9/11 Challenge

Great Debates
1

Most people know by now that there is a small minority of people who think 9/11 was what they call an inside job. This self-labeled 9/11 “Truth” movement has spent the last few years invading Ground Zero, downtown artwalks, and internet messageboards with their chants of “Investigate 9/11!”, “Google WTC7!” and so on. They spend the majority of their time and energy attempting to poke holes in what they call the Official Story of 9/11 by asking questions. When their questions are answered or proven to be flawed, they back off of that point momentarily and defend themselves by saying, Hey, I’m Just Asking Questions. When the dust settles and everyone is satisfied that the matter is resolved once and for all, the same question is asked again and the process starts all over. This tactic is so ubiquitous among members of the Movement that it has been affectionately dubbed “JAQing off.”

Well, 9/11 Truthers, we’ve answered your questions for 8 years now. From Dancing Jews to WTC7 to missiles at the Pentagon and on and on, we’ve been patient and forthcoming. It’s your turn to answer some questions.

What the Truth Movement has not provided, among all their question asking, is a comprehensive alternative theory of what happened on 9/11/01. Not one of them has a consistent story of what happened; only what they insist didn’t happen. Any good detective knows that in order to completely solve a crime, you need to answer Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. Some are given.

Who:
What: A terrorist attack on the United States
Where: NYC, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, PA
When: 9/11/01
Why:
How:

That only leaves you with Who, Why, and How to answer.

You need to provide a comprehensive theory that makes logical and factual sense. Use evidence, facts, credible testimony, and common sense. Professional and academic consensus on a matter are big supporting points in your favor and you are encouraged to cite such, when and where they exist. The credibility of a source will be scrutinized, of course. If a person should happen to have spent most of his or her career chasing, say, cold fusion, or trying to prove Jesus visited America, for instance, that person’s credibility will be very low. Likewise, if someone should happen to be from a completely unrelated field (e.g. theology), his or her expertise will be appropriately weighted.

Your theory will not include questions (“why did . . . ?”, “how were the laws of . . . ?”) You have had 8 years to ask questions and if you genuinely want the answer to one at this point, it’s out there. Google it or keep it to yourself. It’s your turn to be questioned now. Your theory will not include large leaps of logic (e.g. “it was a hypothetical group of trillionaire bankers”) or large gaps in evidence ("I’ve got it all except why the explosive didn’t make any noise . . . ")

In short: Provide a comprehensive alternative theory of what happened on 9/11/01 using facts, evidence, and logic.

At minimum, you must name WHO did it, HOW they were able to pull it off and get away with it, and WHY they did it (motive.) I’m not interested in 1 or 2 of the three. I don’t want pieces to a puzzle. Put the puzzle together. There is already one puzzle out there that has been pieced together carefully and consistently by thousands of professionals, academics, and eyewitnesses. A few jigsaw pieces will not compete with it. If you have two pieces and cannot make them fit with the third, then you need to consider that the two pieces you have are wrong.

If you can pull this off in a satisfactory, logically-consistent, fact-and-evidence-based manner, I personally promise to buy an “Investigate 9/11” tshirt, a bullhorn, and a “9/11 Was an Inside Job” picket sign and picket any location of your choice. I’ll even videotape myself doing it. And I’ll mean it with all my heart.

8 years, Truthers. Put up or shut up.

2

You know, I’d love to participate, but I’ve been real busy performing surveillance on Kris Kristofferson and trying to find out where the Reptilians hold their meetings. I’ll be checking up on this thread with interest, though.

3

No one can meet the criteria of the OP.

The OP insists on “evidence, facts, credible testimony, and common sense” as well as refusing anything that does not provide all three of Who, How and Why.

Thing is, at the least, the “Why” is impossible to answer unless those responsible fess up why they did it. Certainly some could speculate but that is all it is so misses facts and such.

NOTE: I do not buy into any 9/11 conspiracy theories. Just pointing out a problem with the question.

I’ll take a stab for fun though.

WHO: Bush & Co.

