9/11 truthers?!!?!?!?

[NickDagger]

building 7 seems to be brought up in every rebuttal because it received very little media attention.  it was barely reported so nobody knows much about it.  this seems suspicious considering only a small fire brought this building down.  Larry Silverstein (leaseholder of the WTC complex) was quoted the afternoon of 9/11, suggesting NYC Fire Dept. to "pull building 7".  He could have wanted to take down the building because it could have posed a hazard to other buildings or whatever (since a fire jumped from the towers and was burning on the roof) but this scenario is impossible. With a building of that size it would have taken a team of skilled people a few weeks to design and implement the demolition.

Read.

http://www.debunking911.com/pull.htm

[NickDagger]

Expand Quote

Chomsky is right, this movement really is like religious fantasicm.

If you click on that link you will find a VERY detailed breakdown of the causes of the WTC 7 building collapse.

But you don't give a shit.

You'll just repeat "LOOK IT LOOK LIKE DA DEMOLITIONS I SEEN ON DA TV AND THE DOCUMENTARY(that got everything else wrong)SAID SO, SO IT WAS OK!" For the rest of your days.

And psychologically you probably aren't able to really accept any contradicting evidence.

[close]

the same could be said for you  , i guess it comes down to distorted facts . things just dont add up for me and only time will tell

No.

[NickDagger]

The Ultimate 9/11 'Truth' Showdown: David Ray Griffin vs. Matt Taibbi

http://www.alternet.org/story/100688/the_ultimate_9_11_%27truth%27_showdown%3A_david_ray_griffin_vs._matt_taibbi/

[NickDagger]

Some highlights:

3. Matt Taibbi: Again, your answer here to the question of why a plotter would go blabbing his secrets on TV is basically well, er, maybe he wasn't that smart. Which is basically no answer at all. Make no mistake about it -- if Rudy Giuliani knew ahead of time that hundreds of New York firefighters were about to be murdered via bombs planted in the World Trade Center, there is no fucking way in hell he is going to start blabbing on television about the buildings coming down.

And this is what makes it so crazy that you're so willing to believe that Rudy Giuliani was complicit in the murder of hundreds, if not thousands, of people, including team after team of New York city firemen. You don't have any evidence at all; you're just a telephone-averse academic in the California suburbs indicting people left and right on the basis of what? Of nothing at all. One ambiguous statement in the media. Even worse, when pressed, you come up with a real whopper -- that Rudy okayed the wanton murder of thousands of Americans in order save the money his city would have had to pay out for asbestos removal!

Are you fucking kidding me? I'd harp on the fact that this doesn't even make sense (he murders New Yorkers in order to save them money? Not his personal money, but their -- our -- public money?), except that the obscenity of this accusation so totally outweighs its lack of sense.

And also, by the way, you might have picked up the telephone here, too. It took me five minutes to blow up that particular assertion, just by calling the New York City comptroller's office and asking the very obvious question of how much the city stood to gain financially by having its entire downtown district covered in toxic dust and incurring millions of dollars in overtime for its emergency personnel for the better part of three months.

According to that office, they spent $365 million extra in overtime costs in FY 2002 alone. They estimated the total cleanup costs -- from the initial year or so of cleanup -- at about $659 million. "We lost about $2 billion in taxes in 2002 and about $928 billion in 2003 alone," a spokesman for the comptroller's office told me when I called. When I mentioned that someone had a theory that the WTC was blown up to get New York out of an asbestos cleanup, the guy laughed. "Yeah, that makes sense," he says. "This way we had to clean it up anyway. Except it was spread all the way up to Canal Street now, on mountains of rubble and dead bodies."

If Rudy Giuliani green-lighted the 9/11 attacks in order to save the city money, he sure picked a bizarre strategy -- gutting his tax base, straining his services appropriations to the breaking point, and physically destroying some of his city's most valuable infrastructure. Doing all that to avoid a mandated asbestos cleanup makes about as much sense as hijacking a plane full of passengers, secretly disposing of them somewhere, and then faking its crash into the Pentagon while actually launching a missile, all in order to avoid an audit of the Department of Defense. I mean really, where do you get these ideas? Are you completely insane?

As for the charge that Rudy maybe did this to launch a run for president again, this would be laughable if it weren't so disgusting. You don't appear cowed at all by the act of accusing another man of murder, be it Rudy Giuliani, Richard Myers, Ted Olson, or whomever. In the real world, i.e. in the world where we can't publish things unless they're true, we don't make such accusations unless we have very compelling evidence. Not only do we not want to get sued, we actually don't want to be wrong. Because, you know, it's a little bit monstrous to call someone a murderer without proof. This is an intellectual flaw on your part, a rhetorical flaw, but more than that it's a moral flaw. And it pervades a great deal of your work.

5. Matt Taibbi: I was greatly saddened when I read this answer, because it forced me to rewrite the entire first chapter of my next book, The 10 Most regular Things I Have Read This Year. The notion that Pentagon officials blew up a section of their building, and then crashed something (a missile, a drone, whatever) into that same section of the Pentagon in order to hide evidence of financial malfeasance, and kill the relevant auditors, is so mind-bogglingly stupid that it almost belies comment.

In exactly what form do you think this "evidence" was kept? Do you think it was hammered into granite slabs and mounted, hieroglyph-style, on the building's walls? Why else would it be necessary to blow the area up? It should be noted that even U.S. Senators have for decades failed in their attempts to extract meaningful financial data from the Department of Defense, which has failed to comply with the Chief Financial Officer's Act since at least 1990 and is, in the words of former Senate aide and defense budget analyst Winslow Wheeler, "unauditable."

