9-11 – The Truth!

Type the above words in to any search engine, and you will get thousands of websites telling you that they – and they alone – know the truth of what happened during the 9-11 Attacks. 
 

They will tell you that buildings don’t collapse like that. They will tell you that jet fuel doesn’t burn that hot. They will tell you there is no evidence of plane wreckage outside the Pentagon. They will tell you that it wasn’t passengers who brought down the fourth plane – it was either shot down by the US military or brought down by the "hijackers" to disguise the truth that the hijackers were not Islamic Terrorists but US Army Rangers. Or to disguise the fact that there were no passengers on the plane at all, and that it was all smoke and mirrors.

Of course, they will have all the appropriate documentation. They will have their expert witnesses lined up to explain why a skyscraper can’t collapse after it gets hit by an exploding aircraft, and why it would be impossible for an aircraft to hit the Pentagon at that angle without leaving a trail of debris. 

If you are lucky, they will provide you with videos and pictures that back up all their arguments. 

The images will generally show you unusual angles of the various crash sites. These angles will reveal things that you won’t have seen on the news – an extra fuel tank under one of the jumbo jets, a shadow that is clearly a missile within range of The Pentagon – and will be captioned to clearly explain what you are seeing, because sometimes the pictures are not clear and need a little explanation to lead you to the correct conclusion. 

However – as compelling as still images might be, videos can be even more so, because they can guide you through all the evidence in sequence. 

These generally come in two types.

The first is a series of still images – generally much like the images above – usually prefixed with a caption in the form of a question. The question is important – they are not telling you what to believe, they are inviting you to make up your own mind (much like you would do in a court of law). However – unlike a court of law – the questions are almost always leading ("Why was there no mention of…..", "Where was the missing……" and so forth) because while they want you to make up your own mind, they want you to make it up the right way, otherwise what is the point of the site?

The second is series of video clips. 

These clips come in two types – the first is clips from the day itself. They come in the form of interviews with witnesses (who have a story to tell that contradicts the "official" story), or clips culled from various "independent" news sources (as opposed to the "mainstream" news sources that are in on the conspiracy) or clips from cellphones – videos taken by the average man on the street that reveal shocking new facts that again the "mainstream" media have seen fit to ignore. 

This first type will be Interspersed with clips of "experts", people who have official sounding titles (Doctor, Professor, Teacher, Research Physicist, Structural Engineer) and who talk in emphatic, convincing voices about why what happened could not have happened the way it was told. The Professor of aeronautics will tell you that jumbo jets don’t explode like that when they hit a solid source – not without extra combustion agents. The Structural Engineer will tell you – with diagrams, sometimes even models – that the fire balls we see exploding out of The South Tower could not be caused by an aircraft crashing in to it, but that they would be caused if there were explosives built in to the framework, or if there were a hundred propane tanks stored on the floor the aircraft hit.

The two types of clips will – as I said – generally be mixed together. You’ll be shown something, then someone will talk about it, then you’ll be shown it again so that you can apply everything you just learned from the expert to the clip and understand why it is such a startling piece of evidence.

And, again, there will be the ubiquitous captions – "If the media had nothing to hide, why do they only show you one shot?". These questions are almost always asked as captions (rather than having someone ask them), because the experts can not seen to be asking leading questions – they are experts recruited to tell you the truth, it is the job of the person who made the video to point you to the conclusions (sorry – to help you make up your mind and see the light of truth). 

There are odd videos that have an actual narrator – either the person who made the video, or someone who works with them. They will be the ones to ask the questions, and to introduce the experts and talk you through the clips. Again – the experts will not ask the questions, because that is not what they are there for. But the narrator will ask them, generally more than once and generally in a slightly patronising tone – suggesting that if you don’t believe it, you are a clearly a fool.

Regardless of the format of the site, they all have three things in common.

First – not one of them uses evidence from "mainstream" sources. Reports from eye-witnesses, movies from cellphones or hand-held cameras, experts that you don’t tend to see on TV. This is because it is the only way to reveal the truth – the government, the police, the media are all in on the conspiracy and so would have destroyed any evidence that would not agree with the "official" story.

