Actually, one target was the wtc towers specifically. It was reported as such on abc world news tonight anyway. I'm not making that claim personally, I just watched the news report, which didn't come from a conspiracy site. I've been looking for the video link so I could post it. I'll keep trying Donnie B.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXNjLt3vVwg

this is what i could find so far. I apologize for alex jones... but he shows the actual video i am talking about.

"Third, something being a coincident or highly unlikely is meaningless in and of itself. The odds of you being born with exactly your set of chromosomes is trillions upon trillions to one. The odds of dealing out a shuffled 52 card deck in exactly the order it is dealt is 8.0658171709439 E 67. Yet, you are born and the cards are dealt. The improbable odds of either occurring do not matter in the least upon the reality that they occurred"

Xanthro, I don't think thats a fair analogy to what i'm talking about.

Xanthro, I don't think thats a fair analogy to what i'm talking about.
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Of course it’s a fair analogy, because improbable odds without context is meaningless.

Having a simulation of an event, while the event itself occurs, does not constitute any type of evidence that the actual event was planned by those performing the simulation.

In fact, such an act would speak against the simulation and the actual attack being linked as already explained.

I’ll give you two real life examples. During WWII, the Japanese were running a war game exercise prior to the attack on Midway, during the simulation the Japanese fleet was destroyed by American carrier forces. Something that actually happened. Does this mean the Japanese planned for their fleet to be destroyed? No, of course it doesn’t. The Germans in early 1945 were running a war game simulation on how to defend against an American attack when the actual attack took place merely a day later.

Of course the Japanese and Germans ran plenty of other war games that didn’t mimic events that actually took place, but those tend to be forgotten by history.

Now, please explain, why would a simulation of an attack on the World Trade Center provide any evidence that those running the simulation had anything to do with the actual attack?

The two real life examples you gave are not in the same context. The Japanese were running exercises because they were at war. The germans were running exercises because they were at war. NORAD was running exercises of a specific event that actually took place on the exact same day because?? Now add that to the fact that "nobody in the government thought something like this could happen." It's just a staggeringly odd coincidence.

"The odds of dealing out a shuffled 52 card deck in exactly the order it is dealt is 8.0658171709439 E 67. Yet, ..........the cards are dealt." I think for that statement to make sense, we would have to deal the cards twice and see if they come out the exact same both times, or if they come out the exact same in a million times, or a billion. Still not a good analogy, but closer. You're not giving a comparison.

My point isn't to provide any evidence that those running the simulation had anything to do with the actual attack, because I don't necessarily believe thats the case. I'm trying to ask what you think about; the government claiming having no idea an attack like this would or could happen, while also running drills simulating the event that they don't believe would or could happen.

First, plenty of people thought this could happen. Since I've been aware of the possibility since 1985 and I’m a nobody.

Second, the NORAD exercises on 9/11 were not specific to a plane running into the World Trade Centers. The possibility of a commercial airliner being used and response time was under review.

Third, it doesn’t matter if said exercises did mimic in great detail the actual attack. I’ve asked you to explain why a simulation of something and the actual event on the same day would indicate those planning the simulation were somehow involved in the actual attack. Your response is like most others who tend to believe in conspiracy theories, “It's just a staggeringly odd coincidence”

I’ve posted numerous examples of staggeringly odd coincidences occurring in real life. Odds mean NOTHING.

If North Korea launched a rocket at the United States today, you’d find that sometime in the last month or so, somewhere in the US military someone was working on a simulation of that very attack. Almost any conceivable attack you can think of has someone running simulations on it.

The fact that such actual events and simulations may occur nearly simultaneous is meaningless.

We constantly run drills and simulations of events we don't think will take place.

While it's quite possible that those in upper levels of government were unaware of such a possible attack, I find that unlikely. Plenty of people considered such an attack possible, though almost all thought such an attack would come from a plane launched in Europe, not the United States.

The probability of such an attack was considered low, and as such wasn't given the priority of other threats.

Government officials claiming nobody thought such an attack could occur and simply performing the time honored CYA.