Despite its appalling accounting practices the DOD has never come close to changing its ways, mainly because there is absolutely nothing like political momentum in congress for starting an investigation into its spending habits. In fact, in the years after Rumsfeld's "shocking" announcement, a succession of both Republican and Democratic congresses were so horrified by the bad accounting that they increased defense spending every year by an average of $50 billion dollars a year!

The closest thing to a "threat" to the DOD's spending habits that it has experienced in recent years was a call by Dennis Kucinich for an investigation into the unaccounted-for defense funds. A call that was, like almost everything else Dennis Kucinich has asked for, completely ignored. You really think John Murtha's Democrats are going to start demanding an investigation into Pentagon spending? Or Ted Stevens's Republicans? There will never, ever be a serious movement to pry those books open -- and there certainly wasn't even a hint of one on the horizon back in 2001. You might have noticed that Democrats have since taken over both houses of congress, and there hasn't been so much as a whiff of interest in investigating defense spending. So exactly whom were they hiding the evidence from? Exactly whose easy access to Pentagon records did they fear? Yours? Or did your thinking not even go that far?

So the notion that Don Rumsfeld would a) announce a major accounting problem and then b) blow up a section of his own building the next day, murdering over a hundred people, in order to save the bureaucratically impregnable Department of Defense from the investigative ravages of Dennis Kucinich, or someone like him -- that is high, high comedy. I defy you to call any budget analyst in Washington, lay that theory on him, and not have your ears laughed off on the telephone. Oh, I forgot, you don't make phone calls.

Beyond that, even I mean, come on! Even if you wanted to kill someone possessing dangerous information, even if you wanted to hide evidence, do you honestly think the best way to accomplish this would be to fake an elaborate terrorist attack that would focus the eyes of the entire world on the "attack site," aiming a missile or a drone or, let's say, a passenger jet liner, at the office in question? Subtle! Now there's a plan with a very high probability of success! "I know -- we'll herd a bunch of innocent civilian passengers onto a remote-controlled plane, a flight which we've cleverly appropriated from American airlines, and crash it into the very spot in the Pentagon where we'll be exploding bombs at the moment of impact! And everyone will buy it because, as it happens, we'll also be conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center and blame it on Saudi religious radicals in order to advance an imperialist agenda that involves invading the secular dictatorship of Iraq in response!"

It's all so simple! Why didn't I think of that?

Don't you ever wonder about the curious coincidence of criminal interests extant in your muddled thinking? Department of Defense embezzlers just happening to develop a sudden need to commit mass murder to cover up financial malfeasance at the very moment when Rudy Giuliani decides he's on board with leveling the World Trade Center, in order to save New York from having to pay for an expensive asbestos cleanup -- right at the time Dick Cheney and George Bush happened to be plotting to seize Iraq's oil reserves using a violent "false flag" attack involving the murder to untold thousands of Americans? How fortunate that these criminally needy bodies found each other at just the same moment. And I thought Strangers on a Train was unrealistic.

Come on, you can't possibly believe this bullshit! Even the phrasing of your answer -- "that does not mean that a plausible theory cannot be provided" -- betrays the near-total absence of interest on your part in getting your theories to make any kind of sense. The "theory" you provide isn't even your own, just something you scared up while digging through the steadily-expanding mega-landfill of Truther lore -- and recently, it seems to me, perhaps even in response to my questions. This is the very definition of half-assed thinking, half-assed research.

As for the rest of these questions, I apologize to readers, but I'm just not going to bother. It's hopeless. Mr. Griffin is weaving a market niche for himself based upon a reality that every prosecutor and investigator in the world recognizes as unavoidable -- that in any reconstruction of events, there will always be discrepancies in witness statements. History is always an approximation, and in Mr. Griffin's case, he's tangling with the most unreliable of approximations; a politically-charged government report.

In a disaster as epic in scale as 9/11, officials at every level of government are going to be motivated to lie in order to cover their asses. They are going to say they were at their desks when they were not there; they're going to say they tried to make it to the scene as fast as they can when they actually sat on their thumbs and took their time. The same way that Soviet generals reported no failure of their air defenses on the day that 16 year-old Matthias Rust landed a Cessna in Red Square after limping through thousands of miles of heavily-armed Red airspace, our government is, of course, going to lie about how badly it fucked up on 9/11. This is not exactly big news.

But Mr. Griffin makes it big news. He refuses to accept government witness versions of events when it suits him, but when it suits him to accept them as gospel -- for instance, when discussing the reported takeoff times of the fighter planes departing Cape Cod on the morning of 9/11, or the pilot statements that the planes were traveling "full blower," well, in those cases he doesn't quibble.

My point about Griffin's napkin-scrawling math is that a sane person finds it much easier to reconcile the failure of fighter planes to arrive on scene a few minutes earlier -- perhaps they were only 90% of "full-blower," perhaps the planes took off a few minutes later, perhaps some witnesses are in error, perhaps every testifying member of our air defense network had bits of ass that needed covering -- than he does to assume the presence of a massive conspiracy to prevent the planes from arriving on time. So the numbers don't add up. So what? That just means the numbers are wrong, somewhere down the line, for some reason. Who cares?

That's particularly true when coupled with the damning fact that there is no actual evidence of such an order; Griffin is deducing the existence of a conspiracy based upon his idea of what happened in the gaps. In conspiracy theory, the real incontrovertible evidence is always over the bend somewhere -- hidden under the rubble, or lost in the missing minutes. This is the historical version of bite marks in the carrot that prove the Easter Bunny was in the house last night. Personally, I'm waiting for photos of the actual rabbit.

