LOL, double standard, much? Did you by any chance investigate the AE911Truth list? (Answer: no, because it supports your desired conclusion.) It’s full of fake names, people who never submitted their names and have asked (to no response) to be removed, and “engineers” of the computer-programmer and train-driver variety.
“So are there any pieces of evidence regarding a 9/11 conspiracy which cannot be explained?”
I think that question can be effectively shortened.
“So are there any pieces of evidence regarding a 9/11 conspiracy?”
Most conspiracy theorists don’t really provide any evidence of their own. It’s always “why aren’t there any pictures of the plane crashing into the Pentagon?” “How could WTC7 have collapsed hours later?” “Who stood to benefit from the attack?” There’s no evidence for a conspiracy, they just ask questions to try to discredit the evidence against it.
I think it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, but not because the buildings fell. The Twin Towers were the perfect target because there were two of them. After the first plane hit, every camera within ten miles was focused on the towers, so we have lots of pictures of the second. Big, terrifying pictures. The crash of the Hindenberg ended airship travel. Why? It wasn’t that bad. Most people on board survived, and compared to a shipwreck the loss of life was minimal. But newsreel cameras were there, and everybody got to see the flaming hulk crash to the ground.
It’s easy to kill people. If you want to scare people, get it on film.
I remember that. Jon Ronson (author of one of my favorite books Them: Adventures with Extremists) interviewed Rachel North for that piece. My head nearly exploded after hearing the insanity in that piece. I briefly posted to Jon Ronson’s message board, where he had a couple 911 Truthers, and quickly found that any appeal to rational argument and evidence was all for naught, so I saved my frustration and stopped reading it.
The planes could still be tracked with ordinary radar. Norad was totally imcompetant (supposedly) having planes hijacked for a long time, had them crash and still didn’t get up in time? Nope. Not buying it.
The issue with that video is that in one frame you see nothing, the second a white blur and the third a fireball. It is not evidence that will convince anyone of exactly what hit the Pentagon.
Grim
(not a conspiracy theorist)
I assisted with the maintenance of a large and very secure industrial facility. I was privy to the location and monitoring of every camera on the property. None of the 70 or so external cameras would have been able to catch a plane crashing into any of the buildings. Unless the plane happened to fly lower than one of the parking lot cameras and within it’s line of sight. And still, maybe only a frame of blur would have been captured given how fast a jet would be flying.
Security cameras that capture a wide angle view of property have crap resolution. Nobody sets these up for that purpose, they are used to monitor specific entry points at a narrow angle for best resolution.
So…the question here is, “can the ineffectual military response to the 9/11 hijackings be explained?”
Your answer is no. I disagree.
Refer to the 9/11 timeline on Wikipedia:
At 8:20 the FAA came to the tentative conclusion that a single plane might have been hijacked. At 8:37 - just 17 minutes later - they got word to NORAD that a hijacking had taken place; not bad, considering the communication network that the information must have gone through. Remember, it wasn’t that the military saw a massive invasion force approaching on their radar terminals, and pushed a button to give the intercept command via a tightly integrated communication network; this was the FAA taking just 17 minutes to go from thinking that maybe this plane had been hijacked (remember, initially they’re not sure exactly what’s happening, just that there’s some trouble on a plane) to placing the call that alerts NORAD that a hijacking is happening and a military response is called for. A couple of unintentional radio transmissions from Flight 11 during those 17 minutes helped the FAA come to that firm conclusion.
Just nine minutes later, at 8:46, a pair of F-15’s is airborne. That’s a pretty snappy response in my book. The bad news is that Flight 11 hit the WTC about forty seconds later. So now what is there for the fighter jets to do? Go do laps around Long Island until we figure out what else is going on.
At 8:52 an attendant on Flight 175 calls UA to let them know that their plane has been hijacked. As before, the transponder gets shut off at about this time.
8:56, the transponder on Flight 77 gets turned off, the first inkling of trouble on yet another flight. Remember, this doesn’t automatically force a conclusion of “ohshititsbeenhijacked.”
By 9:00, the FAA still can’t find Flight 175. By “can’t find it,” I mean it’s probably appearing on their radar along with everything else, they just don’t know which blip is Flight 175. Three minutes later it hits the second tower. This is only 8 minutes after the call to United Airlines (not to the military) confirming the hijacking. Not enough time for a military response, even if the military had been alerted (which they hadn’t).
Around 9:13 the F-15 fighters leave Long Island and start hanging around Manhattan. Afterall, two airliners were just crashed here, and lacking any more information at all, it’s reasonable to suspect more might be coming here. The F-15’s show up at around 9:25.
9:28, Flight 93 gets hijacked. Air traffic controllers overhear the cockpit commotion.
