9/11 Conspiracy

[nofi]

a friend sent this to me. i'm not a  conspiracy person but i found this 'entertaining'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmbPh3u7_q0&sns=em

[gweimer]

Nice!

[Denis]

I've seen it before but it's still interesting. I'm not really a conspiracy theorist either but if any single item in that video (or all of them) turns out to be proven true it wouldn't surprise me at all. I have that little respect for and trust in the Bush Administration and anything they said or any former members say now.

[gweimer]

Well, I may be wrong, but it seems to me that George W has been the most invisible ex-President in my lifetime.

[Pilgrim]

Well, I may be wrong, but it seems to me that George W has been the most invisible ex-President in my lifetime.

Personally, I have no problem with that.   

But it does limit the opportunities for the late-night comedians looking for malapropisms.

[Dave W]

I posted this video when someone started a discussion on 9/11 last year.

We won't know the truth in our lifetimes unless the US undergoes a Soviet-style collapse. Still, all the questions raised in this video are not just coincidences. Whatever the real facts may show, there is a massive coverup.

[OldManC]

Whether one believes all that was done of malice or incompetence, the thing that beggars belief is that anyone thinks one President or administration is ever singularly responsible for things such as this. A complete moron with an evil deputy masterminded and executed the whole shebang (and planned the cover up to boot) in the space of eight and a half months? While keeping all of it quiet enough that nobody with any access to media exposure has ever come forward to give a reasonable account of how any single aspect of it was pulled off? I don't think so...

How is it that many of us can completely distrust and vilify one half of the government while almost supinely trusting the other half to have our back when they're percentage of office holders rises enough over the other to give them nominal control for a couple years (until the other side swings around)?

As hard as it is to trust in the "official" story on 9/11 (or Kennedy or any other activity in which the U.S. government ever took part) it's even more difficult to believe the twisting and turning of logic it takes to accept all of the crazy alternative theories that pop up in the aftermath of these things.

Dave's right except that I don't think the truth could be established even if all the "archives" were opened tomorrow. Then again, maybe all this stuff happens because most government really is collectively stupid enough to by $1000 hammers and toilet seats (while also being brilliant enough to pull off 9/11 size conspiracies)...

[uwe]

It has nothing to do with Democratic or Republican administrations nor with any degeneration of the political system in the US or of democracies as such. US foreign policy was never any better or any worse than it is today. People tend to believe that because the US is a democracy (and it is - with all its faults), its foreign policy is or should at least be more ethical than the foreign policy of a dictatorship such as the former Soviet Union. That is a load of crap. On the world foreign policy field, the US is first and foremost a world power and it acts like world powers/schoolyard thugs do irrespective whether they are democracies or authoritarian regimes. And the US isn't any worse a world power than other world powers were before it. The only thing that is sometimes irritating is its messianic fervor which generally makes its actions less forseeable. In that way the Soviet Union's foreign policy was much more down to earth and less erratic. The Russians did what helped them and you could rely on the fact that they did that and nothing more. The US is more Forrest Gump'ish: It regularly does dumb things.

That said, it is infinitely more comfortable and convenient to be suppressed by US-Dollars rather than Soviet tanks.

That 9/11 clip is of course good fun, but what the conspiracy theorists have yet failed to explain to me is:

- What strategic benefit was there for the US to stage 9/11 to invade a strategically irrelevant and resourceless country such as Afghanistan that wasn't even communist? Wouldn't it have made more sense to plant Usama or whatever scapegoat they wished to choose in Baghdad right from the start and then invade directly? Why spent ten years of fighting in Afghanistan then?

- The Iraq war showed such bad intelligence, flawed thinking and inane geo-strategy of a three-year-old that I cannot believe for a second that it followed some greater plan. It is a lousy economic deal as for a fraction of the trillions spent there one could have bought out Saddam and all his sons and made them the wealthiest people on earth in exchange for free US access to Iraq's natural resources. Also, that demolition of the Iraq as a local power would result in Iran becoming the major local power is so painfully obvious that I cannot believe that the State Department ever gave the long term effects greater thought as you would expect with some type of diabolical master plan.  

In reality, the US is a master at childlike fumbling as regards foreign policy, you're kind of baby Godzillas except that Godzilla is just a dumb lizard and doesn't preposterously believe to be a role model for the rest of the world. The fact how US administrations cannot establish sensible diplomatic relations - even after half-centuries and decades - with countries that once had a handful of rockets aimed at you (Cuba) or were the scene of a failed military rescue operation and a crashed helicopter (Iran) just speaks volumes, "Realpolitik" is an alien concept to you (in stark contrast to say, the USSR, because that system simply never had the wealth to afford as many foreign policy blunders as you guys, the Russians always had to think first before acting).

