The neo-cons had already publicly stated that they WANTED a Pearl Harbour-type event that they could use as a smokescreen to invade Iraq. Well, they got one.

It doesn’t really matter if there was any conspiracy or not, does it? The one thing we can be fairly sure of is, if the Bush administration did know that the attack was coming, they sure wouldn’t have wanted to stop it. It was exactly what they’d asked Santa to bring them for Christmas.

So I can’t see that it makes a whole lot of difference whether they knew it was coming or not.

The demolition-style collapse of the towers was a huge piece of luck. Otherwise, we’d have had far more casualties. Another piece of luck is that the towers kept standing as long as they did, which allowed many people to escape.

The reason the towers collapsed the way they did was that each floor was a unified structural unit, a big unbroken open space attached only to the central support-and-services column and the building’s sturdy outer skin. The jet fuel fires burned so hot that some floors’ connections to the inner and outer support structures were compromised. The lack of intervening supports between the central column and the skin meant that when floors collapsed, they fell straight down as a unit. Their falling weight tore loose the floor underneath them, and the floor under that, and so on. That’s why the buildings fell straight down in that extraordinary fashion.

7 Wall Street wasn’t built that way, which is why it collapsed in a giant heap like a normal building.

What plotters could be so brilliant as to manage to plant demolition charges throughout a busy office building that had had a major bombing incident only a few years before, and yet so abysmally stupid that in the interests of faking a terrorist attack, they’d take down two buildings with demolition-style collapses?

However, the incendiary tone will only serve to polarize factions of belief instead of encouraging benevolence and productivity.

Well, this may be a bit off-topic, but that is the way the media is going these days. I always see headlines on Fox, CNN, NBC, etc, that make me shake my head, because the headline is such an incendiary exaggeration. It’s meant to grab your attention. “Read this!” They don’t want to say that a suspect in a shooting worked at Walmart, was taking anti-depressants, like pizza and played video games. They want to say, “VIDEO GAME CAUSES RAMPAGE”. It may not be accurate but hey, you’ll wanna click that link!

A recent example was right here a few days ago. An article was quoted that made it sound like Germany was enacting a terrible new law against copying any type of media, and it turns out that the quoted article was almost entirely wrong. Media lives or dies based on readership and sometimes I think the need to be dramatic ends up trumping the need to be accurate. That website surely benefited from the BoingBoing linkage, but they got all that extra web-advertising money through dishonesty (or poor reporting, which is just dishonesty with an excuse).

I understand the BB editors don’t have time to deeply research everything they post — they’re relying on the trustworthiness of their media sources. It’s something we all have to help guard against: that incendiary tones and creative interpretations aren’t allowed to trump basic truthfulness.

Always read these stories with a grain of salt and an eye towards manipulative wording.

Is this just proof by assertion, or do you have evidence? You’re saying that Bush knew that thousands of Americans would be killed (on 9/11, it looked more like it was going to be tens of thousands), that the stock market would probably drop like a stone, and he held back from stopping it? He wanted a mass murder of civilians so that he could start a war? This from the guy who sometimes breaks down in tears when he talks about fallen soldiers? Are you basing your claim on a general feeling that he’s an evil warmongering monster, or actual facts? Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but your claim basically puts him on the same level with a Hitler or a Pol Pot, and lefty paranoia aside, he’s not even close.

You know what he’s right, we shouldn’t question our leaders, we should all follow like little sheep and believe whatever they told us because governments never lie to the goverened [sic].

We should definitely questions our leaders, and we should also question paranoid conspiracy theories, especially when they have little or no factual support. I’ll take Occam’s Razor over emotionally-based “logic” any day.

Hats off to Rushkoff for having the courage to break from the herd — I’m sure he’ll be widely criticized for daring to do so. Rove must have got to him!

Well, looking into the 9-11 attacks was what made me aware of the development of Al Quaeda among a lot of other things.

The nerve of some people!

“definitely questions” –> “definitely question”

ugh!

So either they knew, and allowed it to happen, or they just got really lucky and had it happen without anyone needing to get their hands dirty at all. But I don’t see that it makes a whole lot of difference either way.

It’s on the public record that they wanted this to happen. It’s on the public record that they intended to use it as a smokescreen to invade Iraq when it did happen. The only thing that surprises me is that they were able to do all of this right out in the open, having already said exactly what they intended to do, without people seeming to mind particularly much.

