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Because Bush and company did everything they could to protect the Saudis and the Bin Laden family, and then made massive fortunes attacking Iraq which had nothing to do with the attack.
At best, the Bush administration were opportunistic war-profiteers who abused the situation for their own gain.
That doesn't validate any of the absurd theories about demolitions or RC planes.
Unfortunately many "leaders" seem to abide by the saying "Never let a good disaster go to waste."
Every conspiracy theory comes back to covering for oil money and the political party they run (Republicans).
Watergate proven to happen? "Yeah, but aliens..." worked so well to distract and muddle the public that Reagan was elected in another landslide six years later.
It's easier to believe the people in charge are secretly in control of everything than to believe they're barely in control of anything.
This.
Conspiracy theories are comforting because they are more pleasant to believe than the truth, which is that we're all aboard a ship going full steam ahead with nobody at the rudder.
It also gives people a sense of deep satisfaction believing they know some dark hidden secret nobody else does... regardless of how absurd it is
Nobody’s at the rudder, but also all of us are. Everyone has more capacity than anyone is comfortable with
Also, at the time, in the west, Al Qaida were a largely unknown terrorist cell operating in far-away third-world countries. It seemed incredible that such a devastating attack could be carried out on US soil by a small group most people had never heard of.
And yet, this all powerful government couldn’t even fake finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to “validate” their invasion reasons.
I didn’t actually believe this, but it was fun to entertain the idea.
Here’s why. At the time, there were a bunch of very odd coincidences. I’ll do my best to remember the best of them.
Next!
Next!
Edit: forgot one!
There are more, but it’s been 20 years and my memory is hazy.
Overall, there were some oddities around the whole event that, when allowing yourself to think completely outside of reality, make sense as to why it was an inside job.
Finally, personally I believe the Saudis did it in cooperation with Bin Laden and their goal was to bankrupt America. They did a pretty good job, from their perspective.
I can't vouch for the veracity of most of your content but I wanted to add that building 7 was also announced to have collapsed before it actually did.
I can’t vouch for the veracity of most of your content but I wanted to add that building 7 was also announced to have collapsed before it actually did.
Yep. There was also the quotes from Rudi Guilani where he said something along the lines of "Pull Building 7", where pull is demolitions parlance to set off the charges. This was like a day of audio snippet. Its also basically impossible to find the original footage that isn't pure conspiracy drivel, but I remember it from the time when all of this was happening. There was so much going on in the wake of 9-11, with the country pretty much instantaneously jumping into war mode, being immediately handed a narrative around al-Qaeda with no investigation into the causes or veracity of the government claims around al-Qaeda.
The push back on questioning the narrative was surreal. Like, you would be drawn and quartered publicly for doing so. The 'feeling' at the time was that the investigation into what actually happened and how felt like a complete sham that the government didn't really want to do because so many people weren't accepting the party narrative.
Also, keep in mind the context. There was a strong anti-war sentiment in 2003 going into the invasion of Iraq. The "9-11 was an inside job crowd" found themselves running with the anti-war crowd as general anti-institutionalists. This was when Alex Jones was just finding his footing and definitely wasn't quite fully right wing. He was more accurately (at the time, in historical context) anti-establishment. The modern right-wing movement hadn't fully formed, although it found its roots in this historical period (the Tea party would also come out of this period).
So just broadly consider the different vectors operating on public perception at the time. We were basically instantly construction a "Going to War is the Solution" narrative within hours of 9-11 happening, and the narrative around that construction was found to be fully formed as soon as it emerged, almost as if the institutions of the US government and its surrounding media had been prepared for this exact moment. Push back against this was effectively an instantaneous scarlett letter and there basically was none in US mainstream media*. There was a strong push back against any kind of independent investigation into the events leading up to the event. We got reports from the CIA and FBI, but considering the context, like, if those are the parties in question, do you believe them? Then you had the Saudi Bush family connections, the fact that we were basically going to war with Afghanistan when we knew it was the Saudis that did 9-11, which was like a pretty big red flag. Then there were the reports that globally, many governments warned about this happening to US intelligence agencies, but it seemed like they just kind of let it happen. Which is really where the conspiracy was focused. These days it gets too wrapped up in 'inside job' etc, but the general scheme was more about 9-11 being allowed to happen as an excuse for a Bush invasion into the middle east. This wasn't a conspiracy that was built in hindsight, the speculation was built in real time (before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq), and then go figure, Bush invades the middle east, and specifically, goes after Iraq. This basically fully validates the theory, and to put a cherry on top, the evidence on Iraq was all just.. fraudulent. So if you limit the scope of the theory to 9-11 was 'allowed' to occur to justify a military industrial complex incursion into the middle east, its kind-of like "well yeah duh" because thats exactly what happened.
