Thread: 9/11

Originally Posted by Marcus

Теория заговора - это то, что какие-то Бен Ладен и Аль-Каида сумели атаковать Пентагон. А то, что это провокация, следует изо всего.

Я прочитал тему без просмотра видео и до сих пор не могу понять, кто точно в конечном итоге спланировал и осуществил атаку Пентагона. Можно объяснить "для чайников"?

Originally Posted by diogen_

Я прочитал тему без просмотра видео и до сих пор не могу понять, кто точно в конечном итоге спланировал и осуществил атаку Пентагона. Можно объяснить "для чайников"?

Американское руководство, точнее нельзя.

Originally Posted by Marcus

Американское руководство, точнее нельзя.

Wishful thinking.

Originally Posted by Lampada

Wishful thinking.

Что вы можете сказать против того, на что даются ссылки в первом посте?

Originally Posted by Marcus

Американское руководство, точнее нельзя.

Okay, let's assume for the sake of argument that it was impossible for a small group of highly dedicated and fanatical Arabs to plan and successfully execute these attacks. But granting that...

На какой основе вы исключаете из подозрения российское руководство? Или китайское? Или европейский союз?

("On what basis are you excluding from suspicion the Russian government, or the Chinese, or the European Union?" -- please correct my Russian phrasing!)

Surely these other "suspects" have the sophistication to have planned the attacks -- even if one supposes that Arabs are too stupid and backwards to have come up with the oh-so-complicated strategy of smuggling small knives in their carry-on baggage, slitting the throats of a few stewardesses, and threatening to kill more in order to make the pilots open the cockpit door.

And surely there are theoretical motives for Russia, or China, or the EU to have planned the attacks (possibly to weaken the US's status as "the world's lone superpower", for example).

But while people like Marcus and 14Russian and other "9/11 Skeptics" present themselves as "open-minded" and accuse others of being dull, close-minded sheeple because they accept the official theory that "pissed-off Muslims did it", there is a rather strange limit to the self-proclaimed "open-mindedness" of 9/11 Skeptics!

Their imaginations will stretch exactly far enough to blame the U.S. government (or, possibly, the Israelis too), but not far enough to consider "ex-KGB agents under secret orders from Putin" among the potential suspects.

Why exactly is that?

P.S. To answer my own rhetorical question, I think that Lampada's "wishful thinking" remark is possibly correct: some people want it to be true that the Americans Are Guilty. They don't point fingers at China (for example) because "the Chinese did it" isn't emotionally satisfying to them.

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

Okay, let's assume for the sake of argument that it was impossible for a small group of highly dedicated and fanatical Arabs to plan and successfully execute these attacks. But granting that...

На какой основе вы исключаете из подозрения российское руководство? Или китайское? Или европейский союз?

("On what basis are you excluding from suspicion the Russian government, or the Chinese, or the European Union?" -- please correct my Russian phrasing!)

Surely these other "suspects" have the sophistication to have planned the attacks -- even if one supposes that Arabs are too stupid and backwards to have come up with the oh-so-complicated strategy of smuggling small knives in their carry-on baggage, slitting the throats of a few stewardesses, and threatening to kill more in order to make the pilots open the cockpit door.

And surely there are theoretical motives for Russia, or China, or the EU to have planned the attacks (possibly to weaken the US's status as "the world's lone superpower", for example).

But while people like Marcus and 14Russian and other "9/11 Skeptics" present themselves as "open-minded" and accuse others of being dull, close-minded sheeple because they accept the official theory that "pissed-off Muslims did it", there is a rather strange limit to the self-proclaimed "open-mindedness" of 9/11 Skeptics!

Their imaginations will stretch exactly far enough to blame the U.S. government (or, possibly, the Israelis too), but not far enough to consider "ex-KGB agents under secret orders from Putin" among the potential suspects.

Why exactly is that?

P.S. To answer my own rhetorical question, I think that Lampada's "wishful thinking" remark is possibly correct: some people want it to be true that the Americans Are Guilty. They don't point fingers at China (for example) because "the Chinese did it" isn't emotionally satisfying to them.

