The best thing about 9/11
The best thing about 9/11
It's a wonderful litmus test for identifying morons
Note: if you’re planning to argue with me, then don’t waste your time. I’ve said what I have to say here and I have less than zero interest in your take. And this goes doubly for those who don’t even bother to read what I’ve written but just jump straight to knee-jerk reaction. Hell, if I can figure out how to do it, I’ll just turn comments off.
The best thing about the 9/11 attacks is that whenever the topic comes up, you can learn immediately who among your friends is rational, who is irrational, and who simply isn’t paying attention.
I am sick to death of this topic. But it is never, ever going to go away, is it? That’s because an entire fuck ton of mostly Americans just can’t believe that the Taliban could pull something like that off, even with Saddam Hussein’s help.
Of course, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it, but you know what I mean. Talk to any 9/11 Goofer for more than five minutes and they’ll usually let it slip out: something about camel jockeys and sandals and towel heads, whatever those are.
Those people are just not good enough to threaten chickenshit Americans with box cutters (not even a decent Bowie knife, for God’s sake!), take control of a big jet, and then fly it into a building. That takes ‘merikin know how! Shit, an American dentist could probably manage it. No way those Saudi engineers could.
It ain’t about evidence
So, having established prima facie that it would be impossible for these college educated, highly motivated men to do such a thing, we can safely disregard all the evidence—and there is a lot of it—that they actually did do it.
In place of this obviously false conclusion based on clear evidence that pretty much everyone on Earth saw, we can make innumerable claims based on no evidence at all. Oh, there was evidence to support all the crazy 9/11 Goofer theories, of course, but those evil theys (look out for the theys) destroyed it all. The theys must number in the thousands. “They” are everywhere!
Take the “some engineer/general/dentist says” trope. I love this one. We have to believe everything this gibbering idiot says because he’s an engineer. Or a general. I was kidding about the dentist, but who knows? Goofers will believe anyone who agrees with them, and no one who doesn’t.
Well, I know lots of engineers and many of them are completely full of shit on most topics. Some are utterly incompetent even in their own area of “expertise”.
So why should I trust this guy—the one who is making money off his outrageous claims? Doesn’t he fail the cui-bono test?
And what kind of engineer is he anyway? Are these detailed skills so easily transferrable? Does an electrical engineer—or a software engineer—know all about building construction? Or explosives? Or metallurgy?
But even if these “experts” who magically appear just in time to tell us all the foul truth about our government’s duplicity and treason were experts in not just civil engineering and construction of high rise buildings and large jet crashes into such buildings but also large jet crashes into the very unusual buildings of the WTC—unlikely as such an event had never occurred before—so what? We’re talking a handful of engineers at best.
Even if a thousand “engineers” sign some statement, stop and think for a moment (here is where we leave the 9/11 Goofers behind):
What kind of engineers are they?
What access have they had to the sites, the wreckage, and any of the data?
How many of them have any actual expertise in this kind of event? (Answer: none.)
What percentage of engineers on Earth do they represent?
That last point is particularly illuminating. There are tens of millions of engineers in the world. If 10,000 out of 10,000,000 engineers make some claim, then they represent 0.1% of engineers. And it’s a lot fewer than 10,000 saying this shit and there are many more than 10,000,000 engineers in the world.
Can you think of a single group of humans of any significant size that doesn’t include its percentage of kooks? Do you think engineers are any different? And it’s a percentage much greater than 0.1, I promise you.
People believe what they want to believe.
The big lie
Many have attributed (not quite correctly) to the Nazis and specifically Joseph Goebbels the axiom: if you’re going to lie, lie big. Well, Goebbels may not have actually said it, but it does seem to work.
So the first thing the 9/11 Goofers do is start spouting out wild claims. It is pointless to refute these claims, although I’ll demolish a few just for shits and giggles, as the Goofers are not rational.
Here are my favorites:
There were bombs in the buildings
Building 7 of the WTC is the smoking gun and can only be explained with bombs
The planes were flown by remote control
It was not a plane, but a missile that hit the pentagon
Did we mention bombs in the buildings?
