Posted on 06/05/2005 6:22:17 PM PDT by demlosers
Noted French left-wing activist Thierry Meyssan's 9/11 conspiracy book, L'Effroyable Imposture, became a best-seller in 2002.
But I never imagined such an "appalling deception" would ever find a voice in America. At a recent public lecture I was buttonholed by a Michael Moore–wannabe filmmaker who breathlessly explained that 9/11 was orchestrated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Central Intelligence Agency as part of their plan for global domination and a New World Order. That goal was to be financed by G.O.D. (Gold, Oil, Drugs) and launched by a Pearl Harbor–like attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thereby providing the justification for war.
The evidence was there in the details, he explained, handing me a faux dollar bill (with "9-11" replacing the "1," a picture of Bush supplanting that of Washington) chockablock with Web sites.
In fact, if you type "World Trade Center" and "conspiracy" into Google, you'll get more than 250,000 hits. From these sites, you will discover that some people think the Pentagon was hit by a missile; that U.S. Air Force jets were ordered to "stand down" and not intercept Flights 11 and 175, the ones that struck the twin towers; that the towers themselves were razed by demolition explosives timed to go off soon after the impact of the planes; that a mysterious white jet shot down Flight 93 over Pennsylvania; and that New York Jews were ordered to stay home that day (Zionists and other pro-Israeli factions, of course, were involved). Books also abound, including Inside Job, by Jim Marrs; The New Pearl Harbor, by David Ray Griffin; and 9/11: The Great Illusion, by George Humphrey. The single best debunking of this conspiratorial codswallop is in the March issue of Popular Mechanics, which provides an exhaustive point-by-point analysis of the most prevalent claims.
The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics). All the "evidence" for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy. Such notions are easily refuted by noting that scientific theories are not built on single facts alone but on a convergence of evidence assembled from multiple lines of inquiry.
No melted steel, no collapsed towers.
For example, according to www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers. "The planes did not bring those towers down; bombs did," says www.abovetopsecret.com. Wrong.
In an article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society and in subsequent interviews, Thomas Eagar, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains why: steel loses 50 percent of its strength at 1,200 degrees F; 90,000 liters of jet fuel ignited other combustible materials such as rugs, curtains, furniture and paper, which continued burning after the jet fuel was exhausted, raising temperatures above 1,400 degrees F and spreading the inferno throughout each building. Temperature differentials of hundreds of degrees across single steel horizontal trusses caused them to sag--straining and then breaking the angle clips that held the beams to the vertical columns. Once one truss failed, others followed. When one floor collapsed onto the next floor below, that floor subsequently gave way, creating a pancaking effect that triggered each 500,000-ton structure to crumble. Conspiricists argue that the buildings should have fallen over on their sides, but with 95 percent of each building consisting of air, they could only have collapsed straight down.
All the 9/11 conspiracy claims are this easily refuted. On the Pentagon "missile strike," for example, I queried the would-be filmmaker about what happened to Flight 77, which disappeared at the same time. "The plane was destroyed, and the passengers were murdered by Bush operatives," he solemnly revealed. "Do you mean to tell me that not one of the thousands of conspirators needed to pull all this off," I retorted, "is a whistle-blower who would go on TV or write a tell-all book?"
My rejoinder was met with the same grim response I get from UFOlogists when I ask them for concrete evidence: Men in Black silence witnesses, and dead men tell no tales.
And people you ironic, insensitive jerk!
But the lefties want a socialist NWO, not a "corporatist" NWO.
Or something like that. I dunno...
True.
But some freepers think that way in regards to the Clintons.
I wonder if this is actually more of a "mother" than the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories that have grown and mutated since the '60s. Actually, the only time I believed in the assassination conspiracy theories is when Dan Rather did a special on CBS to debunk them.
Anyone know if Oliver Stone is planning a 9-11 movie?
1. No photographic evidence of the War of 1812 exists.
2. Therefore, the War of 1812 never happened.
3. Anyone claiming that the War of 1812 happened has the duty to produce proof! Since nobody will come forward to do it, they must be covering something up.
