12
Sep
2009
Conspiracy Theorists Require Reality Check
Let me start this out by saying that I think everything coming from anyone should be questioned. Not because every story from the government is some kind of cover-up or because Jesus really did have kids, but because everything needs to be investigated fully so that we can understand things fully. With that being said, the so called “conspiracy theorists,” or as they themselves prefer, “truthers,” need to understand one simple fact. Not everything under the blue sky is a damn conspiracy, and if you were wrong, man up and admit it.
The eight anniversary of the September 11 attacks passed yesterday, and it’s a day that should always be remembered and honoured. With any large scale event not caused directly by nature, people will question it and develop theories, some more believable than others. Television isn’t one to pass up on something that’s close to people’s hearts and gladly ran a two hour 9/11 conspiracy special. Naturally I watched it, I always love to see what people are saying about things like this, JFK, the moon landings, or whatever, and I can honestly say I was disgusted with these so called truthers.
The special (aired on the Discovery Channel and History Television in Canada) sat down with several truthers as an expert panel and sought to quell some of their notions about that day. Like I said, things should be questioned, and I for one believe that there was more to the 9/11 attacks then is public knowledge, and I’ll address this later, but questions do receive answers. It became painfully obvious to me that dedicated truthers don’t care about answers, or even science for that matter. Several topics that were raised by people who think there was more to it all were addressed by experts in the matter. For example, there are many who believe that both of the twin towers were brought down by controlled explosives, there are even a handful of witness reports stating that they heard a series of loud “cracks” before the towers collapsed, and this coupled with the rather neat way they fell into their own footprint is what brought the topic up to begin with. I’ll admit, it’s a strong argument, especially with the fact that both towers fell in a similar way (into their own footprint as opposed to falling sideways or partially collapsing).
So the documentarians went to a true expert in building demolitions. A building demolition company that implodes buildings for neat demolitions for a living and is dedicated solely to that field. They state that, for the size of the twin towers, it would have taken no less than six months with a crew of one hundred demolition experts to rig the building for demolition with having to expose the main support piers (which were covered with fire retardant and building materials such as drywall and concrete). The only window of opportunity that was open for this type of project to undertake was elevator renovations a year prior to the collapse, and this is an entirely plausible window of opportunity (ignoring the fact that someone somewhere in the building would have noticed the elevators not being upgraded and there being explosives throughout the building for a year). The first debunker of this popular view is that there were no signs of demolition equipment anywhere after the buildings collapsed. Such devices would include detonation cord, explosive residue, and the clean cut of a shape charge on an iron pillar. The truthers have an answer to this seemingly solid story, and that’s the use of a super-high tech painted form of thermite that is supposedly researched by a secret government program. So the experts (a company that specializes in testing the effects of explosions and fire on structures) created the most potent form of thermite they could possibly muster and attempted to destroy an iron support column that was no more than half the size of those in the towers. The explosion (more or less the thermite just burning off) did little than blacken the iron. Still, the truthers would not accept this scientific experiment done by experts and retained their stance of an unavailable explosive that, even in the best of scientific theories, would have done nothing.
There’s no point in listing every single theory presented and debunked here, you’ll have to check out the show or do some online research, but you’ll see that for every question they raised in the show there was a physical demonstration and experiment to show that it was incorrect. Going back to my belief that there is more to 9/11 than the report shows, one of the truther “experts” in the show, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, stated that “if we were the victims like they say we were, how come they won’t give us the full story?” He said this in regards to the 9/11 Commission not disclosing full information as the investigation is still ongoing. I have an answer for that young man, and it’s called national security. Why in any realm of reality would anybody lay out how terrorists managed to pull off the biggest attack since Pearl Harbour and the flaws in North American structures and the flaws in national security? Yeah, America was a victim, but if you print a manual on how that came to be, you can more than likely expect another well planned attack or two.
Conspiracy theorists are like the debate club in junior high school. They want to look as though they have all of the answers and will reach to far-flung hearsay answers so as not to look stupid in front of their friends. Many of them (as in the documentary) will even go as far as to say “I’m not saying this is fact,” but will defend what they say endlessly. If they had any physical evidence or any scientific proof to back up their arguments, then I would be fully inclined to believe them. But they don’t, all they have are what-if scenarios based off of incredibly far-flung ideas and notions that there is some sort of big brother pulling strings.
The biggest thing truthers have against them is humanity itself. For any number of the conspiracies they lay out for 9/11, thousands upon thousands of people would have to be involved. It’s a virtual impossibility for there not to be someone who mentions something to somebody somewhere along the line, it’s simply impossible. Even the Manhattan Project had secrets stolen from it during its time. People have to face the fact that George Bush didn’t kill thousands of his own people to start a war in a country he probably couldn’t even pronounce at first, especially with the fact that Bush is a devout Christian. Simply put, truthers who ask questions need to be prepared for the answers they receive.
I could go on for another 1200 words from here, but I won’t because there’s no point. As much as I want people to simply open their eyes to what people are saying, it’ll never happen. Nobody wants to look stupid when they’ve staked their entire reputation on something, especially if they’re delusional about it all (not saying all are, but some definitely). If you have questions about 9/11 or any other conspiracy-rich event in our history, take it upon yourself to do some research. Ask the experts, read the books, conduct your own experiments. You may already be prepared to be right, but you need to be prepared to be wrong as well.
