“How big a lunatic do you have to be to witness two jet airliners filled with jet fuel slam into buildings on live TV, triggering a massive inferno that burned for two hours and then think ‘Well, if you believe that’s the cause…’” Bill Maher
We all know roughly what happened eight years ago today; it was one of those “Where were you moments” like when Kennedy was assassinated, or when a rosy-cheeked Geraldo Rivera took to the air for the first time.
But do we really know? 9/11 conspiracy theorists – truthers, the Colbert-ish name they go by – say absolutely not. Like the people who reckon they faked the moon landing, only often without the tinfoil chapeau and indulged to a far greater degree, 9/11 conspiracy theorists will tell you that the events of September 11 as we have come to understand them –four commercial planes were hijacked by religious nutcases and crashed into World Trade Center buildings one and two and the Pentagon with the fourth going aground in Pennsylvania – did not actually occur, or at least that the official version of those events is deliberately misleading.
The most common 9/11 conspiracy theories suggest that the attacks were an “inside job”, that the collapse of the World Trade Center and World Trade Center 7 was brought about by a controlled demolition, and that a commercial airplane did not strike the Pentagon, but rather it was hit by a missile or fighter aircraft. Bush, Cheney, and company were said to have been running around without pants and with their ties loosened hooting in delight at the thought of all the good warring they could now get done.
Other conspiracy theories are of the more rubber room variety: i.e. the “no planers” who suggest that no commercial aircraft could penetrate the steel of the Trade Center towers and that missiles surrounded by holograms were used in a trick that would likely force Criss Angel into a jealous retirement (and not a moment too soon). Then there are those of an anti-Semitic mindset who think it was a Jewish conspiracy, believing – based on completely false information – that 4,000 Jewish people didn’t show up to work at WTC that day because they were somehow tipped off, maybe in a newsletter.
Most 9/11 conspiracy theories have been debunked to the point where there is hardly any bunk left to take out. (Click here and here for two of the best). Even Noam Chomsky, who could find a fascist plot afoot in Dora the Explorer, had this to say on 9/11 conspiracy theories: "I think the Bush administration would have had to be utterly insane to try anything like what is alleged, for their own narrow interests, and do not think that serious evidence has been provided to support claims about actions that would not only be outlandish, for their own interests, but that have no remote historical parallel."
And Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone offers the following concise review of a popular online documentary that is a favorite of 9/11 conspiracy theorists: “Every time one of those Loose Change dickwads opens his mouth, a Republican somewhere picks up five votes.”
The world we live in – where Bono is asked to do more at a G-8 summit than stay away from it – is one where celebrities have the power to propagate half-baked conspiracy theories, and fans, waylaid by the combined assault of celebrity-dom and the internet on common sense, lap it up. Celebrities may not have an ever-loving clue about the temperature at which steel loses its structural integrity, but their fame will somehow give them the green light to publicly disagree with a professional association of engineers and reckon out loud, “Nah, they just could not have fallen that way. The physics just don’t add up.”
We started this blog with a quote by Bill Maher, undoubtedly a celebrity, but after watching the excellent Religulous, we put him in the camp of comedians with more to offer than jokes about misplaced socks like George Carlin, or Lenny Bruce before he went insane. Organizers at public events that these 10 celebrities are attending may want to be near a plug so they can pull it once they get on the topic of 9/11 — or at least have some air freshener on hand to help mask the heady bouquet of bullshit in the air. Here then are The Top 9/11 Celebrity Conspiracy Theory Nutjobs!
Spencer and Heidi Pratt: (Excerpts from an appearance on the radio show of Alex Jones , himself a conspiracy theorist and the man behind “The Obama Deception” ): “We’ve been nonstop researching the Internet … for information for at least a month all day every day,” said Heidi. Spencer added: “From your [Jones'] research, it [9/11] 100 percent is [an inside job] … “I want to throw up.”
Don’t we all. In England, most people would agree that these two are a pair of pratts before hearing the surname. Spencer and Heidi, best known for their turn on the self-indulgent rich kid zoo called The Hills, prove the danger of giving a broadband internet connection to people with basic literacy skills and the inability to think critically. Their “non-stop” research on the internet combined with Jones’ conspiracy video led them not only to believe that 9/11 was an inside job, but the toe-headed pair were also clued into the fact that a secret plot to install chips in people is fulfilling biblical prophecy — Heidi: “My body belongs to Jesus Christ. I am a disciple of Jesus, and I will speak out to Christians … this chip is the end of humanity.” — and, continuing on in that vein of the oxygen-deprived religious nutcase, that birth control pills are actually just turds from Satan’s rabbit — “most women are suicidal sometimes on it.”
