Incontrovertible – the “truth” about 9/11
Philip Roddis
still from the documentary “Incontrovertible”
As part of our “9/11 fifteen years on” series, Roddis tells us why 9/11 “conspiracy theories” tend to be “pants”
Dylan Avery made four versions of Loose Change, setting out the ‘Truther’ case for 9/11 as an inside job to legitimate Bush-Cheney’s middle east capers. I saw the first cut twice, thought it tripe and still do. Why? False flag attacks are hardly unheard of. The Northwoods Proposal of 1962 sought Kennedy’s approval for a CIA strike on Florida or Guantanemo, to be blamed on Castro prior to bombing Havana. Kennedy turned it down flat and had its key advocate, Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Lyman Lemnitzer, kicked sideways; though that didn’t prevent his resurrection a year later as NATO supremo.
For obvious reasons a recurring feature of conspiracy theories is their invoking of earlier, proven conspiracies. The Daily Mail’s Zinoviev Letter is one example, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion another. But while it doesn’t do to underestimate human nastiness, there’s a clue in the ‘human’ part – it doesn’t do either to grace our indisputably cynical leaders with superhuman powers. Those proven conspiracies were simple and opportunistic, especially where the motive was to fake a casus belli. The Tonkin Incident, allowing LBJ to throw US forces into Vietnam, springs to mind, as do Saddam’s non existent WMDs.
While we’re linking casus belli with conspiracy, did FDR know in advance of Japan’s tactically brilliant – but strategically inept – attack on Pearl Harbour, and see in it a way of surmounting domestic resistance to America being “dragged into yet another European quarrel”? Available evidence, though greater than that for saying Bush did 9/11, is less conclusive than devotees of a Pearl Harbour conspiracy like to believe. Another recurring feature of conspiracy theories is the overegging of anomalous detail which, in our messy world, can always be found if we look hard enough while studiously disregarding far greater volumes of counter evidence. It goes hand in hand, since the epistemological naivity of even degree educated Brits and Americans is topped only by our species dufferdom at assessing probability, with the elevation of remote possibility to cast iron certainty.
(There’s a clue too in ‘remote possibility’. No one can ever prove that Bush-Cheney did not do 9/ll, that MI6 did not do for Diana or that planet earth is not ruled by those extra-terrestial lizards David Icke – who by the way writes with wit, intelligence and a disarming semblance of sanity – is so worried about. Just as good epistemologists leave room for the outlandish possibility that God not only exists but, with time on his hands after creating the universe, is aware of and aggrieved by your sexual fantasies and mine, so too should we leave a scintella of space for the even more outlandish possibility that Dubya, having for years cunningly passed himself off as a half-wit, did indeed gather round him a thousand or two fellow conspirators to do the dirty on 9/11. Proving a negative is tough.)
9/11 Truthism takes three broad forms. The strongest is that the strikes were textbook false flag, the mildest that official accounts leave unanswered questions. In between, though closer to the ‘strong’ form, is the argument that while Bush did not plan the attacks he had foreknowledge yet allowed them to proceed. The less stubborn of strong-form Truthers tend to shift under well informed challenge to the more easily defended view that Doubts Remain. Indeed, Dylan Avery seems to have made that shift himself. This from an interview based feature of April 2014:
[Avery’s] new film is grounded in fact-based stories, not theories, about people abused by the police. And though questions linger about 9/11, such as why, on Sept. 6, 2001, the daily average for put-options on United Airlines stock quadrupled, he no longer tortures himself with speculation.
In my truly angry times, in 2005 or 2006, if you asked if the Bush administration planned the attacks, I would have said, ‘Fuck yeah’.”
But now?
I don’t think Bush could plan a bowl of cereal.”
As a matter of fact the put-options issue, like WTC 7 freefall and ‘expert’ opinions that Boeing 707s could not have brought down WTC 1 and WTC 2, has been comprehensively addressed. Another recurring feature of conspiracy theories is the coexistence of shrill demands that Our Questions Be Answered with stone-deafness to empirical and logical answers convincing to all but the True Believer.
Again we can draw a theistic parallel. Here’s Richard Dawkins, his inalienable human right not to be tortured by stupid people serially breached by creationist and Formidably Stupid Person, Wendy Wright. Her debating style, undeniably effective, is a step up – but just the one – from finger in each ear and ‘la-la, la-la’ . “I don’t see any evidence for evolution”, she keeps saying, and even as the good professor supplies it in spades she’s still at it. “Where’s the evidence? I just don’t see it.” (Postmodernism has much to answer for. Its useful suspicion of positivism in social science, but frequently half-baked grasp of challenging findings in particle physics, led it to the self contradictory claim that there is no truth and science – history too – is ‘just another narrative’, enlarging the space not only for climate change and holocaust denialism but 9/11 Truthism and Voodoo Studies to boot.) And because she is stupid, Wright does a disservice to an analogy that tightens if we drop our dissonance-driven attachment to the idea that only stupid people hold stupid views. I know Truthers and theists who are highly intelligent and great company – just so long as you steer clear of the elephant in the room.
Indeed, a hallmark of the real adept – as with the clinically paranoid – is the ability to go one better than mere imperviousness to counter-evidence. A 24-carat Truther, in for the long haul, will with consummate ease accommodate such evidence within an expanded version of the theory. One set of 9/ll Truthers concedes that Loose Change is shot through and through with factual and logical howlers, only to argue that that just shows Avery to be himself party to the conspiracy, deliberately making a crap film to discredit their case. Scary, huh? With Dylan Avery and George W. Bush in cahoots we’re looking at super-villainy of fiendish intricacy.
