There are several reasons, most have been covered in other answers. I will give my own:
Point 5 is most important, because it allows a small conspiracy. To build drones that resemble jetliners and fly them around on the day of 9/11 would ordinarily take a bunch of people, and they can't all be in on the conspiracy, or else they would never go along with it, and someone would talk. But they would have no problem building such drones for an exercise, for the purpose of shooting them down, and they wouldn't even bat an eye if their exercise turned out to be so precient, that an actual attack just the same as their simulation happened on the very day of the simulation. They would chaulk it up to synchronicity.
The official story is not possible, it's ridiculous. But the requirement of a large conspiracy makes it difficult to believe anything else. The simultaneous exercises means that there is no large conspiracy required.
The simultaneous drill has been a recurring feature of attacks since, repeating on the London bombing attacks (where the people involved were startled when their exercise suddenly turned into a real attack), and most recently in the Boston marathon bombing. The sheer statistical improbability of the coincidence is sufficient evidence of a conspiracy, and the coinciding drill is the mechanism that allows the attack to be staged from the inside.
No drill, no attack. You can't get an army of inside people to attack their own country. But you can get them to pretend to, for a drill, and you can change this into reality with only a small number of people.
Ron, your comments here and elsewhere indicate that you have imbibed many ideas of the sort which give conspiracy theory a bad name - fake blood in Boston, fake planes on 9/11, mass murders faked or engineered to justify gun control... It is too intellectually dismal for me to want to engage with.
However, I will say a few things about this unified theory of fake terrorism carried out via "drills".
There are a variety of ways in which a drill or exercise might end up coinciding with a terror attack.
The most plausible (apart from coincidence) is that there was intelligence warning about a possible attack. And if the attack happens and succeeds, do you think they're going to say, oh, our wiretap or our informant said something like this would happen, and we tried to stop it and failed? No, they will bluff about the coincidence.
Next up is the possibility that the terrorists are actively exploiting inside information about defensive exercises. For example, a sting in which the terrorists outwit the law, by pulling off something deadly when their controllers thought it was safely harmless.
Beyond that come even more byzantine scenarios.
The sort of conspiracy sites that you are reading, are strongly biased towards one specific scenario, the "inside job". And it doesn't help that you have embraced numerous propositions of the form "that couldn't have happened".
I think that if we were to examine one of these long lists of "drills that became terror attacks", we would find that a majority are coincidence, and the rest could be explained by the first two scenarios I mention. But you would have to get the schizophrenic level of paranoia (fakes everywhere) out of your system to see this.
Sorry, I'm gone, and from my point of view, your position is more dismal. Please review the coincidences before calling positions paranoid. I am completely lucid, I just don't watch the TV.
I wasn't reading anything, I was suspicious always, but I couldn't say for sure, because both sides were equally ludicrous. The Boston thing made everything clear, since here it is obvious that it was a scheduled drill that transmuted into a live event. So I 'got' this one immediately, and then I see that in all the other cases, there is a drill too.
The standard 9/11 story was impossible to believe already in 2002. But I also couldn't believe in conspiracy, because the conspiracy seemed just as impossible. It is impossible to maintain a large treasonous government conspiracy, and I couldn't see how to make it work with a small conspiracy. How would you get people to do stuff without knowing? But when you have a DRILL, you can do it. You don't need more than a handful of people.
The drills are not being exploited by any terrorists, they are not omniscient, these things are super secret, the 9/11 drill didn't come out until sometime late in 2002. These drills cannot be a coincidence, the chances against are absolutely astronomical.
To see, look at the London bombing quantitatively, the three stations (and also a bus attack) were predicted to a tee. Even without this, like on 9/11, the chances are incredible, Bush called it a "spooky coincidence" (strongly suggesting, incidentally, that he didn't know anything). He's right. The other ones are even more spooky. The coincidence for the first such event, the Oklahoma city bombing, is just as incredible--- ATF was simulating the event when it happened, and the truck-bomb scenario doesn't fit the damage to the building at all.
I have seen normal terrorist attacks, they happen in Israel all the time. People place bombs, other people get hurt, people respond, it's a mess, but they never look like the batshit crazy attacks in the US, and they NEVER coincide with drills.
The explanation you give is not plausible, some insider information, because the response to a real attack doesn't resemble the stupid drill in nearly all the cases. You don't respond to a threat of bombs by simulating bombs, you respond by trying to find them and defuse them! You don't respond to hijacking threat by simulating fighters shooting simulation drones. You respond to hijacking threats by increasing screening and security, and posting secret marshalls on planes.
I started reading the conspiracy sites only after I got an idea of what was going on. There are converging on a complete consistent story, they understand the drill aspects, but there is still no consensus on what happened to the planes that took off.
The drill aspects of Boston are manifest, the stuff looks like crap, you can see that it's about 10 people sitting on the ground, with very few of them actually hurt. That's not to say there weren't people hurt, but the camera-ready folks look like a part of the drill, not the same folks as the ones injured.
I strongly support your suggestion that the unusually high number of drills on 9/11 were involved in hiding the actual self-inflicted attacks. There is a strong statistical case that can be made about how extremely unlikely it would be, both to have that many drills, and to have them coincide with what actually happened. I encourage you to continue investigating this.
