Withdraw from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, stop buying middle easter oil, and stop supporting Israel and ding the terrorism problem is 100% solved, how hard is that?
Unlikely to a 100% solution. Not only would disenguaging from Israel be very difficult with the current proportion of "Israel Firsters" in the US Government, even if it could be done US would undoubtedly become the target of Zionist terrorists. In addition the US would need to stop threatening Iran and Venezuela.
As a bonus using less oil extends the time until peak oil and is better for the environment.
There's also the factor of the US Government not spending vast amounts of money on wars and "foreign aid".
Its the same with gun rights, chemistry, shit just about everything - lawmakers are good at making laws but bad at thinking of the ramifications from those law.
Even though that is their job. If they are full time "lawmakers" that is the only job they should be doing...
Well, that's one of the flaws of democracy, it selects leaders not on the basis of ability to govern, but on ability to win elections.
Actually it's a flaw of the way "democracy" is currently practiced in many places. There are other ways to practice democracy which tend to be better in this respect. One possible alternative would be the "reality show election", e.g. put all of the candidates in a "Big Brother House". More radical would be having randomly picked juries to review legislation.
Why are you able to believe that an anti-terror law may not do much to protect us from terrorism, and may have outcomes that are worse than the terrorism itself... but you are unable to see that the same situation could exist for other laws?
Because actual debate appears to be quite uncommon with "anti-terrorism" laws. Including if it's possible for the proposed law to actually increase terrorism or to have side effects which are more destructive than any terrorism.
You are willing to condemn a factory owner who opposes an "enviornmental" law, and to attribute some sinister motive to them being against a law... even though you have very little knowledge of the specific manufacturing process and of the specific law he is opposing. But you wouldn't want someone to accuse you of having a terroristic or pedophilic motive if you don't support laws designed to fight terrorism or pedophilia.
This ability to apply a nasty lable is one of the reasons why needed debate is lacking. Other such lables include "pirate", "sexist", "anti-semite", "racist", etc. However there isn't such an effective way to make ad hominem argument in the situation of the factory owner...
For a large building to topple to one side like a tree would require tremendous torque.
All that is required with a tree is to weaken the structure in an asymetric way.
If you have (for example) a brick wall of 3 meters height, then it is possible for the wall to fall over because the mortar is strong enough to allow this action. But if you have a 15 meter tall brick wall, then when the wall collapses, the mortar will fail and the wall will break into pieces. So unless you give this wall a gentle but tremendous push, it will break and basically fall downwards. The same principles apply to steel construction (but on a larger scale).
The strange thing is that the top of WTC2 did initially start to topple to one side.
So the government has no burden to put forward evidence that their story of events is what happened? I have yet to see concrete proof that the Pentagon was hit by a plane. Even this video that is supposed to debunk all the theories doesn't actually show a plane.
Even if it did it would be kind of hard for this to debunk all the theories. Since the vast majority don't dispute what hit the Pentagon. (Including those which are not concerned with what happened there.) The "no plane at the Pentagon" issue is something of a distraction from quite a few of the things which are very obviously wrong with the US Government's explanation.
They could, of course, release the tapes from the other cameras they confiscated almost immediately (within half an hour)), including the Citgo gas station and the nearby hotel. Even if they didn't capture anything, they're still being withheld for some reason.
It would be likely that if these showed anything the footage would be better than that from a camera very near the impact site.
Of more interest to me is not what hit the Pentagon, but who was flying it. Despite discussion of ground effect and clipped lightpoles, it was a hell of a feat to level out where the plane did after making the turns it did.
If they could fly the plane like that why hit the recently reinforced outer wall rather than the central courtyard? The modifications to the building were intended to protect against truck bombs.
Actually, this only provides evidence that 1) some of the fuel was burning in fuel-rich areas and 2) there were other things burning besides fuel. I find it plausible that there was a lot of fuel scattered throughout the impacted floors and that the resulting fires did not have a consistent fuel/air mix and resulting temperature from one location to another.
