Why The 9/11 Conspiracies Won't Go Away

[Toro]

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Why The 9/11 Conspiracies Won't Go Away

Turns out, we need grand theories to make sense of grand events, or the world just seems too random

By LEV GROSSMAN

Take a look, if you can stand it, at video footage of the World Trade Center collapsing. Your eye will naturally jump to the top of the screen, where huge fountains of dark debris erupt out of the falling towers. But fight your natural instincts. Look farther down, at the stories that haven't collapsed yet.

In almost every clip you'll see little puffs of dust spurting out from the sides of the towers. There are two competing explanations for these puffs of dust: 1) the force of the collapsing upper floors raised the air pressure in the lower ones so dramatically that it actually blew out the windows. And 2) the towers did not collapse from the impact of two Boeing 767s and the ensuing fires. They were destroyed in a planned, controlled demolition. The dust puffs you see on film are the detonations of explosives planted there before the attacks.

People who believe the second explanation live in a very different world from those who believe the first. In world No. 2, al-Qaeda is not responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center. The U.S. government is. The Pentagon was not hit by a commercial jet; it was hit by a cruise missile. United Flight 93 did not crash after its occupants rushed the cockpit; it was deliberately taken down by a U.S. Air Force fighter. The entire catastrophe was planned and executed by federal officials in order to provide the U.S. with a pretext for going to war in the Middle East and, by extension, as a means of consolidating and extending the power of the Bush Administration.

The population of world No. 2 is larger than you might think. A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.

Although the 9/11 Truth Movement, as many conspiracy believers refer to their passion, has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, it is flourishing on the Internet. One of the most popular conspiracy videos online is Loose Change, a 90-min. blizzard of statistics, photographs, documents, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony set to a trippy hip-hop backbeat. It's designed to pick apart, point by point, the conventional narrative of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

For all its amateur production values--it was created by a pair of industrious twentysomethings using a laptop, pizza money and footage scavenged from the Internet--Loose Change is a compelling experience. Take the section about the attack on the Pentagon. As the film points out--and this is a tent-pole issue among 9/11 conspiracists--the crash site doesn't look right. There's not enough damage. The hole smashed in the Pentagon's outer wall was 75 ft. wide, but a Boeing 757 has a 124-ft. wingspan. Why wasn't the hole wider? Why does it look so neat?

Experts will tell you that the hole was punched by the plane's fuselage, not its wings, which sheared off on impact. But then what happened to the wings? And the tail and the engines? Images of the crash site show hardly any of the wreckage you would expect from a building that's been rammed by a commercial jet. The lawn, where the plane supposedly dragged a wing on approach, is practically pristine. The plane supposedly clipped five lampposts on its way in, but the lampposts in question show surprisingly little damage. And could Hani Hanjour, the man supposedly at the controls, have executed the maneuvers that the plane performed? He failed a flight test just weeks before the attack. And Pentagon employees reported smelling cordite after the hit, the kind of high explosive a cruise missile carries.

There's something empowering about just exploring such questions. Loose Change appeals to the viewer's common sense: it tells you to forget the official explanations and the expert testimony, and trust your eyes and your brain instead. It implies that the world can be grasped by laymen without any help or interference from the talking heads. Watching Loose Change, you feel as if you are participating in the great American tradition of self-reliance and nonconformist, antiauthoritarian dissent. You're fighting the power. You're thinking different. (Conspiracists call people who follow the government line "sheeple.") "The goal of the movie was just really to get out there and show that there are alternate stories to what the mainstream media and the government will tell you," says Korey Rowe, 23, who produced the movie. "That 19 hijackers are going to completely bypass security and crash four commercial airliners in a span of two hours, with no interruption from the military forces, in the most guarded airspace in the United States and the world? That to me is a conspiracy theory."

It's also not much of a story line. As a narrative, the official story that the government--echoed by the media--is trying to sell shows an almost embarrassing lack of novelistic flair, whereas the story the conspiracy theorists tell about what happened on Sept. 11 is positively Dan Brownesque in its rich, exciting complexity. Rowe and his collaborator, Dylan Avery, 22, actually started writing Loose Change as a fictional screenplay--"loosely based around us discovering that 9/11 was an inside job," Rowe says--before they became convinced that the evidence of conspiracy was overwhelming. The Administration is certainly playing its part in the drama with admirable zeal. If we went to war to root out fictional weapons of mass destruction, is staging a fictional terrorist attack such a stretch?

