In this episode of "Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura," the former governor is most decidedly one of the latter. He sinks his bulldog teeth into the #1 conspiracy theory of the decade: that the World Trade Center buildings were dropped by explosives as an inside job, a "false flag" operation.
(A false flag operation is if I punch myself in the face, then go to the police and claim that you hit me.)
At their core, conspiracy theories are reassuring in two ways. First, even though they are usually sinister, they mean that someone is in control. The other option being the terrifying truth: that reality is a haphazard, chaotic mess, and that no one is steering the ship. And second, because if I know the "real truth" behind events, then I'm going to feel pretty darn smug about myself.
(Apropos of nothing, have you ever noticed that conspiracy theories are almost exclusively the realm of middle-aged white guys?)
A lot of Ventura's "evidence" rests on the shoulders of a contractor named Mike Bellone, a man who has a somewhat less-than-stellar reputation. Bellone has spent the last nine years trotting out preposterous claims with no evidence to back them up. (When he isn't profiting from items which he claims to have excavated from the ruins, like the shoes and glasses of victims.)
Bellone claims to have overheard someone talking about finding the black boxes. But even if his claims are sincere, there was so much misinformation and confusion happening during the first few months of the clean-up, I don't find it suspicious in the least. Who knows what the guy saw. Maybe it was just a paint-striped chunk of metal.
He also claims to have friends who worked at Logan Airport, and who told Bellone that they had heard calls from the airplane cockpits. The claim here is that "they" knew that the planes had been hijacked before the planes even left the ground. The inference being that the government allowed (nay, ordered) the planes to be "hijacked" and flown into the towers.
Ventura keeps asking, "Why didn't anyone find the black boxes from the planes?" An airplane's black box is sturdy, but it's not magic. The black boxes were at the heart of the destruction. It was enough to level entire buildings; why would the black box survive?
Dale Leppard, a crash investigator, attests that he has never once seen an accident site where the boxes had not been recovered. But just look at what happened. The buildings melted and collapsed. It was like an inferno inside the world's biggest garbage compactor. I'd be shocked if the flight recorders HAD survived, frankly.
If you listen closely to each person's testimony on the show, what they basically say is "How could this happen?" Unfortunately, the answer to that is a lot less tidy, and a lot less reassuring, than the idea of a vast government conspiracy.
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