Wild fukin time and wild bit of history. Important to keep context in mind, and to have sources of information about the past which aren't 'edited' to reflect newthink.
*Democracy Now did exist by this time (finding its establishment after the Seattle WTO protests). If you want to really understand what was going on at the time, this would be the media source I would recommend.
Incorrect information in a chaotic situation? Would never happen!
Countless incorrect things were announced. Everyone was collectively panicking. That's odd, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything considering the building was already visibly damaged.
A building fire started by jet fuel absolutely can melt steel beams, and the collapse of building 7 occurred exactly as you would expect from a building fire, which happened because the fire in the other buildings was blown across by the wind and explosions. None of the building collapse videos look like a demolition.
If the government wanted to execute an attack on Americans, why not just fund the terrorists and ignore warnings? Let the jihadists crash planes into buuldings. Setting hidden, controlled demolition charges and trying to make it look like a collapse is harder than finding some terrorists willing to die for their cause and teaching them to fly.
It is conceivable to me that members of the intelligence community, the military-industrial complex, and/or the government ignored warnings and allowed the attacks to happen for their own benefit. I would prefer to think it wasn't true, but I must concede that it would explain many inconsistencies.
It is theoretically possible, but implausible to me, that those same people would coordinate the attacks and support the terrorists to ensure that the attacks would happen as a false flag operation. This is an extraordinary claim with almost no evidence.
It is not in any way possible that the government demolished any of the buildings attacked on purpose and then covered up all evidence of the demolition. There would need to be too many people involved, too many videos altered or destroyed, and too much evidence planted after the fact. It is demonstrably false.
and the collapse of building 7 occurred exactly as you would expect from a building fire
It wasnt the first skyscraper fire, but it was the first and still only skyscraper to collapse from a fire. So no i wouldnt say its expected at all.
The main one for me was that NORAD, for the first time ever, was "stress testing" their system and running every flight sim they had, so when things went down, they had no idea what was real and what wasn't.
The order to do so, for the first time, unprovoked, unnecessarily and unneededly came from Dick Cheney himself, who didn't even have the authority to order the Pentagon to do ANYTHING but his orders were followed regardless.
That's a pretty big discrepancy. It's really hard for me to rule that one out
Building 7 is a big leap of faith to hurdle.
The twin towers themselves collapsing in a controlled manner, that doesn't happen without blowing individual floors. Buildings in war zones don't fall down vertically, they'll partially collapse or fall over, not straight down - that ONLY happens with controlled demolition.
That's a big leap of faith.
Like almost everyone else, I was glued to the TV all day on 9/11. I remember when the Pentagon footage was aired on TV. It was played ONCE. That was a missile. It was clear as day. Beyond that, if it was an airplane, where's the fucking wreckage? Cuz that would be the first plane crash in all of history that left zero wreckage.
That's a big leap of faith.
It requires to many leaps of faith to believe the given story. Idk the whole of what happened, but I know we weren't told it.
The Patriot Act was introduced 5 weeks after the attack. 342 pages, no contradictions in the whole thing. Introduced, passed, and signed into law in 4 days. 5 weeks isn't enough time to read 350 pages of legalese, let alone write it. It was ready to go
Add to all the sus, America's government post WW2, at least, has not warranted any trust from the public. The CIA has done a LOT of fucked up, illegal shit to us. The Bay of Tomkin was a false flag fucking lie to the people. The incessant lie of Neoliberalism telling us that GDP is up! But everyone's quality of life is being striped away faster than our rights. Citizens United is bullshit, 2000 election was bullshit, Iraq and Afghanistan were both bullshit, qualified immunity and civil asset forfeiture are fucking repressive FASCIST bullshit and yea, you know, I don't think the people calling the shots have our best interests in mind, how could you?
"_______ doesn't happen without _______" all all bullshit based on nothing. NIST has published their findings. They had 200 Experts, 125 of which came from the private sector investigate how the towers came down, and there is absolutely no evidence what so ever that they were brought down in a controlled manner. I even remember watching a documentary that interviewed the owner or engineer of one of the US's top demolition companies that easily pokes holes in the idea that a major skyscraper with people, furniture, etc could be brought down like that at all. It's total nonsense. NIST has a FAQ page
How can you not believe any of what you wrote but also say that you believe the Saudis did it? The Bush-Saudi connection was known for a decade before September 11th.
