Give me your 9/11 conspiracy theories! And/or their debunking

[Cisco]

@ivan_astikov

Any chance of an answer to this?
Cisco, if all you have to contribute to the thread is whining, why don’t you save yourself the stress and browse elsewhere?

I won’t put a percentage on how convinced I am of the “official conspiracy theory”, but I’m ever going to become 100% certain like some of you here, it won’t be by calling me “pathetic”, “twoofer”, or any other derogatory term, for merely having the temerity to air my doubts!

If you demonstrated a modicum of integrity, desire to participate in honest discussion, and willingness to admit you’re wrong and change your beliefs when they are proven wrong - or even a willingness not to give the benefit of the doubt to outlandish claims that favor your desired conclusions - you would be treated much differently in these discussions.

And the only thing we’re 100% certain of is that every single claim the “truth” movement has ever made is demonstrably fabricated, from controlled demolition, to dancing Jews, to missiles, to insurance profiteering. If there is a real conspiracy, you guys are distracting from it.

Yes, ivan, anything’s possible; a miniature howler monkey might be living on the backside of Janet Reno’s nutsack, but unless you can prove it using logic, evidence, and facts, I’m not going to waste my time believing it.

Don’t you think a left-leaning board full of skeptics and science-minded people would be all over this if there was the slightest bit of credence to it?

[XT]

@Cisco

Yes, ivan, anything’s possible; a miniature howler monkey might be living on the backside of Janet Reno’s nutsack, but unless you can prove it using logic, evidence, and facts, I’m not going to waste my time believing it.

Er…CISCO? I think this one is actually true…

-XT

[dropzone]

@tomndebb

This is ridiculous!
Here we have a perfectly nice CT thread going and you want to calmly post facts and draw logical conclusions with no histrionics or wild accusations. You’re going to ruin the thread!
Yeeesh!

Wigga*, please. I have confined my histrionics and wild accusations to the Flight 800 thread.

• • Good Lord, I hope that was taken in the parodic sense it intended! :eek:

[dropzone]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

Is that entirely plausible? Could a flight student, flying a real jetliner for the first time in his life, pull this off after hearing about it for the first time only that morning?

Shit-o-dear, the first challenge in the old DOS version of Microsoft Flight Simulator, long considered a DAMNED accurate model of flying an airplane, was to NOT fly into the John Hancock building. Those students didn’t have to do the hard parts, like takeoff and landing. They only had to swing an airliner, which they were trained (though not much else), into a heading and to make the adjustments needed to maintain that heading. And the second plane was BANKING because his heading was wrong. These guys were not the products of Top Gun school, and they cared nothing about the comfort of their passengers.

ETA: Staying airborne and pointed the right way is the easy part.

[CurtC]

@RogueAOV

My secondary point, is the molten steel in the basement found while clearing the wreckage.

Now my understanding is, that the fire could not have been hot enough to melt the steel, but it certainly would weaken the steel, so why was there any molten steel at all, barring some kind of explosive, or thermite etc?

Do you have credible reports that there really was molten steel? Did anyone test its temperature? Could some people have seen molten aluminum and described it as steel? Could some people have seen red-hot (but not actually liquid) steel and described it as “molten”?

Further, how would red-hot metals, weeks after 9/11, be a sign of thermite? Thermite is a chemical mix that has all the reactants self-contained, therefore it burns quickly, like in seconds. I doubt any thermite was used in the towers, but if it had been, it would have cooled off within minutes or hours.

The red-hot metals weeks later points to only one thing: underground fires. Underground fires burn slowly because they’re starved for oxygen, but they’re typically very hot because they’re well insulated.

Red-hot metal weeks later is in no way evidence of thermite, nor of explosives (btw, metals that have been blasted with explosives are cool within seconds).

Another issue is have is, denying molten steel

Watch that again, with what I said above in mind. There are no credible reports of molten steel in the rubble pile.

Now if i may ask a new question, is there anything in the official theory that the conspiracy deniers have issue with, like i do?

First, what you’re calling the “official theory” is not official. It’s the story put together by thousands and thousands of witnesses and investigators. To answer your question, I can’t think of anything in the standard story that I have an issue with.

[tomndebb]

@RogueAOV

My secondary point, is the molten steel in the basement found while clearing the wreckage.

There was no molten steel in or under the collapsed buildings. The claims of “molten steel” can all be traced back to exactly three reports: two of them are by people who simply do not have the knowledge to recognize actual molten steel (and who did not even pretend to witness it, merely commenting that it “was there”) and the third was a second-hand report by a person who was, himself, repeating a casual comment that was not intended to indicate actual molten steel.

