The 11 Facts Card

There's an old gag about how, "It's not what you don't know, it's what you know that ain't so that gets you in trouble."

Consider for a moment the Truther's little helper, the 11 Facts about 9-11 card that Richard Gage is marketing. Now, for starters, yes, most of the 11 facts turn out to be untrue--fer chrissakes, they've still got "some of the hijackers are alive" on the frigging card. But even the ones that are true don't make a whole lot of sense put together. Consider :

5) The Secret Service broke established protocols by allowing President Bush to remain in a well-publicized classroom "photo op" long after it was known that the U.S. was under attack and he might well have been a target.

And:

7) There were warnings of the impending attacks from at least eleven other countries. Also prior to 9/11, insiders such as John Ashcroft, top military officers, and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown were warned not to fly.

Think about #5; what they are trying to get you to do is leap to the conclusion that the only reason the Secret Service left Bush in that classroom was that they "knew" he was safe. That no airplanes were going to crash into Booker Elementary.

Now think about #7; what they want you to do is leap to the conclusion that Ashcroft and Willie Brown (or whoever warned them) "knew" that planes were going to be hijacked, and that therefore they avoided taking commercial flights.

But if Ashcroft and Willie Brown or whoever warned them knew about the plot, why wouldn't they know which planes to avoid? No plane departing from San Francisco (Brown's home base) was hijacked, so therefore he was perfectly safe.

Okay, say the conspiracy theorists, maybe they didn't know all the details of the plot, just that a plan to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings was afoot, but they didn't have a lot more specific information than that.

Then how did the Secret Service know Bush was safe at Booker?