Charlie Sheen Joins 9//11 Conspiracy Coocoo Birds v1.1 (long) Under the heading Sheen Airs 9/11 Conspiracy Theory, an article on IMDB.com reveals that Charlie Sheen is another conspiracy coocoo bird, insisting that the buildings must have been brought down by "controlled demolitions", rather than by the airplanes that ran into them.

He also doubts that an airplane really crashed into the Pentagon, apparently, saying "Just show us how this particular plane pulled off these maneuvers."

He also said

It is up to us to reveal the truth. It is up to us because we owe it to the families, we owe it to the victims, we owe it to everyone's life who was drastically altered, horrifically, that day and forever. We owe it to them to uncover what happened.

Of course, if [as Occam's Razor, eye-witness reports and video footage strongly suggest, to say the least] those airplanes really did crash into the towers and the Pentagon, then convincing the surviving family members of those who died that it was some sort of big conspiracy, probably involving the US government (and, very likely, given the way conspiracy theorists "think", Israel) -- presumably in an attempt to give the Shrub a pretext to go to war is needlessly cruel to the survivors and irresponsible, to say the least, in the context of world politics.

Unfotunately, Sheen is far from the worst of 9/11 conspiracy coocoo birde; just as there are websites that spout misunderstood or even fictitious or downright bogus "scientific proof" that the Apollo moonlandings were faked (click here for an example), websites exist "proving" that, if, indeed, any actual airplanes even hit the World Trade Center (which they doubt), it couldn't possibly have caused the sort of catastrophic collapse that occurred (click here for an example).

911truestory.com, linked above, has this quote at the bottom of its home page:

Hitler writes in "Mein Kampf":

"All this was inspired by the principle that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the (public) more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and continue to think that there may be some other explanation."

(Hitler, as can be easily discovered with a quick Google (using the search terms "'big lie' nazi", for instance), was referring to his claim that the German Army had not lost World War One in the field, but that the Jews who controlled the press had convinced everyone of that; an amusing coincidence, since Israel is often put forth as one of the potential prime movers of alleged 9/11 conspiracy theories.)

9/11 conspiracy theorists make claims that, while true, are actually pretty well irrelevant to the issue -- for instance, one common claim is that other steel-framed buildings have suffered fires much worse than what (in their opinion at east) was happening in the WTC buildings, and did not collapse.

And so? The WTC towers were of a different type of construction than any of those other buildings -- virtually all of the WTC's steel supports were in the central core, not the floors and skin; when those weakened, you essentially had the same situation you can frequently observe in warehouses -- a heavy corrugated-cardboard box set on top of one that is not strong enough to support it, with the result that the lower box collapses straight downward. (There were columns surrounding the outside of the building, primarily to give it torsional rigidity; these were both smaller and not so strong as the central core. According to a paper entitled "Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers", by G Charles Clifton, HERA Structural Engineer (17th September 2001, revised 19th September, minor revision on impact force made 8th October, minor revisions made 11 December), the external bracing was pretty well eliminated by the initial impacts.)

As an example, quoting Dr. David Ray Griffin on 911truestory.com:

Steel does not even begin to melt until it reaches almost 2800° Fahrenheit. And yet open fires fueled by hydrocarbons, such as kerosene---which is what jet fuel is---can at most rise to 1700°F, which is almost 1100 degrees below the melting point of steel. We can, accordingly, dismiss the claim that the towers collapsed because their steel columns melted.

Most defenders of the official theory, in fact, do not make this absurd claim. They say merely that the fire heated the steel up to the point where it lost so much of its strength that it buckled. For example, Thomas Eagar, saying that steel loses 80 percent of its strength when it is heated to 1,300˚F, argues that this is what happened. But for even this claim to be plausible, the fires would have still had to be pretty hot.

I would suggest that, since the core of the building was pretty well open (elevator shafts) a chimney effect, yielding a forced draught may well have occured -- using forced draught, ordinary charcoal easily burns hot enough to melt steel.

Aside from that possibility, ordinary house fires, fuelled primarily by wood and other hydrocarbon-based substances, routinely leave melted steel and glass among the debris.

