The FBI document released Saturday contains significant redactions, but nevertheless shows FBI officials were skeptical of claims by various witnesses that Saudis in the U.S. who met with the two hijackers did so accidentally through chance encounters.
It was “difficult to reconcile” the connection between the hijackers and those who gave them support, the FBI document states, noting that one individual claimed he met the hijackers at a 7-Eleven convenience store in northern Virginia “during a ‘chance meeting’, in a uniquely similar fashion to the way Bayoumi described his ‘chance meeting’ with Hazmi and Midhar in Los Angeles.”
Just like how, according to the 9/11 commission report, on the morning of 9/11 there was a "chance meeting" between the two guys who ran the investigation into attacks (Porter Graham and Bob Goss) and the guy who wired 100k to the lead hijacker (Ahmad).
> On the morning of September 11, 2001, Goss and Graham were having breakfast with General Ahmad [head of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI)]
Secondary source for the $100k money transfer from the ISI head to Atta:
> Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Why not?
The ISI has also been implicated in giving harbor to Al Qaeda (like with bin Laden) and the Taliban (helping them rebuild and take over Afghanistan again). Between these and near constant state supported terrorism against India, how is it that Pakistan has escaped all accountability and public scrutiny? I would love to learn more about the foreign policy or diplomatic dynamics that may be involved here.
> Task Force 74 was a task force assembled from the Seventh Fleet of the United States Navy that was deployed to the Bay of Bengal by the Nixon administration in December 1971, at the height of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971
Here is the reason https://www.nti.org/learn/countries/pakistan/nuclear/ . Pakistan has nukes making it untouchable and unmentionable. Media doesnt even try to link Pakistan with Taliban and super quick fall of Afghanistan.
Here's another weird one. One of the 9/11 hijackers [1] checked into a Florida hospital with apparent cutaneous Anthrax symptoms. After investigation of this incident, the FBI officially ruled out a link between 9/11 and the 2001 Anthrax attacks [2]. The main suspect in the Anthrax attacks, Bruce Ivins, committed suicide. A lot of unknowns remain and I'm still not sure if I believe the official FBI story about Ivins.
This article starts off with meeting between Graham/Goss and Mahmoud Ahmed, or 'Mehmood Ahmed' as it is spelled some other places. Also, what is the reason spellings always differ so much?
How would you translate french "bœuf" to american english? Well, we have, "beef". But someone would also just use boeuf which might have a closer recemblance with the pronounciation of the original word. So whats most important, to have an as direct as possible spelling to how it is pronounced or just make an own version of it.
We have the same with a lot of names in the west as well, Jacob, Jakob, Yakob, Yakov, Jakub, Jakup etc.
Transliteration schemes from one language/alphabet to another are not always consistent.
If I'd have to guess, Mehmood is what is used in Pakistan, reflecting local pronunciation, whereas Mahmoud is the more traditional Arabic translation of the name (which is Arabic).
The "oo" and "ou" spelling difference has more to do with the english vs french influence, with Pakistan having had more English than French influence.
it makes a little sense to question this. It make more sense that they had chance encounters at a mosque (i.e. "strange" visitors who are visiting an area are common to visiting local religious institutions).
with that said, there's a joke that many jews make when they travel, of playing the game "spot the jew", and I can imagine if I ran into a jew at a random 7-11 I'm more likely to have a friendly chit-chat than with other random people, so I can imagine that the same might hold true for saudis. I could very easily imagine if they were in a location with a reasonably sized saudi ex-pat community that there would be many of these chance encounters with other saudis.
I could imagine "white bread" FBI agents that aren't from a minority, might not be able to comprehend how minorities find each other and make connections in random locations.
with all that said, it be proper for the FBI to chase down all these threads.
At least conservative jews and muslims both wear distinctive headwear, and sometimes grooming, so it's decent odds of greeting one another on the street. Most other backgrounds, not so much.
I agree with this. I'm white from Toronto, Canada. A decade or so ago I worked in Saudi Arabia and as I was walking out of a coffee shop I saw another white guy walking past... so of course he stood out by the way he looked and the way he dressed.
But not only that, he was someone I met up with at 2600 meetings every month in Toronto. We chatted, and he was staying in a compound that I had stayed at a number of times before. It was a total chance meeting, as neither of us knew the other had even left Toronto for any particular gig. Prior to that I didn't even know what he did for a living.
So chance meetings certainly can and do happen. In this case it was actually someone I knew. But we initially noticed each other because we similarly stood out in the surrounding population.
Likewise, during prayer times (Saudis pray 5 times a day!) I would stay in whatever restaurant or cafe and they would shut the window blinds so the religious police (Muttawa) wouldn't see us and give us grief for not being at prayer. Every time, the place always had numerous other white people whom I didn't know and didn't meet. But you could be sure several of us bumped into each other repeatedly at these cafes, despite not knowing each other at all. Our only connection was being white and non-Muslim. Exactly the reverse of what's being touted as suspicious coincidences here.
I find it dubious to call chance encounters even "encounters." Muslims are encouraged to pray in congregation, even during travel. You find a random Mosque with several hundred people and perform your prayer rituals there (for most busy people, that is only for Friday congregational prayers.) You are also encouraged to smile at and greet everyone, even though you dont know them.
As a former Management Consultant, i've been in dozens of random mosques in random cities (based on where my client happened to be.) In SF alone I've visited in five or six on Fridays in the year before COVID as I flew in for work meetings.
I dont know anyone at any of these, but you try to smile and greet people as you are encouraged to.
Now imagine you create a graph of where you've been and who else has been there. You can find all sorts of co-incidences because the graph doesnt account for the degree of connectedness (near zero)
Another reason others faiths often dont fully understand this is due to the workday challenge in the west. Muslim mandatory congregational prayers are on a workday (usually Friday 12-1 or 1-2), so we dont get to enjoy the community feel of a long congregation with socializing before/after that one could achieve on a Saturday or Sunday. Instead Muslims often find themselves rushing back to work for a 2pm meeting. If you're unlucky and your meeting starts at 2pm sharp, you are brisk walking back and swapping New Balances for wingtips on the elevator up.