For further information, search Great Debates or The BBQ Pit for username tomndebb and the word “molten”.

[CurtC]

@xtisme

No idea where this obsession with thermite comes from either…

AFAIK, the thermite idea was from Steven Jones of BYU. The collapse of the towers looked like a demolition to some people (who aren’t that familiar with what demolitions look like), but demolitions come with very loud explosions heard for miles around. Since there were no loud explosions, Jones apparently came across info on thermite, and hypothesized how it could be used to bring a building down.

The idea has myriad problems - thermite gets extremely hot, but tends to fall straight down. Getting it to cut a vertical column would require some inventiveness. Control of where it melts a structural element would not be precise.

It burns within several seconds, but real building demolition companies need fraction-of-a-second timing.

This is why thermite is never ever ever used in real building demolitions.

It was some later Truthers who couldn’t think of an explanation for the long-duration fires, and applied the thermite idea to explain it. But that one is just idiotic.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

I’d like to give a direct response to everybody, hopefully tonight.

I think it was an error on my part to label this thread the way I did. My real concerns are with the suspicious nature of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Because those real timelines extend to before 911, and because 911 seems to have been used as an excuse to further other motives, I included it in my review of the situation, including a review of the demolition theory.

While the demolition theorists have some interesting links that flesh out other parts of the story for me, I really couldn’t sustain interest in that aspect of the issue for long- it does seem not to be true. I think I said essentially that on page 1 of this thread. I get the feeling I’m being lumped in with demolition theorists.

My method (Cartesian doubt) seems to be causing some people a lot of distress. Sorry. It seems to have worked, as in this case of ME history what I believed (or was led to believe) wasn’t entirely accurate. Doubting the whole mess and starting over has winnowed out some results.

1. Looks like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan didn’t unfold the away I’d been assuming all along. The ‘The CIA sparked it’ explanation, while I suppose still plenty debatable, provides things like a motive for the 911 attacks and also a pre-existing motive for our over-heated interest in the area in the first place, among other things.

2. The thread hasn’t got into this, but the legal status of Afghanistan has caused me a lot of questioning. There wasn’t really a formal government in Afghanistan. Check out this clip from UN resolution 1267, demanding the turnover of Bin Laden in 1999:

1. Insists that the Afghan faction known as the Taliban, which also calls
   itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, comply promptly with its previous
   resolutions and in particular cease the provision of sanctuary and training for
   international terrorists and their organizations, take appropriate effective
   measures to ensure that the territory under its control is not used for
   terrorist installations and camps, or for the preparation or organization of
   terrorist acts against other States or their citizens, and cooperate with
   efforts to bring indicted terrorists to justice;

Here and other places in the document, the Taliban is referred to as an ‘Afghanistan faction’. Kind of like a more-successful warlord group than a formal government, if I’m getting the analogy straight. Other sources have mentioned that only 4 countries in the world recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan.

I don’t think it has been at all obvious that this is a cause of my distress. Afghanistan in a way was just a label for a bit of territory in the ME- formally, it was nominally, if at all, a country. So the idea of ‘War with Afghanistan’ or ‘Afghan culpability’ is problematic. The details are another story.

I hope that clears up where I am coming from.

[XT]

@Try2B Comprehensive

1. Looks like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan didn’t unfold the away I’d been assuming all along. The ‘The CIA sparked it’ explanation, while I suppose still plenty debatable, provides things like a motive for the 911 attacks and also a pre-existing motive for our over-heated interest in the area in the first place, among other things.

I figured you didn’t actually understand the explanation I gave you earlier on this. As I pointed out up thread you need to read your own cite in the context of what was going on at the time. The short answer is that the CIA didn’t ‘spark’ the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan…a Marxist coup by the PDPA is what set the events in motion. What ‘sparked’ the invasion was the initial resistance to the PDPA by the fundamentalist Islamic factions in the country which was quite violent (I believe a bunch of Soviet’s were also killed). The CIA 's part in all this was peripheral (at best), until well after the Soviets have invaded and the Afghani’s started seriously resisting.