Oh, there is so much more! Just today I read a comment online that said that the buildings were taken out by nukes. OMG. ROTFL. You really can’t make this shit up. Oh, wait … I guess some folks can.
Why do the Goofers have to keep coming up with bigger lies? Simple: with each passing day it becomes more obvious that their theories are worthless bunk. Rather than admit that they are wrong, they simply double down.
Baffle ‘em with bullshit is the name of the technique, IIRC.
So I will answer these few one at a time. But I’m not going to waste time proving them wrong. That’s what the Goofers want you to do. Then they just keep adding absurd detail and demanding that you prove every single detail wrong. If not, then their claims must be taken wholesale as a given.
Of course, they need find only one minor, even insignificant discrepancy in the official story and we must then dismiss it entirely and out of hand.
Now pay attention here because I’m only going to say this once.
The onus is upon the people making outlandish claims to prove them right.
The government doesn’t have to prove anything unless it makes claims that go against what everyone saw. Planes hit buildings. Buildings burned. Buildings collapsed. Why? Because they were hit by planes and burned. Duh!
Only those who make claims contrary to the obvious explanation bear the burden of proof.
This is the part that the Goofers get all backwards. On purpose. They pretend that all they have to do is appear to poke some hole in the “official story”—often by making absurd claims that contradict what can plainly be seen in dozens of videos of the event from all different angles—and presto! Their version is proven.
Cough, cough. That’s not how proof works, you blithering idiots. You are the ones on the hook to prove with solid evidence not hearsay and wild, unsupported claims that the official story is wrong and that yours is right.
There has never been a perfect proof of any complex event and there never will be. The best we can do is a preponderance of evidence. And virtually all the evidence points to the official story and effectively none honestly contradicts it.
The official story
The official story is simple and obvious. Hell, we all saw it—either with our own eyes, or on the videos shown on repeat for months afterward. Is there anyone on Earth not blind who hasn’t seen a video of the towers falling? Hard to believe.
Some hijackers—nineteen, we’re told—hijacked four commercial flights, turned them around, and flew them into buildings, or tried to. Two went to NYC and hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center. A third went to DC and hit the Pentagon. A fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers apparently tried to overpower the hijackers, as confirmed by numerous cell phone calls from the passengers.
Note the lack of speculation there. We’re not guessing at motives. We’re not making any wild claims about exactly how this all went down. We’re sticking to the hard facts.
Within two hours of the strikes on the WTC, both towers had collapsed. Much later, the WTC 7 tower, which had been burning for several hours, collapsed as well. The plane that hit the Pentagon made a big hole and left wreckage everywhere. The plane that went down in Pennsylvania left wreckage strewn across a wide area and caused a large brush fire.
Now the theory:
The planes that crashed into the twin towers did severe damage to the supports and ripped fireproofing off of others. The burning fuel ignited everything else on those floors (including the bodies of the victims, BTW). Those fires burned long enough and hot enough to weaken the remaining supports. When the weakened columns could no longer hold the weight of the ~14-29 story building above the crash site, they gave way.
Then that 14- or 29-story building above the crash site dropped onto the lower floors and began pancaking them one at a time while accelerating downward.
A similar fate awaited WTC 7, but as it was not as badly damaged, it held up quite a while longer.
A plane flew into the Pentagon and made a hole. They found the plane parts and the black box. End of story.
The rest is mostly irrelevant detail, of interest to the investigators and ghouls, but of zero importance to the big picture.
Bombs away
The first big bomb in the Goofers reasoning is that the WTC towers could not have fallen “just” because big, heavy, jet aircraft crashed into them and set them on fire. No way, no how.
This should be your first clue that no rational thought is involved. Where is there any evidence at all that the planes could not have caused the buildings to collapse? Why not? Exactly zero evidence is presented, just a claim, which we are supposed to accept at face value.
Did you buy that bullshit the moment you heard it? If so, why? Why are you so eager to believe that it couldn’t be the collisions and the fires?
