Why were so many people believers in the conspiracy that 9/11 was an inside job

https://lemmy.world/post/11913342

Why were so many people believers in the conspiracy that 9/11 was an inside job - Lemmy.World

When Al-Qaeda themselves claimed responsibility, even with overwhelming evidence aside? Why were so many people still reluctant, I was researching about this stuff and was shocked to see people who I respect a lot believe in this

Easiers rather that to understand they were a war betwin two agency and besides an incompetent government (bush son) who were just focus on irak even before 9/11

You can watch “looming tower”. Really a great show about it.

It’s easier to believe the people in charge are secretly in control of everything than to believe they’re barely in control of anything.

This.

Conspiracy theories are comforting because they are more pleasant to believe than the truth, which is that we’re all aboard a ship going full steam ahead with nobody at the rudder.

It also gives people a sense of deep satisfaction believing they know some dark hidden secret nobody else does... regardless of how absurd it is
Vanity. It's the Devil's favourite sin.
Also, at the time, in the west, Al Qaida were a largely unknown terrorist cell operating in far-away third-world countries. It seemed incredible that such a devastating attack could be carried out on US soil by a small group most people had never heard of.
And yet, this all powerful government couldn’t even fake finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to “validate” their invasion reasons.
Government incompetence is the main reason I didn’t go down the conspiracy rabbit hole. They’re too stupid to pull most shit off without tripping over their own dicks.
I mean prob because although it wasn’t done directly by the gov they had plenty of warning and did nothing.
What do you mean by they had plenty of warning? Do you consider the government, FBI, and CIA to be one entity?
Don’t quote me on this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if many other countries considered those to be in the same camp.

Normally the agencies coordinate.

Cheney changed that when Bush was elected, and had everything go thru him. It was his decision what another agency and even the president was told.

The pieces were all there, but Cheney was literally the only person who saw all the pieces before it happened.

And he never said anything.

Maybe he was incompetent, maybe he was evil enough to let it happen.

But lots of people call Dick Cheney evil, no one calls him incompetent

Go pull the nyt for the week before. There were warnings of terrorist attacks, but they were believed to be threatening US bases overseas, specifically on Okinawa.

It’s not “they knew and did nothing”. It only becomes clear in hindsight. It was a massive failure. Of intelligence and of imagination.

Bin Laden was US-educated and a buddy of the Bush family.
To be fair the Bush family also hates Americans

I’ve argued with multiple people who swear the war in Iraq was over 9/11.

People are just fucking stupid

People are just fucking stupid

There are so many things going on at once all the time that you can’t just blame people for misremembering even the bigger events, especially when they occurred so together long ago and had some overlap in the media.

I argued with fucks about that during THE LEAD UP TO THE WAR

during THE LEAD UP

You could’ve said that before, and that still doesn’t make anyone stupid.

But what is it with people on this platform getting off on calling others stupid for not meeting their arbitrary standards? So odd.

Arbitrary? Not knowing major events like this is not arbitrary. Screaming and yelling you are an America hater who doesn’t care about 9/11 because you oppose the war in Iraq isn’t arbitrary. Then or now.

This isn’t a ‘this platform’ thing. It’s reality.

Yes, it’s arbitrary to call people stupid because they forget. But of all the things they could be, why is stupid the go-to insult?

Screaming and yelling you are an America hater who doesn’t care about 9/11

What are you on about?

This isn’t a ‘this platform’ thing. It’s reality.

Lol Sure, dude, you and the bunch of people calling everyone else is stupid agree on that. Idk what they put in the water on these social media sites for some folks to pretend that they’re the only smart people in the room at all times.

I’m on about exactly what I’ve been talking about all this time. This isn’t a matter of ‘I think Iraq maybe did 9/11’.

I’m talking about heated argument from people who are so convinced about that that they literally scream and yell. I have had those exact words screamed in my face by a person you are convinced is intelligent for some weird reason.