From Wiki:

nitiation of the insurgency

In June 1975, militants from the Jamiat Islami party attempted to overthrow the government. They started the rebellion in the Panjshir valley, some 100 kilometers north of Kabul, and in a number of other provinces of the country. However, government forces easily defeated the insurgency and a sizable portion of the insurgents sought refuge in Pakistan where they enjoyed the support of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government, that had been alarmed by Daoud’s revival of the Pashtunistan issue.[12]

In 1978 the Taraki government initiated a series of reforms, including modernization of the Afghan Civil and especially marriage law, aimed at “uprooting feudalism” in Afghan society.[13] The government brooked no opposition to the reforms[11] and responded with great force to unrest. Between April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979, an estimated 27,000 political prisoners were executed at the notorious[14] Pul-e-Charkhi prison, including many village mullahs and headmen.[15] Other members of the traditional elite, the religious establishment and intelligentsia fled the country.[15]

Consequently, the reaction against the reforms was violent, and large parts of the country went into open rebellion. The Parcham Government claimed that 11,000 were executed during the Amin/Taraki period in response to the revolts.[7] The revolt began in October among the Nuristani tribes of the Kunar Valley, and rapidly spread among the other ethnic groups, including the Pashtun majority. The Afghan army fought back violently, but couldn’t subdue the large insurgency. By the spring of 1979, 24 of the 28 provinces had suffered outbreaks of violence.[16] The rebellion began to take hold in the cities: in March 1979 in Herat Afghan rebels led by Ismail Khan massacred approximately 10 Afghan soldiers. The Afghan Air Force retaliated by a bombing campaign that killed 24,000 inhabitants of the city.[17] Despite these drastic measures, by the end of 1980, the 360,000 soldiers strong Afghan Army were greatly outnumbered by the rebels.[18]

The Afghan government repeatedly requested the introduction of Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 1979. They requested Soviet troops to provide security and to assist in the fight against the mujahideen rebels. On 14 April 1979 the Afghan government requested that the USSR send 15 to 20 helicopters with their crews to Afghanistan, and on June 16th the Soviet government responded and sent a detachment of tanks, BMPs, and crews to guard the government in Kabul and to secure the Bagram and Shindand airfields. In response to this request, an airborne battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel A. Lomakin, arrived at the Bagram Air Base on 7 July. They arrived without their combat gear, disguised as technical specialists. They were the personal bodyguards for President Taraki. The paratroopers were directly subordinate to the senior Soviet military adviser and did not interfere in Afghan politics.

After a month, the Afghan requests were no longer for individual crews and subunits, but for regiments and larger units. On July 19th, the Afghan government requested that two motorized rifle divisions be sent to Afghanistan. The following day, they requested an airborne division in addition to the earlier requests. They repeated these requests and variants to these requests over the following months right up to December 1979. However, the Soviet government was in no hurry to grant these requests.

The anti-communist rebels also garnered support from the United States. As stated by the former director of the CIA and current Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, in his memoirs From the Shadows, the American intelligence services began to aid the rebel factions in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet deployment. On July 3, 1979, US President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order authorizing the CIA to conduct covert propaganda operations against the communist regime.

As for your other question about the Taliban, I’m not sure I understand your objection. The Taliban (it means, roughly, Students BTW) was the de facto ruling faction in Afghanistan prior to 9/11. Afghanistan had gone through a really nasty period of civil war and strife following the the Soviets withdrawing from the country, and the Taliban had basically come out on top, though there was still significant resistance in parts of the country. There was no real need for there to be a ‘formal country’ (whatever that means) for the US to demand that the Taliban turn over high ranking AQ leadership types or to get rid of the AQ training bases the Taliban had allowed to operate in their areas of control.

-XT

[CurtC]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

My real concerns are with the suspicious nature of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Because those real timelines extend to before 911, and because 911 seems to have been used as an excuse to further other motives, I included it in my review of the situation, including a review of the demolition theory.

You’re not going to find much disagreement here about those.

Our invasion into Afghanistan was a direct, explicit result of 9/11. Up until then, the country was a complete mess, but it was a humanitarian mess, not one that had that much to do with our security. They were sheltering ObL, so we were trying to get the Taliban to fork him over, but other than that, since the Soviets were kicked out, it was just another country with severe humanitarian problems. Once 9/11 happened, the ObL issue became enough of a security threat to justify our going in.

IMHO, this invasion was completely rational and justified. The rest of the world supported it as well, and had we done just that, Bush would be viewed quite differently now. But…

Iraq is a whole nother story. Our justification here was complex. It was never directly and explicitly tied to 9/11. There was mention of terrorism, because some people in Iraq had associations with people in AQ, but that was a tenuous connection. I remember from those days that the larger terrorism talk against Iraq was concerning Israel, that Saddam would give money to families of suicide bombers in Israel. But yes, Bush used the 9/11 tragedy in an opportunistic way to go into Iraq, which he (or more correctly, the neocons who influenced him) wanted to do already.

Here and other places in the document, the Taliban is referred to as an ‘Afghanistan faction’. Kind of like a more-successful warlord group than a formal government, if I’m getting the analogy straight. Other sources have mentioned that only 4 countries in the world recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan.

