The Facebook group recently got a post showing a "whistleblower's" talk about how the United States used, and continues to use, depleted uranium in combat zones. I found the talk rather interesting and I've re-posted it below.
Here's why I put "whistleblower" in quotes: I didn't know this was an unknown issue in 2010. I thought it was more or less common knowledge, at least among people who follow news about America's adventures abroad, that depleted uranium was part of the American arsenal. Bushflash did a few videos about it many years ago. It never occurred to me that people could hear phrases like "bunker buster" every day and not wonder what made bunker busters such effective busting devices.
Here's the thing that I think a lot of visitors to our group and this blog from "the other side" don't understand:
Not being a 9/11 denier =/= Support for the actions of any particular politician.
This point is often understated by skeptics, because I think we lack the gene for seeing issues in black and white that 9/11 deniers rely on to make their assumptions about the way the world works. Anyone who has been having the argument for long enough knows that words like "shill" and "spook" are the adjectives of choice 9/11 deniers use for those who refute their ideas. On their planet, it seems, they are part of a golden Crusade, where everyone around them is the unwashed masses, the political sheep who need only be anointed in the homeopathic magic-water of their grainy YouTube videos and fatuous echo chamber of a blogosphere. On their planet, you are either with the 9/11 deniers or you are a die-hard defender of the status quo, 100% copacetic with the proclamations of America's majority party du jour.
The similarities with religious fanaticism have already written themselves in your mind, I'm guessing.
To this video all I can say is, Yep, sounds like depleted uranium is a horrific weapon. 9/11 deniers have to live in a world where it isn't common knowledge that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake (an opinion that at least half this blog's authors have shared since 2003, by the way), for example. No, empirical evidence should not get balled up with your politics. No, not everyone who has a substantive disagreement with you is your enemy on 100% of fronts. I feel this has to get addressed every time I see a 9/11 denier or two hijacking a peace protest or something, but they keep doing it and not getting the un-funny joke they have been spinning this whole time.
"Depleted uranium is a horrific weapon, therefore the government committed 9/11" is a non sequitur. They're unrelated issues, at best part of some epic tu quo que fallacy, spanning decades and continents in some desperately contradictory effort to indict all on all things for an evil utterly unrelated to the debate at hand. The person who posted this video has, at best, conducted a logical fallacy. At worst, he is committing implicit intellectual fraud against his "opponents."