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[Johnny C]

Just for the sake of it, I'll present the conjecture that perhaps 9/11 happened exactly the way we have been told it did, with the sole exception that flight 93 was actually shot down using something that contained enough high explosives to scatter the wreckage far beyond the field the plane allegedly crashed into, and that it was decided that revealing this tactical decision wouldn't be as good for the public as suggesting that the passengers on the plane intentionally downed it.

this is the goofiest conspiracy i've ever heard of especially when the actual events of the flight are well documented and don't even get me started on other 9/11 truth baloney

the camera is not an objective eye and so asking people "uhhh WHERE'S THE WRECKAGE!?? " shows an extraordinary willingness to lay down with your hands over your ears trying to block out reason while the truth soars close enough overhead for you to touch it

[Liz]

Oh Johnny.

<3

[Johnny C]

 

[David_Dovey]

hang on speaking of zoom meme

I'm going to go with the fact that one of the photos is linked from Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice and some folks that have been around the internet have seen other people do the exact same thing before.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice

Scholars

[Reed]

So if I get your meaning, we should trust them due to the fact that they are scholars?

[David_Dovey]

Precisely. And here I was thinking this was all a crock of shit! Boy is my face red.

[Hat]

MEMBER LIST
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Michael Allen   BA, BS, MA, Current doctoral student   University of Rhode Island, University of New Hampshire    Master Mariner

holy shit I will get that many degrees if that is what it takes to be MASTER MARINER.

[snalin]

Hell, most people were barely even cognizant of what Islam was before 9/11.

This is a bit late of an answer, but to be fair, people don't really have any clue today either.

Also, this video at 6:20-ish has a lot of people talking about the Czars. Are there actually that many people that can't differ between a Tsar and a government official? Has this been a real outrage? What?

Can somebody please take away the US nukes soon because I'm getting real, real scared of this bunch being voters in a state who has them. Jesus.

[Josefbugman]

I wasn't cogent of Islam at the time, but I certainly didn't know what christanity was really.

Also, yeah 9/11 was a big event, but even if it was perpatrated by people other than those who it was blamed on (not saying it was, I personally think that the truth movement is a rather large piece of hooey) its more important to focus on the events that occured afterwards and the responses of governments than what possible reason a lot of people had to pile a plane into a building.

I can understand conspiracy theorists and there reasoning that the whole world is being secretly run, but if you actually look at the world, really and think about you realise quite how unttenable that idea is. Even the reptillian lizard folk would presumably like all humans annihilated and would have done so earlier than now. It seems as if conspiracy is an attempt to just shift the blame from yourself on to everyone else. "its the man keeping me down", "its the governments fault" "they turk arrr jarbs!". Heres a hint okay, a small one but it may prove vital. Try and change something yourself, and if that doesn't work keep on trying, because even if the world is controlled from behind the scenes do you actually think that anyone of those facless corporations are going to care about what you do?

sorry, I am just getting a bit sick of conspiracy and ignorance of razors in general.

[Ozymandias]

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Michael Allen   BA, BS, MA, Current doctoral student   University of Rhode Island, University of New Hampshire    Master Mariner

holy shit I will get that many degrees if that is what it takes to be MASTER MARINER.

It's not that impressive, I mean he's not even a Grand Master and after the next expansion he'll be so far behind.

[onewheelwizzard]

the camera is not an objective eye and so asking people "uhhh WHERE'S THE WRECKAGE!?? " shows an extraordinary willingness to lay down with your hands over your ears trying to block out reason while the truth soars close enough overhead for you to touch it

I ... dude, there isn't a plane there.  I know the weird shit I came up with was goofy, but it's not as goofy as looking at a picture of a hole in a field and thinking it's a picture of the site of a plane crash.  Do a GIS for "plane crash" and I guarantee you the only picture you come up with that shows a hole in the ground rather than a mass of twisted metal will be a picture taken in Shanksville, PA on 9/11/01 or shortly thereafter.  There isn't a single visible object at the Flight 93 site bigger than a seat cushion.  You could probably fit all the debris in Shanksville into a the bed of a single large pickup truck.  It's literally just a hole in the ground.  Jet engine blocks and fuselage beams don't just vaporize on impact with dirt, and if they do, they at least leave bigger holes in the ground.

I'm not claiming to know what happened, but it seems pretty clear to me that there's something that didn't happen, and it's a plane vaporizing on impact.  Yet that is the only possible thing that could've happened in a story that starts with a plane crashing in a field, and leads to pictures being taken of that field that show the amount of wreckage seen in Shanksville, PA.  Since the pictures were taken, it's clear that the plane did not crash into the field.  There would be a plane's worth of debris in the field if the plane had crashed into the field.  Is this really that difficult?  Is there an alternate explanation for the total lack of plane in that field?  Are you really saying that it's not worth asking where the wreckage is ... when there actually isn't any wreckage where there should be?  This seems so straightforward to me.  Plane crash = crashed plane.  No crashed plane = no plane crash.

