Pentagon 911 Conspiracy?

[ted_bloody_maul]

Perhaps, after setting up The Big Lie, everything else was anti-climax? Perhaps, they just didn't think it was important.

That's simply inconsistent with the facts. The US reported finding possible wmd sites several times although they always turned out to be false. It's a precarious leap of the imagination to suggest that they couldn't be bothered to fabricate documents showing wmd programmes particularly when they were bothered enough to spin stories about their imminent discovery (and particularly when considering the fact that they were apparently bothered enough to attack the pentagon despite the negligible difference it would make to their overall plan).

The fact is that the Bush administration believed there were WMD in Iraq(although not neccessarily based on the 'evidence' they presented). So did Bush's opponents in the America. And in the UN. And in those countries critical of America's rush to war. It was the intention of Saddam that enemies, particularly those in his neighbourhood, should think that he was armed to the teeth. The American gamble on WMD simply never came off. Whether advance knowledge of the lack of of WMD would have deterred an attack is debatable but there's absolutely no doubt that 'finding' them would have made a huge difference. It would certainly have had a more positive impact on them in the last 4 years than the pentagon attack had.

Some things are just bamboozling to some people and bamboozling has been the Bush Administration's business, since it's Inauguration.

That's the business of all administrations.

 

[Mike_Pratt33]

I was of course taking about faking evidence AFTER the invasion, and as Ted said that would have made a vast difference to the criticism they have received ever since.

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

I was of course taking about faking evidence AFTER the invasion, and as Ted said that would have made a vast difference to the criticism they have received ever since.

It's a good point.

For some time, I've been of the opinion that there are possibly two systems of Intelligence running in the US, these days. The above board, daylight, side, who genuinely work in the interests of the US and the dodgy, dark side, who work in the interests of the Military/Industrial Complex. This group would be much smaller than the real intelligence network, but very well connected, well financed and dangerous.

Perhaps, out in the open, out in the field, they haven't got quite the power, or influence they might have had, working in the grey areas, of counter terrorism, back, Stateside. Perhaps, the official intelligence service is on to them and works to undermine them, just as they work to undermine the work of the official intelligence network?

All very Alias, but it might explain some apparent contradictions in the various Conspiracy Theories.

Perhaps, the 'dark side', spent their load, expending their resources and energies on the whole 9/11 Spectacular? After that, claims and propaganda were considered all that was needed to catapult the US and its Allies from one Invasion, to the next. After which, any Truth, or Proof of the claims and propaganda would be of academic interest, only.

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

And, perhaps the US Administration doesn't take the emphasis on the importance of 'Proof' as seriously as the Brits?

http://www.counterpunch.com/stclair06122007.html

Marketing an Invasion
How to Sell a War

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR. Counterpunch. 12 June 2007


...

This essay is excerpted from Cockburn and St. Clair's new book on the death of the mainstream media: End Times.

The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as "weapons of mass destruction" and "rogue state" were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.

To understand the Iraq war you don't need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.

Consider the picaresque journey of Tony Blair's plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad student's website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister's bombastic speech to the House of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who looted whole passages from Blair's speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely through the tempest. Why?

Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present a legal case for war. They had no interest in making any of their allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology of fear.

Facts were never important to the Bush team. They were disposable nuggets that could be discarded at will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably with their polls and focus groups. The war was about weapons of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next. When neither allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fall back position became the mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war where the U.S.A. backed Iraq) proving that Saddam was an evil thug who deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush PR machine was: Move on. Don't explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind the real motives for war. Never look back. Accuse the questioners of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the cagey Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made mainly to make the invasion palatable, not to justify it.

...

The likes of Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, may know just how easy it is to lose little things like 'The Truth', or the need for 'Evidence', in the Media blitz, that they've helped to create.

 

[Hanslune]

OR 911 happened just as it has been laid out and the adminstration did a big ooops (intentionally or not) on wmd.

OR we have a dual intelligence system, one of which is evil but has not been detected by the good side, any other allied intelligence, enemy intelligence or any one else for that matter.

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

OR 911 happened just as it has been laid out and the adminstration did a big ooops (intentionally or not) on wmd.

...

That's one possibility. But, an awful lot of people find it quite unlikely, these days.

...

OR we have a dual intelligence system, one of which is evil but has not been detected by the good side, any other allied intelligence, enemy intelligence or any one else for that matter.

It's quite possible that "the good side" is quite aware of the "one which is evil", but that it is deeply embedded. Who knows what nastiness the end of Cold War coughed up?

Still, that's my working hypothesis. Like it, or lump it.

 

[Analis]

dr_wu: "We know that the flight took off and was in the air. If it didn't hit the Pentagon where is it and all the passengers? Are we to believe the conspirators dumped it and the people somewhere never to be found again?
Seems very hard to believe to me."