Crazy conspiracy theorist right up there with those getting signals from the mothership via the beer fridge? Not so, says Heidi. “Conspiracy is a word they’ve created to make people sound crazy, but that’s not what God says,” she says. “You can persecute us, you can say whatever you want. ” And, unfortunately, the same holds true for these two.
Woody Harrelson: “I am reading a book now called The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin. I’ve been stuck in the position of ignoring my gut — knowing things don’t stack up. Even though our government obviously took advantage of 9/11 by making it their “Reichstag”, I told myself, “Surely they weren’t involved”. After reading this book I can’t doubt that our government was at least complicit in allowing 9/11 to happen.”
Woody Harrelson has gone from wiping down the bar at Cheers to serving as the poster boy for every sort of liberal/hippy cause imaginable, including good ones like legalizing marijuana. Woody has the rare and odd distinction of being not only the propagator of a popular conspiracy theory, but the son of a subject of a major one. His father, Charles Harrelson, was widely thought by conspiracy theorists to have been one of the “Three Tramps” seen in a box car behind Dealey Plaza after JFK was assassinated. The elder Harrelson first denied then boasted about his role in JFK’s murder, though — like the claims of a government turning against its own people on 9/11 — no solid supporting evidence was ever found to place him in Dallas that day.
Mos Def: “I don’t believe it was bin Laden today. I don’t believe it was never him … I’m sorry, I’m from the projects, I know danger. I don’t feel no danger from that shit… Highly-educated people in all areas of science have spoken on the fishiness around the whole 9/11 theory.”
This quote by Mos Def — who undeniably turned in the best performance ever by an American hip-hop star in a British science-fiction comedy film — must have at least partially inspired the quote at the top of this blog. Mos Def made this statement amid a litany of craziness that included him stating that the moon landing was faked on an episode of Real Time With Bill Maher.
Willie Nelson: “I saw one fall, and it was just so symmetrical, I said wait a minute. I just saw that last week at the casino in Las Vegas, and you see these implosions all the time. And the next one fell, and I said, hell, there’s another one – and they’re trying to tell me that an airplane did it, and I can’t go along with that… “What does it take for us to realize we’re having the wool pulled over our eyes one more time?”
Willie Nelson is one of the greatest country music songwriters of all time, a man who did his best to get out of paying taxes for as long as possible, and the face of fun old guy pot smoking… It is hard to find a cooler person than Willie Nelson. But his 9/11 conspiracy theory, predicated as it is on his having seen a building being blown up in Vegas, is like that idea for a novel you scribble down while higher than an eagle with a rocket up its ass – it seems brilliant while one’s burning, but is best binned and forgotten by the time you get off the couch.
Tom DeLonge (Blink 182 singer): “We do know that the buildings came down in a fashion extremely similar to a controlled demolition of a building – we do know that expertise that is needed to fly those gigantic planes into that exact location could never have been achieved by someone that just learned how to fly a small plane.”
For those who ‘blinked’ and missed Blink 182’s one hit song, they were part of the skate punk movement, the founders of which are now in their mid-30s and probably wear all sorts of padding to stave off injury in the event of a fall. DeLonge takes Willie’s controlled demolition theory a step further, by saying — with the certainty only someone who knows exactly nothing about what he’s talking about can muster — that the 9/11 hijackers would not have been skilled enough as pilots to stage the attacks. Salon.com in an Ask The Pilot article addressing 9/11 questions, quoted someone who did fly planes for living as saying:”…Striking the Pentagon, or navigating along the Hudson River to Manhattan on a cloudless morning, with the sole intention of steering head-on into a building, did not require a mastery of airmanship.”
DeLonge went for the low-hanging fruit by playing on everybody who isn’t peculiar’s dislike for Dick Cheney when he said the the then-vice president “knew that the planes [were] coming in and he capped the order to leave it alone so it could hit.”
Blink 182 times if you believe: a) a conspiracy this big could ever have come off without someone spilling the beans and providing definitive proof of said beans and b) that the tongues of everyone who knew anything about said conspiracy would still be capable of wagging and not be, say, out of their heads.
