Has anyone here seen 9/11 Press for Truth?
Surely someone here has to believe they're covering something up...
Yes, some forum posters did, back in 2006. Here's the thread where it was discussed:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63545
Shifting through the rancor between CLE and others he (yes, Childlike Empress is a "he") was antagonizing, the substance of the rebuttals were in the following posts:
I'm ten minutes into the film. So far I've heard the same boring and fact-less "NORAD Stand Down" argument I have heard repeatedly from CTers.
It's very simple CLE. Please pay attention.
...reading?
...
The moment the 19 hijackers were on board the aircraft the nearly 3000 victims' fates were sealed. There was nothing anyone could do to prevent 9/11 happening at that point.
The mighty USA is NOT invincible, anymore than Battleship Row was. The US got beaten by people who were cleverer and more dedicated. Simple as that.
-Andrew
... and
The first 10 minutes of the film primarily deals with a claim of a NORAD stand down - they point out that NORAD were first informed at 0838, and the last aircraft crashed at 1003. One of the women claims that means "nearly 2 hours in which jets were flying around the US and the military did nothing"
Aside from the fact that 0838 to 1003 is 1 hr 25 mins (quite substantially less than 2 hours), their statements are chocka full of falsehoods and deceptive dishonest comments.
It does not bode well for the rest of the documentary. Any documentary on a sensitive topic, that so grossly distorts the truth and makes outright lies is, in my opinion, pure propaganda.
-Andrew
The NORAD stand down has been discussed many times here and in other forums and has been shown to be false. Refer to the following:
http://www.911myths.com/html/stand_down.html
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/08/norad200608
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1845150&postcount=1
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=70300
By the way, up to 20 minutes, we're now into the "no investigation of 9/11" and "investigation into President's blowjob cost more than investigation into 3000 murders" BS. *yawn*
"No investigation of 9/11" is just plain out incorrect. The
PENTTBOM investigation (another link
here) involved over half of the FBI's total special agent manpower and is simply their biggest investigation ever. Add that to the 9/11 Commision inquiry, the initial FEMA and definitive NIST work, and just from the government's end alone you have multiple, large investigations into the event. Add to that all the
legitimate research on the engineering aspects that were published in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics, Fire Engineering, Civil Engineering, the Engineering News Record, etc., and you simply have the complete opposite of "no investigatoin of 9/11".
As far as the charge about the various 9/11 investigations (or even any one of them) costing less than the one on President Clinton: I don't have that figure, but from manpower allocated alone, I find that hard to believe.
Okay,
30 minutes in and we're now on to the Complete 9/11 Timeline. A useful research tool, but it does have some major issues - for example an enormous chunk of it is pure speculation. There's also no follow-up - it will cite a news article that indicates something out of place, yet that will be a news article that turned out to be a false alarm - like the "hijackers still alive" thing.
A big part of the timeline is "warnings". Most of these have little or no significance whatsoever (the sort of thing that only has significance from the predisposed position of "inside job"). A lot of people critical of the government for ignoring the warnings dump blame on Bush, despite the fact that the vast majority of these links and so-called warnings occured during Clinton's administration. These same people show a severe lack of understanding of what constitutes "actionable intelligence". The same people would froth rabid at the mouth if a cop pulled over someone in the vicinity of a bank robbery because they were black.
-Andrew
One of the rebuttals to the "Hijackers still alive" myth:
http://911myths.com/html/still_alive.html
... and on that page, links to the BBC and other sources stories on this topic.
"Warnings" and foreknowledge:
http://911myths.com/html/foreknowledge.html
And of course, these topics have their own threads in this forum.
40 Minutes in and we're still on warnings. I'm going to simply respond with
this excellent post by David Wong:
Quote:
It's impossible to stop every conceivable method of attack. And it's awfully easy to come back after the fact and say, "WHY DIDN'T WE SEE THAT COMING?!?!?"
We didn't, because those memos warning that Osama might try to hijack planes were buried under other memos warning of cyber terrorism, or poisoning water supplies, or sneaking a nuke on board cargo boxes, or growing biological agents in a lab, or sneaking a shoulder-fired missile to a hill outside an airport, or suicide bombing a shopping mall, or filling a truck full of bombs and running it into a hotel, or...
You get the idea.
50 minutes in and we get the same "no one reacted" BS. "No fighters responded" etc.
This stuff gets tired fast.
-Andrew
Self explanatory.
And finally, Pardalis chimes in:
OK, finished it.
