Was 9/11 an inside job?

[John Q. Citizen]

Poll question: Was 9/11 an inside job?

LIHOP AND MIHOP both imply Yes, inside job in this poll.

The "incompetence" argument implies No, not an inside job in this poll.

[John Q. Citizen]

1. or not?m n/t

[John Q. Citizen]

2. Kicking for a larger sample n/t

[John Q. Citizen]

9. otra! n/t

[John Q. Citizen]

19. and again, kick! n/t

[vorlund]

185. #1 reason I do not believe it was an inside job

I can't really point to any one thing and say "This is THE reason I don't believe it was an inside job." It's more a conclusion based on of all of the available evidence provided both for and against it being an inside job.

Way too many people would have to be involved. Furthermore, if you distrust the NIST findings then you would have to believe that the demolition of the buildings was done in such a way that it would fool numerous experts in various fields into believing that the collapse was due to a combination of the initial impact damage and the resulting fire. Look into the number of professionals who analyzed the data to help generate that report. Seriously. I'm guessing that they know a lot more about engineering and tall buildings than the average person.

The NIST study isn't the only paper written on the collapse. In fact there are a number of articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals on engineering that discuss the physics behind the collapse of the building. If you're ever participated in the peer review process, or been in a graduate level science course, you'd know that people in science and technical fields like to argue with each other a lot, and if something gets published in a journal like that it has most likely been examined very closely by several people. The scientific community is NOT known for being forgiving about people who publish erroneous information. I've read a couple of the papers. I've crunched the numbers. I agree with the NIST report.

Most of the arguments I hear from people who say that the towers just fell un-naturally come from people who I know are not structural engineers. I think it's safe to say they aren't an expert at controlled demolitions. Yes, I know that's an Appeal to Authority argument, but I really don't expect the average person to actually do the math and figure out the forces exerted on the structure of the building and the implications of reducing the overall structural integrity of steel subjected to varying degrees of heat.

At the end of the day though, all the talk between proponents of both sides of the issue here are arguing on the internet. There's a saying I remember from my Usenet days about that...

What's more important than if it was an inside job or not is that as a result the administration has had a pretty much free reign to spend money as they see fit and manipulate the public through mass fear.

If the people in the top 5% income bracket had been given a dollar for every time the administration used 9/11 for political gain.... oh, wait... they have.

[John Q. Citizen]

186. Thanks for your reply. I definitely agree with your last couple of paragraphs,

and while I have a different opinion on the rest, I know that good folks often arrive at different conclusions about a whole lot of things.

Welcome to DU!

[DoYouEverWonder]

189. Since you put so much faith in the NIST report

can you please tell me how do they explain the collapse of WTC 7?

Thanks and welcome to DU :hi:

[treestar]

287. Faith is exactly what it is

The government's explanation is something some people want to believe in, period. Thus the government's reports are true.

The government reports on zillions of subjects. It employs lots of "experts." But you can't get away from the fact that the government is 1) a bureaucracy and 2)likely to want to influence a certain outcome - especially with the current administration.

[vatgrown]

275. WTC 1,2 and 7: first EVER steel frame bldgs to fall from fire...

...no f#*king engineering degree required to mark that as "anomalous." Why no investigation? The "Report" was a whitewash, packed with WH appointees; the "chief investigator" (evidence cherrypicker) for the commitee a FORMER BUSH WHITEHOUSE EMPLOYEE. Why the months of Bush stalling? For time to set up that pathetic charade? Why did the beams fall in 30ft (truck-sized) sections to be hauled away before FEMA was allowed on the scene? Why were they melted down and not held as forensic evidence? This is TAMPERING and OBSTRUCTION. And like the invasion of sovereign nations on the basis of lies, it's done in plain sight. This is the Emperor's New Clothes, the United States of FEAR. NO MORE BILL OF RIGHTS TO PROTECT SPEECH, PERSON, PAPERS OR EFFECTS. Read the "Patriot" Act, the Military Commissions Act. It's OVER. This alcoholic retard, son of a son of a nazi banker, presided over the death of the Republic, and you won't ever admit it - not even when your neighbor turns you in to the empire's secret police for "rendition." The TRUTH is not based on engineering, it's based on acknowledgement of open, obvious CRIME, a globalist mafia COUP. The template was operation Northwoods; the precedents the Gulf of Tonkin, the Reichstag Fire... Puke, or scream into a pillow or something, break your trance, get over your fear - and look at what's happening to your country, it's people, and the world.

[wildbilln864]

277. very fucking well....

said, vat! Bravo! :yourock:

It's so fucking obvious! :patriot:

[Bolo Boffin]

278. I think you need to contact the Tleilaxu with your encouraging words. n/t

[Sinti]

3. Kick n/t

[John Q. Citizen]

4. OK, What is the #1 reason you believe it's an inside job, or, conversely,

What is the #1 reason you believe it was carried out only by radical Islamics? (ie 19 Islamic suicide hijackers and Islamic supporters here or overseas)

[FoxOnTheRun]

5. The 15 war games on 911

[JackRiddler]

6. inside job...

because it's not unusual and actual predictable, given the history of the covert policy apparatus, that at some point of sufficient crisis the terror coup d'etat would be pulled at home as it has been all around the world.

[JackRiddler]

7. 19 suicide hijackers...

because Fat Osama said so on that video.

[DrDebug]

10. The only group capable and able to do this are intelligence/military

A couple of terrorists in a cave cannot perform a massive operation like 9/11 and especially not in "enemy" territory. The only group capable is intelligence / military. It always has been that way ( eg. Reichstag, Moscow 1999 ) and it will always that way. In a crime you always check whether it was inside job first, because quite often it is an inside job.



Marsh was on the inside, so Marsh is the first suspect. And guess what it turns out to be an intelligence front which has at least four teams / corporations capable and able of performing a stunt like 9/11.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x100059

[Nozebro]

11. Has this ever been disputed/refuted here? You'd think they'd be all

over this one or at least they'd make every effort to "shoot the messenger", but apparently they're convinced the best course for them is to ignore it, bury it under another silly post from uknowwho, start a new "this must make Truth Seekers mad" thread, and if all else fails, get out the flame bait bucket and hang on for dear life.

Thanks for being here.

[DrDebug]

14. Upto now the story still stands and has not been refuted/disputed

The only thing which happened is that I've been called a CIA fake on a site. Luckily that same site has a long history of labeling everybody - including a lot of high profile DU posters - CIA fakes (See: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4266578 - I'm in good company), so his opinion is irrelevant, because it makes him sound like a fake from another group IMO.

I'm exactly pretty disappointed about the interest shown thusfar. I'm mainly getting ignored, posts kicked down, etc. however in the past three months there has been no dispute about the findings whatsoever which I think means that the correctness of the finding is closer to what happened than the CIA ever expected.

I'm categorically not saying that everything is perfect and that it is complete, because 1) mistakes are human 2) the research has been mainly comprised of my work and Miranda's work which means that it compromises of our views and it's very hard to look beyond your own structure of looking at things, so the overall story is probably comparable to the investigation thus far, but it will turn out differently. Also Ruppert, Hopsicker, and Al Martin play a major role as primary sources and even though quite a lot of their work can be validated from independent sources, there is a significant amount which remains single sourced and just like me and Miranda, Ruppert, Hopsicker, and Al Martin also have their own biases.

For example DoYouEverWonder noticed that Tom Burnett was part of the evangelic crowd on Flight 93 and I never noticed that and only noticed that Peter Kellogg, his business partner, committed serious fraud just prior to 9/11 and got caught ( http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=97987&mesg_id=99987 ), so I assumed that his presence on Flight 93 could have been related to that story. In this case DoYouEverWonder's finding could well have been more important than my finding

[DrDebug]

15. One little point about the teams

Even though there is no official Top 5 of security teams, I get the impression that the top 5 consists of (not in any particular order):

Kroll O'Gara Eisenhardt (Protecting George W. Bush among others)

Defence Systems Limited (Protecting Queen Elizabeth among others)

Alpha Firm (former KGB top team)

Unnamed Israeli team

Unnamed French team

That means that probably three of the five best teams in the world are part of Marsh. We don't know what the exact composition was of the 9/11 team, but that corporation had direct access to the best in the entire world.

[seatnineb]

17. Yeah...very impressive work Doc!...keep it up! n/t

[mirandapriestly]

22. OMG, DeBug, you 're in good company! Pretty much anybody who has

researched 9-11 has been called a "CIA Fake" by Fintan Dunne. It's too bad, because he has some pretty good things to say, other than that, and I know there are SOME "infiltrators" around, but you lead people into some really good research and information and I don't think that is something the "CIA" would want to do.
Don't underestimate the importance of what you have worked on, it put the "world trade center" in a whole new light for everyone who read it. Before that I had no idea what the sort of "organized crime" aspect of the wtc was , the interconnections, the government tie-in's and it refutes the idea that "too many people would know", because it is not a wholesome group of people who were victimized, it is people who benefited and who would not say anything because they would implicate themselves and they are all tied in together as one of their corporations gobbles up the other and the former military & intelligence are mixed right into it.
And forget about the OCTS, you wouldn't be doing your job if they didn't hassle you.

[tenseconds]

27. enough

I find your research indispensable. Enough of the collapses...this is what I want to know about now.

[DoYouEverWonder]

100. Hey, found another live one

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x125226

BTW: Thanks for the kudos :blush:

[John Q. Citizen]

13. Yes, that's the macro answer which then leads down to everything else,

like no air defense, 15 exercises, intelligence and FBI contacts to the patsies, 3 buildings completely collapsing, Etc.

So far I believe you have the best "overall" single answer for "inside job."

I wonder where all the good answers are for "no inside job?"

[vincent_vega_lives]

199. So what's your credentials for making such definitive claims?

A couple of terrorists in a cave cannot perform a massive operation like 9/11 and especially not in "enemy" territory. The only group capable is intelligence / military.

Thats a pretty confident statement. What is your National Security experience?

[oblivious]

30. The hijacker story has been proved fake; even Mueller admits it.

The rest of the story stands on this non-existent foundation.

It cannot possibly have been done without small but hi-level inside planning.

[John Q. Citizen]

43. The patsies are definatly a weak link in the chain of the

OCT.

Have you read WELCOME TO TERRORLAND -- MOHAMED ATTA & THE 9-11 COVER-UP IN FLORIDA

by Daniel Hopsicker?

It's a very good piece of investigative jounalism. Hopsicker talks to a lot of people in the Venice, Florida area who remember Atta and his friends and comes up with a composite portrait of the hijackers that contrasts like night and day with the Official Conspiracy Theory.


You can read it free at the online lending library.


http://www.american-buddha.com/911.welcometoterrorlandhopsicker.htm

[Laelth]

53. #1 Reason(s) to believe 9-11 was an inside job.

The laws of physics and my own eyes. Jet fuel doesn't burn at a high enough temperature to cause the collapse of the entire frame of a steel-reinforced skyscraper. Fire has never, never, in the history of the modern skyscraper caused a building to collapse. Those towers were brought down by controlled demolitions, as anyone with an open mind and open eyes can see.

Therefore ... inside job.

-Laelth

[vincent_vega_lives]

64. It's NOT a steel REINFORCED Skyscraper.

That implys it was a concrete structure REINFORCED by steel. All three buildings were STEEL frame buildings.

"Fire has never, never, in the history of the modern skyscraper caused a building to collapse."

Actually no one is saying fire alone caused the collapse in any of the three buildings.

AND your statement is FALSE. 15 multi story structrues have either partialy or completely collapsed from fire.

[wildbilln864]

188. why do you post such ...

hogwash without ever having any evidence to back it up! I think you make crap up as you go along. Prove me wrong!
Which 15 are you referring to?

[brothernature]

320. The Bush family has been planning this since the sixties

my spiritual leader told me that there was a program called the operation northrop set up by Bush Sr. (or maybe it was his father?) where they would hijack our own planes to make the North Vietnamese look bad and build support for going to war. Sound familiar yet? I think that was around the time the oil companies were returning the resources back to the rightful owners and bush co took note and began planning how they would get it all back.

The planning for this goes all the way back - they had to start planning a long time ago in order to get insiders up to prominent and useful positions in the various organizations that were involved - the DoT, FAA, military, CIA, etc.

Expect to see more staged attacks now that the war is going to badly for them in Iraq. As soon as they blow something up people will want their bloodthirsty revenge again.

[John Q. Citizen]

8. No air defense, even for the pres in air force 1 It took bush over an

hour to get a fighter jet escort even after what the White House described as "credible threat" against Air Force 1 carrying the Prez on the morning of 9/11.

[michael_1166]

12. LIHOP with a lot of tail wind

to make sure the 19 box cutter guys were successful. Let some untalented (to put it mildly) Cessna pilots into the planes, then switch on the remote control to make sure they hit the towers instead of the car park at WalMart. Et voilà - the perfect scapegoats.

[slaveplanet]

16. inside job

and a particularly amateurish one at that...lots of mistakes, either that or they're so arrogant they just don't care.

[John Q. Citizen]

18. The Big Lie isn't dependent on being verifiable, it's much more dependent

on repetition and human psychology of conformity to the group.

[Name removed]

276. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[mirandapriestly]

21. If we had a real media, they'd be screwed, but the networks

all accommodated the job nicely

[John Q. Citizen]

20. Kicking for a larger sample...

[Lilith Velkor]

23. mmmhmm

[DemInDistress]

24. I voted a big "YES"... especially when king george and his dick

rejected Tom Daschle attempts at opening an investigation. What did those 2 have to hide other than their guilt?

and I gave that idiot king the benefit of the doubt on 911. he said,"he didn't know who did it" scumbag murdering thief and his gang.

don't get me wrong I know young bush couldn't plan an attack this elaborate but the cheney mob could.

[John Q. Citizen]

25. Yes, the cover - up is one of the main legs us inside jobers have to stand

on.

The cover up is always a tip off in so many crimes.

[John Q. Citizen]

26. All right, 100 votes and a clear trend starting to develope here on the

9/11 forum board.

[mirandapriestly]

28. and considering a lot of people aren't

really democrats, they just lurk and vote on polls, make some harmless posts and some to "sway opinion" the percentage who believe mihop is even larger. tons of freepers have DU accounts, they post about it on forums devoted to infiltrating DU.

[John Q. Citizen]

29. Yeah, a poster on my local ISP's forum was bragging about it a few

months back.

My bet is he's been tombstoned, because he quit mentioning it.

[vincent_vega_lives]

47. Yeah impossible for you to believe that there might

just be registered Democrats that may disagree with you. :eyes:

[John Q. Citizen]

49. Oh, I know there are registered Democrats who disagree about whether

9/11 was an inside job or wasn't an inside job.

Just yesterday when I was out knocking on doors to turn out Democrats and independents to vote for Jon Tester, (Dem. candidate for US Senate from MT) I spoke with a really knowledgeable guy who just so happened to believe that 9/11 wasn't an inside job.

He did believe that elections 2000, 2002 and 2004 were conspiracies to steal the elections, via Diebold and other mechanisms such as voter disenfranchisement and voter suppression.

What was strikingly different about our interaction on 9/11 from most interactions I read or experience on this forum, is the guy at the door never once disparaged, insulted, or ridiculed me because I held a differing opinion on 9/11 than he did. There was absolutely none of the "conspiracy nut " crap that is so prevalent here. He didn't seem at all concerned that his opinion and my opinion were different. He was content to express his opinion without feeling the need to change or ridicule mine.

He was also quite willing to share with me his main reason why he believes 9/11 wasn't an inside job, something that not one of the 32 people thus far who have voted on this poll on the "not an inside job" option have been willing to do, including yourself, vincent.

His main reason was that he felt it would be difficult to keep inside involvement covered-up.

Time constraints (I had to keep contacting as many voters as possible) didn't allow us to go into much detail about the rather complex subject of 9/11. But it does seem interesting most (not all) of the "not an inside job posters" on this forum apparently lack the confidence and civility to discuss the issue without resorting to name calling, animosity, and ridicule, whether directed at posters here or at others who express an "inside job" opinion.

It is not entirely one sided, for sure. But I'm of the opinion that if an independent analysis of all posts relating to 9/11 on this forum were done, the results would show a decided tendency for the "non inside job" posters to resort to ridicule to try to make there points, and it would reveal the driving need to convince others that holding a pro "inside job" view is somehow deviant, unacceptable, bigoted, luney, ill informed,or somehow harmful to Democrats.

It makes me wonder why this is the case here.

[Nozebro]

51. Do you think the gentleman is a professional advocate? If so, that might

explain why he was so civil as he explained his weaker-than-water "logic" about 9/11?

[John Q. Citizen]

52. No, he's an activist and a writer. He gave me a copy of his book which i haven't

had time to read, but which doesn't apparently concern 9/11 per se, but is a critique written about the bush administration as a whole. When he gave it to me he said it was directed more toward independents and soft Republican voters instead of Democratic activists who probably know almost all the stuff in his book already.

I have found the easiest way to turn off dialog and the easiest way to not change another persons opinions is to immediately attack the other persons opinions as weaker-than-water- logic, one reason many of the people on this forum who advocate that 9/11 wasn't an inside job don't seem to be making many converts.

My mom used to say :"You get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar," which while a bit hokey and a kinda quaint old saying does contain some basic truth.

I don't edit my opinions but I work to present them so the person I'm attempting to sway will at least consider them.

I don't approach anyone who holds a different opinion than myself as somehow an enemy, or as a knowing agent of the OCT. Actions speak louder than words, and those who actively deceive, propagandize, obstruct, and advocate to bury the truth, yes, I do consider them enemies. Someone who holds an opinion different from me doesn't usually fall into that classification, however.

If I had access to control mass media content I bet I could change public perception pretty quickly, and I might be a little more heavy handed. But I don't, so I have to use what seems to work for me.

He was civil exactly because he wasn't overly vested in his opinion. It was just his his opinion, nothing more, nothing less. And, he was a nice guy. Anyone who expects humans, any human, to always behave logically is in for some deep disappointments.

[vincent_vega_lives]

57. Good Point

"He was civil exactly because he wasn't overly vested in his opinion. "

Far too many folks here have their opinions wrapped up in their egos.

[drdtroit]

59. "Far too many folks here have their opinions wrapped up in their egos"

So true, it's amazing how many posts I read here by people that refuse to open their eyes and realize that this administration is hell bent toward the total destruction of the middle class.
They live in their fragile realities that cannot allow them to accept the fact that their government could perpetrate such a horrific event against their own citizens!

:patriot:

[Nozebro]

60. It sure isn't DEMOCRATS here that pretend to not see thru booshco BS

You hit the nail on the head, "drdtroit", but do you ever wonder if maybe there are some stealth neocons posting here? You know all those posts that take a RW point of view? Those folks are who I'm referring to.

[vincent_vega_lives]

62. "RW point of view"

:wtf: does structural engineering, crash science or photo analysis got to do with politics?

AYOOYFM?

[John Q. Citizen]

285. A lot apparently. Ever see the Zapruder film?

[vincent_vega_lives]

296. Yes I have

So know I suppose you are going to claim that projectile balistics is based on your political viewpoint?

[vincent_vega_lives]

56. Thats because this is the internet

I'm sure most of us could have resonalbe arguments about this if we met (though certainly not all) people tend to be far more polite face to face.

And I garuntee most elected official will tell you this is detracting from worthwhile issues, hence "harmfull".

I haven't shared my #1 reason for not beliving this was an inside job because I really don't have a SINGLE overriding issue.

If you notice my main purpose is to contradict statements and "facts" I feel to be incorrect, misleading, or outright lies. I simply don't belive in the MIHOP arguments as I have not seen a single peice of evidence that has stood up to my own critical analysis.

[John Q. Citizen]

65. So would you describe your purpose as more reactive than proactive?

[vincent_vega_lives]

297. Yes (n/t)

[Nozebro]

66. Sounds like you could use some help in critical thinking.

Although it doesn't take much in the way of critical reasoning skills to see that 9/11 was an inside job, maybe it would help if you boned up on how to use logic and reasoning skills to reach rational conclusions.

[vincent_vega_lives]

46. Gee

What a surprise... :eyes:

[dailykoff]

31. One more yes vote.

How did I miss this before?

[John Q. Citizen]

32. I don't know how this poll escaped your notice, but it's curious that

the OCTers only vote, and for whatever reason, won't give their #1 reason for their belief that 9/11 wasn't an inside job.
I can only assume most have never stopped to consider how or why they came to hold that view, and so can't readily articulate it.