I hadn't heard that there were drills for shooting down planes, which might have been the original planes. But it was not impossible for the original planes to be remotely controlled instead of substitue drones, and it would be a huge risk to hit the original planes with missiles and crash them somewhere that people might witness.
Regarding the Boston bombings, I can imagine that the drill and police presence in this incidence might have been cover not for another false flag attack but to possibly prevent the attack that they only had weak intelligence about. As such, it was still a false flag attack if they let it happen at all. After all, there have been over a dozen attacks in the last decade in which the FBI was involved in encouraging the perpetrator, and they step in at the last minute to prevent it, or the explosive device is knowingly faulty. The FBI has admitted this, in a few cases. I have no doubt that many people were injured or killed in this attack - I know someone who treated many of them, and a doctor who agrees that the wounded could react as they did. It is worthwhile tracking down every lead, however. I don't think we can trust the FBI or CIA to be honest or working for our best interest.
My suggestion is not the the drills COVERED UP the attack (although they did that too), it was that the drills were used to STAGE the attack, because all components of the attack were carried out unwittingly by drill folks, who were doing their job professionally, but collectively committed an act of real terrorism, just with small modifications of their plans. It is possible that only one person knew what the net effect would be, or that any of the actions were even harmful.
The Boston bombing drill coinciding with the attack is completely impossible! The drill bomb timing coincided to the second with the real bomb time, and that's just beyond astronomical, it's 1 in 1000 even if they knew exactly what the plan was, it means they were in the basement with the bomber looking over his shoulder as he set the timer.
Prevention is never done through a drill. A drill, at best, just lulls the public into security. It consists of saying "watch out for suspicious backpacks", extra police, stuff like that, and this usually dissuades the bomber. I don't see a motive here, but it could be a really venal one, these drills are carried out by low level officials, it doesn't have to have any national political motive, it's the work of one person.
The reason you know that drones were piloted is because you can see it's a drone that hit the second WTC building on the video, and this is consistent with enormous amount of credible eyewitness testimony. The coloration is uniform, not like the alleged airliner, and also a strange jutting on the bottom of the plane that appears in the photo, is a part of military drones, and does not appear in any commercial airliners, also not the alleged plane that flew into the building. The other two planes, the first WTC plane and the Pentagon plane are ridiculous, they are both smaller than the plane that is claimed to have been hijacked, and this discrepancy was noted immediately in both cases.
There was a good article in a European journal that established the second plane was a drone using a reliable analysis of the shadows on the apparent jutting on the bottom, establishing it is a three-dimensional thing you are seeing, not a bad shadow or something.
Shooting down the original airliners is the most obvious way you dispose of them without conspiracy. Among the top secret drills of 9/11 there were "live-fly" drone drills of some kind involving simulating intercepting hijacked airlines. You can justify shooting airliners as shooting down drones, and anyone who witnesses it will just be witnessing the drill conclusion. Since the drills were top secret, and all the documents are shredded, one has to interpolate the details, but this is what a formal investigation is for, to check out all these top secret drills, to interview everyone. The shooting down would be over remote areas, and if this happened, the evidence is still lying around, since there is no way to organize a cleanup without a large conspiracy, and all signs point to a tiny conspiracy, perhaps a conspiracy of one.
I understand what you are suggesting about the Boston bombings, but I am suggesting (without having said so directly, but now I am) that you don't really have enough evidence (or I haven't seen it yet) to claim it was definitely a drill staged to implement that attack. You say "The drill bomb timing coincided to the second with the real bomb time, and that's just beyond astronomical", and if that is true, I would agree. But I don't see any evidence of that.
There is evidence that there were bomb-sniffing dogs at the beginning of the race, hours earlier, and perhaps at the end also. Denials by officials that such a drill took place do not help their case. But that is not evidence that a drill to explode bombs near the end of the race was actually happening at the time of the explosion. A drill that covered the entire time might be evidence, but that can also be explained, as I was suggesting, as cover for having police presence in order to try to catch whoever they had suspicions about.
But you seem to be saying that the explosion itself (or one of them?) was part of the drill, and I don't buy that at all. We have no reason to believe the wounds were not real. Making such claims without strong evidence is self-defeating and will be used to discredit all the rest of what you say, so I would advise you to be skeptical of the skeptics as well.
I am NOT saying that there were no victims at Boston. I am saying that the low-level person who was holding the drill did a little switcheroo, and put a big bomb in place of one stupid worthless flash bomb at one of the two locations. One location has no injuries, and only actors going on with a drill. The second location has real victims, but these are evacuated quickly.
The press coverage shows the two sets of people together, making the attack look much bigger and more deadly than it was. This make the official get more funding for his homeland security branch. It's the most small-minded of possible motives.
But the point is that the drill/attack combo makes it possible to plant bombs that you have people innocently design (for the purpose of testing your bomb-squad's defusing skills) at the locations where you were supposed to have fake bombs, using people who have no idea what they are doing, and who end up thinking, "Gosh, I guess a real terrorist just happened to plant another bomb along with our drill bomb".
It's a technique of doing terror from inside the government. The Boston case exposed the method.
I sometimes fantasize that this is really a meta-conspiracy, a conspiracy against the other conspiracies, a way to show the public how false-flags are carried out by carrying out a really incompetent one. But I know that this is mentally defective. This is obviously a low-level bumbling attempt to do drill->attack by a person who was not any good at it, and didn't really want to hurt anyone for real (but failed), but wanted spectacular results for his terror department.