The basic problem is that in over a century of steel framed buildings only WTC1, WTC2 & WTC7 have collapsed in this way. Whereas other buildings have remained standing after much more severe fires. The basic problem with the idea of pockets of intense fire is that steel is a good conductor of heat, in order to even weaken part of a steel structure you need to put in energy faster than it is conducted away.
Some unexpected things were going on in the WTC damaged floors, that much is clear. I don't think it's necessary to suppose that there was more than just an airplane in there to expect extraordinary events.
The "elephant in the room" is WTC7. Even were it the case that there was some factor in the design of WTC1 and WTC2 which made them especially vulnerable to both impact damage followed by fire, WTC7 was built at a different time to a different design. Apart from it's address it was simply a "surrounding building" with respect to the rest of the complex. It was not hit by a plane, nor was it especially close to either WTC1 or WTC2. Why did only this nearby building collapse?
Don't forget that this very story concerns the release of a very small piece of evidence, five years after the fact! And even then, it is of very suspect quality.
A small piece of evidence which is unlikely to show much anyway. Security cameras are intended to record people, not high speed aircraft at close range. Even the best possible images are likely to be of poorer quality than those from New York, where people have made claims that wing fairings are some kind of pod and that communications antenna are sprays of fuel.
My point is just that there are two very different kinds of conspiracies and that the parent posts claiming that "conspiracy theories must be correct, since if it wasn't a conspiracy within our government, then it was a conspiracy of terrorists" are playing a silly word game. No one is arguing that there wasn't a "conspiracy" on some level because that would be an obviously ridiculous position. The people who are worried about conspiracies (and are described as "conspiracy theorists" and as wearing tin-foil hats) are exclusively those worried about the kind of conspiracy that involves our government.
Not all of the conspiracy theories related to 911 are "High Conspiracies".
Simply, there's nothing interesting or controversial about terrorists being involved in a conspiracy, since that's blindingly obvious -- that being what makes them terrorists and not just run-of-the-mill murderous nut-jobs.
The most unintersting theory is that these are just regular terrorists. Entities like the IRA, ETA, ALF, etc Things get "interesting" if governments other than than of the US are involved, similarly with some kind of multi-national business (including organised crime) were to be involved. The "Al-Quaeda" as a global terrorist group idea fits in with this, even if there was no connection between Osama Bin-Goldstien and the US (or any other) government.
However, it's one thing to argue that the events of 9/11 were part of a conspiracy involving the US government and a very different thing to argue that it was a conspiracy involving terrorists. The former is huge news, the latter is blindingly obvious. When someone talks about 9/11 being a conspiracy, they mean the former, not the latter.
This is something of a false dichotomy there are plenty of senarios which involve both in one or more related conspiracy.
Ask the simple question: How did the Towers collapse? Do the research. In the links below, Jones points out that in science, one starts from the facts, from the evidence, then you build your theory. But the main stream media has fed you the theory "19 crazy arab hijackers + jet fuel" (the conclusion we are to draw), from which you build your facts. Any facts that don't fit in, are thrown away. That's bad science. No wonder people are confused. One simple example: take the 911 Report. Didn't even cover the collapse of WTC 7. Why? Because it doesn't make sense, doesn't fit in with their "theory".
The fundermental problem is that no such steel framed building has ever totally collapsed due to fire in over a century, except on that one day. Even though there have been fires in such buildings before and since, including one in the 1970's in one of the WTC towers. WTC7 wasn't even hit by a plane, there is even reason to doubt that the impact damage to WTC1 and WTC2 was sufficent to greatly greatly weaken the structure.
One flaw in the "19 Arab taking out the towers" theory is the military precision required for an effort like this. Moussawi?
The most obvious flaw is that several of the alleged hijackers turned up alive and well a few days later, which logically casts doubt on the identities of all 19.
If you follow the "theory" as trotted out by the Main Stream Media, there was incredible *incompetence* that allowed this to happen. The incompetence of our CIA, such that every other spy agency in the world was warning American officials, yet they were ignored. The incompetence that low-level underlings at the FBI tried to report to their superiors that foreigners trying to learn how to fly, but were stonewalled in their request to investigate - not once, but 70 times! Criminal negligence, or just following orders?