Very well stated, Throbert...

And Americans like cheap Chinese manufactured goods. That's why they don't want to blame the Chinese. No one even calls the Chinese "communists," although I know a lot of Americans who still call the Russians "commies." The Chinese commit horrendous human rights violations (suicide nets just to name one!) and for some reason the media is mostly silent about it, whereas the media never missed a chance to point out all the inhumanities of the co-called "evil empire" (Russia).

Americans like Wal*Mart and the convenience of cheap stuff. They don't really care where it comes from, or how badly people suffered to produce those goods. They don't think about the impact all of this is having on the US economy either! But I digress.

I think Americans are also (deep down) really scared of China. They prefer to think of the Russians as the "bad guys" because Russians were kind of endearing to us as "enemies" - maybe we sensed that they were really just a lot like us. I think those who still call Russia the "number one geopolitical foe" are just nostalgic, and hankering for the comfortable Cold War days, before the "War on Terror" and before the horror of 9/11.

As for all the conspiracy theories out there, I have studied enough of them to see that for the most part they just ask more questions than they really answer. Granted, I am not opposed to asking questions. I just hope we ask the right ones, and do not let our judgement get cloudy by too much "Ancient Aliens" thinking.

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

They don't point fingers at China (for example) because "the Chinese did it" isn't emotionally satisfying to them.

I agree to that

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

На какой основе вы исключаете из подозрения российское руководство? Или китайское? Или европейский союз?

("On what basis are you excluding from suspicion the Russian government, or the Chinese, or the European Union?" -- please correct my Russian phrasing!)

Correcting.
"На каких основаниях [каком основании] вы исключаете из круга подозреваемых российское руководство?"

Originally Posted by Marcus

Do you think I have a special anti-American bias?

I suspect that, like 14Russian, you have a special bias in favor of any conceivable theory that mentions the "New World Order."

And I also know, from past threads, that you never favor a simple explanation when an incredibly elaborate conspiracy will suffice.

Well Hello... those of you who know me know that I tend to stay away from the politic threads... so you newbies don't bother to try and get me into a debate here... I have not watched the videos or read the articles posted in this thread. I have seen some other documentaries about it including Nova's Spy Factory (video transcript) (which I found interesting especially as I have driven by the motel in Laurel so many times!)

On the morning of 9/11 between 7-7:30 ish I was driving my girls to school and taking the back road behind Walter Reed Annex. I did this every morning for over a year now. I noticed something rather odd. Military personnel stationed on the hills of the property with their rifles. I had never seen them there before. I thought maybe the President was coming or something but he usually doesn't come to the annex, he goes to the main building. Anyway, I went on with my day and of course, we all know what happened.

I always wonder why the guards were stationed there that particular morning. Had military intelligence heard chatter that something was up but they just didn't have enough specifics so everyone was on alert? Or was it something else?

Originally Posted by 14Russian

Arbitrarily, really?
So, you chose to 'randomly' choose the mainstream link I posted and a quote from some 'historian?' Yes, I believe you.

Why, sure, just as I believe that you -- or, I guess, the editor of a Toronto newspaper -- went 'randomly' Googling for "Truth About the USS Liberty" websites and 'randomly' picked seven that avoided saying "Zionist".

A truly random search of USS Liberty websites would turn up quite a few in which the site's own authors (not anonymous commenters) use the word Zionist "as though translated from жид-масонский", to paraphrase a great quip from Maria Tsevtaeva.

To be clear, I don't think that everyone who suspects that Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty is anti-Israel or anti-Jewish.

However, in a Venn diagram, the "USS Liberty skeptics circle" would overlap quite a bit with the "rabid antisemite circle"! I would also note that there are various different "alternative explanations" for the Israeli attack. Some theories claim that Israel had "strategically rational" motives (such as wanting to delay American knowledge of the planned Golan Heights attack) -- such theories I would consider to be essentially sane and plausible, even if they may be incorrect.

