9/11 Conspiracy Theories Megathread (please read first post)

[pANDAS Radio]

So that's a no on answering one simple question then?

[MarkMono]

Two questions, but on the same subject.

[pANDAS Radio]

Yeah, but not one of them was answered. Therefore making my point technically correct.

[reptilian]

what i find strange is the way some people deal with conversations regarding 'so called conspiracy theories'' and such.. some people look at them, consider them, and forget them... other people embrace them and take it to be more likely than the 'official' version of events.
the people i can't understand are the ones who get up in arms, shit slinging angry that the version of the truth they believe is being questioned (it seems to me a more common reaction from the ''official version'' people, but not exclusive)....

in the end these conversations are about 'revisionist' history, some people find that the evidence supporting the official analysis of the events dubious (especially when the people telling it have a vested interest in telling it that way) and would like further explanation. jfk or 911 are good examples of how the official line doesn't quite work with how people observe the event themselves....

the saying ''if you don't remember the past, then you are doomed to repeat it'', is often flung around with weight, but in truth... how can you remember the mistakes of history without being sure that whats being said is actually true???

history books said that columbus discovered america (and some of them still do), until people started wondering what the vikings were up to back in their day... so if something like the discovery of a whole continent can be misquoted, why shouldn't we be questioning all the rest??? people look back on world war 2, and shit like it, and wonder how it could have happened... the simple truth is, people turned a blind eye, simple as.... so in my opinion the simple act of questioning the official facts or otherwise is the most important thing a spectator can do......

[LesMTS]

Originally Posted by reptilian

what i find strange is the way some people deal with conversations regarding 'so called conspiracy theories'' and such.. some people look at them, consider them, and forget them... other people embrace them and take it to be more likely than the 'official' version of events.
the people i can't understand are the ones who get up in arms, shit slinging angry that the version of the truth they believe is being questioned (it seems to me a more common reaction from the ''official version'' people, but not exclusive)....

in the end these conversations are about 'revisionist' history, some people find that the evidence supporting the official analysis of the events dubious (especially when the people telling it have a vested interest in telling it that way) and would like further explanation. jfk or 911 are good examples of how the official line doesn't quite work with how people observe the event themselves....

the saying ''if you don't remember the past, then you are doomed to repeat it'', is often flung around with weight, but in truth... how can you remember the mistakes of history without being sure that whats being said is actually true???

history books said that columbus discovered america (and some of them still do), until people started wondering what the vikings were up to back in their day... so if something like the discovery of a whole continent can be misquoted, why shouldn't we be questioning all the rest??? people look back on world war 2, and shit like it, and wonder how it could have happened... the simple truth is, people turned a blind eye, simple as.... so in my opinion the simple act of questioning the official facts or otherwise is the most important thing a spectator can do......

I don't believe the official line, necessarily. I just think it's a better fit for the data, is more coherent, requires smaller leaps of faith and has less wild implications than the "conspiracy theory".

[pANDAS Radio]

What about the official line do you question?

[LesMTS]

Originally Posted by pANDAS Radio

What about the official line do you question?

There was probably negligence, might have even been wilfull negligence. I think it's at least credible that flight 93 was shot down.
You could take the two extremes of the debate as "what you saw on TV is what you get, the government knew absolutely nothing, they were caught with their pants down, the might of the American military pwned etc etc" at one end, and "the government planned and executed the attack themselves, with little or no outside involvement, the towers were demolished with explosives, no plane hit the pentagon etc etc".
But the point is that I'm trying not to argue from a particular standpoint, I'm trying to look at the evidence that's available and then decide where on that spectrum I fall. It turns out to be considerably closer to the former position than the latter. There's probably dodgy shit that went on, but I don't see any good evidence that it's as dodgy as the latter position above.

[pANDAS Radio]

Cheers, I totally see where you're coming from.

The thing that prevents me from sharing that view is rather similar. In trying to look at the evidence myself I couldn't really find any. I accept that I watched two buildings fall down, I accept that many people died, I accept it was a tragedy. Then I expect to see lots of knotted tape barriers and an army of investigators. That's where it all got confusing. If they could rebuild a substantial percentage of the plane from the Lockerbie crash site then how could neither flight 93 or the pentagon plane even produce one recognisable section between them? And the pentagon lawn being instantly cleared up, rather than being made a crime scene, all seemed a bit too odd.

