Can Anyone Spare Me Some Tinfoil?

I provide these links as a public service for the two people who read my blog:

This is a documentary about September 11, 2001.

These links contain quick transcripts if you don't have 90 minutes to watch a movie on the Internet. The last 8 minutes or so isn't transcribed yet, and basically covers theoretical motives for the theoretical deception, and some stuff about the gold from the WTC basement that supposedly has never been recovered.

It's all pretty Mulderous. The evidence they present does a fair job of convincing me that Something Funny Was Going On. However, there's quite a jump between the bizarre events of the day and a conspiracy to take over the world.

In order to believe this theory, one needs to also believe that there's a sinister cartel of Republicans who are 100% contained and uncompromised, all murderously dedicated to securing their rule and pathologically greedy. Basically, you have to believe that George W. Bush and his various hangers-on are Bond villains a hundred times more devious than Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

I don't quite buy it. A quick example of my train of thought:

Unfortunately, this book on the Kennedy assassination is out of print, and I don't have a copy to reference. It uses ballistics, audio analysis, documentary research and so forth to assert that the famously visible head shot in the Zapruder film was fired not by Oswald, but by an overenthusiastic Secret Service agent riding in the second limo who took the safety off of his gun before being knocked over when his ride accelerated. The entirety of the ensuing confusion, doubt and conspiracy-hunting is due to an amateurish coverup by the guy and his buddies, with the witting or unwitting collusion of federal bureaucrats who certainly weren't interested in discovering that the President of the United States was shot to death by his own bodyguards.

This theory isn't widely accepted or even known. I'd imagine that's mostly because it's not very exciting. It falls firmly under Hanlan's Razor, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." I imagine that the real story of 9/11 probably comes somewhere close to that. Somebody, somewhere, screwed up more colossally than anybody who knows about it is willing to admit, and subsequently had enough clout to cover it up. Where in the timeline the Great Mistake occurred -- and just how many of the tragic events that followed result directly from it -- I can't imagine, but the truth is almost guaranteed to emerge, without fanfare or even general public notice, sooner or later.

Another possiblity is that a "perfect storm" of intelligence failures, miscalculations, building code violations, ill-considered military exercises, insider trades, theatrical camera-lust, insurance fraud schemes, airline scheduling errors and the inconvenient fact that most of the super-super-super-rich tend to interact with each other personally or professionally combined with a coincidentally timed terrorist plot to create a shambling chaos that eerily resembles a conspiracy.

That, or William Morgan Clark, Deputy Minister Sutler and their accomplice Count Dooku set fire to the Reichstag in Pearl Harbour while ridding the kingdom of a turbulent priest. Not to strain a metaphor.

I'll see everyone at Jenn's recital. No, I hadn't forgotten.