The 9/11 Disbelievers

Thanks for seeding this article. It was a pretty fascinating read.
I think the main problem with conspiracy theories and theorists is that they don't use enough discernment in their quest to determine what really happened. There's a huge, HUGE leap between Bush ignoring warnings about a (pretty vague) terrorist threat and him knowing ahead of time that thousands on people were going to die and doing nothing about it.

And I totally agree with you, Jason, I can only go so far with this conspiracies because they would often involve so many people to carry out (so many heartless, cruel people, mind you) that it's very difficult to believe that this could be carried out. I know we often demonize some of the actions of government officials, but we're talking about hundreds of people that would be needed to carry out this plan the theorists are trying to convince us of.

One of the things that I dislike about many conspiracy theories, is the motivation? What motivates these people to replace rational explanations with irrational, or at least highly unlikely ones? Some theories, like the fake moon landing or the flat earth are relatively harmless, but 9/11 and the fake holocaust are poison to society.

I understand that people think Bush is incompetent and arrogant and many other things. I just can't believe that he would intentionally cause the death of so many innocent people.

I imagine these are the same people who believe that the levees in New Orleans were blown up. It's not really the conspiracy theorists who bother me. It is people like Al Sharpton who, when asked if he had evidence that they were blown up, responded with "I don't have evidence that they were not blown up" who bother me. These are supposed to be responsible leaders and all they are doing is adding to the hysteria and myths surrounding these events.

Here's something else to consider when thinking about all of this conspiracy theory mumbo-jumbo: there's no one alternate theory, there are often dozens or even hundreds of them and each of them changes small details.

Some people use the magnificently flawed reasoning that if the most outlandish conspiracy theory is false, then they all are and the official story is the truth. Bull. The truth will most likely lie somewhere between the extremes, but much closer to the truth if the theory involves aliens, time travel, or Elvis.

What motivates these people to replace rational explanations with irrational, or at least highly unlikely ones?

What makes you think that the "official" explanation is not ludicrous and highly unlikely like you say. I believe the "official" explanation is ludicrous, and there are a enormoous amount of holes left to be filled. You can't deny the HUGE amount of questions left unanswered.

Both sides have there bad, good and ludicrous points. Stop throwing around the term Conspiracy Theorists like they are a race of people with all the same ideas of what happened that day.

I've seen a documentary on DVD which goes into all of this. It was fascinating and they're asking all the right questions. I'm not convinced that they've given the right answers, but the questions are still out there.

speaking of improbable.. if you want to follow that line of thought, according to exit polls, bush should have lost both Florida and Ohio. It is improbable that we would ever have a President who would follow dogma over science. It is improbable that we would have a president who would eve rsay: Some call you elites, I call you my base."

Put me down as a disbeliever. I still can't @!$%#ing believe something like this could happen.

How many people would be required for such a conspiracy? You would need at least a dozen to hijack the planes. Another dozen or two to wire the buildings to collapse. Another dozen to run all around the world, planting evidence against Atta et al for the FBI and CIA to find (or alternatively, dozens of conspirators inside the FBI and CIA). Another dozen to cover everyone's tracks and watch their backs, and a few more to mastermind the whole thing. Oh, yet another dozen to fake the NIST reports. Therefore, we are talking sixty people at minimum and likely hundreds.

It is absolutely implausible that such a large number of utterly evil people exist in positions of power thoughout a wide range of agencies, or that such a large conspiracy could be formed and executed in secret.

For an hour he's shown videos of planes hitting the towers. If you note the glinting sunlight and angle of wings and you're honest about vectors and maybe the hashish is kicking in, you'll realize there were no planes .

Truth movement veterans distance themselves from Haupt, who has a bit of a temper. But Reynolds, the former Labor Department economist, also is a "no-planer."

"There were no planes, there were no hijackers," Reynolds insists. "I know, I know, I'm out of the mainstream, but that's the way it is."

But what about all those New Yorkers who saw airplanes hitting the twin towers? A chuckle rumbles down the phone line. "I don't believe anyone in Lower Manhattan," he says. "You hire three dozen Actors' Equity dudes and they'll say anything ."