Not that i bother myself about it. Occasionally I'll watch a video on the subject but i don't search them out. Some videos do compile a group of interesting questions and some of those questions are unanswered by the 9/11 Commission (a very, very, very dull read). I find it implausible to believe that the US government was so shocked by the attacks that it immediately started shipping all the evidence off for scrap and chucking it in landfills, but that's what happened.

If there was evidence that showed the attacks were exactly as they seemed then I'd believe it, I'm not a conspiracy nut. Unfortunately the government just ignores all the people who want to see a full enquiry. That does lend some kind of support to those who think something fishy went on. Sometimes a lack of evidence can appear as evidence to the contrary.

[reptilian]

Originally Posted by LesMTS

There was probably negligence, might have even been wilfull negligence. I think it's at least credible that flight 93 was shot down.
You could take the two extremes of the debate as "what you saw on TV is what you get, the government knew absolutely nothing, they were caught with their pants down, the might of the American military pwned etc etc" at one end, and "the government planned and executed the attack themselves, with little or no outside involvement, the towers were demolished with explosives, no plane hit the pentagon etc etc".
But the point is that I'm trying not to argue from a particular standpoint, I'm trying to look at the evidence that's available and then decide where on that spectrum I fall. It turns out to be considerably closer to the former position than the latter. There's probably dodgy shit that went on, but I don't see any good evidence that it's as dodgy as the latter position above.

how do feel regarding both during the 911 and the london bombing, that (and i believe on the actual days of the attacks it was confirmed, but possibly denighed later when the media began giving the official version of events) there was at both times 'drills' being carried out that were distinctly similar (if not completely) to the actual events....? a little suspicious to say the least. one would be coincidence but twice suggests there is more going on than we have been told surely?

[pANDAS Radio]

Found this.

A fictional "scenario" of multiple bomb attacks on London's underground took place at exactly the same time as the bomb attack on July 7, 2005.

Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, a private firm on contract to the London Metropolitan Police, described in a BBC interview how he had organized and conducted the anti-terror drill, on behalf of an unnamed business client.

The fictional scenario was based on simultaneous bombs going off at exactly the same time at the underground stations where the real attacks were occurring:

POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.


HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.


(BBC Radio Interview, 7 July 2005)


In response to the flood of incoming email messages, Peter Power --who is a former senior Scotland Yard official specializing in counterterrorism-- responded in the form of the following "automatic reply":


"Thank you for your message. Given the volume of emails about events on 7 July and a commonly expressed misguided belief that our exercise revealed prescient behaviour, or was somehow a conspiracy (noting that several websites interpreted our work that day in an inaccurate / naive / ignorant / hostile manner) it has been decided to issue a single email response as follows:

It is confirmed that a short number of 'walk through' scenarios planed [sic] well in advance had commenced that morning for a private company in London (as part of a wider project that remains confidential) and that two scenarios related directly to terrorist bombs at the same time as the ones that actually detonated with such tragic results. One scenario in particular, was very similar to real time events.

However, anyone with knowledge about such ongoing threats to our capital city will be aware that (a) the emergency services have already practiced several of their own exercises based on bombs in the underground system (also reported by the main news channels) and (b) a few months ago the BBC broadcast a similar documentary on the same theme, although with much worse consequences [??]. It is hardly surprising therefore, that we chose a feasible scenario - but the timing and script was nonetheless, a little disconcerting.

In short, our exercise (which involved just a few people as crisis managers actually responding to a simulated series of activities involving, on paper, 1000 staff) quickly became the real thing and the players that morning responded very well indeed to the sudden reality of events.

Beyond this no further comment will be made and based on the extraordinary number of messages from ill informed people, no replies will henceforth be given to anyone unable to demonstrate a bona fide reason for asking (e.g. accredited journalist / academic).

[ signed ] Peter Power"

[reptilian]

Originally Posted by pANDAS Radio

Found this.

the strangest part is, ''supposedly'' the same thing happened with the Oklahoma bombings, and 911.... i find that beoned coincidental, and a rational analysis suggests that there has to be more too it than meets the eye...

for example, if someone asked me to ''pretend'' to burgle their house, and during the ''pretend'' robbery someone else broke in and stole stuff, you'd think something was up, but could pass it down to bad timing, BUT 3 times..... 3 times, in all seriousness....

my opinion is A) it was a inside job
B) someone in the terrorist groups somehow had access to this knowledge
or C) the security services of western countries are absolutely bloody incompetent.
take your pick......

in the end, i'd say there was still more investigating to be done, because faced with with these facts alone, something doesn't add up.... couple that with the official brickwall being erected to stop people investigating, suggests that there is a 'conspiracy' of some nature... don't you think?

