To me these sound like justifications on your part to remain in denial.
Look, I’m an atheist, and while I like friends and social groups, I have never been one for “exclusive clubs” whether based on belief in something, IQ, or even a coveted fantasy football team (you probably can tell I know nothing about fantasy football).
Further, if I was to be completely honest, I really wish I wasn’t convinced of the belief I hold about our government—and 9/11 in particular. It’s not really pleasant…at times, yes, scorn is involved. It is not easy knowing something of this magnitude and which ultimately has and continues to affect everyone in a negative way. The resulting consequence is the creation of an irrepressible moral obligation for you to inform others of this truth. I guess in that way, I can see similarities to religion, but religion is based on wishful thinking and an emotional need to begin with. This isn’t.
I am sure you become annoyed when someone suggests that you watch another !#@$! video… But I entreat—this one is only about 12 minutes and is more about psychology than anything else. It uses 9/11 as an example, but it contains nothing in it about falling buildings or molten steel, etc. It’s one of the most interesting videos I’ve seen even apart from it’s reference to 9/11. Please give it a view.
I’m mainly explaining compartmentalization, which I see now you actually went into a bit.
I’m mainly trying to “debunk” (as much as I have grown to despise that word) this whole idea that someone would have talked.
If this was 1955, if someone would have talked, you can bet a hungry reporter (not fearful of losing his job by stepping on the toes of the US government) would follow it up. If it had merit, any resulting investigation would be reported in a newspaper or on TV. I’m sure you are (at least I hope) aware just how scripted our mainstream news is—and further, how insulated the west is in general when it comes to non-domestic news.
I believe real unfettered investigative journalism is returning, but I can see already that when someone does try and speak out, he is very cautious. Truth is a very rare commodity.
<sigh>
He wasn’t talking to the fire chief, he was talking to a newsdroid from one of the TV networks. The fire chief later said he hadn’t had a conversation with Silverstein. No telling who he really had on the phone in the story.
And, being a native English speaker he could not possibly have known a word of French!?? Merde!
I can’t recall a single serious investigator suggesting bombs were used. Cuttiing charges were used.
Word games. Cutting charges are bombs.
Except of course that again, unlike simple bombs, you have to move all the furniture aside to tear apart the walls to wrap the cutting charges around the remain parts of the beams after cutting into them with welding torches to weaken them. It would not go unnoticed by office workers, maintenance staff, security guards etc. And someone in the army of people needed would talk. If not before, then after.
Barry Jennings, the building engineer for WTC 7, is on video describing explosions he heard as he was escaping the building just before it crashed.
That would be expected, given the massive damage to the building even before the fires. Multi-ton pieces of steel and concrete falling off the building are going to sound like explosions when they hit.
Larry Silverstein is on tape saying “A decision was made to pull it, and we watched it fall, and it was horrible”. He later claimed that he didn’t mean what it seems like he meant, but he said it.
The very same record that has him saying that, has the context in which he said it. And it’s crystal clear that he and the fire department were talking about pulling firefighters from the building.
As I said above,
Calling the 9/11 truthers’ claims “conspiracy theories” is offensive only in that it undeservedly dignifies those claims with the word “theory.”
“Theory” implies that the claim is based on evidence, and that it would be rejected if the evidence didn’t match. It implies consideration of other possibilities. It implies testing the claims, rather than blindly accepting what the person making the claims tells you. The “truthers” - another offensively wrong term - are best known for REFUSING to treat their claims like theories.
You must have heard that story Richard Feynman told:
He was at Princeton when much of the physics department, hardware and wetware, went to Los Alamos. The physicists were warned of the strictest secrecy, and told to travel to Los Alamos via their homes, so nobody would wonder at all these academics going to the same obscure place. Feynman reasoned that if nobody else booked their ticket to Los Alamos from Princeton, he wouldn’t arouse any suspicion if he booked one himself. The guy in the ticket office was fascinated: “So it’s you? That complete department’s worth of equipment we sent to Los Alamos was just for you?”
First, a lot of university OUTSIDE of the Manhattan Project figured out what was going on, by which of their colleagues were suddenly absent.
Second, the Germany, Japan and Russia new about the Manhattan Project and what they were attempting. The question was what progress had been made.
Third, those involved were working for their country, NOT against it. It’s a lot easier to convince people to keep their country’s defence a secret than to keep mass murder a secret.
Finally, once the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, IT WASN’T A SECRET ANY MORE. All compartmentalization was smashed to bits, as people could figure it out without being told. And that’s without the post-9/11 FBI, CIA and the rest of the world’s intelligence services focusing What Just Happened.
By your analogy, even if they kept The Conspiracy a secret until the morning of 9/11, the whole plot was exposed within days if not hours.
A $80-300 million cost for maintenance on a building with value for the leaseholder being around $3.3 billion.
Doesn’t sound like a huge liability, honestly. So assuming the high end of asbestos costs, they only make $3 billion.
Note that there was a high level of competition for the lease, and the Port Authority sold the lease to the buildings for more than twice what they reportedly expected to get in 1998. How could this turn of events occur if the liability concerns were serious?
Okay, so the story continues - there is some maintenance needed on the buildings, and a businessman puts in a successful bid (beating 30 other bidders competing for the lease) to negotiate a somewhat cheap but still highly profitable long term lease. Nothing really surprising in any of that, and with the number of bids, it’s pretty clear that the costs of maintenance weren’t really a big concern. The occupancy rates and profits were high.
The lease owner insures the building against a terrorist attack, with insurance covering the amount of the lease’s profits. Why would someone owning an iconic property insure against a terrorist attack? The most plausible explanation is that the building was previously a target of a terrorist attack.
