Investigative Journalist James Corbett on How Skeptics Shape Our Worldview

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with James Corbett, host of, The Corbett Report. During the interview Corbett discusses the believability of the 2011 Osama Bin Laden raid:

Alex Tsakiris: I find myself debating folks who are on my side of these issues about paradigm change — is it coming? Is it imminent?  But both in your world of politics, and my world of science, we’re living in a bubble and underestimating how hard it is to change minds.

Let’s say you wanted to make the case that the government is lying about the death of Osama Bin Laden. Maybe you can give people a thumbnail sketch of what that evidence is—not that you know specifically what happened because that’s a trap, but just make a case that the government is lying.

James Corbett:   Well, that is a particularly interesting example.  It’s black and white that there were various aspects of the Osama Bin Laden raid that were demonstrable lies coming out in the hours after that raid.

So for example, it occurred on the 1st of May, 2011 and immediately there was a narrative created that was bolstered in no small part by the image of Obama and Clinton and others in the White House taking a look at presumably the live video footage of the raid itself. But that was contradicted just three days later on the 4^th of May by the fact that there was a blackout during the time of the raid. So there was no visual footage. The initial indication was that Osama had fought back, that there was some sort of running gunfight, but as it turns out there really was no gunfight at all. There was the initial indication that he was using his wife as a human shield, etc., but eventually they had to admit that didn’t happen. There was the entire saga of the helicopter crash, etc. So there are all sorts of things related to that story that we know that the initial reports that were coming out were, in fact, demonstrably untrue.

But it was interesting for me to watch how people—even people whose opinions I respect and who I think are genuinely quite cautious about the way that they approach these types of situations and disinformation—just immediately took it on faith. “Okay, this is it. This is a raid. They got Osama.” The way that I try to be with most events is, “Okay, that’s interesting. Let’s see the data. If politicians can come out and say X, Y, Z and we’ll just take it as an article of faith, then I think that’s a sign of a very, very unhealthy democracy, isn’t it?

The Skeptiko interview with James Corbett (audio and transcript) is available at: https://www.skeptiko.com/167-investigative-journalist-james-corbett/

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