September 11th becomes the JFK mystery of the new era?

[The Source]

September 11th becomes the JFK mystery of the new era?

Within a few days of the Sept. 11th attack, I also had my theories about what happened. If you look at how things went down historically, there would be no question that the attack was an inside job.

 

Historically (this is what I saw):

1. President Bush wins after a contiversial ellection.

2. President Bush took the first several months off, and stayed at his ranch in Texas.

3. 50% of the nation was upset with him winning.

4. One month before he decided to settle into the White House, September 11th attacks occured.

5. People started to except him for being President.

 

That is what I saw.

 

If you have been watching the PBS documentary 'Dick Chaney: The Dark Side', you will understand how two very powerful people rose into office. Dick Chaney and Donald Rumsfeld. Together they rose to the top of the latter. Durring their progression, they studied the Presidency extensively and made loyalists on their way.

 

Lately:

1. Joe Liberman lost for his position on Iraq.

2. Later that night, British officials were warned by our government about a possible terror attack.

 

At the moment, there is no question in my mind that something is fishy.

What I cannot believe is: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14723997/

 

For this new century, I believe that September 11th will become a JFK story. People will try to figure out 'Who done it?' and 'How?'. I can see theorists are allready at work. Within the next presidency, the dust will settle down, our military will come home, and things will slowly get back to normal.

 

As the new president slides into office, the theorists and quiet theorists will develop newer theories. I truely believe the Sept. 11th attacks will become the JFK Assasination mystery for this new century. Debates will continue for decades to come.

[Jae Onasi]

Well, we don't have any film footage like the Zapruder tapes with its missing few seconds or so when the sign blocked Zapruder's filming that will fuel as much controversy.

I watched (on TV) the second plane hit the WTC as it happened. Looked pretty much like a plane hitting the tower and exploding, I just don't buy the bomb crap. With so many people filming that 2nd crash in particular, I don't see how you could fake that kind of thing.

 

I find it extremely unlikely that Bush would allow or send 4 planes to plow into targets just to bring his ratings up. He's a cowboy, sure, but he's not a sociopath, and he sure wouldn't have chosen the WTC and the Pentagon as targets. Cheney and Rumsfeld are cunning and bright, but neither one of them would bomb either site, either. They wouldn't bomb places that would affect defense and the financial sectors--they're not that dumb.

 

I think the 9/11 events were done by a group of fruitcakes who thought that it was completely ethical and moral to kill a bunch of innocent people and destroy the buildings to make some kind of fruity political statement. What contributed to allowing them to accomplish this was an impressive intelligence failure due to a bloated bureaucracy, a lax security system in airports, and an inability to scramble some fighters fast enough to do anything.

 

It did not surprise me in the least to learn a field agent reported noting these guys were going to school to learn to fly the plane but not to land them, but it didnt surprise me to see that it didn't go very far up the chain of command before it got buried in paperwork.

 

Nor did lax airport security surprise me. I watch people enter and exit the doors all the time in airports. It's easy to see the buttons they're tapping after scanning their cards. It's easy to get a card. All it would take is for me to get a job at an airport in the baggage handling section and voila, instant access to lots and lots of planes.

 

The lack of fighter response can be attributed to a few things.

First, when the planes were hijacked, people assumed that the hijackers wanted to go someplace/get money/whatever and that it would be like most other hijackings. There was not an assumption that these planes would be used to plow into buildings. I don't think anyone imagined this until it actually happened.

 

Second, the hijackers turned off the transponders (at least on Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon) so they were harder to track until they got within radar range.

Third, the timing was organized well enough that once we all figured out that these planes were being used to target buildings, there was not enough time to get our fighters to the hijacked jets. It takes time to get a fighter jet started and ready to fly (even if they're on stand-by), weapons loaded, pilot into the plane, get the fighter off the ground, and then the time to actually fly to the hijacked planes, and then confirm they have the correct ones before shooting them down, because no other planes had been grounded at that point, and the airspace was pretty busy in that area at that time.

