When images collide

THE LOONIEST OF ALL 9/11 CONSPIRACY THEORIES

by Gerard Holmgren

August 2003

 

 

Astute observers of history are aware that for every notable event there will

usually be at least one, often several, wild conspiracy theories which spring

up around it. 'The CIA killed Hendrix', 'The Pope had John Lennon murdered ',

'Hitler was half Werewolf', 'Space aliens replaced Nixon with a clone', etc,

etc. The bigger the event, the more ridiculous and more numerous are the

fanciful rantings which circulate in relation to it.

 

So it's hardly surprising that the events of Sept 11 2001 have spawned their

fair share of these ludicrous fairy tales. And as always, there is sadly a

small but gullible percentage of the population eager to lap up these tall

tales, regardless of facts or rational analysis.

 

One of the wilder stories circulating about Sept 11, and one that has

attracted something of a cult following amongst conspiracy buffs is that it

was carried out by 19 fanatical Arab hijackers, masterminded by an evil genius

named Osama bin Laden, with no apparent motivation other than that they 'hate

our freedoms.

 

Never a group of people to be bothered by facts, the perpetrators of this

cartoon fantasy have constructed an elaborately woven web of delusions and

unsubstantiated hearsay in order to promote this garbage across the internet

and the media to the extent that a number of otherwise rational people have

actually fallen under its spell. Normally I don't even bother debunking this

kind of junk, but the effect that this paranoid myth is beginning to have

requires a little rational analysis, in order to consign it to the same

rubbish bin as all such silly conspiracy theories.

 

These crackpots even contend that the extremist Bush regime was caught

unawares by the attacks, had no hand in organizing them, and actually would

have stopped them if it had been able. Blindly ignoring the stand-down of the

US Air Force, the insider trading on airline stocks — linked to the CIA, the

complicit behavior of Bush on the morning of the attacks, the controlled

demolition of the WTC, the firing of a missile into the Pentagon and a host of

other documented proofs that the Bush regime was behind the attacks, the

conspiracy theorists stick doggedly to a silly story about 19 Arab hijackers

somehow managing to commandeer 4 planes simultaneously and fly them around US

airspace for nearly 2 hours, crashing them into important buildings, without

the US intelligence services having any idea that it was coming, and without

the Air Force knowing what to do.

 

The huge difficulties with such a stupid story force them to invent even more

preposturous stories to distract from its core silliness, and thus the tale

has escalated into a mythic fantasy of truly gargantuan proportions.

It's difficult to apply rational analysis to such unmitigated stupidity, but

that is the task which I take on in this article. However, it should be noted

that one of the curious characteristics of conspiracy theorists is that they

effortlessly change their so-called evidence in response to each aspect which

is debunked. As soon as one delusion is unmasked, they simply invent another

to replace it, and deny that the first ever existed. Eventually, when they

have turned full circle through this endlessly changing fantasy fog , they

then re-invent the original delusion and deny that you ever debunked it, thus

beginning the circle once more. This technique is known as 'the fruit loop'

and saves the conspiracy theorist from ever having to see any of their ideas

through to their (ill)logical conclusions.

 

According to the practitioners of the fruit loop, 19 Arabs took over the 4

planes by subduing the passengers and crew through the use of guns, knives,

box cutters and gas, and then used electronic guidance systems which they had

smuggled on board to fly the planes to their targets.

 

The suspension of disbelief required for this outrageous concoction is only

for the hard-core conspiracy theorist. For a start, they conveniently skip

over the awkward fact that there weren't any Arabs on the planes. If there

were, one must speculate that they somehow got on board without being filmed

by any of the security cameras and without being registered on the passenger

lists. But the curly question of how they are supposed to have got on board is

all too mundane for the exciting world of the conspiracy theorist. With vague

mumblings that they must have been using false ID (but never specifying which

IDs they are alleged to have used, or how these were traced to their real

identities), they quickly bypass this problem, to relate exciting and sinister

tales about how some of the fictitious fiends were actually searched before

boarding because they looked suspicious. However, as inevitably happens with

any web of lies, this simply paints them into an even more difficult corner.

How are they supposed to have got on board with all that stuff if they were

searched? And if they used gas in a confined space, they would have been

affected themselves unless they also had masks in their luggage.

