911 planned by the US Government?

[MrColossal]

Have you read about many explinations as to why the towers did collapse? Or do you only read about the conspiracy?

Also, if this was allowed to happen by the US government, what about the hundreds of people that would know that it was a cover up?

[Raggit]

I am familiar with the non-conspiracy explanations for the collapse of the towers, such as the "pancake effect," or whatever they called it. 
After 9/11, I was acceptiong of ANY explanation, just because I was shocked.  I believed every word Bush spoke, and supported him fully.  But as the trauma from 9/11 wore off, I began to think for myself, and I realized that maybe he wasn't everything he said he was.  Once I started looking into these things, it just started getting deeper and deeper, and more complex. 

Where I stand today is a far cry from the "We just need to support our president no matter what" stance I used to hold.

As for those involved in the cover up, they're either benificiaries of the scheme, and have no reason to reveal information, or they are blackmailed, discredited and forced to be quiet.
I would cite Richard Clarke and Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame as examples of the depths the White House will sink to in order to shut people up who know too much.

[MrColossal]

Outing a CIA agent and smearing Richard Clarke is a far far cry from allowing the murder of thousands of Americans. If you allow the murder of thousands of Americans why did they just out Valerie Wilson? Why didn't they just have her killed "Woops, sometimes that happens in the CIA!" why aren't they assassinating anyone who disagrees with them?

If they have the ability to destroy the sense of security of the American people, destroy 2+ buildings, kill thousands of people, leave thousands and thousands more without jobs and destroy the economy. Why did they just leak Valerie Wilson's name?

Obviously you can't go around assassinating people who disagree with you, people would notice. But you also can't go around allowing terrorists to succeed in attacking the US 3 times in one early morning strike without someone SCREAMING against it. How can they possibly keep hundereds of people quiet? Blackmail and payoffs make no sense, how can you believe that?

[LimpingFish]

"Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness."

LimpingFish puts away his Big Book of Quotes

[MarVelo]

...the fires did not burn hot enough, or long enough to weaken the steel to the point of collapse. Ã, 

Um...yes they did. That is a simple fact.

The Feul from the planes saturated the floors that they hit.

[Raggit]

...the fires did not burn hot enough, or long enough to weaken the steel to the point of collapse. Ã, 

Um...yes they did. That is a simple fact.

The Feul from the planes saturated the floors that they hit.

Proof?

[Nacho]

Proof in the opposite direction?

[SSH]

I think 911 was planned by an elit emilitant group of conspiracy theorists so they and their colleagues had a new topic to obsess over. Apparently, though, there has been a 911 every year for at least the last 100 years, but the government has hushed them up! :o :o :o :

[Radiant]

The towers were over-engineered, and I believe the creators specified that even if two of the main support columns were entirely cut, the towers still would've stood.

The towers were engineered differently than older and more time-tested skyscrapers, and many experts claim that an old-style skyscraper would have withstood the attack better. You can't compare the neat removal of redundant support columns with the impact of a hundred tons of flying steel. My source is the Wikipedia article; what is yours?

The trade center buildings had well over 1000 times the mass of the aircrafts that hit them,

Plausible, but entirely irrelevant if you know anything about demolition, or classical mechanics. Impulse equals mass times VELOCITY, therefore a smaller mass moving at a higher speed can do ugly things to a larger mass that is stationary.

and were built to withstand high wind loads of 30 times the aircraft's weight.

Physically speaking, that sentence doesn't make any sense. You're comparing wind speed with aircraft weight, the proverbial apple and orange. (if you want to compare velocities, cruise speed of an airplane is several times faster than hurricane-level wind speed)

The buildings would've easily absorbed whatever energy and shock was produced by the initial impact. 

Both theory and practice easily prove you wrong. Please read up into physics before talking about energy absorption like this.

It is interesting to note that none of the steel from the wreckage of the towers was tested or studied to see what caused it to fail.  The towers were allegedly built with very high-intregrity steel, which would've have easily survived the heat. 