[sean]

man i didn't think that the whole no plane in the field was that big of a point for truthers.

so like the thing is the gov't blew a whole in the ground and a plane is missing?

i mean im not very fond of gov't or states or hierarchy but man i even get hesitant around truther talk.

[onewheelwizzard]

OK, so I did some quick checking on Wikipedia, just looking at numbers.

Dimensions of a Boeing 757-200:
Length: 47.3m, or 155' 3''
Wingspan: 38m, or 124' 10''

From Flight 93 Wiki page: "The impact left a crater eight to ten feet deep, and thirty to fifty feet wide.[54]"  [54] is a link to an article from a Seattle newspaper that quoted "All that remained after the Boeing 757 crashed into an open field were a crater about eight to 10 feet deep, and 30 to 50 feet wide, pieces of debris no larger than a phone book, said Capt. Frank Monaco of the Pennsylvania State Police."

Even if the plane hit the ground perfectly perpendicular to it, the wingspan of the plane dictates that either the crater left behind would be wider than 30-50 feet, OR a lot more wing debris would've ended up scattered around on either side of it.  Look at the crash site from the air again, imagine how big a 155' X 124' airplane would be (use the cars and people in the lower right of the photo for reference), and then think about what it would look like if 100 tons of aircraft had hit that dirt "at 563 miles per hour (906 km/h) at a 40 degree nose-down, inverted attitude."  The ground isn't even disturbed over a large enough area to fit any cross-section of a plane, at any angle.

Is that even weird to anyone else?  Do I just look like a dick right now?  Someone, tell me it's not totally crazy to look at this information and doubt.

[Ozymandias]

I imagine it's the same reason why the hole in the Pentagon wasn't a cartoony cutout of a plane either.

[supersheep]

Is that even weird to anyone else?  Do I just look like a dick right now?  Someone, tell me it's not totally crazy to look at this information and doubt.

when it becomes not totally crazy to look at this information and doubt, i will let you know. i assume it will be around the same time they start making plane wings out of lead instead of aluminium foil and petrol. oh and also they travel back in time and install them on the plane. in summary, wings are not magic.

But seriously? A much better thing to look at would be the bits of the plane that are actually any way solid - fuselage, engines, that sort of thing. The fuselage is apparently about 12 feet across, and the wheelbase (which is a similar distance to the distance between engines) is about sixty feet. That fits in ok with the figures for the crater.

Also, an aircraft that probably weighed about 100 tonnes, loaded with 30,000l of jet fuel, hits the ground at 906 km/h? That has a potential energy of 1.1 x 10¹² joules - that's 300 tonnes of TNT. Of course, the whole efficiency thing comes into play, as that would imply no loss to any of the other possible factors, but we're still talking 3 tonnes of TNT or more. That's a hell of a lot of energy to apply to a plane. It's also FAR more energy than any deployed missile in existence - the biggest air-to-air missiles have 60kg of explosives.

Doesn't add up.

[onewheelwizzard]

::sigh:: I don't want to seem contentious about this, it'll clearly make me look like a crazy person.  A while ago, I looked at photographs of the Flight 93 crash site and my immediate thought was "there's no way that's what it really looked like when that plane crashed there."  There was just too little stuff.  I still look at those pictures and think "there's no way that's what it looked like" but now it's "IF that plane crashed there."  And, I mean, there are a bunch of eyewitnesses to the descent of a plane, and that's hard to argue with, but ... honestly?  I've never seen it happen in person, but I imagine that the stuff that planes are made of does not simply vaporize.  Metal doesn't just transmute into flame and smoke.  Maybe it does shred into pieces smaller than a phone book, but even then, I think I'd expect there to still be more stuff on the ground, or maybe a bigger hole.  Maybe there was a hollow in the ground that the plane debris just collapsed into and was swallowed up by (it did crash into a reclaimed strip mine after all), but even then, a bigger hole seems appropriate.

I mean, I admit that this is a really silly-looking picture, and totally a shitty shop job, but ... well ...



It doesn't seem like everything from the fuselage out should just disappear.  Maybe that's what happened?  I don't know, I've never seen a plane crash happen in real life.  But it seems like too much metal to just vanish.

This isn't a question of "who I'm listening to" or anything like that.  I don't have any grand story of the massive government cover-up.  I just look at a picture and see a hole in the ground that looks WAY too small and WAY too devoid of bits of plane.  Is that weird?  I understand I'm not an expert, but this looks like a common-sense judgment to me.  I can't imagine a 100-ton plane making a hole and pile of stuff that small.