But for all of that, it’s not my aim here to dissect and rebuff 9/11 conspiracy theories. That job’s been done, thoroughly and to my mind decisively, by those better placed than me. (For the unconvinced, this site is as good a start as any.) Nor am I much concerned with psychological traits allegedly predisposing some of us to buy into conspiracy theories. I do, however, have some interest in their epistemological aspects, which tend to include:
- Evidential cherry-picking and egregious ‘quote mining’, hallmarks of evidence seized on or rejected according to how well it supports a priori conclusions.
- Disproportionate emphasis on anomaly. One left critic, to whom I’ll return, of 9/11 Truthism likens this to a death penalty defence team seizing on the anomolies even the best prepared and damning of prosecution cases must – such is life – contain, in order to sow the all important ‘reasonable doubt’. Such narrow tactics can backfire though, blinding the team to the overall strength of the case against its imperilled client.
- Disproportionate attention to maverick voices and ‘outlier’ findings. This minds me of the way books for the lucrative miracle cure market emblazon their covers with references to The Study THEY Don’t Want YOU to Know About! while staying silent – ignorance or mendacity; it’s all the same to me – on the fact their killer study is at odds with every other finding in the field, and lacks peer review status.
- Citing experts in disciplines only superficially connected. Loose Change is full of this: ‘mining experts’ – disquietingly affiliated to far right holocaust deniers – who not only pronounce on matters, like engineering and munitions, outside their fields but have a nasty habit of cross referencing one another in a cosy little circle.
- Faulty logic, like presenting inductive possibility (inference) as deductive fact.
- Failures re Occam’s Razor and the parsimony principle. One consequence of theory-expansion of the kind that draws Dylan Avery into the 9/11 conspiracy is a burgeoning complexity, jerry-built and inelegant, in explanatory power.
I often said at Sheffield Hallam (“Zero Hours”) University that I could hang a semester course on critical thinking around Loose Change. Since it displays every vice known to man and woman of truly bad science, my students would emerge as epistemological titans. But the philosophy of knowledge is not my focus either. So what is? My point – nearly there! – is that 9/11 Truthism is not only seriously crackers but reactionary too. For a cogent and wickedly entertaining setting out of the case for saying so, do read the late Alexander Cockburn’s CounterPunch essay. Meanwhile, here’s the executive summary of his three core arguments.
First, for materialists worthy of the name, 9/11 Truthers sail too close to metaphysics in their attribution of devilish powers to a bunch of greedily sociopathic but otherwise unremarkable people. As Cockburn puts it:
…These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political economy from Marx. Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a diffuse, peripatic conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate ruling class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, or the falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale (the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos) or supposedly “rogue” agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The 9/11 “conspiracy”, or “inside job”, is the Summa of all this foolishness…
There’s more than an epistemological spat over idealism and materialism at stake here. Nor is this a demand, worthy though that would be, for critics of neoliberalism to get up to speed on Marx. At issue is the high correlation, intuitive and empirical, between such perverse but real deification of the ruling class on the one hand; tacit acceptance on the other that Nothing Can Be Done. Stands to reason dunnit? These guys are too clever for us. Resistance is futile …
Second, 9/11 Truthism, and conspiracy theories at large, show a disturbing tendency towards antisemitism. With 9/11 the latent racism goes further, a not so subtle implication of Truthism being that Arabs in caves could never pull off such a thing. (But white Christian fundamentalists could do something immeasurably harder, especially with The Jews onboard.)
Third, and most importantly, such deranged accusations distract from very real conspiracies perpetrated on a daily basis. Cockburn again:
“…Did the Towers fall because they were badly built [due to] corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port Authority and because they were struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel? No, shout the conspiracists, they “pancaked” because Cheney’s agents – scores of them – methodically planted demolition charges in the preceding days, inserting explosives in the relevant floors of three vast buildings (moving day after day among the unsuspecting office workers) then on 9/11 activating the detonators. It was a conspiracy of thousands, all of whom – party to mass murder – have held their tongues ever since …
… What [an investigation cited by Cockburn] brilliantly showed are the actual corrupt conspiracies on Giuliani’s watch: the favoritism to Motorola which saddled the firemen with radios that didn’t work; the ability of the Port Authority to skimp on fire protection, the mayor’s catastrophic failure in the years before 2001 to organize an effective unified emergency command that would have meant cops and firemen could have communicated; that many firemen wouldn’t have unnecessarily entered the Towers; that people in the Towers wouldn’t have been told by 911 emergency operators to stay in place; and that firemen could have heard the helicopter warnings and the final Mayday messages that prompted most of the NYPD men to flee the Towers.
That’s the real … world, in which Giuliani and others have never been held accountable. The conspiracists disdained the real world because they wanted to promote Bush, Cheney and the Neo-Cons to an elevated status as the Arch Demons of American history, instead of being just one more team running the American empire, a team of more than usual stupidity and incompetence …
… What Bush and Cheney never demonstrated was the slightest degree of competence to pull anything like this off. They couldn’t even manufacture weapons of mass destruction after US troops had invaded Iraq, and when any box labeled “WMD” would have been happily photographed by the embedded U.S. press as conclusive testimony. Arch-demon Cheney and his retinue of neo-cons couldn’t even contrive a provocation sufficient to justify his aim of waging war on Iran or giving Israel the green light to do so.”
Elsewhere Cockburn speaks of other conspiracies, such as those that see prime American real estate – inexcusably inhabited by poor people – being emptied, without resort to such crudities as armed police and bulldozers, to make room for more lucrative development. To these I’d add bigger conspiracies which, like all the really juicy ones, depend for optimal effect on millions of useful idiots. One such – I’ll dissect its mechanics another time – leaves the majority of Anglo-Saxons (9/11 Truthers not excepted) holding a truly staggering net view, i.e. sardonic carps and nudge-wink fantasies notwithstanding, of the USA as a force for good in this troubled world of ours.
But see how far I’ve digressed! This is a film review. Not of Loose Change but of the recent and more sophisticated, cinematically if not epistomologically, Incontrovertible.
Ready?