There was an extensive investigation, and the conclusion was that the initial shockwave caused the removal of large amounts of fireproofing, which allowed the kerosene-fueled fire to wreak havoc. Fire can cause damage in other ways than melting the steel.

I would encourage you to look at any footage of the trade centers collapsing.  The towers just seem to slide into the earth, as if they were sitting on top of a massive hole in the ground, and somebody just pulled the foundation right out from under them.

This is characteristic of gravity. Towers don't fall sideways, they fall down.

Again, if the frame of the structure gave way because of melting steel, the whole building wouldn't have just fell in on itself, only the affected floors would fall away, and I would expect more of a crumbling effect. 

It's fine that you expect that, but your earlier posts have not exactly indicated a substantial grasp of high-level physics. Steel doesn't have to melt to collapse.

The eyewitnesses and firefighters that survived described multiple explosions, some of which actually blew them against the wall, etc.  They all believed that there were bombs planted throughout the building.

They ALL believed that? Heck no. Of course there were multiple explosions; if a fire spreads, any time it hits a new source of fuel (such as a large room full of oxygen) it causes a flare.

Finally, most of all, I'd suggest looking into what happened to building 7.  No airplane hit that one, and it fell straight down like the other two.

The results were similar therefore the causes must have been similar. That reasoning is fallacious. Sorry, but your scientific and logical backing doesn't hold water.

[Haddas]

And you think you're open-minded.

"I think tha..." "DISMISSED"

Jeeeesus...

[Nostradamus]

I hate these conspiracy theories. And I think such thing discussion should not be allowed here because 1) disrespects thosands of victims and their famlilies 2) it's propaganda against Americans, and I'm not American, and this is a worldwide forum and I don't think political arguments bashing any country or nation should be allowed in a place like this.

Some of the arguements people have posted are ridiculous like "the building were desgined to withstand a jet crash" who the hell would plan a building thinking how to defend it from a jet crashing through it? no one could ever think about such a thing it never happened anywhere.
I'm not gonna furhter discuss other arguements cos they don't deserve to be discussed.

[Las Naranjas]

PROOF!?

[Krysis]

I can not say what exatly happened. It is all possible you know. Maybe the US didn't planned, but decided to close their eyes about it. Maybe not. Truth is hard to find.
The fact is: The 09.11 was used as an excuse for USA to play the war game. So were Saddam's bombs. USA doesn't seem like the good guys to me. Sad, but true. :

[Andail]

PORFO!1!?!?

[big brother]

Radiant, my point was the bulk of the fuel was consumed in the initial fireball, and the fires did not burn hot enough, or long enough to weaken the steel to the point of collapse. Ã, The towers were over-engineered, and I believe the creators specified that even if two of the main support columns were entirely cut, the towers still would've stood.

It is interesting to note that none of the steel from the wreckage of the towers was tested or studied to see what caused it to fail.Ã,  The towers were allegedly built with very high-intregrity steel, which would've have easily survived the heat.Ã,  If these two buildings were the first in history to entirely collapse due to melting steel, you'd think that'd be worth investigating.

"Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength--and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."

"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.

But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F."
(http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=4&c=y)

In addition refer to http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34342,00.html. Apparently, some asbestos insulation could've gone a long way.

The fact is: The 09.11 was used as an excuse for USA to play the war game. So were Saddam's bombs. USA doesn't seem like the good guys to me. Sad, but true.

What?
With the 1988 Genocide of the Kurds under his belt (close to 200,000 men, women, and children), Saddam's not exactly an innocent softie. Unlike Santa Claus, he does not want to deliver presents to the children of the world. And maybe the fact that UN inspectors (can anyone say mole?) could not find evidence in Iraqi weapon facilities means that the US invasion was timed well enough to be preventive. There's still little things like this: http://www.slate.com/id/2139609/ that I find suspicious.
I just don't feel sympathy for the guy.

But that's a whole other hive of bees.

[Helm]

Oh yes, and the massive insurance benifit that Larry Silverstein stood to gain.