I think you’re trying to say that there was a huge government conspiracy to destroy some iconic buildings to justify something or other, and then there’s a private motive by a lease owner to destroy the buildings since the insurance profits were higher than ownership. There’s no evidence of the government conspiracy. A government conspiracy that would have involved at a minimum tens of thousands of people in a large number of different roles and organizations, with many of those people later getting screwed by and having a grudge against the Bush administration. That does not seem at all likely in any sense.
And the private motive for the lease owner and his private conspirators to commit a vast series of felonies, destroying personal property, others’ property, the livelihoods of many, and resulting in the deaths of many is to destroy a building complex to get insurance payouts that are barely more than the profits from the lease, apparently to avoid some easily affordable asbestos repair work. That makes no sense at all.
Somehow the government and private parties negotiate a deal to destroy the buildings but there’s no leak of a paper trail ever? Also if you follow the insurance story, the money wasn’t pocketed, was a protracted battle to get covered, and wasn’t sufficient to rebuild - and Silverstein hasn’t come close to making the money he would have if the buildings still simply stood. None of the private party side of the conspiracy theory makes any sense on any level.
The Bush admin dropped the ball on dealing with the terrorist threat, and tried to cover that up. We have evidence of this. The Bush admin exploited the attack for political capital to pursue their agenda. That’s clear. But the idea that there’s any explanatory need for a conspiracy to explain the attacks is solving a problem that doesn’t exist, and offers an imagined explanation of imagined events that makes no sense. There’s no need to suggest that the planes didn’t bring down the buildings - not only is there a very plausible explanation of the physics involved, but the suggestions of using explosives create a huge number of other inconsistencies and unexplainable complications. If you were a conspirator, you could have just blown up the buildings, like the '93 attack, and blamed it on terrorists. Why bother with the hijackings? Why on Earth would you attack the Pentagon at all? It’s not publicly beloved. What kind of maniac would engage in the level of risks involved in a conspiracy with so many groups in so many different organizations (FAA, NYPD, NYFD, FBI, building owners, city gov’t, state gov’t, et al), esp. when you later shafted many people in those orgs who would have hated the masterminds, had evidence, and any one of them tens of thousands could have been a hero taking down an administration they were opposed to while raking in a huge cash windfall from books/talking events/etc on top of being a national hero? The Bush admin. was callow, manipulative, and corrupt, but even they don’t seem so stupid as to engage in such massively politically risky and complicated operation, while later politically shafting conspirators at an incredibly tremendous risk to keeping the conspiracy hidden. The Bush admin were a load of tools, but even they were not that stupid.
They’re trying to prove that FDNY BLEW UP a building on purpose? What? While hundreds of their fellows just perished and radio communications were compromised and the nation was in complete chaos? Oh boy.
Asbestos was only ever going to be used on the first 40 floors of the buildings. There would be no asbestos from floors 41 onward. But anticipating a ban on the use of asbestos, it was only used on the north tower, the first one to go up. And more than half of that was later removed - it’s not the big deal that you think. The south tower did not use asbestos.
[quote=“Syntropic, post:340, topic:65479”]The very peculiar and incriminating aspect however is that Larry Silverstein, as part of the transaction, demands an extraordinarily high $3.5 billion insurance policy for the towers in case of destruction.
[/quote]
In Reality…
The insurance scam fantasy has been long-debunked. The insurance money fell well short of covering the costs. In fact the insurance value was way below what it should have been. Most of the legal wrangling after the fact was also due to the insurance contracts being incomplete. With too low an insurance value and less-than-solid contracts, literally none of the insurance-based activities point to the actions of people who knew what was going to happen in advance.
With the WTC, Silverstein wanted coverage in the amount of $3.5 billion for the virtually unheard of “loss caused due to ‘acts of terrorism’”.
There had already been one terrorist attempt to destroy the buildings. There was later evidence that it was still a target. (This of course was confirmed on 9/11.) Seriously, you’re really making this argument?
I did watch the video. To summarise, people experienced a lot of trauma during 9/11. Their worldview, including belief in their safety within the US, was damaged. Many people came for psychological help at that time, because the attack was deeply traumatic to many normal people. To believe the truthers’ account would challenge deep seated beliefs about the goodness of the government and American people. The standard account represents wishful thinking, and people go into cognitive dissonance and pathologise the messenger rather than believe the truth. On top of this, American exceptionalism and a lack of humility cause people to deny that this kind of conspiracy could happen in the US.
Is this not just an attempt to pathologise people who don’t believe the truther version? Most (all?) people here are far from accepting of the Bush administration’s attempt to justify war based on this, along with a number of other parts of the official account. They don’t believe in US exceptionalism and aren’t particularly complementary about America’s international policy. They don’t believe in the inherent goodness of the American people. Many aren’t even American.
While it was a momentous and tragic event, for most people it wasn’t as traumatic as this video suggests, nor did it change their lives to the extent that it seems to have done with truthers. Having rejected jingoism, there’s no comforting and unifying belief to cling to, as is the case with a conspiracy theory.
As an ex-religious person, truther arguments do remind me of my own thought patterns when I came up against flaws in my beliefs. The account is true whatever the evidence, you just have to find the reasons why it’s true.
You must know that is not a phrase used in the demolition industry. The only “pulling” that is referred to is using heavy equipment and wires to put a strain on a structure to influence the direction of collapse. The connection with the phrase used to demolition was likely made by someone who wanted to fool people who would not actually research the terminology. And it worked!
What, someone wanted insurance on a building that covered acts of terrorism on a building where terrorists had actually set of a bomb previously? Spoooooky.
(ETA: I see others have beaten me to the punch, and with links and reasoned arguments to boot. Ah well).
