Eyewitnesses to Disasters

by Gary North, December 18, 2001 [excerpt only]

THE old saying, “seeing is believing,” is true most of the time for most people, but it isn’t always true. A skeptic may invent alternative explanations for what he is seeing. I call this phenomenon “seeing isn’t believing.” In every Middle Eastern Islamic nation, the vast majority of those people interviewed so far think that the videotape of Osama bin Laden’s bragging was faked by the United States. It is as if they all saw the movie, Wag the Dog.

Then there is another phenomenon, less familiar, “believing is seeing.” It may be even more common that “seeing isn’t believing.” Psychology professors occasionally stage classroom events and then ask their students to summarize what they saw. The accounts vary widely.

[Etc. More…[An unfriendly letter from Eric Garris of the Lew Rockwell website asked us to remove this article from the website, perhaps because of our comment below. The rest of the article can curently (Dec 2001) be seen at

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north72.htm

then return for our comment below] 

Note by this website: Mr North has perhaps not considered whether his correspondents were in different time zones from the Eastern time zone, which would account for how they saw video footage around 9 a.m. their time. Incidentally, we regret that some of the links included in the original article are now defunct; this is the fault of the Rockwell website, not ours.