When I called defense analysts about the speed of the fighter planes involved, including people from Jane's Defense Weekly, I was told that nobody could authoritatively say exactly how fast, to the minute, those planes should have arrived. I'm sure one could make a guess, but that's all it would be, a guess. But David Ray Griffin, a desk-bound religion professor in California, deduces a vast conspiracy based upon his exact calculations of the speed of fighter planes? Why is that not every bit as silly as an Air Force Colonel harping about some hippie professor's doctoral thesis on Norse deities?

In the end it all comes down to what you believe. If you believe that events in life tend to have simple explanations, then you're not going to be very impressed by Griffin's arguments. If on the other hand you think that the people running this country spend their days plotting to create phantom civilian jet-liner flights, disappearing whole fuselages full of passengers, and then shooting missiles into the Pentagon in broad daylight in order to cover up embezzlement schemes if you think, in other words, that our government is run by the same people who cook up second-rate French spy movies or your mind instantly produces the word "crossbow" when asked to produce A MURDER WEAPON by a Mad Libs script well, then, you're probably going to enjoy Griffin's books.

Me, I don't know. I met with a U.S. Senator a few weeks back who told me about hundreds of millions of dollars in spare parts that the Air Force already has marked for disposal -- despite the fact that they haven't even been built yet. They're on order, you're paying for them, and yet they're going to throw them away as soon as they're ready. That's happening right out in the open. No one in the Pentagon is hiding it. They're not planning to shoot a missile at those invoices. Because they don't have to.

And why? Well, if you're a David Ray Griffin fan, it's because you're worrying about this bullshit instead. So if this kind of stuff impresses you, mazel tov. I'm sure our government is happy that you have a hobby.

p.s. Professor: as long as you decided to be a pedantic jerk about my spelling of "Olson," I should point out that the Pentagon is, in fact, the world's largest office building, with 17.5 miles of corridors and three times the office space of the Empire State Building. It can have up to 30,000 employees working in it at any time. But I agree, it sure doesn't look as tall as some of those other buildings. You're right there.

[NickDagger]

When Matt asks "what about the victims on the planes, the phone calls to loved ones, etc?"

This guy, and I assume 9/11 truthers in general point to voice-morphing technology.

WAT.

[TheFrontSeatLife]

I don't think 9/11 was an inside job, but I don't think the government is being totally honest with us either.

[TheFrontSeatLife]

Also, that interview between Taibi and the 9/11 truth guy is just annoying. The 9/11 Truther is as bad as a politician with the roundabout answers. Shit.

[SkeeterValentine.]

all i know is that alot of innocent people died for no reason.

im not even sure if i wanna find out it.

[NickDagger]

There are almost always clear and defined reasons that terrorists carry out attacks.

This does not mean their victims we're not innocent. They were.

But if we refuse to look at the reasons terrorists get motivated enough to carry out something like a suicide bombing-like our inconceivably bad record of supporting the most brutal regimes in the middle east for decades-then we will continue allowing our government to pursue policies that basically assure that we will be attacked again.

[beeda weeda]

PROOF!

[NickDagger]

One of the funniest things ever:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11818067/the_low_post_the_hopeless_stupidity_of_911_conspiracies/2

The specifics vary, but the basic gist of what They Say Happened goes something like this:

A group of power-hungry neocons, led by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Bush and others and organizationally represented by groups like the Project for the New American Century, seeks to bring about a "Pearl-Harbor-like event" that would accelerate a rightist revolution, laying the political foundation for invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Your basic Reichstag fire scenario, logical enough so far. Except in this story, the Reichstag fire is an immensely complicated media hoax; the conspirators plot to topple the World Trade Center and pin a series of hijackings on a group of Sunni extremists with alleged ties to Al Qaeda. How do they topple the Trade Center? Well, they make use of NORAD's expertise in flying remote-control aircraft and actually fly two such remote-control aircraft into the Towers (in another version of the story, they conspire with Al Qaeda terrorists to actually hijack the planes), then pass the planes off as commercial jetliners in the media. But it isn't the plane crashes that topple the buildings, but bombs planted in the Towers that do the trick.

For good measure -- apparently to lend credence to the hijacking story -- they then fake another hijacking/crash in the Pentagon, where there actually is no plane crash at all but instead a hole created by a cruise missile attack, fired by a mysterious "white jet" that after the attack circles the White House for some time, inspiring the attention of Secret Service agents who point at it curiously from the ground (apparently these White House Secret Service agents were not in on the plot, although FBI agents on scene at Ground Zero and in Shanksville and elsewhere were).

Lastly, again apparently to lend weight to the whole hijacking cover story, they burn a big hole in the ground in Pennsylvania and claim that a jet went down there, crashed by a bunch of brave fictional civilians who fictionally storm the fictional plane cabin. The real-life wife of one of the fictional heroes, Lisa Beamer, then writes a convincingly self-serving paean/memoir to her dead husband, again lending tremendous verisimilitude to the hijacking story. These guys are good!

Just imagine how this planning session between Bush, Rummy and Cheney must have gone:

BUSH: So, what's the plan again?

CHENEY: Well, we need to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. So what we've decided to do is crash a whole bunch of remote-controlled planes into Wall Street and the Pentagon, say they're real hijacked commercial planes, and blame it on the towelheads; then we'll just blow up the buildings ourselves to make sure they actually fall down.

RUMSFELD: Right! And we'll make sure that some of the hijackers are agents of Saddam Hussein! That way we'll have no problem getting the public to buy the invasion.

CHENEY: No, Dick, we won't.

RUMSFELD: We won't?

CHENEY: No, that's too obvious. We'll make the hijackers Al Qaeda and then just imply a connection to Iraq.