It’s pants.
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“”… What Bush and Cheney Never demonstrated was the slightest degree of Competence to pull anything like this off. They couldn’t even manufacture weapons of mass destruction after US troops had invaded Iraq, and when any Box labeled “WMD” would have been happily photographed by the embedded U.S. press as conclusive testimony. Arch-demon Cheney and his retinue of neo-cons couldn’t even contrive a provocation sufficient to justify his aim of waging war on Iran or giving Israel the green light to do so.”…”””
So the ostensible reason for the unbelievably complex Inside job/False flag (a cast of Thousands) was to justify an invasion of Iraq… yet no one could plant even a small “WMD,” Nuke, etc, in Iraq with Months of just Military/Govt contractors around!
9/11 Trufers are all psychopaths or 70 IQers. Most obviously the former.
How Many people, At a Minimum, would be necessary to carry out all the activities you insinuate?
Forget any single detail.
Because if you believe in, ie, “Building 7” you have to believe the whole thing.
All the Crash sites, planes, etc.
How many Arabs/Fake cooperative flight-school Arabs, Military, Demolition, Air Traffic, Airline, Intelligence, FBI and Simultaneous Crash scene creaters, News/Videographers, Fake Witnesses, Actors to fake cell phone calls to family members, etc, etc, Would be Necessary to carry out such an act as you all infer or outright say happened?
And no one said “No” to killing thousands/Tens of thousands of fellow Americans, and came forward? Not one?
No one after the fact either with a guilty conscience? No one told their wives? No death bed confessions?
This should be good!
thx
It was good, wasn’t it, Abu – as a well-organised scam, that is. Morally reprehensible, but entirely doable. It would require maybe fifty or so operators fairly fully in the know, plus a penumbra of others who were compartmentalised away from each other, and only told as much as they needed to know – often a cover story rather than the real stuff; innocent assistants who didn’t realise until afterwards into what they’d been drawn; and some of them not even then. In other words, a smaller version of the Manhattan Project, or any one of a number of secret operations which modern state machines – very much including the US – conduct all the time. Nothing impossible about it at all, as recent history demonstrates again and again. It always mystifies my when some innocent naif trots out the ‘someone would have talked’ canard. Don’t you know any history… Read more »
No. A Cast of THOUSANDS would be necessary, not “50”. How many to simultaneously ‘create’ the Pennsylvania and DC crash sites alone? First Responders/Firemen etc, ‘Plant’ Aircraft parts in the Pentagon and all it’s rings? How many overlapping Air Traffic Controllers from overlapping zones would have to Lying about the Planes. And they have tapes of those trackings. Since the Pentagon was ‘hit by a missile’, because the’hole was too small.’.. The plane would have had to have been diverted (or never took off) and landed elsewhere, and all it’s passengers Executed. No problem? And all the [impossibly intimate] Cell phone conversations with family members of those Two flights would have to have been faked by unbelievably good actors. And there were scores/hundreds of witnesses to the Pentagon Plane flying low over the highway towards and/or into the Pentagon. “NO arabs”? LOL We have 19 Arabs traced for a year,… Read more »
See my previous post. You’re just waffling theoretically from a stance of inadequate knowledge of the actual detailed facts now established, Abu. Who said ‘no Arabs’. Don’t you get the concept of patsies/decoys, like the person(s) who impersonated LHO when the Kennedy killing was being set up? The point was that there’s no certainty that any Arabs, let alone the ones who were fingered (some of whom later turned up alive), were actually on the planes at all. And who was doing the Atta impersonation…? Serious disjunct between the picture of him painted by those who knew him, and the rather obvious attention-drawing behaviour of the decoy in Florida. You actually sound rather like some hasbarollocksers I’ve run across from time to time, Abu. You know: do a bit of waffly water muddying, to disrupt the discussions of bona-fide sceptics of the ludicrous official cospithirry, then bow out again when… Read more »
Excellent reply, well put.
Still Nothing remotely like an answer.
Obviously your “50” was ridiculous/deluded.
Again, I’d like a real minimal number on How many – minimally- it would take to make of the Crash Venues, tapes, phone calls, videos, etc.
Once you give your self an honest estimate, (LOL akhmed), you’re have to realize/admit that it’s impossible.
Bye clown
Hmmm… when stuck for an adequate response, go to ad hominems, then bow out. Definitely sounds like a hasbarollockser, doesn’t it…?
As I said: see my previous posts. That’s it; I’m wasting no more time on ‘Abu’.
How many, at a minimum?
you Cannot answer, because its well into the Thousands.
Nor can any other ConspiracYst.
Gameover
BTW, Mr Brilliant…
You don’t want to be posting what you do with an easily Googled handle or real Name, especially if you work for a mainstream large co.
This shows your [Lack] of IQ.
To be fair to Mr Roddis, most of the conspiracy theories are ‘pants’; but this smoke and mirrors piece does little to broaden the debate. Having read this, I would like to add that there are now four kinds of “Truthers” – number four – those who contain themselves to the facts. This article randomly and discursively addresses what might have occured – but fails to address the central issue – that three buildings hit by two planes suffered catastrophic failure resulting in global collapse. STEEL FRAMED BUILDINGS DO NOT COLLAPSE DUE TO FIRE (http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/compare/fires.html). That this has never happened before or since is reason enough for full and transparent investigation. This is all that “serious” truthers – such as AE911Truth – are asking; the who, when and why is and will remain conjecture until such a point. “As a matter of fact the put-options issue, like WTC 7 freefall… Read more »
While his work is ongoing, Professor Hulsey testifies before a panel of attorneys here, and I like how he maintains his scientific purity when answering leading questions :
https://www.facebook.com/ae911truth/videos/10153817499936269/
The analysis on WTC7 freefall has been thorough and comprehensive. The fact of freefall, even if only observable for part of the collapse is absolute proof of demolition whether you like it or not.