I tried to find stories of plane impacts similar to this one, to see just how possible it was for a plane to effectively mostly disappear on impact, and I came up with the story of USAir Flight 427, which went down near Pittsburgh in 1994 at a near-perpendicular angle to the ground, going almost as fast as Flight 93.  It was a smaller plane (a 737 rather than a 757) and the pictures show not a whole lot of wreckage, although it's still recognizable as pieces of plane (and there were many pieces that had to be excavated, apparently up to 8 feet deep, rather than simply picked up).  So it's starting to look a bit more believable to me that a larger plane, crashing into a softer plot of dirt, at a higher speed, could result in even less visible wreckage.  Even still, I don't think it's ridiculous to look at pictures of the impact site and ask questions.

[supersheep]

Oh god no, I didn't mean for a second to imply that doubting before an expert explanation is silly. In fact, it can often be quite a good thing, because it will drive you to expand your knowledge and find out what happened.

Eight years later? On the internets? That's a different story. If you have any doubts that you haven't looked into and been dissuaded of, then yeah, that's crazy talk.

[onewheelwizzard]

So I started with a few pictures and a lot of incredulity, got a bunch more information, and I'm changing my tone because it looks (amazingly) possible that a plane can just half-disintegrate, half-bury itself upon impact with a field of dirt, and leave a really ridiculously small footprint with very little visible wreckage.  I did not think that was even feasible before looking at the case of USAir 427, so I'm glad I did some research (although I still resent some of the contempt that was directed at me for even opening my mouth about it, and I don't blame anyone who looks at what I looked at and sees what I saw).  Going into a frenzy of research on 9/11 isn't exactly something I do all that often, so the fact that it took 8 years for me to reach this point (after taking 4 to get to the point of "hold on, that doesn't make sense") doesn't bother me.

I'm not gonna lie ... there's a lot of stuff that still seems really suspicious to me (the collapse of WTC 7, most notably) and if the event gets lined up in a historical context next to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Pearl Harbor raid, and the sinking of the Lusitania, which have all since been alleged to have been subject to premeditation to varying degrees and in various ways to create public-support basis for entering a war, the idea that the whole thing was totally surprising and not part of the basis of any plans makes little sense to me.  Basically what I'm saying is that the whole thing strikes me as something that makes it very appropriate to get very angry at my own government (you know, because I needed more reasons for that).

At the very least, I think that a lot of warning signs were deliberately ignored and that there was some degree of tacit encouragement to the hijackers and their associates, and that the war in Afghanistan was deliberately scheduled to start shortly after the attacks that some people knew were coming.  I think it is possibly though not necessarily true that secondary explosives were used to precipitate the collapse of WTC 1, 2, and 7 ... I don't think this absolutely WAS what happened, but I don't think it's totally impossible either, and there are definitely a few red flags that I'm not yet willing to discount.  I think it's ridiculous of anyone to attack me for this position, because claiming that it is totally impossible that there were any explosives in those buildings is something that really can't be backed up with evidence at all (although I think it's also the case that anyone claiming that it is totally true that there were explosives has not yet met the burden of proof).

The notion that specific entities within the US government deliberately killed several thousand US citizens (or, in a more mild version of the story, allowed them to be killed) is NOT really that far-fetched to me, nor is the idea that this could happen without repercussions if desired.  The jump from this to "that is exactly what happened" is not really that big.  I don't think it's beyond the moralities of our leaders (or for that matter their subordinates), I don't think it's beyond the capabilities of our "black-ops" networks (which I do believe exist), and it just doesn't strike me as totally unbelievable that this is what happened in the abstract sense.  The exact details are still fuzzy enough that the big picture could still be anything, and the only possibility that I'm confident totally discounting is the "official story" ... I'm just not sure how far the truth deviates from it, exactly.  Things don't add up, but I'm not sure what exactly they do add up to.

Even if the events of that particular day were exactly what we've been told they were, I still believe that, at the very least, the reaction our government had to the attacks was carefully premeditated, because at the very least, some people in our government knew that the attacks were going to happen.  That's 80% of the story to me anyway ... it's all I need to be fucking enraged about the events of last 8 years.  I'm not a die-hard "truther" because I don't have a clear idea, for myself, of what I think happened.  But I do feel comfortable blaming my own government for what happened, on at least some levels, and I think it's still the grossest injustice of this century and will stay that way for a while.

