But Obama the Peace Laureate is so humane, don't you know. He would never have an Enemy of the State tortured!

"The UN special rapporteur on torture has formally accused the US government of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment towards Bradley Manning, the US soldier who was held in solitary confinement for almost a year on suspicion of being the WikiLeaks source."

Sometimes it does.

Exactly. But it's weirder because you'd think it wouldn't feel as important to hold on to a conspiracy theory. It doesn't exactly affect your entire life, does it?

...to the point where they obviously weren't thinking logically, just determined to believe in the conspiracy no matter what.

Sounds like religion.

@Nox

If more conspiracy theorists were willing to modify their theories to fit new information, or walk away from their pet theories when they become untenable, the whole thing would be more worth taking seriously.

Definitely. That's why I ignored most of the conspiracy theories in the beginning because I saw people argue about them to the point where they obviously weren't thinking logically, just determined to believe in the conspiracy no matter what.

@Paul
Thanks for the explanation. Like I said, I'm not an expert in these areas and it's hard to refute this stuff when it's all thrown at me at once.

Thanks for everyone's input. I guess I'm still pretty undecided for the time being. Hopefully this information will be more available in the future.

I have always thought there was something a little fishy about 9/11, more or less allowing something to happen at least,at worst gross incompetence. This is based mostly upon no-fly zones around D.C. and the acknowledged time from highjacks to impacts. Granted this is also as far as I go into theories about this,considering my personal bias against the right wingers and republicans..and Cheney and the 2000 elections. That being said, with the time factor and the fact that many cities(NYC) have military no-fly zones in them something almost has to be wrong with the official story. Then again I have no proof nor do I think I could find some.

@Justice: yeah, that wouldn't be too practical... ^_^

"The collapsing buildings collapsed just like demolitions. ... World Trade Center 7 collapsed even though it was barely damaged. And then there's plenty of people saying they felt an explosion before the plane hit the building."

Except they didn't– demolitions are by knocking out the lower level supports and letting gravity pull the building down, while the collapses started at the height where the planes impacted. But this aside, I'm assuming this is more about the "symmetric collapse" argument? This is easily explained by where the collapse started. The top falling away first will not cause the entire structure to rotate like a lever and cast debris a significant distance from the base. Think that popular game Jenga: consider pushing a few pieces of the tower from the top instead of pulling out enough from the base to make the tower collapse. Which causes pieces to go farther from where they were stacked? That said, how far the debris did make it is not consistent with demolition either. Given that this was a tall building, it would certainly look like the collapse was symmetric, simply by the scales involved (e.g. a 100 foot gap doesn't look that big if you are looking at mile sized distances).

Actually, there was damage to WTC 7, a lot of it. From an interview with Captain Chris Boyle who was one of the firefighters who responded:

"A little north of Vesey I said, we’ll go down, let’s see what’s going on. A couple of the other officers and I were going to see what was going on. We were told to go to Greenwich and Vesey and see what’s going on. So we go there and on the north and east side of 7 it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. Debris was falling down on the building and it didn’t look good."

( http://www.firehouse.com/article/10568001/captain-chris-boyle?page=2 )

Conspiracy theories are only good in that they ask questions, but every time I encounter a conspiracy theorist they are always dogmatic (the one exception being Nox). I do however, completely concur with the assessment that our government is probably not telling us everything; it has no motive to do so, and a track record against doing so. But from what I know about physics, the events of a plane crash and a subsequent collapse appear to hold up.

When I think of government conspiracies as a concept, I don't think everyone who has something to do with it knows at all that they do, they are just called on to do their job and most jobs are part of a bigger job nobody really knows what they do. So, as a concept I don't think it's impossible to coordinate all the working parts without telling them all what it's for. At least in my dealings with various government agencies, everyone knows only exactly how to do their job and not one thing more, and the less you know, the less you get in trouble if it's for something bad. I suspect if an assistant had to make 12 copies of a booklet that had a heading "Terrorist Conspiracy" on it, they might tell someone, and even more especially, if the assistant's only job was to bring it to a copy department - just doing your job and not reading is probably how they do their job. A vivid plot such as an "inside job" 9/11 would have to cross a lot of desks but in such a way as to not raise questions or startle anyone out of their routine, which is plausible to me. Not that I say it was an inside job, but I think it's possible to have a massive amount of working parts who have no idea they are being put to use on an irregular project.