But other theories seem to be based on assumptions of a Giant Jewish Conspiracy To Destroy Muslims And Arabs Everywhere (e.g., "the real reason for the Liberty attack was done to cover up a massacre of Egyptian POWs")

Also, some of the theories strike me as possibly self-contradictory. Supposedly (says yet another theory), Jewish control of the US government was such that the Jews were able to coerce President LBJ into authorizing the Israeli attack on the Liberty. But... if the Jew-tentacles reached so far, and gripped the US government so tightly, wouldn't it have been much simpler to NOT attack a US Naval ship, and simply tell their American puppets "We're going to invade the Golan Heights, and you won't make any attempt to interfere, okay "?

P.S. Also, if you suspect that 9/11 was a "false flag operation" and "inside job," the simplest possible conspiracy theory is this:

19 hijackers who were hired by the US government (i.e., they weren't "Al Qaeda operatives") hijacked four planes, three of which hit their targets, and the intense heat of burning jet fuel was sufficient to cause massive destruction and loss of life.

And before you start speculating about "controlled detonation" and explosives secretly planted in the WTC buildings, you need to rule out the above theory -- otherwise, you're just "multiplying entities without necessity."

Similarly, if you think there was a conspiracy within the federal government, you should rule out the possibility of a "Tiny Rogue Cabal" inside the CIA before you start suggesting that the conspiracy went all the way to the White House. (Occam's Razor tells you to prefer a minimum number of conspirators, rather than a huge number of conspirators, since every additional conspirator is an additional traitor or whistleblower or accidental leaker.)

Finally, you need to give some thought to a coherent motive. The idea that Bush planned the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq makes very little sense to me -- since the 9/11 attacks did not use WMDs, yet the justification given for the Iraq War was the supposed danger that Saddam had a stockpile of WMDs. (If Bush planned the 9/11 attacks because he wanted to invade Iraq, why didn't he arrange for some biological warheads or a radioactive "dirty bomb" to be smuggled onto one or more of the airplanes? Or, conversely, why didn't he try to argue that "Saddam is illegally stockpiling X-acto knives and box-cutters"?)

Another line of thought is that the Gummint planned the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to Take Away All Our Freedoms. ("We'll sweep into power with a degree of control that will make martial law look like anarchy" -- Angela Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate).

Trouble is that such a complete loss of freedom never actually happened. Yes, some aspects of the Patriot Act had the potential to be gradually corrosive of civil rights, and people were quite right to be alarmed that the Patriot Act set "troubling legal precedents." But there's a difference between "gradual corrosion" and the outright suspension of the Constitution. It seems unlikely to me that the Government would go to all the trouble of murdering 3,000 citizens (and temporarily crippling the nation's financial center) as a pretext for passing some laws that were notably NOT very draconian.

With respect to conspiracy theories, I always apply Occam's Razor:

"other things being equal, a simpler explanation is better than a more complex one."

IE, did the US government orchestrate a complex disaster, which would involve the silence/compliance of thousands of people
OR, did angry people from countries which we have had wars with, avenge their dead by attacking the World Trade Center.

I stand by the basic premise. Granted, many questions exist, serious questions, such as why Bin Laden's family was allowed out of the US when no one else was allowed to fly. But I do not necessarily believe that contradicts the main premise.

As Crocodile so adroitly pointed out (только если бы я умела так свободно писать по-русски!), evidence is needed for these conspiracy theories, before any of them can be taken seriously.

Occam's razor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by Deborski

With respect to conspiracy theories, I always apply Occam's Razor:

"other things being equal, a simpler explanation is better than a more complex one."

IE, did the US government orchestrate a complex disaster, which would involve the silence/compliance of thousands of people
OR, did angry people from countries which we have had wars with, avenge their dead by attacking the World Trade Center.

I stand by the basic premise. Granted, many questions exist, serious questions, such as why Bin Laden's family was allowed out of the US when no one else was allowed to fly. But I do not necessarily believe that contradicts the main premise.

