Here there be rants. There will be Freeman stuff, Lawful Rebellion stuff and Random stuff. I am rebelling because I want my country back. My lawful obligations are as follows: “together with the community of the whole realm, distrain and distress us in all possible ways, namely, by seizing our castles, lands, possessions, and in any other way they can, until redress has been obtained as they see fit…” Article 61 Magna Carta 1215
October 12, 2010
Food For Thought?
I don't do conspiracies. Never have. But 9/11 does seem to be surrounded by questions that have never been answered. At least, not properly. And certainly not by the US authorities.
I just have three very simple questions:
1. The heat generated by the planes crashing into the towers was several thousand degrees. So intense was the heat, it reduced two very big aircraft to almost nothing. I just wonder why they found a neat pile of seven slightly charred passports in the rubble belonging to the "bad guys".
2. Why were traces of thermite found in the rubble on all three sites?
3. When you see images of the Pentagon wall where the third plane struck, why is there no damage, not even a scratch, where the engines would have struck the wall? And, where are the engines?
Whatever you think happened, we can be sure of one fact: we will probably never learn the truth of those terrible events. It was an awful day and I remember it vividly. I was sort of involved. The company I worked for at the time despatched around 300 satellite phones for the FBI agents on the ground to use.
The film, inevitably, raises even more questions. I was amazed to learn that one aircraft engine was buried in a landfill. Its serial number was never retrieved before it was buried. That one serial number on its own would have answered around fifty questions the "truthers" have. Yet they buried it without bothering to note what it was. A mystery wrapped up in an enigma surrounded by a puzzle? Or wilful negligence? You decide.
This video seems to be delivered in more sensible tones than some of the others I have looked at.
Have a look if you can spare the time.
CR.
The rightous have certainly benifited the most from the 9/11 incident.
ReplyDeleteLook at all the anti terror laws, travel regulations, 2 wars, massive freedom of speech clamp down, Bin laden still doing his thing and no end in sight.
What really happenned IMO was a black op using the religion of peace as the perps with the organisers being the "CIA".
Our own 7/7 happened in spite of evidence showing our spooks had good intel something was in the offing.
One thing for sure, its a murky world out there.
1 - all sorts of bits and bobs were found. Accepting that the 7 passports were probably not found in a neat pile at all but turned up after lots of sifting through debris I don't find that particularly surprising.
ReplyDelete2 - thermite is powdered aluminium and iron oxide. Aircraft are made out of aluminium, much of which is going to be reduced to a state pretty like that of powder when you crash them into buildings. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that a fair amount of rusty steel was present too. So what exactly were the traces found? Because if it's just the chemicals involved that doesn't seem too surprising either.
3 - I've seen photos of mangled engine parts by the Pentagon walls, but that's by the by. If we're to believe that a plane did not hit the Pentagon we must then assume that this conspiracy took place in the plain sight of a city of more than half a million people in the hope that every single one of them would be looking the other way at the crucial moment, and would therefore be unable to call bullshit on the eyewitness accounts which said, yeah, that was a plane alright, the fucker missed the top of my car by like that much.
Hanlon's Razor works for me. There's no need to look for conspiracies when everything observed can be put down to stupidity.
I've watched all of these conspiracy theory movies on 9/11.
ReplyDeleteMany of them certainly raise questions yet to answered. I still have an open mind about it. Somehow I find it hard to believe that any government would do that to its own people..... but then, I do have some morals.
but....to be perfectly honest, I would not be surprised if it was staged as an excuse to invade Iraq.
Loose Change, 2nd Edition.
ReplyDeletehttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7866929448192753501#
cr
ReplyDeletei was just watching this over at, the truth seeker,they have also got a video of an australian taking on the courts
http://www.youtube.com/user/peternolan1109
trippymalcolm
Like the good Captain, I do not do conspiracies either. Most of the orchestrated oppression of the general public goes on in plain sight if people can be bothered to look.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the more you look at 9/11, the more you have to doubt the official "explanation". It is simply harder to believe than a theory that it was allowed to happen.
As with Sue, most people,including me, cannot get their heads round any government being that venal. But in reality...sometimes they are. Or being able to maintain a cover up. But sometimes they do.