Bush Sr. literally invaded Iraq to protect Saudi oil interests. No one at the top actually believed Saddam was an immediate threat to U.S. interests.
The only planes that flew out of the U.S. after the attacks were Saudi nationals who were granted exception by the White House to flee the country.
the towers were obviously hit by planes, we have plenty of video evidence of this. The controversy is around how the towers actually fell. This is where the “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” meme comes from.
Of course, the meme is a parody of anyone who thinks that's a legitimate argument. You don't need to liquify a material for it to lose its structural integrity.
Because the FBI gave the terrorists all the training, weapons, and about $2bn in cold hard cash money that lead to them being able to commit the act. Because "jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams", although it does weaken steel beams. Because engineering and demolition experts came out and said the whole thing seemed coordinated exactly in the way in which they coordinate tear-downs for a living. Because the terrorists who on the same day planned to blow up the George Washington Bridge got sent home on a plane and were never spoken about publicly again. Because it was obvious Saidi Arabia had a hand in it, which later became confirmed fact, and we're buddy buddy with Saudi, so somebody had to have known something was going to happen but didn't sufficiently try to stop it on our side of the water. Because the Bin Laden family and the Bush family have a weird amount of connections. Be cause conspiracy theory culture was seen as more typical/harmless, and less of a thing for Nazi terrorists like today. Because the FBI had Bin Laden dead to rights in 1998 and had a bedside conversation with him instead of taking the opportunity to kill him while he was on dialysis. Because the 40 years that preceded 9/11 were lousy with proven incidence where our leadership, specifically the FBI & CIA in conjunction with corrupted presidents, in which American citizens were coerced, sabotaged, drugged, tortured, and killed, and all the leaders had to say about it was ‘whoopsy doopsy, so sowwy’
the whole thing seemed coordinated exactly in the way in which they coordinate tear-downs for a living
Oh, yeah, there's that. The buildings had a very unusual¹ structure that tends to naturally collapse on a similar way as controlled demolition. It's extremely unlikely for normal buildings to go down that way, so it did raise some suspicion.
1 - Unusual for buildings in general, but common for buildings of that size.
I think it's because people would rather believe the world is secretly controlled by some truly awful people than acknowledge no-one's steering the bus.
I think it is because of the bizarre way the towers collapsed. Just like a controlled demolition looks like. The way the WTC7, that did not get hit by any plane, also collapsed. Supposedly because it caught on fire too.
I think this is really the cause of suspicion, it was just pretty bizarre. A lot of people came forward to explain that a fire couldn't brind such a massive structure down.
Also, the US is known for doing weird shit behind everyone's backs. The CIA is constantly doing shit like taking governments down or causing a drug crisis in black neighborhoods. You gotta admit the US agencies are sneaky in general, so it wouldn't be a surprise if they were actually responsible for the twin towers. There's no evidence but I'm pretty sure the CIA was somehow involved with the Nord Stream pipeline
Also a lot of people came forward to explain that a fire couldn't brind such a massive structure down.
And yet One Meridian Plaza was a skyscraper built in the same era as 7 World Trade Center that had a fire so bad that caused the building to be condemned due to structural damage caused by the fire. The only reason One Meridian Plaza didn't completely collapse during the fire was because there were fire sprinklers on some of the floors and the fire got up to a floor that had them.
So now Lower Manhattan had lost water pressure, making the fire sprinkler system worthless. You also had a lot of the people who would be responsible for fighting the fire pancaked in debris nearby. This was the first skyscraper of its size in a over a decade allowed to burn.
But a controlled demolition is a lot more comforting of a thought that the complete failure of disaster response.
Because there was some legit sketchy shit:
Bush was warned at least a month in advance that an attack was coming. He deliberately did nothing. This was documented publicly in a Senate hearing afterwards. We don't know whether he did nothing because of incompetence or malice, and we don't know who else knew in advance as well, but either way, at least he and the people who briefed him knew.
The dirty secret of skyscrapers is that they're mostly made of nothing. They're almost entirely air. It takes precious little to weaken them and bring them down. The Bin Laden family was in the construction business and they knew this fact very well.
As others have noted in the thread, Bin Laden and the Muhjadeen had been funded, trained, and armed by the USA. They were our creation.
