Posted on 08/30/2006 8:32:01 AM PDT by UnklGene
Call me crazy. I blame terrorists.
How can 36 per cent of people polled think U.S. officials knew of or participated in 9/11?
MARK STEYN
Who is A. K. Dewdney? He's an adjunct professor of biology at the University of Western Ontario, and he has pieced together the truth about what happened on 9/11. You may be familiar with the official version: "To account for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush White House has produced a scenario involving Arab hijackers flying large aircraft into American landmarks," writes the eminent Ontario academic. "We, like millions of other 9/11 skeptics, have found this explanation to be inconsistent with the facts of the matter."
Instead, he argues, a mid-air plane switch took place on three of the jets. "The passengers of one of the flights died in an aerial explosion over Shanksville, Pa.," he writes, "and the remaining passengers (and aircraft) were disposed of in the Atlantic Ocean." Most of us swallowed "the Bush-Cheney scenario" because we were unaware that, when two planes are less than half a kilometre apart, they appear as a single blip on the radar screen. Thus, the covert switch. Instead of crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the flights were diverted by FBI agents on board to Harrisburg, Pa., where the passengers from all three planes were herded onto UA Flight 175 and flown on to Cleveland Hopkins and their deaths. By then, unmanned Predator drones had been substituted for the passenger jets and directed into their high-profile targets. The original planes and their passengers were finished off over the Atlantic.
But what about all those phone calls, especially from Flight 93? Ha, scoffs Dewdney. "Cellphone calls made by passengers were highly unlikely to impossible. Flight UA93 was not in the air when most of the alleged calls were made. The calls themselves were all faked." Michel Chossudovsky, of Quebec's Centre for Research on Globalization, agrees: "It was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft travelling at high speed above 8,000 feet."
So all the "Let's roll" stuff was cooked up by the government spooks. So, presumably, were the calls from the other planes. Flight 175 passenger Peter Hanson to his father: "Passengers are throwing up and getting sick. The plane is making jerky movements." This at a time when, according to professor Dewdney, Flight 175 was preparing to land smoothly at Harrisburg. Or Flight 11 stewardess Madeline Sweeney: "We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low. Oh my God, we are way too low." Two minutes later, Flight 11 supposedly crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center -- though, as professor Dewdney has demonstrated, by then the plane wasn't even in the state. These so-called "calls" all used state-of-the art voice modification technology to make family members believe they were talking to loved ones rather than vocally disguised government agents. In the case of Todd Beamer's "Let's roll!" the spooks had gone to the trouble of researching and identifying individual passengers' distinctive conversational expressions.
In the end, says Dewdney, Flight 93 was shot down by a "military-looking all-white aircraft." It was an A-10 Thunderbolt cunningly repainted to . . . well, the professor doesn't provide a rationale for why you'd go to the trouble to paint a military aircraft. But the point is, several eyewitnesses reported seeing a white jet in the vicinity of the Flight 93 Pennsylvania crash site, so naturally conspiracy theorists regard that as supporting evidence that the plane was brought down by the U.S. military rather than after a heroic passenger uprising against their jihadist hijackers. "It was taken out by the North Dakota Air Guard," announced retired army Col. Donn de Grand Pre. "I know the pilot who fired those two missiles to take down 93." It was Maj. Rick Gibney, who destroyed the aircraft with a pair of Sidewinders at precisely 9:58 a.m.
Ooooo-kay. We now turn to a brand-new book edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan called Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts. Brad Reagan? There's a name for conspiracy theorists to ponder, notwithstanding his cover as a "contributing editor" for Popular Mechanics. First things first: Maj. Rick Gibney is a lieutenant-colonel. At 9:58 a.m. he wasn't in Shanksville, Pa., but in Fargo, N.D. At 10:45, he took off for Bozeman, Mont., where he picked up Edward Jacoby, Jr., director of the New York State Emergency Management Office, and flew him back to Albany, N.Y., in a two-seat F-16B, unarmed -- i.e., no Sidewinders. The white plane was not an attractively painted A-10 Thunderbolt but a Dassault Falcon 20 corporate jet belonging to the company that owns Wrangler, North Face and other clothing lines. It was coming into Johnstown, near Shanksville, when Flight 93 disappeared and the FAA radioed to ask them if they could look around. "The plane circled the crash site twice," write Dunbar and Reagan, "and then flew directly over it to mark the exact latitude and longitude on the plane's navigation system."
Just for the record, I believe that a cell of Islamist terrorists led by Mohammed Atta carried out the 9/11 attacks. But that puts me in a fast-shrinking minority. In the fall of 2001, a coast-to-coast survey of Canadian imams found all but two insistent that there was no Muslim involvement in 9/11.
Oh, well. It was just after 9/11, everyone was still in shock.
Five years later, a poll in the United Kingdom found that only 17 per cent of British Muslims believe there was any Arab involvement in 9/11.
Ah, but it's a sensitive issue over there, what with Tony Blair being so close to Bush and all.
Professor Dewdney's plane-swap theory?
Come on, if you already live in Canada, it's not such a leap to live in an alternative universe.
But what are we to make of the Scripps Howard poll taken this month in which 36 per cent of those surveyed thought it "somewhat likely" or "very likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks or had knowledge of them beforehand?
