The Idiocy Behind the '9/11 Truth' Movement

by **nomo** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 12:51 pm

The Idiocy Behind the '9/11 Truth' Movement By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com Posted on September 26, 2006 <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/42181/">www.alternet.org/story/42181/</a> A few weeks ago I wrote a column on the anniversary of 9/11 that offhandedly dismissed 9/11 conspiracy theorists as "clinically insane." I expected a little bit of heat in response, but nothing could have prepared me for the deluge of fuck-you mail that I actually got. Apparently every third person in the United States thinks George Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks. " You're just another MSM-whore left gatekeeper paid off by corporate America," said one writer. "What you do isn't journalism at all, you dick," said another. "You're the one who's clinically insane," barked a third, before educating me on the supposed anomalies of physics involved with the collapse of WTC-7. I have two basic gripes with the 9/11 Truth movement. The first is that it gives supporters of Bush an excuse to dismiss critics of this administration. I have no doubt that every time one of those Loose Change dickwads opens his mouth, a Republican somewhere picks up five votes. In fact, if there were any conspiracy here, I'd be far more inclined to believe that this whole movement was cooked up by Karl Rove as a kind of mass cyber-provocation, along the lines of Gordon Liddy hiring hippie peace protesters to piss in the lobbies of hotels where campaign reporters were staying. Secondly, it's bad enough that people in this country think Tim Lahaye is a prophet and Sean Hannity is an objective newsman. But if large numbers of people in this country can swallow 9/11 conspiracy theory without puking, all hope is lost. Our best hope is that the Japanese take pity on us and allow us to serve as industrial slaves in their future empire, farming sushi rice and assembling robot toys. I don't have the space here to address every single reason why 9/11 conspiracy theory is so shamefully stupid, so I'll have to be content with just one point: 9/11 Truth is the lowest form of conspiracy theory, because it doesn't offer an affirmative theory of the crime. Forget for a minute all those internet tales about inexplicable skyscraper fires, strange holes in the ground at Shanksville, and mysterious flight manifestoes. What is the theory of the crime, according to the 9/11 Truth movement? Strikingly, there is no obvious answer to that question, since for all the many articles about "Able Danger" and the witnesses who heard explosions at Ground Zero, there is not -- at least not that I could find -- a single document anywhere that lays out a single, concrete theory of what happened, who ordered what and when they ordered it, and why. There obviously is such a theory, but it has to be pieced together by implication, by paying attention to the various assertions of 9/11 lore (the towers were mined, the Pentagon was really hit by a cruise missile, etc.) and then assembling them later on into one single story. But the funny thing is, when you put together all of those disparate theories, you get the dumbest story since Roman Polanski's Pirates. The specifics vary, but the basic gist of what They Say Happened goes something like this: A group of power-hungry neocons, led by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Bush and others and organizationally represented by groups like the Project for a New American Century, seeks to bring about a "Pearl-Harbor-like event" that would accelerate a rightist revolution, laying the political foundation for invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Your basic Reichstag fire scenario, logical enough so far. Except in this story, the Reichstag fire is an immensely complicated media hoax; the conspirators plot to topple the World Trade Center and pin a series of hijackings on a group of Sunni extremists with alleged ties to al-Qaeda. How do they topple the Trade Center? Well, they make use of NORAD's expertise in flying remote-control aircraft and actually fly two such remote control aircraft into the Towers (in another version of the story, they conspire with al-Qaeda terrorists to actually hijack the planes), then pass the planes off as commercial jetliners in the media. But it isn't the plane crashes that topple the buildings, but bombs planted in the Towers that do the trick. For good measure -- apparently to lend credence to the hijacking story -- they then fake another hijacking/crash in the Pentagon, where there actually is no plane crash at all but instead a hole created by a cruise missile attack, fired by a mysterious "white jet" that after the attack circles the White House for some time, inspiring the attention of Secret Service agents who point at it curiously from the ground (apparently these White House Secret Service agents were not in on the plot, although FBI agents on scene at Ground Zero and in Shanksville and elsewhere were). Lastly, again apparently to lend weight to the whole hijacking cover story, they burn a big hole in the ground in Pennsylvania and claim that a jet went down there, crashed by a bunch of brave fictional civilians who fictionally storm the fictional plane cabin. The real-life wife of one of the fictional heroes, Lisa Beamer, then writes a convincingly self-serving paean/memoir to her dead husband, again lending tremendous verisimilitude to the hijacking story. These guys are good! Just imagine how this planning session between Bush, Rummy and Cheney must have gone: BUSH: So, what's the plan again? CHENEY: Well, we need to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. So what we've decided to do is crash a whole bunch of remote-controlled planes into Wall Street and the Pentagon, say they're real hijacked commercial planes, and blame it on the towelheads; then we'll just