The two bombs exploded nearly simultaneously, the real bomb and the drill bomb. The folks announced the drill just as the real bomb exploded, and in the end, people were confused as to what was drill and what was real, just as in 9/11.
OK, you have a story that can be investigated. We have photos of enough of the people involved. It should come out that some of the people were just acting and not injured. I don't think we have any evidence of that so far. I've only seen claims that pictures of some wounded people didn't look believable to them, but that is what I am not buying. I don't believe there was a drill bomb. There is no credible evidence that no one was injured at one of the bomb sites.
If there is a meta-conspiracy, it might be by those pushing a false conspiracy in this instance to discredit real conspiracy investigations.
I admire your honesty in admitting you don't believe the official story, but I'm really shocked all the same at you possessing the skepticism as people who don't believe the moon landings or the Holocaust took place.
Could you point me to an academic study that backs up your claim that: "2. The physics of WTC towers collapsing is implausible, the physics of WTC building 7 collapse is just plain impossible." ??
Don't "admire my honesty", I am late to the game, others said this in 2002.
There is nothing wrong with skepticism, you just have to verify the story. Funny enough, around 2009, in a fit of complete skepticism, I went and checked out the holocaust and the moon landings, and it was relatively easy to do, both checked out from an armchair using only available internet documents. For the holocaust, I read the entire holocaust denying literature (or all that I could find that wasn't repeating itself) and the only thing disputed by skeptics is the gas-chambers, they contend that a somewhat smaller number of Jews died of starvation and disease, not of murder by gas. They don't contest the slave camps, the shootings, or the disease and starvation, which are 50% of the victims, they only contest the gassings, which are the other 50%. This is plausible to contest, because the number of surviving non-perpetrator witnesses to the gassings themselves, rather than the disposal of bodies, can be counted on one hand--- almost everyone who witnessed it was killed. There were also some allied fabrications related to this, because the actual gas chambers were confined to Treblinka, Auschwitz, and a few other places, they weren't everywhere.
The gassing aspect of the holocaust I easily verified independently, using only Nazi sources, through the 1960 Auschwitz trial, the video-recorded (by next-generation Germans) testimony of an elderly former Nazi official at Treblinka about the gassings themselves, which involved gruesome and completely realistic details. I'll give you an example: the mainstream narrative implausibly contends that at Treblinka, the Germans gassed 800 people at a time in a room which was only 10 ft by 10 ft (or something along those lines), and the holocaust deniers said it was impossible to fit people in this space. It sure looked impossible. But then someone went and made a space, and filled it with typical victims, women and children, and showed that this is surprising but true--- you don't need a big room to stuff 800 people in for gassing. This turned from an argument supporting the skeptical position to an argument for the conventional story. All the arguments switched like this, one by one.
The scale of the holocaust is verified through documents that show, for instance, four-hundred thousand Hungarian Jews arriving in 1944 for "special treatment" and disappearing into thin air. and that this is gassings is verified completely independently by perpetrator testimony. For evidence that doesn't rely on human testimony (which is the most persuasive) a known Auschwitz document, dug up by one of the deniers, ordered a room with showerheads and a gas-tight door. Showerheads, understandable. Gas-tight door, also understandable. But the two together is completely incomprehensible. This document converted the denier, to his great credit, he was fully persuaded, and has now become a noted expert in the mechanics of the holocaust.
This document also put my mind at ease. I had to check it out. My own surviving relatives only personally witnessed slavery and extra-judicial execution (and lots and lots of people disappearing into thin air after deportation, the large majority of Hungarian Jews--- my family is ethnically Hungarian but lived in Romania, where the deportations paradoxically were much better, because Romania was axis aligned), they didn't witness the gassing itself. Even Primo Levy only witnessed the gassings second-hand, from a distance. But they checked out, and will check out, for any skeptic who does their homework.
I also checked out the moon landings, these were verified by a Japanese moon-orbiter that showed the unusual activity at the landing sites, by Australian tracking of the moon-landing which was independent of American stuff, and by the previous missions, which simply orbited the moon and came back. The orbiting by humans is sure, for one because there are pictures of the far-side of the moon more detailed than previous Soviet pictures. I easily found convincing point-by-point rebuttals of the skeptic claims. So it checked out, and I am fully on board. No one who is telling the truth has anything to fear from a skeptical investigation.
Doing the review not only persuaded me that the holocaust and moon-landings are real, it made me dead certain. The skepticism served to cement a belief that happens to be shared by nearly everyone else who didn't do a review.
It also clarified some minor mistakes in the historical narrative--- Jews were not systematically turned to soap, human skin was not systematically turned to lampshades. These camp rumors have only one verifiable counterpart, a Nazi experimentor who tried to do these things with corpses, but they were too gruesome, and the Nazis kicked him out.
The Soviets also exaggerated the number of victims at Auschwitz, the true number is approximately 1,000,000 consisting of 400,000 Hungarian Jews, and a slightly larger number of Jews from other countries. This fits the corpse-disposal capacity of the plant, and the deportation records, and the Jewish association counts of dissapeared people. The Soviets claimed 4,000,000 victims by accepting camp rumors as truth.
The modern literature also overestimates the complicity of the public. The German public knew about the deportations and slavery, they knew about the shootings, but they didn't know about the gassing (except as a wartime rumor, of which there were plenty of false ones).
