9/11 nuttery
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060925/cockburn
Beat the devil by Alexander Cockburn The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts
[from the September 25, 2006 issue]
You trip over one fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracy nuts in
the first paragraph of the book by one of their high priests, David
Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor. “In many respects,” Griffin
writes, “the strongest evidence provided by critics of the official
account involves the events of 9/11 itself…. In light of standard
procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes…not one of these
planes should have reached its target, let alone all three of them.”
The operative word here is “should.” One central characteristic of
the nuts is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous, belief in
American efficiency, and hence many of them start with the racist
premise that “Arabs in caves” weren’t capable of the mission. They
believe that military systems work the way Pentagon press flacks and
aerospace salesmen say they should work. They believe that at 8:14
am, when AA Flight 11 switched off its radio and transponder, an FAA
flight controller should have called the National Military Command
center and NORAD. They believe, citing reverently (this from high
priest Griffin) “the US Air Force’s own website,” that an F-15 could
have intercepted AA Flight 11 “by 8:24, and certainly no later than
8:30.”
They appear to have read no military history, which is too bad
because if they had they’d know that minutely planned operations–let
alone responses to an unprecedented emergency–screw up with
monotonous regularity, by reason of stupidity, cowardice, venality
and other whims of Providence.
According to the minutely prepared plans of the Strategic Air
Command, an impending Soviet attack would have prompted the missile
silos in North Dakota to open and the ICBMs to arc toward Moscow and
kindred targets. The tiny number of test launches actually attempted
all failed, whereupon SAC gave up testing. Was it badly designed
equipment, human incompetence, defense contractor venality or…
conspiracy? Did the April 24, 1980, effort to rescue the hostages in
the US Embassy in Tehran fail because a sandstorm disabled three of
the eight helicopters, or because agents of William Casey poured
sugar into their gas tanks in yet another conspiracy?
Do the military’s varying attempts to explain why F-15s didn’t
intercept and shoot down the hijacked planes stem from predictable
attempts to cover up the usual screw-ups, or because of conspiracy?
Is Mr. Cohen in his little store at the end of the block hiking his
prices because he wants to make a buck, or because his rent just went
up, or because the Jews want to take over the world? Bebel said anti-
Semitism is the socialism of fools. These days the 9/11 conspiracy
fever is fast becoming the “socialism” of the left.
My in-box overflows each day with fresh “proofs” of how the towers
were demolished. I meet people who start quietly, asking me what I
think about 9/11. What they are actually trying to find out is
whether I’m part of the coven. I imagine it is like being a normal
Stoic in the second century AD going for a stroll in the forum and
meeting some fellow asking, with seeming casualness, whether it’s
possible to feed 5,000 people on five loaves of bread and a couple of
fish.
Indeed, at my school the vicar used to urge on us Frank Morison’s
book Who Moved the Stone? It demonstrated, with exhaustive citation
from the Gospels, that since on these accounts no human had moved the
stone from in front of Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, it must have been
an angel who rolled it aside, so Jesus could exit, astonish the
mourners and then ascend. Of course, Morison didn’t allow the
possibility that angels never existed or that the Gospel writers were
making it up.
It’s the same pattern with the 9/11 nuts. There are photos of the
impact of the “object” that hit the Pentagon–i.e., the Boeing 757,
Flight 77–that seem to show the sort of hole a missile might make.
Ergo, it was a missile and a 757 didn’t hit the Pentagon. As regards
the hole, my brother Andrew–writing a book about Rumsfeld–has seen
photos taken within thirty minutes of impact clearly showing the
outline of an entire plane, including wings. This was visible as soon
as the smoke blew away.
And if it was a missile, what happened to the 757? Did the
conspirators shoot it down somewhere else, or force it down and then
kill the passengers? Why plan to demolish the towers with pre-placed
explosives if your conspiracy includes control of the two planes that
hit them? Why bother with the planes at all? Why blame Osama if your
fall guy is Saddam Hussein?
The demolition scenario is classic who-moved-the-stonery. The towers
didn’t fall because they were badly built as a consequence of
corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port Authority
and because they were struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel. No,
they collapsed because Dick Cheney’s agents methodically planted
demolition charges in the preceding days. It was a conspiracy of
thousands, all of whom–party to mass murder–have held their tongues
ever since.
Of course, the buildings didn’t suddenly pancake. People inside who
survived the collapse didn’t hear a series of explosions. As
discussed in Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins’s marvelous Grand
Illusion, about Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, helicopter pilots radioed
warnings nine minutes before the final collapse of the South Tower
that it might well go down, and similar warnings, repeatedly, as much
as twenty-five minutes before the North Tower’s fall.
What Barrett and Collins brilliantly show are the actual corrupt
conspiracies on Giuliani’s watch (see also their article in this
issue); the favoritism to Motorola, which saddled the firemen with
radios that didn’t work; the ability of the Port Authority to scrimp
on fire protection; the mayor’s catastrophic failure in the years
before 9/11 to organize an effective emergency command, meaning that
many lives could have been saved, cops and firemen could have
communicated and firemen could have heard the helicopter warnings and
the Mayday messages that saved most of the police. That’s the real
world, in which Giuliani and others have never been held accountable.
Instead, the conspiracy nuts have combined to produce a ludicrous
distraction.