blow up the buildings ourselves to make sure they actually fall down. RUMSFELD: Right! And we'll make sure that some of the hijackers are agents of Saddam Hussein! That way we'll have no problem getting the public to buy the invasion. CHENEY: No, Don, we won't. RUMSFELD: We won't? CHENEY: No, that's too obvious. We'll make the hijackers al-Qaeda and then just imply a connection to Iraq. RUMSFELD: But if we're just making up the whole thing, why not just put Saddam's fingerprints on the attack? CHENEY: (sighing) It just has to be this way, Don. Ups the ante, as it were. This way, we're not insulated if things go wrong in Iraq. Gives us incentive to get the invasion right the first time around. BUSH: I'm a total idiot who can barely read, so I'll buy that. But I've got a question. Why do we need to crash planes into the Towers at all? Since everyone knows terrorists already tried to blow up that building complex from the ground up once, why don't we just blow it up like we plan to anyway, and blame the bombs on the terrorists? RUMSFELD: Mr. President, you don't understand. It's much better to sneak into the buildings ourselves in the days before the attacks, plant the bombs, and then make it look like it was exploding planes that brought the buildings down. That way, we involve more people in the plot, stand a much greater chance of being exposed, and needlessly complicate everything! CHENEY: Of course, just toppling the Twin Towers will never be enough. No one would give us the war mandate we need if we just blow up the Towers. Clearly, we also need to shoot a missile at a small corner of the Pentagon to create a mightily underpublicized additional symbol of international terrorism -- and then, obviously, we need to fake a plane crash in the middle of fucking nowhere somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. RUMSFELD: Yeah, it goes without saying that the level of public outrage will not be sufficient without that crash in the middle of fucking nowhere. CHENEY: And the Pentagon crash -- we'll have to do it in broad daylight and say it was a plane, even though it'll really be a cruise missile. BUSH: Wait, why do we have to use a missile? CHENEY: Because it's much easier to shoot a missile and say it was a plane. It's not easy to steer a real passenger plane into the Pentagon. Planes are hard to come by. BUSH: But aren't we using two planes for the Twin Towers? CHENEY: Mr. President, you're missing the point. With the Pentagon, we use a missile, and say it was a plane. BUSH: Right, but I'm saying, why don't we just use a plane and say it was a plane? We'll be doing that with the Twin Towers, right? CHENEY: Right, but in this case, we use a missile. (Throws hands up in frustration) Don, can you help me out here? RUMSFELD: Mr. President, in Washington, we use a missile because it's sneakier that way. Using an actual plane would be too obvious, even though we'll be doing just that in New York. BUSH: Oh, okay. RUMSFELD: The other good thing about saying that it was a passenger jet is that that way, we have to invent a few hundred fictional victims and account for a nonexistent missing crew and plane. It's always better when you leave more cover story to invent, more legwork to do, and more possible holes to investigate. Doubt, legwork, and possible exposure -- you can't pull off any good conspiracy without them. BUSH: You guys are brilliant! Because if there's one thing about Americans -- they won't let a president go to war without a damn good reason. How could we ever get the media, the corporate world, and our military to endorse an invasion of a secular Iraqi state unless we faked an attack against New York at the hands of a bunch of Saudi religious radicals? Why, they'd never buy it. Look at how hard it was to get us into Vietnam, Iraq the last time, Kosovo? CHENEY: Like pulling teeth! RUMSFELD: Well, I'm sold on the idea. Let's call the Joint Chiefs, the FAA, the New York and Washington DC fire departments, Rudy Giuliani, all three networks, the families of a thousand fictional airline victims, MI-5, the FBI, FEMA, the NYPD, Larry Eagleburger, Osama bin Laden, Noam Chomsky and the fifty thousand other people we'll need to pull this off. There isn't a moment to lose! BUSH: Don't forget to call all of those Wall Street hotshots who donated $100 million to our last campaign. They'll be thrilled to know that we'll be targeting them for execution as part of our thousand-tentacled modern-day bonehead Reichstag scheme! After all, if we're going to make martyrs -- why not make them out of our campaign paymasters? Shit, didn't the Merrill Lynch guys say they needed a refurbishing in their New York offices? RUMSFELD: Oh, they'll get a refurbishing, all right. Just in time for the "Big Wedding"! ALL THREE: (cackling) Mwah-hah-hah! You get the idea. None of this stuff makes any sense at all. If you just need an excuse to assume authoritarian powers, why fake a plane crash in Shanksville? What the hell does that accomplish? If you're using bombs, why fake a hijacking, why use remote-control planes? If the entire government apparatus is in on the scam, then why bother going to all this murderous trouble at all -- only to go to war a year later with a country no one even bothered to falsely blame for the attacks? You won't see any of this explored in 9/11 Truth lore, because the "conspiracy" they're describing is impossible everywhere outside a Zucker brothers movie -- unbelievably stupid in its conception, pointlessly baroque and excessive in its particulars, but flawless in its execution, with no concrete evidence left behind and tens of thousands keeping their roles a secret forever. We are to imagine that not one of Bush's zillions of murderous confederates would slip and leave real incriminating evidence anywhere along the way, forcing us to deduce this massive crime via things like the shaking of a documentary filmmaker's tripod before the Towers' collapse (aha, see that