HOW: Demolition charges (the planes were smoke and mirrors…nevermind details of how you place those demolition charges on buildings that big and no one notices…would just confuse you)

WHY: Wag the Dog (more specifically to make money for Halliburton and give an excuse to go after the meanie who threatened Dubya’s daddy).

4

Motive is a critical issue in a trial. There is an existing motive, and a competing theory would do well to present a competing motive. Else it will look like a less complete and less explanatory theory. The goal of a competing theory is to better explain something, not less sufficiently explain it.

I don’t want people “taking stabs for fun” here. I want a competing theory that holds water.

5

Let me get my toothpicks…

6

Then you’re going to find bitter failure on the “How” front. (The other two aren’t hard at all.)

7

I don’t know if it’s the date or what, but there seems to be a little spike in 9/11 interest around here lately, and we seem to have a few extra truthers around besides the usual suspects, I’d like to give them a chance to respond.

8

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/BREAKING_NIST_<I>finally<I>_poses_theory_on_0821.html Ok. it is no fun if someone doesn’t play. According to this, in bldg 7,only 2 stories were on fire. It was not subject to airplane fuel. It was not a tube bldg like the powers. A steel frame bldg has never collapsed due to fire. This one dropped 7 hours later. The owner made a shithouse of insurance money.

9

It is not that i believe it was a conspiracy. I doubt it. But I remain neutral. i am sure nobody would think 2 huge bldgs would collapse to the ground after getting bumped into by airplanes. Osama got lucky. I bet his reaction was .“oh shit, they are not going to let this go without raising hell”.

10

This was my view as well. I think they expected to kill quite a few people and make nice, big, public spectacle. I suspect their response to the collapse was something along the lines of, “Aw, hell yeah! We kicked ass! Huh… oh, man, we’re kinda screwed now, aren’t we?”

11

How much money are the main conspiracy theorists making out of their conspiracy theories?

12

FTR, I consider myself a member of the 9/11 truth movement, however I don’t think that means you have to believe the towers were brought down with explosives or anything.

I think anyone with serious questions about 9/11 that haven’t been answered is a truther.

Can I offer an alternative explanation to 9/11? No. That is why I support an open investigation with subpoena power.

For example, during the 9/11 investigation it was found that the landlord of some of the 9/11 hijackers was an FBI informant who informed on radical islamism. To my knowledge, he wasn’t allowed to testify about what he knew.

Sibel Edmonds claims that she came across documents showing an informant in (I believe) Afghanistan warned us about an upcoming terror attack. She was (to my knowledge) left out of the 9/11 investigation.

The US got something like 20 warnings from 14 countries in the months before 9/11. Why weren’t they followed up?

I think its sad that status quo dogmatism has replaced legitimate skepticism, and asking serious questions like this makes you a conspiracy theorist.

Now if (heavy on the if) you wanted me to offer unfounded speculation without serious evidence as to the who or why, assuming 9/11 was an inside job, I would guess it had to do with peak oil. I would assume certain people high in the administration realized peak oil, when it hit in the next decade (2010-2020) would lead to widespread domestic unrest and to a massive realpolitik power advantage to any country that had control over the world’s oil resources. So if (heavy, heavy on the if) 9/11 was somehow a MIHOP or LIHOP, it was probably done so that the US would have the domestic legislation to put down civil unrest due to peak oil (the PATRIOT ACT) and so that we would have a strong military presence in oil heavy middle eastern countries which we could use as leverage against nations like China. We have conquered Iraq and we have Iran surrounded.

13

Why not NYC instead? I personally have no doubt that at the very least we knew something was coming and if we did not outright facilitate it, got out of its way.

Kissinger also said something like oil is too important a resource to be left in the hands of the Arabs.

And from another Nazi we have:

14

Few of the warnings went through the same channels. All of the disparate groups in the intelligence community are rabidly jealous of their own turf, refusing to share information, even today, after the DHS was created explicitly to get them to cooperate. (Remember how many of the agencies lobbied their favorite congresscriter or White House staffer to find ways to get their agancy excluded from DHS? After they were ordered to join forces, they simply ignored the directives–and the WTC/Pentagon attacks occured prior to their forced unions.) No warning, by itself, carried enough credibility to get it passed up to a high enough level of command where an actual intelligence analyst would determine a pattern.

