Allow me to start another thread for the 9/11 conspiracy discussion. The op is asking if we over-reacted to 9/11. My position is: totally.
That position is based partly on my suspicions about the whole situation. Things I find suspicious, especially taken together:
-The precedent of a president being appointed by the Supreme Court.
-Said president being associated with a number of PNAC guys, who are known to have desired ‘another Pearl Harbor’ to galvanize public opinion so they could advance their military agenda.
-The complete absence of air support on the day of 9/11.
-The fact that the WTC towers changed hands months before 9/11, combined with the facts that they were becoming a big liability- a billion-dollar asbestos cleanup bill, inefficiency, vacancy.
-The new insurance policy taken out on the towers shortly before their collapse which made a point of obtaining coverage for terrorist attacks. You know the owners got a double insurance payout since it was ruled there were two separate attacks, right? About $8 billion.
-The owner of WTC7 saying on video that they ‘made the decision to pull WTC7’ on 9/11. ‘Pull’ is a demolition word for ‘demolish’.
-The power was cut for several days? A week? to the vacated towers right before 9/11. No security cameras were operational. I’ve seen photos of loads of suspicious dust all through the towers in the days before the collapse- it is speculated it was dust from perhaps drilling holes in concrete
-Traces of thermite have actually been found on-site. I gotta get that link…
-Transparently dumb comparisons of Saddam to Hitler in the drumbeat to war.
-You’re gonna hate this, but it seems implausible that the buildings would collapse straight down, instead of looking like other building collapses
-The fact that court records for the Enron case were housed in WTC7. Never heard of that case again after 9/11, did we? And Condi Rice was a transplant from Enron to the White House staff. This is what I’m told anyway…
-Pointless invasion of Iraq, unless the point is an endless stream of extra war appropriations. Remember, it was Oilman and War Industry guy as Prez and VP.
-All the shady, evasive rhetoric afterwards. The seeming neglect of other priorities while we pursue the ‘war on terror’.
-The fact that the ‘enemy’ is hardly if at all defined. It’s ‘global terrorism’ the concept, not a well-defined group. Seems like a perfect excuse for perma-war if that’s what you’re going for.
-Which leads to my last, and really most important, point: The terrorists have jack shit! I still need to be convinced that invading foreign countries is the appropriate response. Especially Iraq. And after all this, we haven’t got them yet???
Obviously I could go on…
Whether it was before the fact or after the fact, it looks to me like 9/11 was used as a means to an end, and not very good ends at that. Maybe it is just the stupidity and cynicism of the Bush administration casting an aura of suspicion over every aspect of the situation that’s leading me to this.
Anyway, I realize I’m outnumbered and Cisco is going to accuse me of breaking his rules, so I won’t revisit this topic until I’ve reviewed his material. Fair enough?
Even if you believe every bit of the official story- don’t you agree we overreacted? Kind of like a body with an allergy making itself deathly sick because it ate a peanut, if that analogy isn’t too insulting. Or do you all disagree as strenuously on this point?
So far you’ve posted nothing we haven’t seen a dozen times, and discounted completely. Really, do a search on previous 9/11 threads and you’ll see that you have been mislead and/or are mistaken. There’s nothing new in what you’ve posted, sorry.
Sigh. This is why I was dismissive of you at first, Try2BComprehensive. I gave you the benefit of the doubt, and knew I would regret it, and I do. You can’t say I didn’t try. Your claims are demonstrably, patently false, and more than one of them is overtly anti-semitic.
On this, Condi Rice was a professor at Stanford and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute. She was on Chevron’s board of directors, but she had nothing to do with Enron.
And yes, we did hear of the Enron case after 9/11. Enron was still in the process of collapsing when 9/11 happened. It announced massive losses for the first time and got its credit downgraded in October. It declared bankruptcy at the end of November, and the first indictments came down in 2002. Right now, Fastow’s in prison, Skilling’s in prison, Gilsan and Kopper are in prison, Causey’s in prison, a bunch of lower level Enron execs are in prison, and Lay died after his conviction but before sentencing.
Really? Can you give us an example of someone espousing the conspiracy theory that every troother is an anti-semite?
On the matter of anti-semitism and 9/11 trooth, when you see blatantly false, clearly fabricated lies connecting Larry Silverstein (a Jew) to “inside job” 9/11 plots on the same websites that feature anti-Jewish rhetoric, well, it’s really not much of a leap to connect the two things. Someone made that stuff up. Why?
Not to mention the very first 9/11 conspiracy that most people heard, within hours or days of the events, was the “dancing Jews” myth. The second was the “all the Jews called in sick that day” myth.
Face it, 9/11 trooth and anti-semitism have been in bed together since the beginning. The only reason I don’t believe every single troother is an anti-semite is because most of them are too brain dead and culturally and historically clueless to make the connection.
What? Why? Many people have stressed the enormity of the loss of American life on September 11. Why is it absurd to compare this loss with other losses that get much less attention? Did you notice that the thread was asking about suggesting September 11 shouldn’t have been that big of a deal?
Wow, I never heard me say that. I’m participating in a thread where ALL of us have the benefit of almost eight years.
If you had a family member that died of cancer, and a family member that was BLOWN UP BY ANGRY RELIGIOUS EXTREMISTS, I think you would understand the difference. Murder is a psychologically disturbing way of death to deal with, mass murder moreso. Unprovoked mass murder by people doing it for a god you don’t even believe in . . . you get the picture. It’s tragic in a way that a heart attack at 75 just isn’t.
I don’t understand this statement, “the entire cost was borne by Visa and the airline industry.” Certainly the airlines’ profits are down since the attacks, but how was the credit card company harmed? I’m probably missing something obvious but I don’t get it.
I’m kind of jumping back in at the tail end of this thread, but I’d suggest that this is all about hindsight. In hindsight, would we or would we be better off now if the national response to 9-11 had been much less radical than it was – even leaving aside the Iraq war?
Or put it this way: What specific changes were made to our society and policy, in direct response to 9-11, that in hindsight have left us better off as a nation? I’m suggesting that you can’t find a single example.
Of course it’s different, and we respond to it differently – on a personal level. But if you were a national leader, could you afford to let yourself have such a personal response? Again, I’d suggest that Bush was in his way a big-hearted guy and took 9-11 very personally, and this opened the way for advisors like Cheney to push their own agendas onto him so readily.
I really doubt that al-Quaida would have any intention to do it again. And further, if they really wanted to do it again even now (in our real timeline), I doubt whether we could stop them.