After the first ten minutes where it seemed to raise questions about the collapse, I started to wonder if it would fall into the CT crap about controlled demolitions. Thankfully, it did not. But that leaves me doubtful as to why they left that in, since they don't pursue the idea. Maybe it was to get our attention...
All the way through, as Gumboot said about David Wong's quote, it seemed to make the logical fallacy of hindsight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
But even with that in mind, I acknowledge the film raises interesting questions. By the end of it, it was clear that it was pushing for the LIHOP theory, which is to me, believable but still pending proof. Did the US cover up ties between Al Qaeda and Pakistan? I simply don't know.
Maybe there should be an "international" investigation. Why not?
So OK, go ahead and make this new investigation, what are you waiting for? Why are you asking the Bush administration?
Why are you accusing the Bush administration of not doing an "international" investigation about itself????
And shouldn't you accuse them AFTER the investigation, when (and if) the investigation shows conclusive proof that the US had foreknowledge of the specific attack and covered things up?
I'm not so sure I believe LIHOP explanations, and I don't think I'd be so casual in agreeing that some sort of "new investigation" is needed. Look up LIHOP in these threads for those arguments. Still, though, if a film is pushing LIHOP, then MIHOP explanations are by necessity excluded. I don't think this video is a good thing to push in conjunction with talk about squibs, which is very strictly a MIHOP hypothesis, and contradicted by LIHOP.
Gumboot makes a post I'm not positive I agree in full with. For example, many of the Special Forces troops were in fact veterans of previous conflicts, like Somalia and, or at least well experienced in other areas of operation (unfortunately in too many cases, not the
correct areas; I distinctly remember a story about some SF operators complaining that they were sent over as language specialists and were less than useless. They were indeed specialists...
for Latin America. Not all that happened there was smooth by any stretch). But his post contains compelling information nonetheless, and most of it I do well agree with.
Okay, 50 minutes in now...
We get the whole "we didn't catch anyone in Afghanistan" thing. I'm not sure when the doco was made, because at present Al Qaeda's command structure has been decimated.
I'm starting to see American arrogance in the doco now, which isn't surprising. People are arguing there's no way these Al Qaeda fighters could escape from the US. Well... nonsense. Come on people. Do some military history research.
Most of the American troops in Afghanistan had no previous combat experience. Even fewer had any decent experience in the sort of warfare or climate that they had to face (hence why NZSAS ended up playing such a disproportiantly significant role).
In contrast, the Al Qaeda fighters have been fighting around the world, basically constantly, for THREE DECADES. They defeated the Soviet Army in Afghanistan and know the terrain backwards. They have high level friends in Pakistan - the neighbour that the US was relying on for support.
It's is quite plain and simple. Al Qaeda were BETTER than the US Military. It might be a hard pill for arrogant Americans to swallow, but it's true. Al Qaeda and other militant Islamic groups were running circles around the US intelligence community for a decade leading up to 9/11, and in Afghanistan, for the first year or so, Al Qaeda ran circles around the US Military.
I simply don't understand this incredulous "US is invincible" stance that is so often espoused by those claiming inside involvement. Would anyone we so utterly disbelieving if Soviet cold-war intelligence out-foxed US or British intelligence? Of course not. Yet Al Qaeda beat BOTH the Soviets AND the West. We grossly underestimated them. And by fixing blame on "incompetent US officials" we are CONTINUING to underestimate them. They are a REAL threat. They are not a bunch of towel-heads hiding in a cave. They are highly trained, incredibly experienced, thorough, patient, smart, and dedicated.
Want to know what Al Qaeda looks for in its members? This, according to the Al Qaeda training manual (Second Lesson):
Now. Does that sound like a rag-tag bunch of cave-dwellers? Or a sophisticated unified organisation?
-Andrew
Okay, this post is long enough. You get the point. Yes, Press for Truth was indeed viewed by some here. It failed to sway people (well, CLE, but that poster is rather accomodating of Anti-US government CTs). As said before, the biggest concession was to LIHOP, and even then Pardalis said
"... which is to me, believable but still pending proof". Or in other words, show me how it's true. I don't read that as his being convinced at all, only being fair and conceding there were LIHOP questions that sounded reasonable.
And Gumboot's summary (I won't quote it;
just read it here) pretty much describes what the flaws in the video were. At any rate, yes, that vid was discussed here, back in '06. And we're still skeptical about any conspiracy hypotheses that people present. In that aspect, the film fails to convince.
