Cite?
I’m pretty sure that, now that the loonies have a place to gather and share their delusions and conspiracy materials- - EVERY major event involving death, disaster, or politics is going to be a giant secret conspiracy now. Every election is going to be rigged. Every plane crash is going to be the result of a missile. Every terrorist attack is going to be an “inside job.” And they’re only going to get better and better at convincing sane people of their delusions.
Newspapers don’t employ fact-checkers. Facts are checked by the reporters. That aside, others have shown there were not many facts in your post.
As far as Air France conspiracy theories go, my money is on the bomb threat hoax. They’ll say there really was a bomb put there by terrorists and the airlines are covering it up so it won’t hurt business, and they found the black box but are insisting it’s lost.
Are you intentionally or accidentally conflating this domestic flight with the later international flights?
I thought I was prepared to defend the idea that a trans-Afghanistan oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf is a big enough prize to motivate the kind of guys in charge… but you’re not going to believe this (maybe some of you will) :eek: all the links I had now connect to Chevron’s home page!
I’ll try to come back with some graphs and math concerning peak oil, the pace of new oil-reserve discovery, the path of oil demand and other oil topics later.
This is why I said you have a conspiracy theory in search of a motive. What does peak oil have to do with the September 11 attacks? You seem to have reluctantly acknowledged that the attacks did have a connection to Afghanistan, so why is another nebulous motive required?
You mean that pipeline that everyone says was the big goal? The one that hasn’t been built yet and probably never will?
Pretty lame motive, I’d say.
I’d say : because invasion is overkill. It’s not like terrorism is new and exciting - but I can’t remember a terrorist attack ever blossoming into a full scale war before, unless that full scale war wasn’t already planned and waiting for an excuse. The UK didn’t invade Lybia over Lockerbie (despite Lybia being that time’s major breeding and training ground for international terrorists) - what the Brits did was police work. Same for Japan’s Sarin gas attack, the bomb spree in the Paris subways in '95 etc…
Not that there haven’t ever been violent retaliations against terrorists either - see the Mossad’s response to the Olympic massacre. But again, it was all police work, followed by covert ops. Not a full scale invasion.
Hell, for that matter, the US didn’t go to war over the *first *WTC attack in '93, despite it having been executed by the exact same guys from the exact same place. So, what gives ? 9/11 changed everything ? Meh.
Which is not to say I’m angrily pointing my finger and accusing the US of conspiring to invade Afghanistan over oil*, either. I’m certainly not anywhere close to certitude - but to me, it’s a possibility. The Bush admin certainly proved it wasn’t above milking 9/11 for all its worth, or using US policy to further private interests. If they did it for Iraq, why not for Afghanistan as well ?
- : and I’m certainly not suggesting the US had anything to do with 9/11 itself, neither doing it nor letting it happen.
There’s a big difference between a failure and a success.
Probably because after the first WTC attack, there was still a WTC left to attack again. In addition to the complete destruction of the towers, there was significant damage to the Pentagon. The scale of destruction on 9/11 was unimaginable even the day before the attacks for most people. For several of them, 9/11 really did change everything. For most Americans, terrorism was something people somewhere else had to deal with. Sure, we had some, too. But the first WTC attack didn’t seem like a huge deal to a lot of people - looking at the news broadcasts, you just see a bunch of smoke and some people coming out with some blood coming out of their ears or something. Regardless of whether it was big, it doesn’t look big from there. Oklahoma City in 1995 was a big deal, but it was done by Americans so a lot of people saw it as more of a police issue than a “protect America” issue.
9/11’s scale was amazingly huge compared to those two. It resulted in thousands of deaths, destruction of two of the most iconic buildings in the world, and damage to one of the most secure buildings in America. It exposed a weakness that many people never knew even existed and made them realize just how vulnerable they’d been all these years. So yeah, like it or not, 9/11 was different. Whether it actually changed “everything” is up to whomever you’re asking, I guess.
[QUOTE=Kobal2]
Hell, for that matter, the US didn’t go to war over the first WTC attack in '93, despite it having been executed by the exact same guys from the exact same place. So, what gives ? 9/11 changed everything ? Meh.
[/QUOTE]
Seriously? You don’t see the difference between terrorists blowing up a plane, or attempting an attack that failed to do more than damage the WTC, and an attack that killed 4 plane loads of people, brought down two iconic buildings in New York, damaged the Pentagon, killed several thousand US citizens and did a few billion dollars worth of damage?? You don’t see how this would change American attitudes towards terrorism??
Let me try a different tact here. Can you name another country who had a terrorist attack prior to 9/11 where there was so much loss of life and material damage during a single attack? That had as much of a psychological impact as 9/11 did to America? I admit I don’t know the answer to this…do you?
-XT
It is combined with other actions by high officials that place the motive for both invasions before the 911 attacks. I’m told the plans for both invasions were already drawn up when Bush took office.
It’ll probably have to wait for the weekend for me to look up the cites. What I’m trying to find:
-History of the pipeline project. It was a deal, then it got screwed up… a decades-long history.
-Statements in Bush’s campaign indicating an invasion desire.
-Bin Laden’s reported death in 2001, which would make Bush’s statements of ‘I don’t care’ make sense.
-Admit the 911 attacks are linked to Afghanistan? Well sort of… a bunch of Saudis who know nothing of the mission, who hung out in Hamburg, Spain and then Florida among other places crashed into the buildings because this Saudi guy who founded AQ, Bin Laden, got kicked out of Saudi Arabia, then got kicked out of Sudan and happened to be located in Afghanistan at the time of the attacks- but Bush doesn’t care about him. And KSM was in France, right? Slam dunk.
-I still can’t squash my suspicions! I do have one quote at this time, from General William Odom:
It still doesn’t add up to me. Obviously I don’t know everything either of course.
