if re-opening the 9/11 investigation and examining ALL the evidence . . .

is a goal, it's one that can be pursued without challenging the "core beliefs" that many Americans hold on the issue . . .

seems to me there are four possibilities that many Americans will simply NOT entertain when it comes to 9/11 . . . the "official" story about these four issues have become their core 9/11 beliefs, and challenging any or all of them causes these folks to immediately shut down and dismiss any and all questions about the attacks . . . these four possibilities are:

1) that anything but the planes were responsible for bringing down the WTC towers;

2) that anything but an airliner hit the Pentagon;

3) that Flight 93 was not crashed by passengers attacking the hijackers; and

4) that BushCo or any part of the US government had anything at all to do with allowing or facilitating or causing the attacks to happen.

fine . . . for the sake of argument, let's concede all four points and agree that 9/11 happened exactly as the official story says it did . . . there are STILL scores, if not hundreds, of questions about 9/11 that have not been answered (or even addressed) by any official inquiry that are crucial to understanding what happened on that day, and why . . . just off the top of my head, these include:

- why were interceptor aircraft not scrambled at the first sign of hijackings?
- when interceptors eventually were launched, why was it from a distant base rather than from Andrews?
- why did the Secret Service not react to protect the president (and the school kids) when Bush was informed that "America is under attack?"
- who was responsible for the placing those put options on airline stocks just prior to 9/11?
- why have the two surveillance videos that recorded the Pentagon attack not been released?
- why have personal testimonies -- many by firemen on the scent -- and existing videos from across the river suggesting explosions in the WTC towers not been pursued?
- why were there puddles of molton steel smoldering in the WTC basements up to two weeks following the attacks?
- who ordered the immediate disposition of WTC steel, and why?
- why were pieces of Flight 93 found miles from the crash site?
- why were numerous warnings from various foreign governments and our own intelligence agencies prior to 9/11 ignored?
- and on, and on, and on . . .

my point is that all of these questions -- and many others -- need to be answered whether the official story is true or not . . . and the way to pursue re-opening the investigation may well be to focus on these questions while NOT suggesting that the official story is anything but true . . . in other words, without donning our tinfoil hats . . .

I believe that this approach can ultimately be successful in convincing 9/11 believers to support re-opening the investigation . . . if these questions are presented without challenging the four core beliefs mentioned above, I think that most people will agree that yes, they do need to be addressed and answered . . . if only to verify that the official story is indeed true . . .

once consensus for re-opening the investigation in a thorough and impartial manner can be achieved, the real truth about the WTC, the Pentagon, Flight 93, and US involvement in the attacks will inevitably come out as a by-product . . . the official story will either be confirmed or, more likely, shown to be nothing more than the propaganda that it is . . .

And by the way, I'm open to the third and fourth possibilities. I just haven't seen any evidence of OP yet (which of course rules out M for me). Room for suspicion? Sure, why not? But no real evidence yet.

And according to the recent Frontline documentary, The Dark Side, Cheney thought that two planes had been shot down under his orders. Maybe somebody somewhere can prove that a jet fighter shot down Flight 93, but I just don't think it's true because:

A. The Bushistas are willing to say that the orders were given.

B. They're willing to say that they thought the orders had been carried out in two instances.

C. Far from being a liability, the shooting down of American citizens by American fighters would have been the ultimate trump card in Bush's righteous indignation hand. It would have shown his administration to be resolute in protecting the greater good, and nobody could have seriously faulted him for it.

So I think the plane was ditched by the hijackers as the passengers tried to take it over, as we've been told. (I've never heard a satisfactory explanation of the "missing three minutes" yet from the government, btw.)

It's an attempt to gain credibiltiy where none is deserved.

