Thread: 9/11

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

Originally Posted by Crocodile

Well, I guess, the second sentence somewhat contradicts the first. It's either I spent 5 minutes to visit any of those sites and was able to choose the source that I wanted, or I haven't spent 5 minutes and then I was unable choose a source since I haven't even spent 5 minutes to visit any of those sites. Only one of the above might be true.

Well, I'm not in a position to question your research and deductive abilities, but something (the former part of my post, actually) is telling me I could still reserve the right to be skeptical and not trust your educated conclusions blindly.

Seriously, though... you see, in my opinion, some of the conspiracy theories have a significant logical flaw which they don't like to expose. (Yay! The conspiracy of the conspiracy theories; how do you like that?) They all go mainly like that:

1. Oh, the 'official version' provided by the government to explain X fails to explain Y and Z.
2. Therefore, the government is lying.
3. Therefore, the government wants to hide something.
4. The 'inevitable' conclusion: the government itself is responsible for causing X.

In that step, the conclusion is not inevitable. There might be other causes. A somewhat better conclusion is that the government (i.e. the finite set of politicians) cannot make any good use of knowing who caused X. Or it can foresee bad uses.

What do you think of that?

No contradiction as the first comment was a joke. Hence, the smiley emoticon. At least, I hope you spent more than 5 mins.

Anyway, I'll try to answer your inquiry...????

I think you forgot #5!

5. In response to #1-#4, it is reasonable to suspect the probability and/or prospects of a coverup or conspiracy increase

Do you think 'all' conspiracy theories are postulated this way (via your list)? I don't think so. At least, it would open itself to dispel fairly quickly.

(and, perhaps #6 is: 6. The Government has an extensive history of deception, lies, deceit and unethical behavior when it comes to the people. Get the drift?).

I think your simplistic and thematic list fails. If that's what you take from every conspiracy theory you encounter, then perhaps you don't investigate or research thoroughly enough. Maybe 5 to 20 minutes is insufficient for you.

Thus, your list is too brief. It's true, there can be inadequate or incomplete conclusions but I was not talking about a generic theory. I presented some links for the USS Liberty conspiracy and Marcus and I added a video for 9/11. Do you think we both concluded or speculated based on only your list #1 through #4? I don't think so, dude.

You omit the reason many people speculate or suggest a conspiracy. Inadequate reports, peculiar findings that are contrary to the Government's according to other experts and lack of neutrality. One could go on but it's much more complicated than the presentation you put forth.

Originally Posted by 14Russian

You omit the reason many people speculate or suggest a conspiracy. Inadequate reports, peculiar findings that are contrary to the Government's according to other experts and lack of neutrality. One could go on but it's much more complicated than the presentation you put forth.

Flat refusal, peculiar assumptions, inability to provide any sensible expertise and, yes, lack of neutrality.

Originally Posted by Полуношник

Flat refusal, peculiar assumptions, inability to provide any sensible expertise and, yes, lack of neutrality.

That sounds like the typical response of any Government once you ask them to consider alternative viewpoints or theories outside the government.

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 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

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

Ссылки не открывала, но живу в этой стране более 30 лет и знаю её достаточно для того, чтобы понимать, что здесь возможно, а что нет.

Originally Posted by 14Russian

Do you think 'all' conspiracy theories are postulated this way (via your list)? I don't think so. At least, it would open itself to dispel fairly quickly.

Well, I said 'some', not 'all', but I think 9/11 conspiracy theory (which is the main topic, btw) is put that way.

Originally Posted by 14Russian

The Government has an extensive history of deception, lies, deceit and unethical behavior when it comes to the people. Get the drift?). [...]
You omit the reason many people speculate or suggest a conspiracy. Inadequate reports, peculiar findings that are contrary to the Government's according to other experts and lack of neutrality. One could go on but it's much more complicated than the presentation you put forth.

Ok, so let's go one step back. All we see, in the 9/11 situation is that the government's story is incomplete and we have the right to suspect it's lying. Alright. You have my agreement here. Yes, we realize with some degree of confidence that the government had probably worked out the story to support their further plans. B-U-T! You won't be able to explain that the government had actually designed or performed it! Simply, because you don't have a proof. So, until you venture a proof, I think there's no point to go on blaming the government for designing the 9/11.

In my opinion, the 9/11 was designed by the other people. And not by the Al-Quaeeda and Bin Laden. I also think those who work for the FBI are not less smart than those who create those videos, and they obviously have much more facts at their disposal.

I think the FBI knows who caused 9/11, but that is not the US government. What do you think of that?

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 "?

Originally Posted by Seraph

One of the issues involved here is that of engineering, design, architectural etc, building codes and fire codes, insurance and actuarial issues, and related things.

I just wanted to highlight this and add a point: Some "Truth About 9/11" websites and documentaries have produced petitions signed by 5,000 professional engineers who "are asking troubling questions" or "agree that the official version is incomplete," etc. Suffice to say, some of these sites and movies are very eager to create the impression that 5,000 engineers support the "controlled demolition by CIA-planted explosives" hypothesis.

But in fact, the vast majority of these engineers are asking questions about how to improve the fire-resistant insulation on steel girders, and whether the fuel tanks for Building 7's emergency electrical generators were properly constructed, etc. (And I suspect that some of the engineers who signed this or that petition were kicking themselves afterwards, upon realizing that their positions had been misrepresented.)

P.S. Decades ago, "telekinetic spoon-bender" Uri Geller went on Johnny Carson's talk show, and ended up rather embarrassed -- Geller didn't know that Carson had worked professionally as a stage magician in his younger days, and thus Carson had no difficulty spotting Geller's фокусы. So, of course, Geller's "telekinesis" suddenly didn't work, and he had to make up an excuse about solar flares, or something. James Randi and Penn & Teller have made the same point: scientists are sometimes easy "marks" for con-artists, because scientists tend to assume that everyone is being honest, and aren't trained in deception (as magicians are, of course). So I suspect that some of the scientists and engineers who get quoted by "9/11 Skeptics" were deceived, as Geller tried to do with Carson; and others were simply quoted out of context without their permission.

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

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.

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?!?

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.