h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Conspiracies surrounding 9/11 abound. What the heck are these people on? They are utterly convinced that 9/11 was a set-up.

Why? Given the fact that the chances of a secret being revealed increase exponentially with every person you tell, the chances of being caught are astronomically high. Would Rumsfeld, Cheney Bush et al really be prepared to get comfy on "Old Sparky"?

The most common reason given for a conspiracy is that the Neo-Cons wanted to invade Iraq. So why carry out an atrocity with only the most tenuous and specious link to Iraq?

I don't understand these people.

I've neither the time nor the inclination for a full nor well thought out reply but I suppose it depends on what you mean by conspiracy theory.

It's one thing to say Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were responsible for the attacks and knew about them in advance for instance (which is nonsense)

or

that the CIA covered up evidence (unproven and also probably nonsense)

but it's quite another, and I think a legitimate criticism, to point out that the terrorist attacks suited The Bush administrations long-held desire to invade Iraq and although invading Afghanistan was the principle responce to the events of September 11th 2001, strenuous efforts were subsequently employed to link Iraq and Saddam with Al Queda and Terrorism more broadly in the lead up to the invasion in 2003 and for that Bush and co and duely culpable.

I agree entirely with your post Clive. It isn't my intention to indulge the delusions of the conspiracists, instead maybe to examine the phenomena where people ignore the rational and adopt the utterly nonsensical solution to a given problem.

9/11 is the most popular conspiracy around at the moment, so I thought it would be a good starting point.

What I dislike about such people is some of the theories they make up involve situations where people have died and only add to the suffering of victim's relatives, 9/11 being a prime example. It is bad enough having a relative die in 9/11, trying to convince people that your own government was involved in carrying out the plot can only add to the pain.
.
On a smaller level, the storys about there being no moon landing also belittles the deaths of people who died in the work done towards the eventual moon landing. It is no small coincidence that 90% of the people who promote the faked moon landing story have sold books about it of make a living selling their story to newspapers and sell interviews.
A scientist who still regularly carries out laser measurements of the moon's distance by bounceing a laser off mirrors placed on moon during one moon landing has never had his open offer of sceptics coming to see evidence of moon landinds taken up.

<>

I can't necessarily concur with your dismissal of these points of view, Clive. The thing is that there are a lot of legitimate questions/criticisms of the 'official story', and these questions are enough to make me, for one, wonder! That people died doesn't mean it's illegitimate to question whether things happened the way they are supposed to have done - in fact it makes questioning even more important!
Have a look at http://www.911research.wtc7.net/

>>"What I dislike about such people is some of the theories they make up involve situations where people have died and only add to the suffering of victim's relatives, 9/11 being a prime example."

But shouldn't a politician cynically using a tragic event to advance their personal agenda be more (possibly *much* more) offensive to relatives and survivors than some crank with some dumb pet theory?

Is (for example) an anti-semite claiming 9/11 was a Zionist conspiracy really any worse than an administration claiming (or even heavily *implying*) that Iraq was somehow behind it all?
After all, in the case of the former, they may never get beyond words, wheras the latter may use their excuses to justify killing people.

No, I think the Zionist conspiracy drivel is quite dangerous. It encourages people to treat all Jews with suspicion and distrust. It's a smokescreen. Muslims will blame anyone bar other Muslims for the atrocities carried out in their name. Muslim hatred of Jews goes back 1400 years. However, Jews did not persecute Arabs before Islam.

To date, I've seen Muslim groups pin the blame for 9/11 on:

Bush
Bush Snr
Cheney
Wolfowitz
Rumsfeld
Rice
Haliburton
CIA
Mossad
Britain
France
Christian Extremists
The World Bank

and some that I've forgotten.

It seems that persecuting Jews is politically OK in Britain now. MPACUK listed the home addresses and phone numbers of every member of the Friends of Israel group and encouraged their members to be "active" against them.

Well, to me if someone came out with the claim that my own government carried out a terrorist attack on my own country and I had lost a relative in the attack, then personally I would find that much worse that accusations, false or otherwise, that a foreign country was involved. If such a thing were to happen, then, at the very least, it would mean the collapse of the government of my country, although I suspect that the result would be more than the collapse of a government, possibly it would lead to country wide instabilty.

Which is one of the reasons I don't believe there was a conspiracy in the lead-up to 9/11. The consequences for the conspirators far outweigh the benefits.

However, I can quite believe there have been cover-ups of incompetence and vested interests since then.

Oh come on is it really so surprising when millions believe in a virgin birth, and resurrection from the dead, unimaginable eternal bliss with virgins in paradise, a jealous God sending down commandments to a man on a mountain and having a chosen people. So a load have started believing in some ludicrous myth about 9/11. Par for the course I reckon. No doubt in a few years we'll have some God of the two towers telling everyone how to live.

>>"No, I think the Zionist conspiracy drivel is quite dangerous. It encourages people to treat all Jews with suspicion and distrust. It's a smokescreen."

I didn't say it was a good thing, or that it was harmless, but that people *talking* conspiracies is possibly no more harmful (and maybe somewhat less harmful) than politicians spinning tragedies for their own ends - ends which have involved many other innocent people dying.

