Army Dumb

Now being a career Army Guardsman, I am as respectful of the military as it gets, and for the most part I believe that the average soldier has more common sense than Americans in general, but unfortunately that doesn't mean they are immune from woo.

You can't find a better example of this then that of Donald Buswell, a recently retired Army Sergeant First Class, profiled here in the Lone Star Inconoclast, most well known for Eric May's paranoid predictions.

I think he is trying to set a record for the most incoherent argument:

"And if they did put the bombs in the buildings and they were razed from inside, then what about the passenger manifests from those four planes? And what about the video tapes? And what about the perfect passport of Mohammed Atta flying out of the burning building and landing in the rubble? That’s just unbelievable ... Doesn’t make sense. But this information is coming from my government, so it has to have been spun.

First of all, it wasn't Atta's passport, and it didn't fall into the rubble. Secondly, that first sentence takes the term non sequitur to new heights.

Later he discusses the Pentagon:

"My logic and reasoning on this matter is sound. I’ve been looking at this thing for years, and there’s just no possible way the official story is accurate. The Pentagon is not a hardened structure; it was built during World War II. It is a weak structure. So linking the alleged plane at the Pentagon with this F4 jet angered me. It was insulting to me.

"I didn’t tailor the response in an offensive way. I simply said, ‘If the Pentagon were hit by a plane, there would be a 190-foot wingspan impact on the building, which there was not. There would be two large engine holes in the building, which there was not. There’d be tail wreckage, bodies and debris everywhere, but there wasn’t.

This is a new twist on things, normally they argue that the Pentagon was so hardened that there was no way a plane could damage it that much. Nobody ever said they were consistent. The wingspan of a 757 is only 124 feet by the way, while the hole on the bottom floor was around 90.

And later:

"When you study this subject like I have, you uncover things from time to time that make you say, ‘wow.’ You find things that just add fuel to the fire. When I wrote that e-mail, I didn’t know this at the time, but on Sept. 10, 2001, SECDEF Rumsfeld said in a press conference, ‘Hey, we’ve lost $2.3 trillion dollars.’

Yeah, that is what he said "Hey, we've lost $2.3 trillion dollars". Nevermind the redundant use of the word dollars, this thing has been debunked so many times, I am not getting into it again.