You know what that is

that's if i say i'm interviewing clowns, and then i start talking to a monkey

Funny that's what they used for the last sentences of the article

More than 75% of people who don't believe the actual story, yet they saw the 2 planes go in the WTC. The 2nd plane was live footage.

To end just a lenghty article on some guy who thinks there were no planes whatsover is an insult to the hours spent by all these citizens who are trying to uncover what happened that day.

Gotta love "how much" they mention WTC7. It's as if WTC7 didn't exist in the first place.

The loose change video highlights this report in its opening scenes:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5946593973848835726&q=loose+change

Does the existence of this report mean that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks? No. But was George W. Bush from a family that would have been intimately familiar with this and other covert operations - operations that he is trying to classify via Top Secret designations out of history? Yes.

I have continual pain because of the 9/11 conspirator theorists. Some of what they say makes a lot of sense and a lot of what the government says doesn't make sense. Those two factors make me continue to doubt, and that's painful but probably what most Americans should feel.

The two key pieces in my mind: there is no reasonable explanation for the presence of residue on what few samples of steel are available from the WTC towers that could have come only from explosives typical of those used for building demolitions - not airplane fuel or office building materials. The steel itself is now gone - evidence eliminated from a crime scene. And nobody has any credible explanation as to how 7 WTC, not hit by planes, collapsed in what is to all eyes a very obvious controlled demolition that occured after the building's owner said to officials "pull it" - meaning to destroy it.

Like many in the New York City area I feel the pain of the events of that fateful moment in history every single day. I would like to think that our government did everything that they could have to prevent that day.

But I know that they didn't.

It's just a matter of how sick they were. History seems to be telling us that they're pretty sick. So who knows.

If the U.S. government could flood the streets with crack and cocaine to fund their Contra war in South America what's so difficult to believe that our government had a hand in 9/11?

You've never heard of the Iran-Contra scandal?

I'm still looking for the link for the drugs aspects but here's a link of the other heinous crimes our government committed:

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1076

"The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America..."

Contra supporters dealing cocaine to fund their army was actually first reported in 1985, in an article by Robert Parry and Brian Barger of the ASSOCIATED PRESS. After interviewing DEA, Customs, and FBI officials, the article said there was evidence the Contras were importing drugs into the U.S. to support their war effort. No other newspapers followed up on the story. As would be the case in the future, though the press ignored the allegations, the Reagan administration didn't. The Justice Department contacted the editors at the AP and politely asked them to remove references in that story that connected Contra drug-smuggling to John Hull, a CIA "asset" in Costa Rica.

But information on Contra/drug connections kept coming. In 1987, the allegations eventually led to a Senate investigation (anybody remember that one?) led by John Kerry (D-Mass.). Among the juicier moments:

Senator KERRY: What did you do with those drugs?
Mr. MORALES: Sell them.
Senator KERRY: What did you do with the money?
Mr. MORALES: Give it to the Contras.
Senator KERRY: All right.

But did the Kerry committee report find that the U.S. knew about Contra coke-dealing? Here's an excerpt from the executive summary:

[I]t is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter.

Read the full article.

I've of course heard of the Iran Contra scandal, but I wanted more info on the drug connection.
Thanks.

I am no lover of the morons in charge of this country today, but I do not for an instant believe that President Bush or his administration had any hand in planning or executing the attacks on 9/11. I also doubt that there was any coordinated policy to allow the terror to proceed once the attacks were in motion. As can be seen in nearly everything they touch, planning and follow-through are not strong points of this crowd of idiots; "magical thinking" is a better way of describing their mental processes. Do I think they took advantage of the aftermath to further their sweet crude lubricated, masturbatory fantasies of raping the Middle East into eternal submissiveness? Is the Pope a Nazi? But do I think they could have planned it? No. With the exception of Rumsfeld and Cheney whose aged, swollen prostates kept them dry, I think the rest of them were too busy trying not to slip in their own puddles of piss to do much of anything that day.

Because incompetence is almost a mandated policy of this Administration, the more I think about it, the less trouble I have in believing that they could have made the sheer number of @!$%#-ups necessary for the "official version" to be close to the truth. The problem is, I try to think scientifically and logically about issues like this, and "believing" just doesn't fit into that kind of mindset. Yet that is what we are being asked to do: believe. And if we question anything about the basis of that belief, we are labeled "conspiracy theorists" and our questions are dismissed as summarily as are EPA workers who dare to suggest that global warming may be related to human activity.

