# 9/11 Conspiracy Theories! **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 26, 2006, 10:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948 "2006-03-26T10:02:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 19
**Author:** ![Raygun99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@Raygun99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Raygun99)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2006, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/362 "2006-04-07T21:43:00Z")
Here’s another puzzler - if these CTs have somehow stumbled onto the truth, and have uncovered these massive secrets of these super powerful people who can apparently do anything they want and keep it secret for decades – how is it they haven’t been whisked off to Guantanamo, or buried at the bottom of Lake Michigan, or otherwise disappeared? If the conspiracy really is as evil and nefarious as they claim it is, why compunction would the conspirators have for knocking off some university professor, or random message board poster? ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2006, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/363 "2006-04-07T22:04:43Z")
You don’t even need to disappear them. Just sneak some kiddie-porn onto their computer and some fake IM logs where they solicit sex from 12 year old boys, and suddenly your brave CT is an incarcerated kiddie-diddler. And when they get out after a couple of years, the judge orders them not to use the internet… ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2006, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/364 "2006-04-07T22:18:22Z")
> [@bigpappadiaz](#): > > The force is strong with you Bryan, you may see the light yet. As I’m at work and getting ready to get off early and go skip around the sun, I can’t get to typing a post that could thoroughly answer your question. Trust me though, I will get to answering it because the “why” is every bit as important as the “how,” which is why I’m not going to half-ass it. \*\*Do you have any objective evidence that the World Trade Center was destroyed in the manner you claim? Yes or no?\*\* ---
**Author:** ![Skywatcher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skywatcher/32/254_2.png) [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2006, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/365 "2006-04-07T22:33:04Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > \*\*Do you have any objective evidence that the World Trade Center was destroyed in the manner you claim? \*\* 'Course not. It doesn’t exist, which is how they know it’s a conspiracy. Convenient, ain’t it? ---
**Author:** ![marymargaret](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@marymargaret](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marymargaret)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2006, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/366 "2006-04-07T22:38:12Z")
I don’t believe people think that they could keep a conspiracy this big and far-reaching under cover for any length of time. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2006, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/367 "2006-04-07T22:45:48Z")
> [@Lute Skywatcher](#): > > 'Course not. It doesn’t exist, which is how they know it’s a conspiracy. Convenient, ain’t it? Yeah, I know the standard answer. Thing is… then how do THEY know about it? ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2006, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/368 "2006-04-07T22:52:19Z")
The thing is (since we are at the ‘have some fun with the CT’s who will most likely never return’) with the ‘evidence’ so far presented you could claim that aliens destroyed the WTC as easily as that it was our government. Maybe they used some high tech weapons we know nothing of (some kind of device that once activated by fire exerts a gravity field that brings down buildings). Perhaps it was neither a plane NOR a missile that crashed into the Pentagon…maybe it was an alien drone (filled with air craft parts to fool us). MAYBE the point wasn’t even to attack the US or to start a war. Perhaps it was used to cover up their abduction of all those people on the planes! Or maybe its how these particular aliens say ‘Hi! Howareya? 😛 We want to be your friend!’. -XT ---
**Author:** ![Skywatcher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skywatcher/32/254_2.png) [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2006, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/369 "2006-04-07T23:16:20Z")
One thing everyone should bear in mind is that the towers were not built according to NYC/NYS building or fire codes. What does this mean in regards to their collapse? I have no idea and I doubt anyone else does, either. ---
**Author:** ![Fiveyearlurker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/da6949/32.png) [@Fiveyearlurker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fiveyearlurker)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2006, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/370 "2006-04-08T01:31:33Z")
Out of sheer curiosity (and masochism), how many people do you estimate were in on this conspiracy, **bibpoppadiaz**? How many people alive today know that what happened on September 11th is along the lines of what you say happened? ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2006, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/371 "2006-04-08T02:25:09Z")
