A rationalist look at the 9/11 conspiracy theories

Firstly, let's examine why the theories about 9/11 being an inside job have gained such currency (no pun intended). It has everything to do with who was in the top job at the time they happened. People can believe that 9/11 was a false-flag...they can premit themselves to believe it...because Bush and Cheney seemed evil enough to be capable of such a crime. Can you imagine people saying that Al Gore or Bill Clinton 'did' 9/11 had it happened on their watch? No, they wouldn't, because neither man was evil enough. But it's easy to believe Commander Numb Nuts and Darth Cheney could do it, because they were so dishonest and immoral about so other many other things - starting with the way Bush was 'elected' in 2000. Now, onto specifics:

Let me state upfront that I am a LIHOP believer, btw. OK.

1) In order to believe that 9/11 was an inside job, you'd have to also believe that hundreds if not thousands of people all conspired to murder their own countrymen without a hint of it getting out or without any of them blabbing to the press. That seems inconceivable.

1A) The supposely 'impossible' pancake collapse of the Towers is supposedly suspicious. Is it? I have heard from dozens of qualified engineers and experts in this field who say it WAS possible for the collapse to happen this way. And the theorists can point to the WTC being the only metal frame scrapers in history to collapse due to fire, but...how many other burning skyscrapers before 9/11 had airliners with almost full gas tanks smash into them? The puffs of smoke/dust from windows below the main explosions as the towers came down are very VERY obviously debris and dust being pushed down and outwards by the pressure of the collapse going on immediately above...why the theorists persist in claiming otherwise just beats me, as it's NOT TRUE.

1B) No explanation has given by theorists as to why, if the towers had bombs in them, that the bombers somehow were able to predict EXACTLY which floor the impact sites would be on. If you look at the video, the collapses start at the impact sites, so the bombs would have to be there if it WAS bombs that caused it. And come onnnnnnn...think about it. Assume there are bombs in the towers. Assume they are radio detonated. Now crash a plane into a place full of primed bombs. Would the impact not wreck the detonation gear, or even set the bombs off?! You see, logic doesn't get in the way of desparetly trying to prove something that isn't true. Like creationists and their garbage about the world being 6000 years old. Stop embarrassing yourselves; you are obviously wrong, and you know it - or rather you SHOULD - so shut the hell up.

2) Let's assume there were indeed bombs in the Towers. So...why bother with planes, then? If it was an inside job, it would have been just as easy if not easier to claim that Atta and his chums laid explosives in the buildings. It adds a whole new layer of deception to introduce a separate element, and a whole new potential for the plan to be exposed, if planes were used. And no-one asks the question: Why was it necessary for the Towers to come down at all? What purpose was served in completely destroying the buildings? To cover up evidence of bombs in the towers, you might say. But that's arguing backwards, and means that the only reason planes were used was to conceal the real cause of the collapse. In essence, concealing something that didn't need to happen and just makes your cover up harder to maintain. And the question is again: why conceal it?!! Bush and his cronies had an easy enough time fooling Americans into believing they could not have avoided the 9/11 attacks; convincing the same sheep that Atta and co sneaked into the towers and laid bombs would have been just as simple.

3) Let's face it, Cheney was cunning rather than smart, and Bush was dumber than a bag of hammers. Are you really telling me that these two bastards, who never bothered to conceal their ulterior motives about other things - in fact, revelled in openly proclaiming their contempt for human life, the Constitution, and public outcry - suddenly decided to become criminal masterminds all of a sudden and pull off the most airtight, foolproof conspiracy in history? Bush is so stupid he can't count to 20 without taking his shoes and socks off. It just doesn't make sense.

4) There is ample evidence on hand to show that the FBI and other government groups were told to keep their hands off Atta and his cohorts, and lie about their agencies' knowledge of the terrorists actions. There is no evidence that shows active involvement in the crimes by the American government, aside from allowing the attacks to happen. And as much as I'd like to have Bush in the dock on trial for mass murder, there is NO EVIDENCE THAT HE ORDERED THE ATTACKS.