If the latter you'd expect some action to be taken at the very least officials to be fired and publically humiliated.
Condi, or maybe Bush said, "Who could've imagined this would happen?". Well, just the military, because that is apparently the reason NORAD was mysteriously shut down, and no jets were scrambled, because the flight control folks were told this was a "training exercise" - involving hijacked jets hitting the towers. So they just happened to be training for an attack that no one could've imagined.
Similarly someone at Fox television used the "unimaginable plot" of crashing an airliner into a certain New York landmark in the first episode of "The Lone Gunmen"; in the TV movie "By Dawn's Early Light" a mid air collision is deliberatly engineered between "Looking Glass" and "NECAP", on the orders of the US President; Stephen King wrote a book called "The Running Man" which ends with a plane being hijacked and used as a guided missile; Dale Brown wrote a book called "Storming Heaven" where terrorists use airliners as both bombers and missiles and finally Japanese military pilots in WWII would deliberatly crash their planes into US ships... Quite obviously in the history of aviation nobody has ever considered the possibility of a piloted aircraft being used as a "guided missile":)
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.
Some of the "crazy ideas" may actually come from supporters of the officially blessed theory, as part of a technique called "poisoning the well".
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.
These are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's perfectly possible for a government to not take steps it could do to prevent an attack even to render support to the "terrorists". It's certainly possible to find examples of these kind of things throughout recorded history.
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.
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.
It's rather difficult to come up with an explanation which does not involve conspiracy, it's even harder to come up with such an explanation which isn't obviously pure sciene fiction.
Note that even the official theory has all sort of bizarre aspects (James Bond-style mastermind villian in his secret underground bunker, for example).
Except that the bunker is a cave without even 19th century communications technology...
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.
It isn't even an especially credible one, it rapidly falls apart with such matters ast the identities of the hijackers.
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'.
Whilst there are certainly alternative theories which are less or equally credible there are theories which are rather more credible.
Talk negatively about conspiracy theories all you want.
There are plenty of criminal cases where the prosecution presents nothing but "conspiracy theories"...
Especially with "911" where it's virtually impossible to come up with an explanation which does not involve conspiracy. Never mind that the officially sanctioned explanation is a rather daft conspiracy theory in the first place.
Interestingly enough, this was exactly the tactic of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in Western Germany: to cause an increase in surveillance and generell state repression of the populace by means of terror acts, which then would cause ever-widening differences between government/establishment and the general public, eventually leading to a revolution toppling the government and establishing a communist society.
Alternativly to create a situation where there was little difference between the "Federal Republic" and the "Democratic Republic". Thus Germany would reunify following the model of the DDR...
With other words, these guys deliberately used not only acts of terror but more importantly the *expected government response* to further their goal.
There are two things here. One is that terrorism is about terror the other is that it is important that response to terrorism never results in positive feedback.
I 100% agree with you, and that is 100% irrelevant to my point, which was that going too far in terms of "prevention" can be as bad or worse then not enough.
The issue is one of security. Devising effective security requires cool heads and smart people, doing things the wrong way can easily be counter productive. The best way need not be the most obvious or the most noticable either.
This is a "time of war" about as much as the "war on drugs" was. We're currently "at war" with a tinpot Third-World country whose military we destroyed in approximately five seconds,
Of course, as a brief look at history shows, defeating a military and occupying a country are not the same thing. The Iraqis also know there is no "Operation Overlord" likely.
Terrorist organizations are international crime syndicates. Like most such, they're nasty, they're violent, and sometimes they kill innocent people. Like all such, they can be defeated far better with good detective work and intelligence then draconian "Big Brother" measures.
Assuming the actual intent is to have an "end" to the "war". Or is the behaviour, as with the "war on (some) drugs", going to end up being one of doing something which is never going to "work".
Terrorists are not "imagined" and we are not "hysterical". They are dangerous people, and acts of terrorism can be prevented.