OK, but so what? It was a country in turmoil, but the faction that held the most political power was also the one sheltering Al Qaeda. I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. There was an ass-kicking needed, which we were willing to provide.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

That’s great info, xtisme.

Still, granting everything, this circumstance was transformed from a rebellion/civil war/regional conflict into a Cold War Battlefield with the introduction of American support. There is a distinction between military aid and invasion, no?

@CurtcC: I wonder what motives surround the Afghanistan invasion more than the Iraq invasion- to me they just seem less well-known.

For example, here’s a link and a quote:

Long before the September 11th attacks, the United States had decided to invade Afghanistan in the interest of oil. In February of 1998, at the hearing before a sub-group of the Committee on International Relations, Congress discussed ways to deal with Afghanistan to make way for an oil pipeline. Jane’s Defense News reported in March 2001 that an invasion of Afghanistan was being planned.

Times of India reported that in June of 2001, the US Government told India that there would be an invasion of Afghanistan in October of that year. By July of 2001 George Arney, with the BBC, also reported the planned invasion.

Maybe it is only my personal perception, but I don’t recall a lot of discussion of prior motives to the Afghanistan invasion. What’s the straight dope?

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

Concerning Afghanistan’s status as a ‘country’, consider this quote from link:

“I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.”

• G.W. Bush, 3/13/02

“I am truly not that concerned about him.”

• G.W. Bush, repsonding to a question about bin Laden’s whereabouts,
  3/13/02 (The New American, 4/8/02)

Changed pretty quick once the war was underway, no?

[Mr.Miskatonic]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

Concerning Afghanistan’s status as a ‘country’, consider this quote from link:

Changed pretty quick once the war was underway, no?

Isn’t it fun to make up things people never said?

http://911myths.com/html/ignored.html

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

@Mr.Miskatonic

Isn’t it fun to make up things people never said?

Ignored

All right. That’s fair if a cite turns out to be bad.
Bush was quite the hard-liner when it came to terrorism, no? I think it is inconsistent of him to switch from ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ to ‘He’s on the run, and that’s good enough for me’ in just a few months.
Or, in Bush’s words, from your cite:

I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.

Especially since we’re talking about- as seems to be accepted via the Bin Laden ‘confession video’- one of the key actors in the 911 attacks. Even more suspicious considering Bush and Bin Laden have a previous business relationship. And how silly is it for Bush to claim that Bin Laden had ‘taken over a country’, when nobody, including the US military, can apparently control the place? In Bush’s words, from your cite:

I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.

Really? He took over the country?

Bush’s flip-flop in position is still more suspicious for its consistency with the theory that there are other motives for the invasion of Afghanistan besides Bin Laden. If Bin Laden is just an excuse until the war gets started, he isn’t important afterwards.

‘Bin Laden as excuse for Afghan invasion’ is I suppose the biggest concern in my questioning of Afghanistan’s formal status as a nation.

I don’t think anyone disputes that Bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan from Sudan in the late 1990’s. Apparently taking his entire Al Qaeda organization with him? Maybe someone has details of this part of the stroy.

In any case, he arrived in Afghanistan just a few years before the 911 attacks. At this point Afghanistan’s legal status is unclear. The Taliban is the recognized government- to 4 regional states. The UN refers to ‘lands controlled by the Taliban’, suggesting there is a distinction between the territory of Afghanistan proper and said controlled lands.

Here’s a map showing areas of relative influence of the Taliban. It isn’t that great an image, it isn’t clear how things are measured either- maybe someone has more links to this info? The obvious point is that there is a distinction between ‘Afghanistan Territory’ and ‘Taliban-controlled lands’.

What I’d like to see is a map of the locations of Bin Laden’s terrorist camps.

Apparently we know where they were, since Bush, in your cite, claims to have destroyed them:

He has no place to train his al Qaeda killers anymore.

I’d like to see a map of locations of our military actions in Afghanistan, and see if they prove to be more anti-terrorist or pro-something else. I can’t claim to know the straight dope on US military actions in Afghanistan, so this one could be an easy target. Just don’t attack me personally- remember, this is Cartesian Doubt.

Did he choose Afghanistan because it was a lawless enough a place to which to escape, having already been ejected from first Saudi Arabia and then Sudan? Or was he just familiar with the area from his dealings with the CIA during the Cold War? Whatever the case, if his camps turn out to be located in more lawless regions, or far from any particular ‘government’ facilities, then even under the threat of war it might not have been within the Taliban’s power to deliver Bin Laden. Why would I think that? In your quote, Bush says:

He’s the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it

Wouldn’t a weakness-sucking parasite gravitate toward the most lawless regions?

