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| Copyright © 2008-2009 by Zack Smith. All rights reserved.
For specific evidence mentioned on this page, see my main 9/11 page, here. Introduction: The House of CardsImagine a scale that has two extremes:
The official 9/11 theory is much more like the second extreme: the House of Cards. It is a conspiracy hypothesis -- a claim that people conspired to commit an extraordinary crime -- that is not merely a set of unrelated sub-claims. Rather, the official story being pushed by the US Government and corporate media is a large set of related and interdependent propositions and when any is disproven much of the theory falls entirely away. The problem for the government is that their sub-claims are easily and frequently disproven by two things:
The propagandists who are pushing the official theory want you to believe their theory is like the first type, i.e. where any one sub-claim, if proven true, proves the whole theory. But that's ridiculous. Even a child can see they are full of it. Yet, Americans and others were so traumatized by 9/11 that they became willing to believe almost any illogical nonsense, just as people did after the JFK assassination. Then people wanted someone to blame. The FBI was quick to provide their patsies: 19 Muslims whom the FBI strangely knew about but did nothing to impede. The media were quick to supplement this with videos of cheering Pakistanis. And Americans who were unaccustomed to critical thinking were eager to seize on the patsy scapegoats. Then, the government quietly destroyed, lost, or made classified all vital criminal evidence concerning every attack on 9/11. 1. Let us attempt to prove the official story
If A and B and C and D and E and F, therefore X.
If any of the above propositions is false, much maneuvering is required to rewrite the story of what happened on 9/11 in order to assert that proposition X is true. And the plausibility of any resulting story that proves X is certainly much less than if all of A, B, C, D and E are true. Here is the problem:
2. There were terrorists on the planes -- right?If you look at the earliest published manifest lists for the planes that supposedly hit the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and crashed in Pennsylvania, you find few or no Arab names.(It is important to look at the earliest manifests, because if anyone in the government is going to tamper with the lists, e.g. requiring that airlines insert names, this would more likely occur after the reporting of raw data has begun, and before government or media spin can be imposed.) So for example:
Given that we don't see Arab names in the manifests, we can accommodate this fact by saying:
If A and NOT B and C, therefore X.
That is, that all 19 terrorists managed to use names like "Franco Sinatra" or "Fred Brown" and yet were not stopped. If this seems like a stretch, that's because it is and a wild one in fact. Here's the math: Let's suppose the probability of that scam working for just one terrorist is 80%, which I think is clearly wishful thinking. The probability of the scam working for 19 terrorists is simply
0.8019 = .01441151880758558720 = 1.4%
That's an odds of 1 in 70. In other words, it's extremely unlikely.
Math refresher:
The probability of two events occuring as part of the same event is by definition the probability of the first multiplied by the probability of the second. If 19 things have to occur together e.g. on 9/11, then all their probabilities have to be multiplied together, hence 0.80 "raised to the power of" 19, above. This means 0.80 times 0.80 time 0.80 . . . 19 times.
Now let us suppose that all four passenger lists lacks the terrorists' names somehow out of sympathy for the public on 9/11 itself, when these manifests were made available. If so, that means both American Airlines and United Airlines somehow knew on 9/11 who the terrorists were. This is very unlikely. The airlines are not investigative agencies. Are we to believe that the FBI or CIA provided the terrorists' names already on 9/11? How did they know so soon? And if the knew why did the government not stop the terrorists? You see, it's very specious. It is improbable that the passenger lists initially provided were incorrect, therefore there were no 19 hijackers to begin with. 3. The FBI knew about the terrorists but did not stop them.This is an augmentation of the official story, based on two or three scandals that erupted after 9/11.In the first, it was revealed that higher-up FBI managers had told underlings not to watch certain terror suspects.
This is also the story of the Operation Able Danger scandal, in which the US military had been watching Mohammed Atta prior to 9/11, but the investigator was told to back off, hand over all his evidence (gigabytes worth), and that evidence was destroyed by the Pentagon. So, even though the passenger lists provided on 9/11 by the airlines did not include any obvious Muslims, and certainly not the 19 terrorists identified by the FBI, let us suppose that there were real terrorists on the planes.
If A and B and C, therefore X.
Unfortunately, we already know that:
4. The FBI and Pentagon managers who told underlings to ignore the suspected terrorists would normally be fired.Let's further look at the issue of firing the bad FBI or Pentagon manager. In a fair world, wrongdoing on the job implies termination of the worker, or to express that logically:
If A therefore X.
But in logic this is equivalent to what's called the transposition, which is:
If NOT X, therefore NOT A.