I doubt if we shall ever know the "Truth"... and indeed, with such a complex event as 9/11...you have to wonder what the "truth" could ever look like.
I find it hard to imagine, even in my wildest fantasies, a scenario which would go even half way to explaining the innumerable inconsistancies around this event.
We will probably never know. Even if Dick Cheney came on the Today Program and admitted it, I probably would not believe that either.
“The more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.”
ReplyDeleteFood for thought?
Trippy,
ReplyDeleteI waded through the court transcripts a while back. I remember thinking that if I ever needed help the very last place I would go looking for it is in a courtroom.
It's a game. And we are never told all the rules.
CR.
Defender,
ReplyDeleteI have questions about 7/7 as well.
CR.
Sorry but l don't agree, Defender. We are interested in the truth and truth goes hand in hand with facts and science.
ReplyDeleteToo often are facts and known science discarded. l go with the Angry Exile. Take the Pentagon crash ... it's amazing just how many people expect to see a hole in the Pentagon resembling the outline of the aircraft. What they envisage is what they've seen on cartoons. Virtually the same with Flight 93.
As Angry Exile has pointed out to a degree, there are counter arguements to all the theorists arguements.
ReplyDeleteTo me there is only one question. Why will they not release the tape of the "plane" hitting the Pentagon that was recorded from the CCTV over the road?
So far they have just released a few frames that show an explosion, but not what caused it.
If they release the tape and it shows a passenger plane hitting the Pentagon then the whole conspiracy theory dissolves. You would think that would be in their best interests.
Until I see that tape I will always have doubts.
And as horrible as this incident was, I wouldn't put it past the abilities of a western government to do it if it was in their interest to do so.
it seems he does not like the no planes theory,yet the video (september clues)puts foreward good evidence that the planes were photoshop. holography,energy beam weapons,im sure one day we will know exactly how they did it.
ReplyDeleteanyway,ALL terrorism is state sponsored.
trippymalcolm.
peace.
AE,
ReplyDeleteThe particles were analysed by independent scientists (allegedly). They were not aircraft remnants but the actual thermite remains. Thermite is not a preferred explosive of the bad guys. They use Semtex, or PE-4, or any one of another half-dozen (probably stolen) explosives, but never Thermite.
My three questions were just those I thought of when I was writing the piece. I have dozens more.
Regarding the Pentagon crash, I have seen footage from nearby CCTV from the days before the crash and it is near perfect quality. I find it odd that in this case, and dozens of others where CCTV is involved, the captured images are somehow compromised.
Eye-witnesses? If a JDAM passed within inches of my head (and exploded against a building nano-seconds later) I may be convinced during later questioning that it was an aircraft. Not suggesting that is the case, but it is surely a possibility?
I'm trying not to reach here. I prefer Occams Razor.
CR.
Entertaining video but I don't buy the conspiracy theories in this or anything else.
ReplyDeleteIt's fun going through the what ifs but if we're prepared to believe in imadinnerjacket and photoshopped/holographic planes I think we're getting beyond reasoned judgement.
Agree with the Capt. though that courts are the last place to look for the truth.
Having said all that, what is the reasoning for not releasing the Pentagon video??
My famiy and friend were involved in the enquiry into the loss of the Hull trawler Gaul H243 with the loss of all her 36 crew.
ReplyDeleteThe conspiracy theories flowed there too and still do. Gaul H243 was a spy-ship? sank by a Russian submarine? boarded by Russians and crew taken off and then ship deliberately sank?
The glaringly obvious that she sank in storm force seas never entered their heads or was discarded. Most of these conspiracy theorists had no experience of the sea and some that did had no experience of the conditions the deep sea trawlers sailed in.
Despite the thorough enquiries and knowledge of the fishing community concluding she sank in a storm ... the conspiracy theories continue.
Thing is folks, you really have to ask yourself this one question:
ReplyDeleteAm I satisfied with the answers given (about any event) by the powers that be?
If the answer is yes, then there is no problem.
If the answer is no, then I guess you spend time looking for alternative answers.
Or, there is the third way: wait.
The answers may or may not come along at some point in time.
I look at this stuff and try to keep an open mind, but as we learn here and elsewhere, the government is not trustworthy, neither are the police, and neither are the courts. We have no good reason to believe any of their statements, particularly when some (or all) of the blame falls on them.