shaking -- it must have been a bomb planted by the president and his ten thousand allies!). Richard Nixon was a hundred times smarter than Bush, and he couldn't prevent leaks and cries of anguished pseudo-conscience from sprouting among a dozen intimately involved conspirators -- but under the 9/11 conspiracy theory, even the lowest FBI agent used to seal off the crime scene never squeaks. It's absurd. I challenge a 9/11 Truth leader like Loose Change writer Dylan Avery to come up with a detailed, complete summary of the alleged plot -- not the bits and pieces, but the whole story, put together -- that would not make any fifth grader anywhere burst out in convulsive laughter. And without that, all the rest of it is bosh and bunkum, on the order of the "sonar evidence" proving the existence of the Loch Ness monster. If you can't put all of these alleged scientific impossibilities together into a story that makes sense, then all you're doing is jerking off -- and it's not like no one's ever done that on the internet before. 9/11 Truth followers will doubtless argue that I am ignoring the mountains of scientific evidence proving that the Towers could not have collapsed as a result of the plane crashes alone, that a plane could not have caused the damage at the Pentagon, that the hole in Shanksville was not caused by a jet. To which I'll have to answer: you're right. I am ignoring it. You idiots. Even if it were not the rank steaming bullshit my few scientist friends assure me that it is, none of that stuff would prove anything. All of the 9/11 science claims belong to the "All men are Socrates" school of logic, so named after the famous Woody Allen syllogism: Socrates was a man; All men are mortal; Therefore, all men are Socrates. That's how 9/11 Truth lore works. The towers couldn't have fallen the way they did; there are no big plane parts in the Pentagon crash photos; therefore, all men are Socrates. That's basically the case against George W. Bush. A bunch of people heard explosions, an anchorman says the falling Towers remind him of a controlled demolition, therefore... George Bush committed the crime of the ages? Am I missing something? In the real world you have to have positive proof of involvement to have a believable conspiracy theory. Take an excellent analogous conspiracy story, the 1999 Russian apartment bombings scandal, in which a series of residential buildings were blown up, with the explosions blamed on Muslim terrorists by Vladimir Putin, who quickly assumed emergency powers and started a war in response. Very similar, superficially, to 9/11 Truth lore. A lot of very smart people in Russia think that the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, might have been involved in those attacks. Why? Not because some pinhead on the internet turned a disaster photo upside down 50 times until he found Waldo lurking in its lower left-hand corner. No, people believe that one because numerous witnesses and a local police department found a real bomb and verifiably traced said bomb to a car belonging to the FSB, which subsequently admitted to having been there and having planted the device (they claimed it was an "exercise"). Subsequently, numerous operatives confessed to having been in on the plot. Moreover, numerous journalists who exposed this story were beaten and harassed, with a few even killed, including an acquaintance of mine named Yuri Shekochikhin who died in spy-novel fashion, felled by a mysterious poison. And yet, even with all that, I'm not sure the apartment bombings theory isn't bullshit. But it's at least worth listening to, especially since political mass murders have been as regular as soccer season in Russia since the days of the Doctor's Plot. Compare that with 9/11 Truth lore, where the only positive evidence linking George Bush to the alleged bombings is the fact that Bush's dipshit brother Marvin once sat on the board of a security company that for a time handled security at the Towers. And that's it -- the rest of it is anecdotal evidence of people hearing explosions (in a collapsing skyscraper full of jet fuel? Shocking!), photos of the suspiciously pristine Pentagon lawn, etc. As for the intrepid 9/11 Truthers exposing this deadly conspiracy, when even one of them suffers so much as a scratch to his mom's minivan for his brave investigative efforts, I want to hear about it, because it'll be the first time. Whenever anyone chooses to dismiss 9/11 conspiracy theorists, accusations fly; the internet screams that you've aided and abetted George Bush. I disagree. To me, the 9/11 Truth movement is, itself, a classic example of the pathology of George Bush's America. Bush has presided over a country that has become hopelessly divided into insoluble, paranoid tribes, one of which happens to be Bush's own government. All of these tribes have things in common; they're insular movements that construct their own reality by cherry-picking the evidence they like from the vast information marketplace, violently disbelieve in the humanity of those outside their ranks, and lavishly praise their own movement mediocrities as great thinkers and achievers. There are as many Thomas Paines in the 9/11 Truth movement as there are Isaac Newtons among the Intelligent Design crowd. There's not a whole lot of difference, psychologically, between Sean Hannity's followers believing liberals to be the same as terrorists, and 9/11 Truthers believing even a the lowest soldier or rank-and-file FAA or NORAD official to be a cold-blooded mass murderer. In both cases you have to be far gone enough into your private world of silly tribal bullshit that the concept of "your fellow citizen" has ceased to have any meaning whatsoever. It may be that America has become too big and complicated for most people to deal with being part of. People are longing for a smaller, stupider reality. Some, like Bush, sell a prepackaged version. Others just make theirs up out of thin air. God help us.

