Tag Archives: WTC

What is your HOP level?

An interesting article in NY Magazine discusses conspiracy theories and the secret history of 9/11.

As well as mentioning a few of the suspicious facts about what happened that day, it cites a score to categorize just how far along the conspiracy theory path you are: the HOP level.

Me, I’m about a Level 3.5. Everyone has to have a theory, and here’s mine:

Consider the October surprise conspiracy. Whether that conspiracy is true or not, the Iran-Contra scandal is at the level of documented fact, and it’s hard to deny that the sudden freeing of the hostages immediately after Reagan took office was a vital popularity boost for an otherwise unpopular president.

Wind the clock forward to 2000, and we have an unelected President, so unpopular that he had to skip the usual inaugural parade to avoid being pelted with projectiles. He’s making a routine PR visit to a school, reading The Pet Goat to the kids, when someone tells him that some planes have been hijacked.

I think it was news to him. To me, he looks like he’s worrying about it as he continues to sit there. But I think he’s been told that it’s under control.

I think that one or more people high up in the chain of command decided it would be best to let the hijackings go ahead, then send in the Marines to kick ass, and get a cheap PR victory for the new administration.

That’s why US air defenses weren’t scrambled; that’s why the plane was allowed to get so close to the Pentagon. The expectation was that it would be like every other hijacking and hostage taking, and that the only people in danger were a few hundred civilians. The planes would land somewhere, there would be negotiations, troops would be sent in, Bush’s approval rating from handling the difficult challenge would rocket no matter what happened or how long it took.

I think that those people high up who made the decision to let the hijackers get away with whatever they wanted, were as horrified as the rest of us when they saw what happened next. They had been prepared to risk a few lives, but nothing on the scale of 9/11. If their decision ever became public knowledge, they would be lynched.

Hence, the general level of secrecy and coverup, and the eventual whitewash of the 9/11 Commission Report.

I think my conspiracy theory is better than the Reichstag Fire kind, because it’s a conspiracy of dunces. Remember Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

Is it really plausible that there was a conspiracy over the course of several years, spanning several countries, started long before the election, and that the people now in the Bush administration managed to keep it totally quiet?

I think not. Cheney, Rumsfeld and friends didn’t manage to keep arms sales to Iran and Iraq quiet, so there’s not a hope they could pull off 9/11 as a deliberate act. Look at their performance at running the economy and dealing with Iraq—they’re not evil geniuses, they’re naïve idiots who value blind faith over reality.

And even if I believed they had the skills, ultimately I just don’t believe Republicans are that evil. They might want to run Social Security into the ground and rip up the Bill of Rights, but I don’t think they’d kill thousands of Americans just to boost Bush’s popularity and get a few spying laws passed. That’s just unrealistic.

Quotes of the week

Alan Johnstone, BBC World Service:

“Israel’s population has grown by over 20% in the last ten years. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population is exploding.”

Mobile Radio Technology magazine:

“Losing the WTC [antenna] sites was like losing a personal friend… To see the WTC come down along with its 351-foot antenna mast made me feel sick.”

Tiger Direct online catalog:

“Glancing away from your computer screen, your unfocused eyes reveal a vision. Modular, innovative, advanced. Is it a hallucination? You arise from your chair, drawn to this mechanical marvel. The hallucination is real. A Belkin USB 4-port hub!”

WTC

I first visited the USA in 1990, travelling with a Japanese friend. We wanted to visit New York and Boston. Most people would have stayed in New York, and travelled to Boston; but I remember having a hunch that things would be better the other way around. So we spent more time in Boston, and reduced the New York visit to a long weekend.

Perhaps my problems with New York stem from the fact that we were politely relieved of our excess cash by a gentleman who had taken it upon himself to introduce visiting tourists to the city. I don’t think that was the real problem, though; I’ve had worse experiences in other cities that I still like. No, I think my real problem with New York was one of expectations.

I’ve been to Birmingham, and I don’t feel the need to speak out about how awful it is because, well, nobody really expects any different. But New York gets fetishized as the ultimate city, the place everybody secretly wants to be, the cultural center of the universe. If I’d merely been expecting a large, seedy, run-down looking city with a bunch of art galleries, I would have been OK—but I had been lead to expect so much more.

Still, it has some impressively tall buildings.

I took some photos from the top of the World Trade Center, but it was pretty dull up there. You couldn’t look down, because there was a fence to keep you away from the edge, and anyway the edge just leads to a wide safety ledge a few meters below. You could look out across the city, but the street level was mostly shrouded in a brown haze of smog. Ultimately the whole thing was like a lot of the art in the city—the most impressive part of the experience was the concept.

No, the best place to experience the World Trade Center was from the bottom, looking upwards.

The INS: Your tax dollars at work.

The Smoking Gun has obtained copies of the WTC terrorists’ visa applications.

Guess what? After some delay, they were finally approved on October 1st 2001… and the approval letters were sent out last week.

This does not surprise me in the slightest.

In the mean time, the US is sending suspected terrorists abroad so they can be tortured.

Photography

I’ve uploaded another photo.

It occurred to me after 9/11 that I probably could have made some money by trying to hawk my photo of the WTC to some stock photography agencies. However I decided that was entirely too tawdry a thing to do.

I notice photographs in cafés and the like, and I wonder what you have to do to end up there. Just turn up at Diesel and ask if they want some art?