Applying logical analysis to the events of 9/11

For specific evidence mentioned on this page, see my main 9/11 page, here.

The House of Cards

Imagine a scale that has two extremes:

At one end, a claim is proven when any of let's say 100 sub-claims are proven correct.
At the other end, a claim is proven only when all 100 sub-claims are proven correct.

In the first case, it's easy to prove the larger claim. In the second case, it's very hard, and if any one sub-claim is proven false, the House of Cards as it were collapses.

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 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:

Laws of physics
Evidence

The propagandists who are pushing the official theory want you to believe the 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 have been traumatized so much by 9/11 that they are willing to believe illogical nonsense, just as they did after the JFK assassination.

What arises in light of the logical improbability of the official story is the picture of the angry-mob mentality. After the shock of 9/11 wore off, people wanted someone to blame. The FBI was quick to provide their patsies: 19 Muslims. The media were quick to supplement this with videos of cheering Pakistanis. And Americans who were unaccustomed to questioning the government were eager to seize on the patsy strawman argument. Then, the government quietly destroyed or lost or made classified or lied about critical criminal evidence concerning every attack on 9/11.

1. Let us attempt to prove the official story

Premise A: The attackers were, like all terrorists, devout Muslims.
Premise B: The attackers were bent on attacking the USA.
Premise C: The attackers obtained sufficient skills to fly airplanes.
Premise D: The attackers obtained sufficient money for their enterprise.
Premise E: The attackers obtained men to fill out their teams.
Conclusion X: Muslim terrorists attacked the USA on 9/11.

Deduction #1 is essentially this: If A and B and C and D and E, 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:

A is proven false.
- Mohammed Atta and co-terrorist visited a strip club in Las Vegas days before 9/11, which devout Muslims would never do. (As reported by the national media.)
- Mohammed Atta and co-terrorist gambled on a gambling ship off the coast of Florida owned by Jack Abramoff off the coast of Florida days before 9/11, which again devout Muslims would never do. (Multiple eyewitnesses explained what they saw to a Florida newspaper.)
B is assumed true. We're told the CIA was watching Atta (keep in mind the CIA is believed by some as having perpetrated 9/11). If evidence is plentiful, why did the military destroy gigabytes of data collected while watching Mohammed Atta during Operation "Able Danger"?
C is proven false.
- Hamid Hamza's flight instructor reported that he was barely able to fly a two-seater Cessna.
D may be true, because we know $100,000 came from the head of the ISI shortly before 9/11. The ISI is the Pakistani intelligence service. But, if true, why do we still call Pakistan our ally? Furthermore, why do men who are about to die need so much money?
E may be false, because several "hijackers" were found to be alive and well in Saudi Arabia after 9/11. (As reported by the BBC.)

2. There were terrorists on the planes -- right?

If you look at the manifest lists for the planes that supposedly hit the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and crashed in Pennsylvania, you find few Arab names. For example:

CNN: American Airlines flight 77 passenger list
SFGate:United Airlines flight 93 passenger list.
USA Today: All flights

The claims:

Premise A: The 19 terrorists boarded the planes like every other passenger.
Premise B: The 19 terrorists used real Arab names when boarding.
Premise C: The 19 terrorists used fake names but were not questioned.
Conclusion X: The 19 terrorists were indeed on the planes used on 9/11.

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 "Fred Brown" and were not questioned. If this seems like a stretch, that's because it is. Let's suppose the propability 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% In other words, extremely unlikely.

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.

Source: Time magazine story about Coreen Rowley

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.

Source: Complete 9/11 Timeline, topic Able Danger.

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.

Premise A: The 19 terrorists were in the USA on 9/11.
Premise B: Government agents from the FBI and Pentagon had been watching many of them carefully.
Premise C: Managers internal to the FBI and Pentagon respectively told investigators to do nothing about the Muslims in question.
Conclusion X: Therefore the terrorists were free to board the planes and did so.

In order for B to be true, clearly A must be true. And then: If A and B and C, therefore X. Unfortunately, we already know that:

A is false, because the BBC shortly after 9/11 discovered that several of the 19 were alive and well in Saudi Arabia, and complained of stolen identities.
- Source: BBC Sept 23, 2001
B appears to be true however we have to take FBI and Pentagon employees' word for it. Also, these scandals suggest an even higher-up official telling both FBI and Pentagon to stifle investigations. Could that be the White House, perhaps?
C is a curious sub-claim. If true, whichever FBI manager and/or Pentagon manager committed this wrong should be fired. But (as far as I know) no one has.