As for the rest of the post…it’s ignorant and irrelevant bullshit. I’ve never claimed I’m the only smart person in the room. Only that if you believe that Iraq caused 9/11 and will argue this point till you are blue in the face you are a moron. Simple as that. Saying something INCREDIBLY STUPID can, very easily, prove you are stupid.

Sure, Jan. Go around calling everyone else stupid who doesn’t think like you want them to, that definitely sounds like something intelligent people do.

Nothing implied I call everyone who thinks like I don’t want them to stupid. I’m talking about a very specific situation. People who will start arguments over their belief that Saddam Hussein caused 9/11 and that is why Bush invaded Iraq.

You’re basically saying there’s no such thing as a stupid person, you do understand that right? I’m not out here declaring the vast majority of humanity stupid. I’m not insulting a lot of different people’s intelligence. I’m insulting the intelligence of one very tiny very vocal minority because they go out of their way to say something incredibly stupid and will do so with such anger.

But let’s come at this from another angle. How do you believe this to be in an intelligent thing to say? You’re defending this viewpoint so adamantly.

I didn’t actually believe this, but it was fun to entertain the idea.

Here’s why. At the time, there were a bunch of very odd coincidences. I’ll do my best to remember the best of them.

  • The CIA/NSA (one of the “secret” agencies) put out a budget report showing a large amount of money that was not trackable, in the billions.
  • Coincidentally, the section of the pentagon hit by the “plane” was reportedly where financial records were stored.
  • By “plane”, I mean object. If you watch the 1 video that got out (all other videos were confiscated) from the nearby gas station, the thing that hits the pentagon does not look like a plane but instead a missile.

Next!

  • reportedly, the owner of the twin towers took out a massive insurance policy against the buildings the day or week before 9/11 (I forget exact timing)
  • also, the building was covered in asbestos, the cost to remove was in the billions, and the cost to keep the building occupied always also increasing

Next!

  • building 7 (I think that’s the right one) collapsed under what appeared to be demolishing conditions
  • building 7 was never hit by a plane or anything else, it just dropped like it was purposefully demolished

Edit: forgot one!

  • the towers were obviously hit by planes, we have plenty of video evidence of this. The controversy is around how the towers actually fell. This is where the “jet fuel can’t melt steal beams” meme comes from.

There are more, but it’s been 20 years and my memory is hazy.

Overall, there were some oddities around the whole event that, when allowing yourself to think completely outside of reality, make sense as to why it was an inside job.

Finally, personally I believe the Saudis did it in cooperation with Bin Laden and their goal was to bankrupt America. They did a pretty good job, from their perspective.

I can't vouch for the veracity of most of your content but I wanted to add that building 7 was also announced to have collapsed before it actually did.

I can’t vouch for the veracity of most of your content but I wanted to add that building 7 was also announced to have collapsed before it actually did.

Yep. There was also the quotes from Rudi Guilani where he said something along the lines of “Pull Building 7”, where pull is demolitions parlance to set off the charges. This was like a day of audio snippet. Its also basically impossible to find the original footage that isn’t pure conspiracy drivel, but I remember it from the time when all of this was happening. There was so much going on in the wake of 9-11, with the country pretty much instantaneously jumping into war mode, being immediately handed a narrative around al-Qaeda with no investigation into the causes or veracity of the government claims around al-Qaeda.

The push back on questioning the narrative was surreal. Like, you would be drawn and quartered publicly for doing so. The ‘feeling’ at the time was that the investigation into what actually happened and how felt like a complete sham that the government didn’t really want to do because so many people weren’t accepting the party narrative.

Also, keep in mind the context. There was a strong anti-war sentiment in 2003 going into the invasion of Iraq. The “9-11 was an inside job crowd” found themselves running with the anti-war crowd as general anti-institutionalists. This was when Alex Jones was just finding his footing and definitely wasn’t quite fully right wing. He was more accurately (at the time, in historical context) anti-establishment. The modern right-wing movement hadn’t fully formed, although it found its roots in this historical period (the Tea party would also come out of this period).