This is not me saying this didn't happen, but I really really would rather believe there is NO MAN ALIVE ON THIS EARTH that would kill so many innocent people for financial gain. Not if they can get away with it, not if they can't, doesn't matter. My brain just refuses to believe this. Note: I can accept and do accept that countries, people on the whole will butcher as many children for money or power as they have to, but the dynamics of group action have peculiarities all of their own. It's easy to do something atrocious when you're part of and hidden behind a regime or group that uniformly 'takes the blame', and it happens over a long period of time and many things happen at the same time diffusing the situation.

But if there is a man that can stand there all by his self and can say "yes, I will now press this button and instantly kill 10,000 people because it will make me rich" then... wow. I can't even grasp this! I am not very naive, but that is just beyond me. This doesn't provide any evidence against the premise of this Larry being that kind of man, just saying, if he exists, I would probably look right through him and disregard him as existing completely, this is how much I don't get it.

1) Even if the conspiracies are true, the evidence is not there. (And if it is, no one is going to do anything about it.)

Not much for civil action are you? Democracy?

2) People with money and power do atrocities to us, the little people, all the time. (Read your history books.)

and things have to be as they always were, right?

3) We live in their world, they sway us the way they like. (It's called propaganda.) If you don't like it...too bad!

Not much for civil action are you? Democracy?

4) The media is controlled by those with money and power. They help sway the masses.

and things have to be as they always were, right?

5) So who has all the money? Where do they get all this money? What does a rich (wo)man do with all this money? It's really quite simple...

PLEASE TELL ME. SERIOUSLY. I NEED TO KNOW THIS SIMPLE THING.

There are plenty of reasons why the US would fake a moon landing and each of them is about as stretched as "To invade Iraq" or "For geopolitical power".

I agree with almost everything else you've said in this thread and find this very far-fetched myself. However, your 'why' question begs for oversimplifications nobody can provide about anything that *has* happened too. Historians try and they're doing the most educated guesses and still they themselves say that things happen as they do in very complicated concert. The greeks didn't go to war with troy over the beautiful Helen any more than did the americans drop the bomb. There is no simple answer to your 'why' on anything. It's so many little cells made of people doing so many different things that interface on the microscopical level to the most absurd global level at the same time that are driven this way and that in the course of history. Why did World War II happen? Because the way of the world demanded it. Why did 9/11 happen? Because the way of the world demanded it. This isn't to say these are *answers*. But your question cannot be answered in a single breath by anyone on this planet, be them believers in the conspiracy or not, so it's unfair to use this as a tool in this debate. Best stick to WHAT happened, and let the historians take 300 years to figure out a semi-competent theoretical construction of what was going on in the world at that time that sorta explains the factors that determined why the attack (or 'attack', I have no opinion) happened. There is no single-minded, determined, human will behind ANYTHING in history. It's all little ants doing little things all at once.

The towers just seem to slide into the earth

seem. There's such a thing called the untrained eye? Many things seem to be behaving in an unexpected way. This is not evidence. This is a demand. "This MUST have happened like that because it looked like that to me!" Learn the difference and stick to giving links to what more informed people than you have said on the topic, in far less assured tone. The ease with which you chat for the minority opinion on something so mind-numbingly complex as a plane hitting a tall building is shocking me. It's like I'm looking at two teenagers discussing dna-splicing or quantum mechanics, over coke and pizza, in the most reassured tone possible.

I don't have any doubts about it myself.

Why? Because it seemed like we did?

Where I stand today is a far cry from the "We just need to support our president no matter what" stance I used to hold.

Great. And that a terrorist attack might have occured in your country absolutely did not and does not mean you have to believe everything your president told you. The point is: Bush is a bad president, your whole govermental system is corrupt and in no relation to the will of the common people besides the superficialities of choosing your king for the next 4 years, and that's something you should be devoting much more effort into than trying to knee-jerk yourself in a paranoid position over who did the terrorist strike.

