On this side of the pond, there is talk on one of the forums that goes along the lines of:

"The US government planned and perpertrated the 9-11 attacks, so they could invade countries that would not give them a deal on oil (The Afghan oil pipeline???) and so that they could clamp down and wipe out civil liberties at home"

"There was no airplane at the Pentagon,that was a missile or a truck bomb, the real flight was landed and all on board executed."

"The Pensylvania plane was shot down to make things look good."

" all the telephone calls from the planes were faked because cell phones do not work above a certain height"

"The WTC were actually brought down by demolision explosives, pre planted

etc.... :roll:

Have you had that discussion here and the analysis of the "evidence" put forward by the conspiracy theorists ?

are they the same people who believe in the "Luna landing hoax" :-?

Our discussions here are (mostly) resticted to the Apollo Hoax. It's appearing from the hoax believers that appear here though that people who believe ithat NASA faked the moon landings also believe that 9/11 was faked, are Holocaust deniers etc etc. In short, people who believe in conspiracies believe the whole package. I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that such people are actually insane.

These are people of such delusional paranoia, they are a danger to society and should be committed.

BTW, I'm not sure how allowed this really is.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

Thing is, there have been large-scale conspiracies before in reality : the assassination of the Chilean prime minister in '73, the attempted assassination of the Iraqi prime minister in '59, the bombings of Laos and Cambodia, and a mess of others.
So there is a lot of evidence out there that says that the word "conspiracy" does not equate automatically to "crackpot".

That said, I still want to drop the half-ton of lunar samples on the next idiot that says there's no proof we went to the moon.

And this isn't really an astronomy discussion. Perhaps we shouldn't continue?

There is some talk about Bush's motivation for invading Iraq, but the speculation you cited about oil doesn't make sense. The sanctions disallowed Iraq from selling oil, so obviously it wasn't about securing a "better deal" on the oil they weren't selling.

All of the other "talk" you mention is pretty ridiculous, and most reasonable people on this side of the pond wouldn't entertain such silliness. There are, of course, some more realistic questions regarding varacity of intelligence, the timing of what was known, etc., that should be and are being discussed.

It's pretty pathetic, though, that the first thing the Bush administration did after 9-11 was look for ways to blame Clinton. Clinton actually had a reasonable security apparatus in operation (and more in development) that the Bush team let languish. If anyone's to blame.... well, it ain't Clinton.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

And the bombing of Laos and Cambodia (presumably you mean during the Vietnam War) was a conspiracy just how? Warning - I was in SE Asia during that period. I remember watching the aircraft taking off from U-Tapao, Nakhom Phanon and Korat and (mostly) coming back. There was no secret about it, everybody from the local bar girls to the top politicians knew where they were going, why and how. And if they didn't, they could find out by tuning into the television news that evening. If it was a conspiracy, it was the first one in history where the conspirators gave TV interviews and progress reports.

I also assume that you are referring to the death of Allende during the coup in Chile that put Pinochet into power. I'd be careful about that one as well; what really happened is a lot different from the mythology.

Actually, it does. I would put it more strongly; people who allege vast conspiracies to hide "the truth" are dangerously insane. I came to that conclusion after having read their efforts here.

Remember that most of the current conspiracy theories are out there because someone is promoting their particular book. They don't have to be plausible, only generate ineterest and $ales.

Very true. I think we have to distinguise between the parasites and the believers. There are those who create these conspiracy theories and those who believe them. The former are just in it for the money, the latter are insane. In the time I've been here, we've had plenty of examples of the latter, How often have they produced something and held to it despite being shown how their comments are palpably untrue? How many of them have actually admitted that their beliefs couldn't stand scrutiny? I remember just one.

I know that when something disastrous like 9/11 happens, there are always questions. Some people, like myself, ask the questions, hoping to get real answers.

Questions like: How did so few people die when there were normally ten times as many people in those towers?

Why was so much intelligence ignored?

From what I understand, an intelligence agent was rooming with some of the terrorists.

However, I am sane and know that there is a lot of misinformation out there, so I figure I'll get all of my questions answered at some point, and the fact that it takes time does not make me think it's a conspiracy.

However, believing conspiracies happen does not make you a crackpot. It only takes three people to make a conspiracy. It's these government wide conspiracies that are ridiculous.

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

I'm rather surprised noone's mentioned Kennedy before now...

Astronomy people.... ASTRONOMY

I for one refuse to discuss any conspiracies other then Astronomy linked ones (there are enough of those)

If you want to talk about 9/11 I'm sure Randi will be more then happy to oblige. www.randi.org

The fact that these kind of threads keep popping up annoys and offends me, and I hope Phil locks this thread soon.

ASTRONOMY

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"Ignorance has caused more calamity than malignity" H.G. Wells

"Getting lost is part of exploring." Uniqua in "Backyardigans-Heart of the Jungle"

I think it's 'cause Babbling is closed right now. ops:

Anyway, thanks for the link. I'm headed there now. =D>

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

Let me pick up these questions because I think they have direct relevence to the Apollo Hoax believers

One reason was the earlier attack on the WTC; that had given the building safety admin a chance to try out their evacuation procedures and identify problems. If the terrorists hadn't tried earlierm casualties would ahve been higher. Another reason was that the timing of the attacks was off. A lot of the companies in the WTC didn't start work until 0900 or even 0930; the first plane hit at 0848. That meant a lot of people who would normally have been high up in the building were still at ground level. Finally, the buildings held together pretty well right up until they fell down. The evacuation routes stayed open right to the end. How does this relate to Apollo. The moon landings also built on expertise that went before them, their timing was advantageous and the engineering was good.

This is a very common thing. The problem is that intelligence data isn't like a road-map that points to a given direction. Lets use a road map as an example. Suppose you had to drive from, say, New York to Washington. Answer is easy, Take the New Jersey Turnpike to the Delaware Bridge then pick up I-95 through Baltimore to Washington. Easy. Anybody can do it. Now imagine that you've never driven in America before and your only means of navigation is a road map thats been assembled by randomly cutting out parts of atlas pages from all fifty states, there are large blank areas and others are completely fictions and, finally, all the place names have been removed. Not so easy.

Intelligence data is a vast mass of information, some of which is accurate, most of which is not, some of it is deliberately misleading. From that mass of information, people have to try and work out what is going on. In the pile of information are all the answers. In the intell data coming in right now is the information that tells us exactly where and when the next terrorist attack is coming. Only problem is that there are tens of thousand of other bits of data that tell us other wheres and other whens. How do we distinguise the correct bit of data from all the fake or false bits. Easy answer - we find the person who knows and screw the information out of them. How is a question best left unanswered. Its easy when we know what the answer is to go through the pile of data and point to the various bits saying - there, that one told us what was going to happen. Doing the same when you don't know what the answer is going to be, ahhh there's the trick........

Relevence to the Apollo Hoax here is simple. The HBs snow us with huge amounts of false data. Our responses, showing that they are false gets swallowed up in the mass.

I know I shouldn't be keeping this going, but I can't help myself...

That said, Stuart, your first answer is great. Thanks! I've really been wondering about that, and it's so freaking obvious, I don't know why I didn't figure it out myself. #-o

As for your second answer, it begs the question: Why aren't more terrorist activities successful? Like, for example, suicide bombers like the ones they deal with in Israel?

Honestly, I used to buy into the idea that God protected this country. I've come a long way from Bible thumper to free thinker - so I'm still practicing on the thinking part.

It could make you think there is hope for the HBers, but I fear I may be unique in my conversion. *sigh*

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

Because our guys are pretty darn good at their jobs. There have been a number of attempted attacks since 9/11, all of which were cut off at the pass and eliminated (another case of "don't ask") . We've yanked in a horde of people who know what was happening and they've been persuaded to co-operate (you guessed - "don't ask") . We've got systems that can go through data and pick up patterns. The attacks that get through are the exceptions rather than the rule (that applies in Israel as well by the way; most of the homicide bombers out there are identified and killed long before they do anything deadly ("do...", oh you know by now) , its the exceptions that get the headlines.

