A logical rubble heap within its own footprint, of course.
By the by, when did you ever hear a CTer admit he was wrong? I’d suggest the time I realized that Oswald’s iron sights were still mounted and effective and, after missing the first shot while using the scope, he realized that these shots were easy and no longer had to acquire his target through the scope, which is deadly slow. I mean, I was always a pisspoor CTer and have retained many of my suspicions, but that’s just a charming, slightly dotty, hobby, like building ships in bottles, or using too many commas, and not an obsession.
That hardly removes it from the list of suspicious items, no?
dropzone:
I can’t tell if you’re lumping me in with the demolition theory proponents or not, but if you are it places you squarely in the Bush camp in terms of not making distinctions. No offense to the demolition guys, but personally I can’t buy it.
Thinking that this is somehow a valid response to the objections people raise about your debating tactics is a perfect example of the problem. The fact that you don’t start 9/11 threads has nothing to do with the fact that you participate in every 9/11 thread, spewing the same, already thoroughly debunked, hackneyed ideas and constantly switching the details, adding new, spurious, twists or quoting out of context (or clearly falsified) texts that not only fail to support your ideas but reveal your debating technique to be inept at best or dishonest at worst. You repeat this scenario in every thread, refusing to learn from your past mistakes or even acknowledge that your “evidence” has been shown to be taken completely out of context or flat out wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with asking questions, even if the answers are “No, that couldn’t have happened and here’s why.” It’s ignoring the answers which makes someone a CT’er, and that’s what you repeatedly do. It’s the lack of basic logic, reasoning, or willful misunderstanding that makes CT’ers impossible to bring to reality.
ivan, every single time you are proven wrong you ignore the posts proving you wrong and either disappear for awhile or back up to this “absolutely anything is possible” defense and wait for people to “forget” how badly you were proven wrong, and then you return with the same junk. Do you really think you’re fooling us, or are you so consumed that you don’t even realize you’re doing this?
I still say that either the buildings had a flaw in their construction or something else besides the planes was responsible for their collapse. You can make a reasonable assumption about tower 1 and 2, but you really can’t about building 7. There may be crackpots out there with wild theories but one would also suffer from crackpot-dom if the believe what’s been offered up as reasons for why building 7 collapsed.
What part about the reports covering in detail the collapse of building 7 (significant debris falling from the towers, followed by massive unchecked fires) do you dispute? There’s nothing to assume, the reason for the collapse if building 7 is clearly explained.
Do you have anything to point to that needs further explanation? Your statement is meaningless until you can point to something that isn’t explained by the existing reports.
Hey EasyPhil, how 'bout a direct response to posts 429, 430, 431, and 434? People have taken a lot of time to answer the “concerns” that you and others have expressed in this thread. Do you not respect that? Time after time you guys ignore their efforts and retreat to positions like "I still say . . . " without any support or evidence or logic or viable alternative hypotheses.
ivan, guilty as well. And we’ll not even speak of the several who have scurried away from this thread rather than facing facts or admitting how ridiculously wrong they were proven to be.
So this sites you’re pointing me to indicate that the buidling was soundly constructed and this would happen to any building of similiar height? Right?
AFAIK, the most serious researchers mention that the collapse of WTC7 was caused by the debris from the collapse of one of the WTC towers falling into WTC7, the fires caused by that collapse (several bits of the tower were still burning) and also by the peculiar structural design of 7 World Trade Center that included features to allow a larger building footprint than the originally planned to be constructed.
So the most serious answer has to say: When referring to other buildings it depends. The way building 7 was made played a factor in the collapse.
If you are trying to categorise me as a “CT’er”, perhaps you’d better clarify what you mean by the label first. Then we’ll see if my behaviour -at least on this site - fits that description.
Maybe you should actually tell us what you believe or what you think happened for once instead of prodding at every aspect of 9/11 with CT-inspired questions and then retreating to “anything is possible” when proven wrong.
You need to insert ‘of similar construction and materials’ too, of course. Might want to put in ‘of similar circumstances’ as well, though that might just be me. Let me guess? You are poised to display a bunch of counter examples from buildings ‘of similar height’ that didn’t collapse…right? While ignoring all of the dis-similar factors that caused one building to stay standing while another collapsed? Right?
Nope…never seen THIS argument before either. It’s totally fresh and new…just like EVERY OTHER SILLY POINT BROUGHT UP BY THE CTers IN THIS FREAKING THREAD!