By who? And if so, why didn’t Clinton invade Afghanistan in 1993, or after the 1998 embassy bombings?
And it still hasn’t happened! I guess it shows that long-term plans for Afghanistan tend to get screwed up by its continuing turmoil.
Please do find these. He said during the campaign that he was not interested in “nation building,” although this proved to be a lie.
He put out a statement on Obama YESTERDAY.
So you don’t think they’re based in that region now either?
No. Months or years after failing to capture Bin Laden, Bush said he didn’t care about him. At the time, Bush wanted him “dead or alive,” and said so in those words. He began softpedalling this after it became obvious that, post-Tora Bora, capturing him would be very difficult.
He was captured in Pakistan, which is next to… well, I’ll let you get a map.
You don’t have suspicions, you have an insistence that something happened in spite of evidence.
I can certainly see how and why the man in the street would freak out - but not the people in charge who do know about the reality of the constant threat the average Joe is under.
Same scale ? Hmm. I honestly don’t know. But I don’t think the scale really matters all that much, either - during the Paris subway bombing spree, everyone was freaking out, myself sort of included (in that I didn’t lose my shit, but I certainly accepted that there could be bombs anywhere where before I felt safe, and felt safer when the gvt stationed armed soldiers in there, even though on a higher level I also realize it’s a false sense of security). The bombs didn’t cause much damage, or even kill that many people. They just existed in the conceptual sense, and that was enough to freak out. Certainly lots of people were suggesting all kinds of irrational, extreme measures over them, I can tell you that much.
But I also fully admit that I can’t claim to really understand what Americans felt - I’m not one. To me, terrorism is very real, and I’ve always known it was, even if it was in a vague sense rather than a personnal one (“it happens in France, but it can’t happen to me”). To put it another way, “terrorist with a bomb” always was on the list of freak accidents that could kill me every time I go out, with the drunk driver, the common criminal and the hooligan. So while I can understand, I can’t feel the same thing on the same level. Or maybe I’m just jaded, I dunno.
But as I said earlier, while I can understand the damage on America’s psyche, or zeitgeist or whatnot, for the exact reasons **interface2x **states, I’m not sure I understand how it can directly and instantly translate to international policy. Again, the intelligence community, the security advisors, the defense ministers etc… are well aware of the risks and the nature of the beast, aren’t they ?
My knowledge of engineering could fill a coffee mug, and of physics, a wastebasket, but I do know a few things about seismic data. In fact I was doing earthquake-related research on 9/11/01. Since nobody else jumped on this one, I’ll throw in my 2 bits, in the hope that some future poster may find this before they ask about this particular ‘evidence’ of the demolition hypothesis.
The linked graph shows 2 small spikes, labeled as the 1st and 2nd impacts and 2 much larger (higher amplitude and longer duration) spikes labeled as the 1st and 2nd collapse. The accompanying text seems to say that the graphs show huge bursts of energy immediately before both tower collapses.
Can someone point out where these huge events are?
The graphs, as they are presented, are completely consistent with 2 plane impacts (low amplitude, short duration events at the correct time) and 2 subsequent building collapses (fuck-all huge events that go on for a while, starting at the correct time). The shape of the data even looks consistent with the footage of the collapses: the energy released starts off small, then builds as the collapse involves more of the building+the added vibration of the debris hitting the ground, then tails off as the last of the material hits the ground.
In short: the seismic data sure looks like the ‘official story’.
SPECULATION FOLLOWS: While I know jack about building demolition, I would presume that when one happens, you would see a short, sharp spike-shaped event from the explosives immediately followed by a larger, broader bell-curve like event from the collapse. We do not see that in the data shown, therefore this data does not support a demolition hypothesis for 9/11.
It would be interesting to see seismic data from planned building demolitions and compare that to the 9/11 data.
Sometimes the only response I can consider making to such loopy theories is a lazy “your stupid”, not even expending the effort to spell correctly.
There is another way of interpreting that seismic data. If the spikes from the aeroplane’s impacts was only a barely noticeable blip, how do we know for certain that smaller explosions, possibly undetectable from the seismic data, had not been set off somewhere in the core?
We wouldn’t expect to see any sign of it from the outside, because the core is surrounded by office space. Could a small enough explosion to sever the main core have gone undetected during all the chaos? Plenty of witnesses recollect ‘explosive sounds’, although the experts are convinced these were all perfectly natural on the day.
That’s not a way of interpreting that data. That’s a way of imagining stuff that wasn’t there. So I guess this means you’re not even going to make an effort to stop lending ridiculous amounts of credence to unsupported hypotheses that agree with your desired conclusions, are you, ivan?
if you’re interested in explosions, I’d recommend that you check out the film “9/11 Eyewitness”. A guy setup his camera and filmed the time up to and including the collapses. A was a bit taken back by how many rumbly explosions there are directly preceding the collapses. Say what you will about his opinions, etc - which I can’t vouge for - but his unedited footage is essential.
Wasn’t the original claim that seismic data is evidence for the explosive building demolition idea? Now you’re admitting it’s not there, and hypothesizing that maybe smaller explosions that wouldn’t register could be there? Surely you can see what you’re doing here.
But in real building demolitions, the explosions break windows of buildings for a good distance from the building being demolished. You’re saying that there could be explosions, contained within the very building, that aren’t obvious from outside?
You’re doing it again - the conspiracy theorists think the buildings look like traditional demolitions as evidence for these ideas. Then when that evidence is refuted, they cling to their original ideas, saying that maybe it happened in a way that wouldn’t leave evidence. The whole problem here is that you’ve reached your conclusion first, and are trying to explain away the lack of evidence for it. Horse, then cart.