Here we go again. Weren't you the same guy who denied the lunar landing? I think the most convincing evidence that the Bush administration had nothing to do with 9/11 is because it worked. Why is it so hard to believe a small group of militant Islamic death cultists succeeded in hijacking 3 planes? It's not like no one has ever hijacked a plane before or terrorists have never tried to kill large groups of civilians before 9/11. There do exist people in the world right now who really sincerely believe the more westerners and Israelis they kill will earn them bonus points in heaven. They aren't crazy random maniacs. They are single-minded, very focused and relentless. There is something that turns my stomach about conspiracy theories about 9/11. This isn't about being a vigilant citizen. It's about paranoid people cruising the internet and looking for gratification for their morbid fantasies. The lunar landing was one thing, but real people with real familes and friends were murdered. It's sick and disfunctional to make one's life more interesting by exploiting such a tragedy.

9/11 conspiracy theories are discussed at the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories

They are a fascinating example of wishful thinking - ie hatred of the USA leading to imaginative collation of anything that supports the conspiracy and willful refusal to consider main evidence.

Michael Shermer, writing in Scientific American, said:

"The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking. All the evidence for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy. For example, according to www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers. "The planes did not bring those towers down; bombs did," says www.abovetopsecret.com. Wrong. In an article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society and in subsequent interviews, Thomas Eagar, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains why: steel loses 50 percent of its strength at 1,200 degrees F; 90,000 liters of jet fuel ignited other combustible materials such as rugs, curtains, furniture and paper, which continued burning after the jet fuel was exhausted, raising temperatures above 1,400 degrees F and spreading the inferno throughout each building. Temperature differentials of hundreds of degrees across single steel horizontal trusses caused them to sag--straining and then breaking the angle clips that held the beams to the vertical columns. Once one truss failed, others followed. When one floor collapsed onto the next floor below, that floor subsequently gave way, creating a pancaking effect that triggered each 500,000-ton structure to crumble. Conspiricists argue that the buildings should have fallen over on their sides, but with 95 percent of each building consisting of air, they could only have collapsed straight down.

All the 9/11 conspiracy claims are this easily refuted.

Witness accounts of the 757 hitting the Pentagon are at http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/F77pentaToC.html, a conspiracy site which refers to the NORAD stand down. It seems your 'no 757' part of the conspiracy theory is false.

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_consp ... e_Pentagon links to the above site and to the following account from CNN
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/ ... l[quote]We do also have somebody to talk with us who was an eyewitness to the actual crash. He was watch from Arlington, Virginia, which is a suburb. His name is Tim Timmerman. Mr. Timmerman, are you with us right now? TIM TIMMERMAN, EYEWITNESS: I sure am. FRANKEN: You are a pilot. Tell us what you saw. TIMMERMAN: I was looking out the window; I live on the 16th floor, overlooking the Pentagon, in a corner apartment, so I have quite a panorama. And being next to National Airport, I hear jets all the time, but this jet engine was way too loud. I looked out to the southwest, and it came right down 395, right over Colombia Pike, and as is went by the Sheraton Hotel, the pilot added power to the engines. I heard it pull up a little bit more, and then I lost it behind a building. And then it came out, and I saw it hit right in front of -- it didn't appear to crash into the building; most of the energy was dissipated in hitting the ground, but I saw the nose break up, I saw the wings fly forward, and then the conflagration engulfed everything in flames. It was horrible.
FRANKEN: What can you tell us about the plane itself? TIMMERMAN: It was a Boeing 757, American Airlines, no question. FRANKEN: You say that it was a Boeing, and you say it was a 757 or 767? TIMMERMAN: 7-5-7. FRANKEN: 757, which, of course...TIMMERMAN: American Airlines.
FRANKEN: American Airlines, one of the new generation of jets. TIMMERMAN: Right. It was so close to me it was like looking out my window and looking at a helicopter. It was just right there. FRANKEN: We were told that it was flying so low that it clipped off a couple of light poles as it was coming in. TIMMERMAN: That might have happened behind the apartments that occluded my view. And when it reappeared, it was right before impact, and like I said, it was right before impact, and I saw the airplane just disintegrate and blow up into a huge ball of flames. FRANKEN: So there was a fireball that you saw? TIMMERMAN: Absolutely. And the building shook, and it was quite a tremendous explosion. FRANKEN: What did you see after that? TIMMERMAN: Nothing but the flames. I sat here, and I took a few pictures out of my window, and I noticed the fire trucks and the responses was just wonderful. Fire trucks were there quickly. I saw the area; the building didn't look very damaged initially, but I do see now, looking out my window, there's quite a chunk in it. But I think the blessing here might have been that the airplane hit before it hit the building, it hit the ground, and a lot of energy might have gone that way. That's what it appeared like. FRANKEN: There is, of course -- we heard some discussion about the fact that it could have been worse had it actually gone a little bit higher and gone into what is the called the ring, the center ring...(CROSSTALK)FRANKEN: This is a five-sided building.TIMMERMAN: As you know, the rings are A, B, C, D, E. It is just across the E ring on the outside, and that's why I felt it didn't look as damaged as it could be. It looked like on the helipad, which is on that side.FRANKEN: Did you see any people being removed, any injured being removed, that type of thing?TIMMERMAN: No, sir. I am up about a quarter a mile -- it may be a little bit closer -- and at that point, I saw nothing like that.FRANKEN: Tim Timmerman, thank you very much -- an eyewitness, Judy, to the crash.[/quote]