RUMSFELD: But if we're just making up the whole thing, why not just put Saddam's fingerprints on the attack?

CHENEY: (sighing) It just has to be this way, Dick. Ups the ante, as it were. This way, we're not insulated if things go wrong in Iraq. Gives us incentive to get the invasion right the first time around.

BUSH: I'm a total idiot who can barely read, so I'll buy that. But I've got a question. Why do we need to crash planes into the Towers at all? Since everyone knows terrorists already tried to blow up that building complex from the ground up once, why don't we just blow it up like we plan to anyway, and blame the bombs on the terrorists?

RUMSFELD: Mr. President, you don't understand. It's much better to sneak into the buildings ourselves in the days before the attacks, plant the bombs and then make it look like it was exploding planes that brought the buildings down. That way, we involve more people in the plot, stand a much greater chance of being exposed and needlessly complicate everything!

CHENEY: Of course, just toppling the Twin Towers will never be enough. No one would give us the war mandate we need if we just blow up the Towers. Clearly, we also need to shoot a missile at a small corner of the Pentagon to create a mightily underpublicized additional symbol of international terrorism -- and then, obviously, we need to fake a plane crash in the middle of fucking nowhere in rural Pennsylvania.

RUMSFELD: Yeah, it goes without saying that the level of public outrage will not be sufficient without that crash in the middle of fucking nowhere.

CHENEY: And the Pentagon crash -- we'll have to do it in broad daylight and say it was a plane, even though it'll really be a cruise missile.

BUSH: Wait, why do we have to use a missile?

CHENEY: Because it's much easier to shoot a missile and say it was a plane. It's not easy to steer a real passenger plane into the Pentagon. Planes are hard to come by.

BUSH: But aren't we using two planes for the Twin Towers?

CHENEY: Mr. President, you're missing the point. With the Pentagon, we use a missile, and say it was a plane.

BUSH: Right, but I'm saying, why don't we just use a plane and say it was a plane? We'll be doing that with the Twin Towers, right?

CHENEY: Right, but in this case, we use a missile. (Throws hands up in frustration) Don, can you help me out here?

RUMSFELD: Mr. President, in Washington, we use a missile because it's sneakier that way. Using an actual plane would be too obvious, even though we'll be doing just that in New York.

BUSH: Oh, OK.

RUMSFELD: The other good thing about saying that it was a passenger jet is that that way, we have to invent a few hundred fictional victims and account for a nonexistent missing crew and plane. It's always better when you leave more cover story to invent, more legwork to do and more possible holes to investigate. Doubt, legwork and possible exposure -- you can't pull off any good conspiracy without them.

BUSH: You guys are brilliant! Because if there's one thing about Americans -- they won't let a president go to war without a damn good reason. How could we ever get the media, the corporate world and our military to endorse an invasion of a secular Iraqi state unless we faked an attack against New York at the hands of a bunch of Saudi religious radicals? Why, they'd never buy it. Look at how hard it was to get us into Vietnam, Iraq the last time, Kosovo?

CHENEY: Like pulling teeth!

RUMSFELD: Well, I'm sold on the idea. Let's call the Joint Chiefs, the FAA, the New York and Washington, D.C., fire departments, Rudy Giuliani, all three networks, the families of a thousand fictional airline victims, MI5, the FBI, FEMA, the NYPD, Larry Eagleburger, Osama bin Laden, Noam Chomsky and the fifty thousand other people we'll need to pull this off. There isn't a moment to lose!

BUSH: Don't forget to call all of those Wall Street hotshots who donated $100 million to our last campaign. They'll be thrilled to know that we'll be targeting them for execution as part of our thousand-tentacled modern-day bonehead Reichstag scheme! After all, if we're going to make martyrs -- why not make them out of our campaign paymasters? Shit, didn't the Merrill Lynch guys say they needed a refurbishing in their New York offices?

RUMSFELD: Oh, they'll get a refurbishing, all right. Just in time for the "Big Wedding"!

ALL THREE: (cackling) Mwah-hah-hah!

[net lurk]

makes me sick every time i think about it.......no matter what we say it wont change nothing.

[Evil Kraken from the Arctic Sea]

One of the funniest things ever:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11818067/the_low_post_the_hopeless_stupidity_of_911_conspiracies/2

Expand Quote

The specifics vary, but the basic gist of what They Say Happened goes something like this:

A group of power-hungry neocons, led by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Bush and others and organizationally represented by groups like the Project for the New American Century, seeks to bring about a "Pearl-Harbor-like event" that would accelerate a rightist revolution, laying the political foundation for invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Your basic Reichstag fire scenario, logical enough so far. Except in this story, the Reichstag fire is an immensely complicated media hoax; the conspirators plot to topple the World Trade Center and pin a series of hijackings on a group of Sunni extremists with alleged ties to Al Qaeda. How do they topple the Trade Center? Well, they make use of NORAD's expertise in flying remote-control aircraft and actually fly two such remote-control aircraft into the Towers (in another version of the story, they conspire with Al Qaeda terrorists to actually hijack the planes), then pass the planes off as commercial jetliners in the media. But it isn't the plane crashes that topple the buildings, but bombs planted in the Towers that do the trick.

For good measure -- apparently to lend credence to the hijacking story -- they then fake another hijacking/crash in the Pentagon, where there actually is no plane crash at all but instead a hole created by a cruise missile attack, fired by a mysterious "white jet" that after the attack circles the White House for some time, inspiring the attention of Secret Service agents who point at it curiously from the ground (apparently these White House Secret Service agents were not in on the plot, although FBI agents on scene at Ground Zero and in Shanksville and elsewhere were).