It might be argued that pursuing those ends (such as invading Iraq) were justified for other reasons, but personally, as a skeptic, when people have invented reasons to justify doing something, I tend to wonder if they thought the *other* reasons they had weren't really good enough, or weren't suitable for public consumption.

In any case, the people likely to swallow rubbish about Zionist conspiracies seem likely to be pretty badly disposed to Jews in the first place.

>>"Muslim hatred of Jews goes back 1400 years. However, Jews did not persecute Arabs before Islam."
I doubt there has ever been a time when *all* Musilms have hated Jews, just as I doubt there has been a time when *all* Christians hated Jews or Musilms.
In any case, if the OT is to be believed, in the days after the invention of the Jewish religion, being a Chosen People was used as an excuse for all kinds of conflict, genocide and territorial theft (as it presumably was by many of the other semitic tribes at the time). By the time Islam was invented, Judaism had had some significant time to mature as a religion and/or become more realistic after the dispersal from the Promised Land.

Well, there is very little possibility that the US government planned 9/11 and if it did we probably would have heard it by now. Governments use a lot of people to do small things (but need comparitively less for the larger things as the effieciency of a social system goes up with the number of people involved). The more people that know, the more chance someone will leak it.

The CIA and the FBI (and the NSA and the...) probably did know something about the attack or the attackers but failed to yell loud enough (or yell at all). Hence, a cover to save someone's job at the top. No conspiricy but a cover up none the less.

It'd be interesting to conduct a survey involving those who believe in 9/11 conspiracy stuff to find out what other things they tend to believe in. My bet is that that might give fairly clear pointers as to why they think the way they do.

Really, Fanny? That's an odd statement... As I said above (and I posted a link to a very good site!) I believe in 911 conspiracy stuff (up to a point.)

What else do you think that means I believe in?

we know all sorts of "interesting" things you beleive in...I think Fanny listed quite of few...

Arnie, that's not an answer
(Typical of you, but very uninformative.)

Where did Fanny list such things?

>>"Where did Fanny list such things?"

Have you tried Post 10?

"It'd be interesting to conduct a survey involving those who believe in 9/11 conspiracy stuff to find out what other things they tend to believe in. My bet is that that might give fairly clear pointers as to why they think the way they do."

This is entirely true. It's notable that conspiracy theorists only tend to believe the conspiracies they want to. A lot of people who are convinced by the 9/11 "inside job" stuff probably wouldn't buy the idea that Timothy McVeigh was set up by the Clinton government to discredit the far-right although both conspiracy theories are essentially the same. In both cases, people believe them because it's easier that facing the truth - McVeigh took the anarcho-right logic to it's essential end and 9/11 was perpetrated by an Islamist terrorist organisation who had attacked US interests before.

What I find interesting is that 9/11 conspiracists tend to pick-at details ignoring the bigger picture of "why"? If it was an inside job, why was it so necessary to "detonate" the twin towers or bomb the Pentagon? If shock and fear was required in the US public then the two plane attacks had done that anyway, regardless of whether the towers collapsed or just burned for hours. Also, if it was an inside job, I think they'd have chosen a different target for destruction than the World Trade Centre, given it's importance to the US economic elite. A poor area of New York would have killed more people and created more outrage.

This is post 10... <>

Sorry, I still don't see the connection between someone's bitternes against religion and 911 conspiracy theories. The assertion that having grave doubts about the official 911 story (which is where I stand) and being a believer in one of two Abrahamic religions, quite escapes me...

Granted, I am a Christian (and will continue to be no matter how much it upsets Fanny and the being whose many names include Arnie ) and so is the friend who originally sent the link to the website in my first (presumably ignored) posting. (By which I mean the link was presumably ignored - anyone who had actually looked at it, couldn't continue to smugly insist that the official story is water-tight and that only nuts and lentil-loving flakes could believe otherwise..)

But other '911 conspiracy theorists' on an American political board I am on, include anarchists, atheists and even a Jew!

I'm not aware of any connection between Christians and conspiracy theorists. Given that many of the top conspiracy theories are about the church, I would have thought it less likely.

I have to say, though, that that 9-11 website is wholly unconvincing. It lists a lot of anomolies out of context, which may or may not be true, but don't in themselves add up to very much. THere are also no sources cited.

If we were to pick any date at random, I expect similar things could be found e.g. I bet 'Pentagon Officials' cancel travel plans all the time for a variety of reasons. Why on earth would Salman Rushdie be considered important enough to warn about a terrorist attack - even if he was, in fact, warned? Putting it all together just doesn't make any sense. Even if it were true that the flights were less full than usual, how would that have been fixed?

And the list of motives is very misleading. Even if it's true that I had a motive to do x, it doesn't follow that I did x. Conspiracy theorists often make an error of logic - mistaking consistency and proof. For example:

1. I parked my car in the car park this morning
2. Someone dropped a crisp packet in the car park.
3. I like crisps.
therefore 4. I dropped the crisp packet.

These are consistent - if 1 and 2 and 3 are true, then it's possible for 4 to be true. But it doesn't follow that it *is* true. And that's the one mistake that's being made.

The second mistake is the lack of a plausible alternative explanation. It's not enough to cite anomolies. As in science, if you think that a current theory is false, propose a better one based on the known facts. Listing known facts in a scattergun manner does not produce a rival theory.