But that's the case with all of Prof. James H. Fetzer, Ph.D's claims. Once you follow them back to a reputable source, you discover they're not what you were told. The words are different, the content unrelated. The flight controller said no such thing. The missing parts were in plain sight. The secret airport is a thriving metropolitan hub. The murder victim is up and walking around and talking to CBS. After awhile you get used to it. You stop thinking, 'Uh—oh — this doesn't look good,' and start looking forward with glee, eager to learn what little twist has been added this time. And it's a good thing you can view it that way, because otherwise you'd get sick to your stomach.
One of the first messages I received after my response was posted was from a serving naval officer who was present at the Pentagon on 9/11. He was in the lobby of an adjacent building and he clearly saw the attack take place. Saw the plane approach, saw it brush the antennas atop a nearby Sheraton, and continue on to plunge into the Pentagon.
What he was saw was an American Airlines 757. Just like hundreds of other witnesses across the District — air crewmen, reporters, secretaries, commuters. It's the testimony of these people, living, breathing eyewitnesses, that the conspiracy hounds seek to obscure with their showers of irrelevant, distorted, and bogus information.
And beyond them, there is yet another group. The officer told me of an acquaintance of his, a woman who married an old military friend, a friend who died in the attack. She has never quite gotten over it, and nobody has the right to add any form of doubt to her burden of loss.
And beyond them are the highest group of all: the dead, to whom we owe all honor and respect. That's what they received from the unparalleled forensic investigation by more than a hundred specialists that identified all but one passenger from the scraps that remained. That investigation should close the book on James Fetzer's claims. It won't, of course. Such an investigation is carried out for one purpose above all: to demonstrate that the eternal chain binding the living and the dead cannot be severed even by an event such as 9/11.
But the 9/11scholars have no interest in such bonds, only in piling ever more malicious trivia on the memory of the dead. That's how far we've fallen. The first step back up lies in recognizing — and accepting — that a fact is a fact, whether we like it or not.