As Crocodile so adroitly pointed out (только если бы я умела так свободно писать по-русски!), evidence is needed for these conspiracy theories, before any of them can be taken seriously.

Occam's razor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I always apply Occam's razor too. But the evidence is needed for the official version too! And all the evidence we have says it was done by the American government. There is no need to make all the people silent because the American authorities have information power and can always call such people "conspirologists". Americans simply believe that their government can't be so cruel and they are ready to believe everything but that version, no matter how many arguments are given in its support.

Originally Posted by Marcus

But the evidence is needed for the official version too!

I agree, there are several major flaws in the 'official version'.

Originally Posted by Marcus

And all the evidence we have says it was done by the American government.

I disagree, there's no such evidence. The farthest you could go is to claim the US government knew something was to happen, but they didn't take sufficient precautions to deal with that. Took it lightly, so to speak. Any government is just an always-quarreling group of selfish smug bureaucrats and nothing more. How do you imagine the US government design it? George W. Bush calls John Ashcroft to his ranch, they have some beer and a nice BBQ steak and then Bush calls Ashcroft aside and says something like: "Hey, John, we are unpopular this season, let's crash some airplanes onto some buildings in NYC and whatever's left we'll dump on the Pentagon, how do you like that idea, dude?"

Seriously speaking, the places like the FBI, the CIA, etc. are constantly conveying internal tests of their employees. The tests are of the various nature, among them are the loyalty tests of various kinds. Among them, the higher management is asking the lower management to pass some classified info to their subordinates and see if the subordinates are loyal and would report the incidents to the higher management. If you call you bosom friend in the FBI and ask them to trait their organization, they will agree with you 100% and the very next thing they would report on you to their management and one level up simply because they would think it's just another test. So, no. The US government has nothing to do with the design and the performance of the 9/11. Until you present a proof, which would really prove and not just suspect, you have no right going on blaming the US government.

Originally Posted by Crocodile

I agree, there are several major flaws in the 'official version'.

I disagree, there's no such evidence. .

Really? How so? Based on what?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest you both (yourself and Marcus) can't be right.

911 Proof

9-11 Research: The Evidence

Read through tons of links and investigate all claims and for me, it keeps coming back as enough evidence. I'm not sure how you conclude there isn't. You still haven't said.

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

P.S. Also, if you suspect that 9/11 was a "false flag operation" and "inside job," the simplest possible conspiracy theory is this:

19 hijackers who were hired by the US government (i.e., they weren't "Al Qaeda operatives") hijacked four planes, three of which hit their targets, and the intense heat of burning jet fuel was sufficient to cause massive destruction and loss of life.

And before you start speculating about "controlled detonation" and explosives secretly planted in the WTC buildings, you need to rule out the above theory -- otherwise, you're just "multiplying entities without necessity."

Similarly, if you think there was a conspiracy within the federal government, you should rule out the possibility of a "Tiny Rogue Cabal" inside the CIA before you start suggesting that the conspiracy went all the way to the White House. (Occam's Razor tells you to prefer a minimum number of conspirators, rather than a huge number of conspirators, since every additional conspirator is an additional traitor or whistleblower or accidental leaker.)

Finally, you need to give some thought to a coherent motive. The idea that Bush planned the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq makes very little sense to me -- since the 9/11 attacks did not use WMDs, yet the justification given for the Iraq War was the supposed danger that Saddam had a stockpile of WMDs. (If Bush planned the 9/11 attacks because he wanted to invade Iraq, why didn't he arrange for some biological warheads or a radioactive "dirty bomb" to be smuggled onto one or more of the airplanes? Or, conversely, why didn't he try to argue that "Saddam is illegally stockpiling X-acto knives and box-cutters"?)

Another line of thought is that the Gummint planned the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to Take Away All Our Freedoms. ("We'll sweep into power with a degree of control that will make martial law look like anarchy" -- Angela Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate).

