foot with their parents-in-law. My subject is more alarming by several orders of
magnitude, and very much more important.
My subject tonight is Critical Thinking on 9/11 and the 'War on Terror'. Some of
what I have to say will have a definite bearing on issues of science and engineering,
though I will not be going in any detail into technical matters. I will be concerned more
with issues of method, of how we need to organize our thinking about such matters. I'll be
concerned, that is to to say, with the domain not so much of scientists and engineers as of
philosophers of science. I'll be concerned as well with other matters, some of which have
a bearing on why so many otherwise astute people seem to be unable adequately to
process the physical and material evidence relating to 9/11.
Here I'll be calling on other considerations of method, drawn from the domain of
hermeneutics, the philosophy of interpretation. Now we're into some big words here. But
I want to emphasize that what I'll be dealing with tonight is not really all that
complicated.
Does anyone here know of the British comedy team Mitchell and Webb? You can

watch their stuff on YouTube: I do recommend it. There's a little skit by Mitchell and
Webb in which one of the guests at a cocktail party is an arrogant young brain surgeon
who, when he learns what other guests do for a living tells each of them, Well, that's not
exactly brain surgery, is it? He gets his comeuppance from a new arrival at the party
whoperhaps you've guessed this alreadyworks as an engineering physicist at the
British equivalent to Cape Canaveral (whatever that might be). When the brain surgeon
tells him, with a supercilious smile, how he earns his daily bread, the newcomer replies,
Well, that's not exactly rocket science, is it?
What I have to say tonight about the physical evidence relating to 9/11 is not
exactly rocket science. And what I will have to say about the strange inability of
otherwise clever people to understand or even to engage with this evidence is not exactly
brain surgery either. But the stakes are high. The events of September 11, 2001 are widely
recognized as epoch-making. It is all the stranger, then, that most of us have only a very
indefinite idea of what those events actually amounted toand that most of what people
think they know about those events is, as I hope to persuade you this-evening, either
demonstrably false or scientifically absurd.
I want to propose that a careful application of critical thinkingbringing together
an attitude of mitigated skepticism, and some elementary principles of scientific method
and of hermeneutics, the philosophy of interpretationcan help us both to sort out what
occurred on 9/11 and also to understand the factors that have prevented public
intellectuals of the stature of Noam Chomsky and the late Howard Zinn (for both of
whom I have enormous respect and admiration) from engaging seriously with the
relevant evidence.

2
The stakes, I have said, are high. The events of 9/11 have been used to justify
aggressive wars of genocidal intensity. Think of the number of people who've died in Iraq
since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the fact that there is probably still a very
substantial proportion of citizens of the United States who believe that their invasion of
Iraq was in revenge for what Saddam Hussein did to them on 9/11. Think, indeed, of
the consequences for Afghanistan: the devastation of that country, continuing at this

moment, and the fact of course that Canadian troops are contributing to that devastation.
One might think as well of the situation in Palestine, and the fact that that running sore of
a conflict has been integrated into the conceptual structure of the 'war on terror,' so that
the government of the state of Israel has been able to use that spurious fiction as a pretext
for exacerbating its treatment of the Palestinians.
What we have seen since 9/11, then, are aggressive wars of genocidal intensity
together with assaults on the most fundamental principles of legality. We need to
recognize the degree to which the framework of law that has been built up over centuries
in our society is both crucial to usof primary importanceand also fragile. I'm
thinking here of democratic governance, enlightened and democratic jurisprudence, civil
liberties, and ultimately the whole structure of legitimate domestic and international law.
It may sound odd, by the way, to use an expression like legitimate law: as you
perhaps remember from high school Latin, legitimate has as its root the Latin word for
law (lex, legis), so to speak of legitimate law may appear almost to outdo the
redundancy embedded in my favourite street name in Toronto, Avenue Road. But some
law is not legitimate: the so-called Nuremberg statutes propounded by the Nazi state were
not, by any standards of ethics and decent humanity, legitimate law.
Let's consider a single example of what this corruption of legality by the 'war on
terror' means. Jurists of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment prided themselves on
having done away with torture. Early modern law codes like the Constitutio Criminalis
Carolina, which was adopted in 1530, during the reign of the Emperor Charles V, in all
the principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, had conceived of torture as the basic means
of gathering evidence in criminal cases. We're accustomed to thinking differently: at the
mere mention of an unsolved crime, we put on our Sherlock Holmes hats and start
checking out the mud on people's shoes: we look for material evidence, that is, that can
form the basis of an inductive chain of reasoning. But sixteenth-century jurists were
content simply to take people accused or suspected of the crime and put them to the
questionor, in other words, torture them until they confessed.
During the eighteenth century, however, jurists across Western Europe came to
understand that torture, apart from its functions as an instrument of state terror and a
means of inflicting agony, abjection, and mental breakdown on its victims, served only to
put the words of oppressors into the mouths of the powerless.
Scholars who have studied torture, from Elaine Scarry and Edward Peters to

