911

Maybe not the best day to post this. But I’ve been avoiding posting it for weeks. Possibly because I’m a coward. For a long time I avoided 9-11 conspiracy theories. I’m open-minded but it’s just too depressing to believe to be true, so I avoided it. Recently, I started looking into it. There’s a lot of convincing information put together by credible people--enough that it shouldn’t be thrown out immediately. If people don’t want to believe this, it's understandable. But accepting anything unquestioningly, especially from this administration, doesn’t make any sense.

I don’t have a problem with people not believing in fringe ideas—just not investigating them, not even entertaining the possibility. The implications of this are too huge to write off. If you read up on it and still aren’t convinced, then fine. At least you’ve done some work. 911 Blogger is an epicenter. At the very least watch Loose Change. In a recent interview with the filmmaker, he said, “We know there are errors in the documentary, and we've actually left them in there so that people discredit us and do the research for themselves.” Which is completely fucking retarded. But there’s still enough in there that will make you think. Sites like 911 Myths.com aren’t much more conclusive—their debunking has as many questions as the conspiracy theory.

The Pentagon video shows just a flash of light, no plane. The collapse of building 7 is the other big one. No building had ever collapsed due to fire. These are enough to consider alternate theories. Major strikes against: people who are capable of planning 9-11 are also capable of planting WMDs in Iraq. They had to bend over backwards to prove their case for the War in Iraq. It would have been easier if the hijackers were Iraqi instead of Saudi. I am not 100% convinced—of anything. But it has to be debated.

The left’s attitude towards this topic is puzzling. The Daily Kos FAQs include this:

DailyKos accepts that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by agents of Al-Qaeda. It is forbidden to write diaries that:
1. refer to claims that American, British, Israeli, or any government assisted in the attacks
2. refer to claims that the airplanes that crashed into the WTC and Pentagon were not the cause of the damage to those buildings or their subsequent collapse
Authoring or recommending these diaries may result in banning from Daily Kos.

At Kos, there is no end to the vitriol spewed against George Bush—calling him a war criminal, and more. For instance: “This amounts to cold-blooded mass murder willfully committed in the name of politics by men so beneath the standards of civilization as to constitute a whole new species of soulless sub-creature.” George Bush is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq. He has ruined a country. The Iraq War is a conspiracy, based on false pretenses, planned before 9-11. Bush was negligent during Katrina. Yet, somehow, planning 9-11 is beneath him. The political left is accepting a story put forth by the right wing. It’s a strange disconnect.

I understand why Kos censors 9-11 truth talk. Kos is a politician. He can’t be aligned with the fringe or he won’t be taken seriously. Still, the censorship is wrong. Especially when combined with his censorship about election fraud in 2004. Veers off into being mysterious.

I watched the French fireman documentary last night. I had never seen it before. I didn’t want to hear the sound of people crashing to the ground. The Proby says, towards the end, it’s not just how you respond to the tragedy, it’s how you interpret it. I was in NY on 9-11. Saw the first plane struggling in the sky, heard the boom, saw the second plane hit, had to go uptown to Penn station to pick up my girlfriend, now wife, in the last free cab in New York. I picked her up, terrified Penn station would be hit. We could only get a cab downtown as far as Gramercy Park. From uptown, it looked like our neighborhood—Chinatown—was buried in smoke and rubble. Maybe an overreaction, but I left S. and ran downtown to our apartment, thinking our dog could be suffocating. Got there, she was OK. Called my parents who hadn’t heard from me in hours and didn’t know where I was. We stayed uptown with my parents’ friend. The smell reached far uptown. People don’t talk about it much but that night there was a huge rainstorm—booming thunder which kept me up all night, thinking it was another explosion. But it was like the sky was putting out the fires, washing away the dust.

The day broke something open in me. After that, I got very interested in fringe subjects. Not that I wasn’t before, but not nearly to the same degree. Someone said to me recently that the 9-11 truth movement is a coping mechanism. Possibly, and especially if it’s true.

The topic is slowly coming into the mainstream. Something like 35% of people don’t believe the official story. That’s a lot of people. This a day to remember how powerfully awful it was, but I had to get this out of me.