Having complained of people posting off topic, it seems a reasonable solution to give an opportunity for people to discuss the topics I am banning from other threads – of which 9/11 seems the most popular.
I do not believe that the US government, or any of its agencies, were responsible for 9/11. It would just need too many people to be involved. Someone would have objected. There are some strange and dangerous people in America, but not in sufficient concentration for this one. They couldn’t even keep Watergate quiet, and that was a small group. Any group I can think of – even Blackwater – would contain operatives with scruples about blowing up New York. They may be sadly ready to kill people in poor countries, but Americans en masse? Somebody would say it wasn’t a good idea.
I asked a friend in the construction industry what it would take to demolish the twin towers. He replied nine months, 80 men, and 12 miles of cabling. The notion that a small team at night could plant sufficient explosives embedded at key points, is laughable.
The forces of the aircraft impacts must have been amazingly high. I have no difficulty imagining they would bring down the building. As for WTC 7, again the kinetic energy of the collapse of the twin towers must be immense.
I admit to a private speculation about WTC7. Unfortunately in construction it is extremely common for contractors not to fix or install properly all the expensive girders, ties and rebar that are supposed to be enclosed in the concrete. Supervising contractors and municipal inspectors can be corrupt. I recall vividly that in London some years ago a tragedy occurred when a simple gas oven explosion brought down the whole side of a tower block.
The inquiry found that the building contractor had simply omitted the ties that bound the girders at the corners, all encased in concrete. If a gas oven had not blown up, nobody would have found out. Buildings I strongly suspect are very often not as strong as they are supposed to be, with contractors skimping on apparently redundant protection. The sort of sordid thing you might not want too deeply investigated in the event of a national tragedy.
Precisely what happened at the Pentagon I am less sure. There is not the conclusive film and photographic evidence that there is for New York. I am particularly puzzled by the much more skilled feat of flying that would be required to hit a building virtually at ground level, in an urban area, after a lamppost clipping route – very hard to see how a non-professional pilot did that. But I can think of a number of possible scenarios where the official explanation is not quite the whole truth on the Pentagon, but which do not necessitate a belief that the US government or Dick Cheney was behind the attack.
In my view the real scandal of 9/11 was that it was blowback – the product of a malignant terrorist agency whose origins lay in CIA funding and provision. Also blowback in a more general sense that it was spawned in the nasty theocratic dictatorship of Saudi Arabia which is so close to the US and to the Bush dynasty in particular. As with almost all terrorist activity, I do not rule out any point on the whole spectrum of surveillance, penetration and agent provocateur activity by any number of possible actors.
But was 9/11 false flag and controlled demolition? No, I think not.
(Now I have given full opportunity to discuss 9/11 here, any further references on other threads will be instantly deleted).
I know a guy who lives in DC and saw the plane hit the Pentagon. He says it was a plane. I believe him.
Given the tendency of conspiracy theorists to be woefully wrong, I choose to believe that the people grasping to straws out of desperation to believe in a unifying order that explains something (a very similar psychological process to the religious impulse, I find) are less credible than my friend.
Speculation about how it could not have happened, or was too difficult, is simply speculation.
See also: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html?page=6
For a comprehensive, impeccably researched and thouroughly referenced demolition of the Popular Mechanics special report, read David Griffin’s “Debunking 9/11 Debunking”, and other works by the same author.
Good idea.
9/11 conspiracy narratives often overlook the SE Asian angle, the Ramzi Yusuf cell operating here in Manila in the mid-nineties, which mixed up various explosive concoctions and actually tried them out on a flight to Japan.
http://www.fact-index.com/o/op/operation_bojinka.html
It’s all on the internet, but somehow does not register how international the 9/11 group was.
If you want people to reiterate what they have blogged ad nauseam for years with the come on you’ve given, your results may be less than optimum.
Nonetheless, I was eventually struck with the sardonic notion that, however ridiculous a false flag attack seemed at first blush, the idea that the administration should issue a conclusive description of what happened complete with responsible parties for an episode that killed all involved within hours…is a worse stretch yet.
