Truthers,” left-wing conspiracy theorists who believe (among other things) that 9/11 was an inside job, that no plane hit the Pentagon, that Ted Olson did not receive a call from his wife, Barbara, shortly before she perished in the crash of Flight 77, that the anthrax scare was also a government hoax (although the anthrax was real and deadly), and that hurricane Katrina was the result of weather manipulation by racists or profiteers or both.
This makes for some truly chilling reading: otherwise average-seeming Americans who sincerely (?) believe that 9/11 was created by the US government to control us. Yikes.
Nah, what’s scary is how much of what they believe is reasonable.
It’s easy to point at a bunch of people and yell “FREAKS! YOU BELIEVE WEIRD STUFF!” but much harder to consider what they say and admit that some of it seems reasonable. I’m not saying all of it or even most of it is reasonable. There’s evidence for almost none of it and what evidence there is is not proof.
The thing is, trusting the government story, or anyone’s story is tantamount to letting down your guard. We need to keep questioning and keep challenging. Writing these guys off like they believe aliens are controlling our minds is wrong and it does the truth a disservice. The government, on the other hand, lies all the time and has done so to get us into war, too.
“Remember the Maine” (OK, so we don’t know for sure the USG lied, but then we don’t know for sure that Spain sank the Maine, either.)
Pearl Harbor was a surprise (ok so there’s still some debate about this, but really?)
Do I believe 911 was an inside job? I’m an atheist in most things. I’m not sure what I believe, but I know what’s possible. So, no, I don’t believe 911 was an inside job, nor do I know if it was. All I do is look at the evidence and, of all of it, my biggest problem with 911 is Payne Stewart. Yes, the late golfer. Google “Payne Stewart crash” and read about the circumstances surrounding his death (or just check out the NTSB’s report here). 14 minutes after air-traffic controllers lost contact with his plane F-16s were flying along side it. From a WaPo article reporting on the October 25, 1999 crash:
The military aircraft were not armed with air-to-air missiles, and Pentagon officials said they never considered shooting down the Learjet.
“The [Federal Aviation Administration] said this thing was headed to a sparsely populated part of the country, so let it go,” a senior defense official said.
Contrast this with fighter aircraft taking more than twice that amount of time to reach any of the planes less than two years later on September 11, 2001.
The areas of Washington DC and New York City are minutes from Air Force bases. Yet three hijacked planes were allowed to crash—two of them into populated areas.
This is what I’d like to see investigated. So far, I’ve not heard an explanation for this inability of the military to do its job.
I’ve got other problems with what is the official explanation for 911, but that’s the biggest. Because if the plane that crashed into the WTC had been shot down, more than two thousand people wouldn’t have died that day and, more importantly, as a result, it would have been much harder to justify invading two countries with only a few hundred dead.
So, don’t assume everyone who questions the official story, or even the apparent facts, of 911 is a wing-nut who listens to Alex Jones. I don’t. I just look at what I’m told are the facts and ask questions. Which, you know, is what we should all be doing more often.
I could go on and on about “conspiracies.” In fact, I already did in the 666cast a couple weeks back.