Once you have made that unshakeable assumption—and doubled down with engineering-speak such as “near free-fall velocity” and “into its own footprint”—you’ve already lost the battle.
Utter fail. You’re begging the question. You have assumed up front exactly what you pretend to be trying to prove.
For the record, it’s free-fall acceleration. And what do they mean, “near”? That could mean anything. And how fast would a building that collapsed because of support failure fall? Would its acceleration be “near free-fall” as well?
You see, if you’re a 9/11 Goofer, then you already know where you want to end up: it sure wasn’t some dumb camel-jockeys who pulled this off against the world’s sole superpower! NO WAY. So it saves time to rule the truth out of bounds first thing.
Then you just drown everyone in irrelevant details, most of which are entirely fictional. Somebody said something on the interwebs! OMG! There’s your proof!
The basis for this belief is … well, the true basis is what I said above: no way them camel-jockeys did this. But we can’t say that, can we? Not out loud, anyway. So we make up a basis, which is that jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel.
And that’s true, but deceptive. It’s a classic straw man because no sane person is claiming that the support columns melted. Ha, ha. You didn’t see that coming, did you?
That’s how the trick works.
What actually happened is that the support columns weakened until they could no longer support the weight of the 14-29 story building above them. That’s a lot of weight! Steel weakens appreciably well below the burning temperature of jet fuel.
Then the supports gave way. Not all at once and not all at the same time. But as the first columns gave, the load was transferred onto the remaining columns, so they gave way even more quickly. Once it started, it all happened very rapidly.
And when the columns gave way, that huge building, 14-29 stories high, came crashing down onto the top of the building below. That was too much for the weakened supports on that floor, so it gave way and the top story pancaked.
Then the next and the next and the next, with an ever increasing mass accelerating downward. Resistance was, as they say, futile.
Buildings are big, heavy things
Go stand next to a 14-story building and look up. Now imagine that enormous mass raised up and dropped from several meters onto the top of the building next to it. And with one corner hitting first. What would you expect to happen?
And this ever-increasing mass as the debris from each successive floor was added to it, with ever-increasing momentum, pancaked floor after floor all the way down. You saw it, didn’t you? That top section of the building crashing through the bottom section?
And like popping a paper bag full of confetti, the debris from each pancaked floor blew out the windows, exactly as one would expect, and floor by floor exactly as the collapse proceeded and every video shows.
If you search the Web for videos of the towers collapsing and find a good, clear close up (getting harder every year), you can see this happen in real time.
Watch the corner of the building where the plane hit. You will see it start to buckle. The top of the tower tilts—and this long before any imaginary bombs go off. Then the columns give way and the top of the building slams into each floor consecutively, blowing the debris out the windows. You can watch this happen!
And an important note: WTC 2 was hit at 9:03 AM and collapsed at 9:58, fifty-five minutes later. But WTC 1 was hit earlier—at 8:46 AM—and didn’t collapse until 10:28, one hundred and two minutes later. Why did the South Tower fall first despite being hit later?
The answer is simple: look at where the planes hit. WTC 1 was hit around the 96th floor, leaving 14 stories above the damage. WTC 2 was hit around the 81st floor, leaving 29 stories above the damage. Twice as much weight, half as long before the collapse. Coincidence?
If there were bombs, why not blow each building after a period of time, say fifteen minutes? Why wait? Why the weird time difference? Collapse because of the collisions and fires simply makes more sense, not less.
And the buildings did not fall “into their own footprints”. I guess what the Goofers are claiming, again without any evidence at all, is that the top of the building should have pivoted onto its side and fallen while the bottom section remained standing, like some sort of Road Runner cartoon. Were the bombs made by Acme?
But don’t believe me. Believe your own eyes:
Quod erat demonstrandum. 9/11 Goofers, STFU. If it was bombs, why the tilt? Remember: it happens before any “explosions”.
Compare this to videos of actual controlled demolitions. Do they start at the top and then blow up each floor successively as the upper floors fall? Don’t be ridiculous. They blow out all the supports at once.
But we shouldn’t even need to look at these images to understand that the bomb theory is utter bullshit.
