by James J. McClure
9/11 Eyewitnesses Meet History, Lowlifes Shout Conspiracy
It has been eight years since our nation was attacked in the most brutal and visible way possible.
The loudest and most infamous agents of that intended disunity are not the foreign terrorists who plotted and carried it out, but a growing Internet band of self-styled patriots who claim the whole thing was faked and self-inflicted.
Do you think the folks who claim we never went to the moon were a bit off? How about the sterling individuals who say the Holocaust never happened or was greatly exaggerated, because-as their logic follows—a small secret band of Jewish bankers and statesmen aim to enslave the world?
Sadly, those examples share a common bond with the pitiful band of ignorant ideologues who call themselves “The 9/11 Truth Movement.” Have DVD, Web site and megaphone, will travel.
They claim President George Bush rigged the World Trade Center building to implode on cue, Vice President Dick Cheney fired a missile disguised as an airliner at the Pentagon, the military shot down the Pennsylvania plane and sat back and let the New York planes do their havoc, most likely with the aid of remote control. And don’t forget the airliner phone calls from victims were all faked.
Let’s reenter a world this low class of people, folks Chicago columnist Mike Royko used to call, The Men Who Replace The Nation’s Urinal Cakes, never occupy.
The world of reality.
The Pentagon: Rear Admiral Craig Quigley, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs
As a nightly news visible and uniformed spokesperson for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Quigley’s civilian boss, Torie Clarke, Craig Quigley was more than a polished mouthpiece when he found himself springing into action wearing head-to-toe white capped by gold admiral’s shoulder boards. The strange mixture of smoke, dress uniform and emergency claxons was not unlike a Pearl Harbor movie of Sunday dress sailors under surprise attack.
A surface warfare officer by training, the naval academy graduate had served on ships of war and done his tours of duty with many a damage control drill. But as the Pentagon evacuated and his staff locked safes, secured doors and grabbed non-answering cellphones, Quigley shepherded his crew and the reporters they served outside.
“Thank goodness everyone was accounted for,” says Quigley, who like so many would later find out someone he knew in the opposite side of the building had died. “We saw the tremendous smoke and flames, and realized this was a coordinated attack,” he says. “I had to get around the crash site and somehow establish a base for journalists to start getting the word out.”
With white dress shoes and a half dozen staffers in tow, he hiked two miles around the Pentagon to the top of a hill and a Navy Exchange Citgo Gas Station looking directly down on the disaster. Spotting the view and the two phones in the store with a direct link to the outside world, Quigley said to the manager “We need to take over your station.”
And with that the news dissemination and the investigation began, as a world of journalists swooped down on the site for the first briefings and camera angles.
Manhattan: CBS News Senior Executive Producer Susan Zirinsky
“Only those who have traveled to and covered wars, as I have, could even begin to fathom what we saw happening before our eyes,” Zirinsky says. “To have it happen in our town, on our streets, with our colleagues in imminent danger, was sheer, utter, terror.” Zirinsky attempted to make sense of it while deploying news crews across Manhattan. Some almost trapped and barely escaping the destruction they witnessed live, on camera and radio. Like Quigley, she knew the professional priorities to pursue in the face of personal trauma.
“We had to find out quickly how this possibly happened, and who or what was behind it,” Zirinsky said. She and her colleagues would be pulling around the clock shifts digging out those answers as the world would learn, accurately, the terrible truths. “We knew we were witnessing history, millions of us watched it as it happened and the world would never be the same again.”
Chicago Illinois, Telecommunications Entrepreneur Jack Goeken, Founder of the In-flight Phone
“History was made… and history was changed because a small group of Americans learned what was going on, talked with each other and fought back,” says Army Signal Corps veteran Jack Goeken, the entrepreneur who founded MCI, GTE Airfone, FTD and placed the first phones on countless airlines and airliners. “Planes with real people hit those buildings, we had the wreckage, bodies and aircraft as obvious facts, but most importantly, we had the recorded and eyewitness phone conversations of how history changed and a worse history was avoided,” Goeken says.
While he takes comfort that his technology made goodbyes possible for valiant loved ones, Goeken has little patience for conspiracy theories that say no such conversations took place. “Why on earth would people fight back and try to take back a plane when they were told to sit still and the plane would be safely landed by the hijackers once their demands were met?” Goeken points out. “Those people learned via phone what the world knew. And they took action because of it.”
It’s action that he says changed history. “Imagine if Flight 93 had reached its target of the Capitol building? Without phones aboard that very well may have happened.”
Pentagon Crash Site
Admiral Quigley would sift through the destroyed area of the Pentagon in coming days. As a young lieutenant he analyzed and assisted the development of the Navy’s first ground-attack COMMA sea-based cruise missiles. In the twilight of a 27-year naval career he saw the obvious.
“An airliner caused the damage I saw and the lives we lost,” Quigley says. “No doubt about it. It’s on the tapes. That was no missile.”
The more vocal desperate conspiracists say Quigley’s Citgo command post should have perfect videotape evidence.
“No way,” Quigley says. “I was there, there was nothing of value to record, as the pumps and store were a different direction from the attack. Who would point a security camera down a hill away from your assets?”
Manhattan Ground Zero
Zirinsky, who served as both consultant and model for the Holly Hunter character in the movie Broadcast News, did a film-reminiscent power walk 40 some blocks in the pre-dawn aftermath, feistily getting past roadblocks and police sentries to see the damage for herself.
“No one who sees that in person comes back unchanged,” Zirinsky says. “And yet we found that this was simply one more step in a series of steps and multiple bombings over the years by people bent on our terror by its very definition.”
What of those who say this all was a big cover-up and false front? “Have they not heard of Hitler? Or evil?” asks Zirinsky, who has exposed many a government and private scam or fraud in her day.
In my own investigation, sadly they have heard of Hitler. One top organ of the truth movement, American Free Press, was founded by a holocaust denier/minimalist. Most at their roots point anti-Semitic fingers at all things Jewish. Israel foreign policy, the genealogy of politicians, and as one Chicago-based truth “patriot” and publisher mocks on YouTube, the Jewish owner of the WTC named Larry SilverSTEIN as he inflects.
Hitler indeed. God help us.
And in a way, He already has.
“I’m convinced a Supreme Power minimized what could have been terribly worse and changed history that day, through communication,” Goeken says.
The deliberate and ignorant miscommunication of 9/11 conspiracy advocates won’t overwhelm what Zirinsky has seen and felt. She terms the conspiracies “inconceivable” since so many witnessed the horrible global reality show.
“The world came eye to eye and came together for good that day, opposed to evil. And I will never, ever let a fire truck pass without waving for as long as I live,” she says.
I’ve known Zirinksky since 1984, Quigley since 1983, Goeken since 1990. They are people of accomplishment, intellect and integrity. Believe them.
And pray for those 9/11 victims and their families, and the servicemen and women who bravely defend their memory today.
Ignore those who serve not their country, nor their neighbors, nor their community, but only serve themselves through for-profit online witch hunts, racist conjecture and wild theories.
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