 

'Excuse me sir, why do you have a boxcutter, a gun, a container of gas, a gas

mask and an electronic guidance unit in your luggage?' 'A present for your

grandmother? Very well sir, on you get.' 'Very strange', thinks the security

officer. 'That's the fourth Arab man without an Arabic name who just got on

board with a knife, gun or boxcutter and gas mask. And why does that security

camera keep flicking off every time one of these characters shows up? Must be

one of those days I guess...'

 

Asking any of these basic questions to a conspiracy theorist is likely to

cause a sudden leap to the claim that we know that they were on board because

they left a credit card trail for the tickets they had purchased and cars they

had rented. So if they used credit cards that identified them, how does that

reconcile with the claim that they used false IDs to get on to the plane? But

by this time the fruit loop is in full swing, as the conspiracy theorist tries

to stay one jump ahead of this annoying and awkward rational analysis. They

will allege that the hijackers' passports were found at the crash scenes. 'So

there!' they exalt triumphantly, their fanatical faces lighting up with that

deranged look of one who has just a revelation of questionable sanity. Hmm? So

they got on board with false IDs but took their real passports with them?

However, by this time the fruit loop has been completely circumnavigated,and

the conspiracy theorist exclaims impatiently, 'Who said anything about false

IDs? We know what seats they were sitting in! Their presence is well

documented!' And so the whole loop starts again. 'Well, why aren't they on the

passenger lists?' 'You numbskull! They assumed the identities of other

passengers!' And so on...

 

Finally, out of sheer fascination with this circular method of creative

delusion, the rational sceptic will allow them to get away with this loop, in

order to move on to the next question, and see what further delights await us

in the unraveling of this marvelously stupid story. 'Uh, how come their

passports survived fiery crashes that completely incinerated the planes and

all the passengers? ' The answer of course is that it's just one of those

strange co-incidences, those little quirks of fate that do happen from time to

time. You know, like the same person winning the lottery four weeks in a row.

The odds are astronomical, but these things do happen...

 

This is another favourite deductive method of the conspiracy theorist. The

'improbability drive', in which they decide upon a conclusion without any

evidence whatsoever to support it, and then continually speculate a series of

wildly improbable events and unbelievable co-incidences to support it,

shrugging off the implausibility of each event with the vague assertion that

sometimes the impossible happens (just about all the time in their world).

There is a principle called 'Occam's Razor' which suggests that in the absence

of evidence to the contrary, the simplest explanation is most likely to be

correct. Conspiracy theorists hate Occam's razor.

 

Having for the sake of amusement, allowed them to get away with with the silly

story of the 19 invisible Arabs, we move on to the question of how they are

supposed to have taken over the planes. Hijacking a plane is not an easy thing

to do. Hijacking it without the pilot being able to alert ground control is

nearly impossible. The pilot has only to punch in a four-digit code to alert

ground control to a hijacking. Unconcerned with the awkward question of

plausibility, the conspiracy buffs maintain that on that Sept 11, the

invisible hijackers took over the plane by the rather crude method of

threatening people with boxcutters and knives, and spraying gas (after they

had attached their masks, obviously), but somehow took control of the plane

without the crew first getting a chance to punch in the hijacking code. Not

just on one plane, but on all four. At this point in the tale, the conspiracy

theorist is again forced to call upon the services of the improbability drive.

 

So now that our incredibly lucky hijackers have taken control of the planes,

all four pilots fly them with breath-taking skill and certainty to their fiery

end, all four pilots unflinching in their steely resolve for a swift meeting

with Allah. Apart from their psychotic hatred of 'our freedoms', it was their

fanatical devotion to Islam which enabled them to summon up the iron will to

do this. Which is strange, because according to another piece of hearsay

peddled by the conspiracy buffs, these guys actually went out drinking and

womanizing the night before their great martyrdom, even leaving their Korans

in the bar — really impeccable Islamic behavior — and then got up at 5 am the

next morning to pull off the greatest covert operation in history. This also

requires us to believe that they were even clear-headed enough to learn how to

fly the huge planes by reading flight manuals in Arabic in the car on the way

to the airport. We know this because they supposedly left the flight manuals

there for us to find.