Lastly, again apparently to lend weight to the whole hijacking cover story, they burn a big hole in the ground in Pennsylvania and claim that a jet went down there, crashed by a bunch of brave fictional civilians who fictionally storm the fictional plane cabin. The real-life wife of one of the fictional heroes, Lisa Beamer, then writes a convincingly self-serving paean/memoir to her dead husband, again lending tremendous verisimilitude to the hijacking story. These guys are good!

Just imagine how this planning session between Bush, Rummy and Cheney must have gone:

BUSH: So, what's the plan again?

CHENEY: Well, we need to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. So what we've decided to do is crash a whole bunch of remote-controlled planes into Wall Street and the Pentagon, say they're real hijacked commercial planes, and blame it on the towelheads; then we'll just blow up the buildings ourselves to make sure they actually fall down.

RUMSFELD: Right! And we'll make sure that some of the hijackers are agents of Saddam Hussein! That way we'll have no problem getting the public to buy the invasion.

CHENEY: No, Dick, we won't.

RUMSFELD: We won't?

CHENEY: No, that's too obvious. We'll make the hijackers Al Qaeda and then just imply a connection to Iraq.

RUMSFELD: But if we're just making up the whole thing, why not just put Saddam's fingerprints on the attack?

CHENEY: (sighing) It just has to be this way, Dick. Ups the ante, as it were. This way, we're not insulated if things go wrong in Iraq. Gives us incentive to get the invasion right the first time around.

BUSH: I'm a total idiot who can barely read, so I'll buy that. But I've got a question. Why do we need to crash planes into the Towers at all? Since everyone knows terrorists already tried to blow up that building complex from the ground up once, why don't we just blow it up like we plan to anyway, and blame the bombs on the terrorists?

RUMSFELD: Mr. President, you don't understand. It's much better to sneak into the buildings ourselves in the days before the attacks, plant the bombs and then make it look like it was exploding planes that brought the buildings down. That way, we involve more people in the plot, stand a much greater chance of being exposed and needlessly complicate everything!

CHENEY: Of course, just toppling the Twin Towers will never be enough. No one would give us the war mandate we need if we just blow up the Towers. Clearly, we also need to shoot a missile at a small corner of the Pentagon to create a mightily underpublicized additional symbol of international terrorism -- and then, obviously, we need to fake a plane crash in the middle of fucking nowhere in rural Pennsylvania.

RUMSFELD: Yeah, it goes without saying that the level of public outrage will not be sufficient without that crash in the middle of fucking nowhere.

CHENEY: And the Pentagon crash -- we'll have to do it in broad daylight and say it was a plane, even though it'll really be a cruise missile.

BUSH: Wait, why do we have to use a missile?

CHENEY: Because it's much easier to shoot a missile and say it was a plane. It's not easy to steer a real passenger plane into the Pentagon. Planes are hard to come by.

BUSH: But aren't we using two planes for the Twin Towers?

CHENEY: Mr. President, you're missing the point. With the Pentagon, we use a missile, and say it was a plane.

BUSH: Right, but I'm saying, why don't we just use a plane and say it was a plane? We'll be doing that with the Twin Towers, right?

CHENEY: Right, but in this case, we use a missile. (Throws hands up in frustration) Don, can you help me out here?

RUMSFELD: Mr. President, in Washington, we use a missile because it's sneakier that way. Using an actual plane would be too obvious, even though we'll be doing just that in New York.

BUSH: Oh, OK.

RUMSFELD: The other good thing about saying that it was a passenger jet is that that way, we have to invent a few hundred fictional victims and account for a nonexistent missing crew and plane. It's always better when you leave more cover story to invent, more legwork to do and more possible holes to investigate. Doubt, legwork and possible exposure -- you can't pull off any good conspiracy without them.

BUSH: You guys are brilliant! Because if there's one thing about Americans -- they won't let a president go to war without a damn good reason. How could we ever get the media, the corporate world and our military to endorse an invasion of a secular Iraqi state unless we faked an attack against New York at the hands of a bunch of Saudi religious radicals? Why, they'd never buy it. Look at how hard it was to get us into Vietnam, Iraq the last time, Kosovo?

CHENEY: Like pulling teeth!

RUMSFELD: Well, I'm sold on the idea. Let's call the Joint Chiefs, the FAA, the New York and Washington, D.C., fire departments, Rudy Giuliani, all three networks, the families of a thousand fictional airline victims, MI5, the FBI, FEMA, the NYPD, Larry Eagleburger, Osama bin Laden, Noam Chomsky and the fifty thousand other people we'll need to pull this off. There isn't a moment to lose!

BUSH: Don't forget to call all of those Wall Street hotshots who donated $100 million to our last campaign. They'll be thrilled to know that we'll be targeting them for execution as part of our thousand-tentacled modern-day bonehead Reichstag scheme! After all, if we're going to make martyrs -- why not make them out of our campaign paymasters? Shit, didn't the Merrill Lynch guys say they needed a refurbishing in their New York offices?

RUMSFELD: Oh, they'll get a refurbishing, all right. Just in time for the "Big Wedding"!

ALL THREE: (cackling) Mwah-hah-hah!

[close]

Best post in this topic so far. Head to head with the hulkhogan picture...

[grimcity]

9-11 was the result of religious/political zealots hijacking planes because of a US presence in Saudi Arabia.

Bush and Cheney didn't plan it, they just neglected to plan for any attack in any significant way.
Keep in mind that during the Clinton administration, many Republicans & Dems didn't see Al Qaeda as the significant threat that they were... when Clinton lobbed missiles on AQ targets, he was portrayed as "wagging the dog" by several in the House. 

