Donte Stallworth's reflections on 9/11 CTs...

[JohnG]

I disagree. Unless "non-Truthers" is supposed to be synonymous with "Debunker".

The common person on the street who has not looked into CTs from either side and is a mere average consumer of the usual news, documentary and entertainment media, tends to know practically nothing about skyscraper construction, airport security, demolitions, and their views on Islamic extremism are almost certainly tinted with their own political biases. The moment you become a Truther and start watching videos and reading the crazy stuff, you start learning tids and bits about these things, and as a result you end up knowing more facts, and perhaps even understanding better. So in that sense, the writer is correct and you are wrong.

I don't completely disagree with your criticism of my statement and perhaps I could've/should've been more clear. On the other hand, inferring in some reductio ad absurdum way that I am claiming that everyone knows more than Truthers about skyscraper construction, airport security, demolitions, etc. seems unwarranted.

I wouldn't trust "the common person on the street" to tell me the correct time, let alone tell me exactly what happened on 9/11, but there are also quite a few uncommon people on that same street who are both well-informed on the subject of 9/11 but who also possess specialized knowledge and expertise in the relevant fields. Yes, a few of them are active "debunkers", but many more of them are pilots, soldiers, architects, reporters, firefighters, teachers, demolitions experts, crash scene investigators, physicists, historians, diplomats, police officers, terrorism experts etc. who do in fact have a better understanding of the facts surrounding 9/11 than do "Truthers".

Am I being naive about the "man in the street" or cynical about the "Truther in the basement"? I don't know, perhaps I'm being a little of both, but I've never been impressed by any Truther's marshalling of the facts of 9/11.

 

[JohnG]

But many of us are older (I was 36 on 9/11) and were well aware of OBL's declaration of war on the US, as well as several actual attacks carried out by his people, such as the two US embassy bombings in Africa in '98 and the attack on the USS Cole in '00. There were also several foiled plots in the 1999/2000 time frame.

Once I saw that second airliner hit the WTC, OBL and AQ was the first thing that popped into my mind as possible perpetrators.

Yes, I was an adult at the time and had seen a network TV interview with Bin Laden a year or two before 9/11 where he flat-out said he was planning to attack the US. It was obvious to me that he was serious in his threats and I still remember the sense of foreboding I felt after watching the interview. As soon as the second plane hit, my first thought was "Bin Laden".

A longtime Truther here once said that one of the reasons he found the "official story" so suspicious was that the WTC attacks were captured on few (if any) camera phones. I had to point out to him that camera phones were far from ubiquitous in 2001* and asked if he was a child during that time. He sputtered that he actually meant other types of cameras, but his original question spoke volumes. Adults today who were children or teens on 9/11 are almost inevitably going to have a flawed perception of the world as it was in 2001. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but it's something that has to be taken into consideration.





*Hell, neither I nor anyone else in my immediate family even owned a cellphone in 2001 and we weren't exactly luddites.

 

[Nick Terry]

If you had read what I actually said, you would notice that I did not say September 11, 2001, I said September 11, 2011. My political awakening happened after the Bush years and after I was in the Marines, hence, why I said President Obama. So yes, if you would have read what I had actually said, it would totally make sense. Yet, here you are, saying that I am the one not responding "objectively to discussion." You say that of me after you just fouled up what I said by an entire decade.

As someone already pointed out, the strikethru really didn't help.

But it makes little difference, as I wasn't referring to your 'political awakening' in the original comment, but to your political experiences, which is a far broader category.

Nothing actually happened on September 11, 2011, other than the date being the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden was finally tracked down and killed in May 2011, while US troops were all withdrawn from Iraq in December 2011.

