Conspiracy Theorists: 9/11

[stilicho]

I am pretty new to this board. My first exposure to 9/11 conspiracy theorists was on another forum. I thought at first that the people I was speaking with were joking when they said they'd discovered secret neocon plans to take over the world. Where did they find these secret plans? Why, on-line, on the PNAC site.

That document, famous by now, was created as a central thesis in David Ray Griffin's book about 9/11.

Most of the arguments I've seen on this and other boards have been among what I'd call skilled amateurs. No professional body has ever endorsed any of the 9/11 conspiracy theories and few of them will issue statements opposing them.

The motives of the conspiracy theorists range, of course, since they are only human. But making money is scarcely the chief among them. The ancient American trait (as almost all of the successful CT'rs are from the USA) of ideological nationalism is prominent in most of them. There is fame, of course. And there is the opportunity, afforded by the internet and cheap publishing tools, to influence opinions that mimics Geraldo and Oprah.

I commend the contributors here who have helped me understand more, through resources like internet detectives and the rebuttals to Loose Change. In turn, I recommend books such as those by Ahmed Rashid and John Miller as well as resources like Parameters, the on-line quarterly journal of the US Army War College.

My favourite CT exchange came with what I figured to be an aging hippie type, who repeated the fond mantra that Usama Bin Laden must be a CIA "asset" since he'd gotten money from them once (never really proven) and hadn't been issued a "pink slip". Apart from the obvious ridiculousness of the scenario, I pointed out to him that the Dalai Lama, too, had received CIA money and had never been issued a "pink slip". Ergo, the Dalai Lama is working for the CIA.

The aging hippie CT'r kicked me off his personal "truth forum" shortly after that.

 

[David Wong]

Could this thread be a place where everyone tells how they first got exposed to the whole 9/11 conspiracy thing? That could be really interesting, see how these things spread.

Like most people, I just ran into a guy on a movie forum going NUTS about this video he saw, it turned out to be the first edition of Loose Change (pod under the plane and all). He believed every frame. I mean every single frame. This was before I heard ANY mention anywhere in the news or magazines. Such is the nature of viral videos.

I thought it was the silliest thing I'd ever heard (why fire a missile into the building when you're crashing the plane into it anyway? The flash of light at the nose of the plane? What?)

Trying to help this guy, I googled it, and found the Popular Mechanics article first. I showed it to him, he said that article was written by the brother of the Department of Defense, that I was a Neocon and that the Popular Mechanics article was a straw man, and that we'd meet in George Bush's concentration camps in a few years.

I dismissed him as crazy, and forgot about it. Then, posting on an NFL board, saw somebody else talking about this amazing video he saw. Same link.

So I went searching, and found a raging crowd of LC true believers in the Colbert Report forums, and on some other far-left gathering sites. I kept seeing Alex Jones' name come up and made it a point to listen to his show over my lunch hour. That's when I realized this was such a big deal among conspiracy kooks.

The problem with the Popular Mechanics article was that it was a static thing, it doesn't change, and the conspiracy nuts just kept throwing out claim after claim, changing their ground. So I went hunting for active debunkers, and followed a link trail through the core of debunking websites (SLC video, the SLC blog, debunking911.com, the JREF forums) and later wrote the article linked in my sig.

 

[stilicho]

Your idea has merit, David!

I run into moderate CT'rs a lot more these days, especially since our national television network in Canada broadcast a feature on Loose Change. I also have a modest collection (mainly ripped) of Dave von Kleist's original "In Plane Site" (which includes false claims of an explosion of WTC6--actually the cloud from the collapse of the South Tower), a couple of Alex Jones' gems (including "Bohemian Grove", leading me to wonder if he wasn't himself a rogue FBI agent), and a few others.

One of my favourite nutter sites of all time is wiolawa press. I haven't the URL here but you ought to go see it. Apparently you can reveal reptilians by using the features of Photoshop.

By Adobe shall ye discover truth!

 

[Gravy]

Welcome, stilicho.

and David, I'd like to take a moment to express my appreciation of your contributions here, and of your website, especially your hilarious and accurate demolition of Loose Change. For anyone who hasn't seen it, it's a must-read: http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/911truth.html

I learned about this mess from delphi_ote's original Loose Change thread. I just looked up my first contribution: I coined the word "Loosers."
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=53102

 

[stilicho]

Thanks for the welcome, Gravy.

I'd like to add that I figure the only reason CT'rs would swarm the Colbert Nation is that it's so popular. I think the show is one of the best on television these days. He's a better natural entertainer than Letterman was in his heyday. Mind you, I also think that Waugh's Vile Bodies is one of the best novels ever written.

