Another conspiracy theory crawls out of the woodwork.

Great Debates
1

On a board I frequently post at, there is a guy who is a left-wing anarchist. He started posting regularly after a few of us from this board infiltrated the “justicefiles” message board and asked the admin (who we soon discovered was Bill Sheehan) some pointed questions. Needless to say, this poster (Drew Hendricks) who had no association with Sheehan ended up adressing all the questions we asked, while Mr. Bill basically told us to “**** off” (rather amusing considering Bill’s page encouraged open debate, that is, open debate if you agreed with him.)

So recently Drew posted a conspiracy theory of his own at http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=66651&group=webcast.

The article is quoted below (bear in mind I don’t subscribe to his opinion, I’m only posting this to hear other Doper’s thoughts). Also anyone who wants to can go to the above URL and post responses to Drew as well. (I find it rather amusing that he mentions the Pearl Harbor conspiracy, although it appears he at least doesn’t buy into that one.)

2

Since for some reason the board won’t let me edit my posts, I’m posting a new message.

It appears that a period ended up in the URL above, so when clicked on it bypasses the original message from Drew.

New URL: http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=66651&group=webcast

3

I’m surprised at Newsweek, publishing something so paranoid. “Pentagon Officials canceled their trip, but we can’t tell you who told us that, because if They found out that we told you, They would have us killed…”

Betcha a nickel there’s a perfectly rational reason why “certain Pentagon officials” canceled a trip the day before.

And I don’t see the point of the “CIA couldn’t find him even though he was living at the Marriott Hotel” squib. In a word–huh? So he wasn’t where he said he was going to be, so what?

I’m not following the logic of the “Gas Pipeline” argument, either. The Feds blew up the WTC and the Pentagon so as to ensure the continued possession by someone of a single gas pipeline, but who? Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Iran? I have the feeling there’s a paragraph missing. And what does Haig have to do with it?

4

I suspect the pipe-line the poster is refering to is the pipe which was planned to be build from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan by the Californian company UNOCAL, whith the participation of several other countries (South Korea, Japan, and some others I can’t remember). It has been said that this pipe-line project was the main reason for the supposed continued support to the Talibans by the CIA after the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan. There were concurrent projects involving Iran, and another involving, I believe, China. A lot of people/copanies/countries are interested in Turkmenistan’s gas. The UNOCAL project has been abandonned in 1998, when the US attacked Afghanistan.

5

clairobscur wrote:

That’s odd. According to this chart from the U.S. Department of Energy, Turkmenistan produced less than a quadrillion BTUs of natural gas in 1999. Compare this with the U.S., which produced 19 quadrillion BTUs of natural gas in 1999, and Russia, which produced nearly 21 quadrillion BTUs of natural gas in 1999.

Why would Turkmenistan’s paltry 0.82 BTUs of natural gas be of such overwhelming economic importance?

6

(correction: Turkmenistan’s paltry 0.82 quadrillion BTUs of natural gas. 0.82 BTUs is less than the amount of heat generated by burning one wooden match.)

7

I bet those planes actually took off from the grassy knoll.

8

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by tracer *
**clairobscur wrote:

I asked Drew about this and here’s his response:

**

9

So they are willing to sacrifice 7,000-8,000 lives, wreck the Pentagon, bring the country to a recession, and in the process revitalize the career of Rudolph Guiliani, the one person who made a career out of stopping criminal business cartels, for what? A little oil in the 23rd century? What about dilithium crystals then?

Besides, this potential pipe is going through Afghanistan. What is to prevent pipe tapping on part of the impoverished, to the extent of what is happening in Nigeria, or even of a larger scale?

You gotta do better conspiracy than that. I have a simpler idea of what happened: I think that this is a conspiracy by the cable and satellite dish operators and cable networs, so that there will be no more free TV in the New York area. CNN and the other cable news stations are involved because their ratings were very poor for the longest while. It needed a crisis to boost the ratings. So what is a better way of doing both things at once than dealing with terrorists to knock out the WTC. A few lives will be lost, but therewill be a lot more cable subscriptions of people who have to watch it all on CNN or on Fox News. And sure enough, the networks affected by the WTC collapes suggested that it will take at least 1-3 years to have the reception quality it had at the WTC.)

Notice how they manage to stifle the fact that many of the terrorists involved were already questioned, and that no intelligence agerncy of the government, except for a select few well-placed news sources, managed to ‘put it together’. Also note the lack of reporters dying as a result of these terrorist acts. Hmm…

10

But, as in all conspiracies, there has to be more. Now, who else benefits from the tragedy? Of course, Amtrak!! Look at the hugely increased ridership and cargo supplies on part of the freight RR companies after all flights were banned. How come nobody is looking at that connection? Just weeks ago there were talks of putting it out of business or privatizing it. There must be huge fans of Amtrak, or Amtrak personnel looking desparately to save their jobs. What is a better way of showing the viability of the railroad, than exposing airline security, or the lack of it thereof? I suggest that the FBI investigate aiplane personnel and check for those who used to work for Amtrak or other RR companies, I believe that there you will find your boxcutter smugglers.