@FO – I concur.

Perhaps “government intelligence” should have read: those pertinent individuals within the convoluted system of higher powers (mostly government hired employees) who have hidden agendas and motives way beyond what the average person could ever begin to imagine or construe, and who are likely to use by any means, any available method at their disposal, including lies and manipulation among many other measures, to cover up their deviant actions and intents devised with their own best interests in mind, and do their best to persuade the general public to believe whatever best suits their own personal, self-promoting objectives.

Or something like that.

Just to clarify those weren't fundie caps in my last post. The actual names of both of those exercises would be in all capital letters. The government uses a lot of unnecessary capital letters (for example NORTHWOODS, AJAX, or COINTELPRO).

It's hard to know what exactly to think.

I am thoroughly convinced (and for good reason) that the government is lying about some major details of what happened that day. The official story that we have been asked to believe on the basis of classified evidence and the word of the same guys who made up Saddam's WMD's, has some pretty f*cking huge plot holes. And in addition to being unbelievable on a lot of levels, it has been used to justify many unjustifiable things (as quickly as September 12th 2001 and as recently as four days ago).

Anything we use as casus belli should be subject to a little extra scrutiny. Here we've been asked not only to believe something without sufficient evidence, but to believe it hard enough to choose security over freedom. I can appreciate why skeptics tend to oppose conspiracy theories. But for me it is the application of skepticism that makes me a conspiracy theorist.

I should clarify my use of that term. If you asked me in 2004, I'd have said U.S. military pilots were probably flying those planes, possibly by remote control, and probably under direct orders from Dick Cheney. As I've continued to look into this and related matters, I've come to the conclusion that my earlier conclusion is probably not the most reasonable explanation. Something is still very very wrong with this picture. But at this point I'd have to say the government intentionally letting it happen (with a well timed blind eye and a little encouragement and funding to the right people) is a lot more consistent with the observable facts than the government actually carrying out the attack themselves. And I suppose a legitimate case could be made for incompetence as well.

If more conspiracy theorists were willing to modify their theories to fit new information, or walk away from their pet theories when they become untenable, the whole thing would be more worth taking seriously.

The first problem is the vacuum of information that results from our government's abysmal lack of transparency. Our government has a very long track record of withholding information that would be crucial to a well informed populace, and putting out false information to manufacture public consent for what politicians (or their donors) want to do anyway. When there is actually something to cover up, they cover it up. And when there is nothing to cover up, they cover it up anyway.

The other problem is the same one we see in religion. This idea that when no clear answer is available, the next step is to start making sh*t up.

An event occurs, an unsatisfactory (or sometimes obviously false) explanation is given, the real information is unavailable to the public, and speculation ensues. This has been something of a recurring theme both in the history of america and the history of conspiracy theories.

The rampant unchecked speculation (and Glenn Beck) is why I personally had to step out of the CT community (though I still do encourage everyone to look closer at these matters, there is still much to be seen). It is tempting to want to know what happened. And then it is tempting to want to think you do know what happened. In this earnest zeal, people make up scenarios. Some entirely plausible and well argued. Some absolutely insane. But none exactly proven. None established by sufficient evidence (and here I'm referring to positive assertions about what specifically did happen, I can give you real evidence for what didn't happen). And pretty much all of them stated as though they are already proven. With the truth obscured, there is nothing to check the speculation against. All speculation is treated as equal. If anything the crazier variations get more traction.

By this point, just over ten years later, there are hundreds of versions of what did happen. And quite simply they could not all be true. Neither could everything the news has reported on the attacks. The official story is no less than three conflicting stories. But the stories on the internet are myriad conflicting stories. Leaving aside that many of these claims are patently ridiculous, they just logically could not all be true. If it was a plane, then it wasn't a missile. If it was the U.S. government, then it wasn't the Israeli government. If it was freemasons, then it wasn't aliens.

