I think everyone here believes 9/11 conspiracies to a certain extent. Hell, I think most people believe in certain variations of them. The extent of which is where your mileage may vary.
- Bush/Cheney/Rumself knew about it and intentionally did nothing to stop it
- The Saudis did it
These two are pretty universally accepted in these circles (and beyond them). But I'm curious to where everyone here feels about the more nitty gritty theories:
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Do you believe that the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld-lead cabal actively coordinated in ways to make it easier for the hijackings to be successful (such as disrupting the NORAD response, intentionally allowing the hijackers into the country and coordinating freely, etc...)
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Do you believe in the controlled demolition theory?
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Do you believe Flight 93 was shot down?
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Do you think the people the official narrative claims were flying the planes were actually flying the planes? This seems to breakdown to two different scenarios:
- The hijackers were never actually flying the plane (Which is a theory I don't support)
- The hijackers were "flying" the plane but it was actually being piloted as an autonomous drone (I think this is way more likely)
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Do you believes the planes that crashed into the buildings weren't actually the reported planes and the passengers were disposed by other means?
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Do you believe a missile hit the Pentagon?
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Do you believe that certain people were aware of what was going to happen and tipped off about it, allowing them to execute lucrative securities trading?
For me, I believe:
- That the involvement of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld-lead cabal definitely took active measures to make sure it succeeds
- Flight 93 was shot down
- The planes were being autonomously piloted
I am agnostic to the controlled demolition theories. The physics and engineering component of it goes a bit over my head, so I'm left to trusting certain peoples analysis. I've seen people I trust provide arguments for both sides.
I'm curious to hear where everyone else falls on this spectrum?
she’s 100% convinced that the towers were just a pilot accident that got out of hand. like, no terrorism or plotting involved, just a comical screwup
I just posted that I also believe this. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to an accident!
Look, it's not as memetic as "dudes rock," but old ladies with random completely batshit ideas based on nothing rock.
that's awesome, we're living in some edgar-wright-remaking-naked-gun dark comedy. i dig this theory.
two bizarre, deeply tragic mistakes
second plane hit the towers in solidarity with the first plane
twin towers picture with the following scribbled in red pen: smoke (with arrow pointed at the smoke), mirrors??? (underlined) line drawn between the two towers
Well I don't know about the first plane but the second plane was a rescue mission gone awry clearly :(
Saudi govt knew, I think some portion of the US govt knew something was coming but honestly probably underestimated it. Doubt they knew details.
No controlled demolition or anything necessary, see the 9/11 ep of :wtyp-gang:
93 was probably shot down
i was listening to that last night, great episode but holy shit the bit where roz finds out ruth bader ginsberg just died and becomes completely jokerfied live on air was truly incredible :michael-laugh:
Hard to imagine they would allow 9/11 to happen.
History has proven again and again they need NO EVIDENCE AT ALL to push the American people to war.
The idea that they'd need to concoct a false flag, essentially, is ignoring how stupid and murderous the American people are. It's a-historical.
if you read the pnac documents written prior to 9/11, theyre really fucking mask-off (and remember pnac includes cheney and rumsfeld)
they talk at length about wanting a new "pax americana", and are itching to do a bunch of invasions and transformations of the american military machine
and they explicitly say "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor"
i think its not hard to see how they might see evidence of such an event coming and choose to turn a blind eye to it "for the greater good" of furthering their batshit vision for america
America doesn't do shit on account of how Americans feel or are. It's not a democracy.
I also think it's crazy that you'd say that it's "ahistorical" to claim that we wouldn't need consent manufacturing to go to war, because there are actually a lot of historical examples of this very thing happening!
9/11 as an excuse to go to war on terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq, HW's administration encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait before launching the gulf war in response along with the Nariyah testimony, the Gulf of Tonkin incident was instrumental to really gearing up the Vietnam War, there's plenty of conjecture about the extent to which FDR knew Pearl Harbor would happen to facilitate the entry of America into WW11. The Lusitania for WW1, the USS Maine for the Spanish American war, the USS Leopard for the war of 1812! The US ruling elite manufacturing outrage over incidents in order to build public support for foreign wars and empire building is something that is completely supported by historical events. You've got a real uninformed opinion there, friend.
As the newspaperman William Randolph Hearst said about the prospects of America going to war with Spain in the 20th century "you furnish the photographs, and I'll furnish the war,"
It's not only to drum up domestic support, but also to maintain a plausible story when the international community comes knocking. Their allies need plausible deniability and their enemies need to be reassured that this is a 'one-time thing' so to speak, that they have a clear goal and aren't just turning on the murder machine for shits and giggles.