Usually when people are suspicious, they're right to be suspicious. They're not always right about what to be suspicious about.
It takes precious little to weaken them and bring them down.
I would argue that an airliner filled with tons of fuel is not "little". That was a lot of mass moving really fast into the towers. Even then, it took a while for the structures to become weak enough to collapse. Given the circumstances, it was amazing the towers lasted as long as they did after they were hit.
Your core description is correct though: There really isn't much to skyscrapers.
I'm confused by this comment, what exactly is sketchy?
W is/was an incompetent fool that didn't feel the threat was worth acting upon. Instead of imagining some 4D conspiracy its much easier to see and understand that him and his administration were inept.
There have been numerous documentaries and analysis about skyscrapers and planes and the conclusion was that the towers actually performed ABOVE average. People don't seem to understand the power involved in a fucking jerliner slamming into a building.
Bin Laden was trained and armed to fight the Russians, which he did. He then decided to turn on us because he always was always a lunatic.
Again, nothing about 9/11 is mysterious to me and I don't get the conspiracy thinking.
A lot of people grew up being used to a safe county. The idea that the government didn't actually keep people safe, and that leaders could be so insanely incompetent, was so shocking it was easier to believe in crazy conspiracy theories.
It's pretty easy to believe in an incompetent government after 9/11, but W came after Clinton and Bush Sr. The first Bush was the head of the CIA. He was evil, but highly competent. Clinton was clearly a world leader, also highly competent. Before that you had Reagan, who was Machiavellian as fuck running secret wars around the world. You had decades of these people looking like they were playing geopolitical 4d chess, then you had this clown who was playing checkers with pidgins. Then you had this incredible shock of the biggest attack on the US since Perl Harbor. It broke a lot of people's brains.
A lot of it was shock and confusion. How could this happen? Why did this happen? People wanted answers and people got answers.
I was a truther right away, after 9/11. It's embarrassing to say now. I fell for narratives like "jet fuel doesnt melt steel" and "only a controlled demolition collapses like that."
Jet fuels softens steal beams, and they were holding up so much weight. And that's exactly how a really tall building, surrounded by other tall buildings, looks when it collapses.
People were hot with emotion and it's hard to be rational in that state of mind.
At this point, I believe some in the US government knew the attack was imminent but did not know when, and by the time it was happening, it was too late.
I can't dismiss as out of hand the idea that Bush, Cheny, and some of their friends in Saudi Arabia (people who are now Donald Trump's friends), wanted the attack to happen, specifically in order to justify wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which I do believe were just wars under a doctrine of irredentism.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
I'm going to give one that might be controversial. It was the first high attention news event after the internet made us more connected. It allowed for oddball ideas to get passed around faster than ever before, shaping a "coherent" narrative faster than old media could handle.
Because two planes hit two buildings (and the other one) and like 3-4 buildings imploded. It didn’t look real.
Im guessing engineers didn’t plan for planes to strike the building which is why they crumbled.
That was literally it. It was so odd a situation to our daily lives that parts of it didn’t seem real.
Because the FBI lost 2.3 trillion the day before 9/11 (though note that this was brought up way before 9/11, but was restated the day before), and mixed with things like ruby ridge incident, Waco incident, and other things has lead people to be distrustful of the FBI, and I honestly can't blame them.
I mean prob because although it wasn’t done directly by the gov they had plenty of warning and did nothing.
I drove away from the WTC on the morning of 2001-09-11. I watched from a safe distance as the towers fell. It was a surreal day I shared with like 10 million people as we watched the smoke and fires and falling structures, willing with every ounce of our being that our loved ones due to be in the area at the time - and one in the building interviewing upstairs - ended up far away at the right time. The universe delivered, and we luckily lost no dear friends that day, but it was tense while some of them were in the proverbial wind.
I still - I'm ashamed to admit - think something was SUPER-fishy about the pentagon strike. I believe it when they say the parts don't add up, and I believe them when they say the surveillance tapes from a local gas station were taken, and I debated the significance of the lamp-posts being taken down in the days before where they magically didn't get hit by the incoming plane. And I'm pretty sure the plane following that pennsylvania crash was doing more than watching.
Do I think the planes hit the towers? Yep. Do I think the jet fuel weakened the structure until it popped? Yep. But I can't resolve the rumour that the basement was empty on that day of all days. I heard the stories that the tail numbers were spotted elsewhere and I briefly gave it some thought until I just went "nah, fuck that" and tossed that idea.