The point Yoav makes is one of the more serious objections to be raised against government complicity. The reason I'm not entirely convinced by this is the non-disclosure agreements. You don't just take a job with an intelligence agency and get access to classified documents. There's a contract you sign in between those steps, and part of it says you are subject to prosecution if you tell anyone about what you see at the office.

I'll grant that something like this would be a little harder to keep suppressed than for example the Vice President selling weapons to Iran to give money to the Contras, or the President bugging the headquarters of the Democratic Party, or the CIA smuggling cocaine at the height of the drug war, or the U.S. government staging a proxy invasion of Cuba, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulating a now declassified internal document written by the chairman of the JCS suggesting that maybe the military should just shoot down a plane full of american civilians and blame it on Cuba, or the Navy actually blowing up one of their own ships and using it as a pretext for the Vietnam War, or the colonists dumping a bunch of british tea and playing it off on the indians, or the Vice President holding a meeting at the White House (four month before 9/11 and almost two years before the Iraq invasion) to carve up a map of Iraq and auction off drilling rights to the representatives of various countries or oil companies, or the Office of Special Plans falsifying intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq (in case any of those references were too obscure, those are all things that we know did happen, and each would be best described as a conspiracy).

But the fact that whistleblowers (and would be whistleblowers) have come forward, and some of them have been gag-ordered, imprisoned or threatened with imprisonment (see Sibel Edmonds, Coleen Rowley, Bradley Manning) does not give me much confidence in the idea that this couldn't possibly be covered up. And as FO mentioned, the government is not exactly one entity. The departments that would be involved are highly compartmentalized. Most of the things they already do are carried out by a vast workforce of individuals who are each told only a small portion of what they are part of. If 9/11 were orchestrated by the U.S. government, I think the most plausible scenario would have only Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Myers aware of the entire plan.

I'm assuming the documentary you are referring to is Zeitgeist (if you're not sure of the title don't worry about it, I'm pretty sure that's the one you're talking about). Like a Michael Moore documentary or Fox "news" it may randomly contain some true facts but shouldn't be viewed as a reliable source of information.

Part 1 is lifted in its entirety from an earlier documentary called The God Who Wasn't There, which argues that a historical Jesus never existed. That one is somewhat worth watching. It overstates the strength of the mythicist position, and makes some unfounded assertions, but it makes a better case for a better position than the poor reproduction of that argument in Zeitgeist. Judaism and christianity did borrow a lot from earlier myths. Some aspects of those myths are tied to astrology. But Zeitgeist's claim that the gospels in their entirety are an astrological allegory, is not well supported, does not fully explain the christ myth, and isn't really even necessary. The somewhat mundane possibility of an apocalyptic preacher (something not that rare in 1st Century Palestine) gathering some followers, being killed and posthumously wrapped in layers of (largely borrowed) mythology by those followers, explains the whole thing quite well without needing to stretch zodiac references.

Part 2 is lifted mostly from Loose Change, a documentary that is not particularly worth watching. It makes some good points, but it engages in some incredibly bad journalism and overall is unhelpful to its stated purpose of raising awareness of how much the government has lied to us about what happened that day. By parroting these assertions indiscriminately Zeitgeist adds mud to these already clouded waters.

Part 3 makes some interesting points, slightly marred now by it's knee jerk alarmism. It is an earnest enough apocalyptic message. It is based on extrapolation from a lot of things that actually have been happening in the last few years. But it uses an uncritical method of extrapolation which assumes any scenario that can be drawn from present trends must be inevitable. If the predictions (it might be truer to their intention to call these prophecies) contained in Zeitgeist Part 3 were coming true at the predicted rate, we should have seen that one world government by 2010.

As a slightly better alternative covering some of the same ground as Part 1, I'd suggest Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman. For Part 2, Crossing The Rubicon by Michael Ruppert, or Against All Enemies by Richard A. Clarke will give you better information than Zeitgeist, along with plenty of good reasons to question the official cover story. A considerably more rational, well argued, and evidence based examination of some of the topics in Part 3 can be found in Hegemony Or Survival by Noam Chomsky.

