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.

You don't seem to have a problem when buck tosses out every vulgarity he knows, but oh shucks, FL said the word shit.

Poor buckie. A day late and a brick shy as usual. I've conceded the point twice on the thread now.

That does not change the testimony of any of his instructors who have spoken and each and every one without exception has said he was incompetent as a pilot.

"One of the least understood strategies of the world revolution now moving rapidly toward its goal is the use of mind control as a major means of obtaining the consent of the people who will be subjects of the New World Order." K.M. Heaton, The National Educator

Show me your proof of the Mother of All Conspiracies Bean Counters being so intractible they had to be executed en masse to keep them from going off reservation, Half_Truther_Change_the_Subject?

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One of the major consequences of the 9/11 movement has been to draw enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism directed to real and ongoing crimes of state, and their institutional background, crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be, if there were any credibility to that thesis. That is, I suspect, why the 9/11 movement is treated far more tolerantly by centers of power than is the norm for serious critical and activist work....Noam Chomsky

So AG, I see you're back to calling the Office of Naval Intelligence officers who were killed "bean counters", eh?

Red comes when called or whistled for. Minds when he is told no etc. Good cat. I miss Bandit though. He was my baby.

Able to take over a plane already airborne, turn off the transponder, navigate it to a target, and crash it into the target at high speed.

As is usual for a Half Truther, you omit the explicit statements of the flight instructors saying he was competent to do these tasks.

I miss my little Tia-dorable. She was a special needs kitty but she was a little doll - I'm still broken hearted over that - she died just a week ago from dehydration. I didn't catch it in time and was not able to get her to take enough liquids with syringe feeding. Thankfully I've still got ol' Tom.

What I recall is that FL doubted his licensing/certification because of only seeing verbal claims made about it through the years but no paper-trail documentation for evidence. I think FL requested that you post the evidence if you could but the validity of the documentation is still in doubt due to irregularities about requirements to qualify, etc. Hanjour/Hanjoor is alleged to have gone through flight training or someone pretending to be him may have done so. It's not a lie if that's not accepted as an indisputable fact, what with so many forged documents in the news these days and historically.

I posted the thread and links for his alleged Airman Records as a convenience for myself and others who might be interested in studying them closer without having to search through lengthy threads plural for the scattered info or go to the site that can run very slowly and shut down, as it did for me. At least 2 documents there show that he was not approved by a Brunhilde Bradley. The 2 documents AGA posted which I commented about here show that, once upon a time, it looks like he or some character by that name was given a Piper class Com. Cert. that expired quite some time before 9/11? Who knows what instrumentation, etc., might have changed in the meantime that would then be totally unfamiliar to a flyer re: said expired training?

The Official Story is a Conspiracy Theory despite all who'd like to insist otherwise. Because that OCT/Official Conspiracy Theory narrative is guv-issued, your side has some guv-issued prop pieces to go along with it and some high and mighty sounding talking points. But, like lots of guv-issued things, the pieces are often mismatched -- like some plane parts "found" at the WTC -- and some of the data looks deliberately planted or wrong and so on. The fact is that the Official belief system about 9/11 is lethal. Thousands and thousands of people have been dying and suffering all the years since; and so it must be questioned and investigated by us skeptics, you see, regardless of scorn or how comfortable your side is with what you've been told and believe you've seen or heard as convincing to you.

"They're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time." -- Col. Puller, USMC

Attaboy, blow that smoke, try to get things nice and confused so no one will notice that your gluteus maximus was kicked all over the thread.

You use revised terms all the time... unwilling to confront the datum (HEHE... your term) that you ignore...

Thanks. It's an adjustment. I was so used to having her around and being a constant pest wanting to be the center of attention. I miss her most in the mornings. She would set on my shoulder while I typed. Sigh.

Weren't you asked by our kind and considerate moderator to cease with the name calling?

It seems that your valiant efforts to debunk have once again transpired into an epic failure, so you throw a little tirade in an attempt to get it locked down so you can start another thread and whine that this thread was "stellar"...lol

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ... We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of." Edward Bernays, Father of Public Relations

You really are stupid enough that you think you can interchange qualifications of "pilot" and "suicide hijacker" on a moment's notice.

Did it ever occur to you that a pilot wants to live, and needs greater skills to survive, and a suicide hijacker does not care about dying or risks, windbloated buffoon?

"They're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time." -- Col. Puller, USMC

maybe that fattie has nothing to do with dope, maybe AGovshill is just being vulgar.

So, is the word "incompetent" one of them thar big wurdz that you don't understand? Photobucket

When you have to resort to histrionics and fallacious arguments it simply reinforces one thing - you have soooooooooooo lost the debate.

Those are Original_Indent auditors, supposed to have been killed by the Pentagon Pea Porridge "Not too hot, not too cold" event on 911.

Which wasn't violent enough to get rid of the Pentagon principals like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, but was managed well enough to kill all the heroic accountants, about to uncover a trillion dollar fraud, they couldn't be persuaded to be quiet about.

Unlike all the tens of thousands of other 911 conspirators not one of whom has ever come forward.

I see and understand it every time I come across something with your screen name on it.

9. Play Dumb. No matter what evidence or logical argument is offered, avoid discussing issues with denial 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.

Are you or are you not ***confused*** that a hijacker intent on committing suicide does not need the same qualifications and skills, as a pilot who wants to safely survive all foreseeable hazards?

The only "sound" you make or have have made, YOU HUGE WINDBAG is a BIG, SMELLY FART.

19. Ignore proof presented, demand impossible proofs. This is perhaps a variant of the "play dumb" rule. Regardless of what material may be presented by an opponent in public forums, claim the material irrelevant and demand proof that is impossible for the opponent to come by (it may exist, but not be at his disposal, or it may be something which is known to be safely destroyed or withheld, such as a murder weapon). In order to completely avoid discussing issues may require you to categorically deny and be critical of media or books as valid sources, deny that witnesses are acceptable, or even deny that statements made by government or other authorities have any meaning or relevance.

Gotta get up earlier in the morning than that if you want to beat ole wudidiz to 600...