You have to be wilfully untruthful not to admit this.
Anyone with an ounce of common sense can simply watch film of the collapse … no visible fires on front of the building and it collapses just like every other demolition you have ever seen.
Only trolls and liars try to deny what is proven and obvious.
Hello, I’m copying, pasting, reposting this comment – hope the Admin doesn’t mind. I only discovered Offguardian about three months ago, and I have to say I think it’s amazing. But personally, I hope Offguardian veers away from the majority of 9/11 conspiracy theories, as I feel Offguardian is far too good to focus on them. I’m a little surprised and disappointed by the all the vitriol directed at Phillip Roddis. And I’m also a little surprised and disappointed by the willingness of so many offguardianistas to attach any credence to the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Do governments conspire? – of course they do, (in fact there is probably one conspiring somewhere behind closed doors as we I write). Are governments capable of killing 3000 of their own citizens? – no question about it. Is the official version of 9/11 100pc honest? Probably not 100 per cent. Something seismic like this… Read more »
Vapid and familiar ones (to anyone who has spotted you on Labour List), busy little Hasbara troll that you are.
And this silly accusation – “busy little Hasbara troll that you are” – is a case in point, a fine example of why I hope Offguardian veers away from the majority of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Cos this is the nonsense that will contaminate the comments section of such an otherwise fantastic news source.
That’s what Hasbara artists do; draw attention to, condemn, enforce the mainstream limits of debate in favour of the establishment rules that protect establishment criminal actions, including the slaughter of masses of innocent fellow citizens.
An ignoble (even despicable) role, in my opinion, but I don’t expect a committed Hasbara operative like yourself to agree.
Address in detail the physics of the free fall collapses. Explain to us all how this is possible without the use of explosives or clear off with your sanctimonious attacks that attempt to control free and honest expression of opinion on these most viscerally important of matters..
Amen to that, physicsandmathsrevision.
Andrew, this is one thing I can agree with you on. Name-calling is ugly and juvenile and doesn’t do the “let’s stick to the facts” case any favors. Let’s stick to the facts. (And by the way yours are weak, Andrew. You are using fact-free gut feelings about why building might or might not fall, and you are calling that “logic”. It isn’t.)
I agree. There is no reason for the alleged conspirators to blow up the towers in order to be able to invade Afghanistan etc.
Just the planes flying into the towers would be enough.
I’ll do you one better: I don’t think the US government needed to do a false flag attack of any kind at all to justify a couple of lousy wars. Justifying wars is easy enough. However, that’s a shoddy approach to detective work. That’s like saying “Colonel Mustard couldn’t possibly have done it, because he didn’t need the money!” If true, you’ve successfully eliminated one motive. You’ve done nothing about the evidence or the crime. You’re kicked out of detective school.
So what might be a more convincing motive? This is a side issue, the evidence being the primary issue, but just for fun, you could read the range of plans in the PNAC documentation for starters. It’s fairly ambitious.
But that would have left two obsolete asbestos-riddled eyesores costing billions to safely dismantle.
Can you share your workings on how Newton’s 3rd law of motion didn’t apply that day? Cheers.
Well said.
Hey Andrew, I must say that I feel completely flattened by all of the Chomskyan logic you have just deployed. So 9/11 is blow back. It really is an attack upon the homeland, not matter how justified or not. People have it in for us. Just look what they have done, regardless of the fact that misguided U.S. policy might have been and continues to be the instigation. Well what do we do now? We are under attack. Are we just going to take it and pay the price for what the neocons have got us into, or are we going to defend ourselves and put an end to these terror organizations? Do we not have a right to defend ourselves, regardless of the reasons for the attacks against us? Indeed. And thus many reason and many offer themselves up to take the fight to the Middle East, eh. But… Read more »
Although he and Ed Hermann did some excellent work back in the 60s and 70s, the sad fact is that Noam Chomsky has long since turned into a zionist gatekeeper. He wants us to believe that the US controls Israel, rather than the other way around; that’s why he staunchly refuses to investigate 9/11, because Mossad is the leading suspect: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/9-11/Israel_did_it
I agree entirely that they did (and still do) invaluable work, and to be honest, I have no idea why Chomsky decided not to engage 9/11. Had he, his position on the issue would quite obviously be the opposite of what it is, and because of his deserved reputation and fame, the general attitude toward the issue in academe, which he himself mirrors and encourages, would be quite different than what it is. Maybe he just got old and tired. But in that case, why not just do what Parenti did: admit to already being taken up with far too many issues and simply refusing to make any pronouncements on an issue of which he knows himself to be uninformed. As to whether it is Israel that controls the U.S. or whether it’s the other way around, to my mind, the American oligarchy is a transnational oligarchy without any special… Read more »
It’s been a long while now for Chomsky on these “black ops” kinds of issues. He’s the same about the JFK assassination. He uses the nonsensical “they could never get away with it” argument and adds that it doesn’t matter anyway. The man is great on his kind of issues and absolutely worthless on Gladio-style operations.
Yes, I entirely agree. His focus is overly narrow. It’s all structure and conditioning. Except that in reality, we aren’t just the marionettes of our circumstances . We scheme and plot, deceive and murder, and manipulate — quite consciously. And depending upon the means at hand, the consequences of our actions can end up destroying the lives of millions. To be able to resist the machinations of the ruling classes, the proles need to know what they are up to, how they are being played . . . Chomsky could do better.
Now Obama is rather upset that Israel is planning more settler outposts in the West Bank, after giving Israel over $30 billion in aid this year. You’d think by now there would be lots of thought going into certain conditions attached to a gift of this magnitude, something like the Iran deal, no?
Welcome to Offguardian Andrew. Your comments seen to indicate that you are quite naive about 9/11. There’s lots of scientific evidence available on line, by very qualified people, as opposed to the rubbish comprising the NIST report(written by an “insider’ like Zellikow.) I think most comenters here are surprised by Phillip Roddis’ vague rambling summary, and aren’t so much vitriolic, but dissapointed at how naive he is too.