Bush comes in, determined to turn the administration 180 degrees, and fails to follow up on Richard Clarke's concerns. It didn't help that Bush (and his dad) was beholden to several Saudi oil interests, some of which included family members of Bin Laden himself.

Apathy, conflicts of interest, ignorance and partisanship are why we had no preparations for an attack here.

[NickDagger]

These people are the worst.

[Buddha]

^ Unfortunately you fall into the same trap you are criticizing.  Just you becuase you now regurgitate Noam Chomski as opposed to Alex Jones and disguise it as your own opinion, doesn't mean you are any more neutral or objective on the subject.  It should also be noted that Noam Chomski has academic affiliations with a major Ivy league University and as such would at least explain why he is hesitant or speaking out against the 9/11 truth movement and other conspiracy theories.  That being said, I don't really identify with any side of this flame war.  While the dominant society is fed an outright fabricated reality, the 9/11 truth/ Alex Jones faction is also full of scare monger misinformation as well. 

[NickDagger]

^ Unfortunately you fall into the same trap you are criticizing.  Just you becuase you now regurgitate Noam Chomski as opposed to Alex Jones and disguise it as your own opinion, doesn't mean you are any more neutral or objective on the subject.  It should also be noted that Noam Chomski has academic affiliations with a major Ivy league University and as such would at least explain why he is hesitant or speaking out against the 9/11 truth movement and other conspiracy theories.  That being said, I don't really identify with any side of this flame war.  While the dominant society is fed an outright fabricated reality, the 9/11 truth/ Alex Jones faction is also full of scare monger misinformation as well. 

Oy vey.

First of all, Noam works at MIT, which is not a IVY league school. People have made asinine claims about Noam working there because many of the people who end up working for the defense department come out of there-you could try bringing that up if you wanted. But remember, Noam started working there as a Linguistics professor, and only started speaking out on US and world actions when the Vietnam war started. And Ironically enough the very first article he ever published on the subject was entitled, basically what you just said....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Responsibility_of_Intellectuals

I personally find it great that Noam works at MIT, and I hope as many people that might go into defense/high government offices are forced to listen to him as possible. There is also a great lecture he recently gave at West Point on youtube if you're interested.

Secondly, no one has spoken better to the kind of institutionalized thinking that you're referring to, better than Noam. Show me someone who has been a more ardent critic. Please.

Thirdly, show an instance where Noam has intentionally not spoke out against something the government/media/etc has done in the past. Your comment that I "regurgitate" whatever he says, is pretty pointless unless you're claiming something that I've posted that he's said to be inaccurate.

Fourthly. why the fuck should Noam NOT be hesitant to support the 9/11 truthers?! The claims are all a combination of easily proven wrong, and regular logic...you know as shown repeatedly here in this very thread. If you can convince us otherwise, feel free. I mean fuck. The dude's 80 years old, do you want him-someone who isn't even in the structural engineer or really any related field to give these idiots some kind of validation? Sorry, that's not his job, he said if they have evidence, then present it to people that are in the field. To people who aren't experts in the field, the video that the team from Purdue produced looks pretty convincing, and until the truthers can provide stronger evidence to people in that field-why should the laymen folk like Chomsky and I be convinced that something so insanely illogical happened?

Let's tango.

[frisco]

like someone said before, no one will ever know what truly happened, or if the bush administration had prior knowledge to the attacks. all everyone has is speculation on a massive scale

however, the events that went down at the pentagon are far too shady just to pass up, the small hole, the jet fuel burning everything? the whole thing seems downright wrong. but it brings up the question, what happened to the 'dead' passengers, if it was faked? the u.s would be capable of setting them up with new lives, money and resources but thats super far fetched

the whole thing makes me dizzy when you take in to account all the shit that happened

wtc7 though seems ridiculously out of place, it just 'happened' to go down on 9/11 due to some random 'fire', yeah right.

[TheFrontSeatLife]

To me, the Matt Taibbi's (sp?) Low Post 9/11 debunking article was more convincing than Loose Change Zeitgeist propaganda which employs just as many scare tactics as mainstream news.

[Buddha]

Oy vey.

First of all, Noam works at MIT, which is not a IVY league school. People have made asinine claims about Noam working there because many of the people who end up working for the defense department come out of there-you could try bringing that up if you wanted. But remember, Noam started working there as a Linguistics professor, and only started speaking out on US and world actions when the Vietnam war started. And Ironically enough the very first article he ever published on the subject was entitled, basically what you just said....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Responsibility_of_Intellectuals

I personally find it great that Noam works at MIT, and I hope as many people that might go into defense/high government offices are forced to listen to him as possible. There is also a great lecture he recently gave at West Point on youtube if you're interested.

Secondly, no one has spoken better to the kind of institutionalized thinking that you're referring to, better than Noam. Show me someone who has been a more ardent critic. Please.

Thirdly, show an instance where Noam has intentionally not spoke out against something the government/media/etc has done in the past. Your comment that I "regurgitate" whatever he says, is pretty pointless unless you're claiming something that I've posted that he's said to be inaccurate.

Fourthly. why the fuck should Noam NOT be hesitant to support the 9/11 truthers?! The claims are all a combination of easily proven wrong, and regular logic...you know as shown repeatedly here in this very thread. If you can convince us otherwise, feel free. I mean fuck. The dude's 80 years old, do you want him-someone who isn't even in the structural engineer or really any related field to give these idiots some kind of validation? Sorry, that's not his job, he said if they have evidence, then present it to people that are in the field. To people who aren't experts in the field, the video that the team from Purdue produced looks pretty convincing, and until the truthers can provide stronger evidence to people in that field-why should the laymen folk like Chomsky and I be convinced that something so insanely illogical happened?