 

AA Flight 11 out of Boston got hijacked at 8:13 (Eastern time) and crashed into the WTC at 8:46. (33 minutes)

UA Flight 175 out of Boston got hijacked at 8:47 and crashed into the WTC at 9:03 (16 minutes).

AA Flight 77 out of Dulles (near Washington) got hijacked about 8:51 and crashed at 9:37 (46 minutes).

UA Flight 93 out of Newark got hijacked at 9:28 and crashed in the PA field at 10:03 (35 minutes).

(I wiki'd the flights. Wiki's not my be-all/end-all source, but it's a good starting point in this case).

 

Remember, until the 1st plane hit the WTC, we did not know they were going to be used as weapons. So it wasn't til 8:46 when Flight 11 hit the WTC that any of us had any inkling of what was going on. I remember waking up to the news and thinking the first crash must have been some horrible accident. It wasn't until I saw the 2nd one hit that I knew it was some kind of attack. Granted, I didn't have the benefit of knowing that they'd already been hijacked, but still, my assumption for the first plane was 'accident'.

 

I didn't do an exhaustive search for bases that house fighter jets, but I know Langley in VA does, and I'm assuming Andrews AFB outside Washington probably has some hanging around.

 

I contacted a friend of mine in the Air Force (he's an officer). That person said it took about 40 minutes for the fighters to get airborne on 9/11. Since I'm assuming no one thought about an attack til 8:46, the fastest any fighter would have been lifting off an Air Force or Navy runway would have been around 9:25ish. They would not have been off the ground before Flight 175 hit the second WTC tower. It would have given them 11 or so minutes to find and fly to Flight 77. Assuming they were off the ground, they had 35 minutes to find and take out Flight 93, because word of hijacking didn't come until 9:28.

It would have taken an F-15 at max speed about 10 minutes to get from Langley to Cleveland where flight 93 was hijacked, but since it was off the radar at that point, the F-15 would have had to check around a 75 mile radius (or 17,662 square miles) to find the plane in the remaining 25 minutes. That's a pretty tall order even for an expert fighter pilot.

So, I don't think the gov't was sitting on its hands delaying getting fighters in the air--they just didn't have opportunity to scramble in time to find the 2 planes that they actually had a slim chance of finding.

 

The hijackers studied the airline industry and their targets. They took full advantage of lax security and the mindset of the time about how to handle hijackings. They crashed the 3 planes into the buildings and tried to use the 4th one as a weapon. With the overwhelming amount of amateur and professional video out there completely uncontrolled by the government, it's darn near impossible to prove anything but planes crashing into the buildings.

I can buy the conspiracy theories surrounding JFK's assassination because the forensic evidence is a little wacky. However, that's not nearly the case with 9/11, so I find it incredibly difficult to think it happened any other way than how we all saw it happen.

 

And on the Lieberman/Brit conspiracy thing--it was the Brits who notified the US, not the other way around, AFAIK. And that's going to be one weird election in CT.

[Dagobahn Eagle]

As the new president slides into office, the theorists and quiet theorists will develop newer theories. I truely believe the Sept. 11th attacks will become the JFK Assasination mystery for this new century. Debates will continue for decades to come.

I agree. I think that 9/11 will become "JFK II". Debates will not stop for a long time. I think it's sad, but I also think it's true.

 

It was a year before David Ray Griffin, an eminent liberal theologian and philosopher, began his stroll down the path of disbelief. He wondered why Bush listened to a child's story while the nation was attacked and how Osama bin Laden, America's Public Enemy No. 1, escaped in the mountains of Tora Bora.

The "he just sat there, so he's guilty"-argument fits into the folder I've got in my head labelled "too darn obvious". It's like the photos that "prove" the first 757 to hit WTC didn't have engines.

 

OK, truthers, let's think about that one: Bush&Co. orchestraes a "terrorist attack" that will allow them to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. It'll be watched by thousands. It'll be a million-dollar operation involving thousands of people, and it'll earn them billions. To carry out their plan, they build dummy 757s and outfit them with AI programmes. The plane will be watched by hundreds when it hits, and thousands more when videos start to circulate the Web.

