September 11, 2001—a date surpassing the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 as the “date that will live in infamy”. Everyone alive and old enough to have a memory will live with the events of that day for the rest of their lives. I have already given my thoughts on the attacks, as well as my experiences here, and the general response to it has been tremendously successful. However, in this article, I offer no sympathy or recollection of that traumatic morning. Instead I will project my energies on a question that has been burning in the American public for the last nine years, and much more passionately in the last year or so, as groups have gotten together in a quest for “9/11 Truth”. That is exactly what I am after: the truth. I never was a gung-ho believer in a 9/11 conspiracy, but have only recently began to open up a bit more.
I must admit, I was mesmerized by the documentary Loose Change when it first came out, but because every few years they make edits and remove information from their film that has been proven false, I wonder how much of it is actually credible to begin with. For that reason, I will not cite them further or encourage others to view their hunk of rubbish as a source for anything other than comedic revelry.
My concerns of a 9/11 conspiracy are less technical, meaning I am not going to sit here and pretend to be an architectural expert. People stand on top of their soapbox and claim that the flames did this, but they didn’t do that. Fire could have caused this, but not that. There had to be bombs planted, but if there were, who planted them? These are just a few of the questions included in the dizzying array of melodramatic and paranoid lunacy that gives a bad name to those of us theorists who are more interested in how the United States benefited from such an attack, and not the tin-foil helmet inducing refuse that causes others to sit in a fetal position in their newspaper lined closets chanting how the government is out to get them.
The only concern I have that the buildings were brought down by something other than a single plane each is this following picture. It is not new, nor is it exclusive. It is one of the many taken on that day, and shows a fireball exploding out from the building at the place of impact:
Here you can see a clear fireball, because that is all that is there. There are no missiles, no hidden weapons assisting the plane—all we have is the jetliner that slammed into the tower. Immediately it was announced that jet fuel caused the towers to collapse. Since fuel burns at such a high temperature, if it seeped down the elevator shafts and burned intensely while sticking to the beams, that is what obviously caused them to melt, thus making the building fall on top of itself and implode. But this is where that theory does not make any sense. You see the fireball, do you not? That massive explosion that sent shards of glass and steel flying into the air? THAT is the jet fuel. What could that flame be besides the fuel burning? Steel does not ignite, the wooden desks and Sheetrock do not combust to form a flame like that. The only explanation for that flame is the jet fuel, which all ignited within seconds of the plane striking the tower. So what jet fuel is left to flow down into the center of the building?
I will now end here in regards to the actual World Trade Center on that fateful day, because there are hundreds upon hundreds of websites and documentaries (some good, some not so good) that can explain the building structure and theories of a controlled demolition down to the dots on the I’s. But one more question regarding this: when in the history of human architecture has a building ever been destroyed because of a fire? Not gutted, destroyed. When has a solid, steel frame building (arguably the strongest in the world) ever fell because of a fire?
Where my interest lies, as mentioned earlier, when dealing with conspiracies, is how the US government benefits from such an attack. It’s quite comical that every time this country needs something, or a boost in economy, we conveniently go to war because of an assassination or attack on our soil. We needed a little boost in 1941, which is why the US naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was allowed to be attacked on December 7, yes, allowed. The government had full warning that the Japanese were going to attack because of intelligence, and rather than scramble their soldiers to prepare or evacuate, they had the planes and ships moved into nice little lines, side-by-side with each other so that Japanese bombers could not miss.
The result of this? A swift, and patriotic response to join the US Army by volunteers all over the nation. There were no questions asked; just an overwhelming sense of patriotism. The US had been looking to go to war for some time, but how could they persuade people to enlist to fight a war that they seemingly had no reason entering? Simple: you let the nation be attacked to inspire people.
This quote here comes from Hermann Goering, the president of the Nazi Reichstag, uttered during the Nuremberg Trials:
Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country…
What is the first thing you remember about the days following the attacks on 9/11? A sense of patriotism, of course. We wanted revenge on our attackers and the government quickly saw to it that we would have a war in the Middle East. How many of us know someone who enlisted in the months following, when they never had any intention of doing so previously? How many people were attacked for denouncing the oncoming war, called cowards and un-American? How is it, that for a country whose two main political parties that could not agree on the color of the sky, almost unanimously voted to go to war? Why? Because they were inspired. To serve your country is to do so without questioning its integrity.
The invasion of the Middle East was an illegal one, made so by a rushed sham of a declaration of war. And why, if it was pounded into our skulls day and night, that it was Osama Bin Laden who organized the attack, did we invade Iraq? Was Saddam Hussein ever mentioned with being in cahoots with Bin Laden? No, of course not, but he had those infamous (and now comic) weapons of mass destruction.
