The Fruitloop Conspiracy Theory
the Looniest of All 9-11 Conspiracy Theories
Written by Gerard Holmgren
Astute observers of history are aware that for every notable event there
will usually be at least one, often several wild conspiracy theories which
spring up around it. ‘The CIA killed Hendrix’, ‘The Pope had John Lennon
murdered’, ‘Hitler was half Werewolf’, ‘Space aliens replaced Nixon with a
clone’ etc, etc. The bigger the event, the more ridiculous and more numerous
are the fanciful rantings which circulate in relation to it.
So it’s hardly surprising that the events of September 11th, 2001 have
spawned their fair share of these ludicrous fairy tales. And as always,
there is – sadly – a small but gullible percentage of the population eager
to lap up these tall tales, regardless of facts or rational analysis.
One of the wilder stories circulating about September 11th – and one that
has attracted something of a cult following amongst conspiracy buffs – is
that it was carried out by nineteen fanatical Arab hijackers, masterminded
by an evil genius named Osama bin Laden, with no apparent motivation other
than that they ‘hate our freedoms.’
Never a group of people to be bothered by facts, the perpetrators of this
cartoon fantasy have constructed an elaborately woven web of delusions and
unsubstantiated hearsay in order to promote this garbage across the internet
and the media to the extent that a number of otherwise rational people have
actually fallen under its spell.
Normally I don’t even bother debunking this kind of junk, but the effect
that this paranoid myth is beginning to have requires a little rational
analysis, in order to consign it to the same rubbish bin as all such silly
conspiracy theories.
These crackpots even contend that the extremist Bush regime was caught
unawares by the attacks, had no hand in organizing them, and actually would
have stopped them if it had been able. Blindly ignoring the stand down of
the US air-force, the insider trading on airline stocks – linked to the
CIA – the complicit behavior of Bush on the morning of the attacks, the
controlled demolition of the WTC, the firing of a missile into the Pentagon
and a host of other documented proofs that the Bush regime was behind the
attacks, the conspiracy theorists stick doggedly to a silly story about
nineteen Arab hijackers somehow managing to commandeer four planes
simultaneously and fly them around US airspace for nearly two hours,
crashing them into important buildings, without the US intelligence services
having any idea that it was coming, and without the Air Force knowing what
to do.
The huge difficulties with such a stupid story force them to invent even
more preposterous stories to distract from its core silliness, and thus the
tale has escalated into a mythic fantasy of truly gargantuan proportions.
It’s difficult to apply rational analysis to such unmitigated stupidity, but
that is the task which I take on in this article. However, it should be
noted that one of the curious characteristics of conspiracy theorists is
that they effortlessly change their so called evidence in response to each
aspect which is debunked. As soon as one delusion is unmasked, they simply
invent another to replace it, and deny that the first ever existed.
Eventually, when they have turned full circle through this endlessly
changing fantasy fog, they then re-invent the original delusion and deny
that you ever debunked it, thus beginning the circle once more. This
technique is known as ‘the fruit loop’ and saves the conspiracy theorist
from ever having to see any of their ideas through to their (il)ogical
conclusions.
According to the practitioners of the fruit loop, nineteen Arabs took over
four planes by subduing the passengers and crew through the use of guns,
knives, box cutters and gas, and then used electronic guidance systems which
they had smuggled on board to fly the planes to their targets.
The suspension of disbelief required for this outrageous concoction is only
for the hard core conspiracy theorist. For a start, they conveniently skip
over the awkward fact that there weren’t any Arabs on the planes. If there
were, one must speculate that they somehow got on board without being filmed
by any of the security cameras and without being registered on the passenger
lists. But the curly question of how they are supposed to have got on board
is all too mundane for the exciting world of the conspiracy theorist. With
vague mumblings that they must have been using false ID – but never
specifying which IDs they are alleged to have used, or how these were traced
to their real identities – they quickly bypass this problem, to relate
exciting and sinister tales about how some of the fictitious fiends were
actually searched before boarding because they looked suspicious. However,
as inevitably happens with any web of lies, this simply paints them into an
even more difficult corner. How are they supposed to have got on board with
all that stuff if they were searched? And if they used gas in a confined
space, they would have been affected themselves unless they also had masks
in their luggage.
