CARTMAN’S 9/11 SHOCKER

SOUTH PARK TAKES ON THE TRUTH MOVEMENT
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/The Frustrating Fraud
November 2006 (re-posted January 1 2007)

The crush of news on 9/11 truth wing nuts could not forever escape their due lampooning by Trey Parker and Matt Stone and the crass kids of South Park, who took the movement on in an episode aired October 11 2006. Bitingly satirical as always, the Truth Movement thus far seen was embodied by the portly, obnoxious, and borderline evil Eric Cartman. His initial crusade, dismissed by his friends as retarded, blamed Bush and the Jew-run corporations for the attack. But after closer investigation, Cartman presented for show and tell a “shocking powerpoint report on the truth… behind the 9/11 attacks,” pointing the finger squarely at his friend Kyle “who stood the most to gain from 9/11 […] who was nowhere to be found the morning the towers fell […] who dropped a deuce in the urinal.”

Screenshot: Cartman delving into the Pentagon honeypot for his “shocking powerpoint report”

Cartman was able to succinctly sum up the Frustrating Fraud: “we were told the Pentagon was hit by a hijacked plane as well. But now look at this photo of the Pentagon. The hole is not nearly big enough. And if a plane hit it, where’s the rest of the plane?” To make it funny enough for South Park, they had to change not one bit of the ridiculous charges, just boil them down and have Cartman say them.

The final conclusion of the episode revealed that the Bush administration itself was pushing the conspiracy theory to keep the world scared of them and to seem in control of the situation, which of course they weren’t. Investigator Mr. Hardly, summing up the case cracked by his nitwit sons, said “all the 9/11 conspiracy websites are run by the government. The 9/11 conspiracy is a government conspiracy.” Indeed, a play-acted activist with 9/11 Truth.org explained the whole “false flag” operation to Stan and Kyle before all three were arrested and taken to the Oval Office. With his whole cabinet standing behind him, Bush insisted on taking the blame, and to keep their role in 9/11 secret, “killed” the Truther in front of the kids (“just one more leak to fix”). Bush then bragged of the plot by his “all knowing and all powerful” cabal, summing up their reasons with evil genius zest: control of "the American sheeple" to get more war, oil, and money. To convince the kids, the President elaborated on the mechanics of the attack:

“Quite simple to pull off really. All I had to do was have explosives planted in the base of the towers, then on 9/11 we pretended like four planes were being hijacked when really we just re-routed them to Pennsylvania then flew two military jets into the World Trade Center filled with more explosives and then shot down all the witnesses on Flight 93 with and F-15 after blowing up the Pentagon with a cruise missile. It was only the world’s most intricate and flawlessly executed plan ever… ever.”

The episode’s allegation, while meant as satire to deflate the sense of purpose driving the Truthers, may be nearer the truth than Parker and Stone realize. Whatever its intentions, the episode proved that the movement had somehow been devolved to the point that elementary school kids made of a few bits of digitized construction paper could tear it to shreds with satire – entwined no less with the mystery of the urinal turd. Not a promising omen for our long-term prospects.

When finally the jig was up, the cartoon Bush admitted to Stan and Kyle he didn’t carry out the attack, but “one fourth of the population is retarded. If they want to believe we control everything with intricate plans, why not let them?” It’s a good point; what kind of government hatches such convoluted plans to achieve their objectives? That would be silly. In this case it may be that they hatched a deceptively simple plan to get those planes flown in as close to the official story as possible – and encouraged the raising of row upon row of intricate straw men to conceal the real deal. The red herrings distractions and honeypot traps planted after and, more tellingly, before the attack, are themselves evidence that the truth is being covered up; the alleged (and possibly real) government conspiracy to create the cartoonish 9/11 conspiracy is one of concealment and misdirection, which in turn is evidence of the government’s heavy-as-lead original 9/11 conspiracy – it was at best allowed and at worst staged.

And to avoid any troubles with Comedy Central, let me take this opportunity to state that this episode is hilarious and should be purchased for top dollar from the website or whatever. I've never seen toilet humor come across so well as via Mr. Mackey over the PA. And I'd also like to note the possible relevance a turd in the urinal conspiracy theme that keeps coming up as a distraction in the episode. Some have taken this as an allegory for the crap conspiracy theories put in the space reserved for... piss ones? Anyway, the janitor tasked with cleaning up the mess is a "Mr. Venezuela," which is funny considering Jimmy Walter's ill-advised sojourn to Venezuela to urge Hugo Chavez to open a 9/11 International Inquiry to prove, among other things, Walter's belief in the Frustrating Fraud. It's not clear what happened down there in Spring '06, but I haven't heard of any such urinal scrubbing.