by **nomo** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 12:54 pm

Before the 9/11 Conspiracies, There Was the Oklahoma Bombing By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com Posted on October 24, 2006 <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/43418/">www.alternet.org/story/43418/</a> Over a month after I first wrote a column slamming the 9/11 Truth movement, I continue to get hate mail in massive quantities. A group of Truthers even picketed my office, and I'm still picking food particles out of my scarf after an incident in which the movement's house lunatic, a wild-eyed German blogger named Nico Haupt, tried to goad me into slugging him in a West Side diner. "Go ahead, heet me, then I haf beeg story!" he roared, scream-spitting half-digested detritus in my face. Of course I didn't hit him -- nothing in the world is more ridiculous than two writers fighting in a restaurant. If you're surprised that I would call someone who spit food on my lap a fellow writer, don't be. As I subsequently found out, Haupt is a literary juggernaut, one of the most voluble bloggers on the planet earth. His internet entries read like a MySpace mixture of MTV's Real World meets Che's Congo Diaries, only on meth and in a German accent. His 9/11 conspiracy rants are full of little tidbits from the peripatetic revolutionary's hardscrabble life neatly gift-wrapped for his future biographers, ranging from the personal ("My girlfriend denied to marry me... I'm constantly broke.") to the heroic ("Maybe I'm scared that the Homeland Security will arrest me as a 'terrorist'? Not at all."). Haupt also makes sure to include regular doses of that other staple of pseudo-revolutionary diaries, i.e. the defiant salutation to the secret agents who of course have him under constant surveillance. "A personal note to the NSA, who's a regular log-in guest on my sites," he writes. "You're still bastards for me... Shame on you and go to hell!" But my personal favorite was his theory about how the government's 9/11 conspirators tied up one particularly dangerous loose end:  I always was and always will be a big fan of Ed Asner's movies and TV series, especially "rich man, poor man." Last week, i was a bit disappointed that Asner "caved in" and basically made a u-turn, by writing that 9/11 was based on negligence. I heard a different view a long while ago, even personally from him on the phone. Someone else might speculate, why this has happened now. Maybe someone threatened Asner with some infos of his past? Now there's a subject someone should investigate. What does the government have on Ed Asner? Photos of him shooting smack into Gavin McLeod's ankle? The lost pilot of Gay Lou Grant? If anyone out there has any idea, please don't hesitate to write. Obviously, Nico Haupt does not represent the "mainstream" 9/11 Truth Movement, whatever that is. Even in my own experience I know this to be true. The colleagues of Haupt's from 911Truth.org whom I met that day were universally polite, respectful, and very sincere in their beliefs. True, they had some slightly bent ideas (one woman insisted with a straight face that the military was "behind all that Brad and Jennifer stuff"), but as a group they were nice, earnest people. Unfortunately, I get the sense that these same nice people have a tendency to turn hostile, venomous and unrelentingly paranoid once they get logged back into an email server, which is why most journalists I know won't go near the 9/11 Truth issue more than once, if at all. On the one hand most reporters don't think it's a serious enough issue to bother with twice, and on the other hand nobody wants to deal with the torrent of abuse that comes with trying -- it's like shoving your head into a beehive. "I'd rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick than write about that shit again," is how one columnist put it to me. I'm sure I'll reach that point soon. In the meantime, I feel a need to share something I noticed while studying for a debate I'm supposedly having soon with some of the movement leaders. I doubt it will convince anyone who actually believes this stuff, but it's certainly worth pointing out that the 9/11 Truth movement is not only a cynical fiction, it's a recycled cynical fiction. Take the central "fact" of 9/11 Truth lore, the rhetorical anchor of the entire movement -- the idea that the Twin Towers did not collapse as a result of the gigantic plane/jet-fuel explosions we all saw on television, but because of secondary explosions in other parts of the buildings that were hidden from view. This idea was rocketing around the conspiracy world in almost the exact same rhetorical format just six years before, after the Oklahoma City Federal building bombing. In that case, it was mostly right-wing conspiracy theorists who came up with the idea that the McVeigh/Nichols fertilizer bomb could not possibly have felled the Murrah building, and that the real cause of the building's collapse was a much more powerful "second explosion" planned by the government and executed using more powerful demolition explosives. Here's the lede of a report from World Net Daily, which shortly thereafter would become a major purveyor of 9/11 conspiracy theories, from May 18, 2001:  Multiple witnesses reported hearing more than one explosion the day the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, while other explosives experts contend that the damage done to the building could not have been caused by a single bomb placed outside in a truck. Just like the subsequent 9/11 conspiracy theories, the Oklahoma "second bomb" champions applied intense focus to the initial news reports right after the explosions (ignoring reports published later, by which time various discrepancies were cleared up), during which time numerous reports surfaced indicating that second and third explosive devices had been found, and that secondary explosions had been heard. And just like the 9/11 Truthers, the Oklahoma conspiracists quoted TV anchormen and women who opined offhandedly that the bombings seemed to be the work of sophisticated demolitions experts. Remember the Dan Rather clip used in Loose Change in which the anchorman says the collapse of WTC-7 is "reminiscent" of a controlled demolition? Here's how that worked in OKC: "This is the work of a sophisticated group, this is a very sophisticated device," says one Oklahoma newscaster, in a much-circulated video of early Oklahoma news broadcasts, "and it has to have been done by an explosives expert." Remember, this is just newspeople guessing on live TV; they're not reporting. But in both conspiracy theories, these comments were presented as though they're evidence of something. But what is a collapsing building supposed to remind an anchorman of -- an Aboriginal dance ceremony? An auction of polo ponies? In 9/11 lore we are often told that the fact that people could be seen standing in the craters caused by the planes proved that the fires could not have been hot enough to compromise the steel structure. In Oklahoma City, conspiracists claimed that the fact that the YMCA building across the street from the Murrah building was unaffected proved that the truck bomb could not have caused the damage. "Window washers weren't even knocked off their scaffolding!" screamed one site. Conspiracy theories are always full of this kind of "it's just common sense" rhetoric, i.e. you can't throw an ice cube through the side door of