The suggestion of conspiracy theories is rather quaint and comforting, really. As if they needed to do these things in secrecy. As if someone would have stopped this from happening if only we’d known.

At least most of them are unpaid; no doubt, some of the loudest are working as contractors for the same agencies whose activities they pretend to deconstruct.

The real government conspiracy is the government conspiracy! This seems to be along the mindset that the best way for a government to protect itself is to invent its own enemy which it can control from behind the scenes. But what if the real conspiracy is the government conspiring to create its own government conspiracy? Then the real enemy is the original conspiracy theorists themselves! Would it not be logical for those conspiracy theorists to create Al-Qaeda just so that they could make their conspiracy theories? Well probably not, but it isn’t any more crazy than the rest of this nest of theories.

The lack of intervening supports between the central column and the skin meant that when floors collapsed, they fell straight down as a unit. Their falling weight tore loose the floor underneath them, and the floor under that, and so on. That’s why the buildings fell straight down in that extraordinary fashion.

What about the center? What brought that down? That had been standing for more than 30 years, holding the same amount of weight. I don’t have a problem “believing” that the floors would’ve stripped straight down, like the wrapper of a straw, but what about the central support columns of the building?

(This, however, is just wishful thinking:)
7 Wall Street wasn’t built that way, which is why it collapsed in a giant heap like a normal building. ….you forgot to add “that has been purposefully explosively demolished.”

Bzishi, you’re experiencing what intelligence people call “the hall of mirrors”: endless semi-binary flip-flops between trusting and untrusting states.

Rushkoff’s right. Alternate theories about the WTC being blown up with bombs instead of commercial airplanes and jet fuel, or how something other than an airplane must have hit the Pentagon because the wings didn’t slice through the walls, are a big waste of brain cells.

Sure, there are things about 9/11 I’d like to see investigated. I’d like to know why George was the only person I know of who, on hearing the news, was neither surprised nor scared nor anxious to hear more. But I’m not going to get that, so I might as well spent my mental energy in other places where it’ll do some good.

Greg Palast doesn’t need no stinkin’ 9-11 to prove that the Bush Junta is one sorry bunch of criminals. On the other hand, anybody (as Rushkoff) who buys their 9-11 narrative is at least guilty of childish angelism.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too !

The whole 9-11 question is destined to go the way of the Kennedy assassination investigation. The rabble will never know for sure but a certain doubt will remain. A growing mistrust in our institutions will follow, resulting in a general disinterest in the democratic apparatus thus leaving the field wide open to organized minorities to take over the political agenda.

Bottom line, we all loose while our masters go on their merry way…

Gonzo nailed it for all of us to realize : “We have become a monster in the eyes of the whole world – a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us… No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you.” – Hunter S. Thompson

” We are watching a poorly staged rendition of Wag the Dog, interpreted for the morbidly stupid and performed by the criminally insane.” – Jules Carlysle

Building demolitions are tightly controlled. Fires aren’t. You wouldn’t trigger a demolition by starting a fire; there are far too many variables. Or rather: if someone had the engineering savvy to figure all that out in advance and make it work perfectly the first time, we should give up right now, because their science is well ahead of our own. Their planners would have had to know more about the WTC than any of our own architects, engineers, and actuaries.

You still haven’t answered my question about why the supposed plotters would have taken the towers down via explosive demolition in a way that looked like explosive demolition. For that matter, why did they take down the WTC via demolition-style demolition, but take down 7 Wall Street in a chaotic fashion that looked like a conventional building collapse.

As for what took down the central core of the building, which had stood for more than thirty years: I suspect it had something to do with the almost unimaginable concussion, heat, and pressure generated by the collapse. A normal building demolition or collapse turns concrete into rubble. This one reduced it to finely powdered particles, along with the furnishings and people trapped between the collapsing floors.

I’m sorry. I know you have trouble believing it. But those towers fell down because hijackers crashed big commercial jets into them.

south park did it!

I think the idea that someone somewhere allowed 9-11 to happen is plausible but I don’t “believe” in it. And I also think it isn’t much of a stretch to think they might encourage some of the worst 9-11 crap just to cover up their own monumental incompetence. I’m sure the first reaction of many in the gov. was “Holy shit we fucked up, heads are gonna roll!” Only they didn’t.