Trouble is that such a complete loss of freedom never actually happened. Yes, some aspects of the Patriot Act had the potential to be gradually corrosive of civil rights, and people were quite right to be alarmed that the Patriot Act set "troubling legal precedents." But there's a difference between "gradual corrosion" and the outright suspension of the Constitution. It seems unlikely to me that the Government would go to all the trouble of murdering 3,000 citizens (and temporarily crippling the nation's financial center) as a pretext for passing some laws that were notably NOT very draconian.

Based on what?

There are many theories for that but your conclusion that jet fuel took the towers down is laughable. Where did you get that idea? Are you an expert on melting metal and temperatures?

Also, the official explanation is that fire and fragments from the other buildings brought it down but there has been much debate on the plausibility of that scenario. I happen to agree with it. Most of the official scientific explanation are from paid engineers with Government connections, not independent bodies or neutral experts.

Also, I asked people to check out the PBS video but no one did. Big surprise. If you come up with theories, try to explain why you reached that conclusion with more weight than just parroting what the Government statements were.

Building No. 7 had a 'symmetrical, box-like collapse', where all four corners, and all four facades of the building fell simultaneously straight to the ground. Look at the speed in which the building fell. It's a 576-foot tall building and most concur with the estimates that it fell in 6.5 seconds. If you want to argue on common sense and quick theorizing then I can do the same, right? Does that make sense? From fire?!?

Your theories are insufficient. Your speculation, also. You won't even put in a fraction of time to research on your own.

And you have the audacity to simply conclude and summarize that you have some sort of explanation?!? How can you all dismiss any of these theories without investigating and reading the content? You just see the word 'conspiracy' and write it off immediately? Mr. McGhee, you have some idea but there's a lot of material out there. A lot of it explains or at least gives an explanation for your questions.

Please read some of the articles. C'mon, it's not that hard. I thought the videos might be interesting to you because people have short attention spans in general. Sometimes, people want something visual to complement reading material.

Also, when the public is presented some report on this and too many parts of it don't make sense, it makes me ask questions. Many have took it upon themselves to investigate all this and way too many WTH scenarios are involved with 9/11, for e.g.

There are many theories for that but your conclusion that jet fuel took the towers down is laughable. Where did you get that idea? Are you an expert on melting metal and temperatures?

Where did YOU get the idea that it's "laughable"? And where did you get the idea that the Official Explanation involves "melting metal"? I'm fairly sure that the Official Explanation says that structural steel weakens at temperatures significantly below the temperature of burning jet fuel (which is, in turn, significantly below steel's melting point).

The claim that hot steel смягчается at temperatures far below the температура плавления should not exactly be controversial -- after all, it's why "Smith" (literally "кузнец") is one of the most common American surnames!

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

Where did YOU get the idea that it's "laughable"? And where did you get the idea that the Official Explanation involves "melting metal"? I'm fairly sure that the Official Explanation says that structural steel weakens at temperatures significantly below the temperature of burning jet fuel (which is, in turn, significantly below steel's melting point).

The claim that hot steel смягчается at temperatures far below the температура плавления should not exactly be controversial -- after all, it's why "Smith" (literally "кузнец") is one of the most common American surnames!

POINTS FOR NEWBIES:

POINT #1: THE HEAT ALONE DID NOT DAMAGE THE BUILDING ENOUGH FOR IT TO FREEFALL

A random Youtube question:
'Not to change the subject too soon, but I still seek someone who can please explain to me how a 700 degree jet fuel fire can melt steel girders and frames that melt reluctantly at 2200+ degrees.'

QUESTION: Was the heat (i.e. fires) hot enough to melt steel to weaken frames etc. that ultimately causes the entire structure to buckle and free fall?

Take a look:
9-11 Review: Steel-Melting Fires

The simple facts of temperatures:

1535ºC (2795ºF) - melting point of iron
~1510ºC (2750ºF) - melting point of typical structural steel
~825ºC (1517ºF) - maximum temperature of hydrocarbon fires burning in the atmosphere without pressurization or pre-heating (premixed fuel and air - blue flame)

Diffuse flames burn far cooler.
Oxygen-starved diffuse flames are cooler yet.

