Loose Change video: 9/11 conspiracy

Great Debates
41

Yes. We have detailed plans for all kinds of crazy contingencies. We have plans for invading Canada. Sometimes these things are reasonable strategies for potential comflicts and sometimes they are just exercises in military planning.

Despite the idiocy of the conspiracy theories, there is one factually true conspiracy. The government is conspiring to hide something about the hit at the Pentagon as they have confiscated all tapes of the event. This could be a defense mechanism intended to shoot down incoming attacks or simply that they do not wish people to know how the building responds to direct impact, thereby making it more difficult to plan a successful attack, but they are hiding the tapes.

42

There are no fewer than 33 tapes of some part of the attack at the pentagon… most of which have been in the hands of the News media, and rebroadcast within days of the attack… collecting them after the fact seems silly…

I can think of 100 reasons to want those tapes… none of which have anything to do with hiding anything

43

Janet Jackson’s wardobe malfunction.

44

:smiley: Point conceded.

Daniel

45

As Bookkeeper says, buildings do not tip over. Basically, structurally speaking, a building is a stack, rather than a single unit. The weight of its various parts is vectored straight down. Upset that, and the whole thing falls vertically; there isn’t enough strength in the building as a whole to keep it together and tip it over as a unit.

This is sort of counterintuitive, if you don’t know anything about structural engineering; our brains tend to perceive the building as a single object, and expect it to behave similarly to other single objects, like a refrigerator or a shoebox or other boxy type things. Our firsthand micro experience does not translate well to the macro scale of a huge construction like a ten or twenty story building, and anybody who says there’s something suspicious about an office building falling straight down simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

46

A building that collapses is going to collapse exactly like a house of cards…straight down. If you push over a stack of cards you’re going to impart a very small sideways force to some of the cards…but most of the cards fall because gravity is pulling them down. A skyscraper doesn’t have enough tensile strength to stay together in one piece if it falls over. You can’t push over a skyscraper. It can’t tip over like a model in a Godzilla movie.

And the whole “A missile hit the Pentagon!” and “The World Trade Center collapsed in a controlled demolition!” conspiracies just plain don’t make any fucking sense. We know, verified by videotape, that two planes crashed into the towers. We know this. So, if you’re going to plant explosives in the WTC, why bother somehow enlisting some Islamacist terrorists to fly planes into the WTC? Why not just press the fucking button? You need a cover story? How about the terrorists planted explosives in the WTC and pressed the button?

And if you’re hijacking two planes to crash into the WTC, and a third plane to hit some other target, why not just crash a fourth plane into the Pentagon? Why bother with a different method? If you absolutely positively can’t fly a plane into the Pentagon, for some reason you absolutely positively have to use some other method…like a missile…why not have the cover story be that the terrorists fired a fucking missile at the Pentagon?

In other words, these cover ups just don’t make any sense. We know we had planes crashing into buildings, we know we had a third plane crash into the ground, bound for Allah knows where, we know we had a big hole in the Pentagon and a fourth missing plane.

So the neocon conspirators must have been able to hijack planes, and by some method fly them into buildings. So why the fuck would the neocon cabal use any other secondary method to attack the Pentagon and the WTC? What’s wrong with flying planes into the buildings? Why do you need a backup plan? And if you really do need a backup plan, why the fuck wouldn’t you just make the backup plan the primary plan and skip the whole stupid hijacking coverup angle?

“OK, we have the brainwashed Islamist militants in place. Now, let’s put the whole plan at risk by sending a demolition team to wire the WTC!”

“OK, we have the WTC wired with explosives. Now, let’s put the whole plan at risk by brainwashing some Al Qaida members and convincing them to fly planes into our already explosive-wired buildings!”

“Now, our real plan is to destroy building 7. But how to create a diversion? I know, let’s hijack four planes, wire the WTC for demolition, fly two planes into the WTC, set off the explosives, destroy one of the hijacked planes in mid-flight somewhere over Pennsylvania, disappear the fourth plane, fire a missile at the Pentagon, then truck tons of demolished airplane parts to the Pentagon.”

47

Of COURSE! It’s all so simple!

48

There was A TV prog on a while ago, explaining how the towers went down, apparently the strength of the building was on the outside, when the planes hit, with nearly full tanks of avaition fuel the impact on the floors they hit and the weight of the floors above were a recipie for disaster, they could have taken an explosion from the inside out, but not from the outside in, the burning fuel melted the fireproof coating, the steel was exposed and softened, and buckled under the weight of the floors above, collapsing on the the damaged floor, then the house of cards thingy comes into effect, more and more weight on to the floor below till there are no more floors…
as for the Pentagon, the plane hit the one side of it that had just finished bieng re-built, with bomb-proof windows, and fire proof walls, or the death toll would have been a lot higher.

49

A co worker had once asked me why Norad made no moves to inspect planes for well after an hour after the first was hijacked, and 2 had flown into the WTC.
And why when they knew one was flying toward the pentagon, no nearby planes wer sent up nor why there aren’t any ground to air missiles protesting it. I had no answer.

50

protecting, not protesting. d’oh!

51

Firstly, when a plane is hijacked, its not like a big sign pops up on the radar screen saying “HEY I’M BEING HIJACKED!!!”. It takes time to determine a hijacking vs. a mere transponder failure. Then you have to add the reaction to get jets scrambled, and other delays.

Becuase the final approach to the Pentagon took only a few minutes. It is suspected that the pilot missed or could not locate the initial target and so hit the highly visible Pentagon.

Look at a map of DC sometime, find the Pentagon, then find Ronald Reagan Airport. You will see why there are no ground to air missiles defending it in peacetime.

52

The approach path for Washington National from the north, is right along the Potomac River. This brings planes so close to the Pentagon, you could throw stones at from the plane.

Here is the area:

53

Momentum would have made shooting down an airliner that close to the Pentagon a silly thing to do…

once you could determine which of the planes going arond the area was the ‘right one’ to shoot down, it would have been too late

Not to mention darn near impossible to get ANY anti-air defense set up (a stinger isn’t going to do squat to a heavy…)

54

There are other factors as well of course. People don’t realize how much we had drawn down post Cold War on our air defense. I don’t have time right now but I recall we went from hundreds of bases and pilots and planes on a hair trigger to a couple bases (a dozen?) scattered throughtout the country and pilots and planes basically marking time and pretty much stood down. We all liked the tax savings though.

Another thing people can’t seem to get their minds around is the whole concept of ‘fog of war’. Its easy to look back with retrospect and see what was happening and what SHOULD have been done. At the time though folks had fragementary information. Not all the key players were talking together…in fact, even at the FAA not all the CONTROLLERS were talking together, so what one controller was working on others didn’t know about…while they knew about their own problems and the first controller didn’t. We were caught with our pants down, completely unprepared for this kind of mass attack.

I was recently watching a show on the History Channel about this very subject (well, about how 9/11 happened, what went wrong, etc…not about the crazy tin foil conspiricy stuff :)). One thing they mentioned that was appearently in the 9/11 commission report (that I must have missed…I skimmed the thing when it first came out) was that after the second strike on the WTC when President was on AF-1 there was a communications failure. The President was actually out of communications if you can believe it. Its just one of myriad problems.

-XT

55

I’d like to thank you for the link. I watched and quickly became disturbed. Disturbed, mostly becuase I could not remember or did not know the logical/probable answers to the many ‘unanswered’ questions.

Throughout much of the film the tone seemed objective and I, for one, appreciated that. At the end, however, it quickly fell off, becoming yet another ‘float in the political smear parade’ attacking W and some of his administration.

It got me thinking, and wondering. Surely there had to be logical, if not simple, alternative answers out there to the seemingly good questions the movie put forth. So I went searching. Searching for the other side. Rebuttals, debunkings, etc. The best I found came in the form of the cover story “Debunking the 9/11 Myths” found in this link to the March 05 Issue of Popular Mechanics.

The following is a snipet from the editor’s commentary included in the issue that introduces the topic…

Bold emphasis, mine.

Anyone else have a good debunking source?

56

Where are they now? I would really like to see them. If any copies of them are in the hands of private individuals or the media I imagine I would likely be able to download them now. You seem to say that they were not collected by the government, If not where are they?

57

Actually, it appears that the transponder had been cut off at about 8:55 a.m., rendering the plane invisible to civilian air controllers. The procedures are very strict in the case of a problem with a transponder, both on civilian and military aircraft. The FAA regulations describe exactly how to proceed when a transponder is not functioning properly: the control tower should enter into radio contact at once with the pilot and, if it fails, immediately warn the military who would then send fighters to establish visual contact with the crew. (see FAA regulations: http://faa.gov/ATpubs)

More specifically, “If an object has not been identified in less than two minutes or appears suspect, it is considered to be an eventual threat. Unidentified planes, planes in distress and planes we suspect are being used for illegal activities can then be intercepted by a fighter from NORAD.” (NORAD spokesman: http://www.airforce.dnd.ca/athomedocs/athome1e_e.asp)

So, turning off the transponder should have led to interception about fourty minutes before the plane struck the Pentagon. Why this did not happen is a mystery, as is the reason the government refused to allow the videos to be released. How they even knew to confiscate video tapes from the loval convenience store and hotel only 2-3 minutes after the plane hit the Pentagon is another mystery.

I still have no idea what happened that day, and have not suggested that the US Government conspired to attack its citizens. However, more happened that day then we have been allowed to know.

58

Its not as easy as all that. You are skipping a lot of administrative steps.

http://www.911myths.com/html/intercept_time.html

You are also forgetting the mindset of the time, which was that people had not really used hijacked planes as weapons to that point.

59

Its incorrect to say ‘more happened that day then we have been allowed to know’. There is a very good source of stuff we’ve ‘been allowed to know’…unless you are of the tin foil school. Grab yourself a copy of the 9-11 Commission Report, get a cup of coffee and a nice comfy chair then read through it. If you still have questions after that, then come back and start a thread. Just about everything is answered in there…especially about the time lag and why fighters weren’t dispatched until fairly late in the game. Also why the pilots weren’t actually told they had authorization to shoot the planes down. Lots of good stuff in there.

-XT

60

I am not reviving this as a debate. Rather, a friend sent me a link to the Loose Change video a few days ago and asked for my reaction. I said it seemed not credible. But, being of an inquisitive nature, I did some googling. On the assumption others may find this thread, as I did, I’m recording here some of the links I found. I’ve tried not to duplicate links already mentioned.

In fairness, I probably found more by number going the conspiratorial direction, e.g., the officail Loose Change site and 9/11 Research; see also Wikipedia (collecting links), but they all seem to rely on the same limited set of “smoking guns.” Anti-conspiratorial sites, by contrast, approach the question from a number of different perspectives, so there is more purpose to be served by linking a greater variety of them. Among those I found of interest: David Corn; Snopes; 911 Myths; Rotten.com; Boutin & Di Justo; and William Jasper.

Bottom line, in my humble opinion, the theory doesn’t hold water. It isn’t even colorable.