The wargames that Zeitgeist mentioned (in my opinion the biggest actual smoking gun of the whole thing) are a real thing. Details may be right or wrong (some do not mesh with my own investigation), but in some form or another the wargames on September 11th 2001 did happen. Cynthia McKinney got Donald Rumsfeld to admit that one (on camera) in a congressional hearing. If you dig a little deeper into most conspiracy theories, you'll find they don't hold up to scrutiny. If you dig a little deeper into this particular conspiracy theory, you'll find that by the time the first plane hit, TRIPOD II and NORTHERN VIGILANCE were already underway.

Would the U.S. government actually carry out (or intentionally arrange defense resources to let through) an attack on a U.S. city killing innocent civilians just to create a climate of fear that they could exploit to manufacture consent for a series of wars in the Middle East (coming fall of 2012: Iran. Again), and a series of draconian laws (some of them had been talking about since the 80's) that would increase their own power while stripping american citizens of their basic rights (the Patriot Act being the most well known one but not the worst), funneling a few trillion dollars to their pals in the defense industry while giving themselves an unlimited budget for unprecedented domestic spying, kidnap and torture of U.S. citizens or foreign nationals, bombing villages, targeted assassinations, or really just any f*cking thing they want to do as long as they can keep a straight face while saying it is for our protection?

If they did, it would be entirely in line with a lot of other stuff they have done.

Would the U.S. government be a somewhat randomly assembled team of incompetent corrupt bureaucrats which spends much of its time and resources on infighting staffed in every department at every level by people far too concerned with their own political advancement to be much use in any conspiracy (or really any common agenda) ultimately chosen at its highest level by a bunch of uninformed dipsh*ts in Iowa, that totally would miss something like this (even if their own guys warned them repeatedly) then just sit there sh*tting themselves while it happened, only to later realize the opportunity and then exploit the tragedy to solidify power, and justify some wars that were already on the table?

Yeah. That one sounds about right too.

@Justice Gustin: I think you are making "the government" far more connected than it actually is.
There are factions within, agencies and even within them games of power, blackmailing and such, which happens when you have an environment with strong secrecy requirements.
So, SOME people MAY have been involved, may have known, but it does not mean that ALL did.
It's not like they are all together, all perfectly motivated and all perfectly efficient in keeping outsiders in the dark.
Because they're human.

Ok, they MAY be reptilian overlords from space after all.... =P

Regardless, "the government" is not a single entity.

Ugh, conspiracy theories are so much work. All that forcing ideas that don't fit into a puzzle where they don't go, and feeling all crazy-smug that you know what's really going on. It's one thing to be surprised at just how incompetent our government was at preventing something that had a good number of warning signs, and completely another to think they were in on it. The truth is horrible and straight-forward and simple enough. It works. Our government isn't slick enough to pull off a conspiracy.

Ah, I was going to mention that someone on this board had, IIRC, a pretty big spiel about that. Nox's comment reminded me who it was. (It was Nox.)

When I first saw the Truth video, I found it serious looking enough to consider it, but I was also skeptical and I asked an even more skeptical person to watch it and tell me specifically what's wrong with it. He never made time for it, and I just kept it for later - not believing it but not dismissing it as impossible. Eventually it came up here, we used to have one poster who was extreme about conspiracy theories. There is a very old thread about it and I read all the arguments why the Truth video and 9/11 conspiracy is invalid. I'm convinced there's no conspiracy, but of course I can't recall exactly why, but the information is here if you dig for it or if some of the posters repeat themselves.

I don't outright dismiss any conspiracy is possible, just on the premise that it's important to be vigilant and not just swallow what the news decides to feed me. I like to know all sides and see what everyone has to say and decide who to trust. Widespread government cover-ups are really impossible, and 9/11 "truthers" pick apart every second of footage and look for things to attribute to government malice. There are way too many "signs" you can vaguely detect only in hindsight, and a few "nagging" questions that are within the realm of possible without indicating a conspiracy. Think of all the ways a Christian fundamentalist can scan over vague passages of the bible and crack the "code" and build a case for prophesy.

