9/11: Here it comes again

The last time I checked my stack of screeners, I did not see a single television special being produced to observe the sixth anniversary of the attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

That has not stopped another group of highly creative people from generating their own commemoration of the events of 9/11. I refer, of course, to conspiracy theorists.

This morning I found an email in my inbox from a googler who identified themselves as a graduate student in classics at Rutgers University, arguing that 9/11 "was an inside job." I think it was the classics part that got me — that was my major in college, too, and I've always thought it helped develop my critical-thinking skills, which seem to be missing, or underutilized, among the 9/11 conspiracy crowd.

**UPDATE 1-23-09:** The person whose letter is quoted below informed me today by email that s/he no longer "belongs to the 9/11 truth movement" and requests that our exchange be deleted. I'm deleting the person's identity ... but I worked too hard on this to simply erase it from my site.

Hello,

I am a graduate student at Rutgers University in the Classics. I am writing to urge you to give a fair and balanced cove

rage of the tragic events of 9/11.

I urge you to refrain from the one-sided and misleading slur "conspiracy theory", as applied to views that take exception to the Bush administration"s claims about what happened on 9/11. If, as the Webster-Merriam dictionary says, a conspiracy is "a combination of persons banded secretly together and resolved to accomplish an evil or unlawful end", then the claim according to which Osama bin Laden and 19 hijackers attacked us on 9/11 is also a conspiracy theory. I repeat: the official story is a conspiracy theory. You should either refrain altogether from the phrase, or use it for both parties.

I urge you not to follow in the foot steps of the completely biased and propagandistic "documentary" that was recently aired on the History Channel. In it, Popular Mechanics" David Coburn and James Meigs were hailed as "experts", systematically given the final word and allowed to get away with such egregious lies as the claim that it was "possible" to make cell phone calls below 40000 feet. By possible, they failed to specify that for three successful phone calls to be made at half that elevation, i.e. 20000 feet, there is less than one chance in a million (see p 295 of the following book).

Having dispassionately read what I"ve read, i.e. both sides of the story"the 9/11 Commission Report, The NIST report, Debunking 9/11 as well as reports by 9/11 Truth researchers"the shocking conclusion I've reached is that the theory with the most amount of verifiable evidence is that of an inside job.

I urge you to read the most comprehensive and up-to-date work on the subject:

Debunking 9/11 Debunking
By David Ray Griffin

Every American citizen and every intelligent person should read it.

Thank you for your time.

And I replied:

Hi. With all of your important graduate work going on, I can't help but wonder why you are so interested in 9/11 that you take time to email journalists about it.

As a journalist interested in history (also a classics major, Northwestern 1987), I simply have to go with the big story. Not the official story, which pretty much begins and ends on 9/11, but the big story that begins with Qutb and persecution of radical Muslims in the 1950s. That's the story that leads to OBL and Zawahiri, two psychopaths whose obsession, commitment and instincts led to this dramatic and horrible act. Lawrence Wright spent five years of his life documenting those guys and I find The Looming Tower a convincing account of al Qaeda and how it was able to go about its work.

So unless you convince me that the men of al Qaeda were completely unlikely perpetrators of the acts of 9/11 — which means discrediting 50 years of data establishing their motives and means — your fixation on whether people can make cell phone calls in the air or not isn't just laughable, it's pointless.

Comments

[MMcD]

Any time someone starts an essay, presentation, speech or diatribe with "The dictionary defines (...) as...", they lose me. It suggests their research involved little more than "looking up stuff" instead of "thinking."

[Bill Swensen]

Ok so let's think. Why would they put a transponder on a commercial airliner that had a switch that could be turned off if it's so important to NORAD? How did all the hijackers get into the cockpits without one pilot typing in a four digit hijacking code? The code or message can also be sent through the headset with one button. All four planes had the cockpit doors unlocked? No pilot had time to scream, "We are being hijacked" into their headset? How could an hour and a half go by without planes being scrambled? Are we to believe our government is that incompetent? It's just ludicrous. During the cold war we practiced scrambling jets and timed it in milliseconds.

