At War with Reality

GKB has officially gone off the deep end. Per your request: Greg, you are a paranoid conspiracy freak.

Loose Change? Loose Screws is more like it:

“The only thing they (the filmmakers) seem to have gotten right about the Sept. 11 attacks is the date when they occurred,” says Debra Burlingame, whose brother was the pilot of American Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon.

“They aren’t truth-tellers looking to save the world,” she says. “They’re con artists hoping to sucker conspiracy-theory paranoids or anti-government malcontents into shelling out their hard-earned dollars.”

Instead of wasting your time on this sideshow carny foolishness, go and see United 93. I did. It was relentlessly honest, simple, and powerful. Plus, it has the benefit of being grounded in reality.

As for Flight 77, where did it go, you ask? It crashed into the Pentagon and most of it burned, just like the planes that struck the Twin Towers. To suggest otherwise is absurd, outrageous, and obscene.

It’s the sort of stuff that even other conspiracy nuts reject. Only the most rabid mouth-breathers give it any credence at all. To do so requires that you believe all these people either simultaneously decided to tell the same lie or had a mass hallucination. Anyone familiar with the area around the Pentagon and I-395 during rush hour would know that there was no shortage of people who saw what happened. I nearly witnessed the crash myself. Here’s one compelling account from eyewitness James S. Robbins:

O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. — Voltaire, 1767

* * *

[I]f Flight 77 didn’t hit the Pentagon, where is it? Where are Barbara Olson and the other passengers who left loved ones behind?

* * *

Where video is lacking, as in the case of Flight 77 (which is more proof of the plot, says [Thierry] Meyssan) it is up to the eyewitnesses to tell their stories.

So here’s mine. . . . I went back to my office around 9:20. A short time later a friend of mine called, an Air Force officer, and we spoke awhile about the strikes in New York. I was standing, looking out my large office window, which faces west and from six stories up has a commanding view of the Potomac and the Virginia heights. (When I hired on my boss said we had the best view in town. True, most days.) The Pentagon is about a mile and half distant in the center of the tableau. I was looking directly at it when the aircraft struck. The sight of the 757 diving in at an unrecoverable angle is frozen in my memory, but at the time, I did not immediately comprehend what I was witnessing. There was a silvery flash, an explosion, and a dark, mushroom shaped cloud rose over the building. I froze, gaping for a second until the sound of the detonation, a sharp pop at that distance, shook me out of it. I shouted something both extremely profane and sacrilegious and told my friend, “They hit the Pentagon. We’re under attack. Gotta go.” I hung up the phone and turned back to the window to see the dark cloud spreading. I yelled down the hall, “Look out the window!” I heard gasps outside, and a researcher dashed into my office and stared.

* * *

So, of course, I take it personally when a half-wit like Meyssan comes along saying it did not happen. And he is so evidently at war with reality that one is tempted not to waste time with him. His ideas are obviously foolish, easily disproved, an affront to any reasoning person. It would be easy to ignore him. But that would be a mistake. . . . When such ideas are allowed to stand, they take root among the impressionable or those predisposed to think the worst. And especially now that communications technology has made it possible to give global reach to the bizarre and archive it forever, it is essential for men and women of reason resolutely to counter the delusions of the fringe element.

I was there. I saw it. That is my entire rebuttal.

James Robbins is a contributing editor to National Review. His email address is publicly available. If you don’t believe his account, I suggest you contact him and let him know why that silly “documentary” makes you think he is delusional. He might have an interesting response.

RELATED: Wall-to-wall coverage and first-rate debunking available at Screw Loose Change. See also, this post at Seixon where the very first lie is exposed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 11th, 2006 at 9:00 pm and is filed under The Left, Global War on Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.