Here is a website I found
http://www.debunking911.com/index.html

Once people have a distrust of the government, everything they see looks convincing of a conspiracy such that they don't believe it's not a conspiracy.

Yeah, really my biggest problem with this is how involved the government could have been. I can believe they knew about it and they definitely used it to their advantage. It just doesn't make sense that they would plan this. It just involves too many people who are willing to do something seriously evil. And no one said anything?

"..because the main business is the war, and without terror, is not possible to maintain "the war against terror" If a few have to die to maintain the whole system, well... they (Bush and nice company) don´t think twice!!"

The US government has no problem whipping people in to a frenzy to go off to war. Bush and Co. could have just as easily made a BS "yellow cake" argument about Iraq without 9/11, and we still would have marched 19 year old off to die in the deser

I received this email the other day, so I checked it out with Snopes. Even though it's a mixture of truth, It's still disconcerting.

I think we are still very vulnerable, and believe that government intelligence knows way more than they let on, but Like Yoav said, to cover up something of this magnitude (9/11) seems unlikely.

@Bill, because the main business is the war, and without terror, is not possible to maintain "the war against terror" If a few have to die to maintain the whole system, well... they (Bush and nice company) don´t think twice!!

And besides that, there´s a linkage with the other side of the business, the conflict of interests about the management of crude oil.

Large conspiracies have a fatal inherent flaw to them, they have to involve a lot of people and people talk. Setting up a conspiracy to create 9/11 and make it look like a terrorist attack would have to involve dozens of people doing rather suspicious stuff in public. You would think someone of the thousands of people that went through the WTC daily would have noticed people setting explosives or were they all on the conspiracy as well, and what about everyone in the airports the flights originated at? We talk about the same government that can't cover up the president banging interns in the oval office but somehow it can keep something that big a secret.

What exactly would be the motivation for our government allowing the killing of thousands of Americans?

Clearly there were security and intelligence lapses that created an environment in which the attack could happen. The idea that the US government allowed the attack - or participated in the attack - is ridiculous though.

@Fo, I think you understimate Bush... His "stupidity" doesn´t means he isn´t absolutely wicked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf1WDsEzkoM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnxoULNr9Iw

I´m not saying I believe in that thing of satan. But he surely do and he acts in consequence!!

@Ursa: "the government" is a big lot of people.
George W is just too stupid to have put up such a plan, but I deem possible that some key people knew what would have happened and decided to say nothing.

How many links can I get away with in one post?

The government-incompetence theory seems most plausible to me.

I think there are some very important unanswered questions concerning 9/11 (or at least that I haven't seen the answers yet), for example why did WTC 7 collapse, and I believe the evidence shows that there was a massive failure to deal with intelligence properly. But that absolutely does NOT mean that "Ebul Gubmint Dun it". It does mean that Ebul Gubmint failed to prevent it, but that's not the same thing unless that failure was intentional - And I would find that very hard to believe without evidence.

I´ve hearded that G W Bush, not only knew about that, but did really take part of its organization because the US people were downplaying the war and his government needed to make people feel insecure in order to justify that the armamentistic business be reactivated.
Then Bin Laden was a good scapegoat to justify the movement of that business.

But there are those who go farther and believe that Bin Laden was his partner in all this. And they really don´t believe about his real death (but that last idea seems to be too conspiranoic)

At least that´s what I´ve heard.

Also, for anyone who's seen the movie, what did you think about Part I and III where it talks about religion and then how we're all being controlled?

For part 1, I already knew that Judaism/Christianity had borrowed stories from other religions, but some of it seemed way too exaggerated, especially when it came to the zodiac.

Part 3 was a bit disturbing. It's very depressing and makes me feel a bit powerless if it's true. But that's where I got really frustrated because it's really hard to prove it or disprove it. If there are people way at the top controlling everything that happens in the government, it's not like they're going to tell us.
Also, wouldn't they try to put a stop to movies like this?