Mark Steyn: 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?

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.

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.

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?"

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.

Did you hear about the "SUV" that ran over about a dozen people out in San Francisco?

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1692699/posts

I sure did. It kind of reminds me of a joke by a comedian (Seinfeld?) where someone is trying to describe a mugger while being politically correct. I hadn't considered the speculation about the safety of SUV's being a talking point. But I was sure his mental stability would come into play. But, indeed, at least with some sidewalk drivers, there is a question of craziness or drunkenness. I don't recall the Duke incident offhand.

It's like we are fighting the war blindfolded.

And that's the way some like it!

Silly me, missed the editing.

"http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1692699/posts" should be:

Family: Suspect in SF rampage thought 'devil was coming to him'

Getting Muslims to believe Muslims were behind 9/11 is akin to taking a poll after Jesus was crucified and asking the locals if He really was the Son of God. A minority would say yes. The majority would say no. Thankfully polls do not determine the truth in such cases.

Hey, I have a B.S. in Zoology and it wasn't a soft science (then - UCLA Class 1969).

They taught me a great tool which these fools have either never learned or forgotten.

Occam's Razor.

Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham (Guilhelmi Ockam and Guillermi de ockam in Latin [1]). Originally a tenet of the reductionist philosophy of nominalism, it is more often taken today as a heuristic maxim that advises economy, parsimony, or simplicity in scientific theories.

Occam's razor states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or "shaving off", those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (law of succinctness):

entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,

which translates to:

entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor

Who's here? HoosierGal!

Welcome. I imagine you live or work around Goshen.

Your observations are very good. I knew peaceniks at Notre Dame, some influenced by Howard Yoder. They are big on being against war, but not clear on dealing with aggression.

I hate to break it to you, but your dog's one of Them. You've been under his subtle control for years. Think about it - which one of you gets up, heads over to the can opener, and feeds the other one?

I came to that same realization a couple of years ago. I had a day off and spent it running errands for my pets while they rode around in the back seat. My dogs will come up to me and start barking and I'll let them out. They bark again and I let them in and give them a bone. It took them a couple of years, but I'm trained now.

I honestly don't know what kind of bizarre bloodlust showing the events at every station identification will satisfy.

OK - first it will desensitize and then it will satisfy bloodlust. Which is it?

I think it will serve as a reminder. I have seen recent footage of the second plane smashing into the south tower. I would never confuse that jetliner for a drone.

But there are many who haven't seen what actually happened for 5 years. They need to see it.

And if you broadcast it once an hour, most people will see it 3 times a day or fewer.

Shalom.

The thing that still gets me about the plane swap - why? I mean, the conspiracy folks say that they downed the planes in the ocean, killing all aboard - why not just fly the damn things into their targets rather than relying on the drone concept?

Instead you got this complicated switch, flying a plane into the WTC, planting explosives, triggering the explosives, etc, etc, etc, whereas you could have just flown the damn planes into the thing.

Total nutjobs, so far beyond reason, and they're the Netnuts that are driving the Democrat agenda today. You can disagree on a awful lot of issues, but when your backbenchers are raving loons, there's just not much one can accomplish.

Hopefully the raving loons will continue to get attention. Any rational person would be repulsed by them, liberal or conservative.

Satoisfy the bizaare bloodlust of those advocating a daily screening of the 911 atrocity on every station identification.

Desensitize everyone else who doesn't have that strange fixation.

I dont think what you advocate will make 911 more meaningful to most people. As I said, it will make it less real.

Yeah, the LIVE VIDEO I was watching that morning ...

You thought that was live? That was all produced at ILM/CIA/NSA/FOX HQ months ahead of time, then seamlessly inserted.

Who are you going to believe, thousands of eyewitnesses and your own logic, or me?

I dont think what you advocate will make 911 more meaningful to most people. As I said, it will make it less real.

Doesn't matter - they've already forgotten. Had we kept playing it (hourly, daily, at the start of each day, etc) they might accept the images as real. However, we didn't, so now they would think it was some kind of Hollywood production.

Shalom.

Anyone who thinks that the U.S. government is capable, audacious, and brilliant enough to pull off something like 9/11 and hide it flawlessly, has clearly never worked for ... the U.S. government.

99.9999 percent of government employees wouldn't go along with it, and the ones that wouldn't would be ratting out the conspirators with the very first shred of real evidence they found. Which they'd find, unless there isn't any. You simply can't hide a conspiracy the way that the theoriests describe it happening.

Unless, of course... you're the all powerful, all knowing President of the United States. Who, oddly enough, is considered a big dummy by most of the theorists.

It's one of two extremes with these guys. Either Bush is the dumbest rube to every bumble his way into the White House, or he's a diabolical mastermind who pulled off the greatest conspiracy in history. Whichever fits their need, depending on where in the narrative they are.

For some morons, it was not convincing enough that Bin Laden acknowledged on film that he organized 9/11.

Bin Laden? You do realize that Bin Laden is really just President Bush wearing a mask, right? He and Dr. Ayman Zawa-Cheney are the ones who have been making all of those jihadist videos.

Karl Rove was also playing an al-Qa'ida mastermind in his spare time, but they arranged for his alter ego, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, to be "arrested in Pakistan" so he could get back to the one job he truly loves.

Reprogramming Diebold machines.

I mean, seriously, how have you guys not figured this out yet? Have you ever seen Bush and Bin Laden in the same room? I feel like the guy watching Superman who cringes when no one notices Clark Kent "suddenly disappear" right before Superman shows up.

"Gee, President Bush, where'd ya go? You missed bin Laden! He was right here!"

Think about it! He can't catch bin Laden because he is bin Laden.

Idiots!

Do think the fact that credible news outlets such as Fox News (i.e.O'Reilly for one program. . .) decide to actually debate the 'rumor'; by turn give 'sustenance' to this garbage and help perpetuate it.

A rediculous state of 'news' and/or affairs. . .to give this sickness a forum. . .

Why does the government insist that when individual Muslims run civilians down with their SUV's or gun them down at Jewish community centers or EL AL ticket counters, that it isn't Islamic terrorism?

Is it really the *gov't* that insists this, or the MSM? I don't hear gov't comments on these episodes (and there are more all the time), but I notice that the MSM doesn't give us the names of the perps - otherwise we'd notice that they are Muslim.

We're treating these all as individual crimes here, but if this same stuff was happening in Iraq at the same rate, we'd be calling it "civil war".

And who's to know if the gov't is monitoring these people? Maybe they are, but if the NYT finds out, they'd have to stop.

After all, no one wanted to believe that Hitler had bad intentions back in 1938, either.

That's the point that Rumsfeld has been making lately. He's getting raked over the coals by the Dems and the MSM for doing it, but I applaud him (and Bush) for doing it.
I think this is definitely the important issue.

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