4um: The 9/11 conspiracy plots thicken

They are politically diverse and include academics, ex-officials and Web surfers. All share a belief that the Bush administration played a role in the 9/11 attacks. Their numbers seem to speak to Americans' innate distrust of their government.

NEW YORK — He felt no shiver of doubt in those first terrible hours.

He watched the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and assumed al-Qaida had wreaked terrible vengeance. He listened to anchors and military experts and assumed the facts of Sept. 11, 2001, were as stated on the screen.

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.

He wondered why 110-story towers crashed and military jets failed to intercept even one airliner. He read the 9/11 Commission report with a swell of anger. Contradictions were ignored and no military or civilian official was reprimanded, much less cashiered.

"To me, the report read as a cartoon," Griffin said. "It's a much greater stretch to accept the official conspiracy story than to consider the alternatives."

Such as?

"There was massive complicity in this attack by U.S. government operatives."

If that feels like a skip off the cliff of established reality, more Americans are in free fall than you might guess. There are few more startling measures of American distrust of leaders than the extent of belief that the Bush administration had a hand in the attacks of Sept. 11 to spark an invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

36 percent suspicious

A recent Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll of 1,010 Americans found that 36 percent suspect the U.S. government promoted the attacks or intentionally sat on its hands. Sixteen percent believe explosives brought down the towers. Twelve percent believe a cruise missile hit the Pentagon.

Distrust percolates more strongly near Ground Zero. A Zogby International poll of New York City residents two years ago found 49.3 percent believed the government "consciously failed to act."

Establishment assessments of the believers tend toward the psychotherapeutic. Many academics, politicians and thinkers left, right and center say the conspiracy theories are a case of one plus one equals five. It's a piling up of improbabilities.

Thomas Eager, a professor of materials science at MIT, has studied the collapse of the twin towers. "At first, I thought it was amazing that the buildings would come down in their own footprints," Eager says. "Then I realized that it wasn't that amazing — it's the only way a building that weighs a million tons and is 95 percent air can come down."

But the chatter out there is loud enough for the National Institute of Standards and Technology to post a Web "fact sheet" poking holes in the conspiracy theories and defending its report on the towers.

The loose agglomeration known as the "9/11 Truth Movement" has stopped looking for truth from the government. A cacophonous and free-range a bunch of conspiracists, they produce hip-hop inflected documentaries and scholarly conferences. The Web is their mother lode. Every citizen is a researcher.

Did you see that the CIA met with bin Laden in a hospital room in Dubai? Check out this Pakistani site; there are really weird doings in Baluchistan ...

Peter Knight, senior lecturer in American studies at the University of Manchester and editor of the 2002 book "Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America," called the movement "a strange beast, an amalgam of elements. You've got the anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war crowd — you know, if they lied about the war, maybe they lied about 9/11. Another part is people merely interested in the anomalies, with no preconceived political agenda.

"Then you have the more traditional right-wing conspiracy part of the continuum that believes a vast cabal has taken over the United States, the mega-conspiracy of the right's new world order. To them, all of these things are connected. Each group inserts 9/11 into its pre-existing conspiracy model."

The academic wing is led by Griffin, who founded the Center for a Postmodern World at Claremont University; James Fetzer, a tenured philosopher at the University of Minnesota; and Daniel Orr, retired chairman of the economics department at the University of Illinois.

The movement's de facto minister of engineering is Steven Jones, a tenured physics professor at Brigham Young University who has studied vectors and velocities and tested explosives and concluded that the collapse of the twin towers is best explained as controlled demolition, sped by a thousand pounds of high-grade thermite.

Jones has been placed on paid leave while the Mormon-church-owned school investigates his claims, it was announced Friday.

The physicist published his views two weeks ago in the book "9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out."

Former Reagan aide Barbara Honegger is a senior military-affairs journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School in California. She's convinced, based on her freelance research, that a bomb went off about six minutes before an airplane hit the Pentagon — or didn't hit it, as some believe the case may be.

Then there's Morgan O. Reynolds, appointed by George W. Bush as chief economist at the Labor Department. He left in 2002 and doesn't think much of his former boss.

"Who did it? Elements of our government and M-16 and the Mossad. The government's case is a laugh-out-loud proposition. They used patsies and lies and subterfuge and there's no way that Bush and Cheney could have invaded Iraq without the help of 9/11," Reynolds asserts.

