US Releasing 9/11 Flight 77 Pentagon Crash Tape

Robotron23 writes "The BBC is reporting that the US government has decided to release the videotape depicting the crash of Flight 77 into the Pentagon building, nearly five years after the 9/11 attacks. The government had previously withheld the tape due to 'ongoing investigations' into al-Qaeda's Zacarias Moussaoui. A government representative commented that they 'hope that this video will put to rest the conspiracy theories.'"

Comments

You can't stop the paranoia.

[Kelson]

You can't put the conspiracy theories to rest. They already believe you're covering something up, so if you release a report that shows...

• No reliable evidence of alien spacecraft has been found, ever.
• The Cydonia region on Mars (the "face") appears to be a natural formation, and not ruins of an ancient Martian civilization.
• We really did land astronauts on the moon.
• An airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, not a missile.

...the conspiracy theorists will just claim you've fabricated or altered the "new" evidence.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[Microlith]

Paranoia is self-perpetuating.

Any rational explanation is simply "ignoring the facts" and any evidence that counters is faked.

I bet the Fark article on this is full of references to thermite, missiles, and crazy conspiracy theories all over again.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[MindStalker]

Obviously it was a conspiracy moron.. The issue is was it Al-Quadas conspiracy or the US governments.. OR both..

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[spun]

Why did you put a large extra space in between "conspiracy" and "too" in the last sentence?

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[Julian Morrison]

Yeah. Bush being eeeevil, has dedicated the last four and a bit CPU-years of the Pentagon's secret beowulf cluster of Crays to rendering the snazziest pseudo-real computer graphics since that Final Fantasy movie they made so much fuss over a few years back. All in order to cover up the huge Texaco oil truck backing up to the wall, a guy in a ten-gallon hat getting out, unreeling and lighting a fuse, and scarpering in an unmarked black helicopter full of G-men.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Yes, but the point is, plane or missile, something *did* hit the Pentagon, and the government was involved if only by accident by not shooting down planes that failed to transmit transponder codes or follow orders.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[drinkypoo]

Dude, everyone can tell you're faking. The conditioning not only hides the fnords, but also the space that is left behind when you can't see them.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[kanzels]

I agree ... but still I'm curious what did hit Pentagon :(

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[Martin Blank]

That would be "an airplane." Check with the people on the nearby highway who saw it pass not far over their heads. It's also not hard to see the imprint of the plane in the photographs.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[EdwinBoyd]

Sigh, this has been reported a million times, pre 09/11 Norad had very limited ability to track non transponding aircraft within continental North America. Think of the coverage as a donut, with the most effective sensors on the outside. NORAD was originally designed to track objects trying to enter US airspace, not objects originating from it.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[ehrichweiss]

While I'm sure that someone is going to state that NORAD could respond within 10 minutes of a plane deviating from its flight plan, this is actually not the case as according to the chain of command that is required to get interceptors in the air will take the better part of 1 hour. Typically someone will cite the Payne Stewart incident but that didn't really happen in 11 minutes, it was more like 1 hr and 11 minutes since the plane crossed from Eastern to Central time; this is documented, though not overtly mentioned in the report so most think it was 11 minutes.

"At 0933:38 EDT (6 minutes and 20 seconds after N47BA acknowledged the previous clearance), the controller instructed N47BA to change radio frequencies and contact another Jacksonville ARTCC controller. The controller received no response from N47BA. The controller called the flight five more times over the next 4 1/2 minutes but received no response.

About 0952 CDT,7 a USAF F-16 test pilot from the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base (AFB), Florida, was vectored to within 8 nm of N47BA. About 0954 CDT, at a range of 2,000 feet from the accident airplane and an altitude of about 46,400 feet, the test pilot made two radio calls to N47BA but did not receive a response".
www.ntsb.gov/Publictn/2000/AAB0001.htm

However, that being said, whether it was negligence or conspiracy, the thing we need to concentrate on is that WE NEED THAT MONKEY OUT OF THE WHITEHOUSE!!!

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[rossifer]

An airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, not a missile.

The alternate conspiracy theory I heard on the Pentagon crash was centered around who flew the airliner into the Pentagon, not whether or not an airliner flew into the Pentagon.

It's not all that hard to believe that an airliner flew into WTC2, since just about everyone on the planet has seen footage from a dozen cameras which show a 767/757 hitting the tower. Four planes didn't reach their destinations, four impacts are noted.

As for the alternate conspiracy theory, there are only a few remotely relevant facts. They are centered around the lack of credible identification for the 19 passengers labelled as the terrorists.

• First fact: the Dulles airport video tapes purported to show part of the Flight 77 check-in lack the camera id and time data that should be present on any airport surveillance capture.
• Second fact: the tapes would have to be taken 30 minutes after sunrise, but appear to show bright sunlight and short shadows for people and cars outside the terminal.
• Third fact: the sounds that appear to be the terrorists on the radio are extremely short and badly distorted, leaving little chance for actual identification.
• Fourth fact: people made several phone calls from the first three aircraft before they crashed, but there has been no public release of information that they physically described the terrorists (as middle-eastern or arabic).
• Fifth fact: flight 77 hit the Pentagon in the most heavily reinforced and least populated part of the building, a side that was not on a direct track from takeoff to the Pentagon.

Personally, I find these facts insufficient to dispute the government's conclusions

• There's no compelling reason to doubt the motive or the opportunity of radical islamist hijackers on 9/11. The presented story of the hijackers successful in seizing the aircraft is less astonishing than any alternative explanation.
• All of the cases where the hijackers were supposedly spotted after 9/11 have been resolved as cases of confused identity (similar/same name) or simply bad original reporting.
• Flight 77 was hijacked well into the flight (unlike Flights 11 and 175). Even though the side of the Pentagon hit was not on a direct track from Dulles to the Pentagon, it is very close to a direct track from where the transponders were disabled to the Pentagon.

As for how the WTC buildings collapsed: I agree, it sounds strange that 1) all three of the collapsed buildings would fall mostly down into their foundations 2) at rates consistent with an unimpeded collapse and 3) the heavily reinforced WTC7 fell while WTC6 remained standing (WTC6 was between WTC7 and WTC1/2).

I don't have an explanation for what happened, but then, I'm not a structural engineer. According to the engineers I've read, however, there simply isn't enough information about the collapse of well-engineered steel structures to accurately predict how they should behave during collapse. I do recall, however, that during the collapse, the bottom of each tower looked normal (windows intact, etc.) until engulfed in the debris cloud. The bottom of the tower did not look anything like the "simultaneous collapse" that deliberate building demolition almost always resembles.

Further, I do know that a puddle of kerosene burning will burn at a much lower temperature than a properly aerated and driven kerosene torch (as in, I know from personal experience that you can run a steel forge on kerosene with a correctly sized blower to supply air to the flame) and so I find it highly credible that a kerosene fire could reach well past steel annealing temperatures and get to steel melting temperatures, depending on the specifics of fuel and air flow in the fire.

Ultimately, though, there's no reason to waste your time wondering if the government actually did the atrocities of 9/11 or if several decades of destructive US foreign po

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[VGPowerlord]

Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches, fired from Smuckers's secret headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

There are many reasons to NOT scramble an intercept in such a case but few looking to say it was a conspiracy will bother finding what they are. Some military exercises come to mind as an example and it takes a lot of phone calls to get a straight answer as to whether one is even happening. Care to take a guess how long you'd have your job if you scrambled jets and didn't check the chain of command?

Tactical situations involving national security should *always* err on the side of caution. The side of caution would dictate to *always* scramble- you can always recall later, and of course standard miltiary procedure would be to attempt to contact the off-course aircraft upon intercept, not just shoot it down. In addition to that- ANYBODY putting aircraft, on orders, without a flight plan or transponder and without notifying the people in charge of watching that aircraft, is dangerously negligent and should be court martialed. The fault is with the chain of command- and if they try to fight back against you, well, take your story to the public, we'll see how long that general lasts in his job having endangered civilians for a military exercise.

There is NO excuse, in this day and age of multiple civilian navigation and communication technologies, for having an aircraft off course and not responding to communications. Add to that a flight path into restricted airspace after intercept- and I want those soldiers shooting first, not asking questions of the chain of command. If the current code of military justice doesn't allow our soldiers enough freedom to protect our civilians in the heat of the moment, then it needs a serious reworking until it does. Until then, it's so seriously broken that we might as well not have a military at all.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[jnaujok]

It is, in fact, very easy to fly a plane close to the ground without crashing. There is a wonderful thing known as "ground effect" that causes this to happen. Normally when a plane is flying, the air pushing down off the wings forms a circular vortex. However, as the plane approaches the ground (to within 2/3 the width of the wing) this vortex becomes compressed and oval. In that case, the amount of lift on the wing increases because now it requires the extra force to "squash" the vortex. This is why the "Spruce Goose" (Howard Hughe's Hercules airplane) can't actually fly, but went airborne during testing. It was entirely flown within the realm of ground effect. In fact, it cannot generate enough lift to actually achieve free flight.

In this case, a "rookie pilot" with dozens of hours in a simulator, could ease the plane towards the ground and actually find it like "dropping into a pillow" as he got close to ground level and being able to run the plane straight into the Pentagon.

On the other hand, landing a plane involves a ballet of speed, flaps, landing gear, drag, nose angle, angle of attack and half a dozen other variables. Doing everything perfectly in a landing is the *hardest* part of flying.

Ask a pilot about ground effect, and they'll tell you all about it.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[nickmalthus]

It is intriguing that they did not uncover this glaring defense weakness when they simulated commercial airliners crashing into the twin towers two years before the attack Perhaps that is why the CIA was conducting a simulation the day of the attack

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[grimarr]

If you see a plane without a transponder on your screeen, that's a red alert emergency to a flight controller

That's not really true. Many planes are not required to even HAVE transponders, much less use them. Transponder use is only required in certain airspace or situations.

That said, it would have been apparent to these controllers that the targets on their screens
should have had a transponder. They were all in either Class A or Class B airspace,
except possibly the one in PA, and were probably moving fast enough that they were clearly
jets, not propeller planes. (All jets are required to file IFR flight plans, which for all
practical purposes means they need an operating transponder.)

So clearly, the controllers could see that something was amiss. Was it mechanical, pilot error, or a hijacking? The first two are the most common, the third really rare. And in the event of a hijacking, controllers (and flight crews) were trained to go along with the hijackers' demands. (That has changed since 9/11!) So they would not have considered scrambling fighters to shoot them down until the much more common explanations had been checked out.

Time ran out on them before that happened.

Today, with new procedures and protocols, it might be different. I'm just a private pilot, with no ATC inside knowledge, but I suspect they are much more proactive about such incursions. The actual response time is probably classified. (rightly so, I think)

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[nickmalthus]

CIA simulations the day of the attack

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[KarateExplosions]

Well at least it didn't manage to get through every single defense available and crash directly into the headquarters of the most advanced and expensive military on the planet. Because THAT would have been embarassing.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[BitGeek]

You're wasting time. It doesn't matter how often you point out a hole or inconsistency with the official conspiracy theory, they will just ignore it, call you a nut, and believe their conspiracy theory. They wil lsay you're a conspiracy theorist and ignore that what they believe is also a conpsiracy theory, and one which doesn't make much sense.

But since the government said it, and they are unwilling to seriously look at the evidence, or consider anything that doesn't agree with the official conspiracy theory, they will not pay attention to you.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[orzetto]

[...] a kerosene fire could reach well past steel annealing temperatures and get to steel melting temperatures, depending on the specifics of fuel and air flow in the fire.

I agree with most of your post, but let me state once and for all: the fire did not have to melt steel. It only had to weaken it. Steel gradually loses its tensile strength with temperature. It is a known fact and a pretty well researched one, since it is very important in warehouses containing flammable materials—they can easily collapse during a fire. As you could guess, the steel of an extreme building as the WTC is strained to the limit. Since the second tower to be hit was hit at a lower level (more strain because of the weight), it collapsed first (Ok, sorta simplistic).

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[rossifer]

I agree with most of your post, but let me state once and for all: the fire did not have to melt steel. It only had to weaken it.

I never meant to imply that the steel had to be melted for the building to collapse, only that I have observed a kerosene fueled furnace fully melt steel.

What I frequently hear by 9/11 conspiracy theorists is that kerosene burns at too low a temperature to weaken steel. Since steel becomes essentially plastic above the annealing temperature and I've observed a kerosene-air fire go well beyond softening steel to melting steel (white hot liquid), the assertion of the conspiracy theorists is wrong.

Regards,
ross

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[kcbrown]

I agree with most of your post, but let me state once and for all: the fire did not have to melt steel. It only had to weaken it. Steel gradually loses its tensile strength with temperature. It is a known fact and a pretty well researched one, since it is very important in warehouses containing flammable materials--they can easily collapse during a fire.