Catch up with the realities about 11/9 as soon as you can, Andrew. You have quite a way to go. Then your ‘feeling’ about the matter may be a bit better informed, and more in line with reality. A good place to start – as others here have suggested – is at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (the clue is in the name!), of which, for full disclosure purposes I should mention that I’m a member. Main page here: http://www.ae911truth.org/ Summary of the accumulated evidence so far here: http://www.ae911truth.org/evidence.html Be warned, though: By now the body of HARD, CONCLUSIVE evidence is so copious that it takes anyone who’s really serious – unlike Herr Roddis – about getting to the bottom of what really happened, a good deal of time, study and thoughtful digestion, before you can say that you’re up to speed with the realworld story behind the ludicrous,… Read more »
Mr Roddis, thanks for this piece and for your willingness to engage in the ensuing discussion. I would just say that your argument suffers from the same flaws of all those that seem to grow from the same root, from Hofstadter onwards, which is that they avoid evidence completely in favor of assumptions and generalizations. Not unreasonable generalizations, mind you, but I’ll trade any amount of “they could never get away with it” for one ounce of solid physics. So my first bit of unsolicited advice would be that we must start with the physical facts before we have any business jumping into probabilities, motivations, and assumptions about how implausible the arrangements must have been. If, for example, the science points strongly to controlled demolition, then it’s a bit silly to sit around saying “no, because nobody could conceivably have planted the explosives.” Similarly, if the evidence suggests that humans… Read more »
Those who say there was no conspiracy behind 9/11 are ignoring the fact there had to be. The question is not whether there was a conspiracy but who were the conspirators. To say that no group conspired to bring down the Twin Towers defies all reason, therefore to say it was the result of a conspiracy is merely stating a fact, not a theory. Of the two main conspiracy theories, one has it that al Qaeda conspired to bring them down, the other that something like a deep state operating within the US government brought them down. What is obvious is that Western intelligence agencies, aided by a willing corporate media’, appear to have a vested interest in labelling one side of the argument a ‘conspiracy theory’. Yet, without producing incontrovertible evidence to show otherwise, the official theory amounts to little more than a ‘conspiracy theory’. As we all know… Read more »
To me, all I have to do is watch the collapse of WTC7, as detailed in the David Chandler video, where measurements show the building in free fall for ~2.5 seconds. Further, the collapse was uniform across the whole of the buildings top floor. This MUST have involved simultaneous removal of the lower floor structure. Any theory that cannot explain these observations must be false
OffG, did you have to publish such a turgid and silly piece? Or are they all like this? Really, who cares what this nobody thinks. As an architect studying in the late 1970s/early 1980s, we all had to study and answer exam questions about the Minoru Yamasaki Pruitt-Igoe 1970s controlled demolition….as did engineers of the same period. At the same time, in a separate context [high rise construction], we all studied the structure of Minoru Yamasaki’s NY Twin Towers….These were both paradigm of their type, thus on the curriculum everywhere. Incidentally, also from the high rise courses: ALL high rises are constructed to withstand the impact of plane accidents as a matter of course, and in fact New York high rises – including the 1930s Empire State building – have withstood several plane accidents. On the morning of Sept.12 /2001 – i.e. the day after – in Belgium, I was… Read more »
Two planes cannot knock down three buildings. Gate keepers and coincidence theory peddlers like this guy can’t make an argument. They always just say that the people who believe their lying are eyes have already been debunked. That’s just not true.
I don’t believe George Bush did it and I doubt that the US was involved at all, although it would not surprise me if Cheney didn’t have advanced knowledge. The evidence strongly suggests that the Mossad did the job and this tired old meme of Dylan Avery and Bush is a strawman.
This guy hasn’t done any independent investigation.
Dear Off-Guardian commentators. The scale and unanimity of your displeasure is salutory, and as I take Off-G seriously, so do I take its readers’ views seriously. I’m unable alas to make a detailed response for several weeks and can’t begin to revisit the 9/11 issues till late October. But revisit them I will, and in these ways. One, I’ll engage in greater depth with the evidence for and against. Where such evidence draws on detailed disciplinary knowledge beyond my ken, I’ll try to get to the nub of it, and ask to what degree its champions are representative of their discipline as a whole. Two, if I find the evidential case for a 9/11 conspiracy as strong as many here say it is I’ll do the right thing and say so, in public and with all due humility. While I routinely adopt a style some find cavalier, and am no… Read more »
Give a better explanation of the third tower (WTT7) collapsing that day and your perspective will carry more weight. You have offered no explanation whatsoever for that and that question is certainly central as to why many people doubt the official 9/11 explanation (including me!).
Even the owner of Tower 7 Larry Silverstein, is on record as saying he gave the order to “PULL” the building. “PULL”(in this context anyway) is a term commonly used by explosive experts during Controlled Demolition.
If HE says it was a ‘Controlled Demolition’ it means that the sky scraper already had the explosive devices in place, because it takes weeks to set up a controlled demolition. There were quite clearly explosions in towers 1 and 2, they can be seen exploding outwards as those towers came down, and Fire Dept rescuers claim they heard the explosions as the towers fell.
The Official explanation of 9/11(The NIST Report) is a total pile of crap. Just ask the Architects and Engineers of America. If they don’t know what happened, nobody does.
