Standards and a possible consensus... (or: Weeding Out the Bullshit)

[JackRiddler]

A lot of what is being proclaimed as "9/11 science" ain't solid, at least not yet. The cell phone findings presented on Dewdney's site are sparse indeed. (I guess that whenever taking a flight, 9/11 skeptics should consider it their duty to attempt a cell-phone call and report about their experiences.)

Downright laughable is "planes exceeded their software limits." Actually the pilot, if he is in control, can go way beyond those; those are warning levels, not magic limits on what the plane can do.

Why can't 9/11 Skeptics take up some obvious consensus positions, in the cause of making a stronger political case for disclosure? I suggest the following:

On the collapse: Underline the firemen's demands for a real investigation and anger about the management of Ground Zero. Ask why the rubble was shipped out so quickly, why photographs of GZ were banned. Emphasize WTC 7, which is extremely suspicious! Ask if it was set up to pop already years ago as a security precaution because of its highly sensitive tenants (CIA, etc.) This introduces the possiblity of controlled demolition in a less sinister and less "biased" context. (It also gives us a chance to list WTC 7's amazing set of tenants.)

As for the Twin Tower falls, these are completely unprecedented events, with or without controlled demolition, and I prefer to tread cautiously. Some people obviously think they have definitive proof of controlled demolition. I am satisfied that the pictures raise valid questions and that the issue of CD is very much on the table, that it is a hypothesis that must be confronted. But I am not yet satisfied that the case for CD is definitive.

In my opinion, writers should always point out that the question might be settled by way of tests on the surviving material, and aim to stimulate investigation, rather than conducting the debate on the level of a religious inquisition (which is what it's like on certain 9/11 forums including this one).

Pentagon: Well, yes, the hole is small enough and the evidence of debris is sparse enough to make people wonder. You can't blame them, given the overall context of a lying administration that obstructs all investigations. Still, those who present full scenarios with cruise missiles and the like are over-reaching. It's dangerous to rely on the small number of pictures, the small number of QUOTED witness testimonies, and the five stills from a video released by the government as a sufficiently reliable body of evidence. Especially because we know there is plenty more evidence! Instead of constructing scenarios almost bound to be wrong in their specifics, we should demand release of all video records of the attack from the Sheraton, the gas station and Pentagon cameras. Also, all the grisly pictures from inside the building. We can be clever and point out that "outrageous conspiracy theories" have circulated among the French et al. and that it would be a good PR move, if the government is honest, to counteract these theories. Can our country really afford to have so many people in allied countries doubting the Official Conspiracy Theory? Why not release the existing evidence?

In contrast to the few pictures of the Pentagon hole, we have very solid evidence of the air defense failure. How did AA77 get back from Ohio without being intercepted? This question is one that can interest the vast majority without alienating them, and it is the right starter question for answering what really happened at the Pentagon.

Remote Control: Well, obviously it's technically possible! Several different ways, in fact. Planes land on auto pilot. Drones are flown across oceans, from the hangar to the landing strip. The technology has been there for 50 years. No doubt that a well-paid team of Raytheon engineers, hired decades ago to come up with ways to remote-hijack planes, would have come up with several different solutions even back then: through backdoors in the software (ones that don't allow the pilot to reboot) - through bolt-on hardware modules that suspend all pilot control - possibly even through the remote electronic takeover of a previously unmanipulated system. All pilot commands are electronically transmitted. Programmers can claim their failsafe safety procedures make it impossible to take over a plane, but in such arguments it's the determined hackers who always seem to win. I see no harm in pointing out the obvious, i.e. that remote control is possible, as a potentially *practical* way for certain types of high-level terrorists to stage attacks.

Bumble Planes: I find these theories useless. Sure, they're always made out to seem technically possible, but they make things much more complex than a simple remote control (or real-hijacker) scenario. For example, if I was planning 9/11 as an inside job, I would prefer to only worry about how to dispose of the original four flights. Increasing that to eight or more separate planes plus missiles creates more things that can go wrong. What if an empty drone crashes into Times Square? What if someone photographs one of these bumble-plane switches? What if the planes don't get close enough at the right time and fail to converge properly on the radar screen, and the ATC realizes it's dealing with two objects?

What also makes me suspicious of Bumble Plane speculations is that there are no limits to our imagining such scenarios. Once you start, why not add two or three cruise missiles to hit WTC 6 and 7? (Why is this necessary?!) AA11 becomes a Whatzit. UA175 becomes a fake plane with an extra fuel tank and laser guiding (as some people have interpreted the video artefacts, shadows and reflections). Pentagon involves three or more different planes/missiles. UA 93 is just an explosion that made a small crater while all the real passengers were slaughtered by (preferably Israeli NWO) death squads at U.S. bases.