Alfred McCoy, concur that its evidential value is zero. That, by the way, is the meaning of
the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. We may think of it as a measure
designed by prescient lawmakers to help the scriptwriters of gangster films, so that
thuggish Mafiosi could say, with a crooked grin, You can't make me talk, I plead duh
Fifth. But the actual function of the Fifth Amendment is to protect the accused from
pressures to testify against himself, and to remove from the state the otherwise obvious
temptation to force an accused, by violence, into self-incriminationin effect, to make
him speak the language and repeat the words of his accusers.
Thanks to the 'war on terror'arising, we are told, as a response to the attacks of
9/11Americans have lost this protection, together with the entirety of their Bill of
Rights. This protection has effectively been lost in all of the countries swept up in the
'war on terror', including Canada. Our government has been complicit in and indeed
directly responsible for the torture of Canadian citizens; our government has been directly
responsible for the torture of prisoners taken by our soldiers in Afghanistan.
There is good evidence, by the way, that the responsibility for what happened to
these prisoners in Afghanistan goes a long way up the ladder. Remember the shameful
and disgraceful treatment of Richard Colvin, the Canadian diplomat who said (in effect),
I was serving in Afghanistan, I observed these things going on, I tried to alert the
appropriate authorities to these illegalities, and so on. A flood of garbage was dumped
on his head by senior politicians who denounced one of their senior diplomats as a flaky,
lightweight, unreliable, crooked sort of person. You may remember as wellI'm not sure
what coverage it got in the newspapersthat a large number of senior Canadian
diplomats, people of ambassadorial rank, joined together and wrote a letter of protest
against the appalling treatment of Colvin. The abusive treatment of Colvin seems to me
very much like the behaviour of guilty peoplepeople who know that what they did, in
stupidity or complacency or absent-mindedness, was deeply incriminating. We don't need
fancy language to describe their actions and their complicity: they amounted to a war
crime.
This episode raises a question of some importance: If you are of high status, or
hold a position of high rank within the state, are you somehow exempted from the
requirement to obey the law? This is something I'll be talking about later on.
What we are witnessing and being subjected to is a cancellation of Enlightenment
legal principles, a reversion to the legal barbarity of the age that brought us the European

witch-hunts of the 15th to 17th centuries, in which torture produced a flaring proliferation
of new accusations.
Remember, please, the essential structure of the European witch-craze. Society as
a whole was supposedly under attack by a satanic conspiracy of murderers, whose
'sleeper cells,' we can call them, were everywhere. (Belief in this horrible conspiracy was
of course generated and sustained by the intellectuals of the theocratic statejudges,
lawyers, and theologianswhich is also to say, university teachers.) To oppose this
conspiracy, membership in which was designated in some jurisdictions as a crimen
exceptum, a crime so horrible as to be outside the normal structures of the law, measures
of more than usual violence and severity were required. Ordinary people were
encouraged to believe that their only safety lay in accepting thankfully the appalling
tortures and public executions that were being organized by the state.
Does this sound at all familiar? It should, because this is what we are reverting to.
This is what Western Europe escaped from in the course of the Enlightenment, and this is
what the 'war on terror' is taking us back to by destroying the structures of legality that
had been erected to prevent any recurrence of that kind of abuse and that kind of horror.
Let's remember, as well, that all of the crucial evidence in the 9/11 Commission
Report linking Osama bin Laden and his organization with the crimes of 9/11 comes from
torture. The recordings of that torture were destroyed by the CIA, despite the fact that
Congress and the courts had demanded its preservation. The members of the 9/11
Commission were not allowed to view the videotapes in which 'high-value' prisoners
were subjected to waterboarding and other forms of torture, or to interview the prisoners
themselves or their interrogators. Think about that: the narrative of the 9/11 Commission
Report rests upon claims made by torturers, who first refused access to the 'evidence'
supporting those claimsand then destroyed it.