Second – they all hinge on one or two "facts" – facts that the person who wrote the site/movie disputes. The temperature at which jet fuel burns, the tensile strength of steal, the path of the aircraft that hit The Pentagon. Tiny little facts that don’t really mean anything, but that can be used as the foundation to throw the entire story of the event in to doubt.

Third – they can be very convincing, from a certain point of view. They prevent their story in such a way that it is impossible to doubt it while you are watching/reading it, and you find yourself wondering how you ever could have thought differently. 

They also have two more thing in common – they are all, without exception, wrong and if, on the off chance, you can find a flaw in on of their theories, they will simply say "Well just because that was wrong it doesn’t mean that the rest of my points are wrong".

Case in point – 

There was a video that was posted by a 9-11 Conspiracist that purported to show undeniable evidence that the second explosion at The World Trade Centre was not caused by an aircraft, but by pre-rigged seams of C4 planted in the structure of the building. 

The undeniable evidence was a video of the minutes leading up to the second explosion, taken from a high vantage point behind the tower. There was clearly no aircraft in the shot. The video was intercut with the more famous shots on the news – the news showed the aircraft, but the video showed no aircraft. 

The captions ask – in the tone I mentioned above – why the "image of an aircraft" appears on the news when there is obviously no aircraft there.

However, a year or so later, another video w

as posted – by the same Conspiracist – admitting that he was mislead by the first video – that it was a fake. It went back to the source of the first video and showed that it was originally shot in a much higher resolution – a resolution that clearly showed the plane flying across New York and crashing in to The Tower. But when it was re-edited in to low resolution, the plane more or less vanished in to the digital fuzz and so was invisble.

But even after seeing this the Conspiracist finished the video with the caption "just because this one thing was fake doesn’t answer the thousands of other questions that are still out there. Just because this video has been disproved doesn’t mean our government wasn’t responsible for the attack".

Because the true test of a proper conspiracist is that they don’t let little things – like the truth – get in the way of their beliefs. Either because the truth is not actually relevant ("the fact the plane shows up on the video doesn’t explain why the explosion was so big") or because "the truth" is actually just a distortion of the "real facts" by the government/the police/the people behind the conspiracy.

By now, you will hopefully have gathered that I am not someone who believes the conspiracies. Any of the conspiracies.

The simple fact is that while it seems unlikely an attack this big and this horrific could be planned without the government cottoning on to it, you have to remember two basic facts about life :-

First – when dedicated people are working together towards a common goal, there is almost nothing they can not accomplish. the elimination of smallpox, the return of Apollo 13,  And if you had to pick one phrase to describe a terrorist cell, I suspect "dedicated people working towards a common goal" would probably be high up on the list. 

Second – there are times in history where operations larger than this one have been planned and implemented with utter secrecy with no one knowing about them until they were launched. The D-Day landings spring to mind. 

To me it is a lot easier to believe the US Government and all the Federal Agencies were caught completely and utterly by surprise, and that the attack was what it seemed – a truly horrific attack by a group of truly horrific people.

HOWEVER

The Watergate Conspiracy started with a tiny little detail that didn’t make sense. Only a few people picked up on it, and only a very few people thought it was evidence of something big. 

And (while I can’t be sure), I suspect a fair number of people dismissed this "tiny little detail" as being unimportant, and thought that the people who were pursuing it were "conspiracy nuts" who can’t face the truth. 

Imagine what would have happened if Woodward and Bernstein had listened to the people suggesting this. Imagine if they hadn’t bothered following that "tiny little detail" and had – instead – gone on to writing something else.

Now – if I am honest – most of the "tiny little facts" on the myriad of 9-11 Truth Sites are nonsense. It is people who have either misunderstood something, people who are making stuff up, or people who have made their mind up and are just bending things to fit their point of view.

But, by the same token, if you just rule out everything that the people on these sites are saying because "it doesn’t fit in with my point of view so clearly it is bollocks" then what makes you any different to the people you are looking down upon? 

And if The D-Day Landings teach us that you can organise a MASSIVE operation in complete secrecy, then doesn’t Watergate teach us that sometimes tiny little facts reveal MASSIVE conspiracies?