a Buick, so clearly the Titanic was not sunk by an iceberg... Similar appeals can be found throughout 9/11 literature. One of my favorites comes from David Ray Griffin, who in his book The New Pearl Harbor posited that if the falling top-section of the second tower had paused just a half-section each time it collapsed a floor beneath it, it would have taken 40 to 47 seconds to fall, and not the "near-freefall" 11 seconds or so that it actually took. Which is true. It's also true that if the top-section had paused for three seconds on each floor, it would have taken, not 11 seconds, but three minutes to fall! And if it had paused five minutes on each floor, you could have watched the whole first half of Ghost Dad on the fifteenth floor before you died! And so on. Griffin never explains why he thinks the building should have paused a half-second on each floor, but that's why he teaches theology, not engineering. Murrah conspiracists also used the inevitable scientific mumbo-jumbo genus of argument. Here's a typical entry by J. Orlin Grabbe, a ubiquitous conspiracy barnacle who can be found sticking to the cyber-hull of almost every right-wing conspiracy theory from the last two decades, from Vince Foster to Whitewater:  The concrete in the columns had a compressible yield strength of at least (and probably higher than) 3,500 pounds per square inch. Since this value is almost ten times the strength of the blast wave hitting the columns from the truck bomb, the blast wave is insufficient to produce a wave of deformation in the concrete (and thus to turn it back into its sand, gravel, and clay components). In these accounts structures like the Murrah building and the World Trade Center suddenly become architectural Bismarcks, unsinkable engineering wonders seemingly impervious to damage. Just as writers like Griffin went out of their way to quote engineers who said "nowadays, they just don't build them as tough as the World Trade Center," Oklahoma conspiracists focused intently on the remarkably tough core of the federal building. Here's an excerpt from a post-Murrah report by William F. Jasper, who not surprisingly would surface years later as a leading voice of the relatively small right-wing contingent of 9/11 conspiracy theorists:  Critics have argued compellingly that the blast wave from the ANFO truck bomb was totally inadequate to cause the collapse of the massive, steel-reinforced concrete columns of the federal building in Oklahoma City... One need hardly mention that "steel-reinforced" would a few years later become one of the most-widely circulated phrases on the internet (third place, after "rock hard penis" and "buy vicodin online"), in connection with both the Pentagon and the WTC, which were variously supposed to be impenetrable or unshakeable. "For that hole to have been caused by Flight 77," barks Loose Change about the Pentagon crash, "the Boeing would have had to smash through nine feet of steel-reinforced concrete, traveling 310 feet." Says wanttoknow.info of WTC: "First Steel-Reinforced Skyscraper To Ever Collapse in Fire!" "Steel-reinforced" made great waves with the Murrah revisionists, but the likes of Jasper and Grabbe were not quite reputable enough. For the conspiracy theory to really take off, a true authority was needed to put his stamp on the case. So along came Ted Gunderson, who carried the impressive title of a former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI. Gunderson's analysis of Oklahoma City was a staple of conspiracy websites. Here's what he wrote of the Murrah blast:  "A very high tech and top secret barometric bomb was the cause ... could not have been built ... without the knowledge of research classified at the very highest level of top secret by the U.S. government." The Murrah conspiracy sites that referred to Gunderson's conclusions generally failed to point out that Gunderson had devoted much of his post-FBI career to the exposure of a plot called "The Finders," which he alleged was a vast CIA enterprise to kidnap thousands of American children for sex slavery in Satanic cults. Not surprisingly, Gunderson would resurface after 9/11 with a DVD called 9/11 Failure: The True Colors of the New F.B.I., which argued that the F.B.I. had foreknowledge of the attacks. As if that weren't enough, Oklahoma City conspiracy theorists also pointed to seismic evidence proving the existence of secondary explosions. Raise your hands, kids, if you've seen anything like this graph before. It's a chart put together by the Oklahoma Geological Survey purportedly "proving" that there was more than one explosion in Oklahoma City that day: <img src="http://www.alternet.org/images/managed/storyimage_figa.jpg" style="border:0;"/> Compare that to the seismic graph from the Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.J., frequently cited as "proof" that there were secondary explosions in the Towers. <img src="http://www.alternet.org/images/managed/storyimage_figb.jpg" style="border:0;"/> In both cases the seismologists who actually compiled the data rejected conspiracy explanations, but the non-scientists peddling the conspiracy theories overrode them, apparently knowing better how to interpret their data. Both Oklahoma City conspiracy theorists and 9/11 revisionists circulated "eyewitness accounts" of strange men in suits confiscating evidence -- the last link in the coverup. Regarding the Oklahoma City bombing, here's an account from www.whatreallyhappened.com:  The minister who married my wife and I was in OK City right after the Murrah Building bomb(s) exploded, and he volunteered to help dig for survivors. He told of three very odd occurrences. In the first, he was required to show his ID six times before being allowed to help look for survivors. In the second, he confirmed the stories told by others that men in suits and ties were literally stepping over the wounded in their haste to gather up files and certain other items in the debris. Compare that to this account (complete with photo) from 9-1-1Research.com of the cleanup at the Pentagon after 9/11:  Photographs taken immediately following the attack show a number of pieces of apparent aircraft debris. One of the larger pieces was documented by a photograph by passery-by Mark Faram. It shows the piece on the lawn northwest of the heliport, a few hundred feet from the impact center, suggesting it may have been moved before Faram arrived. Other photographs show people, some in dress attire, moving pieces of debris. <img src="http://www.alternet.org/images/managed/storyimage_fig.c.jpg" style="border:0;"/> How about the suspects, the patsies? Well, in both the OKC bombing and in 9/11, the supposed fall guys are reportedly seen on American military bases before the attacks. Here's how one conspiracy site described the OKC evidence: Prior to the attack, a pilot flying over a small military base outside of Oklahoma City photographed a Ryder Truck similar, if not entirely identical, to the truck used by Timothy McVeigh, inside the compound. Here's how this trick surfaced in 9/11 lore, according to one site (and repeated similarly in thousands of others):  Four of the hijackers trained at Pensacola Naval Air Station, a base that trains many foreign nationals. The Pensacola story continues to circulate today, even though it was long ago established that these accounts of hijackers like Saeed Alghamdi living on U.S. military bases resulted from the same error -- confusing the