Not having a firm alternate theory to propose doesn't mean I don't smell major whiffs of bullshit about the official one.

...

for Hit submit, duck and run:

Beyond all the info that is present for examination of the 9-11 events, that is known or at least released pop info on the event; this one bit of info is enough to raise lots-o questions.

19 youngish males of Saudi decent armed with box cutter knives, hijacked 4 fully fueled heavy commercial airliners simultaneously, and 3 of the airliners hit their intended targets.

Under optimum circumstances, with well trained warriors, this would stretch believability.

Standard of all False Flag Operations is to drown the arena with lots and lots of facts, some true, some half truths, and some outright falsehoods.

Oh, and the biggest fact of all is this, 6 years of Global War on Terra and where is Osama.

"There are two types of folk music:
quiet folk music and loud folk music.
I play both."

Dave Alvin

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

...a dollar's worth a dollar because people believe it is, just like folks believe that our politicians are looking out for the public's best interests.

In an alternate sensibility, we'd have Dr. Guillotine's invention set up on the Capitol Mall and be trucking tumbrels full of malefactors in from the White House and Congress. I might even welcome that as a change for the better.

But it ain't gonna happen as long as friends of the people in power control the media.

it was safe to quit foaming, then you go and post about 9/11. OK, what the hell, I'll go there. I'll just repost an old post and let it go at that.

One more thing, Larisa Alexandrovna, the Managing Investigative News Editor of Raw Story, is willing to follow a story anywhere the evidence takes her. She has looked at 9/11 real hard. She has said, and I can't find the link, that she does not know what happened on 9/11. She does not find the 9/11 Commission to be credible, and neither does she find a lot of 9/11 truth efforts as convincing. But she has a real high standard for what it means to know.

She helped research 9/11: Press for Truth, the best 9/11 video out there. (I can no longer find the full version of YouTube.)

Thanks for the reminder, Don.

Pretty much old news for some of us, but damn fine to see the numbers are on the increase. I had a diary and a poll about this awhile back, and it looks like the line-toers are still losing.

http://agonist.org/joes_bar_and_grill/20060904/9_11_conspiracy_theories_fact_or_fiction_with_poll

Had a long debate about what exactly hit the pentagon with JPD, but we didn't even touch on Bldg 7, which is much less refutable.

You with me to this point? Because I am soon to leave a bunch of you now nodding your heads behind.

More and more people in the alternative news arenas are beginning to accept at least the possibility that the official story behind the 9-11 attacks is incorrect, if not downright fraudulent.

Still with you on this. I think the main point is that we really have to choose among conspiracy theories. The official story is just as much of a conspiracy as the false flag story--one has Islamic radicals hijacking airplanes, the other has the upper echelons of our government pulling off the whole thing. Either way, its a small group of people conspiring to destroy the WTC.

As an intuitive gut-check, I still believe that the official story is more credible, despite the mounds of smoke and inconsistencies in it. Real life is never neat. I don't have a thorough education in the history of false-flag operations, but I think that very few have actually been pulled off on the home territory of the government involved. Too many citizen witnesses leads to too many questions, so having a ship attacked (Gulf of Tonkin, USS Maine, etc.) or a remote border post assaulted (fake Polish attack on Germany in WWII) is usually the method by which it's done.

Staging something as spectacular as 9/11 in broad daylight, in the air over the largest city in our country, with the cameras rolling definitely breaks with "tradition." Governments with strong institutional histories that are intent on making drastic alterations and taking away their citizens' rights often do it stealthily--burning the Reichstag in the middle of the night when few people are there to see. Then they claim to know exactly what happened and act the next day. I think our government is guilty of hijacking the narrative, but I don't think it likely that they actually hijacked the airplanes and knocked down the WTC--they just took advantage of it.

Once again, I don't reject the false flag argument--I just don't think it is as likely as the official story, or some other story where the government didn't take the towers down. You're right that the official narrative has lots of problems and is basically just another conspiracy theory.

To me, that is the main piece of evidence to make me a bit worried. How much would it cost to hire some mercenaries to blow something up? Way less than 700 M.

the one about the Illuminati itself calling for change. Part of that deal was the release of suppressed energy technology which as an engineer is sort of a hobby.
Traditional science tells us there is no free lunch, no perpetual motion machines yet our knowledge is far from complete. With about twenty years in the field I think the breakthroughs in many fields are possible.

will come out in the open for everyone else to see, unlike JFK's assasination.
Those people that where murdered during 911 will be avenged.
The inconsistencies of the official line are so enormous that people won't stay deaf and blind for much longer.
Couls it be why the homeland security is recruiting so many pastors to keep their flocks in line in the advent of "trouble".
What is homeland smelling at this point, could it be that the truth about 911 is just about to "explode" in the face of the populace and that so many levels go the govt had a hand in it that some sort of revolution might get under way.
The poor repukes, seeing the constitution of the people, for the people and by the people really get reclaimed by the people and the nation.