By your own admissions above, you were presumably 26 on that day. At some point in between 9/11/01 and 9/11/11, you had volunteered to join the Marines. Why, you haven't said, but in other posts you've discussed patriotism. The chances of your military service having zero connection to 9/11 and the subsequent 'war on terror' campaigns seem pretty slim, even if the connection is indirect. Indeed if you served in any relevant theatre of operations, you're presumably entitled to the GWOT Service Medal.*

When you were 21, the '9/11 Truth Movement' peaked in popularity, circa 2005-2006, the growth in the movement largely driven by a massive influx of student-age 'Truthers'. At this time, it seems you weren't a Truther at all. But this is the belief that marks out people of your generation.and the cohort of yeargroups to which you belong. 9/11 happened when you were 16. It was going to have a profound effect one way or another.

To make a comparison, Oliver Stone was around 17 when JFK was shot (b.1946), and then served in Vietnam in 1967-1968, but did not really dig into the subject of JFK's assassination in a really big way until he made the film, which came out in 1991. By his own admission, JFK's death was a big deal for him, and it was also a big deal for his generation. It evidently took time for him to decide to investigate the subject, whereas others of his generation attending college in 1967-68 were probably hearing Mark Lane speak and might have become 'buffs'.

In neither case is it being claimed that only those who belong to a certain (micro-) generation will take up a particular conspiracy theory. But when you find out that Stone is a man of the 1960s, and when you hear that Jango the Truther was 16 in 2001, people are going to go 'it figures'.

 

[Nick Terry]

Yes, this post deserved scrutiny at two different levels.

9/11 was the start of the war on terror, eh?

[point-missing examples snipped]

Sorry Nick, the war on terror started before 9/11.

When I put 'war on terror' in inverted commas, I was referring to the so-called 'Global War on Terror', which began in 2001 with the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing invasion of Afghanistan.

This conflict very much had its roots in earlier waves of terrorism against US targets and earlier US interventions in the Middle East/Islamic world, but it is a recognisably discrete phase of conflict against a shifting coalition of enemies (Al Qaeda, Taliban, AQII, ISIS, some of whom really don't like each other any more).

Earlier references to a 'war on terror' don't negate the coherence of referring to the post-9/11 conflicts as the 'war on terror', i.e. GWOT, since earlier counterterrorist military operations did not involve large numbers of boots on the ground.

During the 1980s and 1990s, US ground troops were committed to the Middle East/Islamic World in pursuit of other goals entirely (interventions in Lebanon, Somalia under UN auspices, the first Gulf War and subsequent protection of Saudi Arabia/cordoning of Iraq), and not first and foremost for combating movements that are labelled terrorist.

 

[Jango]

Yes, I was an adult at the time and had seen a network TV interview with Bin Laden a year or two before 9/11 where he flat-out said he was planning to attack the US. It was obvious to me that he was serious in his threats and I still remember the sense of foreboding I felt after watching the interview. As soon as the second plane hit, my first thought was "Bin Laden".

A longtime Truther here once said that one of the reasons he found the "official story" so suspicious was that the WTC attacks were captured on few (if any) camera phones. I had to point out to him that camera phones were far from ubiquitous in 2001* and asked if he was a child during that time. He sputtered that he actually meant other types of cameras, but his original question spoke volumes. Adults today who were children or teens on 9/11 are almost inevitably going to have a flawed perception of the world as it was in 2001. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but it's something that has to be taken into consideration.





*Hell, neither I nor anyone else in my immediate family even owned a cellphone in 2001 and we weren't exactly luddites.