3
As these related patterns of burgeoning military aggression and of legal-judicial
regression may suffice to show, we have entered since 9/11 a critical situation; we are in a
state of crisis. Let's pause for a moment over the two words I have just used, critical
and crisis. Together with other words that make up a semantic field which we enter and

traverse when we speak of critical thinking about any subject, these words are derived
from two related verbs in classical Greek and Latin. In their first-person indicative forms,
these verbs are krino (the Greek one) and cerno (its Latin cognate). Their meanings have
to do with judgment, with the processes of coming to judge a situation or a case, with the
standards that need to be applied, with the qualities of mind that are required, and with
the times in which coming to judgment is urgent.
Thus we have kritikos, Greek for judge, which passed over into Latin and gave
us our words critic and criticism. We have criterion, referring to the standard by
which judgment is to be made; discernment (from cerno), alluding to the necessary
mental equipment; critical, in the temporal sense, which provides a way of talking
about the appropriate or necessary moment for decision-making, the kairos, the critical
moment; and finally, crisis, another derivative of the Greek verb krino, which refers to
the situations in which judgment is urgently called for.
I've sketched out that semantic field because we have in that collection of related
words something that almost starts to look like the equipment we need to talk about
matters of great urgency. In what I have to say about critical thinking, I'm hoping to
activate that whole semantic field. And in setting its terms to work, I wantas I indicated
a few minutes agoto bring together an attitude of mitigated skepticism, and some
elementary principles of scientific method and of hermeneutics.
Let me explain what I mean in talking about skepticism. I don't mean quite the
same thing that Michael Shermer does. Shermer, although he is the founding publisher of
Skeptic magazine and executive director of an organization called The Skeptics Society, is
far from being a skeptic in the sense in which I understand the word. He gave himself
away in the midst of a recent debate with the religious and neoconservative ideologue
Dinesh D'Souza, when he declared that since they were both conservatives, there were
many things they agreed on.
No thoroughgoing skeptic would say such a thing. An Academic skeptic in the
tradition of Carneades and the Platonic Academy would declare that nothing can be
known for sure (including the proposition that nothing can be known for sure)and that
the propositions and prejudices that together make up the ideology of conservatism are
very definitely as uncertain as all the rest. The other branch of classical skepticism took
the name of the philosopher Pyrrho. A Pyrrhonian skeptic would assert that positive
opinions on any subject (such as politics) are evidence of dogmatismand a threat,

moreover, to the peace of mind or mental imperturbability (ataraxia) that should be the
skeptic's goal in life. Shermer, then, is a very partial skeptic, in both senses of the word
partial. He can be corrosively skeptical on some subjects, but other subjects wholly
escape his critiqueamong them the dogmas of his own conservatism, to which he
shows evident partiality, and the dogmas of the official account of the events of 9/11,
which he accepts with a touching and completely non-skeptical simple-mindedness.
What I understand by mitigated skepticism is an attitude of mind in which
critical interrogation is applied not just to other people's doctrines and dogmas, but also,
reflexively, to one's own. This skepticism is mitigated by the fact that its goal is not, as in
the case of the Pyrrhonists, to reduce all propositions to uncertainty by discovering
plausible contradictory propositions that cancel them out. (Debating with a Pyrrhonist
might in practice be a little like entering that Monty Python skit where you pay for a fiveminute argument and discover at once that it's going to consist of nothing more than flatly
annoying contradictions of any statement you make.) The goal of mitigated skepticism is
rather, in the manner of the seventeenth-century philosopher of science Pierre Gassendi,
to sift out errors, delusions, falsehoods, and deceptions, with the aim of arriving at what,
with some confidence, if also with a sense of our own fallibility, we can declare to be at
least conditionally true.
I don't make any claim to originality in this. The first and highest value of
academic life is the notion that truthhowever differently we may construe it or
understand it to be configured, however discordantly we may dispute over the appropriate
means of access to it, however harshly we may debate with one another over the
appropriate methods of separating it from dogma, delusion, or deception, and however
pessimistic we might sometimes feel about its prospects of prevailing over even the the
most arid of established ideologiestruth remains, beyond all these doubts and
differences, the professed goal of the human sciences, no less than of the mathematically
based or natural sciences.
What about scientific method? The basic structure of scientific methoda
hypothetico-deductive-empirical process in which one moves from conjecture to a
theorized hypothesis which is then rigorously (and repeatably) tested against physical or
material evidence, resulting either in disconfirmation or else in tentative confirmation of
the hypothesisis well enough known not to need further discussion here. Much could
be said about related issues, involving in particular those explorations of the social

determinants of science that have been undertaken by historians and philosopherss

ranging from Thomas Kuhn, Brian Easlea and Alan Chalmers to Michel Foucault, but this
isn't the place for it.
I would like to bring to your attention one basic principle that is so taken for
granted in discussions of scientific method that it is commonly not even mentioned; the
principle that conclusions drawn from hypothesizing about human contingencies cannot
trump material evidence and the scientific conclusions drawn from that evidence.
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