You haven’t even begun to write your next article, and already you are setting yourself up to transgress the principle of epistemological parsimony. You want to wrestle with evidence that is ‘for’ and then evidence that is ‘against;’ and you want to deal with questions pertaining to ‘motives’ and the adequacy of the means that were deployed to the criminal ends that were presumably sought after, and that you characterize as questions of ‘logic.’ Already your line of attack is needlessly complicated and, anyway, as pertains to the question of ‘logic,’ they are beyond your ken, or anyone else’s for that matter. What you don’t want to do is to twist yourself into a tangle of groundless speculations. You want to stay in the realm of hard but simple facts, facts that even a schoolboy or schoolgirl can grasp. Here is something from NIST that you can use, and you… Read more »
The primary weakness of this article is that he doesn’t address even once the official explanation for the free falling collapse of the third tower to collapse that day, WTT7. How is it possible that a few office fires on the third floor would have caused this to happen (and why were there fires there anyway?). Plus, why was the fact that the building was going to collapse announced by the media prior to its occurrence. How could this have been predicted when that building was not even struck by an airplane and was some distance away from the other two towers? Certainly, huge skyscrapers doing free fall collapses, unless done by controlled explosions, are unprecedented aside from this one time. This is the biggest flaw in the official narrative and the writer completely ignores it..
A gaping hole in his argument, in my view!
Controlled opposition.
Control the opposition.
S’ audis in Audi s
George y bush ee
Bin lad an
In a cave.
Brother nut in to c here
All u h a
AQ
Barrr
Given that the 2 big towers collapsing were more than enough reason for Bush to declare war, seize dictatorial power etc, why bother blowing up the less important WTC7?
Criminals have to destroy evidence after committing a crime. Steel immediately shipped to China for melting down. WTC7 destroyed. The operation had to be run from somewhere. The explosions sequentially triggered, the planes (or whatever they were) guided into their targets. Mayor Guilliani’s fortified Management Centre on the 23rd floor of WTC7 is prime suspect for control centre of the operation … thus it HAD TO GO. …apart from the fact that massive numbers of CIA and FBI files on other floors of the same building were destroyed, as was the Accountance Department in the Pentagon which happened to be where the plane/missile hit … … all this just one day after Rumsfeld announced that £2.3 TRILLION DOLLARS OF PENTAGON MONEY had “gone missing”. 9/11 was a crime on many different levels. The unspeakable truth is that we are governed by degenerates of indescribable criminality. As Hitler said, “Lies in… Read more »
Because it was full of highly-incriminating documentary evidence of previous big crimes committed by members of the US deep-state ruling ‘elite’ – all of which evidence got conveniently destroyed.
NYC Mayor Giuliani’s hardened Emergency Control Centre, in 7, was also – most probably – the place from which the actual, real perpetrators of the cold-blooded murder of all those New Yorkers in the Towers initiated their atrocity: a direct, line-of-sight control centre for the implosions of the Towers, fingers actually dancing nimbly across rows of detonator buttons…
That, and Larry Silverstein’s previously-planned insurance bonanza, was why 7 too had to come down. The police and fire-chiefs had previous warnings that 7 would come down, and were warning people to get clear both before and exactly at 5.20 in the afternoon. Plenty of online actuality videos of that. Lots of people knew beforehand that it was going to happen.
It’s pants.
I agree. You whole premise is.
Congrats on successfully rewriting Newton’s three laws of motion! Great things await i’m sure.
“Pants”?……..An English term meaning?? This opinion piece was shrouded in so much “waffle” I had trouble understanding what the author was ‘waffling on about”, but I must say I don’t agree with his denial of the ‘bleeding obvious’. 9/11 was an inside job.
An aluminium plane hitting a building(s) and turning hundreds of thousands of tonnes of Concrete and steel into pulverised dust and molten lava???
The American people must be the stupidest people on Earth for passively accepting the verbal and visual diarrhoea that comprises the 9/11 ‘story’.
I have rather been enjoying off-g and the comments.
Now this piece.
Reminds me of Galloway and ‘blow back’.
Ho him.
I will indeed leruscino. Even if it cannot be proven that the US government did-we do have proof that it was a case of contrlled demolition on all 3 buildings. Every time you view the footage its obvious! Keep up the engineering mate! http://humansarefree.com/2016/09/eu-scientific-study-wtc-towers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FYTqom+%28Humans+Are+Free-Blog%29
Keith vaz
When’s the article coming?
Bring the cards down
Thanks for the comments everyone. I’ve stirred a hornets’ nest here! Alas, it’ll take a while to make any response as I’m offline on a walking tour all next week – then India a few days later. Will try though. Wow.
Sorry – I mean all THIS week …
So ‘Bush was too thick and Chaney too incompetent’ to plan and execute 9/11,therefore they must be innocent of any involvement !
Dismiss the many uncovered suspicious links to Israeli companies,MOSAD or Amerian duel citizens like Larry Silverstein as simple antisemitism !
I suggest the author looks up what happened to the USS Liberty in 1967.
We are asked to ‘Accept the terrorists did it’ flawed argument and that the ‘war on Terrorism’ is a justified if as unfortunate bi-product !
What a piss poor load of bollocks wrapped up in academia waffle,more worthy of the neo liberal official Guardian than a site that sets out to question the dictated newspeak of the US Deep State.
No, I don’t think the ‘war on terror’ justified. What in my post leads you to say that? The idea that Salafism as a mass movement was created by US imperialism, as I believe, is in no way dependent on a Bush-Cheney conspiracy.
Please tell me. This is parody. Otherwise. Oh dear. Blind and stupid.
You would do well to watch this brilliant interview with Jewish film Director (‘Trading Places’, ‘The Rose’and, bizarrely, creator of the bikini) Aaron Russo, a great man… who in this entertaining and breathtaking interview describes political aspects of his life including his friendship with Nicholas Rockefeller.
He covers 9/11 and much more besides. You will never forget watching this interview.
Thanks for that link. Never heard of him before but he makes a lot of sense. Very interesting.
As satire, perhaps even self-parody, a good article. Taken at face value, well, ‘it’s just an old pair of soiled pants,’ eh.