I argued with someone about that before too. I argued on the appropriate side: that cell phones circa 2001 are not the HD quality we have now or when I made the argument in 2011, not even remotely close to it. Did the person you argue with happen to be a member of Let's Roll? This is the kind of argument they try to make, which includes the leader himself, who was, by his age at least, an adult on 9/11. It is truly a genuine small-fry argument that is what the folks here call JAQing off. I'm not interested in that nor have I ever been with 9/11. When I learn that our spies and our "friends" spies knew about OBL/al Qaeda/hijackers/sleeper cells, it is only natural to ask questions, such as, What Did They Know And When Did They Know It. We currently do not know the answer to that question. In fact, we know that there are a lot of documents that could answer that question for us but are classified. Does me being 16 on 9/11 have anything to do with that? No, ageism does not work on classified information. Neither does it on cell phones circa 2001. People are ignorant no matter how old they are. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing that there is one -- in our case, it is unknowable ignorance, or to quote the Secretary of Defense on 9/11, an "Unknown Unknown." However, there is no 'solving' that problem, but we could lessen the overall amount of ignorance by getting this issue to go viral. But, this is not a top-tiered hot button topic in the U.S. because deflated footballs and a man who is a woman on the inside who likes women takes precedence 7 days a week, and twice on Sundays.

However, if you are interested in transparency and declassification, check out The National Security Archive. You'll notice a video on the right-hand side on the page. It is as advertised:

Archive Director Tom Blanton on the Colbert Report

It has the potential to go viral. If you have social media, will you share this video?

 

[Jango]

When I put 'war on terror' in inverted commas, I was referring to the so-called 'Global War on Terror', which began in 2001 with the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing invasion of Afghanistan.

This conflict very much had its roots in earlier waves of terrorism against US targets and earlier US interventions in the Middle East/Islamic world, but it is a recognisably discrete phase of conflict against a shifting coalition of enemies (Al Qaeda, Taliban, AQII, ISIS, some of whom really don't like each other any more).

Earlier references to a 'war on terror' don't negate the coherence of referring to the post-9/11 conflicts as the 'war on terror', i.e. GWOT, since earlier counterterrorist military operations did not involve large numbers of boots on the ground.

During the 1980s and 1990s, US ground troops were committed to the Middle East/Islamic World in pursuit of other goals entirely (interventions in Lebanon, Somalia under UN auspices, the first Gulf War and subsequent protection of Saudi Arabia/cordoning of Iraq), and not first and foremost for combating movements that are labelled terrorist.

The C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center opened up in 1986. The C.I.A. had used a car bombing in 1985 to try and assassinate a terrorist leader in Lebanon. They used direct action when they could. There is also the issue of 'renditions':

1. Rendition is something the Bush administration cooked up.

Nope. George W. Bush was still struggling to coax oil out of the ground when the United States "rendered to justice" its first suspect from abroad. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan authorized an operation that lured Lebanese hijacker Fawaz Younis to a boat off the coast of Cyprus, where FBI agents arrested him. (Younis had participated in the 1985 hijacking of a Jordanian plane and was implicated in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which left a U.S. Navy diver dead.) President George H.W. Bush approved the kidnapping in 1990 of Mexican physician Humberto Alvarez Machain, who was believed to be involved in the torture and killing of a Drug Enforcement Administration official. Nothing says that renditions can involve only suspected terrorists; Israel's abduction of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 could be called a rendition, though the term was not yet in use.

Beginning in 1995, the Clinton administration turned up the speed with a full-fledged program to use rendition to disrupt terrorist plotting abroad. According to former director of central intelligence George J. Tenet, about 70 renditions were carried out before Sept. 11, 2001, most of them during the Clinton years.

The "war on terror" refers to President Reagan's version. "War on Terror" is President Bush's, who also called it World War III*. Because he was not going to allow safe havens or differentiate between terrorists or the states that sponsor them, you know, exactly what President Reagan said in the 1980's, which I cited and quoted.

A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm helps explain many of the geopolitical moves made by the Bush administration as well by Israel post 9/11. Many of the chess moves: Iraq, Lebanon, Syria have been made and is the reason why there is so much fuss about the diplomatic route being taken by the Obama administration with Iran, whom the right-wing and neoconservatives from the U.S. and Israel have made a large public spectacle out of it because they want the U.S. to use its military superiority to destroy Iran's nuclear capability *OR* (as a last resort) give to Israel for free the necessary equipment and assistance they would need to pull the operation off.

