All: if you are unable to construct intelligible sentences, do not presume to tell others that you somehow possess the "truth." We are having to remove comments that are utter gibberish, like they were written by a drunken armadillo.
Larry Payne, a commenter here, and lots of silly videos on steel not weakening when a little bit of fuel is burned on them in the open expose how conspiracies with no basis in physical reality have poisoned the discussion. All that said, the Saudi royal family is huge. It would be bizarre not to expect that many Saudi royals were involved. Bin Laden's extended family ran (and still run) a huge construction/engineering company, the largest in Saudi Arabia -- where contracts are awarded on kickback rather than on the basis of lowest competent bid. Would any sane person give Kushner $2 billion to manage, as the Saudi sovereign wealth fund just did, at MBS demand?
Could the hijackers pilot the planes? Of course. Rather easy. I could never land a small plane, but I've been at the controls of one in the air. Commercial airliners have even more automation. Did the hijackers "precisely" put cookie-cutter holes in the towers? Of course not. They had to know that the lower they hit, the more people would be trapped and die and the faster the towers would fall. But the planes hit very high -- 93rd floor and 78th. (WTC2 fell first because there was more building weight above the impact site, despite the fact that the impacting aircraft was tilted more, dissipating the impact somewhat.) Emphatically not precision flying.
What's being forgotten goes beyond the conspiracy that led to the event. Some 45 minutes after WTC1 was hit (and about 45 minutes before it fell), the structural engineer who did the detailed design and whose office was a few blocks away called NYFD to warn buildings would collapse. At about the same time, in the student lounge at BU school of communications where 100+ were watching, I was asked if the towers could be saved. I said flatly they were doomed... had at most an hour. I had studied the structure for a book on construction disasters I wrote in 1983, and I had been involved with ending asbestos spraying there in 1969-1970. They were among the last steel buildings in the USA to have quite a bit of chrysotile asbestos that contained far more dangerous crocidolite asbestos as a contaminant (to the 44th floor in WTC1 and 19th in WTC2). Higher floors had rock wool spraying, and the rock wool contained tremolite, which also turned out to be a dangerous form of asbestos anyway.
Companies on the upper floors of WTC2, most notably AON, started evacuating when WTC1 was hit... and many of their employees were forced back upstairs by idiotic Port Authority police... and died. My wife had worked there until late that spring.
Funny how the news shows, even 60 Minutes, ignore this stuff and so much more that is actually verified truth. No wonder conspiracy theories flourish when rather obvious facts, such as Saudi royal involvement, get brushed aside. Hell, Condi Rice got a memo three weeks before 9/11 headlined that Saudi nationals were being trained to pilot planes and could crash them into buildings. Duh.
One of the things that always made me uncomfortable about 9/11 was the insider trading and where some of it happened. Alex Brown, an investment bank in Baltimore, shorted airline stocks before 9/11. It was a footnote in the 9/11 commission report. The report waved it off as, "Oh, the people there would never cavort with terrorists, nothing to see here." But that bank was run by Buzzy Krongard, who worked there for years. Ended up running the bank but left in 1998 to go work for the CIA. As an aside, another prominent Baltimore banker, Ed Hale, reveals publicly that Buzzy recruited him to the CIA in the early 90s. So Buzzy the banker is recruiting other bankers to the CIA in the early 90s, then Buzzy works for the CIA and on 9/11 was 3rd in charge of the CIA. The bank that Buzzy previously ran shorted airline stocks before 9/11. What are the odds, huh?
There seems to be an active assumption (by both those who consider the possibility of a conspiracy, and those who disavow it) that for members of the US government to have been involved in causing the 11 September 2001 attacks, they had to be at the heart of planning it.
T’ain’t necessarily so…
LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) doesn’t suggest that actors within US officialdom planned the event, or played a forward active role. All it suggests is that they simply got out of the way.
HIHOP (Help It Happen On Purpose) suggests that in addition, they ran a bit of interference and did a little blocking on behalf of the attackers.
Both of these are reasonable options without resorting to some of the more kooky suggestions of the Truther movement.
It’s hard to believe that if the Saudis were involved, US intelligence services at the highest level could not have known
I don't know how widespread those 'active assumptions' are, but I agree that reality is more nuanced.