But the most effective methods of preventing acts of terrorism may well not include governments snooping on people's communications at random, invading countries which were never any kind of threat in the first place, selectivly enforcing "anti-terrorism" laws, supporting "good" terrorists, etc. Indeed there is plenty of historical evidence that at least some of these are at best useless, whilst measures with a good track record of reducing terrorism are not being taken.
Bush: "They are attacking your freedom. But don't worry, we'll fight it by taking your freedom!"
Do you honestly mean you cannot see what is wrong with that statement?
You are far more likely to die from traffic than terrorism.
You are probably more likely to encounter corrupt government official, even a terrorist that government is uninterested in/supports than any of the "nasty terrorists" which all the fuss is made about.
First of all, the fourth amendment is about GOVERNMENT search and seizure. Private events such as concerts, sporting events, etc, can insist on strip searches if they want. Note the same point can be made about the first amendment when fools scream about censorship by a private entity.
Assuming that the event/venue in question is genuinely private. e.g. a sports arena on land aquired under eminent domain really should not be considered a private place.
Second of all, note that pesky word "unreasonable" in the fourth amendment. Airline searches are perfectly reasonable because of the number of lives at stake, and the ease with which someone can blow up a plane.
Some searches may be reasonable, but confiscating nail clippers rather obviously isn't. If the aim is to prevent a bomb getting on the plane searches are also reasonable for crew, people handling baggage/cargo and anyone who might otherwise have access to the plane. Which most definitly includes security guards (at least one plane has been sucessfully hijacked by suicidal terrorists inpersonating police) and those operating metal detectors/X-ray machines/etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Withdraw from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, stop buying middle easter oil, and stop supporting Israel and ding the terrorism problem is 100% solved, how hard is that?
Unlikely to a 100% solution. Not only would disenguaging from Israel be very difficult with the current proportion of "Israel Firsters" in the US Government, even if it could be done US would undoubtedly become the target of Zionist terrorists.
In addition the US would need to stop threatening Iran and Venezuela.
As a bonus using less oil extends the time until peak oil and is better for the environment.
There's also the factor of the US Government not spending vast amounts of money on wars and "foreign aid".
Its the same with gun rights, chemistry, shit just about everything - lawmakers are good at making laws but bad at thinking of the ramifications from those law.
Even though that is their job. If they are full time "lawmakers" that is the only job they should be doing...
Well, that's one of the flaws of democracy, it selects leaders not on the basis of ability to govern, but on ability to win elections.
Actually it's a flaw of the way "democracy" is currently practiced in many places. There are other ways to practice democracy which tend to be better in this respect. One possible alternative would be the "reality show election", e.g. put all of the candidates in a "Big Brother House". More radical would be having randomly picked juries to review legislation.
Why are you able to believe that an anti-terror law may not do much to protect us from terrorism, and may have outcomes that are worse than the terrorism itself... but you are unable to see that the same situation could exist for other laws?
Because actual debate appears to be quite uncommon with "anti-terrorism" laws. Including if it's possible for the proposed law to actually increase terrorism or to have side effects which are more destructive than any terrorism.
You are willing to condemn a factory owner who opposes an "enviornmental" law, and to attribute some sinister motive to them being against a law... even though you have very little knowledge of the specific manufacturing process and of the specific law he is opposing. But you wouldn't want someone to accuse you of having a terroristic or pedophilic motive if you don't support laws designed to fight terrorism or pedophilia.
This ability to apply a nasty lable is one of the reasons why needed debate is lacking. Other such lables include "pirate", "sexist", "anti-semite", "racist", etc.
However there isn't such an effective way to make ad hominem argument in the situation of the factory owner...
Sorry but the US has one-upped England on the privacy invasion and surveillance. Is the UK collecting your call records yet?
They just having admitted to it.
Here in the US, every phone call is logged and stored in an NSA database to arrest you one day.
These probably arn't confined to just "No Such Agency", also it's highly likely that not only the US Government has access to such records.
