9/11 Conspiracies - Fact or Fiction - A Review

I had a chance today to watch the History Channel's 9/11 Conspiracies - Fact or Fiction that first aired last night. It will air again 2 or 3 times this week and you can click on the link for showtimes. It's pretty well done and takes one theory at a time, gives you the conspiracy theory involved, and then contradicts that theory with expert testimony from people knowledgeable about the subject.

One thing that was particularly interesting to me was the backgrounds of the primary proponents of these theories featured in the film. First you have three 20-somethings who produced "Loose Change", the holy scripture of the conspiracy movement. It's an amazing piece of propaganda which takes a few selected facts and embellishes them with fantasies, half-truths, wild speculation, and quite possibly outright lies in order to "prove" their point. The three filmakers have a way with film, but have no scientific or engineering background.

The other three main characters promoting the 9/11 "truth" movement are a radio talk show host with no engineering or scientific background, a retired religion professor with no engineering or scientific background, and a psychology professor with (all together now) no engineering or scientific background.

To refute these nuts the show used the professionals at Popular Mechanics who did an amazing piece of work in refuting the various spurious claims. They also used experts in various fields such as controlled demolition and the like, and also interviewed a number of people actually on the scene or suspected of involvement in the schemes.

One thing that became clear from studying these theories is that they often start with a grain of truth which is almost unrecognizable by the time the nuts get done with them. A couple of examples:

1. There are many out there who believe that the Pentagon was struck with a missile launched by a C-130 military transport seen flying over the Pentagon moments after the explosion. The truth - yes, there was a C-130 over the Pentagon. It was piloted by a Minnesota Air National Guard pilot who was interviewed by the History Channel. He had been on a routine flight that morning when he saw the American Airlines 757 cross his path. The ground controllers ordered him to follow the airplane to keep them apprised of what it was doing (the jet's transponder was turned off making it difficult for controllers to track it). The C-130 is much slower than the 757 and arrived at the Pentagon after the jet had overflown the area and turned back to crash into the building.

2. One theory has Flight 93 being shot down by a mysterious white jet seen circling the crash site right after the jet went down. The truth - there was a white jet circling the crash. It had been directed there by ground controllers after they lost the radar return on Flight 93. Controllers had requested the Falcon bizjet to head toward the last location where the jet had been on radar to see if they could see anything on the ground. They reported seeing the smoke cloud from the crashed jet.

In both cases there was a kernel of truth that was used as the center of a wild theory concocted to make the conspiracy theory work. The principle known as "Occam's Razor" states "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." Conspiracy theorists totally discard the simplest solution, which they must in order to construct the elaborate theories necessary to show the evil hand of a malevolent government or cabal of powerful forces aligned to carry out their terrible plans.

Even if you can disregard everything else, the one thing that pretty much disproves the theory of government involvement in the attacks is the fact that it would take thousands of people to pull something like this off, and in nearly six years, not a soul has come forward to expose the conspiracy. Since when has the government ever been able to keep a secret? There are lots of lower level functionaries in our government agencies who just can't wait to leak secrets to the media in order to embarrass the administration or the military. A conspiracy as large as what would be required to pull of these attacks is simply impossible to keep secret in a government with as many leakers as this one has.

As one expert put it, you would have to believe that there's not a single patriotic or good American in government for a secret like this to remain secret, and that's just not realistic.

Watch the show and judge for yourself. It's pretty enlightening.