Sept. 11 has come and gone, for the 18th time since the horrible events that made Sept. 11 a memorable day in the first place.
Yet my social media feed is still being bombarded with posts about it, and unfortunately, most of them are from nutbars.
There have been, again, all sorts of videos, posts and comments, nearly all of which allege that 9/11 was some sort of inside job, a conspiracy perpetrated by America to start a war.
One suggested that an airliner didn’t actually hit the Pentagon. Rather, it was likely a cruise missile, like the Tomahawk.
That’s a rather important point, actually, as the Tomahawk is likely to be employed in the days before this column goes to print, as the United States military typically uses 100-plus in their opening salvo of any war these days.
A Tomahawk weighs 3,300 pounds, and has a 1,000-pound warhead. These days, the warhead isn’t nuclear, but previous versions did indeed have a nuclear warhead. It flies about 550 miles per hour. When it attacks, it can either drop munitions on a target, or more typically, slam right into it, thus adding its own kinetic energy to that of the warhead. By this point, it will have used much of its fuel, so it’s probably going to weigh closer to 3,000 pounds, or 1 1/2 tonnes.
One of the statements I saw on Facebook was, “Buildings that tall would not drop straight down into there (sic) foot print, let alone three on the same day.” The implication was they were purposely demolished by an inside job.
Okay, let’s consider what happens when you slam a Boeing 767-223ER weighing at least 155 tonnes, and likely a lot more. It was full of fuel – 67 tonnes of it. And American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower at a speed of 465 miles per hour. While jet fuel may not have the same energy as a high explosive warhead, there was 67 tonnes of it. And the plane had the kinetic energy of 100 cruise missiles travelling at 85 per cent of the speed of a Tomahawk.
Fundamentally, that one airliner hitting one of the towers had most of the energy of a 100-missile salvo, striking in one place, at once. When the 1991 Gulf War broke out, it started with 122 Tomahawks being fired at numerous targets. Let me say that again: one fully fueled airliner near top speed has the energy not far from the entire missile barrage opening a major war. My math may not be perfect, but it’s still within the ballpark.
Of course the planes took the towers out. We all saw it. There was no need for some false flag inside job of demolition experts to destroy those buildings, or 7 World Trade Center.
But the conspiracy theorists think in their deep state fantasies it was all an inside job.
In exasperation, I posted, “Have you all lost your mind with these conspiracy theories? Did you not live through 9/11? Is there something fundamentally flawed with your perception of reality?”
I could say no more. I’ve had one heart attack in my life, and I’m not going to drive myself to another over such idiocy.
How have we come to this point? How has a common experience, so earth shaking that, like the assignation of JFK, we all remember where we were when it happened, become so fraught with conspiracy and delusion?
Perhaps using JFK wasn’t such a good example.
This past week, our daughter started asking questions about 9/11, and my wife and I did our best to answer them. There was no question of saying, “just Google it,” because there is so much bovine feces about 9/11 now. I don’t trust hardly any of it to be accurate for a babe-in-the-woods, so to speak, who doesn’t have the benefit of prior knowledge.
In 2002, my wife bought a book about the World Trade Centre, and what happened on 9/11. She bought it before we even had kids, but with the intention of having something to show them when they asked about this. I did just that, pulling the book out of the filing cabinet where it has remained. It was printed before wingnuts everywhere started brazenly blurting their so-called truths.
In history, false flags have happened. That’s where an adversary stages some sort of attack, supposedly by the other side, to justify their own war. The Nazis did this on the border of Poland in 1939, dressing German soldiers in Polish uniforms to carry out an “attack” on a German customs post. The bodies leftover were actually those of concentration camp victims, killed so they could be dressed up in Polish uniforms and masqueraded as supposedly dead Polish soldiers from a failed attack.
The Americans’ Gulf of Tonkin incident was used to spur their heavy involvement in Vietnam.
This brings us to Sept. 14, 2019. What really happened in Saudi Arabia to take out, at least temporarily, half its oil processing capacity? Was it Iran? Yemeni rebels?
Now I’m sounding like a conspiracy theorist!
Whatever happened on the weekend, 9/11 was not an inside job. It was not a false flag. And it shaped our lives for nearly two decades now, and more to come.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