My only coup de main that I can think of, battling with conspiracists, was demonstrating that on any given day you can discover 'suspicious' put options on the major exchanges. To find them, all you need is the Yahoo finance page and news of a prospective bad quarter or restatement of earnings. Halliburton (that evil evil Halliburton) has had a couple of them in past year. But one of the days I was asked about them, I found that Newell-Rubbermaid (maker of spatulas and Sharpie markers) had more than a hundred to one ratio of puts to calls on its shares.

That's the day I figured Terrell Owens and some rogue chefs were planning a terrorist attack on some dumplings.

 

[Gravy]

That's the day I figured Terrell Owens and some rogue chefs were planning a terrorist attack on some dumplings.

So true. We never hear about a "put option scandal" involving all the other publicly-traded companies that took huge hits on 9/11. Why? Because for most of those companies, it was business as usual up until the moment of the attacks. A conspirator of the kind that the CTs posit could have played the stock market in hundreds of devious, untraceable ways, rather than buying put options on companies that had publicly issued loss warnings days before.

 

[MikeW]

I am pretty new to this board. My first exposure to 9/11 conspiracy theorists was on another forum.

Welcome stilicho! Especially since I think I remember you from that forum, combating posters like F***, T** B*** and O**? That was my second forum after a UK one, I got tired of the CTers ignoring rational arguments & went there to see what would happen. I was slightly nervous as I figured they might have better arguments... But they didn't! Of course they also didn't listen either, so I gave up posting there & creating 911myths.com instead.

 

[Orphia Nay]

Welcome, stilicho. Nice opening post, and I like your point about the Dalai Lama.

Hehehe, Gravy - I didn't remember you were the one to coin the term "Loosers". Mind you, I call them "Looosers". I love you anyway.

David Wong, I always really enjoy your contributions, and I've quoted your site numerous times.

I first heard about 9/11 conspiracy fantasies at a woo forum I happen to be a member of, in September 2005, when someone posted an article from Victor Thorn of American Free Press. I've been debating twoofers ever since.

I'd already joined here earlier, in May 2005, and started what I'm pretty sure is the first JREF 9/11 conspiracy thread in December 2005. I'd discovered the Popular Mechanics article (and 9/11 Myths as far as I recall), and also read a bit at Bad Astronomy. I have been very happy to see some far, far greater minds than mine comprehensively address the meticulously incredulous claims of the twoofers.

It's great to see new debunkers join us here. I too remember the feeling of... I'm not sure if it was quite loneliness... disappearing when I found others who had reached similar conclusions as I had in what appeared to be a sea of uncritical thinking.

Again, welcome, stilicho.

 

[David Wong]

Thanks for the kind words.

I'm stunned to hear this all started basically a year ago. I'd have expected to see 9/11 conspiracy threads on these forums going back to 9/12/01. I know Alex Jones jumped right on it, but that's the format of his show. If a volcano erupts, he has to start volcano conspiracies the same day or else his fans will turn elsewhere.

EDIT: I missed orphia's post above mine, that answered my question I had asked before the edit.

 

[David Wong]

I learned about this mess from delphi_ote's original Loose Change thread. I just looked up my first contribution: I coined the word "Loosers."
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=53102

Okay, I went back and started reading some of that thread again...

This post:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1540856&postcount=754

from Sultanist slams the door on the debate so hard the whole house shook. I can't believe the rest of the debate wasn't just all of us quoting that post over and over again.

That was almost a year ago and I don't know if anyone has ever done it better than that, all compacted into one post. Wow. And it's buried on page 19 of a 500-page thread.

 

[Brainster]

I used to be a regular poster on various newsgroups on Usenet until about 2004, and some of the NGs I frequented contained discussions regarding the 9-11 CTs, as early as 2002. (Of course, they were almost immediately posted on alt.conspiracy, but that was not one of my regular hangouts.) I knew years ago what MIHOP and LIHOP meant, for example.

But I was pretty much disinterested in the topic since it seemed so farcical. By 2003 I was blogging regularly, but aside from an occasional mainstream flareup (like when Howard Dean suggested LIHOP on the Diane Rehm show), I didn't pay any attention to the topic.

It wasn't until United 93 came out that I heard of Loose Change. I had always been something of a United 93 buff. In the days after 9-11 I was quite depressed and emotional, and found it difficult to shake things off. Over the first weekend the first services began to be broadcast, and I sat there crying, and began to fear for my own mental health. So on Sunday I set out to learn everything I could about the hero flight.