CR.
To form any sort of theory you have to start at the beginning. The conspiracy theorists will have you believe that 4 aircraft were involved but 2 of them were spirited away never to be seen again nor their pax. Explosives were planted in 3 buildings but still needed 2 aircraft to crash into the towers to conceal the explosions. A missile was responsible for the Pentagon and so on.
ReplyDeleteAnyone see any problems with this plan?
These same people invaded Iraq because they said they had WMD's but afterwards couldn't find any???
Too difficult to find 'WMD's'???
Did a film producer write these plans?
"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
SH,
ReplyDelete"To form any sort of theory you have to start at the beginning."
Good advice. Let's do that.
The baddies were barely able to fly light aircraft yet two of them managed to steer these 737's into two specific buildings in an urban sprawl?
The crashes didn't hide the explosions though, did they? They may have been intended to mask the demolition but some turkey forgot to hit the switch at the right time. In some videos those little bangs can be quite clearly seen at timed intervals.
Confession time.
I was in the Royal Engineers for just over a year. In that time I was trained to (among other things) blow things up. I knew about shaped charges, I knew about timed charges, I knew where to place my plastique on a tree to shut down a road, and I was even on telly once (Granada) blowing up a bridge. Uncontrolled explosions are fearsome. The shit flies everywhere. There are plenty of examples from Iraq available on YouTube.
Controlled demolitions are a thing of beauty, when they work correctly. The twin towers came down in what can only be described as a text-book demolition. Same for Tower 7.
And all of that is before we get to those other coincidences, like the buildings (just the twins and T7, mind you), being re-insured by the owner less than three weeks before the event.
Like the stock in American Airlines spiking two days before the event. Major players dumped their stock. Despite there being no negative financial information about AA at the time. That evidence would be available at the SEC website, if you want to dig for it.
Is it reasonable and fair to ask questions about the events leading up to this tragedy?
I think so.
CR.
Why go for an Ed Wood script then? Just blow the buildings up.
ReplyDeleteOK Capt. that's a more reasoned and plausible picture you have painted, but in order for all this to fit together, and stay together, surely too many people would have to keep (or be kept) quite?
ReplyDeleteI appreciate that I have now built a case for the conspiracy, and that was not my intent.
ReplyDeleteI just think that there are some very simple questions that now, nine years later, have never been answered. If they had, we could all accept the official version.
SH, that is what happened anyway. But I think you'll find that if you insure your buildings for several billion dollars then blow them up in broad daylight, your insurance company won't be willing to write you a cheque. Imagine, you are in the inner circle, and you and the dim-witted chimp are sat one night in the Oval Office. Monkey Boy says, "Gosh-darnit, I just wish we had a reason to invade those rag-heads in the Middle East", and your visitor says, "Well, you fly some planes into my buildings, which are all jammed with asbestos and fail every safety check known to mankind, and then you can blame who ever you like. I'll claim the insurance. It's a win-win".
It is not unknown for governments to murder their own people, is it?
Fireball, yup. That's always the problem. But, people can be bought. The US government, like ours, has no money of its own. They simply raise taxes to pay for their incompetency. Or, to pay people to keep their mouths shut.
CR.
Read Michel Chossudovsky's America's "War on Terror" and Peter Dale Scott's "The Road to 911." These books do not deal with that day's events but are more about the background to the CIA asset know as Al Queda. Especially interesting is the US state's funding of the promotion Wahhabism from the 1960s onwards.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to know what happened on the day by simply looking at the evidence: this video raises some very interesting points that most in the troof movement will not touch.
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=3932150728705348373&pr=goog-sl#
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=3932150728705348373&pr=goog-sl#docid=6714196008143117547
SH and XL5 are right. There's much simpler,secure and effective ways to accomplish the same result along the lines of the Oklahoma City bombing.
ReplyDeleteAnd as SH says, why couldn't they find WMD's in Iraq? Given the complexity of the conspiracy 9/11 you're telling me that they couldn't plant the relevant chemicals to prove WMD? l mean, how difficult would that be?
Thanks Steven.
ReplyDeleteI'll check them out.
CR.
Spartan,
ReplyDeleteI don't know.
