Experts claim 911 an "inside job"

POLITICS
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]Fury as academics claim 9/11 was ‘inside job’ by JAYA NARAIN Last updated at 15:47pm on 6th September 2006 The 9/11 terrorist attack on America which left almost 3,000 people dead was an “inside job”, according to a group of leading academics. Around 75 top professors and leading scientists believe the attacks were puppeteered by war mongers in the White House to justify the invasion and the occupation of oil-rich Arab countries. The claims have caused outrage and anger in the US which marks the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Monday. But leading scientists say the facts of their investigations cannot be ignored and say they have evidence that points to one of the biggest conspiracies ever perpetrated. Professor Steven Jones, who lectures in physics at the Brigham Young University in Utah, says the official version of events is the biggest and most evil cover up in history. He has joined the 9/11 Scholars for Truth whose membership includes up to 75 leading scientists and experts from universities across the US. Prof Jones said: "We don’t believe that 19 hijackers and a few others in a cave in Afghanistan pulled this off acting alone. “We challenge this official conspiracy theory and, by God, we’re going to get to the bottom of this.” In essays and journals, the scientists are giving credence to many of the conspiracy theories that have circulated on the internet in the past five years. They believe a group of US neo-conservatives called the Project for a New American Century, set on US world dominance, orchestrated the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to hit Iraq, Afghanistan and later Iran. The group says scientific evidence over the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon is conclusive proof. Professor Jones said it was impossible for the twin towers to have collapsed in the way they did from the collision of two aeroplanes. He maintains jet fuel does not burn at temperatures high enough to melt steel beams and claims horizontal puffs of smoke seen during the collapse of the towers are indicative of controlled explosions used to bring down the towers. The group also maintains World Trade Centre 7 - a neighbouring building which caught fire and collapsed later in the day - was only partially damaged but had to be destroyed because it housed a clandestine CIA station. Professor James Fetzer, 65, a retired philosopher of science at the University of Minnesota, said: “The evidence is so overwhelming, but most Americans don’t have time to take a look at this.” The 9/11 Commission dismissed the numerous conspiracy theories after its exhaustive investigation into the terror attacks. Subsequent examinations of the towers’ structure have sought to prove they were significantly weakened by the impact which tore off fire retardant materials and led the steel beams bending under heat and then collapsing. Christopher Pyle, professor of constitutional law at Mt Holyoake College in Massachusetts, has dismissed the academic group. He said: "To plant bombs in three buildings with enough bomb materials and wiring? It’s too huge a project and would require far too many people to keep it a secret afterwards. “After every major crisis, like the assassinations of JFK or Martin Luther King, we’ve had conspiracy theorists who come up with plausible scenarios for gullible people. It’s a waste of time.” But University of Wisconsin assistant professor, Kevin Barrett, said experts are unwilling to believe theories which don’t fit into their belief systems. He said: “People will disregard evidence it if causes their faith to be shattered. I think we were all shocked. And then, when the voice of authority told us what happened, we just believed it.” As the fifth anniversary approached, the 9/11 Scholars for Truth is urging Congress to reopen the investigation claiming they have amassed a wealth of scientific evidence to prove their version of the terror attacks.

…and this…

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Who really blew up the twin towers? As the fifth anniversary of 9/11 nears, Christina Asquith finds academics querying the official version of events Tuesday September 5, 2006 The Guardian Shards of glass and dust from the World Trade Centre towers sit on Professor Steven Jones’s desk at Brigham Young University in Utah. Evidence, he says, of the biggest cover-up in history - one too evil for most to believe, but one he has staked his academic career on exposing. The attacks of September 11, Jones asserts, were an “inside job”, puppeteered by the neoconservatives in the White House to justify the occupation of oil-rich Arab countries, inflate military spending and expand Israel. “We don’t believe that 19 hijackers and a few others in a cave in Afghanistan pulled this off acting alone,” says Jones. “We challenge this official conspiracy theory and, by God, we’re going to get to the bottom of this.” While this sinister spin strikes most American academics as absurd, Jones, a physics professor, is not alone. He is a member of 9/11 Scholars for Truth, a recently formed group of around 75 US professors determined to prove 9/11 was a hoax. In essays and journals, they are using their association with prominent universities to give a scholarly stamp to conspiracy theories long believed in parts of Europe and the Arab world, and gaining ground among Americans due to frustration with the Iraq war and opposition to President Bush’s heavily hyped “war on terror”. Their iconoclastic positions have drawn wrath from rightwing radio shows and caused upheaval on campuses, triggering letters to newspapers, phone calls from parents and TV cameras in lecture halls. In the Midwest, 61 legislators signed a petition calling for the dismissal of a University of Wisconsin assistant professor, Kevin Barrett, after he joined the 9/11 Scholars for Truth. Citing academic freedom, the university provost defended Barrett, albeit reluctantly. A Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll taken during the summer indicates that Americans are increasingly suspicious of the government’s explanation of the events of 9/11: 36% said it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, or took no action to stop them, “because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East”.
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Cont…