Cosmored, have you actually re-read yourself? I'm not trying to be mean at all. It actually reminded me quite a bit when in the past I was heavily into New Age beliefs. No one could tell me any different than what I already held to be true. It was completely obvious to me the Universe wanted the best for me if I learned to put forth the correct intentions. I felt vindicated for my faith when I had a positive outcome (my "evidence") and just ignored or explained away a negative outcome. I could always explain everything away in a tidy convenient reasons. The Universe decreed I should not have a new job right now. The answer that the Universe doesn't think or feel anything never occurred to me. Culturally, it's not just religion that encourages people to make great leaps of the imagination and ignore proven facts. The premise of many TV shows and films and many fiction books always take the stance that the rational characters are always short sighted fools and the ones who believe in the most far-fetched are rewarded. Oh, and yes I thought evolution was true and I thought I was superior to those fundamentalist Christians, but I still believed that a supernatural force started the process and watched over us. Yes, my ideas were reasonable and sane, while others were silly. Science just hadn't caught up to the point where it could detect spiritual energy, but it would someday. Isn't that big of me to allow science to catch up to my brilliant ideas? It never once crossed my mind that my beliefs could not stand up to any serious scrutiny, because what I knew of the scrutiny came from New Age authors -- just as you dismiss the debunking of a 9/11 conspiracy because conspiracy theorists prevent their readers from reading say Scientific American by acting as if they already have a handle on any argument against them. You know what changed my mind about all religion and irrational beliefs? September 11th. I could not continue to question other people's beliefs without pointing the finger back at myself. And once I honestly sat down and read a little about agnosticism and atheism WRITTEN BY atheists and agnostics I found I couldn't just dismiss their arguments. I found that what I read about them was a lie, they were not as stubborn and arrogant as the religious. They know exactly what it would take to change their minds. Do you know what it would take to change your mind and embrace it were provided to you? Is it more likely that the government conducted a conspiracy that would involved the silence and cooperation of thousands of people in broad daylight and on live television? More likely than paranoid people who apparently credit our government with so much efficiency and capability than it has ever demonstrated? Couldn't some of them be motivated partly by book sales, internet celebrity, or some psychological gratification?

Oh hell, you'll probably just respond by posting another link.

Hi Cosmored:

How do you account for the passenger victims? Did the “Government” quickly murder and cremate everyone scheduled to be on AA Flight 77 and plant the evidence at the Pentagon?

Trish:

Is it more likely that the government conducted a conspiracy that would involved the silence and cooperation of thousands of people in broad daylight and on live television? More likely than paranoid people who apparently credit our government with so much efficiency and capability than it has ever demonstrated? Couldn't some of them be motivated partly by book sales, internet celebrity, or some psychological gratification?