The workday challenge also means that the congregational prayer is not in your home community, it is whatever is closest to your office. Sometimes, you have multiple depending on whether you're at the downtown or uptown office, etc.
religious jews pray 3 times a day as well. It's common in cities with reasonable size jewish populations to have afternoon services in different office buildings scattered throughout the city where people meet up every work day. so that experience is common to them as well.
This is one of the Saudi’s frequently mentioned in the report in connection to two hijackers, who was being financed by a Saudi princess married to a US Ambassador:
> FBI agents involved in the case had received several reports that led them to believe al-Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence officer, living and working secretly in the U.S. His cover story was that he worked for an aviation logistics company owned by the Saudi government, but investigators found he never did any work for the company.
> Bayoumi got the hijackers an apartment and helped open a bank account, obtain car insurance, get Social Security cards and call flight schools in Florida—and also threw a welcoming party for the hijackers, during which he introduced them to the local Muslim community.
It's pretty widely accepted by now that the premise for Iraq 2.0 was manufactured by the GWB administration.
Regarding 9/11:
I think Cheney was pulling the shots and knowingly and cynically ignored all of those glaring warnings, thinking they'd get maybe a small attack somewhere with a smaller number of US deaths, which would sort of be the cost of doing business in the middle east, and that this could be politically expedient in the context of his larger vision on how to deal with "the Iraq/Saddam problem", and in the larger picture morally "fine".
Btw: Dick Cheney is actually still around. How he and GWB never were indicted is beyond me. Don't get me started on the GWB PR rehabilitation campaign that has been ongoing during the the past ~6 years.
> How he and GWB never were indicted is beyond me.
Same reason nothing will ever happen to Trump for January 6th (and many other things). Same reason Nixon was pardoned. Same reason Clinton got away with lying to Congress, nothing happened to Reagan or Bush Sr. over Iran Contra, and so on...
Once you reach a certain level, laws no longer apply.
This is a more likely explanation than more complex conspiracy theories for Saudi and Pakistani ISI involvement with the 9/11 hijackers. These people were never brought to justice because they are powerful, rich, or "valuable" in some other way. They're not subject to the law.
More like US Law is a tool and not a useful one, in leveraging political influence. In US Politics, the political presentation of events/behavior of individuals, are a sort of ammunition for both other individuals and associated groups. Nobody wants to go to war with a political opponent who can weaponize information effectively, so you never chase them down legally. Especially with no guarantee that legal recourse will do anything but drain coffers and political favors.
> I think Cheney was pulling the shots and knowingly and cynically ignored all of those glaring warnings, thinking they'd get maybe a small attack somewhere with a smaller number of US deaths
Did he have so much control that he could suppress intelligence about an attack? I know he was pretty powerful for a vice president, but it sounds weird to me that one guy who isn't even in command could do that.
Note I'm not American and don't know that much about that period.
"Harry Whittington, the Republican lawyer shot by Dick Cheney in a hunting accident in Texas last weekend, emerged from hospital yesterday and apologised to the vice-president for all the trouble the shooting had caused."
> Whittington told the paper that although many media outlets had described Cheney and him as "good friends", the pair had only met one another three times in 30 years, and had never been hunting before. The Washington Post article also said that Cheney had violated "two basic rules of hunting safety": he failed to ensure that he had a clear shot before firing, and fired without being able to see blue sky beneath his target. The paper also reported that Cheney has still neither publicly nor privately apologized to Whittington for the shooting.
He was a very unusual vice president. Often described as the most powerful american VP ever. It's not clear that GWB was in control of these aspects during his presidency.
You should watch Vice (2018).
That movie really made a shitload of sense to me after following politics closely since a bit before the Bush/Gore election in 2000.
Cheney and the well-aligned group he was part of clearly had extensive control, clearly demonstrated by how well he executed the policy in 2001-2005. It is helpful not to think of the current VP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris) as a comparison as her background [while worthy] was mostly local (SF) and state (CA) -- Cheney on the other hand decades of DC+White House experience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney) with a strong and almost singular view on Foreign Policy.
W/r/t control beyond the whitehouse, he was publicly part of multiple groups with other key players (e.g., PNAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...) as well as part of non-public "groups" -- Neoconservative. He was clearly effective because his cohorts (Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Bremer) were also part of the same circles, well placed in the DC foreign policy / defense apparatus, also shared the same singular focus of hawkish Foreign Policy.
It also helped that half the media landscape unashamedly supported the Cheney stance. Parts of other media (NY Times) reduced their critical thinking for several years until the disaster of the Bush administration became clear.
This is also why Comedy Central and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Show took off during that time -- because they (along with PBS News Hour and NPR) were one of the few consistently thoughtful sources of news during that time. Consider how much easier it is for Cheney to execute policy when the media check-and-balance has disappeared.
> Did he have so much control that he could suppress intelligence about an attack?
Not sure about suppressing intelligence - but he sure was powerful enough to generate fake intelligence about "Sadam having weapons of mass destruction" - overriding the skepticism of multiple established intelligence services in the process[1]. Cheney basically set up a parallel intelligence service out of his office to push the "weapons of mass destruction" angle with no factual/ground-intelligence basis.
Let's not forget about the nuclear bomb factories on rails. That story sounded fake from the get-go, and since it wasn't true, they just dropped it and let it slip out of the public's memory.
Back then I was fond of saying that if George W Bush were president during Pearl Harbor we would have declared "War on Aerial Bombing" and invaded Korea.
I have never seen a coherent explanation of what was going through anyone's mind regarding the Iraq war. The nearest I've heard is that Iraq was Bush's idee fixe going into office. (My personal theory was that Bush realized Afghanistan was not going to get him re-elected to a second term.)
It's not really a complex mystery. GWB's admin was heavily stacked with people from a particular ideological clique, the Project for a New American Century folks. Cheney, Wolfowitz, etc. These folks had done the essay and speech circuit for well over a decade before 9/11 happened, and were very clear about their perspective and aims. I'd summarize those as:
~"American hegemony is net good for the world, therefor the US should not hesitate to use military power, unilaterally, to reshape the world towards US interests, without apology."