hijackers with men with similar Arab names -- that initially led some journalists to think that some of the 9/11 hijackers were still alive (more on that nonsense in a future column -- I've almost finished chasing down the last of those reports, work that people like the Loose Change documentarians should have done long ago). How about faked evidence? In the Murrah case, there was much suspicion about one crucial discovery. "The truck axle found at the site is alleged to have been moved or planted, or to have its vehicle identification number doctored to implicate McVeigh," recounts the Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories. Numerous Murrah conspiracy sites complain that the axle should have been destroyed in the blast, that the government must have known about McVeigh in advance and planted the truck-part at the scene (I love the idea of the government blowing up a normal truck axle, carving McVeigh's VIN number on it, surreptitiously leaving it at the scene -- probably dropping it through a pantleg a la The Great Escape -- and then finding it themselves a few hours later). In 9/11 Truth, it's the fragment of hijacker Ziad Jarrah's passport that too-mysteriously survives, making it famous as the "crash-proof passport" which one source says strains "the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI's War on Terrorism." Popular Mechanics, in its 9/11 Truth debunking, also recalled one site that listed all the evidence found implicating the hijackers, including Mohammed Atta's suitcase and the rental car, and wrote after each notation: "HOW CONVENIENT!" How about the "the attacks were too sophisticated for such hicks to pull off" argument? It, too was present in both OKC and 9/11. In the Oklahoma City bombing we were told time and again that the bombing was beyond the capabilities of a pair of dolts like Nichols and McVeigh, while the line about "19 boxcutter-wielding Arabs led by a guy in a cave outwitting the U.S. military" is one of the most commonly repeated lines of the 9/11 movement. One could go on in this way forever. What good conspiracy theory, for instance, would lack an allegation of some highly-placed insider who is warned ahead of time to stay away from the crime scene? This one you can find in almost any popular scandal dating back a hundred years. J.P. Morgan, it is said, was warned off the Titanic. Remember those rumors about Richard Nixon being warned off Korean Air Lines Flight 007? How about Lockerbie? Conspiracy theorists back then insisted that state department employees were "tipped off" in advance of the fateful crash. In Oklahoma City, there were repeated whispers that government employees were warned in advance to stay away from the Murrah building. Some conspiracists were even more specific: "The first appointed trial judge in the OKC case, Judge Wayne Alley, was removed after it was learned that he was warned to stay away from the Murrah Federal Building in the days before the bombing," wrote William F. Jasper, who of course would surface years later with nearly identical allegations of government foreknowledge in 9/11. As for insiders serendipitously warned away from the bomb site, there are plenty of those stories in 9/11 lore, too -- I even got a letter from one Truther pointing to the fact that Bush nephew Jim Pierce had a meeting in the Towers rescheduled as evidence of foreknowledge. (The source saying Pierce's meeting was rescheduled was Barbara Bush, which would mean that the Bushes were intentionally informing the public about their dastardly efforts to warn off their relatives). That the motive for the bombings would be the same in both cases is no surprise, I guess. OKC conspiracists believed the Murrah bombing was a smokescreen for the "introduction of laws cracking down on 'patriot' militias," while the usual 9/11 explanation, ironically, involves an excuse to pass the Patriot Act. "Can you imagine the Patriot Act passing without 9/11 having taken place?" screams one site. No surprise, again, because the motive of most all secret government conspiracies is usually supposed to be some kind of aggrandizement of power. But it's certainly an interesting coincidence that both the Murrah and the WTC bombings were also imagined to have been committed to destroy actual physical evidence of the plot inside the respective buildings. "There has been a U.S. government (primarily BATF and FBI) cover-up motivated by the desire to destroy evidence of a 'government sting gone bad,'" writes Grabbe about the OKC bombings. This dovetails nicely with the usual explanation for the "pulling" of WTC-7: "WTC 7 was allowed to be taken down so it would destroy evidence of the greatest crime in American history," insists one of many 9/11 Truth sites. I think this last contention has to be the absolute funniest detail in all 9/11 lore -- the contention that the CIA or whoever destroyed a whole building to get rid of the "evidence" of the 9/11 plot, which many alleged was masterminded from the CIA offices in WTC-7. The same people who complain endlessly that they can't get the evidence they need without subpoena power imagine that the Central Intelligence Agency somehow needs to destroy its own buildings in order to keep its "secret plans" (contained in a Mission Impossible-style folder, no doubt!) from leaking to... the 9/11 Truth Movement! Why would the CIA need to do that, if they don't even need a shredder -- shit, not even a four-dollar Master Lock -- to keep their 9/11 secrets hidden now? And what evidence could possibly exist that would be so unwieldy that it would require the destruction of an entire building to be rid of? What, did the CIA carve its 9/11 plans in a 7,000-pound slab of New Hampshire granite in the WTC-7 basement? Were they doodled on the CIA bathroom stalls? Here I sit, broken-hearted. Came to shit, but only... planned controlled demolition of the World Trade Center! Seriously, what "evidence" had to go? And why wouldn't they just remove it surreptitiously, rather than blowing up a gazillion-dollar building on live international television, leaving the rubble to the mercy of firemen and whoever else was down there? The obvious answer to this entire essay, of course, is that both conspiracies are absolutely true. The government committed both crimes, in both cases leaving no evidence except that which can be deduced by engineers, amateur seismological readings, mysterious forewarnings, pictures of men in suits concealing evidence, rumors about patsies seen on military bases, and, of course, the always-reliable Cui bono? If that's the case, one really has to give it to the government -- those guys are good. They can't keep sex scandals or fundraising corruption or classified Pentagon war assessments or clandestine wiretap programs a secret, but they can commit two humongous mass murders and get away with them, being arrogant and devious enough to leave exactly the same maddeningly incomplete circumstantial evidence behind for us to stew over in both cases. Almost like they did it on purpose that way, to fuck with us. Which is kind of funny, when you think about it. In fact, if they did pull that off, they fucking deserve to get away with it. Anyone that clever must know what they're doing. p.s. Truthers are going to complain that I still haven't addressed the science claims. That's coming next. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nomo@rigorousintuition>nomo</A> at: 10/25/06 11:24 am