What does this mean? It means that if we know that the FBI manager in question was not fired, logically we can infer that he did no wrong. Or rather, even if we the public think he did wrong, his supervisors or more generally "higher-ups" believe he did not. Therefore, logically this calls into question how higher-ups were defining wrongdoing prior to 9/11. It suggests but does not prove that the manager who told underlings "hands off" in regards to the terror suspects was doing good by the standards of the FBI's upper management. 5. If the government perpetrated 9/11 then cops would attack 9/11 protesters.A well-known activist explained to me that, these days, protesters are getting beaten up left and right.
So he asked, why aren't 9/11 Truth protesters getting beaten up for walking around in New York City or elsewhere chanting "9/11 was an inside job"? (Actually, cops have harrassed some truthers and arrested a few people.) As I explained, the issue is whether the powerful interests have managed to prevent serious investigations that would identify the real wrongdoers, and whether beating up protesters would increase public demands for an investigation.
If A and B and C, therefore X.
In other words, bad people did bad things, they got away with it, and protesters will be attacked by cops e.g. to set an example. The answer to the activist's question in the implication's transposition:
If not X, therefore NOT (A and B and C).
In logic, this is the same as: If not X, therefore (NOT A) or (NOT B) or (NOT C). In other words, if protesters don't get beaten up by the cops, it must be that either:
If 9/11 protesters don't get beaten up by the cops,
it must be that
it is not the case that the cat is out of the bag
about who really perpetrated 9/11.
The guilty parties remain unknown and are not Al Qaeda.
6. What names did Muslims use to get on the planes?Some believe that Muslims got on all four planes using fake names. If this is true, it was a scam obviously and you have to ask, what are the odds of such a scam working. But first you need to think about the context. The people who check your ID before you get on a plane are flight attendants. Flight attendants travel often, so they see many kinds of faces, many ethnicities, and they are much more likely to know an Arab from an Italian. But for the sake of logic:
If A and B, therefore X.
To say that A implies X is true in many cases is a no-brainer. However it is possible to imagine an asocial individual who must travel frequently, but who ignores everyone around him or her. Therefore B is necessary too. Key point: Both A & B are true for flight attendants. Now, if the person checking passports had never left a small town in Iowa and didn't know a Arab from a Russian, sure, the scam of an Arab using an Italian or Spanish name to get on board a plane might have a chance. Alas, even a child knows that's not how things work at airports. Therefore the chance of the scam working is low, and the "hijackers" could not have used it. And yet, the passenger lists provided on 9/11 don't include any obvious Middle-Easterners. 7. The government is too incompetent to have committed 9/11.This is an argument that is so mindless it smacks of anti-intellectualism.Obviously whoever perpetrated 9/11 was very competent, yet there are many elements of 9/11 that could not have been perpetrated by people outside of government, whether the government is the USA or Israel or some other. For example, the fact that NORAD stood down on 9/11 and did not scramble jets to pursue any of the planes, as is required by law, and as is routinely done.
Of course, one must guard against people who promote this mindless view subsequently skipping over contrary evidence, such as:
Thus the truth is that there are parts to the US government and certainly others that are exceedingly competent. The idea that government is incompetent is common in America because there is a prevailing ideological view that governments are incompetent compared to corporations i.e. the private sector. What is most freakish of all are those people would clearly rather argue that Muslims are virtually superhuman attackers, capable of perpetrating 9/11 and perhaps far more, rather than accept that some part of the US government or another government (Israel) is capable of doing it.
They at once argue that
8. This would have required a grand conspiracy if it the government really did it.The belief that perpetrating 9/11 from inside the governemnt would require a huge number of people is born out of ignorance. There is no defensible basis for this argument.
This line of reasoning is full of holes:
How many people were required?Perpetrating 9/11 from within the US government and/or with the assistance of Mossad simply required highly committed people, moved into the correct positions of power such as in the Pentagon. How many? Only in the hundreds according to Dr. Steven Jones.It may well be the case that the 9/11 perpetrators were people loyal to Israel -- either Israelis or Americans such as Dick Cheney. Or it may have been the CIA. 9. Muslims hate us so obviously they did it.Anyone who's ever watched a cop show knows that just because someone had a motive, that doesn't mean they committed a crime.While Islam is clearly a very troubling religion, because a Muslim is not permitted to question or criticize key issues about Islam, and therefore some of its followers explicitly practice a totalitarian version of Islam that seeks to conquer the non-Muslim part of the world and kill anyone who opposes that, even that doesn't logically imply that Muslims of that type or any other perpetrated 9/11. Sorry! To prove that Muslims committed 9/11, you have to show evidence and establish a logical basis for reaching that conclusion. Unfortunately, the US government has confiscated much critical evidence and refuses to release it to the public. That in itself is suspicious behavior. But if you realize that there is evidence that criminal elements in the government perpetrated 9/11, their refusal to release the evidence that they confiscated (i.e. evidence they haven't destroyed) is high suspicious: It suggests but doesn't prove that the criminals are hiding evidence of their own crimes, or that witless lackeys were duped into hiding evidence of crimes. At a minimum, the government and media's logic does not hold up to scrutiny, and since they make no serious effort to prove their own claims, there is no reason to believe their story. That they have spent so much effort confiscating evidence is disturbing. 10. We cannot explain it therefore there was no conspiracy.It is common to hear irrational people use this type of argument, which is Argument from Personal Incredulity.The skeptic says that just because he cannot understand physics or how explosives work, it follows that 9/11 was not an inside job after all. Typically the person will expand this approach when while switching to an ad hominem attack against whoever is saying 9/11 was an inside job by claiming that they (the truthers) aren't experts either therefore they don't understand it all really, so that settles it. Of course it settles nothing, because even if 90% of the claims of the 9/11 truth movement fall away, the core claims are valid and very powerful. 11. Buildings fall down all the time so 9/11 is nothing special.This is an uncreative, illogical lie intended to discourage analysis.
