There's one reason (compelling enough to be the only one you really need) to believe that the WTC buildings were brought down by controlled demolitions: it's the theory that is the most consistent with the laws of physics. The official story, steel buildings collapsed from office fires (in the case of WTC7 very minor fires, yet the collapse was predicted in advance despite this never happening before), demands putting your faith in miracles instead of science. It is the 21st century version of George Orwell's "2+2=5".
Demolition is not quite enough to demonstrate that the attack was an inside job. All that it does is establish a cover-up of the demolition. That the demolition happened is completely obvious, given the physics and chemistry, but it is not in itself indicative of anything much. For all you know, all high-profile high-rises are rigged to be demolished in case of terror attack, to prevent them falling over and killing more people in case of collapse. That's a terrible thing to keep secret, but that's not the same as saying America attacked itself.
The main problem is to persuasively explain that it WAS an inside job. This is not done using the demolition evidence, it just isn't strong enough. To establish the inside job, you absolutely need to examine the drills of that day. Those confirm that it was done in pretty much the only way that it could be done, at least, the only way that doesn't involve a massive conspiracy. The method I explain below doesn't involve any conspiracy at all, it can be the plan of one person, the rest all believe they are simply doing their job for a scheduled military exercise, a military drill.
The demolition itself is not hard to do in secret--- just hire a team to rig the building up in advance. It can be 5-10 people, and you can hire Israelis, or whoever. I only say Israelis because of the report of dancing Israelis on 9/11. Maybe they set up the demolition. To cover it up is extremely simple, because you say "The demolition system was necessary for public safety, and we have similar systems on the Sears tower, and we want you to keep it secret, because otherwise the Sears tower will become a target".
As for the rest of the plot, every aspect of 9/11 can be arranged, planned and paid for, from within the government, using four simultaneous drills:
Fake Airliner hijacking drill (to get airplanes)
radar blip drill (to confuse air-traffic control)
fly drones over the Eastern US
Flight simulate crashing airplanes into WTC and Pentagon.
These drills are individually harmless, nobody doing them would suspect that they have anything to do with terrorism. But then your lone conspirator, who is in charge of these drills just changes things slightly--- the simulation from drill 4 is attached to the drones of drill 3, and the radar blip drill, drill 2, is used to swap the drones of drill 3 with the airliners of drill 1 to make the flight paths seem continuous. Then the attack carries itself out.
The complete evidence that the attack is an inside job is that these exact drills were taking place on 9/11, on the morning, inexplicably simultaneous with the attacks. These drills (at least 3 of them) were widely reported in the mainstream press, but of course, you wouldn't consider this information anything more than a crazy coincidence. Once you understand how to pull it off, it becomes overwhelming evidence of an inside job.
To arrange the death of crew and passengers on the planes, you have to do a little bit of shifting of boarding at the gate, which can be justified as part of the drill, to get the flight 77 passengers on flight 93, perhaps also flight 175 and 11, and you can also land the now untracked airliners, and transfer passengers from flight until they are all on flight 93 (it's actually flight 11 in terms of the airplane used). Then you shoot flight 93 down, and this is the other cover up. Both cover-ups are normal government nonsense, one to protect safety, the other to protect the military from civil liability.
The statistical coincidence of drills and attack is impossible without it being a false flag, so that's the end of the story. Regarding the "conspiracy", there IS NO CONSPIRACY NECESSARY. All of this is done by whoever organized the drills, essentially working alone. I'll let you look up who was in charge of all that morning's drills yourself, but I assure you it will not come as a surprise--- it was a well known balding neoconservative figure with a pacemaker. The modern information tools make it possible to do much more effective false flags, if you have the drills you need to pull them off in secret.
There is no counter-argument to this, there is no other possibility, the attack simply WAS an inside job, no ifs ands or buts. Still, only the demolition and shoot-down of flight 93 were covered up intentionally. The only concrete evidence this kind of thing leaves is an attack that coincides spookily with a drill to simulate a VERY SIMILAR attack. That's all you would see in public, and that's all you would see if you were investigating. Bush was probably clueless about this, the 9/11 commission was clueless, the only thing they covered up intentionally was the demolition, and possibly the shoot-down of flight "93", if they knew about it.
That doesn't excuse the commission members from culpability, nor does it excuse the Bush administration. The solution to a covert attack in the US is a public review of all secret documents and drills, and an investigation of all administration officials, not sheilding people from scrutiny and shredding the official relevant documents, which is what Bush and co did.
(This is a re-post without the hyperlink to an article by Peirce. My original is waiting for moderators approval, I think it was flagged for that hyperlink.)