Let's tango.

My reasons for being critical of Noam Chomski's stance on this debate are based on some of the things you just highlighted.  And when I say critical, I am not saying he is absolutely wrong, I just question the motives behind such an opinion.  For someone who has spoken out against the orwelian nature of North American mass media and various nefarious activities conducted by the C.I.A (I.E Nicaragua/contras), it just seems pretty hard to believe that he would genuinely side with the official story.  Having such an opinion in this case is completely counter inuitive and made void.  As much as Noam Chomski criticizes mass media, he also exists in it, maybe he isn't trying to bite the hand that feeds him?  He did side with the Warren Commission regarding the JFK Assassination.   

[sergioflorez]

http://www.aftenbladet.no/english/englishcomment/article628550.ece

[kilgore.]

PROOF!

the fuck kinda shit are you trying to pull?

[NickDagger]

Expand Quote

Oy vey.

First of all, Noam works at MIT, which is not a IVY league school. People have made asinine claims about Noam working there because many of the people who end up working for the defense department come out of there-you could try bringing that up if you wanted. But remember, Noam started working there as a Linguistics professor, and only started speaking out on US and world actions when the Vietnam war started. And Ironically enough the very first article he ever published on the subject was entitled, basically what you just said....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Responsibility_of_Intellectuals

I personally find it great that Noam works at MIT, and I hope as many people that might go into defense/high government offices are forced to listen to him as possible. There is also a great lecture he recently gave at West Point on youtube if you're interested.

Secondly, no one has spoken better to the kind of institutionalized thinking that you're referring to, better than Noam. Show me someone who has been a more ardent critic. Please.

Thirdly, show an instance where Noam has intentionally not spoke out against something the government/media/etc has done in the past. Your comment that I "regurgitate" whatever he says, is pretty pointless unless you're claiming something that I've posted that he's said to be inaccurate.

Fourthly. why the fuck should Noam NOT be hesitant to support the 9/11 truthers?! The claims are all a combination of easily proven wrong, and regular logic...you know as shown repeatedly here in this very thread. If you can convince us otherwise, feel free. I mean fuck. The dude's 80 years old, do you want him-someone who isn't even in the structural engineer or really any related field to give these idiots some kind of validation? Sorry, that's not his job, he said if they have evidence, then present it to people that are in the field. To people who aren't experts in the field, the video that the team from Purdue produced looks pretty convincing, and until the truthers can provide stronger evidence to people in that field-why should the laymen folk like Chomsky and I be convinced that something so insanely illogical happened?

Let's tango.

[close]

My reasons for being critical of Noam Chomski's stance on this debate are based on some of the things you just highlighted.  And when I say critical, I am not saying he is absolutely wrong, I just question the motives behind such an opinion.  For someone who has spoken out against the orwelian nature of North American mass media and various nefarious activities conducted by the C.I.A (I.E Nicaragua/contras), it just seems pretty hard to believe that he would genuinely side with the official story.  Having such an opinion in this case is completely counter inuitive and made void.  As much as Noam Chomski criticizes mass media, he also exists in it, maybe he isn't trying to bite the hand that feeds him?  He did side with the Warren Commission regarding the JFK Assassination.   

Basically everything you just said was wrong, again.

1.)Whatis Noam's stance in this debate? I sure as fuck haven't been convinced by the loose change videos, or Alex Jones, or any other of the evidence I've seen presented. And neither has Noam, or a lot of the people in this thread. Are we in on it as well? Should Noam pretend that he is convinced by something he is not? He said that the theory presented seemed highly unlikely and extremely illogical. Which, as presented here, it is. Unless you can convince us otherwise, then criticizing Noam's "stance" is silly. What he said is about as basic as you can get. If you have strong evidence take it to leaders in the field. And unless you're saying that most Engineering departments at most Universities in the nation are also a part of the conspiracy(Along with Noam, and myself, all the victims, possibly their families, etc)-then why should anyone else believe you? As he said, you simply cannot become an expert in engineering by watching a few videos made by other people who do not have backgrounds in the field. So the fact that to some it looks suspicious, alone, isn't evidence of anything. Look at the picture at the top of the page-does that look like a controlled demolition to you?

Furthermore, as Noam said, this conspiracy is a great distraction to millions of citizens. So the government likes that people are spending all their free time on it. Of course the attacks were awful, but let's suppose that they were carried out by the government-why is this worse, than anything else they've done lately? Simply because the victims we're our own citizens?

Let's look at some numbers here:

Deaths on 9/11:   2,999

Compared with:

Deaths of Iraqis since invasion:   At the most conservative estimate 43,000, but many sources indicate the number is much higher, possibly even as high as 1.2 million.

How about deaths caused by the sanctions against Iraq?  Try at least 500,000 child deaths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_sanctions

The modern Iraqi economy had been highly dependent on oil exports: In 1989, the oil sector comprised 61% of the GNP. A major drawback of this over-dependence has been the narrowing of the economic base during the last three decades, with the agricultural sector rapidly declining in the 1970s. So some claim that the post-1990 sanctions had a particularly devastating effect on Iraq’s economy and food security levels of the population.[12]

Shortly after the sanctions were imposed, the Iraqi government developed a system of free food rations comprising of 1000 calories per person/day or 40% of the daily requirements, which an estimated 60% of the population relied on for a vital part of their sustenance. With the introduction of the Oil-for-Food Programme in 1997, this situation gradually improved. In May 2000 a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) survey noted that almost half the children under 5 years suffered from diarrhoea, in a country where the population is marked by its youth, with 45% being under 14 years of age in 2000. Power shortages, lack of spare parts and insufficient technical know-how lead to the breakdown of many modern facilities.[12]