How exactly was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a proven conspiracy?. I couldn’t get beyond that line. Everytime I read that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a proven conspiracy, I ask myself “How was the conspiracy proven?”. So far I have not figured it out and I have never seen any author who goes along with that line explain it either. Can anybody here explain how the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a proven conspiracy?
Well for me the protocols were an aside but … this from Wiki. “The Protocols is one of the best-known and most-discussed examples of literary forgery, with analysis and proof of its fraudulent origin going as far back as 1921.” There are more scholarly pieces of course, though I don’t claim expertise.
Defining the Protocols as a fraud was a major operation conducted in England after major Times and Observer shareholder, Lord Northcliffe, demanded an “Inquiry” into their significance (not their origin). Within six months Northcliffe was declared “mad” and died under suspicious circumstances in Switzerland. The UK’s “foremost war reporter” in his day, Douglas Reed, knew Northcliffe and met him in France during the weeks prior to his death where Northcliffe, in a state of some fear (Reed reports) told him he had made some “very powerful enemies” by his attitude to the Protocols. Shortly after northcliffe’s death the Times declared the protocols a Tsarist forgery but this makes little sense on many counts. Though the document came out of Russia via ‘Professor Nilus’, their origin, going by the style of language and some of the claims in the contents “we control all the press”, etc … makes it much more… Read more »
Thanks for the reply, great answer. It is as I suspected, the hoax and fraud crowd are just pulling the wool over our eyes.
Please….now you cite Wiki? give us a break!
This deeply-silly piece – quite unworthy of a good site like Off-Guardian – doesn’t even engage at all with the body of hard, well-tested and argued evidence that has been built up by the serious truth-seekers since the false flag actually happened. All the usual stupid straw-men are trotted out, and duly knocked down – as if that proved anything apart from the fact that Roddis has the silly denialist patter at his fingertips. Try engaging with the hard facts, Phillip – honestly. You might actually make some contact with the real world if you do. Start with my alma mater: Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. They’ve done as much as anyone to get the realworld truth out – past all the massed maunderings like this silly piece. http://www.ae911truth.org/ This link will lead on to other equally high-quality, realworld-engaging sites, which – for serious seekers of the truth –… Read more »
I can’t believe anyone would compare ALL the serious critics of the official 9/11 story with Creationists! This is just demonising the opposition so you don’t have to engage with what they are saying. Don;t insult them. Prove them wrong with facts. Saying “these people are so nuts we don’t need to tell you why they’re wrong” is contemptible and cowardly. Shame on Philip, and I always liked his writing before.
i would love the author to explain how all the passengers made their alleged cell phone calls and why Prof Dewdleys research must therefore according to him be irrelevant and how he interprets the FBIs new position in the Moussaiou Trial….he has done no research .Dr Griffin takes apart the official story re the cellphones
he sorry
edited it for you 🙂
Then also edit the name – it is Dewdney.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Dewdney
Alexander Keewatin (AK) Dewdney, to give it in full. Good bloke. Careful truth investigator. I was briefly in touch with him about his demonstration that the alleged cell-phone calls from the hijacked planes were actually physically impossible at that time – though voice-morphing technology was already available in 2001 ‘off the shelf’. Developed, de-bugged and in good working order.
OMFG! As many of you are reading this, Tubularsock was placing nano-thermite charges at every other paragraph. By mid-day all that will be left will be a dust-pile of verbs and nouns and a few hundred periods in a variety of mangled forms. So read quickly! By evening Tubularsock will have collected all the letters and punctuation symbols and loaded them into trash containers, which Tubularsock JUST HAPPENED to have standing by, and carry them off to China. By tomorrow ……. this article will be just “A Theory”. What evidence? Why ask? Let’s not think ……. let’s go out and buy more thing to show this author that WE are not going to be frightened by those who don’t like our freedoms! 9/11 Was Not An Inside Job …. if was an out-sourced job! We Americans, through Trade Treaties, don’t have jobs anymore. We out-source terrorism … it’s THE AMERICAN… Read more »
Excellent comments! There isn’t a single serious fact presented in this apology of an argument to challenge Professor David Ray Griffin’s wholly valid charge that the 9/11 Commission Report was “a 576-page lie” – scripted by neocon insider Philip Zelikow who told the commissioners in advance which questions they were allowed to ask. To repeat an earlier comment, the FBI has stated it has no evidence of involvement by Osama bin Laden; and that there were no calls from any of the allegedly hijacked planes i.e. they were faked – a small matter, perhaps, but with only one possible inference: this was an inside job, a made-for-TV-shock-and-awe-spectacular that left so many clues, large and small, that no-one with an ounce of honesty could seriously support the ridiculous official story. How did the “dancing Israelis” (including at least two Mossad agents) – who stated on Israeli TV that “they were only… Read more »
‘Second, 9/11 Truthism, and conspiracy theories at large, show a disturbing tendency towards antisemitism. With 9/11 the latent racism goes further, a not so subtle implication of Truthism being that Arabs in caves could never pull off such a thing. (But white Christian fundamentalists could do something immeasurably harder, especially with The Jews onboard.)’
What a poor argument! – someone in a cave (irrespective of their religion) would find it extremely difficult to carry out such an attack. However a group with the resources of the United States – irrespective of their religion or nationality – would find it a whole lot easier!
Is it antisemitism to ask why the five Israelis were all set up with video cameras recording the event as it happened? Why they were high fiving each other and in a celebratory mood as the towers were demolished? Is it antisemitism to ask how they knew beforehand the event was about to take place? Is it antisemitism ask the Israeli regime to come clean and confess any and all facts they have about the attack on the USA? Is it antisemitism to get to the bottom of the “Israeli Art Student” story? Or why they were living in the world trade centre?
I don’t think so.
Darling, ANY mention of Israel, Israelis, jewish people / objects / endeavors etc. is nowadays considered rank anti-semitism. In other words a place and people that do not exist. Go directly to jail, do not pass GO!
