They believe, for example, that on 9/11 some clown named Osama bin Laden picked up his cell phone in a cave in Afghanistan and directed 19 Muslims, none of them professional pilots, to hijack four airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thereby bringing down three steel-skeleton skyscrapers, the only time in world history that has ever happened.

A humdinger of a conspiracy, that one. My conspiracy nut friends know it's true because they have it on good authority -- George Bush told them so.

These conspiracy nuts also believe Osama is part of some mysterious worldwide "terrorist" organization of "Islamic fascists" that hates us because of our freedoms and democracy, and have enough power to destroy us -- despite our thousands of nuclear warheads, ships, warplanes, tanks, and countless men under arms. A fearsome enemy, to be sure, as President Bush frequently tells us.

For once, I agree with George Bush; 9/11 was a conspiracy. We just disagree on who was involved in that conspiracy. That is, we MAY disagree -- if he really believes what he told us. In other words, whether or not he was in or out of the loop.

9/11 was an inside job. The facts are indisputable. There was no way that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could have pulled it off, or at least pulled it off without help.

Official story -- AKA Alternative Reality

Let's examine some of the absurdities that official government story on 9/11 would have us believe:

Nineteen hijackers were sent to the U.S., some of them taking flying lessons, apparently because Al Qaeda couldn't find any trained pilots. They didn't bother with aliases. One of them leaves his copy of the Koran at a bar, some of the others leave flight manuals in Arabic in parked cars.

They use undetected box cutters to overwhelm the crew and passengers of four different airliners and then engage in some miraculous precision flying to crash two of them into the WTC and one into the Pentagon. The fourth crashes into a field.

President Bush, meanwhile, is reading to some school kids when he is told about the hijackings. With the United States apparently under attack, he seems unconcerned and stays with the kids for quite some time.

Though the whole sequence of events takes more than an hour, none of the hijacked planes are intercepted, or even seen, by the Air Force.

The WTC South Tower collapses less than an hour after it was struck by one lone airplane; the North Tower falls in less than two hours. A third building, unhit by planes, falls later.

If you believe all of this, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Back in the Real World

The official story is so absurd on the surface that we have to consider some more realistic possibilities.

There are really only three others, although they have hundreds of variations.

1) Incompetence: Everybody just goofed -- from intelligence agencies to the Air Force.

2) They knew but ... Various people in power knew about the plot, the conspiracy, but they let it happen.

3) It was an inside job.

Number one is a nonstarter. It is impossible to believe in such massive incompetence. If our intelligence agencies and military and political establishments were that incompetent, the country would have fallen years ago.

Number two is a bit more plausible. If the neocons currently in power knew about the Al Qaeda plot, they might have decided to let it go ahead in order to serve their own purposes; a war on Iraq, for example. A bit more plausible, but not very persuasive. It still assumes some of the most absurd aspects of the official story.

Number three is the scenario of choice.

Let's briefly examine just a couple of the problems with the official fantasy.

Our Missing Air Force

The Air Force is protecting the United States with the most advanced fighter planes in the world. But on 9/11, planes that routinely fly at close to 2000 miles an hour, somehow couldn't catch up with airliners that fly at one quarter the speed.

The official fairy tale talks of war games, communications mix-up between the FAA and NORAD, fighters out of position in training exercises, etc. No matter how you slice it, it's still baloney.

While planes were flying into the WTC towers, F-15s from Otis Air Force Base were sent off Long Island and ordered to remain in a holding pattern. Why weren't they ordered to protect New York?

For the hour that the plane that supposedly hit the Pentagon was under the control of hijackers, military officials in a command center on the east side of the building were urgently talking to law enforcement and air traffic control officials about what to do. In the end, they did nothing. Why? If we can't protect the Pentagon from attack, no place in the country is safe.

You Canna' Change the Laws of Physics!

We are told that both the North and South World Trade Center towers collapsed because of the plane impacts and fires. The "pancake" theory explains this -- i.e., each floor fell on the one below until the building is totally destroyed.

The trouble with this, it's physically impossible. The burning kerosene from the plane's fuel tanks does not create a hot enough fire to melt the steel skeletons of a modern skyscraper. No skyscraper in the world has ever collapsed from a fire, not even buildings that burned for days.

You can get tangled up in conflicting expert opinion. But the opinions that allow for this kind of collapse are so tortured that they defy reason, logic, and common sense.

And even then, they are defeated by the simple fact that all three buildings -- the two hit by planes and the one that wasn't -- fell at near freefall speed, impossible for a pancaking building. Each floor would be slowed as it hit the one below, appreciably lengthening the building collapse.

Then you have the minor but vexing problem, of course, that each building fell so perfectly within its own footprint.

The only way the buildings could have fallen the way they did was through controlled demolition. In short, they were blown up.

Who Did It?

The fact that it was an inside job is evident. There was enormous expertise involved.

Beyond that, is impossible to know. We don't have the facts to point to anybody. And we'll never have those facts, if there is not a real serious investigation. That yet isn't in the cards. While there is a great deal of skepticism about the official story, the corporate media flatly refuses to examine it. And that isn't likely to change soon.

But, as Fox Mulder said, the truth is out there. We have to look for it.

Read some books about 9/11. The corporate media refuses to review books that challenge the official line, but you can find them in bookstores. Try Towers of Deception; The Media Cover up of 9/11 by Barrie Zwicker.

There are a dozen major websites that are seeking the truth about 9/11. Look at them, study the evidence, and demand that your congressman and senators do something. They won't, of course, but we have to start somewhere.

Unless, of course, you prefer living in the Land of Oz.

__________________

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