Posted on 09/11/2006 7:10:10 AM PDT by aculeus
Edited on 09/12/2006 3:52:54 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
They believe there weren't any planes on 9/11, just missiles wrapped in holograms - and there weren't any London terrorists on 7/7 either. The new-wave conspiracy theorists aren't green-ink types: they're educated; they have secret service connections; they live in Highgate.
At first sight, David Shayler and Annie Machon's home in Highgate - the leafiest of London's leafy suburbs - looks like a picture of middle-class respectability. There are Japanese landscape paintings on the living-room walls. Shelves groan under the weight of hardback novels and books on politics. An Alsatian with a well-kept, glossy coat looks on curiously as Belinda McKenzie - the grandmotherly landlady of the house - serves tea in china cups with a plate of delicious shortbread biscuits. "Enjoy," she says in a soft, plummy English accent.
Then you notice the curiosities. On the table sits a document about the "controlled demolition" of the twin towers. The shelves hold books titled The 9/11 Commission Report: omissions and distortions and The New Pearl Harbor: disturbing questions about the Bush administration and 9/11. There's a stack of colourful leaflets advertising a club night called Truth 9/11, to take place in Brixton in a week's time, the "11" in "9/11" represented by two tall stereo speakers. DVDs litter a work desk. One is called 7/7: mind the gap. The cover of another, titled Loose Change, asks: "What if 9/11 were an inside job rather than the work of al-Qaeda...?"
This cluttered house in the heart of respectable, latte-drinking Highgate doubles as the hub of the British and Irish 9/11 Truth Campaign. It's a loose group, founded in January 2004, which suspects precisely that 9/11 was an "inside job", organised and executed by a "shadowy elite" made up of individuals from the FBI, the CIA, the arms industry and politics. Shayler and Machon - the boyfriend-and-girlfriend former spies who famously left MI5 in 1996 after becoming disgruntled - are its leading lights. They've gone from being the Posh and Becks of the whistle-blowing world to something very like the Richard and Judy of the 9/11 conspiracy-theory set.
Sitting on the comfy couch, their cups of tea in hand, they try to convince me that the 11 September 2001 attacks were executed by elements in the west who wanted to launch wars and "make billions upon trillions of dollars".
"We know for certain that the official story of 9/11 isn't true," says Shayler. "The twin towers did not collapse because of planes and fire; they were brought down in a controlled demolition. The Pentagon was most likely hit by an American missile, not an aeroplane." Machon nods. In black trousers and black top, this sophisticated blonde in her late thirties comes across more like a schoolmarm than a 9/11 anorak. "The Pentagon's anti-missile defence system would definitely have picked up and dealt with a commercial airliner. We can only assume that whatever hit the Pentagon was sending a friendly signal. A missile fired by a US military plane would have sent a friendly signal." She says this in a kind of Anna Ford-style newsreader's voice, as if she were speaking the truth and nothing but the truth. She takes another sip of tea.
Say the phrase "conspiracy theorist" (but don't say it to Shayler and Machon if you can help it, because they angrily deny being conspiracy theorists) and most people will think of those nutty militiamen in redneck areas of America who hate Big Government, or of taxi drivers with possibly anti-Semitic leanings in some hot, dusty backwater of the Middle East who revel in telling western clients in particular: "America and the Jew did 9/11." Yet, here in Highgate, I am talking to a man and woman who have worked in the British secret services and who, together with their landlady Belinda, a professional linguist, truly believe that American elements facilitated 9/11 in order to "justify their adventurism in oil-rich countries in the Middle East", in Shayler's words. Here we have a new kind of conspiracy theorist: the chattering conspiracist, respectable, well-read, articulate, but, I regret to report, no less cranky than those rednecks and misguided Kabul cabbies.
The 9/11 Truth Campaign tries to distance itself from the green-ink loons who have been spreading rumours about 9/11 ever since the first plane slammed into the World Trade Center. "In London we meet socially on the first Monday of every month, and for a discussion on the third Monday of every month," says the ever-chirpy Machon, as if describing a Women's Institute get-together to discuss knitting, rather than a meeting of individuals who think a dark cabal of nutters controls the world. Its activists - many of whom are fairly well-to-do, and who include lecturers, film-makers and other whistle-blowers - pore over footage and photos of the events of 9/11, furiously debate them online, and argue that, scientifically, the official version of events doesn't add up. For Belinda - who describes herself as the "tea-maker and dishwasher of the movement" and allows activists from outside London to stay at her home - this is about "getting to the historical truth of what happened".
Yet, for all their forensic pretensions, their views remain crankily conspiratorial and unfounded. Take the claim that a plane did not hit the Pentagon, which has been doing the rounds since the French journalist Thierry Meyssan published 9/11: the big lie in 2002. "Just look at the news footage," says Shayler. "You won't see any plane debris on the Pentagon lawn."
Truth-seekers on a mission
True, but there was plenty of plane debris inside the Pentagon, where Flight 77 entered and exploded. There are numerous photographs of the blackened belly of the Pentagon crash site, taken by officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other rescue workers, which clearly show airliner wheel hubs, landing gear, part of a nose cone and bits of fuselage in the smouldering rubble (I hate to have to do this, but if you don't believe me take a look here: [http://www.rense.com/general32/phot.htm]). What kind of warrior for historical truth doesn't pay attention to basic photographic evidence?