Only an idiot would believe a written constitution means anything at all anyway, as they can just be rewritten whenever a government wants to.
Or they could reinterpret it or simply ignore what is written.
For a large building to topple to one side like a tree would require tremendous torque.
All that is required with a tree is to weaken the structure in an asymetric way.
If you have (for example) a brick wall of 3 meters height, then it is possible for the wall to fall over because the mortar is strong enough to allow this action. But if you have a 15 meter tall brick wall, then when the wall collapses, the mortar will fail and the wall will break into pieces. So unless you give this wall a gentle but tremendous push, it will break and basically fall downwards. The same principles apply to steel construction (but on a larger scale).
The strange thing is that the top of WTC2 did initially start to topple to one side.
So the government has no burden to put forward evidence that their story of events is what happened? I have yet to see concrete proof that the Pentagon was hit by a plane. Even this video that is supposed to debunk all the theories doesn't actually show a plane.
Even if it did it would be kind of hard for this to debunk all the theories. Since the vast majority don't dispute what hit the Pentagon. (Including those which are not concerned with what happened there.)
The "no plane at the Pentagon" issue is something of a distraction from quite a few of the things which are very obviously wrong with the US Government's explanation.
They could, of course, release the tapes from the other cameras they confiscated almost immediately (within half an hour)), including the Citgo gas station and the nearby hotel. Even if they didn't capture anything, they're still being withheld for some reason.
It would be likely that if these showed anything the footage would be better than that from a camera very near the impact site.
Of more interest to me is not what hit the Pentagon, but who was flying it. Despite discussion of ground effect and clipped lightpoles, it was a hell of a feat to level out where the plane did after making the turns it did.
If they could fly the plane like that why hit the recently reinforced outer wall rather than the central courtyard? The modifications to the building were intended to protect against truck bombs.
Actually, this only provides evidence that 1) some of the fuel was burning in fuel-rich areas and 2) there were other things burning besides fuel. I find it plausible that there was a lot of fuel scattered throughout the impacted floors and that the resulting fires did not have a consistent fuel/air mix and resulting temperature from one location to another.
The basic problem is that in over a century of steel framed buildings only WTC1, WTC2 & WTC7 have collapsed in this way. Whereas other buildings have remained standing after much more severe fires. The basic problem with the idea of pockets of intense fire is that steel is a good conductor of heat, in order to even weaken part of a steel structure you need to put in energy faster than it is conducted away.
Some unexpected things were going on in the WTC damaged floors, that much is clear. I don't think it's necessary to suppose that there was more than just an airplane in there to expect extraordinary events.
The "elephant in the room" is WTC7. Even were it the case that there was some factor in the design of WTC1 and WTC2 which made them especially vulnerable to both impact damage followed by fire, WTC7 was built at a different time to a different design. Apart from it's address it was simply a "surrounding building" with respect to the rest of the complex. It was not hit by a plane, nor was it especially close to either WTC1 or WTC2. Why did only this nearby building collapse?
Don't forget that this very story concerns the release of a very small piece of evidence, five years after the fact! And even then, it is of very suspect quality.
A small piece of evidence which is unlikely to show much anyway. Security cameras are intended to record people, not high speed aircraft at close range. Even the best possible images are likely to be of poorer quality than those from New York, where people have made claims that wing fairings are some kind of pod and that communications antenna are sprays of fuel.
My point is just that there are two very different kinds of conspiracies and that the parent posts claiming that "conspiracy theories must be correct, since if it wasn't a conspiracy within our government, then it was a conspiracy of terrorists" are playing a silly word game. No one is arguing that there wasn't a "conspiracy" on some level because that would be an obviously ridiculous position. The people who are worried about conspiracies (and are described as "conspiracy theorists" and as wearing tin-foil hats) are exclusively those worried about the kind of conspiracy that involves our government.
Not all of the conspiracy theories related to 911 are "High Conspiracies".
Simply, there's nothing interesting or controversial about terrorists being involved in a conspiracy, since that's blindingly obvious -- that being what makes them terrorists and not just run-of-the-mill murderous nut-jobs.