And I began to discover little connections between my own life and the lives of some of the more famous folks on that plane. Jeremy Glick grew up in Upper Saddle River, NJ, which was two towns over from mine and which shared our high school. So I wondered if he'd actually graduated from my school, and sent off an email to my sister to see if she remembered him. She responded shortly afterwards that her husband had worked with Glick's dad (!) and she remembered being at a company picnic where the topic had come up and Glick's mother had said all their kids went to private school. In another article, I saw that Glick had been a big comic book fan as a kid, with a special interest in Green Lantern. I had been a huge comic book fan, and GL was one of my top faves as well.

Todd Beamer was variously described as living in Cranbury, Plainsboro or Hightstown; that same sister of mine lives in Plainsboro with a Cranbury mailing address, and my dad lives in Hightstown. She knew the Beamers but not well.

And my depression lifted that afternoon, so I've always felt that maybe I owe just a little bit more to the heroes of Flight 93 than the rest of us. I watched the A&E film a couple years back and read Jere Longman's book. As United 93 neared release I knew I was going to have to watch it the first day and blog about it.

Several of the celebrities at the Huffington Post were invited to the Tribeca premiere, and they posted their (very positive) reviews. And in the comments section, a bunch of the idiots were posting about how United 93 was government propaganda and if you wanted to know the real truth about 9-11, you had to watch Loose Change.

As it happened, I had just finished an assignment and it was late in the afternoon, so I figured I'd sit back and watch it on my computer. And at first the film (BTW, Version 1) just annoyed me; I could watch the parts about the pod and the missile and controlled demolition and the Pentagon and mostly roll my eyes.

But then they got to the "cellphone" calls, and I realized that they were completely denying my heroes. And I got a little pissed off and wrote a couple of posts on the idiots over the next few days, during which I also saw and wrote about United 93. But I was pretty much inclined to dismiss it until James B sent me an email suggesting that we collaborate on a blog about Loose Change, which he called "Loose Screws, Loose Change". He indicated that the movie was quite hot among the college crowd and that he felt it deserved a more thorough debunking. I had seen enough little things that seemed off that I thought we could probably find enough to cover over there, so I agreed, but suggested "Screw Loose Change" for the name.

We got lucky, too. Allahpundit over at Hot Air linked us on our second or third day, sending over thousands of readers. We joined an alliance of bloggers that resulted in our being linked on hundreds of blogs under the words "Screw Loose Change", which became a huge Google Bomb. Within a couple weeks we were coming up on the first page for searches for "Loose Change" and number 1 for "debunking Loose Change".

I think it was Gravy that brought James and me over here, a week or two later.

 

[stilicho]

Hi Again, All:

To MikeW, yes, you are remembering the same forum. One of the people you mentioned had started his own "World Citizens For Truth" forum, which is the one I was kicked off for starting a campaign to censure the Dalai Lama since he was a "CIA asset". That forum is long gone by now, but I imagine the deluded fellow is still bashing along at his own pace.

It was astonishing that he was fully prepared to accept the original Thierry Meyssan idea that no plane hit the Pentagon until one poster told him he'd pay for a plane ticket for him to fly to DC to meet the ironworkers who helped remove debris and discovered charred bodies and aircraft parts all over the site. The problem with those who try the 'no plane hit the Pentagon' gambit is that there are simply too many eyewitnesses. I had visited a Yahoo group, some time ago, where the guy who originally photographed the now-famous large section of Flight 77 explained his points to the likes of webfairy and others. The participants were at least civil to the guy, but that Yahoo group was from 2002, and lot of those involved (I think that killtown guy was even there) have since become a lot nastier.

One thing I discovered here was the "Lloyd The Taxi Driver" thing. I'd never heard of the guy before, but apparently he's been widely interviewed in the (eeep!) mainstream DC press. There's some link here that made a huge deal about Lloyd reading a David Icke book at the time, declaiming that Lloyd "wasn't in the right demographic". So was Lloyd a 12-foot invisible shape-shifting reptilian? Or what? (Also, why would the reptilians have to read books about themselves? Wouldn't they already know who they were?)

I have to hand it to David Icke. He is this generation's L Ron Hubbard.