[supersheep]

your sig is remarkably ironic next to your post

the thing about conspiracy theories is this: ask yourself how many people would need to be in on a plan for it to work. the higher this number is, the less likely your conspiracy theory is to be true

the only point of yours that i see as being in any way a possible explanation is the claim that information might have been deliberately not acted upon. even then, i reckon it unlikely. the black ops people that the US have are still people, american people, and even in the CIA there are going to be people who have qualms about letting thousands of innocent americans die

also remember that militaries have contingency plans for nearly everything, and are also very good at rapidly generating extremely detailed plans

i feel confident ruling out the other claims truthers make, mind, because their evidence consists of picking out a few aberrations/accidents/chance happenstance and concocting it into a huge theory, and also because of the rule of conspiracy theories

also, yes, some people in the US government did know the attacks were about to happen. this, however, needs qualification. they knew that there was a high risk of some spectacular attacks being carried out in some fashion at some point around that time. that's not actionable. it's not the same as a deliberate ignoring of the bad guys

[Ozymandias]

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

[onewheelwizzard]

See, Ozy, I believe that, but it's not malice that I attribute this to.  Nobody in the government secretly hates working-class New Yorkers.  It's the drive for power and profit that I think can bring people to do stuff like this.  I'm certain there were people who were planning for war long before 9/11 and used foreknowledge of 9/11, however vague, in these plans.  I mean, if you're already planning on starting a war for profit, some collateral damage of a few thousand civilians seems like a reasonable means to the end.  And it's not ultimately "malicious," per se ... just good business.  All some people need is enough dollars and power on the other end of their agenda, and they'll follow it, insulated from the cost in humanity by their privilege.

At least, that's what I believe about the way the world works.  That's really what I'm going on, honestly.  It worked out too well for the people who turned into villains over the following 8 years, the villainy had to have begun before the hijackings.

I'm sure there were plenty of concerned American civil servants in the CIA, who knew some things but were limited in their actions to reporting them to their superiors.  The higher the rank or power, the fewer people need to make conscious decisions in pursuit of a "conspiracy."  If a conspiracy goes high enough, most people performing a function within it are just following orders and have no idea what the big picture looks like.  Just as it's true that the bigger a hypothetical conspiracy is, the less likely it is to be real, it's also true that the higher up a conspiracy goes, the fewer people it needs actively working in it in order to function, because each individual wields a greater influence and can perform more functions.

[snalin]

First the defence of Israel, now this.

I'm not claiming to be an expert on anything, but look at Iraq. If the Bush administration had wanted to go to war, they could have made up some shitty excuse and gone to war. There's no economic gain anywhere here. The income from the oil they can tap from middle east soil is as far as I know puny compared to the cost of the war.

Secondary, the black ops isn't that big. Yeah, there's secret police. Sure, they can cover a lot of ground. But back in 2001, Afghanistan wasn't interesting at all. The commies had left, the guys who could threaten Israel hangs around in Palestine and surrounding countries. When the bureaucracy is told that there's some extremists down there who is planning to blow up some American shit, why should they respond? There's people all over the world who wants to blow up some American shit. North-Korea had started making fucking nukes, southern America was getting closer to socialism all the time. Spending resources chasing after bogeymen in Taliban would have been plain stupidity  when there's so many real threats everywhere.

The terrorists were lucky, and had a good plan. That's all it takes, really. They had a very slim chance, but they rolled a natural 20 a couple of times, and the towers went down. The reason for conspiracy theories and truthism is that a lot of people see the special forces of America as such an omnipotent organisation that it had to be an inside job. The arguments are built on lies, misunderstanding of science (The plane engines weren't hot enough to make WTC's metal structure melt/there should have been plane wreckage/the tower falls in a way that has to be controlled etc.), and avoiding parts of the truth.

The Afghanistan war didn't look like it was started for profit. It looked like an act of extreme desperation and the collective rage of a country.

[0bsessions]

I'm reasonably sure this should've been moved to the Discuss forum about a page and a half back.

[onewheelwizzard]

I'm not claiming to be an expert on anything, but look at Iraq. If the Bush administration had wanted to go to war, they could have made up some shitty excuse and gone to war. There's no economic gain anywhere here. The income from the oil they can tap from middle east soil is as far as I know puny compared to the cost of the war.

You're missing something.  The "cost of the war" is money paid by the government to contractors who are building weapons, constructing infrastructure, paying mercenaries, etc. ... the US government is not actually the financial beneficiary here.  The people who profited from the wars (both Iraq and Afghanistan) are the people who got paid to make it all actually happen, not the people paying for it all to happen (aka the taxpayers of the USA).

The reason for conspiracy theories and truthism is that a lot of people see the special forces of America as such an omnipotent organisation that it had to be an inside job.

No, the reason for conspiracy theories is the intuition that many people have, including myself, and that may in fact be false, that the elite class in America (in other words, the men who are capable of wielding large amounts of both political and economic power ... Dick Cheney, for example) has an agenda that is geared to keep them in the positions of power that they're in, without regard for the degree of human suffering caused in the process, and that the series of events that started with 9/11 and has followed with two wars and countless infringements on civil rights and liberties around the world has been in service of that agenda to varying degrees.