The 1st and second 'possibilities' are total bullshit.

particularly about such a complicated issue where there are still so many unanswered questions . . . if you view those two possibilities as bullshit, that's certainly your prerogative . . .

but what about the questions I posed? . . . aren't you at all curious about why most have not only not been answered, but have not even been posed in the official investigation? . . . I sure am . . .

when golfer Payne Stewart's plane went off course and didn't respond to inquiries, for example, two jet fighters were on it's tail within ten minutes and stayed with it until it crashed hours later . . . whether I accept the "official" explanation of 9/11 or not, I'd certainly like to know why something similar didn't happen when not one but four airliners were similarly off course and not responding . . . I would hope that you and everyone else would, too . . .

Payne Stewart's plane was NOT intercepted within 10 minutes. Stop with the misinformation!

It was a good 1-1/2 hrs to intercept. NOT 10 MINUTES.

Contact was lost at 9:27 first intercept was the F-16 at 9:52....

0923:16 EDT, the controller cleared N47BA direct to Cross City and then direct to DAL. N47BA acknowledged the clearance. At 0926:48 EDT, N47BA was issued instructions to change radio frequency and contact another Jacksonville ARTCC controller. N47BA acknowledged the frequency change.

At 0927:10 EDT, N47BA called the Jacksonville ARTCC controller and stated that the flight was climbing through an altitude of FL 230. At 0927:13 EDT, the controller instructed N47BA to climb and maintain FL 390. At 0927:18 EDT, N47BA acknowledged the clearance by stating, "three nine zero bravo alpha." This was the last known radio transmission from the airplane.4 The sound of the cabin altitude aural warning5 was not heard on the ATC recording of this transmission.6

At 0933:38 EDT (6 minutes and 20 seconds after N47BA acknowledged the previous clearance), the controller instructed N47BA to change radio frequencies and contact another Jacksonville ARTCC controller. The controller received no response from N47BA. The controller called the flight five more times over the next 4 1/2 minutes but received no response.

About 0952 CDT,7 a USAF F-16 test pilot from the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base (AFB), Florida, was vectored to within 8 nm of N47BA.8 About 0954 CDT, at a range of 2,000 feet from the accident airplane and an altitude of about 46,400 feet,9 the test pilot made two radio calls to N47BA but did not receive a response.

http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/2000/AAB0001.htm

At 0927:18 EDT...

About 0952 CDT...

What's the difference between Eastern time and Central time, Quetta? About an hour.
The original "ten minute" assessment is completely wrong. For one, even if the two times were recorded in the same time zone, 27 from 52 leaves 25 minutes, not 10.

But it's actually an hour and twenty-five minutes from last transmission to intercept. Why? Because Stewart's jet had crossed into the Central Time Zone and was being tracked by a new set of ATCs, who used their local time to record the intercept time.

One hour and twenty five minutes. From your own source, no less. You will be reaccessing all the mental assumptions you've been making based on your erroneous assumption, won't you?

For that independent verification of the timing.

But... I bet you that the real, valid, times will be ignored by people living in their fantasy world of 10 minute intercepts.

Instead, according to an Air Force timeline, a series of military planes provided an emergency escort to the stricken Lear, beginning with a pair of F-16 Falcons from the Air National Guard at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., about 20 minutes after ground controllers lost contact.

An F-16 and an A-10 Warthog attack plane from Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., took up the chase a few minutes later and were trailing the Lear when it climbed abruptly from 39,000 to 44,000 feet at 9:52 a.m. CDT.

10/26/1999
KRTBN Knight-Ridder Tribune Business News: The Dallas Morning News - Texas
Copyright (C) 1999 KRTBN Knight Ridder Tribune Business News; Source: World Reporter (TM)

That's the only thing you got.

although I'm sure I read somewhere that the planes were scrambled within 10 minutes of hearing that the flight was in trouble . . . should have checked my facts and not relied on memory, though . . .

how long it took to respond to the Payne Stewart incident is really irrelevant, though . . . that was one small private plane with a few passengers . . . on 9/11, we're talking about four jetliners and hundreds of passengers . . . that the government took an hour an a half to respond is certainly something that needs to be investigated if we want to know what really happened that day . . . and who was responsible . . .

In actuality, it was not intercepted by a scrambled fighter, but was intercepted by a couple of F-16s on a test flight. Presumably, those F-16s were unarmed, and thus unable to take any action if it had been necessary.