 

[Dave Rogers]

It started for me, I think, just before Christmas 2005 when my mother phoned and asked me whether I could stop my brother going on about 9-11 conspiracy theories because it was upsetting her. I spoke to him for about an hour on the phone (not unusual for us) while he told me about controlled demolition and squibs and the size of the hole in the Pentagon, and my initial reaction was "that's ridiculous". I took a look on the WWW, quickly found the Popular Mechanics article and a couple of Twoofer websites, and compared the quality of their reasoning and research. A few weeks later my brother came and visited, and we had a lengthy argument in which he re-hashed all the theories about US false flag operations right back to the USS Maine, including a whole load of stuff about Pearl Harbor that I knew to be (rule8) (I have an interest in WW2 history, and I know quite a bit about PH and the US codebreaking effort before and after, although all from sources that CT's would consider unreliable i.e. not them). My overwhelming memory of that conversation was when he said, "Oh. You've read the Popular Mechanics article." in a tone that said "You traitor to the human race, you're complicit in mass murder." I mean, this was my (rule8)ing brother. Although I still couldn't take any of it seriously, he raised a few of what I later came to realise were the standard DRG questions about 9-11, like "Did you know none of the hijackers appear on the flight manifests?" and "Why are six of them still alive?" ... well, you all know the full list, I should think. After a while he calmed down and remembered who I was, and after he left we had a series of e-mails, where I started trying to debunk his conclusions on my own. I actually got through to him on a couple of points, but I had to drop the subject after I had some heart trouble last February, and stressful discussions were a possible cause.

About four or five months ago, I got interested again after learning a little about the Intelligent Design movement and recognising some aspects of the quality of their arguments. It prompted me to look into 9-11 in more detail, and I quickly found 911myths.com - thanks Mike, if you're reading this - which did a superb job of both answering all my brother's questions, and providing the source material to validate these answers.

Looking at all the work people like Mike, Frank Greening, Gravy and many others were doing made me want to contribute, so I came here to engage in the debunking community and see if there were any gaps I could fill. I'm still ready to accept decent evidence if any arises, but so far I've seen nothing of any value in any of the Twoofers' claims.

Incidentally, I don't believe the Bush administration has told everything it knows about the 9-11 attacks, simply because that's something governments rarely do, and the Bush administration strikes me as unusually obfuscatory and secretive. So in theory I suppose that counts me in with the 84% of Americans who support the Truth Movement, except that I'm not an American.

I'm a newcomer and I haven't made a significant contribution yet. I'll let you know if I come up with anything worthwhile.

Dave

 

[stilicho]

Hi Dave R:

I am not sure if this is a place many more of us could actually do any more work. In a way it's like support group (as is that of the "Truth Movement").

The most interesting part of your post is about what the American administration knew and when they knew it. This is the embryo of the LIHOP perspective and it's the one that's most popular among the people I know who I'd also call intelligent.

The biggest problem with LIHOP is the focus on simple cause and effect versus the overwhelming noise that obfuscates figure and ground. You appear to acknowledge the controversy over Pearl Harbour, in that Kimmel and others in the American intelligence community knew something. But what did they know? They had interests in the Philippines as well as in Hawaii (which wasn't a state at the time--something rarely mentioned in the "attack on America" conspiracies).

We also know that FDR absolutely wanted to help the UK in 1941.

My biggest problem with LIHOP theories, whether of Pearl Harbour or of 9/11, is that they subordinate the actions of the perpetrators to the supposed mindsets of the targets. I have seen numerous examples of conspiracists making the perpetrators (the Japanese, Muslim extremists, Lee Harvey Oswald) appear to be hapless, unmotivated and almost sub-human. If such people were writing in the fifteenth century, they would explain that Constantinople fell to the Turks not because the Turks were better equipped and motivated but because the Byzantine authorities wanted to be overthrown.

I run into similarly inclined people in business. I have spoken to people who felt that Atari (whose GUI was far ahead of its time, developed before IBM even thought a mouse was necessary to navigate its product) let themselves be defeated.

And I've met dozens of people who think they're smarter than any American president and know exactly what to do and how to do it. I have to sometimes rein in my own exuberance. [*I* would've ACTED on that August 6th memo, dammit!]

Sometimes we have to recognise our own shortcomings to the extent that we can forgive our public representatives for not being supernatural beings.

 

[The Silver Shadow]

9/11 Conspiracy theories came into light sometime last year. I was procrastinating for final exams (Like I always do!) and I saw the Loose Change video on Google video. I watched it and I was all gung ho that 9/11 was an inside job. I even told my friends about this, many of whom are in the civil engineering department and they kept telling me that it was stupid and everything. I told them to watch the film and do their research, which they told me that the arguments that LC brings up are at the very least, stupid. I went and did real research, not just specialist websites whose main objective is to say that 9/11 was an inside job, but rather unbiased science journals (I have database access because I'm a student) as well as stumbling upon MarkyX's screwloosechange website. I spent a good day after exams looking, and when it ended, I was very upset at Dylan and Co. and felt betrayed beyond anything. Ever since then, I stick to truth, not twoof! I hope Dylan reads this, and of course, he has my e-mail, so I welcome your reply.