The most unintersting theory is that these are just regular terrorists. Entities like the IRA, ETA, ALF, etc
Things get "interesting" if governments other than than of the US are involved, similarly with some kind of multi-national business (including organised crime) were to be involved. The "Al-Quaeda" as a global terrorist group idea fits in with this, even if there was no connection between Osama Bin-Goldstien and the US (or any other) government.
However, it's one thing to argue that the events of 9/11 were part of a conspiracy involving the US government and a very different thing to argue that it was a conspiracy involving terrorists. The former is huge news, the latter is blindingly obvious. When someone talks about 9/11 being a conspiracy, they mean the former, not the latter.
This is something of a false dichotomy there are plenty of senarios which involve both in one or more related conspiracy.
Ask the simple question: How did the Towers collapse? Do the research. In the links below, Jones points out that in science, one starts from the facts, from the evidence, then you build your theory. But the main stream media has fed you the theory "19 crazy arab hijackers + jet fuel" (the conclusion we are to draw), from which you build your facts. Any facts that don't fit in, are thrown away. That's bad science. No wonder people are confused. One simple example: take the 911 Report. Didn't even cover the collapse of WTC 7. Why? Because it doesn't make sense, doesn't fit in with their "theory".
:)
The fundermental problem is that no such steel framed building has ever totally collapsed due to fire in over a century, except on that one day. Even though there have been fires in such buildings before and since, including one in the 1970's in one of the WTC towers. WTC7 wasn't even hit by a plane, there is even reason to doubt that the impact damage to WTC1 and WTC2 was sufficent to greatly greatly weaken the structure.
One flaw in the "19 Arab taking out the towers" theory is the military precision required for an effort like this. Moussawi?
The most obvious flaw is that several of the alleged hijackers turned up alive and well a few days later, which logically casts doubt on the identities of all 19.
If you follow the "theory" as trotted out by the Main Stream Media, there was incredible *incompetence* that allowed this to happen. The incompetence of our CIA, such that every other spy agency in the world was warning American officials, yet they were ignored. The incompetence that low-level underlings at the FBI tried to report to their superiors that foreigners trying to learn how to fly, but were stonewalled in their request to investigate - not once, but 70 times! Criminal negligence, or just following orders?
If the latter you'd expect some action to be taken at the very least officials to be fired and publically humiliated.
Condi, or maybe Bush said, "Who could've imagined this would happen?". Well, just the military, because that is apparently the reason NORAD was mysteriously shut down, and no jets were scrambled, because the flight control folks were told this was a "training exercise" - involving hijacked jets hitting the towers. So they just happened to be training for an attack that no one could've imagined.
Similarly someone at Fox television used the "unimaginable plot" of crashing an airliner into a certain New York landmark in the first episode of "The Lone Gunmen"; in the TV movie "By Dawn's Early Light" a mid air collision is deliberatly engineered between "Looking Glass" and "NECAP", on the orders of the US President; Stephen King wrote a book called "The Running Man" which ends with a plane being hijacked and used as a guided missile; Dale Brown wrote a book called "Storming Heaven" where terrorists use airliners as both bombers and missiles and finally Japanese military pilots in WWII would deliberatly crash their planes into US ships...
Quite obviously in the history of aviation nobody has ever considered the possibility of a piloted aircraft being used as a "guided missile"
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.
Some of the "crazy ideas" may actually come from supporters of the officially blessed theory, as part of a technique called "poisoning the well".
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.
These are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's perfectly possible for a government to not take steps it could do to prevent an attack even to render support to the "terrorists". It's certainly possible to find examples of these kind of things throughout recorded history.
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.
It certainly isn't much use against the latter.
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.
It's rather difficult to come up with an explanation which does not involve conspiracy, it's even harder to come up with such an explanation which isn't obviously pure sciene fiction.
Note that even the official theory has all sort of bizarre aspects (James Bond-style mastermind villian in his secret underground bunker, for example).
Except that the bunker is a cave without even 19th century communications technology...