So what is your number one reason that you believe 9/11 is an inside job, dailykoff? (I wish I'd included that in the OP instead of as an after thought.)

I resurrected this poll from Pg. 2 because a name-calling OCTer (who claims he doesn't mean to insult anyone as he insults everyone who disagrees with him) apparently believes only a tiny minority here at DU believe 9/11 was an inside job. I thought I'd help him out with his view of reality, at least as concerns DUers opinions on 9/11. While I can't prove to him that 9/11 was an inside job, I can at least make the data easily available on what those who have chosen to participate in this poll believe.

[dailykoff]

33. My #1 reason now is the way the buildings came down,

which would have been impossible without some heavy-duty engineered devices, whatever the hell they were. Probably a smorgasbord.

But what pushed me into MIHOP was finding out about the Marvin connection a couple of years ago. Up until that point, I pretty much bought the incompetence theory, even though people were already out there pushing CD.

But Marvin made me actually consider it, and sure enough, Griffin and the others were absolutely right about the demolitions, which lead directly to everything else (at least in my view), going back to 11/22/63.

[Nozebro]

34. U.S. doesn't control world's supply of "heavy-duty eng. devices"...

so, it IS possible that a foreign gov't-sponsored group could have gotten access to such and even had them shipped here in small parts (for later assembly).

On the other hand, I agree with you that the 9/11 is the "son" of 11/22/63. The New World Order is now a middle-aged (43) "Once Proud Beast, Now a Faithful Servant...of the rich".

[dailykoff]

35. I suppose there could have been some outsourcing

to foreign agents, depending on how they actually did it, just to cover their tracks. But I don't see how any of the planning and coordination could have been done outside the US. And there had to have been a lot of it.

[Nozebro]

36. Planning & coord. could have been done HERE....by terrorists. Not that

I believe there WERE any terrorists involved with 9/11; but my opinion notwithstanding, and it's a minor point, but the needed tools, planning, and coordination could have taken place in NYC, Washington D.C., or any number of other places (topless bars in Florida, casinos in Vegas, CIA airports in western Florida, PNAC Headquarters, Karl Rove's office, or even Osama's grandfather's mustache)

[dailykoff]

37. Coordination with Rudy, Larry, CNN, the NYT, Wall Street, etc?

:eyes:

[Nozebro]

38. Those folks probably wouldn't have cared if OBL HAD done the deed!

Many of our "esteemed" elite believed that the U.S. fought for the wrong side in WWII. The benefits of 9/11 didn't depend on who was responsible for it, as long as it wasn't public knowledge if the U.S. Gov't was responsible.

[Spigot]

39. Wrong

How did the terrorists make NORAD stand down?? How did the terrorists schedule so many war games for September 11 (or how did they know these war games were occuring)??

Only by ignoring such evidence can you maintain that view.

[John Q. Citizen]

40. I can't speak for Nozebro, but I think he's playing devil advocate here, not

maintaining that view.

From reading his other post, he seems to believe 9/11 was an inside job. He's considering controlled or planned demolition from all the angles, IMHO. If I'm incorrect I'm sure I'll hear about it. (at least i hope I will)

[Nozebro]

41. I can maintain my views very well, without your help or anyone elses.

Your comments don't refute or change the logic of what I said. Sorry to have to remind you of that. It must be a little discomforting, but you'll get over it.

[vincent_vega_lives]

48. If THATS you #1 reason

you really need to go back to school. Perhaps take a few classes in physics, engineering, or even Intro to Science. :eyes:

[John Q. Citizen]

50. If your need to attack someone with a different opinion than you is so strong,

perhaps you might at least consider also sharing with us your #1 reason you hold the opinion 9/11 wasn't an inside job.

You might also consider taking a civics course, an ethics course, or a civility in political discourse class. Try your adult ed options, or junior colleges. They are usually more reasonably priced.

[vincent_vega_lives]

58. That's the problem

Too many Liberal Arts, not enough hard science on this site :)

See my other post regarding my "#1 reason".

[Nozebro]

61. Too many stealth neocons posing as Democrats

"That's the problem"

[vincent_vega_lives]

63. Too many stealth asshats

posting like they have a clue. :eyes:

[wildbilln864]

190. I think you're projecting...

again!
Just sayin...

[John Q. Citizen]

300. You don't say?

[John Q. Citizen]

187. It's not a problem unless the only lens you care to observe the events

related to 9/11 through are a structural engineering one, for instance.

That is quite one dimensional to my way of thinking. I see research and understanding into human events as necessarily a multi-disciplinary approach.

[ima_sinnic]

42. YES--b/c it was ALL just "too perfect" for *Co agenda--& no cooperation

from * in an investigation. What's he trying to hide, anyway? A real LEADER would leave no stone unturned to get to the truth--but, true to form, the disgusting little pretender fouling up the White House has treated this like something that needs to go away, fast. He has not cooperated in any way with a real investigaton (ha ha, like sitting on the string-puller's lap in a closed-door hearing w/9/11 Commission is "cooperating"--sheesh).
Why didn't he spring into action after the 1st strike on 9/11?
Why did he continue to sit there, staring blankly into space like a total dumbass, after the 2nd strike--and then continue with his goddam photo-op for another goddam 20 minutes after that?? BECAUSE HE KNEW NOTHING ELSE WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. Same reason his puppeteers didn't whisk him out of there. THEY KNEW HE WAS SAFE THERE.
WHY HAS SIBEL EDMONDS BEEN GAGGED?
WHY DID * DELETE 28 PAGES OF WH DOCS RELEVANT TO THE "INVESTIGATION"?

not to mention all the technical details covered so splendidly in these threads.

9/11 made everything else possible for the stinking fascists: an excuse to invade Iraq (AS IF the 2 were connected) and more and more laws curtailing our rights and getting us "under control"--also, justification for illegal wiretapping and endless orgies of fear-baiting. Polls down? Call out memories of 9/11 and get the people scared!! 9/11 has made these evil sons of bitches RICH beyond their wildest dreams--mass murder in Iraq and burgeoning "security" and "intelligence" industries are very very profitable.

anyone who buys the simple-minded jackass story of "19 terrorists with boxcutters" is a moron.

[John Q. Citizen]

44. Don't forget to vote !

[John Q. Citizen]

45. Why won't the people who believe 9/11 wasn't an inside job state their

#1 reason that they believe it wasn't?

[HornBuckler]

54. We've been asking that for awhile now.

Myself, as well as others - and although I don't see many of those I asked this of still posting (interesting in itself) I never did get an answer. I hope you do, I'd like to read them.

[John Q. Citizen]

55. I think the question stumps them. The don't have an answer.

[Marie26]

67. Please see the 500-page 9/11 Commission report. nt

[John Q. Citizen]

68. I've seen it. They didn't ever consider whether it was an inside job. They

started with the assumption that 19 arab hijackers who apparently weren't devout Muslims were capable of shutting down US air defenses for a couple of hours.

Please see 9/11 Press for Truth which is the story of how the 9/11 commission came to be in the first place, the story of the Jersey Girls and their allies who worked like hell for a long time to even get that white wash.

You can see it free here. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5589099104255077250

Just down load it and watch. They have footage of the commission meeting. So if you care about what happened, in terms of the commission, you really can't do better than this.


You may also be aware that Keane and Hamilton, the co-chairs of the commission, have since come out and said that NORAD, the Pentagon, and the FAA lied repeatedly to the commission. So I hope that (NORAD, Pentagon, and FAA testimony) isn't the part of the report which you consider your #1 reason that 9/11 wasn't an inside job.

Which part of the report did you find to be particularly convincing that 9/11 wasn't an inside job? Which chapter?

[Nozebro]

69. 9/11 Commissioners were all CT'ers with zero interest in the truth.

Just like the Warren Commission and the Iran/Contra hearings committee.

[John Q. Citizen]

70. I am quite aware of the structural and political shortfalls of the

9/11 commission.

In fact, reading their report is enlightening because of the tortured way they go about not investigating what happened. I highly recommend reading it.

However, there are a lot of people who can't seem to get their heads around the fact that the American oligarchy runs things here in the good ol' USA, and has for a long time.

At least they do, apparently, until the random lone gunman, the evil Iranian students, or the 19 Arab muslim fanatics who enjoy drinking, drugs, and strip clubs somehow just take over the Secret Service, the FBI, The CIA, NORAD, The Pentagon, The FAA, MIA, NSA, and just do as they please whenever they please.

[Nozebro]

71. Other than those that know, but pretend otherwise, I think that a growing

number of ordinary people ARE able to "get their heads around the fact that..." once they become educated by people such as yourself. That, despite the fact that Disinformation and Propaganda are passed off as "news"...alongside the real news: celebrity goings-on, crime, sports, and weather reports.

[William Seger]

73. Okay, since you asked politely...

"Why won't the people who believe 9/11 wasn't an inside job state their #1 reason that they believe it wasn't?"

"I think the question stumps them. The don't have an answer."

Well, please allow me to disabuse you of that notion. But let's start with just the major reasons why CTers have a very tough row to hoe in making their case:

1. Even if we assume that "they" wanted to do something for any and all the reasons that CTers imagine, it's absurd to think that any sane person would have concocted such a ridiculously elaborate and risky plan, when it shouldn't take 5 minutes to come up with something that would accomplish the same presumed objective but would have been far, far easier to pull off, and incredibly safer to pull off without getting caught. And even if we assume that BushCo has at least a few people who really are that insane, why wouldn't at least one of the many, many people who would have had to been involved in just the planning stop and say, "Hey, guys, this plan is fuckin' nuts. Why don't we just do this instead..."

2. The mainline "theories" propose schemes that would have involved at least hundreds of people to pull off, and literally thousands more to cover up. We're expected believe that all these people -- every damn one of them -- are simply evil, or they were happy to accept money to help the government murder 3000 people. The belief that such a thing of such scale could be covered up so completely for five years is beyond absurd.

3. Many thousands more people would have been a position to catch the culprits redhanded making preparations or pulling it off, but somehow either no one did or the ones who did were willing to become part of the conspiracy to commit mass murder. (I don't mean the few dozen who say they saw or heard "something strange"; I mean people who were clearly in a position to catch the perps redhanded.)

Of course, as a matter of logic, none of that proves anything. All it shows is why a rational person should be skeptical of the conspiracy claims, to the point that they would need some really solid evidence to start believing that it really could have happened the way CTers claim. Now, there's where we get to the number one reason why rational people, if they are informed, aren't buying CT: the huge body of evidence that the "official story" is fairly accurate, and the lack of convincing evidence for any conspiracy theory. The very best evidence that CTers have been able to dig up so far is very ambiguous, at best -- i.e. it has explanations that don't involve conspiracies -- and there's damn little evidence that even falls in that ambiguous category. Most of what's presented as "evidence" by the "truth movement" -- and I mean something well over 95% -- turns out to be everything from simple "confirmation bias" up to and including willful ignorance, and then onward into utter bullshit, if you dig into it far enough. Yet, ironically, CTers insist that it's the lack of digging into it that prevents most people from seeing the "obvious truth" that they see.

And then, we find that the predominant attitude in the "truth movement" is, well so what; it's all good if it helps sucker in a few more gullible people; it's all about the "movement" and to hell with the truth.

Since you seem to be sincerely interested in why "OCTers" think the way they do, does that give you some insight? I do hope that all this typing wasn't a complete waste of time...

[BrokenBeyondRepair]

74. not sure about all the scenarios presented..

to explain who was involved and exactly how it happened but there are many things that don't add up. we deserve and should demand a thorough investigation. it's that simple.. i personally think some of the theories are kind of out there but the fact that truth is NEVER measured in mass appeal is always lingering in the back of my mind. also, it's not a crazy conspiracy that the average american has the critical thinking skills of a donut and has a nasty habit of mistaking objectivity for gullibility... this includes O & CTers as well. it's a mentality follows the path of least resistance like everything in the physical world except wtc 1, 2, and 7.

i've read most of the official docs and most of the alternative theories and still have a many questions.

* i'd like to know how the concrete was pulverized or how the marble panels in the lobby where knocked off the walls prior to the collapse.
* an explanation to why the area wasn't treated as a crime scene would be nice.
* the source of energy that created the molten steel/iron before and after the collapse? why this was ignored by all agencies given the task of explaining what happened to their employers.. which is me..us
* i think rodriguez is sincere and video evidence corroborates his story; why was he and many others ignored by the commission?
etc etc etc

also.. the term "obvious" should be removed from all discussion regarding this event; nothing about it is obvious except for the fact that nobody seems to know what really happened.

[Nozebro]

75. I disagree with what I think you mean by "O & CTers "

I'm convinced that 9/11 was a False Flag operation, NOT a conspiracy. There's really only ONE 9/11 conspiracy theory that gets much attention, and that's the one that says OBL & Company plotted, planned, and carried out the "attacks" of 9/11. If you are trying to conflate "False Flag Operation" as being the same thing as a Conspiracy Theory, then I disagree with your dictionary.

[BrokenBeyondRepair]

79. a false flag operation is a conspiracy

and it's one of the theories re: 911

a conspiracy theory.. not as a derogatory term; just a simple way to describe events w/ conspirators who manipulate things from behind the scenes.

not implying false flag should be dismissed at all but w/o conclusive evidence to support it most aren't going to buy it. actually, most will dismiss it outright, think ur a retard and never think about it again... i'm not one of them

anything short of a thorough and objective investigation w/ adequate resources should be unacceptable to anyone who believes in accountability. if it did turn out to be a false flag operation then we would need to know exactly who was involved and exactly how it was executed first... then bust out a can of patriot act on their asses.. IF it was just 19 arabs w/ box cutters and a cave then we need to find out exactly who didn't do their jobs and make sure they never hold a position of responsibly again(instead of being promoted) IF they let it happen then they are going to get away w/ it..

[Nozebro]

88. We'll have to agree to disagree on that.

You seem to have such an expansive definition of what you call "conspiracies" that the word no longer has any practical meaning. I disagree with that.

[BrokenBeyondRepair]

90. ?????

con·spir·a·cy:
An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.

would a false flag not be an illegal, wrongful, and subversive act requiring an agreement between at least 2 ppl?

it is what it is.. a word w/ a simple and straightforward definition.

[Nozebro]

96. Incorrect useage of the word "conspiracy" - even by your definition

9/11 was a False Flag operation for which OBL was framed. As a U.S. - sponsored act, the Gov't would assert that it was legal, right, and not subversive. Therefore, it is wrong to characterize it as a conspiracy.

[BrokenBeyondRepair]

102. lol.. whatever dude

get a dictionary.. learn how to use it and leave me alone..


l8r

[Nozebro]

103. Laughing at yourself is healthy sometimes, so have some...today, DUDE.

I have a dictionary and I know how to use it. Speak for yourself.

[petgoat]

76. Ah, the old "conspiracy of thousands" canard

What thousands? The war games disrupted the air defense, and
no one is allowed to talk about classified war games.

Dr. Romero said a few charges in key places could have brought
the towers down. According to Eagar's zipper theory, which was
conventional wisdom until NIST abandoned it, a few truss clips
failing could unzip a whole floor, and that's all she wrote--
so two suicide guys with abrasive cutting wheels could have
brought the towers down in half an hour!

All that was needed was for Rummy and Myers and Rice and Cheney
and W to sit on their hands.

What for must you invent this supposed conspiracy of thousands?

[AZCat]

78. You're not still flogging that dead horse, are you?

Dr. Romero has recanted his statement, yet you refuse to stop quoting his off-the-cuff "analysis".

What for must you invent this supposed support for your theories?

[petgoat]

80. "Dr. Romero has recanted his statement"

Dr. Romero NEVER recanted his statement that a small amount of explosives
in key places could have done the job.

Never.

[AZCat]

81. Such a view is disingenous and self-serving.

Otherwise known as "bullshit".

We have gone over this issue here before and it is clear that you are determined to continue lying to yourself and others about this.

[petgoat]

83. Dr. Romero recanted ONLY his statement that the fires

could not have brought the towers down.

He never recanted the statement that a few charges could have done the job,
or his statement that the collapse looked just like a controlled demolition.

That you are so quick to squeal "liar!" shows the level of your desperation.

[AZCat]

84. Desperation?

I'm not the one digging through the dumpster for any sort of statement that will support my claims.

[petgoat]

86. You're the one that's making dumpster claims, such as the

claim that Romero recanted.

If you read both statements it's obvious that Dr. Romero's initial
reaction was incredulity. The collapse was too symmetrical, too
well organized, to have happened from random insults.

Obviously before the later statement he talked with some engineers
who convinced him that the collapse could have been natural. I'd
be curious to know what their arguments were--did they have the
zipper theory already?

[AZCat]

87. You are taking the one-off opinion of Romero...

and turning it into something it was (and is) not - this is the fallacy.

He watched news footage of the collapses and says they appeared "too methodical" (no mention of symmetry or organization here) and that it would be "difficult for something from the plane to trigger an event like that."

Later he recants this, after talking to some structural engineers and reviewing the tapes himself. He says "Certainly the fire is what caused the building to fail." He says that he now believes that explosives would not have been needed to cause the collapses.

Regardless your immature little quip about zipper theory, the man clearly does not support your claims. Notice that he did no in-depth analysis that would support your claim of "a few charges in key places" (something you seem to demand from everyone else). It was merely his (hastily formed) opinion, and one you continue to blow completely out of proportion.

[petgoat]

94. "methodical" equals "organization" = "symmetry"

An asymmetrical collapse would not have been methodical.

He said a few charges could do the job. He said it looked just like
a controlled demolition. And he never recanted those. Because they're
undeniably true.

[AZCat]

95. There you go again - ASSUMING something.

You have no idea if Romero meant "symmetrical" when he said "methodical" but that doesn't stop you from pushing the idea.

Undeniably true? Bullshit again - especially compared with how these one-offs are used to support your theories.

[petgoat]

107. Methodical is organized and orderly

Symmetrical is organized and orderly

A natural collapse from asymmetrical damage and asymmetrical fires varying in intensity
and in time can not reasonably be expected to be symmetrical or methodical.

these one-offs are used to support your theories.

It's not theory but a fact that Dr Romero said the collapse looked just like CD
and said a few charges could have done the job. And he never recanted that.

[AZCat]

118. I see that your grasp of the english language...

is as poor as your understanding of fluid mechanics (which I see you are again displaying in a post below), physics, and logic.

Do you feel even the slightest twinge of guilt over such a blatant misrepresentation of language?

[Nozebro]

120. Very disrespectful. Isn't that getting close to violating the rules here?

nt

[AZCat]

139. It is indeed disrespectful.

The english language does not exist to be used as a tool of propaganda, and attempts to do so (whether by petgoat or by others) are certainly lacking in respect.

[Nozebro]

140. Yes, and I was specifically citing YOUR disrespectful posts

I didn't mention anything about your possible motivations, only that it is very disrespectful of you and I think you owe PG and this entire forum an apology.

[AZCat]

141. I disagree.

You still haven't explained why you think my posts are disrespectful. I don't really expect a cogent explanation but couldn't you at least make an attempt?

[AZCat]

170. Still waiting for this explanation also.

Providing either one (this one or the one below) would be nice - perhaps you could take a little time this holiday to do so? If you cut all the snarky hot air posts out of your schedule you might find it a little easier to produce such a thing (just a little advice).

[petgoat]

171. "The collapse of the buildings appears 'too methodical' to be a chance result of airplanes colliding

with the structures, said Van Romero."

http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/retractions/romero.html

Pray tell.... If Dr. Romero was not talking about symmetry, and total progressive collapse
as opposed to piecemeal collapse, pray tell: What the hell was he talking about in saying
the collapse appeared (on TV) to be "too methodical"?

He certainly wasn't talking about the process of stringing miles of det cord and sneaking
hundreds of tons of TNT or employing thousands of jewish elves or of co-opting hundreds
of pure-gold honest-injun security guards.

He was talking about the collapse.

[hack89]

82. So you agree with Romero ...

that the PE of the towers were sufficient to cause the pulverization seen at ground zero? Because that is the obvious inference that has to be drawn. And it also brings into question the need for thermate - Romero seems to think that explosives alone were sufficient.

[petgoat]

85. I don't know.

The unknown nature of the light weight concrete makes calculation
of the pulverization energy difficult.

Much more compelling than the pulverization energy I find the fact
that there is no plausible mechanism for the ejection of the dust.