I don't think there's gonna be an alternate explanation to cover the weird concerns I have, and I can live with that; but I'm not gonna forget it.
That's the way it is.
It was unthinkable to millions of people that an attack on the USA could reach so far in as to hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in a single morning. We were the strongest military on earth and had fully operational radar, but failed to keep planes from absolutely demolishing the towers. A lot of people just can't understand the complicated stuff like that.
The government has done a lot worse.
In 2001, I would have considered it crazy to think that an administration would sacrifice the lives of several thousand US citizens to further their own political interests. In 2024, a few thousand lives seems like a low number.
I think you need to reassess these people you respect a lot. Belief in 9-11 conspiracy theories is not common.
It was done by a group propped up by the CIA.
Immediately after the attack the US gov did nothing but watch Bin Laden go from a known position into unreachable hideout. Then immediately started an illegal attack that took years to get authorized.
Just after this, the US started a huge war, with plenty of indiscriminate civilian killing against one of the largest enemies of the people behind Al-Qaeda, and started exercises for a war against another one of their other top 3 enemies.
The US intelligence organizations got several warnings, didn't act on any of them.
And I'm pretty sure there are more issues, I didn't follow it closely. During all that time the media was lying about everything. So, if you have to believe something that is not the official information, I'd guess it's not hard to go overbroad and decide the US gov took the building down by themselves.
My guess is that if you repeat BS enough, people will sooner or later start believing it.
The mainstream conspiracy theory is that the US knew about it but allowed it to happen for a reason to pass more restrictions like the Patriot Act. One fact we do know is that the CIA was actively still trying to recruit and turn one of the terrorists on one of the planes. So we have proof that the CIA knew about it.
https://www.politico.eu/article/attacks-will-be-spectacular-cia-war-on-terror-bush-bin-laden/
We know that the majority of pilots were Saudi citizens
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/11/september-11-saudi-arabia/
There's more, but the CIA connection shows we knew about it before it happened.
My personal "hmmm" moment was how well the towers fell, almost as if they were controlled demoloshed, but I admit ignorance on the subject.
To quote Pearl from 'Keep Beach City Weird':
Humans just lead short, boring, insignificant lives, so they make up stories to feel like they're a part of something bigger. They want to blame all the world's problems on some single enemy they can fight, instead of a complex network of interrelated forces beyond anyone's control.
Also the usual pattern (seen in many countries/empires, not just USA) - since civil war war-profiting (closely related to the two parties & why the switch happened) the industry was always hungry and in need of a good loosing-ish war (or - only short periods without a war).
It always follows the same pattern --> need for profits/power expenditure rises --> if public is (fuded) on board, great, if not, we need a terrorist-like attack, seemingly unpreventable yet utterly publicly show before it happened.
Like in WWII, USA had stakes on both sides, but also not 'as big' of a military budget as they could have. The problem was that the public was super against entering the conflict (80~90% against, this is the time when the civil war was well within lining memory with soldiers and widows on proper military pensionsv still alive, regular parades, etc). So for the first time ever they decide to put all their ship-eggs in one Pearl-basket & advertise that move a lott, how they did that, where they did that (how much time they are gonna wait there, lul), and what defenses are there, how the seamen were sent home etc. All under the disguise of showing their military power to Japan (that's like exposing your balls to an enemy that is already attacking you). Ofc the attack successfully happened, propaganda machine spun up (still today we get movies about that, 'the horror'), the public option switched over night and politicians could hike the military budget substantially. (Movies that we don't get is about what/how USA did to japan - like how they killed more civilians with regular carpet bombing per day compared to the killed in blasts of atomic bombs - the most destructive single air attack in human history ... and USA dropped about 4× as much bombs total in Vietnam)
The same with 9-11, public is anti war, you have the two towers and movies detailing how easy it would be to crash a plane into specifically the towers. Or Vietnam proxy war, which lasted for so long that the public turned back against it (hippies) and government had to demonize them (the ridiculous anti weed laws/enforcement, "satanism", etc).
Funding and assisting a foreign terrorist group for profit is shockingly common. Sometimes you even have to manufacture a new group because the existing don't suit your needs.
Oh, and the atrocities compared are always like x killed in domestic attack, xxxxxx killed in the foreign bombarding campaign. When public opinion isn't that big of an issue a smaller trigger point is needed - usually USA sends literal military personnel into sovereign foreign countries & when the invaded county returns fire in the invading force USA counts that as an act of war (huh, I guess technically that is correct).