4. The FBI and Pentagon managers who told underlings to ignore the terrorist-suspects 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:

Premise A: An FBI or Pentagon manager does something horribly wrong for no good reason and thousands of people die as a result.
Conclusion X: Result? He is fired.

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.

If you protest the Iraq war, the cops attack you.
If you protest Bush or Cheney, the cops attack you.
If you protest globalization, the cops attack you.

So he said, 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 and arrested I think two 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.

Premise A: "The cat is already out of the bag" meaning powerful interests have already been somehow implicated in some wrongdoing.
Premise B: The guilty party has managed the situation and will not be held accountable, e.g. by exerting influence over judges or other corrupt means.
Premise C: The public is apathetic toward protesters.
Conclusion X: There is no risk in beating up protesters.

The implication is: 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:

NOT A: It is not the case that the cat is out of the bag.
NOT B: It is not the case that the guilty have prevented being held accountable.
NOT C: It is not the case that the public is apathetic toward protesters.

Looking at these three, can we eliminated any?

NOT A = TRUE, according to activists. The true specific groups who perpetrated 9/11 are not accounted for. Too much evidence suggests it was not Al Qaeda. For example:
- Eyewitnesses heard many secondary explosions in the Twin Towers.
- The collapse of WTC building 7 date in the day on 9/11 was highly suspicous since it was not hit by any plane, nor debris, nor did it have significant fires. History shows that fires do not bring down steel buildings anyway.
- Eyewitnesses say workmen going into the towers before 9/11 doing suspicious wiring operations.
- Eyewitnesses say one of the planes to hit the towers was clearly gray without windows on the side and looked like a military plane.
- George W Bush's youngest brother Marvin and a cousin helped run the security company that exclusively managed security for both the WTC complex and Dulles airport before and on 9/11.
- An Italian former prime minister and head of the Italian spy agency said it was well known in the intelligence community that 9/11 was done by the CIA and Mossad.
- And so on.
NOT B = FALSE, according to the official story.
- If you assert that Osama BinLaden and Al Qaeda perpetrated 9/11, then they have avoided prosecution. There have been essentially no serious convictions.
NOT C = FALSE. Unfortunately the public is apathetic toward protesters, largely because of conditioning by the mass media.

Thus, by process of elimination we have the answer: 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:

Premise A: "A person travels a lot and sees many kinds of faces, and hears many languages spoken by those faces."
Premise B: "A person who works in any customer service job must pay more attention to people than a person who does not need to interact with people."
Conclusion X: "Their brain adapts to differentiate ethnicities."

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.

Premise A: "There are some examples of incompetence in the government."
Conclusion X: "Everyone in the government is incompetent."

Of course, one must guard against people who promote this mindless view subsequently skipping over contrary evidence, such as:

The US government put men on the moon.
The US government built numerous public works such as the Hoover Dam.
The US government won World War II.

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

Muslims are the ultimate enemy and
Our government is the supremely incompetent.

And this is the seed that grows into true fascism, because they would surely argue that:

The supreme enemy necessitates an absolute war mentality starting with removal of all civil liberties to fight.
Incompetence is caused by democracy and necessitates replacement with rule by corporations and authoritarianism.

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.

Premise A: "For 9/11 to be an inside job, people inside the government had to know" [true]
Premise B: "If people inside the government knew, they would have told others."
Conclusion X: "Someone inside the government would have leaked the truth."

This line of reasoning is full of holes:

It presupposes that people are allowed to talk without being killed as a result. That is nonsensical since obviously there are highly classified operations and the penalty for divulging some of them is prison or death.
It presupposes that everyone working in government is loyal to the USA. This is false. There are many people who are dual-citizens of Israel and the USA working in the government and even in high positions of the Pentagon. An example is Dov Zakheim. He was in charge of Pentagon finances when $2.3 trillion went missing.
It assumes that talking with the public is as common and trivial as talking wiht other government workers.

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.

Belief without proof is foolish.