I'm not sure that Dr. Romero evaluated the dust. He did not comment
on it. It could be that his opinion that a relatively small amount
of explosives could have done the job was based more on on his practical
experience than on a forensic observation of a TV event he may have seen
only once when he commented on it.

[Nozebro]

89. Do you agree that a few cutting charges in key places would be sufficient

to bring down the WTC buildings?

[AZCat]

91. No, I do not agree with that statement.

It's not the general idea that I disagree with, it's the ambiguity.

[Nozebro]

97. It's a question - but never mind that. It isn't ambiguous. You must be

either confused or else saying it's ambiguous as a defensive strategy, not a statement of what you believe is fact.

[AZCat]

99. The ambiguosity (spelling?) is in the use of certain words.

I don't know how many cutting charges it would take (I'm not an expert, nor have I read any in-depth analysis by experts) so I cannot accept that it would take "a few" (an ambiguous word I am reluctant to support just on its own).

I also don't have any idea how large these "cutting charges" would need to be (and the statement by Romero doesn't give any clue).

I agree with the general idea that explosives in a necessary quantity placed in a proper manner would be sufficient for causing the collapse of the WTC towers, but I cannot agree with the previous statement (or "question" - whatever).

[petgoat]

108. According to NIST only 6 core columns in WTC1 were severed

by flight 11.

http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/nist/index.html

[dailykoff]

255. 6 out of 5,170 -- about 0.1% -- and the building fell to the ground in seconds.

Nothing unusual about that.

[William Seger]

92. Uh-huh

So, it's completely impossible that a 150-ton airplane carrying 9000 gallons of fuel and flying over 500 MPH could do any serious damage to the building, but "two suicide guys with abrasive cutting wheels" wouldn't have a problem bringing them down? Wow.

If by "a few charges" you mean at least several tons of explosives in each tower, very carefully placed, then I think it would be possible. But then, there goes your "defies the laws of physics, so it musta been an inside job" argument. (Which would be no big loss, since that argument is nonsense anyway.) Then, you're stuck with "I think it was an inside job because I prefer that explanation." But that would still take more than 2 guys, plus cooperation from the building security, and you still need to come up with a way to protect the explosives during the fire. Also, you still need to hijack the planes and fly them into the buildings at exactly the floors where the explosives were placed. And you would still need at least a few key NORAD people to make sure they didn't interfere.

But the biggest manpower requirement would still be to cover up the whole mess -- all the hundreds of people involved in the FBI, FEMA, NIST, and 9/11 Commission investigations. So, even if we ignore the more bizarre CTs -- explosives all over the buildings, no planes, beam weapons, etc. -- you might be able to trim the "thousands" down to "hundreds." And, you're still running quite a risk of getting caught redhanded by someone who isn't in on it.

Which still doesn't avoid the problem: why all the unnecessary complexity and risk? Why not just drive a big-ass bomb into the garage, like the first WTC attack only this time get it right -- or better yet, pick a different target -- and find "conclusive proof" that it was Islamic terrorists? (And while we're at it, why not include at least one or two Iraqis, if the intent is to justify invading Iraq?)

[petgoat]

93. Your post is all over the map, which makes reply difficult.

Your first sentence is a silly straw man; I never said such a stupid thing.

Your belief that I was professing suicide abrasive-wheel wielders is mistaken--
I was simply pointing out that it logically follows Dr. Eagar's absurd zipper
theory.

By "a few charges" I meant only what Dr. Romero meant--he's the explosives expert,
and I don't pretend to be. He said "a relatively small amount" which I can't
reasonably stretch to mean several tons--maybe you can.

The "defies the laws of physics" argument was not part of this thread, and I don't
know why you choose to invoke it now.

that would still take more than 2 guys, plus cooperation from the building security

Building security after midnight probably limits itself to watching video monitors and
performing scheduled rounds. No cooperation is necessary.

a way to protect the explosives during the fire.

Dr. Jones says fires will not ignite thermite.


Why not just drive a big-ass bomb into the garage,

Because that would be embarrassing to Marvin Bush's security company, and it would fail to
provoke the desired response. The message from a truck bomb would be: "Tall buildings need
to institute better security measures." The message from the planes was: "Civilization is
very fragile and those insane islamofascists can strike at a moment's notice any time, any where.
Every time you see a plane flying over, that plane could be a weapon."

Truck bombs would not justify surveillance of fliers.

fly them into the buildings at exactly the floors where the explosives were placed.

A radio beacon makes this easy. Or place explosives in many floors, and alter the computer
controlled radio mediated detonation sequence to fit the crash.

a few key NORAD people to make sure they didn't interfere.

War games disrupt both FAA and NORAD and nobody can talk about classified war games.

the biggest manpower requirement would still be to cover up the whole mess -- all the hundreds of people involved in the FBI, FEMA, NIST, and 9/11 Commission investigations.

There you go again, inventing a huge cast. How many does it take to sabotage the FEMA investigation
through inadequate financing, lack of site access, and the destruction of the steel?

How many does it take to sabotage NIST by limiting the areas of study, and interfering with the
computer simulations?

Philip Zelikow alone could sabotage the 9/11 Commission (and did--by limiting access to documents).

you're still running quite a risk of getting caught redhanded by someone who isn't in on it.

Right. I always inspect the elevator shafts every morning on my way to work. I also look into the
space above the suspended ceiling, and the plumbing shaft behind the bathroom every day.

[Nozebro]

98. PG: Outsanding post. You are a formidable advocate/rebuttalist. EOM

nt

[William Seger]

101. Sorry, not impressed or convinced

Your first sentence is a silly straw man; I never said such a stupid thing.

Yes, it's silly -- that was the whole point -- so I trust that neither you nor any other CTer here will ever be tempted to say such a stupid thing? Good; mission accomplished.

Your belief that I was professing suicide abrasive-wheel wielders is mistaken-- I was simply pointing out that it logically follows Dr. Eagar's absurd zipper theory.

Oh? You implied that you were explaining how the conspiracy could be pulled off by a couple of guys. Saying silly and stupid things doesn't quite do that, does it. (And BTW, Eager's "zipper theory" has never been considered "absurd" by anyone who understood it -- you'll have to take my word on that -- it was simply found to not fit the observations of how the buildings collapsed. Big difference.)

By "a few charges" I meant only what Dr. Romero meant--he's the explosives expert, and I don't pretend to be. He said "a relatively small amount" which I can't reasonably stretch to mean several tons--maybe you can.

Yes, I can, but not on the basis of my own expertise. I've looked at several different estimates of the minimum amount required, and relative to the size of the building, I'd say a few tons is "a relatively small amount." And, your misinterpretation of "a relatively small amount" as meaning a "a few charges" is just wrong. Just the raw energy required to cut through the steel columns on just one floor would be in the vacinity of a ton of TNT, but using that small an amount would require putting the explosives in direct contact with the steel, the way CD folks do, which would require preparing the building the way CD folks do. If the explosives could only be put near the columns, because you couldn't tear up a floor the way CD folks do without causing suspicion, then you need much more. And, it wouldn't be "a few charges"; you would need to put charges near more than half the columns on a floor -- maybe 150 or so would do it.

The "defies the laws of physics" argument was not part of this thread, and I don't know why you choose to invoke it now.

Simply because that has become the standard reason that CTers insist that it must have been a CD job. If you don't buy that reasoning, then good for you; but then I don't know why you prefer the "inside job" hypothesis.

> that would still take more than 2 guys, plus cooperation from the building security

Building security after midnight probably limits itself to watching video monitors and
performing scheduled rounds. No cooperation is necessary.

"Probably?" So, your plan depends on being able to sneak a few tons of explosives into the building and get them placed on 150 or so columns, and you "probably" won't get caught? Okay, good luck.

> a way to protect the explosives during the fire.

Dr. Jones says fires will not ignite thermite.

Well, duh, that's because thermite is not an explosive. Problem is, there's no known way to bring down a building with thermite, except possibly packing a ridiculous amount around the columns and coming up with some (unexplained) way to hold it in place long enough to melt the steel. If you want to talk about theories that are considered absurd by the experts, then Jones' thermite theory is absurd.

> Why not just drive a big-ass bomb into the garage,

Because that would be embarrassing to Marvin Bush's security company...

Not a problem, since Marvin Bush was no longer involved with security at WTC, as has been pointed out repeatedly on this board. You need to let that one go. And, as I said, why not just pick another target. We know the Islamic terrorists wanted to bring down WTC -- they tried before -- but I can't think of any reason why a "false flag" operation would require the same objective.

...and it would fail to provoke the desired response. The message from a truck bomb would be: "Tall buildings need to institute better security measures." The message from the planes was: "Civilization is very fragile and those insane islamofascists can strike at a moment's notice any time, any where. Every time you see a plane flying over, that plane could be a weapon."

If you mean the response desired by the Islamic terrorists, then I agree. But I thought we were only looking for reasons why an "inside job" could be used to justify invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, you're tailoring the presumed motives to fit the crime, and -- what a coincidence -- it turns out to be the same motives that Islamic terrorists would have!

Truck bombs would not justify surveillance of fliers.

The need for that is self-evident and it was already in effect (just not effective enough) at the time.

> fly them into the buildings at exactly the floors where the explosives were placed.

A radio beacon makes this easy. Or place explosives in many floors, and alter the computer
controlled radio mediated detonation sequence to fit the crash.

It would take more than a radio beacon to "make this easy." You also need a way to get the plane to fly directly toward the radio beacon, don't you? (Not that I'm seriously questioning the ability of CTers to imagine some way; I'm just challenging the "easy" assertion.) Bompbs on more than one floor? Not a bad idea, but now you've made it N times harder to do, and you still haven't explained how to do it without the fires setting off the explosives.

> a few key NORAD people to make sure they didn't interfere.

War games disrupt both FAA and NORAD and nobody can talk about classified war games.

Oh, okay, let's hope so, or the whole plan goes to hell. Good luck.

> the biggest manpower requirement would still be to cover up the whole mess -- all the hundreds of people involved in the FBI, FEMA, NIST, and 9/11 Commission investigations.

There you go again, inventing a huge cast. How many does it take to sabotage the FEMA investigation
through inadequate financing, lack of site access, and the destruction of the steel?

How many does it take to sabotage NIST by limiting the areas of study, and interfering with the
computer simulations?

Philip Zelikow alone could sabotage the 9/11 Commission (and did--by limiting access to documents).

Oh, okay; good luck -- again.

> you're still running quite a risk of getting caught redhanded by someone who isn't in on it.

Right. I always inspect the elevator shafts every morning on my way to work. I also look into the
space above the suspended ceiling, and the plumbing shaft behind the bathroom every day.

As I said, if you're going to bring down the buildings with "a relatively small amount" of exlosives (which can't be "a few charges") then you need to get the explosives as near to the columns as you can. If you're going to hide them where they won't be easily seen, then you need more explosives. And, I hate to keep bringing it up, but you still need to come up with some way to protect the explosives from the fires.

The whole point here is, every time you cut down on the number of people involved, you increase the risk of having everything blow up in your face -- and you started out with a huge risk of that, anyway. And every time you make the thing "easier" to pull off (by increasing the risk), you're removing more reasons for thinking it must have been an inside job. Look at it this way: If this really was an inside job pulled off by a few people, then it's because not only were they very lucky, but they also did such a good job that the results are virtually indistinguishable from what reasonable and conscientious investigators would have seen if 19 hijackers had flown the planes into the buildings, and they left no evidence to prove otherwise. In other words, you can't simultaneously assert that it must have been an inside job and that covering it up wouldn't require very many people. You're stuck with prefering the "inside job" hypothesis just because you prefer it.

And you failed to respond to my main points, which I'll state again: Why use such a ridiculously complicated and risky scheme when a simple and safe plan could accomplish the same presumed objective? And, where's the evidence? Since I said pretty clearly that those were major concerns, I find your rebuttal rather disappointing.

[Name removed]

104. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[William Seger]

105. That's because...

... you're suffering from an advanced form of CT Syndrome, which coincidentally is called Nozebrosis. Here petgoat is trying to reduce the size of the conspiracy down to something realistic, and in almost all of your posts here, you want to keep increasing it to include everyone who simply finds your evidence and reasoning to be very weak. And you've deluded yourself into thinking that it's all a matter of political opinion? Think what you like, but I find you and your ilk to be a huge embarrassment to the Democratic Underground, which is precisely why "certain other boards" love to ridicule this particular subforum.

[petgoat]

106. ..

Good; mission accomplished.

William, please don't beat your wife tonight. If I save just one woman from brutal abuse,
I can sleep much easier don'tyaknow.

You implied that you were explaining how the conspiracy could be pulled off by a couple
of guys.

IF Dr. Eagar's theory is true (and the structural engineering community apparently found it
plausible enough to decline to challenge it for three years) then it logically follows that
a couple of guys with abrasive wheels could do the same thing in half an hour.

Eager's "zipper theory" has never been considered "absurd" by anyone who understood it

I understand it just fine. I believed it for three years until I realized—let's see, he's saying
that the truss clips at the perimeter were so weak they unzipped under mere gravity loads,
but the truss clips at the core were so freaking strong that falling floors took down the 47 14” X 36”
core columns with them?

Just the raw energy required to cut through the steel columns on just one floor would be in the
vacinity of a ton of TNT

TNT is a very inefficient explosive. Does anyone use TNT in pro demolition work?

you couldn't tear up a floor the way CD folks do

I don't understand the need to tear up floors to reach the columns when there's only 5” of floor
obstructing the column and there's 12 feet of unobstructed column between floors.

you would need to put charges near more than half the columns on a floor -- maybe 150 or so would
do it.

I see, so to do CD you need to take out 150 columns—and you need to take them out simultaneously,
right? Can we agree that you need to spread them out widely on the floor because if they're all on
one side, you'll get a toppling block, not a total progressive straight-down collapse? How then can
you believe NIST's claim that severing only six columns in WTC1 resulted in total collapse?

{"defies the laws of physics"} has become the standard reason that CTers insist that it must have
been a CD job.

We weren't talking about whether it was CD. We were talking about whether a small amount
of explosives could have done the job. Different issue.

your plan depends on being able to sneak a few tons of explosives into the building and get
them placed on 150 or so columns.

NIST says only six core columns were severed in WTC1. Some tenants of the towers used their offices
to warehouse product (see “102 Minutes”), so explosives could easily have been smuggled up the freight
elevator in product boxes on pallets--or for that matter in computer monitor boxes, or
office-furniture boxes. One anonymous poster on this board claimed she'd seen a van routinely
driven into the freight elevator and hoisted up in the building.

there's no known way to bring down a building with thermite

Is there any known way to bring it down with burning file cabinets and carpets? That would make
controlled demolition a lot cheaper, wouldn't it? Just pile up a lot of trash, sprinkle it with
diesel fuel and voila! A neat pile of rubble.

coming up with some (unexplained) way to hold it in place long enough to melt the steel.

Anti CD folks show an amazing lack of resourcefulness. I've seen thermite contained in a flower
pot. I suppose some kind of ceramic trough could have been devised.

Marvin Bush was no longer involved with security at WTC

He'd been on the board for ten years. He was part of the story. He was still a major stockholder,
right?

{re: discussion of the “desired response” of the attacks} You're tailoring the presumed motives to
fit the crime, and -- what a coincidence -- it turns out to be the same motives that Islamic
terrorists would have!

I disagree. The only motivations I've seen articulated for islamic terrorists were their wish that
US troops be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia (which wish was granted in 2003) and a wish to
alter US foreign policy with respect to support of Israel. I don't see how these goals are served by
an attack calculated to terrorize the American people and galvanize them into support for a holy
jihad against the Muslim world. Terrorizing the American people served the goals of the Bush
administration because it motivated the suppression of rights, ill-advised wars, military buildups,
suspension of criticism of a wartime president, and other elements of what was clearly a
pre-existing neofascistic agenda.

If Saudi suicide pilots did in fact fly the planes, attack on the towers may have been a condition
of their participation. Peculiar hostage-like behavior of a number of participants in the events of
9/11 including Osama, Atta, General Ahmad, Shafig bin Laden, and W himself is consistent with
a very complicated deal among a lot of parties.

The need for {surveillance of fliers} is self-evident and it was already in effect

It was not evident to the American people, who were the targets of the terrorist attack.

a way to get the plane to fly directly toward the radio beacon

Pilots follow radio beacons all the time.


if you're going to bring down the buildings with "a relatively small amount" of exlosives (which
can't be "a few charges")

Dr. Romero said a few charges could do it.

Here's from the ABQ Journal:

"It could have been a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points," Romero said.
The explosives likely would have been put in more than two points in each of the towers, he said.

http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/retractions/romero.html


you need to get the explosives as near to the columns as you can.

Drop ceilings provide a two-foot region of hidden access. Elevator shafts provide easy access.
Using the roofs of the elevator cars as movable staging would make placing charges on columns
on multiple floors easy.

you still need to come up with some way to protect the explosives from the fires.

Why? Maybe that was some of the explosions people reported before the towers fell—-charges
being set off by fire.

they also did such a good job that the results are virtually indistinguishable from what
reasonable and conscientious investigators would have seen if 19 hijackers had flown the planes
into the buildings

That's not true. That asymmetrical damage and fires yielded a perfectly symmetrical collapse is
bizarre. That the tower hit second fell first is bizarre. That the rotating top of WTC2 turned to
dust before it could topple off is bizarre. The energetic expulsion of dust with no known mechanism
for that expulsion is bizarre. The squibs are bizarre. The dropping of the antenna on WTC1 is
bizarre--because even if the core failed, the hat truss should have held the antenna up.

they left no evidence to prove otherwise.

They left no evidence to prove the official story either. The steel samples they were able to snatch
from a juggernaut recycling operation do not show sufficient heating to weaken the steel. The
official investigators were excluded from the site, and had to fight to get access to the blueprints.

You're stuck with prefering the "inside job" hypothesis just because you prefer it.

A natural collapse does not explain the bizarre collapse features above. And if the officials have
nothing to hide, why has the evidence been destroyed?

Why use such a ridiculously complicated and risky scheme when a simple and safe plan could
accomplish the same presumed objective?

What's complicated about blowing up a building? According to the official story it could be done
by asymmetrical fire and asymmetrical damage.

And, where's the evidence?

The evidence was destroyed. Do innocent people go around destroying evidence that would prove their
innocence?

[William Seger]

110. ....?

I'll have to come back later when I have more time to give you a proper point-by-point -- most especially your "bizarre collapse features" and "evidence was destroyed" assertions -- but just a quick response to try to refocus on the big picture: You are clearly arguing that the collapse would be easier to trigger than most CTers recognize, and for that I applaud you, but that's precicely why I don't see any need for any explosives at all. The direct damage from the plane and the steel weakening in the fire is all that's required. And, I'm not the one who's inventing a large cast of characters for the conspiracy; CTers are, because every time an objection is raised about how a few conspirators could have done thus-and-so and gotten away with it so cleanly, CTers wave away the objection by simply adding more conspirators. If you want to try to reduce the number of conspirators, fine, but then you need to answer to the objections that caused the CTers to add all those conspirators in the first place. I think you've done about as good a job with that as you can... and it's still not very convincing -- certainly nowhere strong enough to build a murder case. Basically, you are hypothesizing that this small group of conspirators were extremely lucky that everything fell their way, but even that doesn't answer the question of why they came up with a scheme that required so much luck in the first place. I think you must realize that, since you resort in the end to hypothesizing that all the presumed evidence must have been destroyed (which really doesn't square well with the facts, either, but we'll get into that later).

[William Seger]

111. Okay, back to this silly game

William, please don't beat your wife tonight. If I save just one woman from brutal abuse,
I can sleep much easier don'tyaknow.

Sorry, but I won't let you get away with pretending that that's remotely similar to our exchange. You posted something "silly" and "stupid" and I called you on it by pointing out how ridiculous the argument would be if carried to its logical conclusion: argumentum ad absurdum. Just because you didn't carry your own argument to the obviously ridiculous conclusion doesn't let you off the hook.

IF Dr. Eagar's theory is true (and the structural engineering community apparently found it
plausible enough to decline to challenge it for three years) then it logically follows that
a couple of guys with abrasive wheels could do the same thing in half an hour.

Half an hour... with abrasive wheels, huh. Complete baloney. And even if that were true (:rofl:), and Eagar's theory had been correct, you're still missing the explanation that would make me think the guys with abrasive wheels were necessary after the planes crashed into the buildings and started massive fires.

... he's saying that the truss clips at the perimeter were so weak they unzipped under mere gravity loads, but the truss clips at the core were so freaking strong that falling floors took down the 47 14” X 36” core columns with them?

