{"id":220,"date":"2009-09-10T11:33:19","date_gmt":"2009-09-10T09:33:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=220"},"modified":"2015-04-26T18:37:31","modified_gmt":"2015-04-26T16:37:31","slug":"911-history-or-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/911-history-or-mystery\/","title":{"rendered":"9\/11: History or mystery?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4552b42\">sobering<\/span> to realize that eight years have passed since New York and Washington, DC, were <a title=\"Complete 9\/11 Timeline\" href=\"http:\/\/www.historycommons.org\/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&amp;day_of_9\/11=dayOf911\" target=\"_blank\">attacked<\/a> on <b>September 11, 2001<\/b>. Something that happened that long ago, and is already the subject of numerous <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4552f27\">documentaries<\/span>, is history.<\/p>\n<p>The more time passes, the more the official version of events is accepted, and the less plausible any alternative version becomes. This fact <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4553310\">contributed<\/span> to a prominent <span id=\"tooltip551bbb45536f8\">adviser<\/span> to Barack Obama being <a title=\"In Adviser's Resignation, Vetting Bites Obama Again (Washington Post)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2009\/09\/06\/AR2009090601054.html\" target=\"_blank\">pressured into resigning<\/a> last weekend.<\/p>\n<p>Anthony &#8220;Van&#8221; Jones, best-selling author of <i>The Green-Collar Economy<\/i>, had been the special adviser for green jobs in the White House Council on Environmental Quality. A lot of noise had been made about how, in 2004, he&#8217;d signed a petition for <b>911truth.org<\/b> that had <a title=\"911truth.org Statement to the Press\" href=\"http:\/\/www.911truth.org\/article.php?story=20090904181706887\" target=\"_blank\">raised 12 questions<\/a>, including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Why were numerous advance warnings ignored?<\/li>\n<li>Why was the Pentagon not defended? and<\/li>\n<li>How were the FBI and CIA able to identify the attackers within hours?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In America, such questions are more politically <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4553adf\">charged<\/span> than they are in Europe, which has some distance to 9\/11. German documentarians <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4553ec7\">tend to<\/span> note that truth is stranger than fiction, and that the extreme physics of <span id=\"tooltip551bbb45542af\">collapsing<\/span> <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4554698\">skyscrapers<\/span> and exploding <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4554a7f\">airplane fuselages<\/span> can produce very unusual results. An Italian documentary, <a title=\"Zero: An Investigation into 9\/11 (Topdocumentaryfilms.com)\" href=\"http:\/\/topdocumentaryfilms.com\/zero-an-investigation-into-911\/\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Zero: An Investigation into 9\/11<\/i><\/a> \u2014 shown on Austrian television earlier this week \u2014 takes a very different approach, questioning the <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4554e67\">conspicuous<\/span> behavior of the <span id=\"tooltip551bbb455524f\">alleged<\/span> <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4555638\">hijackers<\/span> in the days before the attacks.<\/p>\n<p>Americans, however, tend to let their own emotions color their view of 9\/11, <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4555a1f\">presupposing<\/span> either that the government would never lie or that it must have lied about everything.<\/p>\n<h2><i>United 93<\/i><\/h2>\n<p>Where is the middle ground? The most plausible <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4555e06\">depiction<\/span> I&#8217;ve seen is that in the film <a title=\"Roger Ebert reviews United 93\" href=\"http:\/\/rogerebert.suntimes.com\/apps\/pbcs.dll\/article?AID=\/20060427\/REVIEWS\/60419006\/1023&amp;template=printart\" target=\"_blank\"><i>United 93<\/i><\/a> (German title: <i>Flug 93<\/i>), which <b>recreates September 11<\/b> in an <span id=\"tooltip551bbb45561ef\">air-traffic control<\/span> tower and on board one of the hijacked planes. <span id=\"tooltip551bbb45565d8\">Odd<\/span> things, like the phone calls that passengers &#8220;impossibly&#8221; made from the air, and the <span id=\"tooltip551bbb45569bf\">mid-air<\/span> breakup of Flight 93 over Pennsylvania, are explained in a way that I, with my <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4556da7\">degree<\/span> in physics, can accept.<\/p>\n<p>However: what the film also depicts is that on the morning of September 11, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) was <span id=\"tooltip551bbb455718e\">conducting<\/span> several exercises, one of which included a simulation of aircraft being hijacked. When the real hijackings happened just before and during the simulation, confused military <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4557578\">air-traffic controllers<\/span> had to ask, <b>&#8220;Is this real-world or exercise?&#8221;<\/b> The handful of <span id=\"tooltip551bbb455795f\">fighter planes<\/span> guarding the entire East Coast stayed on the ground until it was too late.<\/p>\n<p>Having heard about this in the <a title=\"9\/11 Commission official site\" href=\"http:\/\/www.9-11commission.gov\/\" target=\"_blank\">9\/11 Commission<\/a> hearings, <i>United 93<\/i>\u2019s <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4557d47\">associate producer<\/span>, Michael Bronner, asked NORAD for a copy of its recordings of air-traffic conversations. <b>You can listen<\/b> to parts of them online in his long, but <span id=\"tooltip551bbb455812f\">eye-opening<\/span>, <a title=\"9\/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes (Vanity Fair)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/features\/2006\/08\/norad200608?currentPage=1\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a> in <i>Vanity Fair<\/i>.<\/p>\n<h2>Truth be told<\/h2>\n<p>The amateur <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4558517\">armchair<\/span> <span id=\"tooltip551bbb45588ff\">investigators<\/span> of the &#8220;9\/11 truth movement&#8221; have given themselves a bad name by <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4558ce6\">focusing on<\/span> <span id=\"tooltip551bbb45590ce\">distractions<\/span> (Why would a controlled <span id=\"tooltip551bbb45594b7\">demolition<\/span> of the World Trade Center be necessary if there were hijackers? I ask) and inventing even stranger scenarios (Why imagine the passenger planes landing and <span id=\"tooltip551bbb455989f\">drones<\/span> hitting the buildings instead?). These only <span id=\"tooltip551bbb4559c86\">obscure<\/span> <span id=\"tooltip551bbb455a076\">the real crux of the matter<\/span>: that, even with the facts we&#8217;ve got, <b>we don&#8217;t know the whole story<\/b>.<\/p>\n<p>We can say that about Van Jones as well. In his case, 9\/11 was only a <span id=\"tooltip551bbb455a457\">pretext<\/span>. He was <span id=\"tooltip551bbb455a83f\">pressured<\/span> to resign because he, an African-American activist for black <span id=\"tooltip551bbb455ac26\">causes<\/span>, had engaged in a <span id=\"tooltip551bbb455b00f\">feud<\/span> with a racially sensitive white radio commentator whose listeners include a lot of Sarah Palin supporters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s sobering to realize that eight years have passed since New York and Washington, DC, were attacked on September 11, 2001. Something that happened that long ago, and is already the subject of numerous documentaries, is history. The more time passes, the more the official version of events is accepted, and the less plausible any alternative version becomes. This fact <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/911-history-or-mystery\/\">&#8230; >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,24,61],"tags":[39,14,22,25,108,104,35,109],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1552,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220\/revisions\/1552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}