But there's a big problem with Loose Change and with most other conspiracy theories. The more you think about them, the more you realize how much they depend on circumstantial evidence, facts without analysis or documentation, quotes taken out of context and the scattered testimony of traumatized eyewitnesses. (For what it's worth, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a fact sheet responding to some of the conspiracy theorists' ideas on its website, www.nist.gov. The theories prompt small, reasonable questions that demand answers that are just too large and unreasonable to swallow. Granted, the Pentagon crash site looks odd in photographs. But if the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile, then what happened to American Airlines Flight 77? Where did all the real, documented people on it go? Assassinated? Relocated? What about eyewitnesses who saw a plane, not a missile? And what are the chances that an operation of such size--it would surely have involved hundreds of military and civilian personnel--could be carried out without a single leak? Without leaving behind a single piece of evidence hard enough to stand up to scrutiny in a court? People, the feds just aren't that slick. Nobody is.

There are psychological explanations for why conspiracy theories are so seductive. Academics who study them argue that they meet a basic human need: to have the magnitude of any given effect be balanced by the magnitude of the cause behind it. A world in which tiny causes can have huge consequences feels scary and unreliable. Therefore a grand disaster like Sept. 11 needs a grand conspiracy behind it. "We tend to associate major events--a President or princess dying--with major causes," says Patrick Leman, a lecturer in psychology at Royal Holloway University of London, who has conducted studies on conspiracy belief. "If we think big events like a President being assassinated can happen at the hands of a minor individual, that points to the unpredictability and randomness of life and unsettles us." In that sense, the idea that there is a malevolent controlling force orchestrating global events is, in a perverse way, comforting.

You would have thought the age of conspiracy theories might have declined with the rise of digital media. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was a private, intimate affair compared with the attack on the World Trade Center, which was witnessed by millions of bystanders and television viewers and documented by hundreds of Zapruders. You would think there was enough footage and enough forensics to get us past the grassy knoll and the magic bullet, to create a consensus reality, a single version of the truth, a single world we can all live in together.

But there is no event so plain and clear that a determined human being can't find ambiguity in it. And as divisive as they are, conspiracy theories are part of the process by which Americans deal with traumatic public events like Sept. 11. Conspiracy theories form around them like scar tissue. In a curious way, they're an American form of national mourning. They'll be with us as long as we fear lone gunmen, and feel the pain of losses like the one we suffered on Sept. 11, and as long as the past, even the immediate past, is ultimately unknowable. That is to say, forever.

Link

 

[Kreskin]

A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves.

Did the Bush Administration want to invade Iraq before 9-11? Many members of the team ackowledged the idea in writing.

Would Bush have been able to mount an invasion in Iraq without a major homeland event? There is no way he could've gained enough public support without one.

So, why would it be a stretch to think the administration could've turned a blind eye to some of the terrorism threats, hoping they would be able to use the fallout for political purposes? The Bush Administration benefitted politically from the event. Perhaps the potential scope of the terrorist event was miscalculated or ignored.

How many hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide have been lost as a result of the miscalculations of Bush?

I think the "Bush can do nothing wrongers" live in a fantasy world. That somehow Bush has been an innocent bystander to the events of the world over the last 5 years.

 

[Hotshot]

A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves.

Did the Bush Administration want to invade Iraq before 9-11? Many members of the team ackowledged the idea in writing.

Would Bush have been able to mount an invasion in Iraq without a major homeland event? There is no way he could've gained enough public support without one.

So, why would it be a stretch to think the administration could've turned a blind eye to some of the terrorism threats, hoping they would be able to use the fallout for political purposes? The Bush Administration benefitted politically from the event. Perhaps the potential scope of the terrorist event was miscalculated or ignored.

How many hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide have been lost as a result of the miscalculations of Bush?

I think the "Bush can do nothing wrongers" live in a fantasy world. That somehow Bush has been an innocent bystander to the events of the world over the last 5 years.

First, Iraq wasn't involved with the 9-11 attacks, so your post is irrelevant to the original topic. That said, Buskinski was quoted in Time magazine several years ago (I wish I knew the date) that he was going after Sadam Hussein saying "after all he was the man who tried to kill my dad". That makes it sound personal and premeditated doesn't it?

On the original topic, the yankee government involvement is written all over the events of 9-11. The first reports about the plane in Penn. was that the plane was shot down by Yankee fighters. That in itself makes that 'lets roll' story nothing more than yank propaganda.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

I don't think it's that complicated, really. Most people don't know, because our educational systems don't teach it, how to think very well. They mostly learn what to think, not how to think.