People here have a misguided view about me. They've beaten around the bush that I'm anti-government or anti-American, but that is simply not the case. As I've openly professed, I am a fan of history and politics. I don't link to Infowars or anything from that realm, I only link to mainstream sources, like the MSM, .gov, .edu kind of sites. In other words, I'm linking to the open credible public record of historical accounting. The fact that so many people resist this information, but are on the debunker side of the equation, is a remarkably weird thing.

 

[Oystein]

... On the other hand, inferring in some reductio ad absurdum way that I am claiming that everyone knows more than Truthers about skyscraper construction, airport security, demolitions, etc. seems unwarranted.

No, I am not infering this at all. I am talking about the average person, not every single one.

I wouldn't trust "the common person on the street" to tell me the correct time, let alone tell me exactly what happened on 9/11, but there are also quite a few uncommon people on that same street who are both well-informed on the subject of 9/11 but who also possess specialized knowledge and expertise in the relevant fields.

The author quoted in the OP said "Indeed, surveys consistently show that people who believe in conspiracy theories are paradoxically far more informed about an issue than those who don't." I took that as meaning that people on average (whether you look at means or medians or other measures of "average") are less informed about specialized fields of knowledge pertaining to CTs than the average CTist.

Yes, a few of them are active "debunkers", but many more of them are pilots, soldiers, architects, reporters, firefighters, teachers, demolitions experts, crash scene investigators, physicists, historians, diplomats, police officers, terrorism experts etc. who do in fact have a better understanding of the facts surrounding 9/11 than do "Truthers".

Agreed, but not, IMO, what the author had in mind.

Am I being naive about the "man in the street" or cynical about the "Truther in the basement"? I don't know, perhaps I'm being a little of both, but I've never been impressed by any Truther's marshalling of the facts of 9/11.

As a matter of fact, I sometimes am impressed by the odd Truther's marshalling of some of the facts of 9/11. More commonly I am deeply unimpressed by some debunkers' marshalling of the facts of 9/11. And usually find that people who are neither truther not debunkers are ignorant of amost all special field knowledge.

 

[WilliamSeger]

No, I am not infering this at all. I am talking about the average person, not every single one.

The average person has one testicle and one boob. (Sorry, couldn't resist ]

The author quoted in the OP said "Indeed, surveys consistently show that people who believe in conspiracy theories are paradoxically far more informed about an issue than those who don't." I took that as meaning that people on average (whether you look at means or medians or other measures of "average") are less informed about specialized fields of knowledge pertaining to CTs than the average CTist.

That's the way I took the quote, too, and after wondering for a second why anyone should think that's a significant fact, I pretty much lost interest in whatever Stallworth had inferred from it. The general population has never paid any attention to 9/11 conspiracy theories. A better question would be whether or not CTists know enough to have an informed opinion, and an even better question would be, what do actual experts have to say? Stallworth says he conducted his own investigation, but I don't see any evidence that he investigated very far.

 

[beachnut]

... People here have a misguided view about me. They've beaten around the bush that I'm anti-government or anti-American, ...

"Yes, based on what we don't know there are reasons to believe the government was involved. - Jango"

Fooled like Donte, by "legit" sources.


For Donte, this is/was ...

The genius of "Loose Change," a series of films positing a 9/11 conspiracy that have been viewed tens of millions of times online, is the power of vision. Seeing is believing, and people tend to believe something more if they've seen it with their own eyes. The narrator's ability to dive into complex physics or aerodynamics issues, and break them down in simple terms, brings an additional legitimacy to the overall project.

Idiots make up a fictional account, and Donte thought the narrator explained complex physics, aerodynamic issues; but the narrator, like Donte, had no clue. Loose Change was fiction out of the minds of idiots; ideas which match the brain pattern for Donte. He was fooled by idiots, thinking they understood physics and other topics, and failed to realize they were talking trash, BS, opinions based on ignorance.

Then Donte mistakes the art of Gish Gallop for...

