You're never bored when you're paranoid- the truth behind 9/11, part 3

Originally published September 13, 2008

This is the third part of a four-part series: for the other parts, click here: 1st part, 2nd part, 4th part

A favorite theme of Rube Goldberg in his drawings of combobulated machines was the introduction of an animal's action in tyhe mechanism, for example a parrot jerking up upon receiving a kick in the butt, or a hamster starting to gallop in his wheel after a stimulation of some sort. The idea was of course to take the complexity and uncertainty factor up a notch. Needless to say, people who build rube goldberg devices as a hobby or for contests hardly ever use animals in their machines, if at all.

Well, not only the 9/11 conspirators introduced the animal factor in their plan, but they went all out and selected the most unpredictable, the most random of them all: the human, namely the passengers of flight 93.

The plan was at first put in motion once again with the hijacking of an airliner, this one from United Airlines. But this time, and contrary to the three other flights, this one was hijacked by genuine kamikazis, actually determined to crash on the Capitol (or the White House, nobody's certain). We could see in this a concession to simplicity, but as you no doubt understand by now that suicide crash didn't represent the real intent of the conspirators; at best it constituted a contingency plan.

The central element in this plan was the strict instructions given the pirates to hold their attack until absolutely sure that the other targets had already been hit; if those orders haven't been followed to the letter, they nevertheless successfully accomplished their purpose. By the time they started setting things in motion, their plane was flying almost over Cleveland, and would need a minimum of thirty minutes to make the way back to Washington.

This delay then allowed the passengers to learn about the attacks on the WTC from phonecalls lodged to their relatives, to understand the situation and so hence to form plans for a revolt. We know the rest: the heroic epic of average american joe against the forces of evil and the famous "let's roll" still to this day co-opted to death by untold numbers of heroe wannabes and venal demagogues. In this baroque machinery, the passengers were the hamsters, the plane the wheel and the hijacking the prod poked in the hamster's ass.

All there remained to do was to sent flight 93 crashing somewhere in a field in Pennsylvania. The conspirators dispatched a US Air Force fighter plane which had been sneaked away beforehand and (did you notice that I use the word "beforehand" quite a lot? Like I said, they thought of everything), and sent it to simply shoot down the Boeing, while sending a private jet to fly around the scene to confound any eyewitness. The fighter then casually returned to its base.

You certainly imagine that all those preparations left traces: minutes from secret meetings, blueprints, recordings... they had to get rid of it all. Obviously if you followed carefully so far and got the general idea well, you probably already figured that simply gathering all this stuff and burn it away in a discreet area certainly wasn't part of their plan. Far from it, they still needed a money shot, the cherry on the top, the grand finale that would conclude the whole affair in an apotheosis of extreme intricateness (I'm really running out of synonyms here).

For their secret planning sessions, the conspirators had... that's right, beforehand elected to rent offices in nothing less than the 7 World Trade Center, which is to say right across the street from the Twin Towers. You remember the controlled demolitions of those towers? Well, hang on to your lugnuts, those explosions were carefully and expertly calculated to make the towers damage WTC7 on their way down so as to cause it to collapse as well, a couple of well placed charges completing the process with a third controlled demolition. The entire scheme then resulted in the disappearing of any and all evidence of the plot. A domino chain!

What would be a good rube goldberg without its domino chain? Our conspirators understood that well and went to the point of using whole skyscrapers in lieu of dominoes. I've said it before and I'll say it again, why make it simple when you can make it complicated?

Tomorrow, the conclusion