Another terrorist attack depends entirely on the Bush administration anyway. After all, they were behind the first one.

I don’t know about bait… it’s mainstream opinion the Bush administration is behind 9/11. In fact those who still believe it was bin Laden are pretty much the ones in the conspiracy theory camp.

Homeland Security is fulfilling its’ mandate treehugger - keep the people afraid, a fearful and distracted population is so much easier to control than a thinking one.

Whats that age-old question? Something along the lines of “who stands to gain from this?”

-Tens, nay HUNDREDS of billions of dollars in “defense” spending.
-Steady erosion of civil rights and freedoms.
-Attacking Iraq for “oil-security”.
-Arbitrary distribution of reconstruction and service contracts (Haliburton).
-Control of populace through fear and gut-feeling terror warnings. (You said it yourself SL)
-Potential “Permanent Republican Majority”
-Distracting populace from increasingly conservative and elitist social policies.

Just like it is widely believed that the military-industrial complex that we were warned about was complicit in JFK’s death, more and more people are seeing 9/11 as an excuse for certain Cabals to do certain things.

There is a troubling trend for people who believe that 9/11 was an inside job to be dismissed as crackpots and conspiracy theorists. When does a view of a certain event move from the much-dismissed and villfied realm of “conspiracy theory” into the realm of the plausible?

I know, I know, I’m another crackpot. But to think that certain elements of the Bush Administration and the Military Industrial complex “just wouldn’t do that” or “couldn’t possibly get away with it” gives them, respectively, too much credit and too little credit.

The problem with all conspiracy theories, Throbbin, is that they string together a series of so-called unanswered questions that MUST together equal a credible theory with little or no facts to back to back them up. The “9-11 was perpetrated by Bush & co” argument is no different in that respect and even more puzzling considering the amount factual evidence against the idea.

Whooee! I reckon maybe the story of the century might be the tale of how the world’s greatest democracy transformed into a police state with the willing consent of a fearful populace.

That won’t be big enough fer the comin’ millenium. The story’ll be how Earth became uninhabitable and humans nearly went extinct on accounta climate change and radiation poisoning. Mutant bloggers in 2999 will post their choices fer Story of the Millenium to their interstellar blogs from their space station homes.

JB

“When the 9/11 commission conducts a “thorough investigation”, but is a purely partisan body and releases incomplete or blacked-out report, one gets suspicious.”

American conservative felt that the 9/11 commission was a purely partisan (anti-Bush) body too.

“I mentioned JFK for a reason - because virtually nobody believes Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone anymore - even though it was the simplest explanation to blame him.”

I’m not sure that’s true…and it’s certainly not relevant. Most Americans believe in angels. That has no bearing at all on their existence.

As you may be aware, a huge, second study of the Kennedy assassination has just concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald did, in fact, act alone.

Bottom line: I have yet to read a single coherent theory that even begins to make more sense than the mainstream version, beyond a kind of generalized, unarticulated conspiracy. Do I believe everything about 9/11 (or the Kennedy assassination, or the death of elvis) is known? Nope. Do I believe that the overwhelming preponderence of evidence supports the premise of an Al Qaeda planned and executed attack MORE than a vast, secret conspiracy which has miraculously remained undiscovered? Yes.

“I don’t think thats relevant either.”

The point is that folks on either side of a partisan fence were bound to be unhappy with and distrustful of the Commission’s findings, as you were.

On the second Kennedy study: Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Norton, 2007, 1632 p. ISBN 0393045250.

“In a statement that I’m sure you’ll rip apart one way or another, I’ll say that any good conspiracy is one that isn’t discovered (or proven).”

Shrug. There’s an invisible, intangible alien sitting on your desk right now controlling your thoughts. You can’t prove I’m wrong, can you?

‘Where’s the plane that hit the pentagon?”

I’m sorry, what does that mean? Small pieces of debris were recovered (and photographed), and the fuselage section burned up.

Why did building 7 fall?

Well, the working hypothesis of the 2004 interim report by the National Insitute of STandards and technology was that “at a local failure in a critical column, caused by damage from either fire or falling debris from the collapses of the two towers, progressed first vertically and then horizontally to result in “a disproportionate collapse of the entire structure”. They will publish their final report at the end of this year sometime.

““extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.