 

And they forget that real 757s have engines?

 

I'm not going to accuse the truth movement of being deluded or the idea of being insane. I think the fact speaks for itself.

 

As for the "he just sat there"-argument, that's more of the same. If he was guilty, he'd not have made it so "obvious" that he knew about it in advance (not that he looked calm - he looked confused and flatfooted enough to me).

 

Synopsis: 9/11 was the works of Taliban fanatics, who most likely had backing from the Saudi government or at least from Saudi extremists. There's zero evidence Bush was behind the attack (lots of lies, mis-conceptions, and pseudo-science, though).

 

Jae's post:

 

It did not surprise me in the least to learn a field agent reported noting these guys were going to school to learn to fly the plane but not to land them, but it didnt surprise me to see that it didn't go very far up the chain of command before it got buried in paperwork.

Isn't landing about the last thing you learn, seeing it's the hardest? A lot of people don't finish flight training, and I suppose some of them coincidentally do it just before landing.

 

Nor did lax airport security surprise me. I watch people enter and exit the doors all the time in airports. It's easy to see the buttons they're tapping after scanning their cards. It's easy to get a card. All it would take is for me to get a job at an airport in the baggage handling section and voila, instant access to lots and lots of planes.

Airport security, even the controversial current one in the UK, is really quite minimal, due to the fact that real security would cripple air travel due to the huge number of passengers.

 

Let me offer a comparison, if I may: I happen to have been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where security is high. Every visitor has to walk through a metal detector, and then go through that deal with the rod-shaped hand-held metal detector thingie.

 

Then they go through everything in your luggage, and make you take off your shoes and socks. They then take away your shoe-laces, plastic bags, sharp items, and glass items (and probably other things I have not thought of).

 

That is security.

 

Since it's related to the topic, I'll post this "first post" of a thread I started in "Atho Spaceport" (KOTOR forum). It never got to be a discussion as there already was a 9/11 thread of old there, and I've been waiting for an opportunity to post it as it took me a while to put together. Oh, and don't look for the original thread - it's deleted.

This thread is to discuss the most widespread conspiracy theory revolving around 9/11: That the attack was masterminded by the Bush Administration, who deliberately made it appear as if the nation had been attacked by Taliban and Saudi-Arabian terrorists in order to pave the way for an invasion of Iraq (no, don't ask, I don't get it either).

 

The primary weapon of the conspiracy theorists is a movie called Loose Change, which is available on Google Video (it's finally free now that the two makers have gotten themselves rich by selling it on DVD along with t-shirts and other 9/11 "truth" accessories). I'll give the movie two things:

1. It's the only 9/11 conspiracy theory I've read or watched that wasn't a total B. S. Compilation, and
2. It made me stop and think at two spots (a. "My, the timing of those exercises was dang unfortunate!", and b. "Why's ibn Ladin writing with his right hand?").

But of course, closer examination reveals it to be total nonsense. The US is a super-power, staging a lot of exercises. Ibn Ladin writes with his right hand because he was raised to do so - he is from a conservative family that has, as incredible as it may sound, not endorsed left-handedness (this girl I came to know from Nigeria had a family that was the same way. Her brother was left-handed, and he still had to use his right hand for whatever reason). And the other claims in the movie are either outright lies, misconceptions, or, for the most part, quotes taken out of context.

 

They state that the WTC was demolished, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. While demolition experts publicly deemed the demolition theory bollocks, the Loose Change duo filled their movie with quotes from fire-fighters, police officers, and bystanders - none of which had any knowledge of demolitions whatsoever - and pulled as many quotes as they could out of context to back up their claim.

 

Every single claim ever made by a conspiracy theorist has been throughoutly debunked, shot down, stomped out, and turned inside-out, gutted, pissed on, and thrown in the trash bin, leaving its supporters to resort to personal attacks, cynical remarks about how gullible their opponents are, and threats as to how our leaders will throw us into tyranny if we do not see The Truth™. This thread should be obsolete. But just like there are people who think evolution is an unproven lie, there are people who still cling to this largelly refuted idea that the Bush administration managed to orchestrate this and keep it a secret, despite numerous demonstrations of how they're totally incompetent when it comes to keeping their human rights violations, lies, and widespread corruption out of the public eye.