Is it possible that Smiley Bliar and Monkey-Boy thought they would never be caught in that lie?
I agree that planting WMD's would have been relatively simple to do.
Maybe they did? Maybe they will be discovered at some point in the future, "by accident"?
Who knows?
I just know I don't trust any of them now and I doubt I ever will again. They are liars and thieves mostly. The odd one or two appear to have honourable intentions.
But that ratio should be inverted.
CR.
CR, l agree there is valid reasons not to trust politicians. Hell our own prove that daily.
ReplyDeletel cant see WMD's being found in the future, the time for that was at the invasion. They'd have been lauded as superheroes if they'd been found ... which shows how dumb they really are. What an opportunity missed.
Then we'd have another conspiracy theory :-) Personally l believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Also the lack of Pirates is to blame for Climate Change.
Steven,
ReplyDeleteI watched the first video with Dr Wood. All she does is ask questions. No statements made, she just presents data.
Fascinating stuff. There was a lot in there that I hadn't seen before.
CR.
This is madness.
ReplyDeleteFFS it says Capt Ranty at the top not David Icke!
I watched one of those vids but that Dr Judy Woods was as boring as fuck, sent me to sleep. From what bits I stayed awake for it seems like she was suggesting that because of the smoke going upwards, all the dust particles being the same size and no debris being found they must have been vapourised. By some sort of as yet unknown technology.
OK, so the Chimp and Ruin Mk1 cook up the scheme as a pretext to bomb the rag heads, then they delegate the organisation to, say the CIA, who employ a load of manpower in rigging the buildings, hi-jacking the planes etc. etc. etc. Massive logistical operation with lots of people involved and all with a callous disregard for human life, (their fellow countrymen) and any potential consequences.
We're in Elvis lives territory here. No way could you keep everyone quite, just one whistleblower coming out of the woodwork, for a multimillion media payoff, would lift the lid on this or any other any conspiracy theory you care to think of.
Surely?
Spartan,
ReplyDeleteI used to think that way. That our pollies are as dumb as catshit. And it's true. They are.
But it's that under-government, that layer just a millimetre away from power. Those that direct, those that orchestrate. It's those bastards that are clever and devious. They pulled Browns strings just as surely as they pulled Bliars. The same mob pull Camerons strings too.
Trouble is, we can't point a finger at them. They are grey men. They don't exist where we can see them.
Fuck me. I'm rolling out another conspiracy!
CR.
Fireball,
ReplyDeleteIt is madness.
There is a very fine line between madness and genius though.
Anyway, it doesn't hurt to roll these things out into the sunlight now and then.
I certainly didn't want to cause a ruckus.
It looks like most of you are running with the official version, and that is just fine by me.
I'm going to reserve judgement for a bit. We'll see what turns up in the next few years.
Because sure as eggs is eggs, something will.
CR.
And don't, FFS, get me started on Elvis.
ReplyDeleteHe works in the Spar down the road but I am sworn to secrecy about that.
CR.
Having watched many documentaries from both sides on this I think there are many unanswered questions.
ReplyDeleteBucko raised a point in his comment which has always concerned. Why won't they release the film of the plane hitting the Pentagon? Release the film and remove all the rumours at a stroke.
I loved the bit in the film where Obama is moaning about Imadinnerjacket making his speach so close to Ground Zero, because it would upset victims relatives. Yet he is happy for the Victory Moswue to be built there. how hypocritical is that?
I'm not sure if we're talking about the same film but the only thing I've seen is a few frames of security video showing clear blue sky, large blur and big bang in that order. I'm going from memory but I'd estimate that the film was running around 3-4 fps, as many security cameras do to increase the available recording time. This would inevitably mean there's no picture perfect freeze frame of a 757 with its nose up against the glass of a second floor window. Anything before or after that would show nothing of further relevance anyway, so releasing the rest isn't going to help unless we expect to see Dubya running into shot waving a sign saying 'Gotcha!'
