Excellent Article

This Article was originally published by Dr. Gwynne Dyer and I think it really sums up the feelings the authors of this blog feel concerning the 9/11 conspiracy movement. Please take the time to read the whole article and reflect on its contents.

Aaron

8 March 2007

Loose Screws

By Gwynne Dyer

The 9/11 conspiracy theory is back, in a much more virulent form,
and normally sane people are being taken in by it: I am getting half a
dozen earnest e-mails every day telling me I must see a film called "Loose
Change." It has been around in various versions for almost two years, but
it now seems to be gathering converts faster than ever

Well, I have seen it, and I concede that it is a much slicker, more
professional product than other 9/11 conspiracy films, and therefore more
seductive. But the argument is pure paranoid fantasy, and it is rotting
people's brains.

There have always been two versions of 9/11 conspiracy theory. The
lesser version held that the Bush administration had advance intelligence
of al-Qaeda's plans, but chose to ignore the warning because the attacks
suited its purposes. The greater version insisted that there was no
al-Qaeda involvement, and that the attacks were carried out by the US
government.

Until recently, the greater version was largely confined to the
Arab world, where many people are in complete denial about any Arab
involvement in the atrocity. Very few Americans took that version
seriously, though many wondered whether the intelligence lapses had really
been accidental.

Even the lesser conspiracy would have required the complicity of
half a dozen very senior people who received the intelligence and decided
to ignore it: the heads of the CIA and the FBI (George Tenet and Louis
Freeh), the national security adviser (Condoleezza Rice), the secretaries
of defence and state (Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell), plus of course
Vice-President Cheney and perhaps President Bush. It would also have
required the permanent silence (or silencing) of a dozen lower-level
intelligence analysts who knew that the senior people had seen the
information.

I don't believe that happened because I don't think that Tenet,
Rice, Powell et al. would have deliberately plotted the deaths of thousands
of Americans. I don't believe even Dick Cheney would have done that. And I
note that there has been no inexplicable wave of sudden deaths among junior
intelligence analysts in Washington.

I do believe, however, that 9/11 served the purposes of the
neo-conservatives and their allies in the Bush administration. They were
already planning to attack Iraq, as part of a larger plan, dating back to
the late 1990s and the Project for a New American Century, to re-launch Pax
America and re-establish American hegemony in the 21st-century world. I
agree that they were adroit in seizing on 9/11 as a way of enlisting
popular support for their project. But that's all.

I cannot absolutely refute the lesser conspiracy theory, but I find
it extremely implausible. The greater conspiracy theory, on the other
hand, is just plain loony -- and yet more and more people are falling for
it in the West, where it was once the exclusive domain of people with
counter-rotating eyeballs and poor personal hygiene. You cannot overstate
the impact of a well-made film.

"Loose Change" confidently asserts that the twin towers were
brought down by carefully placed demolition charges, not by the fires
ignited by the planes that hit them; that the Pentagon was struck by a
cruise missile and not by a plane at all; and that the fourth "hijacked"
plane, Flight 93, did not crash in a field in Pennsylvania but landed at
Cleveland airport, where the passengers were taken into a NASA building and
never seen again.

What about all the calls that the passengers on Flight 93 made on
their phones? Their voices were cloned by the Los Alamos laboratories and
the calls to their relatives were faked. The FBI was in on it, the CIA was
in on it, the US Air Force was in on it (except, of course, those USAF
personnel who were killed at the Pentagon), and North American Aerospace
Defence Command was in on it (but they kept the Canadians in NORAD out of
the loop.)

The security companies guarding the World Trade Centre were in on
it, Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in on it, the Federal Aviation Administration
was in on it, NASA was in on it, and the Pentagon was in on it. At least
ten thousand people were in on it. They had to be, or it couldn't have
worked. And more than five years later, not one of them has talked.

Nobody has got drunk and spilled their guts. Nobody has told their
spouse, who then blabbed. Not one of these ten thousand accomplices to
mass murder has yielded to the temptation for instant fame and great wealth
if only they blow the whistle on the greatest conspiracy in history. Even
the Mafia code of silence is nothing compared to this.

In normal times you wouldn't waste breath arguing with people who
fall for this kind of rubbish, but the makers of "Loose Change" claim that
their film has already been seen by over 100 million people, and looking at
my e-mail in-tray I believe them. It is a real problem, because by linking
their fantasies about 9/11 to the Bush administration's deliberate
deception of the American people in order to gain support for the invasion
of Iraq, they bring discredit on the truth and the nonsense alike.

You almost wonder if they are secretly working for the Bush
administration.