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For most of the world, the story of 9/11 begins at 8.45am on September 11 2001, when American Airlines flight 11 smashed into the North tower of the World Trade Centre. But, tumble down the rabbit hole with Jones, and the plotline begins a year earlier, in September 2000. A neoconservative group called Project for a New American Century, which included the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the vice-president, Dick Cheney, brought out a report arguing for a global expansion of American military and economic supremacy, and for the US to transform itself into a “one-world superpower”. The report warned that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor”. Excuse for aggression The group, in concert with about 20 others, orchestrated the attacks of 9/11 as an excuse for pre-emptive global aggression against Afghanistan, then Iraq and soon Iran, the academics say. And they insist that they have amassed a wealth of scientific data to prove it. It is impossible, says Jones, for the towers to have collapsed from the collision of two aeroplanes, as jet fuel doesn’t burn at temperatures hot enough to melt steel beams. The horizontal puffs of smoke - squibs - emitted during the collapse of the towers are indicative of controlled implosions on lower floors. The scholars have collected eyewitness accounts of flashes and loud explosions immediately before the fall. The twin towers must, they say, have been brought down by explosives - hence the container of dust on Jones’s desk, sent to him unsolicited by a woman living in lower Manhattan. He is using X-ray fluorescents to test it for explosive materials. What’s more, the nearby World Trade Centre 7 also collapsed later that afternoon. The building had not been hit by a plane, only damaged by fire. WTC 7 housed a clandestine CIA station, which the scholars believe was the command centre for the planning of 9/11. “The planes were just a distraction,” says Professor James Fetzer, 65, a recently retired philosopher of science at the University of Minnesota. “The evidence is so overwhelming, but most Americans don’t have time to take a look at this.” But Jonathan Barnett, professor of fire protection engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, calls such claims “bad science”. Barnett was a member of the World Trade Centre Building Performance Study, one of the government groups that investigated the towers’ collapse. Reluctantly, he has familiarised himself with the scholars’ claims - many of them have emailed him. Yes, it is unusual for a steel structure to collapse from fire, Barnett agrees. However, his group and others argue that the planes’ impact weakened the structures and stripped off the fireproofing materials. That caused the top floors of both towers to collapse on to the floors below. “A big chunk of building falling down made the next floor fall down, and then they all came down like a deck of cards,” Barnett says. The collapse of WTC 7 was also unusual, he admits. However, firefighters do not usually let a fire rage unabated for seven hours as they did on the morning of September 11, because they had prioritised the rescue of victims. “The fact that you don’t have evidence to support your theory doesn’t mean that the other theory is true,” Barnett says. “They just made it up out of the blue.” Since the attacks, the US government has issued three reports into the events of the day, all of which involved hundreds of professors, scientists and government officials. The 9/11 Commission, a bipartisan group, issued a 500-page, moment-by-moment investigation into the hijackers’ movements, concluding that they were connected to Osama bin Laden. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency, filed 10,000 pages of reports examining the towers’ collapse. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency weighed in, examining the response to the attacks. “To plant bombs in three buildings with enough bomb materials and wiring? It’s too huge a project and would require far too many people to keep it a secret afterwards,” says Christopher Pyle, professor of constitutional law at Mt Holyoke College. “After every major crisis, like the assassinations of JFK or Martin Luther King, we’ve had conspiracy theorists who come up with plausible scenarios for gullible people. It’s a waste of time.” But Barrett says the experts have been fooled by an “act of psychological conversion” not unlike the tactics CIA interrogators use on their victims. “People will disregard evidence if it causes their faith to be shattered,” he says. “I think we were all shocked. And then, when the voice of authority told us what happened, we just believed it.” Misleading the public History has revealed that governments have a tradition of misleading the public into going to war, says Barrett, and the next generation of Americans will realise the truth. “Europe and Canada are way ahead of us on this.” The 9/11 scholars go to great lengths to portray themselves as rational thinkers, who have been slowly won over by a careful, academic analysis of the facts of the day. However, a study of the full extent of their claims is a journey into the increasingly absurd: Flight 93 did not crash in Pennsylvania but landed safely in Cleveland; desperate phone calls received by relatives on the ground from passengers were actually computer-generated voices from a laboratory in California. The Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines Flight 77, but by a smaller, remote-controlled A-3 Sky Warrior, which shot a missile into the building before crashing into it. Many of the 9/11 scholars have a history of defending conspiracy theories, including that the CIA plotted both the Lockerbie bombing and the plane crash of John F Kennedy Jr and his wife, and that “global secret societies” control the world. Professor Robert Goldberg, of the University of Utah, wrote a book on conspiracy theories, Enemies Within: the Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. He recounts a history of religious and political leaders using conspiracy theories for personal and political gain. The common enemy is usually Jews, big government or corporations. The public laps it up, either because these theories are more exciting than the truth, or out of emotional need. “What the conspiracy theorists do is present their case with facts and figures: they have dates, meeting places and always name names,” he says. "The case is always presented in a prosecutorial way, or the way an adventure writer presents a novel. It’s a breathless account. They are willing to say hearsay is a fact, and rumour is true, and accidents are never what they seem. “One of the stories is that a missile hit the Pentagon, and all the data is there. But what is missing is: what actually happened to the plane and the people on it? Conspiracy theorists avoid discussion of those facts that don’t fit.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that the public’s willingness to believe conspiracy theories parallels their dissatisfaction with the Bush administration. In recent years, the American public has felt misled over false claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11. Many fear infringements on their civil liberties now the National Security Agency has gained access to phone billing records from telecommunications companies, the Bush administration has engaged in wiretapping without court warrants and there are thousands of cases of indefinite detentions of American and foreign citizens without trial. Those who criticise the Bush administration’s “war on terror” are accused of being unpatriotic. By taking their criticisms to such extremes, though, the scholars risk caricaturing the opposition. None the less, they are pushing on, and imploring Congress to reopen the investigation. “We’re academics and we’re rational, and we really believe Congress or someone should investigate this,” says David Gabbard, an East Carolina education professor and 9/11 scholar. “But there are a lot of crazies out there who purport that UFOs were involved. We don’t want to be lumped in with those folks.”