PHASE ONE: FLIGHT OF THE BUMBLE-THEORIES

One of the earliest explanations for the attack to surface was presented by Carol A. Valentine, the Seattle-based operator of Public Action, Inc. and curator of the “Waco Holocaust Museum.” There are at least hints of anti-Semitism in her “historical revisionist” Public Action website, which warns of “the American Coup d’Etat And the War for Jewish Supremacy” and the machinations of the “Imperium Judaicum.” [1] After 9/11, Valentine also became a Truther who specialized in remote control theories; on October 6, less than a month afterwards, she issued a piece called “Operation 9/11: No Suicide Pilots.” In March 2002 she expanded the thesis, passing on the “Flight of the Bumble Planes” theory. Perhaps the most intricate explanation yet, this was laid out to her by a mysterious expert code-named “Snake Plissken.” Snake urged Valentine and her readers to:

“Go visit a bumblebee hive some time, and try to keep your eye on just one bee. You can't do it. You get confused. Think of the 9-11 jets as bumblebees. […] I've worked in cryptology and there are many ways of hiding the truth. Substitute information, omit information, scramble the information out of sequence, and add nonsense (random garbage). All four methods were used on the 9-11 incident. Let me lay out the clues and show you where they lead.” [2]

This introduction sounds intriguing, and it was compellingly tied in with the reports of as many as thirteen possible hijackings, cluttered radar screens, "phantom" flights, and other apparently incidental confusion that helped mask the attack and cripple the defense. but Plissken cited among the clues leading to his/her conclusion such questionable claims as “no Boeing 757 debris at Pentagon crash site,” explaining that “the aluminum wings of the plane should have been ripped off and left outside the building,” just laying there intact with their fuel pouring peacefully out. Of course there have been photos of debris, including metal scraps bearing portions of an American Airlines paint job found on the lawn, and of various discs and turbines from the engines, and even matching landing gear found inside, though people still debate whether these were really from a 757.

In the end analysis, this theory allows for no Arab suicide pilots, obviously, and only one 767-sized remote control drone. This was the “pseudo-Flight 175,” the one so widely seen hitting the South Tower. The unseen “Flight 77” was actually “a remote controlled commuter jet filled with incendiaries/explosives - a cruise missile if you like.” Incredibly, even the first attack plane, Flight 11 that hit the North Tower in numerous public photos and videos aired as early as the evening of 9/11, was also “a small remote controlled commuter jet filled with incendiaries/explosives - a cruise missile, if you like.” This point in particular is a remarkable charge to be making any later than September 12 2001, but one Valentine has maintained through several updates of the Bumble Planes piece up through 2004 at least. [2]

In this construct, the original planes with their passengers were landed under terror threat, swapping radar tracks with drone replacements on the way in (the telltale transponders having been switched off for “security” reasons). The only non-remote controlled plane, of course, was Flight 93, onto which the passengers from the other three flights were crammed. She adds “if you've put some of your own agents aboard, they stay on the ground, of course,” which is important since 66 of the total passengers, not to mention three of the four missing flight crews, would have to be left behind to fit the rest on board that single 757. Once well filled and airborne, the plane was then of course “shot down or bombed - makes no difference which,” Valentine summed up. “Main deal is to destroy that human meat without questions,” yet another holocaust in which “no mass graves will ever be discovered.” [2]

If we’re going to bother pondering such convoluted and unsubstantiated nonsense, we may as well speculate further that the “cruise missile if you like” headed to the Pentagon was then radar-swapped with an actual cruise missile, while the explosives-laden plane it replaced was used to blow up Flight 93, which was filled with nobody, all the original passengers having been flown to Area 51 and vaporized in a secret underground nuclear “test” carried out a month later. The F-15 originally sent to shoot down 93 was then sent back in time via a government-designed wormhole, and became the plane that hit tower one at 8:46, all a sinister plot of the Jewish Empire to be blamed on the Arabs.

Despite its profound weaknesses, the Bumble Planes construct has woven its way into the many revisionist accounts in one form or another, though it’s gradually taken on a generic quality seldom cited back to Valentine. The basic concept is in fact a cornerstone of the most prominent conspiracy theories, figuring in the final cut of Loose Change for one, with Flight 11 now admitted as another drone like 175, and with the Flight 93 passenger transfer done at Cleveland International Airport.

The main point of interest in Valentine’s work to me is that the cartoonishly complex Bumble Planes theory is just one among many, a field of possibilities itself akin to a swarming hive. The methods Snake cited for hiding the truth – especially “add nonsense” - are in fact evident in the theory itself as well as in the wider field. Many have tried locating the truth in that swarm, but few want to admit that our radar screens are simply jammed with too many fake possibilities to zero in on the real mechanics with any certainty.

Sources:
[1] Public Action, Inc. A News and News Analysis Service operated by Carol A. Valentine
http://www.public-action.com/
[2] “Flight Of The Bumble Planes.” By Snake Plissken, as told to Carol A. Valentine. March 2002.
http://www.public-action.com/911/bumble.html