The fires in the towers were diffuse -- well below 800ºC.
Their dark smoke showed they were oxygen-starved -- particularly in the South Tower.

POINT #2: EVEN IF THE STEEL HEATED TO THE POINT THAT IT SUPPOSEDLY CAUSED OR CONTRIBUTED TO STRUCTURAL 'MODIFICATION' OR WARPED SURROUNDING STRUCTURE, IT WAS STILL NOT ENOUGH TO CAUSE THE BUILDING TO COLLAPSE

THE BUILDINGS ALL FELL THE SAME – BUILDING #7 HAD NO PLANE HIT IT. THEREFORE NO JET FUEL. Only fires. So, these fires burned at heat that caused the collapse?!?

9/11 Truth and the Collapse of Steel Framed Buildings | Global Research

“The 1992 edition of the National Fire Protection Association’s Fire Protection Handbook(1) says that structural steel does not even BEGIN to soften until it reaches a temperature of 425 degrees centigrade, or 837 degrees fahrenheit, and doesn’t loose half its strength until 650 degrees centigrade, or 1202 degrees fahrenheit. And W. I. Edgar and C. Musse in their 2001 article “Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science, Engineering and Speculation,” in the JOURNAL OF THE MINERALS, METALS AND MATERIALS SOCIETY (53/12:8-11) state that even with its strength halved, the steel in the World Trade Center could still support two or three times the stresses imposed by a 650 degrees centigrade or 1250 degrees fahrenheit fire.”

FEMA is the federal agency that later came up with a theory about thermal expansion to explain the collapse of World Trade Center 7. Yet in this FEMA statement quoted by Berhinig, we have an admission by FEMA that no such thermal expansion from fire had ever collapsed a steel framed building, even though steel framed buildings had been around for more than a hundred years, since the 1880′s.

In “Fire Inside: Strectural Design with Fire Safety in Mind,” by Carolyn Berry in the August 25, 2007 issue of SCIENCE NEWS, Allen Hay, chief fire safety officer of the New York City Fire Department said concerning World Trade Center 7: “We just expected it to burn out — we didn’t expect it to fall down.”  “It’s the only building I know of in New York City to ever collapse (strictly) from fire.”
Upon reading the SCIENCE NEWS article, it turns out that the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) computer simulation, which purported to account for for the collapse of WTC 7, did not account for that building’s collapse.  In the paragraph in the first column on page 124 of SCIENCE NEWS, Berry writes: “The NIST simulation, like all models of building failures to date, couldn’t follow the 9/11 collapses through to the end.  No computer is yet powerful enough to follow the chaotic sequence of events that ensues when components break apart and a building falls, but this is where research is headed.”

Point WTC7-1 | Consensus 911

The Official Account
NIST originally suggested1 that WTC 7 was brought down by structural damage combined with a raging fire fed by diesel fuel. However, in its Final Report (of November 200, NIST declared that neither diesel fuel nor structural damage played a role in this building’s collapse, and that this building, which was not struck by a plane, was brought down by fire alone.
The Best Evidence
Before or after 9/11, no steel-frame high-rise building had ever collapsed due to fire.3 If fire were to cause such a building to collapse, the onset would be gradual, whereas the videos show that WTC 7, after being completely stable, suddenly came down in virtual free fall. This building’s straight-down, symmetrical collapse, with the roofline remaining essentially horizontal, shows that all 82 of WTC 7’s support columns had been eliminated by the time the top started down.

Lastly:
9/11 and the Evidence

If you don't read the above. We're done debating. It's not even a page and even the average high school student could read it and understand it.

As for China or Russia playing a part. Find me just one page or any article or any speculation whatsoever that either is involved. Anything. I am not sure where that is coming from. Possibly, you just don't want to investigate yourself so both of you are grasping for straws. Seems just as reasonable a conclusion as saying 'maybe one those countries did it.'

"Romney said 'Russia is still our enemy'' so maybe they did 9/11. "We don't like that China stocks all our Walmart crap so they could theoretically had a hand in 9/11' LOL But, do you try any research yourselves?!? NOPE!