These are people that rejected any concept of a collaborative or consensus based world order among peer powers, consent of those governed but subjects of a weaker state, etc, vs the US becoming a benevolent in their imagination unipolar power. They'd spent most of the 90s writing essays about why the US should just straight up depose Saddam and allow US private interests to take over all Iraqi oil infrastructure.
These people had an extremely hawkish take on US foreign policy and it's undeniable that 9/11 dropped a giant present right in their lap. They did exactly what they'd already told the world they wanted to do as a response just using 9/11 as a new justification. The only real surprise is they failed to convince everyone on taking over Iran too.
As for GWB himself, it's not clear what his personal views were other than he stacked his admin full of these people and clearly trusted them. The argument that he had a personal grudge vs Saddam due to his father makes perfect sense and would be an easy way to persuade him personally.
I think a lot of the Bush folks thought of Saddam as a kind of rogue asset. They'd funded him to attack the Iranians, and then he went off reservation when he invaded Kuwait, and later tried to assassinate HW Bush. They knew he had chemical weapons (because they had sold them to him), and tricked themselves into believing he was developing nukes. 9/11 ramped up the paranoia and gave the Bush administration license to lie their way into war.
Prior to the Iraq war Saddam was pressing the UN to lift a bunch of sanctions and courting Russian and European oil companies to come in and run their oil operations. By the time of the invasion Iraq's oil infrastructure had been gutted due to sanctions.
This was a complete anathema to the PNAC psychos' vision of the Middle East [0]. They basically wanted to exact control over the majority share of OPEC producers for power over economic rivals (as they saw them).
The PNAC [1] had been pushing for war in the Middle East from their founding in the 90s. They got a lot of buy-in from all the Nixonites in GWB's administration. Rumsfeld set up the Office of Special Plans [2] that stovepiped unvetted intelligence from a bunch of Iraqi expats and exiles to push PNAC narratives to GWB.
The most credible theory in my eyes as to why they needed to invade Iraq, was that Saddam intended to boycott the US dollar, and rather sell Iraq's oil in Euros.
There's a de facto global tacit agreement to sell oil in US dollars - on pain of unilateral sanctions by the US or military intervention by the US military. All countries who deviate from this agreement are in fact deemed enemies of the US. This includes, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and China, and (formely) Iraq and Libya. When they don't, that means that the US can't simply print dollars as they please and force other countries (who purchases that oil) to purchase US debt as well. Pricing oil in currencies other than the worlds reserve currency (the US dollar) affects the dollar value greatly. The US printed about 10 trillion dollars in two years. The rest of the oil-dependent world pays the price.
> There's a de facto global tacit agreement to sell oil in US dollars - on pain of unilateral sanctions by the US or military intervention by the US military.
That is 100% how the US has managed to maintain as a "stable" global currency.
Not really. Cheney was under the influence of Ahmad Chalabi, who was a deep Iranian asset. Chalabi's job was to get the US to invade Iraq and dispose of Saddam. He succeeded admirably, and was given an award by Iran.
I recently read Islamic imperialism, a history from Yale university press. The first thing you need to know is that in the Middle East, countries do not exist. What we call countries are conglomerations of loosely associated factions from top to bottom. That’s why there isn’t a single middle eastern state that is stable and also free of brutality, except the black sheep. Even if some Saudi people were involved, saying that “the saudis” were involved doesn’t make sense. The higher levels of the Saudi dynasty were certainly not in favor of 9/11 even if the fundamentalists in the country hadn’t lost any sleep over it.
Bin laden was an outcast. He left Saudi Arabia and went around to various places and at one point ended up in Northern Africa where he was engaged in evicting the Americans from Somalia. He said that the Americans he fought in Somalia were so weak and retreated so readily that it opened his mind to the possibility of inflicting real damage to the United States. But around this time he became more high profile and was evicted from his host country and wasn’t welcome anywhere, including Saudi Arabia. That should be a big hint about the Saudi theory. He made an appeal to the UK for political asylum, which based on his rhetoric at the time was like hitler asking for asylum in Israel. If the UK had granted him asylum 9/11 wouldn’t have happened. But they didn’t.
From there he ultimately moved on to Afghanistan and the tribal regions of the Pakistan border where there is no presence of government.
Bin laden was a religious fanatic who outwardly pursued The universal adoption of islam and protested foreign occupation of the pan-Arab community, even the willful presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia after the invasion of Kuwait. He killed 3,000 people because the saudis willingly hosted American troops. Mind-bending. But this leads to the next point which is that despite his outward behavior, inwardly he probably had political ambitions and all indications point to yet another repetition of history in that region — a small group of people justify violence in the name of Islam and then promptly transform into a conventional state, built upon violations of Islam, as soon as they have captured the material means to do so. Bin laden, who probably thought 9/11 would cause the United States to remove itself from the Middle East, only made it to step one.
And this has interesting consequences for the future landscape of terror. We probably won’t see another attack from the Middle East. Attacks from these groups are almost always pragmatic, even if they are done in the name of “Islam,” and almost always the pragmatic target is some other player in that region.
> because the saudis willingly hosted American troops.
Saudi royal family are one thing, and Saudi nation is another.
Saudi royal family is effectively an occupational regime, largely propped by American handouts, and backing, on top of gigatons of $$$ coming from ArAmCo
Well the key word is occupational. They are just a regular regime, not occupational. And they take “handouts” from their ally of choice just like every other state. There’s no occupation going on and they aren’t a puppet state.
If you topple the Saud dynasty then another regime would take their place. They aren’t suppressing some kind of egalitarian wellspring. If you disagree then I have 2000 years of history to show you.
As I said, if they didn’t have support from the US it would just be some other country. And if it weren’t the Sauds it would be some other totalitarian body.
They derive their power from their natural resources. If history is racist then perhaps we should abolish history books?
Whatever happened to the $2.3T (trillion) dollars that went missing as per Donald Rumsfeld's speech on September 10, 2001? I think we forgot to follow-up on this question...leading ourselves into greater debt year-after-year since then.