Debunking 9/11 Myths does a grand job of explaining such popular conspiracy-website mainstays as how a 125-foot-wide plane leaves a 16-foot hole in the Pentagon. Answer: it didn't. The 16-foot hole in the Pentagon's Ring C was made by the plane's landing gear. But the problem isn't scientific, it's psychological: if you're prepared to believe that government agents went to the trouble of researching, say, gay rugby player Mark Bingham's family background and vocal characteristics so they could fake cellphone calls back to his mom, then clearly you're not going to be deterred by mere facts. As James B. Meigs, the editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, remarks toward the end of this book, the overwhelming nature of the evidence is, to the conspiratorially inclined, only further evidence of a cover-up: "One forum posting that has multiplied across the Internet includes a long list of the physical evidence linking the 19 hijackers to the crime: the rental car left behind at Boston's Logan airport, Mohammed Atta's suitcase, passports recovered at the crash sites, and so on. 'HOW CONVENIENT!' the author notes after each citation. In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic of conspiracism, there is no piece of information that cannot be incorporated into one's pet theory."
When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that's one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:
"I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don't think I could still live here. I'm not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?"
Over to you, Col. de Grand Pre, and Charlie Sheen, and Alan Colmes.
The sad reality is that never before has an enemy hidden in such plain sight. Osama bin Laden declared a jihad against America in 1998. Iran's nuclear president vows to wipe Israel off the map. A year before the tube bombings, radical Brit imam Omar Bakri announced that a group of London Islamists are "ready to launch a big operation" on British soil. "We don't make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents," he added, clarifying the ground rules. "Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value."
Our enemies hang their shingles on Main Street, and a University of Western Ontario professor puts it down to a carefully planned substitution of transponder codes.
Debunking this 'professor' is like taking batting practice from my little sister. Just too easy.
Just for the record, I believe that a cell of Islamist terrorists led by Mohammed Atta carried out the 9/11 attacks. But that puts me in a fast-shrinking minority.
Steyn says it like it is. I guess we need to state it now, but it seems so obvious.
It's amazing how many people will suck up the notion that we did it to ourselves, and worse, that we somehow 'deserve' it, rather than the truth that terrorists are gunning for us. A real issue with denial.
BTTT
As in, "my name is Shelly, I like walks in the rain and cats"?
Where are Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and the Lone Gunmen when ya need them???!!!
Well, you know what BS means.
MS is just More S***
PhD is Piled Higher and Deeper.
Shalom.
Ah, the old mid-air plane switcheroo...
They need to show the footage of the plan slamming into the south tower, then both towers streaming smoke into the air while people jump to their deaths, at every station identification.
Shalom.
Well said Omar. That is my interpretation of your religion in a nutshell. Now if only the Muslim apostates and Muslim heretics continue to believe in a more peaceful approach to the Infidels, us Infidels have a good chance of doing you in. - tom
Hi, everyone. This is my first post on FR; I've lurked here for about two years, and feel the need to post on this subject. I work in a facility run by the Mennonites; most of my co-workers are conscientious objectors. Needless to say, we have frequent debates about the current geopolitical situation. What I have found is that people who embrace the concept of "world peace" do not have a workable solution to deal with a threat that is external, evil, and implacable. Their usual responses are to (1) deny the reality; (2) ignore the reality; (3) blame someone who won't retaliate (i.e., the Jews, the Bush Administration, the USA), or (4) invent some alternative theory about what the reality really is. One of my co-workers actually told me she would not read the Koran, "because there are things in it that might upset me." Their world view is so idealistic and so fragile, that it cannot stand up to reality. The truth creates a terrible cognitive dissonance for them. These people do not have bad intentions, but I fear that their "peaceful" world view will ultimately cost a lot more lives than it will save. After all, no one wanted to believe that Hitler had bad intentions back in 1938, either.
Welcome to FR!
So...it WAS the Germans who bombed us at Pearl Harbor!!!
Steyn ping!
" a University of Western Ontario professor puts it down to a carefully planned substitution of transponder codes"
No matter how educated or intelligent a person is, we are all equally capable of being delusional.
For some morons, it was not convincing enough that Bin Laden acknowledged on film that he organized 9/11.
Welcome HS.
The reason the "world peace" folks can never come up with a workable solution is that they are dreaming of a different world. Just as the sun rises in the East, our fallen world is full of war & slaughter & rape & murder & oppression & torture & jealousy & greed & lies & betrayal & disease & difficult decisions. To think any different is equivalent to wishing the sun to rise in the West.
It's irresistible to get incensed with idiots like the 9/11 conspiracy kooks especially when they phone radio shows and potentially spread their kookiness. The host(s) should say:
1) Conspiracy theorists are narcissists. They take comfort, even pride, in 'knowing' some deep dark secret.
2) Most of the conspiracy nuts are XXL ignoramuses. They know every minute detail of 9/11 or JFK in Dallas yet they probably can't name half the state capitals, tell you what the chemical formula for water is, or explain why sound travels faster in water than it does in air (just to pick a few at random). In other words, they are mentally ill and absorb thousands of 'facts' to cover their illness while being deficient in almost every other area of cognition.
Oops... I meant "Welcome HG"
Won't happen again - promise.
Amen. They can't show it enough, imho. I'm surprised the people I know who now, if not before, think it wasn't terrorism by others. Recently, I had an opportunity to visit Ground Zero. I've never seen in person the Towers while they stood. Around that same time, Charlie Sheen was quoted as supporting a 'we did it to ourselves' theory. I was, and am, aghast. And then the 911 phone calls were released. And still people prefer to believe that it was some government thing.
It's frightening how far some people will go to shove their heads deeply into the sand to avoid the truth and deny that terrorists wish us harm.
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