Oh yes! Those four words echo through my brain like a razor blade bouncing in a spinning dryer. Those four words single-handedly convinced the American public that war is alright. Where did these weapons go, though? Did we ever find them? And how about Saddam Hussein? We were able to capture him yet we do not have the slightest idea where Bin Laden is. Sure, he releases his tapes every few years, shaking his finger at America and the world and promising jihad. How do we know he isn’t dead already? How is it that this man, who has been on the run for nine years while living in cave after cave, who supposedly has kidney disease, has not turned up dead? Maybe it’s because he isn’t supposed to. Maybe Bin Laden never really existed, or perhaps he was just an insignificant little peon whose worth was exaggerated by our government to scare the hell out of us. Is it so unbelievable? Shall we make reference to McCarthyism and the Red Scare?
Is it so unbelievable, coming from the nation who will murder and invade at the drop of a hat, a nation that concocted the Tonkin Gulf Incident out of thin air to give us reason to invade Vietnam? Yes, out of thin air. This incident, which supposedly had one of our ships attacked by a Vietnamese gun boat, never happened. It was made up—a “false flag” operation if you will, and the scary part is, the government admitted it earlier this year. But that’s alright: the 50,000 Americans who died during the struggle were just pawns in a chess game, a mere sacrifice for the boost of our economy, which thrives on war.
War is a business, and it does not take a brain surgeon to figure that out. War means weapons need to be made, which means factories need to be opened or filled with additional workers. Then there are tanks and other vehicles, and uniforms, and food, and computers, and so on and so forth—the list is endless. And of course, there’s the oil, the one liquid on earth that will drive men to the edge of insanity to claim it for themselves. We needed oil in the 90′s and today, just like we needed the rubber trees in Vietnam, and in case you have not realized it, what the United States of America needs is what the United States of America gets. That should be painfully obvious by now. It only cost John F. Kennedy his life, because he would not commit to an all-out war in Vietnam, and let the CIA have a chance to redeem themselves after the Bay of Pigs disaster in the early 1960′s.
But now the United States does not even have the common decency to let our own soldiers being the sole purveyors in this fruitless war, but they need to contract jobs out to companies like Blackwater, who carry out covert political assassinations, and who have ties to none other than Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
So I will end with this question: DO YOU TRUST YOUR GOVERNMENT?
I would like to sit here and think that 9/11 was not an inside job or anything but a terrorist attack on our nation. I remember much simpler times when I was younger, when the world seemed like such a better place and whatever I was told was the truth, and even if it wasn’t, I was not burdened by some underlying sense of guilt, that it is my job, and the job of us as Americans to ask questions. Historian Howard Zinn once said, “Dissension is the highest form of patriotism”, meaning it is ok to ask questions, and that we have a right to, as citizens.
Look at the middle east today, look at our soldiers dying. What is the purpose of war? How have we not learned in our human existence? For a country that saw 600,000 men die during the Civil War, how did we not learn? World War I was the war to end all wars, and less than 30 years later, there is a second world war. Then came Korea, then Vietnam, then Desert Storm, and now this mess. And what is this for? Our men and women are giving up their lives fighting on a dusty piece of land that holds no more significance to them than a piece of spit-out gum in a storm drain. Is it worth it? Is it worth it for this country and others to engage in fruitless wars?
I am 19 years old, and I have only known nine years without war or terrorism. I look at the children born today, and some of the boys and girls I have taught in the last few years at CCD, and I just think that these kids will never known anything but terror and violence. Since they first developed a memory, there has been war. At least I can look back at a time in my childhood where there was no worldwide fear—no danger in going on vacation to a foreign country and having to worry if you will come back alive, no danger in getting on an airplane wondering if the person behind you is going to hijack it or blow it up, no danger in looking at every person of Middle Eastern descent and thinking to myself, could they be a terrorist? Do they want to do me harm? It is a generalization and a prejudice that I, and everyone else, should rid themselves of, but I fear that will be impossible so long as the world works this way, and continues to head in a path of destruction.
That is what angers me, that there are people in positions of power who stand to make a buck on the death of others. I hate to sound like a hippie, yelling for peace and not war, but as someone who has immersed himself in history, and past wars, very rarely do I find a war with a real purpose. Again, what is the point to send people to die in a foreign land when we have threats right here in our own country. I do hope that one day there will be peace, that children can grow up in a world without fear, and maybe it needs this generation’s bones in the ground before that can be accomplished, I don’t know. And that, my friends, is the real conspiracy.