ReplyDeleteBut I don't understand why actual film of the plane hitting the Pentagon is necessary to accept it. For me it's an a priori conclusion that it was a plane even if the conspiracy involved Americans in an office rather than bearded madmen in an Afghan cave. To believe that is wasn't a plane means I must assume that the entire population of the area - that's got to be all of Washington DC and anyone from the surrounding area who might have had reason to be in the vicinity of the Pentagon at the crucial time - are either mad, blind or in on the conspiracy. Come on, folks, put yourselves in the driving seat of the hypothetical conspiracy mastermind - if you wanted to damage a public building and blame it on a plane crash that never happened would you really do it in broad daylight in front of a city of more than half a million people plus neighbouring suburbs in the surrounding states? Call it a million people in the area - what are you going to do? Hope every single one of them happens to look the wrong way? Bribe them all either to stay away from the Pentagon on the day or keep shtum about anything out of the ordinary they might see? And even if you did that you'd need to persuade all of them not to give the game away by suddenly living the high life post Sept 11, because the inhabitants of DC being suddenly knee deep in cocaine, hookers and gold plated Ferraris might attract attention. So on top of spending all that money on buying silence - and for something of this magnitude it would need to be millions per person - you'd then have to persuade them all to carry on life as normal and not spend the money.
Even allowing for the possibility of a conspiracy the idea that it wasn't a plane just creates even bigger questions than it claims to solve. In my book the biggest of all those new questions would be how come nobody in this hypothetical shadowy conspiracy said something like, 'You know what, guys? This is just too complicated. We'll never be able to control what all those people do, see and say even if we spend about a zillion dollars on hush money, and it would need to be about a zillion dollars. I say fuck it, let's just go get a 757 and do it for real.'
AE,
ReplyDeleteThat is a strong argument and it makes a lot more sense than the suggestion that they used a JDAM.
What about the theory of empty, remote controlled planes? That one gets a lot of attention as well.
I lean towards the most accepted story that it was the bad guys but it's all those unanswered questions, the odd way the buildings collapsed, the financial angle, and the fact that on the day, many hundreds of people who worked in the towers decided not to come to work.
There are far too many "coincidences" that make the official version smell.
CR.
Cap'n, that’s a question that needs a long answer, so this comes in two parts. And it may be interrupted because of the iffy internet where I am at the mo. When I mentioned Hanlon’s you said you used Occam's Razor. I do too, though it often comes bundled in a gift set with Hanlon's since they do very nearly the same job ;-) Actually I'd say that Hanlon's Razor is Occam's Razor, but as applied narrowly to the subject of possible conspiracies. To me both say that the conventional narrative for the WTC attacks is in fact the most plausible. Of course a false flag job can’t be ruled out if only because it’s impossible to prove a negative but all alternatives mean accepting stuff that’s even harder to believe, not least that such a huge conspiracy could be run without leaks in a nation that nine years on still hasn't worked out what to put up where the towers stood. On top of that question mark I'd add these:
ReplyDelete- Why demolish the towers and building 7 at all? If it was a false flag op to justify war then simply ramming the buildings with planes would have been enough. The only thing that makes sense is if we go for the remote controlled empty planes idea, which brings up the feasibility of remote controlling heavy aircraft with the precision needed to hit a particular building. Piss easy with small, agile aircraft like missiles and the current crop of UAVs, but commercial wide bodies? I’m not so sure, and don’t forget that you only get one shot at it. What if, having wired the place with explosives to bring the towers down, they’d missed the WTC on one or both goes? In that event the plan is completely fucked and all that planning goes down the swanney. If you were running it would you want to take that chance? I wouldn’t, and so that leads to the next question.
- Why the WTC at all? If it's just provocation for war that you want there are better and easier choices. Remember the reaction after Columbine? Multiply that by ten or so and pin it on some bearded loons in caves. Half America's mothers would queue up for an M16 and the other half would be making the things.
- Following on from that, why the theatre with the planes at all? Change targets and methods to drop the complex plan with the aircraft and you'd probably reduce the necessary size of the conspiracy into the bargain. It’s like that gag about how the Apollo moon landings were faked in a film studio on Mars. Why bother with fake hijacks to cover your explosives when you could as easily concoct a story that involved Al Qaeda and explosives and get the same result?