Now think: Why the hell would the planners of such scenarios risk total exposure? Don't they know that tourists in NYC point cameras at the Towers every day? Why would you plan to send a Whatzit to hit the WTC, use undisclosed hologram technology to fool people people into thinking it was AA11, and then hire death squads to eliminate the real passengers at some undisclosed location, when all you have to do instead is just arrange to crash the real AA11 into the real WTC?!

By the time you've described one of these unnecessarily complex scenarios, you have alienated 90 percent of our potential supporters. Bumble planes theory is mental masturbation, perhaps satisfying to certain inquisitive mentalities, but of little practical use in guessing the truth, and of zero political use towards the goal of gaining full disclosure.

Six living hijackers: sorry, evidence again sparse. So men with the same names supposedly called Saudi and Morroccan papers in the week after to say they were still alive. Show me these Saudi papers. Show me pictures of these men, interviews, video footage. Otherwise it's all hearsay. Not that the identities of the hijackers aren't in doubt. Just that this rather limited angle seems fruitless. We should be demanding the original passenger documentation, ticketing, boarding passes, video footage from parking lot and airports, autopsy reports/DNA tests, etc. The public has not been given complete and credible information to establish the identities of the perpetrators, or the steps they took in carrying out the attacks. This is what we should be demonstrating, instead of allowing ourselves to be lured by hearsay into specific statements that Hijacker X or Y is still alive.

Israeli Art Students: Yep, they seem to have been all over the States in advance of the attacks. Now show me that they were connected to 9/11. Not just the circumstantial evidence that one or another lived near to hijackers. (We have even better evidence that various hijackers lived near CIA offices, on U.S. military bases, and right in the same house as a variety of suspicious Saudis.) And if you can show the Art Students were tracking the hijackers - show me that Israel didn't deliver a warning, as Mossad sources have claimed! The case, again is sparse. There is zero case for imagining these guys were the operational masterminds (as several authors do). Remember that most of them were arrested before 9/11.

Israelis celebrating on top of a van: Sorry, it's hearsay. Who says they were celebrating, perhaps it only appeared that way to the witnesses. If they were partying, how do you know they weren't high on ecstasy and perversely enjoying the attack as a cool light show? And if they were celebrating, so what? How does this establish involvement? This is the same category of evidence as the pictures of dancing Palestinians flashed by CNN on 9/11. I have met New Yorkers who reported a celebratory mood among certain Muslim communities in New York on Sept. 11. While I doubt these stories, it's far from impossible! But even if this hearsay is true, it does not suffice to prove these happy Muslims were connected to the actual attacks. In either case: We need more evidence than what we have seen!

Again, I see no problem in demanding the FBI release whatever evidence it collected on these guys.

Compare most of the above red herrings to the evidence of

-- Bush administration foreknowledge and advance warnings, even of rehearsals and wargames

-- of obstruction of the FBI's pre-911 investigations: Rowley, Wright, O'Neill, 199i... (followed by the "Bin Ladin airlift" post-911)

-- of an air defense standdown and of inactivity in the chain of command on 9/11 (Bush at school)

-- of lies and obstruction over a two-year period

-- of surveillance of the alleged hijackers, of apparent spook connections at the flight schools, and of the many oddities and contradictions in the stories about them and in the "evidence" connecting them to the deed (magic passport, etc.)

-- of CIA/Octopus/Guns/Oil/Drugs connections to Qaeda, Taliban, terrorism in general

-- of past hoax terror, from the Maine to Northwoods to the Putin Putsch of Sept. 1999 in Moscow (practically the 9/11 scenario, but without Hollywood effects).

These all make for a case! They should be our first lines of approach, of course keeping open minds throughout.

I also have no problems hopping on WTC 7, a phenomenon that absolutely screams for explanation and presents the logical route for unravelling what happened at Ground Zero.

It may one day turn out that the truth is even more exotic than LIHOP theory, but if so, we will get to that point by taking a sober, methodical and conservative approach with the solid facts actually available to us, and by using that to force the government to allow real investigation.

[dofus]

1. Thank you.

I've gotten so sick of reading ignorant, ill-thought out theories about the hijackings of 9/11 that I could scream. It's useless, of course, to try to refute those things, but you did exactly that. Thank you.

The one thing I'd like to add is that those who claim the towers fell because of controlled demolition is to ask exactly when and how was the demolition set up. It would take weeks, perhaps months, to put all those explosives in place (extrapolating from what I've read of controlled demolitions of empty buildings) and I think it's beyond unbelievable to think that could have taken place with no one ever noticing.