Ron, here’s an example of the thinking that needs to be cleared up: What are the chances that you would have written a post with exactly 5128 characters and exactly 895 words? The odds are very slim, however, it just happened. The more important these numbers are the more people will believe their occurrence was not a chance anomaly but was planned. How does a shift in importance justify a shift in judgment?
In an inference to the best hypothesis, the probability that one of the hypotheses is true is slim when considering that each hypothesis was a guess from an astronomical number of possible guesses. This is the problem of abduction: What guides our guesses toward the truth? (C. S. Peirce analyzed the problem well, but gave the very unsatisfactory answer that our correct guesses are guided by “an inward light“ and other similarly mystical terms.) But who has a better explanation?
Or, what am I missing? (I'm looking for the answer. I'll report back if I find it.)
You are missing Bayesian inference, see my answer to your next post below. It is important you don't use your intuition, because this intuition is biased by the blast of propaganda, which gives you a gut feeling that the scenario I gave is wrong. That gut feeling is worthless, it is what you must overcome to think independently.
If you want an in-depth description of proper inference for laypeople, there's Richard Carrier's most recent books "Proving History" and "On the Historicity of Jesus", which do a fair job of describing how it works (although, just as a plug for physicists' methods, it is easier to do it using logarithms of probability, which doesn't require as much tedious multiplications and divisions, and allows you to do it in your head to the rough ballpark accuracy which is all that is required in these types of debates).
OK, great. I've known for a while that I was missing an understanding of Bayes’s Theorem, and it has been bothering me lately, so your recommendation of these books dealing with it is good timing. I'll order one of 'em.
Nevermind my last post. I was looking for the legitimacy in Noam Chomsky’s statement that the coincidence of these events that you mention was a chance anomaly. I now see that it’s easy to weigh the probability of the coincidence being planned against the probability of it being a chance anomaly; and while the chance of each option happening per se (rather than weighed against each other) will be very low if you were predicting it’s occurrence in the future, given that the coincidence did happen, and weighing the chances of ‘planned’ vs. ‘not-planned’, the odds will of course will favor the side of them being planned.
(I think I got it right with this. I'll review it later.)
Richard Carrier has explained how to weigh evidence like this for a completely different case, in "Proving History" and "On the Historicity of Jesus", and in Carrier's case, the evidence is ancient, and has much lower quality. The method is Bayesian inference, and the quality of the evidence is the relative factor of confidence that it gives you for either the "coincidence theory" (the drills are coincidental--- required on the official story) or the "one-man conspiracy theory" (the one that predicts the drills).
The "one-man conspiracy theoy" doesn't just predict that SOME drills are occuring, it is a straightforward inference from this theory that you pretty much need all of the four drills I gave. You need drones, because pilots won't do it, you need a simulation, because even with drones pilots still won't do it, and you need real airliners and a switch in order to make it work (you also need a practice run for the simulation, which is reported for four months before 9/11, and you also need other drills to get satellite imagers out of their office, and to disable fighter response, etc, etc, all of which were occuring, but ignore that, as it only makes my case stronger). The only reasonable alternative inside-job scenario is rigging the actual airliners for remote hijacking from the ground, to take over the commercial plane itself and then pilot it into the building without a swap with a drone. But that this is not what happened can be established from the engine on Murray St. (which doesn't match the hijacked Boings, but matches military aircraft), the speed of impact (too high at Sea-level for a commercial aircraft, but within tolerance for a military aircraft), witnesses (who attest to windowless uniform-color planes), and photos of the underside of the plane that crashed into the building, which show that the underside is that of a drone not a plane. Given these additional bits of data, the hijacked planes were not taken over by remote control, that theory is implausible even within the inside-job sector of theory space, you need a swap.
But ignore all this secondary stuff, and just examine the drills. The scenario predicts multiple precise drills on that day involving airplane crashes, multiple hijacking, air-traffic control, and terrorism, and the frequency of such drills is at best 1 in 100, as it is not even 3 drills a year, these are more once-in-a-lifetime drills. Also, they didn't need to take place in the morning, they could have been at different times, in the afternoon, in the evening.
To have 1 drill coinciding is a baysian factor of 1/100 confidence, to have 2 drills coinciding is 1/10,000, and three drills on the same morning is 1/1,000,000. We have rock-solid evidence that the radar-blip drill was going on, rock-solid evidence of live-fly exercizes, and rock-solid evidence of simulation of crashes on that day, although the targets are not known to be the Pentagon and WTC with any confidence. There is also some indication of a hijacking drill, but this is from incidental testimony, this evidence is not solid like the others, which is not surprising, because all the direct witnesses to this drill died on the flights. The 1 in a million is a bit of an overestimate, considering the drills aren't completely independent events, but it is an underestimate in a different way, in that the drills precise form is predicted also, not just their precise date (let alone time) and I haven't taken any of this into account. The estimate above is more than reasonable, it is charitable, and you could make it better with up to a factor of 10, pushing in my direction.