So what do people think? Its one thing for just anybody with a grasp of how to make a flash slideshow on the net throwing up these sort of theories - but here we have a collection of academics and scientists claiming the biggest cover-up in history.

Or is this part of a wider left-wing academic conspiracy to destabalise the Bush Administration?

Im amazed this hasn’t already been posted here - and I did look, just couldn’t find anything.

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Wow, my friend, you haven’t looked hard enough - just do a search for Uncle Cthulu and you’ll find pages and pages and pages of posts on this very discussion.

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This is even less likely than the government faking the moon landing. In other words, no.

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The thing I keep coming back to is that if 9/11 was a way for the government to rationalize invading Iraq, wouldn’t they have done a better job of making it look like Iraq was responsible for it? I mean, there’s no evidence whatsoever of an Iraq connection, and there never was. The administration never even claimed there was. That’s what makes this whole theory fall down.

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Originally Posted by JGButler Wow, my friend, you haven’t looked hard enough - just do a search for Uncle Cthulu and you’ll find pages and pages and pages of posts on this very discussion.

Yeah, you really could have just named this thread The Call of Uncle Cthulu.

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Perhaps the President and Vice President’s slowness in responding to calls for guidance during the attacks could be seen as a passive act of complicity, but I don’t see any reason to believe the government was in any way involved in carrying out the attacks. It’s just highly improbable in too many ways.

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Or is this part of a wider left-wing academic conspiracy to destabalise the Bush Administration?

You’re kidding, right?

Kooky stories from people who may or may not be qualified and informed enough to comment who will end up being discredited by their peers don’t strike me as being the hallmarks of a well planned conspiracy. We’re talking about people whose evidence include vials of who-knows-what sent to them by who-knows-who, and this doesn’t strike me as being terribly academic.

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I’m really torn on this. On one hand, I wouldn’t put it past our government for even a second. On the other, the number of people who would either have to: a) be complicit and yet trusted to keep their mouths shut, or b) participate unwittingly and unknowingly would simply be staggering. It’s hard to swallow, and I have no issue with conspiracy theories whatsoever.