 

Granted, the US government has pulled a McCarthy and capitalized on the attacks all they could. But guess what? They were not behind them.

 

But either way, feel free to discuss the conspiracy theory here. Discuss Loose Change, the attack itself, Pentagon, and everything else related to 9/11.

 

Personally, I recommend everyone take the time to see Loose Change first (keep a punching bag within reach to vent your frustration at its idiocy, though:rolleyes: ) and then go through at least a fraction of the sites below. The Screw Loose Change blog and movie are highly recommended. Once you're set, post your opinions here.

 

My references (well, some of them):

9/11 Myths

S***w Loose Change [the blog]

S***w Loose Change [the movie, in three parts]: Part 1, 2, and 3.

9-11 Loose Change Second Edition Viewer Guide

9/11 You Judge

"Hunt the Boeing!" at the Snopes urban legends site

A critical look at the collapse of WTC(...)

[The Source]

It will be interesting to see how this stuff will playout in history books. Jae you brought somethings back, which I had totally forgotten. My father worked on a Navy base. When timming is everything, you keep forgetting how long it may take to get an F-16 fuled, prepped, and ready to go. No one was expecting those events to happen, so one could understand that it caught us off guard. Good points.

 

Even though I personally saw, like everyone else has, the planes fly into the Trade Center buildings. I didn't see the Pentagon inscodent occur. I am completely ignorant when it comes to the Pantagon attack.

 

Dagobahn Eagle

Nice read. You mentioned some logical things about the Bush Administration. I have to agree. How can someone so incompetant about other issues be able to create a sealed tight conspiracy. Lol...

[Dagobahn Eagle]

The 9/11 attacks happened during peacetime, so only 14 fighters were left to protect US air-space (Loose Change implies this is somehow less than the normal amount). As far as I know, none of them were on an especially high alert statis.

 

It's also not the norm to scramble fighters when planes get hijacked. In the last 40 years, one plane was intercepted by fighters. It was intercepted not due to hijacking, but because its crew and passengers passed out and stopped responding (cabin pressure fell suddenly for unknown reasons). The fighters stayed with the plane, which was on automatic pilot, until it ran out of fuel and crashed, killing all on board.

 

To say that "hijacked airplanes are always intercepted, so the 9/11 stand-down is evidence of high treason" speaks of ignorance of how US hijacking procedures worked.

[The Source]

The 9/11 attacks happened during peacetime, so only 14 fighters were left to protect US air-space (Loose Change implies this is somehow less than the normal amount). As far as I know, none of them were on an especially high alert statis.

 

It's also not the norm to scramble fighters when planes get hijacked. In the last 40 years, one plane was intercepted by fighters. It was intercepted not due to hijacking, but because its crew and passengers passed out and stopped responding (cabin pressure fell suddenly for unknown reasons). The fighters stayed with the plane, which was on automatic pilot, until it ran out of fuel and crashed, killing all on board.

 

To say that "hijacked airplanes are always intercepted, so the 9/11 stand-down is evidence of high treason" speaks of ignorance of how US hijacking procedures worked.

When it comes to the numbers game, how many fighters this or that, I don't think they could have responded any faster. Like you said, "We were attacked during peace time." There would be no need for several fighters to be active, and it would present a perfect opportunity for a strike.

 

Low security, no one looking. Perfect time to do something.

[Jae Onasi]

 

Isn't landing about the last thing you learn, seeing it's the hardest? A lot of people don't finish flight training, and I suppose some of them coincidentally do it just before landing.

 

Every single pilot has to learn how to take off, keep the plane in the air, land, how to communicate with the tower, and emergency procedures (among many other things). You learn landing procedures before you ever set foot on a plane. Otherwise, the first time you fly is your last. One of them had apparently said to the flight instructor that he didn't need to learn to land, just to fly. Most flight instructors assume you want to get back on the ground safely at some point. I'd have to go find a reference for that one and get the exact wording.