The complacency, incompetence and internal turf wars commonly exhibited within governments provide ideal cover for malfeasance. Motivations can be incredibly petty - for example withholding information to undermine and oust the particular official/department that requires it - overruling decisions just to show who's in charge - refusal to acknowledge certain dangers, or make unpopular decisions.
Whilst LIHOP/HIHOP are possible, I think that vanity, distraction and incompetence can bring catastrophy on a scale beyond the imaginations of those engaged in it. With Dubya clueless about leadership, and his father being too cosy with the Saudis, conditions were perfect.
(2 of 2) -industrial complex. Cui bono? Them and the Bush Dynasty and their oil buddies. Of course the Saudis would want to help lube the project to go to war with Saddam and Afghanis if their pals George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were going to owe them favors. Why would they not?
The deaths of thousands of expendables didn't need to be a concern for 9/11. Besides, the owners of the World Trade Center were facing a billion dollars' worth of asbestos elimination and insulation rework, so if instead they happened to lose the building and get restoration from insurance they would be money net ahead, as happened. In the days leading up to 9/11, WTC security guards and bomb-sniffing dogs were told to stand down. WTC security was managed by Securacom. Who headed Securacom? A certain Marvin P. Bush. Who was his brother? George W. Bush.
Promptly after the 9/11 attack all civilian air traffic was grounded. Only a few military flights were allowed, and organ donor flights an hour or two later. Except...... except the only civilians allowed to fly out of the US were the brothers and sisters of Osama bin Laden. Family courtesy from the long-associated Bushes to their solid friends, the bin Ladins, without them needing to hire lawyers or delay packing luggage that was somehow all ready to go. Curious things can happen if you know the right people, and it is only the little expendables who need to suffer.
Given 9/11, billions of military-industrial/Bush/oil war profits were made, and then Afghanistan got to be a dull-dreary and most importantly a low-profit enterprise. But wait! Our spies in the Kremlin found out Putin was dead-set on invading Ukraine in a few months, so we dumped Afghanistan like a hot potato and got ready for a more profitable enterprise. By curiously abandoning $85 billion in war materiel in Afghanistan, the profiteers stand to take in $185 billion in replacement costs once the cost overruns and inflation are figured in. 9/11 was good for its run time, and now the profiteers have graduated to other pretexts for endless war. Manipulate Ukraine, make Russia mad and looking for revenge, and opportunities abound.
We can be tight with Saudi Arabia against Russia and Iran. Germany has been positioned to be at odds with Russia in a new way, and suffer from energy deficits. As long as the Russians and the Germans are at odds once again, the Anglo-American-French axis is profiting. Recruit some sucker assassins, pick a fight involving an Archduke or a couple of skyscrapers or a guy who likes swastikas, or tweak Putin, and the simple-minded will spend the next decade and the next trillions of dollars seeking endless revenge. Endless revenge means endless war means endless profits in an environment of endless gullibility. Once this cycle runs its course, there will be another one for the next generation of manipulated fools. And it will help the big boys in another way also. The more there are wars and famines and plagues, the more governments will prosper having to pay less Social Security and Medicare.
Why would the Saudis aid in an attack on the United States? Because their ally is American economic leaders, not the poor schmucks who get killed when the fabricated drama is played out. Expendable is expendable.
Archduke Ferdinand was one of the most pro-Serbian men of note in Austria. When he was conveniently eliminated by a cultivated patsy, this of course moved Austria to attack Serbia. Now Russia had to defend fellow Slavs in Serbia, and so Germany then had to defend their Austrian brethren against Russia. Cui bono if Germany and Russia are baited into going at one another's throats? The Anglo-American Axis of course, and the French along with them. Key players included the Harriman-Brown Brothers-Bush-Walker cabal that made profits from selling weapons and financial services to both sides. Like Henry Ford made money through WW II building tanks for Hitler or Coca-Cola invented Fanta to profit from Hitler's forces in their own way.
To avoid Senate hearings after WWI regarding selling to the enemy, the growing Bush Dynasty agreed to put their business papers on file for public examination at the National Archives. Whence they promptly disappeared, just like JFK's brain less than half a century later. Had Sen. Yarborough been sitting in the front limousine with JFK in Dealey Plaza, the shot that Connally received could have killed Yarborough and benefited the then-Republican candidate for the 1964 Texas US Senate seat. That would be one George H. W. Bush. Expendable is expendable. When Reagan had been president for only a few weeks he was shot in the chest with an explosive lead azide bullet. Had it actually detonated, George H.W. Bush would have promptly become the next president. Expendable is expendable
Killing Archduke Ferdinand, man of peace, was why a nut job named Gavrilo Princip was recruited through conniving intermediaries to think it was his heroic duty to save his people by killing the Archduke. Just like modern Arabs can be hepped up into heroically attacking infidel US interests anywhere in the world, providing a provocation pretext for spending billions of dollars for the military-industrial complex to make gigantic profits fighting them. Big oil and the Bush Dynasty again make their cut along the way if the US were to go to war for revenge after 9/11. Cultivate the sucker assassin, get him to take the bait, and you have all the pretext you need if the big boys have been set up over time to be properly offended and interested in blind revenge the minute the proper trigger is pulled.
Why did Prescott Bush et alii give Hitler so much early aid? To boost his rabid efforts to attack Russia. As long as Germany and Russia are at war in any kind of world war, Ango-American-French interests stand to greatly profit on a massive scale both financially and politically. Only the expendable little people have to suffer, and fewer people living to an old age means less money is needed to fund Social Security and Medicare types of programs in today's world.
The Saudi government would of course want to help their good pals-- George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. If the Saudis could promote the irritating of the United States by lubricating the 9/11 scheme, of course they would want to curry favor with American financial and political big boys who could be of immense return value. Help America get mad at some kind of Arab or another, transfer the blame to Saddam and Afghanistan, and voila! -- there's the stampede for having a war engineered for mega oil profits. Until you find out that Afghanistan is becoming stale and less profitable and your spies in the Kremlin let you know Putin is about to make a big move on Ukraine in coming months. Now you can direct your ambitions for armament lucre there, and abandon $85 billion in weaponry as conveniently left behind in Afghanistan. All that means is that with cost overruns and inflation, the military-industrial complex will take in $185 billion for the replacements. And meanwhile the US and Saudi Arabia will be more cozy than ever, together against Russia and Iran. At the same time, Germany and nearby expendables are being starved for energy, so now we see a new way to make sure Russia and Germany are kept down and kept at one another's throats for the time being. Follow the money. The little people are expendable, but money is not.
When the World Trade Center went down, another profit was derived from not having to do a billion dollars' worth of asbestos elimination work inside the Twin Towers. Of course the owners got their insurance money, so losing the place instead of retrofitting it made for a financial benefit. In the days leading up to 9/11, WTC security guards were told to stand down along with bomb-sniffing dogs. Who was in charge of World Trade Center security and its nullification? A company called Securacom. Who was in charge of Securacom? Marvin P. Bush, brother of George W. Bush. On 9/11 when all civilian flights were grounded and only military planes were allowed to fly, then organ transplant planes were allowed to fly, who were the only civilians allowed to fly out of the country? The brothers and sisters of Osama bin Laden. They got away without having to answer a single question or get any kind of lawyer since the skids were already greased and the bags were already packed. As long as you know the right people, and certain monies are passing through certain hands, the other guy's catastrophe is actually your profit opportunity. Not a problem when it is only the little people who suffer.
Combat training, ruthlessness and the element of surprise may have been more important than competence in flying. Storming the cockpit and taking the pilots hostage may have been enough.
Pilots may have completed a hundred drills for the worst scenario, but it's not the same as when it's for real.
"PTech is the one golden thread you pull on. All of this is unraveled because it goes into the corporations, it goes into these government entities, it goes into the terrorism financing entities."
......
"[Yassin] al-Qadi, who has been identified as one of Osama bin Laden’s ‘chief money launderers,’ owned a prominent U.S. technology firm and alleged CIA front known as Ptech."
--Indira Singh, interviewed by Bonnie Faulkner, on Guns and Butter in 2005.
All: if you are unable to construct intelligible sentences, do not presume to tell others that you somehow possess the "truth." We are having to remove comments that are utter gibberish, like they were written by a drunken armadillo.
Larry Payne, a commenter here, and lots of silly videos on steel not weakening when a little bit of fuel is burned on them in the open expose how conspiracies with no basis in physical reality have poisoned the discussion. All that said, the Saudi royal family is huge. It would be bizarre not to expect that many Saudi royals were involved. Bin Laden's extended family ran (and still run) a huge construction/engineering company, the largest in Saudi Arabia -- where contracts are awarded on kickback rather than on the basis of lowest competent bid. Would any sane person give Kushner $2 billion to manage, as the Saudi sovereign wealth fund just did, at MBS demand?
Could the hijackers pilot the planes? Of course. Rather easy. I could never land a small plane, but I've been at the controls of one in the air. Commercial airliners have even more automation. Did the hijackers "precisely" put cookie-cutter holes in the towers? Of course not. They had to know that the lower they hit, the more people would be trapped and die and the faster the towers would fall. But the planes hit very high -- 93rd floor and 78th. (WTC2 fell first because there was more building weight above the impact site, despite the fact that the impacting aircraft was tilted more, dissipating the impact somewhat.) Emphatically not precision flying.
What's being forgotten goes beyond the conspiracy that led to the event. Some 45 minutes after WTC1 was hit (and about 45 minutes before it fell), the structural engineer who did the detailed design and whose office was a few blocks away called NYFD to warn buildings would collapse. At about the same time, in the student lounge at BU school of communications where 100+ were watching, I was asked if the towers could be saved. I said flatly they were doomed... had at most an hour. I had studied the structure for a book on construction disasters I wrote in 1983, and I had been involved with ending asbestos spraying there in 1969-1970. They were among the last steel buildings in the USA to have quite a bit of chrysotile asbestos that contained far more dangerous crocidolite asbestos as a contaminant (to the 44th floor in WTC1 and 19th in WTC2). Higher floors had rock wool spraying, and the rock wool contained tremolite, which also turned out to be a dangerous form of asbestos anyway.
Companies on the upper floors of WTC2, most notably AON, started evacuating when WTC1 was hit... and many of their employees were forced back upstairs by idiotic Port Authority police... and died. My wife had worked there until late that spring.
Funny how the news shows, even 60 Minutes, ignore this stuff and so much more that is actually verified truth. No wonder conspiracy theories flourish when rather obvious facts, such as Saudi royal involvement, get brushed aside. Hell, Condi Rice got a memo three weeks before 9/11 headlined that Saudi nationals were being trained to pilot planes and could crash them into buildings. Duh.
One of the things that always made me uncomfortable about 9/11 was the insider trading and where some of it happened. Alex Brown, an investment bank in Baltimore, shorted airline stocks before 9/11. It was a footnote in the 9/11 commission report. The report waved it off as, "Oh, the people there would never cavort with terrorists, nothing to see here." But that bank was run by Buzzy Krongard, who worked there for years. Ended up running the bank but left in 1998 to go work for the CIA. As an aside, another prominent Baltimore banker, Ed Hale, reveals publicly that Buzzy recruited him to the CIA in the early 90s. So Buzzy the banker is recruiting other bankers to the CIA in the early 90s, then Buzzy works for the CIA and on 9/11 was 3rd in charge of the CIA. The bank that Buzzy previously ran shorted airline stocks before 9/11. What are the odds, huh?
There seems to be an active assumption (by both those who consider the possibility of a conspiracy, and those who disavow it) that for members of the US government to have been involved in causing the 11 September 2001 attacks, they had to be at the heart of planning it.
T’ain’t necessarily so…
LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) doesn’t suggest that actors within US officialdom planned the event, or played a forward active role. All it suggests is that they simply got out of the way.
HIHOP (Help It Happen On Purpose) suggests that in addition, they ran a bit of interference and did a little blocking on behalf of the attackers.
Both of these are reasonable options without resorting to some of the more kooky suggestions of the Truther movement.
It’s hard to believe that if the Saudis were involved, US intelligence services at the highest level could not have known
I don't know how widespread those 'active assumptions' are, but I agree that reality is more nuanced.
The complacency, incompetence and internal turf wars commonly exhibited within governments provide ideal cover for malfeasance. Motivations can be incredibly petty - for example withholding information to undermine and oust the particular official/department that requires it - overruling decisions just to show who's in charge - refusal to acknowledge certain dangers, or make unpopular decisions.
Whilst LIHOP/HIHOP are possible, I think that vanity, distraction and incompetence can bring catastrophy on a scale beyond the imaginations of those engaged in it. With Dubya clueless about leadership, and his father being too cosy with the Saudis, conditions were perfect.
(2 of 2) -industrial complex. Cui bono? Them and the Bush Dynasty and their oil buddies. Of course the Saudis would want to help lube the project to go to war with Saddam and Afghanis if their pals George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were going to owe them favors. Why would they not?
The deaths of thousands of expendables didn't need to be a concern for 9/11. Besides, the owners of the World Trade Center were facing a billion dollars' worth of asbestos elimination and insulation rework, so if instead they happened to lose the building and get restoration from insurance they would be money net ahead, as happened. In the days leading up to 9/11, WTC security guards and bomb-sniffing dogs were told to stand down. WTC security was managed by Securacom. Who headed Securacom? A certain Marvin P. Bush. Who was his brother? George W. Bush.
Promptly after the 9/11 attack all civilian air traffic was grounded. Only a few military flights were allowed, and organ donor flights an hour or two later. Except...... except the only civilians allowed to fly out of the US were the brothers and sisters of Osama bin Laden. Family courtesy from the long-associated Bushes to their solid friends, the bin Ladins, without them needing to hire lawyers or delay packing luggage that was somehow all ready to go. Curious things can happen if you know the right people, and it is only the little expendables who need to suffer.
Given 9/11, billions of military-industrial/Bush/oil war profits were made, and then Afghanistan got to be a dull-dreary and most importantly a low-profit enterprise. But wait! Our spies in the Kremlin found out Putin was dead-set on invading Ukraine in a few months, so we dumped Afghanistan like a hot potato and got ready for a more profitable enterprise. By curiously abandoning $85 billion in war materiel in Afghanistan, the profiteers stand to take in $185 billion in replacement costs once the cost overruns and inflation are figured in. 9/11 was good for its run time, and now the profiteers have graduated to other pretexts for endless war. Manipulate Ukraine, make Russia mad and looking for revenge, and opportunities abound.
We can be tight with Saudi Arabia against Russia and Iran. Germany has been positioned to be at odds with Russia in a new way, and suffer from energy deficits. As long as the Russians and the Germans are at odds once again, the Anglo-American-French axis is profiting. Recruit some sucker assassins, pick a fight involving an Archduke or a couple of skyscrapers or a guy who likes swastikas, or tweak Putin, and the simple-minded will spend the next decade and the next trillions of dollars seeking endless revenge. Endless revenge means endless war means endless profits in an environment of endless gullibility. Once this cycle runs its course, there will be another one for the next generation of manipulated fools. And it will help the big boys in another way also. The more there are wars and famines and plagues, the more governments will prosper having to pay less Social Security and Medicare.
Why would the Saudis aid in an attack on the United States? Because their ally is American economic leaders, not the poor schmucks who get killed when the fabricated drama is played out. Expendable is expendable.
Archduke Ferdinand was one of the most pro-Serbian men of note in Austria. When he was conveniently eliminated by a cultivated patsy, this of course moved Austria to attack Serbia. Now Russia had to defend fellow Slavs in Serbia, and so Germany then had to defend their Austrian brethren against Russia. Cui bono if Germany and Russia are baited into going at one another's throats? The Anglo-American Axis of course, and the French along with them. Key players included the Harriman-Brown Brothers-Bush-Walker cabal that made profits from selling weapons and financial services to both sides. Like Henry Ford made money through WW II building tanks for Hitler or Coca-Cola invented Fanta to profit from Hitler's forces in their own way.
To avoid Senate hearings after WWI regarding selling to the enemy, the growing Bush Dynasty agreed to put their business papers on file for public examination at the National Archives. Whence they promptly disappeared, just like JFK's brain less than half a century later. Had Sen. Yarborough been sitting in the front limousine with JFK in Dealey Plaza, the shot that Connally received could have killed Yarborough and benefited the then-Republican candidate for the 1964 Texas US Senate seat. That would be one George H. W. Bush. Expendable is expendable. When Reagan had been president for only a few weeks he was shot in the chest with an explosive lead azide bullet. Had it actually detonated, George H.W. Bush would have promptly become the next president. Expendable is expendable
Killing Archduke Ferdinand, man of peace, was why a nut job named Gavrilo Princip was recruited through conniving intermediaries to think it was his heroic duty to save his people by killing the Archduke. Just like modern Arabs can be hepped up into heroically attacking infidel US interests anywhere in the world, providing a provocation pretext for spending billions of dollars for the military-industrial complex to make gigantic profits fighting them. Big oil and the Bush Dynasty again make their cut along the way if the US were to go to war for revenge after 9/11. Cultivate the sucker assassin, get him to take the bait, and you have all the pretext you need if the big boys have been set up over time to be properly offended and interested in blind revenge the minute the proper trigger is pulled.
Why did Prescott Bush et alii give Hitler so much early aid? To boost his rabid efforts to attack Russia. As long as Germany and Russia are at war in any kind of world war, Ango-American-French interests stand to greatly profit on a massive scale both financially and politically. Only the expendable little people have to suffer, and fewer people living to an old age means less money is needed to fund Social Security and Medicare types of programs in today's world.
The Saudi government would of course want to help their good pals-- George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. If the Saudis could promote the irritating of the United States by lubricating the 9/11 scheme, of course they would want to curry favor with American financial and political big boys who could be of immense return value. Help America get mad at some kind of Arab or another, transfer the blame to Saddam and Afghanistan, and voila! -- there's the stampede for having a war engineered for mega oil profits. Until you find out that Afghanistan is becoming stale and less profitable and your spies in the Kremlin let you know Putin is about to make a big move on Ukraine in coming months. Now you can direct your ambitions for armament lucre there, and abandon $85 billion in weaponry as conveniently left behind in Afghanistan. All that means is that with cost overruns and inflation, the military-industrial complex will take in $185 billion for the replacements. And meanwhile the US and Saudi Arabia will be more cozy than ever, together against Russia and Iran. At the same time, Germany and nearby expendables are being starved for energy, so now we see a new way to make sure Russia and Germany are kept down and kept at one another's throats for the time being. Follow the money. The little people are expendable, but money is not.
When the World Trade Center went down, another profit was derived from not having to do a billion dollars' worth of asbestos elimination work inside the Twin Towers. Of course the owners got their insurance money, so losing the place instead of retrofitting it made for a financial benefit. In the days leading up to 9/11, WTC security guards were told to stand down along with bomb-sniffing dogs. Who was in charge of World Trade Center security and its nullification? A company called Securacom. Who was in charge of Securacom? Marvin P. Bush, brother of George W. Bush. On 9/11 when all civilian flights were grounded and only military planes were allowed to fly, then organ transplant planes were allowed to fly, who were the only civilians allowed to fly out of the country? The brothers and sisters of Osama bin Laden. They got away without having to answer a single question or get any kind of lawyer since the skids were already greased and the bags were already packed. As long as you know the right people, and certain monies are passing through certain hands, the other guy's catastrophe is actually your profit opportunity. Not a problem when it is only the little people who suffer.
Combat training, ruthlessness and the element of surprise may have been more important than competence in flying. Storming the cockpit and taking the pilots hostage may have been enough.
Pilots may have completed a hundred drills for the worst scenario, but it's not the same as when it's for real.
"PTech is the one golden thread you pull on. All of this is unraveled because it goes into the corporations, it goes into these government entities, it goes into the terrorism financing entities."
......
"[Yassin] al-Qadi, who has been identified as one of Osama bin Laden’s ‘chief money launderers,’ owned a prominent U.S. technology firm and alleged CIA front known as Ptech."
--Indira Singh, interviewed by Bonnie Faulkner, on Guns and Butter in 2005.
https://youtu.be/SR5dXAO09QE