5) The Pentagon was hit by an airliner. Not a missile, not a drone, not anything else. This doesn't even need evidence to be shown to be correct. It just takes common sense. If a chopper had fired a missile at the Pentagon, that's what the vast majority of the many witnesses on site would have seen. But, despite trying to fudge the facts, the conspiracy theorists can't get round the fact that most people *saw an airliner crash into that horrible Satanic building*. There would have been - there IS - no way to hide a missile strike in broad daylight in the open air, or pretend it wasn't a missile. The people who say they DID see a missile, well, I don't know why they'd say that, because it simply isn't true. They MUST be mistaken, because it wasn't a missile. Again, as much as I want it to be true, it's NOT TRUE.

6) The conspiracy that CAN be proved - the obvious links to Bush's pals the Saudi Arabians, the post-attack cover-up, the destruction of evidence, the lies the Bush regime told, the wholly false link to Iraq etc - doesn't seem to interest the conspiracy theorists. They're more interested in chasing obvious nonsense, searching for hologram planes and particle beam weapons and suspicious puffs of dust from windows, and swapped aircraft. Do they not realise that most left-wing conspiracy groups are riddled with what J Edgar Hoover used to call COINTELPRO agents? People whose mission is to insert crazy stories into legitimate events that may embarrass or endanger the Establishment and lead people off on false trails? It worked in the 50s and 60s with UFOs - a serious topic reduced to ridicule through the recruitment of crackpots by the government - and they did it again with 9/11. The inside job theory is demonstrably not true, and those who let 9/11 happen know this; so the smart thing to do to hide your REAL guilt is to allege a fantastic story that has no basis in reality, and have the questers for truth lose themselves down blind alleys. The 7/7 attacks in London WERE an inside job, and the evidence shows this. The same is not true for 9/11. 7/7 was a result of the 9/11 cover up over LIHOP....a deliberate inside job to cover up the crime of letting 9/11 take place, not really a separate crime in itself.

7) The cell calls from the hijacked planes do contain puzzling oddities, like people IDing themselves to close family with their full names, but to claim that voice synthesis is advanced enough NOW, let alone a decade ago, to allow such a deception is just ludicrous. Come on, it's rubbish.

8) The flight that crashed at Shanksville probably WAS shot down. That would explain the almost total lack of wreckage. But for what reason was it shot down? I can believe Bush and Cheney lying about having to do that so as to prevent a fourth attack - lying to avoid having to answer the inevitable hard questions about whether the shootdown was the right thing to do - a lot more easily than I can believe they shot the plane down in order to hide the fact that the attacks were inside jobs! That Cheney was messing about with the shoot down order is proven beyond doubt, as Norm Minetta's testimony shows, but the MOTIVE for the shootdown is not conclusive at all.

9) Again, there is ample evidence that warnings from numerous foreign intel agencies such as Mossad were ignored, and it's fairly easy to see that allowing the attacks to happen would further the sinister geopolitical goals of the Cheney cabal. That is deeply immoral, criminal and evil, but it is NOT the same case as actively causing it to happen! By that, I mean it is a DIFFERENT crime, not a lesser one. For a start, in the main you are looking for evidence of omission, not of action, and if you're looking for proof of an active plot you would tend to put the wrong spin on the evidence you DO find. But apparently, the far more plausible LIHOP theory is nonsense, and the real reason for this view is that people WANT Bush and co to be guilty of it. Evidence, proof, that doesn't mean jack diddly. Just burn Bush and Cheney and Blair from the nearest lamp-post. That's how people thought in the Middle Ages about witches, and it was as wrong then as this is now.

10) Granted, there are very strange puzzles - WTC 7 and the whole 'pulling' thing, the accounts of apparent bombs heard by witnesses, the extremely convenient finding of Atta's passport and so on. Since we were given mostly lies instead of a proper investigation (the 9/11 Commission whitewash), until these oddities are properly explored and explained by a qualified independent ppanel, claims that they 'prove' an inside job are not only illogical, they're also bad law. A murder case may contain strange anomalies, but just because they are present and puzzling does not automatically mean they prove something or ANYTHING one way or the other.

CONCLUSION - Maybe it WAS an inside job. It's not likely, but possible. JUST possible. But we are never going to prove it one way or another unless we can
present credible evidence of malfeasance. Loose Change presents none.