Trillions of dollars are NOT missing…never were. With 34 colors of money, subdivided by Fiscal Year (FY), and where the RDT&E is further divided by 8 budget activities (each also divided by FY), it becomes a task impossible to tell congress (who actually created this insane level of fiscal sub-division in the first place) that every single dollar was spent according to their scheme.
Think about it, there is not a single off the shelf enterprise accounting system designed to accommodate even a fraction of this maniacal minutia.
Note that the cited list didn’t account for JIEDO appropriation type (which also had a FY component) which was prevalent over the past 20 years, but is now defunct.
A major part of the problem (save the super fragmented parsing of the funding) is that each service has their own accounting & execution systems. There is NOT a singular DoD system.
Nobody could answer the question of what the money was spent on, so it's missing. This is a normal usage of the term, nobody is alleging that someone was walking down the street with a briefcase full of 2.3 trillion dollars and whoops accidentally slipped and threw it into the bushes somewhere but can't find it.
And I'm no accountant but I suspect there could be a reasonable middle ground between accounting for every single dollar spent, and accounting for 2.3 trillion dollars.
> "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.
I think this is related to the very long DoD audit process, and there's a difference between being unable to track those dollars and them being missing or stolen or inappropriately used.
Notably, it took until about 2017 for annual audits to actually start at DoD, and AFAIK, they have yet to have a 'clean' audit where all/substantially all assets and spending is accounted for, although it seems like progress is being made. This isn't necessarily unexpected as the organization wasn't built with auditing as a requirement and it takes some time to retrofit that into a large organization. Congressional oversight is powerful, but persistant focus is hard to come by and is really needed on something like this.
The article makes it pretty clear that the $2.3T figure is about efficiency, sloppy accounting and diffuse accountability. It’s not like there was $2.3T cash in a van that got stolen.
But as a matter of probability and human greed, some people understood the system and invisibly stole from it. How much of the money was mismanaged vs how much was stolen is debatable.
Well, sure, are you going to confirm to accounting norms when you're not required to and you've got more urgent matters to attend to? Especially if you're in an institution that has ignored accounting norms for many many years?
I think you're confused. This is money before Iraq ever came into the picture (post 9/11). This is money that was reported "unaccounted for" 1 day prior to 9/11.
A couple of contentions from 9/11 truthers never made much sense to me:
Firstly, why would the government plant explosives/thermite/whatever in the buildings? Flying planes into buildings would be enough pretext to start a war on terror, if that was the intention. You don't need to ensure they collapse with additional explosives.
Secondly, why would they use a missile rather than a plane when targeting the pentagon? If you're planning to make the public think a plane hit the pentagon, why not just use a plane?
One suggested explanation for the first point I've seen is that it was to limit damage to the surrounding areas in case of an uncontrolled collapse. I don't recall any evidence being presented for this claim though, and it doesn't strike me as particularly plausible, as it doesn't seem worth complicating the plan to such a degree for seemingly little benefit.
The use of a missile rather than a plane has never made any sense to me - one unexpected photo, or even a plausible witness account, gives you a problem, despite there being an obvious way to avoid it. It also invites questions if the result is inconsistent with a plane crash in any way.
I'm no 9/11 truther but I'm fascinated by the subject at the same time. It's such a complex subject and there are no easy and simple answers. There are many angles to take into consideration. I guess the truth is somewhere in the middle as with most things these days.
I thought this video was interesting since it doesn't really seem to claim anything. It's asking difficult questions though:
Beware of false equivalences though. Some facts are black and white even if parties are trying to muddy the water, retain secrets, or whatever. Eg, flat Earth: there is no middle and by humoring the story tellers elevates them to credence they haven't earned.
More like Saudi Arabia could be the next target for the US attack.
Reason is simple: it possesses large deposits of fossil fuel but spends "too much" (from American point of view in the world with rapidly declining energy resources) for internal consumption.
By bombing Saudi Arabia, killing millions and destroying infrastructure (e.g. oil-fired power plants), USA will reduce consumption of fossil fuels by Saudi Arabia and leave more for export to the US.
Saudi Arabia is the Land of the Two Shrines. If you want to kick the hornet's nest (not just regular hornets, but Asian Murder Hornets), that is the way. You'll have 1.5B pissed off Muslims if the US does anything hostile against the Saudi Kingdom.
yes, you can definitely utilize the millennia-old Shia-Sunni conflict to knock the Saudis down a couple of notches.
They have been busy solidifying a wall around Iran. Pakistan is, basically, their bitch. Pakistan and Saudis have an agreement, that should the Saudis need, the Pakistani nukes will be made available within a few hours. No wonder the Iranians want to develop nukes; the Saudis practically have them!
Yet the coalition of 3400 architects and engineers still do not have computer inputs of NIST's mathematical models used for simulating how the buildings were destroyed. As per NIST: "This information was exempt from public disclosure under Section 7d of the National Construction Safety Team Act because it was determined by the Director of NIST that release of the files might jeopardize public safety."
It isn't odd to think that some of the wilder conspiracy theories on this, and other subjects, are seeded precisely to be such bullshit as to tar any discussion of the issue.
Plus the ever present rampant hucksterism that will say anything to sell stuff.
Two planes are hijacked and then rammed into two of the tallest buildings in the world. Both buildings collapse, while causing another 3rd building to collapse as well. I'm not sure how a mathematical model would help/teach the terrorist any more than the already available public videos of the attacks.
It sounds unlikely to me that some terrorists have figured out a secret way to collapse skyscrapers with an airliner that architects and engineers haven't figured out already and which wouldn't be part of the curriculum of becoming an architect or engineer in the first place.
BLS estimates several hundred thousand in directly overlapping professions in the US. I suspect a good number of these 3400 are people who are not even aware their name is being used for this cause.
It's weird, all my coming of age I believed that 9/11 had something fishy going for it. I fell for the popularized conspiracy theories. There were videos propagated through Google Videos. I don't hold them much anymore.
Still to this day, I'm extremely skeptical of some of the official stories. I don't get the point of classified documents in this case. And there are still many open questions like e.g. why WTC 5 collapsed without an airplane impact.