[MrColossal]

Helm RE: "Why"

The thing behind why I aks why is... People who believe in these conspiracy theories seem to be able to think up [not actually discover, but imagine]a reason for everything and I find the more you ask a conspiracy theorist "But why, explain that more..." the more far fetched their explinations get and the more... I guess... Ammo you have against them. Like how Raggit seems to believe that you can keep hundreds of people quiet over something as huge as this by just paying them enough money or black mailing them. People have ratted on the Mafia countless times throughout history where they KNOW they'd die if the cops they told were on the take or if the mafia ever found them and they still did it. I can't remember his name and it's killing me but a man just confessed to tons of illegal activities related to washington and paying people off, he was 70 something years old and he'll go to jail for the rest of his life, he lost all his money and property and he has a wife and children. He said it was the right thing to do. Washington can't even keep private emails private how can they keep 100% of the people in on this deal quiet?

Then again the other problem with asking conspiracy theorists questions is that after a while I guess they stop answering you. Since Raggit skipped my questions all together... Oh well.

I don't mean to ask "why did 9/11 happen" I mean to ask "Why would you believe that?" Sure something like war is a bunch of little cells of people all doing things that eventually adds up. But a mass coverup of the Bush administration either allowing 4 terrorist strikes in 1 day or actually placing bombs in the WTC and helping to destroy it... That is not something where you can say "It's just people existing that caused this to happen." In my opinion.

[Helm]

I see how you use the 'why' thing, you've done it before in similar situations. I agree a cover-up of this magnitude seems not exactly probable at all. My uninformed opinion is that the terrorist attack happened with no knowledge or at least not full wide-spread knowledge in the US administration beforehand, but was, and is still exploited by the current administration very expertly and as much as possible at all times.

I can picture a high-ranking official (or more than one) in the whitehouse receiving a phone-call 24 hours beforehand and getting the news of what will happen and then just saying 'ok' and putting the phone down, calculating the possible benefits. I can see that. I can't see Bush discussing it with his think tank around beers and pretzels and going 'tomorrow 10,000 americans die lol! We're totally going to use this good, but uh, guys, keep it on the lowdown, ok?'

[Raggit]

Mr. Colossal, what questions did I skip?

I'm not sure how I feel about being labeled a conspiracy theorist.Ã,  Is anybody who doubts anything automatically a conspiracy theorist?Ã, 

Anyway, maybe this is my fault, for not making this clear, but just incase I didn't mention this before: I don't automatically ASSUME that the events of 9/11 were DEFINATELY a hoax committed by the government just to create a pass key for whatever ambitions they had.Ã,  I just think that since this is such a massive and complex event, with so many unanswered questions, it should be scrutinized from all angles.

There are numerous holes in the current conspiracy theories circulating about 9/11, and I try to be equally critical about those as I am the official story.

However, I also see numerous holes in the official explanation for 9/11 as well.

This is one of those things that we may never know exactly what happened.Ã,  Possibly, only our great, great grandchildren will know for certain!Ã, 

I myself have no problem believing that our government would kill thousands (even Americans) if they thought they could benefit.Ã,  I mean, look at the war in Iraq!Ã,  They've killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over 2300 American troops, but they don't care, as long as there is still oil to be harvested.

Given the name "911 planed by US government," I thought this would be an open discussion, but I can see that folks are very skittish of the idea that 9/11 wasn't what it looked like, and what the media and government IMMEDIATELY started saying it was.

EDIT:

By the way, in regards to what Helm said about being overly assured in my mannerism, I guess I should apologize for that, too.  Personally, I didn't think I was in acting in such a way, but if I was, sorry.

[big brother]

Don't catastrophes usually get immediate coverage?

Is that your argument against the official explanation?

When I see a plane smack into a building, I don't assume it's the government trying to fuck its citizens. Because of this, your theory is the alternative hypothesis not the null.

Skiddish is not an apt word. It will take more than hunches and circumstancial evidence to convince me of a secret conspiracy against innocent civilians.