Without knowing the precise design details, there's no way to know whether or not that's possible, and as I said, the final determination that something else happened was made by the visual evidence of the perimeter columns being pulled inward. His point was that the floor slabs might have "unzipped" in a type of progressive failure where the failure of enough perimeter connections would put loads on immediately adjacent connections that they simply couldn't handle -- perfectly plausible -- and that that kind of failure would "pancake" on the floor below, which would break them free. Whether or not that failure would cause the floor slabs to break free of the core, leaving them to collapse because of a lack of lateral support -- plausible -- or pull the core columns down immediately by putting lateral loads on them that they had not been designed to resist -- also perfectly plausible since they were had been designed to primarily carry vertical loads -- was a secondary issue, and not relevant to whether or not the tower should have remained standing. The one and only reason that you are now calling it an "absurd" theory seems to be to prop up your own speculations.

TNT is a very inefficient explosive. Does anyone use TNT in pro demolition work?

Irrelevant, since I was only using that as an indication of the amount of energy required. If you want to have your conspirators using slightly less of something slightly more powerful, fine; just don't try to spin a Mission Impossible yarn out of it where they bring down the towers with a few packs of C4.

I don't understand the need to tear up floors to reach the columns when there's only 5” of floor
obstructing the column and there's 12 feet of unobstructed column between floors.

Sorry to have confused you; I was using "floor" in the sense of "office space on a floor" -- not ripping up the floor slab. And the point still holds that if you're only going to hide the explosives in the ceilings or what-not -- near the columns rather than in direct contact with the steel -- then you need a lot more of it. And, despite your efforts to imply there wasn't any risk of getting caught, there certainly was, and you still haven't any given me any reason whatsoever why they came up with a plan that required that much risk, when a simpler plan could have avoided it.

I see, so to do CD you need to take out 150 columns—and you need to take them out simultaneously,
right? Can we agree that you need to spread them out widely on the floor because if they're all on
one side, you'll get a toppling block, not a total progressive straight-down collapse? How then can
you believe NIST's claim that severing only six columns in WTC1 resulted in total collapse?

Taking out six core columns didn't bring down the towers; remember the perimeter columns? Remember the fires? Are you simply pretending to not understand? Taking out some of the perimeter columns and some of the core columns dumped load on neighboring columns, which were then weakened by the fires to perhaps 50% of their original capacity (and that's assuming that they were all in their original configuration, which they weren't if there was significant damage to the floor trusses that helped hold them vertical). Then, sagging floor trusses pulled the perimeter columns in, which meant they couldn't carry ANY load, and the hat trusses dumped that load on the weakened core. No "laws of physics" defied! Is that explanation EXACTLY right? That's impossible to say without having cameras in the building, but it's MORE than plausible enough that we don't need any explosives. And if new information should indicate that's not quite what happened, there's plenty more hypotheses to explore before we go nuts insisting that there must have been explosives. As for the "toppling block," yes, if the columns didn't fail simultaneously, there would be something of a "toppling block" -- which is precisely what happened. Your point? Not enough "toppling" to suit you? Based on what, please?

Is there any known way to bring it down with burning file cabinets and carpets?

Now, that's a genuine straw man, since absolutely nobody that I know of has ever claimed that the fire was the sole cause of the collapse.

Anti CD folks show an amazing lack of resourcefulness. I've seen thermite contained in a flower
pot. I suppose some kind of ceramic trough could have been devised.

I thought the flower pot thing sounded familiar, and on Wikipedia I found: "For up to 100 grams of mixture, two stacked clay flower pots will contain the molten iron slag..." Oh, okay, so the conspirators tore out the walls so they could put giant flower pots around the columns and then filled them with thermite? Gee, I guess Jones' theory isn't so absurd after all. :eyes: Has anyone ever demonstrated this revolutionary demolition method? Sorry, but I ask because I seriously doubt that even that would work. Putting enough thermite in your flower pots to melt through the columns would likely create more than enough heat to crack your pots (no pun intended).

He'd {Marvin Bush} been on the board for ten years. He was part of the story. He was still a major stockholder, right?

Part of whose story? Still a major stockholder? That's a mighty thin straw you're grasping.

I disagree. The only motivations I've seen articulated for islamic terrorists were their wish that
US troops be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia (which wish was granted in 2003) and a wish to
alter US foreign policy with respect to support of Israel. I don't see how these goals are served by
an attack calculated to terrorize the American people and galvanize them into support for a holy
jihad against the Muslim world.

When al Qaeda attacked two US embassies and a US warship, I'm thinking they were trying to pick a fight. Declaring a holy jihad was another subtle clue to most people. But Clinton didn't take the bait, so they escalated. Disagree all you want, but the motivation of terrorists is always to create terror. BushCo took advantage of it because they're rightwing scumbags. What's so fucking mysterious about all this? What you seem to be trying to imply here -- oh, we don't have to worry about terrorists, they aren't even real -- is the main reason this CT bullshit really pisses me off.

If Saudi suicide pilots did in fact fly the planes, attack on the towers may have been a condition
of their participation. Peculiar hostage-like behavior of a number of participants in the events of
9/11 including Osama, Atta, General Ahmad, Shafig bin Laden, and W himself is consistent with
a very complicated deal among a lot of parties.

A "complicated deal" that involved suicide terrorists? Well, I'm thinking those guys in the planes killed themselves in the attack because they really, really hate us. Your speculation about "complicated deals" behind it all is just that -- unsubstantiated speculation -- and has apparently been thrown in just as a backup, just in case it really was Arabs who attacked us, and you still have a compulsive need for a conspiracy theory. Bring forth some actual evidence and I suspect there will be a whole lot of interest.

It {the need for surveillance of fliers} was not evident to the American people, who were the targets of the terrorist attack.

Sez who? And why would they say something so ridiculous? Have there or have there not been numerous plane hijackings over the last few decades? That was lame.

Pilots follow radio beacons all the time.

With what margin of error? Enough to hit the right floor? Call me a skeptic, but if that's your claim, please prove it.

Dr. Romero said a few charges could do it.

Then Romero was wrong. He shouldn't have opened his mouth without knowing anything about the buildings. "The explosives likely would have been put in more than two points in each of the towers." Yup, a LOT more than two points, or a lot more than "a relatively small amount." Can't have it both ways.

Drop ceilings provide a two-foot region of hidden access. Elevator shafts provide easy access.
Using the roofs of the elevator cars as movable staging would make placing charges on columns
on multiple floors easy.

Already covered. If you want to put the explosives anywhere other than directly on the steel, okay, but bring a lot more with you.

That's not true {that they left no evidence to prove otherwise}. That asymmetrical damage and fires yielded a perfectly symmetrical collapse is bizarre. That the tower hit second fell first is bizarre. That the rotating top of WTC2 turned to dust before it could topple off is bizarre. The energetic expulsion of dust with no known mechanism for that expulsion is bizarre. The squibs are bizarre. The dropping of the antenna on WTC1 is bizarre--because even if the core failed, the hat truss should have held the antenna up.

That's amazing. In my original post, I said, "Most of what's presented as 'evidence' by the 'truth movement' -- and I mean something well over 95% -- turns out to be everything from simple 'confirmation bias' up to and including willful ignorance, and then onward into utter bullshit, if you dig into it far enough." And then, in a single paragraph, you illustrate my point perfectly.

"That asymmetrical damage and fires yielded a perfectly symmetrical collapse is bizarre." No, it wasn't "perfectly symmetrical"; the tops of both towers leaned over as they fell -- the south tower more than the north. More to the point I believe you're trying to imply, there's a reason why structural engineers think that Jones and Wood are full of crap when they say the towers should have fallen over like trees: it's utter nonsense. The reason that the collapses were "almost" symmetrical is simply that the structural failures propagated rapidly. A column fails; it's load is dumped somewhere else very rapidly; something else fails very rapidly. And if it all happens very rapidly, then you're bound to get a collapse that's "almost" symmetrical. Why in the hell CTers think that should proceed slowly is beyond me. Apparently, they think a column should be able to withstand any load you put on it for at least a few seconds, and then it gets tired or something. What would it take for the towers to fall over like trees? One thing it would take would be the ability to withstand the lateral forces, in the opposite direction, generated as the falling block tries to rotate around its center of mass. If you or Jones or Wood have some cogent reason for thinking that the tower columns should have been able to do that, then please present them, since none of the people who understand these things can find one. This is just a case of CTers justifying their "theories" with their own ignorance and unrealistic notions about the "laws of physics."

"That the tower hit second fell first is bizarre." WHY is it bizarre? One simple explanation might be that the damaged part was lower, so it was carrying more load. But there's at least one more specific non-obvious explanation: the fireproofing on the steel in WTC1 was 1-1/2" while on WTC2 it was only 3/4" -- less than it should have been, but it's a fact. And anyway, the towers was also hit differently, so there's no reason to expect that the time between the hit and the collapse should be the same in both towers. If you've got some cogent reason for thinking it should have taken longer than the other tower, please state it. Just calling it "bizarre" as if that covered it is simply blowing smoke up peoples asses.

"That the rotating top of WTC2 turned to dust before it could topple off is bizarre." Sorry, I can't explain that one. Fortunately, there's no need to, since it didn't happen. You see the block destroying the tower at about the same rate that the tower is destroying the block -- just as expected -- and then it's all covered in smoke and dust and you can't tell what happened after that. Your description of what happened is just bullshit.

"The energetic expulsion of dust with no known mechanism for that expulsion is bizarre." No known mechanism?! How about the damned building collapsing? Or are you suggesting that the air inside the building should have been destroyed in the impact? Maybe you're referring to the perfectly idiotic "analysis" by Jim Hoffman that the expanding dust cloud could only be explained as the air expanding because of terrific heat? Try this experiment: Put a few handfuls of flour in a milk carton or paper bag and then smash is flat with your fist. Note how large the cloud of dust is, and how fast. Now use Hoffman's technique to calculate how much TNT must have been in that flour to "explain" that "pyroclastic" expansion. Why do you end up with such an idiotic conclusion? Because the expansion of the flour cloud wasn't caused by heat.

"The squibs are bizarre." No, calling puffs of air blowing smoke out vents and broken windows "squibs" is bizarre. Well, of course, you might not think of that explanation if you believe there's "no know mechanism" for blowing smoke and dust out of a collapsing building. CTers claim to be some amazing video analysts, but for some reason they can't see the difference between those puffs and explosives? Hint: calculate -- or even estimate by eye -- the speed of those puffs exiting the building. Now, compare that to the way a smoke cloud from an ACTUAL explosion appears in a video; it's almost at it's full size within a frame or two. Those puffs coming out of the towers "look just like explosives" -- except they don't.

"The dropping of the antenna on WTC1 is bizarre--because even if the core failed, the hat truss should have held the antenna up." Really? Perhaps the NIST report can clear up that misconception for you: "Observations from a single vantage point can be misleading and may result in incorrect interpretation of events. For instance, photographic and videographic records taken from due north of the WTC 1 collapse appeared to indicate that the antenna was sinking into the roof (McAllister 2002). When records from east and west vantage points were viewed, it was apparent that the building section above the impact area tilted to the south as the building collapsed." Don't understand that explanation? Sorry; not my problem.

Got some more? I've wasted a lot of time in the last year digging through a LOT more of this same kind of nonsense and bullshit, so I know there's a lot more where that came from. But just how much of this crap do you expect people to dig through before they start suspecting that it's ALL a bunch of crap? How many times does the exact same crap have to be refuted before CTers get a clue that throwing it up again and again just pisses people off? How can you seriously expect anyone to "reopen the investigation" just to dig though it again?

They left no evidence to prove the official story either. The steel samples they were able to snatch
from a juggernaut recycling operation do not show sufficient heating to weaken the steel.

Really? Sez who? They found evidence of steel that had reached 615^oC, which is high enough for it to lose half it's load-bearing capacity. That's not enough? Why not?

The official investigators were excluded from the site, and had to fight to get access to the blueprints.

And again, not true. According to news reports: "At the beginning of October, the team visited the collapsed and damaged buildings at Ground Zero and over a period of six days collected a significant amount of data on building performance under extreme conditions." And: "Team members toured what was left of the 16-acre World Trade Center Plaza, interviewed officials and eyewitnesses, and examined remnants of fallen structures at the Staten Island landfill and at salvage yards. Steel samples were cut and catalogued for further study, and some were taken back to WPI for analysis." And: "The investigation consisted of visiting Ground Zero, a survey of the WTC site, land-fill and steel recycling centers, review of videotape records, eyewitness accounts, interviews with building design teams, and analysis using computer models". And this is what Robert Shea said about his involvement with the FEMA investigation: "Because of the importance of the rescue effort at the World Trade Center complex, it was clear that information would have to be gathered without interfering with response and rescue activities. Based on this fact, the FEMA-ASCE team first visited the site on October 6, but gathered information from others who had been on-site before this date. This information included plans, photographs, videotapes, eyewitness accounts from rescue workers and reports from the New York City Department of Design and Construction. In addition difficulty in finding material such as steel, the Structural Engineers Association of New York, in support of the City and as a formal member of the BPAT, located and identified specimens of steel for use in future studies. FEMA is coordinating with NIST to make sure that these specimens are properly stored and available for future testing. Also, it is important to note that there are, literally, thousands of plans, specifications and other documents for the World Trade Center. Although it took some weeks to obtain the plans, the owner’s were fully cooperative with our requests."

What's complicated about blowing up a building?

Nothing, which was exactly a point I already brought up. What's complicated is deciding that you need to hijack 4 planes, fly them into the building, then make blowing up the building look exactly like the planes did it. Still waiting for you to explain to me why that makes a lick of sense to you.

The evidence was destroyed. Do innocent people go around destroying evidence that would prove their
innocence?

People who are serious about finding out what really happened to cause the collapse (a group in which I would put hardly any CTers, since they generally seem to have a violent aversion to any facts that don't support their conspiracy presumptions) have made a valid case, I think, that not enough investigation and analysis was done, if the objective was to learn how to make buildings safer. But one thing we can be quite sure of is that NO amount of time spent would satisfy CTers unless they turned up some evidence of a conspiracy. So, CTers use ridiculous hyperbole like "a juggernaut recycling operation" and "the evidence was destroyed" to blatantly misrepresent the fact that a lot of people spent a lot of unhurried time examining the debris. I do believe there's a whole lot of "evidence" in a big pile on Staten Island that was looked at pretty closely, and none of it has been destroyed. Yes, most -- but not all! -- of the steel was eventually recycled, but the idea that it was shipped off to China as fast as possible is bullshit. A lot of volunteer experts were involved in just the FEMA operation, not counting FBI, etc., on the site and at the landfill, and they got to look at the stuff as closely as they wanted to. And, they got to keep as much of it as they wanted to -- not destroyed either. How many of those experts reported ANY evidence of explosives? Zero. So, naturally, we can conclude they must have all been Bush-lovin' murder supporters who were in on the conspiracy, too, right?

Have doubts about anything I've said here? Look it up yourself, somewhere other than the conspiracy huckster sites. Why pretend to be "truth seekers" if you're going to avoid any contrary information like it was anthrax? You've been there, done that, and still prefer CTs for some strange reason? Well, knock yerself out. Just please stop trying to tell me how oh-so overwhelming the evidence is, and inventing stupid and imaginary reasons why everyone else doesn't see it.

Okay, I've wasted a lot of time here answering to your nonsense. If you really want to keep playing, maybe I will or maybe I'll just say, "Fuck it." It isn't really necessary; virtually everything that the "movement" calls "evidence" has already been criticized on the Web, and anyone who WANTS to find it, can. Too bad for your side.

[Nozebro]

112. Respect is a two way street . At least it should be.

"Got some more? I've wasted a lot of time in the last year digging through a LOT more of this same kind of nonsense and bullshit, so I know there's a lot more where that came from. But just how much of this crap do you expect people to dig through before they start suspecting that it's ALL a bunch of crap? How many times does the exact same crap have to be refuted before CTers get a clue that throwing it up again and again just pisses people off? How can you seriously expect anyone to "reopen the investigation" just to dig though it again?"

[William Seger]

114. Respect what?

On this board, there should be respect for the participants, and if I violate that rule, my postings get trashed, too. But there isn't any requirement that I know of to respect bullshit. If that becomes the case, I'll refrain from participating -- definitely on this particular subforum, anyway.

[petgoat]

117. ....

You posted something "silly" and "stupid" and I called you on it by pointing out how ridiculous
the argument would be if carried to its logical conclusion: argumentum ad absurdum.

Your ad absurdem was based on a mischaracterization of what I said; I thus satirized your claim to
have pre-emptively forestalled silly arguments, doing so by making a pre-emptive “stop beating your
wife”claim.


Half an hour... with abrasive wheels, huh. Complete baloney.

Have you ever used one of these 10,000 rpm cutoff wheels?



If Dr. Eagar's zipper theory is correct, how many truss clips do you think would have to be cut?

planes crashed into the buildings and started massive fires.

Do you have evidence for these massive fires? NIST says the jet fuel burned off in ten minutes.
At least half of the fuel was consumed in the fireballs outside the building. Brian Clark walked
down from the 84th floor of WTC2—and he saw only a few flames, no blazing inferno. FDNY
Chief Orio Palmer radioed from 78 and said he had a couple of “isolated” fires that he was
going to “knock down.”

the visual evidence of the perimeter columns being pulled inward.

Did NIST make any effort to ensure that these pictures of distorted columns were not simple
artifacts of refracted light due to heat rising along the side of the building?

Look how the smoke rises like a river alongside. Smokeless hot air would do the same thing.




the failure of enough perimeter connections would put loads on immediately adjacent connections that they simply couldn't handle

NOVA's animation left out the cross trusses designed to resist exactly that.


Whether or not that failure would cause the floor slabs to break free of the core, leaving them to
collapse because of a lack of lateral support

The core columns were extensively cross braced, and the core had its own floors (it was not a
“hollow steel shaft” as the 9/11 Commission claimed.)

Or pull the core columns down

So the perimeter clips are so flimsy they “unzip” despite the cross-trusses, but the
core clips are so strong the floors pull the core down? That's what's absurd about
the Eagar theory. My speculations need no propping.

I was only using as an indication of the amount of energy required.

Not so. You were citing tons of TNT as an issue in your claim that planting explosives
was impractically complex.

don't try to spin a Mission Impossible yarn out of it where they bring down the towers with a few packs of C4.

If Dr. Eagar's theory is correct, and NOBODY EXCEPT TINFOIL-HATTERS CHALLENGED
IT until NIST rejected it,(and now no one will defend it, not even Eagar himself),
a few packs of C-4 could have unzippered the floors and brought the towers down.

I don't understand the need to tear up floors to reach the columns when there's only 5” of
floor obstructing the column and there's 12 feet of unobstructed column between floors.

despite your efforts to imply there wasn't any risk of getting caught, there certainly was

Not really. How often are the elevator shafts inspected? How often are the vacant floors
inspected? Do the gravyard shift guards do anything beyond watch the lobby, watch the TV monitors
and alarms, and try to stay awake?

you still haven't any given me any reason whatsoever why they came up with a plan that required
that much risk, when a simpler plan could have avoided it.

I certainly have. Perhaps the towers had to come down because Muslim suicide pilots would not
participate unless they did. Perhaps they had to come down because only a Hollywood-style horror
show would provide the desired effect of creating the impression of the fragility of civilization and
its inability to defend itself against lunatics armed with boxcutters.


Taking out some of the perimeter columns and some of the core columns dumped load on neighboring
columns, which were then weakened by the fires to perhaps 50% of their original capacity (and that's
assuming that they were all in their original configuration, which they weren't if there was
significant damage to the floor trusses that helped hold them vertical).

NIST has not one piece of core steel showing heating above 250 degrees C. There is no evidence
for this theory except that the buildings collapsed. Other features of the collapse—its symmetry,
its speed, its sudden onset, and its totality can far more plausibly be explained by the use of
explosives than by dissymetrical heating and weakening of the structure.

Sagging floor trusses pulled the perimeter columns in

NIST's floor sag tests failed to show the desired sag, despite a heavy thumb on the scale.

Not enough "toppling" to suit you? Based on what, please?

Based on the law of the conservation of angular momentm, which says that once that top
started topling, it should have kept on toppling in the absence of any forces to straighten
out. It certainly shouldn't have turned to dust in mid-air.

Absolutely nobody that I know of has ever claimed that the fire was the sole cause of the collapse.

Actually, NIST blames damage to the fireproofing and says that with undamaged fireproofing the
buildings would have stood. The point remains: the jet fuel burned off in ten minutes. The fuel
in the building (carpets, desks, file cabinets) could not burn hot enough to weaken the steel, and
there's no evidence that they did.

conspirators tore out the walls so they could put giant flower pots around the columns and then
filled them with thermite?

There's no need to tear out walls—--core columns can be accessed from elevator shafts and utility
rooms. Actually, since the columns were hollow, holes could have been cut in them using torches
and thermite packed into the inside.


When al Qaeda attacked two US embassies and a US warship, I'm thinking they were trying to pick a
fight.

The Cole was attacked less than a month before the election in 2000. Why does Osama work so hard to
help get Bush elected?

Clinton didn't take the bait

He did take the bait. He ordered Osama killed and on 11-7-00 he asked for commando raids
on the al Qaeda camps. Had Gore been president-elect, no doubt Clarke's plan for military
action would have gone forward. Since Bush was president-elect, Clinton's team waited until
January to present Clarke's plan. Bush ignored it.

Disagree all you want, but the motivation of terrorists is always to create terror.

I didn't disagree with that. I disagreed with the proposition that provoking a holy war got Osama
anything he wanted.

What you seem to be trying to imply here -- oh, we don't have to worry about terrorists, they
aren't even real -- is the main reason this CT bullshit really pisses me off.

I'm not implying that we don't need to worry about terrorists. I'm stating that we need to be sure we
know who the terrorists are. And there are many indications that even if 19 young Saudi men were
involved, they were just patsies.

Well, I'm thinking those guys in the planes killed themselves in the attack because they really,
really hate us.

Why then did they do so many things to minimize casualties? Why did Ziad Jarra fly UA93 into a field
instead of flying it into a school? Why did they attack the WTC before 9:00 when, had they simply
waited until the building was full, they might have killed 10,000 instead of 3000? Why did they
take so many risks to fly flight 77 into the unoccupied wing of the Pentagon and kill 100 civilian construction workers (and only 25 military people) when they could have gone in through the roof after the top brass?

Your speculation about "complicated deals" behind it all is just that -- unsubstantiated speculation --

Absolutely. I have not investigated the special immigration status Mohammed Atta seemed to enjoy,
and the immunity from US fingerpointing enjoyed by the Pakistani intelligence agency, or the
special status of the bin Ladens or their longstanding relationship with the Bush family. That's
where the evidence is. The evidence is also in the Secret Service's bizarre move in allowing Bush
to stay in that school room 2-1/4 miles from the Int'l airport when the nation was under attack by
hijacked airplanes.

Pilots follow radio beacons all the time. With what margin of error? Enough to hit the right floor?

I don't know. Instrument Landing Systems (ILS) commonly supply a glide slope beam and allow you to
approach the runway to an altitude of 200 feet. Given the great cost of a miscalculation, one
supposes this distance is many times the error range of the equipment.



Romero was wrong.

Then why didn't he say so, and why does no expert say so? The only ones who comment are the idiots
who say that since Dr. Romero changed his mind about the impossibility of fire causing the collapse
that therefore everything he said is inadmissible.

{re: Drop ceilings:} If you want to put the explosives anywhere other than directly on the
steel, okay, but bring a lot more with you.

Umm, the columns go through the drop ceilings.

it wasn't "perfectly symmetrical"; the tops of both towers leaned over as they fell -- the south
tower more than the north.

It's perfectly symmetrical because it fell straight down. Your conflation of rapidity of collapse
with symmetry makes no sense. A car wreck is fast, but if you hit a pole on the left side, the damage
is on the left side. The whole car doesn't accordion symmetrically.


What would it take for the towers to fall over like trees?

It would take asymmetrical damage at the base of the towers. Why do you ask?

the damaged part {of WTC2} was lower, so it was carrying more load.

It was correspondingly more robustly built. Don't forget the safety factor of five.

If you've got some cogent reason for thinking {WTC2} should have taken longer
than the other tower, please state it. Just calling it "bizarre" as if that covered it is
simply blowing smoke up peoples asses.

It shouldn't have fallen at all. Obviously most of the fuel burned up in the fireball
outside, the fuselage of the plane missed the core entirely and flew out the other
side of the building, so damage to the core was minimal. Testimony of Brian Clark
and Chief Orio Palmer indicates that the fires were not bad.


"The energetic expulsion of dust with no known mechanism for that expulsion is bizarre." No known
mechanism?! How about the damned building collapsing?

The expulsion of air and the expulsion of dust are two different things. The pump that expels
the air is an upper floor falling on the lower. The air expelled by that contains paper. Only when
the upper floor contacts the lower floor is dust created, and then the pump on that floor is no more.

Put a few handfuls of flour in a milk carton or paper bag and then smash is flat with your fist.

That's an illegitimate experiment because it injects pre-mixed dust into the pump. Try this
experiment: put a soda cracker in your hand, then clap your hands together. Where's the dust?
Between your hands. It doesn't make mushroom clouds all over the room.

calculate -- or even estimate by eye -- the speed of those puffs exiting the building. Now,
compare that to the way a smoke cloud from an ACTUAL explosion appears in a video; it's almost at it's
full size within a frame or two.

The squibs in the videos are from explosions in the core. Thus comparing them with videos of
explosions taking place where we can see them is illegitimate.

Perhaps the NIST report can clear up {the antenna drop} misconception for you....Don't understand
that explanation?

I understand it just fine. It doesn't work because if the north view was a picture of the builting
tilting, we would have seen the top of the building move away from us. We don't see it move.
Therefore the antenna drop is real and NIST's explanation is their usual hooey.

How many times does the exact same crap have to be refuted before CTers get a clue

Once. Try refuting it. Better yet, get someone who has the guts to show up and debate the Scholars
or Jim Hoffman.

How can you seriously expect anyone to "reopen the investigation" just to dig though it again?

Many questions remain unanswered, among them the cause of collapse of WTC7.

They found evidence of steel that had reached 615oC

It wasn't core steel.

Re: lack of site access.

The upshot of your misleading quotes is that the investigators got one guided tour of Ground Zero,
apparently on October 6. That's what I said: they were excluded from the site. They should have
been there examining, cataloguing, and photographing every piece of steel as it came off the
pile. The steel was marked with stamped ID numbers, which should have made it easy to
identify the pieces of interest.

What's complicated is deciding that you need to hijack 4 planes, fly them into the building, then
make blowing up the building look exactly like the planes did it.

It doesn't look exactly like the planes did it. The fires were small. In WTC2 they were going out.
The cauliflower top does not look like a collapse from fire. It looks like an explosion.


NO amount of time spent would satisfy CTers unless they turned up some evidence of a conspiracy.

That's another canned argument as stale as the “Conspiracy of thousands, too complicated” one.

I do believe there's a whole lot of "evidence" in a big pile on Staten Island that was looked at
pretty closely, and none of it has been destroyed.

Then why doesn't NIST have any core steel showing heating above 250 degrees C? And why
can't they tell us why WTC7 fell down?

How many of those experts reported ANY evidence of explosives? Zero.

They didn't test for explosives. But when Dr. Jones tested the steel for thermate, he found it.
FDNY personnel reported explosions. If that's not evidence of explosives, what is?

The claims of the recycling juggernaut and the destruction of evidence are not hyperbole.
The steel was removed over the protest of Fire Engineering Magazine, and over the protests
of family members and FDNY personnel who rioted at Ground Zero.

I've wasted a lot of time here.

You certainly have. You've put quite some time into assembling data, but it only shows
that you don't know what you're talking about.

[AZCat]

119. Anyone who knows anything about fluid mechanics...

will laugh their ass off at your continued flogging of the "column distortions due to refracted light" argument.

I don't know if you were aware of this, but a crap argument continues to be crap no matter how many times you recycle it.

[Nozebro]

121. Aren't personal insults against the rules here, no matter who is doing the insulting?

It's very discouraging that some people are here as partisans, not objective seekers of the truth, but it's even worse than discouraging that they don't feel any compunction about resorting to insult whenever they're interacting with a non-partisan. There are very few, if any, people that post here who are even close to knowing as much about 9/11 as "petgoat", and to see someone show such a lack of respect, topped by personally insulting an always respectful "petgoat" is hard to understand.

Why do you (and some others) do that? Aren't you concerned about having your posts deletd?

[mirandapriestly]

124. The Bush defenders seem to think that if they preface a personal

attack with "your post is..." they can insult, humiliate, and ridicule at will because of a comment in the "rules" section. Most of their remarks are far worse than anything those of us who question the government's role in 9-11 say to them, but for some reason our posts are disproportionately deleted.

[Nozebro]

125. Ohhhhhh. So, THAT'S the secret code. Thanks.

TEFLON. BETTER than a bag of chips.

[William Seger]

127. NAH!

It's all just part of the conspiracy. Why would "they" delete OUR posts when "they" are paying us to post here? And see, I can say that freely because it sounds just too crazy to be true. MWAHAHA :evilgrin:

[AZCat]

138. The irony of this post...

is that it illustrates exactly what you don't understand about the rules here (and about common decency in general). If you find this confusing, perhaps it would be helpful to look at your subject line and contemplate the phrase "Bush defenders" in light of what has been explained to you more times than I care to count.

Otherwise - if you have problems with the way the forum is run, bring it up with the mods or admin - they're the only ones who have the power to change things. Perhaps you'd like all posts that you don't agree with to be deleted instantaneously? Would that make it all better?

[AZCat]

137. If you think my post violates the rules..

feel free to alert on it. Meanwhile, please explain to me how pointing out someone's continued posting of incorrect information (even in the face of evidence to the contrary) is insulting. Are we so worried about "respect" that we are not going to call B.S. when we see it?

[Nozebro]

143. Thanks, but I don't need your permission. It is kinda curious that only certain people

here ever say things like "feel free to alert on it". I've never seen anyone that doesn't believe in the boosh 9/11 fairy tale say something like that; only people that support the Official 9/11 storyline.

[AZCat]

145. I wasn't giving permission.

Is there any point to your rant, or are you just randomly slinging mud?

[Nozebro]

148. "mud slinging"? We'll get to your speical interest a little bit later on.

As I said, I don't need your permission to point out how disrespectful you've been to one of DUers smartest, most knowledgeable and reasonable poster. Whether or not a moderator agrees that your disrespect breaks the rules doesn't change my opinion that you have and that you really do owe "petgoat" an apology. Fortunately, "petgoat" obviously doesn't let "mud slinging" deter him/her, and for that we should all be greatful.

[AZCat]

150. If you think petgoat is one of DU's...

smartest, most knowledgeable and reasonable posters, then I disagree. Again, you haven't pointed out what in the world was so disrespectful, unless it was to challenge the crappy arguments put forth.

Whether or not petgoat lets mudslinging deter him/her I cannot tell, but it is clear that petgoat doesn't let a little thing like physics get in the way of a good "fact" so I wouldn't be surprised if mud had as little effect.

[Nozebro]

151. I don't just THINK that, it's a fact. His facts, evidence, research, and reasoning

all result in posts that are never refuted. Argued against, of course. There are people here who oppose the conclusions p.g. and others long ago came to, so they give it their best shot ... usually in the form of extended arguments, full of sound and fury, but in the end, they just can't kill the beast.

[AZCat]

152. That's funny.

Perhaps you'd like to try explaining why petgoat's theory on refraction (regarding the apparent column buckling of the towers) is valid?

Oh wait - you can't. It's a crap theory, based on a poor understanding of the physics involved. I'd post an "extended argument" explaining why, but it's clear that it would fall on deaf ears.

[Nozebro]

155. Thanks. It also has the advantage of being true. You like Jazz?

Just wondering.

[AZCat]

157. Care to explain why?

And don't worry about using complex concepts - I'm a big boy.

I don't see at all what jazz (or "Jazz") has anything to do with the discussion. Are you attempting to change the topic so you don't have to explain why you think petgoat's theory is true?

[Nozebro]

158. Sounded like Jazz to me, so I was just wondering. (not straight ahead jazz, mind you)...

but nonetheless. I don't see at all what your claims about being a "big boy" have to do with my question about Jazz, but I'll think about that, because it's an interesting comment. Thanks, "big boy".

[AZCat]

159. And I'm still waiting for that explanation... n/t

[Nozebro]

162. Jazz/jazz/"jazz" doesn't need any explanation. It's different, but not THAT different.

nt

[Make7]

165. Americus / BuddyYoung / Uppanotch / Nitty-Gritty / Artdyst

"It's different, but not THAT different."

- Make7

[AZCat]

169. And again with the misdirect, you avoid giving me an explanation.

I'm beginning to think you might not have one.

[petgoat]

173. So NIST didn't need to deal with the refraction hypothesis?

Because they checked with AZCat, and he assured them he could provide a
mathematical proof that refraction was not reasonable based on his knowledge
of fluid mechanics? And thus NIST needn't prove it, and you needn't prove it,
but need only wave a non-existent Fat Book in support of your argument?

I'm not saying I know. I say, let NIST build a model of the towers, let them
set in it heat generators powerful enough to create the heat they need to bring
the towers down, let's exhaust this heat out the broken windows, and let's check
and see if there is no measurable refraction.

[William Seger]

122. ????

Have you ever used one of these 10,000 rpm cutoff wheels? If Dr. Eagar's zipper theory is correct, how many truss clips do you think would have to be cut?

Hey, great question, pg. Um... oh, 'bout a half-hour's worth? :eyes: Actually, I'd have to guess that either a) your guy is going to have about zero clips cut after a half-hour, just trying to get at one with that thing to cut all the way through it, or b) if he did get through it, you'd need another guy to cut the next one, because that guy would be dead when the joist fell on him. How many guys did you send? And, jog my memory here, what was the purpose of this stupid exercise?

Do you have evidence for these massive fires?

Huh? Ah! I get it; it's an opportunity to practice our CT Critical Thinking Skills^tm. The massive amounts of smoke don't prove there were massive fires. The massive amounts of smoke could be coming from a massive smoke generator -- probably in WTC7, even, and the smoke was piped over to the towers and pumped up the freight elevator shafts -- or maybe it was just a small mini-nuke-powered smoke generator, or it was just a smoke hologram (um, and the projector was in WTC7), or it was all smoke from the Death Star Beam Weapon, so there didn't need to be any fires, or.... hmmm, I'm stuck. Maybe Wood and Reynolds can help me think of some more explanations that are more probable than massive fires. And, I dunno, there might be SOME other evidence besides the smoke (say, people jumping out of the building), but since we're in CT Critical Thinking Skills^tm mode, I suppose we can ignore that.

NIST says the jet fuel burned off in ten minutes.

Leaving nothing else to burn?

At least half of the fuel was consumed in the fireballs outside the building.

That's interesting; and how much HEAT energy was in the 4000 or 5000 gallons of fuel that burned INSIDE each building? And you're real sure, now, that we don't have to worry about anything else burning?

Brian Clark walked down from the 84th floor of WTC2—and he saw only a few flames, no blazing inferno.

Really? Did he open the door on each floor, or did he stay pretty much in the stairwell? I wonder why so few people thought to stroll down.

FDNY Chief Orio Palmer radioed from 78 and said he had a couple of “isolated” fires that he was
going to “knock down.”

OK! Now we've got a point where you and NIST agree -- not much fire on floor 78. Of course, that was a floor or two below where the main fire was, but who's counting. (Are we still in CT Critical Thinking Skills^tm mode?)

Did NIST make any effort to ensure that these pictures of distorted columns were not simple
artifacts of refracted light due to heat rising along the side of the building?

Gosh, I would hope so. What do you see in this video?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5405555553528290546

Tell ya what, PG, since we both agree that I'm wasting time talking to you, and at least one of us agrees that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm gonna just say "fuck it" after all.

[Nozebro]

123. Well, I declare. Praise Jeebus. Better late than never.

"Tell ya what, PG, since we both agree that I'm wasting time talking to you, and at least one of us agrees that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm gonna just say "fuck it" after all."

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

[William Seger]

126. Don't celebrate yet

You're next on my list. I'm pretty sure I can talk you out of believing all this silly CT stuff.:evilgrin:

[Nozebro]

128. 9/11 was a False Flag operation, not a CT. The CT you must be referring

to is the one where a very sick man with a pair of bad oil filters has to have them flushed just literally hours before his fellow conspirators put down their coke spoons and suited uP for their flight to Jesus. Sorry, Charlie. Not buying it.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

[William Seger]

130. Thanks, I'll try to remember...

... to pull a leg off the turkey in your honor.

[Nozebro]

131. Be a good Promise Keeper now. You're already giving signs of backsliding.

Don't let the door...

[petgoat]

153. The massive amounts of smoke don't prove there were massive fires.

Well we finally agree on something.

One burning tire can make massive amounts of smoke, as can smoldering carpets.

People jumping out of buildings is not evidence of massive fires. It's evidence
of toxic smoke from smoldering rugs making life very uncomfortable for them.

I wonder why so few people thought to stroll down.

Probably they were afraid of the dark, afraid of the smoke, and afraid of getting
their clothes dirty.

What do you see in this video?

I see what might be bent perimeter columns and might be heat-refracted light. Wouldn't
it have been nice if somebody had thought to preserve some of those bent perimeter
columns? Why do you think they shipped them all to China for recycling?

I'm gonna just say "fuck it" after all.

That's what you 911myths groupies always do, because your facile arguments don't
stand up to scrutiny.

[William Seger]

160. Still wanna play, huh

Okay, if you don't want to take the opportunity to bow out gracefully, then fuck it again, let's play.

The massive amounts of smoke don't prove there were massive fires.

Read the NIST report. It was written by people who know what they're talking about, not by people who prefer to imagine that it was just a bunch of "smoldering carpets" if that's what it takes to support their other imaginary suppositions. Bottom line: your personal definition of "massive" is not the least bit relevant; there was enough fire to weaken the structure. You disagree? Prove it with an analysis from someone equally qualified, not from some self-appointed CT "expert."

People jumping out of buildings is not evidence of massive fires. It's evidence
of toxic smoke from smoldering rugs making life very uncomfortable for them.

That's almost too absurd to respond to, but it's your game rules. Think what it would take to get you to jump out that window. Me, I don't think "very uncomfortable" would do it. I wouldn't know whether or not that smoke was toxic until I was dead, I wouldn't know whether or not I was just about to get rescued, but I think I'd have a really good hunch what happens if I jump.

I see what might be bent perimeter columns and might be heat-refracted light.

Thank you; you have demonstrated total incompetence in "analyzing" even a very clear, very close up video. Let me see if I can deprogram you and get you to go back and take another look: The whole row of columns clearly buckles inward almost simultaneously. (I love that comment that's there now about "suck bombs.") This was one of the primary videos that NIST used to decide that collapsing floors pulled the perimeter columns in, and you'd have to be either blind, too-far-gone delusional, or too unwilling to admit you were simply wrong not to see it. Which are you?

That's what you 911myths groupies always do, because your facile arguments don't
stand up to scrutiny.

I suppose I could make a snide remark about people who apparently don't give a shit about the quality of their arguments, they just keep piling on those long and boring point-by-points with whatever pops into their heads (e.g. your "people jumping" crap above), until the other side gets tired of the game, and then the "master debater" declares victory as if other people can't reach their own conclusions which arguments weren't withstanding scrutiny... In fact, I guess I just did make such a comment... But anyway, that thread did leave a lot of "facile arguments" unscrutinized; you're just confused about whose they were.

So the perimeter clips are so flimsy they “unzip” despite the cross-trusses, but the
core clips are so strong the floors pull the core down? That's what's absurd about
the Eagar theory. My speculations need no propping.

If you claim on the basis of your own experise that the "zipper theory" (even in the form that you misrepresent it) is "absurd," please show me your calculations for the relative strength of the connections on each end, and the force required to pull the core columns in. (I notice you still want to talk about what happened to the core columns, after I already called your attention to the fact that it was irrelevant to the theory of the floors pancaking. But what the heck; it all counts toward the total number of words in your reply, huh, and Nozebro probably won't notice anyway. Hey, this is fun!) Calculations are the one and only way anyone could determine what to expect for those connections, but you declare it "absurd" based on... what? It just seems absurd to you? Could your mistaken belief that the core columns were relevant have had any influence? If the "zipper theory" was so obviously absurd, how come people who, unlike you, actually know what they're talking about didn't notice that absurdity right away? An impressive example of how CTers go about "analyzing" things after claiming how they're all about "truth seeking"... (And again, trying to make up with quantity what you apparently can't achieve with quality, you want to continue a totally irrelevant tangent -- which already included your "silly" and "stupid" insistence that we discuss cutting joists with a grinding wheel :eyes: -- when the zipper theory is no longer relevant since we now have a better idea what happened. Did you go back to look at that video yet?)

You were citing tons of TNT as an issue in your claim that planting explosives
was impractically complex.

That's right; after reading several analyses (and again, by people who know what they're talking about) I'm claiming tons of whatever explosive you want to use. If you want to quote another number -- and give me a reason for thinking it's more accurate -- go ahead.

If Dr. Eagar's theory is correct, and NOBODY EXCEPT TINFOIL-HATTERS CHALLENGED
IT until NIST rejected it,(and now no one will defend it, not even Eagar himself),
a few packs of C-4 could have unzippered the floors and brought the towers down.

Well, unlike the tinfoil-hatters, NIST rejected it after actually studying it, and no one defends it now because we know from that study that it didn't happen. Funny how you can't draw any conclusions from that! All you can do is imply that the tinfoil-hatter shoot-from-the-hip we-don't-need-no-science approach somehow got the right answer, so that must be a superior method for "analyzing" things. No surprises there. Even so, your assertion that a few packs of C4 would have done the same thing is totally unfounded, since the zipper theory presumed that all the floor joists were hot enough to be sagging, and that assumption appears to have been correct.

Not really {any risk planting explosives all over even one floor}. How often are the elevator shafts inspected? How often are the vacant floors inspected? Do the gravyard shift guards do anything beyond watch the lobby, watch the TV monitors and alarms, and try to stay awake?

Sorry, but I don't see anything there but a bunch of unsupported assumptions about how lax the security was. The question was, why implement a plan that required that much risk -- recognizing the consequences of getting caught! -- instead of coming up with a plan that didn't require it. And your only answer is, there wasn't any risk? Okay, then I consider the question unanwered, so I still consider the demolition theory implausible. Yes, I understand that CTers don't seem to consider plausibility as an issue in their suppositions, but I certainly do, so I guess we're at a standstill on that.

I certainly have {given you a reason why they came up with a plan that required
that much risk}. Perhaps the towers had to come down because Muslim suicide pilots would not
participate unless they did. Perhaps they had to come down because only a Hollywood-style horror
show would provide the desired effect of creating the impression of the fragility of civilization and
its inability to defend itself against lunatics armed with boxcutters.

Okay, sorry, I misspoke when I said you hadn't given me "any reason whatsoever." I should have said "any reason that makes any sense."

NIST has not one piece of core steel showing heating above 250 degrees C. There is no evidence
for this theory except that the buildings collapsed.

What do you mean by "this theory"? NIST doesn't claim that it was weakening of the core columns that initiated the collapse. You'll have read the NIST report if you want to argue against the NIST theory. (I'm assuming you haven't read it, since I'm sure you wouldn't throw up a straw man argument, would you?)

Other features of the collapse—its symmetry, its speed, its sudden onset, and its totality can far more plausibly be explained by the use of explosives than by dissymetrical heating and weakening of the structure.

Really? Around the world, there are probably hundreds of thousands of people who actually have the knowledge and training that it would take to credibly make that assertion. (ASCE alone has about 130,000 members.) How many of them agree with you? It may not quite be zero, but it doesn't miss by much -- 0.0001% would probably be an over-estimate. Why is that? I'd suggest you consider the remote possibility that there are a LOT of people who understand the collapses better than you. And, just like the fire issue, I'm not claiming to be one of those experts. To get back to the original topic that started that thread -- why I don't believe the CTers -- can you give me one good reason why I should accept your assertions here -- unsubstantiated by anything except your own notion of how a collapse "ought" to look -- instead of people who actually know what they're talking about? But it isn't even just the virtually unanimous consensus of the experts: When I look at those collapses, I honestly don't see even the slightest thing implausible about them -- not that they got started, not that they were unstoppable after they got started, and not the "symmetry" -- not the first time I saw them, and not now after watching them many, many times and after reading assertions similar to yours about what they "ought" to look like. When I watched most of it live on TV, I was glad to see that they didn't collapse right away, but I suspected that they would pretty soon. So my own common sense seems to be more in line with what the experts think than with what you think, thank you very much.

NIST's floor sag tests failed to show the desired sag, despite a heavy thumb on the scale.

I'll take a wild guess: you're getting that from Kevin Ryan? WHAT "desired" sag? And I don't know what "heavy thumb" you're referring to -- sounds like typical CTer hyperbole -- but the tests were standard ASTM E 19. And, NIST didn't test 60-foot-long joists like the ones in WTC; they only tested 35-foot and 17-foot joists, so the amount of sag would of course be less than at WTC, which was not the intent of the tests, anyway. From the NIST report: "These tests alone cannot be used to determine the actual performance of the floor systems in the collapse of the WTC towers. However, they are already providing valuable insight into the role that the floors may have played in causing the inward bowing of the perimeter columns minutes before both buildings collapsed... The fire conditions in the towers on 9-11 were far more extreme than those to which floor systems in standard U.S. fire rating tests are subjected." In other words, the weren't trying to justify the floor collapse theory -- that theory is justified by watching the columns being pulled in (did you go back to watch that yet?) -- they were simply performing standard fire tests, so there was no "desired" sag; the tests can't be used to accurately model what happened in in WTC for several reasons; and the fires in WTC were more severe than the test. The blatant way that CTers misrepresent both the purpose and the conclusions from the floor tests tells me a lot about what kind of "truth seekers" they are, if you'll recall the original topic of this thread!

Based on the law of the conservation of angular momentm, which says that once that top
started topling, it should have kept on toppling in the absence of any forces to straighten
out. It certainly shouldn't have turned to dust in mid-air.

More of that keen video analysis, huh? Sorry, but one thing you still seem to be missing about the angular momentum in that top block is that it's actually trying to rotate about its center of mass; it's going to "topple" only to the degree that the bottom is constrained from moving the other way. I already attempted to explain that to you (apparently unsuccessfully) in regards to expecting the tower to fall over like a tree. Again, how many experts agree that your expectations make sense? And once again, when I look at that video, I see the block being destroyed from the bottom up, just as expected when its smashing against the tower, until you can no longer see what's happening. It DOESN'T just "turn to dust in mid-air," yet you've claimed it twice now.

Okay, it's getting late, so I'm going to say "fuck it" again and go to bed. There's a lot more crap to dig through, and maybe I will and maybe I won't, but I will say this: You claim that my "facile arguments don't stand up to scrutiny." I claim that all you have done here is demonstrate -- to excess, in fact -- the comment from my first post in this thread, which triggered all this "scrutiny" from you: "Most of what's presented as 'evidence' by the "truth movement" -- and I mean something well over 95% -- turns out to be everything from simple "confirmation bias" up to and including willful ignorance, and then onward into utter bullshit, if you dig into it far enough." You apparently are of the opinion that you can win any debate as long as you never concede, the quality of both your evidence and your reasoning be damned, just keep dumping it longer than the other guy then declare victory. But in this particular case you seem to have lost the plot; you seem to be oblivious to how convincingly you are proving my original point for me. It's ironic and pathetic at the same time.

[Nozebro]

161. What a long strange load of CT BS. Better luck in the future.

nt

[William Seger]

164. Yes it was, wasn't it

...but I thought you were a petgoat fan? Wow, I didn't expect to talk you out of believing the silly CT BS that fast!

Hey! Wait a minute! You invent your own language, so you were actually trying to insult me, weren't you? Grrr... When people come to visit you in Nozebroland (or is it Planet Nozebro?), I suppose you can make up your own rules, but when you visit our lands, you should honor our traditions and customs. Oh, and while you're here, if you ask someone "Where's the ladies room?" and they direct you to a door with a sign that shows a stick figure in a skirt, you're probably not where you wanted to be.

[petgoat]

166. play

there was enough fire to weaken the structure.

No one has proven that. You believe it because you apply a post hoc ergo propter
hoc analysis: There were fires, the building fell, therefore the fires caused the
collapse. The steel that would have showed what happened was destroyed. Doesn't
that strike you as strange? If the nursing home told you Grandma had died of natural
causes, and they cremated the body before you got there wouldn't you be a bit upset?

You never provided any pictures of those massive fires. I'll suppose you have none.

Prove it with an analysis from someone equally qualified

It can't be proven because the evidence was hastily destroyed.

re: bent perimeter columns or heat-refracted light.---Thank you; you have
demonstrated total incompetence

Ah, and where did you achieve your expertise in heat-refracted light? Mine is simply
a matter of practical observations on asphalt roads in the deep south and the western
desert. You never answered the question: How did NIST exclude the possibility that
the observations of bending were an illusion?

please show me your calculations for the relative strength of the connections on each end

I don't need to calculate. The comparison is made in the requirements of the Eagar
theory—which are that the perimeter clips be very weak, and that the core clips be
exceedingly strong.

the core columns... {were} irrelevant to the theory of the floors pancaking.

They're essential, because pancake theory doesn't explain what took the core down.

If the "zipper theory" was so obviously absurd, how come people who, unlike you, actually
know what they're talking about didn't notice that absurdity right away?

That's a very good question. How come there was NO controversy whatsoever about such a
patently absurd theory except from tinfoil hatters? And when the theory was rejected by
NIST, how come NOT ONE person would defend it? What is responsible for this great silence?
“Oh Great Gods of Structural Engineering, MIT, Tell Us What to Believe. Oh Great Gods of
Structural Engineering, NIST, Tell Us What to Believe.” Is this science? Is this America?

Your "silly" and "stupid" insistence that we discuss cutting joists with a grinding wheel

I wasn't talking about a grinding wheel. I was talking about an abrasive cut-off disk. If
you had ever used one you would not call it a grinding wheel. When you said you could not cut
one clip in half an hour, I didn't challenge you because I thought you were lying. Now I see
you just didn't know what you were talking about. Abrasive disks cut steel with amazing rapidity.

the tinfoil-hatter shoot-from-the-hip we-don't-need-no-science approach somehow got the right answer

Nobody is saying we don't need no science. We are calling for a new investigation using science.
We are lamenting the destruction of evidence and the Bush Science that makes the NIST report
shameful. The Eagar theory was, as I pointed out, absurd on its face.

the zipper theory presumed that all the floor joists were hot enough to be sagging

The zipper presumed that the clips were weak. There was no suggestion of bowed perimeter
columns. In fact, the zipper theory supposed that the perimeter columns buckled outward because
they were unsupported by the floors. The NIST theory has the columns buckling inward because
they are pulled in by shrinking cooling sagging trusses (so now the “weak truss clips” are
unbelievably strong!

.
why implement a plan that required that much risk -- recognizing the consequences of getting caught!

What risk? I suppose your idea is that if they were going to blow up the building, they could
have just blown up the building. Well, maybe that was the fail-safe, Monitor the security radios
and then if by chance something was discovered, they'd just blow up the buildings prematurely.
Or... maybe the WTC security team was blackmailable.

Okay, sorry, I misspoke when I said you hadn't given me "any reason whatsoever." I should have said "any reason that makes any sense."

If the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize in order to stimulate certain reactions, the supposition
that complex and risky events were stage-managed very carefully to achieve the effects they did is
a perfectly reasonable one.

(ASCE alone has about 130,000 members.) How many of them agree with you?

It appears that 130,000 ASCE members agreed with the absurd Eagar theory, so the
judgement of the “great silent majority” is suspect. Most engineers very wisely refrain from
commenting on things outside their area of expertise, and without access to the data. Few
have the expertise, and nobody has the data.

When I look at those collapses, I honestly don't see even the slightest thing implausible
about them

The engineer Skilling said the building was designed to take a hit from a 707 and could withstand
the fires. He's the expert. In an open society, where engineers were free to examine the secret blueprints that Ahmed Refai dug out of the trash just a few years before, and where debate about
the collapses could take place freely in the mainstream media, and where the investigations were
thorough and scientific and honest, and where the evidence had not been destroyed, I would
probably find the official explanation of the collapses plausible. I accepted the zipper theory
myself for three years, because I never gave enough thought to it to realize its essential absurdity.

my own common sense seems to be more in line with what the experts think

You don't know what the experts think. You know what the political hacks who controlled the
NIST investigation think. You see a report and imagine that its thousand authors and the silence
of a couple hundred thousand engineers whose silence constitute endorsement. Baloney. The NIST
report was completely compartmentalized, and the number of people permitted to comment on
the central findings is very few.

WHAT "desired" sag?

Ummm, the sag that would have buckled the perimeter columns in accordance with NIST's theories.
Which has nothing to do with the “floor collapse theory” you cite for no apparent reason except to
confuse the issue. The weasel language you cite about the purposes of the tests in effect say:
“Okay, the tests didn't show what we thought they would show, but that's okay—we weren't trying to
show what happened, we just wanted some insight into what might have happened.” The floor sag tests
caused only a few inches of sag in a 35-foot truss in a high-heat furnace after TWO HOURS!

that top block is... trying to rotate about its center of mass; it's going to "topple" only to the degree that the bottom is constrained from moving the other way.

The bottom is constrained, obviously, by the 47 14” X 36” core columns and by the perimeter
columns at the side that remain intact. The tower falling like a tree is a straw man issue unless
someone is postulating massive asymmetrical damage at the base of the tower. How you can distinguish “the block being destroyed from the bottom up” from “turning to dust in mid air” when there's too much
dust to see what's going on, I don't know.

you seem to be oblivious to how convincingly you are proving my original point for me.

Your ignorance of the extent of the actions taken to cover up the facts, the dishonesty of the
science, and the inadequacy of the official explanations shows that your knowledge of the issues
rests not on considering the evidence but on simply absorbing a set of talking points.

Under the circumstances, your repeated invocation of imaginary armies of hundreds of thousands of
qualified engineers who agree with the official story, your repeated appeal to your own
undemonstrated authority about the supposed plausibility of the official accounts, and your apparent
inability to recognize that the lack of proof of the official account is itself a smoking gun when
that proof has been destroyed by the officials in charge of the investigations all work to render your
posts a waste of time.

[John Q. Citizen]

109. Thanks for your reply to my question. However, it appears that you

answered a different question than the one I asked.

You answered the question, "What is it about various unspecified alternative theories do I find implausible?"

And it would appear from your response that the #1 reason (the reason most cited in your response)that you find various unspecified alternative theories implausible is that you assume it would require that too many people would be involved who would have both wide and deep knowledge of any of the unspecified alternative theories to make them practical to keep quite.

Another reason cited in your response that you find various unspecified alternative theories implausible is that:

"1. Even if we assume that "they" wanted to do something for any and all the reasons that CTers imagine, it's absurd to think that any sane person would have concocted such a ridiculously elaborate and risky plan, when it shouldn't take 5 minutes to come up with something that would accomplish the same presumed objective but would have been far, far easier to pull off, and incredibly safer to pull off without getting caught. And even if we assume that BushCo has at least a few people who really are that insane, why wouldn't at least one of the many, many people who would have had to been involved in just the planning stop and say, "Hey, guys, this plan is fuckin' nuts. Why don't we just do this instead..."

To that I say, look at Iraq, the cooking of intelligence, the outrageous lies about WMD's the outrageous lies about a Saddam connection to 9/11. Look at Operation Northwoods, which was signed off on by the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, look at Iran/Contra. Look at the Gulf of Tonkin deception. All these schemes weren't any less insane, and all these schemes didn't apparently place a premium on ease of execution. "...why wouldn't at least one of the many, many people who would have had to been involved in just the planning stop and say, "Hey, guys, this plan is fuckin' nuts. Why don't we just do this instead..." Well, perhaps you can answer that for me. Thanks. It should also be noted that the penalties for people involved with these schemes was almost nothing. A few people lost their jobs maybe. The rest essentially walked.

Let me ask you my original question from a different angle, in hopes of getting my question answered.

What is your #1 reason to believe in the completeness and veracity of the 9/11 official report? In other words, why do you believe the 9/11 commission report should be accepted by the American people as the truth about 9/11?

[William Seger]

113. I quoted the question I was answering

"Why won't the people who believe 9/11 wasn't an inside job state their #1 reason that they believe it wasn't?"

I first explained why such CTs seemed implausible, but then said that they were inplausible enough that they would require something resembling solid evidence before they would become, in my mind, the most probable explanations. And I simply don't see it.

"To that I say, look at Iraq, the cooking of intelligence, the outrageous lies about WMD's the outrageous lies about a Saddam connection to 9/11. Look at Operation Northwoods, which was signed off on by the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, look at Iran/Contra. Look at the Gulf of Tonkin deception. All these schemes weren't any less insane, and all these schemes didn't apparently place a premium on ease of execution."

And how do we know about those things now? My reason #2 was how hard it is to keep secrets. And you blew right past my reason #1 -- that the 9/11 CTs seem to be way more complicated than necessary -- by simply claiming that "All these schemes weren't any less insane, and all these schemes didn't apparently place a premium on ease of execution." That's just simple contradiction, not an argument. (Queue Monty Python skit.)

"What is your #1 reason to believe in the completeness and veracity of the 9/11 official report?"

Where do you see me saying anything that ridiculous? It's a false dichotomy.

"In other words, why do you believe the 9/11 commission report should be accepted by the American people as the truth about 9/11?"

I'm absolutely 100% sure that the 9/11 commission report did not dig into a whole lot of negligence and incompetence, and ultimately it never held anyone seriously responsible for it, much less accountable. I'm 100% sure because that's a simple conclusion based just on the public record that we have outside the report.

But to get at what I think is the underlying issue: How does anyone know "the truth" about anything? Religious zealots seem to be so frustrated with the unavoidable fact that we can't know "the truth" about a lot of things, so they releave their frustration by just making stuff up and calling it "the truth." CTers seem to have the same mindset -- minus the diety, of course, but they always have a devil. Unfortunately, I don't have any independent way of knowing "the truth" about 9/11; all I can do is to evaluate the contending possible explanations, weighing the evidence in terms of amount, credibility and unambiguity, and arriving at what seems to be the most probable explanation. Juries are called on to do exactly that, with no expectation that their decisions are "the truth," because if that was a requirement, our legal system couldn't function. But it beats the hell out of whatever method is in second place. A logical conclusion is not at all the same thing as "the truth," and I don't parade that judgement call around as "the truth."

[petgoat]

115. ....

CTs seemed implausible

You made them seem implausible by supposing that they required casts
of hundreds if not thousands, and were extremely complex, neither
of which was true.

{i] how do we know about {Tonkin Gulf and Operation Northwoods} now?

We know because forty years after the fact the documents were declassified
and people talked--but for forty years we didn't know about them, so
they prove the point that evil conspiracies CAN remain under wraps.

How does anyone know "the truth" about anything?

That's a question of philosophy--epistemology, specifically, a field in which
Dr. David Ray Griffin and Dr. James Fetzer have done a lot of writing. Both
are members of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.

I don't have any independent way of knowing "the truth" about 9/11

"The truth about 9/11," says Dr. Robert Bowman, Lt. Col. USAF (retired), a
veteran of 101 combat flights in Vietnam, with a PhD in Aeronautical
Engineering from CalTech, head of the "Star Wars" program before it was called
that, "is that we don't know the truth about 9/11, and we should."

Any evaluation of the evidence must include an evaluation of the destruction and
suppression of evidence by the authorities. As Dr. Bowman says: "If they have
nothing to hide, why are they hiding everything?"