 

[Dave Rogers]

The most interesting part of your post is about what the American administration knew and when they knew it. This is the embryo of the LIHOP perspective and it's the one that's most popular among the people I know who I'd also call intelligent.

Let me make it quite clear that I don't believe LIHOP - it's not supported by the evidence, and although it's not contradicted either (how could it be, really?) I just can't see it as probable. My views are probably closest to the excellent BBC documentary that I've just watched, which basically suggests that there may have been an after-the-fact coverup of the intelligence failures that allowed the attacks to succeed.

Dave

 

[Elizabeth I]

I didn't find out about 9/11 "inside job" conspiracy theories until I went to the JREF web page on the advice of an acquaintance, saw the "Forum" section and thought, "That might be fun."

My jaw dropped the first time I saw a post by a 9/11 CTer. I could NOT believe it was not a joke. However, I read further and found out that are were some real nutty people who mean what they are saying. (Interestingly, not long after that, a "9/11 Was an Inside Job" bumper sticker appeared on my next door neighbor's car. Coincidence? You tell me...)

I admire those of you with the skills and background to mathematically and scientifically refute this idiocy, and the patience to return and cover the same ground again and again, however often the same arguments are trotted out.

Besides, I was right and the forum is fun!

 

[Kiwiwriter]

Greetings!

Stilicho, welcome aboard.

I first heard the conspiracy nonsense about 9/11 about a year after the blast, but I didn't know about "Loose Change" until I found ads for it on E-Bay, at $1.50 a pop. I wondered what this nonsense was about, and I found my way here. Being a fan of James Randi, this was an obvious place for me to land.

The theories infuriated me because my wife's former boyfriend, Mike Sheridan, was operations manager of the WTC and a big wheel in the union there, so both of them personally knew many people killed there. Mike was in charge in the 1993 bombing, and had retired by 2001, but he knew what went down there from his PA colleagues.

He had no truck with the conspiracy theorists, and if you knew Mike Sheridan, he was as honest and passionate as the day was long. There was no way Mike Sheridan would be "silenced" or "paid off" by the NWO to cover up some idiotic conspiracy. So I resent these theorists, because I see them as urinating on Mike's grave (he died last year of prostate cancer) and all the other dead of 9/11.

I like that, the Dalai Lama is a CIA plant, too. I guess he's responsible for that gerbil Richard Gere met....

 

[LashL]

stilicho and Dave Rogers.

Nice to have you aboard (pun intended )

 

[LashL]

Stilicho, welcome aboard.

I first heard the conspiracy nonsense about 9/11 about a year after the blast, but I didn't know about "Loose Change" until I found ads for it on E-Bay, at $1.50 a pop. I wondered what this nonsense was about, and I found my way here. Being a fan of James Randi, this was an obvious place for me to land.

The theories infuriated me because my wife's former boyfriend, Mike Sheridan, was operations manager of the WTC and a big wheel in the union there, so both of them personally knew many people killed there. Mike was in charge in the 1993 bombing, and had retired by 2001, but he knew what went down there from his PA colleagues.

He had no truck with the conspiracy theorists, and if you knew Mike Sheridan, he was as honest and passionate as the day was long. There was no way Mike Sheridan would be "silenced" or "paid off" by the NWO to cover up some idiotic conspiracy. So I resent these theorists, because I see them as urinating on Mike's grave (he died last year of prostate cancer) and all the other dead of 9/11.

I like that, the Dalai Lama is a CIA plant, too. I guess he's responsible for that gerbil Richard Gere met....

Kiwiwriter,

My story is similar to yours in some respects. I first heard rumblings of conspiracy theories about the events of 9/11 in 2003, but didn't pay much attention to them because they were pretty vague and just as baseless then as they are now.

Later, when conspiracy theories evolved that included the firefighters being "paid off" or "in on it", I became very angry, probably in large part because my beau is a fire captain and he knows and knew firefighters who were at the WTC on 9/11, and because there is no way in hell that FDNY members would be or could be "silenced" about the deaths of the 343 firefighters who died that day.

I posted on a couple of other boards for a couple of years, where I was among a small minority of sane voices surrounded by woowoos - many of whom were completely and utterly delusional - before I discovered this forum in 2006, and it was like finding an island of rationality in an ocean of lunacy.

Also like you, I resent the conspiracy fantasists because I see them as urinating on the graves of all of the people who died that day, not only the firefighters and police officers and other first responders, but every single victim who died that day and since as a result of the attacks, and every one of the loved ones that they left behind.