None of this will stop those who want to believe the nonsense from believing it, but it's nice to know someone else is paying attention.

[JackRiddler]

2. hmmm...

Example: The buildings could have been secretly wired for demolition after the 1993 attack (which supposedly intended to topple them over like dominoes and thus hit the whole area). This as a misguided safety precaution, as an insurance that if they were going to collapse after a second attack, they would do so into their own footprint. This in turn was exploited on 9/11, not necessarily by those who did the original wiring.

This also seems to me plausible (but far from proven) in the case of WTC 7, which was full of spook offices, and on which my own suspicions center. (However, I do say suspicions - I am certain of nothing.)

At any rate, there's no requirement that the wiring would have had to be accomplished in the time immediately before the attacks.

Given months or years as opposed to days, and given the right explosives (stable, won't go off because of a fire), it seems to me that one team could do it in a leisurely and inconspicuous fashion.

One thing those who are sure of demolition will argue is that if you can prove there was a demolition on the basis of the photographic evidence, then it obviously happened, and it is not your obligation to say who planted the explosives or how.

[dofus]

3. Wiring the buildings as an INSURANCE precaution?

And no one involved in the wiring has come forward in all this time? Maybe two people could have accomplished all the wiring in the eight years available from 1993 to 2001, but really. And it's not up to anyone to prove the negative (they weren't wired) but rather to prove that they were wired.

Sheesh.

[DulceDecorum]

4. Don't worry

nobody is here is about to contradict you.
I don't think they dare.

Incidentally, dofus, when you say this:
"And it's not up to anyone to prove the negative (they weren't wired) but rather to prove that they were wired."

Does that apply ONLY to the wiring in this particular instance,
(like how the Supreme Court Bush vs Gore decision was a one time shot)
or is that a general principle?
(which may or may not be used in the case of, say, a scalp.)

[JackRiddler]

5. I think you're missing the point...

All that has been "proven" so far is that the towers collapsed, in the way and sequence we can still see in the many videos and stills taken from the outside (alas, we lack records from the inside).

In terms of scientific method, there is no neutral hypothesis here, and there is no burden on the advocate of any particular hypothesis, except to come up with hypotheses that explain the known facts.

If, using these visual records, you could show that the collapse was a controlled demolition - for example, by demonstrating that it released more energy than a collapse without explosives could have possibly done - then you would not have to prove anything about HOW the Towers were blown up. The burden would then shift to those who wanted to refute CD theory to show that this collapse could occur as a natural consequence of the airplane strikes.

Many CD advocates believe they have proven the collapse released too much energy not to have involved outside inputs (i.e., explosives). I am not yet satisfied of this.

The issue would probably not even concern me, if not for WTC 7. (And if not for the destruction of the evidence and the general obstruction of all investigations into all aspects of 9/11, indicating a coverup.)

I have merely answered your question (how could it have been wired?) by forwarding one scenario under which it would have been possible to wire the buildings without raising much attention.

Now seriously, have you ever been in an office building? If you see some workers in overalls screwing around some piece of building infrastructure, do you even wonder what they are doing? How does this raise attention?

One thing I am certain you are wrong about is the likelihood of anyone "coming forward."

Where do you get the weird idea that every crime in the world has its willing whistleblowers? This is a myth. Au contraire, secrets are kept all the time!

In any situation of a tight-knit group ordered by its authority figure to keep a secret, for every willing blabber, there will be 10 who prefer not to know anything about the matter.

Mafias have often existed for many years without anyone coming forward. Exposure usually happens because the authorities ACTIVELY pursue the mafia in question, or because they exist for so long that they get overconfident and do something stupid.

There are cases in which village majorities massacred minorities and no one "came forward" for many years. Those who felt they should hesitated, out of fear.

Every year we find out about government secrets that were successfully kept for many years. Last year the Navy revealed it had sprayed sailors with poison gas during a four-year period in the 1960s. How unbelievable that "no one came forward..." and yet apparently no one did, or it was successfully suppressed through sanctions or sweet-talk. The government ran MK-ULTRA and COINTELPRO for many years without anyone coming forward.

And what if they did come forward? What if they have already, and were completely ignored or discouraged by the response? ("Ha ha, Here's another loon who says...")

I mean, look at the attitude of many people who post here. Any time someone who might be able to damage the BFEE dies in a suspicious manner, a whole bunch of people SHRIEK that it's absolute looniness and heresy and a mortal danger to the Democratic Party to even suggest the possibility that this death might not have been kosher.

"Coming forward" in any situation of criminal conspiracy entails serious risks and costs - with the rather vague rewards of salving conscience (or the distant hope of a book contract).

