I think claiming responsibility is just not Al Qaeda’s style. I’m not aware of them claiming it for ANY of the attacks ascribed to them (September 11th, Bali, the USS Cole, etc).
YES, THEY ARE!!! The New York Post is a goddamn tabloid. It is a rag, and as newspapers go, it’s a complete piece of crap. As a New Yorker, I can’t state that emphatically enough. They’re pure sensationalism and have ZERO credibility.
On top of which, as mentioned above, the headline was in reference to the idea of a terrorist plot with airliners, not the September 11th attacks themselves.
When the towers were designed, the concept they used was a Boeing 707, at the time the largest plane around. (I beleive the 747 came shortly later) The 767’s that were used are much larger aircraft. Also, they assumed that a plane hit would be an accident, much like the bomber that ran into the Empire State Building decades earlier. Lost, in a fog, and flying at reletivly slow speeds.
The hijacked aircraft were flying with the engines full out, well over their designed cruise speeds, and were far from lost. It’s been speculated that the cockpits of both WTC planes would have been sounding the overspeed warning.
Also, it is beleived that the steel protectant that was sprayed onto the steel during contruction was probebly blown off by the force of the blast. The stuff works well on a standard office fire, but this was not a standard fire.
Does anyone remember the right-wing “Free Mcveigh” crowd? They presented all kinds of little “factoids” that, as presented by the conspiracists, would indicate that McVeigh was completely innocent. If you read a list of them, without any context, you would walk away certain that poor McVeigh was railroaded by the eeeeevil Clinton administration in order to boost their populatory and pass some eeeeevil restrictive anti-terrorist legistlation.
Then McVeigh ruined all the fun by admitting he did it.
A lot of the “McVeigh sites” are still out on the web. I’d bet rense has a page or two that he hasn’t bothered to delete.
We did in fact have reason to think that terrorists might attack the WTC using airplanes because a similar conspiracy was thwarted during the Clinton administration. The target was CIA headquarters in Langly.
As some of the intelligence failures leading up to the war in Iraq have shown, this administration is not always quick to appreciate the value of information it doesn’t want to hear.
Seventy-one percent of the American people do incorrectly believe that Saddam was behind the 911 attacks and this ignorance is profoundly disturbing. However, there are plenty of people who despise this administration for deception and incompetence — such as yours truly — who find the scenario presented by akrako1 to be pure crackpot stuff. President Bush’s slap-happy approach to capital punishment does lead me to think of him as having a somewhat depraved indifference to human life and I also think he has some profoundly undemocratic tendencies which trouble me. But even people such as myself and such luminaries as Joe Conasan, Marueen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Al Franken, Molly Ivens, the entire staff of The Nation to name a very few who have looked beyond the corporate-controlled happy talk and distortion of the major news media, do not buy the insane conspiracy theories advocated by akrako1. So let’s drop the 71% ignorant Americans stuff because, though hugely regrettable, it just isn’t relevent.
Not only would the so-called “unidentified object” supposedly located on the bottom of the planes be difficult to install without the whole freakin’ airport noticing something funny, but there’s no way the administration could count on somebody not getting a great shot of the second plane hitting the WTC for the whole world to see said object in graphic detail. It’s therefore fair to say that the remote-control theory really doesn’t pass the smell test.
Discussing the collapse of the towers, Osama was quoted as saying, “I was the most optimistic of all.”
I’d call that a confession. In fact, I recall the Arab world sort of shutting up in regards to their assertions that bin Laden had nothing to do with 911 just after that tape came out.
Finally, the latest bin Laden tape convinces me that he has trancended this mortal coil and is in a state where the shackles of time are no longer a consideration. Why would someone shoot a tape of him to prove he exists and not have him talk directly into the camera with a recent newspaper headlline? It all remind of all those films that were cobbled together following the death of Bruce Lee with leftover footage, a lot of back-of-the-head shots and poorly dubbed dialouge.
Yes, in fact, I did. I know all about the videotape you’re talking about. If my post was ambiguous, what I meant was that (far as I know), Al Qaeda does not typically make public statements of responsibility like a Hamas does. I’m pretty sure the tape you mentioned was not for public consumption.
This is sad. I’m traveling to Germany Monday to meet an online friend. And I lived there from July of 1989 to July of 1990. I do find it disturbing that so many “well informed” Germans buy into this ludricious crap. I do hope that the survey was in some way flawed.
However, I also chat with another German lady who informed me that it was impolite of me to say bad things about Saddam’s recently departed children, because “how would I feel if they were my children and someone said those things about them.”
So, I don’t know what to think. But I’m beginning to suspect that many Europeans are not exactly as well informed as many of them think they are. However, the vocal nutjob minority does tend to get a lot of airplay and they do tend to migrate to message boards. I just pray that there is a more sensible, silent majority who we don’t hear about as much because that isn’t seen as being particularly newsworthy. Controversy sells.
Munster, if it makes you feel better, I’m pretty sure akrako1 is misremembering the wording of the question. I think it was more like “do you think it’s possible the US might have been behind 9/11,” or something similar that could be interpreted that way. Saying something might be possible isn’t the same as saying that it’s what you really think happened.
Further demonstrated by the pilot of the second plane being so inept that he had to make a hard turn to even hit a HUGE BUILDING, and the Pentagon pilot hitting the ground BEFORE hitting the Pentagon.
And contrary to the belief of some, hitting the WTC at a higher bank would do less damage. The square-footage of impacted area would be the same, but not the final effect. The main influence in the collapse of a building is cross-sectional support. All that needed to be done is to collapse a single floor, and everything else would have gone under the weight of the floors above crashing down. A large vertical gash in the side of the WTC would have done very little impact to this cross-section, and the majority of the load-bearing structure (The outer walls) would be intact, resulting in an only slightly-increased load per square foot. A large horizontal gash would take out a much higher section of the load-bearing structure, resulting in significantly higher pressure on the remaining walls. A banked impact lessens the chance of collapse.
None of which could have been installed without the knowledge of the maintenance crew. Nor would they be able to override the pilot. And assuming they -could- override the pilot, they would not prevent the pilot from calling for help, resetting the transponder to indicate a hijack, or any other method of contacting the ground. Nor would anyone in the plane be able to crash the plane prior to reaching a target, as was done.
You’ll definatly need a cite for the 3 minutes bit. The highest state of readiness I know of for aircraft on the ground is “plus five” status, meaning about five minutes from the time the call goes out until the time the planes are in the air. Even that is only used when necessary, as it’s supposedly very taxing on aircrews.
When the first plane struck the WTC tower, it was not apparant immediately that there was an attack. It was thought to be a horrible accident. It wasn’t until reports of hijacking, and the second plane hit, that it was known that it was an attack. That’s when the fighters were called up.
The plane that struck the pentagon was approaching a major international airport whos approach airspace runs directly over the pentagon. It was only a momentary change of direction to hurtle down and strike it, prior to wich it would appear to be an airliner approaching the airfield as normal. It, and dozens of other airliners.
And the fourth plane had F-16s just a few minutes from intercept when it crashed into that field.
Yup. 707s, to be specific. And as a testament to their design, both towers survived the impact of the much larger 767s crashing into them.
It wasn’t the impact that brought them down. It was the huge amount of jet fuel and later fires melting the supporting structure that brought them down. That’s why it took so long for the towers to collapse.
It shows that people are stupid. This isn’t a uniquely american trait, and I think showing one poll displaying stupid beliefs of the masses while showing another poll displaying people in other countries believing the US government planned the attacks, may not work quite as much in your favor as you think. In fact, the two may have more in common than you think; people everywhere can hold ideas that have no proof.
Wow. Where to start?
To start with, that’s not the first impact, it’s the second. You can see the smoke from the other tower in it.
That object? First off, the dark spot is part of a blurred image. Because it’s darker than the areas around it, its area of coverage (Due to being blurred) is more prominant. It’s a common optical effect for translucent objects, darker objects with the same opacity tend to be more prominant to the human eye. However, when you look at it closely, you can see that the inner edge (100% opaque, the area that is covered entirely by the plane even after the blur) and the outer edge (The outer extent of the covered area in the blur) is identical to the inner and outer edges of the hull both before and after the wing. If there’s an “object” there, it does not protrude out from the side of the aircraft, it is flush with it. Like paint or a shadow, not an engine or bomb.
Second, is the lighting. Due to the rounded hull of the airliner, as well as the buildings in the area, we can draw a very good conclusions about the angle of lighting, even barring such simple methods as just looking at the time of impact to find the angle the sun would be at. For example, the underside of the wing is dark until about three seconds before the crash, where, as the plane is banking, the underside abruptly lightens. It is at this point that the plane’s wingplane passes the sun, or more simply, the moment the wingtip points above the sun’s possition in the sky. This puts the sun directly “beside” the aircraft. With the light source directly beside the aircraft, the shadow of the engine would fall across the hull. This is further shown by how the “object” on the side of the airplane’s hull seems to be rotating at a quicker rate than the airplane’s own roll. When the plane starts its bank, it’s low, near the very bottom of the aircraft, and obscured by the hull’s own shadow. As it banks further, the “object” approaches closer and closer to the base of the wing. Exactly as you would expect a shadow to behave.
And all of this is neverminding the fact that there would be either hundreds of witnesses to someone strapping a huge object to the side of four 767s, or lots of ATC witnesses to four 767s dropping off the scope and being replaced by four similar-sized aircraft,which also ignores the questions of how the various passengers on those planes were able to tell what was going on, such as seeing buildings moments before striking the WTC tower, or even just where those four unexplained 767s came from, and where the replaced aircraft landed!
Besides, even if none of this were true, the conspiracy theories just leave one major unsatisfactory scenario; that the US government was capable of carrying out a huge conspiracy to attack itself and blame a person that is already a “major enemy”, and is ruthless enough to carry it out, but has to rely upon easily disproven information AND a complete failure to turn up any shred of physical evidence in Iraq. I mean, if this is the same government that carried out a massive conspiracy on the scale of the 9-11 attacks, “Saddam” would have nuked our troops or something.
“Conspiracy theorists are the only true patriots left. They have a lot more faith in the government than most sane people…”
"We knew we were under attack, both towers had been hit, and nothing was done. Bush in fact kept reading a childrens story for 30 minutes after being told that we were under attack. "
Yet one more example of his sterling accuracy. In fact, President Bush read for only another five minutes and then schmoozed for another two. Here is a most instructive link:
Frankly, I’m not sure what they thought was being gained by staying there for even as long as seven minutes after it became clear that THE F***ING COUNTRY WAS BEING ATTACKED!! But seeing as how well they’ve handled things in the two years since, in terms of international relations, handling the economy and helping to promote democracy by truthfully appraising us of the administration’s action, I think it’s best that we try to refrain from any overly harsh criticism even if my eyeballs are bulging from the chronic leap in bloodpressure and are about to explode.
Anyways, anyone else find it entertianing that someone’s crackpot conspiracy theory is based on one man (Osama’s buddy) and his lack of knowledge of a crackpot conspiracy theory?
-Joe, who wonders how the USA has had so many Evil presidents…yet old T.R. had a moustache that was good for doing the evil-twisty thing.
I checked your link and the link to the autopsy article. I read it all twice just to make sure. There is no mention of Arabs anywhere. I think the “no arabs” idea originated with your post. You, sir are a nimcompoop.
I doubt, however, that you will see this post as it is so late in the thread that you might have gone back under whatever rock you crawled out from under as most people do when they have been so throughly debunked.
Some other delusions yet to be addressed:
what connection does a huge object hung under the body of the aircraft have to do with remote control? i.e. does one infer the other?
if the towers were actually wired with explosives, wouldn’t the impact of the airplane have severed wires rendering the integrity of the explosive system useless or at least compromised?
you are not alone.
You must know, on the straight dope, the majority is always right.
if they say something is crackpot, well it is.
Thats all there is to it.
Do not question.
The government would never lie or do anything bad whatsoever!
The news channels are totally unbiased, believe only what the official government line is.
This will make your life much easier.
BTW, I’ve read all the arguments you have, apparently also.
Including of the firefighters who said no way could fire from a plane topple that particular building.