 

Airport security, even the controversial current one in the UK, is really quite minimal, due to the fact that real security would cripple air travel due to the huge number of passengers.

 

 

Oh, I agree it's minimal, but I remember hearing a report about how someone found the secret code for the lock written on the wall in pencil right next to the door. That one was Dumb with a capital Duh.

 

I actually got my computer bag searched and gone over for traces of explosives last time I flew.

 

I have a tough time believing there were only 14 fighters up, however. There's lots of fighters taking off and landing on each aircraft carrier alone on every day that weather and sea conditions allow. I can't imagine that we wouldn't have a bunch more doing exercises at least, though probably not in the right places. They wouldn't be doing exercises in commercial airspace.

 

I agree it will be debated ad nauseum for quite a few years.

[Dagobahn Eagle]

If you look at how things went down historically, there would be no question that the attack was an inside job.

 

Historically (this is what I saw):

1. President Bush wins after a contiversial ellection.

2. President Bush took the first several months off, and stayed at his ranch in Texas.

3. 50% of the nation was upset with him winning.

4. One month before he decided to settle into the White House, September 11th attacks occured.

5. People started to except him for being President.

 

That is what I saw.

It's called a coincidence, and there are lots of them in history - some small, some large.

 

There was not an assumption that these planes would be used to plow into buildings. I don't think anyone imagined this until it actually happened.

Stephen King did. In the end of his novel The Running Man he has a hijacked plane crash about 3/4th of the way up a skyscraper housing the Network, or the TV company that rules the futuristic dystopia-USA. He also has the plane be almost full of fuel for a long flight.

 

So maybe fighters would've been scrambled if Mr. King was President at the time. Seeing he wasn't, however, the planes stayed where they were.

 

On only 14 aircraft being ready: http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/planes/defense/aviationnow_jumpstart.htm

 

Scroll until you find the paragraph starting with "AT THE TIME, NORAD..."

[edlib]

Have I said before that I love conspiracy theories???

 

The idea that the Bush administration had to build fake planes to attack the towers is really stretching credibility quite a bit. What happened to all those passengers on the 4 jet liners that disappeared then? Where did the planes themselves go? That's a lot of trouble to go through to maintain an illusion. And the fact these actions would have to be carried out by American soldiers,.. presumably none of whom balked at attacking targets on American soil, and taking hundreds of American citizens (airline crews and passengers) in custody and making them vanish.

 

And nobody involved (which would have to number in the thousands...) has talked in 5 years.

 

 

Yeah,.. right.

 

It's really far simpler to stop and think about the all the stories about bin Laden being trained and in the employ of the CIA during the '80s... (all of the denied by official channels, but wouldn't that be the way they would operate anyway?..) and then make the presumption that perhaps he still is to this day.

 

Put the events leading up to 9/11 and everything that has happened since in that context, and you have a far more plausible conspiracy theory to come to grips with.

 

Not that I believe it myself, of course... but if you were to construct a 9/11 conspiracy theory that could really get people wondering without being to outlandish too ever possibly believe, that would be the one.

 

I'm sure I'm not the first one to come up with this idea... but I find it odd that conspiracy theorists almost always come up with the far more complicated set of circumstances they use to question some event when they have a problem with the official account.

 

Something that would have to involve thousands of people working together to suppress their fellow citizens, having to operate through super-secret channels without once ever being caught, and keep hundreds of terrible, world-shaking secrets for their entire lives without ever once letting those secrets slip or spill out.

 

It flies in the face of everything we know and have ever witnessed about the way human nature operates.

 

The truth is usually the simplest explanation, no matter how mundane or ugly.

 

In this case, it's a little of both.

[Arátoeldar]

Stephen King did. In the end of his novel The Running Man he has a hijacked plane crash about 3/4th of the way up a skyscraper housing the Network, or the TV company that rules the futuristic dystopia-USA. He also has the plane be almost full of fuel for a long flight.

