Whatever Became Of The 9-11 Truthers?

It took a few thousand half-truths, misunderstandings, amateur analysis, hunches, suspicions, mistakes, historical quotes, incompetencies, guesses, and a lot of extra time; a dash of Bush hatred and a pinch of ignorance of Islamic fundamentalism and world affairs and what you got was the “9-11 truth movement.” Remember them?

The only thing that ever threatened to out rival a feminist zealot was a 9/11 truther. They were the Crusaders for a mistaken cause out to convince the world of the enlightened truth that had opened their eyes and made them the most dangerous of converts.

I looked into the arguments of the blame the victim crowd at the time and (wisely) concluded that an administration that had waged the war in Iraq as incompetently as it had, and was apparently unable to manufacture even just a few small piles of ‘WMD’s’ to placate the home-grown opposition, cannot be expected to have managed to plan and execute what would have been one of the most elaborate, difficult, and malicious conspiracies in the history of mankind.

And if you were ever foolish enough to lose your sanity by wading into the Google black hole of “9-11 conspiracy,” the one thing you found was that the 9-11 truthers basically could not agree on any one theory at all. It was a strange amalgamation of hundreds of pet theories, rumors, suppositions, and self-important revelations. The only thing they could agree on was that it somehow, someway, George Bush’s fault and absolutely not the followers of the Religion of Peace seeking to blacken the eye of the Great Satan and usher in the age of a new worldwide caliphate.

I suppose that would be too much of a “conspiracy” for even them to swallow.

In the end the “9-11 truth movement” earned only a “nice try” and will be little more than an odd asterisk in history, if it is remembered at all. It simply failed the smell test. The facts didn’t support it and blind hatred of a president was really the only thing that fueled its momentum. Bush is now gone and one has to wonder what ever became of the fanatical foot-soldiers of that particular conspiracy theory.

Surely, with their ‘guy’ in office they’d have pressed forward fervently to have him reveal the secrets of the deepest and darkest betrayal in this country’s history and destroy the power of the Republican Party, Pentagon militarists, and even the neo-cons once and for all. But, alas, all we have heard since the election of Barack Obama are the crickets chirping at night. The Truthers evaporated like dew in the morning sun as their hated enemy rode off into the sunset and chance are they will never be heard from again.

“In the end, we were able to debunk each of these assertions with hard evidence and a healthy dose of common sense. We learned that a few theories are based on something as innocent as a reporting error on that chaotic day. Others are the byproducts of cynical imaginations that aim to inject suspicion and animosity into public debate. Only by confronting such poisonous claims with irrefutable facts can we understand what really happened on a day that is forever seared into world history.” –the editors of Popular Mechanics in Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report