How ironic to find you and so many others at the same place that I find myself (reading Fisk), coming to the same place (only from a slightly different angle) and writing something similar at my blog.

Having been very careful to not go down the conspiracy theorist road, I find these days that I have to do what the 9/11 Commission members did (agreeing to only investigate and publish that which they could all agree upon beforehand), which means stumbling around with one eye closed and the other squinting from the dirt that's been thrown into it.

These days when I hear the pro-war crowd crow about our not having been hit again, and that that is proof that Bush and Cheney are doing something right, my mind reasons something else entirely: Given how inept Bush and Cheney have been at securing the nation's ports, highways, bridges, borders, chemical plants, nuclear reactors, etc., how big a threat to us could Al Qaeda actually be? I mean, anyone who was marginally motivated to make a big splashy terrorist attack somewhere in the U.S. wouldn't have to try very hard given how Bush and Cheney have squandered so many of our resources in Iraq, and not here shoring up America's defenses.

Then I look at how, despite all evidence of criminality and wrongdoing, the Democrats just play at oversight, continue to back whatever Bush/Cheney demand, and treat Bush/Cheney as "well intentioned" instead of what is obvious to me: The result of a coup d'etat in 2000, bloodless for sure, but a coup nonetheless. We've all been writing that "the emperor has no clothes" since they took over the White House, but in truth it's a military junta dressed in gray flannel suits.

The Congress of the United States (Republicans as well as Democrats) appears to be terrified of this administration. Can you think of any time in the history of the republic when the legislative branch has allowed the executive branch to emasculate it so? Even when they've been from the same party.

When Senator Jay Rockefeller put a handwritten copy of a letter to Dick Cheney (objecting to the administration's warrantless surveillance program) in his personal safe as "insurance," what did we think Rockefeller did that for? Insurance against what?

The air hangs heavy these days, expectant, as if everyone is waiting to see if anyone is going to do something, come forward, speak the unspeakable and save the republic. I'm reminded of the early days, of John Bolton and the NSA intercepts, and realize, again, that no calvalry will come to the rescue. The fix is in, the listening devices keep the "calvalry" from organizing successfully against this administration.

I don't know how it's going to turn out, but it seems that we're on the path to whatever Bush-Cheney want. At the moment, it's looking like either the world caves to their demands for western multinationals to own/control Iraq's oil (and Iran's reserves, too), or no one will ever know peace again. We're certainly never removing a U.S. military presence from the Middle East. Don't look for Democrats to save us from this outcome, bringing the troops home and geting us out of the Middle East - Hillary and Obama have already signed on to the long war, in incremental steps.

during my lifetime. It took a very long time before new 'facts' of the causes of WWII and the atomic bombings surfaced.

I'm inclined to believe that it was not an inside job because I'm not much into conspiracy theories. Usually people who build conspiracies are out to make a buck on a book or something else they're plugging or they get their 5 minutes of fame by making outlandish claims. There are 'honest' people who take fragments of facts, and put them together drawing conclusions that aren't substantiated by the facts they used because they lack the scientific or analytic ability. And my problem is I don't either. So until an authoritative source examines all the facts, sifts through them, and comes up with new information that is reasonable and not tainted with politics, then Don, I'm in the same boat you are.

Keep us abreast of what you find out because I do try to keep my mind open and am eager to hear new theories and facts.

What really puzzles me is why American's allowed 9/11 to distort reality and abandon their good sense? Whoever did it was a very small percentage of the world population, but the reaction was totally out of proportion to the threat whomever these criminals were. But I confess, I still scratch my head in astonishment over the McCarthy era and that happened during my lifetime. Americans didn't go nuts when JFK was assassinated but they have those other two times: McCarthy and 9/11!

I don't know how dangerous Al Queda really is...

I agree, and I didn't mean to sound as if no risk or threat exists.

The perpetrators of 9/11 got a lot of bang for the buck. Constant attacks aren't necessary to achieve the goal of ruining America, bankrupting us, turning us into the greatest debtor nation after having the greatest surplus of any nation ever.

But to continue along the lines of my earlier skeptical post, I find it remarkably convenient that after the divisive days of the post-2000 election in Florida, no sooner had Bush been named by the USSC (not even in the White House) than he dropped the "R" word (recession), to grease the skids for his tax cuts.