The US is addicted to militarism, because its leaders are addicted to the support of those who profit through militarism.  The wars are not for the profit of the US Treasury, they are for the profit of the private interests that were given massive contracts to service the war and reconstruction efforts ... and the human heads of those private interests have been represented in the US government to a laughably disproportionate degree.  That's the real smoking gun, as far as I can see.

[supersheep]

it is possible to believe that elites are self-interested and like wars without being fucking mad

i mean, most people do it

don't attempt to try and make out that having a sensible outlook on what our leaders are like has ANYTHING to do with truther crap

[pwhodges]

the higher up a conspiracy goes, the fewer people it needs actively working in it in order to function, because each individual wields a greater influence and can perform more functions.

Like they'd be the people to shoot down a civil airliner or plant explosives in the WTC themselves?

[onewheelwizzard]

It seems pretty clear that everyone else in this thread is tired of it, so feel free to just let it die.

What it comes down to for me is that I'm perfectly willing to believe that there are entities in the world (individuals or organizations) that COULD do this and get away with it, that these entities furthermore WOULD do this, and that they never lived in caves in the Middle East but rather are very very rich and powerful and influential.  This isn't because I think it's impossible for cave-dwelling jihadists to bring an event like this about, but rather because this particular event fit too well into a larger picture and timeline for it to have been that uncoordinated.  Maybe the hijackers were trained and directed by undercover US agents (that wouldn't take too many people at all).  Maybe some way weirder shit went down (like evacuation drills in the weeks leading up to the attack being used to plant explosives in the WTC buildings).  The only thing I feel confident of is that the incident was deliberate on the part of more interests than just some religious fanatics who wanted to kill Americans.

[KvP]

Our crazies are less crazy than your crazies!

[Alex C]

I dunno if I actually find that graph to put the Dems in a better light. I guess it depends on how people are interpreting the phrase "Bush allowed 9-11 to happen." I can buy into saying yes if you mean that as president it he bears some responsibility for the fact that the government failed to prevent 9-11. You know, kind of like how a keeper might "allow" a goal. But to say that he was OK with it happening is basically making the claim that the dude is balls out evil. That hits me as a more serious claim than saying that Obama might have fudged the truth a bit on the details of his birth. I mean, hell, that isn't even necessarily all that sinister. I'm not really worried about a dude who lived the vast majority of his life here wanting to become president.

[KvP]

I like that while adding some softening context to the Trutherism, you completely remove all context from Birtherism.

Both claims are fucking ridiculous, but the scale of artifice that Trutherism requires is extra fuckin' ridiculous. Sure, there could be some super-duper sophisticated deception involved in presenting our President as a natural American, but for every supposed deception claimed in Trutherism there are ever more deceptions that have to be claimed for it to be consistent, which makes it a conspiracy theory through and through. It's similar to Holocaust Denial - in order for the Holocaust to have been a lie, the number of interconnected collaborations, lies and deceptions had to have been staggering, and what's more every single fucking one of them had to have gone absolutely perfectly for over 60 years. Surely these so called "survivors" have been duped or are lying for their own reasons! Surely the people who saw these plane crashes are being duped or are lying for their own reasons! Wackety schmakety do!

[Alex C]

I'm pretty comfortable with doing things like that when someone starts going "Ahaha, your side is crazier than our side." Even if it's meant tongue in cheek people go along with that line of thought way too often for my tastes.

[Ozymandias]

It's similar to Holocaust Denial - in order for the Holocaust to have been a lie, the number of interconnected collaborations, lies and deceptions had to have been staggering, and what's more every single fucking one of them had to have gone absolutely perfectly for over 60 years.

This is exactly where I cannot believe in so many conspiracy theories, especially ones like Trutherism. It requires such enormous faith in the idea that everything went perfectly right rather than the simple acceptance that something went wrong. I can accept that our government failed to thwart a terrorist attack. I cannot accept that our government has their shit together enough to orchestrate pulling the wool over our eyes so fucking thoroughly that a bunch of dudes on YouTube were the only ones to spot it.

Let's face it. We know the government lied about WMDs in Iraq or, at the very least, willfully misinterpreted intel. We know that for an absolute fact. They managed to pull off the deadly attack on American soil in history and blame it on someone else, but couldn't manage to, I don't know- put some damn WMDs in Iraq to keep the American public on their side?

[Hat]

counterpoint/devil's advocate:

Nobody is really claiming the US government did this

rather that some shadowy agency has enough influence over the US government to do this without government interference

very few people are stupid enough to argue the Bush Administration was actually competent enough to pull it off

[Josefbugman]

Because that implies that any "shadow" organisation, is able to pull this crap off.