Around 9:33, the FAA finds Flight 77 hauling ass toward the White House and alerts the secret service. It’s not clear whether they ever told the military (which is not the same thing as the secret service).
9:36, it’s not clear whether the FAA has informed the military about Flight 93.
At 9:37 - just 4 minutes after the FAA said “oh, there it is” - Flight 77 hits the pentagon. Even if they had definitively informed the military, four minutes is not enough time to muster any kind of military response.
10:03, Flight 93 crashes in Pennsylvania. This is, coincidentally, about the same time that the White House informs the military that the plane has been hijacked. So, zero time here for a military response.
OK, so to sum up:
Flight 11: nine minutes and forty seconds from NORAD notification to crash.
Flight 175: eight minutes from “confirmed hijacking” to crash.
Flight 77: four minutes from “we found the plane on radar” to crash.
Flight 93: zero minutes from military awareness to crash.
The inability of the military to respond effectively on 9/11 was not due to incompetence or due to conspiracy: it was due to the extreme rapidity with which the individual events unfolded.
Apparently, they could not. The blips don’t tell you which plane it is.
You’ve discounted the information I have provided and held to your own conclusion, despite information that refutes your conclusion.
See how we wind up with these sorts of threads now?
Even if NORAD turned out to be totally incompetent (which as we see below probably wasn’t the case), why is that evidence of a conspiracy?
Incompetence in any organization shouldn’t be surprising, especially when the task they are supposed to accomplish happens very rarely. So finding out that NORAD didn’t do a good job scrambling fighters to shoot down hijacked airliners shouldn’t be surprising, because it’s not something they do on a daily basis. I bet your town’s earthquake preparedness team won’t do a very good job the next time you have an earthquake, because even in California earthquakes happen rarely enough that people are tempted to fuck off and not do their job, and who’s going to know? Except when the earthquake happens.
Surely they at least know what planes all the other blips are. Or you’re suggesting that modern airtraffic control is ludicrously flawed? Why even have radar if it’s just, “oh, look, a whole bunch of blips making pretty pictures.”
That’s a very good point. But think of it this way: Bush is an alcohol-wrecked idiot (especially back then–I think the years on the job have mended his neurons a bit). He’s just a stooge, he couldn’t be trusted with a secret. He couldn’t prep for a speech beforehand, and he’d bungle anything impromptu. He was also busy being given the runaround, being sent on a plane from one spot to another–anywhere that’s not Washington. Cheney, meanwhile, didn’t run around like a frightened rabbit. After not flinching as the South Tower collapses, he immediately begins assembling a legal team to expanding presidential powers. He successfully keeps Bush out of DC, and Congressional leaders too. No crowd-stirring speeches, but he’d “taken a leadership role,” as you say, in a way that a speech never could.
I think it’s about time to send this thread on a one-way flight from GQ to GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Yep. And then Bush was pushed aside and Cheney stepped-in as president and . . . wait . . . 
Jon Ronson also wrote another notable book, The Men Who Stare at Goats. That one has just been made into a movie, to be released in November, starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, and Jeff Bridges.
The trailer can be seen here: The Men Who Stare at Goats | IMDb
It looks hilarious. It’s the true story about the time that Ronson spent with the guys who were in the CIA’s psychic spying program.
Cool. The movie, that is. I have the book, as well, but didn’t find it as compelling or entertaining as Them.
Is it true that they found one of the terrorists passports in the WTC rubble
From what I’ve ever been able to gather, yes, this is true. However, the tinhatters have shit so voluminously into the well of 9/11 information that it can be hard for even the most discerning of us to wade through it all. I thought for years, until a recent thread here, that the spiriting away of the bin Laden family was true. That one was even reported in the mainstream media IIRC, but it wasn’t true.
That really wasn’t true? I always believed that it was as well just because the bin Laden family is massive and has more money than god. There were (are) some in the elite Boston schools. I didn’t think anyone thought they were guilty of anything. I just thought the U.S. government was trying to protect them in the aftermath. I am still not convinced that it isn’t true but I will keep an open mind. What is the best evidence against it? In normally wouldn’t try to ask for a negative argument but this one seems really odd because it was so widely reported. I always heard the bin Laden family had to be evacuated when no one else was allowed to fly.
That’s what I thought, too.
I don’t remember the details, besides that I was convinced. It was in either the “give me your 9/11 conspiracy theories (and/or their debunking)!” thread, or the thread that spawned that one. That’s a few thousand posts so you’ll understand me not wanting to read it all over again :p.
It was either xtisme or tomndebb who pointed it out; if either of them vanity search, they can explain it here.
Satam al Suqami’s passport was found, but not in the rubble - it was found on the street, before the buildings collapsed. Along with a bunch more airplane debris BTW.