I can’t believe it is five years since the World Trade Centre attacks. It seems like only yesterday that the world sat glued to their television sets amazed at what they were seeing.
Since 2001 the world has become a very different place. The words ‘terrorist’ and ‘Muslim’ are now commonplace (I reckon I’d heard the word Muslim maybe five times in my life prior to 9/11.) The last few years have seen an increase in security, an increase in law making, an increase in fuel prices, an increase in military expenditure and my favourite, an increase in conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theorists have always had a bad name. Their foil hat wearing, moon-landing doubting, UFO spotting ways opened them up to ridicule that tarnished the term ‘conspiracy’ with an inherent subtext of paranoid lunacy. They did have a couple of wins though. Oliver Stone’s film JFK changed many people’s minds about Kennedy’s assassination and The X-Files gave UFO geeks the chance to be cool for a short time. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 also got people thinking. But still, mentioning a ‘conspiracy theory’ will doubtlessly be met with sighs of indignation from ‘realists’.
Psychologists claim that belief in conspiracy theories is actually an attempt to feel secure. The belief that a government can control so many people and events is actually more preferable to believing that the bureaucracy is incompetent and not in control of our wellbeing. The flipside of this is people who refuse to believe in conspiracy theories for exactly the opposite reason. They don’t want to entertain the thought that the government may not have their best interests at heart and may be lying to them.
Where do I stand? I try to remain rational and realistic. I know that in reality governments are made up of people and departments that would struggle to organise the tying of a shoelace. Self interest and corruption tends to weigh against organisation and unity. However I also understand that through the power of media voters are often mislead and lied too. Politicians even trade on their reputation as liars coming up with expressions like ‘core’ promises that are to be differentiated from election promises that they will break. I also know that very few things happen in this world unless someone is making money from them.
In a world where lies like ‘Saddam’s WMDs’ and ‘links to al Qaeda’ or ‘children overboard’ can be propagated and believed it is hard not to be sceptical when our leaders try to sell us a story. Especially when that ‘story’ seems to be playing very well to their interests.
And so we come to 9/11. A simple Google search will bring forth an insurmountable wealth of pages making all sorts of claims of conspiracy and government complicity. They range from sensible and rational debunking to fantastical and downright ridiculous speculations. It would be easy to just ignore it all and just believe the official government line.
Unfortunately I have this little part of my brain that kind of twitches when things don’t seem right. I can’t quite explain it but it is the same part that gives me bad feelings about people I meet who later prove themselves untrustworthy. And I have to admit when it comes to the events of 9/11, “I have a bad feeling about this”.
To try and come to terms with it all I took the position of a juror. That is, I will look at the evidence that is put before me and make a judgement on whether it seems credible or not. In this way I am not bound to believe any one source or any single explanation. I can simply look at each event and decide what it means. I won’t make unfounded assumptions. I don’t ask anyone to believe the same as I do and certainly don’t claim to have the answers.
The only conclusion that I have drawn is that there are some very worrying anomalies in the events of
1. The way the WTC towers collapsed with special attention to the less often reported collapse of Tower 7. This link is one of many that uses physics to demonstrate the problems with the official story. http://janedoe0911.tripod.com/BilliardBalls.html or here
2. What got destroyed and who profited. http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/silverstein.html
http://killtown.911review.org/wtc7/collapse.html#cdi
3. How easy is it to fly a passenger airline into a building? http://physics911.net/sagadevan.htm
From my point of view these few aspects of 9/11 are the ones that don’t seem to have adequate explanations and aren’t ‘debunked’ effectively by any source that I can find. Granted, they all pose even more questions than they answer but so do the ‘official’ explanations. I understand if people don’t want to believe a conspiracy theory but isn’t the idea that a faceless group of foreign terrorists could elude security, plot and plan to hijack planes and fly them into protected airspace and accurately crash them into high profile targets and bring down two of the biggest buildings in the world in itself a ‘conspiracy theory’?
I will not speculate on who is responsible for the events of 9/11. As far as I can see there is evidence to incriminate all sorts of people. All that is known for sure is that planes were flown into the World Trade Centre and many innocent people died needlessly. If I had lost a loved one in such a disaster I would want to know the truth. I would not want to blame the wrong person and I certainly would not want the perpetrators to be allowed to go free.
There is no reason to involve yourself in the conspiracy theories or even ask any questions about it. But considering the fear that has been thrust upon our society since 9/11, the racism towards the Muslim community that is being encouraged and incited by our media and even our Prime Minister, the infringements on our basic freedoms that are being proposed by sedition laws and the degradation of the basic principles of law such as ‘innocent until proven guilty’ I for one would like to know that the War On Terror is directed at the real threats to our society and not some convenient patsy devised for the profits of a few.
I promise that next weeks post will be funnier. And that’s a core promise.
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