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld all admit it, Bush in his book, decision points, Cheney and Rumsfeld during interviews that can be found on youtube. Also, the debris field is consistent with mid-air breakup, being strewn across many tens of miles, and we know for sure F-16s were scrambled to intercept flight 93.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vV3fjfeb9Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNuosBnlw5s
Forget why -- I'd like to know how, considering the USAF doesn't typically fuck around with live munitions on training flights over the continental US (especially during peacetime), and they didn't have armed fighters on 24/7 standby back then. There are also some inconsistencies in the stories:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93#Fighter_jet_response
and they didn’t have armed fighters on 24/7 standby back then
ah, the good ol' days of pre-9/11
Because even theories about much wider conspiracies don't require everyone to be "in on it", so that would be a normal response from a military trying to prevent some terrorism.
And then it would be covered up because it's a bad look for the military to intentionally kill a bunch of Americans.
Ah. I was assuming people that think the plane was shot down would also think that the government was in on it and wouldn’t care what it did
My 9/11 conspiracy theory is that the US caused it by supporting and training radicals to fight communists and then bombing them and causing them to turn against the US for political reasons. I don't see much use for conspiracies when I can just say that.
Having said that, George W. Bush did personally fly the first plane into a tower, and Dick Cheney did the second.
agreed with all of this, especially the last bit.
But yeah, this was just what was going to happen lol. I don't believe they had some secret pact to blow up part of new york, they're fucking nationalist idiots. I think it's just hubris coming back to haunt America and then the US lashing out as hard as they can at the nearest brown people they can find instead of looking inwardly, as was intended by the founding fathers..
This seems the most logical and likely to me I would only add I wouldn’t be surprised if they knew beforehand and allowed it to happen as an excuse to make money /justify the military budget while also increasing it going to war in the Middle East
I believe 9/11 likely happened as reported. If anything, the intelligence community may have seeded some of the first conspiracy theories out of embarrassment and to distract oppositional groups in the ramp up to launching the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
One thing I'm recalling is that we know the feds did warn Bush that Bin Laden might be planning something, but the office doing so was a holdover from Clinton which hadn't been cleared out yet and were effectively ignored. Not a plot, just politics as usual.
It can be very hard for those in the imperial core to believe that a small group of radical guerillas from the global south were able to outmaneuver the American empire and catch its defense mechanisms off guard. The concept of The State as all powerful is ingrained deep in America's culture and it finds weird outlets. Recent example of this is the liberal and conservative embarrassment over the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The Saudis may have thrown some funding to Al-Qaeda, I could see that, but I doubt they were paying enough attention to understand how that funding was being used. They'd want to maintain distance and also keeping a guerilla group tightly aligned with your goals takes work. The rich and powerful hate working, they're going to do the minimal amount possible. It's much easier to just throw money at some psychos and trust they're going to destabilize their region for you.
I haven't looked into the arguments for Flight 93 being shot down, but that's also something that would have already leaked if it did happen. People are bad at keeping secrets and a panicked response during a total meltdown of US security would have probably had too many people in the room to effectively lock that information down.
It can be comforting to believe the people in the seats of power are competent and have a well defined plan. The reality is that they rarely do and are most often reactive, especially the American government. It was captured by corporations and has been reorganized over decades to function in line with the quarterly (ie 3 month) rhythms of the market.
Again, using the withdrawal from Afghanistan as an example, there was close to zero planning in place leading up to the event. 20 years of occupation and no one had maintained a withdrawal plan in the event it became politically necessary to execute. Does that look like a State entity that has its shit together to you?
It can be very hard for those in the imperial core to believe that a small group of radical guerillas from the global south were able to outmaneuver the American empire and catch its defense mechanisms off guard.
Yeah, I don't see a grand conspiracy. Just arrogant failure of the US security apparatus. It's like the Death Star
The CIA fed Lucas the idea for the Death Star plot to set the seed for avoiding the conspiracy theories for 9/11 24 years later.
Exactly. At that point, America hadn't even had an ideological rival for almost two decades to compete against once the USSR collapsed. It's security apparatus had atrophied.
Depends how far down the truther hole they are, but yeah. The ones who are full on "only a white man named Dubya could have done this" are pretty sus and have some western brainworms.
It can be very hard for those in the imperial core to believe that a small group of radical guerillas from the global south were able to outmaneuver the American empire and catch its defense mechanisms off guard.
This might apply to a very small number of people who never believed the official story to begin with, but this doesn't comport with the fact that the vast majority of people who now doubt the official narrative (including Brace Belden and myself) believed it for years. We stopped believing it because we saw something that changed our minds.
I think an opposite psychological barrier is in play for the people who still believe the official story. It can be very hard for people in the imperial core to believe that our own authorities are capable of such evil. At the same time, Western propaganda has been dehumanizing Muslims for decades to create the the impression that Muslims are.