First, that was a rough quote of what the president said in his state of the union. He said “we had never envisioned they would fly planes into buildings” if I remember.

Second, I wish you wouldn't try to discredit me by saying that I tend to believe in conspiracy theories. My question has been about the government acting poorly in response to the attack.

The reason why we started talking about the “odd coincidence” is because of a post by another member of this board, which was “I'm not positive about this, but as I recall the exercises being run that day did not involve planes being flown into buildings. They included aircraft being hijacked in the more traditional way.

Can you give any source for the claim that the exercises on 9/11 included a WTC-like attack? A source other than a 9/11 conspiracy site, that is.”

That’s how we got to where we are now.

There was a government agency running a drill on 9/11 that involved an airplane crashing into a building

http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/cia-simulation.htm

It want NORAD or the FAA, it was a CIA office running the drill to prepare employees on how to react in an emergency.

I

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Reality is for those that can't handle video games.

Goes to show that one must get their quotes right before making accusations.

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This is no fantasy. No careless product of wild imagination. - Jor-El

Godspeed, John Glenn. - Scott Carpenter

And these atomic bombs that science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men that used them.
- H.G Wells, The World Set Free

To the conspiracy crowd, radiation is a big Boogey Man that inspires terror and death in all who encounter it. - JayUtah

you're right woody. I was mistaken.
I got that confused and overlapped it with this one:


http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...18-norad_x.htm

my apologies xanthro

Woody-'s comment adds some support to what I understand was going on: there were actually two different exercises going on. One involved a traditional hijacking. The other was a plane crashing into a building shortly after take off. (I might be wrong, though.)

It seems that somewhere in CT Land these two separate exercises were merged into a single exercise...

yeah thats where i got confused, because the google video I watched was narrated by Alex Jones.

I'm glad that you guys cleared that up for me.

Isn't Alex Jones also a CTer or something? The name sounds familar....

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This is no fantasy. No careless product of wild imagination. - Jor-El

Godspeed, John Glenn. - Scott Carpenter

And these atomic bombs that science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men that used them.
- H.G Wells, The World Set Free

To the conspiracy crowd, radiation is a big Boogey Man that inspires terror and death in all who encounter it. - JayUtah

Yeah, and I'm pretty sure mdbapa is aware of that. He did apologize for posting the video, because it was from Jones.

Anyway, Jones and his ilk are notorious for their blatant dishonesty (well, outside of the CT community anyway). I mean, this is one of the people who endorse placing (paraphrased poll answer) "53% believe the government is mostly telling the truth, but covering some things up, about what they knew prior to 9/11" and "3% are unsure" in with "reject the official account of 9/11".

G'day mdbapa

I often subscribe to the "foul-up" view of history, because it's often very educational. The idea is that when people cause things to happen, very often there are unforseen consequences which see events spiral in a very different direction.

Let's look at the September 11 attacks with the assumption that they were carried out by 19 terrorists. Their plan was to crash their planes into four buildings, striking against symbols of American military, political and financial might, and cause maximum casualties.

But things went wrong:

- The two WTC towers were struck early enough in the morning that the buildings weren't fully occupied, reducing casualties;
- The two WTC remained standing for 50 or 100 minutes, allowing nearly everyone who survived the impacts to evacuate, reducing casualties;
- The passengers on the fourth plane were allowed to talk to relatives, and decided as a result to fight back, preventing the hijackers from reaching their intended target;
- After the attacks, instead of being cowed, the US and its allies invaded Afghanistan, overthrowing the Taliban government and severely disrupting Al Qaeda for a few years.

So things hardly turned out exactly as Al Qaeda expected.

Now let's apply the same assessment to the US government, bureaucracy and military.