Belief has nothing to do with the scientific method, yet belief is all we're given to go on in the post-9/11 investigation. You are a structural engineer, Jason, and your decisions are based on observation and experimentation and years of experience. You know with a great deal of certainty that particular materials can handle particular stresses, and that if you assemble the materials in a particular way, experience shows that the building or the car or the cardboard carton will hold up under those strains is highly probable. Never 100% certain, but occasionally approaching 100%. You might state your conclusions by saying, "I believe that..." but that's just linguistic shorthand for "My observations and others' observations and research into reviewed and reproducible experimentation indicates a very high probability that..."

Although I'm not a structural engineer, just a reasonably intelligent layman, I read the NIST report. What I kept coming back to was how so much of the report's conclusions were based on such flimsy, uncorroborated, and highly contaminated evidence. Virtually all the calculations and physical explanations of how and why the towers came down trace their data back to the conclusions reached in the "Mechanical and Metallurgical Analysis of Structural Steel" report by the NIST.

Out of the enormous wreckage of the World Trade Center, the researchers had access to 236 pieces of steel -- 500 to 1,000 tons -- much of which did not come from the two towers, and none of which came from WTC7. Sometime in October of 2001, structural engineers from FEMA, universities and other organizations began collecting examples of structural steel for analysis and continued collecting through October 2002. Unlike a good forensic examination, however, they did not have the opportunity to collect the steel in situ, nor did the have the opportunity to verify the chain of custody of pieces. Instead, they had to pick the pieces from one of 4 scrap yards or from the hangar at JFK airport where the steel to be used as parts of memorials and whatnot were being decontaminated and cleaned for preservation. Some of the steel in the scrapyards they merely tagged and months later, the piece they'd chosen or a chunk of that piece was delivered and transported to Gaithersburg, Maryland. Some pieces, especially the floor trusses, were too big to be transported as they were, so they were crunched and crumbled into balls. Some of the steel was removed quickly after the collapse, while other pieces were allowed to sit in the very hot fires and temperatures which lasted in the Ground Zero excavations for several months.

Many of the pieces they examined were matched to their place in the building by the codes written or stamped on the steel during original construction. But, because there was no corroborating location evidence from its position in the debris pile, there was no way to be certain that just because a piece was originally specified for the east face of WTC1, that it was actually attached there. Deformations of the steel pre-collapse were computed based on photographs taken at uncertain intervals from inexactly specified locations, using various uncalibrated cameras. Steel specifications -- especially for the evidence-free WTC7 -- were taken from manufacturers' catalogs. Discussions of the effectiveness and presence or absence of fireproofing materials were gathered from highly processed and enhanced video frames and camera images. Temperature exposures of the steel pieces were determined in large part by the condition of the paint on the surface of the steel, despite there being absolutely no certainty whether the temperature effects occurred pre-collapse or post-collapse. Only three pieces of steel showed exposure to temperatures above 250°C, and one of them was most likely exposed to those temperatures on the ground. A number of the pieces may have been deformed by the impact of one of the planes, but there is no way to be certain that the damage, bending and breaking it suffered weren't a result of the forces of the crumbling, the impact, the digging, the transportation, the handling, or from being separated from other pieces in order that it be shipped to NIST facilities.

This inexactness, these suppositions upon suppositions, the uncertainties involved go far beyond what would be acceptable in even a run-of-the-mill arson investigation. There is even a disclaimer at the beginning of the report that states that it can't be used as evidence in any suit or action for damages. And yet, this report, with its findings that virtually all of the steel used in the WTC construction exceeded the design specifications by 15% or more, that only two of the recovered pieces of steel showed any evidence of being exposed to temperatures over 250°C and none of the pieces over 650°C -- this report on the physical evidence is used as the foundation for all the conclusions that the buildings came down because of weakening due to fire.

The only way I can come to that conclusion is through faith. Maybe all the conclusions reached in the official version are correct. Maybe not. I'm just sick and tired of being told by people who haven't taken a second to have an original thought on the matter that my questions are foolish, fantastic and unrealistic, while their certainty is scientific and rock solid when it is balanced on nothing more than fuzzy hopes and clouds of smoke.