I just don’t know the details of this part of the story. I don’t know the details of the contemporary Taliban’s relationship to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda aka ‘the moveable international terrorist group’. Maybe there are some clear cites out there that show the leaders of the Taliban playing golf with Bin Laden, and their refusal to turn him over is therefore totally egregious.

I don’t know quite how they’re linked. There is a relationship, some of it official, but the details so far remain unknown to me. I question if it was within the power of the Taliban to turn over Bin Laden. After all, wasn’t Bin Laden himself ‘basically running Afghanistan’?
So. There is a 911 conspiracy theory for you to debunk. It could be a real easy target. The SDMB ought to be the right place to shine some light on the unknowns in the story.

For fun I’ll add a corroborating quote from here (page 49 if you don’t go there in the pdf)

I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.
-Former CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, 1998

And a map http://www.lindsayfincher.com/news/caspian_sea_map.png of the Caspian area. You realize there are large oil reserves in the new states of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan? If Caspian Oil is the pipe dream motivating the Afghanistan invasion, Cheney’s words in 1998 support it.

[Marley23]

At this point, Try2B Comprehensive, you appear to have a conspiracy theory in search of a motive.

[CurtC]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

Bush was quite the hard-liner when it came to terrorism, no? I think it is inconsistent of him to switch from ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ to ‘He’s on the run, and that’s good enough for me’ in just a few months.

Yes, it was inconsistent. Look, you won’t find too many Bush supporters here, but I can point out that he was inconsistent just like Aesop’s fox was inconsistent when he changed his mind about the grapes.

Even more suspicious considering Bush and Bin Laden have a previous business relationship.

They do? What?

I don’t think anyone disputes that Bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan from Sudan in the late 1990’s. Apparently taking his entire Al Qaeda organization with him? Maybe someone has details of this part of the stroy.

Al Qaeda supported terrorism. Countries where they had set up shop previously wouldn’t tolerate them anymore. Seriously - AQ bombed Muslims who were waiting in line to freakin’ vote. The only place AQ could find that wouldn’t kick them out would be a place without a controlling government.

I’d like to see a map of locations of our military actions in Afghanistan, and see if they prove to be more anti-terrorist or pro-something else.

It does sound like you’re desperate to find a conspiracy theory. Remember, facts first, theory afterwards.

Did he choose Afghanistan because it was a lawless enough a place to which to escape, having already been ejected from first Saudi Arabia and then Sudan? Or was he just familiar with the area from his dealings with the CIA during the Cold War?

He dealt with the CIA in the Cold War? Cite?

So. There is a 911 conspiracy theory for you to debunk. It could be a real easy target.

There’s not really debunking to be done there. You haven’t made specific claims.

And a map http://www.lindsayfincher.com/news/caspian_sea_map.png of the Caspian area.

Did you notice that Afghanistan is not pictured in this map?

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

@Marley23

At this point, Try2B Comprehensive, you appear to have a conspiracy theory in search of a motive.

The motive would be oil. The reason for using some other excuse for war instead of going on TV and stating, 'Mah fella ‘mericans, we have an energy crisis on our hands. Without military intervention, our oil supplies are seriously threatened, with potentially catastrophic consequences’ is that honesty leads to the obvious conclusion that maybe we ought to review our dependence on oil instead of our dominance of oil-producers.

I’m not saying AQ isn’t a dangerous terror group. I’m pointing out that here we are many years later, still in Afghanistan, seemingly focused on a lot more than taking out terrorists, ‘dead or alive’.

I’ll have to get back to the rest later.

[42fish]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

I’m not saying AQ isn’t a dangerous terror group. I’m pointing out that here we are many years later, still in Afghanistan, seemingly focused on a lot more than taking out terrorists, ‘dead or alive’.

Strangely, we don’t seem to be all that focussed on that pipeline you think is the real motive, either, considering that we haven’t built it during the eight years we’ve been in the country.

[Marley23]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

The motive would be oil.

The events of the last eight years do nothing to support this conclusion. If the war was about oil, why hit Afghanistan and Iraq, and not finish the pipelines in either one? Why did the price of oil spike last year if there was a plot to invade foreign countries to get more control of the oil market?

[Cisco]

@Marley23

At this point, Try2B Comprehensive, you appear to have a conspiracy theory in search of a motive.

I was trying to think of a way to word this. T2BC seems to be caught in the interesting position of being desperate to believe a conspiracy theory, but honest enough to admit when the ones he presents are blown out of the water.