by Lionel Bascom — August 27th, 2007 — 1 comment
When The Cullman Times in Cullman, Ala. printed a pledge two weeks ago, the newspaper made several promises.
Among them, they pledged to print all viewpoints in the paper, including those with which they disagree. And this week they followed through with that promise.
The opinion page printed an opinion that we many readers found offensive. Donnie Nobinger sharply criticized the U.S. military and said the World Trade Center’s destruction was a government conspiracy.
Practically as soon as the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were executed, conspiracy theories began to emerge. Some people blamed it on Jews or thought it was carried out by a “new world order,” and others concocted stories about the tragedy being predicted by the French mystic Nostradamus. And someone, somewhere, probably thought it was connected to space aliens.
These conspiracy theories shouldn’t come as a surprise, after all, because of how frightening it is to think about what happened that September morning. It’s only human nature to try to find some other explanation — however implausible — that’s less emotionally jarring than the reality of terrorists killing random, innocent people going about their normal lives in American cities.
The most recent Sept. 11 conspiracy theory to emerge is that the buildings were destroyed by explosives in a controlled demolition. And it shares one thing with all the other conspiracies: it’s absolute bunk.
An argument this weak may not even deserve a response, but we’ll try anyway.
If the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were destroyed on purpose, it would have required precision placement of explosives throughout the building’s support structure. And that would have had to happen in buildings with tens of thousands of workers and some of the tightest security on Earth. Would that be possible without anyone asking questions at the time, or all the survivors failing to mention it after the towers fell? Of course not. It’s baloney.
Of course, the horror of 9/11 is difficult for the normal human mind to fathom. However, having been attacked in 1993, the World Trade Center was under strict security. There was no way that the extensive amount of explosives needed to destroy those buildings could have been planted unnoticed. And there is no way that this government would deliberately allow the Pentagon to be this kind of target.
In the United States, most people cannot imagine that showing up for work one beautiful morning in early fall could end in such tragedy. As a result, many respond to this shock to the consciousness with a form of reasoning, inventing creative scenarios that attempt to theorize away their grief.
However, this theory doesn’t hold water because each of the terrorists who were on the three ill-fated planes had a history of planning this horrific event as proven by the publicized records of the F.B.I. They took flying lessons and kept detailed records of their plots. This was a murderous crime, and we all know who the perpetrators were. No conspiracy here.
Jeanne · August 27th, 2007 at 9:55 pm