2001: a whistleblower odyssey

October 16, 2010 11:47 AM

WikiLeaks and 9/11: What if? That is the question posed by former FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley and former Federal Air Marshal Bogdan Dzakovic.
posted by grounded (112 comments total)

This is not at all what I expected them to say.
posted by JHarris at 11:54 AM on October 16, 2010

That's an interesting hypothetical but I wonder if they really would have leaked information at the time, without the benefit of hindsight, and potentially risked their careers/reputations.
posted by ghharr at 11:54 AM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Q. If WikiLeaks had been around in 2001, could the events of 9/11 have been prevented?

A. No
posted by axon at 11:58 AM on October 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

Those same officials stonewalled Samit's supervisor, who pleaded with them in late August 2001 that he was "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center."

I hope this guy doesn't have copious amounts of guilt over what his supervisors could have helped prevent.
posted by morganannie at 12:02 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Well, they could have leaked to any news organization, they are pretty serious about protecting sources too.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 12:03 PM on October 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

Those same officials stonewalled Samit's supervisor, who pleaded with them in late August 2001 that he was "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center." (Yes, he was that explicit.) Later, testifying at Moussaoui's trial, Samit testified that he believed the behavior of his FBI superiors in Washington constituted "criminal negligence."

Some days it's hard not to believe the day's events were collectively an inside job, one that was known to be coming and was allowed to proceed, to some degree.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:05 PM on October 16, 2010 [13 favorites]

Based on how things went down with McVeigh and Oklahoma City - published reports in advance of 4/19 pointing out the dangers and type of people involved - it still happened.

Law enforcement is directed at obtaining convictions after the fact. Terrorism prevention is something they have never been good at.

Terrorists fly under the radar and that's something they are good at.

That being said, wikileaks seems more likely to harm bad policy and make coverups more difficult.

The bad guys will keep trying. That is certain. Inept government agents and agencies will continue to try to hide their mistakes. That is also certain.
posted by warbaby at 12:10 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I hope the people John O'Neil reported to have copious amounts of guilt.
posted by mlis at 12:15 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Some days it's hard not to believe the day's events were collectively an inside job, one that was known to be coming and was allowed to proceed, to some degree.

It may very well have been "criminal negligence" on the parts of Samit's supervisors. However, insinuating they "allowed [it] to proceed" is a big stretch.
posted by morganannie at 12:23 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

"I hope the people John O'Neil reported to have copious amounts of guilt."

I do too, but I doubt they do. They probably feel something like schadenfruede. There's a term that eludes me at the moment - that refers to "malicious adherence to the rules". Bureaucrats who have been taking the beatdown for years sometimes do this - it's a passive aggressive response to overwhelming rules and the removal of discretion, disempowerment.

Oneil's bosses have bosses, too. And the higher you go, the more political and less rational policy implementation becomes, until - at the highest levels - you have a kafkaesque, irrational stew of ambition, frustration, and resentment. The rules exist to beat people up with.

These guys feel "vindicated". "We forced the rules down everyone's throats, and look what it got them". It's sociopathic.

So, no, they don't feel guilty. There is not only no justice for these cretins, there is no satisfaction for us knowing they might feel guilty. They don't.
posted by Xoebe at 12:26 PM on October 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

However, insinuating they "allowed [it] to proceed" is a big stretch.

Sure, harder to prove. No question.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:27 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I have to admit... my first reaction to the entire event (from which I was oddly separated by being at work from 5am until 6pm that day) was "oh, shit. they let this happen so they could grab for power."

I don't claim to be a Truther by any measure, but that was exactly my first emotional response. I still don't know what to make of that when I reflect upon it.
posted by hippybear at 12:30 PM on October 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Do you believe that the findings of the 9/11 Commission - whose formation Bush initially opposed - represents a complete and candid account of the government's actions leading up to and in response to the attacks?

No?

Then you are a 9/11 truther - whether you want to be called that or not.
posted by Joe Beese at 12:36 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Um.... I don't think I said anything about the 9/11 commission or believing anything. I was simply stating my intuitive response to the event on the day it happened.

Or maybe you're not actually talking to me when you write that. Certainly feels that way. D'oh! Another intuitive response!
posted by hippybear at 12:40 PM on October 16, 2010

Shining light into dark corners always gets the cockroaches running.

If outing the faults highlighted in the article would have meant they were fixed instead of swept under carpets, that would have been very beneficial even if it would not have been able to prevent 9/11.

For example, it might have stopped the whole yellow-cake-so-lets-invade-iraq bullshit later on. Don't underestimate the long-term effects of getting rid of the kind of crap these agents describe.
posted by DreamerFi at 12:49 PM on October 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

I have to admit... my first reaction to the entire event (from which I was oddly separated by being at work from 5am until 6pm that day) was "oh, shit. they let this happen so they could grab for power."

I have the same feeling, but it came afterwards, when the naked grab for power actually took place.

It's hard not to see conspiratorial veins when, for example, Congress signs the PATRIOT Act into law without reading it, or when a seriously-ill Attorney General Ashcroft gets visited by FBI agents and Cheney associates, pressured at bedside to sign off on domestic wiretapping, or just looking at how much taxpayer money has been spent on a security apparatus that spies on Americans for purposes unrelated to terrorism.

Part of my feeling on this is, like yours, an emotional one, but it's also difficult, sometimes, not to see the consequences of 9/11 as logical, intentional and beneficial for people who looked the other way, up to that day.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:52 PM on October 16, 2010 [10 favorites]

Large bureaucracies are probably the last thing you want when dealing with issues like terrorism. They are simply incapable of handling information fast enough to enable the quick decision-making necessary. Yet our response to 9/11 was to create DHS and make things even worse.
posted by tommasz at 1:04 PM on October 16, 2010

Right. Guys had worked for FBI. FBI screws up (with others) and so we need outside outfit to tell us what the govt seems unable or unwilling to tell us.Then why bother with funding intel and other agenciels? out source all to Wiki etc
posted by Postroad at 1:05 PM on October 16, 2010

Do you believe that the findings of the 9/11 Commission - whose formation Bush initially opposed - represents a complete and candid account of the government's actions leading up to and in response to the attacks? No? Then you are a 9/11 truther...

False dichotomy.
posted by callmejay at 1:07 PM on October 16, 2010 [11 favorites]

so we need outside outfit to tell us what the govt seems unable or unwilling to tell us

No, we need an outside outfit to tell us that the govt seems unable or unwilling to tell us.

Subtle, but important difference. It also means you don't need to outsourse all to Wiki etc.
posted by DreamerFi at 1:08 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Um.... I don't think I said anything about the 9/11 commission or believing anything.

I apologize for not making clear that it was a generic "you". I wasn't thinking of your comment when I wrote that.

It just irritates me when people jeer at "9/11 truthers" when, by my definition, they belong to that group themselves.

Like any other crime, 9/11 comes down to means, motive, and opportunity. And as BP points out, the government had plenty of the second. It was exactly the "new Pearl Harbor" that the neocons wanted.
posted by Joe Beese at 1:09 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Congress signs the PATRIOT Act into law without reading it,

Sorry, I should correct that. Congress doesn't sign laws, they vote for them. I always get that phrasing messed up.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:11 PM on October 16, 2010

when the naked grab for power actually took place.

Okay. Bush and his people made a naked grab for power. Then they quietly handed the power over to Obama and his people. "Thanks for the power, George." "Don't mention it, Barry." Is that what happened?
posted by Faze at 1:33 PM on October 16, 2010

National security is one of those things I'd rather not crowdsource.
posted by Xezlec at 1:35 PM on October 16, 2010

Like any other crime, 9/11 comes down to means, motive, and opportunity. And as BP points out, the government had plenty of the second. It was exactly the "new Pearl Harbor" that the neocons wanted.

There seems to be a body of circumstantial evidence in light of prior negligence and post activity, but no "smoking gun", to borrow a Bush-era metaphor. In light of this, instead of "truther", I propose a separate category called "skepticant".
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:36 PM on October 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

You might as well as McFly if he didn't drag race with Flea what would happen. Shit happened, wondering what-if ain't gonna change it. Doing your job that you were supposed to do better - and not blaming others and some nebulously "lack of government power" - will prevent the next one.

Amazing that this 20/20 hindsight peace took nine years to come out.
posted by Old'n'Busted at 1:36 PM on October 16, 2010

You might as well as McFly if he didn't drag race with Flea what would happen.

I'm in love with this sentence. I can try to parse it all day and keep coming up with different outcomes.
posted by hippybear at 1:39 PM on October 16, 2010 [13 favorites]

Those same officials stonewalled Samit's supervisor, who pleaded with them in late August 2001 that he was "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center." (Yes, he was that explicit.)

Everytime I read something like this, I think of Thomas Friedman's pompous post-9/11 take on the attacks - that it wasn't a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of "imagination." Yeah, there was no American who could imagine such an evil plan being hatched. I've yet to see him correct himself.
posted by Dasein at 1:44 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I don't really see what WikiLeaks has to do with this. It's not as though there weren't numerous outlets to leak classified information before someone setup an offshore wiki. The article makes a brief case that going to the media is somehow more perilous than a WikiLeaks post, but I don't really buy it. You're risking your career and your freedom by leaking classified information whether you post it to a wiki or hand it to the press. WikiLeaks is great, don't get me wrong, but it seems disingenuous to suggest that whistle-blowers couldn't have gone to the press in the first place.
posted by zachlipton at 1:51 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Truther (extreme): believes that the Two Tours were detonated by charges set inside the buildings by shadow agents probably linked to the Bush-Admin (literally, an inside job).

Skepticant (moderate): doesn't rule out that the Bush-Admin and various other interests may have allowed certain things to happen, never remotely imagining that whatever it was would be so effective and devastating ... and then, yes, they used the aftermath to push certain agenda points.
posted by philip-random at 1:52 PM on October 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

Yeah, there was no American who could imagine such an evil plan being hatched. I've yet to see him correct himself.

It's not about individual Americans lacking imagination; it's about the collective monolith of American security apparatus lacking it. That is, the evil in this regard was bureaucracy, more interested in serving its own Kafkaesque ends than actually serving the needs of the bosses (ie: the taxpayers).
posted by philip-random at 1:56 PM on October 16, 2010

Has anyone ever done a study of the human tendency towards seeing conspiracies in everything? Is it about seeking patterns in chaos, sort of how we see a face on the moon even though it's all just a bunch of craters? Or how we see the Virgin Mary in a water stain?
posted by incessant at 1:58 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

In my more paranoid moments, I suspect that the missile-hit-the-Pentagon crowd are CIA plants, intended to discredit anybody who doesn't think the government is telling the whole truth.

But in my most paranoid moments, I think it's the Lizard People...
posted by steambadger at 1:59 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Superbombs and Secret Jails: What to Look for in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs
posted by homunculus at 2:02 PM on October 16, 2010

If they had planned it, it would have been clearly committed by agents of the Iraqi government. They wanted to invade Iraq to get the oil. That was their goal from the time W. announced he was going to run. They just didn't think Osama could pull anything like 9/11 off, so they ignored it. It was arrogance and incompetence that let it happen. Then they made the most of the situation by pivoting to Iraq. If they had planned it, it would have been clearly connected to Iraq from the beginning.

And the Truther movement was started by the CIA to cover up the incompetence that allowed 9/11 to happen.
posted by vibrotronica at 2:03 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Oh, and thinking that Bush et al wouldn't have prevented 9/11 if they could have makes no sense to me -- before it all happened, which would Bush et al have seen as more beneficial to the administration and the neocon way: major terrorist act, or highly-publicized stopping of a major terrorist act? In hindsight, the answer seems to be the former, but before 9/11, we'd all say that stopping it would turn the administration into a bunch of heroic cowboys and not stopping it would be a disaster for them.
posted by incessant at 2:04 PM on October 16, 2010

I hope the people John O'Neil reported to have copious amounts of guilt.

Wikipedia: John P. O'Neill was a counter-terrorism expert and the Assistant Director of the FBI until late 2001. He retired from the FBI and was offered the position of director of security at the World Trade Center (WTC). He took the job at the WTC two weeks before 9/11. On September 10, 2001, John O’Neill told two of his friends, "We're due. And we're due for something big. ... Some things have happened in Afghanistan. [referring to the assassination of Massoud] I don’t like the way things are lining up in Afghanistan. ... I sense a shift, and I think things are going to happen. ... soon." John O'Neill died on September 11, 2001, when the south tower collapsed.

In other news: Recently, a new video has resurfaced which was reluctantly released by NIST after a lawsuit by the International Centre for 9/11 Studies, which shows two fire fighters discussing how secondary explosions occurred right before the collapse of the twin towers. The International Centre for 9/11 Studies is currently reviewing over 300 DVDs as well as several external hard disk drives that contain unseen photographs and footage from ground zero.

And: Newly obtained 9/11 eyewitness footage that NIST fought tooth and nail to keep secret contains what appears to be the sound of explosions coming from the vicinity of WTC 7 after the collapse of the twin towers, offering yet more startling evidence that the building, which was not hit by a plane yet collapsed demolition style, was deliberately imploded.
posted by thescientificmethhead at 2:09 PM on October 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Has anyone ever done a study of the human tendency towards seeing conspiracies in everything? Is it about seeking patterns in chaos, sort of how we see a face on the moon even though it's all just a bunch of craters? Or how we see the Virgin Mary in a water stain?

Yep. There's lots of evolutionary psychology on this, the idea being, as far as I recall, that we see causality and intentionality that isn't there because the reverse errors are often more dangerous.
posted by Maias at 2:11 PM on October 16, 2010

or when a seriously-ill Attorney General Ashcroft gets visited by FBI agents and Cheney associates

That was an interesting story.
posted by mlis at 2:17 PM on October 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

I try to use the word "hate" very, very rarely, else it loses all potency.

I hate George W. Bush with a huge, fiery, burning passion. Hate him. I wish him ill. He destroyed a good portion of political policy, both foreign, that it will take decades to repair, if it even can be repaired. It think he's an idiot, a functioning alcoholic, and a religious nutbag.

But watch this, and then tell me he knew it was coming, and let it happen. At the one-minute mark, he is told that the second tower has been hit. The nation is now under attack. What does George Bush do.

He sits, in shock, with *no idea of what to do*, for seven minutes. Instead of getting up and excusing himself with something like "I'm sorry, kids--I got a message from the White House and I have to go back now. Thanks for having me," he sat there UNTIL SOMEONE FROM HIS DETAIL MADE HIM GET UP AND LEAVE.

He was, metaphorically, shitting his pants.
posted by tzikeh at 2:18 PM on October 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

er, that should be "both foreign and domestic."

And, to quote Bill Maher, "You know how I know the Bush Administration couldn't possibly have been behind the 9/11 attacks? They worked."
posted by tzikeh at 2:20 PM on October 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

The damn thing happened the same day, the same hour, that NORAD was doing a drill of pretty much exactly the same thing happening. Now it's not impossible that's a coincidence, but the p-value is surely low enough to make you think
posted by moorooka at 2:24 PM on October 16, 2010

But watch this, and then tell me he knew it was coming, and let it happen.

It begs the question that he was much more than a figurehead over his two terms. Has he been anything more than a rubber-stamp for powerful people behind the scenes his entire professional life, for much longer than his relatively short stint as President?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:26 PM on October 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

He sits, in shock, with *no idea of what to do*, for seven minutes.

I don't think that means anything. If you were running a covert op and Bush was the figurehead, would you let him in on it? I wouldn't. For one thing, there's no need; if it's not officially happening then you don't need his signature on it. In any event you certainly don't need his involvement; we're talking about a guy who read the speeches he was handed without giving any sign that he understood them. The only thing he could possibly do is blow it for you, there'd be no upside.

(On preview, what BP said.)
posted by George_Spiggott at 2:30 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

"[I]f there was one thing, one moment, when the United States might have gone to a higher level of alert, it came on August 6, 2001, when a briefer gave the President of the United States a briefing entitled, “Bin Ladin determined to strike in U.S.”
posted by jokeefe at 2:42 PM on October 16, 2010

The damn thing happened the same day, the same hour, that NORAD was doing a drill of pretty much exactly the same thing happening.

Exercise Jump-Starts Response to Attacks

Amid Crisis Simulation, "We Were Suddenly No-Kidding Under Attack"

"I thought it was the start of World War III"
posted by mlis at 2:43 PM on October 16, 2010

I am up in here like ericb
posted by mlis at 2:43 PM on October 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

It begs the question that

No.
posted by kafziel at 2:46 PM on October 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

^It's not about individual Americans lacking imagination; it's about the collective monolith of American security apparatus lacking it.

USA TODAY: In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties. One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center. In another exercise, jets performed a mock shootdown over the Atlantic Ocean of a jet supposedly laden with chemical poisons headed toward a target in the United States. In a third scenario, the target was the Pentagon — but that drill was not run after Defense officials said it was unrealistic, NORAD and Defense officials say.

(9/11 Coincidences video that includes ABC news segment on the story.)

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer recently released a book about his experiences with Able Danger. The Pentagon bought up and destroyed the entire first printing.

Wikipedia page for Able Danger: An investigation by the Defense Department Inspector General's office in September 2006 concluded that "the evidence did not support assertions that Able Danger identified the September 11, 2001, terrorists nearly a year before the attack, that Able Danger team members were prohibited from sharing information with law enforcement authorities, or that DoD officials reprised against LTC Shaffer for his disclosures regarding Able Danger."

"The BBC says that America's special agents backed away from the bin Laden family soon after George W Bush became president. Agents were also told to back off the Saudi royals - although that has all changed since September 11." (Ananova/9/11 Researcher)

"Two veteran FBI investigators say they were ordered to stop investigations
into a suspected terror cell linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and the September 11 attacks." (ABCNEWS)

"Former FBI Deputy Director John O'Neill wanted to investigate the terrorists who were planning to blow up the trade towers on 9-11, but he was prevented from doing so by George W. Bush signing presidential directive W199i. Presidential directive W199i prohibited the FBI and Defense Department officials from stopping terrorists." (9/11 Myths)
posted by thescientificmethhead at 2:50 PM on October 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

It sure would be nice to live without the nagging doubt in the back of my head, which I can mostly attribute to previous evidence of planning terrorism on US targets for the sake of justifying military action.

At the end of the day, without even having to go into conspiracy theories, we can point to an illegal war drummed up for anything but a good reason and the loss of all appearances of civil rights and rule of law- waterboarding, loss of habeas corpus, broad wiretapping without warrants, extraordinary rendition, holding people indefinitely without any trial, etc. - these are all things that don't need any conspiracy or hidden proof to be discovered- the obvious crimes still stand and the population has accepted them.
posted by yeloson at 2:54 PM on October 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Some days it's hard not to believe the day's events were collectively an inside job, one that was known to be coming and was allowed to proceed, to some degree.

I see those as two different things. "Inside job" implies that direct or indirect agents of the US government were behind the attacks. That's different than knowing an attack is likely and letting it happen. I don't think the Bush administration was behind the attacks, and I don't think they knew of a specific attack and let it happen.

Now, sometimes it's hard not to think that the anthrax attacks weren't an inside job.

If they had planned it, it would have been clearly connected to Iraq from the beginning.

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

-- Richard Clarke

Rumsfeld Sought Plan For Iraq Strike Hours After 9/11 Attack

. In another exercise, jets performed a mock shootdown over the Atlantic Ocean of a jet supposedly laden with chemical poisons headed toward a target in the United States.

...after someone made an Executive Decision.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:57 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I'm highly doubtful that wikileaks could have prevented the attacks, but obviously wikileaks might have helped prevent the Bush administration from promoting the yes men that made these mistakes while firing competent people.

In truth, all the U.S. current issues with wikileaks could be resolved by creating stronger procedures for "internal whistle blowing". For example : We should give every senator several staff members with security clearances to whom service men would have the right to submit classified reports identifying other classified documents. I'm confident enough senators would act on these tips to make wikileaks irrelevant.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:59 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I think of Thomas Friedman's pompous post-9/11 take on the attacks - that it wasn't a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of "imagination."

Just about every Tom Friedman column is a failure of intelligence and a failure of imagination.
posted by grounded at 3:07 PM on October 16, 2010 [13 favorites]

I'm highly doubtful that wikileaks could have prevented the attacks, but obviously wikileaks might have helped prevent the Bush administration from promoting the yes men that made these mistakes while firing competent people.

Seymour Hersh's reporting in 2005 might have helped stop the war on Iraq from spreading to Iran. Good journalism can avert tragedy, sometimes.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:14 PM on October 16, 2010

I'm in the "let it happen" (LIHOP) camp, although I don't think the Bushites realized exactly how big the thing they were letting happen was, and they shit themselves when it all came down. After they got over that they shit themselves with joy.

I also think that some portion of the "made it happen" (MIHOP) camp is disinformation meant to delegitimize truthers...not that there's any shortage of lunatics able to come up with or believe any ridiculous story at all, so that portion is vanishingly small, probably only functioning to pump up the MIHOP camp when the LIHOP camp looks like it's getting a little traction.

Anyone who saved any documentary evidence of it is an idiot, though, so the chances we'll ever know are slim to none.
posted by Jimmy Havok at 4:17 PM on October 16, 2010

I kind of agree with you Tzikeh, but there is another way to think about this.

It's often brought up that on the PNAC website they said they wanted a "pearl harbor" type event. But looking at how things have gone before and since, I think what they wanted was something more like another Cole attack, only where with the Cole their echo chamber kept repeating, "He got a blowjob" and "Wag the dog!" this time it would be saying that this attack represented an immediate threat to our American way of life.

So now it's late summer 2001 and there is noise about something being planned, and someone somewhere is putting in a lot of overtime laughing maniacally and stroking their Persian cat and expecting a car bomb to go off on a street near a military base somewhere or some other equally penny ante kind of thing relative to the stakes in real live geopolitics.

So if that video were in a movie, only jut before that clip we see a flashback where Dick Cheney says, "Whatever - they'll kill forty of fifty grunts at the most!" and then some information that lets us know that what is going on outside is a lot more like loosing six warships and 2500 men, I'd be telling all my friends that it had Oscar written all over it.

Do I believe that's what happened? If it was then whatever Ernst Blofeld they had planning things for them must have been in the wrong wing of the pentagon that day because everything that went down after that made it look a lot more like the show was being run by a bunch of people who couldn't have stopped Al Qaeda if they'd knew that they'd be showing up at the airport in Miami disguised as Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 4:45 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Isn't this what the press is for?
Are they suggesting that the press is too much under state control?
posted by joost de vries at 4:56 PM on October 16, 2010

^However, insinuating they "allowed [it] to proceed" is a big stretch.

NBC News: President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaida two days before Sept. 11 but did not have the chance before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, U.S. and foreign sources told NBC News.

In many respects, the directive, as described to NBC News, outlined essentially the same war plan that the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon put into action after the Sept. 11 attacks. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly to the attacks because it simply had to pull the plans “off the shelf,” Miklaszewski said.

Salon: According to the book, Naik confirmed what the authors had been told by legendary FBI anti-terror czar John O'Neill before he died Sept. 11 -- that oil interests had hampered the investigation into Osama bin Laden's terror network, and provoked the U.S. into making a military threat that triggered Sept. 11.

The Afghanistan war was planned months before the 9/11 attacks.

^The damn thing happened the same day, the same hour, that NORAD was doing a drill of pretty much exactly the same thing happening. Now it's not impossible that's a coincidence, but the p-value is surely low enough to make you think

That's nothing compared to the coincidence of the 7/7 bombings in London. A security firm was conducting a drill based on the scenario of simultaneous bombings at the exact locations that were bombed that day.

Anchor: Just to get this right, you were actually working today on an exercise that envisioned virtually this scenario?

Powers: Almost precisely.

The probability of this coincidence has allegedly been calculated as 1 in 300 tetragillion.

9/11 war games before and during the attacks.
posted by thescientificmethhead at 5:10 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

people drill 24/7
so yeah, the odds would be something one could not pronounce.
posted by clavdivs at 5:33 PM on October 16, 2010

like nixon and jfk in the same city
and only one makes it out alive
posted by clavdivs at 5:36 PM on October 16, 2010

Some days it's hard not to believe the day's events were collectively an inside job, one that was known to be coming and was allowed to proceed, to some degree.

I think you misunderstand the ridiculous FLOOD of bullshit that comes down the pipe everyday. They get literally thousands of plausible-sounding plots from every yahoo with a DIY-bomb kit. Sifting through the shit to find the real deal is a matter of skill and, more importantly, luck. They do what they can, but it's not hard to see where this one probably sounded as kooky as all of the others.
posted by GilloD at 5:37 PM on October 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

I see those as two different things.

I think secret theories of 9/11 can be roughly divided into three categories:

1. The attacks were planned and executed by the US government, PNAC, CIA, Dominionists, or some such. I think this is what "9/11 was an inside job!" usually refers to. I like to think of it as the Watchmen scenario, with Rove or someone trying to play Veidt.
2. The attacks were planned and executed by someone else, but despite knowing about them in advance the government allowed them to happen or even helped them along a bit, in order to manipulate public opinion.
3. The government didn't know about the attacks ahead of time, but cynically used them to manipulate public opinion after the fact, probably in order to start a war that had been planned previously.

None of these are completely absurd— things as bad as #1 have happened historically. So it's a question of what you can find supporting evidence for: controlled-demolition theories are trying to support #1, most of the stuff in this post is trying to support #2, or #3.
posted by hattifattener at 5:54 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I think Alex Jones did WTC 7. WITH HIS MIND.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 5:58 PM on October 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Drill baby drill!
posted by azarbayejani at 5:59 PM on October 16, 2010

Deception was already in the air before 9/11 -

Gen. Hugh Shelton: Clinton Official Suggested Letting U.S. Plane Be Shot Down To Provoke War With Iraq (Madeleine Albright's smoking chemicals).
posted by psyche7 at 6:16 PM on October 16, 2010

During the Zacarias Moussaoui trial the Bush administration claimed that they would have prevented the attacks if he had told them about the plan.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:35 PM on October 16, 2010

Since a few people don't know what the term "begging the question" means, Wikipedia has a good explanation that is worth checking out.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:37 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

None of these are completely absurd— things as bad as #1 have happened historically. So it's a question of what you can find supporting evidence for: controlled-demolition theories are trying to support #1, most of the stuff in this post is trying to support #2, or #3.

If it weren't for Cheney and Rumsfeld's involvement in Operation Just Cause and Desert Storm, I would be willing to give the Bush Administration more benefit of the doubt and say that they pulled a #3 (which is still incredibly maddening.)

However, after that little caper in Central America and our previous exploitation of Kuwait-Iraq relations, #2 sounds less absurd and more like the continuation of political ends through military strategies that Cheney and Rumsfeld have been working on since the late-70's.
posted by jeanmari at 6:53 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Okay. Bush and his people made a naked grab for power. Then they quietly handed the power over to Obama and his people. "Thanks for the power, George." "Don't mention it, Barry." Is that what happened?

What's the point here, Faze? If the Bush Administration overreached, does it make it somehow all okay if they handed it off to somebody else who can abuse the power?

Or maybe your point is that people 'round here aren't hard enough on the abuses of the Obama administration? If so, do you actually read Metafilter? The answer to both those questions can't be yes. I only tune/chime in periodically and lately I've regularly ended up in debates with people who seem to be pretty damn upset about how Obama has handled things (I'm upset about it, and the major point of difference I argue is that I don't think disengaging from the Democrats is going to help anything, not that I think it's A-OK).
posted by namespan at 7:08 PM on October 16, 2010

^I like to think of it as the Watchmen scenario, with Rove or someone trying to play Veidt.

Alan Moore definitely acknowledged the efficacy of false flag attacks in Watchmen, but the real world analogue to Veidt's giant squid hoax would be Project Blue Beam:

When the media has announced in mainstream news that the planet is being attacked by hostile aliens the solution will be martial law declared and the introduction of a one world government and army to fight this threat to humanity. The idea was actually once voiced by the late President Reagan when he spoke about a cause needed to unite the world and suggested that that threat might come from outer space.

^If they had planned it, it would have been clearly connected to Iraq from the beginning.

Well, first of all: “From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11. (CBS News)

Secondly; pinning the blame squarely on Iraq isn't ideal if your goal is to wage an endless war against an invisible enemy throughout the entire middle east and indeed the whole world.

Thirdly; oil was not the only objective. There is the other 'o' word: opium.

“Before 1980, Afghanistan produced 0% of the world’s opium. After the US/CIA backed Mujahadeen won the Soviet/Afghan war, by 1986 they were producing 40% of the world’s heroin supply. By 1999, they were producing 80% of the total market supply.
But then, something unexpected happened.
The Taliban rose to power, and by 2000 they had destroyed most of the opium fields. Production dropped from 3.000+ tons to only 185 tons, a 94% reduction.
On Sept. 9th 2001, the full Afghanistan invasion plans were on President Bush’s desk. Two days later they had their excuse. Today, opium productions in US controlled Afghanistan, which now provides more than 90% of the world’s heroin, breaks new production records nearly every year.” [adapted from Zeitgeist Addendum]

Fox News (Geraldo): We Tolerate the Cultivation of Opium Poppies
ABC News: U.S. Helping Afghan Farmers Grow Opium Poppies
Graph: Afghanistan opium poppy cultivation 1994-2007
MailOnline: Taliban rakes in £63million from heroin crops despite British troops' crackdown on growers
Washington Post: Afghanistan Opium Crop Sets Record

TL;DR: HURF DURF 9/11 TROOF
posted by thescientificmethhead at 7:45 PM on October 16, 2010 [5 favorites]

Begs the Question from Common Errors in English.
posted by mlis at 7:54 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I think Alex Jones did WTC 7. WITH HIS MIND.

You know who else did WTC?
posted by mlis at 7:56 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

if the Bush admin knew it was going to happen, preventing it and then going on to thump on Al Queda makes a spot more sense.
posted by angrycat at 8:12 PM on October 16, 2010

Some days it's hard not to believe the day's events were collectively an inside job, one that was known to be coming and was allowed to proceed, to some degree.

Have you never worked in a bureaucracy?

Do you believe that the findings of the 9/11 Commission - whose formation Bush initially opposed - represents a complete and candid account of the government's actions leading up to and in response to the attacks?

No?

Then you are a 9/11 truther - whether you want to be called that or not.

No document is perfect, but there is a huge difference between "We don't have a complete picture of the internal bungling that led to 9/11" and "It was a controlled demolition!!!" No one let this happen.

---

That said, I think these people don't understand that Wikileaks is also a bureaucracy. They can't promote all their leaks the way they did with Collateral Murder of the afghan leaks. There's a good chance that if they did leak this stuff to wikileaks, that it would have just gotten lost in the noise of all the other leaks.

Also, while it's true that these people may have been warning about 9/11 in advance, it's also possible that lots of other FBI people had bugs up their asses about all kinds of other things, many of which turned out not to be true. There were lots of people who thought saddam had WMDs or was involved in 9/11 or whatever.

Amazing that this 20/20 hindsight peace took nine years to come out.

Plenty of this stuff was written at the time. Coleen Rowley was on the cover of TIME. This article came out now because wikileaks was in the news.
posted by delmoi at 8:46 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Blazecock, I believe the part of the Wikipedia article you are using is this one:

Some English speakers assume "beg the question" means "raise the question" and use it so: for example, "this year's deficit is half a trillion dollars, which begs the question: how are we ever going to balance the budget?" Many usage commentators deem such usage incorrect. (emphasis mine)

Here's the actual, specific, definition of the term.
posted by tzikeh at 8:49 PM on October 16, 2010

The history commons website is pretty good on this as well. One of the few non-crazy websites out there that gather information on 9/11 (although hard to build a constructive theory from due to combinatorial explosion and the survivorship bias of the data). Recommended on the site, is the collected information on key warnings, the two experienced hijackers al Hazmi and al Mihadar. and the timeline of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds.
posted by ollyollyoxenfree at 8:50 PM on October 16, 2010

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also known unknowns. There are things we don't could know but prefer not to.
posted by simms2k at 8:55 PM on October 16, 2010

I went back and searched to see who used "Begs the question" and it turned out it was only Blazecock. And he used it wrong.
posted by delmoi at 8:55 PM on October 16, 2010

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.

The very brief television moment when Bush is at a press conference and someone asks him about Iraq and Saddam Hussain, and he answers "Well, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad" in his faux Texas drawl.... told me everything I've ever needed to know about the invasion of that country.
posted by hippybear at 9:16 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Here is a New Yorker profile of O'Neill: The Counter-Terrorist
posted by mlis at 9:24 PM on October 16, 2010

Some English speakers assume "beg the question" means "raise the question" and use it so: for example, "this year's deficit is half a trillion dollars, which begs the question: how are we ever going to balance the budget?" Many usage commentators deem such usage incorrect. (emphasis mine)

This is not how I used the phrase. I used it properly, to mean that the statement in question makes a questionable prior assumption. Here is what I wrote:

It begs the question that he was much more than a figurehead over his two terms.

This is not "raising the question", it is saying that the previous statement assumes something that is probably incorrect. So either this comment is a knee-jerk reaction to something I wrote, or its writer doesn't understand what begging the question means, or he doesn't have very good reading comprehension skills.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:51 PM on October 16, 2010

MLIS's link is a bit more succinct than the Wiki article and essentially confirms what I'm saying.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:54 PM on October 16, 2010

I am with Blaze delmoi I don't get how you folks are not seeing it.
posted by mlis at 9:55 PM on October 16, 2010

yeah, jinx, coke, et cetera!
posted by mlis at 9:56 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

>>But watch this, and then tell me he knew it was coming, and let it happen.

> It begs the question that he was much more than a figurehead over his two terms.

The original statement translates as "it wasn't an inside job because Bush obviously wasn't prepared for it". There is a fallacy here: the assumption that Bush would know about an inside job, and Blazecock's use of "begging the question" refers to that assumption.

But that's not what the term means. It refers to using the conclusion in your argument, e.g. "I know he's dishonest because he's a crook"; trying to prove your assertion with the assertion itself. That's not the fallacy on display here. The original statement didn't say "it wasn't an inside job because somebody else did it", which actually would beg the question, it said "it wasn't an inside job because if it was then [some other thing would be true]". That thing doesn't follow, but it's not begging the question.

Also, the accepted form is to simply name the fallacy as "begging the question" or "it begs the question", not to follow it with some actual question, i.e. "it begs the question of whether he was necessarily in charge". That form doesn't actually make sense when the term is used correctly.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:46 PM on October 16, 2010

Several things bother me about a couple of comments here.

NORAD conducted drills on September 11th. Neither of which could have influenced the events on that day and there is no evidence that day that it did. One was a drill involving a Russian bomber in Alaska. The other was a plane hijacking with Cuban mercenaries requesting asylum in the united states. The scenario takes place in Florida and Georgia and the other takes place in Alaska and Canada.

Both are well out of range of any involvement with 9/11. If there were 1000 planes in the air above Canada/Alaska and Florida, they wouldn't have enough time to get to New York.

At the time it wasn't unusual for less then a dozen planes able to be launched at a moments notice. Those that were launched, were just simply to far away. At the time there was a speed limit imposed on fighter jets over the mainland. NORAD after Sept 11th called the mainland United States a "donut hole". NORAD radar was designed to look for threats outside of the United States.

There is no evidence that anyone at NORAD was not aware of the exact training scenario that were occurring. In other words, they knew exactly what the steps of the exercise were. So when the FAA did call NORAD, the question was "Is this part of the exercise?" And the answer was that it was not. That is pretty clear cut answer. How would that be confusing? How could that delay any response?

We were caught with our pants down. Plain and simple. They effectively used our own resources against us.

----WTC7

True it wasn't hit by a plane. What was true it was hit by chunks of a 110ft structure falling down next to it and on fire. All photographs show it from the north side. There is evidence of fatal damage to the south side.

Let's look at demolition experts view on WTC7.
posted by andryeevna at 4:13 AM on October 17, 2010 [3 favorites]

Yeah, there was no American who could imagine such an evil plan being hatched. I've yet to see him correct himself.

It's not about individual Americans lacking imagination; it's about the collective monolith of American security apparatus lacking it. That is, the evil in this regard was bureaucracy, more interested in serving its own Kafkaesque ends than actually serving the needs of the bosses (ie: the taxpayers).

____________________________

Has anyone ever done a study of the human tendency towards seeing conspiracies in everything? Is it about seeking patterns in chaos, sort of how we see a face on the moon even though it's all just a bunch of craters? Or how we see the Virgin Mary in a water stain?

Yep. There's lots of evolutionary psychology on this, the idea being, as far as I recall, that we see causality and intentionality that isn't there because the reverse errors are often more dangerous.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I found the above pair of comments and responses to have an interesting consonance.
posted by fairmettle at 5:30 AM on October 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

True it wasn't hit by a plane. What was true it was hit by chunks of a 110ft structure falling down next to it and on fire. All photographs show it from the north side. There is evidence of fatal damage to the south side.

Because the structural damage was asymmetrical, wouldn't this type of collapse been more likely?
posted by Enron Hubbard at 6:19 AM on October 17, 2010

I am somewhat shocked by the level of paranoia in this thread. Having grown up in Cuba, I had thought Americans and especially educated Americans were much more likely to view far-reaching conspiracies as exceedingly rare and even more rarely effective.

The desire for a conspiracy that can make sense of a very tragic set of coincidences is understandable but it is also intellectually lazy and morally as well as politically quite dangerous. Intuition and truth are fundamentally unrelated. You may rationalize it as the implicated parties are plainly guilty of other offenses – perhaps, even crimes – but it is rationalizing this kind of illogic that has justified the miscarriage of justice for centuries.

If that's not obvious to you, perhaps spend a little more time feeling around in the dark of human history which does not begin nor end on September 11, 2001. Or, for that matter, meditate on the meaning of coincidence.

Skepticism requires that you apply the same inflexible and demanding standard of doubt and evidence towards all narratives, not just towards those of your political enemies.
posted by noway at 7:23 AM on October 17, 2010 [13 favorites]

I agree with noway all the way.

I have a friend who is a truther, a good, smart, kind man, and this obsession with 9/11 has hurt his life in a big way. Because he's convinced himself that he has the inside scoop on the most nefarious conspiracy in history, and nothing is more important, and I believe his life has been hurt consequently.
posted by angrycat at 8:36 AM on October 17, 2010

noway - thank you for saying that. I was beginning to wonder what had happened to all of the intelligent, rational people I admire on MetaFilter. A conspiracy of this magnitude would never remain a secret, and would likely break down in multiple pieces just due to the sheer number of *people* who would have to be involved in keeping quiet. Complacency, incompetence, and flat-out not giving a damn about what anyone else thinks but your own little circle of nasties is nearly infinitely more likely to be the reason that these attacks were carried out than any kind of evil plan put together in Cheney's underground bunker.

It's like C.J. Cregg says on The West Wing: "There is no group of people this large in the world that can keep a secret. I find it comforting. It's how I know for sure that the government isn't covering up aliens in New Mexico."
posted by tzikeh at 8:42 AM on October 17, 2010 [2 favorites]

^NORAD conducted drills on September 11th. Neither of which could have influenced the events on that day and there is no evidence that day that it did.

9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes:

For the neads crew, 9/11 was not a story of four hijacked airplanes, but one of a heated chase after more than a dozen potential hijackings—some real, some phantom—that emerged from the turbulence of misinformation that spiked in the first 100 minutes of the attack and continued well into the afternoon and evening.

BOSTON CENTER: Hi. Boston Center T.M.U. [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.
POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?
BOSTON CENTER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.

War Games: the key to a 9/11 USAF stand down

In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings.

In a promotion for speaker John Fulton, a CIA officer assigned as chief of NRO's strategic gaming division, the announcement says, "On the morning of September 11th 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team ... were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day."

This document superseded earlier DOD procedures for dealing with hijacked aircraft, and it requires that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is personally responsible for issuing intercept orders.

Cheney recalls taking charge from bunker

WTC 7:

Jeffrey Shapiro writing for FOX News: "Shortly before the building collapsed, several NYPD officers and Con-Edison workers told me that Larry Silverstein, the property developer of One World Financial Center was on the phone with his insurance carrier to see if they would authorize the controlled demolition of the building – since its foundation was already unstable and expected to fall.

A controlled demolition would have minimized the damage caused by the building’s imminent collapse and potentially save lives. Many law enforcement personnel, firefighters and other journalists were aware of this possible option. There was no secret. There was no conspiracy."

On 9/11 the building's tenants included the IRS, U.S. Secret Service, NYC Office of Emergency Management, the Department of Defense, and the CIA.

Interview with Barry Jennings (who apparently didn't get the memo that the OEM had been abandoned that morning).

Video that seems to show window breakages and explosions that the NIST report cited as indicators of controlled demolition.

"Seven is exploding!"
"This building is about to blow up."
WTC 7 explosion heard by firemen
Interview with first responder Craig Bartmer
Side-by-side comparison with controlled demolitions.
BBC reported WTC 7 collapse 20 minutes early
A compilation of many different videos of the collapse.
posted by thescientificmethhead at 9:41 AM on October 17, 2010

There seems to be a body of circumstantial evidence in light of prior negligence and post activity, but no "smoking gun"

Building Seven is the smoking gun. It's clear as day that building was brought down by explosives: any 12 year old can tell as much just by watching the video of that building imploding. I realize that tons of people will now jump on me and argue otherwise, but it's hard for me to think of anything more suspicious than the collapse of Building Seven. There, I said it.
posted by existential hobo at 1:18 PM on October 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

A conspiracy of this magnitude would never remain a secret, and would likely break down in multiple pieces just due to the sheer number of *people* who would have to be involved in keeping quiet.

What's the conspiracy? I have no idea. I just know there is WAY too much weirdness surrounding the events of that day: the collapse of WTC7, the missing black boxes, the NORAD war games, etc. Instead of saying "conspiracy," maybe we should just be adults and demand a more thorough investigation than the one we got? Because the one we got is seriously deficient on any number of levels.
posted by existential hobo at 1:22 PM on October 17, 2010

BOSTON CENTER: Hi. Boston Center T.M.U. [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.
POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?
BOSTON CENTER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.

That isn't confusion. That confirmation that they knew it wasn't a drill. Exactly what I said in my first post. No confusion. It is one sentence that took less then 10 seconds to explain.


War Games: the key to a 9/11 USAF stand down

Stand down of what? You cite a completely unrelated exercise in Virginia (involving a small corporate jet) that didn't involve NORAD or the USAF and had absolutely no jurisdiction of anything that happened on September 11th. I already pointed out the armed forces involved in the other wargames were no where near the eastern corridor. I'm sure there were fire drills held in new york the same day. That doesn't prove anything nor confuse anything. The drill never even got started because Sept 11th already was happening when it was scheduled.

WTC7:

Shapiro goes on to say: "Building 7 suddenly collapsed, and before it hit the ground, not a single sound emanated from the tower area. There were no explosives; I would have heard them. In fact, I remember that in those few seconds, as the building sank to the ground that I was stunned by how quiet it was."

Larry Silverstein has no authority to demolish buildings in the middle of a national crisis. The term pull it is never used as a demolition term. It is used as a term to pull firefighters out of the building to the fire commander he was speaking to.

Barry Jennings and Michael Hess were in WTC7 when both towers collapsed. Explosions they heard were WTC 1 and 2 collapsing. There is video of Hess still in WTC7 after the collapse.

Firefighters reported south side damage to WTC7. ".on the north and east side of 7 it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. Debris was falling down on the building and it didn’t look good. "... "There was a huge gaping hole and it was scattered throughout there. It was a huge hole. I would say it was probably about a third of it, right in the middle of it."

Photographic evidence of south side damage. (1)(2)

This is what a controlled demolition looks like WITH SOUND. Your comparison is a 47 story tower vs a 15 story tower WITHOUT SOUND. If it were a controlled demolition, they would have had to prepared WTC7 for a controlled demolition. If they didn't prepare for a controlled demolition, the explosions would have to been much more apparent and LOUDER.

Demolition experts refute WTC7 controlled demolition.

A foreign news agency getting the names of 7 different buildings wrong? There was a lot of misinformation that day.

A plane never hit WTC7. Large chunks of WTC 1 and 2 collapsing at the base AND fire was enough to cause damage to collapse WTC7.
posted by andryeevna at 1:28 PM on October 17, 2010 [2 favorites]

That isn't confusion. That confirmation that they knew it wasn't a drill.

9/11 Commission Report: "A shootdown authorization was not communicated to the NORAD air defense sector until 28 minutes after United 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania. Planes were scrambled, but ineffectively, as they did not know where to go or what targets they were to intercept. And once the shootdown order was given, it was not communicated to the pilots. In short, while leaders in Washington believed that the fighters circling above them had been instructed to "take out" hostile aircraft, the only orders actually conveyed to the pilots were to "ID type and tail."" Note: the Commission report emphasizes issues with the intercept orders rather than confusion caused by the war game exercises.

If they didn't prepare for a controlled demolition, the explosions would have to been much more apparent and LOUDER.

I completely agree. The fact that controlled demolitions are extremely loud is one of the most vexing aspects of the 9/11 demolition theories. The lack of audio in this video is extremely frustrating because the video is pretty clearly showing a controlled demolition. But there are many video recordings and eye witness accounts of secondary explosions at Ground Zero on 9/11. I've already posted several in this thread, but here is another that presents a good breakdown: WTC 7: Sound Evidence for Explosions.

Also, I don't know how nano-thermite works, but I suppose it's possible that the implosions of the buildings were not as loud as traditional demolitions because they did not involve traditional explosives. See also: WTC Collapse Under Fresh Scrutiny After Explosive Dust Samples Found :

The energetic material that was found in the WTC dust by an international team of scientists led by Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, consists of “nano-engineered iron oxide and aluminum particles” that “exhibit the same characteristics as advanced energetic materials developed in US national laboratories in the years leading up to 9/11.”

^Building Seven is the smoking gun.

Building 7 and the Pentagon cover up are the two smoking barrels of 9/11. Whether or not it's possible for a 757 airliner to execute the maneuvers required to hit the Pentagon, the confiscation of CCTV footage from businesses around the Pentagon and the conspicuous lack of plane wreckage at the crash site are unsettling, and the only images of the impact available to the public (finally released in 2006) are far from conclusive.

CNN reporter: "From my close-up inspection there is no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon."

maybe we should just be adults and demand a more thorough investigation than the one we got? Because the one we got is seriously deficient on any number of levels.

Commission members agree.

Max Cleland: “One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up”.

Bob Kerrey: “There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version,” Kerrey said. The commission had limited time and limited resources to pursue its investigation, and its access to key documents and witnesses was fettered by the administration.
posted by thescientificmethhead at 2:45 PM on October 17, 2010

oh lordy do i not have patience to refute this conspiracy stuff

i salute those who are doing so

i also wonder: what's the point of uncovering a conspiracy? at this hour? and I say this as one who hated bush and cheney just as much as the most leftist among you

there are just so many other problems afoot
posted by angrycat at 3:01 PM on October 17, 2010

also, these conspiracy musings do get picked up by folks in the Middle East and that does not really help anything. I'm all for slagging off on the U.S. -- there's so much to hate -- but jeez it strikes me as irresponsible to engage in this speculation
posted by angrycat at 3:06 PM on October 17, 2010

What's the point of uncovering a conspiracy at this hour? Because if we expose 9/11 as a hoax, we can discredit and eventually dismantle the other heinous enterprises that cite the 9/11 attacks as justification, specifically the Patriot Act police state and the War on Terror.
posted by thescientificmethhead at 3:27 PM on October 17, 2010

I do think it's a big step to jump from "Bush & Co. knew about the attack and allowed it to happen" and "this was an inside job made to look like a terrorist attack".

Honestly, I don't know enough about any of it to know what to believe. Every trail of research possible leads to its own foregone conclusions about that day. If you look at website X's articles, they all support the views of X. If you look at book Y, it contains a logical chain which supports its own conclusions.

All I do know is that when I got off work that day, I came home to see (for the first time for me) images of planes and buildings and smoke and dust. Something horrible happened that day, and it set us on a path which leads to today. My own research or intuition about it can't possibly uncover the truth, because it's nearly 10 years ago now and everyone has co-opted whatever they need to make their own case.

(That said, I am a bit shocked at the depth of conspiracy linkage in this thread. I didn't know anyone here actually thought along those lines. I keep forgetting that MeFi is as diverse as it is.)
posted by hippybear at 3:43 PM on October 17, 2010

Do you guys think it was the Mossad or just CIA?
posted by mlis at 5:10 PM on October 17, 2010

Dr.No and the blouebacks
posted by clavdivs at 5:42 PM on October 17, 2010

It was Ladybird Johnson, wearing nothing but tefillin and rollerblades.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 7:17 PM on October 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

Mossad or just CIA?

I can only pick one?

Jesse Ventura Schools Foxnews Anchor on Who's Behind 9/11

WeAreChange confronts Bo Dietl (former NYPD detective, ironworker on WTC construction, and friend of John O'Neill)
posted by thescientificmethhead at 7:54 PM on October 17, 2010

Q: If WikiLeaks had been around in 2001, could the events of 9/11 have been prevented?

A: Most definitely.
posted by mrgrimm at 10:42 PM on October 17, 2010

This thread wasted my time. I thought we were gonna talk about leaks and whistle blowers and present outlets and what their effect might have been on the past. Instead I get 9/11 Truthers and arguments about "begs the question". ::sigh::
posted by IvoShandor at 10:44 PM on October 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

Yeah, and I feel badly about that (sorry grounded and thanks for the post) I started things off with the first O'Neill link and things just went off the rails from there. Did not see the Alex Jones stuff coming, though, that was, how to say, different.
posted by mlis at 11:00 PM on October 17, 2010

Maybe a new Godwin's Law for 9/11 threads. Something something about explosive detonation something something I'm gonna pretend I know what I'm talking about something something. Alas. Article was an interesting jumping off point for discussion, albeit a bit short.
posted by IvoShandor at 11:48 PM on October 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

The wargames had little effect on anything because by the time NORAD was notified it was already too late.

NORAD had very little and no time to react:

"the NEADS air defenders had nine minutes' notice on the first hijacked plane, no advance notice on the second, no advance notice on the third, and no advance notice on the fourth."

9 minutes was not enough time to identify the target or its destination.

The entire 1.2 IMPROVISING A HOMELAND DEFENSE section shows exactly what happened when. Go on, read it yourself. The confusion was with juggling civilian aircraft which may or may not have been hijacked. Planes disappearing by slamming into the towers added to the confusion as many of the military were still looking for them as other planes were being hijacked.

There is absolutely no evidence that any of this confusion was the result of wargames.

This is evidenced by the 9/11 commission report footnote 116. "According to General Eberhart, after the first attack, "it took about 30 seconds" to make the adjustment to the real-world situation"

In fact, the response was sped up because NORAD officials were already in place during the attack because of the drill going on that day.

--------WTC7

The demolition experts disagree with your assertion that WTC7 looks like a controlled demolition. Non-demolition experts contend that it does.

Their independant siesmograph disputes the claim of any demolition siesmic activitiy. No spikes were recorded on independent seismographs active that day.

There were several demolition experts several hundred feet from WTC7 on September 11 and they dispute the NON-expert assertion of demolition charges exploding.

There was no evidence of a demolition in the piles of debris.

Composite image of WTC7 south side damage. Taken from this video

-----Pentagon

Evidence of wreckage: Engine wreckage. Wheel wreckage Lawn wreckage. (1)(2)(3)

CCTV footage that shows very little and nothing. Citgo. Doubletree

Max Cleland is 100 percent right. I am no fan of Bush at all. I am just not prepared to ignore the evidence that 9/11 was caused by Muslim extremists and not by some clandestine secret organization or our government. The whole Iraq situation pisses me off. My best friend from grade school has been in Iraq and was there till 2007 and is now currently in Afghanistan. I'm right there with you if you believe Bush used 9/11 to advance his agenda. I cannot under good conscience blame him for it.
posted by andryeevna at 3:31 AM on October 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

I don't have a dog in the "who did WTC" fight, but I think the incredulousness of "It's so OBVIOUS that it was the burning jet fuel" stems from people not wanting to look stupid, combined with any questioning of the Official Story being conflated with the tinfoil hat brigade.

Hell, the average citizen could SEE an alien with their own eyes, even talk to it, but when the news says "It was a weather balloon" and the public says "only an IDIOT would believe in aliens!" The average citizen will tell themselves "Huh, it must have been something else, these people are experts" and eventually get to the level of mocking incredulousness.
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 11:45 AM on October 18, 2010

Sweden denies residency permit to WikiLeaks founder
posted by homunculus at 12:17 PM on October 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

Months Later, Defense Secretary Gates Reveals Wikileaks Document Leak Didn't Actually Reveal Intelligence Sources
posted by homunculus at 12:27 PM on October 18, 2010 [2 favorites]