[QUOTE=Try2B Comprehensive]
Are you lumping me in with ‘CTers’? Are my points silly too?
[/QUOTE]
Gods know, since as Cisco pointed out it’s hard to tell exactly what your points are, or where you stand. My post was addressed to EasyPhil, however…though I mis-attributed it obviously (it’s difficult to post from my iPod and I frequently screw up the posts).
To summarize: This post back in the thread roughly categorizes conspiracy theories surrounding 911. It is a rough job, but you can see most of the discussion in the thread has been focused on section IB2, demolition theories. I suppose something new technically could come to light on this one, but as far as I’m concerned it is debunked.
I’ve been mostly talking about section IIA- the aftermath of 911, particularly our entry into Afghanistan. That much really should be obvious by now. I read up on the subject, and include a lot of links from posts that IIRC you yourself suggested I check out. I laid it out here.
It would be easier for you to review the whole thing than for me to summarize.
But in a nutshell, the armed forces we not necessary to subdue the Taliban and Al Qaeda, as demonstrated by their downfall at the hands of the CIA, special forces groups, and the Northern Alliance.
There is something covered up about Saudi financing of… something to do with all this, who knows what it is since it is covered up? I can speculate that some wealthy Saudis were funneling money to Bin Laden, probably independent of their government’s sanction, and it is covered up to avoid a stinky international incident. Dunno. There is some role played by Saudis, not necessarily their government, but whatever that role is remains unknown.
The AQ of the media is probably a much-inflated version of what it really is. Or a distortion. It is probably no more than a rich (or funded), terrorist-friendly guy(s) who supports motivated terrorists if they come up with a sinister enough idea. Just so happens it was Bin Laden’s job to gather Islamic militants from around the region to fight the Soviets. Now he’s against us.
The Taliban may very well not be accountable for Bin Laden or AQ, but the CIA has been contributing to the situation for about 30 years. It starts with a priority to beat the Soviets and a we’ll-deal-with-the-consequences later attitude, and develops into the monstrous regime the Taliban became. To some degree, it’s our baby.
The Taliban stink, but the official reasons for the war in Afghanistan are probably not valid. High-ups have their own motives for wanting to take down the Taliban, and 911 gave an excuse for this war too.
If you want to debunk the story I’ve dug up, ok. Just please debunk the post I cite above and not this little summary.
Bottom line is- The Afghanistan War story never did add up for me because there is heavy CIA involvement going back to the beginning. There are some secrets being kept, there is major bs involved, but I can’t discern what the underlying motives are. Could be corporate interests, especially oil. Or perhaps simply regional security.
Maybe there is an actual conspiracy, maybe not. Maybe we’re doing was has to be done, though for whatever reason the full explanation isn’t made public. The secrets and the CIA involvement are enough to make the situation highly suspicious, even more so before I put in the effort to add it all up. Know what I mean? I realized why the situation seemed so fishy when my digging kept uncovering CIA involvement. What they do will probably remain secret to me, except for the fact that bombing their headquarters stirs them up.
You are still (seemingly) on this kick that someone is claiming the Taliban were responsible for 9/11. AFAIK, no one is claiming that. What they are claiming is that the Taliban government was sheltering AQ and ObL. I have to say that this is pretty much indisputable at this point…the Taliban were and are allied to AQ.
[QUOTE=Try2B Comprehensive]
It would be easier for you to review the whole thing than for me to summarize.
[/QUOTE]
It’s too difficult for me to read through that post again where I’m am atm, and I believe most of the points have already been addressed. I’ll just address some of the points you make in the summary instead, and leave it to others to address anything that hasn’t already been addressed previous in this thread (IIRC, I already addressed some of this stuff previously…if my memory is false though I’ll see what I can do when I get someplace with a laptop so I can do some searches).
There was a lot more to our invasion of Afghanistan than the CIA and a few special forces. True, we did rely heavily on NA forces, but understand that the NA had been fighting the Taliban for literally a decade before we showed up…and without much success. The US also put a large contingent of ground forces (remember all that ruckus in Tora Bora when we were fighting in the mountains and blowing out AQ strongholds and searching for ObL?) and heavily used air power to attack both Taliban and AQ forces and strongholds. Absolutely it was necessary for our armed forces to be involved (as they were), and I’ll point out that after we got distracted and wandered off into Iraq the campaign in Afghanistan started to deteriorate…despite the fact that the US still had something like 30k troop in Afghanistan, and various of our allies also had large contingents of troops there (you might want to look up what the Canadians in particular have done there, despite having a fairly small contingent of troops…quite valiant IMHO).