Throughout history there have been people who think that their lives are being controlled, by God, destiny etc. But now that people are starting to think that there lives are run like that but their lives suck they can ill afford to look at themselves and think "oh god I f*cked up" no. Its just much much easier to blame someone on why yopu haven't done anything. Once you start doing that you get into a strange cycle where, as humans think they are at the centre of the universe, the same thing that has stopped you from becoming the doctor/ screwing the cheerleader/ killing that man in Reno becomes the same "shadowy group" that ruins the world.

Here is a hint, the depth of human stupidity is bottomless, people can get away with things for a very long time, if they keep it to themselves or perhaps 5 other people, but the average people who are used to wielding the sort of power to make huge world shattering desicions are not the sort who "play well" with others.

The good money is on the fact that the world is not being orchastrated by some shadowy organisation from behind the scenes, Sometimes I wish it was, because the world would make a lot more sense. But it doesn't, there is no world spanning ancient conspiracy there is just humans, and there are lots of us.

[Hat]

The good money is on the fact that the world is not being orchastrated by some shadowy organisation from behind the scenes

I would argue that the world is too complex a system to be able to predict it well enough to place bets reliably enough to hit "the good money" but if there was a sure fire bet based on patterns of behaviour, it would be that we are getting fucked by someone with power who wants to maintain it.

Occam's razor doesn't really apply to government conspiracy because the argument is that people are already programmed to fuck ourselves and have been since long before like a kind of self-harvesting crop.

This is why the best conspiracy theories all involve weird David Icke style DMT planes of existence where every human flaw is physicalized in whatever wacked out form they saw on their last bad trip.

[KharBevNor]

This may be beating a dead horse, but the lack of large pieces of wreckage is actually a very good indication that the aircraft did crash, rather than being blown up. When a passenger aircraft is hit with explosives, what does the major damage is not the explosive itself, but the rapid equalising of pressure. The pressure difference between the inside of an aircraft and the outside, at cruising height, puts about 8 psi on the outer skin of the aircraft. It's like a filled balloon. Make a large enough hole in the side, and the air inside will tear apart whichever rivetline you have cut through. The aircraft literally pops. Take Pan Am 103, the Lockerbie plane, as an example; when the bomb went off, that plane was literally torn in two, and then the pieces tumbled relatively slowly to earth. The terminal velocity of a piece of aircraft debris is much lower than the speed of an aircraft hitting the ground nose first under full power. At Lockerbie they found enormous pieces of the aeroplane, like the entire tail and nose section, as well as things like corpses and pieces of luggage that had survived the fall relatively intact. You've got to remember that aircraft aren't actually very strong in some ways. They're very lightly constructed. The skin of an aircraft is only about 3 millimetres thick aluminium, under enormous tension. A fully loaded 757 only ways, after all, about 110 tonnes, and a lot of that is fuel. When you finally take into account the fact that the melting point of aluminium is only 660.37 °C, well...


Now lets do some science. The great thing about science is you can do it yourself. I personally do it kinda badly, but here we go:

Now, using a NASA program for calculating terminal velocity*, plugging in earth conditions, for a piece of wreckage about two metres square and massing about 500 newtons (which I think is probably a fair approximation of a piece of the skin of a wrecked aircraft) we find a terminal velocity, from the 757's cruising altitude of 12km, of about  21.764 M/S. Now, how fast is the cruising speed of a 757?

Well, that would be 272.232 M/S. I imagine that a powered nosedive would be even faster. So that's 20 times the speed of a pieces of debris falling from an explosion. When comparing this to other crashes, you've got to remember that this isn't even similiar to the vast majority of other 'Controlled Flight Into Terrain' crashes. Those very rarely involve a full throttle head-on collision (it normally happens when the pilots misjudge the altitude somehow during landing).

Then again, I am not a professional forensic engineer with years of experience and detailed knowledge about air accidents. Though all those guys are pretty damn certain it crashed.


* Of course, NASA could be in on it, and their spy satellites could have read my mind to discern my purpose for using the calculator.

[onewheelwizzard]

Nah, Khar, you've made your point pretty well.  I'm used to thinking about aircraft as big fucking metal things that intuitively should stick around in some vaguely recognizable physical form if they hit the ground going really fast.

Has anyone read the Garth Ennis Punisher MAX series of comic books?  There's a storyline in it in which a single deep cover operative is privately contacted by a small group of high-ranking military officials and is instructed to use his undercover identity to organize a small terrorist cell under the pretense of attacking the West, so that these officials have the capacity to order a terrorist attack on a friendly target if it suits their purposes to do so.  The character, of course, is unscrupulous enough to do so.  I mean, it's a comic book, so it just ends with the Punisher killing everyone, but the concept seems reasonable to me.