11

Good points. However, Drew just posted a link that although still doesn’t provide any proof to a conspiracy, does raise some questions about possible alterior motives.

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/oil.html

12

If the US government had really been seeking an excuse to attack Afghanistan, couldn’t they have used Bin Laden’s other bombings?

I don’t think that there would be much need to wait for an event so dramatic that it threatens to tip the West well into recession.

13

Maybe they didn’t think they could get the rest of the world behind them until now?

I don’t believe the U.S. had anything to do with the attacks (if our government wanted to create a reason to attack Afghanistan, there no doubt would have been much better ways to go about it for everyone concerned), but it does raise the question of are we doing all this purely to stop terrorism, or are there other underlying motives.

The guy from UNOCAL seemed to think that running a pipeline through Afghanistan would be a good idea. The U.S. could have the chance to set up a new regime loyal to the U.S. in Afghanistan, which would no doubt expedite a building of a pipeline there.

14

Wow. This is kind of sad. I recently read that in Indonesia there is a conspiracy theory which says the WTC attacks were masterminded by Jews, hoping to provoke the US into attacking Islam and consolidating US-Israeli relations.

So we have the capitalists and the Jews…I guess the gays and the blacks will be next.

15

Can you prove the Taliban would not permit a pipeline through Afghanistan? I have read other sources that say they are amenable to the idea. I think Unocal would have bribed the Taliban before letting the WTC get blown up.

As for Roosevelt, it is not clear he knew about the attack in advance. Yes, there was the “East Wind Rain” intercept, and some other things. Not exactly a clear-cut case of duplicity.

The “foreknowledge” point is pretty weak. There were terrorist warnings all the time for years leading up to the WTC.

Also, the attack hurt our economy, cut oil consumption, and caused a dramatic rollback in prices. Cut off nose = spite face. I think this is hogwash.

16

Unocal pulled out for several reasons. I guess there is an argument that a different government in Afghanistan could have produced some advantages. Or, Unocal could have tried to moderate the Taliban slightly and push for international recogniton. That seems smarter than letting the WTC get blown up. Anyhoo, the other arguments need no correction.

17

Okay, let’s see if I’m following this. From the Congressional Record link.

So, in order to get extra pipelines built through Afghanistan, the U.S. would have to get rid of the Taliban. The best excuse to get rid of the Taliban would be to declare that they’re harboring terrorists, and here’s Bin Laden ready to hand, ready to blame for something. So the Feds blow up the Pentagon and the WTC, kill 6,000 people, and blame it all on Osama Bin Laden and declare war on the Taliban, just so’s we can put a couple more oil pipelines through Afghanistan.

Hmmm…

Nope, sorry, it doesn’t work for me.

But here’s my theory, FWIW.

Last year Motorola was in deep doo-doo, especially their cell phone division. They were laying people off by the thousands.

http://216.34.146.180/toit/08info7.htm

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/breaking/0906motorola06-ON.html

But now Motorola stock is doing much better.

http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/10/12/europe.markets/index.html

What changed? Iridium satellite phones were the only phones that continued to work at Ground Zero in the hours after WTC.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/13/satellite-phones.htm#more

Made by Motorola.

However, the boom isn’t panning out quite the way they hoped–

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3T6MJMXSC

–so this is probably the source of the predictions of more bombings of shopping malls at Halloween. They’ve gotta get all those American soccer moms behind the “buy an Iridium phone” program.

Hey, if Drew can have the Feds doing it for cheap gasoline, I guess I can have Motorola doing it for telephones. :smiley:

18

I thought Iridium went bankrupt and let all their satellites fall out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.

Also, any honest book on cryptography written after the 1970s will tell you that the US did not have any advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. There have also been several threads here on that point, in which the case for a conspiracy has been pretty thoroughly dismantled.

19

waterj2 wrote:

AFAIK, Motorola sold off (or is in the process of selling off) its unprofitable Iridium satellites to other companies.

Satellites in Low Earth Orbit, such as Iridium, are indeed subject to slight amounts of drag from the outermost fringes of Earth’s atmosphere. Such satellites have to be designed with orbital-correction thrusters, which can provide tiny amounts of oomph to the satellite every so often and thereby keep its orbit from decaying. But once such a self-contained low-Earth-orbiting satellite is up there, as far as I know, it costs next-to-nothing to just keep firing its orbital-correction thrusters on the regular pre-programmed schedule. The satellite is built and launched with enough fuel on board to perform orbital-correction thruster burns for several years.

Motorola would have had no reason to shut off these orbital-correction burns. In fact, had they done so, they would have lost all the potential revenue they could have gotten from selling the satellites to other companies – such a move would probably violate the Prudent Man Rule that corporations are required to follow.