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.
It isn't even an especially credible one, it rapidly falls apart with such matters ast the identities of the hijackers.
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'.
Whilst there are certainly alternative theories which are less or equally credible there are theories which are rather more credible.
Talk negatively about conspiracy theories all you want.
There are plenty of criminal cases where the prosecution presents nothing but "conspiracy theories"...
You can't put the conspiracy theories to rest.
Especially with "911" where it's virtually impossible to come up with an explanation which does not involve conspiracy.
Never mind that the officially sanctioned explanation is a rather daft conspiracy theory in the first place.
Basically, the rule is the same as for unsolicited phone calls: always be the one to initiate the communication.
If someone claiming to be from your bank phones you then you ask them security questions, not the other way around.
Interestingly enough, this was exactly the tactic of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in Western Germany: to cause an increase in surveillance and generell state repression of the populace by means of terror acts, which then would cause ever-widening differences between government/establishment and the general public, eventually leading to a revolution toppling the government and establishing a communist society.
Alternativly to create a situation where there was little difference between the "Federal Republic" and the "Democratic Republic". Thus Germany would reunify following the model of the DDR...
With other words, these guys deliberately used not only acts of terror but more importantly the *expected government response* to further their goal.
There are two things here. One is that terrorism is about terror the other is that it is important that response to terrorism never results in positive feedback.
I 100% agree with you, and that is 100% irrelevant to my point, which was that going too far in terms of "prevention" can be as bad or worse then not enough.
The issue is one of security. Devising effective security requires cool heads and smart people, doing things the wrong way can easily be counter productive. The best way need not be the most obvious or the most noticable either.
This is a "time of war" about as much as the "war on drugs" was. We're currently "at war" with a tinpot Third-World country whose military we destroyed in approximately five seconds,
Of course, as a brief look at history shows, defeating a military and occupying a country are not the same thing. The Iraqis also know there is no "Operation Overlord" likely.
Terrorist organizations are international crime syndicates. Like most such, they're nasty, they're violent, and sometimes they kill innocent people. Like all such, they can be defeated far better with good detective work and intelligence then draconian "Big Brother" measures.
Assuming the actual intent is to have an "end" to the "war". Or is the behaviour, as with the "war on (some) drugs", going to end up being one of doing something which is never going to "work".
Terrorists are not "imagined" and we are not "hysterical". They are dangerous people, and acts of terrorism can be prevented.
But the most effective methods of preventing acts of terrorism may well not include governments snooping on people's communications at random, invading countries which were never any kind of threat in the first place, selectivly enforcing "anti-terrorism" laws, supporting "good" terrorists, etc.
Indeed there is plenty of historical evidence that at least some of these are at best useless, whilst measures with a good track record of reducing terrorism are not being taken.
Bush: "They are attacking your freedom. But don't worry, we'll fight it by taking your freedom!" Do you honestly mean you cannot see what is wrong with that statement?
You are far more likely to die from traffic than terrorism.
You are probably more likely to encounter corrupt government official, even a terrorist that government is uninterested in/supports than any of the "nasty terrorists" which all the fuss is made about.
First of all, the fourth amendment is about GOVERNMENT search and seizure. Private events such as concerts, sporting events, etc, can insist on strip searches if they want. Note the same point can be made about the first amendment when fools scream about censorship by a private entity.
Assuming that the event/venue in question is genuinely private. e.g. a sports arena on land aquired under eminent domain really should not be considered a private place.
Second of all, note that pesky word "unreasonable" in the fourth amendment. Airline searches are perfectly reasonable because of the number of lives at stake, and the ease with which someone can blow up a plane.
Some searches may be reasonable, but confiscating nail clippers rather obviously isn't. If the aim is to prevent a bomb getting on the plane searches are also reasonable for crew, people handling baggage/cargo and anyone who might otherwise have access to the plane. Which most definitly includes security guards (at least one plane has been sucessfully hijacked by suicidal terrorists inpersonating police) and those operating metal detectors/X-ray machines/etc.