I didn't know you were a converted HBer, my apologies, that makes two.

Ah. I see. And I reckon we're even more vigilant as a result of 9/11...

I wouldn't say HBer. I never really got into the whole moon thing. More, I'm just a converted conspiracy theorist. I was more into the whole Illuminati thing -- anything related to the idea of Satan running the world kind of thing. ops: I know. Even now, I don't know how I swallowed that codswallop as long as I did. It certainly gives me a different perspective on where these people are coming from than most have. It's kind of like former drug addicts understanding addicts in a way the rest of us cannot.

Anyway, no apologies needed. Learning how to think actually gave me a MUCH thicker skin, so I don't even know why you're apologizing.

And two? Two what? Is there another convert here?

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

Just to add a footnote a lot of the theories mentioned in the original post are in direct contadiction to what millions watching on TV saw. It just shows that most consiracy theorist would rather believe this stuff than use their eyes.

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Its better tae meddle wi the deil............

Stuart wrote:
There was no secret about it, everybody from the local bar girls to the top politicians knew where they were going, why and how.
This is a good example of one of the problems with conspiracy theorists: they assume that only a massive cover-up keeps a slew of earth-shaking scandals from erupting. The real truth is that most scandals are already out there; people just don't care. Most folks didn't care about Laos, or Vietnam, or Iran or Guatemala or whatever. Most people don't care about Georgia or Rwanda or Central Mexico or big chunks of inner cities.

I needn't go into specifics here; pick your outrage on either the right or the left. The point is, people tend to think about their jobs, families, and diversions. It takes a helluva lot to get large chunks of the population worked up about something for any significant amount of time. Mainstream news organizations cover what people are interested in, so less attention => less news => no attention at all. This is especially true for things that don't obviously involve your stock portfolio.

Even when some big conspiracy is uncovered, so what? Those who aren't glad you did it, shrug it off or forgive. You 'fess up with an insincere apology, ignore the criticism, and pretty soon you've got a fat book contract. Conspiracy "theorists" not only ignore how hard it is to create and maintain a secret conspiracy, they vastly overrate how much damage is done to most of the conspirators.

Though I'd hesitate to use the word "insane," there is a pathology at work there that psychologists could tell us about. Is there a psychologist in the house? The problem here is one of scale. The validity of those specific stories aside, those other conspiracies are orders of magnitude smaller than what would be required for a 9/11 or Apollo conspiracy to work.

A good rule of thumb is that secrecy is inversely proportional to the number of people who know about something. So an assasination concpiracy with 10 people knowing about it is 100 times easier to pull of than a 9/11 conspiracy (1,000 is a rough estimate for the number of people who would have to be in on it) and 10,000 times easier than an Apollo moon hoax conspiracy (100,000 is a pretty low end guess at how many people worked in the space program at that time). I'd make a different category for these guys. The people who believe the conspiracy theories are "hoax believers" (HB). The people who make them up in order to profit from them are frauds (HF). As Stuart pointed out, those in category 2 may also fall into category 1. Often it is difficult to tell if they believe their own BS. Good point - in the 60's, to the hundreds of thousands of protesters, what was going on was pretty important. To everyone else, all they cared about was if their brother/dad/uncle/friend was coming back alive. Sometimes people get so frustrated that other people don't care as much for a specific issue that they start making up (or thinking) that there must be some unseen thing making them not care.

As far as this being OT, since the purpose of this board (as I see it) is to identify and counter bad science, I think a discussion on the pathology of conspiracy theory is pretty relevant. But I'm not the BA...

This question might seem out of place, but this is a thread for conspirisy theories involving 9-11 and such.

I was wondering how reliable DEBKAfile is. They have a report up on how New York will be nuked on February 2nd. It's somewhere in the BABBling forum. I beli