To believe the official story you have to believe our government is totally incompetent while at the same time trust our government, NORAD and the FAA are telling the truth. Just looking at the official story you have to ask why no one was fired or even reprimanded. How deep does this incompetence go?

[Steve Barry]

"your fixation on whether people can make cell phone calls in the air or not isn't just laughable, it's pointless."

He's right about that. There are much stronger discrepancies in the official story than the cell phone thing. WTC7 imploding in on itself for example. You won't see Aaron bringing that up.

I've had a simple rule since 2002: every year from September 10th through September 12th, I put myself on a self-imposed "news blackout". I make a concerted effort to avoid as much as humanly possible any news coverage during these three days. I was deeply affected by the events in 2001; but I don't need to rehash it every anniversary of the events of 9/11/01.

[Aaron]

Steve, why should I bring up WTC7? You've said it so well yourself. Either we believe that a group of extremely well-prepared and single-minded men who fit the Milosevic profile (messianic nut jobs with historical axes to grind) pulled off an incredible, yet hardly implausible, act of terrorism ... or we believe that WTC7 imploded. And a bunch of other things, all masterfully coordinated behind the scenes and without a single leak to a credible journalist.

Really, you don't need me on this.

[b. j. edwards]

You are of course correct, Aaron. The inability of 9/11 "Truthers" to think critically and rationally is the hallmark of their "movement."

We have listened to the same repeated and debunked nonsense of the 9/11 "Truth" Movement (more commonly and correctly known as the 9/11 Denial Movement) for almost six years now. They harp on the fact that Al Quaeda's plot was in fact a conspiracy theory but ignore that the "theory" is backed up by thousands of pieces of unconnected and independent evidence that all converge to the irrefutable conclusion that Al Quaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

9/11 Truthers ignore this salient fact so that they don't HAVE to deal with the overwhelming evidence against their "inside job" claims. Instead, they want everyone to believe that there are two competing and EQUALLY valid theories: theirs and some imaginary "official story."

It hasn't worked.

The "official story" canard forms the quicksand foundation of the 9/11 Truth Movement's house of cards. Debunked before it ever got off the ground, 9/11 Truthers want everyone to believe that the "government" magically is the SOURCE of all the evidence of what happened on 9/11 AND controls all of that evidence. What absurd nonsense!

Of course, 9/11 Truthers HAVE to use the "official story" canard in order to narrow down the number of "plotters" in their "theory" to a handful of conniving government officials rather than the thousands of people who would have had to know of the plot or would have had to be involved in a "coverup."

The we have the "we're just asking questions" crowd exemplified by commenter above, Bill Swenson, who claims there are all these "unanswered" questions but who is quite willing to ignore every single answer inconvenient to his pre-ordained conclusion, while of course resorting to the "official story" canard.

I tired to reason with 9/11 Truthers for years online. I gave up; these people have had no training in critical thinking nor do they care to. They are happy to follow the various Messiahs of the 9/11 Denial Movement - Griffith, Jones, Fetzer, etc. - never once bothering to question the claims and assertions of those individuals. Instead, I can only make fun of them on my blog.

The 9/11 Denial Movement has reached its peak of popularity; it's already falling apart like any cult and conspiracy movement always has. It will never go away; there will always be a fringe group of 9/11 Deniers yelling the same debunked nonsense no matter how much evidence shoots them down.

One thing we know for sure: there will not be another 9/11 investigation. There is no need for one just to satisfy 9/11 Truther's conspiracy fantasies.

[Aaron]

B.J., thanks.

Normally I keep these comment threads open for days if not weeks. But my fear is that the signal-to-noise ratio is about to go off the charts. I'm not that interested in driving up the comments count to boost my ego. After a certain point people don't read ANY of the comments, which defeats the purpose of allowing them. Yes, that's kind of a 1980s Dartmouth "we're suppressing free speech so it will bloom" kind of reasoning, and if my punishment is losing traffic to other sites with less constrained 9/11 debates, well, I'll just have to swallow that pill.

If you've got something really salient to add here, you know where to reach me, and I'm open to adding useful comments to this thread. Until then ...