(Indeed, surveys consistently show that people who believe in conspiracy theories are paradoxically far more informed about an issue than those who don't. If you've ever debated a climate-change denier, you've seen this phenomenon firsthand.)

For Donte, the Gish Gallop = "more informed about an issue". How does spewing BS faster than free-fall equal knowledge on an issue.

 

[Jango]

The average person has one testicle and one boob. (Sorry, couldn't resist ]



That's the way I took the quote, too, and after wondering for a second why anyone should think that's a significant fact, I pretty much lost interest in whatever Stallworth had inferred from it. The general population has never paid any attention to 9/11 conspiracy theories. A better question would be whether or not CTists know enough to have an informed opinion, and an even better question would be, what do actual experts have to say? Stallworth says he conducted his own investigation, but I don't see any evidence that he investigated very far.

1. Do you mean 'based on knowledge of the facts and carefully considered principles'?

2. Do you mean 'a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area' or a person with degrees and titles?

 

[Jango]

"Yes, based on what we don't know there are reasons to believe the government was involved. - Jango"

That's not being anti-American nor is it being anti-government.

 

[beachnut]

That's not being anti-American nor is it being anti-government.

It is worse, a conclusion based on nothing. Blaming others on the acts of 19 murderers.

... I'm anti-government or anti-American, but that is simply not the case. ...

"Yes, based on what we don't know there are reasons to believe the government was involved. - Jango"

Anti-logic.

 

[Axxman300]

The C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center opened up in 1986.

Sounds more impressive than it was. CIA's OTA was less than 20 people, all annalists. The focus was on the Soviet Union, everything else was an ugly step-child.

The C.I.A. had used a car bombing in 1985 to try and assassinate a terrorist leader in Lebanon.

Old news, known publicly by 1989.

They used direct action when they could.

Name one time. The car-bomb hit was done via the Saudis and a 3rd party, all had an interest in seeing the target put into the ground. The guy who pulled off the US Embassy bombing in Beirut lives openly in the city today. The CIA has never gone after him.

The U.S. Army had a counter terror unit by 1976 (Blue Light), and SFOD-D by 1978. They were used sparingly until the 1990s. There just was not a lot of terrorist-zapping going on by the United States until 1999.

*OR* (as a last resort) give to Israel for free the necessary equipment and assistance they would need to pull the operation off.

This is why nobody takes you seriously. Israel doesn't need our help. Israel already has everything they need to strike. Israel has been doing night training in Saudi Arabia practicing refueling on remote Saudi airfields which are in range of Iran. This is not a secret, it has been in the news for over a year.

 

[HotRodDeluxe]

Yes, this post deserved scrutiny at two different levels.

9/11 was the start of the war on terror, eh?

Nick is clearly identifying the War on Terror as declared by Bush after 9/11. I can remember it.

Of course there were previous actions to address terrorism, but Bush did declare a War on Terror and this derail seems to be an evasive as opposed to illuminating.

 

[Sceptic-PK]

Such as?

Your inability to work out what happened on 911.

 

[Jango]

Your inability to work out what happened on 911.

What's your excuse?

 

[Sceptic-PK]

What's your excuse?

? I know what happened.

 

[Jango]

? I know what happened.

Assuming that you were watching T.V. that day, what was your POV on the collapses? Do you think they were fire-induced collapses or did you think they collapsed by other means (I.e. controlled demolitions, which mind you, was widely reported that day on live T.V. by field reporters and other media workers, like Dan Rather)?

 

[Sceptic-PK]

I'm not here to play 20 questions with you.

 

[The Big Dog]

Assuming that you were watching T.V. that day, what was your POV on the collapses? Do you think they were fire-induced collapses or did you think they collapsed by other means (I.e. controlled demolitions, which mind you, was widely reported that day on live T.V. by field reporters and other media workers, like Dan Rather)?

I thought it was an attack by terrorists led by Osama bin Ladin who were based in a country called Afghanistan, which I had heard of before 9/11.