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.

So that's the Half Truther circlejerk term for having to follow the rules you demand everybody else follow...

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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

Let's go one better: Put Hani Hanjour or Mohammed Atta on one of those planes or any of the other "9-11 hijackers."

It is amazing how some posters ( such as yourself) re-play their own plagiarized and scratched recordings while they can not produce FACTS about the issues being discussed. O_I, you have succumbed to an emotional appeal to the insane asylum ... never admitting your own errors while accusing others of the same; you can't learn and don't care to as you regard your own posts as something magnificent.

But where are witnesses with FACTS and direct evidence? No where to be found, even all your own "research" finds this point to be true. So far, all you have ever produced in a post (beyond your plagiarized BS) is: "perhaps", "maybe", "possibly", "probably", "I think" ... and so on and so forth.

Furthermore throughout its 8 minutes, the tape repeatedly says the aircraft was hijacked with crew members slashed and stabbed.

No one other than Arabs have ever been reported to be hijackers, carrying boxcutters which were foolishly allowed on board at the time.

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.

Back on the "demolition theory thread" and the "cabin door thread" (each achieving posts of 900+) you (AGAviator) ... went up to bat day after day after day.. NEVER vacillating your original opinions, even when some posters taunted you for details that were later produced time after time after time.

Some of these posters just don't care about FACTS; they are enmeshed into their own opinions lifted off some silly conspiracy website as FL did on the demolition thread that are half-truth and half-lies; FL's own post is proof he doesn't read his own posted footnotes.... and as a result can never learn or comprehend what realy happened.

FL would rather consider his rabble-rousers as a method to assure his immediate audience that he has some sort of passion for truth while alluding to hypocrisy about his ownself.... i.e. moving the bar for "truth" about his insistent posts for some 400 posts through the demolition thread about credentials ... to some off-the-wall remarck "well Hanjour's trainers said dis or dat."

This is the problem with America, today and unfortunately FL is symptomatic of it; in fact, FL is nothing more than a charlatan akin to government getting BIGGER while they bury BS behind smoke screens.

After being debunked on the licensed pilot matter, their latest whopper is to claim that commercial pilot certificates ("licenses" per the FAA), are simply "learners permits."

They pull that "shit" right out of their own asses.... and slap themselves on the back for an "idea" to counter their own disproven dialogues.....

Go back to the "demolition theory thread" @post#527 FL ... starts taking the thread off topic. And through posts 900 or so, badgers the issue about how Hanjour has no publick records of being a credentialed pilot.

So, when it categorically he was blowing smoke up the thread's respective ass(es) .. it was categorically proven he was WRONG!

And then he lies about it ... and so does O_I ... as their little questions have produced genuine facts to dispel and PROVE their points as silly at best but sidetracking the entire thread from the WTC.

And that is all they (FL and O_I) will ever do.... lie, cheat and swindle even on their own posts.... even after they are PROVEN WRONG.

Do you hear engine noise on the 8-minute tape featuring Betty Ong and the aircraft control centers?

"Rubbery" refers to elastic methods of stress based on applied forces: with the WTC buildings with that term in mind (which is just a way to view the author's ideas ... ) the HUGE masses above the stress points acted straight downward.

The metal wasn't "rubbery" ... it no longer acted within the designed stress limits of the mass it was supporting. The central core of both the WTC buildings collapsed because both the heat of the fires and the loss of support structure caused the collapse.

BTW, welders normally don't have those added masses as they meld the skeletal structure together as in a new design.

That's right! It exploded with great force from the planted explosives going off on each floor. You are starting to get it Buck! There is hope even for shills like you.

haha, I unlike that guy wouldn't let an old con man hit me. I also wouldn't let a stooge like you do it either. I am too fast and would knock your ass out before you were done with your swing.

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

Rick, there were no explosions other than the compressed hot aire pushing outward as the structure collapsed breaking the weaker outer perimeter giving the illusion of some sort of demolition. Review the photographs and the videos that you find anywhere.

Hahahah, your whole posting history is chock full of false statements and bombast only accepted by a handful of kooks, why stop now?

As for that thread, it had become a big stinking floater that needed to be flushed and there is nothing "stellar" about that.

"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

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
Lord Acton

He (Gordon Duff) also implies that forcibly removing Obama, a Constitution-hating, on-the-down-low, crackhead Communist, is an attack on America, Mom, and apple pie. I swear these military people are worse than useless. Just look around at the condition of the country and tell me if they have fulfilled their oaths to protect the nation from all enemies foreign and domestic.
OsamaBinGoldstein posted on 2010-05-25 9:39:59 ET (2 images) Reply Trace

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
Lord Acton

Are you upset because I spent a little time pinning buckie's ears back. Such petty jealousy.

My point of course, which you took out of context of course, was I simply grew tired the childish antics of you and buckie. As well when I insult someone it is clearly an insult and not an attempt to avoid issues or derail the discussion. It's just that you two with your barbarian table manners earn every drop of vitriol which I drop in your direction. So, I gave you some of your own medicine. You're just jealous because I'm better at than you are, and even worse I use all them thar edumacated wurdz you don't understand. Cry me a river shipmate, cry me a river.

Oh, by the way, I'm sure this eluded you, I didn't use any crass 4 letter vulgarisms of the kind you and buckie seem to be so fond of. Ain't that just the shits?

"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

2:43 "Exposed to fires for 7 hours and critically weakened, Truss 1 (in the northeast corner) finally failed at 5:20.

2:48 "This vertical collapse progressed all the way to the roof, as evidenced by the collapse of the east penthouse."

2:56 "Unable to handle the redistributed wieight, the two remaining trusses gae way about 8 seconds later, resulting in a complete collapse of the building."

3:39 "The firefighers certainly weren't surprised when the building collapsed just as predicted."

Naturally, the k00ksites do not show the collapse starting with the failure of Truss 1, which gave in about 8 seconds before Trusses 2 and 3.

Trusses 2 and 3 failed simultaneously and allowed for the remaining parts of the building to go down to the ground all at once.

AGABLOWviator and Buckie need a tissue for their big crocodile tears and sniffles.

Po' lil' victims whining about insults on one hand and throwing them in vulgar tirades with the other.

As already stated, you're a pathological lying windbag who can't abide by the rules you yourself post.

Bingo. If they wish to be treated like adults participating in a debate from opposite ends of an issue then it would seem to me that it would behoove them to behave as adults. Now, I know that is not going to happen, but then I'm an optimist.

Just noting for the record it's your side which posts rules for discourse, which you then systematically violate every time you feel like it.

All of the acoustic measurements AND seismic recordings show no demolitions on 9/11... before or after the respective passenger jet crashes.... you would think everyone running for their lives that day would have busted eardrums from any explosions before the collapse.

Not at all my dear microencephalic neanderthal, unlike you when I levy an insult it is not to win the debate, or because I am so ungracious as to emulate the dregs in an ill tempered tantrum because I have been proven wrong on a point (not that, that happens), but because the level of refinement of another, such as yourself, encourages comparisons worthy of the churlish behavior exhibited. Mind you I am not saying you are without some class it is simply that it is all of the lowest order.

Yeah, by all means, let's start another 1200+ posting thread about who did 9/11 that no one's cared about since, oh...I dunno...2002.