Agreed. And if the WTC towers had collapsed at a rate consistent with that idea, we'd basically be done.

But they didn't. They collapsed at, essentially, freefall speed.

There's NO WAY that could possibly happen unless almost all of the internal support (being provided by the large internal steel structural members) was completely removed immediately prior to the collapse. Simply weakening them isn't enough. The lower floors that were still being supported would have slowed the collapse considerably.

Because of that, the fact that the kerosene fires were relatively cool (fuel rich) as evidenced by the plethora of black smoke from them, the visual evidence of squibs (or something that looks like it) being set off in the lower parts of the building immediately prior to collapse, the still molten and/or yellow-hot steel in the basement rubble weeks after the collapse, the reports of multiple explosions within the buildings immediately prior to collapse, and on and on, I'm completely convinced that the trade center towers were demolished using some combination of thermite/thermate and high explosives.

I'm not a conspiracy nut by most measures. I believe whatever the evidence most strongly suggests. And in this case, it most strongly suggests a controlled demolition of the WTC towers.

See the paper and other supporing material here.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[jnaujok]

But they *didn't* avoid things on the ground. I believe something like 11 light poles were snapped off at the breakaway bolts when the wing sheared them. Witnesses said he hit the ground just shy of the pentagon and bounced slightly before impact. There's also nothing really around the Pentagon for obvious security reasons. Look at a satellite photo of the Pentagon some time. Then look all around it. It's mostly empty lawns.

The terrorists weren't able to make "amazingly tight turns." The words of the air traffic controller was that they "were making dangerously sharp turns" and that "you shouldn't fly a 757 that way." Rookie luck, or rookie blundering? Turning a plane too hard is typical of rookies. Face it, they didn't really care about how much stress they put on the passengers or the plane. I doubt they were worried about the maintenance record that day.

WTC7 collapsed because debris ignited the 47,000 gallons of diesel fuel stored in the building as part of the emergency command center. The building was burning and belching smoke from nearly every window for three hours before it finally collapsed. No one was surprised by it. The firemen evacuated the area around it two hours before it fell because they knew it was going to come down when huge cracks appeared up and down the facade.

As for the twin towers and why and how they collapsed -- simply look up any of the dozens of engineering studies on the failure mode of the building. The impact most likely knocked away the "blown on" insulation over the steel, and the jet fuel and collateral materials burned long enough to heat the steel. As the steel expanded, it would have snapped the joints connecting the support beams to the floor connections. As soon as one floor collapses, it puts that much more weight on the floor below it, then that floor fails, then the floor beneath, etc. What you get is a perfect "stack of pancakes" collapse, which is exactly the failure mode you see in the towers. The central core stabilizes the collapse and maintains the nearly vertical fall. I've seen interviews with the designer of the building, and he said that the way the building fell is exactly how it was *designed* to fail in a catastrophic event. No one wanted the building to wipe out half a mile of buildings around it in some unplanned catastrophe.

What was Bush doing reading? Perhaps he was scheduled to read to a group of elementary students for weeks or months in advance. Perhaps the terrorists weren't considerate enough to inform Mr. Bush of the impending attack on the World Trade Center. According to reports, when the first sketchy information about a plane hitting the World Trade Center came in, Bush's first reaction was, "That's one lousy pilot." Which, I have to admit was my first reaction upon hearing the news on my clock radio that morning. In fact, I spent twenty minutes getting up and ready before I switched to headline news to see "if they might show the moron". By that time, the second plane had already hit. According to the Conspiracy Theorists out there, I must have been part of the conspiracy because I was brushing my teeth while the planes hit the buildings. It's just as valid as your statement about Bush.

Clearly the terrorists wanted to learn how to fly because they needed the knowledge. Clearly they knew they weren't going to land, so they didn't bother with that part of the training. Was it well rehearsed and well planned out? In retrospect, it was blatantly obvious and amazingly amateurish. In retrospect. Of course, before 9/11 no one thought about flying planes into buildings.

In retrospect, the theory of gravity is blatantly obvious. Clearly we should be calling Newton incompetent and claiming that he was part of the "Gravity Conspiracy". Sheesh.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[Vitriol Angst]

Bottom line, they reacted fairly quickly given the circumstances. Air Force jets were over NYC roughly 15 minutes after the second plane hit. Had it been a conventional attack, they could have engaged the enemy plane(s) and done fairly well. There were only like 2 military jets in the air in the entire eastern part of the US on the morning of 9/11,

Yeah -- that makes a lot of sense. A government that sends everyone away and leaves us defenseless to run a drill on how to defend us.
Isn't it ironic that Dick Cheney was there and they were doing drills on planes attacking buildings -- how convenient for the terrorists.

And July of 2001, Bush changed the policy so that only 3 people in the united states could allow a plane to be shot down. Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Before that time, field commanders could.

Weather radar would not be as ideally suited to track these planes as Air Traffic Control radar -- that's kind of what IT is designed to do.

Re:You can't stop the paranoia.

[BenBenBen]

Your post is well-reasoned, but I have to point out a couple of things for the sake of argument:

WTC7 collapsed because debris ignited the 47,000 gallons of diesel fuel stored in the building as part of the emergency command center.

I'm having a hard time picturing this screnario. Diesel isn't the most combustible of fuels, and a no-doubt strengthened and shielded tank designed to provide emergency coverage shouldn't just burst into flame because of a fire several hundred metres distant horizontally and even more metres vertically. This assumption seems to depend on a Heath-Robinson style series of events that would be unlikely at best. The collapse of WTC7 remains one of the less sensational unexplained events of that day

What was Bush doing reading? Perhaps he was scheduled to read to a group of elementary students for weeks or months in advance. Perhaps the terrorists weren't considerate enough to inform Mr. Bush of the impending attack on the World Trade Center.

His visit to the school, not 10 minutes from the Sarasota airport, was indeed scheduled and announced. This makes not his inaction, but the inaction of his Secret Service detail very surprising. Contrary to your later assertion, very many people had thought about flying planes into buildings - Tom Clancy for one (had Flight 93 made it to DC it would have flown into the very building that Clancy hit with a commercial airliner, the Capitol building).

At the very least the USSS should have been bundling Bush out of there as soon as it was apparent an airliner had hit the building. Any other building and I'd waver to make this prediction, but the WTC was THE building that UBL was likely to hit, and the August 6th PDB made it clear that he was determined to strike inside the US.

As with that other seminal US event on November 22nd 1963 this controversy is likely to run and run, and thanks to the amazingly inept way in which the 9/11 commission did its job we're unlikely to see the end of this anytime soon.

By the way, "conspiracy theory" is a fantastically Orwellian phrase designed to trigger certain doubt and feelings of probable kookiness in those it is used on. A cynic might wonder just how many of the 9/11 theories are disinformation put about by those with soemthing to gain.

Probably not

[suso]

A government representative commented that they 'hope that this video will put to rest the conspiracy theories.'

The problem is that there is not a clear view of a 747 running into the pentagon. Just a streak and a fireball. Kinda like those UFO pictures and videos.

What is that saying? "I want to believe", right?

Re:Probably not

[pcgamez]

"A government representative commented that they 'hope that this video will put to rest the conspiracy theories.'"

It doesn't matter. The government can't win. There are two possible scenerios for releasing the tape:

1) They release it immediately after the attack. People claim that there is no way they could release the tape that quick so it must have been fabricated beforehand.

2) They release it well after the attack. People claim they had enough time to fabricate the tape.

It's a no-win situation.

Re:Probably not

[DaHat]

Any evidence of a 747 hitting the pentagon would be quite a surprise and likely fake given that Flight 77 was a 757.

Re:Probably not

[ScentCone]

The problem is that there is not a clear view of a 747 running into the pentagon. Just a streak and a fireball. Kinda like those UFO pictures and videos.

Well, yes, that's a problem for people that only believe what they see on what they presume to be un-alterable video tape... but why not just ask the people that watched it happen.

Re:Probably not

[Ohreally_factor]

It all depends on what conspiracy theories he was referring to.

I think he meant it would put to rest all those crazy theories that have recently surfaced that the government is engaging in illegal domestic spying.

The timing of the tape release couldn't be more perfect, as a reminder to the populace for the reason why their civil liberties are being curtailed. Hopefully this will re-scare enough people to get Bush's approval rating moving in the other direction.

Re:Probably not

[Eunuchswear]

"The French"...

What all of them?

Or just one loon?

Re:Probably not

[equack]

The best solution:

3) Release it just prior to the attack. That way the media can preview the tape but still present it as a live broadcast.

Re:Probably not

[grammar fascist]

"The French"...

What all of them?

Or just one loon?

As far as I can tell, "The French" is just one guy with smelly armpits in a country across the Atlantic with a funky symmetrical 1/x-shaped tower. He wears a black beret, form-fitting black trousers, and a red-and-yellow striped shirt. He eats nothing but cheese and drinks nothing but wine, and he has a single opinion about everything to do with the United States: it sucks.

Oh, and he has an amorous pet skunk.

Re:Probably not

[grammar fascist]

Any evidence of a 747 hitting the pentagon would be quite a surprise and likely fake given that Flight 77 was a 757.

Thats what you goons want us to believe. Why do you think we're all suckers?

Re:Probably not

[Bob9113]

The timing of the tape release couldn't be more perfect, as a reminder to the populace for the reason why their civil liberties are being curtailed.

You say the timing is "perfect", and yet, there are so many other times that it could have been released since 9/11 that would have been just as perfect. In fact, can you name a time in the past few years when there wasn't a borderline catastrophe bubbling away in DC? Perfect timing? I think not - our bold DC leaders are truly dedicated to ensuring that every moment is equally perfect for a distracting press release. The rules changed on 9/11 - we can no longer afford to leave months or even weeks unfilled by scandal at the highest levels of government.

:)

Re:Well thats nice

[955301]

They did release it immediately. The Moussaoui trial just ended. It's common that the government and companies do not discuss details relating to a trial while it's in progress.

The fact is, the integrity of the tape will be questioned more because of what it is and who it's from than how long it took to release it. There would still be skeptics if it was released immediately

Fox News Has It

[Trip Ericson]

It's on Fox News's site, front page.

It doesn't show us anything new. It answers no questions. The frame rate of the camera was too low to catch the plane/missile/emu (take your pick) as it came in.

What would have been good would be a release of the other video tapes that were seized on 9/11. Even if their quality wasn't that good, I'd imagine at least ONE should have something vaguely resembling a plane in it.

Re:Fox News Has It

[badasscat]

Odd that the idiot conspiracy theorists have yet propose a solutuion to the following:

1) where is American flight 77?
2) where are all the people that were on board flight 77?
3) why are the family members of all the people on board flight 77 not concerned that a plane is missing.

These are the same questions that (presumably other?) conspiracy theorists are asked about KAL flight 007. Some answers they have given in that case and probably do now about flight 77:

a) There was no flight 77
b) There were no passengers aboard flight 77
c) The "families" are all government employees in on the conspiracy
etc. etc.

I mean none of this can really be disproved; that's the thing. It sounds nutty, and it *is* nutty, but to someone who really believes it, there is no way to definitively prove a person's family member isn't secretly a member of the CIA.

Conspiracy theories rely on the idea that in most cases, you can't prove a negative. They rely on "facts" that are refuted only if you don't believe in the conspiracy.

And they also persist because there are real conspiracies that have gone on and are still going on. We've only just gotten the tip of the NSA domestic spying thing, most likely. There was Watergate. There was Iran-Contra. How many more conspiracies have occurred in government that have never been uncovered?

But that doesn't mean everything is a government conspiracy. Most events have other explanations and you'd have to have a complete inability to objectively look at where the evidence points to think otherwise.

I saw the recording and...

[jasonmicron]

It is a complete waste. It's like a George Lucas remake of the original camera that we have already seen over the last 4 1/2 years. And by "George Lucas" remake I mean it is 99% original material, but from new angles!

No plane can be seen and all you really see is a flash of light then an explosion.

I'm not one of those whack-job conspiracy theorists but for Judicial Watch to make claims of, "this will end all conspiracy theories" and then go on to release this load of steaming dog poo is poor judgement and will only continue to be fodder for the tin foil hatters the world over.

Re:I saw the recording and...

[Hitokiri]

But at least we now know that the Pentagon did in fact shoot first.

Absurd

[Poppler]

the US government has decided to release the videotape depicting the crash of Flight 77 into the Pentagon building, nearly five years after the 9/11 attacks

We should have had this on day 1. How did keeping this under wraps help the Moussaoui trial?
This kind of secretive attitude creates an environment where conspiracy theories flourish. If the Government wants to disprove these theories, they should release as much information as they safely can, instead of fighting tooth and nail to keep everything secret.

Re:Absurd

[christopherfinke]

If the Government wants to disprove these theories

Regarding conspiracy theories, I believe the burden is on the conspiracy theorists to prove their theories, not for the targeted group to disprove all conspiracies directed towards them. If I say "George Bush is an alien," should he undergo a medical examination specifically to prove that he is human, or should I offer undeniable proof of his extra-terrestriality?

Re:Absurd

[Cheapy]

If that surgery has a high mortality rate, then yes. Yes he should go under the knife.

  (for those who can't tell)

Re:Absurd

[svkal]

Surely you've heard of the concept of not dignifying something with a response? If the U.S. government were to publicly and explicitly deny that they orchestrated the events of September 11, 2001, then they would implicitly acknowledging that a significant number of people consider that to be a credible theory. If the government were tomorrow to vehemently deny that the moon is green, you would probably be perplexed, because we do not expect people to deny things that we feel extremely confident in believing to be untrue - doing such is more likely to make us begin to entertain the notion of their truth in spite of the denial than the opposite.

(For the record, I think it is pretty clear that the events of that day were not the result of an American conspiracy. As other people have pointed out, the easiest way to explain why this is extremely unlikely is the "house of cards" analogy: such an elaborate conspiracy could be defeated by a single leak, and hundreds or thousands of people would have to be involved in matters that would test their consciences immensely. Furthermore, by Occam's Razor, we should remember that there are people out there who actually had much clearer motives for performing the attacks - even though the stance of the al-Qaeda and similar fundamentalists may not be that of "hating our freedom", there is no denying that there is a significant amount of animosity in the world directed towards western civilization in general and the United States in particular. In other words - there is no need for a conspiracy to explain these attacks.)

Video conspiracy debunking work

[Council]

Most of the traffic I've seen about the conspiracy theories centers around the most recent Loose Change video. The claims in the video are well-argued but absolutely silly. While trying to explain this to several people who had sent it to me (as well as check to see if maybe some of their stuff was true) I stumbled on an excellent viewer's guide in which the video is taken apart line-by-line and fact/logic-checked. I found it on some cached upload site thing whose reliability I can't vouch for, so I've mirrored it here:

http://xkcd.com/911_loose_change_viewer_guide.pdf

Remember: if you can't identify the fake conspiracy theories, you'll never learn who's really out to get you.

Re:Video conspiracy debunking work

[Bob Bobbinson]

Funnily enough I was reading this earlier which is just the plain HTML and not in PDF (not sure if it's the original source though).

Re:Video conspiracy debunking work

[lawpoop]

This 'debunking guide' has language just as smarmy and referenceless statements just like conspiracy videos. That degrades its credibility, in my eyes. I was keen on seeing a decent debunking of the loose change video, but this guide is simply a troll. If you want to be taken seriously, speak seriously. Here are a few select quotes:

"You must be thinking of the old Pentagon, which was made of balsa wood and marshmallows" (p. 31)

"KARL! Thank God we've got an expert in the house!" (p. 33)

"And they're all accounted for. You can check yourself if you don't believe me." (p. 41)

"They work for the 'Boss'. (Springsteen?)" (p. 42)

This sloppy scarcastic language is found throughout the guide. Why should I take it seriously?

Re:Video conspiracy debunking work

[Council]

This sloppy scarcastic language is found throughout the guide. Why should I take it seriously?

It's fairly sensible to accept more sloppy language in something disputing an extraordinary claim than in something making the claim in the first place. If you think about it, you see it everywhere. It's the same reason Snopes is reasonably trusted -- debunking a claim doesn't take nearly the credibility it takes to make one. After a claim is made, the incentives shift, and parties previously uninvolved are brought in. The dialogue changes, but the debate also changes to be more fact-check-y and less initial-claim-make-y. This permits sloppier language to be taken more seriously.

But by all means -- and I say this without sarcasm -- take seriously anything you want using whatever credibility metrics work for you.

Re:Video conspiracy debunking work

[attackiko]

Ok the conspiracy is crap. But how smart is the debunker?

He starts with:

To avoid being harrassed by CTists, I have chosen to issue this guide anonymously.

and ends with:

file:///Users/markroberts/Desktop/911%20Activism/L oose%20Chang...wer%20Guide/911%20Loose%20Change%20 2%20Viewer%20GuideText.htm

Re:Video conspiracy debunking work

[lawpoop]

I'm not sure where I fall with the stress/temperature curves -- the Loose Change video references several steel buildings that burned for days without falling. That doesn't meant that it couldn't have fallen due to fire, but it's far from clear-cut.

What I really want to know is, where are the planes reconstructed from the debris? Here is an image of a section of fuselage in the WTC descrution. Where is the fuselage now? Where are all the parts they pulled from the pentagon? By contrast, here is an image of the reconstruction of flight 800. Why don't we have such reconstructions of the 9/11 planes?

Re:Video conspiracy debunking work

[lawpoop]

What would we gain? We would know more about terrorist techniques than we know now. Maybe the terrorists somehow smuggled fuel or explosives into the planes to make their impact more destructive. The only evidence that we have for exactly what went on during the hijacking is the remains of the planes themselves. Why would you want to ignore this very important information when you're waging a war on terror?

When there is a crime, there needs to be a complete investigation of the physical evidence. That's standard procedure for all crime scene investigations. You don't just march in, declare what happened, and throw all the evidence in the trash. If, however, you do decide to violate these age-old procedures, it makes you look extremely suspicious.

"...why would they invest that kind of time and resources?"

Look, they have to clean up the sites. They are going to encounter plane parts in the debris. How much extra time and effort is it to gather all the plane debris into a hangar? Very little.

Five years...

[mobby_6kl]

What the hell, did they use a cluster of 386s to render the thing?

Re:Five years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but the turbo buttons were turned off.

Response to 911: Loose Change

[Cornflake917]

For those of you unaware of the conspiracy theories floating around, 911: Loose Change is a documentary that claims that the U.S. government planned and executed the attacks on 911. It's obviously all B.S., but it does make you think. The documentary fails to address the fact that no one tried to expose these plans beforehand. If the U.S. gov't tried to do something like this, thousands of people would of have to known about it. Anyone with a conscience would have exposed this plan and tried to put a stop to it. And there has a to be at least A FEW government employees that have a conscience. Either way it's such a stretch, it almost reminds of the whole "We never landed on the moon" theory. People are willing to say anything to get some attention.

Re:Response to 911: Loose Change

[iminplaya]

If the U.S. gov't tried to do something like this, thousands of people would of have to known about it.

The plot has been on the table for over forty years. You're not one of those that believe that our government would never do such a thing, are you?

Re:Response to 911: Loose Change

[crhylove]

The insurance changing hands mere hours before the attack on the WTC was enough to convince me BEFORE I saw loose change. Let's not forget the "security drills" where regular employees were kept out, etc. There is too much evidence to asuage as a nutty conspiracy theory, no matter how unflattering some random pdf propaganda is to a particular documentary.

Re:Watch **** Space

[sidfaiwu]

It's shaped just like a robot's anus.

let's be honest

[Joe the Lesser]

As much as I don't trust Bushco, I just can't see all those people not being dead. You can't cover up something that big.

I mean, we clearly saw the planes hit the towers, so it's logical to assume that if planes were used in place A, why bother to not use planes in place B.

I think the thurst of the paranoia would be better suited looking at how the towers fell as if internal explosions took them down, and the planes were just for drama. That's the only part that I think I can begin to question, though that's not to say our government is more behind it than any other government in the world. If anything's wrong, it's the towers falling so quickly like they did.

Not that I really believe Bush planned it, (is he smart enough?) but if someone other than bin Laden and his crazies was in on it, I want their heads too.

Re:let's be honest

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Wow, thanks. That's fascinating, in that it directly contradicts the official story -- has it been adopted into the official story?

No, because that interpretation of Silverstein's words is incorrect. The word "pull" is used in demolition to mean manually knocking a structure down using, say, a wrecking ball or cables. The term used for explosive demolition is "shoot".

Re:let's be honest

[Cl1mh4224rd]

That's too bad, because that would have made sense. Instead we have the Warren Commision-esque "magic fire".

And severe structural damage.

Pictures:
http://wtc7.batcave.net/_webimages/WTC-7_sw_corner _2.JPG
http://www.kolumbus.fi/av.caesar/wtc/wtc7_2.jpg

Firefighter interviews:
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/911/magazine/gz /hayden.html
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/911/magazine/gz /boyle.html

Re:let's be honest

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Except FEMA claims that it was primarily fire damage that caused the collapse.

That was a preliminary report with little investigation.

Which makes sense, as for the building to fall straight down as it did the core of the building would have had to have been damaged, while if the damage to the south side was critical to the collapse either that side would have fallen while the rest remained upright or it would have fallen over rather than implode.

Videos indicate that WTC7 did, in fact, tip toward the side of significant damage during it's collapse. Clearly seen in these frames. This picture shows the north face of WTC7 laying on top of debris pile, which suggests that the collapse did indeed initiate on the south face.

Source, and more info: http://www.geocities.com/debunking911/pull.htm

Futile task

[Gadzinka]

A government representative commented that they 'hope that this video will put to rest the conspiracy theories.'

Now, that's really stupid and pointless task. Every conspiracy theory is not falsifiable, so there's no point in disproving it.

In short, there's no proof that you can give to conspiracy theorist, that will convince him he is wrong. Just ask any of them, if there is anything in the world that would make him change his mind.

Robert

Re:Futile task

[basic0]

1. Not that I doubt the Pentagon was hit by an aircraft, but it is documented fact that several security camera tapes were confiscated after the crash. Release them in their entirety.

2. Explain to me why standard operating procedures for NORAD that would normally require specific orders to disregard, were disregarded that day.

3. Explain to me how WTC-7 came to be the only steel-framed structure in recorded history to suffer a complete collapse as a result of fire alone. (FEMA's own report offers an elaborate theory which they say has a "low probability of occurance")

4. In light of the signifigance (particularly to insurers, architechts, engineers) of WTC-7's collapse-due-to-fire, why were the building remains sold to China for scrap before they could be fully analyzed? The building had been evacuated hours before the collapse, it was not necessary for rescue crews. This is a major event in the building industry: if steel structures can collapse from fire alone, insurance rates would have to be adjusted, architects would have to reconsider the design of thousands of structures.

5. If Flight 93 was destroyed by being crashed (intentionally or accidentally) into a field in Shanksville, PA, why did it leave a debris field over 8+ miles?

Answer those questions and I'll change my mind on the subject. And no, "I don't know", "It's not important" and "Maybe you need to adjust your tinfoil hat you crazy moonbat!" aren't valid responses. This isn't some wacky UFO and alien abduction silliness. The known laws of physics and US military standard operation procedure were both apparently out to lunch on 9/11, and we want to know why.

Re:Futile task

[Cl1mh4224rd]

1. Not that I doubt the Pentagon was hit by an aircraft, but it is documented fact that several security camera tapes were confiscated after the crash. Release them in their entirety.

The videos are property of the companies they were confiscated from. It's up to those companies to publically release the videos, not the government.

2. Explain to me why standard operating procedures for NORAD that would normally require specific orders to disregard, were disregarded that day.

What procedures were ignored?

3. Explain to me how WTC-7 came to be the only steel-framed structure in recorded history to suffer a complete collapse as a result of fire alone. (FEMA's own report offers an elaborate theory which they say has a "low probability of occurance")

The FEMA report was preliminary. Further investigation, not to mention some pictures and some interviews with firefighters on the scene, indicate that WTC7 also suffered severe structural damage, not just fire.

4. In light of the signifigance (particularly to insurers, architechts, engineers) of WTC-7's collapse-due-to-fire, why were the building remains sold to China for scrap before they could be fully analyzed?

This is just plain wrong. http://911myths.com/html/recycled_steel.html

The building had been evacuated hours before the collapse, it was not necessary for rescue crews. This is a major event in the building industry: if steel structures can collapse from fire alone, insurance rates would have to be adjusted, architects would have to reconsider the design of thousands of structures.

Well, if a building couldn't collapse due to fire alone, then what's the point of fireproofing the steel columns?

5. If Flight 93 was destroyed by being crashed (intentionally or accidentally) into a field in Shanksville, PA, why did it leave a debris field over 8+ miles?

It didn't. Indian Lake is not 6 miles from the impact site, as some people would like you to believe. Popular Mechanics has some bits about Flight 93 (continues on next page, too) in their "9/11: Debunking The Myths" article.

Re:Well thats nice

[Jugalator]

While I'm of the opinion that just because little of it can be seen doesn't imply that it must not have happened, I must still say that it's strange that this particular building isn't under better surveillance that they can barely catch an entire plane flying into it clearly.

what this video proves

[SocietyoftheFist]

The heart of the US military apparently isn't watched any harder than me when I drive around town. Really.... are those two time lapse cameras really the best they had?

Re:Where's The Plane?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

What happened to the Flight 93 that left the airport with all the passengers and crew on board ?

Wow, I just noticed this (don't know why I never noticed before) but this plane has the same freakin' flight number as an airplane in The Twilight Zone that never returned- got lost in time.

The official story is a conspiracy theory.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you realize that the story about 20 or so Arab men conspiring to hijack planes and fly them into various landmarks is a conspiracy theory, as well.

Many people who rant on and on about 'conspiracy theorists' follow beliefs that are just as questionable. Their position may be supported by certain governments or the mass media in various nations. But on the basis of evidence alone, their stance is often far weaker than that of even the so-called 'conspiracy theorists'.

Talk negatively about conspiracy theories all you want. Just realize that the story you hold dear is just that: a conspiracy theory.

Re:The official story is a conspiracy theory.

[NutscrapeSucks]

I hope you realize that the story about 20 or so Arab men conspiring to hijack planes and fly them into various landmarks is a conspiracy theory, as well.

Excellent point AC. Most Conspiracy Theories can be dismissed easily because there probably wasn't even a consipracy to begin with. But 911 *was* a conspiracy, so by defintion any explaination is a conspiracy theory.

Note that even the official theory has all sort of bizarre aspects (James Bond-style mastermind villian in his secret underground bunker, for example).

Re:The official story is a conspiracy theory.

[honkycat]

Yeah, but there's a big difference between a conspiracy between religious extremists to hijack planes and crash them into the buildings of their enemy and a conspiracy of a government to arrange for an attack on its own people. The latter is what people mean when they talk about a conspiracy in this context. The former, yeah, it's technically and legally a conspiracy, but it's not the kind of thing that you can protect against with tin foil.

Re:The official story is a conspiracy theory.

[NutscrapeSucks]

Well, there's also a big difference between "The government used hologram missiles and controlled demolition to blow up WTC" and "The government used certain bureaucratic mechanisms in order to increase the likelihood of that a known terrorist plot would be successful for ultra-cynical political gain."

Of course, most people in the Conspiracy Theory world don't really understand the difference and there's very much a "ends justify the means" attitude where any crazy idea is good if it will raise doubt on the official theory, and that approach tends to cast the whole lot in tinfoil.

And it still doesn't change the fact that an official conspiracy theory was put forward, and acted on, without a whole lot of evidence. (Not just "religious extremists", but the whole "Al Qaeda==Worldwide Terrorist Network", when the reality is that the conspiracy theory created Al Qaeda rather than visa-versa.)

Re:The official story is a conspiracy theory.

[ph1ll]

But the sad truth is that authorities often allow disasters to happen. A couple of examples in American history alone that I can think of off the top of my head:

• There is evidence to suggest Roosevelt knew about the Japanese plans to attack prior to Pearl Harbour to unite the wavering American people in entering World War II. Though this is still somewhat contentious, it is undeniable that he was certainly forcing Japan to attack by refusing to sell them fuel (for example). A sharp operator like FDR would have easily forseen the outcome of that.

• The incident that is generally considered the start of the Vietnam War were two alleged attacks on the US in the Gulf of Tonkin.

  The first involved a single bullet hitting an American boat. The second both sides now agree never happened. At best it was over-eager sailors. At worst, an attempt by the US Military to entangle America in a "proper" war against communism. It depends on your interpretation. But what is surprising is if the banal, first explanation is true, one would have thought there would have been some due diligence before committing the lives of 58 000 Americans to a war the US ultimately lost...

I'm sure many other countries have acted in a similar manner.

Re:The official story is a conspiracy theory.

[ScuzzMonkey]

While your points are correct, I think it's safe to say they're only really significant in hindsight. One of the classic problems with conspiracy theory is that it retroactively highlights facts that, at the time, no one would necessarily have thought significant. Roosevelt may well have expected a Japanese attack of some sort; he almost certainly never imagined a defeat on the scale of Pearl Harbor and the loss of the Phillipines. Similarly, it's unlikely that anyone in the chain of command responsible for blowing the Tonkin incident out of proportion imagined what a quagmire Vietnam would turn into when we took over the war there and their motivations may have been much less grand than sparking a full-blown intervention anyway.

So I think it's a little off-base to say that anyone allowed disasters to happen. The chain of events leading up to them is always clear in retrospect, but another flaw in conspiracy theory is that it attributes such masterful vision and control to the conspiracists leading into the event, and then presumes such incompetence in handling and covering it up. In reality, no one has such complete control nor such prescience. Things become immensely confusing and fractious around such events, and no one who has ever been in the middle of such confusion could give much credence to these grand theories of shadowy orchestration. The Clausewitzian concept of "friction" is very real and works against such clockwork machinations as most concepts of conspiracy would have you believe.

Re:The official story is a conspiracy theory.

[code_monkey_steve]

Most Conspiracy Theories can be dismissed easily because there probably wasn't even a consipracy to begin with. But 911 *was* a conspiracy, so by defintion any explaination is a conspiracy theory.

Ha ha, you consipiracy nuts always make me laugh. If you'd open your eyes, you'd see the obvious: THERE WAS NO CONSPIRACY! The events of 9/11 were all according to the secret plan of *one single person* who, acting completely independantly, crashed the four planes and fabricated the necessary evidence to cover-up his involvement.

You hear that, you rabid conspiracy freak?! JUST ONE GUY.

His name is Fred.

/hates Fred

Re:The official story is a conspiracy theory.

[shmlco]

"One flaw in the "19 Arab taking out the towers" theory is the military precision required for an effort like this."

Military precision? I'm confused. How much "military precision" does one need to book tickets on four different airline flights that will be taking off at about the same time? And then say, "Okay, twenty minutes into the flight, get up and..."

I once arranged flights for people leaving from NY, San Diego, Indy, and Chicago to go skiing in Denver. We all ARRIVED within 30 minutes of one another, gathered up our gear, headed out to the waiting rental car, and took off to the prearranged condo.

I guess I must be ex-military...

Re:The official story is a conspiracy theory.

[Yvanhoe]

Note that even the official theory has all sort of bizarre aspects (James Bond-style mastermind villian in his secret underground bunker, for example).

* Intact hijacker passport found in the WTC ruins

* Corpse identification thanks to fingerprints in the pentagon

* Rumsfled making a lapsus about "these terrorists who pilot a plane into the WTC and a missile into this very building" while at the Pentagon

* Tapes that would really show the pentagon plane never disclosed (3 more to go with more than one blurry frame)

* half of the presumed "hijackers" still alive in Saudi Arabia or Qatar

Re:The official story is a conspiracy theory.

[caluml]

So can you provide evidence of:
* Rumsfled making a lapsus about "these terrorists who pilot a plane into the WTC and a missile into this very building" while at the Pentagon
* half of the presumed "hijackers" still alive in Saudi Arabia or Qatar

Re:The official story is a conspiracy theory.

[Yvanhoe]

Would a .mil reference be enough ? Ctrl-f to "missile"

http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2001/t11182 001_t1012pm.html

I cannot find a .gov or .mil link stating the "terrorists" identities are not known and we only know the name of the person from whom they stole passports, I saw that in "9/11 Loose changes", free download anywhere google can find it.

Re:The official story is a conspiracy theory.

[Yvanhoe]

I am pointing at contradictions in their stories with the list (few posts above) of facts that are reasonally well documented. I am not making a story up, I don't have enough facts for that. All I know is that I don't know what happened on 9/11/2001 and that the official version doesn't hold.

This administration has been seen telling a big lie (Iras has WMD) and getting along with that without even a word of excuse.
It then told another big lie (Iraq-Al Quaeda ties). What is so unbelievable in the fact that they could have lied on another intelligence report ?

Further...

[Robotron23]

Further to my article posting...it appears the "new" video is no more than a slightly higher quality and lenghtier version of the Pentagon's CCTV camera tape - released less than six months after 9/11 itself. I won't go in to the inconsistancies here - spot them for yourself at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4987716. stm> the BBC's page.

Will it put the conspiracy theories to rest? No. Did the US government want this footage retained as it simply fuels speculations of foul play; what with a higher quality image of a false looking 747 revealed?

If anything, this new higher definition tape just fans the flames of speculation. What about the CCTV confiscated from nearby establishments such as a high rise hotel? These too are in possession of the US government - yet haven't been released. If they give (as they will, given their position overlooking the Pentagon) clearer pictures, then why haven't these been released as well, to utterly cement US claims of Flight 77's actual crash?

Who knows...maybe I'm just a paranoid android.

It certainly does tell something

[Stevyn]

I saw it on Fox News today and something I noticed should dampen the missile theorists. The low framerate prevented the smoking gun shot of an airplane everyone was hoping to see, however the explosion is key. There was a big red fireball with thick black smoke when it hit the building. This is evident of a fuel explosion, not a missile explosion. Dispite how movies portray ordinances exploding in big puffy fireballs, they're actually like big "bangs". They don't create much smoke, instead just blow dust and material everywhere.

Look at the tapes of the plane hitting the second WTC tower and see how similar the explosions are. Just because there is no hole where the engines should be does not mean a plane didn't hit the building. The building is like a fortrace and could withstand most of the impact of the aluminum plane. This explosion looks like a large amount of fuel exploded, not a missile or bomb.

Re:It certainly does tell something

[TomorrowPlusX]

I work in DC, and lived -- at the time -- in Old Town Alexandria. On Sept 11, given the general state of confusion, I opted not to take the metro home that day, and instead walked home along the GW parkway ( it was such a beautiful day, actually -- and the ten mile walk allowed me to really think about the situation, and how this was pretty much the end of freedom in the US for a while at least, but that's another story ).

Anyway -- here's the thing. I was upwind of the pentagon, maybe a mile away, and I smelled ( what smelled to me like ) burning kerosene. LOTS of burning kerosene. As in, I personally stank of kerosene smoke after walking past.

Frankly, that's enough for me. I understand that jet fuel is more or less like kerosene, and I would expect a crashed airplane to burn up whatever's in its tanks. Hence, the stench of lots of burning kerosene.

Now, regarding the "another story"... as I was approaching National airport ( I will never call it "Reagan National" ), I came across a bunch of toddlers and little kids, surrounded by military personnel. There was another civilian ( like me ) walking past, she had a camera, and took a photo of the pentagon smoke, and another of the military types and the children. The officials immediately stormed her, confiscated her camera and tore out the film. Very rudely, I might add. I saw all this, and after the lady left, I walked up and said to one of the friendlier looking guards "What was that all about?". She said the kids were pentagon employee children from the daycare facilities and they wanted to respect their privacy -- which is commendable, so in principle I understand. But the way they went about it was unnacceptable.

I saw one of the opening acts of our descent into a police state, right there.

Re:It certainly does tell something

[eh2o]

Ok, so first of all we all know that nobody walks home 10 miles. That is just common sense. And just why is it that *all of the sudden* after 9/11 you no longer live in Old Town?? Something smells fishy. Second, kerosene burns in lamps, and the pentagon is a very secretive place, so they probably don't have lights. Therefore they could not possibly have any kerosene there. Third, smoke rises so you couldn't possibly have smelled it from a *mile* away. Like what, the laws of physics just didn't apply that day? Well I asked a physics professor and he said the laws of physics *always* apply! So, just how is it that *you* would smell like kerosene unless, obviously, you had rubbed kerosene on your clothing to make people *think* there was a something like kerosene burning. As for the photograph, its obviously *you* that took the film because you didn't want any documented evidence that you were in fact at the National Airport the whole time! Obviously you were in the mysterious "unmarked white plane" and had just landed.

Nice try, Mr. Three-Letter-Agency, but we can see right through your web of lies.

Re:It certainly does tell something

[Deadstick]

Jet fuel is not more or less like kerosene. Jet fuel is kerosene.

It has certain antifungal and other additives in small concentrations, and the solid crap has been filtered out of it, but other than that it's your grandfather's coal oil.

rj

Mad props for the National Security Archive

[Chris Burke]

Love that place, and love the Freedom of Information Act that allows it to exist -- one of the true strengths of our Democracy.

If you haven't read it, and if you are at all prone to dismissing "conspiracy theories" on the basis that our government wouldn't do that kind of thing, you have to read it. If you've ever wondered: Did the CIA really know and approve of the Contras funding their war by selling drugs in the States? Did the U.S. really know that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds at the same time Donald Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam's hand and providing cover stories for him? Read it.

Nothing that I know of that is relevent to the current situation, but it is still a fantastic archive and a great resource for putting to pasture any remaining naivete you may have about the nature of governments.

Re:Where's The Plane?

[corbettw]

There's no debris, no fuselage, no tail assembly, no cloud of dust, no nothin'

Bzzt, wrong. http://images.google.com/images?q=pentagon%20fligh t%2077&oe=UTF-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:e n-US:official&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi shows dozens of images from the crashsite, all of them with debris clearly visible. Some are dupes of each other, but scroll through, there was a lot of debris scattered about.

On the other hand,

[Peter Trepan]

it's dangerous to discount all conspiracy theories. The Tuskeegee Experiment was a real conspiracy. The Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish doctrine is a real conspiracy. When landlords get together and change a neighborhood's zoning laws, that's a conspiracy too.

These are the kinds of conspiracies that occur without the protection of the federal government. What kinds of schemes might people think up if they're free from any oversight whatsoever?

I'm just saying that a little paranoia is a healthy thing. I'm not saying that our government hides aliens with guitar pick-shaped heads, or that they orchestrated the 9-11 attack, or that they conspired to fool everyone into thinking Iraq had nuclear...

...oh, wait.

Black Ops

[Doc Ruby]

Why don't they release the black box recordings of the inflight data?

Re:I now approve of Bush!

[MrLogic17]

>And that strategy has worked exactly when in history?

Um, WWII ring any bells?

Incredibility

[Doc Ruby]

What happens when the people who release the evidence have been shown to have been lying about everything else important during that time period? Like cooperation between Saddam and Osama. Like Iraq WMD, including Iraq-bound Niger uranium, nuke-only centrifuges, mobile bioweapon labs - none of which existed. Like preparation for the collapsed Iraqi state we broke, and now own, said to be a nation of flower-throwers. Like finishing the Afhanistan war.

Like no one anticipating that someone would use planes as missiles into our tall buildings - or that levees would collapse in Katrina. Like no domestic calls being spied on. Like cheaper, more plentiful oil. Like cutting federal spending. Like securing our borders. Like increasing the integrity and dignity of the White House.

When lying liars lie about all those important activities, there's no reason to trust evidence they produce that merely protects another story they tell, which if exposed would have kept our country from going down the track to hell it's been on for the past 5 years.

Re:Incredibility

[metamatic]

> What happens when the people who release the evidence have been shown to have been lying about everything else important during that time period? .... Like Iraq WMD

To say that Iraq never had WMD is pure non-sense.

That's why he didn't say it. You introduced the word "never", and yes, your straw man is nonsense.

He was referring to the claims that Iraq had WMD circa 2001-2003, which were used as justification for the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. Those claims were lies.

Yes, we know Iraq had WMD in the past. Of course we know that, we sold them the WMD. But Iraq had used or destroyed all its WMD prior to the illegal invasion.

> ... Like cheaper, more plentiful oil.

I'm guessing you are hiding in a cave somewhere. You obviously haven't bought gas recently.

Oh, do pay attention. He was saying that the claim that oil prices would be controlled was false. The current high prices are demonstration that he's right.

And as for bringing up Bill Clinton: Did anybody claim that the problems started in 2000? No, I don't think so, so once again you're erecting a straw man.

In fact, if you look at the people who complain about the lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq, you'll find that almost all of them were also deeply critical of the Clinton era sanctions that resulted in the lingering death of tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and their children.

Re:Incredibility

[radtea]

To say that Iraq never had WMD is pure non-sense. Ask the thousands of living Iranian widows or the Kurdish what gas they or their loved ones were exposed to and when.

Arguing with bellicose right-wingnuts is starting to feel a lot like arguing with Soviet appoligists back in the day. They reply to perfectly ordinary claims of fact--that Bush & co. lied about Iraq's WMDs and much else as a pretext for war--with a completely irrelevant non sequitur.

For those lacking basic English comprehension skills, no one claimed that Iraq never had WMDs, and trying to twist the argument to answer that premise is nothing more than an obvious admission of that fact.

This non sequitur was quickly followed by another: invoking the Ghost of Presidents Past in the form of Bill Clinton. Bellicose right-wingnuts have reached the bottom of the polemical barrel--they are now reduced to waving a stuffed scarecrow of a man from the better part of a decade ago in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the uncontroversial fact that they and theirs have lied American into a pointless and stupid war that has killed thousands of Americans for no discernible purpose.

Give it up guys--every time one of you clowns mentions Clinton it's just more proof that you have lost. Your time is done.

I'm surprised no one has already mentioned....

[xenophrak]

This site: http://www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/e rreurs_en.htm

Re:I'm surprised no one has already mentioned....

[JoeCodeMonkey]

Or this one...

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/911_pentagon_7 57_plane_evidence.html

The Video Is Out

[i_am_profiled]

Here are links to the video.

http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/foi/index.html

mms:wmworldmii-streamingnetmediadefenseflight77fl7 7-111094135WMV

mms:wmworldmii-streamingnetmediadefenseflight77fl7 7-211094237WMV

Re:Where's The Plane?

[bheading]

In this case I'm inclined to apply Occam's razor and pick the simplest explanation given the available facts, which are :

- a plane took off
- bits of fuselage were photographed on the lawn of the Pentagon
- three other hijacked planes were seen crashing into other places
- several eyewitnesses reported seeing a plane

Come up with an alternative explanation if you wish - but you have to make it fit with the above facts. The existing conspiracy theories don't.

Re:Bin Laden and the CIA

[Paladin144]

So, let's forget about the UFO guys and the "it wasn't airplanes it was missiles" nutjobs. What about a much more plausible conspiracy? i.e. Bush (or one of his friends) having an agreement with Osama (Let's not forget that the Bin Ladens DID have business with the Bush family - i'm talking about Oil).

This is not as far out as it seems. What everybody seems to forget is that Bin Laden was a CIA agent for years and years when he was part of the mujahideen that were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. He was our boy, on our payroll. We gave him cash, weapons, logistical support, equipment and god knows what else. So what I wanna know is this:

When exactly did Bin Laden quit the CIA?

That's all I wanna know. Well, that and how he did it. I just can't imagine that leaving the employ of the CIA is as easy as leaving, say, Sears. Do they hold you an office party where you're blindfolded the whole time or something? Do they just say, "Remember all that classified info you were privy to over the years? Can you, like, not say anything to anyone about that? K, thx, bye."

It all seems a little fishy. Can somebody point me to a document proving Bin Laden is no longer working for the CIA? Otherwise, don't we have to assume that he is still in their pocket?

Witnesses Stories Don't Match

[Nazmun]

Even i remember witnesses saying things like car-bombs, truck bombs, and even missles. Which witness do we actually trust? The ones the government backs up?

Re:Witnesses Stories Don't Match

[diablomonic]

how about a combination? there are 40 witnesses saw a plane (but not the same plane, two different sorts of jumbo and some swore it was a bizjet, semi-explainable, they were in shock and memory is not always 100%):My take, there was a plane of some sort, and it looked at least reasonably like a passenger jet

Next we have a witness who saw a millitary helicopter, from the far side of the building, and it went towards the helipad near the crash site just before the fireball. Only one witness (as far as I know) but its not like you could confuse a plane with a helicopter all that easily and it was coming from the far (hidden from freeway) side. Relevance? unsure. possibility given later

Next we have millitary trained personal claiming to have smelled cordite (explosives), witnesses who claimed the airoplane blew up before impact, witnesses who saw a missile, and a damage pattern more consistant with a combination missile/explosives strike than a plane crash. We also have a video showing:

- no recognizable airplane: the one frame that shows a small white thing doesnt look like a jumbo jet to me (but could be...maybe): wrong size/shape/thickness but its hard to tell. It looks like a missile to me though.
- Fireball is COMPLETELY wrong for a jet crash... isn't it? am I the only one noticing this? a jet traveling at 500 miles per hour flies smack into a building and the resulting fireball looks perfectly symetrical around a vertical center line? not splayed out as I would expect? can someone explain this cos I cant see it
- some people have raised doubts about its authenticity: to do with shadows, lighting, what looks like editing of the colours in one frame (talking about older release here). Me- I think its probably mostly real, but question what it shows, and REALLY would like to know if there is no conspiracy, then why has the other footage not been released, and why did this take so long?

My theory? there was a plane (remote controlled, maybe the original, maybe not) and it was somehow exploded before impact (perhaps the helicopter shot missiles at it? I doubt they would be powerful enough but dont know, or it already had explosives on board, or the anti arcraft missile battery actuallly worked but they havent told us). or maybe overflew the building and kept out of view (Im doubtful of this one, but otheriwse where is all the wreckage?) I think there was a missile involved (either in blowing up the plane before impact or causing some of the damage- wintesses saw it) I'm a bit thrown off by the fireball. It doesnt fit with what I imagine should have happened in a pure plane crash (why symmetrical?) but also cordite is almost smokeless and flashless and so couldnt have caused it. there is the strangely almost perfect edge of the hole supposedly knocked out by part of the airplane (it seems looking at that website that that may have just been a mistake and it was really an access hole made for emergency workers: makes more sense)

ok so what are we left with? confusion. And I think thats likely one of the main purposes of the attack at the pentagon: confusion and misdirection. Get conspiracy theorists confused and making up wild speculation, including the speculation that there wasn't a plane, and most people will just assume they are nuts, cos 40 people saw the plane. maybe the people involved werent sure they could count on the plane not getting shot down at the last minute (eg by the aa missiles), so set up explosives just in case? this particular conspiracy is generally thought NOT to have deeply involved the military in the planning and execution, with the bush administration, CIA and others involved probably relying on confusion due to the wargames and key personel who were in on it to dupe the millitary into letting it happen, which also explains flight 93 getting shot down (not everyone went along with it...)

i call bullshit

[ultramrw21]

The release of this video is not about "disproving conspiracy theories". It's to remind the american people of what happened 5 years ago. Approval ratings are plummeting across the board, when were the president's approval ratings at their highest? right after 9/11. It's pretty clever, we havent had any other attacks to scare us into submission, why not bring the terrorist attacks of 9/11 back in the citizen's minds? Thats just my two cents

New? That is an OLD VIDEO

[PaulQuinn]

That video has been out for years. All the conspiracy sites show it. This is creapier than ever - the pentagon is rebranding an old video as 'cooperatively releasing sensative information that proves once and for all that a plane hit the pentagon'? Seriously?

And no, I can not spot a 757 in that video. If I was a man in the desert for 50 years, and never heard of 9/11, then saw that video for the first time and was asked to describe what I saw, it would be: "a stream of smoke, a flash, a ball of flame".

Whatever. This news is an insult. A joke is being played here. Again.

Obvious

[diegocgteleline.es]

Like extremists need any help to make a plan to kill thousands of people.

If anything, the US Government could have let terrorist plan the 9/11 attack. Why do it or contribute themselves

BTW, I'm not paranoid, but if there was just a SINGLE camera taking care of the Dep. of Defense of the most powerful country in the world and it had a capture rate so slow that it couldn't grab the frame where the the 747 appeared, you'd need at least to fire somebody because it's insane.

Re:knew I'd seen it before...

[NeuroManson]

The wings on most aircraft today are made to shear off (eg; snap off of the fuselage) upon impact, in order to reduce the risk of ruptured fuel tanks discharging their burning payload directly into the cabin.

The only reason that the outlines of the planes' wings remained on both of the impacted WTC towers was due to the building materials. Short of the box girders, those sites were covered with a thin stainless steel facade. The underlying girders themselves were in fact a ruddy brown color, which would be invisible to the naked eye under fire conditions, adding to the illusion that those planes somehow punched a huge hole through, when at best it was approximately the size of the fuselage as well. Evidence of this is consistent with the debris left at the Pentagon.

Similarly, you have building materials VS. aircraft design in the Pentagon attack. The Pentagon was initially designed to withstand aerial bombardment during WWII, and retrofitted for nuclear attack in the decades to follow. That translates to LOTS of reinforced concrete and stone which, if anyone else here watched impact testing and missile tests against solid concrete bunkers, et al, showed very similar, if not exactly, the same results when compared to the Pentagon attack. The impacts would not only have sheared off the wings, but the general refusal of reinforced concrete to either snap or bend out of the way would have resulted in a misleadingly small impact site.
As for nonexistant skid marks at the Pentagon, it may just be possible that the plane was either in level flight, or on the rebound (as evidenced by light posts that were snapped off at the base, exactly as they're designed to) before impacting.

Additionally, to all the nutters who claimed the WTC was hit by a missile, those so called pods are in fact the rear landing gear bays, the flash they claim to be a launch is more than likely a high voltage discharge from the radome in the aircraft's nose (visible just as the fiberglas dome comes into contact with the outside of the towers). Just bright enough to arc and trigger theories everywhere from people who have no idea how planes are made, sadly enough.

But nowhere enough to give people the real story about 9/11, just more noise to keep people with real credentials from being heard.

Anyway, the long and short: There's a lot more involved in aerospace than most would imagine, and even fewer bother to verify or study, like much junk science or conspiracy theories. If the idea of aircraft "disappearing" in the process of crashing sounds like a conspiracy, then the Valujet crash in the Everglades a decade or so ago must have come from little green men indeed.

Conspiracy Morons

[NokX]

here's a list of all the people who died on flight 77, the flight that hit the pentagon: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/vict ims/AA77.victims.html that would be impressive if the government made up all that info in a short period of time with erasing all records of that flight from american airlines as well.

PDF not worth

[Anonymous Coward]

honestly. i think reading the pdf is a waste of time,
i won't say i read it all because it is a 285 page document.
Sounds like there whole documetary doesn't have one single valid proof. everytring is false. and everything the author says seems to be the thuth and he even has a comment for every single footage or line in the movie!!!!
Many of his comments are of the kind of (look for the ***):

177
00:16:06,200 --> 00:16:10,700
If Flight 77 had crash landed and skidded into the Pentagon, it would have looked like this.
*** "Crash landed and skidded?" Haven't you heard that pot makes you dumb and paranoid?

127
00:10:55,500 --> 00:10:57,800 " And yeah, I just look around looking for "
128
00:10:57,900 --> 00:11:02,000
" who had the motive, who had the opportunity, who had the equipment, "
129
00:11:02,100 --> 00:11:04,500
" who had the will... "
**** Islamic Jihadists, that's who.

look for #822 to see more (it is too much text to paste here)

please. don't waste your time.

Re:Satellite?

[TheSync]

You can't just "train a satellite" on something, spy satellites are generally in a low earth orbit moving at around four miles per second, and have the capability of only looking in a small region (a few hundred miles on a side). While most parts of the earth are covered once or twice a day by a spy sat, it is only for a brief period of time. It is impossible to follow an aircraft with a spy satellite.

Typical orbits for KH-12's are 202 x 689 km, inclination near 90 degrees (meaning twice a day coverage of most areas).

Re:The official story is not a conspiracy theory.

[Russ Nelson]

Uhhhhhh, it's only a conspiracy theory if a false explanation is publicized while the real facts are kept quiet by a conspracy. What is the false explanation for the 20-1 hijackers and what are the real facts, and who are conspiring to keep them secret?

Re:Bushy

[nagora]

I can see where you're coming from, and the "New Pearl Harbour" comment by Wolfie and Rumsfeld back in 1999 certainly does make me wonder sometimes, but I disagree on two points:

1 Bush is not a patsy. He is a member of the cabal who is perfectly happy to be seen as "too dumb to sin". Makes any future trial a LOT easier. But he is in it up to his neck for the same reason Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld are: he's an oil man. Nothing more and nothing less. Oil and oil shares are the only things he cares about and he's as happy as the rest of them to kill a few hundred or thousands (especially if they are foreigners) to get them. Iran is just sabre-rattling to boost the price of oil and their collective pension funds.

2. I think Bush simply ignored the warnings because he and his friends thought it was going to be a small attack like the van bomb. That would have been enough of a "Pearl Harbour" for the PNAC. He was genuinely shocked when the scale of it became clear. He must have been thinking about what would happen if the story of all the warnings he'd had came out before his friends in the media clamped the lid on it. He had a close shave but Fox et al came to the rescue and people like John O'Neil were literally buried in the bad news and shock.

Now the reality bit: all empires have been founded on economics. They have to be. It is only in the post-WWII era that governments have decided to pretend otherwise (around the time the War Department became the Defence Department). The reality is that America needs Iraq's oil and now it has it. And if they did not, the American economy would be in deep shit very soon. In the old days this would have been explained openly - proudly - and then the troops sent in. Britain did it all the time. Japan did it. Germany and Italy did it. The Romans did it (grain mostly rather than oil). It's a fact of life. What has changed is that an extra layer of hypocrisy has been added. But there's nothing unusual about invading a country with or without a pretext to seize its resources, even if it means letting someone attack you first when you could have stopped them. The alternative is to drastically change your way of life, a way of life that these guys at the top simply worship and can not even imagine changing just because a bunch of dirty foreign rag-heads object! The idea actually makes them feel ill; you can see it on their faces when they talk about countries that have oil and aren't being properly servile. They hate that. They are by their own definition the pinacle of human achievement and despise anyone who does not vocally agree with that assessment. Look at Bush's crack about the London anti-war protests. The rabble are not entitled to an opinion.

A hundred years ago Wolfowitz would have got a medal, now he gets a cushy job in the World Bank. He successfully defended the American Way of Life(tm). And if you read his speeches and letters about why a pretext for invading Iraq had to be found, I think you'll see that's what he thought all along.

Imperialists are all the same in every place and every time.

TWW

Re:Where's The Plane?

[Russ Nelson]

Let's crank up our imaginations here. When the front of the airplane hit the Pentagon, the back of the airplane was still moving at 500mph. What do you think happens to an airplane when one end is not moving and the other end is travelling at 500mph? Ever smooshed an aluminum can with your foot? Ever filled it up with kerosene and smooshed it with your foot? Ever do it with a propane torch running next to it at the same time?

If so, I want to stay far, far away from you, because you're a dangerous fool.

Re:Yep.

[Russ Nelson]

Yes, and two wing-shaped slots as well! Because as everyone knows from watching Bugs Bunny, when an object goes through a wall, it cuts out a perfect outline of itself in the wall.

In other words, everyone posting this crap learned their physics from Bugs Bunny.

Re:Then explain this.

[Cl1mh4224rd]

If you want to kill the conspiracy theories, you have to explain WTC7. It was over-engineered because it was the bunker for emergencies for NYC.

No, the building itself wasn't, and how could it be? The bunker came well after the construction of WTC7. Not to mention that WTC7 was built over an electrical substation, and that required such unique construction that ultimately failed under load, because if significant damage.

Then you have the owner of the building, Larry Silverstein, saying that he was sorry they had to "pull" the building. (Link to video below.)

The word "pull" is used in the demolitions industry to indicate manual demolition through things like wrecking balls and, literally, pulling the structure over or down. When you talk about explosive demolition, you use the word "shoot".

Why would they disavow pulling the building due to safety concerns? Because it takes weeks to plan the demolition of a building, and you can't really plant explosives to pull a building if the building is on fire. Especially the kind of fire that is melting steel, which occurs at 3000 degrees Fahrenheit.

There is no evidence "melted steel", especially at WTC7. Of course, steel doesn't have to melt in order to fail. I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that at half its melting point, steel has only 25% of its strength.

Explain why a high rise in Spain can burn for over 24 hours, partially collapse, and still not fall.

lol. Wow, awesome. You fell for that claptrap hook, line, and sinker. Did you know that the Windor building is a predominately concrete structure? Did you realize that the steel parts of the building exposed to the fire did fail?

Don't waste my time if you can't be bothered to do basic research.

Explain why the only three steel and concrete buildings in history to collapse from fire do it on a single day in the same square mile.

My God... Why do you people keep insisting that fire was the only cause of these collapses? You only demonstrate severe ignorance and blindness when doing so. Have you forgotten about the two planes that impacted WTC1 and WTC2? How about the severe structural damage (evidence for which I linked to earlier) of WTC7? How many other steel building in history have been subjected to these conditions? You're conveniently ignoring all of this.

The Origins Of al-Qaeda

[WombatControl]

And it still doesn't change the fact that an official conspiracy theory was put forward, and acted on, without a whole lot of evidence. (Not just "religious extremists", but the whole "Al Qaeda==Worldwide Terrorist Network", when the reality is that the conspiracy theory created Al Qaeda rather than visa-versa.)

That is completely untrue.

Al-Qaeda is Arabic for "the Base" or "the Foundation" - but it's actually a shortened form of the Arabic term "qaedat bayanat" - or database. Al-Qaeda started in the mid 1990s based on Osama bin Laden's personal database of Arab mujihadeen who had fought with him in Afghanistan against the Soviets. His number 2 man, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri was recruited in order to merge al-Qaeda with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

As a side note, the CIA did not fund bin Laden, although they knew of him and knew that some fighters they did fund were also working with him. The CIA's main group in Afghanistan throughout the 1990s was led by a man named Ahmad Shah Masood. Masood was assassinated by bin Laden on September 9, 2001 as a symbol of al-Qaeda's commitment to protecting the Taliban. The group that Masood founded was the Northern Alliance - the same fighters who fought with the CIA in 2001 against the Taliban.

Al-Qaeda has existed as a terrorist organization since at least 1998, and probably earlier. It was 1998 when al-Qaeda launched the attacks against the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and bin Laden declared his fatwa against the presence of American troops on the Arabian peninsula.

So, no, you are not correct. Al-Qaeda has root well before 9/11, and to insinuate that it was invented afterwards is simply not correct.

Re:The Origins Of al-Qaeda

[NutscrapeSucks]

WombatControl -- I didn't mean to imply that Al-Qaeda did not exist, and I'm fully aware of the "The Database" explaination. However, by positioning Al-Qaeda as something much larger than what it actually was, the US Government's propaganda effort essentially created "Al-Qaeda London", "Al-Qaeda Spain", and "Al-Qaeda Iraq" out of random disorganized groups, thus mainfesting a "worldwide" enemy were there simply was not one before.

The BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares", expounds on this theory. You may have seen it already, but I might as well recommend it for other slashdotters:
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmare s

Re:The Origins Of al-Qaeda

[WombatControl]

WombatControl -- I didn't mean to imply that Al-Qaeda did not exist, and I'm fully aware of the "The Database" explaination. However, by positioning Al-Qaeda as something much larger than what it actually was, the US Government's propaganda effort essentially created "Al-Qaeda London", "Al-Qaeda Spain", and "Al-Qaeda Iraq" out of random disorganized groups, thus mainfesting a "worldwide" enemy were there simply was not one before.

Except that is also not quite accurate. Al-Qaeda basically operated like a "franchise" - operatives were trained in Afghanistan, but then scattered across the globe. It didn't become nearly as decentralized until after September 11, 2001 when such centralization became too dangerous. For instance, the 9/11 plot was planned in Kuala Lumpur, and executed by a cell originating in Hamburg, Germany that later moved to Florida.

There may be three different McDonald's in a town, owned and operated by different people, but they were still McDonald's. Al-Qaeda's real genius was in taking that kind of model and applying it to terrorism.

Re:The Origins Of al-Qaeda

[killjoe]

There are lots of theories as to who assinated Masood and why. Massood was an immensely popular figure and would have been the natural leader of the post taliban Afghan govt. More then likely he would not be a patsy for anyone.

The fact that he died so suddenly just before the US invasion certaintly turned out to be very convenient for both the US and Pakistani governments.

Re:Bin Laden and the CIA

[WombatControl]

This is not as far out as it seems. What everybody seems to forget is that Bin Laden was a CIA agent for years and years when he was part of the mujahideen that were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. He was our boy, on our payroll. We gave him cash, weapons, logistical support, equipment and god knows what else. So what I wanna know is this:

The short answer is we didn't.

Bin Laden wasn't funded by the CIA. He wouldn't have taken American money anyway, and didn't need it besides. We did fund some groups that were associated with his Arab mujihadeen, but not his group directly.

The person you're thinking of was Ahmad Shah Masood, who was one of the more successful Afghan fighters during the war. Masood was an enemy of the Taliban, and was assassinated by al-Qaeda shortly before 9/11 to help reassure the Taliban that al-Qaeda would protect them from American reprisals. (Bloody lot of good that did!)

Ahmad Shah Masood was the founder of the anti-Taliban resistance called The Northern Alliance - and that's one of the reasons that the CIA had such good luck in Afghanistan - we were working with the same fighters we had a decade before in fighting the Russians.

This footage is worthless and very non-convincing

[inexion]

I dont understand how this footage is supposed to put at ease any doubts of whether or not flight 77 actually hit the pentagon. I mean, come on now - all you need is a pair of eyeballs and common sense. Heres the breakdown basically - Please see the two tapes here @ Judicial Watch

• during the first clip at exactly 1:26 you can see a small white nub enter from the right side of the clip
• during the second clip at exactly 0:24 you can see a small white blob enter from the right as well

obviously after watching these clips there are missing frames, not to mention that the clip itself only plays at 1-2 frames a second, you can easily tell this when a police/security car drives by the gate - besides most cameras, especially a surveillance camera I would hope, would film at nearly 60-80 fps.

anyways, a plane which is travelling at a descending speed of nearly 400mph should be able to be captured by a camera filming at 60 fps. It just makes no sense to me why a surveillance camera would film at such a shitty rate especially at the PENTAGON for christs sake - if I wanted to I could simply run real fast by the damn thing and no one could ever put an id on me......whats the point of the camera. So this means one of two things in my mind .... 1) there are frames missing - and/or 2) the camera was filming at an unnecessarily slow speed (which doesnt make sense, especially in the nations capital)
So when they decide to release the full clip or clips from other cameras that captured the event, I'm still not convinced. I want to see the full body of that 757 slamming into the building

on another interesting note heres a weird web site with someone trying to work out the geometry of the crash site in relation to that very same camera

Oh yeah...

[chaboud]

And here's (video, wmv) a video of me kicking over a box right before another copy of me walks in front of the first and picks the box up.

I made it in about 20 minutes. They've had five years. I'm definitely not saying that the video is faked. I'm just saying that the conspiracy theorists will just look at this as a feeble attempt to fight back a tide of question-worthy evidence.

They might be right, or they might not. I'll be surprised if we ever get solid evidence one way or another. If I had the really good tape of the hit locked up in the Pentagon, I'd just hang on to it to mess with people.

Re:The official story is not a conspiracy theory.

[cicho]

Seen these?

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Hijack 'suspects' alive and well
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/15591 51.stm

BBC News | MIDDLE EAST | Hijack 'suspect' alive in Morocco
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/15586 69.stm

BBC News | AMERICAS | FBI probes hijackers' identities
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1553754. stm

So much for "facts" about your 19 hijackers.

And by the way, you speak of facts, but we have never been shown proof. You know, that thing that establishes facts as such. We were told it was Bin Laden within hours of the attack, and we were told proof was forthcoming. But it never, um, forthcame.

Re:A fallacy of your own

[dbcad7]

Colin Powell, February 2001:
"[Saddam] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq."

Condoleeza Rice, July 2001:
"We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

The Downing Street Memo, July 2002:
There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

George W. Bush Speech to UN General Assembly September 12, 2002:
Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

Ari Fleischer Press Briefing January 9, 2003:
We know for a fact that there are weapons there.

George W. Bush Address to the Nation March 17, 2003:
Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

Donald Rumsfeld ABC Interview March 30, 2003:
We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

Paul Wolfowitz Vanity Fair interview May 28, 2003:
For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.

There are more.. blatenly taken from this site.. http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WMDlies.html

Re:Where's The Plane?

[Scrameustache]

debris clearly visible. Some are dupes of each other, but scroll through, there was a lot of debris scattered about.

Debris.

I always see the same, easy-to-carry, lonely piece of fuselage, from many angles, but the rest of the debris looks like it came from the construction site that was where the explosion took place.

If you look at the earliest pictures of the site, you can clearly see a half destroyed truck and some big spoils of something, a broken fence... All good sources of debris.
Especially the half destroyed truck.

Re:Bin Laden and the CIA

[Paladin144]

The short answer is we didn't.

The long anwswer is, yes we did.

Bin Laden wasn't funded by the CIA. He wouldn't have taken American money anyway, and didn't need it besides. We did fund some groups that were associated with his Arab mujihadeen, but not his group directly.

Source, please? You're incorrect; Bin Laden was funded by the CIA. Even the Identifying Misinformation page, so helpfully and ironically supplied by the government, admits that:

"While the charges that the CIA was responsible for the rise of the Afghan Arabs might make good copy, they don't make good history. The truth is more complicated, tinged with varying shades of gray. The United States wanted to be able to deny that the CIA was funding the Afghan war, so its support was funneled through Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). ISI in turn made the decisions about which Afghan factions to arm and train, tending to favor the most Islamist and pro-Pakistan. The Afghan Arabs generally fought alongside those factions, which is how the charge arose that they were creatures of the CIA.

I love how he tells us that the CIA was engaged in a coverup and then expects us to believe everything that comes after that. The CIA was aiming for that deniability for a reason. There wouldn't've been anything to deny unless they were also directly funding the Afghan Arabs, along with funneling funds through ISI. The CIA is the one with the cash after all. You think just because Bin Laden's daddy was rich that he didn't need money? War is expensive, and rich people need money more than the rest of us because they're used to buying their way through life.

Even the Wikipedia article on OBL mentions the CIA connection. It's a widely known fact, but not one that you're supposed to bring up in public because, just like NSA spying, we don't officially acknowledge that it happened, even though everyone knows it has. That's government for you.

Re:(conspiracy nut)

[DumbSwede]

I hope this was intended funny --or-- OMG you are ignorant. Cell phones work on planes without a transponder or re-transmitter on the plane. You just are discouraged from using the cell phone while it is in flight. I used my cell phone just last week from inside a plane on the ground. Now it might be at certain altitudes and great distances from city center a cell phone wouldn't connect, but when a hijacking is in progress nobody is going to think "Oh, I can't use my cell phone, it's against FAA rules." They will just flip open and try, and if close enough to a cell tower(s) it will work.

This is exactly what I'm talking about with wish fulfillment. You assume you know something about how something works then assume it is an inviolate law of the universe, which completely upholds and supports your position, but mostly because it is what you want to believe. Perhaps the cell phones had poor connections or experienced frequent drop outs, but work they did. No doubt you will fire back with some other half backed urban nonsense to prove me wrong. But I won't bother responding to what would be a pointless debate the likes of which I've had dozens of other times with conspiracy nuts who believe in things like: crop circle (alien origin), Face on Mars, Faked Moon landings, and Creationism.

Re:Of Bunkers and Reichstag fires..

[shmlco]

Yep. That makes sense. Of course, you probably need ex-military pilots willing to commit suicide as they'd need that skill to hit both towers on the exact levels where sufficient high-explosives were pre-positioned to pancake the structure.

Or is video footage of the towers collapse beginning at the same floors where the planes struck them coincidence? Or did demolition experts also willing to commit suicide and wearing fireproof suits run into the building and onto those floors and, in the middle of a raging inferno, place high explosives in the exact spots need to "pull" the building?

Yeah, I can see how that kind of "theory" is more plausible...

911research.wtc7.net had suggested that

[psiXaos]

Here is the related article from http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pentagon/video. html which I think one of the few respectable research sites out there.

[It has always claimed that 'no-707' theory is false and is a booby-trap for conspiracy theorists, and a disinformation that may have been intentionally flamed up by the government to cover-up other evidence (thus when they finally prove that a 707 indeed crashed Pentagon, they would have practically discredited all the other theories by the nature of human psychology.]

Video of the Pentagon Attack: What is the Government Hiding?
by Jim Hoffman
Version 0.9, May 16, 2006

Today, the DOD released two videos from Pentagon security cameras, through JudicialWatch.org. One of the videos includes the five frames leaked in 2002. The new frames, including several from a different camera, add almost nothing to the body of public evidence about the Pentagon attack on 9/11/01. Since the new videos don't show an airplane, they promise to fuel debates about what hit the Pentagon, rather than put them to rest.

The US government has for years refused to release video evidence that might undermine the popularity of no-Boeing theories. Today's release did not include video recordings from nearby businesses seized by the FBI within minutes of the attack.

Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information Act Request, filed on December 14, 2004, is similar to another request by different plaintifs, documented at Flight77.info. Both sought to obtain all of the camera recordings of the attack, including those from other Pentagon security cameras, ones seized from the Sheraton National Hotel and Nexcomm/Citgo gas station, and those managed by the Virginia Department of Transportation. The Pentagon had refused to release its recordings before today, claiming they were "part of an ongoing investigation involving Zacarias Moussaoui."

Most people who have heard of challenges to the official account (that cells of al Qaeda operatives were solely responsible for the attack) have heard of the theory that the Pentagon was not hit by a jetliner. The theory has been in circulation since early 2002, with the Hunt the Boeing website and Thierry Meyssan's Big Lie and Le Pentagate. The "no-Boeing" theories, which come in small-plane, missile, and truck bomb, variants, have flourished in the vacuum of video evidence, and served as a straw man with which to smear all challenges to the official account of the attack.

The refusal of authorities to release video evidence has been cited by supporters of Pentagon no-jetliner theories as evidence that Flight 77 wasn't there. If the government has proof that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, why doesn't it make it public? Perhaps because it serves the cover-up to keep the sideshow debate about what hit the Pentagon going. In 2004, I suggested that the question of what hit the Pentagon was a huge distraction. Analysis of physical evidence of the crash shows that what's known of the damage and debris fits the crash of Flight 77.

Today Mike Berger was interviewed on ABCNews.com for the story New Tape Stirs Up 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. Rather than take the opportunity point out that the no-Boeing theory is a distraction, Berger stated:

Four-and-a-half years later, we still don't have definitive proof that a plane hit that building.

Mike Berger may not have grasped the implications of saying there is not proof that a plane hit the Pentagon, but it necessarily implies the following:

1. That the scores of accounts of a large plane are either faked or coerced.
2. That the damage to the Pentagon, including an approximately 100-foot-wide expanse of punctured facade walls on the first floor, were somehow produced by a means other than a plane.
3. That fires that smelled like burning jet fuel, running about 200 feet across the facade of the Pentagon, were prod

Re:This footage is worthless and very non-convinci

[bj8rn]

t just makes no sense to me why a surveillance camera would film at such a shitty rate especially at the PENTAGON for christs sake

It's quite simple, actually: the tape will last a lot longer if you shoot it at only one frame per one or two seconds. If you're trying to find out at what time did a car enter or exit the compound (which the cameras the footage was taken from seem to be there for, judging from their position), this will just about suffice; with any luck, you'll even see a blurry picture of the driver. You can see a police car in the videos; this is something the camera was meant to take pictures of. You cannot see the plane, but it's hardly surprising as a plane can move a lot faster than a car.

Re:damn you, Scuttlemonkey!!!!

[hkmwbz]

Your post is so full of lies, deception, manipulation and general nonsense and unfounded claims that you would be best off ignored. But it is dangerous to ignore kooks, so just to show anyone who might read your drivel and believe it how wrong you are. Examples:

"No steel/concrete skyscraper has EVER completely or even nearly completely collapse from fire before or after 9/11"

No steel/concrete skyscraper has ever had huge planes smash into them.

"video/pictures of PEOPLE HANGING OUT OF THE GASH IN THE BUILDING where temperatures hot enough to melt steel are supposed to be present"

Straw man. The steel didn't melt. It was hot enough to significantly weaken it (ask a blacksmith), but not to melt it.

"hydrocarbon (jet fuel/carpet/paper/wood etc) flames CANNOT reach the > 1500 C temperature needed to melt steel"

Which is irrelevant, since steel doesn't have to melt to be significantly weakened.

"Another first: No steel/concrete building has ever collapsed Symetrically into its own footprint without carefully placed explosives."

No steel/concrete building has had the top part partly separated from the rest of the building, only to give in and fall down on the floors below.

"Do you even remember tower 7?"

Yes. It was severely damaged by falling debris from the other buildings.

"MANY MANY WITNESSES AND NEWS REPORTS on the day talked about many multiple exlosions inside the buildings."

If you are implying that "explosions" == "bombs", then you are, frankly, a fucking moron. Many things can cause explosions.

"Fire fighters talk about what looked like controlled detonations coming down the side of the building"

If you think that "looks like" == "actually is", then you are, frankly, a fucking moron.

"The huge flowing dust clouds that formed in the collapses are called apyroclastic flow they require HUGE amounts of energy to form"

You are delusional. When a building collapses, there is lots of air which suddenly finds itself in a lot less space, so it finds its ways out, resulting in what people observed - puffs of smoke, or puffs of dust, debris, etc.

Re:Bin Laden and the CIA

[Kirth]

The short answer is we didn't

*Cough*. Please get our sources straight. The BBC thinks you're wrong, too.

Re:Speaking of which...

[TripMaster Monkey]

Well, I guess that's my cue.

Since I was on an on-site call for much of yesterday, this is the first opportunity I've had to post here. Sorry for the delay.

Well, I've looked very carefully at the newly released video (as I'm sure everyone else in the nation has by now), and like most others, I'm rather disappointed. I was really hoping for some sort of conclusive evidence (one way or another) so we might finally put one of the 9/11 controversies to bed.

Unfortunately, the newly released video shows nothing conclusive...quite the contrary. There is only one frame that contains new information...the alleged 'nose cone'. However, this nose cone certainly does not look like it belongs to a 757, although it is understandable that at the speeds this object was travelling (450-500 mph), there will be a certain amount of blurring.

It's a real shame that the only frame in video 1 that seems to show any of the aircraft has the aircraft hidden behind that yellow column, while the only frame in video 2 that seems to show any of the aircraft shows only a tiny bit of the nose. I realize that these are CCTV cameras whose framerate is not high, but while it's unfortunate that video 1 contains no useful information about the aircraft, the fact that video 2 has no useful info either can only be described as unfortunate squared. How unlucky can you get?

From the BBC article:

"Finally, we hope that this video will put to rest the conspiracy theories involving American Airlines Flight 77," president Tom Fitton said.

Exactly how is a blurry, indistinct shot of a nose cone that doesn't seem to belong to a 757 going to 'put to rest' the conspiracy theories? All this video can do is fan the flames.

This video was not released to attempt to put the conspiracy theories to rest...it was released for one purpose only...to forcefully remind the general public of 9/11. Bush' numbers at the polls are abyssmal, and beating his breast over 9/11 hs been proven to help them. After all, the link to the video on Fox News is titled 'Timely reminder of a clear and present danger'. Timely, indeed.