 

It gets better. Their practical training had allegedly been limited to Cessnas

and flight simulators, but this was no barrier to the unflinching certainty

with which they took over the planes and skillfully guided them to their doom.

If they are supposed to have done their flight training with these tools,

which would be available just about anywhere in the world, it's not clear why

they would have decided to risk blowing their cover to US intelligence

services by doing the training in Florida, rather than somewhere in the Middle

East, but such reasoning is foreign to the foggy world of the conspiracy

theorist, too trapped in the constant rotation of the mental fruit loop to

make their unsubstantiated fabrications seem even semi-believable.

 

Having triumphantly established a circular delusion in support of the mythical

Arabs, the conspiracy theorist now confronts the difficult question of why

there's nothing left of the planes. Anybody who has seen the

endlessly-replayed footage of the second plane going into the WTC will realize

that the plane was packed with explosives. Planes do not and cannot blow up

into nothing in that manner when they crash.

 

Did the mythical Arabs also haul a huge heap of explosives on board, and

manage to deploy them in such a manner that they went off in the exact instant

of the crash, completely vapourizing the plane? This is a little difficult

even for the conspiracy theorist, who at this point decides that it's easier

to invent new laws of physics in order to keep the delusion rolling along.

 

There weren't any explosives. It wasn't an inside job. The plane blew up into

nothing from its exploding fuel load! Remarkable! Sluggishly combustible jet

fuel which is basically kerosine,and which burns at a maximum temperature of

around 800°C has suddenly taken on the qualities of a ferociously explosive

demolition agent, vapourizing 65 tons of aircraft into a puff of smoke. Never

mind that a plane of that size contains around 15 tons of steel and titanium,

of which even the melting points are about double that of the maximum

combustion temperature of kerosine — let alone the boiling point — which is

what would be required to vapourize a plane. And then there's about 50 tons of

aluminium to be accounted for. In excess of 15 lbs of metal for each gallon of

kerosine.

 

For the conspiracy theorist, such inconvenient facts are vaguely dismissed as

'mumbo jumbo'. This convenient little phrase is their answer to just about

anything factual or logical. Like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat,

they suddenly become fanatically insistent about the devastating explosive

qualities of kerosine, something hitherto completely unknown to science, but

just discovered by them, this very minute. Blissfully ignoring the fact that

never before or since in aviation history has a plane vapourized into nothing

from an exploding fuel load, the conspiracy theorist relies upon Hollywood

images, where the effects are are always larger than life, and certainly

larger than the intellects of these cretins. 'Its a well known fact that

planes blow up into nothing on impact.' they state with pompous certainty.

'Watch any Bruce Willis movie.

 

' Care to provide any documented examples? If it's a well-known fact, then

presumably this well-known fact springs from some kind of documentation —

other than Bruce Willis movies?

 

At this point the mad but cunning eyes of the conspiracy theorist will narrow

as they sense the corner that they have backed themselves into, and plan their

escape by means of another stunning backflip.

 

'Ah, but planes have never crashed into buildings before, so there's no way of

telling.' they counter with a sly grin.

 

Well, actually planes have crashed into buildings before and since, and not

vapourized into nothing.

 

'But not big planes, with that much fuel ', they shriek in hysterical denial.

 

Or that much metal to vapourize.

 

'Yes but not hijacked planes!'

 

Are you suggesting that whether the crash is deliberate or accidental affects

the combustion qualities of the fuel?

 

'Now you're just being silly'.

 

Although collisions with buildings are rare, planes frequently crash into

mountains, streets, other aircraft, nosedive into the ground, or have bombs

planted aboard them, and don't vapourize into nothing. What's so special about

a tower that's mostly glass? But by now, the conspiracy theorist has once

again sailed happily around the fruit loop. 'Its a well-documented fact that

planes explode into nothing on impact.

 

Effortlessly weaving back and forth between the position that it's a

'well-known fact' and that 'it's never happened before, so we have nothing to

compare it to', the conspiracy theorist has now convinced himself (if not too

many other people) that the WTC plane was not loaded with explosives, and that

the instant vapourization of the plane in a massive fireball was the same as

any other plane crash you might care to mention. Round and round the fruit

loop...