It wasn't until 11:13 CDT (12:13 EDT) - about 2:20 hrs after losing contact with the Lear that the first ANG fighters intercepted. Nothing is mentioned in the NTSB report as to whether or not the ANG planes were armed.

So - it looks like fighters were scrambled quicker on 9/11 than they were for Payne Stewart's airplane.

Just get off this tiny basement island and read some contrary opinions.

and the contrary opinions (many of which I have read) just don't make any sense . . .

if they make sense to you, God bless ya . . .

And an number of OBS's questions already have answers. There are definitely a lot more answers out there than most alternate theorists want to accept.

But we all know that BushCo has been covering up a lot of crap. The alternate conspiracy theorists are running riot in that aggressive omission, and a thorough investigation...

...will actually solve nothing, both you and I know. The snake-oil salesmen like Von Kliest and Meyssan will call it all "too little, too late". The positions are too entrenched. The No Planers can mock the shoddy graphics of the Pentagon frames in one post, and sarcastically remark that the WTC plane videos are getting better and better with the graphics available today.

Still, it would be nice to have an "official" Official story. :)

for many, they are more than possibilities -- they are probabilities . . .

Glad you "skeptics" are here to stomp out heresy.

Care to debate whether the Earth is flat?

Or was that your other sockpuppet.

An not questioned in the immediate aftermath of September 11th?

and, a very good question.

And the Saudis have more oil than anyone else. And they own a good portion of our National Debt and can probably bust our economy if they choose to do so.

or being manipulated by them or manipulating them.

.

Require validity to form opinion; the social science AND logical definition of validity

Some will dismiss these questions as ‘bullshit’..A textbook response from a regressive thinker

Unfortunately the majority of the population has no problem believing nonsense like virgin births, people rising from the dead, etc. In order to be effective absolute proof of complicity will be required for this movement to be effective and remove these murderers from power.

Your highlighted points:
1) and 2) are utter and obvious bullshit. Refuted as many ways as it is possible to refute bullshit.

3) is a different order of claim. It's -possible- that plane was shot down, but there is no real evidence of that and a coverup would be real hard. Military pilots are an honorable bunch.

4) It is -possible- that the Administration, or some part of it had some guilty part in the attacks, or are guilty of deliberate negligence. Proof of that will have to come from -real- investigations. Not from amateur proofs of foolish theories.

Your 'questions' are simply rehashes of Conspiracist claims, which have been refuted multitudinously. Check out 911Myths, for example.

Some REAL questions:

What was the role of the Saudi Government and Royal family?
What is the relationship of the Bush and Saud families?
What is the extent of involvement of the Saudi Royals in the US economy?
What was the exact state of knowledge of the US intelligence agencies on 9/10?
Were those agencies given the support a reasonable and prudent President would have given?
Why has Osama Bin Laden not been captured?

answer the question you've avoided answering. Namely, what is your definition of "conspiracy"? Is it your position that what Osama bin Laden & the "boys" did was NOT a conspiracy? If so, then you are either intentionally trying to be misleading, or else you don't know what the word means. It's hypocritical to apply the term "conspiracist claims" to only a group of people that you purport to not believe were conspiracists.

In the spirit of what DU is all about, and in the interests of fairness, it's time for you now to explain yourself and agree to stop being selective in your use of important words like "conspiracist claims."

Two kids plannning how to steal candy are engaged in a "conspiracy". George Bush and Dick Cheney planning to misuse intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion are engaged in a "conspiracy".

In common usage, a "Conspiracy Theory" or "Paranoid Conspiracy Theory", or "Nutcase Conspiracy Theory" is an hypothesis ("theory") that has several diagnostic characteristics. A couple of these:

=>An improbably high degree of cooperation between independent agencies and individuals in a criminal enterprise.

=>Physical or functional impossibility or extreme improbability.

=>Extreme unnecessary complexity.

=>A standard set of logical fallacies in arguments

=>Repeated assertion of disputed or disproved facts as evidence.