They don't understand the nature of evidence or how to assess it, or how error-prone human thinking and perception can be without elaborate safeguards. They fall prey to all kinds of errors in logic and perception, like confirmation bias, self-deception, selective thinking, communal reinforcement, confabulation, wishful thinking, cognitive biases, coincidences, and dozens of others (see http://www.skepdic.com for discussions of all those terms and more), including plain old inattention. That's what the methods of science are really all about, safeguarding against those kinds of errors. I spend a good deal of my time around here trying to respond to such errors.

Thinking clearly is a learned skill like any other, and takes study and practice. But first you have to understand that you aren't thinking very clearly and need the study and practice. My experience is that most people never get even to that point. I realized it about myself a long time ago, thanks to a couple of really superlative teachers I encountered, who really annoyed me at the time, needless to say, because they kept telling me in effect that I was full of crap. They were right. That was almost 40 years ago, and it's only in the last decade that I've really felt I've got a grip on what they were trying to teach all us testosterone-addled neophytes.

 

[tamarin]

The problem with all conspiracies is that they ignore human nature. If 9/11 has a large US government element it would have entailed the labour of a well organized select group of individuals, not all of whom would have kept their mouth shut. A person willing to tell usually has a lot to share and will have had the resources and resolve to back it up. No one like that has come forward. Or, indeed, came forward before the event.
Look at other great 'secrets' of history. The inimitable Egyptian tombs. Almost none has been found intact, despite the efforts of professionals of that time, because someone involved always blabbed.
9/11 is too big for someone not to share it. And with proof.

 

[Kreskin]

A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves.

Did the Bush Administration want to invade Iraq before 9-11? Many members of the team ackowledged the idea in writing.

Would Bush have been able to mount an invasion in Iraq without a major homeland event? There is no way he could've gained enough public support without one.

So, why would it be a stretch to think the administration could've turned a blind eye to some of the terrorism threats, hoping they would be able to use the fallout for political purposes? The Bush Administration benefitted politically from the event. Perhaps the potential scope of the terrorist event was miscalculated or ignored.

How many hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide have been lost as a result of the miscalculations of Bush?

I think the "Bush can do nothing wrongers" live in a fantasy world. That somehow Bush has been an innocent bystander to the events of the world over the last 5 years.

First, Iraq wasn't involved with the 9-11 attacks, so your post is irrelevant to the original topic. That said, Buskinski was quoted in Time magazine several years ago (I wish I knew the date) that he was going after Sadam Hussein saying "after all he was the man who tried to kill my dad". That makes it sound personal and premeditated doesn't it?

On the original topic, the yankee government involvement is written all over the events of 9-11. The first reports about the plane in Penn. was that the plane was shot down by Yankee fighters. That in itself makes that 'lets roll' story nothing more than yank propaganda.

It wasn't irrelevant because Bush linked the two as the war on terror.

 

[Renée]

It won't go away just like all the other ones won't b/c we know all to well what the American govt' is capable of making it very difficult for some to trust any version of events that they support. Fool me once....

 

[gopher]

RE: Why The 9/11 Conspira

The Pentagon Papers (which are official government records) is all you need to verify that the USA government is perfectly willing to kill its own citizenry in order to create profits for the wealthy.

 

[hermanntrude]

check out what maddox has written about it recently on his famous "best page in the universe". sums it up nicely says i

 

[GentleGiant]

The number of dumb Americans who made the claim like Michael Moore the idiot lefty, that the US Government was involved in the terrorist action of 9/11 are fear mongers, hatemongers and liars.

How many Islamists and other terrorists reside in the USA? How many lefty jerks do not like the current US Fed GOV? There are a number of these lying idiots residing in Canada as well and behave exactly the same way.

These are the ones whom are creating lies everywhere including Lou Dobbs from CNN, The New York Times, many Democrats who are narrow minded along with The Toronto Lieberal Star, the CBC , the NDP and a bunch of Lieberal lefties like Carolyn the idiot Parrish, Paul Martin a supporter of the Tamil Tigers terrorist organization and Jean Chretien another crook and racist from Quebec and there are thousands of them there.

During WWII if anyone made any stupid comments like these idiots are currently doing they would be imprisoned for a long time and rightfully so. Jack Lay-it-on along with his dog Chow, Peggy Nash and supporters should also be imprisoned for their stupid public comments regarding our troops in Afghanistan.

 

[mabudon]

RE: Why The 9/11 Conspira

Man GG, you sure do like using emotinally charged words and makin WW2 references, just like the official strategy.
If you actually made points you would find discussion a tad more fun I'd imagine

SOMETHING stinks about 9-11, but without any actual information expected EVER, I doubt we'll get much past "something sure does STINK about the whole deal"

300 dead is mot much of a price to pay in the grand scheme of things.

