# Was Bush Regime complicit in 9/11 attack? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 18, 2008, 5:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707 "2008-12-18T05:05:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/81 "2008-12-19T05:06:06Z")
> [@Fish](#): > > World Trade Center: 110 stories. Footprint of 43,264 ft² (208 ft x 208 ft). Height of 1,368 feet. > > Windsor Tower in Madrid: 32 stories. Estimate of footprint 2,925 ft² (about 45 feet by about 65 feet, based on the scale of the remains visible by Google satellite photo). Height of 348 feet. > > It should be elementary geometry here, but the World Trade Center was a building with a volume of about 5.9 million ft³. The Windsor Tower had a volume of about 1.01 million ft³. > > Difference factor in height: about 3x. Difference factor in volume: about 6x. You dropped a digit somewhere - each WTC tower was about 59 million ft³, not 5.9 million. Each was almost 60x larger than the Windsor. ---
**Author:** ![Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/bc8723/32.png) [@Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fish)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/82 "2008-12-19T05:37:05Z")
Ah, that’s where that went! Thanks. 😉 A factor of 60x better illustrates the principle: that a 3-fold increase in height creates far more than a 3-fold increase in mass. ---
**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 7:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/83 "2008-12-19T07:35:20Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > The reason the WTC collapses and controlled demolitions look superficially similar is that in both cases the main cause of the collapse is gravity. Buildings that big wiegh a lot. They have to have very strong supports to avoid collapsing. Weaken those supports until they are no longer strong enough to counteract gravity and the building falls down. Since the force of gravity acts to pull things straight down, the majority of material falls straight down, “into its own footprint”. > > So noting that the towers fell straight down isn’t exactly mysterious, because how else would you expect them to fall? To tip over like dominos? But they can’t do that because the forces holding the building together are very small compared to the weight of the building. Our intuitive understanding of how strong materials are doesn’t scale well. A steel beam is strong. But a steel beam ten times longer and thicker and wider is stronger, 100 times stronger. But that same steel beam is 1000 times heavier. That means it is proportionally 1/10th as strong. Now scale that up to the size of a skyscraper. > [@RickJay](#): > > Actually, no comparison can be made to your arm, because your arm is orders of magnitude stronger than a skyscraper. There really isn’t any scalable comparison to a jet liner hitting a skyscraper because no steel-framed building that has ever been, or will ever be, constructed will be nearly as dense or as strong, after adjusting for size, as your arm. > > Hold your arm out in front of you. Is it threatening to fall apart? No? Well, a 100-storey building can’t even do that. Right. Actually, I don’t think I personally understood until after 2001 that a large building _can’t_ fall over like a tree going “timm-berr!”. I mean, I simply hadn’t really thought about it much. If you just casually watch one of those Discovery Channel specials about controlled demolitions experts blowing stuff up, you might think “Wow, that building fell straight down! Those guys are really good!” (At least, you might have thought that if you’re a liberal arts major like me.) But–not to take away from what the controlled demolitions guys do–what they’re doing isn’t quite as miraculous as it looks. It’s not that, by careful planning and preparation, they keep the unwanted building from just keeling over sideways like a falling tree and wiping out whole city blocks; rather, what controlled demolitions teams do is make the building fall _exactly_ straight down–instead of only _mostly_ straight down like the Twin Towers did, with debris sideswiping and wrecking or damaging various other structures, like the ill-fated WTC 7. ---
**Author:** ![sailor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a587f6/32.png) [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 7:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/84 "2008-12-19T07:53:01Z")
Buildings and other structures _want_ to fall vertically. This is due to either their own weight or to the force of gravity, scientists are not certain. But they want to fall vertically. Each part, each atom, wants to fall vertically with an equal acceleration. It requires force to deviate from this. Look at how tall industrial chimneys collapse when demolished by explosives. They do not topple over in one piece. They start to topple over but if they were to topple in one piece the top would have to fall _much_ faster than the bottom and that is not what nature wants. So normally the stack will break in parts so that each part can fall independent of the other. This breaking up of the stack higher up is caused solely by gravity and nothing to do with the explosives. ---
**Author:** ![Zoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a4c791/32.png) [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/85 "2008-12-19T08:16:54Z")
> [@](#): > > **Lonesome Polecat** : You see, that’s the problem not only with 9/11 conspiracy theories but with all conspiracy theories. No conspiracy theories are ever right? I seem to remember a lot of conspirators convicted for the coverup of Watergate. Even the President was an unindicted co-conspirator. Was that a conspiracy-theory-lite? What is the difference in believing there was a conspiracy and in being a conspiracy theorist? Naturally I believe the OP of this thread is a whole bag of nuttin’. ---