I think the Plame case may help to change people's perceptions, however - by providing proof that our ruling elites really do consider their own people to be eminently expendable. Which is logic, given the mentality the ruling elite have. They have been fighting a "war" of one kind or another their whole lives - wars for political survival, wars with rival factions, wars on crime, wars on drugs, wars on commies and subversives, wars on other countries... Of course they can convince themselves that "their own people" are expendable, all the more so since there are very few people they even consider to be on the same level of value as themselves.

We're talking about megalomaniacs. You're probably not a megalomaniac, but you have to acknowledge their existence. Think outside the box.

[dofus]

6. Admittedly it's been a while since I've worked

in an office building. And I've never worked in a giant high rise of any kind. But I still maintain that the kind of wiring necessary for a CD of the WTC would have taken a very long time and or would have involved lots of people and that someone would have noticed. Someone of the many thousands of people who worked in the WTC who didn't die that day would have said, "Jeez, remember how those guys were messing around on our floor back when, and then they systematically seemed to do every floor on the building?" NO ONE has come forward and said anything like that. It doesn't require whistle blowing from inside -- and I'm sure you're right, that a tightly knit, well-controlled group is not going to give itself up, but all the many thousands of workers who would have seen these guys, whoever they were, didn't see anybody doing the work?

I'm talking about paying attention to what's going on around you all the time. I have my own suspicions about 9/11, trust me. I keep on harping on the fact that right around the time of the Pentagon crash, all the networks reported that there were fires on the Mall, and a car bomb had gone off at the State Department. I used to live in DC. (I used to work at National Airport, also, which is another story) I was watching the live coverage from no more than two blocks away from either point, and I was screaming at the TV that all any network had to do was to move a few feet, point the camera in another direction, and we'd be able to see if there were fires on the Mall. Or send someone the several blocks over to the State Department likewise to see if a car bomb had gone off. But no, those stories simply quietly disappeared.

I think both of those stories were plants, and I'm not sure exactly why they were planted. One of the networks claimed the reports came from someone in the DC police department. There used to be a wonderful link to that day's programming, and you could watch all the networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, BBC, CBC, and others) in real time. The link has been broken, or at least I can't find it again. At the very least, it was good for determining what those of us watching TV could know at any given time.

[JackRiddler]

7. think about it...

For now, we're only talking about this one point, okay?

You write: Someone of the many thousands of people who worked in the WTC who didn't die that day would have said, "Jeez, remember how those guys were messing around on our floor back when, and then they systematically seemed to do every floor on the building?"

Not guaranteed. Who is this someone who spends time on EVERY floor of the building? Nearly everyone will just go straight to their own floor, every day, and not notice or talk about some maintenance action. And it's easy to think of a maintenance action that would require workers to go through every floor on the building ("We're rewiring the heating..." or whatever!)

NO ONE has come forward and said anything like that.

How do you know? Pretend you are someone who wanted to. What exactly did you see? What is your suspicion, and what is the basis for it in what you actually saw? Who are you going to take this story to? Why should they take it seriously, risk their career on it? What if you're doubting your own sanity, given how the whole world is already talking about the Official Conspiracy Theory? Isn't it a kind of treason against the people you knew who died, to doubt the official story?

People keep their doubts for decades! To the grave! Fear plus doubt plus not wanting to rock the boat plus cognitive dissonance.

What am I going to believe, the social consensus or my own lying eyes?

[reorg]

8. maintenance action

>And it's easy to think of a maintenance action that would require workers to go through every floor on the building ("We're rewiring the heating..." or whatever!)<

All the more so if such maintenance action had been carried out by a firm that at the same time provided security:

'When, following the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey began its multi-million-dollar, multiyear revamping of security in and around the Twin Towers and Buildings 4 and 5, Securacom was among numerous contractors hired in the upgrade.

The companies doing security jobs received due mention in print, in security industry publications and elsewhere. The board membership of a son of former President Bush went unnoticed, at least in print.

According to SEC filings, Securacom/Stratesec acquired the $8.3 million World Trade Center contract in October 1996. (...)

Barry McDaniel, CEO of the company since January 2002, declines on security grounds to give specific details about work the company did at the World Trade Center. According to McDaniel, the contract was ongoing (a "completion contract"), and "not quite completed when the Center went down." The company designed a system, but -- as he points out -- obviously that "didn't have anything to do with planes flying into buildings."

The key words "access control" are less feeble and irrelevant, however, in regard to airports and airlines. Had the hijackers failed on the ground, they would have lost their airborne weapon.'

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0204-06.htm
http://www.populist.com/03.02.burns.html

[DulceDecorum]

9. Yes dear

whatever you say.
Just don't hit me.