=>Selection of evidence supporting the 'Theory' while ignoring massive evidence to the contrary.

OK?

OCT'ers rarely talk about what they think happened on 911, but whenever you DO, make sure that you describe the official version accurately: CONSPIRACY THEORY.

The conspiracy theory YOU support is so outrageously absurd that it borders on being a real FARCE, but that's not the point. Anyone that says Osama bin Laden & 19 young Arab men plotted, planned, and carried out the events of 911 is talking about a CONSPIRACY THEORY. And that makes YOU a Conspiracy Theorist, even when you post one of your "silly" messages.

It's a "conspiracy", yes. But it's a "Conspiracy Theory" only if it is wildly improbable AND there is no credible evidence.

What's incredible?

=>Plotting in Afghanistan? They had a whole f'ing country to work with. Training camps. Years to think about it. A history of previous hijackings for experience.

=>19 young men? There have been hundreds of suicide bombers in Iraq, Israel. Japanese Kamikaze. It's hard to understand, but it happens.

=>Hijacking planes? Call a travel agent, get 19 tickets, get to the airport on time, hijack the planes. What's hard?

=>Flying the planes? They'd had some training and expert pilots say the controls of a 767 aren't much different than a piper cub. Besides, they didn't have to take off, or land.

WHAT'S INCREDIBLE ABOUT THIS?

THAT'S what makes it a conspiracy theory. If the BUSH 911 version wasn't a lie, they would have provided the evidence they said would prove their theory. Five years on, and they have yet to make good on that promise. Is THAT itself incredible? NO. The Bush administration has lied about nearly everything, including the theft of the 2000 & 2004 elections.

Informed people know all that.

Evidence HAS been provided. The 911 Commission included prominent and respected people from both parties. Journalists throughout the world have investigated. The Moussaoui trial involved presentation of much evidence. The FBI and NSA and CIA are made up of 1000s of actual people who have seen the raw evidence.

Agreed, there needs to be a more independent and vigorous investigation, but the basic facts are entirely clear and not credibly disputable.

Do YOU know of any proof that Bush was telling the truth about 911? Propaganda stories don't count. Sorry.

YOU have to give some proof.


I pointed you to evidence and investigations of 9/11. What's wrong with them? Be SPECIFIC.

Bush may well be lying. Or just dumb. It's the official reports and the journalistic reports and the testimony of witnesses that doesn't lie.

C'mon, you're much better suited for your "silly" Merv. That IS you, right?

The publicly available evidence supports the conventional story. That's why it IS the conventional story.

The alternative evidence is DERIVED from the conventional evidence and mainstream press. It's not possible that such evidence can be stronger than the thing it is derived from.

What's happened to that great sense of juvenile humor we've become so accustomed to? Wouldn't NOW be a good time to get the taste of humiliation out of the system? C'mon, have you lost that silly feeling already?

WHAT is inaccurate in 911Myths?

It's a simple question, you just have to offer an opinion.

It's no longer a debatable issue. Informed people have long known the BUSH 911 story is a lie.

OF COURSE it's a debatable issue. You keep repeating the same nonsense statement.

The conventional story IS conventional because most of the CONVENTIONAL evidence supports it and because most informed people support it.

You are just talking nonsense to claim otherwise.

Yes, there are questions, and, yes, parts of the conventional wisdom are certainly wrong. But the conventional wisdom does NOT include Holographic aircraft and invisible elves.

You get nowhere claiming UP is DOWN.

See #54 below (oops).

It really shouldn't be that hard.

Pick ONE element. Any element. Then explain why it is impossible, using standard rules of evidence and logic.

Because structural steel doesn't behave like balsa wood just because Al Qaeda hates our freedoms.

Or that it melted from the flames. After substantial structural damage from the impacts, all that was needed was for the remaining structural members to weaken or deform. There are multiple plausible ways that this could happen. If any ONE of them could cause a collapse, then the building would collapse.

This is the considered opinion of the WORLD community of structural engineers and architects. Neither I, nor you, nor a U Utah particle physicist are qualified to say with certainty that it is wrong.