They are cantankerous and sometimes distrust each other — who knows where the double agents lurk? But unreasonable questions resonate with the reasonable. Colleen Kelly's brother, a salesman, had breakfast at the Windows on the World restaurant on Sept. 11. After he died she founded September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows to oppose the Iraq war. She lives in the Bronx and gives a gingerly embrace to the conspiracy crowd.

"Sometimes I listen to them and I think that's sooooo outlandish and bizarre," she says. "But that day had such disastrous geopolitical consequences. If David Ray Griffin asks uncomfortable questions and points out painful discrepancies, good for him."

Griffin's book, "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11," sold more than 100,000 copies and became a movement founding stone. Last year he traveled through New England, giving speeches. One evening in West Hartford, Conn., 400 mostly middle-aged and upper-middle-class doctors and lawyers, teachers and social workers sat waiting.

Griffin took the podium and laid down his ideas with calm and cool. He concluded:

"It is already possible to know beyond a reasonable doubt one very important thing: The destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by domestic terrorists. The welfare of our republic and perhaps even the survival of our civilization depend on getting the truth about 9/11 exposed."

Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a Boston-based left-leaning think tank, is no fan of the 9/11 Commission. He believes a serious investigation should have led to indictments and the firing of incompetent generals and civilian officials.

"They don't do their homework; it's a kind of charlatanism," says Berlet. "They say there's no debris on the lawn in front of the Pentagon, but they base their analysis on a photo on the Internet. That's like analyzing an impressionist painting by looking at a postcard.

"I love 'The X-Files' but I don't base my research on it. My vision of hell is having to review these [conspiracy] books over and over again."

In the days after Sept. 11, experts claimed temperatures reached 2,000 degrees on the upper floors. Others claimed steel melted. Nope. What happened, says Eager, the MIT materials-science professor, is that jet fuel sloshed around and beams got rubbery.

"It's not too much to think that you could have some regions at 900 degrees and others at 1,200 degrees, and that will distort the beams."

The truth movement doesn't really care for Eager. A Web site casts a fisheye of suspicion at the professor and his colleagues. "Did the MIT have prior knowledge?" notes one chat room. "This is for sure another speculative topic ... "

Professsor Jones' suspension was reported Friday by The Associated Press. Peter Knight was quoted by McClatchy Newspapers.

Reply: I know Loizeaux wasn't the author of the article. He was part of AGA's list (#9) that you quoted in a post to him (#1137 You To: AGAviator #1096) . The title of the thread was mentioned in my post to you to bring the topic back to the subject of CD and Loizeaux's statement about it at #9 in AGA's list, the premise of which was already debunked with an alert to that fact at Post #982 and again at Post #1109.

Replying to AGAviator @ Post #857 of the 9/11 demolition theory challenged:

What satelite phones with noise filters? I don't understand your next question about sotto voce. There were places in the alleged phone call recordings without anyone speaking and no engine-noise heard. And the Right Here link you posted to me is the very same NTSB pdf footnote link I posted to you from your Wikipedia page reference for Flight 77 that had nothing in it at all about 40 hours and 11 flights prior to 9/11 on the FDR.

It brings to tears to my eyes since several REAL attempts to persuade and convince a pile of rabble rousers, HELL bent on pushing a conspiracy agenda killed the thread. That thread could have gone stellar here at 4um bringing the truth about some of the silly conspiracy plots.

Yes buckie, you cried like a little girl when nobody wanted to buy the BS you were selling, and instead, people posted facts and evidence which tore your little fairie tale to shreads.

Which as usual, you cannot explicitly cite, but only assert exists some place, some where.

9. Play Dumb. No matter what evidence or logical argument is offered, avoid discussing issues except with denials they have any credibility, make any sense, provide any proof, contain or make a point, have logic, or support a conclusion. Mix well for maximum effect.

18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how 'sensitive they are to criticism.'

Hey, Mr. "No Moon Landing," here's what's in store for you when you pop off to the wrong person and call him a liar.

Hey retard, you do know that WTC 7 is going to sink your little career don't you?

I love it, keep it up. WTC 7 wakes them up every time without fail. Most still haven't even seen it fall.

I think that is a nice summation of the credibility of the "Official Cover Legend™"

In looking at the entire problem globally the first thing that comes to mind is the old axiom of logic:

There are simply too many apparently contradictory datums for the "Official Cover Legend™" to be true. Therefore we are left trying to reconstruct, from an artificially (by suppression of information) limited data set. (As well we cannot rule out the possibility that false data was planted to mislead.)

