Conspiracy Reality

Hello, Unrestrained Questioners!

Over the past ten years a veritable tsunami of conspiracy theories have cropped up about 9/11. For me, questions about that terrible day started to germinate in real time.

I've already summarized my own experience and thoughts about that dreadful morning in the form of this poem which I wrote last year. I was working in a cloistered call center environment on September 11'th 2001 and the only information I was privy to came from a dwindling parade of increasingly freaked-out customers.

By noon it was abundantly clear that the United States had just suffered a horrible terrorist attack and an inconceivably-terrible national tragedy. Despite the gravity of the situation, our employer resolutely kept us shackled to our cubicles. For the next protracted eight-and-half-hours, I tried to glean some information during my allotted forty-five minutes of break time, as well as from snippets of conversation with co-workers and customers.  Every once and awhile I had to turn back to my computer in order to sell useless tchotchkes to some company who also wanted their employees to act as if nothing was happening.

As soon as I got home I turned on the television and proceeded to watch seven straight hours of news coverage. Needless to say, I had a really hard time processing what I saw. This was big, really big. Like "bordering on the surreal" big.

As an imaginative kid weaned on James Bond movies and comic books, this was the sort of grand, maniacal scheme that only a Doctor Doom or an Ernst Stavro Blofeld could possibly dream up. Instead we were asked to believe that a bunch of amateur pilots, armed only with box-cutters and led by a cave-bound shmuck in Afghanistan, had somehow manged to defeat the most sophisticated intelligence and defense force on the planet to deliver the most devastating strike on North American soil ever.     

And then, at 6:20 pm our local time, thing got even weirder:

As I was watching this I distinctly remember turning to my wife and saying: "Wow, that building must have been in such bad shape that they had to demolish it."

I kept watching the news until around 12:30. Since it was a school night and I had to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for work the following day I forced myself to go to bed. Unfortunately, I barely slept a wink.  For hours I just sat there, my saucer-shaped eyes illuminating the entire room. All night long, my feeble, over-clocked brain tried to make sense out of what I'd just witnessed.

Fast forward a few years later and I stumbled upon this article about the demolition of the J.L. Hudson Department Store in Detroit, Michigan back in 1998.  According to the article: "In 24 days, CDI's 12 person loading crew placed 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations on 9 levels of the structure."

24 days.

Reading this instantly chilled me to the bone. I was still laboring under what my own eyes and ears had told me: that World Trade Center 7 was brought down by a deliberate, controlled demolition and hadn't collapsed because of structural failure. This feeling of unease intensified after I learned that no modern office building has ever collapsed due to fire.

That bears repeating: no modern office building has ever collapsed due to fire.   

Now, I'm not saying that the official explanation of what happened that day was false. I just find it difficult to believe that every single one of these structures pancaked in on themselves at free-fall speed. Within a matter of seconds, three of the most durable structures on the planet were reduced to a smoking heap of rubble and dust. This is especially far-fetched in light of the fact that the World Trade Center was actually engineered to withstand the impact of several jet planes:

Now, don't get me wrong, in my heart of hearts I'd much rather believe something like this:

But even sober explanations like this fly in the face of my own experience and instincts.

Contrary to the trepidations I've expressed here, I'd love to buy the official story of what happened on 9/11 wholesale. Mainly because the implications posited by any other scenario is w-a-a-a-a-a-a-y too disturbing to ponder.

Regardless, this time every year, just like clockwork, the grim theater of my mind's eye begins re-play the image of Building 7 imploding in a cloud of dust in a near-continuous loop.

And I end up losing a lot of sleep.      

EPIC DOC   9/11 still feels completely unreal to me, like a (particularly) bad Roland Emmerich movie. Although it's painful to revisit that awful tragedy, I'm hoping that our sustained vigilance and inquiring minds will someday yield some dividends of truth.

  

EPIC VID  Another short video, directly addressing the Building 7 conundrum.

EPIC ARTICLE  Here's a rather scholarly piece written by physicist and architect Dave Heller.

FAIL-URE OF TRANSPARENCY   Way back in 2002 Senator Tom Daschle held a press conference and revealed to the largely-oblivious press that both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney told him not to investigate 9/11. The question still lingers, why?

FAIL-URE OF CONSCIENCE  As if my own epiphany about controlled demolitions wasn't chilling enough, the predictions proffered by NeoCon creep Paul Wolfowitz in his PNAC document "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (written just one year before 9/11) is even more disturbing: