There is an old sayin we've all herd: "Is it better to be a feared leader or loved leader."-(something like that) What I mean by that is: In the time of G.W. Bush were people blaming him for 9/11, cause they feared him or couldn't trust him. After all, he was the new president. And its easy for people to assume the goverment had some informatation before-hand of the attack. People will blame politics because, either thay can't trust them or they just don't like them.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/50427/911_conspiracy_theorist s_echo_early.html?cat=62

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/991808/alex_jones_dnc_confron tation_with_michelle.html?cat=8

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/728809/what_should_be_the_las t_word_on_the.html?cat=9

Let me give you some information that might be usefull.

One thing that you must understand, is weight bearing loads. WBL basically say that X floor can hold X weight. X floor exerts X amount of force on load bearing structure. If X floor (In this case, FLOORS) are compromised, than X floor caan only hold X weight.

Example. Take a stack of bricks. Not cinder blocks, but bricks. Walking stones are the best for this analogy. Stack them 15-20 tall. Put a small spacer on all four corners of each block before putting the next one on. Now, take a hammer and wack the top one fairly hard. I can almost GUARANTEE that your hammer will break every brick in the stack. This is basically what happened on 9/11.
The floors below were only designed to safely hold X amount of weight. EVEN IF they could hold 50% more than the design pressure, they STILL couldn't hold up 25-30 floors above it. This would exceede its WBL by 3000% or more. Impossible to hold.

And as far as it slowing them down, nope. Not at all. When X floor recieved X load from 25-30 floors above, it failed. This in turn created MORE weight for the floor below it to try to absorb. It couldn't so it failed also.
For instance. If it took (Not accurate just numbers for argument sake) floor 75 10 seconds to absorb 100 pounds of weight from above to the point of failure, then now floor 75 has not only 100 pounds of pressure from the inital fall, but also floor 75's weight. Now, because floor 74 has 110 lbs of weight, it would only take 9 seconds. See my drift?? Multiply that by millions of pounds of force, and you get casastropic failure.

I wanted to thank you for making some well reasoned and intelligent arguments. You take offense to the comment that all those doubting the 9/11 conspiracy just use pejoratives..however, you are the only exception.

Why use four planes? Why such a big incident? Well, because they could, I suppose. Because it is quite easy to install remote control devices on airplanes (assuming that's what they did). Because, who could believe that terrorists could sneak into the WTC planting explosives all over? Because, this way, it constricts travel.

Why, then, did they not plant WMDs in Iraq? I don't know, it's a good question. It might make sense when you think about the attacks in the context of psychological warfare against the American people to make them accept a police state. To me, the Iraq war seemed like a huge smoke screen, to draw media attention and the ire of those from those who might be suspicious of the government. So, the whole Iraq fiasco is made as preposterous as possible (for instance, only guarding the oil ministry and not the national museum in the initial invasion) in order to make it appear the the government is just hopelessly inept, and not overtly malicious.

So, the "politically correct" thing to do is to criticize the Iraq War, and not to mention 9/11..even when, whether the govt. did it or not, the 9/11 commission report is glaringly erroneous and full of holes.

By the way, it is clearly a woman that is in the hole in the photos. The "official line" (NIST website) is that she was just away from the center of the heat.

In my eyes, I do believe it is possible that 19 hijackers committed the act..but I wouldn't put the odds at more than 5-10%. There are just too many things that don't fit together in the story. Why didn't they scramble planes to protect the pentagon more than an hour after the wtc attacks? Why wasn't anyone reprimanded in the air defense? What about norm mineta's testimony on cspan that directly contradicted what cheney had claimed? Why the lies about having "never anticipated anything like this?", why were the pentagon video tapes and wtc rubble destroyed?

If people doubt the government's story, it is because the government acted like a guilty criminal in dealing with it.

"Sorry, Love to Be Wrong, but you just don’t get my point. Why crash four planes at all? Why come up with such a fantastic and potentially unmanageable catastrophe such as using four planes when a few well-placed explosives will do?"

Could equally be asked of the terrorist hijackers. How did they hide such a fantastical plan, and why didn't they use bombs instead of planes?

I have my beliefs about 9/11 but at this point I'm not trying to argue either way - just putting your logic to the test.

Also, real conspiracies do exist as someone pointed out in a comment above. To question those conspiracies would be conspiratorial in itself eg. Did Nixon really conspire to gather information about an opponent, or was he set up by someone who didn't want him to win the next election? Did Guy Fawkes really plot to blow up English parliament or was he a scapegoat?

Equally, it is very real and very feasible a government would want to harm it's own people to political ends. Unless you do trust the words of democratically elected leaders such as Robert Mugabe?

Finally, since it is believable that terrorists conspired to fly planes into major American landmarks, and it's believable that high level operators such as Bin Laden conspired (there's that word again) with others behind closed cave-doors to carry this out... is it really that hard to imagine some higher-level agents working for any countries government eg. Taliban or America used Bin Laden and others to carry this out?

Oh but we're back to the American government would never lie to it's people argument again.

Look through your emotions and see the big picture. Like I say, I'm not promoting my views, just asking questions.

Now you're calling me crazy. I think their reaction time was way too slow to the planes' change of flight because of complacency. It had never happened before. I really doubt they'd let it happen because it's way too embarrassing, for one thing.

Did they take advantage of the attacks for their own political ends? Of course. Again, a conspiracy like that would be way too big to manage reasonably.

At the end of the day, I'm doubtful that the US did anything more than let it happen. But let it happen they did. If anyone wants to tell me that three airliners turned off their flight transponders and made u-turns over the most protected airspace in the US, and no one noticed, I'll tell you to your face that you're crazy. It is standard protocol to scramble jets within three minutes of a transponder going off or a plane going off course. No order is given, it just happens. An order must be given for it not to happen. And it didn't. That alone should raise some eyebrows of all levels of civic and governmental minds.

It's interesting that you call it the "government's version"; it shows a natural mistrust of the government, which can be a good thing if not taken to the paranoid extreme.

To accept, verbatim, the government version when there are so many flaws and holes is to piss on the memory of the thousands that died that day IMO. To not question, to accept blindly without the hint of being able to think for yourself is disturbing.

Do I believe the government did it? Directly? No. Do I believe they knew it was coming and did nothing? Absolutely. Pearl Harbor was allowed to happen to justify America entering the war. This much as has been confirmed by various sources over the years. But it took several decades for it to even be considered as possible.

Governments will sacrifice their citizens for their own ends, whether noble or nefarious. Anyone who doubts this, just look up the bombings of Coventry in World War 2. The British government knew it was coming, but couldn't issue an evacuation order, because if they did the German's would know their code had been cracked. Hundreds were killed.

Anyone who doesn't at least question 9/11 is so very very blind.

Looks like a lot of conspiracy theory thought focuses on putting down your opponents, and maligning them as irrational, obsessively patriotic, insecure, and traumatized.

Wow, you may be right. Just looking it up, I see that camera phones were invented by that time, but I don't see anything about when they actually came into widespread use.

I believe the reason lies behind the fact that if what the "truthers" are saying is true, or even part of it is, it would create an insecurity that most people are not prepared to handle. People get defensive when their ideals and convictions are put into question. Imagine if there was a large lobby trying to prove that Jesus was a homosexual.
OK not the best example but I think you get my point.
Plus we all watched many of our countrymen die in a horrible way that day. Many people need someone to blame and to blame one's own government is a pill way to large for many people to swallow.

1) The Pentagon attack had perfectly fine video of the crash taken from a hotel nearby. That footage was seized and is presumably destroyed. The extended camera shots they released a year or two ago simply make the object look more like a missile to my trained eye. (Aviation Ordnance, 3rd class, USN, 1987-1990)

2) The Project For the New American Century was a group of people, a thinktank, really, that posited a theory of how to propel the US into dominance throughout the 2000's. "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor" The PNAC had active advocates like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Out.

Here's my 3 cents on the subject:

Cent 1: If the attack was indeed staged, there would be a cast of thousands to corral and keep quiet; the current administration isn't quite up to that task, nor is our military establishment.

Cent 2: If the attack was indeed staged, wouldn't it make sense to have multiple followup "attacks" that would give the opportunity to put some real restrictions on people's freedom?

Cent 3: The people who are so adamant that the 9-11 attack was staged also tend to be Bush haters; if the attack had happened during Clinton's watch, what do you want to bet that those same people would be the ones dismissing any claims of conspiracy.

LOL, ted

So what you're saying is when President Bush "got the message" while he was sitting listening to those school children, he wasn't thinking "What the hell?", but he was thinking, "Oh - was that today?"

That picture of the "woman" in the building, for one, only looks like a woman if you want it to. To me, it looks more like the surrounding material of the building. It only looks like a woman because that's our mind's eye. Just like the man in the moon or the face on Mars.

From what I've seen here, the people who think there's a conspiracy are pretty condescending, dubbing other folks as overemotional, mindless sheep just because they accept the overwhelmingly plausible sequence of events on Sept 11, and not the far-fetched, credibility-straining ideas of conspiracy theorists.

That is fine. My suggestion is to start with the Kennedy assasination and work your way up to present times. It will be easier to objectively look at alternate explanations for an older historical event than one that is still fresh.

There are very clear reasons for the Reichstag fire, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Kennedy assasination, and the 9/11 hoaxes. Be a student of history and view present day events through those lenses.

The two men who chaired our nation's investigation into 9/11 are documented to have met the "9/11 Money Man" on the morning of that horrific day. Our nation's official report offers no explanation for this meeting. One of these men, Goss, later went on to head the CIA.

It truly saddens me that Neatorama has stooped to poking fun at "9/11 Conspiracy Theorists" when there are so very many unanswered questions about the Neoconservative's theory of the events of that day. I expected better of this website- virtually everyone I know questions our government's story to some extent.

Where did you get that? Does moveon.org have it's own dictionary now? Here's the actual definition:

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This
pa·tri·ot Audio Help /?pe?tri?t, -??t or, especially Brit., ?pætri?t/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[pey-tree-uht, -ot or, especially Brit., pa-tree-uht] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. a person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests with devotion.
2. a person who regards himself or herself as a defender, esp. of individual rights, against presumed interference by the federal government.
3. (initial capital letter) Military. a U.S. Army antiaircraft missile with a range of 37 mi. (60 km) and a 200-lb. (90 kg) warhead, launched from a tracked vehicle with radar and computer guidance and fire control.
[Origin: 1590–1600; < MF patriote < LL patri?ta < Gk patrités fellow-countryman, lineage member]
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

And even worse comments from the readers.

(-10 respect points)