Use your brain for more than skull filler
The day after the attacks, I was chatting with someone online who first mentioned the idea that there were bombs in the buildings. He seemed like an intelligent man, so I considered it.
And dismissed it after maybe thirty seconds as utter bullshit. Poppycock. Fetid horse manure.
How was I able to reach this conclusion so quickly? Easy. I used my fucking brain as something other than a paperweight.
The obvious and immediate questions are:
Who planted these bombs? (Answer: too many people to keep a conspiracy secret for twenty-two years.)
Why? (Flying planes into the buildings wasn’t traumatic enough?)
How did they do it? (The Goofers always skip this part.)
Most importantly, what would it involve to rig up three enormous buildings that were occupied and guarded 24/7 with explosives from top to bottom without anyone noticing?
When I got to the fourth question, I realized that the first three were unnecessary. What would it involve? Hmm …
Tons of explosives hauled in somehow. Removal of walls on all floors, the planting of explosives on the support columns, running wires all up and down the building (what, we’re going to depend on radio signals getting through?), and then plastering the walls back up, painting them, and all this with no one noticing.
Remember that the claim is that the explosives are set off on the floors sequentially as the top is falling. That is the only way that the debris flying out the windows makes sense. So you’d have to put bombs on every floor.
If you believe that that is possible, then you’ll believe anything, which is kind of the point. You are no longer rational, if you ever were. But even if it were possible, the Goofers have never explained, or even tried to explain, why this insane idea is any more plausible than that the buildings simply fell because the support columns gave out.
The Goofers never heard of Occam’s Razor, evidently.
But the final nail in the coffin of this stupidity is that in twenty-two years, not one single reliable witness has come forward to discuss all the “maintenance” work being done on every floor involving ripping out walls, installing something in them, resurfacing them, and painting them.
Think of all the disruption. The construction dust and debris—what, they took it out in the elevators? The stink of fresh paint. And somehow not one person noticed this? No one got suspicious after the towers “blew up”?
Oh, wait! I bet they used the Enterprise transporter to beam those explosives into the walls! Yeah … that’s the ticket.
But … but … but … WTC 7!
Oh, dear God. More utter bullshit.
WTC 7 was a somewhat smaller—but still enormous (47 stories)—building near the towers that was hit with debris when the towers fell, igniting fires on some ten floors near the bottom. Those fires burned steadily for seven hours and spread before the building finally collapsed.
The explanation for why WTC 7 failed is a bit more complex. It wasn’t the columns themselves that gave way initially, although some were significantly weakened. It was connectors in the floor that allowed the columns to spread the load. When one of those snapped, it started a chain reaction that brought the whole building down.
This is an eminently reasonable explanation. Why would anyone even question it? Unless they had an ulterior motive, that is.
But how it collapsed is irrelevant.
What??? How could it be irrelevant? Isn’t it the key to the entire 9/11 Goofer bullshit?
Well, it is. So its irrelevance means we can dismiss the 9/11 Goofers as utterly irrational morons and be done with this. Please.
It’s irrelevant because we’ve already determined that there is zero reason to believe that towers 1 and 2 were brought down my anything other than the damage from the collisions and fires and maybe some not-quite-good-enough engineering.
No one, not even the hijackers, expected the towers to fall. That they did came as an utter shock to everyone on Earth, this author included. This is, in part, why there has been so much speculation.
So if there were no bombs in 1 and 2, and no one expected them to fall, then the collapse of WTC 7 would have been extremely suspicious, no? Isn’t the key to their “theory” that WTC 1 and 2 had to fall to provide cover for the real goal: destroying WTC 7?
Because, I guess, the Bush Administration just really hated that building. Maybe it was sucking up to the towers a bit too much. Or maybe it was an aesthetic fault: they hate granite or something.
No one died in WTC 7, so what was in those buildings that the government so wanted to get rid of so badly? And why was such key information stored only in one place? And why did they need to destroy a whole building to get rid of it?
Oh, wait! I know! WTC 7 is where they kept all the proof that 9/11 was an inside job. No wonder we can’t find any evidence of that these days!