- Air traffic controllers had difficulties contacting someone with authority to approve a military intercept;
- Military pilots were given insufficient information to intercept the hijacked flights, meaning they initially wasted time travelling out to sea, away from the planes;
- President Bush appears to have been paralysed by indecision when first informed of the attacks (though if he'd leapt to his feet in an attempt to be decisive, I'm sure conspiracy theorists would have been suspicious of this too);
- On the evening of September 11, Bush and his cabinet tried to tie the attacks to Iraq to provide an excuse to attack it, having been obsessed with Iraq specifically, while ignoring other threats;
- Having invaded Iraq on the premise of the threat of WMD, none were found; and
- The US Government made no plans for post-Saddam Iraq, completely failing to forsee the chaos which ensued.

So even without a conspiracy theory angle, the US still comes out the other side not looking to flash.

In other words, you don't need to propose conspiracy theories to make events occur as they did - sheer human incompetence and hubris does a much better job.

Why were no US Government officials sacked as a result of September 11? Anyone who's worked in a large organisation would know the answer to that: let whoever's without blame cast the first stone.

Point well taken.

One other thing, and I've said this before in both Sept 11 and JFK threads, for a conspiracy to work, it needs to fit the lie as closely as possible. I learned this by being an only child. I shot our patio window with a blowgun I missed the bag I was trying for) The dart shattered the window. No siblings to blame it on and the damage was only on the inside pane of glass. I called up a window repair place and described the window, he asked if it was on th south side of the house. It was. He asked if there was an air conditioning vent near by. There was. He said it sounded like a stress fracture. The AC blows on the insulated, tempered glass that has the afternoon sun hitting hit all day and, if there is a weak spot there, it pops. About 10 year later, that same window actually did suffer a heat stress 'pop', which sounded like a gunshot. The lie fit the truth very closely, and was later corroborated with a seemingly identical repeat of the same event.

Initially, you suggested that we on this board are dismissing any thought of a conspiracy out of hand. That is not true. If there was some indication that the US Government, or some small group within, planed and orchestrated the hiring of "19 angry Muslims" to carry out the attacks exactly as they appeared to have been done, then it becomes a very valid theory in my eyes. It's only the lack of any form of plan to build on the events that swings things back the other way. The biggest hole in the "Bush did it" theory is that if the g'ment planned and executed the attacks, why would they NOT plant WMDs in Iraq and save themselves international embarrassment?

As for the government's ineffectiveness in the time leading up to the attacks, there was a show on the history channel that covered quite a bit of it.

In one case an FBI agent found out about one of the flight schools attended by one of the terrorists. He reported it it to his superior in the FBI, who seemingly ignored it as being of no importance. The agent actually went so far as to take it to the CIA for follow up.

No one likes to look foolish. When the attacks happened, people did what people do. They scrambled to cover their butts.
And as others have said, something of this size would have the participation of a number of people, every one of which would have to not only have agreed to keep silent, but still agree, even after the whole Iraq thing has gotten bogged down like it is. Unless there are people that think that this is exactly what was planned from the start.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

What do you mean by "missed on the third attempt"? As for flight 93, the terrorists were taken out by the passengers.

And, why is implausible that terrorists could do something that we weren't expecting? By "not expecting" I'm referring to something that hadn't happened before, where there was no specific warning.

Why do you say that? Why did the attack have to be extraordinarily well thought out?

Without relying on 20/20 hindsight, what do you think indicates exceptional incompetence in this case? Oh, no doubt mistakes were made. But no organization works perfectly, and in fact we don't want our intelligence organizations to work too well. There is a constant debate between those who want to protect personal rights and those who want to increase security against terrorists.

What were the specific warnings of an attack on the WTC and Pentagon using passenger jets?

In a way, you're too right: There were many warnings of many types of attacks, as well as theoretical arguments for many types of possible attacks. There had also been other successful terrorist attacks. The question is, given the many different ways we could be attacked at any time anywhere in the world, what should have made this particular attack at this particular time so obvious?

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

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I don’t really feel the need to discuss this much more. Meaning: I’m now in agreement with you guys. I agree with you, for the most part, Van.

“What do you mean by "missed on the third attempt"? As for flight 93, the terrorists were taken out by the passengers.” - I messed up there; I was just trying to generalize the official story and wasn’t thinking. Those on Flight 93 did a hell of a job and are heroes.