“Excuse me sir, why do you have a box cutter, a gun, a container of gas, a
gas mask and an electronic guidance unit in your luggage?”
“A present for your grandmother? Very well sir, on you get.”
“Very strange”, thinks the security officer, “that’s the fourth Arabic man
without an Arabic name who just got on board with a knife, gun or box cutter
and gas mask…and why does that security camera keep flicking off every
time one of these characters shows up? Must be one of those days I guess…”
Asking any of these basic questions to a conspiracy theorist is likely to
cause a sudden leap to the claim that we know that they were on board
because they left a credit card trail for the tickets they had purchased and
cars they had rented. So if they used credit cards that identified them, how
does that reconcile with the claim that they used false IDs to get on to the
plane? But by this time, the fruit loop is in full swing, as the conspiracy
theorist tries to stay one jump ahead of this annoying and awkward rational
analysis. They will allege that the hijackers’ passports were found at the
crash scenes. “So there!” they exalt triumphantly, their fanatical faces
lighting up with that deranged look of one who has just a revelation of
questionable sanity.
Hmm? So they got on board with false IDs but took their real passports with
them? However, by this time the fruit loop has been completely
circumnavigated, and the conspiracy theorist exclaims impatiently, “who said
anything about false IDs? We know what seats they were sitting in! Their
presence is well documented!” And so the whole loop starts again. “Well, why
aren’t they on the passenger lists?” “You numbskull! They assumed the
identities of other passengers!” And so on…
Finally, out of sheer fascination with this circular method of creative
delusion, the rational skeptic will allow them to get away with this loop,
in order to move on to the next question, and see what further delights
await us in the unraveling of this marvelously stupid story.
"Uh, how come their passports survived fiery crashes that completely
incinerated the planes and all the passengers? "The answer of course is that
its just one of those strange coincidences, those little quirks of fate that
do happen from time to time. You know, like the same person winning the
lottery four weeks in a row. The odds are astronomical, but these things do
happen.
This is another favorite deductive method of the conspiracy theorist. The
‘improbability drive’, in which they decide upon a conclusion without any
evidence whatsoever to support it, and then continually speculate a series
of wildly improbable events and unbelievable co-incidences to support it,
shrugging off the implausibility of each event with the vague assertion that
sometimes the impossible happens – just about all the time in their world.
There is a principle called ‘Occam’s razor’ which suggests that in the
absence of evidence to the contrary, the simplest explanation is most likely
to be correct. Conspiracy theorists hate Occam’s razor.
Having for the sake of amusement, allowed them to get away with the silly
story of the nineteen invisible Arabs, we move on to the question of how
they are supposed to have taken over the planes.
Hijacking a plane is not an easy thing to do. Hijacking it without the pilot
being able to alert ground control is near impossible. Unconcerned with the
awkward question of The pilot has only to punch in a four digit code to
alert ground control to a hijacking. plausibility, the conspiracy buffs
maintain that on that September 11th, the invisible hijackers took over the
plane by the rather crude method of threatening people with box cutters and
knives, and spraying gas – after they had attached their masks,
obviously – but somehow took control of the plane without the crew first
getting a chance to punch in the hijacking code. Not just on one plane, but
on all four. At this point in the tale, the conspiracy theorist is again
forced to call upon the services of the improbability drive.
So now that our incredibly lucky hijackers have taken control of the planes,
all four pilots fly them with breath taking skill and certainty to their
fiery end, all four pilots unflinching in their steely resolve for a swift
meeting with Allah. Apart from their psychotic hatred of ‘our freedoms’, it
was their fanatical devotion to Islam which enabled them to summon up the
iron will to do this. Which is strange, because according to another piece
of hearsay peddled by the conspiracy buffs, these guys actually went out
drinking and womanizing the night before their great martyrdom, even leaving
their Korans in the bar – really impeccable Islamic behavior – and then
got up at 5 o’clock the next morning to pull off the greatest covert
operation in history. This also requires us to believe that they were even
clear headed enough to learn how to fly the huge planes by reading flight
manuals in Arabic in the car on the way to the airport. We know this because
they supposedly left the flight manuals there for us to find.
It gets better. Their practical training had allegedly been limited to
Cessnas and flight simulators, but this was no barrier to the unflinching
certainty with which they took over the planes and skillfully guided them to
their doom. If they are supposed to have done their flight training with
these tools, which would be available just about anywhere in the world, its
not clear why they would have decided to risk blowing their cover to US
intelligence services by doing the training in Florida, rather than
somewhere in the Middle East, but such reasoning is foreign to the foggy
world of the conspiracy theorist, too trapped in the constant rotation of
the mental fruit loop to make their unsubstantiated fabrications seem even
semi-believable.
Having triumphantly established a circular delusion in support of the
mythical Arabs, the conspiracy theorist now confronts the difficult question
of why there’s nothing left of the planes. Anybody who has seen the
endlessly replayed footage of the second plane going into the WTC will
realize that the plane was packed with explosives. Planes do not and cannot
blow up into nothing in that manner when they crash.
Did the mythical Arabs also haul a huge heap of explosives on board, and
mange to deploy them in such a manner that they went off in the exact
instant of the crash, completely vaporizing the plane? This is a little
difficult even for the conspiracy theorist, who at this point decides that
it’s easier to invent new laws of physics in order to keep the delusion
rolling along.
There weren’t any explosives. It wasn’t an inside job. The plane blew up
into nothing from its exploding fuel load! Remarkable, quite remarkable.
Sluggishly combustible jet fuel which is basically Kerosene, and which burns
at a maximum temperature of around 800 degrees Celsius has suddenly taken on
the qualities of a ferociously explosive demolition agent, vaporizing
sixty-five tons of aircraft into a puff of smoke. Never mind that a plane of
that size contains around fifteen tons of steel and titanium, of which even
the melting points are about double that of the maximum combustion
temperature of Kerosene – let alone the boiling point – which is what
would be required to vaporize a plane. And then there’s about fifty tons of
aluminum to be accounted for. In excess of 15 lbs of metal for each gallon
of Kerosene.
For the conspiracy theorist, such inconvenient facts are vaguely dismissed
as ‘mumbo jumbo’. This convenient little phrase is their answer to just
about anything factual or logical. Like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a
hat, they suddenly become fanatically insistent about the devastating
explosive qualities of Kerosene, something hitherto completely unknown to
science, but just discovered by them, this very minute. Blissfully ignoring
the fact that never before or since in aviation history has a plane
vaporized into nothing from an exploding fuel load, the conspiracy theorist
relies upon Hollywood images, where the effects are always larger than life,
and certainly larger than the intellects of these cretins.
“Its a well known fact that planes blow up into nothing on impact”, they
state with pompous certainty, “watch any Bruce Willis movie.”
“Care to provide any documented examples? If it’s a well known fact, then
presumably this well known fact springs from some kind of documentation –
other than Bruce Willis movies?”
At this point the mad but cunning eyes of the conspiracy theorist will
narrow as they sense the corner that they have backed themselves into, and
plan their escape by means of another stunning back flip.
“Ah, but planes have never crashed into buildings before, so there’s no way
of telling.” they counter with a sly grin. Well, actually planes have
crashed into buildings before and since, and not vaporized into nothing.
“But not big planes, with that much fuel”, they shriek in hysterical denial.
Or that much metal to vaporize.
“Yes but not hijacked planes!” “Are you suggesting that whether the crash is
deliberate or accidental affects the combustion qualities of the fuel?” “Now
you’re just being silly”.
Although collisions with buildings are rare, planes frequently crash into
mountains, streets, other aircraft, nosedive into the ground, or have bombs
planted aboard them, and don’t vaporize into nothing. What’s so special
about a tower that’s mostly glass? But by now, the conspiracy theorist has
once again sailed happily around the fruit loop. “It’s a well documented
fact that planes explode into nothing on impact.”
Effortlessly weaving back and forth between the position that its a “well
known fact” and that “its never happened before, so we have nothing to
compare it to”, the conspiracy theorist has now convinced themselves – if
not too many other people – that the WTC plane was not loaded with
explosives, and that the instant vaporization of the plane in a massive
fireball was the same as any other plane crash you might care to mention.
Round and round the fruit loop.
But the hurdles which confront the conspiracy theorist are many, and they
are now forced to implement even more creative uses for the newly discovered
shockingly destructive qualities of Kerosene. They have to explain how the
Arabs also engineered the elegant vertical collapse of both the WTC towers,
and for this awkward fact the easiest counter is to simply deny that it was
a controlled demolition, and claim that the buildings collapsed from fire
caused by the burning Kerosene.
For this, its necessary to sweep aside the second law of thermodynamics and
propose Kerosene which is not only impossibly destructive, but also recycles
itself for a second burning in violation of the law of degradation of
energy. You see, it not only consumed itself in a sudden catastrophic
fireball , vaporizing a sixty-five ton plane into nothing, but then came
back for a second go, burning at 2000 degrees centigrade for another hour at
the impact point, melting the skyscraper’s steel like butter. And while it
was doing all this it also poured down the elevator shafts, starting fires
all through the building. When I was at school there was a little thing
called the entropy law which suggests that a given portion of fuel can only
burn once, something which is readily observable in the real world, even for
those who didn’t make it to junior high school science. But this is no
problem for the conspiracy theorist. Gleefully, they claim that a few
thousand gallons of Kerosene is enough to:
-
Completely vaporize a sixty-five ton aircraft
-
Have enough left over to burn ferociously enough for over an hour at the
impact point to melt steel – melting point about double the maximum
combustion temperature of the fuel -
Still have enough left over to pour down the elevator shafts and start
similarly destructive fires all through the building
This Kerosene really is remarkable stuff! How chilling to realize that those
Kerosene heaters we had in the house when I was a kid were deadly bombs,
just waiting to go off. One false move and the entire street might have been
vaporized. And never again will I take Kerosene lamps out camping. One
moment you’re there innocently holding the lamp – the next – kapow!
Vaporized into nothing along with the rest of the camp site, and still
leaving enough of the deadly stuff to start a massive forest fire.
These whackos are actually claiming that the raging inferno allegedly
created by the miraculously recycling, and impossibly hot burning Kerosene
melted or at least softened the steel supports of the skyscraper. Oblivious
to the fact that the black smoke coming from the WTC indicates an oxygen
starved fire – therefore not particularly hot – they trumpet an alleged
temperature in the building of 2000 degrees centigrade, without a shred of
evidence to support this curious suspension of the laws of physics.
Not content with this ludicrous garbage, they then contend that as the steel
frames softened, they came straight down instead of buckling and twisting
and falling sideways.
Since they’re already re-engineered the combustion qualities of jet fuel,
violated the second law of thermodynamics, and redefined the structural
properties of steel, why let a little thing like the laws of gravity get in
the way?
The tower fell in a time almost identical to that of a free falling object,
dropped from that height, meaning that its physically impossible for it to
have collapsed by the method of the top floors smashing through the lower
floors. But according to the conspiracy theorists, the laws of gravity were
temporarily suspended on the morning of September 11th. It appears that the
evil psychic power of those dreadful Arabs knew no bounds. Even after they
were dead, they were able, by the power of their evil spirits, to force down
the tower at a speed physically impossible under the laws of gravity, had it
been meeting any resistance from fireproofed steel structures originally
designed to resist many tons of hurricane force wind as well as the impact
of a Boeing passenger jet straying off course.
Clearly, these conspiracy nuts never did their science homework at school,
but did become extremely adept at inventing tall tales for why. “Muslim
terrorists stole my notes, Sir.” “No Miss, the Kerosene heater blew up and
vaporized everything in the street, except for my passport.” “You see, Sir,
the school bus was hijacked by Arabs who destroyed my homework because they
hate our freedoms.”
Or perhaps they misunderstood the term ‘creative science’ and mistakenly
thought that coming up with such rubbish was in fact, their science
homework.
The ferocious heat generated by this ghastly Kerosene was, according to the
conspiracy theorists, the reason why so many of the WTC victims can’t be
identified. DNA is destroyed by heat – although 2000 degrees centigrade
isn’t really required, 100 degrees centigrade will generally do the job.
This is quite remarkable, because according to the conspiracy theorist, the
nature of DNA suddenly changes if you go to a different city.