I can't believe it either. But some things I can't believe are true...


The "if they faked 11-September, then they should have planted wmd in Iraq" argument relies on a logical fallacy. Like ted_bloody_maul, I suspect that, yes: they probably believed that SH had retained chemical weapons stocks. But too small to be a threat. Almost everybody in the world suspected it. But it was possibly not enough to justify a war, and they had no proof of their existence. They did falsify evidence. When they used unrelated photos, or forged this bogus story of Nigerien uranium, they knew what they did. If we are to use this argument, then we should conclude too, "if they faked evidence before the war, then they should have planted wmd in Iraq". Everybody can see that this is not the case.
Why? Probably, because the context was different. They had gotten rid of the UN inspectors. But they were still monitored. They were not at home, couldn't control the situation in the same way. Faking evidence at home is one thing, in a foreign country, an entirely different story. Maybe they tried, but renounced. And there was possibly much improvisation: maybe they had expected to find those small stocks they "knew" to exist. When they saw they couldn't, they were too short.

Hanslune: "but has not been detected by the good side, any other allied intelligence, enemy intelligence or any one else for that matter."
But all other intelligence services probably have their dark side too. We don't know what they do, what their connections to US services are.

 

[crunchy5]

For some time, I've been of the opinion that there are possibly two systems of Intelligence running in the US, these days. The above board, daylight, side, who genuinely work in the interests of the US and the dodgy, dark side, who work in the interests of the Military/Industrial Complex. This group would be much smaller than the real intelligence network, but very well connected, well financed and dangerous.

When thinking on this let's not forget how many Nazis were taken on board by US intel after WW11, not forgetting any possibility of unknown wartime penetration of Allied intel by Nazis.

 

[Anonymous]

Darned spooks are everywhere - double agents and all sorts.

Don't you just love conspiracy theories?

Some of it was real during war time apparently - so why not now?

 

[Jerry_B]

For some time, I've been of the opinion that there are possibly two systems of Intelligence running in the US, these days. The above board, daylight, side, who genuinely work in the interests of the US and the dodgy, dark side, who work in the interests of the Military/Industrial Complex. This group would be much smaller than the real intelligence network, but very well connected, well financed and dangerous.

But you might as well say that the greys/jews/illuminati/reptoids, etc. are in charge of things instead. If some sort of supposed 'secret' intelligence service has to be brought in in order for a conspiracy to add up, you're on shaky ground IMHO. This is because this 'secret' construct can be wheeled in to explain things and to make things add up nicely - and instead all that's going is that one fantasy is being used to explain another fantasy.

 

[ted_bloody_maul]

Darned spooks are everywhere - double agents and all sorts.

Don't you just love conspiracy theories?

Some of it was real during war time apparently - so why not now?

They were generally double agents for a foreign agency. They'd also be used to spy on things that that agency could not get access to. Whilst there's a theoretical possibilty that there could be conflicting interests at work within intelligence services beyond inter-agency rivalry this instance would require the knowledge of the ultimate executors. It would also have to be a particularly large splinter since the other agencies would most likely be onto them given the scale of the cover-up that would be neccessary. So far there seems to be no examples of whistle-blowing by those not involved in the conspiracy. Of course, the lack of evidence doesn't mean that there is no conspiracy but it does mean that it's entirely speculative and, ultimately, there are many equally plausible but unsubstantiated speculations that could be made.

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

For some time, I've been of the opinion that there are possibly two systems of Intelligence running in the US, these days. The above board, daylight, side, who genuinely work in the interests of the US and the dodgy, dark side, who work in the interests of the Military/Industrial Complex. This group would be much smaller than the real intelligence network, but very well connected, well financed and dangerous.

But you might as well say that the greys/jews/illuminati/reptoids, etc. are in charge of things instead. If some sort of supposed 'secret' intelligence service has to be brought in in order for a conspiracy to add up, you're on shaky ground IMHO. This is because this 'secret' construct can be wheeled in to explain things and to make things add up nicely - and instead all that's going is that one fantasy is being used to explain another fantasy.

Hardly.

I'm sure plenty of unimaginative types never considered that the US Intelligence Services, under Reagan, would have been involved in a funding the Contras in Nicaragua, through cocaine money and trading in arms with Iran, back in the 1980's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_Affair

If the rot started anywhere, it would probably have been somewhere between there and the undercover operations, funding and supporting the Mujihadeen, in Afghanistan via Pakistan, around that time.

 

[Jerry_B]

Hardly.