Even though at an intellectual level I understood that imperialism was the most violent force in the world, I was reluctant to consider them capable of murdering "their own people" for a long time. This manifested itself in a belief that if it had been an inside job that at least one of the plotters would have had a guilty conscience and come forward to foil the plan.
Then I realized that the exact same logic applied to the Muslim hijackers. Why didn't any of them get a guilty conscience?
The towers never existed, and all flights are faked by Stanley Kubrick, who is alive
I believe it was all a big accident and those fellas just really wanted to be big shot airline pilots. It’s not their fault their flight school didn’t teach them how to land.
:sadness:
It's still really weird how no one talks about the plane that hit the Pentagon. Has the footage from DC actually had frames removed? If so, why? Just a general lack of info or discourse at all.
Its bad CTV footage from one angle, least the one we have access to. However you can see enough of it imo. Plus the physical evidence is consistent given the knocked over lampposts on approach, plus civilians seeing it fly overhead right before
Bush knew, Saudi's did it, some of the more outlandish conspiracies of 9/11 were spread on purpose to discredit people wanting to know more.
some of the more outlandish conspiracies of 9/11 were spread on purpose to discredit people wanting to know more
Pet theory that Alex Jones gained right wing funding and grew out of local radio fame for this very reason
I'm definitely in the LIHOP (let it happen on purpose) camp, rather than the MIHOP camp.
For the details:
- I think the Bush/Cheney cabal knew Al-Quaeda was plotting some major attack, but not the exact details. The actual attack may have been bigger than they were expecting.
- I think at least parts of the Saudi government and royal family knew about the pending attack, if not all the details.
- I think the Bush/Cheney cabal worked to make sure the plot didn't get foiled in advance, by shelving relevant FBI investigations and so on, but didn't really do anything directly to help it succeed or interfere with the response beyond normal bureaucratic actions.
- If there was a controlled demolition, it was likely done not to make the attack more serious, but in order to prevent the uncontrolled collapse of the towers that could have damaged other real estate. This would have been a contingency measure already in place for any unexpected disaster to befall the towers, not specifically this attack. I'm agnostic on whether a controlled demolition actually happened.
- I do think there was insider trading based on tips that "something" was going to happen, but that this wasn't the main goal of interfering with investigations into Al-Quaeda; the main goal was facilitating PNAC's foreign policy goals.
- The Bush administration did help various Saudis leave the US before they could be investigated, but if they were even involved with the attack, it was probably not operationally.
- I don't think a missile hit the Pentagon, nor that the planes were piloted autonomously. I'm neutral on whether Flight 93 was shot down.
Yeah I have no issues with this. Again, I believe Flight 93 was shot down, but I'm open to hearing otherwise.
I also strongly question how the fuck Hani Hanjour - widely considered the worst pilot of the bunch who flight instructors tried to get his pilots license revoked and allegedly could not solo a Cesna 150 - somehow pulled off an absurdly difficult maneuver that ultimately hit the Pentagon at a weird angle EXACTLY on the only side to receive a very recent safety upgrade against this type of thing (and was not a particularly populated section of the Pentagon on the opposite side of all the important people).
Yeah. I also stop pretty early on the conspiracy train. My feel is that by doing it this way, the neocon cabal gets plenty of plausible deniability, and if one attack fails, the jig isn't up; they can just let Al-Quaeda take another bite at the apple. The neocons can even double-dip by taking credit for foiling failed attacks. Biggest payoff for the least risk.
I think everyone here believes 9/11 conspiracies to a certain extent.
No?? I think the intelligence community was completely incompetent (as always) and they should have known, and they likely even have had some idea of an upcoming attack but the idea that they knew specific detail and let it occur on purpose isn't backed up enough.
Bush/Cheney/Rumself knew about it and intentionally did nothing to stop it
The Saudis did it
These two I fully believe. Flight 93 being shot down sounds really plausible, especially after listening to the NORAD recordings of them scrambling jets to intercept it.
I do also accept that Bush and co. were inept enough to not have seen 9/11 coming but profited off a tragedy in order to make a killing off two wars.
Yeah I could buy that.
Wasn't there some leak that Clinton had sent over a report saying that Bin Laden was planning a major terror attack? I could see them doing any of not caring or thinking that it'd be small and they could still use it for invading multiple countries in the middle east.
in July the FBI put out a memo that Al-Queda connected people were taking flight lessons in the states, and in August Bush got tipped off by MI5 that there was a plot to hijack a plane, but it was considered that it would be held hostage for the release of an Al Queda guy's release from Prison. Flight Hijackings used to happen like that, you'd be like "I'm the captain now," and make them land in Cuba or hold the plane ransom for something. I'm pretty sure that's what Bush thought would happen and thought he was letting happen in order to build a base of public support to do more imperialism in the Middle East and Central Asia. The rest was just kind of Cool Zone vibes.