Marion Cotillard: “We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes. Are they burned? There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burnt for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [in NY], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed.”
It pains us to cast aspersions on a hot French actress who undoubtedly sounded very sexy while saying these crazy things, but, in addition to the above, Marion Cotillard — Oscar winner, 2008 –offered what is likely THE craziest reason anyone has come up with to explain why the US blew up the towers: it was to avoid all that pesky upkeep! “It was a money sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying them.”
(Trade Center official getting an estimate on renovations prior to 9/11): “How much? And the re-cabling? You sure you didn’t add just add an extra zero there? What are you guys, union? Screw that noise. Let’s blow it up.”
We reckon even the no planers would be saying, “What the hell is she going on about?” at this point.
Jesse Ventura: “How could those buildings fall at the speed of gravity – if you put a stopwatch on them both of those World Trade Center buildings were on the ground in ten seconds – how can that be? Never before in the annals of history has a fire caused a steel structure building to fall to the ground like these two did.”
Jesse Ventura used to dress up in a feather boa and tights and stage pre-determined wrestling matches, but the suspension of disbelief required during his wrestling days pales compared to that needed to buy his 9/11 theories. Ventura, in Alex Jones’ video, is said to have ‘moved to Mexico to escape fascism’ (and in this picture looks like Sean Connery in Zardoz).
Rosie O’Donnell: “It is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved — World Trade Center 7. World Trade 1 and 2 got hit by planes. 7, miraculously, the first time in history, steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible.
Rosie O’Donnell is a one woman argument for upgrading basic cable and was a former host of The View, the TV equivalent of an induced coma. O’Donnell, no stranger to having a outsize gob and sticking her foot in it (it’s actually large enough to accommodate both of Shaquille O’Neal’s size 23s), took Jesse the Body’s contention one step with her claim that fire had never melted steel prior to 9/11. As Jonah Goldberg of the National Review wrote: “This, of course, came as news to steelworkers, blacksmiths, firefighters, manufacturers of samurai swords, and other fools who hadn’t realized that steel is forged in magic furnaces using dragon breath and pixie dust.”
Janeane Garofalo: “9/11 was an inside job!! I have come to this conclusion about that. … I think all Air America phone-in callers should open by saying, ‘9/11 was an inside job. We can all agree on that.’, then get on with their specific question or comment. We should re-condition the listening audience to accept the Truth about 9/11 as the gospel.”
Janeane Garofalo is the world’s third most famous hairy, squat, Sicilian American after Rachael Ray and Danny De Vito, but neither as unintentionally or intentionally funny, respectively, as either (actually, De Vito was unexpectedly funny on a show nobody associates with humor of any kind whatsoever, The View). First Rosie, now Janeane, when did all the wisecracking supporting actresses in early 90s comedies turn into such vocal moon-howlers?
Charlie Sheen: “It seems to me like 19 amateurs with box cutters taking over four commercial airliners and hitting 75 percent of their targets, that feels like a conspiracy theory. It raises a lot of questions.”
Charlie Sheen, star of Two and a Half Men (and one quarter wit), is the bull goose loony of the celebrity truther movement. In better days, Charlie Sheen made headlines the honest way: he earned them by being one of the most debauched individuals in Hollywood, no small feat. These days, when he’s not exchanging bon mots with the husky kid from Fraser, Sheen works overtime in his role as celebrity spokesman for the truther movement. In a bizarre, and from a mental health standpoint, troubling, move, Sheen wrote a script of a fictional conversation between himself and Barack Obama, which, along with his 9/11 walk in wonderland also included the even fiction — that Obama likes and watches Two and a Half Men. He also compiled a video message to Obama. The video concerns the alleged cover up involving real estate mogul Larry Silverstein’s infamous ‘pull it’ remark, which, if you are living proof that gray matter consists mostly of fatty tissue, you construe as an order to demolish building 7 (because naturally as a multi billionaire you’d be motivated to collect on the world’s largest ever ‘insure-and-burn’ and then ruin everything by accidentally blurting out your clandestine plan on national TV).
So imagine the surprise when you follow the 
When Frances Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1960, the U-2 program lost its cover. But the CIA already had Lovick and some 200 scientists, engineers and pilots working at Area 51 on the A-12 OXCART, which would outfox Soviet radar using height, stealth and speed.