There are any number of totally feasible ways in which the order to create a terrorist attack (put quotes around that if you want to) on the US could've come from very high up.  And it doesn't seem like something that was just kind of waited for.  It definitely served the purposes of the corporatocratic elite, that much is true.  The idea that it happened without their influence and yet at precisely the right time to serve their purposes best strikes me as weird.  It's like, yeah, it'd easy to believe that things just went wrong, and that's what allowed this to happen, but from some perspectives things went VERY right.  If 9/11 hadn't advanced an agenda to the extent that it did, I wouldn't be suspicious.

[Ozymandias]

That's such a mindblowingly bad logical fallacy that it's literally causing me physical pain when I try to wrap my head around it.

The only tangible benefit anyone in the administration got were the corporations paid to go into Iraq. Iraq, not Afghanistan. If the US government's goal was to go into Iraq by constructing 9/11, why the fuck weren't the terrorists Iraqi?

Seriously, you're citing a comic book which was written based on 9/11 conspiracy theories to support your logic and it's driving me absolutely fucking bonkers.

[onewheelwizzard]

I don't mean to cite the comic book to "support" anything.  It's a fiction story.  It's just that as a story, it's reasonably feasible.  I mean, it's pretty well known that small numbers of rich men have, in the past, used undercover agents to manipulate world events (CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt Jr., for example, engineered the coup d'etat in Iran that put the Shah in power in 1953, at the behest of British and American oil interests).  It's not meant to support my logic in any rational way, only demonstrate what it might look like.

I think it's patently untrue that "the only tangible benefit to anyone in the administration were the corporations paid to go into Iraq."  I mean, first off, those payments were obscenely large.  The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are approaching 1 trillion dollars.  This money isn't just burning, it's going into people's pockets (like weapons manufacturers and anyone else contracted by the military in the defense budget ... the reconstruction contracts aren't the only way for US companies to make money on war).  But we're also talking about military presence in the Middle East, army bases in the part of the world that is most likely to be important to the maintenance of a large military force over the next 50 years.  That's a huge strategic advantage regardless of what said military forces are actually doing.  We're also talking about the heroin trade in Afghanistan, which declined 94% in a single year after the Taliban banned the growing of opium poppies in 2000 ... when the US moved in and displaced the Taliban a year later, opium production went right back up again and Afghanistan was the top world supplier again almost immediately (it still is and production is only increasing).  Someone's collecting that money, and given the CIA's track record with drug trafficking, it's not ridiculous to assume that US-related interests are getting a cut.  We're also talking about the Patriot Act, which left the door open to a lot of really nasty possibilities when it came to getting rid of political enemies.  We're also talking about the political approval rating of the administration, which skyrocketed immediately following 9/11 and was ultimately the basis for Bush's reelection platform.

(I should also mention that Iraq and Afghanistan are the two most important targets for anyone looking to mess with Iran, which has definitely been on the table in Washington for quite some time.)

The point here is that a state of war, not even necessarily a successful war, is in itself desirable to certain extremely powerful interests, and the process of developing a military presence in the Middle East that started in 2001 is not done yet.  We didn't go into Afghanistan to look for Osama, we went in so that we'd have a place to shoot off expensive toys and gain the basis for further conquest of oil-rich countries (and maybe make a little drug money on the side, but that's secondary).  We went into Iraq to make sure that anything profitable in that country (oil contracts, construction contracts, mercenary contracts, etc.) fell into the control of a US company ... and to shoot off expensive toys and gain the basis for further conquest of oil-rich countries.  The amount of debt that the US taxpayers are in right now is just the icing on the cake.

America is an imperialist nation, and private interests, rather than governments, are the new paradigm for empire-building.  This much is completely indisputable.  If you look at the imperialist actions taken by this nation and its private interests since 9/11, I think it's pretty clear that the plans were in place before the attacks.  The only question is whether or not the attacks were part of the plans, and I think that not only is this not an unreasonable question, but "yes" is not an unreasonable answer.

[supersheep]

only if the world is a tom clancy book

[Johnny C]

America is an imperialist nation, and private interests, rather than governments, are the new paradigm for empire-building.  This much is completely indisputable.  If you look at the imperialist actions taken by this nation and its private interests since 9/11, I think it's pretty clear that the plans were in place before the attacks.  The only question is whether or not the attacks were part of the plans, and I think that not only is this not an unreasonable question, but "yes" is not an unreasonable answer.

It's an unreasonable answer because it's not the right question to ask. It's a question that presumes individuals with power are villainous in a cartoonish way - consider that the scenario you've outlined is very close to that of an actual James Bond film, and not even a particularly good Bond film but the first cringeworthy Brosnan one. It's also a question that basically gives us an easy out. We just need to find these villainous men, root them out and punish them for what they've done to the innocent people of United 93, what they've done to the innocent people of Iraq and Afghanistan, what they've done to the people in America's military.