Or consider the claim that the twin towers were brought down in a controlled demolition (which would have involved sinister individuals planting tonnes of dynamite in the weeks prior to 9/11 without being spotted by any of the good citizens of New York). The US National Institute of Standards and Technology investigated the cause of the collapse - during which "some 200 technical experts reviewed tens of thousands of documents, interviewed more than 1,000 people, reviewed 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs [and] analysed 236 pieces of steel" - and it found "no corroborating evidence" that the towers had been toppled by dynamite. There is a lot of scientific evidence there, yet it is ignored or discounted by the apparently scientifically minded truth-seekers of this campaign.
At times, the line between these middle-class campaigners' apparently "scientific investigations" and old-fashioned conspiracy-mongering seems uncomfortably thin. One of their leaflets has a web address for David Icke, the former sports presenter-turned-"Son of God" who thinks the world is run by a race of reptilian humanoids. Shayler says: "There is a Zionist conspiracy; that's a fact. And they were behind 9/11." Machon intervenes diplomatically: "Not everyone in the campaign shares that view."
Then things really go off the rails. I ask Shayler if it's true he has become a "no planer" - that is, someone who believes that no planes at all were involved in the 9/11 atrocity. Machon looks uncomfortable. "Oh, f*** it, I'm just going to say this," he tells her. "Yes, I believe no planes were involved in 9/11." But we all saw with our own eyes the two planes crash into the WTC. "The only explanation is that they were missiles surrounded by holograms made to look like planes," he says. "Watch the footage frame by frame and you will see a cigar-shaped missile hitting the World Trade Center." He must notice that my jaw has dropped. "I know it sounds weird, but this is what I believe."
The 7/7 photo "forgery"
What about 7/7? Some in the 9/11 Truth Campaign aren't "really into 7/7", in Belinda's words. But Shayler is. He recently finished making 7/7: mind the gap, a film in which he suggests that, given the late running of trains on that fateful day last year, the four bombers could not have blown themselves up in London at the times claimed. He also believes that the closed-circuit TV image of the four men entering Luton Station is a "Photoshop job - a forgery, and a bad one at that". He goes so far as to argue that those who forged the photo did it badly in order to send a signal to the rest of us. "This could be elements in the New World Order saying, 'Look, we're sick of lying. We've had enough.'"
So have I. The thought of behind-the-scenes suits being cajoled by their evil paymasters to create an image of four rucksack-wearing terrorists in order to cover up their own bombing of London is just too ludicrous. These 9/11 truth campaigners merely add a supposedly scientific gloss to already existing conspiracy theories, trying to make the ridiculous seem respectable. In the process, they actually do a disservice to "historical truth". History gets reduced to a mysterious force beyond our control, and politics - real politics - is imagined to be the preserve of unknown, faceless puppet-masters whom we can never hope to influence. And the rest of us are reduced to the status of helpless spectators, searching amid the rubble of 9/11 and the aftermath of 7/7 for signs of truth and meaning.
Read more of my articles for the New Statesman here.
The Pentagon didn't have an "anti-missile defence system" on 9/11/2001.
A spokesman for one of the conpiracy groups,Drew Avery,was on WRKO several weeks ago.
The host asked him, if it was a missile that hit the Pentagon,..what happened to the flight that took off from (Boston?)He replied that he didn't know,but he was sure it didn't hit the Pentagon!!
My mom's second-cousin was one of the civilian contractors working on remodeling the Pentagon. He had a flat tire on his way to work that morning and was just pulling up to the gate when the plane hit, otherwise he probably would have been killed when Flight 77 hit.
I guess they need to be surrounded by a vast circle of STUPID people, before they can convince themselves that they actually ARE intellectually superior.
I think we all miss the point. It's simply a marketing niche. In any poll, no matter how absurd, at least 10% of the people end up on the goody side of the poll. Elvis, space aliens, Courtney Love, etc. 10% of the population can make for an incredibly lucrative market. When you are making money spouting absurd bile, you simply make lame excuses for any inconsistency and your audience laps it up.
My office had the best view in the entire building, so we had a lot of people up there watching, absolutely dumbstruck. One of the guys I worked with had one of those tiny portable TVs and we watched one of the local over-the-air stations give the description of what we were watching.
Luckily, I had had a cable modem installed only about 10 days earlier because phone service in Manhattan was sporadic, at best. My mother and I reached each other, and we agreed that she would meet me at my apartment. She's not in the best of health, but she had to walk from her office on lower 5th Avenue to my apartment on the Upper East Side.
I managed to get some cash from an ATM that didn't have an outrageous line, as well as some groceries, and a friend and I agreed that I'd bring my mother over to her place so all 3 of us could watch Fox News and keep each other company.
I thank God for that cable modem because it was my only link with the outside world. They'd asked us to avoid using cell phones so that the cells would be free for emergency workers, and the landlines were difficult. I had to e-mail my brother in Los Angeles to tell him to call our father on Long Island (only 25 miles from Manhattan) to let him know our mother was with me and doing well.