And don't write out the possibility of shenanigans with the "human nature" notion, there have been a FEW things I could think of that have happened where the "official story" was obvious hokum and no-one blew the whistle, either all involved were killed or otherwise silenced, or maybe another aspect of human nature came into play- give someone a big enough piece of the pie and a "new life" far away from the scene of the crime and add the incentive of "we'll be watching you and if you say so much as ONE wrong word that's IT for you" and you could likely hide even HUGE events involving hundreds of people...

 

[GentleGiant]

3,000 people were killed by Islamist Terrorists on 9/11 some of them were Canadians and the lefty's continue to ignore the truth and facts.

Michael Moore is a communist and a complete bad joke lied to the public with his film which was garbage.

I used to work in a certain area of the Federal Government and I knew how terrorism was growing and the misinformation that was published to the public in order to cover up lefty and terrorist actions.

It has grown over the years on every internet forum, in fact there are over 360,000 active sites on the "net" that promotes terrorism, hatemongering, racism, bigotry, and tons of misinformation. They have representatives on every public internet forum.

There is no longer any doubt about that.

 

[mabudon]

RE: Why The 9/11 Conspira

I believe that there are no "facts" or "truths" to ignore and you really can't argue that.
I DO tend to ignore folks spouting nonsense, but it is also good practice to disarm the most strident as their position is usually untenable

 

[Kreskin]

In politics, the more you follow the money trail the closer you get to the truth. Therefore it is no surprise that the conspiracy theories don't go away.

 

[Toro]

I don't think it's that complicated, really. Most people don't know, because our educational systems don't teach it, how to think very well. They mostly learn what to think, not how to think.

They don't understand the nature of evidence or how to assess it, or how error-prone human thinking and perception can be without elaborate safeguards. They fall prey to all kinds of errors in logic and perception, like confirmation bias, self-deception, selective thinking, communal reinforcement, confabulation, wishful thinking, cognitive biases, coincidences, and dozens of others (see http://www.skepdic.com for discussions of all those terms and more), including plain old inattention. That's what the methods of science are really all about, safeguarding against those kinds of errors. I spend a good deal of my time around here trying to respond to such errors.

Thinking clearly is a learned skill like any other, and takes study and practice. But first you have to understand that you aren't thinking very clearly and need the study and practice. My experience is that most people never get even to that point. I realized it about myself a long time ago, thanks to a couple of really superlative teachers I encountered, who really annoyed me at the time, needless to say, because they kept telling me in effect that I was full of crap. They were right. That was almost 40 years ago, and it's only in the last decade that I've really felt I've got a grip on what they were trying to teach all us testosterone-addled neophytes.

Dexter, that may be the single most intelligent post I have ever read here.

And that's saying something since I've posted a lot at CanCon! :wink:

 

[Toro]

A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves.

Here are a number of other polls of things Americans believe in. The fact that a third of Americans may believe something does not mean its not absurd. How many Fox News supporters still believe to this day that Saddam was behind 9/11?

How many hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide have been lost as a result of the miscalculations of Bush?

I think the "Bush can do nothing wrongers" live in a fantasy world. That somehow Bush has been an innocent bystander to the events of the world over the last 5 years.

But why is that the dichotomy Kreskin? Why must the choice be "nothing wrong" and "act of traitorious barbaric evil"? I didn't support Bush in either election, but I think these conspiracy theories are beyond asinine.

I think the question is better posed to the Bush-haters - Why is your (third-person) hatred so strong that you are willing to believe such a fantastic, bizarre scenario that runs counter with what you saw with your own eyes?

 

[Logic 7]

The number of dumb Americans who made the claim like Michael Moore the idiot lefty, that the US Government was involved in the terrorist action of 9/11 are fear mongers, hatemongers and liars.

How many Islamists and other terrorists reside in the USA? How many lefty jerks do not like the current US Fed GOV? There are a number of these lying idiots residing in Canada as well and behave exactly the same way.

These are the ones whom are creating lies everywhere including Lou Dobbs from CNN, The New York Times, many Democrats who are narrow minded along with The Toronto Lieberal Star, the CBC , the NDP and a bunch of Lieberal lefties like Carolyn the idiot Parrish, Paul Martin a supporter of the Tamil Tigers terrorist organization and Jean Chretien another crook and racist from Quebec and there are thousands of them there.

During WWII if anyone made any stupid comments like these idiots are currently doing they would be imprisoned for a long time and rightfully so. Jack Lay-it-on along with his dog Chow, Peggy Nash and supporters should also be imprisoned for their stupid public comments regarding our troops in Afghanistan.