So just broadly consider the different vectors operating on public perception at the time. We were basically instantly construction a “Going to War is the Solution” narrative within hours of 9-11 happening, and the narrative around that construction was found to be fully formed as soon as it emerged, almost as if the institutions of the US government and its surrounding media had been prepared for this exact moment. Push back against this was effectively an instantaneous scarlett letter and there basically was none in US mainstream media*. There was a strong push back against any kind of independent investigation into the events leading up to the event. We got reports from the CIA and FBI, but considering the context, like, if those are the parties in question, do you believe them? Then you had the Saudi Bush family connections, the fact that we were basically going to war with Afghanistan when we knew it was the Saudis that did 9-11, which was like a pretty big red flag. Then there were the reports that globally, many governments warned about this happening to US intelligence agencies, but it seemed like they just kind of let it happen. Which is really where the conspiracy was focused. These days it gets too wrapped up in ‘inside job’ etc, but the general scheme was more about 9-11 being allowed to happen as an excuse for a Bush invasion into the middle east. This wasn’t a conspiracy that was built in hindsight, the speculation was built in real time (before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq), and then go figure, Bush invades the middle east, and specifically, goes after Iraq. This basically fully validates the theory, and to put a cherry on top, the evidence on Iraq was all just… fraudulent. So if you limit the scope of the theory to 9-11 was ‘allowed’ to occur to justify a military industrial complex incursion into the middle east, its kind-of like “well yeah duh” because thats exactly what happened.

Wild fukin time and wild bit of history. Important to keep context in mind, and to have sources of information about the past which aren’t ‘edited’ to reflect newthink.

*Democracy Now did exist by this time (finding its establishment after the Seattle WTO protests). If you want to really understand what was going on at the time, this would be the media source I would recommend.

Do you write? I really enjoyed reading your comments, just flowed naturally talented

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.

I’m a scientist, so I do ‘write’ professionally, but its a very different kind of writing than I do here, and I would say that they are entirely seperate (excepting my discussion sections where I afford a bit more liberty to style, although I tend to be more focused on methods).

I attribute my writing style to years of participating in forums and threaded discussion boards, starting in the early 90s. I try to use quotes from who I’m replying to, hyper links, bold and italics for emphasis, but to use a conversational/ editorial style. When I was coming up on the internet, I truly believed that the internet allowed for the democratization of ideas, in that, on the internet you have no appeal to authority on your credentials or name or background. The only weight you can provide is rhetoric and whatever evidence you can scuff up, and because of that, the best ideas should find their way to the top. Boy was I wrong, but I still believe in the virtue of good ideas, and that belief is part of my motivation for being involved in places like (formerly) reddit or (currently) lemmy.

As a scientist, how did you feel at the time about the railroading of scientist Bruce Ivins for the Anthrax scare?

The push back on questioning the narrative was surreal.

The vast majority of the time, the pushback was low effort “asking questions” based on fundamental misunderstanding of the subject matter or entirely pulled our of their asses.

Bro say what you will about the baselessness of it, but 9-11 conspiracy theorists were anything but low effort. People made documentaries, traveled to track down steel, built media enterprises off the back of it.
Time consuming sure; But doubling down on their own fundamental misunderstandings and preconceived notions isn’t what I would classify as real effort.
And those people are all people like Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson who are totally shameless liars and manipulators, all his 911 truth stuff led to stuff like the sandy hook denials and maga nonsence.

Yes, terrible people all.

But not lazy people. Not ‘low effort’. Its important to get criticism right. These people went completely down a rabbit hole and committed to it fully. In doing so they were able to form a kind of platform that would buoy the communication and mental frameworks that have set up the current white nationalist and christian fascist movements. They invested enough effort to effectively and successfully restructure American politics. If not for the work they did in this time period, which might reflect banal in juxtaposition, the MAGA movement of 2016-current might not actually exist.