Then add that the explanation given by the government is entirely satisfactory—it accounts for all the key events—and that we’ve already determined that rigging a huge building with bombs secretly would be incredibly difficult. And, of course, no one has come forward with any real evidence at all to suggest otherwise.
And it just isn’t necessary to the explanation. It doesn’t make the explanation for what happened on 9/11 any more believable. Quite the reverse: it makes it absurd. It’s absolutely through the looking glass.
How is this claim that thousands of Americans conspired to kill thousands of other innocent Americans, destroy three of their most important buildings, and humiliate America and Americans in front of the whole world more likely than that some very angry bad men got incredibly lucky while the people who were supposed to be watching them were napping?
Why do so many people prefer to believe the absurd rather than the simple and obvious truth—a truth they can see with their own eyes? Planes! → Crash! → Fire! → Collapse! Oh, noes!
There can only be one reason for such irrationality: they are reacting emotionally: brain disengaged.
After all, how many thousands of people—air traffic controllers, fire fighters, military officials, airport personnel, security guards, police, reporters, etc.—would have to be in on this massive conspiracy? And not one has blown the whistle since? Did all of them die mysteriously?
The 9/11 Goofers and their dupes simply do not want to believe that some A-rab hijackers could have pulled this off. Not without help from smart (read: white) American traitors.
They are so offended by the idea that America got caught with its pants down that they’d rather believe a fairy tale. They’d rather believe that Americans were traitors than that they were incompetent and negligent.
It’s insanity. And remarkable bigotry.
As for the planes being flown by remote control, I’m not even going to bother. Does anyone seriously believe that crap? But I do want to point out the obvious: this claim does away with the A-rab element entirely. How utterly convenient! There were no hijackers! Drone operators in containers in the Nevada desert piloted those planes into the buildings as part of the mega-conspiracy!
Oh, it’s all so clear now! Our brilliant, traitorous, white boys.
How big a hole does a plane make?
We can dispense with this one quickly. Just as the “bombs in the buildings” trope begins by eliminating the truth as a possibility right up front, thus ensuring that the wacky nonsense spouted by the 9/11 Goofers will be taken at face value by literally hundreds of millions of not-very-bright humans, we begin the Pentagon story by ruling out the plane.
Naturally.
Gosh, doesn’t that hole look a touch small for such a big aircraft?
And we’re off and running! Why, that hole just isn’t big enough. Obviously! No need to measure it. No need to compare it to other holes in similar buildings by similar jets flying at similar speeds. Nah! No need to do complex computer modeling to figure it out, either. No way.
We’ll just eyeball it. From photographs. What could go wrong?
Now that we’ve ruled out the possibility that it was an commercial jet that hit the building—begging the question as mentioned above—we can proceed with all sorts of outlandish nonsense.
What the 9/11 Goofers seem to miss (because they are desperately trying to miss it) is that this not only doesn’t answer any questions, it raises an enormous number of new questions, for which they have wild guesses and claims but no evidence at all.
The obvious story is too simple. Planes were hijacked. One was flown into the Pentagon. No way, right? It has to be much more complicated and mysterious than that. Must have been a missile, am I right?
A few questions:
How did all that debris from an American Airlines flight, including the black box, get to the debris field outside the Pentagon? When did “they” sneak that in there?
If the Pentagon was hit by a missile, then whose missile? Fired from where? What kind of missile? Where is there any evidence at all that it was a missile?
Hmm. So then what happened to the plane and all the passengers?
And WHY? WHY? WHY? Why use a missile when you had a perfectly good, hand-piloted airplane on the way that would do the job at least as well? Remote controlled, too. Right?
Oh, but so-and-so said he saw a missile. OK, but more than a hundred people saw an American Airlines plane. Why are the majority of witnesses dismissed out of hand as dupes or government agents, but the one or two exceptions taken as the gospel truth?
Any rational person would dismiss this nonsense immediately because he or she would see that far from explaining anything, this “theory” (read: idiocy) introduces a significant number of new and difficult-to-answer questions and answers no questions at all. But then there weren’t really any questions until the Goofers made them up.
