THE LOW POST: Murrah Redux

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More than a month after I first wrote a column slamming the 9/11 Truth movement, I continue to get hate mail in massive quantities. A group of Truthers even picketed my office, and I'm still picking food particles out of my scarf after an incident in which the movement's house lunatic, a wild-eyed German blogger named Nico Haupt, tried to goad me into slugging him in a West Side diner.

"Go ahead, heet me, then I haf beeg story!" he roared, scream-spitting half-digested detritus in my face.

Of course I didn't hit him -- nothing in the world is more ridiculous than two writers fighting in a restaurant. If you're surprised that that I would call someone who spits food on my lap a fellow writer, don't be. As I subsequently found out, Haupt is a literary juggernaut, one of the most voluble bloggers on planet Earth. His Internet entries read like a MySpace mixture of MTV's Real World meets Che's Congo Diaries, only on meth and in a German accent.

His 9/11 conspiracy rants are full of little tidbits from the peripatetic revolutionary's hardscrabble life neatly gift-wrapped for his future biographers, ranging from the personal ("My girlfriend denied to marry me . . . i'm constantly broke.") to the heroic ("Maybe i'm scared that the Homeland Security will arrest me as a 'terrorist'? Not at all"). Haupt also makes sure to include regular doses of that other staple of pseudo-revolutionary diaries, i.e. the defiant salutation to the secret agents who of course have him under constant surveillance. "A personal note to the NSA, who's a regular log-in guest on my sites," he writes. "You're still bastards for me . . . Shame on you and go to hell!"

But my personal favorite was his theory about how the government's 9/11 conspirators tied up one particularly dangerous loose end:

I always was and always will be a big fan of Ed Asner's movies and TV series, especially "rich man, poor man". Last week, i was a bit disappointed that Asner "caved in" and basically made a u-turn, by writing that 9/11 was based on negligence. I heard a different view a long while ago, even personally from him on the phone. Someone else might speculate, why this has happened now. Maybe someone threatened Asner with some infos of his past?

Now there's a subject someone should investigate. What does the government have on Ed Asner? Photos of him shooting smack into Gavin MacLeod's ankle? The lost pilot of Gay Lou Grant? If anyone out there has any idea, please don't hesitate to write.

Obviously, Nico Haupt does not represent the "mainstream" 9/11 Truth movement, whatever that is. Even in my own experience I know this to be true. The colleagues of Haupt's from 911Truth.org whom I met that day were universally polite, respectful, and very sincere in their beliefs. True, they had some slightly bent ideas (one woman insisted with a straight face that the military was "behind all that Brad and Jennifer stuff"), but as a group they were nice, earnest people.

Unfortunately, I get the sense that these same nice people have a tendency to turn hostile, venomous and unrelentingly paranoid once they get logged back into an e-mail server, which is why most journalists I know won't go near the 9/11 Truth issue more than once, if at all. On the one hand most reporters don't think it's a serious enough issue to bother with twice, and on the other hand nobody wants to deal with the torrent of abuse that comes with trying -- it's like shoving your head into a beehive. "I'd rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick than write about that shit again," is how one columnist put it to me.

I'm sure I'll reach that point soon. In the meantime, I feel a need to share something I noticed while studying for a debate I'm supposedly having soon with some of the movement leaders. I doubt it will convince anyone who actually believes this stuff, but it's certainly worth pointing out that the 9/11 Truth movement is not only a cynical fiction, it's a recycled cynical fiction.

Take the central "fact" of 9/11 Truth lore, the rhetorical anchor of the entire movement -- the idea that the Twin Towers did not collapse as a result of the gigantic plane/jet-fuel explosions we all saw on television, but because of secondary explosions in other parts of the buildings that were hidden from view. This idea was rocketing around the conspiracy world in almost the exact same rhetorical format just six years before, after the Oklahoma City Federal building bombing.

In that case, it was mostly right-wing conspiracy theorists who came up with the idea that the McVeigh/Nichols fertilizer bomb could not possibly have felled the Murrah building, and that the real cause of the building's collapse was a much more powerful "second explosion" planned by the government and executed using more powerful demolition explosives.

Here's the beginning of a report from World Net Daily, which shortly thereafter would become a major purveyor of 9/11 conspiracy theories, from May 18, 2001:

Multiple witnesses reported hearing more than one explosion the day the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, while other explosives experts contend that the damage done to the building could not have been caused by a single bomb placed outside in a truck.