[LesMTS]

There was no unusual drill being run on 9/11. The myth that there were is based on a hodge-podge of cherry picked quotes and facts.
You can read about where that claim comes from and why it's unreliable here and here. (both links are heavily sourced)
There was also no stand down by NORAD. They acted entirely as would be expected pre 9/11. You can read about that in the second link.

Regarding 7/7. There were drills being run frequently, that one happened to coincide with the attack is an interesting coincidence but not wildly so.

[pANDAS Radio]

Les, that site is no different from the sites that you don't like.

Look at many of the points they "correct" and you'll see that they start their version of events with "Our Take". Their scenarios are generally as speculatory as those they're debunking and their evidence is also heavily gathered from the internet. Just look at what they say about the reason hijacked planes were able to fly hundreds of miles across the US and not be seen.

The story...

It's inconceivable that air traffic controllers could have lost track of any of the hijacked aircraft, just because they turned off their transponders. It should still have been possible to track them through primary radar

Our take...

Air Traffic Controllers make use of two different radar systems.

Secondary radar uses transponder information to display details about a plane like its identity and altitude, so is the most important.

In the absence of a transponder signal, controllers must pick out an unidentified blip on the screen from all the other aircraft they're dealing with, not such an easy task. And it's further complicated because some areas don't have primary radar, meaning a plane passing through them with no transponder signal simply disappear. The FAA Aeronautical Information Manual confirms this:

So, hijackers knew exactly what parts of the country had the poorest radar cover, only used those areas a flightpaths--straight to Washington and New York, obviously places that wouldn't have primary radar . It's not exactly a good description of how 4 passenger planes managed to vanish and not be found until three of them slammed into heavily populated areas. It's things like this that will continue because there wasn't a proper investigation.

[LesMTS]

Originally Posted by pANDAS Radio

Not that i bother myself about it. Occasionally I'll watch a video on the subject but i don't search them out. Some videos do compile a group of interesting questions and some of those questions are unanswered by the 9/11 Commission (a very, very, very dull read). I find it implausible to believe that the US government was so shocked by the attacks that it immediately started shipping all the evidence off for scrap and chucking it in landfills, but that's what happened.

If we assume for a second that the official story is correct: retaining the scrap for evidence would only have been necessary if there was some vitally important, unexplained factor in the buildings' collapse. There wasn't, really. The planes hit, the buildings suffered huge structural damage, there were enormous fires, the towers fell. Is it worth the expensive and rigorous job of storing that much scrap and going through it with a fine toothed comb? I mean we don't perform rigorous autopsies on someone we've just witnessed being beheaded.

So, with regard to retaining scrap for evidence, the government would have likely acted in the same way whether it was all down to them or not. The only difference being that in the "official" case they'd be acting because they had no interest in the scrap, and in the "conspiracy" case that they'd have a vested interest in getting rid of it.
The fact that it wasn't retained doesn't tell us anything.

Also, selling on scrap to independent parties is not the behaviour of someone who wants to hide something about the scrap.

Originally Posted by pANDAS Radio

Les, that site is no different from the sites that you don't like.

Look at many of the points they "correct" and you'll see that they start their version of events with "Our Take". Their scenarios are generally as speculatory as those they're debunking and their evidence is also heavily gathered from the internet. Just look at what they say about the reason hijacked planes were able to fly hundreds of miles across the US and not be seen.



So, hijackers knew exactly what parts of the country had the poorest radar cover, only used those areas a flightpaths--straight to Washington and New York, obviously places that wouldn't have primary radar . It's not exactly a good description of how 4 passenger planes managed to vanish and not be found until three of them slammed into heavily populated areas. It's things like this that will continue because there wasn't a proper investigation.

They didn't fly hundreds of miles without being seen, though. They were tracked until they turned their transponders off, very close to impact. I'll try to find a source for this when I get back from the shop.

I see your point but the page I linked to in countering a specific argument does contain primary sources.

[reptilian]

and there was radar gaps around the pentagon?????