Dunno, I guess eventually with more years passing we'll start to learn more diverging stories and potentially the truth?
> section of the fuselage from United Airlines Flight 175 landed on the roof
The only fishiness radar I have is around the subsequent power grab and civil liberties rollback by the espionage organizations within the USA. Certainly I wouldn’t have given more power to the organizations that so clearly failed, let alone who have had a track record in directly creating enemies for the USA.
Read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. It basically lays out the idea that there are groups with legislation like this already prepared just waiting for an opportunity to get it pushed through. It's pretty shitty behaviour but doesn't require a conspiracy to explain it.
That phrase is generally attributed to Rham Emanuel [1], and the sentiment is discussed in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (page 89, Communications).
Rather large showing of bias to try to attribute that saying to Republicans.
Taking advantage of a situation doesn’t mean you caused it. This is correlation != causation situation. Anti-vaxxers didn’t cause covid but the captured the moment to exploit it.
I didn’t mean to imply that at all but I could see how what I wrote could be interpreted that way. Just that, as an non-American teenager, I was surprised how that happened and how the left capitulated to it. To me it seemed obvious that you shouldn’t grant even more authoritarian powers to agencies that have historically had poor oversight and results.
Its worse than that - at very best they failed in their primary role of defending the nation, at worst knowingly let it fly and then got surprised how bad it ended up (or not, who actually knows keeps silent).
No matter what is the reality, one thing is for sure - you should never, ever trust in any meaningful way a single word from anybody from those agencies. Whether they are incompetent beyond belief or just good liers is not so important.
Most conspiracy theories become impossible when you consider the number of people that would have to be in on it.
Sure, there are bugs in our history books (and lots of propaganda).
But if you discard facts reported in the media, then how do you know water is wet? :)
On topic: it's hard to know if classification makes sense. But I'll admit I don't really feel competent to have an opinion on the subject.
I wonder what the theoretical limit is for the number of people that can retain a secret actually is, with modern technology and all.
e.g. governments definitely keep secrets, so how many people can be in on a given conspiracy-like government secret without major leaks that cannot be squashed through media, suppression, etc.?
I feel like precursors to the Manhattan project (since the project itself was clearly widely known) would hold the answer, but wouldn't account for modern technology / communication methods.
I'm not particularly a conspiracy theorist on this topic, but I do feel the need to point out that hundreds of millions, possibly over a billion people engage in a conspiracy worldwide to hide the fact that Santa Claus doesn't exist from children.
Wtc 5 didnt collapse it was demolished. Wtc 7 did. Which do you think is worse getting hit by an airplane or getting hit by another massive building as it collapses?
It experienced fire and partial collapse due to being hit with part of the fuselage of UA 175 and other debris from the North Tower. (“Without an airplane impact” is, of course, a false description.)
It was hit by north tower collapse then fire raged on for many hours as sprinkler system had failed etc. I think structurally it still shouldn’t have collapsed but it doesn’t require a grand conspiracy to explain the failure here.
Except that two people who were in that building, both claim a stairwell exploded under their feet before the towers came down. Not that the towers coming down should have anything to do with an explosion inside WTC7 but regardless, something exploded inside corroborated by the only two people who got out of that building.
So something something grand conspiracy...
Also symmetric free falling, from a fire? Has fire become opinionated and decided to consume a steel scraper equally at all floors on all sides of a building all at once?
WTC 7's collapse, viewed from the exterior (most videos were taken from the north), did appear to fall almost uniformly as a single unit. This occurred because the interior failures that took place did not cause the exterior framing to fail until the final stages of the building collapse. The interior floor framing and columns collapsed downward and pulled away from the exterior frame. There were clues that internal damage was taking place, prior to the downward movement of the exterior frame, such as when the east penthouse fell downward into the building and windows broke out on the north face at the ends of the building core. The symmetric appearance of the downward fall of the WTC 7 was primarily due to the greater stiffness and strength of its exterior frame relative to the interior framing.
>Also symmetric free falling, from a fire? Has fire become opinionated and decided to consume a steel scraper equally at all floors on all sides of a building
Yes, by way of having a hollow center (aka, the elevators) and dumping large quantities of jet fuel down it, essentially becoming massive chimneys.
There are some awful survivor stories you can find about hearing people stuck in the elevators and getting cooked alive.
what jet fuel? no airplane hit WTC7
and to add to that, i believe NIST used the term "regular office fires" (... brought down building 7...) in their presentation.
Once fire weakens multiple individual structural members, collapse is both inevitable and rapid as the loads transfer within the materials to the remaining supports at the speed of sound.
You're assuming the fire would burn all the columns at the same rate at the same time, that's not what empirically is seen at other building fires.
For reference please google Grenfell Tower Fire. Or in China, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Fire.
For gravity to be symmetric such that free fall speed is achieved by the whole building at once at the same time (start of collapse), all the columns would have to suffer the exact same fire made damage at the same exact time. I don't know about you, but i have yet to see nature produce exact results at the same exact time anywhere. Gradual, slow and chaotic describes nature better. Fast, precise and calculated usually is the realm of human beings.
It may if you want your explanation to be correct though. And technically, a grand conspiracy is subjective, and a bit of a false dichotomy. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
The complexity of the problem is such that it is extremely difficult to not make a cognitive error during contemplation, even leaving aside the famous unreliability of the multiple systems this cognition sits on top of.
Think of how hard it can sometimes be to debug a system for which you have the literal source code for, which sits on a highly trustworthy base. Now consider reality, for which you have no source code, but you do know (at least during certain mental states, but not necessarily all) that it is chock full of bugs, indeterminate behaviors, etc.
Here you are not distinguishing between your perception of (or, rhetorical misinterpretation of) the ideas within my words, and the actual ideas themselves (as you also do with the events of that day). I wonder which one it is (maybe a little of both?).
Although the big media outlets of the time (CBS, NBC, etc) have "lost" their footage, I specifically remember a reporter asking a question of a NYC Fire Chief (some borough), after the second aircraft hit.
Reporter: "what about the new that there will be a controlled demolition of WTC 7 because of fear of collapse?"