As far as the moon landings, everything the government says is 100% absolutely true. It withstands skeptical scrutiny.
Regarding 9/11, there is no apolitical investigation, and the skeptic's claims are not refuted anywhere, not persuasively, not convincingly, not at all! They are simply buried. I will not point you to published literature, although, if you want this, you can look at the work of Jones from Brigham Young. He found thermite residues in WTC dust, and other academics verified and accepted this claim. The WTC building 7 collapse is manifestly impossible, there was no plane that hit building 7, and only secondary fires, and people have plenty of experience with fires, it is impossible for them to lead to collapse. This is not controversial in any way, I can't argue it, it's too plain-as-your-nose obvious, and if a paper came to a journal saying this, I would say "no duh, nothing new here'. Building 7 came down in a demolition of some sort.
the WTC towers collapse is implausible to the point of impossible also, but here one has no direct firsthand experience in making this claim. You have a NIST report which claims they reproduced it in a simulation. But the simulation is implausible, it is super-secret, so you can't check it, and it doesn't tally with reports of molten steel, and Jones's detection of thermite reside in the dust, nor of witnesses who heard explosions, nor of back-of-the-envelope calculations for time of collapse.
Ron, you are showing yourself to be very reasonable and an honest skeptic. I also looked into the holocaust and moonlanding claims, not that I was very suspicious, but just to find out for sure, and I quickly found that none of the claims of the deniers held up. Their arguments had a similar flavor and smell as the global warming deniers, very obviously weak and contorted.
Associating 9/11 truth with holocaust denial and moonlanding denial is an often used strategy to discredit by association, and discourage other people from doing their own investigations.
But regarding 9/11, we find the weakness and denial and appeal to authority is on the side of the official story. So it is not enough to be a skeptic or to side with the official story, or to claim that someone else is doing one or the other. Finding the truth requires honesty and integrity, and indeed, it requires a truly skeptical mind, very much like all scientists ought to have. It requires some creativity as well, as effective scientists know, to find ways of uncovering mysteries and discovering previously unknown patterns. It is most certainly not about merely accepting what we are told, no matter how much authority someone may appear to have.
We also do find a few scientific sounding arguments in support of the official story, and you have to dig in a little to figure out they don't hold water. And on the other hand, we find many preposterous stories about what might have happened on 9/11, such as no planes, and energy beams, which seem like disinformation intended to confuse people about honest investigations.
I often tell people that I am not asking them to believe me about 9/11. I am asking them to doubt the official story, and to do their own investigation.
Start with the most solid case, that WTC 7 fell at freefall, which NIST badly wanted to deny or cover up because, as they admit, freefall requires zero resistance, and they had no explanation for how there could be zero resistance. Check out World Trade Center Building 7 Demolished on 9/11? for more info.
I don't need to check out building 7, the official explanations are trivial to refute, and every demolition person in the world knows this.
But in my own mind, I imagined that high-rise demolition has been a pre-planned feature of high-rises for a long time, perhaps even that all high-rise buildings which are sufficiently attractive targets for terrorism have an emergency demolition system installed, to prevent them toppling over on other buildings in case of attack. If this is so, then it is reasonable that only the owner and government know, so as to keep people renting there (you would be scared witless to put your office in a building packed to the gills with thermal charges, and 9/11 showed you have good reason to be). So this part, the demolition, while obviously true, and obviously requiring government lying, would not require complicity in the attack themselves. The public doesn't agree with me on this, and they identify demolition with conspiracy. Demolition is not in itself evidence of conspiracy regarding the attack, it is conspiracy in covering up an unpopular but perhaps necessary public-safety feature.
To keep the smoke screen up regarding this would require well-meaning NIST folks to make up bullshit, to keep the demolition secret, and you can see honest people going along with such a ruse, for the purpose of public safety, even though they know that their work is nonsense scientifically speaking.
UNLIKE this datum, which can be explained completely innocently, the coincidence of drills and attacks has no innocent explanation. The response to intelligence is never a simulation drill, it is security, and we know what the response of a real bomber is when there is a bunch of suspicious official looking people with bomb sniffing dogs around: they go away and try again somewhere else at some other time. Not so for our bombers, they LOVE drills! They LOVE police, and they somehow are telepathically linked with the drill planners, exactly matching the imaginary attack in date, place, time and form.
This is why I held out for a decade before accepting 9/11 truth, because I didn't have a quantifiable piece of evidence that didn't have a reasonable public-safety explanation. The coincidence of terrorist drills with identical attacks can be quantified, it's completely impossible in the courtroom sense, people have been justifiably convicted of capital crimes with less statistical confidence than the type of implausibility of a simulation to exactly coincide with an attack in date, time, place, and form.
I was hoping other readers might check out the building 7 information at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth (at ae911truth . org - which conveniently got turned into that link). You are quite correct that the demolition is very hard for people to refute, but some do anyway, and most others are willing to merely believe what they are told (by officials and media) rather than to check it out for themselves. It is an eye opener to learn how bad the report by NIST is.
I've heard this theory that the buildings might have been prewired for demolition just in case there might be some safety need, but I have trouble believing it mostly because the buildings really should never have collapsed at all, not even when hit at high speed by fully loaded large jet planes. They didn't, in fact, collapse at the time of impact, which is when they would have been most affected. The fires after that were not roaring infernos, but dying out. So there was no need to take down the buildings deliberately, and there should be no need ever unless something much more catastrophic happens, such as a nuke, or huge earthquake, something that would damage a lot more in the neighborhood anyway.
I think it is more likely that the WTC buildings were being wired for demolition because they were money losers, and full of asbestos insulation that would be very expensive to replace. And, by the way, there was a lot of incriminating evidence that would be conveniently destroyed, and perhaps a few tons of gold stolen.
And curiously, the supposed hijackers were blamed for the whole thing, as if they knew it would happen, even though it was totally unpredictable because it was not just unlikely, but basically impossible. At best, there might be some partial asymmetrical collapsing between a few floors, but the steel support structures would quickly entangle and distribute the load and dampen out any further collapse.
But if the supposed hijackers somehow knew the towers would collapse, and their purpose was maximum death and destruction, they did a few rather stupid things, by not aiming lower on the towers, and not doing it a bit later in the morning when more people would be at work. And they should have hit the Pentagon in the middle which would have been much easier and more destructive than what they somehow managed to do by circling around 300 degrees and hitting the first floor of the newly reinforced side. And oh yeah, what's with the 30 minute delay before hitting the Pentagon, thus maximizing the chance that the military would wake up and do their jobs by shooting them down before they got anywhere close to Washington DC? It is the craziest stupidest terrorist plan imaginable, and yet they got away with it?
And worse, the real terrorists, and everyone who aided them, got away with lying about what really happened, and dragged us into 2 senseless wars costing trillions and killing thousands more americans, and possibly millions of brown people. For what? Oil?!? Power?!? What psychopathic insanity is doing this to us? And why do we allow it to continue?
You are forgetting the 1993 bomber: he explicitly wanted to topple the buildings onto each other and then onto other buildings. It would arguably make sense to install the system, you can see why people would do it. it would make sense to keep it secret, but of course I agree it was abused in 9/11 to demolish buildings that would have stayed up just fine if left alone.
The people who installed it could not imagine that a person in the government could abuse it purposefully, since it was beyond the level of evil that they imagined a government official would have. This was an unforgivable mistake, and it shows why secrecy is the biggest problem in government today.
The demolition system should never have been activated given that the attack was obviously not going to topple the buildings, or even significantly damage them. But I WILL NOT believe that the system was installed specifically for the attack, since it requires the owner to be in the conspiracy, the engineers who installed the system, a ton of non-CIA people. A conspiracy is confined to only a few CIA-type people at the top, always, with no exceptions. Nobody else knows how to pull it off, these things are not even in the range of concievable thoughts for lay-people.
So although using the demolition system was a terribly wrong decision, it could be argued to be a judgement call for those who knew it was there, meaning anyone with a security clearance, and you can't really second guess people's judgement in situations like this, not publically, especially since doing so requires you to admit there was a demolition system. So if you are Bill Clinton, you can't say "Yes, I authorized the demolition system, it was a mistake", because there might be one on the Sears tower, who knows where else. So you make up excuses.
You see, it is important to explain with well meaning bumbling people, not conspirators, and if you fail, you have the wrong idea. Because nefarious conspiracies are small, tiny, sometimes one person wide. That's why people made the CIA, to allow small groups of people wide lattitude and discretion to plot evil deeds in far away places, to counter communist insurgency activity. You can argue it was needed then, because the communists were doing similar things (but I do not argue this), but you can't argue that it's obsolete today, and costs the US enormously, posing an existential threat to American democracy and even to individuals' rights to own guns, to have a small business (businesses can be harassed by anti-terror measures), everything that the US holds most dear. Any actual terrorists, not stupid gullible people egged on by the CIA or FBI to plant a bomb, I mean actual terrorists, pose no threat whatsoever to the US.
It turns out that you CAN explain the 9/11 false-flag with only well meaning bumbling people, plus one psychopath leading the drills. This is the only reason it is possible. If you need many psychopaths, you're not going to find them, especially people with pre-existing technical skills. These people would have to turn into psychopaths when you need them to.
But the one particular psychopath needed to stage 9/11 would know there is a demolition system in the towers, and exploits it for making the attack work. And he has a drill, so he can stage it. That's all you need. Further, he now takes all the people made obsolete by the end of the cold war, and makes their skills permanently necessary for a neverending war on terror, that can be prolonged at will by holding enough drills, and staging a handful to go live, by individual actors, according to the laws of probability.
There is no terror. The situation was prophesied already in 1985 by Terry Gilliam in Brazil: a neverending war against terrorists, and yet, the government has so many secret agents, that it doesn't know if all the bombs are planted by its own agents or not. Nothing like this existed in 1985, except perhaps warning signs in the UK campaign against the IRA, but this is the situation we find ourselves in today. The only solution to staged terror is to forbid terror drills, or funding simulations of terror, and to open up the secret world to full public scrutiny, the way the US government was run before the late 1950s.
The problem with selling 9/11 truth using the demolition is that it is very easy to see that the buildings were demolished, and it is also very easy to see that government would want to lie about this for completely non-sinister reasons. You can argue if demolition was justified, but having it happen is just a sign of government stupidity, not a grand conspiracy, not necessarily.
The 9/11 truth can only be sold with good evidence that there was an actual plan to execute the attacks as a false-flag, not to cover up the demolition. This evidence was sitting in plain sight, but it hasn't been exploited.
The mathematically good evidence here is the simultaneous drills. It is statistically impossible for drills to simulate flying planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon to coincide with actual attacks to fly planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, even if there were hypothetically speaking terrorists who would be foolish enough to think about doing this.
It is important to focus on this datum, as they give the ability to stage this with one bad person and no help. It is impossible to explain this data innocently, like it is possible with the demolitions.
What you say is true, but I don't believe in large conspiracies, only small ones. So a few people in the building might have known, and done shady trading in gold, but they would be random individuals linked to the single conspirator. Maybe other people heard rumors and did other things. It doesn't matter. The point is that you need to explain the attack using well-meaning people, and this was not possible, until you see the drills that morning, and then suddenly, it not only is possible, it immediately jumps out to lead the pack in probability by margins of at least 1000 to 1 as the most likely possibility, in the Baysian sense. This is effective certainty for the purpose of politics, and so one should hold firm. The level of confidence is certainly better than "Beyond a reasonable doubt", which in effect means about 98% confidence, it's "beyond a reasonable doubt about even the first unreasonable doubt".
All this is certain just by considering the improbability of coincidence of attack time, attack target and attack type, even under the most generous assumptions about existence of terrorists wanting to do the exact same thing. It becomes more than a mind-boggling coincidence, it becomes an explanation, only when you realize the drills can be easily used to stage the attack with no conspiracy required.
I generally agree that the conspiracy was very likely limited to as few people as they could manage. But I tend to think it could have been a few dozen at the top, and most of the rest just following orders, or being fooled into doing something that they believed was for the best, not wanting to know how deep they were getting themselves into trouble. The *less* you know, the safer you are, if you are involved with criminal elements. Once you know you are involved with murder, your life is also in jeopardy.
Silverstein may not have known what was planned for his buildings, which he had just purchased (was it in July 2001?) and he may have been stupid enough to agree to wiring the buildings for demolition, but I disagree that he *had* to know and had to agree. Only a few individuals within the security team would be implicated for either not doing their jobs properly, or for knowingly facilitating the actions of whoever did wire the demolitions. We know there were suspicious activities in the months and weeks leading up to 9/11, the elevator work, and the power outages. So it seems the final preparation for demolition was done not years before, but just within the prior year. I would not discount longer-term demolition preparation, but I haven't heard of evidence for it.
The 1993 bombing was an apparent attempt to topple one tower onto the other, but I haven't seen any analysis that shows it would have been possible. A large percentage of the core columns on one side, and perimeter columns, would have to be cut in order for this to actually happen. Making the public believe such a toppling was possible, or making the owner believe it was possible - that is a different story. But that doesn't make it an engineering actuality, and legitimate architects and engineers would argue the rational reality.
If other buildings are similarly wired for demolition, this could be checked now. I can only see it as possible they did it with the WTC towers (including building 7, by the way) by lying about the need or by blackmailing their way in, and such actions are unlikely to be repeated any time soon. Maybe you are agreeing with this and I have misunderstood.
I agree that it is not enough for 9/11 truth to prove there was a coverup about demolitions and other events, but the admission that there was a coverup should lead to investigations about who pushed for the coverup, and by the way, what really did happen.
We don't have to answer all the questions in order to crack open the door and make it clear that something very much worse happened on 9/11 than the public has been led to believe.
It is important to avoid the scapegoating of a few individuals, if there is really a larger conspiracy. Making the argument that only a very few people were behind it all tends to excuse all the rest of the people who enabled it.
I am saying that the people who enabled and executed it were all, except for the leadership, completely innocent! This is not like the nazi crimes, where all the people knew more or less what they were doing along the chain of command--- that can only happen in a dictatorship. These were people innocently working on a military drill. They are victims too, they were unwittingly turned into murderers by following opaque orders they didn't know the consequences of, and they have massive resistance to accepting this, because they also don't want the burden of guilt. You must not view them as your opponents. They are just scared to death, because each thinks that either the standard story is true, or else there is an enormous conspiracy of evil, and so they won't speak out. Once they know it's a tiny conspiracy, perhaps just a plan of a single person, they will not be afraid.
The fighter pilots thought they were shooting down drones that day, not airliners. They still do--- they marvel that the same day they were shooting down drones, they also had to shoot down flight 93 and cover it up.
The owner just did what the government asked him to do, and he didn't resist demolition partly because it coincided with his own private interest, but mostly because he could see a reasonable reason for every action, and he considers it a spooky coincidence that the timing of the attack coincided with the demolition adjustments as it did. He transferred ownership and bought insurance because the government activity made him suspicious that they have very good intelligence that an attack is brewing, and he hedged himself to do well in such an eventuality. He also paid attention to any intelligence rumors, and took care to stay the hell away from the building whenever there was a rumor that something big was going to happen involving airplanes.
The NORAD/air-traffic people have nothing to fear from telling the truth, and they told the truth--- they said the drills were hindering their work that day, which is why their response to the attacks was so weak. But, aside from ruining their response, they don't associate the radar drill anomalies with the attack--- they consider the glitches coinciding with the attack to be a horrible spooky, completely improbable coincidence, but a coincidence which has no explanation.
The people flying the drones into WTC and Pentagon thought they were doing a flight simulation, they are the only ones who know for sure, and they are also victims, not perpetrators. They had absolutely no idea, and there is no way they could have suspected ahead of time, aside from the flight simulation being much better than usual. These people are suffering. Once they realized what was going on, when they saw the TV, they also probably refused to fly the fourth drone into the capital or wherever it was going, so orders were given for it to be shot down by missile and it promptly was. Covering this up is obvious, and would be done even if the attack was otherwise as the government says, so it gives people involved in the flight 93 coverup no clue about the other coverups.
In general, all the people who covered everything up with false stories each thought they were doing good---- each one added in a piece of evidence that was non-existant in order to blame the people that higher ups with security clearences told them were known to be guilty for sure for sure. They were doing simple propaganda. The ones who put together the fake Bin-Laden video didn't think of it as protecting the guilty, they thought of it as giving visual form to documents the US already acquired from spy-intelligence, documents which were manufactured wholecloth by one person, the one planner, and the source must be kept secret. The top levels of government have secrecy, and so no checks and balances to protect against a single person with a security clearence who is lying. What can you do? You can't verify without a security clearence. So you make a fake Bin Laden (and you do so badly) and you make a fake confession video (badly) which matches the report you have of spied-on conversation.
The people who demolished the WTC also thought they were working in the interest of public safety. They also covered up their part for perfectly understandable reasons. The final elevator work and late-night projects right before was probably just installing new timers to readjust the timing of the demolition in some way, so that it collapses from the point of impact downward, rather than from the bottom. Such adjustment was not done on building 7, which was not a target, and building 7 collapsed from the bottom up, as usual for a demolition.
The person designing the demolition for this event would have to be aware after the fact that there is something fishy, but it could be justified to this person too--- can we make it that the already-existing demolition looks arguably like a natural collapse, so it doesn't give a clue to future terrorists? This person could have been murdered before the attack took place, and there would be no reason for suspicion. The people installing new explosive timers and new software adjustments on the demolition system, would have no idea what the details are, and what they are for. They would just chalk it up to coincidence that they adjusted the demolition system in the early part of the year, just before the attack.
Using secrecy and drills, it's possible to execute and cover up nearly any crime, simply by manipulating security clearences of the people doing the execution, and making sure that the only people who end up knowing something incriminating are low-level folks with no security clearence and no power.
It can be done by one person, it doesn't require any special magic. Everyone is collectively guilty and only a tiny handful of people have proof.
I think your argument that only one person could have been responsible for making 9/11 happen is at least more believable that the strawman argument that there must have been 1000s who knew, so therefore it couldn't have happened.
But I think you push it too far, and make your statements a bit too definitively, thus weakening your case. It is also possible for a small group of co-conspirators to be at the top, and in some ways it seems much more likely because they would be supportive of each others' part, with gang-psychology keeping them in line.
Just a technicality, but it would not be a "conspiracy" without more than one person being in the know. Meanwhile, the media has got people believing 9/11 wasn't a conspiracy at all, even though it was supposedly 4 groups of 5 guys acting in a magically coordinated way.
You make a good case for why most people did not have to know much about the role they played. I am in agreement with that line of argument, though we have to be careful to not merely accept pleas of ignorance, especially when ignorance is not an excuse for breaking the law.
"I am saying that the people who enabled and executed it were all, except for the leadership, completely innocent! "
By "enabling" I meant the kind of thing people do with an alcoholic in the family, excusing their behavior, accommodating their habits, rather than taking responsibility to deal with the problem, even if it was not their problem to start with. I'm sure that many people who we would like to believe are completely innocent before and after 9/11 were, as you say at the end, "collectively guilty" at the very least, but individually guilty of not doing their jobs properly.
After 9/11, they are even more guilty of not speaking up about what they knew at the time, or what they found out since, no matter how hard that is to become a whistleblower and risk their careers or even their lives. They are collectively guilty of participating in the coverup, but with the knowledge that they probably had some role in the coverup as well as the actual events.
"This is not like the nazi crimes, where all the people knew more or less what they were doing along the chain of command--- that can only happen in a dictatorship."
Military and intelligence organizations are essentially dictatorships, and a large portion of 9/11 was carried out by members of such hierarchically strict organizations (NORAD, FAA, CIA, FBI). Some people even argue that after WW2, many nazis were incorporated into our military and intelligence. (By the way, I don't justify anything being a dictatorship, and I can't justify more than a tiny fraction of what the military does no matter how it does it.)
In addition to individuals, it is important to recognize that the institutions of the US government that allowed 9/11 to have occurred are also at fault. The checks and balances are obviously not enough since there was not enough checking going on regarding the elements of the government that directed the activities of 9/11, knowingly or not. In many cases, it was probably non-governmental organizations as well, and not necessarily entirely US-centric. We know that Israel has a strong interest in our supportive presence in the mideast.
Lots of things need major restructuring and I worry more that, once 9/11 truth starts coming out, a few isolated individuals and organizations will be targeted by the media and the public for most of the blame without digging into and routing out the much deeper corruption that manifested as 9/11 and all the rest of our systemic problems. 9/11 was small potatoes compared to the billions of lives that will be affected in the near future by perfect storms of multiple ecological disasters and socia-political collapse.