Just given the FBI confiscation of all the videos from surrounding cameras we can infer that they contained, or were likely to contain, images which would have been directly contradictory to the "Official Cover Legend™".

We know from his training record and the testimony of his instructors etc., that Hani Hanjour/Hanjoor had never evidenced the level of piloting skill or knowledge to have taken flight 77 through its apparent flight path and into the Pentagon wall. This particularly applies to the ability to navigate the aircraft from Ohio to the Pentagon, several States away, locate and close on a target, the Pentagon, put a Jumbo Jet through maneuvers that would tax the skills of a Master Pilot, and then make a theoretically impossible final approach at 460 Knots (530 M.P.H.) 20 fee above the ground (leaving about a 2.5 foot clearance above ground for the engine cowlings) for a mile, to precisely impact the Pentagon on the first floor of a 71 foot high wall.

We also know from the accounts that apparently Flt. 77 disappears from Radar somewhere over Ohio only to miraculously reappear on its final approach to the Pentagon. I am not sure what to make of that datum. I could speculate, but it would be speculation based on incomplete data.

We know that the impact occurred on the side of the Pentagon directly on the opposite side, as far as it could be, from the offices housing all of the Brass despite the fact that the initial approach would have made that the easiest target, afforded the largest target, based on the angle of approach, and the one most likely taken by a suicide pilot of very limited skill who was just trying to hit the building anywhere. Also "coincidentall" the one spot chosen is the one most convenient to any cover up of the missing 2.3 TRILLION dollars that had been reported unaccounted for just the day before.

Then we have the data of conflicting reports on the final approach path of the aircraft to its impact point. There is the testimony of the two officers as well as witnesses claiming to see a plane continuing low over the other side after the supposed impact of flight 77. The C-130 does not credibly account for this as it its closest approach was a couple of miles and too high.

So as we see we have a data set with conflicting and apparently mutually contradictory datums. So, the first thing we can reasonably conclude is that the official story is false or incomplete, and that the data necessary to resolve the conflict, the 32 videos confiscated and hidden by the FBI the afternoon of 911 (How did they know where ALL the videos were just hours after the event?) is being held under lock and key 9 years after the event.

If what they claimed happened actually DID happen the way they say it did, we would have seen that footage on every network news channel 24/7 starting on the evening of 9/11/2001.

There would be no reason not to show it. They sure didn't mind showing the twin towers get hit, so there is no good reason to not show it if a plane struck the Pentagon. That's why I think no plane hit it. I don't think it was a missile either because of the neat, almost carved out holes in the Pentagon, especially the last hole. If it were a missile there would have been some evidence in the courtyard where it landed, it wouldn't have just vanished into thin air. And a plane doing those aviation tricks would be hard enough for a pro in the cockpit, never mind one on the ground trying to do the same thing remotely. There would be too much chance for error, and the planners of 9/11 weren't leaving anything to chance on their big day. If 9/11 didn't go as planned and they were exposed they would all be dead men. They had to do it right the first time. The bombs could have been planted in the Pentagon and they might have never intended on hitting it with a plane, only making it look as if a plane hit it. The other plane people saw could have been the air force jet arriving later, after the alleged terror attack on the Pentagon occurred.

Nah, the C-130 showed up after the aircraft which witnesses saw had already hit the Pentagon.

It had to have been some sort of drone, loaded with explosives perhaps, or maybe even armed with a missile which it could have fired immediately before impact.

There would be too much chance for error, and the planners of 9/11 weren't leaving anything to chance on their big day. If 9/11 didn't go as planned and they were exposed they would all be dead men. They had to do it right the first time.

There's a LOT that happened that day that if it didn't go off just right, would have made them all dead men.

I do find it interesting that the Pentagon witnesses all report a time of 9:32 where the earliest the aircraft is said to have hit was 9:37.

Something definitely doesn't add up, and there could well have been explosives involved to ensure the pesky accountants and their computers bit the dust, who knows...

If that were the case then could just say this plane hit the Pentagon and still blame the Muslims. They don't need to hide the videos if that is the case. Yes, they have said all along that 77 hit it, but if they knew it was going to be a drone, they could have just said it hit it and shown the video of it. The only reason they have for not showing it is that there was no plane that hit the Pentagon. I don't think it was a missile either. There was no evidence for a missile, and a missile also presents lots of room for error on a day, place, and time where errors could not be tolerated.

What about the penetration within the Pentagon, and the timing of the blast not coinciding with the time the plane is alleged to have hit?