Fire Chief: "What? What are you talking about?"
Reporter: "There's a rumor that building 7 needs to be brought down due to damage..."
Fire Chief: "Listen miss, I don't know what you've heard, but there is no damage to building 7 and there's no reason to bring it down. If you suggest such a thing to someone else, I'll have you arrested for inciting a panic. We have a high amount of coordination and there is limited information available to the public."
There was more to it, but that was memorable because, as a kid, I realized something. In a real disaster situation, people would be getting conflicting information. During 9/11, it was a real disaster. Nobody seemed to know wtf was really going on or going to happen and the reporters were, notably, just in the way of the real work. Later, when building 7 fell, I thought...well...that's quite a coincidence. I don't feel it was a coincidence anymore.
One of my vivid memories of 9/11 is my sister's panic over the car bomb at the National Mall. We had some visitors staying with us that week, and 9/11 was the day they were going to go down to see the National Mall (needless to say, that was aborted).
Yet, in trying to find more information about it, I have found absolutely no mention about such a car bomb. It's not on any "false rumors that got started during the day" lists; it's not picked up even by the most insane of conspiracy theorists as suppressed information. I'm actually kind of curious where the idea got into my sister's head--the closest I can figure is that the original attack on the Pentagon was reported as a blast in an unknown area to the southwest of the caller, and the National Mall was suggested as a possible site by the reporter.
This goes to show two things. One, it's very easy to specifically remember facts (including reporting of facts) that never actually happened. Two, in a day of hectic reporting, it's very easy for wrong information to spread very quickly.
I think you might find this interesting, because someone else was fearful of national mall bombings enough for FEMA to act that day (among other organizations)
Also, the BBC specifically says it was notified beforehand about the plans to take WTC7 down. I feel like small confirmation about some of the details.
The archives you linked are almost all Washington DC area archives, showing none of the majority independent (and minor station) journalists that west coast channels had to leverage for coverage. I did comb through them for quite awhile. Thanks.
I'm not on the conspiracy train either, but when I think about it now, the world was very naive before the modern era of ease of discussion and information sharing. The story "some guys stole some planes" sold fine in 2001, but in my mind something this big requires a lot more moving parts than that. I don't claim to know what those moving parts are, but there's definitely a lot more to the story than what we know. I doubt we will ever learn the full truth of what happened, or anything resembling it.
If I were to throw out probable pieces I'd say there had to be some state involvement from at least one state intelligence apparatus and some financing through the traditional, "white market" finance sector, that's about all I'd be willing to bet on.
Looks like the only reason why some of these mentioned weren't on the planes was because they cannot operate one.
With the described anti western and anti Jewish sentiments and views, being Saudi citizens(I presume) , why would they want American citizenship?
Saudi embassy/consulate staff involved meeting these people? This looks so dodgy, the Kashoggi case has shown that Saudi diplomat staff doesn't respect territorial laws when being hosted.
Mediterranean restaurant is some sort of key word or red herring, not just because of the rather offensive "beneath their status" statement, but clearly if it's more than just Mediterranean than in name, their last priority would be to cater for halal food and I am pretty sure that the Mediterranean dressing style would be viewed as "beneath their status" (but certainly not style, if I mad add this).
So they didn't go there for the food, but to meet with other lackeys, to not been seen in the usual, not under status locations.
That's strange, I'm getting a TLS certificate error when I visit that website now. Is it just me?
Edit: must be a DNS issue, the website resolves to cloudflare-dns.com so I guess it must be part of the website's operator's childish fight with Cloudflare's DNS resolver for not forwarding the resolving IP subnet to their DNS servers.
Edit: the flagged / removed comment asked Americans when we are going to stop remembering 9/11
I don’t like the tone of your comment (“you got 9/11’d” tells me you were probably very young when it happened or have very little empathy for those involved), but if I may get patriotic:
It doesn’t. That day will be equivalent in history to Pearl Harbor in the sense that it dragged us into a long war and conflict, and it was an attack on American soil.
Remembering the innocent lives lost, those first responders who gave a heroic but futile effort to rescue the innocent, and the resulting war (and it’s associated failures - WMDs) is important for the fabric and culture of the country. Some of the other reasons to remember include that it can happen again, not to take freedom for granted, and that how we respond is very, very important if a similar event happens in the future.
The Americans that died that day, those on flight 93 and those first responders that climbed against the crowd to try to save lives, they represent the best of us and the American ideal. In the face of adversity and uncertainty they took action to fight back and made the ultimate sacrifice. Why should we stop remembering them and what they did that day?
Of course you shouldn't forget them. But if you want to honor them, also don't forget people who resisted starting a war of aggression which ended up causing two orders of magnitude more lives lost, helped create ISIS and other things that continue to this day. Remembering the dead doesn't make them alive, and without also holding murderers that still run free accountable it has no sentimental value either in my books. If the American public as a whole had 1% of the energy they have for flowery language dedicated to the values they pay lip service to, George Bush, Dick Cheney and many others would be in jail. They used this for a war of aggression, and enriched themselves and their buddies. How is them still walking free not an insult to all these people who lost their lives in 9/11?
That people help each other in catastrophies, be that earthquakes or anything else, is human. The pattern of war and war profiteering at the cost of the public, of the very same average Joes and Janes that get to die, that's the thing the USA excels at. Just as a random example, look at healthcare: that does not strike me as something that is even possible in a society where caring for others and selfless sacrifice is a priority, much less the ideal.
> If you care about other people, that’s now a very dangerous idea. If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich, but you don’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school, or can afford food to eat, or things like that.
-- Noam Chomsky
I'm not disrespecting the victims in my own heart, but you could say I'm somewhat unimpressed by the somber display of respect by many people who, with their (in)actions, betray the values that would give such respect weight.
There are a number of things here, but it’s a lot easier to Monday Morning quarterback decisions made 20 years later after seeing outcomes of the war. There are already a ton of case studies on the Intelligence communities’ failures, and military leaders and Master’s programs in public policy are learning from the mistakes.
The country had a full report on the failures that lead to it (https://www.9-11commission.gov/) and has done extensive work to prevent it. We are able to know about the mistakes they made because it was made public.