> [@bigpappadiaz](#): > > The passport that flew out of the guy’s pocket as he was crashing into the building, that flew through the fireball that destroyed all the black boxes and flew onto the street below? Repeating lies does not make them come true. The fireball would have been behind anyone in the cockpit (or anyone forward of the wing section–more than one third of the occupants of the planes) and there was a lot of stuff discharged out into the streets that never encountered any fire (which was back in the buildings). Pretending that the fireball went through the buildings _ahead_ of the airplanes does not make sense even if one is a CT buff. ---
**Author:** ![bigpappadiaz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a698b9/32.png) [@bigpappadiaz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bigpappadiaz)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2006, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/372 "2006-04-08T04:08:14Z")
And the human whose pocket it flew out of didn’t wind up on the street below. The human had more forward momentum. I’m trying to imagine this, if you want to help convince me, help me envision what kind of process was taking place that would allow this to happen. So his pants get to torn apart around his legs before he stops moving forward, including the dangly white pocket itself, and continues flying forward. Riiiiight. That’s ridiculous enough that it happened to one, but it actually happened to two. Mohamed Atta and Satam al-Sugami’s passport were found lying on the ground outside. No body parts… no blood on the passports from whatever shredded the pants… ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2006, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/373 "2006-04-08T04:10:38Z")
> [@bigpappadiaz](#): > > And the human whose pocket it flew out of didn’t wind up on the street below. The human had more forward momentum. I’m trying to imagine this, if you want to help convince me, help me envision what kind of process was taking place that would allow this to happen. So his pants get to torn apart around his legs before he stops moving forward, including the dangly white pocket itself, and continues flying forward. Riiiiight. \*\*Do you have any objective evidence that the World Trade Center was destroyed by demolitions? \*\* ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Miskatonic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mr.miskatonic/32/310_2.png) [@Mr.Miskatonic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Miskatonic)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2006, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/374 "2006-04-08T04:31:46Z")
> [@bigpappadiaz](#): > > That’s ridiculous enough that it happened to one, but it actually happened to two. Mohamed Atta and Satam al-Sugami’s passport were found lying on the ground outside. No body parts… no blood on the passports from whatever shredded the pants… I’ll take this sudden concentration on an irrelevancy to mean that you are trying hide from the drubbing you took over the structural issues. I love it when people jump from topic to topic to hide the fact that they have nothing substantial. ---
**Author:** ![Skywatcher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skywatcher/32/254_2.png) [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2006, 4:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/375 "2006-04-08T04:33:14Z")
> [@bigpappadiaz](#): > > And the human whose pocket it flew out of didn’t wind up on the street below. The human had more forward momentum. I’m trying to imagine this, if you want to help convince me, help me envision what kind of process was taking place that would allow this to happen. So his pants get to torn apart around his legs before he stops moving forward, including the dangly white pocket itself, and continues flying forward. Riiiiight. Who said the passports have to be in their pants? ---
**Author:** ![Skywatcher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skywatcher/32/254_2.png) [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2006, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/376 "2006-04-08T04:42:03Z")
> [@Dob](#): > > Everything else aside, you have to give **Sent** a nod for passion. He hasnt backed down and contuies the debate…such as it is. He seems to truly believe what he is saying. > > As a slight hi-jack, I wonder if there are any CT that you dont believe in Sent? JFK? Pearl Harbor? Area51? Moon Landings? Lincoln? AIDS? Clinton killing some 58 close associates during his Presidency? MLK? Govt. shiping drugs/guns into black neighborhoods? Using HAARP to control the weather? ---
**Author:** ![E-Sabbath](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e19adc/32.png) [@E-Sabbath](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-Sabbath)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2006, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/377 "2006-04-08T05:03:29Z")
Who said the human didn’t exit the building, too? They keep finding ‘remains’ on rooftops, man. Five years later. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2006, 5:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/378 "2006-04-08T05:26:53Z")