No idea what you are talking about. Certainly there are various factions in Saudi financing both insurgents in Iraq and in Afghanistan. This is hardly surprising however. As to the ‘cover up’…what cover up? Obviously the groups sending covert financing are, well, covert…but afaik no one is covering up the fact that there are Wahabist factions in Saudi who send money to the enemies of the US…heck, there is no doubt that these same groups probably financed AQ and ObL in the first place wrt the 9/11 attacks. I’d even go so far as to say that some of these elements are highly placed in the Saudi government.
No one is denying this, so I’m unsure of what your point is here. Have you read the 9/11 Commission report??
No…I’d say that it’s pretty well established that AQ and ObL were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. It’s neither a distortion, nor much-inflated…it’s the unvarnished truth. Why this is so hard for people to grasp or believe is beyond me, to be honest.
I’m not sure why you tossed in the last sentences. Yes, ObL fought against the Soviets. He not only used his own funds to support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, but he actually went there to fight (and to act as an engineer, bringing his own expertise and some of his families heavy equipment). Post war he saw himself as a liberator, and as someone would could bring the Islamic/Arab world together into a large fundamentalist super state. When Saddam invaded Kuwait he saw this as his big chance, and he pleaded with the Saudi government to allow (and fund) his group of fighters to repel the Iraqi’s and destroy Saddam (and probably wipe out Iran to, in the bargain). However, the Saudi government instead choose to ally itself with the US and use our (and our coalitions) support instead. This completely incensed ObL, and he instantly became our enemy. He launched a series of attacks on the US, our interests and other countries associated with the US throughout the 90’s, including a first attack on the WTC.
So…he was our enemy long before 9/11. His attack was not only NOT out of the blue, but in retrospect you can see the progression from minor to major attacks on the US, culminating in 9/11.
Sure, though we didn’t create the Taliban. We supported the Mujahideen because they were fighting the Soviets (who, if you will recall, had overthrown the previous Afghani regime and replaced it with a socialist government who ‘invited’ the Soviets in) and it was the cold war. Once the Soviets withdrew the US (and the rest of the world) no longer really had any interest in Afghanistan. A very nasty civil war ensued in which the Taliban came out on top.
The CIA was not solely or even mostly to blame for what happened. The Soviets were at least as responsible…and, frankly, the Afghan people were also to blame, seeing as how a large number of them WANTED a nasty fundamentalist theocracy in power.
Again, I’m unsure where you are going with this. History happened…and the US was at least partially to blame for how fucked up Afghanistan was. And…?
Horseshit. The Taliban were aiding and abetting AQ and refused to make any concessions at all when demands were made on them to turn over ObL and the higher level AQ operatives. AQ was using Afghanistan as a base of operations. There is no way we were going to let them continue to do so after the 9/11 attacks…and no way we could have stopped them short of a pretty heavy duty military operation. Which is what we did.
The thing about oil pipelines being the primary reason is, well, complete BS. We have been in Afghanistan fighting in Afghanistan for a rather long ass time, and no attempt has been made to build any silly pipeline.
I’ll leave it to others (if it hasn’t previously been debunked in this thread) or will take a look at it when I get the chance. If it’s about oil pipelines and such, though, it probably won’t be worth my time, to be honest.
Or, you could have a tenuous grasp of the history of the region (this isn’t a slam btw…a LOT of people have only a thin grasp of the time line of events or the history of our involvement there), and are conflating a bunch of things, or compressing the time between events and our continued involvement in the region. The fact is, the CIA WAS heavily involved…from, say, late 1978 and ramping up until the Soviets withdrew in the late 80’s. After that? Not so much. They had other things on their plate by then, including that little dust up in Iraq in the early 90’s. No one really gave a shit about Afghanistan after that…not until 9/11. Why? Well, because Afghanistan really didn’t (and doesn’t) have anything most of the world wants or needs (except drugs, perhaps).
WHAT secrets?? For gods sake man, there was a freaking MOVIE about this not long ago. Did you see Charlie Wilson’s War?? Seriously…it’s not exactly news at this point. After 1989 however, the CIA sort of lost interest.