All to exactly zero benefit. I repeat: there weren’t any questions to begin with!
Four flights were hijacked. Four are accounted for. More than a hundred witnesses saw the plane fly toward the Pentagon and/or hit it. The debris from the plane was all over the scene and was clearly identified at the time and on the spot. Ditto for UA 93 in PA.
Hmm. How can that debris possibly be explained? Hey! Maybe a fucking American Airlines flight was deliberately crashed into the building!
What? No! Impossible. Literally everything points to that, so that can’t possibly be true. It must have been aliens from outer space! No, wait! It was the New York Giants, still angry that they got their asses handed to them in the Super Bowl. Or wait … maybe GOD blew up the building and He’s just messin’ with us!
I guess you can make this shit up
By why do we? Why do so many people insist on obvious fallacies and ignore all evidence to the contrary?
You might as well ask why we are all going about our daily business as if nothing is wrong in the world despite knowing that our current activities are steadily destroying all life on Earth, and that a horrific bill is coming due.
It’s called denial. It’s a trick we use to get out of cognitive dissonance without having to do anything we don’t want to do. We just make shit up.
For example: you steal a large sum of money from your best friend and he finds out. This creates a terrible cognitive dissonance. Either you have to return the money, apologize, and make it up to him—no way! impossible! MINE!—or you have to admit that you are a lying, thieving skunk—also impossible.
Your are stuck. It’s a dilemma. But then the obvious “solution” occurs to you: simply rewrite the narrative. Just make up a story about how your friend did you some horrible wrong first, and your taking of his money was therefore utterly justified. Yes! That’s it. He’s the bad guy, not you. It was your money all along!
This works great for 9/11, too. Some foreigners outsmarted the great American government and made fools of Americans? Impossible. New narrative: we did it to ourselves.
That this makes Americans even more stupid doesn’t seem to occur to the Goofers. Foreign agents sneaking in and getting lucky is bad enough. But our own people did it right under our own noses? Just how stupid are we? (Rhetorical question.)
The worst part: it was a pinprick
But the worst part of all this is that 9/11 was, in itself, insignificant. We’ve had floods, fires, hurricanes, etc. that were far worse, and everyone has long forgotten them. But we just can’t let go of 9/11. It’s the effrontery of those swarthy evildoers!
Who did they think they were?
More Americans die every three weeks, month after month, year after year, because of lack of health care than died on 9/11. But no one gives a shit except their friends and families who are helpless to change anything because humans only care about their own kin. Your kin? Meh.
More Americans die of gun deaths every three weeks than died on 9/11, more than half of those suicides. No one gives a shit but the survivors. And we loves our guns.
More Americans died of COVID-19 on a bad day than died on 9/11. And there were many bad days.
Over the past three years, it is probable that more Americans died from COVID than died in all the wars America has ever fought. But half of America couldn’t be arsed to take even rudimentary precautions and rather than acting with compassion and intelligence, the government used it as an excuse to ramp up totalitarianism and to boost corporate profits.
More Americans die every four days from medical errors than died on 9/11, but the death toll never abates. No action is taken. No one cares.
The reason we just can’t let go of 9/11 is because we all know the truth:
9/11 exposed the weakness of the American state and the cowardice and bigotry of the American people and their remarkable ignorance and insouciance.
The US government wants people to think that “they hate us for our freedoms”. Which freedoms are those?
The freedom to die young for lack of health care? The freedom to live in a cardboard box under a bridge? To eat out of dumpsters? To be assaulted and often killed in schools, malls, churches, government offices, etc. so that others can have their deadly toys and imagine themselves tough guys? To die of a fentanyl or oxycontin overdose? To be shot and killed by the cops you called for help?
9/11 was blowback, pure and simple. It was the chickens coming home to roost. After centuries of robbing, raping, extorting, bullying, and murdering people all over the world (and many right at home), a few of the victims decided to fight back: to give the Americans a taste of their own medicine. And it turned out to be surprisingly easy.
The Americans are paper tigers.
The planners, whoever they really were, must have been ecstatic at their success. Not that the buildings fell down. That was minor. No, they must have been ecstatic that the stupid Americans fell for it. They ripped off their mask and showed the world just how brutal and vile they truly were, not that many had been fooled. In Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Libya and Syria, now in Ukraine. There is no recovering from that.
And in their infantile terror, they rushed to surrender the very freedoms and liberties that they insisted the “terrorists” were hating them for. Wow. You really can’t make this shit up.
But it was a fucking pinprick! A tiny, insignificant event blown way out of proportion only because it happened to Americans—the only people who count.
Introducing the 9/11-equivalent
Here is a little metric I’ve been using for many years now. I call it the “9/11-equivalent”.
It’s a simple metric. One 9/11-equivalent is an event that kills the same proportion of a population as that of Americans killed on 9/11.
The population of the US in 2001 was 285 million people. Not counting the hijackers, 2977 people died on 9/11. Simple arithmetic tells us that this represents 2977 / 285,470,493 * 100 = ~0.001% of the population. That is one thousandth of one percent. Pinprick.
So let’s take a look at some of America’s victims. How about Iraq?
According to this study, between 670,000 and 880,000 Iraqi children under five died unnecessarily in the twelve years from the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the sanctions regime to the second war in 2003. Note: we’re only talking Iraqi children. Young children.
The average population of Iraq during that time was 22 million, so one “911-equivalent” would be 22,000,000 * 0.00001 = 220 people. If we take the intermediate number of estimated excess deaths, that would be 775,000 dead. Divide by 220 to get the number of 9/11-equivalents:
775,000 / 220 = ~3573
Three thousand five hundred and seventy-three 9/11s!
There are 105,120 hours in a twelve-year period. Simple division tells us that this represents one 9/11 equivalent every 29 hours or so. Non-stop. For twelve years. And that’s just children under five. Plenty of adults and older children died, too.
And those are conservative estimates. Some are several times higher. And the dying didn’t stop in 2003 with the advent of the second hot war against Iraq, it got worse. It is not difficult at all to come up with an equivalent of one 9/11 per day for more than two decades.
Now imagine that 9/11 happened again on 9/12 and again on 9/13 and again and again, every day. But now both towers are filled with young (white) children.
Would the US have lasted even a week before some foreign country was reduced to a smoldering radioactive wasteland? Can you imagine the US enduring a 9/11 per day for twelve days, let alone twelve (or twenty) years?
Well, as I said above, Americans already do. Just not al Qaeda 9/11s. But medical error 9/11s, gun violence 9/11s, lack of health care 9/11s, fentanyl 9/11s (one every ten days), etc.? No problema.
We can do raw, too
You don’t like the idea of “equivalency”? Fine. Use the raw number: 2977. Now the Iraq numbers come out to 260 raw 9/11s, or one every 403.7 hours. That’s one every 16.8 days.
So a full-on 9/11 every bit as costly in raw numbers as the US 9/11 and ignoring the population difference every two and a half weeks for twelve years without let up. And we’re still talking only children under five.
And this same tale can be told all over the world. Fifteen percent (15%!) of the North Korean population died just to keep Korea from reunifying under a communist government—as if that were any business of the West. An entire nation flattened (and quite a few South Korean dissidents massacred as well). Biological and chemical weapons, especially napalm, widely used. Nukes threatened.
You’re either with us or we’ll kill you, I guess.
How many millions in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos? Still dying from dioxins and land mines and who knows what else forty years on. For what? What threat were they to the American people? None at all.
George H.W. Bush ordered an invasion of Panama—population about 2.5 million—in 1989 on absurd pretenses that killed an estimated 2-3000 people, mostly civilians, according to the Central American Human Rights Commission.
A 9/11-equivalent for Panama is 25 people, so that’s what? A hundred 9/11-equivalents in just a few days?
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, now Ukraine and Russia. The list goes on and on and on. Suffering and death on a scale unimaginable to ignorant, self-satisfied, and arrogant Americans. Thousands—tens of thousands—of 9/11-equivalents in a never ending river of blood.
How many Venezuelan civilians have died needlessly from illegal US sanctions? The last number I heard was 40,000. How many 9/11’s is that?
I am sorry to see anyone die pointlessly, needlessly. But seriously, ‘merikins: man up. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
But, but … the government is lying
OMFG. You’re killing me here. The government is lying? Wow. That’s never happened before.
Look, the scientists, engineers, etc. who did the studies for NIST, etc. were probably mostly apolitical, disinterested, and reasonably competent actors who did their best to get it right while under severe political pressure.
But then they had to hand their findings over to politicians. The same politicians that had fucked up so badly that America lost 2977 people and three major buildings, suffered damage to Evil Imperialist Headquarters, not to mention four expensive commercial aircraft. And Americans looked like utter, incompetent fools.
Can anyone ever really forget George W. Bush’s deer-in-the-headlights moment when he first heard of the attack? Or the whack-a-mole game he played right after that?
Clearly, some information needed to be kept secret, such as how to blow up US buildings. But let’s face it, lots of info was redacted just because it made someone powerful look bad. That’s how power works. Is anyone really unclear on this?
So the government was always going to use the studies to whitewash their own incompetence and negligence. Hey, it could have happened to anyone, right? Who knew that people could hijack planes and fly them into buildings? (Oh, yeah. Right. The US knew because it had been discussed shortly before it actually happened.)
Big side benefit: by lying and hiding things, the government amps up the crazy conspiracy theories. I am always shocked by people who ask why the government doesn’t just tell the whole truth and stop the conspiracy nuts.
Are you insane? The 9/11 Goofer conspiracy conspiracy is the best thing the US has had going since the Kennedy assassination. Millions of Americans have wasted billions of hours chasing down absurd minutiae rather than paying attention to what the government is really doing in their names. RIGHT NOW.
The lying fat cat criminals in power love it. Why would they kill the goose that laid the golden egg? While Americans run around frantically focusing on a pinprick that happened more than two decades ago—before the first episode of American Idol aired, if you can believe it—the government continues to consolidate power and steal everything it can get its hands on.
It’s a mafia
News flash: The US, like every other nation on Earth, is run by an organized crime syndicate. Being a powerful nation, the US government and the oligarchy they work for specialize in extortion and money laundering.
Of course, if you’re the government of a smaller nation, then you specialize in oppressing your own people and serving them up to the big bully nations. But every national government is run by organized crime. Wake up.
But while crude and evil, they are not entirely stupid. (Just mostly stupid, but that’s a discussion for another time.) They are, however, utterly venal. They do what gains them money and power regardless of the consequences to others, even their own kin. They are sociopaths, plain and simple. Or they rationalized away their evil acts long ago.
All they had to do to get a “new Pearl Harbor” was just keep offending people in other countries, keep murdering their children, keep destroying their futures, keep stealing their wealth, keep raping their women and sooner or later someone was going to get angry enough to strike at the US itself.
And because they knew that they were utterly incompetent and negligent at everything except corruption and crime, they also knew that any attack would likely be successful. After all, these are the guys who hadn’t won a real war since the Soviets beat the crap out of the Germans and then the Americans stole the credit. And the WTC had been bombed before, right? And the Murrah building …
Anyone paying attention knew that something big was coming.
So no need to take the risk of an enormous and complex false flag attack on US soil that might fail and screw them all. Just wait. It would come on its own.
And it did.
I doubt that any of the criminals in the government ever thought for a moment that the “terrorists” would be so successful. That must have been a shock. But it didn’t take long for them to turn it to their advantage. And the Americans bought it hook, line, and sinker, the fools.
Instead of hanging Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld by their balls for their treasonous incompetence, in a very short period Bush’s popularity soared into the stratosphere and he became a hero even to many on the ostensible “left” (there is no real left in America).
No bombs, no remote control, no missiles, no other nonsense required. Just a willingness to admit that other people—not American and not even white—are capable of acting competently and even bravely in their own interests.
The one thing that most Westerners just can’t bring themselves to admit.
Now can we finally put this 9/11 bullshit to rest?