> [@bigpappadiaz](#): > > That’s ridiculous enough that it happened to one, but it actually happened to two. Mohamed Atta and Satam al-Sugami’s passport were found lying on the ground outside. No body parts… no blood on the passports from whatever shredded the pants… You’re making stuff up, again. How do you know that al-Sugami’s passport had no blood and no clothing associated with it? I have not seen that in any reports. Why do you think that he carried it in his pants pocket and not in a jacket (that may have been taken off and left in the cockpit, but not on his person)? Odd bits of personal items are often found near the sites of crashes. Your inability to imagine how that could occur (while vividly imagining burning debris as “molten steel” and similar phenomena) is not really our problem. And you are simply inventing the story about Atta’s passport. It was in perfect condition because, (in a story with which many travelers can relate), Atta’s passport was in his suitcase that did not get loaded aboard the plane. ---
**Author:** ![PBear42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@PBear42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PBear42)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2006, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/379 "2006-04-08T17:03:38Z")
Bigpoppadiaz, thanks for the reply. For reasons others have already pointed out, it demonstrates better than anything I could have written how little merit your position has. For example, no, no one ever claimed bin Laden was in Iraq. If there had been a plot, Saddam is who we would have framed. If you don’t understand that, I can’t help you. The point is that, to have a **theory** , you need a coherent set of ideas that fit together and fit with the world as we know it. Questions are not a theory. Ambiguity is not a theory. Inconsistent evidence is not a theory. Those things can suggest a need for a theory, but cannot serve as a theory in themselves. As you may have noticed from one of my earlier [posts](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=7262027&postcount=122), I stipulate that there are unanswered questions. The problem is that the conspiracy theory is not a plausible answer. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2006, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/380 "2006-04-09T00:47:36Z")
> [@bigpappadiaz](#): > > And the human whose pocket it flew out of didn’t wind up on the street below. The human had more forward momentum. I’m trying to imagine this, if you want to help convince me, help me envision what kind of process was taking place that would allow this to happen. So his pants get to torn apart around his legs before he stops moving forward, including the dangly white pocket itself, and continues flying forward. Riiiiight. > > That’s ridiculous enough that it happened to one, but it actually happened to two. Mohamed Atta and Satam al-Sugami’s passport were found lying on the ground outside. No body parts… no blood on the passports from whatever shredded the pants… This is one of the most minor of points to get hung up on. I watched an office building across the street from me burn one day (this was before 9/11, so I guess it could have been a rehearsal.) At one point when the heat from the fire got intense, windows shattered. The gust blew out scads of paper. Some of it was on fire, some of it was charred, some of it was pristine. Any halfway decent video of the Towers burning shows literally hundreds of pieces of junk coming down. A large quantity of it is not on fire. What does it prove? Sometimes stuff catches on fire, sometimes it doesn’t. **Bigpappadiaz** you’ll help your position greatly if you spend more time if you’d spend more time addressing the bigger questions and clarifying what some skeptics feel are inconsistencies in your version of what happened. Heck, if you have a few minutes, maybe you could answer the question I asked back in post #165 – if the buildings were wired to implode and the planes were simply to mask the evidence, why wasn’t WTC 7 hit by a plane, and why did the conspirators wait seven hours to implode it? Post #98 – Kunilou’s second rule of conspiracies. “The pieces have to fit together.” So far you haven’t done a good job of fitting the pieces together. ---
**Author:** ![bigpappadiaz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a698b9/32.png) [@bigpappadiaz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bigpappadiaz)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2006, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948/381 "2006-04-09T02:31:18Z")
Am I the one getting hung up on minor details? Maybe there were a few things they wanted to get out of building 7 first, while it was empty and evacuated. Files, hard drives, any number of things you could only get away with on a hectic day like that. It could also be one of those "Let’s blow this one up 7 hours later, so those people on the straight dope message boards can ask those crazy conspiracy theorists “Why did they blow it up 7 hours later, huh? It doesn’t make sense! Make it make sense for me!!!” If all the buildings went crashing down at the same damn time that would look way more suspiscious. They were nice symmetrical implosions, all of them. They crashed straight down on their footprints. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948.md?page=18) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/9-11-conspiracy-theories/349948.md?page=20)