Why 'hardly'? Essentially you're trying to get the various 'apparent contradictions' in the conspiracy theories' overall story to fit by pretty much inventing some sort of shadowy organisation. The theories might have contradictions because they're based on falsehoods or errors, and so the idea of a shadowy agency is thus also based on a falsehood. Why add another layer of assumption and speculation to what's already a large mass of assumption and speculation? Why not instead just assume that the theories are wrong, and that's why they possess problematic contradictions?

You could replace your shadowy group with the greys/jews/reptoids, etc. and it would still amount to the same end point - that, in order to get any given conspiracy theory to work, it has to rely on highly speculative reasons or groups.

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

I will just have to disagree with you and your weird fantasies of grey Jewish reptoids, Jerry_B. Not to mention your massive generalizations.

 

[Jerry_B]

Then you've clearly misunderstood my point. I'm not talking about any of my fantasies. I'm a skeptic-debunker type, remember And what 'massive generalisations' am I guilty of making?

The idea that some sort of shadowy group is behind things such as 9/11 is really no different than similar ideas such as greys, jews, reptoids, etc.. That is, such things have to be brought in to 'explain' aspects of a theory, because flaws in that theory don't allow it to add up and the theoriser cannot simply discard their theory altogether. They believe too much in the theory. Therefore, to them, they have to make their theory work by introducing something else going on in the background. Actually proving that the background 'thing' is actually there is problematic - but then again, trying to prove it perhaps give the theory extra legs. and so the whole thing can run and run, never really 'proving' anything apart from it's own invented constructs, assumptions and theories.

 

[Anonymous]

Massive generalisation - all alternative ideas are conspiracy theories and are to be lumped in with aliens/jews/greys/ufos/reptilioids etc

 

[Analis]

This indigestible concoction, made of parts of the Philadelphia experiment, reverse engineering, CIA-aliens treaties, Alternative 3, M.I.B., Illuminati and Bilderbergers, AIDS and other illnesses designed in laboratories, Roswell, advanced weapons and weird experiments, shape shifting invaders... I suspect that this mythology was propagated in the 70s for other purposes. More probably a consequence of their powerlessness to master an incontrollable matter. But now, it could have evolved into something else. This mythos has taken on a live of its own, at the core of the "hyper reality". Some people could use it to hide all kinds of disturbing matters and wrongdoings. This identification seems to be ingrained inside the mind of many people. When I discuss the matter of political conspiracies, I am surprised to see that many immediately identify it with Roswell and co. Now, probably, it would be much more difficult to expose MK ULTRA, Gladio or radiation experiments. Investigators would be labelled conspiracy nuts.
Possibly, JACQUES Vallée sometimes fell victim of his kind of disnformation. But the warnings he issued more than 20 years ago shoud be taken very seriously.

 

[ted_bloody_maul]

Massive generalisation - all alternative ideas are conspiracy theories and are to be lumped in with aliens/jews/greys/ufos/reptilioids etc

It's not really a generalisation, though, and nor is the point being made as you've explained it, I think. The point is that they are simply comparable but alternative paradigms that fit the same narrative since they rely on an unknowable (or unprovable) element to sustain the theory. There may be differing levels of likelihood that one or other group could be involved but that doesn't indicate that they actually are. To believe that some sort of unseen group was involved would be entering the realm of faith or preconception rather than reason.

 

[Jerry_B]

Yes, that's exactly my point.

 

[Anonymous]

I agree if you are saying that what Pietro was saying bore similarities in narrative to conspiracy theories re aliens etc.

The point I was making was that saying an alternative explanation is a conspiracy theory and should be treated in the same way as a conspiracy theory re aliens etc would be a massive generalisation.

With regard to unseen folks doing things we do not know about, it is not that far fetched IMO.

One example is Wal-Mart. They have a building which stores data, not even the US government can enter apparently. Nobody knows what it is for. The people there are therefore unseen and so is what they do.

Another thread I know - but it backs up my point.

 

[ted_bloody_maul]

With regard to unseen folks doing things we do not know about, it is not that far fetched IMO.

True but nothing in the world could ever be understood if every argument ended up with the "ah but we don't know" clause. If we applied that logic to everyday life we'd be permanently confused and practically paralysed by uncertainty. Instead we rely on observable evidence and in lieu of that the most likely conclusions of logic will have to suffice. When we veer from that we tend to get things stunningly wrong and, quite possibly, would be said to be displaying signs of a mental problem.

One example is Wal-Mart. They have a building which stores data, not even the US government can enter apparently. Nobody knows what it is for. The people there are therefore unseen and so is what they do.

Another thread I know - but it backs up my point.

That would be a known unknown... :lol:

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

... And what 'massive generalisations' am I guilty of making?

...

This one will do for starters:

...

You could replace your shadowy group with the greys/jews/reptoids, etc. and it would still amount to the same end point - that, in order to get any given conspiracy theory to work, it has to rely on highly speculative reasons or groups.