4. Therefore, the Illuminati probably concocted the whole story, to cover up their great strike on the heart of Freemasonry at Washington, D.C.
Well, just for the record, he did not say that no photographic evidence exists of the plane strike on the Pentagon, he said that such evidence exists but is being suppressed.
There's a big difference, not that I'm taking his side or even agree with it (I don't).
Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate in '04, espoused what you wrote. And then the libertarians wonder why they have stagnant growth in American politics.
They reported no evidence of any plane hitting the pentagon.
I was in Washington the day it happend and saw the pentagon just after the attack.
There is no way an airplane could have hit the pentagon as we were told.
We were told the aircraft...a Boeing jet flying 2 feet above the ground would have hit automobiles on the freeway just a few hundred yards from the pentagon.It would have made massive damage of the grass just in front of the pentagon.....guess what...no damage at all.
There would have been more damage (at least in 150 feet of the center of the impact zone) because of the wings hittig the building.Also the wings would have sheared right off and would have been left outside the pentagon.
If you look at the photographs of the pentagon after the impact, you will see reels of cable that were undamaged by the supposed impact of the Boeing Jet.THey would have been destroyed by an aircraft hitting the pentagon as we were told.
I don't know what happend to flight 77, but it did not hit the pentagon.
And don't bother trying to change my mind on this. There is nothing you can say or type that that will change my mind on this.
I was there shortly after and no way was this an aircraft hit.
If it was, have the government release the tapes of the cameras that video taped the whole incident.
They haven't and won't.
This is the problem I have with most conspiracy theories. You need so many people to pull them off properly and people love to talk. I believe it was Ben Franklin who wrote that three can keep a secret if two are dead.
Pretty close. The more people you have involved the more chance you have that someone will talk. And even if you can keep them from going to the media they have spouses and lovers that they will talk to. A conspiracy with more then ten people hasn't got a prayer of staying under wraps.
One that involves thousand would be on the front page inside a week.
Isn't it a neat trick how the author casually links together creationism and Holocaust denial? Also, isn't he being a bit cavalier in his broad-brush dismissal of the importance of unexplained anomalies? Isn't the history of the advancement of science littered with unexplained anomalies undermining well-established theories? If the author is supposed to be a "skeptic", he should be sued for malpractice. This is just more of the same, uninformed, but politically-correct trash talking that Scientific American has descended into in recent years.
Congratulations. You've just entered the annals of Free Republic kookdom.
You join such esteemed former posters as Justine Raimondo, Harry Callahan, and Michael Rivero.
You're destined to live, forever, at the margins of society, peering over your shoulder wondering who might be following you, voraciously reading the newspapers in early June to find out where the latest Bilderberger confab is being held, and forever standing on street corners, trying to convince passersby that the 1969 moon landing was enacted on a Hollywood sound stage.
Textbook case of cranio-rectal inversion! The symptoms are all there!
Interesting that this statement should appear in Scientific American, since the entire history of science is full of examples of a handful of unexplained anomalies undermining well-established theory, and leading to new and better theories.
It's called the "Scientific Method".
Building 7 sure came down perfectly, didn't it?
And it did not even get hit by a plane.
PBS had an interview with LARRY SILVERSTEIN (The World Trade Center was leased by Westfield America and Larry Silverstein, on April 26th, 2001)where he was quoted as saying : "I remember getting a call from the fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it (WTC7)." And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse."
That building was brought down by a controlled demolition.
And he's a proud Bush-hater.
Anyhow, getting to the point, there used to be this website that had mpeg clips of every network and news channel covering that day. You could watch the entire replay for that day, and then clips of coverage for at least the week after. In any case, back in '02 I watched the alphabet network coverage & the 24 hour news channel coverage over and over. I remember the initial coverage of the Pentagon much as you describe.
One thing I would stress however is that things were very chaotic that day, to state the obvious, and it's not odd if the initial reports were erratic just as initial reports often are. By example, just earlier this week they initially reported that 50 houses slid off that cliff in Laguna, CA and it turned out to be a dozen or so.
Whatever the case, I should go to hell for posting this, but you might find this site interesting: Pentagon Strike.
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