The FEMA report actually uses the term "progressive collapse" as I recall, and if the NIST report doesn't, it implies it by explicitly ruling out the use of explosives, leaving one to wonder how 10,340 core columns simultaneously snapped like toothpicks.

And there's only one way that could happen.

Osama bin Laden is one of the CIA's many assets, but it's absurd to think he had the resources to carry out a CONSPIRACY of the magnitude of 911. The real 911 CONSPIRACISTS are not disgruntled muslim extremists.

They probably have a lower union rate than G-men.

So, the team of leading figures in Structural Engineering and Architecture studied collapse and concluded that there was "progressive collapse" and the rest of the world's experts read the results and concluded that it was reasonable,

BUT

YOU read a few conspiracist sites and conluded that these learned experts are fools and idiots and
YOU know that this is an impossibility.

SO, you must have stayed in the Holiday Inn Express.

OR

Maybe you are just not quite as smart as you think you are.

I also repeatedly recommend Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style In American Politics
http://www.neuralgourmet.com/theparanoidstyle

In other words, it's not so much about what you believe, but how you believe it. By that measure, many people who question the official narrative concerning the events of 9-11 are not conspiracists per se. Almost all of the 9-11 Truth movement is however being influenced by conspiracist sources. For instance, much of the concern with Larry Silverstein (and the role of Jews in the events of 9-11) originates with holocaust denier David Irving and La Voz de Aztlán, the webzine of the antisemitic revanchist organiztion Nation of Aztlán (which seeks to return Texas, New Mexico, California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Oklahoma to Mexico).
http://tinyurl.com/fclcd <-- Links to archive.org copy of David Irving's Action Report Online ("Jewish Magnate had just signed $3.2 billion deal on WTC towers")

The problem comes in when conspiracist websites parrot opinions and factually challenged information such as appears on David Irving's website without attribution. Very quickly it is forgotten from whom the claims originate and it becomes an accepted "fact" of the 9-11 Truth Movement.

Another example I use is of Michael Rivero and WhatReallyHappened.com, often used both as a source of information and as an avenue of disseminating information relating to the 9-11 Truth Movement. Yet very few people remember that WRH was the original source of the "Vince Foster was murdered" conspiracy theories and that Michael Rivero is, literally, a freeper. See these two entries from my DU journal.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/salvorhardin/18
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/salvorhardin/23

Two other avenues for disseminating far right wing (often racist/anti-semitic) conspiracism to a lefty audience are David Icke and Lyndon LaRouche. But this is far too complex a topic to go into here and now, so let me point you to Chip Berlet's excellent Right Woos Left.
http://www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9_TOC.html

It's an interesting question how the current outbreak of conspiracism differs from classic conspiracism.

Obviously, the Internet allows anyone with a wild theory to gain instant notoriety; hence, the rapid drift away from accepted fact.

I don't see much explicit scapegoating. Bush is evil, but much of the 'Theory' is too incoherent to identify a villain.

I think the population is different also. I'll not discuss that here.

The 9-11 Truth Movement is part of the wider NWO conspiracist narrative. The scapegoat in that class of conspiracies is usually the Jew although some go to great lengths in their attempt to avoid the label antisemitic.

The net effect over the past 15-20 years has been a coalescing of conspiracies into superconspiracies (Michael Barkun's term). The internet has certainly helped that end, but there are other factors to consider too, such as the mainstreaming of conspiracy theory into popular culture by the media.
Here's a short article by Michael Barkun: http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2005/5/2005_5_64.shtml
And you can read Chapter 5 of his Culture of Conspiracy online: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10011/10011.ch05.html

I picture some of these guys as video-game addicts or isolated folk who spend -way- too much time on the computer. There is a lack of distinction between video and real world. And Sophomoric skepticism--"there -might- be holographic airplanes". It's just mostly incoherent.

This is entirely different from the Militia Movement of the '90s, which was armed, active, organized and violent.

I understand the narrative is derived from similar sources. I'm not sure how much that matters if people aren't aware of it.