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I heard one day on a radio show some guy trying to explain how wiring and bombs were smuggled into the WTC, and wired it just right to fall the way it did, and the radio host said, “Isn’t it easier to believe that a group of terrorists that hate our country and administration hijacked some planes and flew them into the WTC?” And to that I say yes. The WTC has been a bomb target before, and terrorists hijacking planes was nothing new. What is so hard to believe about that?
Side note though: As soon as I heard about the planes hitting the buildings, the first thing I thought was conspiracy. But that’s probably because at the time I was reading about Operation Blackwoods (I think that was the name), where the military came up with a clandestine plan to attack US military ships and other US targets under the guise of the Cubans, creating a swing of the American people to support an attack on Cuba. But Kennedy extremely shot it down as soon as it was proposed to him. So yeah, my first thought was conspiracy in the same vein. But the more I thought about it, the less I believed it.

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All I can add to this (and I’ve posted ad nauseum already) is to quote Socrates: the unexamined life is not worth living.

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Whether or not there’s any truth to any of this, do any of you even begin to realize how much you all really don’t know? All you know about this is what you’ve been told. Any point of view on this that any of you have, is for the most part, only one that has been presented to you. Do you realize that? Does it bother you?

You all are just too conditioned to believe what those in “authority” tell you, that just the truth, regardless of what did or did not happen on 9/11.

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Originally Posted by Uncle Cthulhu Whether or not there’s any truth to any of this, do any of you even begin to realize how much you all really don’t know? All you know about this is what you’ve been told. Any point of view on this that any of you have, is for the most part, only one that has been presented to you. Do you realize that? Does it bother you? You all are just too conditioned to believe what those in “authority” tell you, that just the truth, regardless of what did or did not happen on 9/11.

You know how, in all those other threads, you always used to cry about people making assumptions about you?

Yeah, I think that lesson can be applied here.

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Originally Posted by Greg David I mean, there’s no evidence whatsoever of an Iraq connection, and there never was. The administration never even claimed there was.

I’m not sure about that. The administration did an excellent job of conflating Iraq and Sept 11th in official speeches, and even today the stance is still very equivocal.

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While I think this Administration is capable of such an act MORALLY, the image of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Condi, etc sitting in a smoke filled room and actually having the mental capacity to mastermind this is hilarious. I don’t think this crew could mastermind the destruction of a sand castle, let alone handle the far reaching implications of 9/11.

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I’m getting a little tired of the “airplane fuel can’t cause a fire hot enough to melt steel” argument. It didn’t have to completely melt it to molten slag, it just had to get it hot enough to soften to the point where it wouldn’t support the weight of the floors anymore.

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I’m getting a little tired of the idea that three planes crashing on three very large, very iconic buildings wouldn’t be enough justification for the “War on Terror” .

If the conspiracy theorists simply said that the attacks had CIA backing, I’d entertain the thought. But this is nonsense.

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…And crazy people believe them.

Heyzeus christ, I cannot believe people still argue about this as something plausable. Let’s look at this with a really simple logic proof:

Fact A)
Iran-Contra was found out. Hell, the government was incapable of covering up the president getting a blow job from a fat intern. What in the holy fuck makes people believe they could pull something like this off?

Theorem B)
Let’s negate A) by saying the “Project for a New American Century” imported Black Op ninja kung-fu geniuses from the Yakuza in Japan to pull this off. Then why fly planes into buildings? Far too many variables to control and oppurtunities for mishaps. Why not instead just have terrorists blow up the building and claim responsibility? The two-towers collapsing is the focal point for 9/11 (hell some people are unaware a plane hit the Pentagon), so why not wrap it in a bow a hell of a lot easier?

Theorem C)
Let’s Negate B) by claiming that the Yakuza Black Ops had help from disgruntled airport security unions who wanted an up in pay and work force. Now we got planes going into the buildings.
Then Why not have terrorists claiming they did it for Iraq? Why the whole WMD fiasco and more important, the invasion of Afghanastan? It’s not a major oil rich country, only a pipeline transporter. Syria would have made far more sense to have direct port access from Iraq to the mediterranian sea.

Unfortunatly, for C) to be negated, we would require Fact A):morons were planning the aftermath.

Believe 9/11 was used politically to start the Iraq war?
Fair enough.

Believe 9/11 was planned by government conspirorists to start the Iraq war?
You are a moron beyond all definitions of the word.

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Death Surge Fact A) Iran-Contra was found out. Hell, the government was incapable of covering up the president getting a blow job from a fat intern. What in the holy fuck makes people believe they could pull something like this off?

There are actually people who believe that the conspirators let stuff like this slip out to create a believable air of fallibility. Seriously.

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They also believe no one has set foot on the moon, the Illuminati are in control of a single world goverment, Aliens steal cows from cattle ranches, and Elvis is still alive.

Speaking of which…Hey Cthulu! How is Elvis these days?