Subscribe"For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed."President John F. Kennedy
"The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it."
Suppose, on the other hand, that substantially all of the merchants, money lenders, security holders, manufacturers, shippers, capitalists, and financiers and their professional associates are to be found on one side in support of the Constitution and that substantially all or a major portion of the opposition came from the non-slaveholding farmers and the debtors--would it not be pretty conclusively demonstrated that our fundamental law was not the product of an abstraction known as "the whole people," but of a group of economic interests which must have expected beneficial results from its adoption? ... The data ... bear out the latter hypothesis.Democratic presidents (with the possible exception of FDR) have always been beholden to their business cronies to the same extent that Republicans have been. This is as true for Kennedy as it is for Clinton.
(Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 17)
"There was a young man who came in and said to the vice president "The plane is 50 miles out" [from Washington], "The plane is 30 miles out", and when it got down to "The plane is 10 miles out" the young man also said to the vice president "Do the orders still stand?", and the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said "Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary?"
POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.Helluva coincidence. Visor is a crisis management company. They were doing a drill for a situation that was very close to what actually happened.
The damage caused by Flight 93 in Shanksville was more extensive than many Web sites portray, and the lack of sizable pieces is fully consistent with an aircraft striking the ground at a tremendous rate of speed (over 500 miles per hour). According to the black boxes, the skyjackers put the 757 into a near vertical dive at maximum power. Similar to the case of American 77, this sets up a crash dynamic entirely different...from that of the vast majority of airplane accidents.From a three-page commentary on conspiracy theories.
...
Many remnants of the 757, including an engine, were discovered at considerable distances from the main impact zone, fueling speculation that the jet was fired on by one or more U.S. military fighters, causing it to burst apart in midair.
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Reality: High-energy impacts can eject fragments over startlingly long distances. It's also quite probable that the violent, high-speed maneuvers induced by the skyjackers caused one or both of the plane's engines to detach and/or partial breakup of the main structure. Comparatively benign plummets of aircraft in the past have resulted in the separation of engines, control surfaces and even entire wings. Debris can be carried aloft for many miles by the wind. And had Flight 93 been blown up with a missile, destruction of the airframe would not have been as complete, with portions falling to earth at a lower, less disintegrative velocity.
We know that this version of events isn't even correct. The president never ok'd a shootdown. He granted Norad commanders teh authority to order a shootdown, but there is no evidence that they did and a great deal of evidence that they did not.Uh, how is "[granting] the authority to order a shootdown" at all different from OKing a shootdown? In fact, that sounds like the process I would expect to take place.
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posted by kirkaracha at 9:52 AM on August 2, 2006