The Big Lie

The mornings my boss is in town on the way to the office, he picks up a coffee for me and we shoot the shit for a few minutes before he starts his day. One day last week he came in and told me about a web site his friend told him about. The site examines the official report on the 9/11 tragedy and says that the report is false.

Well, ya know, I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy so I had to check it out.

In David Ray Griffin's essay, The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True, he examines the official story that the impact from the planes and the resulting fires caused the structural damage which caused the collapse of the towers. Through this examination he argues that the collapse could not have happened the way the authorities say but that the collapse was more like a controlled demolition. His theory is basically that the buildings were pre-wired with explosives and that the US government had sanctioned this tragedy.

Mr. Griffin is not alone in his thinking. Judy Wood, in her study, The Case for Controlled Demolition, gives a compelling argument for controlled demolition as opposed to the official “pancake collapse” theory. Perhaps Steven Jones' essay Why Indeed Did The WTC Buildings Collapse, explains why, when I first saw the towers fall I thought it looked a lot like the felling of the Sands hotel in Vegas. If you have a high-speed internet connection, you can watch Barry Zwicker's video titled, The Great Conspiracy which postulates that the attack on the WTC was staged to enflame the American people to the point that they would willingly go to war.

Can this possibly be true?

Well, I just had to read the official reports. Now I haven't read all 585 pages of the 9-11 Commission's report but I have read Section 9 and the Executive Summary. I've also read Chapter 2 of FEMA's World Trade Center Building Performace Study and their Executive Summary. These portions of each report deal specifically with the collapse of the towers.

In reading through all of this, I am reminded of The Big Lie.

If you are not already aware, this phrase refers to a propaganda technique that functions on the premise that people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. Basically, if you tell a big enough whopper, people will believe it because they won't believe you'd have the audacity to tell such a whopper. That's probably why I always seem to get away with telling everyone that I am Diana Ross' love child. (grin)

I feel certain that somebody is lying about this 9/11 thing but who is lying and more importantly, why?

As James H. Fetzer says in Thinking About Conspiracy Theories, “But what matters now is that we are confronted by alternative accounts of what happened on 9/11, both of which qualify as "conspiracy theories". It is therefore no longer rational to dismiss one of them as a "conspiracy theory" in favor of the other. The question becomes, Which of two "conspiracy theories" is more defensible?”

I'm told that one of the methods law enforcement uses to unravel the intricacies of organized crime is to follow the money. I think it's even simpler – who benefits? Who has benefited as a result of this heinous attack? Think about it then ask yourself, which is the big lie?