9/11 Conspiracy Theorists: You're All Wrong

I actually meant to comment on this yesterday, but I forgot. I got caught up looking at some people have sex on HBO. Before, I address that title, let me comment on this new HBO show Tell Me You Love Me. Aside from having the creativity to take your title from a fairly well-known Cardigans song, this show is groundbreaking because you actually get to see some male junk. Everyone's objectified! Huzzah! Anyway, it's not a particularly exciting show to watch. Actually, it's pretty boring. It's like an updated, less interesting version of thirtysomething. That's actually a bit of an insult to thirtysomething, but it's the best that I can do for now.

Back to my original complaint. I was watching the History Channel last night and there was a show on 9/11 conspiracy theories. The idea had popped into my head when Mos Def, someone whose politics I generally agreed with, suggested that 9/11 was a conspiracy. The show laid out some of the conspiracies that had been floating around. Much like the grassy knoll, there are many theories surrounding the falling of the towers. Some people believe that it is a government conspiracy, a corporate conspiracy, etc. I'm confident in making the following statement: these people are idiots.

With the JFK assassination, there was a possibility that it was an outside shooter. But, with recreations of the fatal shot done on television, we all learned that the magic bullet wasn't so magical; it was just a regular bullet shot by a highly trained former marine, a marine that was widely considered as a very good marksman. But, this fact does not stop the conspiracy theorists who believe that this whole thing is a cover-up. We will never know who Oswald was working for or why he did it, but that's sort of immaterial. We just know that Oswald acted alone and let off all of the shots that killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Why will be one of the all-time great mysteries. Thanks for nothing Jack Ruby. But, I digress.

The JFK Assassination is exactly like 9/11. We know who committed 9/11. We have pictures and manifestos from them before they did it. We have al-Qaeda acknowledging the 19 men. But, on top of this, we saw it happen. Unless you didn't have a television, you saw the two planes hit the World Trade Center. You can see the second plane fly directly into the tower. I watched this with my own two eyes as I'm sure millions others around the world did too. Even if you didn't have a television, the pictures were in every newspaper in the country following the event. The fact that there are conspiracy theories surrounding this confounds me to no end. There's no conspiracy to be had. There were a bunch of men who had grown angry at the United States, hatched a plan then executed said plan. Period. That's what happened.

The CIA wasn't involved. They tried to stop it. The White House could be considered responsible, but that's from their own stupidity more than complicity. Defense didn't have a motive. No one has a motive to destroy these two towers with airplanes other than the 19 men who did. Also, why would the Defense Department want to destroy their own building? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

I don't mean to be so flippant about conspiracy theories because a lot of people believe that 9/11 is a huge conspiracy. I'm just one of those people who believe that the conspiracy theories are crocks of shit, paranoid explanations of a reality that is far simpler and less explicable: some assholes took out two buildings with planes, cost us a few more structures in collateral damage, gave an administration an unfortunate death grip on the national psyche, and sent thousands of Americans and Iraqis to their untimely deaths. That's what happened. That's all that happened.