Wow. Typos or no, some excellent points. I always think that conspiracy doesn't have to be secret in order to exist; in fact the most effective conspiracies take place right out in the open, relying, for their success, on intuition and the human ability to draw conclusions and infer rewards.

When you go to do your wheat-for-poppy dance in the name of the pipeline, will you be looking at social entrepreneurship, microfinancing, and the potential impact of women on the equation?

(Seems to me that if you're handing out money, it's worth considering the old idea that men will spend it on guns while women will spend it on butter. So you want to be in the butter business as well as the gun business, perhaps even more so.)

I hope you will post more on this.

Thanks for the revelation. It is right there in front of our eyes, but willfully ignored to enable us to sate our appetite for revenge while serving the petrochemical gods we have put on the pedestal of profit.

Eric, I too am a truther.

But we lost that one. The historic narrative has been set. Questions relegated to the dustbin of history. The truth will never be know, the hints will merely be fodder for future historians.

I am sad. I still want to know the truth.

Are you sure you're a truther? You're talking about exploiting the tragedy after it happened. Not sure that qualifies.

I heard a truther on the radio last night and had to turn it off. He seemed typical, though, in that he had seized upon some fact and was using that as proof of something. In the case of the fellow on the radio, it was that jet fuel burns at some temperature and steel doesn't melt until some much higher temperature. Ipso facto, bada boom bada bing -- it could only have been a controlled demolition, etc. etc.

He completely ignored the fact that the buildings had each been burning for some time before they collapsed -- long enough that I would assume the jet fuel was long spent and the fire was now being "fueled" by other materials. Might any of those other burning materials have resulted in whatever higher temperature this guy was claiming was required? He didn't say. Didn't even address that.

I've also heard truthers point to the manner of collapse as "proof" that it was a controlled demolition. Now, has any of us actually seen a controlled demolition of a building the size of the World Trade Center? No. But don't let that stop ya!

But, think about it. Even intuitively, the manner of collapse makes a certain sense. The steel supporting the top floors begins to melt and give until those floors simply give way and crash to the floors below. It appeared that the entire top floors were engulfed but even if they fell unevenly at first, it makes sense to me that, as they fell, the distribution of weight would even out, as the weight crashing down successively to each floor below caused that floor to give way, and the ever increasing weight of the floors crashed down to the floors below. But this is never considered (that I've heard). I agree it was a stunning thing to see, but that alone is not enough to say it could only have been controlled.

Anyway, I must admit I don't really follow what the details of what the truthers say. I mostly think they're nuts.

But, to return to this note, I'm just not sure that coverup and exploitation after the fact makes you a truther. That's not really their calling card, is it?

Your post is brilliant, and insightful. But I agree with destor23: Be careful about using the term "Truther", even ironically. It automatically sends anything you propose deep into the hollow-earth netherland of Those With Too Much Time on Their Hands.

You lie!

Excellent post as always Zipperupus. I believe that had the 9/11 Commission and other investigators not covered up or downplayed the asleep-at-the-wheel actions of those "protecting" us, the conspiracy theories would not have run so wild.

Is there any debate that the Nazi party had a hand in the Reichstag fire?

Did Roosevelt know about Pearl Harbor,
but let it happen to get the USA into WWII?

Who wanted the Lusitania to sink (damn dirty business)?

What is the full story behind the Golf of Tonkin?

Remember the USS Maine?

___

If any of these truths were introduced back in the day would the person who proposed it be attacked personally? Would society allow any discussion on the matter?

It seems to me that if one does not look at “conspiracy theories” then one is not really interested in history. If you are not interested in the most interesting of puzzles then put your head back in the sand and wait for Sunday football.

By the way, my fantasy football team took an 8 point hit because Hines Ward fumbled instead of scoring that touchdown on Thursday. Now that is a truth!

Remember, history is written by the winners.

Thanks for the thoughtful (as always) post.

As a matter of history the events of September 2001 are not available to us. There is no such thing as “contemporary” history worthy of the name. We must wait upon the day when all the papers and all the letters and all the autobiographical writings and any material evidence that may survive sit as a pile of useless junk. Only then can the historian qua historian begin to practice his profession.

There is of course the impulse to know what happened in celebrated incidents. We might call this subject “current events.” The details of the matter known and imagined form a kind of historical fiction that can entertain, calm or otherwise mollify the desire to have an explanation for something that is really not knowable in the present. I used the phrase “history of the events of September 2001” advisedly because what happened began on September 10, or maybe earlier September 9 or maybe earlier, say 1994 or 1953. And of course there was September 12 and on to today. This isn’t about the asteroid that ended all life on earth. Life goes on and like the noise of the jet engines the moment quickly fades everywhere except in the imagination. This is in the end part of what it means to be mortal.

The Neocons wrote openly of the efficacy toward their ambitions of a “Pearl Harbor” type event. No historians here for if there had been they would have known that the seeds of Pearl Harbor were sown in Japan in 1925 in the writings of the military clique. Or was it earlier in 1906 when Japan surprised itself and defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War? The Neocons hope was for a political success in their lifetimes not their grandchildren’s. This group of likely suspects was just too impatient to ever have events unfold as they wanted. They were just a bunch of crackpots.

George W. Bush became President of the United States in 2001. For me that is a greater and more telling failure of the institutions of governance and polity than all delinquencies of the state required for the success of the attack on September 11. A nation that chooses to be led by the likes of a George Bush will unsurprisingly fail and fail and fail until it is undone. We cannot know our own history but we can perceive the trajectory that we are on. That merely requires prudence and candor.

The sky is blue. Water is wet. Wars are fought for economic gain.

I am going to think of you as a Questioner of the Truth....not a Truther...because as a few have mentioned above, the Truther handle has some rust on it.

Amike does have a good point about history. There's always somebody taking notes that don't get read or studied and eventually, the truth questioned becomes just the truth.

It only took 400 years, but the Native American side to the story of the New World is beginning to be told honestly. 9/11 will have its day, too.

What if we are entering a time when things are not going to be as they have always been?

The development of the Internet gave governments the ability to control society to an extent that was unimaginable even 10 years ago. Face it; we have already slipped into a totalitarian form of government. The charade of freedom will only last as long it is useful in controlling society. When the time comes to dispense with the façade of freedom it will not matter one bit if it resulting government is called conservative or liberal.

The people feel it already. Why do you think we have all of the yelling at the town hall meetings?

The positive side of the Internet, and the freedom we still enjoy is that it has the possibility to speed up the historical process. We no longer need to wait the years for the material evidence to become available. Our problem is that we have too much information. How do we sort through all of the noise and disinformation?

What a fun time to be a historian. It is a wilderness of mirrors.