Oh hell, you'll probably just respond by posting another link.

Well, never mind Trish, your brilliant post has helped me. So thank you.

I got a bit conspiracy-minded when Princess Diana died.....so I know a little how it feels to desperately want someone to blame for the anger and frustration. I suppose in some ways it is marginally better than meekly putting it down to God's will. Think I'd rather have the conspiracy theorist.

Trish wrote:

I think the most convincing evidence that the Bush administration had nothing to do with 9/11 is because it worked.

To use a Quaker expression perfect for the case, "This Friend speaks my mind."

I believe that explanations of what really happened, involving any one person or consortium's motivated interactions with the event are often much simpler than those we can conceive. Also there are so many more of them than we can conceive, all of which are true at once and affecting each other, that while the Whole Truth is very complex and involves a lot of people with different motives and perceptions, the truth about any one agent's part in it is pretty simple, limited, not in that much control of the outcome. The apparent agents of action here were the people who plotted to fly planes into buildings and succeeded. They seem to have done it because they did it.

Conspiracy theories that try to bring in too much and ascribe too much to the intentional manipulations of a single secret group with a single agenda distract us from seeing the real duplicities, manipulations and insufficiencies of those groups and agents. Our government did have a part in participating in the overall situation that led up to 9/11, painful as that is to consider. There is nothing secret about it; it's there for anybody to look at who wants to be honest with him or herself and read the historic, public record. If Belgium had suddenly sent a missile at us and taken out the Twin Towers, that would have been an unprovoked, really wierd, hard-to-understand attack and might require some conspiracy theorizing to explain it. As it is, anyone who is stunned and confused for too long about the situation is just not able to look at it. I can understand why it's hard for people to stand to look at it and I don't want to force anyone to look who feels too hurt about it. But if you're going to focus your attention and a lot of other people's attention on it, try to at least get grounded and relaxed enough to be practical and rigorous about what you're making us go through. There are too many real people with direct experience of the event for the strange idea that it didn't involve the planes we think it did to be true. You almost have to think someone would be trying to foreclose any examination of ugly roles people might have had in it by making that activity look completely crazy. Almost, but that seems overly complicated again.

Cosmored: "If the evidence shows that the plane that hit the Pentagon was too small to be a 757 and witnesses say they saw a 757 hit the Pentagon, we can deduce tht the witnesses are lying."

Or, most likely, the evidence is faulty in a way which you haven't yet considered.

Also, I just looked at the photos claiming that the plane looked too small. It doesn't. It looks correctly sized to be a 757. I looked at them closely because a part of me wants to believe that there is a coverup. In the case of the plane being too small, I was convinced otherwise.

Cosmored,

I was just looking at the photo of the plane and the impact site… there are always problems with scale when looking at a 2 dimensional image, and cameras are notoriously bad at distorting images… the expression that the camera adds 10 pound is an accurate statement for example… cameras are notorious for making things look fatter.

Another problem is the angle of the plane… even a small angle as little as 5% from the exact side will considerably shorten the profile of the object and in this case alter the perceived shape of the nose.

From what I can see the plane is indeed slightly at an angle, this is not an exact side profile…

With the angle being slightly off any assessment of the nose shape and length would make calculations invalid unless you take that into account, or had an actual 757 to compare it to… or at least a 3D model… and considered camera distortion as well.

Despite this, the length of the plane can be relatively well established using the height of the wall at the impact area of the explosion.

The plane is clearly much longer that the building is high where it hit the wall… a rough estimate is at least 1/3rd longer... taking into account camera distortion the offset angle of the plane and leaving a small margin for error that plane fits well within the 150 foot length.

From everything I see above none of your examples take those problems into consideration… making them invalid.

You're evidence is not very solid...

Later

The distortion is a larger factor than you think. There's nothing in any of the pictures to make me think it's anything other than a 757. When the plane crashes, it silhouettes an object a little closer to the camera. That frame puts it in perspective, the plane is far away and is massive. Other than that, the pictures are so distorted that they can be dismissed without further analysis. If we're looking at the same pictures, you're mistaken I'm afraid.