The unanswered questions go far beyond a simple disinterest in exposing incompetence.
They include 200 out of the 300 questions posed by the 9/11 widows which got no response.
(Another 63 got inadequate answers.)
http://www.justicefor911.org/Appendix4_FSCQuestionRatings_111904.php

Here's a list of questions from Dr. Bowman:

"Why are they hiding audiotapes of FAA and NORAD controllers? Why are they hiding videotapes of whatever hit the Pentagon? Why are they hiding the black boxes? Why did they destroy most of the forensic evidence which appears to show that three buildings at the World Trade Center were brought down by thermite demolition charges? If the thermite residue found on severed steel beams didn’t bring down the towers, what did? (Never before in history did steel skyscrapers fall because of fire, and THREE of them did on the same day … one of which wasn’t even hit by an airplane!) For the government’s story to be accepted as factual, they will have to explain why WTC 7 came down. Why did four hijacked airliners fly around for up to an hour and 45 minutes without being intercepted? Why were normal procedures not followed? (If normal procedures HAD been followed, the aircraft would have been intercepted with 20 minutes to spare, the twin towers would still be standing, and thousands of dead Americans would still be alive.) If it was massive incompetence, why has no one been fired? … or demoted? … or court martialed? (Instead they were promoted or given the medal of freedom!) If Osama bin Laden was really suspected, why did our government violate its own “no-fly” order to hurriedly fly the bin Laden family out of the United States before they could be questioned? Why does the “Osama bin Laden” in the “confession” videotape have a nose about an inch shorter than the real Osama bin Laden? Why have half a dozen of the 19 “hijackers” turned up in other countries … alive and well? Were there really any hijackers at all, and if there were, were they patsies? Who made millions on short sales of United and American Airlines? Where is the tens of billions of dollars worth of missing gold that was stored in the World Trade Center? Why did the Secret Service not whisk the president away from the school where he and the students read about a pet goat even after it became clear that the nation was under attack?"

http://bowman2006.com/issues_az.htm#9_11

[William Seger]

116. "Scholars for Truth"

That's a question of philosophy--epistemology, specifically, a field in which
Dr. David Ray Griffin and Dr. James Fetzer have done a lot of writing.

Perhaps they should do less writing and more reading.

[John Q. Citizen]

129. What is your best #1 reason that you believe the 9/11 report when it indicates

that 9/11 occurred without any inside help?

"And how do we know about those things now?"

Well, operation North woods was declassified, what 40 or 50 years later? Nobody talked.

Iran/Contra was discovered when a guy running the supplies to the Contras was shot down by the Sandinista, and survived. Nobody talked, except the proof was in the pudding. He was in a plane filled with supplies for the Contras. Iran/Contra lasted a time and was discovered by chance. It was a very big operation that required loading and shipping TOW missiles to the Iranians and loading and unloading supplies from the Iranians in this country, and then reshipping them to the Contras. Nobody talked.

So, if we remove the "someone would talk" argument from your list, and the "Nobody would be that insane" argument from your list, what does that leave us with?

Your obvious need to disparage those who don't agree with your opinion, by equating them with the religious or by calling them CTers is very telling. When you can't prevail in your argument you just call those who don't agree with you names, you lump them into a box of your own choosing and assume that makes you right and anyone who dares to hold the opinion that it was an inside job is somehow more defective than yourself. And then you claim that to be "rational."

We know that the 19 accused hijackers couldn't have cleared out US air defenses over the North Eastern US. Not without inside help. Or maybe they just got lucky?

We know that 4 accused hijackers trained at 2 flight schools in tiny Venice Beach, Florida and that the owner of one of the flight schools owned a plane implicated in importing 43 pounds of heroin yet faced zero sanctions for repeated cash rental of his plane to the smugglers.

We know that many of the accused hijackers were being monitored, trailed, watched, lived with law enforcement assets, and anyone who tried to do anything about it were taken off the case, thwarted, impeded, and generally told not to go there.

And we know that we were lied to repeatedly by NORAD, the Pentagon, and the FAA.

We know that the 9/11 commission was impeded in their investigation by numerous government agencies, especially those controlled by the executive branch.

If this doesn't at least suggest to you that perhaps the accused hijackers were receiving some help from somebody within the government, then that's fine. You can just chalk all that stuff up to an amazing series of coincidence, bad luck and incompetence.

But I don't. I think 9/11 was an inside job.

And I don't need to have a theory of who was inside and how it was done. All I need is to look at the overwhelming evidence that points to an inside job, and come to my conclusion.

In fact, what I'm amazed at is the lack of evidence that there wasn't any inside help. So -called wet backs have to swim the Rio Grande to gain entry to this country, or walk across the desert. All the known accused terrorist hijackers had to do was apply for a visa and fly in through customs, even though they were known terrorists.

That in itself points to inside help.

[Nozebro]

132. Hear! Hear! Very well put. Thanks. EOM

nt

[William Seger]

133. "When you can't prevail...

... in your argument you just call those who don't agree with you names, you lump them into a box of your own choosing and assume that makes you right and anyone who dares to hold the opinion that it was an inside job is somehow more defective than yourself. And then you claim that to be 'rational.'"

Defensive much? What argument? What "assume that makes you right?" You asked a question, twice, and I gave you an honest answer, twice. Take it or leave it. I did so because you specifically stated that you believe that "people who don't believe that 9/11 was an inside job" didn't have an answer as to why. (Were you trying to imply that "anyone who dares to hold" that opinion is "somehow more defective than yourself," or do you really believe that?) But if you want to now START an argument... well, not tonight, please. Already been here too much lately, but I guess I asked for that by posting at all.

But why do you consider "CTer" to be insulting and "name-calling?" I consider it to be standard shorthand or jargon for "people who DO believe that 9/11 (or JFK assassination, etc., depending on the topic at hand) was an inside job." It sounds like YOU'RE the one saying "CTer" means someone "defective." But whatever, if you're a "Conspiracist, but don't have a Theory yet," I don't know any jargon for that, but I will refrain from calling you (or anyone else who requests it) a CTer if you find it offensive.

[Nozebro]

134. As you know, or SHOULD know, it's not only offensive, it's inaccurate & wrong

Calling someone (that believes 9/11 was a False Flag operation) a "CTer" is like calling someone (who ISN'T) - a bushco shill or disinfo agent or truth suppressor or stealth right-winger etc..

I consider someone that believes OBL & Co. conspired to carry out the attacks on 9/11 a CTer...even though many of these same people disagree on various aspects of the conspiracy, but I will refrain from calling YOU (or anyone else who requests it) a CTer if you find it offensive, AND if you stop calling
people who do not believe 9/11 was a conspiracy by OBL & Co. CTers.

[John Q. Citizen]

135. If you trace the origin of the use of the term 'conspiracy theorist' as a

derogatory term it sheds some light on our current state of affairs.

This is from Webster Tarpley's book Synthetic Terrorism; Made In The USA. Chapter XII
http://www.american-buddha.com/911.syntheticterrormadeusa.htm (you can read the chapter or the whole book for free here, if you want to. I recommend it.

THE PARANOID STYLE

Objections to the 9/11 imposture in its official version are often dismissed as conspiracy theories. Supporters of the official version use this a term of contempt, even though it is clear that to label a point of view as a conspiracy theory is in no way to refute it. The charge or insult of conspiracy theory is not only demagogical, but also intellectually dishonest, since the official version, involving as it does Bin Laden and al Qaeda acting at a distance from remote caves with the help of laptops, represents a conspiracy theory of a peculiarly fantastic type. Implicit in this procedure is the assumption that a conspiracy theory which is endorsed and embraced by the controlled corporate media is no longer a conspiracy theory, but rather respectable, and presumed true. Minority views which are not supported by the controlled corporate media remain conspiracy theories, and cannot be credible, no matter how true they can be shown to be. To these applies the warning issued by the deranged prevaricator in the White House:

We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th, malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty. (UN General Assembly, November 10, 2001)

The entire controversy about conspiracy theory is a diversion, and is generally conducted in such a way as to lead away from the facts on the table. Charges of conspiracy theory represent in their own way a form of ideological terrorism, and grow out of the intellectual climate of cold war McCarthyite witch-hunts. Conspiracy itself has a history as long as humanity, since it is one of the primordial forms of political action. Machiavelli writes about conspiracy in a long chapter of his Discourses; what he means by conspiracy is a plot to kill a ruler and to seize power in his place, like the conspiracy organized by the Pazzi family against the Medici in the 1480s. Conspiracy is also an active category of the Anglo-Saxon common law.



Conspiracy theory as a term of opprobrium is relatively new. It dates back to the work of Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University. Hofstadter was himself a kind of neocon ante litteram who became a direct beneficiary of McCarthyism: he took over a job vacated by Prof. Philip Foner, who had come under ostracism as a member of the Communist Party USA. In his essay on "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964) and in his other writings Hofstadter took issue with the 1880s-1890s prairie populist critique of international bankers, a critique which today seems prophetic in its foreshadowing of the destructive shenanigans of Lord Montagu Norman of the Bank of England during the interwar period (Norman was part of Brown, Shipley in London, the home office of Prescott Bush's Brown Brothers, Harriman in Wall Street) and of the International Monetary Fund during the entire postwar period. But for Hofstadter, radical critics of Anglo- American finance oligarchy were paranoids. His essay is doubly suspect because it appeared in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, and seemed to suggest that the many critics of the Warren Commission report were also -- paranoids. An interesting problem was posed for Hofstadter in that sophisticated western Europe, where populist paranoia was supposedly less strong, was even more critical of the Warren Commission report than was the alleged US citadel of paranoia.

Hofstadter's favorite habit of tarring political forces he did not like, such as the populists, with the brush of paranoia appears illegitimate. The paranoid typically fears that there is a conspiracy afoot specifically against himself. For Hofstadter, this notion becomes impossibly broad: anyone who thinks he sees a conspiracy anywhere is ipso facto a paranoid. What is lost here is the necessary reference point in reality: is there a conspiracy going on or not? US Attorneys have been proving the existence of conspiracies to juries for a long time, and they have generally escaped the charge of paranoia.

It is impossible to write political history without admitting from time to time the possibility of confidential agreements for concerted action made in advance. There are of course times when conspiracy plays no role: an absolute tyrant at the height of his power has no need of conspiracy; he can act directly by issuing orders. (Yet even here, even figures like Hitler and Stalin turn out to have been less absolute than usually assumed; it is enough to think of Hitler's chronic need to keep an eye on his Gauleiters, or the fact that the USSR functioned as an oligarchy during more years of its history than it did as a tyranny.) Similarly, an absolutely spontaneous mob -- a rarity, although a theoretical possibility -- is also innocent of conspiratorial planning. Between these two extremes, some form of surreptitious concerted action can frequently be found. As has been stressed throughout this book, US society today is neither a tyranny nor a democracy; it is organized from top to bottom according to the principle of oligarchy or plutocracy. The characteristic way in which an oligarchy functions is by means of conspiracy, a mode which is necessary because of the polycentric distribution of power in an oligarchical system, and the resulting need to secure the cooperation and approval of several oligarchical centers in order to get things done. Furthermore, the operations of secret intelligence agencies tend to follow conspiratorial models; this is what a covert operation means -- oordinated and preplanned actions by a number of agents and groups leading towards a pre-concerted result, with the nature of the operation remaining shielded from public view. So, in an oligarchical society characterized by the preponderant role of secret intelligence agencies -- such as the United States at the beginning of the twenty- first century -- anyone who rules out conspiracies a priori runs the risk of not understanding very much of what is going on. One gathers that the phobia against alleged conspiracy theory in much of postmodern academia is actually a cover story for a distaste for political thinking itself.

more...

[Nozebro]

136. Makes you wonder why ANY DUer would resort to doing that.

"The entire controversy about conspiracy theory is a diversion, and is generally conducted in such a way as to lead away from the facts on the table. Charges of conspiracy theory represent in their own way a form of ideological terrorism,"

[John Q. Citizen]

174. They do it because they have bought into the Repo re- framing of our language

and all that entails.

I recall hearing a recorded talk Dick Gregory gave in the 1980's where he mentioned that some were calling him a health-nut. He asked, "since when is it nutty to want to be healthy?"

Gregory had been doing some food fasts for peace and he said that people would write him and ask, "What about your family? Aren't you neglecting them by fasting and putting your health at risk?"

Dick Gregory pointed out that a few years before that when he was quite over weight, smoking two packs a day, and drinking a fifth of scotch a day that nobody had bothered to write him then and ask, "What about your family?"

So, yes, those on DU who perpetuate the right wing framing that assumes anyone who sees a conspiracy anywhere is somehow a paranoid know exactly what they are doing, and they know why they are doing it. At least that's my assesment.

I know language is a powerful tool of persuasion,and they do too.

[dfgrbac]

72. Thanks for the poll. Here's a new petition to our Democratic leaders.

The results of your poll are interesting. I really think a very large portion of the American public distrusts the government reports (NIST AND 9/11 Commission).

Although there are petitions out there to begin a new investigation of 9/11, I didn't see any of them that were specifically addressed to the new Democratic leadership. Therefore, I created one to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Henry Waxman at the E-The People site. If you believe as strongly as I do that 9/11 needs a new and thorough investigation, I would appreciate you reading my petition. If you agree, please sign the petition.

If we keep the pressure on for a new investigation, we will get it. The committee will find the answers to all these questions.

[petgoat]

77. Two more petitions.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth call for release of suppressed evidence. (18,000 signatures)

http://www.st911.org/

Petition of Solidarity with the 9/11 Widows. (13,000 signatures)

http://www.justicefor911.org/

[Lasthorseman]

142. Done

all those and many more before them. They will not give up the illusion though.

[SaiGirl]

147. Impotent wringing of hands and crawling on the knees .... good practice..

That's all this "petition" is.

Here's an example of the "confirmation code" they demand that you type in (or cut and paste) in order to sign this stupid boot-licking, butt-sucking petition, allowing you crawl on your knees begging the Dem Party hack-ocracy to just "please...please... pretty please .."

'f98c2793ea4eedc59f18e0e4e709e202b6b2c344'

Thank my lucky stars that my "cut and paste" works in Netscape.
You would have to cut and paste the stupid thing, just to sign the worthless petition, since it would take half a liftime to key in each character of this stupid "electronic confirmation"...

For a stupid, sniveling "petition" to conscious, witting criminals and corrupted flunkies, owned by corporate lobbyists and mob lawyers...

Got to stop this for a moment .... think I might throw up..
I'm gagging on the idea that someone in COINTELPRO might actually have thought people here at DU would be too stupid too see just how RIDICULOUS and lame this limp-wristed petition sounds.

They can murder us at will .... and you fools will still be on your knees, begging some corrupt pol to wring his or her hands with you...
to "feel your pain..."....

Getting nauseous ... gotta go..

[SaiGirl]

144. And what about the role of the media ...

Not just the controlled state-licensed corporate media (CNN, FOX, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, Clear Channel ...

But also the fake "alternative" media:
Pacifica - Amy Goodman is a paid Ford Foundation mouthpiece, who truly represents Pacifica policy from the top down.
Even if Bonnie Faulkner, Ralph Schoneman and Ambrose Lane have given some time to 9/11 as an inside job.
Air America (admittedly a few honest people),but mostly they prop up the Big Lie.
Chomsky, Alex Cockburn and Counterpunch, The Nation, The Progessive, In These Times ..... all bought and paid for .... all shilling for the Big Lie or some pathetically feeble "failure and negligence" limited hangout.

It makes sense.

No Democrat calls the Niger Yellowcake (Iraq WMD) forgeries a pack bold-faced manufactured lies.
No, the Democrat leadership, tethered to the corporate elites with a ring thru it's nose, refers to the WMD lies as "bad data" or "faulty intelligence". ....
but no... NOT A LIE !!!

So it all makes perfect sense.
In a nation of whores and cowards, everyone is bought and paid for
So everyone plays along with a manifestly transparent lie like 9/11.

That's the real message: "Surrender Dorothy."

After all, they blew up those buildings and cold-bloodedly murdered Americans on American soil RIGHT IN OUR FACE.

So the real message is (and not very hidden or subtle either)
"WE DID IT. WE GOT AWAY WITH IT. YOU CAN'T DO A F**KIN' THING ABOUT IT EITHER..."

That's the real message.
Get used to it.

It's only been five years now.

[AZCat]

146. Please

It's DemocratIC leadership, not "Democrat" leadership. This is a seemingly small point, but important all the same.

[Nozebro]

149. Hear! Hear! Nothing new. JFK was murdered in broad daylight in a very

public place in a very conservative city, and one of the loud and clear messages of THAT particular inside job is the notion that anyone that occupies the WH and announces an intent to pursue a policy that works against the interests of the Military Industrial Complex ("At GE, PROFIT Is Our Most IMPORTANT Product") should worry about receiving the very same treatment as that received by President Kennedy.

[petgoat]

154. John Judge says the warning is not just to those in the White House

but to all of us: "We can blow you away in broad daylight
and nobody can do a thing about it."

[Nozebro]

156. Senator Wellstone's loved ones can attest to that. EOM

nt

[petgoat]

172. At least those who survived. nt

[oblivious]

163. Welcome to DU SaiGirl. Good post.

As an outsider I just shake my head in wonder that they pulled it off with barely a whimper, barely even a question, from the 'independent' media and the 'opposition' party, and only a small (but growing) portion of the population thinks there's anything strange about that.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

167. You're all wrong. The WTC never existed

Bilderberg directed by the British Royal Family used holograms to simulate towers in New York. Everyone who claims to have been inside the WTC are either lying and/or in on the conspiracy. The myth that the WTC ever existed was put forward by the media who are directed by Bushco at the behest of the Carlyle Group.

You've all been taken in by the conspiracy. Lyndon LaRouche was right.

[John Q. Citizen]

168. Ha ha, you forgot about Poland. But thanks, anyway.

[John Q. Citizen]

175. Kicking!

[Generarth]

176. And the winner is ........5089 Views.

Seems to me on that observation that this is widely suspected now of being an inside job.

[spillthebeans]

177. It would be interesting to read what got people to vote how they voted. nt

[John Q. Citizen]

178. yes, I wish more would post on that.

[petgoat]

179. It's easy to vote for LIHOP. How could anybody ignore all those

warnings? And claim nobody ever thought of aircraft as weapons?

[spillthebeans]

183. I was thinking of LIHOP when I saw CONDI and the MEMO on TV

....but once you leave the MSM you get another picture

[orleans]

181. (how do the number of views get counted? if i go back and look at this

thread tomorrow and the next day do each of those times count as another view?)

(not that it really matters in the long run)

[John Q. Citizen]

182. I think it is total views, not unique views that are counted.

[Peace is Possible]

180. no doubt

And they really screwed up too, and yet they continue to get away with more lies.

"who would have thought that anyone would crash a plane into buildings"
Well actually lots of people have considered this for many years now, not too mention all those warnings. Shouldn't there be some qualifications for these jobs or something?

Rumsfeld was in the pentagon in a meeting until the plane hit the pentagon???? Millions of people across the globe were glued to the screens watching the events unfold....everyone except our secretary of defense, chairman of the joint chief of staffs, secretary of state etc etc

[John Q. Citizen]

184. What is your #1 reason that you believe 9/11 was an inside job?

[John Q. Citizen]

191. Kick!!

[John Q. Citizen]

192. And kick again...n/t

[John Q. Citizen]

193. And again

[seatnineb]

194. Just to remind the OCT community here at DU how far behind they are!

LARED
Make7
Hack
Bolo
Greyl
Merv
Brainster
WilliamSegar
AnarchoSocialist
Taxloss
SidDithers
VinceVega

....and any other OCT supporter I could not be bothered to remember......you guys got alot of work to do to turn that poll around!!!

[mirandapriestly]

195. I think the more they post, the more

readers are likely to vote for MIHOP

[Name removed]

196. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[seatnineb]

197. I think you may be right. n.t

[Bolo Boffin]

198. What an interesting hypothesis!

Reads almost like a confession, but I wouldn't want to accuse you of anything.

[John Q. Citizen]

200. Glad you like it, boloboffin.

But how does it read like a confession?

[SidDithers]

201. He's makin' a list...

Checkin' it twice...

And just in time for Christmas, too!

:rofl:

Sid

[seatnineb]

202. How does it feel to be so far behind in the poll Sid?!!!!

As I said....you and your band of Official Story Believers got a lot of work to do to turn that Poll around.......

[Grateful for Hope]

203. I like that DU only allows one vote per member

At least this poll, although not "scientific" has escaped some of the pitfalls of other online polls that permit multiple voting.

I think the poll suggests that, despite the tag-team efforts of the OCT supporters, most members who responded (76%) are listening to their own gut feelings and have at least begun to question the flimsy official story line.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

204. "listening to their own gut feelings"

:rofl:

The 9/11 Truthiness Movement, yay!

[Make7]

206. Do you know...

"That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now, I know some of you are going to say, "I did look it up, and that's not true." That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works." - Stephen Colbert

http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/stephencolbert/a/colbertbush.htm

:) Make7

[seatnineb]

208. Was that supposed to be funny?

Quit pranking around and get on your 9/11 official story pedestal......you got about 100 or so votes to recuperate in the poll........

[mirandapriestly]

211. OCTS watch a lot of TV. That is why they're OCTS

the guy in the suit told them what happened, so that is what they think happened and they call it "empiricism", lol. Then, when they want to "walk on the razors edge" they quote that Colbert guy, from the gatekeeping comedy show.

