This OP is all over the place. You begin by reassuring us that you are no conspiracy theorist, then proceed to lay out a conspiracy theory. You also say you believe the only scenario in which a terror attack occurs is when the government is complicit. Then, in the very next sentence, you say that you could not see the US government being complicit in 9/11.
Um, wha? I’ll just ignore the rest and just respond to the last sentence of the OP; no.
Oh yes: the “Government went along with it” theory requires that the “Government” knew about it.
Before everything went into computers, and the computers are now online, making a permanent audit trail: If I can’t put together a plan without alerting the Government about it, I am a damned fool.
Stories of “After the shooting, police examined his computer and phone and found that he bought the gun from X on May17th, took at train on the 21st and took an Uber ride from the station house to the Plaza” show that, with enough coordination and active searches of simply everything, i would have been possible to prevent the shooting.
It is a huge jump from “with tremendous surveillance of everybody at every time, could have known” to "did know, and therefore must have been complicit.
That is where your CT falls down. Until about 2005, the electronic snooping was not even possible.
As of the date 9/11/01 there was no internet surveillance.
11/22/63 had no idea.
that is a ridiculous statement. There are literally millions of plausible attacks that don’t require Government acquiescence.
Frankly this is about as close to trolling as I see on the Dope.
To answer the OP: No. Not only no but hell no.
Nice movie plot!
The government", no. A few key individuals, quite possibly.
The difficulty of keeping a secret rapidly expands with the number of people involved; which is one of the (many) reasons why something like “the government blew up the Twin Towers” is so implausible. That would have required a large number of people, and somebody would have leaked the secret.
But one or a handful of guys staying passively quiet and letting something happen? Sure, that’s possible. Also nearly impossible to verify unless one of them decides to blurt it out years later, for the same reason it’s workable; doing nothing doesn’t leave evidence.
Depends on what the OP means. George W. Bush ignored a warning about the 9/11 attacks. By doing nothing he allowed the attacks to occur. Does that sound too distant from what the OP is asking? Consider also that his excuse for doing nothing was that he thought it was about some more conventional terrorist attack like an airplane hijacking. Is that allowing a terrorist attack to occur? How far would he have to go to satisfy the OP? Would the terrorists have to call him and get his permission first?
Exactly. But in the scenario I described, there was no terrorist plot for the FBI to discover, so they were out of the loop. Except for the one that was highly classified, so they wouldn’t have know about that.
There are people who know exactly what is going in Area 51. What keeps them silent for decades? How much is the budget for the NSA in Fort Meade? How many employees? Everyone who knows is “told to keep quiet” – and they do.
I doubt most Western governments would. However, it isn’t far-fetched at all. It depends on what the attack is and who would be carrying it out. If a government is trying to rally support for a xenophobic anti-immigration, anti-refugee policy, then I could certainly envision it looking the other way if it found out that a cell of Syrian, Somali or other such refugees were planning an attack, etc.
Similarly, if a government is in favor of gun control, then it might certainly allow a mass shooting to happen, to rally support against guns. Or if it is pro-choice, then maybe an attack on an abortion clinic is just what it needs to win over public opinion. And I think there are some conservatives who feel not-so-subtle joy when there is an Islamic attack on America.
The incentive is certainly there, although I think most leaders are still better than that.
Allow it to happen? Probably not. Take advantage of it? What do you think?.
If one believes that President Felipe González truly didn’t know his Minister of the Interior was organizing a terrorist group, then one believes he’s an idiot.
If one believes that he did know it, then one believes he’s a son of a bitch.
No matter what one believes, the Spanish government didn’t just allow but organize terrorist attacks. And they weren’t even good at it.
ETA: kindly disregard the sideline with the dates. Whomever wrote it had his head so far up his ass he could smell his own stomach.
usedtobe writes:
> Almost all elected officials at the Federal level are rich!
i don’t know what you define “rich” to be. First, I assume you do know that the term “elected officials at the Federal level” encompasses exactly 537 people: the President, the Vice-President, the 100 Senators, and the 435 Representatives. I’ve just looked at some websites about the net worth of the current Congress. Most estimates say that somewhat more than half of them have a net worth of more than a million dollars. Is a million dollars of net worth (note: of net worth, not annual income) enough to be considered rich? Is it even very well off for people of their background, given that most people in Congress are at least middle-aged and well educated?