So whatever one thinks happened, the fact that no standard air crash investigation was made – in fact the rubble was secreted away, a seeming unlawful action – has my skunk detector on high.
Add to that my generally low regard for what I consider de facto institutional psyops in society – Orwellianism – and you begin to understand my thought that wild fantasies are nonetheless no less credible than the paid arrant nonsense that is the media.
Len Hart caught my attention some years back because he was following my blog. He has continually produced volumes of material researched to the nines and available at http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/ He is a guest blogger at Bluebloggin and also has posts at http://www.opednews.com/
911 Truth is another ‘find’ in the genre.
If you find these interesting, I have listed some that I have read somewhat and noted. See my index at my.opera.com/oldephartte/links “Collections Forwarded to Blogger”; Not ‘P.C.’ | NWO will be 911 oriented. “Perception Alteration” should be considered media bias related ideas.
Everybody spoofs ‘conspiracy theories’. One recent article outlined a number of cases in which they were accurate. Just sayin’.
Interesting. Me and the boys kicked this idea around last night..how we, as professional explosives experts (anyone who reads this blog will know I destroy land mines and UXO’s)would rig the WTC buildings to collapse.
After a few beers at the UN club and some technical discussions on explosive type, det cord length etc, we came to this conclusion.
We would need approx 1 tonne of semtex, 2.5 miles of det cord, several hundred electronic detonators and about 2 weeks to rig it all.
We would then ‘flash’ the detonation, eg, the explosives would be detonated in sequence every 3 floors, allowing the floors above to collapse downwards in a chain reaction, therefore allowing gravity and the sheer wieght of the building to do the job by itself.
However, as the blast wave from each charge moves at over 300 meters per second, it would blow out every window and door on the floor it was set, so you would actually be able to see the detonation with the naked eye, dust,rubble and blast wind fanning out from the building. This is not the case if you watch all the news footage of the buildings collapse.
Our opinion, crashing a large jet into a skyscraper is enough to weaken the main support structure in itself. Addition of large amounts of explosives would just be overkill.
Thanks for this Craig! I think it’s a very reasonable solution and you have my word that I won’t be bringing the subject up on other threads.
I also agree with you that there probably has been some CYA involved in the 9/11 Commission. In fact, as has been noted here, John Farmer who was part of the 9/11 Commission, has recently criticised the 9/11 Commission for what he thinks is the report’s favourable impression it gives of Bush and Cheney’s actions on the day.
There is no monolithic “official story”. This is an invention of the Truthers. There have been numerous independent investigations including by “Counterpunch” and controlled demolition experts and structural engineering facilities at universities and while there have been disagreements over the particulars there is widespread agreement on the essentials “19 guys hijacked planes and flew them into buildings which then collapsed as a result of the damage.”
The reason why those who disagree over the particulars are not Truthers is because they don’t hold to the articles of faith that a) it was an inside job and b) that the Twin Towers and Building 7 were demolished by explosives/thermite etc…
There is also a tendency for Truthers to get so carried away with looking into tiny anomalies that almost no one cares about that they completely lose the bigger picture. Barbara is completely correct in pointing out that Operation Bojinka is a far more relevant precedent that Operation Northwoods, because a) it was rehearsed and a Japanese passenger was killed on a flight from Manila b) It was conducted by Ramzi Yusef who also attempted to demolish the World Trade Center and c) Yusef was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed the presumed mastermind of 9/11.
They also ignore the repeated threats made by bin Laden, his role in blowing up embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, his involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole and his declaration of war on the US. (Instead they focus on some highly dubious article that is all but unsourced about him being visited in a Dubai hospital by the CIA).
As for the Pentagon, there may not be any photographs of the plane actually hitting the Pentagon but that couldn’t be expected on the video that was released because of the low number of frames per second of the camera. The security services are also, as any Truther can tell you, notoriously stingy about how much information they are willing to share.