However, I do wish to comment on one of your questions. “Without relying on 20/20 hindsight, what do you think indicates exceptional incompetence in this case?”

I think the entire handling of the “war on terror” from the attacks up until now has been botched. I had been screaming for weeks before the Iraq war began that there were no WMDs. In fact, it pains me to even have to mention Iraq in this discussion, because they had nothing to do with 911. I was called unpatriotic, stupid, un-American, ignorant, liberally biased, and words I can’t repeat on this forum just for my belief that we shouldn’t invade Iraq. I just want this war to end- I want my friends out of that hell hole known as Iraq. That’s what I’m worried about.

I appreciate all the posts.

I appreciate how reasonable you've been on the subject. Makes a nice change. (BTW, I sent you a Private Message.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

And I doubt you'll find many on this site who disagree with you on that point.

As Gillian said, it's refreshing to see a more reasonable discussion on this topic than we see from the more typical conspiracist mindset. The comments below are about specific previous posts and are not intended to continue beating mdbapa about the head and ears...

To this you might add that in all probablility, one of the attacking pilots could not locate his intended target (the White House) and instead attacked a much larger and more robust target (the Pentagon), with proportionally less devastating results.

For that matter, given their clear interest in linking the attacks to Iraq, why would they not have used Iraqi hijackers (if you assume actual attacks) or blamed it on Iraqis (if you prefer the bizarre holographic planes and controlled demo theories)?

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Relight the Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

This is some often missed Point of View.
Even if the WTC was the most attractive target for the terrorists, any hit in NYC would have been a success for them.

Wouldn't it have been more likely (easy) to go for the Capitol instead of the small White House as is often claimed? Not that the White House is that small, but it appears as a rather difficult target to me. Easier than poking out an eye of Ms Liberty, but still...

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

I agree with your views on that (though I never voiced them, as at the time I was in the navy, and my shipmates supported the invasion).

Of course, we shouldn't expand on that in the main forum (too political); best to save it for PMs.

__________________
This is no fantasy. No careless product of wild imagination. - Jor-El

Godspeed, John Glenn. - Scott Carpenter

And these atomic bombs that science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men that used them.
- H.G Wells, The World Set Free

To the conspiracy crowd, radiation is a big Boogey Man that inspires terror and death in all who encounter it. - JayUtah

And by too political, mdbapa, meaning it's gotten people banned if it goes far enough. I also agree with you but, as Grand Lunar suggested, that's best expressed in PMs. We (and you) don't want to see you lose posting priviledges, even temporarily. If we didn't care, we wouldn't warn ya

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"I have this theory that the Apollo missions were faked when NASA found out that general relativity was wrong because the Earth was expanding due to the Sun's iron core being influenced by magnetic waves from the electric universe after being perturbed by Planet X and thereby causing global warming. Where should I start a thread about this?" ~ ToSeek

"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher

Wouldn't it have been more likely (easy) to go for the Capitol instead of the small White House as is often claimed?

It's believed that 93 was heading for the Capitol, it'd be illogical to have two planes heading for the same target, and 77's heading took it almost right over the Whitehouse before it swung back in a tight turn, lost attitude and hit the Pentagon. Also remember that both flight 77 and 93 suffered from delays getting off the ground. That is why they hit their targets late. The original plan was to hit almost at the same time. Flight 93 being delayed so long gave the passangers a chance to learn what had been happening elsewhere and react to it.

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Take a look at these pictures.
http://0911.site.voila.fr/index3.htm
http://www.physics911.net/aircraftoutlined.jpg
Here's a blow-up of a frame from the video released by the government. It shows the front of the craft that hit the Pentagon. It's obviously not the front of a 757.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles...giantpsyop.htm

http://www.physics911.ca/Dewdney:_The_Missing_Wings
http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/A...March2006.html

For an explanation of what happened to the passengers, watch part 1 of "Painful Deceptions". It's explained in the last 5 minutes.

http://www.question911.com/linksall.htm