by **sunny** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 1:14 pm

Ridiculous claim #1: <blockquote>Quote:<hr>a single document anywhere that lays out a single, concrete theory of what happened, who ordered what and when they ordered it, and why.<hr></blockquote> Umm, yeah. Like mass murderers spell out their entire plans in a single document and leave it lying around for researchers to find. Yeah. Happens all the time. Someone send that man The Coincidence Theorists Guide to 9-11. Also, someone send him Mineta's testimony in front of the Kean Commission, proving beyond doubt Cheney ordered a stand-down of air defences over Washington.

by **nomo** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 1:22 pm

Sorry Sunny, you gotta work on your reading comprehension. The author isn't looking for "a single document" by the perpetrators, but one from the 9/11 "Truthers", one document that spells out what they believe happened. Not just grainy pictures and baseless conjectures about "thermate" or some such bullshit, but a single comprehensive theory that spells out what "Truthers" think took place that day. Know of one, per chance? And speaking of all those Coincidences, whaddabout trying to piece them together to form a coherent theory? Or are we supposed to read them and scratch our heads and make something up? Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nomo@rigorousintuition>nomo</A> at: 10/25/06 11:33 am

by **erosoplier** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 1:32 pm

Haven't read the articles yet - I will, I'm just not in the right head-space at the moment. George Bush wasn't behind the 9/11 attacks. Did you see him at Booker elementary? He was like a rabbit caught in the headlights, trying very hard not to look like one! (And did you see Tony Blair at the 7/7 G8 summit post-bombs press conference? He was visibly embarassed - he was blushing. He was embarassed at being thrust into the spotlight like that, because he knew the bombings could only have been an inside job, but he had to try to put the right face on for the peoples!). Bush sat there thinking "Oh fuck, what's going on??!! What are they doing? ...Haaaa...I'm supposed to be the decider, I should act like I'm doin something - doing What Needs To Be Done Once When The Nation Comes Under Attack! But what If I do something and fuck up the plan??!! They'll be serious pissed if I fuck up the plan. I don't wanna fuck up the plan. Herrr...I'll just sit here a while, chew my lip.....Oh fuck. Look cool, look cool." That's what Bush was thinking. He had nothing to do with 9/11 really. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=erosoplier>erosoplier</A> at: 10/25/06 11:33 am

by **sunny** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 1:36 pm

Forgive my lack of reading apprehension skills. Nevertheless, why should the burden be on a bunch of amateurs who lack access to crucial documetation? People are asking questions. Shoud that not be allowed? Why are people crazy for disbelieving a theory with massive holes in it? Crossing the Rubicon, however, could serve as a "single document" on the theory of the crime.