If they watched Santa and his sleight crash into the world trade center on CiaNN,they'd think that was what happened. Or I should say "believe"

[Make7]

217. I sincerely recommend that you read his speech at that link.

Edit to add - here's a link to the video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879

Enjoy.

- Make7

[Make7]

215. You don't like Stephen Colbert?

Edited to fix smilie in my signature

A brilliant comedian that satirizes the right-wing? I hear he has quite a few fans here at DU - they seem to think he's funny. Perhaps I should start a DU poll to settle the matter once and for all.

To be fair, that quote was intended for people familiar with his work. Without knowing the context of the speech it came from, or without knowing what his comedy persona is about, it is not likely to make much sense.

Glad to see that not understanding something won't distract you from responding simply to rant.

:toast: Make7

[seatnineb]

218. I know....being 100 votes behind in the poll must be shattering

...for such an avid official story believer such as your good self.

Hey...when you catch up in the poll....let me know.

[Make7]

225. The poll results aren't the reason I'm so devastated.

I'm upset because I was number two on the list that you posted.

:) Make7
For those that can't tell, this is a joke.

[seatnineb]

227. Still struggling to recuperate the 100 or so votes Make7?

Come on should be easy......you know....you only have evidence from the NIST,FEMA,CIA,FBI,Saudi Mahabeth ,The U.S institute of Pathologists ect ect to fall back on....

With all that man power you still can't win an easy little poll on here on a progressive site like DU?

Oh dear.

[Make7]

231. Why did you put LARED first on your list?

Is it because he is mentioned on the homepage of the www.scholarsfor911truth.org website?

- Make7

[seatnineb]

233. Why are you so far behind in the poll?

Is it because you are failing to convince other DU ers that 9/11 was not an inside job?

[Make7]

237. This is really bugging me.

Why did you put LARED before me in your list? Did his 2005 9/11 "truthseeker" Oscar have anything to do with your decision?

:shrug: Make7

[seatnineb]

238. What is really bugging me is that with all your "resources"...you failed .....

...to convince 140 DU er's that 9/11 was not an Inside Job.

Gee.....should have been so easy.

Oh well ...you win some.....you lose some.

Tough break.

[Make7]

239. Why won't you tell me?

I'm hoping to finally get a 9/11 "truthseeker" Oscar of my own this year. However, if I still don't win this time around, I would like to know why you chose to list LARED before me in your list. I feel this information may help give me a competitive edge for my chance at next year's 9/11 "truthseeker" Oscars. C'mon - just tell me why he was the first one on your list.

Thank you in advance.

- Make7

[seatnineb]

240. Come on ..why not tell me why you and your band can't win a simple poll?

It must hurt so bad for you not to give me an answer.

[Make7]

259. I'm still not sure why you won't answer my question.

So here it is again. You included the following list in post #194:

LARED
Make7
Hack
Bolo
Greyl
Merv
Brainster
WilliamSegar
AnarchoSocialist
Taxloss
SidDithers
VinceVega

I am wondering why you decided to list LARED at the top of the list and me second. Could you explain the reason why you chose that particular order?

- Make7

[seatnineb]

260. I still don't understand why you won't explain why you are so far behind in the poll

Gee...I could play this game all day.

[Make7]

261. Well, I'll just let you play with yourself then. ( n/t )

[seatnineb]

262. Well when you are trailing 100 votes behind in the poll........... n/t

[mirandapriestly]

264. heh heh heh

Maybe there is something to this "truth" thing after all, it's beating a billion dollar propaganda campaign

[seatnineb]

266. Well I have lost count of how many posts Make7 has failed to answer a simple question

Yet he/she continues to ask me about why I only named him/her second in a list.........

[SidDithers]

284. How do you think I feel?...

Oh well, at least I beat vincent :)

Hi vince! :hi:

Sid

[Make7]

293. Inadequate?

Compared to the attention LARED gets, none of us seem to quite measure up.

I'm sure you noticed in the link from your 9/11 Truthling Community Guide... thread that LARED was the only DU non-PCTer mentioned by name.

What does a person have to do to get a little recognition?

:toast: Make7

[Anarcho-Socialist]

205. I didn't realise that this DU Poll was final

and was meant to settle the issue for the whole universe. Or maybe that's what the CIA wants us to think? :D Or am I saying that because I am CIA? Or am I saying this to make you think I'm CIA when I'm not? Or... am I?

[seatnineb]

207. Rubbish,,,,,,,,,,

If the poll was final I would not have said:

"You hava a got a lot of work to do to turn this poll around"

But you are trailing in the poll.....and at least in this little corner of the DU forum the official 9/11 story that you believe in.....is only believed in by 41 odd members of DU....as opposed to 141 other DU members who do not believe the Official story of 9/11.....

Gee...you don't take defeat too well.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

213. Well...

...it seems that this matters more to you than I. I mean seriously... what does an unscientific poll with zero methodology tell you? If there's any prestige to be gained here, it is scraps.

If you think this poll matters to any non-MIHOPer then you have a lot to learn about people.

Although perhaps you take some scrap of solace in this poll. I have no idea how it feels to be going against the near-entire intellectual and academic left, as well as the high-scientific community on the subject of September 11. If this is all you have left then what does it tell you?

[seatnineb]

216. As I said....you got 100 votes to catch up on......

And if it was so unimportant....you would not be partcipating in this forum!

[Anarcho-Socialist]

221. ...

...I am here for debate and for the entertaining delights of this forum. I am not here to spend time pondering the results of a meaningless web poll. In this thread, the replies are what bring me here, not the poll result. May I ask why this web poll is important to you? I look forward to your answer.

[seatnineb]

224. If your debate was so convincing....you would not be behind in the poll.......

...would you now.

I guess the poll is only meaningless when you trail in it....LOL!!!!!

[Anarcho-Socialist]

226. If it was 90% no, it would be meaningless

Do you understand science behind polling? Actually, I already know the answer.

[seatnineb]

228. Pathetic.

So if there were 140 voters who said 9/11 was not an inside job...and 41 voters who said 9/11 was an inside job......

The poll would be meaningless?!!!!!

O.K

Next.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

230. *sigh*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls#Potential_for_inaccuracy

[seatnineb]

234. LOL!!!!! .....is that the best you got...try harder.

Nothing more amusing at watching DU's finest OTC supporters having to resort to WIKI in order to explain why they are lagging so far behind in a poll.

Next.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

235. You aren't reading my posts (or not understanding them)

so there is little point talking with you.

It seems that this poll matters to you a huge amount. It may be surprising to you that this poll is inconsequential to other people. Perhaps you are incapable of understanding that.

[seatnineb]

236. If it is so inconsequential...then why are U participating in this thread....

....oh yeah....because you like to "debate and have fun"...right?

But all that "fun and "debate" is still not enough to salvage the 100 votes you need to turn that oh so meaningless poll around.

Next.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

243. let me see if I can type it in very simple words for you

I (Anarcho-Socialist) don't care about the result of this web poll. It matters not to me.

[seatnineb]

245. If you don't care about the poll.....why are you interested in whether.......

...I am interested in a poll that you do not care about?

[Anarcho-Socialist]

246. Well, I found the way you pushed it to be fascinating

from a materialist (the philosophy) stand-point. But each to their own.

[seatnineb]

249. This thread is about the poll. If you are not interested in the Poll....

...don't take part in the thread.

It really is quite simple.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

250. No. I shall do what I please

within the spirit of discourse and the messageboard rules.

[seatnineb]

252. Fine you continue to ask me why you are interested why I am interested

...in a poll you are not interested about.

I could play this till' I die.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

253. your thoughts fascinate me more than this poll

But if you care not to answer then we shall leave it at that.

[seatnineb]

254. Even though my thoughts are directly related to the poll you are not interested about?

[John Q. Citizen]

273. Careful, the thought police don't like that stuff!

[LeftishBrit]

323. 'Don't take defeat'? - what defeat? This isn't a popularity contest.

It's a matter of fact. The facts are not changed by how many people on DU vote for or against the theory. I might change my mind on the basis of new clear evidence; not how many people vote one way or another.

I am reminded of a Japanese study, which indicated that many 11-year-olds think that you can decide the result of a multiplication problem by voting on it.

It's interesting in itself to know how many DU-ers believe certain theories, but it doesn't prove any of our views to be correct.

(And I suppose I also belong on that Santa Claus list of Who's Naughty!)

[mirandapriestly]

209. No, you're probably just

a retiree with a lot of of time on your hands

[seatnineb]

210. LOL!!!!!!! n/t

[Anarcho-Socialist]

212. Well gosh...

...I'd love to retire whilst in my mid-twenties and all. However I'll have to wait until aged 67 like my fellow UK citizens. However spending time in this forum is fun. People who believe in junk science fascinate me.

Oh, and BTW - your jibe at retirees was crass.

[seatnineb]

214. Junk science..... oh yeah.... you mean the official story of 9/11!!!!! n/t

[Anarcho-Socialist]

219. Yeah, the theory that all those scientists believe in

You know, those with relevant expertise and letters after their name.

However the Truth movement have their "gut-feeling" which as we all know is far superior epistemology-wise. I don't know why I didn't see it before.

[seatnineb]

220. Gee...with that kind of reasoning............

...no wonder you are 100 votes behind.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

222. Oh I know

Let all those scientists admit their defeat now, for this poll has vanquished them once and for all.

[seatnineb]

223. Well...those scientists only made an impression on 41 of you.......

...as opposed to the 140 DU er's where they failed to make an impression.

You are not dealing with that too well... are you?

[Anarcho-Socialist]

229. You're becoming quite obsessive about this

It would be fascinating to know what you see in this poll and why it is important to you.

[seatnineb]

232. Ummm..no I am just responding to your posts.

It is amusing to see your reaction to you and your ilk being so far behind in the poll.

[greyl]

242. I think you have work to do on that ""no planes" are a huge embarassment" poll.nt

[seatnineb]

244. That poll is of no interest to me.That is why I did not participate in that thread

Unlike your buddy Anarcho-Socialist...who claims to not to be interested in the aforementioned poll...... yet he is participating in this thread ........a thread dedicated to this same poll.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

247. Again, I find the responses here to be more engaging

than the actual poll itself. It's one of those things, one can read an OP but not be particularly interested in it, but yet find things of interest in the very replies.

[seatnineb]

251. And my replies are related to the poll you are not interested in.

[greyl]

256. Of course not, because it doesn't confirm your bias.

Fyi, I don't mind being in a minority. You talk as if it's a bad thing - as if argument ad populum weren't a fallacy. If you had the facts and evidence on your side, you'd be less inclined to resort to that fallacy so vehemently. When the facts and evidence are on your side, let us know.

[seatnineb]

258. Wrong......I am not interested in the no-plane poll....that is why I did not participate

....in that thread.

You on the other hand are very much interested in the poll of this thread.

And all the "facts and evidence" that you have at your disposal have single-handedly failed to convince no-less than 240 DU posters....

As I said to Make7...you win some and you lose some.

[greyl]

263. Of course not, because it doesn't confirm your bias.

Fyi, I don't mind being in a minority. You talk as if it's a bad thing - as if argument ad populum weren't a fallacy. If you had the facts and evidence on your side, you'd be less inclined to resort to that fallacy so vehemently. When the facts and evidence are on your side, let us know.

[seatnineb]

265. As I said...your facts and evidence failed to convince 240 voters here at DU

Your "facts" are obviously failing to convince the majority of people here.

[greyl]

267. You keep repeating that falsehood.

It's not 240. Check your facts.
Plus, they are votes in this particular forum, not DU at large.
Fyi, I don't mind being in a minority. You talk as if it's a bad thing - as if argument ad populum weren't a fallacy. If you had the facts and evidence on your side, you'd be less inclined to resort to that fallacy so vehemently. When the facts and evidence are on your side, let us know.

[seatnineb]

268. My mistake ....apologies.....still you only have to look at the poll

....at the top of the web page to find out the true figure.

Which still leaves you 100 in defecit.

So much for the abilities of your facts to convince people.

[greyl]

269. There are plenty of facts one "only needs to look at".

I hope you liked it, try again sometime. Fyi, I don't mind being in a minority. You talk as if it's a bad thing - as if argument ad populum weren't a fallacy. If you had the facts and evidence on your side, you'd be less inclined to resort to that fallacy so vehemently. When the facts and evidence are on your side, let us know.

[seatnineb]

270. You obviously don't understand that your facts are not convincing.

That is why you are behind in the poll.

It will be my pleasure to keep on repeating this "fact".....that you are behind in the poll.

[greyl]

241. You should post that picture of yourself.

Your cuteness may disarm her/him.

And what's with the idea that people who are sharp, intelligent, articulate, and knowledgeable can't be young and must be "old"? Sounds a bit ageist to me. Probably just anti-intellectualism.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

248. Well, thank you kindly sir

I do appreciate that very much :blush:

[greyl]

257. Well, no problem. :)

I'm just a little older than you are, and about as cute, and the ignorant anti-intellectual stereotypes piss me off.
Where the hell do some people get the idea that anti-intellectualism is a progressive value?

[John Q. Citizen]

271. kick for more votes!

[Make7]

272. .

Yes:   140 votes, 76%
No:     41 votes, 22%
Unsure:  4 votes,  2%

[Twist_U_Up]

274. 143 to 42

3-1/2 to 1

Kick

[John Q. Citizen]

279. You can't fool all of the people all of the time. Or so this poll would indicate. n/t

[Bolo Boffin]

280. At this moment, 44 people aren't being fooled.

Or so this poll would indicate.

C'mon, John, you can't provide setup like that!

[John Q. Citizen]

281. Those 44 would be among the some of the people you can fool all of the time,

Bolo. Most of those same 44 likely also believe:

1. Oswald acted alone,

2. A jury never found the US government complicit in MLK's assassination,

3. Experts are above reproach.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

282. I bet they believe that

the US actually landed on the moon too. They'll believe anything they're told.

[John Q. Citizen]

283. I bet those 44 also believe many things the rest of us do, too, such as

your example of the moon landings.

Of course there was a national program to go to the moon that proceeded it, publically attended and televised launches, photgraphs, and publically accessable moon rocks to examine.

My guess is that if no moon program was initiated 10 years proior, if NASA had withheld all the photographic evidence, if they shipped off the moon rocks to be melted down immediatly and didn't let people examine them, then there would be a lot more people who would rightly question the claims.

But probably not those 44.

Because, if a governement expert said so, they would, by that fact alone, probably be predisposed to believe it.

[treestar]

288. Number 3 is interesting, because the top experts on anything

will disagree about things.

The bottom line is that no one understands it and tries to prop their belief with "my expert is better than your expert." But the bottom line is, that they cannot explain it themselves, because they do not really understand it.

It's like the fundie who hands you the Bible and tells you all the answers are in there. It's their way of pretending their opinions are not subject to discussion, because of the "ultimate authority."

[John Q. Citizen]

290. Some people truely understand some parts of 9/11. Those aren't the nuts and bolts,

parts though because with the physical evidence whisked out of the country at top speed, there isn't any evidence to look at. Heck, NIST has a hypothisis with no physical evidence to prove it.

But on the intel, the hijackers, and their associates there is a rich and convoluted history which is being documented by some very good investigative journalists.

There is Paul Thompson's media treasure chest, the 9/11 timeline, as well as very real indications of a concerted cover up our government.

[treestar]

286. There is no way for anyone to know what really happened

Whether the official theory is possible is obviously even arguable to experts, as they disagree.

This is why the subject goes so quickly into snarkiness. Everybody is going on belief and knows they cannot convince the other side scientifically.

I would say in the long run it does not matter how it happened, we just have to attack the uses the administration makes of it (as an excuse for wars and scaling back the bill of rights, etc.)

[John Q. Citizen]

289. There is a lot of evidence that US agencies knew who, where , and what

the accused hijackers were up to prior to 9/11.

As for the collapses, I agree that there is a dearth of physical evidence.

[wildbilln864]

291. and ...

3/4ths say it was probably an inside job?

[Grateful for Hope]

292. kick n/t

[John Q. Citizen]

294. Thanks for that, Hope!

[Grateful for Hope]

295. You are welcome, John Q. n/t

[John Q. Citizen]

298. Vote 'em up!

[John Q. Citizen]

299. Kick!.

[John Q. Citizen]

301. all right, another undecided. They seem severly under represented on this poll.

[greyl]

302. You must have missed it. I will represent it for you:

I don't mind being in a minority. You talk as if it's a bad thing - as if argument ad populum weren't a fallacy. If you had the facts and evidence on your side, you'd be less inclined to resort to that fallacy so vehemently. When the facts and evidence are on your side, let us know.

[John Q. Citizen]

303. You flatter yourself, greyl.

but I think it's healthy that you have apparently abandoned your earlier conspiracy theories concerning the participants of this admittedly non-scientic sampling of opinion.

Your strawman argument, that I have now or ever promoted an argument ad populum, is a fallacy.

I realize that some have in the past, on both sides of the debate, But I haven't.

So perhaps you might want to make your representation to those that have.

Thanks.

[John Q. Citizen]

304. A kick for more votes!

[Larry Allen]

305. This poll is so old I can't vote

[John Q. Citizen]

313. And another!

[Grateful for Hope]

306. JQ...looks like it is time to start a new poll

Apparently, one can no longer vote?

[John Q. Citizen]

307. I think it changed again since your post, Hope. I see that the OCT

is at 21%, which is a new low to the best of my knowledge for this poll.

So i think the poll is still operating.

[Grateful for Hope]

308. Sure does look that way, JQ n/t

[CB_Brooklyn]

309. For those who believe bin Laden did 9/11 from his cave....

see here: http://www.911researchers.com/node/241

[Bolo Boffin]

310. The link is to another link about TV Newcasters reading from the same script.

And it's information that's already been posted here, hasn't it? Why did you need to post an anonymous or inaccurately described link here, CB? Driving traffic to your site?

Typical. At the very least, couldn't your link have been something actually to do with bin Laden?

[John Q. Citizen]

311. Well, look at the bright side bolo;

his post gave you an opportunity to criticize and castigate a CTer. That's a pastime you seems to thrive on.

I'd say the glass is half full for you.

[wildbilln864]

312. Great poll!

75% believe it was. That shows the Bush/PNAC CTers to be the minority.
We need representation in DC but I don't see it happening any time soon.

[John Q. Citizen]

314. A repeated low, percentage wise, on this poll for the "not an inside job" choice : 21%

[wildbilln864]

315. Yes....

very interesting. Only 2 out of 10 believe the Bush/PNAC CT! :hi:

[StrictlyRockers]

316. Wow the nutjob government apologists who post all day long try to slant things...

But the poll tells the truth about the intelligence of DUers and their ability to think critically.

It is only very small percentage of DUers who feel the way of the OCT folks. The people who post here defending the government's story are people with no lives and nothing better to do than to keep their world-view viable by defending it tooth and nail despite all the mounting evidence. I pity them.

SR

[John Q. Citizen]

318. It's a non-scientific just for fun poll that reflects only the self selected who decided to

cast a vote. I would caution against drawing any meaningful conclusions as per this poll.

On the other hand, I am glad that the non-scientifically self-selected apparently have spoken for a while now, and I am in the majority opinion on this poll.

I think it was an inside job.

[John Q. Citizen]

319. Kicking for a lark!

[wildbilln864]

317. kick!

.

[Twist_U_Up]

321. 4 to 1= Inside Job

read it and weep octers. you guys are going to have to work harder.

[Make7]

322. Results on Dec-28-06 - Yes: 76% , No: 22% , Unsure: 2%

Results at 11:41 AM on Dec-28-06  -  Yes: 76% , No: 22% , Unsure: 2% , Total Votes: 185
Results at 02:02 PM on Mar-25-07  -  Yes: 75% , No: 21% , Unsure: 4% , Total Votes: 229

Let's keep this kicked for more votes!

- Make7

[Twist_U_Up]

324. 172 to 49 and 9....................oh my KICK!!!!!

Lets keep this kicked for more votes.

But yet these debunkers act as if we are in the minority.
Fools

[quicknthedead]

325. Kick (the OCT when she's down) n/t

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

326. Kick. nt.

[Grateful for Hope]

327. kicking for the majority n/t

[AZCat]

328. The majority of what?

Who gives a shit what a poll says? As I asked someone else - is the truth dependent on popular opinion?

[Grateful for Hope]

329. You are assuming that the majority responses are based

on opinion rather than on seeing anomalies in the OCT.