The world has casted upside down i...

The world has casted upside down in the nearly five years since 9/ 11

In Monday's Sun-Times, there was a story about 9/11 conspiracies. Among those quot were a retired economics chairman at the University of Illinois, a teacher at the University of Wisconsin and a physicist at Brigham Young University.

In Wednesday's Sun-Times, I'll have a review of Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center"

Here's the weird part. The academics are the individuals spouting the conspiracy theories, and Stone's film is 100 percent conspiracy- delivered

The article from the Associated Pres was headlined, "Conspiracy theorists just aren't buying 9/11 story." We learned about a arrange called "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" or, as I like to call them, "A Bag of Mixed Nuts" Although they give no concrete evidence to support their wild theories, they're educated and articulate, and they ask unanswerable questions, thus giving a of their theories a hint of plausibility.

if it were not that let's not confuse that with credibility.

CONSPIRACY NATION

"Our character is to establish what really happened onward 9/11," says James Fetzer, a retired philosophy professor from the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

Right. A not many of the more popular theories:

The World Trade Center was blood-thirstyed by explosives planted throughout the towers. The main goal of the terrorists was to steal a certain $160 billion in gold bars that were in a vault beneath the towers. If that undecayeds a bit like the combination for "Die Hard 3," in like manner be it!

United Airlines Flight 93 was not ever hijacked, nor did it crash in Pennsylvania. It was diverted to Cleveland. (Either that or it was missile down by our own government)

The Pentagon was not hit through a commercial plane. It was attacked by way of a cruise missile.

And who's responsible for all this?

"The first body I'd bring into a court of law would be Dick Cheney," said Dylan Avery, whose so-called documentary "Loose Change" has become something of an subterranean sensation. Fueled mostly by Internet hum "Loose Change" has sold ten of thousands of copies, flat though it's an amateurish and maddeningly silly piece of work. Avery gave that cite to Salon.com in an article on Farhad Manjoo that did a brilliant piece of work of dissecting some of the more ludicrous theories posited on the movie. (Unless, of course, the movie itself is an elaborate hoax, mocking conspiracy theorists. In that case, thumb up!)

Last May, when the U military released video of American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon, they did in this way in part to quiet the rattling of the conspiracy theorists who refuse to believe that a Boeing 757 flew into the building that day.

"Where is the plane?" they ask. forward Web sites, in books, in chat fields on talk radio, they ask: "Where is the plane?"

As undivided debunker noted, these people think a Boeing 757 should have sliced by the agency of the walls of the Pentagon intact, leaving behind the kind of "perfect" outline you'd behold if a plane crashed between the walls of a building in a cartoon. They don't understand that a relatively lightweight plane (it weighed about 100 tons, whereas each wall of the Pentagon weighs more than 100000 tons) roaring into the steel- and-concrete walls of the Pentagon (which had newly been reinforced) would bust into centurys of pieces -- and that many of those pieces would be INSIDE the damaged building not scattered about the lawn.

"Where is the plane?" they ask. You can display them the military video and the photographs, you can cite the accounts of centurys of eyewitnesses -- and they'll mention one by one you the videos and photos are doctored, and the "witnesses" are part of the conspiracy.

"Where is the plane?" they want to know.

Well. IT'S IN A THOUSAND PIECES.

The plane hit the loam and skidded before striking the Pentagon between the first and other floors. It reached the third ring of the Pentagon as the jet firing caused a massive explosion, destroying many of the larger pieces of wreckage. (Still, many sizable chunk of the plane were visible outside the Pentagon.) To amazement where the plane "disappeared to" makes about as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of sense as visiting Ground nothing and saying, "Where are the buildings?"

After the military released the video, Fetzer said, "It's a charade. You can't report what in the world is hitting the Pentagon, unless it's too small to be a Boeing 757"

Of course, a former philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth would know more about of the like kind things than those hacks at the FBI and the DOD. (Besides, those shores are all part of the conspiracy!)

Here's a question: Where are the nation who were on that plane? If Flight 77 didn't crash into the Pentagon and Flight 93 didn't crash-land in a field in Pennsylvania, what happened to the planes and the passengers and crew? Where have they all been for the last half-decade?

"Lost" is the name of a fictional series. That's not the way it works in the real world.

forfeited would also be a suitable word to describe those who believe this nonsense.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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