Yes. Terrible people and actions of huge consequence in hind sight. But not people just lazily asking questions.

The if you truly find your self in opposition to white nationalism, fascism, dominionism and zionism, you do both yourself and the rest of us a disservice if you fail to understand history and how these movements form and function, and what motivates these people to do what they do. To trivialize their efforts, its to underestimate them, and to set all of us in a position of weakness relative to a common opponent. These people are not for lack of effort, they do not lack for resources, and they are clever, if wrong in the conclusions they’ve made about the world. They are organized, motivated, funded, and fully committed to the vision. This final bit, their commitment, is the part that white liberals simply can-not comprehend. These people lack the cynicism that permeates white liberalism. They truly believe the things they do - whereas white liberals will only associate with political movements that are safe, low social impact, and demand little from themselves. White liberalism mistakes that every one else is as cynical as they are. See the comments by @phillaholic as an example of this political philosophy. Because of this cynicism, they constantly and completely underestimate the strength of their opponents. Examples of this political philosophy in action and its consequences are represented in modern political history throughout: Bush v Gore; The anti-war movement of 2003; The housing market collapse of 2007-8 and the refusal to hold capitol accountable in that time; Occupy Wallstreet; Obamas entire 8 years as president; Clinton campaign 2014-16; All of the investigations into the Trump administration 2016-2020; BLM 2016-2021; etc. We are all bearing the cost borne of the cynical heart of white liberalism.

You should never underestimate true believers.

Before the Bush election, Cheney and Rumsfeild belonged to a think tank called a New American Century that created the plan to invade Iraq in order to create a government friendly to the US.

One author even said that America would need a new Pearl Harbor to regain its military strength.

I mean, this shit writes itself. If history were a work of political fiction, it would be called out as tropish, too on the nose and goofy to sustain disbelief.
Hard to believe he was Super America Mayor Man, and threw it away for an overgrown child. And his tax rate.
Incorrect information in a chaotic situation? Would never happen!
Countless incorrect things were announced. Everyone was collectively panicking. That’s odd, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything considering the building was already visibly damaged.

The building had been on fire for hours at that point with no water pressure to run the sprinklers or allow firefighters to effectively combat it. It was decided to stop efforts to save the building as it was presumed the integrity of the structure was damaged beyond repair.

As for the reporters announcing it collapsing early, its doubtful that it was anything but one of many mistakes reporters made live on air hours into an exhausting day of chaos. Maybe that had been told the building was going to collapse at any minute or maybe they had been told efforts to stop collapse had ceased and an assumption was made by the crew on the ground it had already fell. As I recall it was the BBC that said it fell before it actually did, so the idea of a foreign news outlet being in on a false flag conspiracy is just too ridiculous to be believable over something such as an exhausted reporter misspeaking in the middle of an emotionally overwhelming day.

How can you not believe any of what you wrote but also say that you believe the Saudis did it? The Bush-Saudi connection was known for a decade before September 11th.

Bush Sr. literally invaded Iraq to protect Saudi oil interests. No one at the top actually believed Saddam was an immediate threat to U.S. interests.

The only planes that flew out of the U.S. after the attacks were Saudi nationals who were granted exception by the White House to flee the country.

Bush's Saudi Connections

The American Prospect
I’m not the person you’re responding to, but where I land on the question is basically I think there’s a very good chance that GWB knew about a credible threat of something like 9/11 happening and deliberately chose not to interfere. So more like an act by intentionally doing nothing.
Do I think Dubya sat around in dark rooms in 2001 with Bin Laden, planning every stage of 9/11? Absolutely not. I don’t know any serious Truther who does, either. But there’s no doubt in my mind that some members of the Bush admin and the Pentagon knew in advance that something big was going to happen. That, in my mind, is qualitive enough to be an inside job

I don’t know any serious Truther who does, either.