The level of confidence from the coincidence is therefore that the inside job theory is preferred by about a million to 1 as compared to the coincidence theory. Let me make an analogy. If you saw a magician levitating, and you found out that three weeks before he purchased a large amount of Niobium-Tin alloy, a dewar-full of liquid Helium, and heat-sheilding and thermostat equipment, and that he brought all of these along to the levitation date, you might say "that's a coincidence, what does that have to do with levitation?". Once someone points out to you that Niobium Tin is a superconductor at liquid Helium temperature, and that magnets float on a superconductor, you are justified in deducing that the magician was using a superconducting material and magnets to levitate, even if you didn't yet get direct evidence for the purchace of a large quantity of magnets. That's how inference works, it works by Bayesian rules, and the theory that best fits the evidence is the one that is overwhelmingly likely to be correct.
But I must caution that by itself, without further evidence, you aren't 100% confident yet, you need to make sure the story is consistent with ALL the evidence, because there might be some implausible story behind it all. For example, Bin Laden knew administration officials, and arranged the drills and exploited them to his own advantage, or nonsense like this, which is implausible, but the coincidence itself is already beyond implausible. In the magician analogy, maybe he intended to use superconductors to levitate, but the superconductor didn't work, and he just ended up using wires in the end, or something like this. You can't foresee all possibilities. This is why, despite the overwhelming confidence of the drills, it is important to review ALL the remaining evidence carefully, to make sure you have accounted for everything (aside from known lies, like the Bin-Laden confession video, or the known-to-be-hoaxed phone call to that administration official from his wife on flight 77)
The ACARS and radar data obtained by Pilots for 9/11 Truth shows the swap of flight 175 and an unidentified plane from the military exercises of that day explicitly. I mentioned the engine, and the underside of the plane, and the witness testimony. In conjunction with the drills very occurence, this is enough for scientific certainty, it's about as good as the current evidence for the Higgs Boson.
I am sorry to tell you, but 9/11 was simply an inside job, without any qualification. There is no reasonable chance that it happened any other way than the exact way I said above.
Now, it is incumbant upon you to explain the psychology of the deniers, and mainstream shills, who write nonsense articles like the above. What I said was said somewhat more verbosely by Webster Tarpley, and the author of "Flight of the Bumble Planes", already in 2002. It just seems nobody paid attention at the time, and that includes me. The real psychology worth studying is why most of us were able to deny this evidence and buy a cock-and-bull story for so long. In my defense, I didn't think about it all that much until the Boston Bombing, but that's no excuse, I should have.
OK. Well, I have to say that the belief I've had on the subject is not anywhere as well informed as yours. I fairly strongly believe that the WTC buildings collapsed from a controlled demolition and our government has been covering for the real criminals. My belief on who exactly is the criminal is a little more hazy. I did lean toward 'inside job', but sometimes I thought it could also be a Mossad job where the US government's cover up is because they decided that they could both use the event to their advantage as well as avoid offending their "friend" as was their excuse for not prosecuting the crimes on the USS Liberty. Then again, if both the US government and the Israeli government have been hijacked by a group of people with similar specific interests, then to the extent the US government is ruled by them is the extent I would re-define an attack by the Mossad as an "inside job."
As for explaining the psychology of deniers, that's a fascinating subject. I think William James's essay The Sentiment of Rationality is a good start. My answer, in a nut-shell, is that people are in the habit of testing any hypothesis that comes to mind by matching it with how it makes them feel, but they do a sloppy job in the matching of these. I think if they could do a better job matching them (the hypothesis with the specific feeling which that hypothesis triggers) their conclusions would often be more accurate. I don't think, however, that if they were able to make a perfect match that it would ensure perfect accuracy of their conclusion. It's just that in the long run it seems to work often enough, and, of course, that seeming is reinforced by peer approval/pressure, financial expedience/risk, etc.
Anyway, I agree that logic should be separated from psychology as much as possible. But not so much that you're railroaded into an incoherent theory of truth. (I've looked into the psychologism vs anti-psychologism debate and I'm not satisfied with either side. I've never seen a perfectly coherent theory of truth, so I have to go with what I think is the best.)
The Mossad can arrange the demolition very easily, it doesn't even need to be the whole Mossad, just a few agents. But they can't arrange the military drills, and they certainly can't pay agents any amount of money to hijack airplanes and crash them into buildings. The Mossad is not a savory institution, and it works in conjunction with the CIA, but even the CIA wouldn't do this in whole, it would only be a few individuals here and there at best.
