Friday, October 20, 2006

Matt Taibbi takes on 9/11 conspiracy theorists

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone has an excellent article on 9/11 conspiracy theorists, pointing out the absurdity of their claims in the form of a dialogue among the plotters:

BUSH: So, what's the plan again?

CHENEY: Well, we need to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. So what we've decided to do is crash a whole bunch of remote-controlled planes into Wall Street and the Pentagon, say they're real hijacked commercial planes, and blame it on the towelheads; then we'll just blow up the buildings ourselves to make sure they actually fall down.

RUMSFELD: Right! And we'll make sure that some of the hijackers are agents of Saddam Hussein! That way we'll have no problem getting the public to buy the invasion.

CHENEY: No, Dick, we won't.

RUMSFELD: We won't?

CHENEY: No, that's too obvious. We'll make the hijackers Al Qaeda and then just imply a connection to Iraq.

RUMSFELD: But if we're just making up the whole thing, why not just put Saddam's fingerprints on the attack?

CHENEY: (sighing) It just has to be this way, Dick. Ups the ante, as it were. This way, we're not insulated if things go wrong in Iraq. Gives us incentive to get the invasion right the first time around.

BUSH: I'm a total idiot who can barely read, so I'll buy that. But I've got a question. Why do we need to crash planes into the Towers at all? Since everyone knows terrorists already tried to blow up that building complex from the ground up once, why don't we just blow it up like we plan to anyway, and blame the bombs on the terrorists?

RUMSFELD: Mr. President, you don't understand. It's much better to sneak into the buildings ourselves in the days before the attacks, plant the bombs and then make it look like it was exploding planes that brought the buildings down. That way, we involve more people in the plot, stand a much greater chance of being exposed and needlessly complicate everything!

CHENEY: Of course, just toppling the Twin Towers will never be enough. No one would give us the war mandate we need if we just blow up the Towers. Clearly, we also need to shoot a missile at a small corner of the Pentagon to create a mightily underpublicized additional symbol of international terrorism -- and then, obviously, we need to fake a plane crash in the middle of fucking nowhere in rural Pennsylvania.

RUMSFELD: Yeah, it goes without saying that the level of public outrage will not be sufficient without that crash in the middle of fucking nowhere.

There's lots more dialogue in the article... Taibbi summarizes:

None of this stuff makes any sense at all. If you just need an excuse to assume authoritarian powers, why fake a plane crash in Shanksville? What the hell does that accomplish? If you're using bombs, why fake a hijacking, why use remote-control planes? If the entire government apparatus is in on the scam, then why bother going to all this murderous trouble at all -- only to go to war a year later with a country no one even bothered to falsely blame for the attacks? You won't see any of this explored in 9/11 Truth lore, because the "conspiracy" they're describing is impossible everywhere outside a Zucker brothers movie -- unbelievably stupid in its conception, pointlessly baroque and excessive in its particulars, but flawless in its execution, with no concrete evidence left behind and tens of thousands keeping their roles a secret forever.

Check it out--highly recommended, along with these other 9/11 conspiracy debunking sites.

5 comments:

thumperings said...

This blathering does nothing but allow you to slep better at night. Any asshole could do what you just did from their perspective and make it work. When you can explain building 7 you snide goof, then I'll listen to you. Explain the molton steel in the basements 1000 degrees hotter than kerosene burns. explain the towers dropping at freefall speed, the seismic proof of bombs, and the admission of demolition by silverstein . and the fact that no steel structures have ever fallen by fire (and never will) get a clue

Lippard said...

Thumperings: You'd have more credibility if your list of problems to be explained hadn't already all been explained in detail (or refuted, like the "admission of demolition by Silverstein").

The sites I've linked to in previous posts on the subject of 9/11 on this blog address everything you've brought up.

I particularly recommend the 9/11 Myths site's treatment of Building 7 myths.

Kenric said...

You are obviously not aware of the other possible motives that actually DID require demolishing the buildings:

* WTC owner Larry Silverstein just prior to 9/11 added a clause to his insurance specifically for terrorist attacks and he made a huge bundle from that.

* The fireproofing throughout the buildings was due for replacement by law and that would have cost millions of dollars.

* There were allegedly many files for criminal investigations that were destroyed in the towers.

* There may have also been gold stolen from the towers.

Furthermore, even if there were NO known motives, this line of "debunking" totally ignores the mountain of evidence, particularly five months of molten steel and the detection of nanothermite explosives as reported in a PEER-REVIEWED scientific journal and recently independently verified by a chemical engineer, that at the very least demand a real investigation, so we can figure out what those motives were.

Kenric said...

The debunker site's claim that there are only three sources re: molten steel is completely ridiculous. See here:

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=142980022410

And you are referencing debunk sites that themselves have already been debunked. For example:

http://www.911popularmechanics.com/

Lippard said...

Kenric: Your bullet points are not inconsistent at all with what we know happened--i.e., 19 terrorists flew planes into the WTC, Pentagon, and the ground in Pennsylvania. There is no remotely plausible conspiracy theory in which the events of 9/11 took place because Silverstein wanted the insurance money.

The molten steel quotes do nothing to demonstrate that any observed metal in a liquid state was steel (itself an alloy, not an element) to the exclusion of all other metals--such as aluminum, which was observed at the 80th floor of WTC 2, according to the NIST investigation. Nor, even if it was steel, that there was some other cause--as NIST notes, "Under certain circumstances it is conceivable for some of the steel in the wreckage to have melted after the buildings collapsed. Any molten steel in the wreckage was more likely due to the high temperature resulting from long exposure to combustion within the pile than to short exposure to fires or explosions while the buildings were standing."

See the answers to questions 11 and 13 in that FAQ.

You've posted a bunch of other comments to this post which go off on wild tangents, which I'll consider publishing later.