Western Government? :rolleyes:
I doubt any Government would tolerate a terrorist attack on its soil, a government which loses the monopoly of force on its territory is no longer a Government. The only exception I can think of is tactical, a Government might not swoop in immdietly or permit an attack on a defended installation in the hope of capturing or killing more.
This. People were aghast in 2002 when it was revealed (or merely asserted) that the government already had a plan for invading Iraq, during the very early stages of saber-rattling. Big deal. I hope (and expect) that they did have a pre-written plan; I hope they have a plan drawn up for attacking just about every country in the world. You don’t start arming/training your military on the day that you send them into battle, and you don’t ask your strategists for a battle plan the day before. Plans should be drawn up well in advance, and then as current events unfold only minor adjustments need to be made in the months leading up to their actual implementation.
A reminder that Evil Defense Contractors and Evil Government Officials want to protect their own lives and those of their families and friends, so the idea of a conspiracy to allow terrorist attacks that might kill or maim them is idiotic. Happily making money from preparations to prevent/repel such attacks is another matter.
This conspiracy angle makes as much sense as the commonly heard meme about Big Pharma and scientist stooges conspiring to prevent cancer cures from coming to market and suppressing cheap natural cures. Pharma Conspirators are just as susceptible to cancer as everyone else (not to mention the fabulous sums that could be made from a huge treatment breakthrough).
Uh, you’re saying that defense contractors may be planning, or did plan, terrorist attacks on the United States in order to increase profits?
The public may not know the exact details of what happens at Area 51, but it is generally known that it is a secret test range for aircraft. There’s been plenty of books written about the NSA for decades, even setting aside Snowden, including ones by James Bamford that surely address your last two questions.
The reason more isn’t disclosed about those types of secrets is that people who work on them are screened and investigated to try to make sure that they believe our national security depends on keeping quiet about what they work on. This system works most of the time, but not perfectly.
People are not screened to keep quiet about government-sponsored plots to murder fellow Americans (including fellow national security professionals working at the Pentagon on 9/11, for example). There’s no reason to expect that people would be generally motivated to keep secrets about government plots to murder Americans in order to increase corporate profits. That’s batshit crazy talk.
More specifically, the wife of the then-Solicitor General of the United States was killed on 9/11.
I think it’s possible that some people suppressed stuff concerning the strange dudes at flight schools that local FBI offices were reporting to HQ. If so, the plan wasn’t to allow 9/11 to happen as it did. They might have thought that it was smaller scale, they’d prevent it as it was going on, etc. But it didn’t end up like that.
It’s really odd that the response the local FBI guys got was to stop wasting time on the flight school stuff. Really odd.
If Hitler went so far as to stage a false-flag attack on the Reichstag, I can certainly envision some governments learning about an upcoming attack being plotted by “undesirable” peoples and thinking, “This is just what we need, to better stir up furor against undesirable population X.”
Some governments? Which ones did you have in mind? Which ones do you think have the flow of information so tightly controlled that the decision-makers have absolute confidence in the foreverafter silence of all of those under them who might know of their conspiracy?
We’re not talking about a conspiracy that starts at the top and spreads only to a trusted cadre of co-conspirators. This is about random field agents learning of an imminent attack, passing the info up the chain of command, and later (after the attack) noticing that nothing was ever done about it. The higher-ups would have to believe that nobody in that entire chain would testify before congress that they had prior information about the attack.
No. I was asked to suggest a “plausible mechanism”, and I did.
YES!
Many politicians are “bought and paid for” by large corporations. Those corporations can include military contractors.
So to these folks, getting into a war could be a big money maker for their companies. And they would show their appreciation to any politicians who “play along”.
Once the politician is out of office, these corporations invite them to speak and pay them QUITE well. Foreign countries do this as well.
This is the way our world works.