That’s right, if you are killed by an Arab terrorist in New York, your DNA
will be destroyed by such temperatures. But if you are killed by an Arab
terrorist in Washington, your DNA will be so robust that it can survive
temperatures which completely vaporize a sixty-five ton aircraft.
You see, these loonies have somehow concocted the idea that the missile
which hit the pentagon was not a missile at all, but one of the hijacked
planes. And to prove this unlikely premise, they point to a propaganda
statement from the Bush regime, which rather stupidly claims that all but
one of the people aboard the plane were identified from the site by DNA
testing, even though nothing remains of the plane. The plane was vaporized
by the fuel tank explosion, maintain these space loonies, but the people
inside it were all but one identified by DNA testing.
So there we have it. The qualities of DNA are different, depending upon
which city you’re in, or perhaps depending upon which fairy story you’re
trying to sell at any particular time.
This concoction about one of the hijacked planes hitting the Pentagon really
is a howler. For those not familiar with the layout of the Pentagon, it
consists of 5 rings of building, each with a space in between. Each ring of
building is about 30-35 feet deep, with a similar amount of open space
between it and the next ring. The object which penetrated the Pentagon went
in at about a 45 degree angle, punching a neat circular hole of about a 12
foot diameter through three rings – six walls. A little later a section of
wall about 65 foot wide collapsed in the outer ring. Since the plane which
the conspiracy theorists claim to be responsible for the impact had a wing
span of 125 feet and a length of 155 feet, and there was no wreckage of the
plane, either inside or outside the building, and the lawns outside were
still smooth and green enough to play golf on, this crazy delusion is
clearly physically impossible.
But hey, we’ve already disregarded the combustion qualities of jet fuel, the
normal properties of common building materials, the properties of DNA, the
laws of gravity and the second law of thermodynamics, so what the hell –
why not throw in a little spatial impossibility as well? I would have
thought that the observation that a solid object cannot pass through another
solid object without leaving a hole at least as big as itself is reasonably
sound science. But to the conspiracy theorist, this is ‘mumbo jumbo’. It
conflicts with the delusion that they’re hooked on, so it ‘must be wrong’
although trying to get them to explain exactly how it could be wrong is a
futile endeavor.
Conspiracy theorists fly into a curious panic whenever the Pentagon missile
is mentioned. They nervously maintain that the plane was vaporized by its
exploding fuel load, and point to the WTC crash as evidence of this
behavior. That’s a wonderful fruit loop. Like an insect which has just been
sprayed, running back and forth in its last mad death throes, they first
argue that the reason the hole is so small is that the plane never entered
the wall, having blown up outside, and then suddenly back flip to explain
the 250 foot deep missile hole by saying that the plane disappeared all the
way into the building, and then blew up inside the building – even though
the building shows no sign of such damage. As for what happened to the
wings – here’s where they get really creative. The wings snapped off and
folded into the fuselage which then carried them into the building, which
then closed up behind the plane like a piece of meat.
When it suits them, they’ll also claim that the plane slid in on its
belly – ignoring the undamaged lawn – while at the same time citing
alleged witnesses to the plane diving steeply into the building from an
‘irrecoverable angle.’ How they reconcile these two scenarios as being
compatible is truly a study in stupidity.
Once they get desperate enough, you can be sure that the UFO conspiracy
stuff will make an appearance. The Arabs are in league with the Martians.
Space aliens snatched the remains of the Pentagon plane and fixed most of
the hole in the wall, just to confuse people. They gave the Arabs
invisibility pills to help get them onto the planes. Little green men were
seen talking to Bin Laden a few weeks prior to the attacks.
As America gears up to impeach the traitor Bush, and stop his perpetual oil
war, it’s not helpful to have these idiots distracting from the process by
spreading silly conspiracy theories about mythical Arabs, stories which do
nothing but play into the hands of the extremist Bush regime.
At a less serious time, we might tolerate such crackpots with amused
detachment, but they need to understand that the treachery that was
perpetrated on September 11th, and the subsequent war crimes committed in
‘retaliation’ are far too serious for us to allow such frivolous self
indulgence to go unchallenged.
Those who are truly addicted to conspiracy delusions should find a more
appropriate outlet for their paranoia.
Its time to stop loony conspiracy theories about September 11th.
Every guy knows exactly what I’m talking about.