They recovered four, three of them AT the crash sites! How. The black boxes didn't even survive. cat-confused

  • aaro [they/them]
    hexbear
    7
    1 month ago

    Okay 9/11 truthers, since it seems that there's a lot of you here, why would the Bush administration do it? To justify an invasion? We could have invaded anywhere we wanted any time we wanted. Thinking that we needed a lot of people to die on domestic soil in order to justify an invasion in the public eye is lib shit. So what's left? Was the government whacking someone in the towers?

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    • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]
      hexbear
      31
      1 month ago

      acting like 9/11 didn't change anything is incredible wilful ignorance. it revolutionised the capabilities of the American security state, domestic and global. i super don't want a debate about this but I recommend the trueanon series as a good primer to de-lib your brain about this

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      • invo_rt [he/him]
        hexbear
        15
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        Adding on, it's important for younger comrades to know that shit like the TSA, DHS, and all those fusion centers (which somehow seem to be used against every major protest movement from Occupy to Pro-Palestine) did NOT exist before 2001. Also shit like the FISA bill which, after the PATRIOT Act, allows the security state to monitor anyone's communications in the US despite security state officials perjuring themselves to claim the opposite for years and was JUST renewed.

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        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          hexbear
          5
          1 month ago

          I spent, literally, twenty years refusing to go through Chertoff's milimeter scanners hoping that a tall white guy getting frisked might, idk, make someone wonder why this was all happening, how it became normal. Spent a decade with people looking at me like I was a crank as I ranted about how the TSA was a massive expansion of federal power, the first time most people came in to regular contact with a federal law enforcement agency. How it was all completely useless security theater that amounted to little more than a jobs program wrapped around an extension of the police state. It's all so goddamn frustrating, and now there's a whole generation of kids who don't remember anything else. We used to be able to go to the gate, greet our families as they got off the plane. It all sucks so much.

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      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        hexbear
        2
        1 month ago

        What truth do you think is being concealed? This is all wikipedia page stuff. USAPATRIOT was already written and waiting for signatures. The Bushes and their cronies had been frothing for an invasion of Iraq for years. This isn't hidden, this was mainstream news throughout the 00s.

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    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
      hexbear
      21
      1 month ago

      The bloodlust immediately after 9/11 was the highest I've seen in my lifetime, much like Oct 7th has been for the Zionist project. I could maybe buy that 9/11 was orchestrated to not just invade countries but to rally Americans around the flag and secure the empire as the End of History.

      Except Bush didn't do that. He could have pointed the finger at anyone and used that to orient the imperial project, but instead of using his biggest political windfall to start a war with Iran he blew his political capital on Afghanistan and then Iraq. Maybe he thought those would be easier occupations and he could use them to build momentum for Iran, but I don't see it. It just seems opportunist, rather than planned.

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      • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]
        hexbear
        16
        1 month ago

        I'll say again, the meme boiling-down of the broad category of 9/11 truth to "bush did 9/11" has been a disaster. that's not what we mean when we say there is more to the story lol. the commission was undeniably a massive coverup and the people deserve to know the truth of every aspect of the story, that's what we mean.

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        • aaro [they/them]
          hexbear
          7
          1 month ago

          we know it wasn't literally Bush slipping some hijackers a twenty under the table and asking them to hijack planes. We understand that you're proposing a complex and long-running plan that would have originated prior to the start of his term. He just would have had to be complicit, and as the head of state at the time, the turn of phrase is the easiest by saying that he did it.

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          • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]
            hexbear
            12
            1 month ago

            i just want Americans to stop blindly reinforcing the state department narrative around this lol. I know it's hard and you've been very heavily propagandized about it but try to apply the same level of critical thought you would to something less close to home

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            • BobDole [none/use name]
              hexbear
              5
              1 month ago

              The 9/11 Truth well has been thoroughly poisoned in America by the the insistence on repeating bad engineering concepts: the “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” memes, the “squibs” as air compressed by a falling building blew out windows and the “basement explosions” caused by the same, the insistence that a cruise missile hit the Pentagon because the plane didn’t leave a perfectly plane shaped hole like a cartoon and the security camera with terrible frame rate and resolution. These crank memes that don’t hold up under scrutiny don’t help anyone’s case, and yet they’re always all over every thread about it because people don’t investigate, just repeat.

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              • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]
                hexbear
                4
                1 month ago

                wow I wonder what caused people to start theorising wildly about what happened, it could be the fact it's completely obvious the official report is a cover up and a crock of lies. the things you're pointing at are symptoms of the people being lied to about this, not just "wow those 9/11 people are so wacky"

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      • @MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml
        hexbear
        7
        1 month ago

        Iraq and Afghanistan are just two of the countries in the region that US politicians have openly been plotting to invade for decades. Syria, Yemen, and Iran are also on this list. They've plotted this since the 70s and have openly admitted to it in interviews since then.