**Author:** ![LonesomePolecat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a88e57/32.png) [@LonesomePolecat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonesomePolecat)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/86 "2008-12-19T13:25:09Z")
> [@glee](#): > > What was the point of killing all those Americans? [hijack] Bush & Co. had the idea that they would turn Iraq into a successful Western style democracy which would serve as a beacon of light to the benighted Middle East, the idea being to reduce the threat of terrorism by promoting the spread of democracy in the region. The results were pretty much the same as you’d get from any other scheme based on starry-eyed idealism. [/hijack] ---
**Author:** ![LonesomePolecat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a88e57/32.png) [@LonesomePolecat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonesomePolecat)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/87 "2008-12-19T13:36:43Z")
> [@Zoe](#): > > No conspiracy theories are ever right? I seem to remember a lot of conspirators convicted for the coverup of Watergate. Even the President was an unindicted co-conspirator. > > Was that a conspiracy-theory-lite? What is the difference in believing there was a conspiracy and in being a conspiracy theorist? > > Naturally I believe the OP of this thread is a whole bag of nuttin’. Generally speaking, when we talk of “conspiracy theory” around here, we mean theories which involve huge, massive super-conspiracies that have an incredible power to control events from behind the scene, and the evidence for these super-conspiracies consists of shaky re-interpretations or outright denial of evidence, “facts” that turn out not to be facts, seeing suspicious connections in the most ordinary and mundane situations, etc. In other words, something that sounds more like a Fu Manchu novel than a serious political analysis. Certainly there have been real conspiracies, but none that even come close to matching wild paranoid fantasies like the 911 Truth movement. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/88 "2008-12-19T13:54:14Z")
Watergate is a good example. Even a petty burglary couldn’t be successfully covered up. Imagine a huge conspiracy like would be necessary to bing off 9/11. The chances of keeping it covered up are indistinguishable from zero. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/89 "2008-12-19T15:36:38Z")
The problem with Conspiracies-with-a-capital-“C” (as opposed to mere conspiracies, which happen everytime some mook robs a convenience store with his buddy waiting in the getaway car with the motor running) is that they tend to be non-falsifiable. Absence of evidence, or even evidence of absence? Ah, that just shows the shocking extent of the _cover-up_! Indeed, “They” are everywhere and all-powerful. ---
**Author:** ![Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/bc8723/32.png) [@Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fish)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/90 "2008-12-19T16:20:56Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > Imagine a huge conspiracy like would be necessary to **bing off** 9/11. Ba-ba-ba-booom? ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/91 "2008-12-19T17:38:33Z")
> [@](#): > > The problem with Conspiracies-with-a-capital-“C” (as opposed to mere conspiracies, which happen everytime some mook robs a convenience store with his buddy waiting in the getaway car with the motor running) is that they tend to be non-falsifiable. Absence of evidence, or even evidence of absence? Ah, that just shows the shocking extent of the cover-up! Indeed, “They” are everywhere and all-powerful. All you have to do is imagine the organization that would be necessary in order to cause the event and hide their involvement. And then ask yourself if that organization would choose to cause the event the way it happened. If you controlled the entire American government in 1963, would you shoot the President in the middle of a public street in front of hundreds of witnesses? No, you’d cause him to have a “heart attack” in the middle of the night when he was alone in the White House. By the same token, if there had been a conspiracy to blow up the World Trade Center as an excuse to invade Iraq, then the conspirators would have arranged to make it look like Iraqis had been flying the planes not Saudis. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/92 "2008-12-19T18:17:03Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > Watergate is a good example. Even a petty burglary couldn’t be successfully covered up. > > Imagine a huge conspiracy like would be necessary to bing off 9/11. The chances of keeping it covered up are indistinguishable from zero. > > Regards, > Shodan Agreed. The idea of a controlled demolition or any variation thereon is preposterous. It is **not** so preposterous, however, that someone inside the Admin had very specific advance intelligence of the attack and deliberately did nothing about it, for political reasons. (Not W himself, I think – he is not a good enough actor to pull off that deer-in-the-headlights reaction we all saw in _Fahrenheit 9-11.)_ And we’ll never know that one way or another unless someone in the know has an attack of conscience and blabs. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/93 "2008-12-19T18:25:47Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Agreed. The idea of a controlled demolition or any variation thereon is preposterous. It is **not** so preposterous, however, that someone inside the Admin had very specific advance intelligence of the attack and deliberately did nothing about it, for political reasons. (Not W himself, I think – he is not a good enough actor to pull off that deer-in-the-headlights reaction we all saw in _Fahrenheit 9-11.)