Opaque Lucidity

Pesky Reality

Americans, for some reason, seem to love conspiracies. Look at our movies: The Manchurian Candidate, The Bourne series, etc. all turn around secret organizations with agendas which may or may not be detrimental to the nation or a certain group of people.

I enjoy a good conspiracy tale as much as the next guy, but there is a growing base of people who believe in a conspiracy that I don't find funny at all: the notion that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were all inside jobs. Let me state my opinion on this matter up front and in plain language. If you believe that something happened other than 19 hijackers taking over four planes and flying them into three different targets and a field in Pennsylvania, then you are a fool who is both out of touch with reality and sorely in need of some basic education with regard to metallurgy, aerodynamics, history and foreign policy.

I will not recount all the technical details that the conspiracy nuts get wrong. If you want an excellent analysis, check out Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts by the editors of Popular Mechanics magazine. Rosie O'Donnell should've read a few pages before spouting off about fire and steel. Then again, liberal, angry lesbians are allowed to be short on facts as long as they make fun of conservatives.

I'm also not going to discuss the Jewish conspiracy, that is, the idea that all the Jews in the WTC towers knew about the attacks before they happened because they were warned by the Mossad. These ideas are put forth by virulent anti-Semites of the type who wanted to accuse the Jews of burning down the Reichstag in 1933. These people aren't foolish; they're idiots.

And then there are those who claim that Osama Bin Laden is a creation of the CIA. According to this theory, Bin Laden received funds from the CIA during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. This is only plausible if you know nothing about what happened during those years. Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 is probably the premier authority on Bin Laden during the period of 1980-1989. He spent five years researching his book, including interviews with former members of Bin Laden's inner circle. The Saudis who went to Afghanistan during the 1980's never integrated into the Mujihadin because the Afghans considered them glory hounds with dreams of martyrdom. You see, the rebels who fought the Soviets were not one homogenous group; rather, they were essentially a group of clans who were only allies in the most strained sense of the term. The CIA did not fund every group, only those who had a decent chance of actually making a difference in their homeland. Bin Laden and his cronies didn't meet the criteria. In fact, he personally only faced combat less than a handful of times and very late in the war.

9/11 conspiracy nuts make strange bedfellows. First, there are the ultra-right wing nuts who don't trust government, don't like Jews and think Henry Kissinger is still running the State Department. With them are the liberal nuts who despise President Bush and want to pin the war on him to justify their belief that the "Bigs" (Oil, Healthcare, Military, etc) really run the show. If a Clinton were in office, you wouldn't hear a peep out of them.

Then there are the people like Rosie O'Donnell and her fellow travelers. They are often poorly educated (simply because they didn't take school seriously) and mad about their lot in life. Instead of reaching into themselves for a solution to their woes, they continually look to outside sources. To them, it makes sense that The Man would conspire to start what may turn into World War Three. They're not crazy about facts; instead, they say things like "I'm just asking questions" instead of expressing their looney theories. The saving grace of this group is that they are lemmings. As soon as something new comes along, they'll latch on to that.

There are plenty of REAL problems we should be focusing on; it saddens me to think that so many people are wasting their energy on non-facts and one world government fantasies.