 

But the hurdles which confront the conspiracy theorist are many, and they are

now forced to implement even more creative uses for the newly-discovered

shockingly destructive qualities of kerosine. They have to explain how the

Arabs also engineered the elegant vertical collapse of both the WTC towers,

and for this awkward fact the easiest counter is to simply deny that it was a

controlled demolition, and claim that the buildings collapsed from fire caused

by the burning kerosine.

 

For this, it's necessary to sweep aside the second law of thermodynamics and

propose kerosine which is not only impossibly destructive, but also recycles

itself for a second burning in violation of the law of degradation of energy.

You see, the kerosine not only consumed itself in a sudden catastrophic

fireball, vapourizing a 65 ton plane into nothing, but then came back for a

second go, burning at 2000°C for another hour at the impact point, melting the

skyscraper's steel like butter. And while it was doing all this it also poured

down the elevator shafts, starting fires all through the building. When I was

at school there was a little thing called the entropy law which suggests that

a given portion of fuel can only burn once, something which is readily

observable in the real world, even for those who didn't make it to junior high

school science. But this is no problem for the conspiracy theorist.

 

Gleefully, they claim that a few thousand gallons of kerosine is enough to:

 

* completely vapourize a 65 ton aircraft

* have enough left over to burn ferociously enough for over an hour at the

impact point to melt steel (melting point about double the maximum combustion

temperature of the fuel) and

* still have enough left over to pour down the elevator shafts and start

similarly destructive fires all through the building.

 

This kerosine really is remarkable stuff! How chilling to realize that those

kerosine heaters we had in the house when I was a kid were deadly bombs, just

waiting to go off. One false move and the entire street might have been

vapourized. And never again will I take kerosine lamps out camping. One moment

you're there innocently holding the lamp — the next — kapow! vapourized into

nothing along with with the rest of the camp site, and still leaving enough of

the deadly stuff to start a massive forest fire.

 

These whackos are actually claiming that the raging inferno allegedly created

by the miraculously recycling, and impossibly hot burning kerosine melted or

at least softened the steel supports of the skyscraper. Oblivious to the fact

that the smoke coming from the WTC was black, which indicates an

oxygen-starved fire — therefore, not particularly hot, they trumpet an alleged

temperature in the building of 2000°C, without a shred of evidence to support

this curious suspension of the laws of physics.

 

Not content with this ludicrous garbage, they then contend that as the steel

frames softened, they came straight down instead of buckling and twisting and

falling sideways.

 

Since they've already re-engineered the combustion qualities of jet fuel,

violated the second law of thermodynamics, and re-defined the structural

properties of steel, why let a little thing like the laws of gravity get in

the way?

 

The tower fell in a time almost identical to that of a free-falling object,

dropped from that height, meaning that it's physically impossible for it to

have collapsed by the method of the top floors smashing through the lower

floors. But according to the conspiracy theorists, the laws of gravity were

temporarily suspended on the morning of Sept 11. It appears that the evil

psychic power of those dreadful Arabs knew no bounds. Even after they were

dead, they were able, by the power of their evil spirits, to force down the

tower at a speed physically impossible under the laws of gravity, had it been

meeting any resistance from fireproofed steel structures originally designed

to resist many tons of hurricane force wind as well as the impact of a Boeing

passenger jet straying off course.

 

Clearly, these conspiracy nuts never did their science homework at school, but

did become extremely adept at inventing tall tales for why.

 

'Muslim terrorists stole my notes, sir'

 

'No miss, the kerosine heater blew up and vapourized everything in the street,

except for my passport.

 

'You see sir, the schoolbus was hijacked by Arabs who destroyed my homework

because they hate our freedoms.

 

Or perhaps they misunderstood the term 'creative science' and mistakenly

thought that coming up with such rubbish was, in fact, their science homework.

 

The ferocious heat generated by this ghastly kerosine was, according to the

conspiracy theorists, the reason why so many of the WTC victims can't be

identified. DNA is destroyed by heat. (Although 2000°C isn't really required,

100°C will generally do the job.) This is quite remarkable, because according

to the conspiracy theorist, the nature of DNA suddenly changes if you go to a

different city. That's right! If you are killed by an Arab terrorist in New

York, your DNA will be destroyed by such temperatures. But if you are killed

by an Arab terrorist in Washington DC, your DNA will be so robust that it can

survive temperatures which completely vapourize a 65 ton aircraft.