- Why less than a year into a new Presidency? Planning and prep would have taken far longer than the 11 months since the election so the conspiracy wouldn't have known if the plan needed to persuade the trigger happy Texan or a tree hugger from Tennessee who may reacted rather differently. A plot with political aims must be tailored for a particular politician, yet at the time it would began they could not have known even who the presidential candidates would be, much less the winner. Sure, we could believe the plot involved the election result too, but how narrow was that? We’d also have to believe the conspiracy extended to the voting system and/or the electoral colleges, plus at least one state government – probably more – and a minimum of two separate Supreme Courts.
Of course some people do believe that, but Occam’s Razor in its original form talks of not multiplying entities and adding assumptions without need. So which theory involves more of that? The one(s) that say to suit neo-con foreign policy and/or the military-industrial complex one government and three civilian office buildings were partially or completely demolished with explosives, having first nicked up to four commercial aircraft depending on your preferred version and crashed them into two of the civilian buildings, though for unexplained reasons possibly not the government one which may have had a missile shot at it while hoping a million people would all look the wrong way at the critical instant and not see it was something other than a plane and so accept the lie that it was really a plane after all, and all that would create the political pressure needed to get a recently inaugurated President, who must therefore have been installed by rigging the election for a close result, which in turn meant that at least the government of Florida, the Florida Supreme Court, and the US Supreme Court, possibly more, must also have been co-opted, to give the go ahead for a couple of ruinously expensive war that benefited no one but the military-industrial complex who were happy to get that relatively little extra money and influence in return for arguably the biggest and most astronomical risk taken since we began walking upright? Or the theory that says it was almost like that apart from the rigged election because the conspiracy had chosen to rely on a fucking shit ton of luck and post election night patchwork to get the necessary useful idiot nominally in charge, which would be the biggest risk ever taken since we stopped breathing gills? Or the theory that says it was terrorists risking no more than the lives of 19 guys who were already prepared to die?
ReplyDeleteAlso we tend to forget the psychological aspect. How people's minds work and how people, and importantly, organisations, behave. The natural path is the path of least resistance, the path that requires the minimum number of steps and the fewest number of risks to reach the goal inside the desired time frame. A false flag op needn't have taken anywhere near as many of either, but the opposite is true for terrorists with the simple goal of hurting America and her pride. I'm sure OBL and his chums would have salivated at the idea of setting off a nuke at Christmas time or something, but for them finding a few idiots to blag a few airliners for kamikaze jobs was the path with fewer steps and risks.
Of course the other psychological aspect is that we don't like randomness and chaos, especially when it involves death and destruction. We're practically hard wired to find 'shit happens' unsatisfactory and instead reach for increasingly complex explanations that are probably impossible to prove. Just as taking the path of least resistance is human nature so is the desire to believe in something like a conspiracy instead of accepting the idea that random death could drop from the sky because of the ravings of a beardy weirdy in a cave ten thousand miles away. A shadowy conspiracy is, in a slightly fucked up way, a comforter. It feels better than trying to get a grip on why the beardy weirdy hates us all so much when as individuals we'd done nothing to him. We have a need to be able to rationalise things and you just can't with something as irrational as the insane hatred of the beardy weirdy in the cave. So we'd rather look for reasons our own governments, whom we usually tend not to credit with being able to find their own arse with a map and a compass, might have chosen to do it instead.
Sure, there are coincidences and oddities, but I think nothing like as many or as large as there would need to be for it to be an inside job. The bottom line is that there are far safer and surer ways to have gone about it, and that makes any kind of conspiracy very unlikely.
AE,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your thoughts. Wonderfully laid out, BTW.
The target had to be something iconic and linked to finance, I think. It had to be big, it had to be dramatic, and it had to involve a catastrophic loss of life. (Whichever side did the deed).
The remote control thing relates to evidence that the US military were testing just such a technology prior to the event. Besides which, I happen to know that these birds can fly themselves around the world. The pilot and his/her crew are there purely because we humans would not get into an unmanned aircraft to set off on our jollies, or our business trips. It is not, therefore, beyond existing technology for these (empty) planes to have taken off and then flown into the buildings by some spotty nerd with a joystick in a bunker somewhere. We see smaller versions flying with precision over Afghanistan daily.
I agree that the planning must have taken years (again, whoever did the deed) but we should not limit ourselves to thinking that Monkey Boy and the building owner (as in my assertion) planned it all, or at all. The CIA are a nefarious bunch who have been interfering with world events since their creation. Is it beyond our ability to believe, or at least consider, the possibility that they planned it 10, 15, or 20 years ago? (In theory, at least). And then waited for technology to catch up, and, of course, the right time.