Would that apply to real US Government conspiracies, which have been uncovered, like the Iran-Contra Affair?

I often wondered about Colonel Oliver North. Now there was a guy who looked like he was not of this World.

 

[Jerry_B]

Would that apply to real US Government conspiracies, which have been uncovered, like the Iran-Contra Affair?

I'm talking about conspiracy theories, not conspiracies of another (perhaps actual) kind. The theory that there's some sort of secret group behind 9/11 - an idea you've posited - is not borne out by any evidence AFAIK. Unlike what happened with the Iran-Contra stuff.

 

[Jerry_B]

The point I was making was that saying an alternative explanation is a conspiracy theory and should be treated in the same way as a conspiracy theory re aliens etc would be a massive generalisation.

But I wasn't saying that, so don't worry

 

[crunchy5]

Would that apply to real US Government conspiracies, which have been uncovered, like the Iran-Contra Affair?

I'm talking about conspiracy theories, not conspiracies of another (perhaps actual) kind. The theory that there's some sort of secret group behind 9/11 - an idea you've posited - is not borne out by any evidence AFAIK. Unlike what happened with the Iran-Contra stuff.

The whole of the Iran Contra affair was a "conspiracy theory", it was being covered up none of the guys involved talked there were just folk looking in making logical guesses and connections putting two and two together and coming up with the correct conclusions who pushed and pushed getting mocked and pressured all the time until it was proven to be true. We caught them at it in the Suez affair , Watergate and the Iran Contra affair, I'm too much of a realist to think we got them every time they tried to do something.

 

[Jerry_B]

We caught them at it in the Suez affair , Watergate and the Iran Contra affair, I'm too much of a realist to think we got them every time they tried to do something.

So much of a realist that you believe that the huge plot that is 9/11 is 100% leakproof with no leads into it?

 

[ted_bloody_maul]

The whole of the Iran Contra affair was a "conspiracy theory", it was being covered up none of the guys involved talked there were just folk looking in making logical guesses and connections putting two and two together and coming up with the correct conclusions who pushed and pushed getting mocked and pressured all the time until it was proven to be true. We caught them at it in the Suez affair , Watergate and the Iran Contra affair, I'm too much of a realist to think we got them every time they tried to do something.

But surely the logical conclusion of that is to believe that everything they do is a conspiracy regardless of whether there is any supporting evidence?

 

[crunchy5]

We caught them at it in the Suez affair , Watergate and the Iran Contra affair, I'm too much of a realist to think we got them every time they tried to do something.

So much of a realist that you believe that the huge plot that is 9/11 is 100% leakproof with no leads into it?

I very much doubt that I've ever said anything of the sort jerry, if it was as you suggest how would all the suspicions have come about, there are leads every where :lol: :lol:

 

[crunchy5]

The whole of the Iran Contra affair was a "conspiracy theory", it was being covered up none of the guys involved talked there were just folk looking in making logical guesses and connections putting two and two together and coming up with the correct conclusions who pushed and pushed getting mocked and pressured all the time until it was proven to be true. We caught them at it in the Suez affair , Watergate and the Iran Contra affair, I'm too much of a realist to think we got them every time they tried to do something.

But surely the logical conclusion of that is to believe that everything they do is a conspiracy regardless of whether there is any supporting evidence?

That's not what my philosophy lecturer would have called logic ted, is there anything to connect Jimmy Carter to 9 11, no, is there anything suspicious linking cheney, wuh or any of the neocon cabal to to the events, yes loads of evidence, piles of it, just no proof. yet.

 

[ted_bloody_maul]

The whole of the Iran Contra affair was a "conspiracy theory", it was being covered up none of the guys involved talked there were just folk looking in making logical guesses and connections putting two and two together and coming up with the correct conclusions who pushed and pushed getting mocked and pressured all the time until it was proven to be true. We caught them at it in the Suez affair , Watergate and the Iran Contra affair, I'm too much of a realist to think we got them every time they tried to do something.

But surely the logical conclusion of that is to believe that everything they do is a conspiracy regardless of whether there is any supporting evidence?

That's not what my philosophy lecturer would have called logic ted, is there anything to connect Jimmy Carter to 9 11, no, is there anything suspicious linking cheney, wuh or any of the neocon cabal to to the events, yes loads of evidence, piles of it, just no proof. yet.

There might be evidence but the reason that it hasn't become proof yet is because it generally doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. Inevitably the neo-con cabal is going to be linked to those events because they're the ones in charge and theoretically the only ones who could carry it out. In that respect it wouldn't matter who was in charge as people in those positions would get the blame (as Clinton did for Waco, Oklahoma etc). However, there's little in the way of any technical evidence that links them to the theories - it's mostly circumstantial.