Nevertheless there have been plenty of eyewitness accounts of the 757 hitting the Pentagon (although some of it has been mined and cropped by Truthers), plenty of photographs of the debris and even a book on the firefighting operation in which body parts from the planes are gruesomely described. Truthers will often say that any description that doesn’t fit with their theory has come from the goverment or is fabricated but these seem to me to be regular people giving THEIR account, THEIR story, not the “official story”.
“Yusef was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed ”
Whoops! That is to say that Yusef was KSM’s uncle despite being younger.
No matter whether the buildings were properly constructed or not, the undisputed facts are that all three buildings collapsed in freefall time. Unless Newtonian physics were suspended in NY on 9/11, that implies that all of the potential energy the buildings possessed by virtue of their height had to be converted to kinetic energy to make it to the ground in the time they did. No further energy would be left to collapse the building and break the joints. It is impossible for the buildins to have collapsed of their own accord, particularly as the path was that of the greatest resistance
“No matter whether the buildings were properly constructed or not, the undisputed facts are that all three buildings collapsed in freefall time.”
I dispute that and so do thousands and thousands of others.
“It is impossible for the buildins to have collapsed of their own accord, particularly as the path was that of the greatest resistance”
The damage and fires helped out. Do I have to show this video again?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwFHEoiUZ7o
Please watch the video of buildings destroying themselves through the “path of greatest resistance”.
This is my and only post on this thread and i’m to even going to look at it again. This has to be one of Craig’s biggest blind spots. I’ll say no more…
P.S. Good luck ‘debating’ with the shills guys. Have fun! Ha ha ha.
Well I have to say that pretty much all the reasoning presented in this post is, to put it at its mildest, naive. So you spoke to ‘a friend in the construction industry’ eh? Try reading through the Architects and Engineers for Truth site – over 1,000 of some of the most highly qualified people on those types of building in the world. To dismiss their objections to the official narrative with ‘I spoke to a friend’ is not simply glib, it’s frankly childish – a bit like a 6 year old defending Santa Claus and the tooth fairy against his 8 year old sibling.
As for your other objections along the lines ‘someone would have objected and blown the whistle’. On the face of it they are indeed reassuring – even persuasive – but you are clearly NOT well read on the opposing literature. Would someone not have done the same these past 50 years on the JFK assassination for example – or maybe you still think that was the work of a mad lone assassin?
I have spent the best part of the past 3 years reading little else. I was drawn into it by the clear, simple principle which has always produced the the most telling and accurate results in any major criminal investigation, namely ‘Qui bono?’
This isn’t the place to rehearse the arguments, they are far too detailed, complex, counter-intuitive and downright scary for superficial treatment. Suffice to say that, dealing with the whole issue on a balance of probabilities basis, the official narrative -v- Deep State Agency orchestration/involvement runs somewhere around 10/90 to anyone who has given the matter serious studied attention. For sure the Keane-Hamilton report is as shot through with demonstrable wilful falsehoods and deliberate ommissions as ever the Warren Commission Report is.
As for it being ‘unthinkable’ that a government and/or its ‘Deep-State’ agencies simply ‘would not do such a thing’; I’m afraid we’re back in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy Land again. They HAVE done such things (ie attacking their own people in order to blame it on the enemy-du-jour for purposes which become crystal clear once ones childish blinkers are removed) on a regular basis and I’m surprised that a former UK ambassador should be so clearly unaware of the outrageous, sordid details of the whole post WWII Operation Gladio thing – for example.
9/11.
Isn’t it strange the way Obama is fighting for universal health care for all in gold ole US of A.
Maybe he should place images of all those sick ‘the first responders’ who are in the process of dying. Me thinks they deserve the title of ‘patriots’ and look how they are treated…NICE
There is a theorem in mathematics which says that if a continuous function has both positive and negative values then it has at least one zero value. It’s obvious. If you see a man walking down the street on one side of the road but looking again a moment later he is on the other, you will reason that he must have crossed the street at least once. Obvious though the result may seem, in pure mathematics one is nevertheless obliged to prove it, and occasionally proofs of the obvious can be difficult to find.