Without the simple binary of that question we're in murkier depths. Consider this for a second: if the answer to your question is "no" - and, besides the sheer logistics of such a conspiracy, the empirical evidence we have makes a pretty strong case that "no" is the correct answer - that doesn't change the fact that there are people who had a monetary interest in a war and who used 9/11 and the resulting international conflicts to essentially move product. These people watched the Twin Towers fall and, instead of tragedy, saw opportunity. They seized that opportunity, and they were rewarded for it. We have no laws, no rules, no structures in place to bring those people to justice because they committed no crime, they did no injustice. They simply achieved what our society regards as success.

It's uncomfortable to face this truth. It's way, way more uncomfortable to think about it than it is to think that some faceless group somewhere decided that someone was going to push a button and blow a plane full of innocent people out of the sky. It's much easier for us to punish the murder of our countrymen than it is for us to reconsider how our entire way of life can enable Blackwater.

But it's the real truth behind 9/11 - the greatest evils perpetrated in our lifetime may go unpunished simply because our society does not count them as evils. The only question we should be asking is, "How can this change?"

[jhocking]

the greatest evils perpetrated in our lifetime may go unpunished simply because our society does not count them as evils.

Did you come up with this line? Because it is amazing.

[Johnny C]

all i'm gonna say is that's not the first draft of that post

[KharBevNor]

If you look at the imperialist actions taken by this nation and its private interests since 9/11, I think it's pretty clear that the plans were in place before the attacks.

I don't quite know what this means. I mean, if they really had planned ahead to that an extent, don't you think they might have managed not to utterly fuck up quite so much? On the other hand, you are aware that, at least historically, the US has made a point of planning to a limited extent for every war they might possibly be involved in?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Color-coded_War_Plans

Given the fact that Afghanistan was already known to be harbouring anti-US groups and militants, and that they had already fought one war with Iraq a decade before and the same government was still in power, I think they probably certainly did plan the wars before 9/11. Just like they planned a war with Pakistan, or Suadi Arabia, or Nigeria, or Venezuala.

[David_Dovey]

Can you guys stop telling the truth that kind of prattle has absolutely no place in Truther discussion

[Johnny C]

Just like they planned a war with Pakistan, or Suadi Arabia, or Nigeria, or Venezuala.

or canada

i wish we had an emoticon with a little tinfoil hat or something

[0bsessions]

[KharBevNor]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_foil_hat

[onewheelwizzard]

But it's the real truth behind 9/11 - the greatest evils perpetrated in our lifetime may go unpunished simply because our society does not count them as evils. The only question we should be asking is, "How can this change?"

This post is dead on about a lot of things that I think are totally integral to this discussion, and I think it's addressing the fundamentally more important aspects of the issue, so I don't want to challenge you directly on anything you've said because I ultimately agree with it.  But I don't think resemblance to schlocky fictions is necessarily a good reason to discount the idea that maybe there were rich white people who knew some terrorists were going to direct an attack on the US and were looking forward to the opportunity it would present, and that just maybe there were some white people who took part in making it happen.  I don't think anything like that could be proven beyond reasonable doubt, nor do I think that any solution to the problems inherent in this issue would need that proof as a foundation (for the reasons you mentioned), so maybe that makes it irrelevant?  I don't know.

Honestly, I find that what I'm trying to explain to people when I end up talking about 9/11 isn't related to the black-and-white, find-the-bad-guys-and-make-them-pay aspect of it.  I make noise about 9/11 when I want people to understand that the society we've built actively rewards and encourages man's inhumanity to man.  Most people can't really grasp this until they get broken out of the "us vs. them" mindset that 9/11 put our entire nation in, and questioning the idea that it's really "them" that we need to fight against is the only way to do it, all too often.  I mean, I also believe that there are people out there who are consciously acting as forces of evil in the world, that the world really HAS produced such caricatures (Bond villain types), because it's big enough to do so and people can in fact be pushed to that extreme.  But the more important questions, about the nature of a society that can create people like that, don't really allow that to be an "easy out."  Bringing these people to justice doesn't actually fix anything.

I mean, if they really had planned ahead to that an extent, don't you think they might have managed not to utterly fuck up quite so much?

Our hypothetical Bond-villain 9/11 conspirators aren't necessarily the people who actually carried out the plan.  They're just the ones who set it in motion.  Once it gets out of a think-tank conference room and into the actual Iraqi and Afghani deserts, shit goes wrong and people make mistakes.  But I think the decisions that were made happened in a premeditated sequence.

[Dazed]

Pat Buchanan did 9/11.

He is also a secret Jew and head of the international media conspiracy.