I knew a few people who died in the Towers. If there hadn't been a hiring freeze at Marsh & McLennan, I'd have been in Tower 1 at the point of impact. To this day, I wonder how I managed to escape that fate. Some friends knew upwards of a dozen. I sent out e-mails to a lot of former co-workers, to see if they were OK. I got an e-mail back from one of those former co-workers who sent me a blackberry message he'd gotten from one of the other men on my list who didn't make it. That message was sent while he was trying to escape.
Another friend is a former cop who spent days at the site, helping with the cleanup. She didn't sleep well for a very long time afterwards.
I have close friends who were among those who were covered in dust and debris. I don't pretend that my story is any more harrowing than theirs. I only know that it angers me no end that so many people here in New York pretend the world is the same as it was on 9/10/01 and that George W. Bush is more dangerous than either Saddam Hussein or Osama. I'd be ashamed for them, but it wouldn't matter because, as we here know, liberals have no shame.
The technology was publicly available in 2003, so it is possible the military had it earlier. Such a plane might have taken off from Stewart Air base in Newburgh, NY, the alleged crossover point of the flight paths of Flights 11 and 175. The soon-to-turn-invisible plane would blend in with a radar inject and become the new radar blip. The aircraft could have been remote controlled to fly by the south tower on its east side or piloted by a human. The plane would time its “switch to invisibility” at the south tower with nearly simultaneous ignition of internal charges in the tower. It would all happen within the space of two seconds, stunning everyone and convincing many that they just saw a crash at the tower.
(and the now-invisible plane would avoid hitting Tower 2 itself by...stopping short?)
The spectacular fireball on the east side of the south tower went off too fast to be natural and did not burn at the so-called impact hole where oxygen and fuel would be abundant, so it was a trick. The fireball was an “Independence Day” terror event on its own but also performed the role of being a spectacular distraction to further hide the fly by. The plane’s engines presumably would have been quieted to enhance the realism of the feigned crash, perhaps essentially gliding for moments.
It's just a miracle that the invisible plane didn't glide right into the Millenium hotel after passing Tower 2 and "quieting its engines".
It then headed out to sea for destruction if remote controlled or more likely it landed at a secret base because it would have been expensive “one-off” technology.
This entire hypothesis, of course, may prove barren but deserves further investigation, especially since it would reconcile impossible crash physics with eyewitness testimony to the contrary. Please people, do not call this a “hologram” theory! I do not believe there is technology to project a realistic 3D high-speed image in broad daylight, as hypothesized by hologram speculation . Instead I am proposing that a real airplane suddenly turned sky blue on its underside, thereby “disappearing” from view, and maybe even simultaneously reflecting lower Manhattan on its topside to fool people at higher elevations.
I'm so relieved. For a minute there, I thought you were going to suggest something insane. :D
Here is more food for thought: the same chameleon plane could have appeared at all three events: 9:03a at WTC 2, 9:32-9:37a at the Pentagon, and 10:06a at Shanksville, PA. In truth, the perps only needed the disappearing plane trick at WTC 2 but it is a promising possibility for Shanksville too. The Pentagon event did not really need an airliner but the single plane theory proposed this month as a parody of the JFK single-bullet theory actually might make sense! The same disappearing act by the same secret plane could have been used at all three locations! We shall see if future work bears any of this out.
Maybe I'm still wrong, and this IS satire, as I originally thought? He drew a federal paycheck, please tell me he's joking?
I don't remember which one of you three was the Morgan Reynolds fan (one of you mentioned his name to me on a thread a couple months back, which thread I can't seem to find anymore)-- but anyway, please take a look at the site linked in #87 and tell me if it's his site and if he's serious...and if you were...
Paging Dr. Freud....
bump
"They walk among us, they even look like us" BUMP
-ccm
...And, of course, the bottom line in this article, is that the JEWS did it.
The left shows its mentally deranged state. They can't accept the fact that hate-filled islamic terrorists murdered almost 3000 people and that Bush actually went after the bastards. They hate the fact that people actually admired Bush for his actions and re-elected him.
That fact is too much for their hate-filled minds and they try to change reality. It's not possible to change reality, and so they go crazier and crazier.
I've had a problem reaching that site. Will try later.
"So apparently the thousands of people that saw the plane hit were imagining it?"
That's right! All those evil Americans in Hoboken, Jersey City and the Atlantic Highlands who looked out their window that morning imagined it. But two stupid Brits eating biscuits in a flat in Highgate know what happened. Why do I give that country my tourist dollars??????
No,no,no,no, they were holograms! Don't you get it? It was all fake. And the towers were brought down by explosives! Bush did it. He wanted to start a war. /s
That's what you think. How much do you actually know about her?
Sure it can. That's the great thing about conspiracy theories. Everything that should disprove them only proves how devious the conspirators are, how deep and elaborate the deception. I occasionally poke into DU, and the depth of the insanity there is amazing. You should read them analyzing the phone calls from the planes. One person can't locate Todd Beamer's birth certificate, and is telling the world that means he never existed.
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