A and B, therefore X. But of course, premise A is false. Buildings don't fall down all the time, and if they did then we would hear about it. Indeed, the media would take advantage of the situation and encouraged us to feel that we are in constant peril. Consider this reasonable argument, C therefore Y:
The transposition of this is NOT Y, therefore NOT C, i.e. we do not hear about building collapses constantly, therefore buildings do not fall down all the time. This is a much more rational assessment. 12. Buildings fell down at freefall speed because a heavy strong thing (the upper floors falling) that strikes a weak thing (each individual floor below) will crash through it.This is a lie in which the proponent deliberately ignores the collapse of WTC 7 in order to claim that the collapse of the Twin Towers was reasonable and ends all discussion.It relies on many omissions of information:
Once the omitted facts are recognized, we can assess the situation logically:
But this is illogical, because in order for the upper floors to pound the lower floors to dust, they have to expend kinetic energy (i.e. momentum, which is mass times speed). But in expending that kinetic energy, the floors would have slowed down, therefore free-fall speed would not have been achieved. Therefore, something else destroyed the lower floors and removed them before the upper floors hit them. Of course, all the evidence points to controlled demolition, whose practitioners specifically use explosives to remove lower floors using demolitions. 13. If a plane did not hit the Pentagon then where did the plane and passengers go? You cannot explain therefore 9/11 was perpetrated by Muslims.This is a common logical fallacy known to some as the Achilles heal fallacy. It is caused by the mistaken belief that a theory consisting of many claims falls apart if just one claim is disproven. You'll remember this from my introduction at the top.
A and B, therefore X. You can see this fallacy operating in many contexts, not just 9/11. For instance:
14. Where are the 9/11 whistleblowers?This is a curious reasoning which crops up from time to time.
A and B, therefore X. First, this misconception assumes that no one has come forward. This is not true.
Second, the bigger the crime, the greater the pressure that will be imposed to keep quiet. Third, it is mainly the security services of the USA and Israel who seem to have perpetrated 9/11. In their world, the expression "I could tell you but I'd have to kill you" is a reality. People are expected, as in the mafia, to keep their mouths shut. In the mafia, this is called omerta, meaning the code of silence. While some "spy" types to eventually brag about their exploits, that comes decades later if ever. Even novice observers of the CIA and other security services know that their histories feature numerous assassinations and collateral killings. Fourth, A and B are separate. It is quite possible for the US government to do something terrible and yet no one comes forward. And it is possible for someone to blow the whistle when the US government has not done anything wrong. ConclusionsAs you can see, some very fundamental aspects of the official 9/11 story don't hold water. And without that, because these are the foundations of the story, the story itself can hardly be true.So why do people persist in believing the government and media's fantastical story? They consider the public dumb monkeysWhen people believe strongly about something that they do not have the knowledge to understand, the strength of those feelings can override their nature desire to learn and understand. They become strong-headed and stubborn. They don't want to hear new evidence or reasoning. They become like the angry mob descending on an accused person, the dumb mob that takes justice into its own hands. As Socrates said: "They think they know, but they do not, and that is ignorance."And to be sure, the powerful people who really did order that 9/11 happen, this "mob hit" on American democracy if you will, whether they be intelligence services or international bankers or whoever, know very well that they have excited strong feelings and funneled those feelings toward a safe target: Safe for them, that is. They want you to feel, don't think. They are elitists. They think the public is a dumb monkey that will never look behind the curtain. They consider the public cowardly sheepBy keeping the facts about 9/11 from the public and out of the media, by limiting debate, by employing their people in the media and academia to make sure no one learns the truth, they have encouraged those of the public who would rather stick their heads in the sand to do just that. "Go back to your life, don't think about big doings. You're a little person. Leave it up to the specialists." Unfortunately major scams are perpetrated in this way and continue to be.Links
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