If the government was truly interested in ending the controversy, why not release the several other videos that were shot that day? Neil Cavuto of Fox News said that 'the other videos didn't pan out', but if that's the case, why does the government need to deny access to them at all? Why can't we see them? It's not like the don't exist.

Another quote from Fox News' Neil Cavuto:

"It is odd that this image hits our senses as the debate over our freedoms hits the headlines."

No, Neil, it's not 'odd' at all. It's what we've come to expect from a President who shamelessly uses the horror of 9/11 to further his own political ends.

Re:damn you, Scuttlemonkey!!!!

[diablomonic]

"No steel/concrete skyscraper has ever had huge planes smash into them."

First of all, WT7 DID NOT have a plane crash into it, and yet still fell (symetrically and into its own footprint), next:

the empire state building had a plane crash into it: At 9:49 a.m. on Saturday July 28, 1945, a B-25 Mitchell bomber accidentally crashed into the north side between the 79th and 80th floors, where the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Council were located. The fire was extinguished in 40 minutes. 14 people were killed in the accident[3].(wikipedia)

Regardless of this, the building was designed to withstand impacts by aircraft of this size, so it shouldn't (and indeed thats not the official explanation) have been the impact that caused the problem. if you think it was the fire, then compare this picture of the WTC fire towers where you can see a small area on one tower and a larger but still relatively small section on the other smoking (black indicating low oxygen therefore cooler fires) with a few visible flames, with this and thisimage of the windsor building in madrid, that was totally engulfed in flames from about halfway up the building to the top, and burned for 10 hours, yet didn't collapse, with only parts not including the inner support section collapsing after burning for hours, as you might expect. Note that the tower, while smaller, had a similar construction to the wtc, being a central support column and perimeter supports, and that the tower was "built using normal strength concrete and before modern fire proofing standards, without any sprinkler system. It was undergoing a complete refurbishment, including the installation of various active fire prevention and resistance measures, when the fire began at around 11pm on 14 February 2005." (see here and here for more pictures and (you may say biased) info and here for a case study of the construction and result of the huge fire. Many other buildings have burned for similar or longer, and not collapsed. If you still think it's reasonable to accept three world first events on the same day at face value, in your words "then you are, frankly, a fucking moron.""(in a less offensive way, if it was conspiracy theorists saying that al queda did it with planes, and the government saying that they demolished it to make room for new towers or something, then would you still think it was rediculous?)

also if you think it was "not an ordinary fire" and that the addition of the jet fuel caused the extra heat that differentiated them from every other fire in history, then, from the debunking 911 myths on popular mechanics:

"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsiblefor the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."

therefore apart from a hot start and some mild damage to the outer structure (which was not intended for holding up the bulk of the weight of the building but rather to resist torsional forces from wind etc, and therfore if that had failed would be much more likely to have caused an assymetrical toppling, rather than a symetrical fall), it was no different to any other fire in the history of steel/concrete buildings. So I ask again, why did three buildings fall on the same day from fire, and never before or since in history?

straw man. The steel didn't melt. It was hot enough to significantly weaken it (ask a blacksmith), but not to melt it.

"Peter Tully, presid

Re:damn you, Scuttlemonkey!!!!

[cayenne8]

As I posted before...the main flaw I see in your arguments is...you give the Feds WAY too much credit for being smart enough, agile enough, and stealthy enough to pull all this off.

I just don't see a part of our government having what it would take to pull off such a massive undertaking, and be able to not only successively pull it off, but, keep the evidence of their involvement covered up.

Re:damn you, Scuttlemonkey!!!!

[TripMaster Monkey]

Look, the crap you are spewing out has been answered a million times.

Odd, then, that you failed to sufficiently answer them in your response. All we get from you is more distortions and evasions.

Repeating lies won't make them true.

Then why do you persist?

This is really a waste of time, except that you may convince some gullible idiot that you are telling the truth.

Exactly why I'm taking the time to debunk your nonsense now.

As you point out, they were built to withstand smaller planes.

The 707 and 757 are virtually identical in weight, and actually have the same fuselage diameter.
Meanwhile, the WTCs were overdesigned by 600%
Still want to argue that the 757 is sufficiently different from the 707 to invalidate my point?

And then the top part fell down on the floors below because of the plane, and the building went to the ground.

Setting aside for just a moment that you're presenting the conclusion of your argument as if it was a defense, if the collapse had occured as you suggest, then there would have been a necessary slowdown as the 'top part' impacted the rest of the building, overcame the resistance of the steel structure, and caused the collapse. Video evidence contradicts this, however, instead showing the towers collapsing at free-fall speeds. No stutters or pauses of any type, just a smooth acceleration all the way down.

Again, it doesn't have to melt. It weakens at significantly lower temperatures.

Again, the temperatures of the kerosene fires were far too low to cause the weakening you speak of. Again, the steel in question is ASTM E119 certified. Apparently, you didn't check the link I provided, in which Kevin R. Ryan,
Site Manager of the Environmental Health Laboratories, South Bend, Indiana (A division of Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.), states:

We know that the steel components were certified to ASTM E119. The time temperature curves for this standard require the samples to be exposed to temperatures around 2000F for several hours. And as we all agree, the steel applied met those specifications. Additionally, I think we can all agree that even un-fireproofed steel will not melt until reaching red-hot temperatures of nearly 3000F (2). Why Dr. Brown would imply that 2000F would melt the high-grade steel used in those buildings makes no sense at all.

The results of your recently published metallurgical tests seem to clear things up (3), and support your team's August 2003 update as detailed by the Associated Press (4), in which you were ready to "rule out weak steel as a contributing factor in the collapse". The evaluation of paint deformation and spheroidization seem very straightforward, and you noted that the samples available were adequate for the investigation. Your comments suggest that the steel was probably exposed to temperatures of only about 500F (250C), which is what one might expect from a thermodynamic analysis of the situation.

However the summary of the new NIST report seems to ignore your findings, as it suggests that these low temperatures caused exposed bits of the building's steel core to "soften and buckle"(5). Additionally this summary states that the perimeter columns softened, yet your findings make clear that "most perimeter panels (157 of 160) saw no temperature above 250C". To soften steel for the purposes of forging, normally temperatures need to be above 1100C (6). However, this new summary report suggests that much lower temperatures were be able to not only soften the steel in a matter of minutes, but lead to rapid structural collapse.

This story just does not add up. If steel from those buildings did soften or melt, I?m sure we can all agree that this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers. That fact should be of great concern to all Americans. Alternatively, the contention that this st

Conspiracy Theories

[Thangodin]

Every aspect of every conspiracy theory about 9/11 has been systematically debunked somewhere or another. Since the WTC was structurally unique, comparisons to other buildings really don't have much bearing in the matter, and while they anticipated the impact of a 707, they did not take into account the combined effect of impact and a full load of fuel; all of this, of course, assumes that the designers were correct when saying that the building could withstand a 707. Timelines show that jets were scrambled in a timely manner when the situation was understood (within minutes of realizing the planes were hijacked and pinpointing their locations.) The dissenting expert opinions are not unusual in science; all scientific fields have their share of wing nuts, but these are fringe opinions usually based upon a single, simplistic, and inconclusive study. There were also people who speculated openly in the early days, and have since come to regret it. In the course of normal science these come out in the wash, but conspiracy theorists cherry pick these and run with them--in some cases, long after the original proponent has disowned and attempted to kill the theory attributed to him. There are pseudo-scientific theories that persist decades after they have been debunked.

The most frustrating thing about conspiracy theories is not the individual factoids that comprise them, but the profound ignorance of human nature, and the obessively magical thinking, that underlie them. As Ben Franklin said, three may keep a secret if two of them are dead. 9/11 conspiracy theories require thousands of conspirators--think of just what would be required to run drone planes into buildings, dispose of all the passengers, rig the buildings, fake everything so that the airlines wouldn't notice, and on, and on, and on. Even the mafia can't keep a secret when the boss tells one guy to whack another, and that's a conspiracy of two, protected by the Omerta!

Only a true fanatic can keep secrets like these, and then, only for a short time, provided he is kept relatively isolated. The Al Queda plan was remarkeably low tech with few moving parts and carried out by a small group of fanatics, most of whom did not arrive in America until a couple days beforehand. Even so, it almost got discovered beforehand. In the aftermath, there is almost no detail of how it was done that we don't know. Compare this with conspiracy theories, which remain isolated pinpoints of data organized by a unifying myth. The Al Queda plan left a big footprint. A government conspiracy would have left an even bigger one.

Conspiracy theories are the new secular religion, supported by the same cognitive errors which support religion, and serving the same purpose. To the conspiracy theorist, the dark cabals which run the world are both stupid and supernaturally brilliant, fools who are somehow capable of godlike prescience, omiscience, and control. The conspiracy theorist himself is a figure on the same mythical scale: he has pierced the veil of the illuminati, seen what few have seen--he is the great challenger to this omnipotent cabal. By following his warnings, we shall overcome the evil presence which has corrupted our world from within, and restore all to goodness and innocence. It's all good, because the solution is so simple.

You'll never convince him otherwise, because his entire conception of self is wound up in the idea that he is the rare visionary, the one who cannot be fooled. To admit that he is wrong would require him to admit that he is profoundly wrong, not just gulled, but gullible. This would be a fall of luciferian proportion, from grand visier to court fool. Conspiracy theorists tend to be marginal and disenfranchised. The fall from mythic heights to the harsh reality of their lives is very hard indeed.

The reality, of course, is that there may actually be no one in control, that both the leaders and the conspiracy theorists can't tell their assholes from a gopher hole, and that this has been the situation for nearly all of hum

Re:damn you, Scuttlemonkey!!!!

[MegaZone]

Just to note, the external walls of the WTC were, in fact, load bearing. It was a revolutionary structure designed to maximize open space. Unlike most skyscrapers, which have curtain walls, the WTC's outer walls carried a significant portion of the buildings load. The floors were carried by beams that spanned the gap from the central column to the walls. As those beams were softened by the heat they pulled on the outer walls and the core.

The design of the building was DIRECTLY related to the collapse. One of the main reason the WTC collapsed while other buildings have not is the way the structure distributed load and how it reacted to this failure mode. The fire alone wouldn't have been enough to bring it down, most likely. And if the aircraft hadn't hit then the spray-on fire insulation wouldn't have been blown off the beams. And the sprinklers would've still worked. Etc. The combination of the fire AND the weakened structure is what did it.

Many of your arguments are bogus. These are not the only buildings to collapse into their own footprint. There was a shopping mall collapse a few years back in Taiwan, IIRC, a multi-story structure that suffered a progressive, pancake collapse exactly like the WTC. That was do to poor construction, and once the collapse started it went right into its own footprint. The two ends of the building were left standing.

There was the tragic Cold Storage Building fire in Worcester, MA a few years back that killed a number of firemen when the building collapsed on them. It was only a few stories tall, but it fell right into its own footprint due to the fire. Didn't even touch the buildings around it. (I live in Worcester.)

As the the B-25 hitting the Empire State Building. So what? Have you seen a B-25 in person? I have, I've been in one. How about a Boeing 767? You can't begin to compare the two. A B-25 is smaller than most commuter turboprops let along an intercontinental widebody airliner. The B-25 was also at the end of its flight and nearly out of fuel, the 767s were almost full. The B-25 had a Maximum Take-Off Weight of 41,800, the B767-200 has a MTOW of 395,000 - nearly ten times as high. And the 767 was much closer to its MTOW than the B-25, especially since a large part of the MTOW of the B-25 was devoted to bombs, which it wasn't carrying. On top of that the B767 travels a hell of a lot faster than the B-25 - vastly increasing the energy of the impact (mass times velocity).

You know a little while after 9/11 a kid flew a Cesna into a high rise in Florida in some bizarre suicide attempt. That building didn't fall either. That applies to the WTC almost as much as the B-25.

Of course, the other factor is the buildings structure. The Empire State Building was in the early school. Heavy steel framework with lots of crossmembers. Stone exterior. Massive, heavy, not much open space. Most of the impact energy was expended in simply penetrating the outer wall. And that outer wall was NOT the primary load bearing structure. On the WTC, as I said above, the outer wall was. It was a bit like a old balloon framed house - put a big enough hole in the outer wall and it will probably come down.

As for the seismic readings - that's been debunked repeatedly. Experts agree that the readings are NOT indicative of an explosion. They give distinct readings. And the energy needed to produce the readings would've required a very large explosion, which would've been impossible to hide. The collapse very easily explains the readings obtained. As for the 'ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE' explosions - bullshit. I don't agree at all. I just don't think that's what it sounds like. And, if it were, why are they not audible or visible on any of the footage shot right at the scene? There is a LOT of continuous footage leading up to the collapse, which you can sync exactly with the across-the-bay shot, and there are no explosions. Period.

Even if pockets of fire got hot enough to melt some steel, that doesn't mean the fires i