Demosophia

Mr. Moore's Neighborhood

Andrew Sullivan points to a recent Michael Moore interview in which he promotes his latest "bumper sticker," and speculates in his best imitation of a Kindergarten teacher:

MOORE: I'd like to ask the question whether September 11 was a terrorist attack, or was it a military attack? We call it a terrorist attack. We keep calling it a terrorist attack.

But it sure has the markings of a military attack. And I'd like to know whose military was involved in this precision, perfectly planned operation. I'm sorry, but my common sense has never allowed me to believe since that day that you can learn how to fly a plane at 500 miles per hour. And you know, when you go up 500 miles an hour, if you're off by this much, you're in the Potomac. You don't hit a five-store building like that.

You don't learn how to do that at some rinky-dink flight training school in Florida on a little video game with PacMan buttons. I'm sorry. I just don't buy that.

Back when the only decent home computer you could acquire other than an Apple II was a Commodore 64 someone came out with a nifty program called Flight Simulator, and one of the great things you could do with it was to fly a simulated plane between the two towers of the World Trade Center. You had to roll the plane briefly so that the wings were perpendicular to the ground in order to make it through. Well, it was pretty difficult, but after about a half-dozen tries I got the hang of it. Now, it's true that this simulated plane was only going about 200 mph, which is way slower than 500, but I found it all too easy to crash into the towers. That was no problem at all. The trick was to miss them.

Now, I don't know how difficult it would've been to transfer that experience to a real plane... but when I was about 10 years old my Dad and I flew to a lake in northern British Columbia in a Navion that belonged to a friend of my Dad's. And during the long flight both myself and another kid took turns flying the plane for brief periods, which wasn't much more difficult than flying that Flight Simulator on the C-64. So I'm pretty sure that even as a kid I could have, fairly easily, hit the broad side of a barn if I'd had half a mind to do so. And a barn is a lot smaller than the Twin Towers.

Now, granted, I couldn't have taken off or landed. But with a bit of practice I think I could have even done that, and it was fairly easy to learn *how* to do it in the Commodore. And as for navigation, I often take my GPS on the plane with me nowadays. So homing in on a waypoint programmed with the coordinates of the Twin Towers, would have been easy as pie. The GPS had some trouble with altitude, but only because it was determining altitude from barometric pressure inside a pressurized plane. Reading an altimeter on a plane isn't hard though, and the GPS without the barometric altimeter can still determine altitude to within 300 feet. So even if I'd been unable to read instruments I'd really have had no problem navigating to the Towers, if I knew the rudiments of flying the plane itself.

You can mock this if you like, but my gut tells me we're talking here about a task that may seem extraordinarily difficult, but in reality just requires some basic competence. I mean, it's certainly easy enough that someone with the engineering savvy of Atta could have managed it without much trouble. And it's also reasonable to assume that flying a large passenger jet is actually somewhat easier than flying a Cessna or a Navion at half the speed, because the controls on a large plane are much more forgiving, and the plane itself is inherently more stable. There is no mystery that requires the sort of hypothesis Moore tosses out.

[And, of course, as Zachary points out below, Moore's comment wasn't really about the WTC attack directly, but about the Pentagon attack. It's hard to imagine that the plane flown into the Pentagon would have been a DOD or IDF (CIA or Mossad?) project, while the WTC attack wasn't. So the case would presume that the more difficult scenario better sorts out the potential culprits of all four attacks. Fair enough. And, in that light, CJC is right to observe that the Pentagon attack did, in fact, miss. (And the Whitehouse attack missed by a lot more, which is difficult to explain if you assume it was conducted by a competent military unit.) Moreover, the Pentagon *is* a lot bigger than a barn. It is, in fact, one of the largest buildings in the world. And it'd only be a difficult target in the vertical dimension, which is the dimension in which the shot did miss. Even more significantly the pilot didn't manage to target the inner side of the ring, which is far more vulnerable than the outside. Surely a well-seasoned military pilot would have been able to do that if he'd wanted maximal dramatic effect? And visually sighting the Pentagon from the air would, of course, be child's play. There aren't too many other five-sided buildings the size of six football fields. And by the way, never mind that recruiting a team of armed forces personnel for a suicide attack on their own command/control center is a bit of a stretch. We ask our military to do some difficult tasks, but there isn't much of a history of outright suicide missions, Pickett's Charge notwithstanding. As a general rule such "suicide missions" are military blunders.]

So what really concerns me isn't any sort of silly notion that Muslims couldn't manage the complex circumstances of setting up and coordinating a terrorist action on a grand scale, or that university educated professional engineers couldn't fly a plane into the towers. They could and did. What concerns me is the apparently desperate need to sew any disparaging belief, even the utterly preposterous notion that only a capitalist-serving, or Zionist-serving military could have performed such an act. And you'll note that Michael doesn't actually say he believes it. He just speculates in a suggestive way. The way a Tom Metzger might speculate about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while maintaining plausible deniability that he was inciting anyone to violence. You have the desperate need to believe anything other than that the WTC attack marked a fundamental shift in our perception of what people other than the "usual suspects" are capable of. Because Marxism really does have, as a basic tenet, that mankind is benign except as motivated by greed. Hatred is only a problem if it's exploited by the powerful, and people are just peachy, otherwise. And make no mistake, such desperation will not stop at street marches and Usenet diatribes. This is pretty raw mental and emotional sewage, thrown into the mix with a little knowing elbow jab. But there are people who'll treat it like manna from heaven.

"I'd like to ask the question..." wink, wink, nod, nod, saynamore, saynamore.

Posted by Demosophist at October 15, 2003 04:28 AM | TrackBack