But Gate 32 was the gate that Flight 11 was supposed to have departed from.
American Airline employee Elizabeth Williams told the FBI that she had gone down to Gate 32 after hearing of Sweeney’s comment. And found an empty plane matching the description of Flight 11.
An empty plane. That was supposed to be full of passengers crashing into the World Trade Center.
This is a "smoking gun" that completely destroys the official story of 9/11!
How has the official story succeeded in spite of this fact? Simple. It is because facts do not matter when people get scared.
We became scared of Middle Easterners, Muslims and hijackings after watching the news repeatedly. The theory that nineteen hijackers, all Middle Eastern and all Muslim, would attack us rang a chord because our society prejudices against people from the Middle East and against Muslims.
This prejudice is hardly new. I recall the United States Embassy taken over in Tehran in 1979 by people referred to as Muslim “fundamentalists.” Everyone I knew blamed the Iranians and made fun of their leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Of course, I believed like everyone else. Years later, I can see the Iranian side to the story. Our Central Intelligence Agency participated in a successful plot to overthrow a democratically elected leader in Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh. This coup happened in 1954.
Think about this: For a quarter of a century, the Iranian people had to put up with a leader, the Shah Reza Pahlavi, whom they did not elect! How would we like it if another country imposed a president on us?
During the Shah’s regime, the United States traded weapons for cheap oil and provided intelligence to the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK. The Shah was no friend to human rights and ordered the jailing and execution of countless people.
Little wonder, then, that when the Ayatollah had a chance to take over the nation that hundreds of thousands of loyal supporters helped him gain power. And when the Ayatollah pointed the finger at the United States for some of their nation’s difficulties that these supporters followed his lead and took over the Embassy.
I can now say that the United States was very much at fault for the hostage taking now. But then I could not. This truth was too much to take. Our whole nation was furious. People who appeared to be Middle Eastern were eyed with suspicion. It felt like war might even break out – not against Iran, for fear we would cause harm to our own people there – but rather against those who did not go along with the official line that Iran was at fault.
So here we are again. The seeds of prejudice, planted long ago, still grow. The target of our hatred has moved from the Ayatollah (who died in 1989) to Manuel Noriega of Panama to Saddam Hussein of Iraq to Osama bin Laden and to anyone else who appears to cause us any trouble or get in the way of something we want.
Other issues persist in our society: shootings in schools, cyberwarfare and weapons buildup. These issues will continue to persist because they go back to the same issue brought to our attention about 9/11: security.
But it is not so much our physical security at risk as it is our feelings of security in society.
We want to feel secure in our environment. It doesn’t matter whether we are at home or in front of the White House: as our need for security increases, our interest in speaking the truth decreases.