_ And we’ll never know that one way or another unless someone in the know has an attack of conscience and blabs. Do not ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. For any number of reasons, I find the notion that someone in the U.S. government would know about the actual plans for the WTC/Pentagon attacks and deliberately do nothing ludicrous. I do not think that there are that many people in government who think that way that the odds of one of them coming across the information, (all by themselves, because no one else has noted that they suppressed it), to be very high. There is no way for anyone to have known that the attacks would not have been more successful and actually harmed them for suppressing the information. Hating people in government or members of particular parties or professions can be an amusing passtime if not taken seriously, but it is not a good foundation on which to form an actual worldview. ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Borgia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/larry_borgia/32/156_2.png) [@Larry\_Borgia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Borgia)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/94 "2008-12-19T18:43:36Z")
From what I’ve read all the information was there to prevent the attack, but it was parceled out among different agencies, mostly the FBI and the CIA. Had the two agencies talked to each other, the attack may well have been prevented. They didn’t and it wasn’t. I thnk this is still a problem, and has not been helped by the creation of the DHS. ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/95 "2008-12-19T18:43:42Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > It is **not** so preposterous, however, that someone inside the Admin had very specific advance intelligence of the attack and deliberately did nothing about it, for political reasons. (Not W himself, I think – he is not a good enough actor to pull off that deer-in-the-headlights reaction we all saw in _Fahrenheit 9-11.)_ And we’ll never know that one way or another unless someone in the know has an attack of conscience and blabs. Yes, it **is** so preposterous, for reasons tomndebb mentioned and more. I had a military intelligence officer explain this to me once, and this is a gross simplification of what he said because I can’t remember all the details, but basically what it boiled down to is that whoever discovered this information would’ve been a very low-level/low-ranking person, and it would’ve had to go through many channels before getting anywhere near the White House. Despite the fantasties of your average 9/11 troother, Dick Cheney himself does not spend his days in a dark room with headphones on doing the grunt work of gathering intelligence. That puts us right back in “how many people can really keep a secret that big for 7 years” territory. ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/96 "2008-12-19T18:46:21Z")
> [@Larry\_Borgia](#): > > From what I’ve read all the information was there to prevent the attack, but it was parceled out among different agencies, mostly the FBI and the CIA. Had the two agencies talked to each other, the attack may well have been prevented. They didn’t and it wasn’t. I thnk this is still a problem, and has not been helped by the creation of the DHS. In hindsight, it probably was all there. Not so much in linear time, though. The nature of a surprise attack is that no one is expecting it. It’s easy to say “all the intelligence was there” now, but our brains work in a post-9/11 way now. I doubt 9/11 could’ve happened on 9/12 or any day since then. ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Borgia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/larry_borgia/32/156_2.png) [@Larry\_Borgia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Borgia)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/97 "2008-12-19T18:52:35Z")
> [@Cisco](#): > > In hindsight, it probably was all there. Not so much in linear time, though. The nature of a surprise attack is that no one is expecting it. It’s easy to say “all the intelligence was there” now, but our brains work in a post-9/11 way now. I doubt 9/11 could’ve happened on 9/12 or any day since then. From what I’ve read–and this is going by memory, which could be faulty–the CIA knew how dangerous Atta was and was interested in picking him up, but they didn’t know he was in the country. The FBI had information that he was in the country, but didn’t know who he really was. ---
**Author:** ![Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/bc8723/32.png) [@Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fish)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/98 "2008-12-19T18:54:12Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > It is **not** so preposterous, however, that someone inside the Admin had very specific advance intelligence of the attack and deliberately did nothing about it, for political reasons. And if they did know about the Twin Towers in advance, why would they do nothing? There was no way to know that there weren’t _other_ targets of which we were not advised in advance. ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/99 "2008-12-19T19:07:56Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > It is **not** so preposterous, however, that someone inside the Admin had very specific advance intelligence of the attack and deliberately did nothing about it, for political reasons. Add me to the folks who thinks this idea **is** preposterous. The number of people who would need to completely throw morality aside, and keep it completely quiet, defies plausibility. ---
**Author:** ![Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/bc8723/32.png) [@Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fish)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707/100 "2008-12-19T19:41:43Z")
You’d think at least Kiefer Sutherland would have heard about it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-bush-regime-complicit-in-9-11-attack/477707.md?page=6)