The guns of 9/11

It may seem strange for me to say this, since I've recently been writing about elves and abductions and hyperdimensional portals, but when it comes to parsing the mundane magick of 9/11, I think it's important that we not be led by our imagination. Or, perhaps more worrisomely, by someone else's.

I'm talking about "holograms." I'm talking about "pods." I'm talking, too, as I've talked before, about the Pentagon "missile." But I'm talking about other things, even some of which may be true.

There's a lot of wiggle room for informed speculation concerning 9/11, but it should be done on the back end. If it doesn't follow an argument based on tangibles, if it doesn't bring up the rear, there's not much likelihood of it being informed. There's no reason why the case against Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al should be led with hypothetical scenarios, when what we know is already enough to condemn them. Enough happened that is beyond reasonable dispute; we shouldn't let our conjecture about how it happened dominate the argument. Even if it's well-founded.

Here's a for instance: I suspect remote control was engaged at some point in the flights, surprising the patsy hijackers to ensure the operation reflected expectations. I think there is circumstantial evidence to support the claim (for example, the institutional deceit regarding the recovery of the flight recorders, the improbable trajectory of Flight 77, and the viability of remote technologies) as well as logic (if such a world-changing event were allowed to happen, its chance of success would not likely be left in the hands of the unskilled pilots), but still, there is no smoking gun. So it's a position I hold in an open hand, and I'm prepared to be persuaded that I'm wrong.

Then there's WTC 7. I suspect it was demolished. But I fear for those who consider its collapse the "key" to 9/11. Hanging the entire case upon it gives disproportionate weight to the physical evidence, and if there's an even slightly plausible explanation for its collapse short of demolition, then the whole case pays for the weakness of this single point of conjecture.

On the April 27 Guns and Butter, Indira Singh mentioned that early on the afternoon of September 11, firefighters came by her triage center near Building 7 and informed the EMT workers they would need to evacuate. The reason given was "We're going to have to bring it down." Meaning Building 7. And before it fell, she describes a growing sense of panic, because "people seemed to know ahead of time" it was going to fall.

This is interesting and deserving of follow up, but I don't see this as anything like a smoking gun for demolition, because there still exist other plausible explanations for the remark, even if I may not buy them myself. Also, it begs a number of legitimate questions: Who were the firefighters? On whose authority were they speaking? If these were conspirators, why were they speaking freely? Could people have known ahead of time it was going to fall because it appeared unstable? I think we need to ask ourselves these kind of questions, before we start flagging Singh's remarks as a smoking gun, and are asked them by others. In other words, we ought to debunk ourselves of lazy thinking to spare ourselves getting pissed off when it's done for us.

I'm persuaded Indira Singh has important things to say, but about things she knows, such as Ptech, and I don't think this is one of them. To her credit, she admits as much in the interview. "I'm not an engineer," she says. Neither am I. Which is part of the reason I hesitate to speak with authority on this issue, and why I omitted it altogether from the Coincidence Theorist's Guide. As I've said, I suspect WTC 7 was demolished, but suspicion isn't good enough here, not when we have so much more.

The guns of 9/11 are still smoking, but they have little to do with the physical evidence. They have much more to do with the movement of wealth, with the coincident war games, with the Florida flight schools, with Pakistan, with the change to the standing orders for shoot downs - that kind of material. Those are the dots that connect for me. Generally, I believe the weakest arguments are those dedicated to the physical evidence of the crime. (And it's noteworthy that Popular Mechanics, in its recent "debunking" issue of 9/11 conspiracy theories, restricted itself to those very arguments.)

There are different orders of knowledge, even regarding things meant to be kept hidden from us. It's a tricky business, but I think it's important that we observe the rules for each order, and know what kind of knowledge we're talking about. Because there are degrees of darkness in which we're kept. UFOs and High Weirdness are pitch black compared to the twilight world of 9/11. And to the degree we have light, even a little at twilight, then we needn't imagine that we do.