No 9/11 Conspiracy Theory Can Survive Thirty Seconds of Google Searching: Episode 346

Blogger Paul Schreyer made a positively exhausting attempt to demonstrate that the United States Air Force “stood down” on 9/11. Sound familiar?



Given the vast quantity of 9/11 denier absurdity out there I usually give their videos until the first big bogus claim, and then I tune out (of course, this tends to mean tuning out after the first claim, period – but so far it doesn’t look like I’ve missed any shockers). I had some extra time today, so I gave it its first two.

You know precisely where it’s going from the start. It builds a cast of characters – in this case, a sort of caricature of the U.S. military’s chain of command, with Bush at the top and some of the staff at NEADS at the bottom – and begins with the claim that “the top of this chain of command was empty on 9/11” – this is false. President Bush spent the morning doing what all presidents are always doing – photo ops. What does it even mean to “stay out of the loop of military orders,” as the speaker intones? Let’s think of a counterfactual: how much weirder would it have been if the President was actually giving military orders on 9/11? That’s something that essentially never happens, and when it does, it makes headlines.

The barely grammatically coherent second claim falsely reads:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld abandoned his post and was not available for his air defense subordinates during the attack.

This is false as well – Rumsfeld was at the Pentagon during the attacks.

Marr tried to “obstruct” the process. Right. Let’s see what he means.

Two fighter pilots at Otis Air Force Base, 300 km northeast of New York, were alarmed [?] and sat in their jets ready to start their engines at around 8:42, even before any hijacked plane had hit the World Trade Center towers.

But than [sic] they had to wait.

Colonel Marr, who could have ordered them to take off immediately, chose not to do that. He made an unnecessary phone call with his boss, General Arnold, instead. In effect the order to take off was delayed for a crucial 3 to 4 minutes.

Without that delay the pilots could have intercepted the second hijacked plane, which crashed at 9:03.

Could Marr have ordered those planes to intercept a civilian aircraft? No. it would have been literally illegal for him to have done so – additionally, at 8:42 it was still unclear that any planes had been hijacked. Indeed, it wasn’t 8:42 that Flight 93 even took off, and Flight 175 wasn’t even actually hijacked until about 8:46.

And what was that “unnecessary call?”He was telling him about the possibility of a hijacking and the need to scramble planes.

Doesn’t this bullshit sound familiar? Haven’t 9/11 deniers made very similar claims before? Oh yes – just like the ones refuted years ago in Popular Mechanics’ great little books.

Claim: "It has been standard operating procedures for decades to immediately intercept off-course planes that do not respond to communications from air traffic controllers," says the Web site oilempire.us. "When the Air Force 'scrambles' a fighter plane to intercept, they usually reach the plane in question in minutes."

9/11 deniers must be absolutely fucking exhausted by now. They’ve been making the same demonstrably false claims since 2003, and still have to pretend to each other that this shit isn’t already out there.