 

You see, these loonies have somehow concocted the idea that the missile which

hit the pentagon was not a missile at all, but one of the hijacked planes. And

to prove this unlikely premise, they point to a propaganda statement from the

Bush regime, which rather stupidly claims that all but one of the people

aboard the plane were identified from the site by DNA testing, even though

nothing remains of the plane. The plane was vapourized by the fuel tank

explosion maintain these space loonies, but the people inside it were all but

one identified by DNA testing.

 

So there we have it. The qualities of DNA are different, depending upon which

city you're in, or perhaps depending upon which fairy story you're trying to

sell at any particular time.

 

This concoction about one of the hijacked planes hitting the Pentagon really

is a howler. For those not familiar with the layout of the Pentagon, it

consists of 5 rings of building, each with a space inbetween. Each ring of

building is about 30 to 35 ft deep, with a similar amount of open space

between it and the next ring. The object which penetrated the Pentagon went in

at about a 45-degree angle, punching a neat circular hole of about a 12-foot

diameter through three rings (six walls). A little later a section of wall

about 65 ft wide collapsed in the outer ring. Since the plane which the

conspiracy theorists claim to be responsible for the impact had a wing span of

125 ft and a length of 155 ft, and there was no wreckage of the plane, either

inside or outside the building, and the lawns outside were still smooth and

green enough to play golf on, this crazy delusion is clearly physically

impossible.

 

But hey, we've already disregarded the combustion qualities of jet fuel, the

normal properties of common building materials, the properties of DNA, the

laws of gravity and the second law of thermodynamics, so what the hell — why

not throw in a little spatial impossibility as well? I would have thought that

the observation that a solid object cannot pass through another solid object

without leaving a hole at least as big as itself is reasonably sound science.

But to the conspiracy theorist, this is 'mumbo jumbo'. It conflicts with the

delusion that they're hooked on, so it 'must be wrong' although trying to get

then to explain exactly how it could be wrong is a futile endeavour.

 

Conspiracy theorists fly into a curious panic whenever the Pentagon missile is

mentioned. They nervously maintain that the plane was vapourized by it's

exploding fuel load and point to the WTC crash as evidence of this behavior.

(That's a wonderful fruit loop.) Like an insect which has just been sprayed,

running back and forth in its last mad death throes, they first argue that the

reason the hole is so small is that plane never entered the wall, having blown

up outside, and then suddenly backflip to explain the 250 ft deep missile hole

by saying that the plane disappeared all the way into the building, and then

blew up inside the building (even though the building shows no sign of such

damage). As for what happened to the wings — here's where they get really

creative. The wings snapped off and folded into the fuselage which then

carried them into the building, which then closed up behind the plane like a

piece of meat.

 

When it suits them, they'll also claim that the plane slid in on its belly

(ignoring the undamaged lawn) while at the same time citing alleged witnesses

to the plane diving steeply into the building from an 'irrecoverable angle.'

How they reconcile these two scenarios as being compatible is truly a study in

stupidity.

 

Once they get desperate enough, you can be sure that the UFO conspiracy stuff

will make an appearance. The Arabs are in league with the Martians. Space

aliens snatched the remains of the Pentagon plane and fixed most of the hole

in the wall, just to confuse people. They gave the Arabs invisibility pills to

help get them onto the planes. Little green men were seen were seen talking to

Bin Laden a few weeks prior to the attacks.

 

As the nation gears up to impeach the traitor Bush, and stop his perpetual oil

war, it's not helpful to have these idiots distracting from the process by

spreading silly conspiracy theories about mythical Arabs, stories which do

nothing but play into the hands of the extremist Bush regime [and their

arab-hating Israeli fuckbuddies].

 

At a less serious time, we might tolerate such crackpots with amused

detachment, but they need to understand that the treachery that was

perpetrated on Sept 11, and the subsequent war crimes committed in

'retaliation', are far too serious for us to allow such frivolous

self-indulgence to go unchallenged.

 

Those who are truly addicted to conspiracy delusions should find a more

appropriate outlet for their Paranoia.

 

It's time to stop loony conspiracy theories about Sept 11.

 

 

Done