The claim is made that the holes in the towers are not wide enough for an actual aircraft to have gone through. Aside from the question of eye-witnesses who saw, as i saw, live on television, an airplane actually hit one of the tower and punch through, the video of the second strike clearly shows (if you freeze-frame it), for the instant before smoke and debris erupt and obscure the side of the tower, an almost Warner Brothers-cartoon-perfect airplane-shaped hole in the building.

And so on.

(Clifton, cited above, opines that the fire was actually only a secondary or minor contributor to the collapse,finishing what initial impact began.)

While i have no doubt that there are people -- quie possibly in our own government -- evil enough to carry out such an elaborate and deadly (not to mention expensive) hoax, i simply cannot believe that anyone actually did. As with Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, you can "prove" anything happened, if you postulate enough conspirators. But then you have to postulate more conspirators covering up the deeds of the first bunch, and even more conspirators supporting those until, if carried to its "logical", the conspiracy involves pretty much everyone except you and your friends.

A conspiracy big enough to pull 9/11 off would not --could not -- remain secret. Someone would leak.

Word would get out to plausible sources, not, say, Jim Garrison and his friends -- not in the "Well, I know for a fact that someone who knew someone related to the real conspirators said that his acquaintance heard that the reason his relative hadn't been seen was that he'd been killed to keep him from talking..." way that often pops up in the Great Uncocnscious.

Unless someone shows me something a lot more convincing about the WTC towers' collapse than any of these people have yet provided, airplanes hit them and they fell down.

Consider the logistics of the thing. Controlled Demolitions, the leader in the field, takes days or even weeks to rig a building they're going to bring down.

For a rational online post demonstrating why it is implausible to the point of impossibility that controlled demolitions could have been used, forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=3108&st=330, in which a rational person using the handle "adoucette" finds himself responding to the posts of conspiracy wackos (arguing online with trolls and conspiracy wackos is like mud wrestling a pig -- you both get filthy, but only the pig enjoys it); scroll down to the message (ninth on the page as i'm seeing it) wherein he posts links to factual articles about controlled explosive demolition; like me he finds it Very Unlikely that nobody noticed the forty or fifty workers planting the hundreds -- probably thousands -- of charges necessary to take down something the size of the WTC, not toi mention the drilling in the walls and necessary torch precutting of a large percentage of the support members, not to mention the miles of det cord or other detonating connections needed over a period of weeks that such a demolition would have taken.

OTOH, if you want to read more wackos, here's a very small sample found by googling on "'controlled demolitions' preparation" (i'm sure you could quite easily find more, ranging from nearly-rational sounding to frothing-at-the-mout anti-semites and "libertarians"):

suetheterrorists.net/, www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr69.html,letters to a conspiracy wacko: prisonplanetweb@hotmail.com (and his site's home page: www.infowars.com/ "It is not exactly clear when the grassy knoll supplanted the sixth-floor window in the popular mind-set. But now, four decades after Dallas, it is difficult to find anyone who believes Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman."), www.911truthla.us/btmframe.php (which is all about how the "Los Angeles Citizens' Grand Jury" "CONDEMNS GOVERNMENT ROLE IN 9/11 & COVERUP"; the entire "LACGJ" "finding" may be found at www.911truthla.us/news/cgj.htm) and so on.

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Note 1: As if he really needed one, having apparently come into office determined to spank Saddam Hussein for dissing his daddy back in the day... {Return to Post}

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Note 2: My own favourite such is the loon who triumphantly proclaims as proof that a picture of an astronaut on the moon must be faked because we are told that it was taken with a camera carried by another astronaut, mounted on his chest, but -- See?!? It shows the top of the other astronaut's head!!

Apparently this guy, besides having no academic knowledge of the laws of optics, has never taken a snapshot or wondered how the sky gets into pics taken by cameras held at eye level.{Return to Post}

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"CONDEMNS GOVERNMENT ROLE IN 9/11 & COVERUP; SEES U.S. 'TREASONOUS INSIDE CABAL' AS RESPONSIBLE FOR 9/11 TERROR ATTACKS; FINDS OFFICIAL STORY 'IMPOSSIBLE, IMPLAUSIBLE' ON MULTIPLE POINTS

"Demands Immediate Release of CIA Inspector General’s Report, Cheney Counter-Terrorism Task Force & War Game Records, Pentagon Evidence Seized by FBI, and Suppressed 9/11 Report of 'broadly inaccurate accounts by several civil & military officials'." {back to article}  ¶ 4:31 PM