No matter how bad a president is perceived to be, I’m not sure we will see him or her jailed for their actions. It would be too partisan and divide the country. Every future candidate for president would be concerned that they will be charged and jailed once out of office, and it would weaken the candidate pool until someone got in who would be able to mount a resistance of the impending arrest after coming out of office. The checks and balances of the branches of government, and the American people, are responsible for limiting the President’s power in office.
Those who were responsible for the lives lost on 9/11 were held accountable. Our government brought them to justice.
Democracy is not perfect, but I’d argue it’s the best system humans have invented for governing, and I’d not rather live under any other system of government.
Your comment on healthcare is a different topic altogether, but we have some of the best care in the world. We have the top medical schools and training and research. Is it perfectly distributed? No. Frankly there isn’t enough to go around, and when you have competition, by definition 100% of the population can’t receive care from the top 5% of doctors. Billing and insurance are a mess, but I don’t think you’ll find anyone argue that. It’s awful that medical bills are a major driver of bankruptcy, but if you walk into any hospital in the country you will be provided care first, and billed later whether or not you can afford it.
But we know our problems. I don’t think any American says we’re perfect. The first step in addressing them is to identify them. In a democracy it is up to the people in the country to fix it, because the people are the government - it’s not some abstract body who comes in to save the day or a dictator who magically knows the optimal solution.
Authority in America is granted by the American people through our voting and who we elect to office. So that Chomsky quote is interesting, because we’re already organized, and we vote people into office who share our beliefs and serve us as constituents. So we don’t need to undermine authority, because we are the authority, and we can change over time as we vote people out of office.
America has provided more vaccines to the rest of the world than Russia, China, and all of Europe combined. We have countless non-profits that serve people at home and abroad. We very much care about others, and the support for the war in Afghanistan (and from those who wanted to maintain the force of 2500 troops to keep order there) was driven by the fact that we care about the women and children there who are now being oppressed under Taliban rule.
> it’s a lot easier to Monday Morning quarterback decisions made 20 years later
I'm not doing that. I was around and paying attention, and I remember Colin Powell sweating trying to sell this story about scary mobile weapons labs to the UN. And I also remember stuff like that one US news site that reported on an anti-Iraq-war demonstration by school children by captioning a photo of a few blonde kids with open mouths and furrowed brows (since they were likely chanting something) with "Hitlers children: Pro-Sadam demonstrators protest in Munich, Germany". Some people had such a hard-on for war, and it was obvious from day one. Even Christopher Hitchens ended up being a cheerleader for it, so deep was the depravity.
But it wasn't something nobody could have known better, which is why most people knew better. They were proven correct, too, and to call that quarterbacking now, because they were shouted down then, with phrases like anti-Americanism and Bush Derangement Syndrome is kinda rich. If nobody could have known, how come so many called it right away?
> War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
-- from the Judgement of the International Military Tribunal for Germany
It wasn't hard to see, it was just a lot of people had and have double standards.
> No matter how bad a president is perceived to be, I’m not sure we will see him or her jailed for their actions.
It's not about "perceiving a president", it's the simple act of a war of aggression on Iraq. And yes, it's unlikely, which is my whole point.
> Billing and insurance are a mess, but I don’t think you’ll find anyone argue that.
It's a profitable mess for some, hell for others. And to combine that with 9/11:
"Jon Stewart slams Congress over benefits for 9/11 first responders"
If you have never seen it, watch it in full. In the face of that and what it stands for, many other things, and not least the war of aggression pitched to it which you agree is "unlikely" to ever have any justice shed upon it, a phrase like "Those who were responsible for the lives lost on 9/11 were held accountable." is just incorrect.
Perhaps within the US. To the rest of the word it’s like talking about assassination of prince Ferdinand without mentioning the World War - what happened next made 9/11 insignificant by comparison.
We had a domestic terror attack, invaded two countries that the terrorist organization lived and thrived in, removed and dismantled most of their support structure.
Admittedly we failed to rebuild the Afgani state. Gotta call it quits eventually, 20 years is one hell of a try.
We still took the most gold in the regular olympics though.
So probably in another 30 years when someone else makes a gaffe in that area.
> invaded two countries that the terrorist organization lived and thrived in
al-Qaeda didn't exist in any substantial way in Iraq before we destroyed the regime and unleashed a previously minor group which affiliated with al-Qaeda for a while before becoming ISIS.
We sacrificed more lives than were lost in the initial attack. And then there's the financial cost which is astronomical.
We had the chance to stop that attack and fucked up.
And now we've handed over control to the Taliban, the very same "freedom fighters" we helped to create. If you think that's victory then you're mistaken.
Meanwhile the greatest threats to America are from internal terrorists.
> I just wonder how WTC7 collapsed in 5 seconds despite not being hit by any aircraft.
Did you see the video of, say, the Surfside condo collapse? When a skyscraper starts to collapse--and it doesn't really matter all that much how it starts to collapse--it invariably collapses quite quickly and in much the same way.
WTC7 didn't collapse in "5 seconds". The actual observed portion of the collapse took about 9 seconds, and this is a view that only shows about the first ⅓ of the collapse. One of the things that greatly hampers analysis of the WTC7 collapse is there just aren't good views of much of WTC7, and so the full extent of the damage it received from its front-row seat of a collapsing building isn't entirely known.
I just checked the nist report.
An airplane impact doesn't even matter, wtc7 wasn't hit by one.
It did not collapse in 5 seconds, 5 seconds was the visually obvious footage, but many things happened before that, it took 7 hours.
- Debris from wtc1 ignites fire on at least 10 floors. Sounds believable to me.
- floor 7-13 fires got out of control, primary sprinkler system failed, the redundancy or backup system didn't not work due to damage from the tower 1 and 2, the water supply for the backup relied on the cities water system which was mia on that day. This caused the fire to spread diagonally across the building. Sounds ok to me, I don't think anyone could make this up and it would be allowed into such a report without review.
There's much more but assuming usual explosives, this has to be considered:
The smallest charge capable of initiating column failure would have resulted in a sound level of 130 to 140 dB at a distance of at least half a mile.