I still don't know what to believe but I find arguments like yours very persuasive. Thanks again for the detailed reply.
CR.
AE,
ReplyDeleteYour second post got spammed. No idea why. Blogger has no logic. None at all.
I will answer that one in the a.m.
CR.
Good point about the aircraft systems on commercial jets. As I said, I don't think you can compare UAVs with commercial wide bodies but I'd forgotten that they're technically capable of taking off from Heathrow, crossing the Atlantic and landing at Kennedy all on their own. If they can find a 70m wide strip of tarmac several thousand kilometres from their starting point I suppose it's not beyond the realms of possibility that they could be programmed to find a particular office building in New York. I expect it could be as simple as entering a waypoint in the GPS that's twenty storeys below the roof altitude and on the far side of the building from where the aircraft is. Of course that would also mean that a kamikaze hijacker wouldn't need to know much more than how to program the GPS and autopilot to do that. Even if there are safety protocols built in I reckon if it could be programmed to get within a mile before the hijackers had to switch off it'd be enough.
ReplyDeleteBut again, compare the situation from the perspective of hijackers and conspirators. For the hijackers even a near miss of either or both towers followed by crashing into the wrong building(s) would achieve pretty much the same result. For hypothetical conspirators controlling empty aircraft it is absolutely essential that the aircraft hit the correct building - for the plan to work they simply cannot afford to crash anywhere else at all. The next block would be as much a disaster for the conspirators as the next country. That makes the risk/reward balance far too lopsided when there are safer, more secure options which could produce the same kind of outcome for the conspirators.
I'm not sure why the target would have needed to be iconic or linked to finance but even if we accept that there's still umpteen ways to achieve something similar without going to the trouble of faking four hijacks and vastly increasing the necessary number of people in on the plot. Keep it small, keep it simple, keep it to suicide bombers on foot or in vehicles. Look what Tim McVeigh achieved without even buying a copy of MS Flight Simulator. Why wouldn't a conspiracy copy that instead?
... we should not limit ourselves to thinking that Monkey Boy ...
ReplyDeleteNot saying he was involved as such. Actually a conspiracy involving the President as a co-conspirator is really far fetched but while a hypothetical conspiracy wouldn't need to include the president personally when it has political goals it certainly would need to allow for the sitting president, his politics, personality, psychology and so on - basically which way the man will react to a certain situation. The conspiracy needn't have involved Shrub but it would needed to have taken him into account, and that would imply planning beginning no earlier than Nov 2000 unless we believe that the electoral colleges, voting machine companies, Florida govt, Sup Court and US Sup Court all were co-opted into the plot to a greater or lesser extent. The conspiracy is either implausibly large or working within an implausibly short time scale, all to accomplish that which could have been done more securely, with less risk and at shorter notice with a few truck bombs.
Yes, a teed up and ready to go when the time is right conspiracy would be possible but again there's the problem with security - would you keep something like that on simmer for years, maybe decades, risking that it would leak or that something else would happen in the meantime to make the plan worthless or unworkable? Again, too much out of the plotters control. Realistically it'd be ditched as over complicated and too dependent on other things just dropping into place. You'd drop it in favour of maybe truck bombing schools or something else which offered the big terror payoff you want but which had far more under your precise control and much more margin for error.
Another thought on the psychology of looking for conspiracies. It's kind of like a God of the Gaps thing. A thousand years ago people couldn't explain lightning so rather than accepting that we have imperfect knowledge of events they decided they must have made Thor angry. We still can't fully explain lightning but we no longer think Swedish thunder gods have anything to do with it. It's the same when we look at conspiracy theories. Rather than looking at little oddities suggesting a 'conspiracy of the gaps' we should look at what is known and undisputed, and then consider whether that fits better with the conventional narrative or with one or more conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theories might fit the gaps well, but everywhere else they seem far fetched because there are much easier ways for them to have achieved the various aims suggested. The opposite applies to a bunch of religious fucknuts with knives and minimal pilot skills but without the funds and means to get lots of truck bombs organised in a foreign land.