by **nomo** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 1:51 pm

You're assuming that those holes in the story are real. It is of course fine to ask questions, but the problem with most "Truthers" is that that is all they do. But sheer innuendo is not  a good alternative theory for what happened that day. And claiming a lack of evidence available to you is not one, either. In fact, that would imply that putting forth a theory is decidedly premature. Crossing the Rubicon, as far as I'm concerned is a decent account of how 9/11 has been taken advantage of, but it does not offer a convincing alternative account of the actual events of that day.

by **darkbeforedawn** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:00 pm

Yeah Nomo, guess we just have to go back to the old totally reliable Fox news account of the 19 hijackers (most of which couldn't pilot a pizza delivery truck) flawlessly manuevering jumbo jets full of screaming passengers into mysteriously disintegrating buildings that had just been insured for enormous sums against just such an attack by people who simply had no idea that "planes could be flown in to buildings by terrorists." Of course, this is not as strange as the fact that many of the "terrorists"-as yet unlisted on any known flight manifest--are still alive. But I'm wasting my time...as I'm sure you know. Your fairy tales are simply charming, and you know they are a lot more comforting than thinking our government contrived this war which murdered over 600,000 innocents simply for strategic control of resources. Nah, they wouldn't do that now would they, old boy?

by **Seamus OBlimey** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:02 pm

nomo, you're such a twit. You ask "Truthers" to explain exactly how the plan was carried out when we've all had five years to see exactly why. If you really believe the official conspiracy theory that 19 arabs with no connections to US intelligence did it then please explain exactly how and why.

by **dugoboy** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:19 pm

i skimmed thru this thread so sorry if i missed a few things. seamus is right in that there is no way we will ever truly know what happened on 9/11. i wrote a comment on one of jeff's recent posts saying this very thing. there comes a time when we must realize we will never know. it'll become much like the JFK assassination, we'll have endless theories and in the end we will never know. whether or not 9/11 was LIHOP or MIHOP or both or just a huge coincidence....you cannot deny the things that 9/11 allowed the bush administration to do: patriot act, afghanistan (secure heroin fields), secure complete legislative control, scare the crap out of people, iraq, win reelection, wiretappping, and pass the military commisions act. we are now on the fast track to fascism, maybe even ahead of schedule. what can we do? i have no fucking clue.. ___________________________________________ "Fascism finds root best in unreality, dysfunction and irresponsibility." - Me "Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act" -George Orwell "When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it - always." -Mahatma GandhiEdited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=dugoboy@rigorousintuition>dugoboy</A> <IMG HEIGHT=10 WIDTH=10 SRC="http://www.geocities.com/orcthrasher/files/images/Qn38113.gif" BORDER=0> at: 10/25/06 12:24 pm

by **nomo** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:27 pm

Fine, while you kids continue the silly little debate about what might have happened that day, the grownups have moved on from even before that day up to where we are now. Don't you see that in the end you're doing exactly what Bush & Co want you to do? Obsess over "thermate" and other such rubbish until the cows come home, but in the meantime the world's aflame, people are dying, and THAT's what you should be investing your energies in. Just for a brief moment, take a deep breath and think about it: it is entirely within the realm of possibilities that 19 hijackers flew those planes into the buildings, and it is indeed entirely possible that those buildings came down because of structural damage. You say it's impossible? Well, you're trying to prove a negative and it makes you look silly. And you're still wasting everyone's time.

by **nomo** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:28 pm

Oh, and what Dugobay said.

by **Seamus OBlimey** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:47 pm

So you started a new thread and posted two long articles debunking questioners just to show us kids you're an adult now?

by **dugoboy** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:50 pm

oh and i also said, in that comment, how i hoped we could move beyond 9/11 yet understanding the most probable causes of that event and then looking at 9/11 as just one of a long serious of events stretching back to even the jfk assassination and project northwoods, even back to the establishment of the federal reserve and the 16th ammendment and to the court decision that corporations should be treated as 'people'. ___________________________________________ "Fascism finds root best in unreality, dysfunction and irresponsibility." - Me "Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act" -George Orwell "When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it - always." -Mahatma Gandhi

by **sunny** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:56 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>but in the meantime the world's aflame, people are dying, and THAT's what you should be investing your energies in.<hr></blockquote> That is the main reason for a truth movement, in fact. Bushco happen to be the only entities in the entire world who benefitted from 9-11. Bushco then lit the world aflame, based on the 9-11 rationale, making money by the tankerfull all the while. If we had a truly independent media, as opposed to state run propaganda organs, asking tough questions of the criminals from the very beginning, their world igniting agenda's could have been stymied. To say that people concerned with the truth behind 9-11 are somehow unconcerned with the horrors that arose afterward is disengenous, to say the least.

The Idiocy Behind the '9/11 Truth' Movement

The Idiocy Behind the '9/11 Truth' Movement

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