There was no recession, but we all know how talk of one (particularly by a President) can sharply influence consumer spending and drive an economy into a recession. Bush's argument then for the tax cuts became "to stave off the recession we're in" (that we weren't in). "To give people money to spend, to juice up the economy." Forget the fact that the money people got back that year they had to pay the following year. Bush was desperate to get legislation cutting taxes for the richest committed before any talk of keeping the surplus around for a "rainy day" (shoring up social security, or a war, perhaps?) could take place.

Once done (signed into law 6/7/01), the decks were cleared for 9/11/01.

Let's not forget that according to several Bush insiders (beginning with Paul O'Neill), Bush was talking about war with Iraq as early as two weeks after his inauguration (1/20/01). We know from Bush's first biographer, journalist Mickey Herskowitz, Bush was already talking about invading Iraq in 1999.

So when you (and I) say "I don't know how dangerous Al Qaeda really is," I think we can agree that at this point that Al Qaeda is certainly a hell of a lot less dangerous than Bush and Cheney have been to the American people. Because let's say that 9/11 was not a false flag operation - Bush still intended to get the U.S. onto war footing with Iraq and by extension, unrest the entire region of the Middle East.

One last consideration:

Most Americans' lives haven't been personally touched by terrorism. Most of us haven't known anyone who has been killed by a terrorist act. Those who have lost someone they know and love to a terrorist act, an interesting revelation occurs to many. An awakening of sorts: The rhetoric that terrorists kill "innocent civilians" isn't true when we're talking about a democratic republic where We, the People, vote and are responsible for the actions our elected leaders do in our names.

Bush, Cheney, Pelosi, they don't fly commercial. Ashcroft, as Attorney General, only flew on corporate jets before 9/11. We are the front line because we are reachable where Bush and Cheney aren't. We are the targets for what Bush and Cheney (and at this point Democrats, too) are doing to other people around the world with the awesome military power that we vest with them. Once an act of terror touches your life, you awaken politically, become educated as never before, even if you were politically active and civically involved before.

.... the mantra of every celluloid gumshoe. The true story of 9/11 can't be understood and accepted until the events of that awful day are treated and fully investigated as a conventional crime. Step one is to correctly identify a reasonable and provable motive. Frankly, I don't think "they hate our freedoms" remotely fulfills that requirement. Who benefitted? That's the question. It turns out there may have been quite a long list. Let's check them out and disqualify them, one by one, before accepting any conclusions, "official" or "alternative", about this crime. Was that investigative task fully completed in the short hours between the collapsing of the towers and the identification of a perp in an Afghan cave? (For instance, I would have thought that particular mastermind might have wished to cancel, or at least postpone, his coup de grace, until after a consortium of several US newspapers were delivered the results of their own investigation into the Florida election results that September - a presentation that was subsequently cancelled. Florida vote Arguably a "freedom hating" motive might well have been much more efficiently and cost-effectively served if the election results had been shown to have been fraudulent. In any case, I've never been able to fathom how Bin Laden and co could possibly have known, planned for, and designed in advance, the physics defying results of those particular airplane/tower collisions.) If I were a celluloid gumshoe, I'd start by interviewing the 50,000 or so people who evidently didn't show up to work that Tuesday morning or who successfully escaped. Even factoring in the possibility that a number of people were able to push their way past firemen, down narrow fligts of stairs in the dark, it still begs credibility that, say, 30,000 people were able to do so. All those stenos and receptionists and ordertakers and floorwashers and so on - every one of whom must have been given some good reason to be late that day. What was it? Work on their floor? Special holiday? Computers down? Elevators being repaired? Who told all those companies to tell employees to stay away? Or was the general tardiness of thousands of people on that fateful day just another of the awesome number of nearly magical co-incidences that appear to have singularly characterized the event?

There is another compelling reason for treating the felling of the Twin Towers as a conventional crime - it provides a complete investigation with the proper allocation of blame where necessary. If we accept the official story in its totality, then there are thousands of tall buildings in the United States that are subject to complete structural failure following minimal impact and fire. It is essential to learn whether corners were cut in the design and construction procedures, construction codes, and permitting procedures that could allow future collapses and fires, including accidental ones. All the aforementioned need to know how to design and construct buildings that don't fall down, in order to avoid horrific lawsuits, if nothing else. Citizens need to know where they can turn for remedy in the event of future collapses - hopefully with a more reality-based, practical response than a retalitory invasion of some foreign country - and fire and emergency personnel need to be fully trained to properly and very promptly deal with similar circumstances. WTC Design