 

So maybe fighters would've been scrambled if Mr. King was President at the time. Seeing he wasn't, however, the planes stayed where they were.

 

You can add Tom Clancy and his book Debt of Honor, In the end of the book, a Japanese jumbo jet crashes into the Capitol. Killing the entire tope of the federal government except Ryan.

[Jae Onasi]

Someone actually questioned Clancy about that after 9/11--asked him if he thought the hijackers got the idea from that book. His comment was something along the lines of "I doubt they were the kind of people who would take the time to read my books."

I can't remember the exact wording, unfortunately.

 

Of course, kamikazes were doing this in WWII, so it's not new. However, if you look at the history of hijacking prior to 9/11, hijackers would threaten to kill people on board, but they did not use the plane itself as a weapon.

[TK-8252]

The most bizarre thing with these conspiracy theories is how they want to paint Bush as an evil Hitler-like figure. There is a BIG different between Bush and Hitler: not only was one competent and the other is not, but Hitler knew how to talk for god's sake.

 

How could someone as incompetent as Bush and his cronies POSSIBLY pull off such a scheme without it being leaked to the New York Times?

[Dagobahn Eagle]

Screw Loose Change - Not Freakin' Again Edition.

[Dagobahn Eagle]

I normally do not attack the messenger instead of the message, but because the message is so shot down it can't really be attacked anymore, I found this article rather swell.

 

His other articles aren't much, though. The Suicide Guide just reeked of... I don't know what. Likewise with the Real War Simulator article.

[toms]

If i was bush.. no scratch that, cheney or rumsfeld.. then there is no way i'd risk all the leaks you'd get with a conspiracy that large.

 

Most of these conspiracy theories are a bit like the sting in "The Sting". They are entertaining and sound great.. but they'd just require far too many resources, and far too many people in the know to ever be practical.

 

Heck.. they can't pull off the easy stuff, especially without leaks and whistle blowers.. so why would you think they could organise this sort of thing.

 

If I was doing it, the ONLY remotely safe way would be to use an existing Al Quaida cell. THen you'd just need one or two guys in the know.. and to trick the al quaida cell into thinking they were triggered by their bosses.

But if that was the case then all the conspiracy nuts evidence would amount to nothing.

 

I DO think it will become like JFK.. which will be fun. But lets remember that ALL the theories around JFK were disproved years ago.. it's only people's imaginations that cause them to cling on to them.

(and besides, anyone who watched Red Dwarf know that it was JFK, on the grassy knoll who shot JFK. )

[Kurgan]

Conspiracy theories are overrated.

 

But they're popular because they make a confusing world make sense, in simplifying complex situations. That doesn't mean people don't scheme, of course they do, but yeah, pretty much.

[The Source]

Someone actually questioned Clancy about that after 9/11--asked him if he thought the hijackers got the idea from that book. His comment was something along the lines of "I doubt they were the kind of people who would take the time to read my books."

I can't remember the exact wording, unfortunately.

 

Of course, kamikazes were doing this in WWII, so it's not new. However, if you look at the history of hijacking prior to 9/11, hijackers would threaten to kill people on board, but they did not use the plane itself as a weapon.

I have seen several interviews of Tom Clancey. Lets just say the CIA and FBI are very good friends of his. He was given inside access over ten to twenty years ago. Several of his books hit on key events, which no one could actually have known. In some cases, he was damn close to the truth, and the CIA questioned him about where he got the intel. After watching what had occured after 9/11, I knew they talked to him about other potential terror possibilities. Some of the key events that followed Sept. 11th came straight out of his books. Or- they were damn close to how they were played out. During a news interview after 9/11, there was a mention that the government talked to some people from Hollywood. The premise was that the CIA and FBI needed to think outside of the box, and only certain Hollywood writters could predict potential terror opportunities. After I heard the statement, watched certain events unfold, I knew the government was playing a Tom Clancey senerio out.

 

How do you think the Bush Administration got the idea for hidding CIA prisons around the world?

 

It was kind of funny that they became very intellegent overnight. Don't you think?