This would be quite a couple seconds or max a minute before the full collapse, but no footage had such sounds, nor did witnesses report such sounds, and any nearby seismology equipment would detect irregularities.
Just for reference 130-140 decibels are much louder than I would have thought, 130 is peak stadium crowd noise, 135 is an air raid siren, 140 is a jet engine take off.
> There's much more but assuming usual explosives, this has to be considered...
True, but it is possible to apply the same strict epistemology to the consensus narrative as well, like how is it that "many things happened" resulting in an orderly freefall that appeared magically homogeneous across the entire structure, resulting in a descent that is (afaik) largely indistinguishable from a controlled demolition.
> but no footage had such sounds, nor did witnesses report such sounds, and any nearby seismology equipment would detect irregularities
A strict epistemological examination wouldn't let such premises be deployed without scrutiny.
> how is it that "many things happened" resulting in an orderly freefall that appeared magically homogeneous across the entire structure
I mentioned in my other comment the Surfside condo collapse, and that accidentally illustrates a key point about the WTC7 collapse. In the video of the Surfside condo collapse, we get a decent view of the origin of the collapse, so we can see how the collapse progresses. But with WTC7, the video we have is of the roof of the back side (with respect to the collapse origin). So we don't have visual of the collapse progress until it reaches the fairly homogeneous progressive collapse phase.
> resulting in a descent that is (afaik) largely indistinguishable from a controlled demolition.
All progressive collapses are going to look superficially similar. The most notable facet of a controlled demolition is the sheer sound of the charges going off to initiate the collapse. I've had the pleasure of being able to view a controlled demolition live, and I can tell you that the sound is loud enough and distinctive enough that all of the rescuers working on the debris pile that was the twin towers would have been reporting the explosions.
> But with WTC7, the video we have is of the roof of the back side (with respect to the collapse origin).
Which in itself seems a bit odd, not unlike the lack of footage of the Pentagon (publicly released footage, at least).
> So we don't have visual of the collapse progress until it reaches the fairly homogeneous progressive collapse phase.
Suggesting there is some uncertainty involved.
> The most notable facet of a controlled demolition is the sheer sound of the charges going off to initiate the collapse.
If one uses the traditional loud approach, agreed.
> I've had the pleasure of being able to view a controlled demolition live, and I can tell you that the sound is loud enough and distinctive enough that all of the rescuers working on the debris pile that was the twin towers would have been reporting the explosions.
Isn't it strange that all 24 internal columns of building 7 would collapse simultaneously?
Even if the office fires burned hot enough to compromise the columns, wouldn't they have advanced gradually over the diagonal span, trigger slow sequential collapses that might have resulted in the building listing or distorting, rather than falling flat to the ground in 5 seconds?
Would thermite be deployed explosively at 140db, or might it work over a longer period of minutes at lower volume to heat the steel columns to 700 degrees, the temperature at which it would lose structural integrity?
There's nothing mysterious here. Once a column begins to fail, the load it was supporting transfers to other columns. If several columns are weakened simultaneously, the remaining columns are pushed past their safety margins very rapidly, and the building enters a progressive collapse.
Should be very simple then to produce a model that would look like the actual video footage of the building's collapse in the real world wouldn't it? Yet here we are, 20 years later with no such model...
Because they built something too big for the foundation? I bet if you weaken those trusses between 5&7, gravity will handle the rest.
>The final design for 7 World Trade Center was for a much larger building than originally planned when the substation was built.[16]:xxxviii The structural design of 7 World Trade Center therefore included a system of gravity column transfer trusses and girders, located between floors 5 and 7, to transfer loads to the smaller foundation.[0]
Page 109-110 [1] covers the collapse of WTC7, the conclusion is:
Despite simulating a number of hypothetical scenarios, we were unable to identify any progressive sequence of failures that could have taken place on September 11, 2001, and caused a total collapse of the building, let alone the observed straight-down collapse with approximately 2.5 seconds of free fall and minimal differential movement of the exterior.
I generally don't pay much attention to conspiracy theories but with regards to WTC 7 I feel there was something missing, a common video I see cited for this is this one [0], where Larry Silverstein, owner of the trade centers, says the fire department 'pulled' the building down because they determined that would be safer than letting it collapse of its own volition.
>I remember getting a call from the fire department commander telling me that they were not sure they are going to be able to contain the fire. "I said, "you know, we've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it". And they made that decision to pull. And then we watched the building collapse.
It sounds to me like Silverstein and the NYFD were talking about pulling firefighters out of WTC7. Once the fire department realized saving the building was a lost cause, there was no reason for firefighters to remain inside and risk their lives further. I don't hear anything in the video about "pulling" the building down.
If you're going to quote Silverstein and give him the benefit of the doubt, then at least quote the full quote. The end of your quote is "... and then we watched the building collapse..." leading you to understand that he's referring to a cause and effect.
As in, they decided to pull and then the building collapsed. This means one of two things:
1) They pulled as in the context of some kind of an act of a pre determined demolition of the building
2) Something closer to what you're referring to, but with the foresight that the building WILL collapse and actually did as they have expected it to by their decision to pull the men (and women) and equipment. To which of course the first question is, why then? why at 5pm and not any of the hours before Larry made that decision. It only took about 40 or so minutes for the big buildings to fail.
Option (2) is equally problematic as option (1) in the context of 9/11. Given that the claim is that all 3 buildings (all the WTC complex really) has suffered an equal progressive fate made by 2 projectiles hitting WTC 1&2.
The FBI document released Saturday contains significant redactions, but nevertheless shows FBI officials were skeptical of claims by various witnesses that Saudis in the U.S. who met with the two hijackers did so accidentally through chance encounters.
It was “difficult to reconcile” the connection between the hijackers and those who gave them support, the FBI document states, noting that one individual claimed he met the hijackers at a 7-Eleven convenience store in northern Virginia “during a ‘chance meeting’, in a uniquely similar fashion to the way Bayoumi described his ‘chance meeting’ with Hazmi and Midhar in Los Angeles.”