Imagine how much more difficult such proofs would be if the question were politicised, and one was required for respectability to deny the obvious; the function is never zero, and that man never crossed the street. 2+2=5. Ten floors fell on to 90 and crushed them out of existence – and as if they had never existed.
“I asked a friend in the construction industry what it would take to demolish the twin towers. He replied nine months, 80 men, and 12 miles of cabling.”
Which begs the question: why is your friend not now converted to the much faster and cheaper option of blowing away a few floors near the top of the building, setting some office materials on fire, then just sitting back and letting nature take its course? It only takes a few hours, at most 19 people, and costs next to nothing in materials. He’d better get there before his competitors do!
@angrysoba.
Not possible mate, read my comments. No explosives used, if there were there would be evidence.
Why is the PR of the terrorists not more obvious?
When the Palestinians, or ETA, or the IRA committed an act of terrorism, it was owned up to, for the purpose of their politics; but for 9/11, we are left with speculation.
Ironic that Craig mentions the LAMPOST TOPPING flight into the Pentagon – as the photos of the day show them facing AWAY from the building, i.e. as if blown out.
If any one bit of the story fails then something other than the official line must of occured. There are dozens or more discrepancies that stretch logic and physics to incredulity.
Great idea for a post Craig- lateral thinking at its best
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did someone mention thermite residue?
Craig how about a fish thread?
I think the phrase ‘Qui bono?’ is much too simplistic when looking at complex political issues. People all have different values, world views and expectations, so even if we were to assume that all actors are 100% ‘rational’ (which I most definitely don’t), it’s not hard to see that people could do some very counter productive things without even realising it. According to ‘Qui bono?’, during the Vietnam war, American war policy must have been secretly dictated by the Soviets, because waging war on Vietnam was disastrous for the US. I guess Watergate was thought up by the Democrats and they tricked Nixon into carrying it out.
“false flag”…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv6EuukxqKQ
I was going to mention something that I know which most of you don’t. And this is something which will disgree with both groups, the inside Job group and the outside job group.
But I can’t because I have to get to a meeting now.
Bye.
I couldn’t resist. It’s ‘Invasion Of The Bodysnatching Shills’ and they seem to have got to Craig. Eek!
arsalan –
{xkcd.com/690/} A compromise?
Craig,
The reason I believed in the ‘conspiracy’- it all seemed too convenient for the Bush administration.
My thoughts were remote control planes. It didn’t seem plausible that a few people could take over a plane with a tin opener? That could have been kept between a few people couldn’t it?- Extra explosives could have been loaded onto the planes by a small team.
In situations like this it isn’t a case of how (comparable to a person?s own knowledge anyone can be fooled) but why, and who would get the most out of it…
How could Iraq and Afghanistan have happened without this crisis on American soil? How could the US have gotten any international sympathy?
How convenient that Bush, Cheney etc owned Mercenary companies, dealt in weapons, managed to buy so much gold, disguised the Enron fiasco?
Sigh. I believe in you as a person Craig. So perhaps it’s time to put this one to bed based on what you’ve said. Double Sigh.
But if anyone could have a stab at the questions above?
@arsalan
You sound like Fermat’s Last Theorem (deliberately?).
Writing in the margin of Diophantus’ Arithmetica: “It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.”
@January.No thermite resedue was ever found despite extensive testing of rubble etc. Besides,thermite would not be suitable for collapsing a building such as the WTC. Personally, I love a good conspiracy theory..the Grassy Knoll, did we actually land on the Moon, Area 51, the Bigfoot to name but a few. Unfortunatly the WTC was just a tradgedy that happened due to a few fanatics. The buildings were so extensively damaged they needed no outside help to collapse.
Massive damage to internal structures and gravity was to blame.
Oh dear. I have nothing much to say on the topic, I could just have all left it alone, if it wasn’t for Craig’s “They couldn’t even keep Watergate quiet”.
Which is true, but they did a better job with the Iran/contra stuff, and an even neater one with the Libby trial. Watergate was a long time ago, and people seem to have learnt. Plus, of course, it seemed to depend on a functioning media.