May 1, 2007

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from a classmate of mine at Highland Park (Illinois) High. She forwarded a link to what she considered a "disturbing...compelling" one-hour documentary that her brother had forwarded to her about the secret story behind 9/11. The tape explored the possible coverup by the U.S. government of its foreknowledge of, and involvement in, the attacks of September 11--a thesis I consider anathema.

In a similar vein, someone who attended my collegiate alma mater, Amherst, recently sent this e-mail, after reading about Watching the World Change in the school's alumni magazine:

"I wonder if you've ever ventured into the even more challenging territory of reframing 9-11 as a horrendous and cynical native US-based national crime of unprecedented proportions, rather than the hole-riddled official cover story of international terrorism. More and more people are finally ready to see past their deeply programmed denial, and say the truth that the emperor has no clothes. Right there in plain sight, even in your photos.

"Planes indeed crashed into buildings. But they could not have caused building 'collapse.' The cores of the buildings were too strong, and the flames were never hot enough. The buildings fell too fast and too symmetrically, and they turned to fine powder instead of rubble. Those three towers (WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7 [Salomon Bldg]) could only have gone down by deliberate, carefully planned, and expertly engineered, controlled explosive demolition. Anyone with engineering and physics background can tell you that.

"I'd be happy to go over the ample evidence. But others have already done this very well.

"OK, now check out THESE images: Hot off the Internet...is some 9-11 news video footage from BBC saying that the Salomon Bldg (WTC7) had just collapsed. But it was about half an hour before the collapse! Oops. Busted. Check out the shot of the BBC reporter talking about WTC7 collapse, with WTC7 still standing and showing over her shoulder! Please explain 'That.'

"There is much damning evidence that 9-11 was a spectacular staged special effects extravaganza, shock and awe, no doubt designed by US insiders to traumatize US citizens and pave the way for wars, tyranny, domestic spying (hello spooks!), and curtailment and loss of constitutional rights and freedoms. They even carted off the debris from the crime scene, quickly, before any evidence could be gathered and studied, in classic mafia-inspired style. It worked.

"But the mental fog from psyops traumatic hypnosis is wafting away, and more people are waking up to the truth, which I think is far more frightening and dangerous than spooky Al Quaeda. I hope you are among the awakened, even though you may not dare to speak up about it just yet, even to a fellow Amherst alum.

"Your work over the last few years has helped support and propagate the official coverup story. If 9-11 was a crime, you are an accomplice. But I do hope you were an unwitting one, that it was unintentional, and that you got your cues from the context of the infectious mass delusion and the seductive cover story, and not from an elaborate playbook that you helped write. I hope you were duped, and not a duper. Super duped, not a super duper. (Couldn't resist writing that.)

"Otherwise, I'm not sure how you could live with yourself, then or now. Unless you were convinced by shadowy spooks that such a crime and coverup was necessary and justified to prevent a far worse disaster. In which case please tell me; I would 'really' like to know about it."

In response to such e-mails, I repeat what I stated on this blog back in March. Such conspiracy theorists are looking at the trees--even the chinks in the leaves of the trees--and missing the forest.

In my opinion the people spending time concentrating on side-shows -- the fate of Building 7 (7 WTC, which collapsed after 5 pm on September 11); the size of the Pentagon plane’s impact hole and would-be phantom passengers of that plane; the theories of secret demo teams pre-rigging the towers with dynamite in the days before 9/11; and various mis-statements or misperceptions or unsubstantiated accounts by eyewitnesses, journalists and public officials in the hectic hours after the attacks -- are missing what I see as the four main themes of the Bigger Picture.

1. Al Qaeda took the towers down. They attacked the towers once before, in 1993, and had vowed to do it again. They pre-videotaped the hijackers who intended to do this. They left a paper and video path across the northeast corridor as they planned the mission. They trumpeted it and heralded the martyrs on their Websites. Metallurgists, architects, structural engineers, demolition experts, and an impressive study by a team from Popular Mechanics have stated that this is precisely what buildings would do -- implode -- if hit with such force and with this amount of fuel. If one were to have rigged such structures with dynamite, as has been theorized, then the buildings, as all dynamited buildings, would have been rigged to fall from the bottom first, not from the top. And it would have taken days to do the rigging, with many, many witnesses crying foul in the aftermath of having survived the 1993 attacks. What's more, there is nothing to support the theory that no buildings like this have ever fallen. First, no one has ever smashed jumbo jets into 110-story buildings; so there are no literal precedents upon which so-called experts can make such statements. Second, previously ‘impervious’ buildings actually do fall in wartime. We have only to look at images from WWII. The Titanic, remember, was thought to be indestructible. But its builders had not bargained for an iceberg of that size or an impact of that force.

2. The Bush administration was too inept to have somehow been in league with or complicit with the terrorists. They were intellectually and systemically incapable of coordinating this -- and keeping it leak-free. Instead, as we've known for ages, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing in an intelligence bureaucracy rife with turf wars and in an administration weakened by the stress fractures of internal power struggles. The Pentagon did not bomb the Pentagon.

3. Many misguided and unconscionably distracted officials (such as Condoleezza Rice, who repeatedly ignored or mis-prioritized the warnings of her counterterror chief, Richard Clarke) downplayed or misread a threat that was staring them in the face. And because of the weak-kneed 9/11 Commission recommendations, put out by a Republican-controlled Congress and watered down in the spirit of bi-partisanship, no one on the Bush team has ever been reprimanded for his or her roles in these truly tragic lapses. In fact, most of them have been promoted or given presidential medals of honor! This has been a consistent behavior pattern of this so-called C.E.O. president.

4. Often, people who spend a good portion of their days or nights theorizing on the Internet have too much idle time on their hands. They can sometimes fall into the trap of pondering murky videoclips and digital photographs, coming up with grand theories to explain away complex physical events, even if they're basing their theories on technical flaws or on glitches in the images themselves. They are dancing on the head of pins. This sort of 'stove-pipe' intelligence and this accumulation of 'soda-straw' snapshots of misperceived data, events and motives constitute precisely the same sort of juiced-up bogus-case justification that led us into war in Iraq. In this instance, we are doing it on our laptops and desktops.

While it certainly makes good sense to be skeptical of this administration in light of its six-year record of obfuscation, and while healthy debate in a democracy requires that we ask hard questions, it is foolhardy to be delusional and to lose site of the fact that al Qaeda is still on the mend, regrouping, and primed to attack us. As sensible as these convenient little myths may sound, they are distractions, and dangerous ones at that.