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This notice was posted on 13:31, 21 August 2006 (UTC).
I've long been interested about the various 9/11 conspiracies floating around. I really got interested about this when I saw a document called A Loose Change. After watching it I bought A book called The New Pearl Harbor from amazon.com. It really made some excellent points why the Bush Administration might have been involved in the planning of the attacks. Too long have people been silent about this issue. Now that we have a chance let's talk. -- Teemu Romppanen 21:47, 6 July 2006
- I read the criticism of "Loose Change" after watching the latest version of it on YouTube, and this appears to be nothing more than a crazy conspiracy theory. Steel looses strength when it gets hot. Jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning (papers, desks, and other various things burn hot). Those poles are designed to knock out of the ground easily, in the event a car would hit them. Something you guys lack is HOW they would have managed to pull off such a elaborate scam on the U.S. people. Why is it so hard to believe a plane crashed into a building? Why does it have to be some "the government is out to get me" paranoia? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_Change_%28video%29#Criticisms. --Anphanax 23:44, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
There is also a frightening incidence of parallels between the 9/11 attack and the Reichstag fire of 1933, which was pivotal in the Nazi party's rise to power, and for which many historians believe that Hitler and Göring were responsible.
- I think that one of the great strengths of the open collaborative approach is the fast and powerful destruction of untenable conspiracy theories. It is quite easy to watch a pseudo-documentary like 'Loose Change' and to find it compelling, until you back up and do some homework with the help of sites like Wikipedia. --Jimbo Wales 02:48, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
Anphanax I read the page that you showed and it did really debunk most of the so called facts presented in the documentary. Thanks for linking it. One thing about the events of 9/11 that has kept me very interested is the fact that the airplanes weren't stopped by anyone even though they had a lot of time to do it and knowledge of where they were. --Teemu Romppanen 16:58, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
Loose Change is a good introduction, but it has it's fair share of holes. A better research approach to 9/11 is Steven E Jones' Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse? (video) Steven E Jones, a BYU Physics Professor, has analyzed samples of the recovered steel from the towers and found evidence of thermate. Thermate (Thermite), a common cutting tool in building demolitions, and is never mentioned in the Official 9/11 Comission Report. The FBI has "no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11"[1] to prosecute in a court of law, yet the lack of evidence is satisfactory to start a war. A CIA unit that had hunted for Osama bin Laden and his top deputies for a decade has been disbanded. Bin Laden never really was the threat to our nation.
- Just take a closer look on the the 911 report from the administration, after it compare it with the facts we do know or should know and the facts we do not know. [2] Then start doing your own research. Maybe can start at world war 2 and the grandpa from george bush junior, Prescott Bush [3] or this anti christianic skulls and bones club in Yales. They adore death, useing skulls and bones and no christian symbols like a cross, the tree of life, etc. etc. --Nd 08:59, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
General comments on 9/11 "conspiracy theories"[]
All theories of the "planes operation" of 9/11/01 are conspiracy theories, since all assume that a number of people worked together in secret to plan and execute a criminal act. In the context of the 9/11 attacks, the term "conspiracy theory" is normally used to refer to theories of government involvement in the attacks, and to imply that these theories, as creations of wild-eyed "conspiracy nuts," don't deserve serious consideration. However, governments do in fact work in secret to plan and execute acts that cause death and destruction, and the Bush administration is - rightly or wrongly - widely accused both of excessive secrecy and of contempt for legal restraints on its power.
David Ray Griffin, the theology professor who wrote the "New Pearl Harbor" book mentioned above, has broken the various conspiracy theories down into four categories, approximately as follows:
1. 9/11 was accomplished by al Qaeda, and the U.S. Government's reactions to it have been reasonable and proportional.
2. 9/11 was accomplished by al Qaeda despite the best efforts of the U.S. Government, but that government, the neoconservatives, and the old Cold Warriors have exploited it and used it to advance various militaristic and authoritarian agendas.
3. 9/11 was accomplished by al Qaeda, but elements of the U.S. Government had prior knowledge of it and let it happen for the reasons mentioned above, possibly taking steps to facilitate the symbolic destruction of the twin towers, while limiting damage to government operations and the U.S. economy.
4. 9/11, and any Arab/Islamic perpetrators that may have been involved, were controlled by elements and/or associates of the U.S. Government.
Contributions to this discussion will be more useful if they're appended to the argument they support rather than injected into an opposing point of view.
No government involvement, and appropriate government responses[]
The eagerness and ability of radical Islamic terrorists to kill Americans is well documented, and predates this administration. The principle of Occam's Razor should keep us from inventing mysterious and complex conspiracies to explain actions that our knowledge of al Qaeda already explains.
Speculation about the physical facts of the attacks - the similarity of the towers' collapses to controlled implosions, the relatively small but deep penetration of the aircraft into the Pentagon, and the absence of visible Boeing 757 parts at the Pentagon - is a major part of most of the alternative 9/11 theories. However, the attacks were so unprecedented that no one has reliable intuition about what happens when large modern airliners crash into buildings as exceptional in design and as different from each other as the towers and the Pentagon.
Any theory of a massive government conspiracy depends on the plausibility of the massive continuing cover-up that must follow it. As the number of people who are knowingly involved in the plot increases beyond a small core of ideologically-committed participants, the degree of plausibility of such a cover-up declines rapidly.
An unexpected opportunity[]
While the collapse of the Soviet Union offered the U.S. a chance to reduce its military spending, a number of defense theorists and practitioners saw the absence of a major threat as a chance to increase American military power. Their goal was to dominate the world to such an extent that there would be no way for any other country to compete militarily with the U.S. for generations. They included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives, and Zbignieuw Brzezinski. Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," like writings from the neoconservative "Project for the New American Century," expressed doubt that such a project could be sold to the American people in the absence of some crisis like a "new Pearl Harbor." 9/11, of course, created just the crisis that was "needed."
A manipulated opportunity[]
WTC building 7, a 47-story steel-framed skyscraper that wasn't hit by a plane or consumed by fire, collapsed from the bottom up, unlike the Twin Towers but like buildings deliberately demolished by explosives. Videos show it sinking straight down into the area it occupied, leaving the buildings on either side relatively unharmed. The building was not heavily damaged by falling debris from the towers, and fires had been visible only on floors 7 and 12. In any other situation, such an amazing structural failure would have been studied at great length, and the lessons in design and/or construction would have been used to re-evaluate all similar buildings. However, as with the Twin Towers, the ruins of the WTC 7 were disposed of before the NIST's investigation began. The final NIST report on the collapse of WTC 7 remains incomplete.
Stories told by FBI agents and government translators describe inexplicable pre-9/11 pressures to back off of certain terrorism investigations.
The full-blown "false-flag operation" theory[]
Large-scale secret operations have succeeded many times, including industrial-sized projects like the Manhattan Project and the F-117A stealth fighter. Silence can be expected from participants who are ideologically committed to a project, who risk severe criminal penalties as a result of their involvement, or who work in "special access" programs. Deadplanet 06:50, 30 August 2006 (UTC)