On the other hand, a LOT of sci-fi comes straight out of the lunatic fringe. Stargate SG-1 (among many others) is one example that follows David Icke’s reptilian delusions almost word for word. And Phillip K Dick had at best a tenuous hold on the real world.

You’re saying that Bush knew that thousands of Americans would be killed

Well, he was warned in a PDB that Al Qaeda was determined to strike, with planes, and he ignored it. He ought to be impeached on that basis alone.

This from the guy who sometimes breaks down in tears when he talks about fallen soldiers?

Those are staged tears, just as his famous malapropisms are also staged. Bush is in fact a fairly intelligent man who has read over 60 books recently and also reads newspapers. His public personae is carefully managed by Machiavelli student Carl Rove.

your claim basically puts him on the same level with a Hitler or a Pol Pot

No, that would be Dick Cheney.

Those are staged tears, just as his famous malapropisms are also staged. Bush is in fact a fairly intelligent man who has read over 60 books recently and also reads newspapers. His public personae is carefully managed by Machiavelli student Carl Rove.

Wow, are you serious, or just pulling our leg?

It sounds like we’ve come full swing. Instead of Bush being an idiot and a puppet of the oil corporations, he’s now an evil genius, master of all he surveys! I guess he is whatever works best in each individual person’s conspiracy theory.

If you’re having to adapt facts to fit your theory, then your theory is probably wrong.

This site was always good enough for me:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html

Basically debunks the biggest 9/11 theories.

Sure, you could suppose that the debunkers are lying, but then, why use the internet at all if you’re only going to believe the bits that agree with you? In that case, you clearly already know all the answers and can safely sign off.

“Oh read Popular Mechanics, har har.”

People are never going to get over 9/11.

Ever.

And honestly, we don’t need them to. What we need is to start steering these people towards the later events that can be proven that help justify their claims of vast shadow conspiracies. Can’t find proof of that Pentagon bomb? Well why not shore up your missing weapon theory by pointing out that the U.S. also claimed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and couldn’t find those after the fact. Don’t understand how some “tiny” man took on a big bad American he-man pilot? Well just look at how some virtually unknown private organization called the TSA is now the single most powerful agency of the government – despite not being an actual government agency.

Etc.

We don’t need to stop speculation about 9/11 amongst the thinkers, we just need them to start using the evidence we have and can prove (ad nauseum in some cases) to shore up their own special theories. After all, in politics, like forensics, whoever benefits the most from an action almost certainly had a hand in it. And no one has benefitted more from the chaos of 9/11 then the current politcial regime.

Do you really believe that Bush is an evil genius who fakes being inarticulate? Again, I’d like to hear the evidence, since we have vast amounts of evidence that he’s inarticulate and not exceptionally intelligent.

Let’s say they are absolutely right, that it is a conspiracy created by the Bush administration, let’s say, even, that the craziest conspiracies are right- that they were remote controlled drone planes that crashed and then they also blew up the buildings… just assume for a second that it’s all true-

What difference does it make?

A) Even if it’s true, most people won’t believe it.

B) The damage has already been done.

C) There’s nothing us peons could do about it anyway.

D) A government powerful enough to orchestrate an attack like that already has so much in control that they ain’t goin’ anywhere.

So I am not going to attack the conspiracy theorists’ beliefs, I simply don’t see what difference it makes if they’re right. We’d still be in Iraq, we’ve already gotten rid of Haebas Corpus and legalized torture, etc.

So let’s say you’re right. Good for you. You know THE TRUTH(tm)… I’m sure all the soldiers that are going to die over the years we’ll be stuck in Iraq will really care.

“As to the question of what happened at 9/11, I am reading at the moment a book by a man named David Griffin, on the debunking of the 9/11 debunking, and he raises a number of sharp questions… which I think deserve further questioning and investigation, but I am not as yet prepared to think that the bringing down of the… trade towers was the work of the Bush administration.”

Rushkoff can spin it however he likes, but I’m not biting.

Conspiracy theories are compelling narratives, but don’t always reflect a scientific (or even rational) approach.

Lewis Lapham left his role as editor of Harper’s Magazine in 2006.

Pedantically yours,
– SCAM