Not quite as famous as Occam’s Razor, but every bit as useful in analysis, is Hanlon’s Razor
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

No one who has ever worked in a large organization of many departments that need to share knowlwdge would ever get hung up on the idea that “they were TOLD.”

Asking a question does not bring on a label of CT, by itself. Asking the same tired and long-answered questions over and over, then switching to a different question the moment the first has been demonstrated to have been answered will earn one the label CT.

15

More like, “Whoopee! They are not going to let this go without raising hell!”. Bin Laden wanted us to raise hell. We gave him exactly what he wanted.

16

Why, when stupidity is so often a cloak for criminal behavior? Stupidity whether out of the loop or just out to lunch is the essence of deniability.

17

A theory I consider plausible, but hard-to-impossible to prove:

Who: Al Qaeda, with the Bush Administration trying very hard to let them succeed.
What: A terrorist attack on the United States
Where: NYC, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, PA
When: 9/11/01
Why: **Al Qaeda’s own goals, and in order to give the neocons the political capital they wanted. They even said they wanted something of the sort, a “New Pearl Harbor”. **
How: On the Bush Administration’s part, simply not doing their job properly. Ignoring warnings, looking the other way.

It’s not provable short of a confession, since you’d have to be able to read minds to tell if they were being willfully incompetent. And unlike the “FEMA Ninjas mined the Towers with thermite” style theories it doesn’t require huge numbers of people ( who would eventually talk ) but just a few at the top; it has a known motive; and it doesn’t ignore the laws of physics or engineering.

If it’s true and the facts come out, I expect it’ll be one of those “thirty years later blank admits the truth” things, and we’ll be old and grey or dead.

Actually, the Bush Adminstration and Bush himself were warned that something was coming, and were warned that Osama was planning something by the outgoing Clinton Administration. Bush’s response was to order the hunt for Bin Laden called off as soon as he got into office. And to dismiss warnings from his own people.

The problem with that is that it leaves you highly vulnerable to people who ARE motivated by malice ( or greed, or whatever ). Almost anything can be explained by stupidity. Especially if the people in question really ARE incompetent, like Bush and friends.

18

In this case, let’s not forget that willful incompetence is not incompetence. They were quite competent in getting us into two wars.

19

Stupidity does not remove culpability.

It does, however, argue against malice–and a conspiracy requires malice, (or, at least, intent). Very few drunk drivers set out to kill specific victims. Drunks are still held liable for their actions, but it would be silly to guess that most DUI fatalities are acts of premeditated murder.

In the same way, it makes more sense that a number of insular agencies, who have long histories of jealously guarding what they know, simply followed years of tradition and failed to pool thier knowledge, thus missing an opportunity to identify and thwart an attack, than it does to believe that those same agencies actually put aside their differences, on only one single occasion, pooled their knowledge, discovered the pattern and plot, and then were told to sit back and ignore the attack, and then those same agencies invested all sorts of effort into painting themselves as idiots who were too stupid to share information–and not one person among all the participants has come forward in the last eight years to cry “Foul!”.

20

I’m not sure if this is the kind of 911 theory you’re looking for, since the planes and buildings still play out as commonly believed.
I think some people still question whether W somehow had a hand in it. He had a life in oil, had had business relations with the Bin Ladens, became president, then got us into 2 wars in the ME via the ‘political device’ of OBL. If OBL really did maintain his ties with the CIA (and Bush Elder was head of the CIA, he had access to at least info on OBL prior to all this), perhaps this moveable terrorist was supported in putting together the 911 plot, spotlighting the ME while the US was a nest of pissed hornets, and blammo- our armies are again marching across the world. Why? Maybe Bush had a Napoleon complex, though one that hinged on his small brain rather than his short stature.

Not very well put I admit, and probably false to boot, but there you go. This article goes into details of W’s business life.

I know you don’t want questions, but hey, I didn’t write 'em.