The word “serious” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There are a ton of truthers out there with some truly unhinged theories about 9/11, and I’d say that the unhinged truthers outnumber the reasonable ones by a fair bit.

It’s been pretty well publicized that the lack of collaboration between the three letter agencies allowed them to slip through the cracks. Foreign intelligence knew about it, but domestic wasn’t aware. The fact of the matter is, they aren’t just sitting around getting 1 of these reports every couple months that they have to investigate. They get Thousands of these constantly. There’s a declassified docuseries on Netflix, that despite being “copaganda” to a degree, all describe legitimate threats that could have turned into big things if they were left along. There’s no doubt what the individuals intended to do. I don’t think the Bush Administration left anyone do anything, they simply didn’t let a tragedy go to waste.

Because I knew someone would take the bait. The saudis did it is another conspiracy theory from the time.

The conspiracy theories around 9/11 are almost as numerous and as fun to play with as JFK assassination.

the towers were obviously hit by planes, we have plenty of video evidence of this. The controversy is around how the towers actually fell. This is where the “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” meme comes from.

Of course, the meme is a parody of anyone who thinks that’s a legitimate argument. You don’t need to liquify a material for it to lose its structural integrity.

No, people actually believed it from day 1.

Yes, people believed “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”, but the meme is a parody of people who believed it.

Sometimes parodies are just literal reflections.

Building 7 had one of the towers fucking fall on it, was seen bulging massively before collapsing, and it was pretty obvious what was going to happen, hence people getting confused and saying it had already collapsed.

A building fire started by jet fuel absolutely can melt steel beams, and the collapse of building 7 occurred exactly as you would expect from a building fire, which happened because the fire in the other buildings was blown across by the wind and explosions. None of the building collapse videos look like a demolition.

If the government wanted to execute an attack on Americans, why not just fund the terrorists and ignore warnings? Let the jihadists crash planes into buuldings. Setting hidden, controlled demolition charges and trying to make it look like a collapse is harder than finding some terrorists willing to die for their cause and teaching them to fly.

It is conceivable to me that members of the intelligence community, the military-industrial complex, and/or the government ignored warnings and allowed the attacks to happen for their own benefit. I would prefer to think it wasn’t true, but I must concede that it would explain many inconsistencies.

It is theoretically possible, but implausible to me, that those same people would coordinate the attacks and support the terrorists to ensure that the attacks would happen as a false flag operation. This is an extraordinary claim with almost no evidence.

It is not in any way possible that the government demolished any of the buildings attacked on purpose and then covered up all evidence of the demolition. There would need to be too many people involved, too many videos altered or destroyed, and too much evidence planted after the fact. It is demonstrably false.

As I said with the very first statement, I don’t believe any of this.

why not just fund the terrorists and ignore warnings?

This is exactly what many tinfoil hatters thought and probably still think.

I mean… In a way they were financed and armed by the US, just not recently…

and the collapse of building 7 occurred exactly as you would expect from a building fire

It wasnt the first skyscraper fire, but it was the first and still only skyscraper to collapse from a fire. So no i wouldnt say its expected at all.

FAQs - NIST WTC 7 Investigation

September 19, 2011 (updated 11/20/19) | Updated: September 10, 2021*

NIST

Even if you ask them

"The collapse of WTC 7 is the first known instance of a tall building brought down primarily by uncontrolled fires. The fires in WTC 7 were similar to those that have occurred in several tall buildings where the automatic sprinklers did not function or were not present."

There’s a first for everything. And after reading the report, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that a building under those conditions would be expected to fail.
like a first for govenment coverup of a building demolition disguised as a terror attack?
Could have been, but it wasn’t. It’s utterly absurd to think it was logistically possible to do so without anyone seeing or leaking anything. That plot wouldn’t make it out of 9th grade creative writing class.