        Iraq was part of the bigger picture, like Iran. It wasn't just opportunistic, it was part of the plan from the beginning.

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        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
          hexbear
          2
          edit-2
          1 month ago

          So why didn't he invade Iraq first? Or further, why didn't he skip all that and just invade Iran?

          Why Afghanistan? It has some strategic importance but it's certainly not that important.

          That's what makes it look opportunistic. It's like no one really thought out how to best use 9/11 because it wasn't actually planned out. They just had a political opportunity fall in their laps and then blew it on lesser targets.

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          • @MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml
            hexbear
            3
            1 month ago

            They did strike Iran to destabilize them around that time period and multiple times before and after the 2000s. Iran is also a much more difficult target than Iraq because they are (and were) much more powerful. Part of the point of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is not just to destabilize those countries, but to destabilize the entire region.

            Iran is flanked on either side by Iraq and Afghanistan, having countries on two opposite borders collapse didn't leave Iran untouched. These actions are connected. Sure, I'm not saying they had everything planned out well beforehand, but they've had their targets planned for a long time and Iran wasn't even close to the same level of difficulty as Iraq and Afghanistan were. It makes more sense to go for the weaker targets and use these to weaken the tougher targets.

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          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            hexbear
            2
            1 month ago

            Iran was a much harder target than Iraq. More mountains, more unified populace, a whole bunch of factors. Iraq had been crushed by a decade of sanctions and as far as I know never really recovered from the destruction wrought in 91. I have no idea how smart anyone in the Bush admin was, whether they had any idea what they were actually up against. Their complete, buffoonish ignorance about Iraqi culture and politics was a constant topic of discussion back in the day. The whole yellow cake kayfabe.

            It's hard for me, at least, to say how much of Iraq was planned and how much was a raft of fools stumbling from one disaster to another but always having unlimited funds and materiel to throw in to the chaos to keep things going. I've heard people who were there talk about the absolute clusterfuck at every level - From US soldiers who never really understood what they were doing, from people who worked in the "reconstruction" effort and described just mind-blowing levels of cultural ignorance and ideology. Views on the motive for the invasion have changed a lot over the years. It went form oil, to MIC grifting, to a large scale strategic plot to destabilize the region.

            it was probably equal parts planned, plans going bad, culturally ignorant and incurious Americans, and the chaos of an inept state with an inpet military doing something really stupid with no clear objective. The US government isn't a monolith, it's neither helplessly foolish nor hyper competent. And probably a lot of cases where people's expertise in one area didn't translate to general competence.

            Like I remember the absolute fiasco when un-armored Humvees that were never supposed to be anything but scout and utility vehicles started getting owned by IEDs. There was this whole period were the public found out that soldiers were welding scrap metal to their trucks to try to protect themselves from bombs. They found out there was really no defense against IEDs, the whole concept of an IED entered the public consciousness. I think the body armor thing was happening at the same time, where infantry didn't have worth while body armor. Just cheap flak vests from the 80s if they had anything. It was a huge public relations disaster for Bush. They had to dump a lot of resources in to procurring body armor and MRAPs (Mine resistant ambush protected, a kind of large truck looking APC). The MRAP thing was a fiasco, every firm in the US that knew how to weld was building these over-weight, badly engineered, barely functional monster trucks. The US Army's hardware is notoriously shit, from what I remember all they had at the time for infantry transport was unarmored trucks, bradley IFVs, and shitty old M113s. maybe a few of whatever the predessecor to the strykers was.

            So they put in all these procurrement orders for any truck with armor and a V-hull, and they get tons of shitty overweight trucks that couldn't go off road due to their massive weight and being massive top heavy, they couldn't go on many roads in iraq for the same reason, they were all slapped together by MIC grifters so there were all kinds of parts problems, it was a huge mess on every level.

            What happened there? Did the regime not anticipate the use of bombs and mines to ambush patrols? Did they think the Iraqis would just surrender and they wouldn't need armored vehicles or body armor? Did they anticipate those things but believe that the US public would accept the resulting casualties? I have no idea. There are probably documents somewhere. How much of it was ignorance, how much was foolishness, how much was poor planning, how much was calculated indifference?

