Thoughts on September 11

Frankly, I didn’t want to get caught up in the hubbub that has marked the 10th anniversary of the disasters of 9/11/2001, but my wife had been watching the TV about this constantly, so I thought I would weigh in on opinions on what has been called 9/11.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there, which I don’t support. It is unfortunate that the minute someone hears the phrase “conspiracy theory”, the phrase almost seems to discredit the story that comes after it. I have friends that say “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories” as if to say that because your story involves a conspiracy, that invalidates it in some people’s minds without needing to hear the rest of the story. But there was a conspiracy, just not of the government kind that would have formed such a tantalizing story.

9/11 was the result of a conspiracy on the face of it, because there were four separate incidents (the two towers, the Pentagon, and the farmer’s field), and I think that we need to agree here that the same person could not have driven all four planes. And the fact that the four attacks happened on the same day makes it a little hard to believe that the four incidents were random, unrelated events hatched by four individuals acting on their own. And this is taking the official story on its face value. Therefore, this constitute some kind of conspiracy.

It couldn’t have been a government conspiracy, simply because George H. Bush is too incompetent to have the organizational skills to pull this off. Most of the rest of his cabinet were famous for being “chickenhawks” with very little military experience, criticised for having no qualms for sending the adult children of other families to their deaths or put in harm’s way. If this were a government conspiracy, there would need to be a military level of organization, but this cabinet simply didn’t have that kind of talent. In fact, they were busy working against the CIA (remember Valerie Plame?) and applying their Libertarian principles to the military (Blackwater, Halliburton), weakening both.

There is also the idea that if the US Government were pointing the finger at Al-Qaeda, then why attack Saddam Hussein? They had little to do with each other. In fact, there were many ideological differences between Saddam’s Ba’athist beliefs and Bin Laden’s Islamist beliefs. So much so, that both were actually enemies of each other.

More evidence seems to point to intelligence failures and to the idea that people from a third world country has attacked a superpower. This would mark the first time in recorded human history that Davids from third world countries have attacked the most precious symbols that the Goliath of a superpower owns. Countries around the world acted with paranoia, including the U.S. and Canada. The reaction was pretty universal: take away our rights, detain us without trial. There was even debate in the United States as to whether Habeas Corpus should be repealed (after serving us for over 700 years).

A great discussion between two of the creators of Loose Change (Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas) and two editors of Popupar Mechanics which published an issue and an entire book debunking documentaries and books such as Loose Change (namely James Meigs and David Dunbar) took place some years ago was found on Democracy Now, a grassroots, listener-supported Internet/radio program not known to be in the pockets of the Republican Party. I felt embarrassed seeing Avery and Bermas being taught Journalism on-air by these two sesasoned professionals. I felt equally embarrassed when all Avery and Bermas could counter with are ad-hominem attacks against their fellow guests, as well as to change the topic countless times, techniques the right wing uses all the time. It was just a sad day for those who believed that “Bush did it”, and Avery and Bermas soldiered on, refusing to let the facts get in their way.

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