All you did in this post is spouting hatred,spreading your fear, instead of trying to prove your point, which they are dumb. Yes i believe americans are dumb, there is no question about it, especially when you look what this bush administration did since they are in power, and the proof they are dumb, they have re-elected those whatever are their names.


You are the kind of guy, who will accept anything from his goverment, even martial law, pathetic you are.

 

[Logic 7]

I don't think it's that complicated, really. Most people don't know, because our educational systems don't teach it, how to think very well. They mostly learn what to think, not how to think.

They don't understand the nature of evidence or how to assess it, or how error-prone human thinking and perception can be without elaborate safeguards. They fall prey to all kinds of errors in logic and perception, like confirmation bias, self-deception, selective thinking, communal reinforcement, confabulation, wishful thinking, cognitive biases, coincidences, and dozens of others (see http://www.skepdic.com for discussions of all those terms and more), including plain old inattention. That's what the methods of science are really all about, safeguarding against those kinds of errors. I spend a good deal of my time around here trying to respond to such errors.

Thinking clearly is a learned skill like any other, and takes study and practice. But first you have to understand that you aren't thinking very clearly and need the study and practice. My experience is that most people never get even to that point. I realized it about myself a long time ago, thanks to a couple of really superlative teachers I encountered, who really annoyed me at the time, needless to say, because they kept telling me in effect that I was full of crap. They were right. That was almost 40 years ago, and it's only in the last decade that I've really felt I've got a grip on what they were trying to teach all us testosterone-addled neophytes.

Dexter, that may be the single most intelligent post I have ever read here.

And that's saying something since I've posted a lot at CanCon! :wink:

No debate, nothing at all, except trying to discredits those who try to find the truth, you guys needs serious help, you know,you are talking about conspiracy theorist like they are stupid, but accepting to send troops on the other side of the planet, withouth a single shred of evidence, what is the definition of this? i think you guys have an idea.

 

[GentleGiant]

Logic7: In North America Canada is the absolute worst of either the USA or us. Take a good look at how stupid and corrupt the Lieberals have been since Trudeau the communist took over that sect. It was a political party before that but hasn't been since 1970.

The number of dumbells in Canada voting for the Lieberals such as Quebec and GTA throught to Windsor and out west In BC is unreal.

The social engineers aka High school teachers and University Profs plus the allowing of illegals into this country for years which has provided us with a ton of terrorists mostly in the GTA , drug lords, murderers, rapists and so on was caused by the Lieberals and NDP.

That is the main reason Canada has slipped from the top 8 to 2nd last place in the democratic countries listing. We are borderline communists.

Stephen Harper tried to purchase 10,000 mops and buckets to clean up the lefty mess caused by the Lieberals but Home Hardware and Home Depot cannot provide him with what he needs to help return Canada to being Canada once again.

 

[DurkaDurka]

I don't think it's that complicated, really. Most people don't know, because our educational systems don't teach it, how to think very well. They mostly learn what to think, not how to think.

They don't understand the nature of evidence or how to assess it, or how error-prone human thinking and perception can be without elaborate safeguards. They fall prey to all kinds of errors in logic and perception, like confirmation bias, self-deception, selective thinking, communal reinforcement, confabulation, wishful thinking, cognitive biases, coincidences, and dozens of others (see http://www.skepdic.com for discussions of all those terms and more), including plain old inattention. That's what the methods of science are really all about, safeguarding against those kinds of errors. I spend a good deal of my time around here trying to respond to such errors.

Thinking clearly is a learned skill like any other, and takes study and practice. But first you have to understand that you aren't thinking very clearly and need the study and practice. My experience is that most people never get even to that point. I realized it about myself a long time ago, thanks to a couple of really superlative teachers I encountered, who really annoyed me at the time, needless to say, because they kept telling me in effect that I was full of crap. They were right. That was almost 40 years ago, and it's only in the last decade that I've really felt I've got a grip on what they were trying to teach all us testosterone-addled neophytes.

Dexter, that may be the single most intelligent post I have ever read here.

And that's saying something since I've posted a lot at CanCon! :wink:

No debate, nothing at all, except trying to discredits those who try to find the truth, you guys needs serious help, you know,you are talking about conspiracy theorist like they are stupid, but accepting to send troops on the other side of the planet, withouth a single shred of evidence, what is the definition of this? i think you guys have an idea.

People who are rational and can differentiate between fantasy & fact need help? You are not seeking truth, the truth is quite obvious if you take off your tin foil hat for a minute.

Please, don't subject us to anymore of your rants about Osama and his dominant hand theory please.
:twisted: