[quote]
BostonBarrister wrote:
Conspiracy theories rest on the premise that the government is super-competent, and some number of higher ups managed to be competent enough to go across agencies and parties to coordinate something of this magnitude – and then have kept it all under wraps, with not one credible person coming forward and claiming to have been part of the whole cover up, which would necessarily have had to involve many people at various levels of government.
Inner Hulk wrote:
Tell me this.
Why is that when someone says maybe the government orchestrated the attacks, someone counters and says it would have taken hundreds of people to carry out such a thing. YET, these people believe that NINETEEN foreigners with extremely limited knowledge of 757 knowhow executed the attack almost flawlessly.
Stupid much?[/quote]
Why am I not surprised someone of your sophistication and reasoning skills, on such prominent display in the thread on corporate profits, would buy in to this?
It would not have taken “hundreds” – it would necessarily have involved thousands of people, across local, state and national governments, across agencies within said governments, and within the military. And yet, somehow, some way, no one involved has come forward or been caught with actual evidence of this conspiracy?
“NINETEEN” (by the way, thanks for bolding - it adds such force to your point - next time, try adding words like “really, really big” in front of “NINETEEN”, or maybe even bolding, for added rhetorical force) people involved in the same terrorist organization is comparable to that, hmmm?
And BTW, they weren’t living in caves before 9/11 - Osama’s been in a cave since, but many of the 9/11 hijackers were well educated, including and particularly Mohammed Atta. The planner was as well, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed.
The government can’t keep the lid on its wireless telecommunication searches of foreign communications, couldn’t cover up abuse by a relatively small group of soldiers half a world away in one prison location, or.
State and federal governmental agencies couldn’t coordinate tying their shoes for days after Katrina. But the fiendishly clever Bush Administration, which has managed to tie up its other leaks and loose ends so well, has tied up all the loose ends and controlled all the pieces to keep this grand conspiracy under wraps for the past 6 years?
There is a reason why a large number of articles constituting JTF’s supposed proof have not been picked up by any respectable news agencies, and it’s not a corporate conspiracy on top of the original conspiracy. It’s because they’re garbage: not well sourced, not provable on fact checking, not corroborated by any respected sources. Some joker on YouTube is not definitive proof…
The problem here is that you and rest of the fever-swamp conspiracy set like to “reason” by taking one hugely improbable outcome out of an almost infinite set of possibilities and concluding that it must be true.
[quote]Inner Hulk wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
Conspiracy theories rest on the premise that the government is super-competent, and some number of higher ups managed to be competent enough to go across agencies and parties to coordinate something of this magnitude – and then have kept it all under wraps, with not one credible person coming forward and claiming to have been part of the whole cover up, which would necessarily have had to involve many people at various levels of government.
Tell me this.
Why is that when someone says maybe the government orchestrated the attacks, someone counters and says it would have taken hundreds of people to carry out such a thing. YET, these people believe that NINETEEN foreigners with extremely limited knowledge of 757 knowhow executed the attack almost flawlessly.
Stupid much?[/quote]
Creating fake amputation for movie much harder than actually cutting limb.
[quote]Inner Hulk wrote:
Deviating from the flight path and plotting a new course hundreds of miles away? Quite advanced piloting for 19 cave dwellers, don’t ya think?[/quote]
JustTheFacts wrote:
…since the Pakistani General hasn’t been arrested, tortured and put on trial by Pakistan or the US as far as anyone has heard.
A direct financial link to the hijackers is having breakfast with the soon to be head of the CIA and a republican senator on 9/11, and is NEVER brought to justice – yet somehow in your mind, I’m the “twisted individual” for repeating the actual facts. Its what they DIDN’T do with the General that ultimately tells the story.
Gosh, how could the government ever get away with such a thing?
BostonBarrister wrote:
Again, the internal functioning (or lack thereof) of Pakistan’s government proves – or even implies – what? Nothing related to the point.
As I said earlier, Musharraf is doing all he can to hold on in Pakistan ( Poll: Bin Laden tops Musharraf in Pakistan - CNN.com ) – yet because he doesn’t take on a very powerful constituency, that is a point of proof that the U.S. government staged 9/11? Please.
JustTheFacts wrote:
Man your really trying to cloud the issue – the internal functioning of Pakistan’s government has little relevancy to my point.
This isn’t rocket science – Did Goss meet with the Pakistani General on 9/11? YES. Did the General have $100,000 wired to Atta? YES. Has the US arrested or demanded that Pakistan turn him over to be tried on terrorism charges? NO. THEN WHY NOT!?
Its a very simple question/concept for anyone still capable of critical thought.
Republican tough talk on terrorism except when confronted with your own red, white and blue elephant in the room.[/quote]
Let me see if I can make this more simple for you. Why would we go out in the world and demand Musharraf, whom we believe is our ally and is working with us against al Queda in Pakistan, deliver something to us which he is incapable of delivering? If the general was the former head of the Pakistani secret service, which has been accused of subverting Musharraf’s government, having a hand in attempted assassinations of Musharraf and of working with al Queda in the border region, what makes you think Musharraf could capture him or force his delivery? Musharraf is in a precarious, unstable position, but he is supposed to step in and force this to occur?
And if we were to demand Musharraf do so in public, we would accomplish two things: 1) inflame the internal Pakistani situation; and/or 2) make Musharraf look weak at home and internationally.
Do these sound intelligent to you? That’s why we haven’t demanded it. The general hasn’t been otherwise dealt with because Musharraf can’t do it - he hasn’t been able to overcome or oust the al Queda influence in the internal security forces.
[quote]
JustTheFacts wrote: Bush Opposes 9/11 Query Panel
Its no wonder they didn’t want a true, independent investigation of 9/11 – it would have exposed the government lies even worse than the Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation did…
BostonBarrister wrote:
So, Bush is against releasing top-secret information to a panel - perhaps he doesn’t like the idea of detailed information about the U.S.'s anti-terrorism defenses and other such info getting out (because no one ever leaks these things…) -
so therefore it must have been a massive, cross-party, cross-branch and cross-agency governmental conspiracy. Just like the failure to release video tape that could have shown sensitive defense info on the Pentagon, like the placement of hidden SAMs and other such things, was proof of the same. Do you see any holes there?
JustTheFacts wrote:
Ah, SECRECY – another convenient use for 9/11.
WHAT detailed information about the U.S.'s anti-terrorism defenses (before 9/11) would he want to keep secret!? Isn’t that the point – there apparently wasn’t ANY. They already knew the “plane” making a beeline for DC that eventually hit the Pentagon was hijacked – so what does the unreleased video show? The LACK OF defenses around the Pentagon for one.
A lumbering, hijacked jet flew for two hours over the most heavily guarded air space in the WORLD and slammed into the front door of DOD’s headquarters! From where I’m at in PA, I could have DRIVEN to the Pentagon after the first plane hit the towers and been there in time to watch it happen.
We’re supposed to believe that 19 half-wit Arab “hijackers” spent five some odd years of meticulous training and millions of dollars (?) training for a mission who’s success relied solely… solely on our government’s inefficient bureaucracy!? Please.
(9/11 planner: “Hey, I got brilliant idea! We train to fly airplane for 5 years, probably spend millions – then we hijack airliner full of passengers with ahhh, box cutters lets say – then make u-turn and fly wrong way over Langley Airforce Base and crash into Pentagon. I figure we have two hour window, tops. It perfect plan!”)
Next they’ll break into Fort Knox with shovels – seriously, who would suspect that? After all, that IS the rational for 9/11.[/quote]
Yes, just so obvious and convenient that it must not be true. There is obviously nothing we’d want to hide from either other countries or future attackers.
There is absolutely no reason to want to keep secret the details of failures in the defensive response to a surprise attack. Why, the mere suggestion of the desire for secrecy obviously proves the double-secrete probation conspiracy theories.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
do you not see the categorical difference between the CIA planning foreign operations, hypothetical or otherwise, versus and idea of a conspiracy that involved state and federal governmental officials and the military in an organized attack on the United States. Which was not only kept amazingly secret – unlike those top-secret plans for foreign ops, mind you – but also so well executed as to leave no actual proof of its existence.[/quote]
This is one of my all-time favorite debunking arguments. First of all, it WASN’T kept amazingly secret – if things like Porter Goss and the 9/11 finance guy having breakfast in DC on the morning of 9/11 whiz past your head as “not suspicious”, what does it matter. People know all about it, they just choose to pretend its not exactly how it appears. Actual proof of its existence is EVERYWHERE – and you practically admit it yourself.
An operation too massive and calculated for the US government to secretly pull off was “officially” pulled off by 19 Arabs with box cutters and less than amateur pilots who it seems could never to keep a low profile…
FAA Was Alerted To Sept. 11 Hijacker
(CBS) Months before Hani Hanjour is believed to have flown an American Airlines jet into the Pentagon, managers at an Arizona flight school reported him at least five times to the FAA http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/10/attack/main508656.shtml
And didn’t you watch the “Lone Gunmen” pilot episode aired 6 months BEFORE 9/11 – fiction or not, it’d be rather easy (and not for Arabs) http://killtown.911review.org/lonegunmen.html
Especially when you have the means, motive and technology…
DOV S. ZAKHEIM TAKES OFFICE AS UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
May 07, 2001
Zakheim has previously served in a number of key positions in government and private business. Most recently, he was corporate vice president of System Planning Corp…
System Planning Corporation - Flight Termination System:
System Planning Corporation is proud to offer the Flight Termination System (FTS), a fully redundant turnkey range safety and test system for remote control and flight termination of airborne test vehicles… http://www.sysplan.com/Radar/FTS
Of course also being a PNAC member and signatory of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” calling for a “new Pearl Harbor” is just another one of those “wacky coincidences” that’s so easily shrugged off…
[quote]orion wrote:
rainjack wrote:
lixy wrote:
bigflamer wrote:
Links to back this up?
Get a clue.
In terorrist-ese: “I don’t need to back anything up”.
The majority of the highjackers were Saudi Arabian, Bin Laden belongs to the second most influential family in Saudi Arabia, which also happens to be filthy rich and the Saudis have long standing tradition to finance islamist organizations.
Do your homework.
[/quote]
Orion is making a very good case for conquering Saudi Arabia. Oil hit $80/barrel today. I say ‘GO’. (Just wish I could get in on it, like you young gents can!!)
If the rest of the world would join us, we could conquer the whole ME and simply take the oil. Hell, western countries developed those fields anyway. The people there are just tribes of marauding savages anyway. Treat 'em like the US Army did the Indians — put up a reservation in Darfur, or some other hellhole.
[quote]
BostonBarrister wrote:
do you not see the categorical difference between the CIA planning foreign operations, hypothetical or otherwise, versus and idea of a conspiracy that involved state and federal governmental officials and the military in an organized attack on the United States. Which was not only kept amazingly secret – unlike those top-secret plans for foreign ops, mind you – but also so well executed as to leave no actual proof of its existence.
JustTheFacts wrote:
This is one of my all-time favorite debunking arguments. First of all, it WASN’T kept amazingly secret – if things like Porter Goss and the 9/11 finance guy having breakfast in DC on the morning of 9/11 whiz past your head as “not suspicious”, what does it matter. People know all about it, they just choose to pretend its not exactly how it appears. Actual proof of its existence is EVERYWHERE – and you practically admit it yourself.
An operation too massive and calculated for the US government to secretly pull off was “officially” pulled off by 19 Arabs with box cutters and less than amateur pilots who it seems could never to keep a low profile…[/quote]
Yes, imagine that: it’s easier to coordinate a small group to act in a cohesive fashion than a huge, disparate group with conflicting interests. The “massive” part of the argument refers to the difficulty of keeping the secret and keeping all actual evidence under wraps afterward, not in the hijacking or the run-up.
And this works into the conspiracy theory how? Someone on the inside was floating secret signals, and then has clammed up afterward? Please do tell…
[quote]JustTheFacts wrote:
Especially when you have the means, motive and technology…
DOV S. ZAKHEIM TAKES OFFICE AS UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
May 07, 2001
Zakheim has previously served in a number of key positions in government and private business. Most recently, he was corporate vice president of System Planning Corp…
System Planning Corporation - Flight Termination System:
System Planning Corporation is proud to offer the Flight Termination System (FTS), a fully redundant turnkey range safety and test system for remote control and flight termination of airborne test vehicles… http://www.sysplan.com/Radar/FTS
Of course also being a PNAC member and signatory of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” calling for a “new Pearl Harbor” is just another one of those “wacky coincidences” that’s so easily shrugged off… [/quote]
Umm – so what? How many various contingency plans are out there? I know you think the Jews run everything, but this is ridiculous.
A good article by the author if the book I linked above:
Our Clueless Intelligence System
By Amy Zegart
Sunday, July 8, 2007; B01
The hunt was on last week as British intelligence officials searched for suspects in the attempted bombings in Scotland and London. After the attention fades, they’ll examine what went right and wrong and how to do better next time. Let’s hope that in doing so, they’ll be more successful than the United States has been since Sept. 11, 2001.
Our national response to the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history has consisted chiefly of finger pointing and ax grinding. Some say Clinton administration officials were too wimpy in their response to earlier al-Qaeda attacks outside the United States. Others think that Bush administration officials were out to lunch, so preoccupied with Cold War bogeymen that they never noticed the CIA’s memo warning of Osama bin Laden’s determination to strike on U.S. soil.
We’ve become obsessed with the personal drama of failure. As Bob Woodward wrote in his book “The Commanders”: “Decision making at the highest levels . . . is a complex human interaction. . . . This human story is the core.”
Actually, the human story is irrelevant. Those who want to learn what went wrong and how to fix it need to understand something far less intriguing: bureaucracy – the organizational weaknesses that cause smart people to make dumb decisions.
Many of the agonizing missteps and missed clues leading to 9/11 are now well known. There was the failure to watchlist or spread the word about Khalid Almihdhar, the 9/11 hijacker who first attracted the CIA’s attention in January 2000 when he attended an al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia carrying a multiple-entry U.S. visa in his passport.
There is the FBI’s “Phoenix memo,” which warned that bin Laden could be training terrorists in U.S. flight schools but which never reached top FBI officials or any other intelligence agency. And there is the refusal by FBI headquarters to seek a search warrant for the computer files of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted in the United States for his connection to the 9/11 plot.
But these screw-ups are the tip of the iceberg, and they all stem from a handful of organizational deficiencies that have plagued U.S. intelligence agencies for decades-- and, despite intelligence “reform,” still do.
Public government documents reveal that the CIA and the FBI missed 23 potential opportunities to disrupt the
9/11 attacks. In each case, failure stemmed from the same causes: 1. agency cultures that led officials to resist new ideas, technologies and missions; 2. promotion incentives that rewarded all the wrong things; and 3. structural weaknesses that hampered the CIA and the FBI and prevented all 15 U.S intelligence agencies from working as a unified team.
Case in point: Nineteen days before 9/11, the FBI got word that the suspected al-Qaeda operative Almihdhar might be in the United States. Its response was to put the manhunt on the back burner and call out the C-team. The search was designated “routine,” the lowest priority level, and given to an agent who had just finished his rookie year.
Although a full-scale, first-string effort might not have found Almihdhar in time, the evidence suggests otherwise. He and fellow hijacker Nawaf Alhazmi were hiding in plain sight, using their real names on rental agreements, bank accounts, credit cards, auto insurance and telephone listings. They were also operating under the FBI’s nose, living for a while with an FBI informant and making contact with several targets of counterterrorism investigations. On the evening of 9/11, an anguished FBI agent, suspecting Almihdhar, submitted his name to the bureau’s information technology center just to see what a search of public records would uncover. A few hours later, he got Almihdhar’s correct address in San Diego.
Individuals were not the problem. The FBI was. The bureau’s highly decentralized structure – which assigned all cases to a lead office – meant that what should have been a nationwide effort was instead the focus of a few people in New York. The FBI’s law enforcement culture, which prized catching criminals and investigating past crimes more than finding suspected terrorists and preventing future disasters, guaranteed that the manhunt would go straight to the bottom of the pile. And in an organization in which convictions made careers, finding potential terrorists went to one of the office’s least seasoned investigators because it was one of the least desirable jobs.
These and other crippling organizational weaknesses were no secret before 9/11. Between 1991 and 2001, a dozen reports examining U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism capabilities found serious organizational problems and urged immediate action. The consensus was stunning. Of 340 recommendations, 84 percent focused on the same four deficiencies: poor coordination across intelligence agencies, terrible information sharing, inadequate human intelligence and insufficient attention to setting priorities.
But almost none of the suggested fixes were implemented before 9/11. Most recommendations – 268, or 79 percent of the total – spurred no action. Nothing. The 9/11 commission and the congressional intelligence committees found that these same weaknesses led to disaster on 9/11.
If you think these problems have been solved, think again. Despite the recent creation of a director of national intelligence, the U.S. intelligence community remains a dysfunctional family with no one firmly in charge. The “new FBI” is still fighting the old FBI’s cops-and-robbers culture. Visit the bureau’s Web site, where job postings are divided into two categories – special agents who wear badges, carry guns and catch bad guys, and everyone else. Analysts, those dot-connectors who since
9/11 have been touted as equal partners in the FBI’s counterterrorism mission, are still relegated to “professional support staff,” alongside auto mechanics and janitors.
Meanwhile, incentives still encourage analysts everywhere to think in the short term. At his confirmation hearings last year, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden warned Congress that unless the United States gets serious about doing big-picture analysis, it will be “endlessly surprised.” And not in a good way.
Even our successes aren’t cause for celebration. The FBI’s recent disruptions of terrorist plots to kill soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey and to blow up the Sears tower in Chicago and New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport were all in the early planning stages – more pipe dreams than pipe bombs. In January, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III characterized the bureau’s 2006 record as one of stopping “several unsophisticated, small-scale attack plans that reflect the broader problem homegrown extremists pose.”
Intelligence reform is failing now for the same reasons it always has: Transforming any organization from the inside is hard, and imposing reform from the outside is even harder.
No organization changes easily by itself. Businesses often fail to adapt to shifting market conditions even when their corporate lives depend on it. Government agencies are worse off because they aren’t designed to adapt. They’re built to be reliable and fair, performing the same tasks in standard ways over and over again.
This isn’t all bad. Standard operating procedures ensure that all military pilots have the same rules of engagement and that everyone stands in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. But the downside is that government agencies are hardwired to keep doing things the same old way even when they shouldn’t.
Imposing intelligence reform from the outside has always been a political loser. There’s a reason why no president since Harry S. Truman has gotten serious about overhauling intelligence agencies through executive orders or legislation. It’s called the Pentagon. For decades, the Defense Department has controlled about 80 percent of the intelligence budget and housed most of the agencies. And for decades, it has fiercely resisted any move to realign power in the CIA or anywhere else. Pentagon officials and their turf-conscious congressional supporters have been torpedoing intelligence reform forever – crippling the CIA when it was created in 1947, savaging intelligence reform bills twice in the 1990s and fatally weakening the powers of the new national intelligence director during the last reform round, after the release of the 9/11 commission’s report in 2004.
There’s no magic potion for fixing U.S. intelligence. Meaningful reform will take years, requiring bottom-up cultural transformation as well as top-down policy changes. Sadly, it may need another catastrophic failure to gain traction. We’ve known about intelligence problems and their solutions for years. What we’ve never had, and desperately need, is the political courage in the White House and Congress to take on the Pentagon, demand radical overhaul and see it through.
Now that’s where individuals matter.
Amy Zegart is associate professor of public policy at UCLA and the author of the forthcoming “Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI and the Origins of 9/11.”
[quote]JustTheFacts wrote:
We’re supposed to believe that 19 half-wit Arab “hijackers” spent five some odd years of meticulous training and millions of dollars (?) training for a mission who’s success relied solely… solely on our government’s inefficient bureaucracy!? Please.
[/quote]
BostonBarrister wrote:
do you not see the categorical difference between the CIA planning foreign operations, hypothetical or otherwise, versus and idea of a conspiracy that involved state and federal governmental officials and the military in an organized attack on the United States. Which was not only kept amazingly secret – unlike those top-secret plans for foreign ops, mind you – but also so well executed as to leave no actual proof of its existence.
JustTheFacts wrote:
This is one of my all-time favorite debunking arguments. First of all, it WASN’T kept amazingly secret – if things like Porter Goss and the 9/11 finance guy having breakfast in DC on the morning of 9/11 whiz past your head as “not suspicious”, what does it matter. People know all about it, they just choose to pretend its not exactly how it appears. Actual proof of its existence is EVERYWHERE – and you practically admit it yourself.
An operation too massive and calculated for the US government to secretly pull off was “officially” pulled off by 19 Arabs with box cutters and less than amateur pilots who it seems could never to keep a low profile…
Yes, imagine that: it’s easier to coordinate a small group to act in a cohesive fashion than a huge, disparate group with conflicting interests. The “massive” part of the argument refers to the difficulty of keeping the secret and keeping all actual evidence under wraps afterward, not in the hijacking or the run-up.
JustTheFacts wrote:
And didn’t you watch the “Lone Gunmen” pilot episode aired 6 months BEFORE 9/11 – fiction or not, it’d be rather easy (and not for Arabs) http://killtown.911review.org/lonegunmen.html
And this works into the conspiracy theory how? Someone on the inside was floating secret signals, and then has clammed up afterward? Please do tell…
JustTheFacts wrote:
Especially when you have the means, motive and technology…
DOV S. ZAKHEIM TAKES OFFICE AS UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
May 07, 2001
Zakheim has previously served in a number of key positions in government and private business. Most recently, he was corporate vice president of System Planning Corp…
System Planning Corporation - Flight Termination System:
System Planning Corporation is proud to offer the Flight Termination System (FTS), a fully redundant turnkey range safety and test system for remote control and flight termination of airborne test vehicles… http://www.sysplan.com/Radar/FTS
Of course also being a PNAC member and signatory of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” calling for a “new Pearl Harbor” is just another one of those “wacky coincidences” that’s so easily shrugged off…
Umm – so what? How many various contingency plans are out there? I know you think the Jews run everything, but this is ridiculous.[/quote]
Don’t bother, your wasting your time here. Actually, Your time would be more productive if your were to try and smash through a brick wall with your fist.
Bin Laden didn’t do it. He’s still alive. His organization did it. Al-Qaeda I’m sure you are familiar with them. It is well established he ordered the attack beyond a reasonable doubt. Not enough for a radical like yourself but more then enough for a prudent man.
Osama bin Laden denied any involvement in 9/11 and no indictments have been made against him for those acts. In fact, the only “proof” we have of Osama’s involvement is a mysterious videotape that showed up right before the elections in 2004 where he all of a sudden changed his tune. Hardly anything that would hold up in court.
Thanks but on this I’ll stick with Strunk & White and the folks who would grade your GMAT, should you take it:
Quote from Strunk & White:
A common inaccuracy is the use of the plural pronoun when the antecedent is a distributive expression such as each, each one, everybody, every one, many a man, which, though implying more than one person, requires the pronoun to be in the singular. Similar to this, but with even less justification, is the use of the plural pronoun with the antecedent anybody, any one, somebody, some one, the intention being either to avoid the awkward “he or she,” or to avoid committing oneself to either. Some bashful speakers even say, “A friend of mine told me that they, etc.”
See also: The Cambridge Guide to English Usage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; ISBN 0-521-62181-X), p.538.
Don’t bother, your wasting your time here. Actually, Your time would be more productive if your were to try and smash through a brick wall with your fist.[/quote]
Yeah, I know. I’m more posting for anyone who might read and actually believe his tripe.
What I find especially irksome is that this whole conspiracy line is a distraction from addressing the real structural problems that still exist in our intelligence and counter-intelligence services.
Aside from having people embrace a John Grisham reality and go off tilting at conspiracy windmills (mixing literary references, I know), which is depressing enough, it interferes with the creation of the will required to push some of these things through.
I suppose it’s much scarier for some to contemplate the massive incompetence of our government than to imagine an all-powerful government capable for malevolence…
BostonBarrister wrote:
Conspiracy theories rest on the premise that the government is super-competent, and some number of higher ups managed to be competent enough to go across agencies and parties to coordinate something of this magnitude – and then have kept it all under wraps, with not one credible person coming forward and claiming to have been part of the whole cover up, which would necessarily have had to involve many people at various levels of government.
Inner Hulk wrote:
Tell me this.
Why is that when someone says maybe the government orchestrated the attacks, someone counters and says it would have taken hundreds of people to carry out such a thing. YET, these people believe that NINETEEN foreigners with extremely limited knowledge of 757 knowhow executed the attack almost flawlessly.
Stupid much?
Why am I not surprised someone of your sophistication and reasoning skills, on such prominent display in the thread on corporate profits, would buy in to this?
It would not have taken “hundreds” – it would necessarily have involved thousands of people, across local, state and national governments, across agencies within said governments, and within the military. And yet, somehow, some way, no one involved has come forward or been caught with actual evidence of this conspiracy?
“NINETEEN” (by the way, thanks for bolding - it adds such force to your point - next time, try adding words like “really, really big” in front of “NINETEEN”, or maybe even bolding, for added rhetorical force) people involved in the same terrorist organization is comparable to that, hmmm?
And BTW, they weren’t living in caves before 9/11 - Osama’s been in a cave since, but many of the 9/11 hijackers were well educated, including and particularly Mohammed Atta. The planner was as well, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed.
The government can’t keep the lid on its wireless telecommunication searches of foreign communications, couldn’t cover up abuse by a relatively small group of soldiers half a world away in one prison location, or.
State and federal governmental agencies couldn’t coordinate tying their shoes for days after Katrina. But the fiendishly clever Bush Administration, which has managed to tie up its other leaks and loose ends so well, has tied up all the loose ends and controlled all the pieces to keep this grand conspiracy under wraps for the past 6 years?
There is a reason why a large number of articles constituting JTF’s supposed proof have not been picked up by any respectable news agencies, and it’s not a corporate conspiracy on top of the original conspiracy. It’s because they’re garbage: not well sourced, not provable on fact checking, not corroborated by any respected sources. Some joker on YouTube is not definitive proof…
The problem here is that you and rest of the fever-swamp conspiracy set like to “reason” by taking one hugely improbable outcome out of an almost infinite set of possibilities and concluding that it must be true.
You really should dig in and reach around under your couch cushions and put together a jar full of sticky change to use to buy yourself a clue. Start with a beginner-level class on economics, and follow it up with intro to logic. Then buy and read this book, which I referenced above: Amazon.com
[/quote]
You can’t compare the incompetence in regards to the many Bush administration failures to a hypothetical attack on US soil. Don’t you think an operation of this nature would have required the utmost privacy, security, and loyalty? You really think they’re going to go about it casually? Really now.
By your own admittance, you believe 19 men carried out this attack. Therefore, it would stand to reason that the government could have also executed the attack with 30 or less men. Why is it so wildly unbelieveable that less than a hundred people on the inside could have carried out a covert op but yet foreigners with not nearly the resours could have? WHY?
The problem with you and the rest of your kind is that you’re readily willing to accept government THEORY. Yes, capitalized again. All of the important questions remain unanswered, brushed aside by that fucking joke of a 9.11 commission. WTC 7? You forget about that building? Who needs an explanation for a 40+ story building collapsing, right? Or why the pentagon videos aren’t released??
Don’t you wonder why Bush blocked a 9/11 commission for years? Or why firefighter engineering called the 9/11 investigation a “half baked farce”?
Of course you don’t. It was crazy fanatical muslims, and that’s that. There is no other possiblity, nothing. Insanely important questions don’t need to be answered, you have the government’s word. And as we all know, the US government never, ever deceives.
As I pointed out to JTF, there are completely believable security-related reasons for secrecy. The people’s representatives on select committees of the legislature, and on the 9/11 commission, have reviewed the evidence. Who knows why Bush & Cheney wanted to appear in tandem? The 9/11 committee probably does. Just because we live in a Wikipedia society doesn’t mean that the government necessarily needs to provide all the information we would want. And just to restate, the lack of evidence is not evidence of a conspiracy…
[/quote]
This is fine but why take issue with citizens who question the government’s right to withhold pertinent information? A wikipedia society might be the only society that can maintain a Constitutional Republic.
[quote]
Thanks but on this I’ll stick with Strunk & White and the folks who would grade your GMAT, should you take it:
Quote from Strunk & White:
A common inaccuracy is the use of the plural pronoun when the antecedent is a distributive expression such as each, each one, everybody, every one, many a man, which, though implying more than one person, requires the pronoun to be in the singular. Similar to this, but with even less justification, is the use of the plural pronoun with the antecedent anybody, any one, somebody, some one, the intention being either to avoid the awkward “he or she,” or to avoid committing oneself to either. Some bashful speakers even say, “A friend of mine told me that they, etc.”
See also: The Cambridge Guide to English Usage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; ISBN 0-521-62181-X), p.538.[/quote]
Fine you win but only because you had to physically get up and take a book off it’s shelf and quote from it. This probably will be the only thing I remember if I take the GMAT so maybe this whole discussion has been worthwhile after all.
[quote]
BostonBarrister wrote:
Conspiracy theories rest on the premise that the government is super-competent, and some number of higher ups managed to be competent enough to go across agencies and parties to coordinate something of this magnitude – and then have kept it all under wraps, with not one credible person coming forward and claiming to have been part of the whole cover up, which would necessarily have had to involve many people at various levels of government.
Inner Hulk wrote:
Tell me this.
Why is that when someone says maybe the government orchestrated the attacks, someone counters and says it would have taken hundreds of people to carry out such a thing. YET, these people believe that NINETEEN foreigners with extremely limited knowledge of 757 knowhow executed the attack almost flawlessly.
Stupid much?
BostonBarrister wrote:
Why am I not surprised someone of your sophistication and reasoning skills, on such prominent display in the thread on corporate profits, would buy in to this?
It would not have taken “hundreds” – it would necessarily have involved thousands of people, across local, state and national governments, across agencies within said governments, and within the military. And yet, somehow, some way, no one involved has come forward or been caught with actual evidence of this conspiracy?
“NINETEEN” (by the way, thanks for bolding - it adds such force to your point - next time, try adding words like “really, really big” in front of “NINETEEN”, or maybe even bolding, for added rhetorical force) people involved in the same terrorist organization is comparable to that, hmmm?
And BTW, they weren’t living in caves before 9/11 - Osama’s been in a cave since, but many of the 9/11 hijackers were well educated, including and particularly Mohammed Atta. The planner was as well, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed.
The government can’t keep the lid on its wireless telecommunication searches of foreign communications, couldn’t cover up abuse by a relatively small group of soldiers half a world away in one prison location, or.
State and federal governmental agencies couldn’t coordinate tying their shoes for days after Katrina. But the fiendishly clever Bush Administration, which has managed to tie up its other leaks and loose ends so well, has tied up all the loose ends and controlled all the pieces to keep this grand conspiracy under wraps for the past 6 years?
There is a reason why a large number of articles constituting JTF’s supposed proof have not been picked up by any respectable news agencies, and it’s not a corporate conspiracy on top of the original conspiracy. It’s because they’re garbage: not well sourced, not provable on fact checking, not corroborated by any respected sources. Some joker on YouTube is not definitive proof…
The problem here is that you and rest of the fever-swamp conspiracy set like to “reason” by taking one hugely improbable outcome out of an almost infinite set of possibilities and concluding that it must be true.
You really should dig in and reach around under your couch cushions and put together a jar full of sticky change to use to buy yourself a clue. Start with a beginner-level class on economics, and follow it up with intro to logic. Then buy and read this book, which I referenced above: Amazon.com
Inner Hulk wrote:
You can’t compare the incompetence in regards to the many Bush administration failures to a hypothetical attack on US soil. Don’t you think an operation of this nature would have required the utmost privacy, security, and loyalty? You really think they’re going to go about it casually? Really now.[/quote]
Ah, but I can – particularly in relation to the top secret national security programs regarding wireless communications that were leaked to the press, the fight between the state and defense departments over Iraq, which was leaked all over the press, or seemingly anything else the Bush administration has tried to keep secret. And don’t forget, this would require secrecy across party lines, across agencies, departments, levels of government, etc.
[quote]Inner Hulk wrote:
By your own admittance, you believe 19 men carried out this attack. Therefore, it would stand to reason that the government could have also executed the attack with 30 or less men. Why is it so wildly unbelieveable that less than a hundred people on the inside could have carried out a covert op but yet foreigners with not nearly the resours could have? WHY? [/quote]
Let me try to explain this more clearly for you. The competence to carry out the hijacking and attack in the manner claimed by the government would be infinitesimally less than the competence required to pull off not only the hijacking and attack, but also to coordinate and rig all of the responses, and then to keep it secret during the attack, the response, and afterward. And each person required to pull off the attack and any part of the response would not only have to completely buy in, but then not have an attack of conscience or even a drunk bender and confession afterward. Not to mention all the friends and relatives of the various claimed conspiracy participants – U.S. citizens all – that couldn’t find out or would have to agree to keep the secret. You think Bush couldn’t get cooperation from the Dems to pass social security reform but could get buy off on an attack against the U.S.? You think Rumsfeld could earn the emnity of all those career officers on the Joint Chiefs by trying to ram home his preferred reforms prior to 9/11 but get a bunch of them to sign off on an attack on U.S. soil to achieve some of those goals?
And don’t forget the foreign intelligence angle. We know that our allies spy on us, as well as our not-so-friendlies. Did they buy off on the whole thing too – or did we magically manage to fool all of them as well? Of was it JTF’s cabal of world-controlling Jews ordering all the other governments to keep the truth bottled up?
Nixon couldn’t even get a proper burglary pulled off. The Bay of Pigs operation under Kennedy was a complete farce. And the Bush administration is supposed to be able to have coordinated something like this, in cooperation with the non-administration military, the CIA and FBI, the Congressional select committees who have examined this?
Go read some more Robert Ludlum and keep those fantasy wheels a turnin’.
[quote]Inner Hulk wrote:
The problem with you and the rest of your kind is that you’re readily willing to accept government THEORY. Yes, capitalized again. All of the important questions remain unanswered, brushed aside by that fucking joke of a 9.11 commission. WTC 7? You forget about that building? Who needs an explanation for a 40+ story building collapsing, right? Or why the pentagon videos aren’t released??
Don’t you wonder why Bush blocked a 9/11 commission for years? Or why firefighter engineering called the 9/11 investigation a “half baked farce”?
Of course you don’t. It was crazy fanatical muslims, and that’s that. There is no other possiblity, nothing. Insanely important questions don’t need to be answered, you have the government’s word. And as we all know, the US government never, ever deceives.[/quote]
The questions that need to be answered most immediately are why the U.S. intelligence and counter-intelligence services are still incompetent to address terrorist threats at home.
The problem with those of you who rush off into la-la land is that you don’t want to deal with the reality that government is inept. It’s a huge collection of individuals, who each have individual agendas and motivations and need to be organized logistically to achieve any big goal. It’s much more comforting to you to latch on to a ridiculous [u][i]“THEORY”[/u][/i] like a baby’s binky - one with an extremely low probability at that - than to contemplate that there is no monolith omnipotent “government” actor, nor, to JTF’s chagrin, some powerful cabal of Jewish bankers secretly pulling all the strings.
Here are a couple good articles by Popular Mechanics – I’ll leave it to JTF to start with the usual ad hominem stuff about and the editor of Popular Mechanics being a relative of the Secretary of Homeland Defense:
And why would anyone think it might be “crazy, fanatical muslims[sic]”?
1993
Feb. 26, New York City: bomb exploded in basement garage of World Trade Center, killing 6 and injuring at least 1,040 others. In 1995, militant Islamist Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 9 others were convicted of conspiracy charges, and in 1998, Ramzi Yousef, believed to have been the mastermind, was convicted of the bombing. Al-Qaeda involvement is suspected.
1995
Nov. 13, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: car bomb exploded at U.S. military headquarters, killing 5 U.S. military servicemen.
1996
June 25, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia: truck bomb exploded outside Khobar Towers military complex, killing 19 American servicemen and injuring hundreds of others. 13 Saudis and a Lebanese, all alleged members of Islamic militant group Hezbollah, were indicted on charges relating to the attack in June 2001.
1998
Aug. 7, Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: truck bombs exploded almost simultaneously near 2 U.S. embassies, killing 224 (213 in Kenya and 11 in Tanzania) and injuring about 4,500. 4 men connected with al-Qaeda 2 of whom had received training at al-Qaeda camps inside Afghanistan, were convicted of the killings in May 2001 and later sentenced to life in prison. A federal grand jury had indicted 22 men in connection with the attacks, including Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, who remained at large.
2000
Oct. 12, Aden, Yemen: U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole heavily damaged when a small boat loaded with explosives blew up alongside it. 17 sailors killed. Linked to Osama bin Laden, or members of al-Qaeda terrorist network.
I don’t take issue with that, and I apologize if I lumped you in the loony bin too hastily. Question away – just don’t infer that a desire for secrecy necessarily means nefarious purposes. I mean, even if there were untoward purposes, maybe they are personal/political (too embarrassing to let everyone see how incompetent they were, for example). In that latter case, the info should definitely come out - but if we are going to accept national defense secrets, then we necessarily need to trust someone to determine what is important enough to qualify.
If the rest of the world would join us, we could conquer the whole ME and simply take the oil. Hell, western countries developed those fields anyway. The people there are just tribes of marauding savages anyway. Treat 'em like the US Army did the Indians — put up a reservation in Darfur, or some other hellhole.
[/quote]
This particular part of Headhunter’s thread should leave no doubt that he’s not only totally clueless, but perhaps even racist.
You (Headhunter) speak of the U.S. government’s damn near genocidal policies against American Indians with pride and yet, I’m the first person to call you a stupid fool. You call millions of peaceful Middle Easterners, who aren’t all Muslim (some are actually Christian) by the way, “tribes of marauding savages”. Am I the only one on this board that can see you legitimately have a screw loose?
Headhunter, you’re a poster boy for the American propaganda system.
If the rest of the world would join us, we could conquer the whole ME and simply take the oil. Hell, western countries developed those fields anyway. The people there are just tribes of marauding savages anyway. Treat 'em like the US Army did the Indians — put up a reservation in Darfur, or some other hellhole.
This particular part of Headhunter’s thread should leave no doubt that he’s not only totally clueless, but perhaps even racist.
You (Headhunter) speak of the U.S. government’s damn near genocidal policies against American Indians with pride and yet, I’m the first person to call you a stupid fool. You call millions of peaceful Middle Easterners, who aren’t all Muslim (some are actually Christian) by the way, “tribes of marauding savages”. Am I the only one on this board that can see you legitimately have a screw loose?
Headhunter, you’re a poster boy for the American propaganda system.
Dustin[/quote]
I’m being realistic, Dustin. The Saudis and Pakistanis are probably as guilty as hell. The Saudis have a shitload of the most vital commodity of western civilisation. Should western civilisation come to a screeching halt because of a few tribesmen wearing bedspreads?
You do realize what $125 oil will do to this country and to the rest of the civilised world, don’t you?
Do you honestly expect the most powerful nation on earth to be ‘nice’ when its survival/well-being is at stake?
BTW: The US Army cleared the land of marauding savages, who’d done about as much development to this country as would a few bears wandering the countryside.