It is not possible to blame Israel for this, because Israel just couldn't do it. They have no control over American airspace, and they have no real Israeli motive for this, as unless you are in the administration and can control what the response is going to be, the effects are unpredictable. I mean, the US could have entirely pulled out of the Levant and adjacent regions in response to 9/11, for all that Netanyahu knew in 2000, and focused all resources on Afghanistan. Where you should examine the Mossad is for similar events inside Israel, like the kidnapping of three teens the summer before last, which was extremely suspicious, as well as the implausible effectiveness of the "Iron Dome" defense, which is likely hyped up beyond its maximum possible effectiveness, by propaganda.
I lived in Israel, I was born there, and I was visiting in the summer of the attacks, and the media situation in Israel, while slightly better than that in the US (because it's a much smaller country) is still much worse than it was in the 1980s, when the press regularly investigated government malfeasance. Netanyahu's administration is not above covert activities inside Israel. Israel is probably one of the funding sources for ISIS (as is the CIA) to destabilize Syria, ISIS has no support within Syria or Lebanon, and operates entirely on payments and bribery, power, without any actual religious justification or any base of support.
This is why it is important to explain the drills, and their implausibility, because they don't require nefarious foreign agents infiltrating the whole government. You certainly won't find it. All they require is a team of programmers for the radar blip drill and simulation (who don't even have to be in on the plan), and a demolition team. Those could ALL be Israeli agents without the attack being an Israeli operation, because none of these people would know why they are doing what they are commanded to do. In the end, you need to blame the drill coordinator, not some evil Jews, because although you find plenty of mighty evil Jews in positions of power in Israel today, they aren't powerful enough in the US to do anything like this.
I really doubt Cheney and Rusmsfeld went in person to WTC and set the explosive charges themselves. First of all, a lot of the equipment would probably have set off Cheney's pacemaker.
In any hypothetical 9/11 conspiracy in which they were instrumental they would have had to rely upon the machinery of government to get drones out there to perform that work for them--meaning that,yes, there would indeed be a paper trail and thousands of people 'in network'.
You know, like the actual paper trail of internal memos that actually was discovered about the administration's tarting up of pre-War "intelligence" about WMD in Iraq.
Agree about the trial, though. That will never happen, and that is why America is doomed. Those *ssholes may be dead and gone before the worst of the blowback catches up with the US, but it will one day, as inevitable as any law of physics.
The demolition itself is not hard to do in secret--- just hire a team to rig the building up in advance. It can be 5-10 people, and you can hire Israelis, or whoever. I only say Israelis because of the report of dancing Israelis on 9/11. Maybe they set up the demolition. To cover it up is extremely simple, because you say "The demolition system was necessary for public safety, and we have similar systems on the Sears tower, and we want you to keep it secret, because otherwise the Sears tower will become a target".
As for disguising the rest of the plot, it is done under the cover of drills. Every aspect of 9/11 can be done using drills, as follows:
Fake Airliner hijacking drill (to get airplanes)
radar blip drill (to confuse air-traffic control)
fly drones over the Eastern US
Flight simulate crashing airplanes into WTC and Pentagon.
These are individually harmless drills. But then your conspirator just rearranges things slightly--- the simulation from drill 4 is attacked to the drones of drill 3, and the radar blip drill, drill 2, is used to swap the drones of drill 3 with the airliners of drill 1 to make the flight paths seem continuous. Then the attack carries itself out.
The complete evidence that the attack is an inside job is that these exact drills were taking place on 9/11, on the morning, simultaneous with the attacks. They were widely reported in the mainstream press, but of course, you wouldn't consider this information anything more than a crazy coincidence unless you know how to pull of a false flag like this.
To arrange the death of crew and passengers, you have to do a little bit of shifting of boarding at the gate, which can be justified as part of the drill, and you can also land the now untracked airliners, and transfer passengers, until they are all on flight 93 (actually flight 11 in terms of airplain used). Then you shoot flight 93 down, and this is the other cover up.
The statistical coincidence is impossible without it being a false flag, so that's the end of the story. Regarding the "conspiracy", there IS NO CONSPIRACY. All of this is done by whoever organized the drills, essentially working alone. I'll let you look up who was in charge of that morning's drill yourself, but I assure you it will not come as a surprise--- it was a well known balding neoconservative figure with a pacemaker.
There is no alternative argument, there is no other possibility. The attack was an inside job, but only the demolition and shoot-down of flight 93 were covered up intentionally, the rest seems to be a mysterious attack, coinciding spookily with drills to simulate such an attack, even to the government and those investigating. Bush was probably clueless about this.