Last night, I was headed home from the city around 9 p.m. I was driving over the 14th St. Bridge when I saw, on the other side of the Potomac, hundreds of fingers of light reaching for the sky. As I got closer, I saw they were coming from the center of the Pentagon.
I rounded the Pentagon on Washington Blvd. and saw an entire side of the building illuminated in blue, a giant American flag draped over the solid concrete wall of the nation’s military nerve center.
Flight 77 careened over that same road on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 moments before slamming into the Pentagon and taking the lives of 184 people. Last night, a beam of light shone for each of those victims, rising toward the moon on a clear September night.
Hani Hanjour, a 29-year-old Saudi, flew that plane into the Pentagon in a suicidal strike on the “Great Satan,” America , driven by a sick Islamofascist ideology.
But there are some who don’t believe that. There are some who call that the “official story.” They say they seek the “truth” about what really happened on 9/11. The “truth,” according to them, is that a sinister cabal of neocon politicians arranged for a missile to hit the Pentagon and for a controlled demolition to bring down the Twin Towers.
These neocons killed almost 3,000 Americans in a bid to increase both the power of the Bush administration and the willingness of American citizens to support military action in the Middle East, according to the conspiracy theorists. They subsequently covered it up with the “official story” of bin Laden and 19 hijackers, according to members of the “9/11 Truth Movement.”
The head of this tinfoil hat brigade is Dylan Avery, a 22-year-old conspiracy theorist who has parlayed his creative version of history into two very popular Internet films, “Loose Change” and “Loose Change 2nd Edition.”
Avery and his cohorts’ research, theories, and “evidence” are so laughable that it can be easy to laugh off the movement itself. That was my reaction to this crowd until I took the time to watch “Screw Loose Change,” this weekend. “Screw Loose Change” is an extensive, three-hour-long debunking of Avery’s claims, which allows you to view Avery’s film along with a powerful presentation of all the evidence he distorts and omits.
Until I watched it and really let the Avery crowd’s accusations sink in, my reaction to the 9/11 Truthers was to say, “wow, they’re crazy. Moving on.” But I shouldn’t have moved on. I should have stopped and looked at the Truthers and listened to them a lot sooner.
It’s important for those of us who know what took the lives of 3,000 Americans five years ago today—four commercial planes with full loads of jet fuel and passengers driven by 19 murderous maniacs—to understand that there is a disturbingly large and vocal segment of the American population that doesn’t believe that.
A recent Scripps poll found that more than a third of Americans believe 9/11 was an “inside job.”
Truthers are professors and Democrat candidates for Congress.
The Truthers believe the American government planned and carried out the carnage of Sept. 11 on its own people, and they’re determined to tell the rest of us all about it. Today, the “Loose Change” kids planned to be at Ground Zero handing out free DVDs. On their website, they offer a free DVD to anyone who lost someone in the 9/11 attacks, and proclaim it everyone’s “duty” to watch the film. Continued... |