Exactly. Carl Sagan was as scathingly funny in his writings on conspiracy theorists in the pages of Sceptical Inquirer and Sceptic Magazine as he was about those who blindly accept the government press release in The Demon Haunted World. He believed in critical thought…applied to EVERY side of an argument.

So…present a hypothesis here, and we’ll weigh your evidence against the evidence supporting the conclusions of the 9/11 inquiry and the NIST study. And then we’ll decide which scenario is more probable.

Well, actually, if you recall, it wasn’t ” a handful of Arabs in a cave”. Prior to 9/11, it was a fairly well established network, operating relatively in the open in countries like Afghanistan and Sudan, and in several of the Arab countries. With a track record of terrorist attacks.

I’m a sceptic (I really am, you know), and I am examining two hypotheses.

One says this was an Al Qaeda initiative, pretty much start to finish. In support of that hypothesis, we have the their claim of responsibility, every major inquiry conducted to date, the fact that they had conducted other terrorist attacks, links between the attackers and Al Qaeda, and so on.

The other hypothesis is…well, there isn’t one, really; just that somehow several thousand people from several dozen orgnizations and agencies somehow managed to stage and then cover up a mass murder on a scale completely unprecedented, and somehow hoodwinked hundreds of thousands of investigators (many of whom were, presumably Democrats, or folks who’d be delighted to expose a conspiracy, and media (including all the best investigative reporters on the planet, many of whom would be delighted to expose a conspiracy) and the world at large.

Believe what you like. For me…well, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I await the extraordinary proof. Haven’t seen it yet.

Of course, if it turns out I’m wrong, I’m REALLY gonna look like an asshole.

But hey…some would say it’s not that big a stretch.

I work in construction and I know several engineers. To knock down the WTC towers with 2 airplanes full of fuel is patently impossible. It’s probably even impossible with a plane containing a large amount of TNT. Think of a plane hitting the WTC as a bullet striking a STOP sign in redneck country. The stop sign doesn’t fall down.

There is positively no reasonable explanation for WTC building 7 falling down. Which is why the administration has not even tried to offer up an explanation, believing (wisely) that saying nothing is far more convincing than saying anything that could be refuted.

And finally, there is a growing number of 747 pilots, some with 30 years of experience, who say that the Pentagon attack by an Arab who couldn’t fly a twin Cessna engine, to somehow commandeer an airplane, fly to the Pentagon, orchestrate a perfect 333 degree turn, and fly along the lawn without so much as disturbing the grass, and then land in the shape of a Cruise Missile without any airplane wreckage whatsoever.

The main refutation I’ve heard that Bush can’t be behind 9/11 is because he’s an idiot. Nobody said Bush had to be behind 9/11. All that is necessary to know is that he and many of his friends stood to gain by this attack, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. In fact the belief that Bush was behind 9/11 is so mainstream that I hear major news programs insinuate so almost every day that passes. They go almost to the extreme edge of simply saying “the neo-cons masterminded 9/11″ without actually saying it. At this point it’s not even whether they did, but how they did it.

One last thing. No building made of structurally reinforced steel can fall at the speed of gravity (as the WTC buildings did) without each and every support column failing simultaneously. The idea that 2 airplanes knocked down 3 buildings at free-fall speed is not only unlikely. It’s utterly and irrefutably impossible by the laws of physics. Oh and, did I mention it would be the first time in history that a fire or airplane did collapse a building? Yes. It would.

How about this - it was deliberately blown up (or imploded) because the owner of the WTC buildings (including 7) had just taken out a hunormous insurance policy on them only weeks prior…and stood to gain billions of dollars if it “collapsed”. How’s that one Balb?

BTW - no one (on this blog) thinks you are an asshole, or would call you one if you are wrong. After reading your writings, we would expect nothing less of you than your very best in defending your rationale and convictions.

As a totally unrelated aside - I just finished watching Sicko. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it! I know Balb has misgivings because of Moore’s style, but it’s just too provocative and common-sense to miss!

(The asshole comment was self deprecating humour to reassure new arrival Jesse that we don’t take ourselves too seriously here. Don’t worry, Throbbin’, I ain’t getting all sensitive ;)

Welcome, Jesse, by the way…always excellent to get a new perspective.

“I don’t know if he was in league with anyone.”

Oh, but he must have been. Think about the implications of your scenario. He was obviously in league with Al Qaeda, because their pilots flew the planes. You don’t deny that, do you? And with Bush, because he’s behind it all, right? And with the air force, because, as remarked above, it couldn’t just have been a coincident that they were conducting exercises on 9/11. And with ALL the engineers and investigators and journalists who combed through the wreckage and carefully eliminated any trace of the demolition. Not to mention the designers of the demolition, the suppliers of the tons of explosives, the workies who actually smuggled the tons of explosives into the buildings, placed them, wired them, and programmed the detonation, all without a single detectable trace, before or after. And of course, the insurance investigators were totally hoodwinked as well.

So…were all these thousands of conspirator neo-conservative republicans, completely sworn to secrecy? All the investigators and cops and journalists and engineers too? Phew. That must have taken a heck of a lot of work. And not a single leak or trace of evidence in six years. Damn, that’s a good conspiracy. Especially for an adminstration that has shown itself incapable of covering up relatively minor misdemeanours like the Plame affair. But they’ve managed to keep this completely under wraps. Astonishing, really.

“as Jesse and thousands of others have observed, the buildings toppled at free fall speeds, and no steel structure in the history of the planet has ever collapsed due to a strike by a plane.”

This sounds like mock-science copied from someone’s conspiracy website. I actually don’t understand what you’re talking about here. Could you explain in plain talk?

My sensitivity? You’re one of the good guys, dude. You can say what you want.

“The biggest evidence for some sort of controlled demolition is the fact that they faell at free fall speeds. No collapsing building with their structure should have been able to do that. You know damn well what I was trying to say in my post.”

Umm…no, I don’t. I know what the universal rate of accelleration for falling objects is. I watch the videos. I see objects falling in a way that seems to me to be consistent with the lawas of physics, as I understand them. I am not being wilfully obtuse here: I don’t understand what you’re saying. Can you rephrase?

“Regarding the owner of the buildings - who knows if he was involved, maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. The point is he could have been, and he had alot to gain from their destruction.”

My point was this: any alternative explanation has to be weighed for plausibility against the current explanation. Your suggestion that the building owner was a co-conspirator introduces a level of complexity to the “conspiracy” that approaches the utterly ludicrous (see response 29), as do any of the other interesting conspiracy theories I’ve read.

So to state the obvious, one more time, I have two choices: accept that the most obvious explanation is the correct one, with some anomalies that are currently under investigation: or accept that an administration incapable of covering up its own corruption somehow pulled off, in PERFECT secrecy, a plan involving thousands of people, dozens of government agencies, tons of explosives carefully placed throughout one of the most heavily populated and highly secured pieces of real estate on the planet, and have kept it perfect secret for six years. Naw.

“You quote the Nationa Institute of Standards & Technology, which sounds like an awfully legitimate and edumacated organization…”

Ummm…I’m sorry, is that phrasing supposed to somehow diminish their legitimacy? Would you like to call them poopy heads, too? Will that strengthen your argument?

“…who attributed building 7’s fall to ” a local failure in a critical column”.

More correctly, whose preliminary findings do, and whose final report is due later this year after an addition year of data analysis. Yes.

“Have you even watched the videos?”

Yes, several times.

“Check them out, and let me know if you believe that damage to a single, even critical, column would make a building like this collapse at a uniform speed, in an almost perfectly even pattern.”

Throbbin, ever see the video of the collapse of the Tacoma bridge? New engineering principles, tortional stress, unanticipated resonances…the bridge appears to be literally dancing itself to death. New engineering subjected to new stresses do things no-one can anticipate; it took about thirty years for them to figure out why Tacoma collapsed the way it did.

I’ll say it again: thousands of engineers, presumably not all neoconservative conspirators, have watched this video, poked through the site, and analyzed what happened. So far there is NO evidence for a deliberate demolition, beyond the fact that the building collapsed in a way that reminded some observers of one. (Funny…you’d think a conspiracy able to deceive ALL the world’s media, and ALL those investigators, would have figured out a more convincing looking collapse, eh?)

“Also - wanted to ask you what your definition is of a “theory” in this case…”

Any alternative take on the events that doesn’t involve a greater leap of credibility than the existing version.

“I am trying to show how the maintstream version fo events just isn’t plausible”.

Well, your key argument seems to be something about the speed of falling objects, so I look forward to your restatement of that so I can get your point.