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            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
              hexbear
              1
              edit-2
              1 month ago

              Everything you said just makes it all seem opportunistic to me, like they were just going for low hanging fruit to try to score "easy" wins. The fact that they were too ignorant and uncoordinated to stand a chance against the insurgency in Iraq reveals how unplanned everything was. What that says, to me, is that 9/11 was a happy accident that the Bush administration wanted to use but that they had no actual long term plans.

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              • Frank [he/him, he/him]
                hexbear
                2
                1 month ago

                My take is that the US political class was operating on the correct belief that their violence would lead to an event that would give them the excuse they needed to launch USAPATRIOT and the GWOT, or something like it. I guess you could compare it to, idk, flooding of a drained swamp. You know that a swamp will flood next time there's a big rain upstream. You don't have to destroy the dikes. You just wait for your moment. Like a predator employing an ambush hunting strategy. They know prey will come along and they're content to wait.

                Analyzing the occupation and invasion is hard for me. If you assume their goal was to remove Saddam and create a stable regional "democratic" ally under US hegemony they clearly fucked up and were totally incompetent. If you assume their goal was to get filthy stinking rich, prop up the MIC, expand the US police state, and they didn't really give a shit about Iraq or about the US military, then they succeeded spectacularly. Idk how much of each is true.

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                • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
                  hexbear
                  2
                  edit-2
                  1 month ago

                  They can get filthy stinking rich doing nothing, though. They're basically all insider trading and getting richer ever day no matter what, with or without a war. I'm sure there are some hungry ghosts who just yearn for an ever greater "more" and are not satisfied with just getting richer if they aren't also getting richer faster, but they don't have any plans bigger than that. Just more, forever.

                  If their goal was to expand US influence and dominance over the world, they failed. If their goal was to acquire cheap resources, they failed. If their goal was to assert US hegemony, they failed. If their goal was to stabilize trade and resource extraction, they failed.

                  I just don't think they planned any of this out. They just bumbled from event to event and tried to opportunistically profit on a case-by-case basis, in turn being unable to build a long-lasting project, and that's why it eventually became a debacle and had to be abandoned.

                  That also doesn't really answer my original question: why did they start with Afghanistan? If the goal was Iraq, why bother? Just start there!

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                  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
                    hexbear
                    1
                    1 month ago

                    From what I remember Afghanistan started out very small, with a very small number of troops on the ground allegedly looking for bin Laden, then... I think we started supporting the Northern Alliance warlords against the Taliban for some reason, and things snowballed? idk, I really haven't looked in to the history of Afghanistan in a long time.

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      • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]
        hexbear
        3
        1 month ago

        It's true. Any action in the middle east or central Asia would be completely unquestioned as long as a lot of people got killed. So we got a giant money laundering scheme disguised ad wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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    • TechnoUnionTypeBeat [he/him, they/them]
      hexbear
      21
      1 month ago

      To justify an invasion? We could have invaded anywhere we wanted any time we wanted

      This makes it sound like you were born after 2001

      Yes, in theory, the US could have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan any time they wanted, but wars in the US always require an excuse of some kind for The International Community (tm), and inevitably are unpopular with one party

      The revanchist fury that soaked into the West right after 9/11 is hard to describe if you weren't there. That shit was bipartisan, every liberal went full holden-bloodfeast overnight. News was 24/7 bloodlust, with the initial sucker punch on Baghdad playing live on every news outlet

      What followed was 20 years of the biggest MIC grifting the world had ever seen. Billions in failed Future Soldier shit, billions in new weapons. Contractors selling pens valued at a thousand times their worth just to grift a few million more. And then came the PATRIOT Act and other surveillance methods which were accepted to wide acclaim because of 9/11, with no mainstream pushback. It further solidified the vassal relationship of the rest of NATO/the EU to the US as the US dragged others in and began militarily grifting them as well.The pre-9/11 world would be just unrecognizable to anyone born afterwards

      Nobody is legitimately arguing that Bush personally contacted the Saudis and asked for Bin Laden. The usual argument is that the Bush regime had intel that they chose not to act on

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      • @MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml
        hexbear
        8
        1 month ago

        Also, multiple bush regimes set up the circumstances that led to 9/11 starting with funding and arming the mujahideen. Bin Laden didn't come out of nowhere and the invasion of Afghanistan was completely unnecessary in terms of catching him and others who orchestrated the attack. Even Al-Qaeda offered to hand him over before the invasion and they weren't the last group to offer handing him over.

        Bush Sr, Bush Jr, and many other ghouls indirectly setup 9/11 and then made the fallout larger than it needed to be to achieve their stated goals. The blood of millions is on their hands and 9/11 was a drop in the bucket. They deserve to be tried, convicted, and locked away as war criminals, not to sit out retirement painting and pretending they did no wrong.

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