9/11 Conspiracies

For the last few weeks while Brad has been in Crawford with Cindy Sheehan. BradBlog has been guest-blogged by Winter Patriot and others who have a decidedly wing-nuttier view than Brad does. One of their recent obsessions is the 9/11 "conspiracy" that the CIA and the military carried out the 9/11 attacks to whip up a war in the Middle East.

Hogwash.

The truth is bad enough:

1. That the Bush administration didn't focus enough on Al-Quaeda as a threat in the Summer of 2001.
2. That they used 9/11 as a springboard to attack Iraq even though there was no connection.
3. And they have repeatedly resisted any effort to investigate the government's response to 9/11.

If you can stand rambling, spurious logic, please read the most recent posting about 9/11. I can summarize all of it for you, though:

1. In each case, there is an "obvious" detail that the MSM didn't notice/highlight/investigate (Even though the explanation is actually quite reasonable).
2. Since they didn't notice/highlight/investigate it, there must have been a cover-up.
3. The wing-nut answer that they supply is the ONLY possible interpretation.

Example:

1. There was not much visible wreckage from plane that crashed into the Pentagon
2. Since the wreckage was missing from photographs, it must have been something else that hit the Pentagon.
3. The only possible answer is a missle/drone/small plane packed with explosives.

The only problem is that HUNDREDS of people saw the passenger jet hit the building. Also, as Popular Mechanics pointed out in their very good series of articles debunking 9/11 conspiracies that there was a lot of debris from the plane, but, as you would expect from an object moving at 200+ MPH, and which struck the building low to the ground, most of the debris was thrown into the building. There are holes in the building as far in as the "C" ring (third from the outside).

Occam's Razor requires that when you have countless reports from eyewitnesses of a plane hitting a building that's probably what happened. The Bush administration is greedy, incompetent, opportunistic, and stubborn, but all of these conspiracy theories rely on him being some sort of evil genius.

Since the conspiracy wingnuts like to ask loaded rhetorical questions, I've got a few of my own:

• If Bush was so clever in planning 9/11 to get us into a war with Iraq, why not set up scenario with Iraqi commandos hijacking the plane? It would have saved them that little detour through Afghanistan, which has not exactly yielded huge financial gains for the US (or even Halliburton).
• Why kill 3,000+ Americans and destroy the financial center of the country? We've been drawn into wars before over far less. Yes, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that escalated our role in Vietnam was most likely based on a lie, but that involved a bunch of US ships pretending to be shot at, and then returning fire. A downed fighter jet in the Iraqi no-fly zone or missle launched at Israel might have been enough. Destroying lower Manhattan and the Pentagon seems like an excessive and piss-poor way to manufacture a war in Iraq.

Would Bush: authorize torture, invade a country for oil, suppress dissidents, cover up mistakes? Sure. He has. Is he clever enough to set in motion all the events from 9/11 to the Iraq War? I don't think so.

I think that, to a certain extent, we need conspiracies to help us deal with tremendous tragedies and acts of violence. It's the same impulse that causes us to invent mythologies and religions. It stems from the hope that someone or something is in charge of the world--sometimes benevolent (God, country, parents), and sometimes evil (conspiracies, devils, criminals). Usually there's a degree of truth in these conspiracies. Bush is a bad leader, he lies, and does underhanded things all the time ergo, if you don't like him and really need the world to make sense, it's pretty easy to make the leap that he is an evil genius (rather than an callous, indifferent idiot).

The "proof" for these accusations takes on a life of it's own. The Kennedy assasination is the most obvious example, culminating in the wild fantasy that is Oliver Stone's JFK. This fascinating site debunks all of the claims in that film and takes the mystery out of the wild accusations that have become "fact" to JFK conspiracy nuts. A few choice examples:

• FBI sharpshooters WERE able to repeat Oswald's feat of getting off three shots from the book depository (one actually did it in 4.5 sec vs. Oswald's 9 sec)
• The force of a bullet that enters the back of the head from a high-powered rifle will, in fact often send the head "back and to the left."
• The "magic bullet" is actually quite reasonable when you consider that Kennedy's seat in the back of the car was raised up higher that Gov. Connelly's in front of him. The bullet made no weird turns in the air, but actually behaved very predictably based on the positions of the two men.
• The "shooter" on the grassy knoll, sometimes called "Badgeman" that appears as a blur in Abraham Zapruder's famous film has been identified as an African American couple who were drinking cokes an watching the president go by from the wall. Witnesses saw them drop a coke bottle when the heard the shots, and they, like everyone else, ran like hell. Most of the "mysterious" people in Dealy Plaza have been identified and interviewed, all with innocent stories.

Note the similarity between the Kennedy "evidence" and the alleged 9/11 conspiracy. They're all about a mysteriously overlooked detail that only has one possible "fantastic" explanation. I guess, for me, I'm outraged enough about what is actually happening, and I don't need to pile on a CIA financed 9/11 before I want Bush impeached and in jail for war crimes. Most times the simplest explanation is the right one.

-Tin Foil Out.