I agree with almost everything you said. I disagree with the following:
As far as the points of agreement, I expect the reader is not a gullible naive person, and knows that I am not an insider or investigator, and that I have no special knowledge. My hypothesis comes form the answer to the same question you ask when you see a magic-trick: "How would I do it, all by myself?" I have an answer which works, and this answer makes ridiculously precise predictions about what to find around the attack: it absolutely REQUIRES a whole bunch of otherwise improbable simultaneous drills that are unrelated.
These drills all exist on 9/11, "coincidentally", but they are not coincidental in this view, and this reduction in improbability is persuasive enough to make me sure that this is what happened. The improbability is removed at a ratio of thousands to 1. After coming to terms with this, I made a few further "predictions" (things I didn't know before, but that would falsify the idea immediately):
They didn't. Not one of the four planes sent out a hijacking signal before disappearing. This was one of the mysteries of 9/11, I didn't know about it when I made up the idea, I found it out later.
This is confirmed by news reports and analysis, and has split the 9/11 truth into "real planes" "fake planes" camps. I didn't know about it when I made up the theory, I found out later. I didn't read the skeptical literature before figuring out how it's done.
This also came out at some point, that this drill, unlike the others, wasn't cancelled at the time of the attack. I found this out while checking if I nailed it.
And so on. In fact this scenario makes so many precise falsifiable predictions (among them, the precise forms of the drills) which work, that it means it's certainly correct, there is no way that you can have it pass so many nontrivial tests.
To produce understanding in the public, you don't nitpick fine points. That can be done by people with google in their own spare time. All you have to do is produce a complete scenario for the attack, and the "lone wolf" scenario I have given is very important:
The third point means that we can put an end to modern terror by simply forbidding terrorism drills, this must be said again and again.
The collective behavior is not unusual, and it is enabled by secrecy. Opening up the government requires perhaps a law, perhaps a constitutional amendment to require each classified document to be authorized by the president's own pen, not by anybody else, so secret organizations in the government cannot operate without the knowledge of the president.
Also, we need a president whose vocabulary includes the phrases: "Hell no.", "Go fuck yourself" and "you're fired. Go home.", which he can use upon any occasion where people wish to make something that should be open secret, or have torture, or rendition, or any such abomination. Perhaps such a person is Jesse Ventura.
Googling "why the twin towers fell" returns many articles from professional structural engineers, with even a video created by NOVA, the same respected production company that did one on String theory with Brian Greene. But I like this Scientific America article by MIT structural engineers:
I'm not a structural engineer, but it seems obvious to me that the steel structure supporting the floors softened and buckled from the intense heat, meaning they could no longer support the floors above them. These top floors falling on the lower floors strained the supports of the lower floors leading to catastrophic failure.
Of course, I could be wrong and these MIT engineers are in on the conspiracy, paid by the government to keep their mouths shut, but the part of my brain that keeps my paranoia in check informs me that this is extremely unlikely.
Just show me one article by a world class structural engineering academic that questions current main stream thinking.
No, these engineers are not conspirators. I don't think there was a conspiracy, I think this was the work of one senior official, working essentially alone, in the sense that no one else knew anything before the attack, and only a handful of people afterwards (although many suspected).
The structural engineers were simply manipulated by social forces. Their explanation is for sure bogus for building 7, the fires were small and contained, and even if they engulfed the building, nothing would have wrecked its structural integrity.
If you have a floor soften hitting another floor, the floor must start accelerating only when it is impacted, it doesn't have foreknowledge that it's going to get hit in the future. The rate of collapse is going to be slower than free fall for sure, by a huge amount, since each floor starts stationary and needs time to accelerate. The collapse happened in about 10 seconds, only slightly slower than free-fall at around 9 seconds. There is ejected material which could not possibly be gravitationally accelerated, it is obviously a demolition, I cannot argue it, because it is too obvious.
I should also add that it can't be symmetrical, it would topple to one side, damaging neighboring buildings with huge chunks of WTC. There is never an unplanned symmetrical implosion, or else we wouldn't need structural engineers or demolitions experts. I am sure that ALL the world-class structural engineering experts are certain the main-stream thinking is absurd, but they just don't say it. That doesn't mean they don't believe it, I think they will just refuse to comment on it, for fear of political reprisal.
But a demolition by itself is not evidence of a conspiracy, not necessarily (although possibly). It can still be the work of one person, although a high ranking one who can order things in secret. People could have put thermite demolition charges secretly, over many months, simply because the building had already been a terrorism target, and they wanted to ensure that the building could collapse if struck, instead of toppling over catastrophically on neighboring buildings.
If this was the motivation, the people involved in the demolition would not be conspirators, since they would imagine they were working in the interest of public safety. NIST would then be covering up their unfortunate, but necessary, actions.
I will not show you any authorities, I do not cite authorities, I never have, and I'm not about to start now. I do my own physics, and my own thinking. Perhaps it's time you started doing this too?
The collapse gained momentum quickly because as each floor collapsed, it added more weight and momentum to the floor below. It isn't difficult to believe that once the collapse picked up momentum, it was in free fall.
The reason it didn't tip over is because the bulk of its structural strength was in the center of the building.
I'm a civil engineer, and used to work for the company that designed those towers, so I read about the design a few years before 9/11, and was privy to their analysis of the collapse shortly after 9/11. With knowledge of the design, they collapsed exactly the way you would expect.