Thanks for the refs, I'll bookmark and read later.

But if a person trusts a source for one type of information, they're more likely to trust the source for other types of information. That can lead to further erroneous conclusions. The ideal would be to be skeptical across the board but people don't work that way (mostly). So it is important I think to debunk not just the laughable comic book skepticism, but also the information sources.

I think though that the connections may be partly in the opposite directions. There are "serious" controlled demolition sites that do a very good job of debunking the No Plane theories and certainly aren't Holocaust Deniers. The original No Plane theory started with a French Leftist, I think.

The NWO sites picked up the 911 theories and incorporated them into their narrative. The 911 Conspiracies are a substantially independent phenomenon.

It's a complex ecology. Both sides pick and choose the parts that fit into their worldviews, Barkun likes to call this improvisational millennialism.

I know anarchists in DC who had formulated them that very afternoon.

And like I keep saying, some people are just mentally ill. Doesn't mean they're out to get you.

and your trees are bogus anyway. Psychology has nothing to do with it. The 9/11 fairy tale is physically impossible. The only way to have brought the Trade Center down without cutting it into pieces was to use explosives, period.

And it certainly hasn't been done here.

In fact the preponderance of expert opinion is that there is no mystery at all--impact damage plus fire provide an adequate explanation.

There are, yes, some individuals who claim otherwise.

But it's ridiculous to claim the preponderance of expert opinion is CERTAINLY wrong on the basis of a few isolated individuals' opinions.

Common sense: Skyscrapers are complicated structures and impact damage from fire is not THAT different from impact damage plus explosives. No responsible expert is going to claim that collapse without is explosives is physically impossible. Especially, if he lives in Utah and is a particle physicist and not a structural engineer.

which many resident "physicists" and "engineers" apparently don't, no offense.

Physicist was assigned to find out how to make a horse run fast. Several weeks later, he begged for more time, claiming much progress in solving the "Case of the Spherical Horse".

The Real World is complicated and hard to understand. Any person who has experience beyond sophomore physics will be very careful about making grand claims about a complex system.

In this case, MY expertise is of no consequence. The consensus of the world's experts is contrary to YOUR opinion.

A person of humility and intelligence should ponder that situation carefully.

is this your opinion? if not, could you be more specific?

thx

Social Psychology and sociology are also very important in trying to understand why people believe what they do. Also, you might want to reflect further on your first sentence. Unless you were deliberately trying to present a koan, in which case I think you should still reflect further upon it and perhaps enlightenment will follow.

but to many who have studied the events of 9/11 they are more probabilities than possibilities . . . guess we'll never know for sure until all the evidence is impartially examined . . .

"Your 'questions' are simply rehashes of Conspiracist claims, which have been refuted multitudinously. Check out 911Myths, for example."

I disagree . . . the explanations I've read (indluding 911Myths) just don't make sense in light of what we know . . . just because some may have been "refuted multitudinously" doesn't mean they've been refuted accurately or truthfully . . .

Don't do the whole thing. Pick ONE issue and show me where it is wrong.

911myths.com has a sometimes condescending attitude. Nothing further. ;)

How could they not be respectful of No Planes theories?

I don't think it's true that Mike from 911myths.com has a condescending attitude. ;)
I think PT was trying to stay in the favor of CTers. Why, I can only guess.

total bullshit . . .

that's your opinion, which is no more or no less valuable than contrary opinions . . . I too have looked at the evidence and read the analyses, and where you see confirmations of the official story, others see contradictions . . . we'll never known who's right unless and until we re-open the investigation and impartially examine ALL the evidence . . . something that the commission failed to do, and quite miserably . . .

I guess I'm also just amazed that, given BushCo's track record, some folks refuse to entertain the possibility that they're lying through their teeth about 9/11 . . .

Chances are pretty good that another congressional or presidentially appointed investigating committee will follow the course laid out by the last one. Since there's evidence of criminal activity, criminal charges should be sought.

nt

As far as I can tell not a single element transpired as officially reported.