The overall literacy rate in Iraq had been 78% in 1977 and 87% for adult women by 1985, but declined rapidly since then. Between 1990 and 1998, over one fifth of Iraqi children stopped enrolling in school, consequently increasing the number of non-literates and losing all the gains made in the previous decade. The 1990s also saw a dramatic increase in child labor, from a virtually non-existent level in the 1980s. The per capita income in Iraq dropped from $3510 in 1989 to $450 in 1996, heavily influenced by the rapid devaluation of the Iraqi dinar.[12]

Iraq had been one of the few countries in the Middle East that invested in women’s education. But this situation changed from the late eighties on with increasing militarisation and a declining economic situation. Consequencently the economic hardships and war casualties in the last decades have increased the number of women-headed households and working women.[12]

Some researchers say that over a million Iraqis, disproportionately children, died as a result of the sanctions, [13] although other estimates have ranged as low as 170,000 children. [9] [14] [15] UNICEF announced that 500,000 child deaths have occurred as a result of the sanctions.[16] The sanctions resulted in high rates of malnutrition, lack of medical supplies, and diseases from lack of clean water. Chlorine, was desperately needed to disinfect water supplies, but it was banned from the country due to the potential that it may be used as part of a chemical weapon. On May 10, 1996, Madeleine Albright (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations at the time) appeared on 60 Minutes and was confronted with statistics of half a million children under five having died as a result of the sanctions. She replied "we think the price is worth it", though in her 2003 autobiography she wrote of her response (answering a loaded question):[17][18]

Do any of the 9/11 Truthers care about these deaths as much?

Or the horrible things America has done around the world in general? Do they care about our crimes in Latin America, that you point out, Noam has been one of the only and loudest voices against? Do they care?

They spend all of their time in resources on this one event in America, that, while tragic, even if it were true is nothing compared to the well-documented crimes we have committed.

Awesome.

2.)Noam exists in Mass Media? Are you high? Not in America he doesn't. He is constantly booked on TV stations around the world, but through out his career he has very, very rarely been allowed to be on main US media. This is well documented. You should check out Manufacturing Consent, it's on google video-the reasons for this are discussed. Noam is the most quoted man alive today...and how many Americans even know who he is?

3.)JFK is another distraction. Read his book Rethinking Camelot, he makes a very good case that Kennedy was not the "dove" on military interventionism that the conventional elite view says he was(ironic that many conspiracy theorists accept this view of Kennedy when convenient for them, as presented by people like Robert McNamara), this view of Kennedy is motivation for most of the conspiracy theorists on the matter.
 

[NickDagger]

wtc7 though seems ridiculously out of place, it just 'happened' to go down on 9/11 due to some random 'fire', yeah right.

http://www.debunking911.com/pull.htm

[Albatross]

A man provides a 3rd, sort of middle ground, conflicting viewpoint that outlines how the two concurrent conflicting viewpoints are actually being fed by those in power only to confuse us enough to keep us interested in the attacks rather than real, more severe threats to our nation? ( I am canadian but i am also a realist and my country is run by harper ).  Anyone else feel the irony?

This only manages to confuse me more. It makes perfect sense given the lack of official and proven information we have received on the attacks, but lack of information has never been considered a proving ground for anything. This theory neither strengthens or weakens either argument so bicker away.


On a side note im hyped on the dude thats always talking about/quoting noam, one of my all time favorite sociopolitical voices. I dont necessarily agree with you but i like your sources.

[ARFARFARF]

I know I'm new so I don't count...But I was VERY into this for a long time. I saw Zeitgeist and flipped the fuck out for like 6 months, reading everything I could get my hands on, on both sides of the debate. Oddly enough it was this guy's Youtube channel that answered all my questions, effectively ending my obsession.

http://www.youtube.com/user/RKOwens4

Theres plenty of videos, but really the explanation of WTC7 (which was my main concern) is what got me. Just thought I'd share.

[NickDagger]

A man provides a 3rd, sort of middle ground, conflicting viewpoint that outlines how the two concurrent conflicting viewpoints are actually being fed by those in power only to confuse us enough to keep us interested in the attacks rather than real, more severe threats to our nation? ( I am canadian but i am also a realist and my country is run by harper ).  Anyone else feel the irony?

What? No.

[Albatross]

Expand Quote

A man provides a 3rd, sort of middle ground, conflicting viewpoint that outlines how the two concurrent conflicting viewpoints are actually being fed by those in power only to confuse us enough to keep us interested in the attacks rather than real, more severe threats to our nation? ( I am canadian but i am also a realist and my country is run by harper ).  Anyone else feel the irony?

[close]

What? No.

kennedy assassination declassification parallel rings a bell. given, he was kind of debunking the 9/11 conspiracy while doing it but the point he was driving across was not that 9/11 is real, but that we have far more important things to focus our efforts on. He suggests that the government realizes this and simply feeds the fire for these distractions while larger more important issues that are worth our time, effort, and protest, go unnoticed.

I dont think his side of the 9/11 debate has all that much to do with it, despite that being the grounds for the interview. i might just be out of it though, lately i only post right when i wake up pre coffee so i wouldnt be suprised if im a bit outta line.

[THRILL_HOUSE]

Expand Quote

what do you beleive about the subject ND?

[close]

I don't believe it was a conspiracy perpetrated by our government, or that the buildings were blown up.

End of fucking discussion

[TheFrontSeatLife]

Well, Loose Changers, looks who's leaving information out now.

It's good enough for me.