But there is another side to the coin: The US' inherent ability/God given grace to reinvent itself, pick itself up from the floor and - Godzilla yet again - regenerate its tail and other lost limbs if need be. With your constantly mutating economy you can simply afford more mistakes than anybody else on earth and still be a world power. At least that is the way it has been for the last 100 years or so.

Much more than in conspiracy theories I believe that the US is living proof of the chaos theory at work. Wasteful, inefficient and unpredictable, yes, but also durable, tenacious and buoyant. That is why you are still there and other world powers like the Soviet Union aren't.

[dadagoboi]

100 years is a short stretch of history.  The US military's timeline on Afghanistan has always been 50 years; 25 congresses and at least 7 presidents.  So who really runs things?

[the mojo hobo]

While I agree with most of what Uwe posted, I must take exception to:

It has nothing to do with Democratic or Republican administrations nor with any degeneration of the political system in the US or of democracies as such. US foreign policy was never any better or any worse than it is today. People tend to believe that because the US is a democracy (and it is - with all its faults), its foreign policy is or should at least be more ethical than the foreign policy of a dictatorship such as the former Soviet Union.

Although the folks in Washington believe we are a democracy, this country was founded as a republic (and our Supreme Court is now debating an issue to decide if the majority overrules the constitution or not) and as a republic our foreign policy should be ethical, but sometimes special interests may affect foreign policy. Our government is human (with all it's faults).

But I think in this day and age it is almost impossible to keep big secrets, as Brad Manning and Wikileaks has demonstrated.

[Denis]

But I think in this day and age it is almost impossible to keep big secrets, as Brad Manning and Wikileaks has demonstrated.

I generally agree and believe it would be impossible today to stage something like D-Day, because in the interest of a news scoop, all the details would have been leaked and our troops would be slaughtered.

[dadagoboi]

I generally agree and believe it would be impossible today to stage something like D-Day, because in the interest of a news scoop, all the details would have been leaked and our troops would be slaughtered.

The difference between D-Day and our current wars is the government didn't need a jingoistic media to drum up a reason to go to war then.

Fairly recent example of how it works now: Judith Miller of the NY Times and Iraq's supposed WMD...I see she now works for FOX.

[gweimer]

Always interesting stuff here.  A couple of completely unfounded opinions on a couple points.

1.  We are in Afghanistan to protect the nuclear weapons in Pakistan.

2.  Iran was a bad idea all around.  Part of me says that Dubya wanted to make Saddam pay for what he did to Daddy.  An old supply vendor I used to work with back then had a pretty wild theory that isn't too far fetched.  His theory about the intel and the WMDs was that they never really existed, but all the intel said they did, including Saddam's own info.  You take Russian arms dealers selling non-functional junk to the Iranian buyers with Saddam's money in hand.  After the deal closes, and the Iranians find they have wasted Saddam's money, they bury the items in the desert and report that they have the weapons on hand.  None of the buyers wants to be executed for screwing up a bad deal.  So, in the end, everyone thinks that the weapons are there, but they really aren't.

[uwe]

While I agree with most of what Uwe posted, I must take exception to:

Although the folks in Washington believe we are a democracy, this country was founded as a republic (and our Supreme Court is now debating an issue to decide if the majority overrules the constitution or not) and as a republic our foreign policy should be ethical, but sometimes special interests may affect foreign policy. Our government is human (with all it's faults).

But I think in this day and age it is almost impossible to keep big secrets, as Brad Manning and Wikileaks has demonstrated.

I'm not saying that aspiring for an ethical foreign policy is a bad thing or that the US never acts ethically - your whole WW II European theatre engagement certainly was. The US acts like it acts, sometimes with cynical and sometimes with the best intentions (and sometimes just blundering into things), but even best intentions often enough yield bad results, the support of Iraq against Iran in the war of these two countries or the support of the Afghan Mujadin (spawned by a Democratic administration and a Democratic senator) against the Russian invasion are prime examples.

[Dave W]

That 9/11 clip is of course good fun, but what the conspiracy theorists have yet failed to explain to me is:

- What strategic benefit was there for the US to stage 9/11 to invade a strategically irrelevant and resourceless country such as Afghanistan that wasn't even communist? Wouldn't it have made more sense to plant Usama or whatever scapegoat they wished to choose in Baghdad right from the start and then invade directly? Why spent ten years of fighting in Afghanistan then?

The makers of that clip never said that the 9/11 attacks were staged by the official US government. The clip just ridicules the official story and hints at the rest.

It's certainly plausible that forces within the government either knew about the attacks in advance and allowed them to happen, or had a hand in executing the attacks. What I'm sure of is that the official story is false.

And Godzilla isn't dumb. He's smarter than most world leaders.