Oh yes, if you have to ask, “is it antisemitism to ask,” you are already on your way to committing the rankest acts of bigotry and prove yet again why every ‘race, every ‘ethnicity’ or ‘confessional denomination’ needs a place — an entire country of its own, even — purged of all corrupting contamination from any daily intercourse with any other ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity’ or ‘faith,’ not to say a ‘lesser’ one, especially if it’s Palestinian. Away with you! Additionally, to help you finally vanquish any lingering suspicion that you may have about yourself, and as Roddis proves ‘incontrovetibly’ if only in passing, because of your antisemitism, you already have a leg up on most in terms of an ingrained propensity for ‘believing’ in the conspiratorial version(s) of 9/11, or at the very least, if not ‘believing’ in any particular version(s), then doubting in whole or in part that which “has… Read more »
Oh, Canada, O elenits,
I hit the wrong “Reply,” and elenits got my message instead. Apologies to both of you.
All the classic and useless tropes and logical fallacies in one article I would say. -Selection bias: Roddis mentions Avery and his film (notably his first film) several times, but no mention of the members of academia who have legitimately questioned the government story: -Straw man arguments: such as ‘Bush did it’ knocked down by ‘Bush was incompetent’. Even Avary’s ‘shift’ is taken out of context – very few researchers devote much attention to G W Bush, more so to Cheney and Rumsfeld and a circle of cohorts: http://www.globalresearch.ca/war-crimes-and-911-why-dick-cheney-and-donald-rumsfeld-are-suspects/5385759 -Baseless conflation (smearing) : 911 Truthers are aligned with holocaust denial, 911 Truthers are anti-semites, 911 Truthers are all David Icke advocates, 911 Truthers believe in ‘voodoo subjects’……I’ve followed 911blogger.com for about ten years and not ever seen any of this. Again there are a bunch of respected academics and scientists who have actually led the research, none of whom get… Read more »
“Is there a conflict between class analysis and conspiracy analysis?” No, to be fair there isn’t in principle – though I think Cockburn is onto something important with his assertion about conspiracism having – in practise -filled the vacuum left by fewer (proportionally) of neoliberalism’s critics having read Marx.
There is an issue here about the epistemological approach of political historians. Peter Dale Scott: ‘If we are to seek understanding of our society through studying its systems and structures, then we need to acknowledge that some of those systems and structures have trap doors and hidden passageways within them’. Scott’s split with Chomsky was connected to his interest in (what he later called) ‘Deep Politics’, which is an attempt to academically study these hidden aspects of state power and its relationship to organised crime, drug trafficking, private intelligence networks and the like. The overall analysis of writers like Chomsky and Cockburn, once you have read Scott (or other decent works on these subjects) starts to look a bit thin. Chomsky is like a walking library of congress, able at his best to recall so many damning facts from the public record, however, he is so unwilling to ‘fill in… Read more »
Many of us truthers would say that the official theory regarding 9/11 is actually–to borrow a Marxian concept–an excellent example of false consciousness. The reason it works to well in this case, is because many people assume that, having read Marx’s works for themselves, they must therefore be immune to false consciousness! Pretty ironic …
This is a rather cliché debunking piece. Like most of them it seeks to poison the well by bringing up the well-known hoaxes and crack pots, such as the Protocols of Zion and David Icke, while ignoring serious research like that of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
Must do better Off-Guardian!
All “debunkers” use these tactics. They have to. It’s all they’ve got.
David Icke might have some crackpot ideas but he was one of the first to declare the official 9/11 narrative a crock … so he’s not wrong about everything.
The Protocols of Zion? Hey, that’s another story. Maybe OffGuardian will invoke the 2 sides of that coin some other time. Aaronovitch and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn perhaps … but that really would be going too far. Niet?
it’s true David Icke isn’t wrong about every single issue, but mention his name in an article or conversation and the first thing everyone will think about “alien reptile lizards”. That serves a very useful purpose for debunkers. Through association, the implication is that the theory that 9/11 was an inside job is just as ridiculous as the world being governed by alien reptile lizards, simply because Icke believes both. This alone makes Icke more harmful to the truth movement than any correct theory he’s ever come up with.
I agree and sometimes wonder if his “lizard” thing is some kind of instrument that was placed on him under threat. Relationships between Intelligence Services and their ‘partners’ are often subtle and very obscure. Remember how many leading IRA men were “working with” military Intelligence. Mostly this probably meant we can finish you now or you can continue doing what you’re doing provided you report new developments to us. The Bletchley Park intercepts were never used to stop German attacks, only to aid in future strategic thinking.
Who knows what’s up with Icke? Not me.
We haven’t received many debunking pieces to be honest. This was one of the better ones.
Really?
Yes. Really. Which if you think about it is quite revealing.
One of the better ones, Admin? Don’t you mean: ‘one of the least inadequate – though still way below any real credibility threshold.’ – ?
How exactly was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a hoax?. Last thing I read on that topic was that the published bit was only part of a larger book. But the question I have is how it that the work is a hoax?
Compared to The Saker’s article this one is witless and wilfully ignorant. It embodies ALL the faults it projects onto ‘troofers’.
Furthermore, using the word ‘epistomological’ in every second sentence does not establish an individual as a person of intelligence, but is more indicative of masturbatory habits and an effort to disguise a chronic stupidity.
The author of this piece is a tosser.
… and did I ignore the key data that makes the case re 9/11 being an inside job here?
Blimey!! How did that happen? It must be catching.
Can’t agree more – Why does anyone even print this shite ! Unless its to make readers laugh or cry?
We have all seen the plane crash of MH17, compare it to the faked crash into the Pentagon !!!!! A blind man on a galloping horse can see its faked.
WTC7 – how did it fall ? I did a university degree in this field & all qualified engineers know WTC7 is not possible & neither are the Trade Towers – Gimme a break !