you know what's astonishing?

[Shpira]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

What was their motive, in your mind?

I unlike my fellow conspiracy theory believers do not think its was an "evil" sect trying to impose their will on the world.
No, it think the most likely motive is always the simplest one i.e. MONEY.
Defence contracts, CIA budget, Private and state groups and individuals that would profit from increase in spending if something like this happened. You invent this new enemy and clean up. No need to advertise or compete there is enough for all and all you need to say is the T word. Think about it no one even questions any of the shit we hear...imagine if it wasn't the Taliban and if it was someone else...anyone! As there is as much concrete evidence this is the Taliban work as there is that it was done by Santa's sleigh. So if that's not true...why the fuck are we in two wars? Its just not enough solid evidence for me to say hey lets go to war and kill a bunch of ppl because they might have maybe had some small part or performed the physical act. Its ridiculous...I am meant to believe that a bunch or uneducated bearded psychos sat in a cave in the middle of fucking Afghanistan plotting and planing and in the end they outsmarted the whole world? BULLSHIT.

[chunky]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

^^Nail on the head. This is what res0 seemed to overlook when watching the news. David Cameron & Obama have just this week remortgaged the war for another 5 years. Hopfully another enemy will pop up by then giving them another war to finance.

[floridaorange]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

I unlike my fellow conspiracy theory believers do not think its was an "evil" sect trying to impose their will on the world.
No, it think the most likely motive is always the simplest one i.e. MONEY.
Defence contracts, CIA budget, Private and state groups and individuals that would profit from increase in spending if something like this happened. You invent this new enemy and clean up. No need to advertise or compete there is enough for all and all you need to say is the T word. Think about it no one even questions any of the shit we hear...imagine if it wasn't the Taliban and if it was someone else...anyone! As there is as much concrete evidence this is the Taliban work as there is that it was done by Santa's sleigh. So if that's not true...why the fuck are we in two wars? Its just not enough solid evidence for me to say hey lets go to war and kill a bunch of ppl because they might have maybe had some small part or performed the physical act. Its ridiculous...I am meant to believe that a bunch or uneducated bearded psychos sat in a cave in the middle of fucking Afghanistan plotting and planing and in the end they outsmarted the whole world? BULLSHIT.

That's all fine and good that you think that, but I can promise you, you're wrong. I'm not sure how many years you've lived in America, but this did not happen so that individuals in our Gov't could then profit. People do profit after wars have started, but wars are not started so that people can profit.

These fools:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/?utm_campaign=homepage&utm_medium=bigimage&utm_source=bigimage

Are not looking for an imaginary group of Muslims camping out in caves either...

Please educate yourself on who these terrorists were, and how they hijacked the planes and why:

The 9/11 Hijackers
By Jonathan Yardley
Sunday, May 1, 2005


PERFECT SOLDIERS
The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It


Earlier this year the British writer Gerald Seymour constructed an exceptionally good novel, The Unknown Soldier , around the premise that the men who are drawn into the embrace of al Qaeda are not at all who we think they are. We believe, as one of his characters puts it, that they are "brainwashed," when in fact "Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants . . . have refined a skill in identifying young men of varying social backgrounds and economic advantage who are prepared to make supreme sacrifices for a cause." They are not necessarily loners but are attracted to "the excitement of being a part of that select fugitive family," they have strong "personal self-esteem," they seek "adventure and purpose."



Now, in Perfect Soldiers , Terry McDermott provides the hard facts behind the fictional picture that Seymour so persuasively draws. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times who has been on the story of the September 2001 terrorist attacks since the day they occurred, McDermott has talked to everyone -- everyone who will talk, that is -- and read everything, the result of which is what may well be, for now at least, the definitive book on the 19 men who brought such devastation and terror to this country nearly four years ago. Clearly written in good, plain English, Perfect Soldiers is a group portrait of ordinary men who were driven to do a surpassingly evil thing.



McDermott takes his title from Dashiell Hammett: "He was the perfect soldier: he went where you sent him, stayed where you put him, and had no idea of his own to keep him from doing exactly what you told him." The last part of that equation is not wholly true of these young men -- Mohamed Atta, for example, was a planner of the Sept. 11 attacks as well as an instrument of al Qaeda's will -- but the overall description is accurate. Having discovered a cause for which they were ready -- indeed, often eager -- to sacrifice their own lives, these young jihadists followed orders as precisely and dutifully as the most assiduously trained U.S. Marine.



They were not born to be soldiers -- none seems to have come from a military background -- and there was little in their early lives to suggest that they would become what they did. The pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, Atta, came from "an ambitious, not overtly religious middle-class household in Egypt" and had led "a sheltered life" until he arrived in Hamburg, Germany, in 1992 to do graduate study in architecture. The pilot of the second plane, Marwan al-Shehhi, was an amiable, "laid-back" fellow from the United Arab Emirates who had joined the UAE army, "not the world's most effective fighting force but one of its most generous, paying [its scholarship] students monthly stipends of about $2,000," which may have been his primary reason for enlisting; this enabled him to go to Hamburg, though there is little evidence that he "had any serious scholarly ambitions."



Hani Hanjour, the Saudi pilot who flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon, "had lived in the United States off and on throughout the 1990s, mostly in Arizona, intermittently taking flying lessons at several different flying schools." He was, in the view of one of his flight instructors, "intelligent, friendly, and 'very courteous, very formal,' a nice enough fellow but a terrible pilot." He finally got a commercial license from the FAA but was unable to find work here or in the Middle East. As for Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, he was "the handsome middle child and only son of an industrious, middle-class family in Beirut," a "secular Muslim" family that "was easygoing -- the men drank whiskey and the women wore short skirts about town and bikinis at the beach." At university in Germany he met Aysel Sengün, "the daughter of conservative, working-class Turkish immigrants"; eventually they got married, but he disappeared for long periods, usually without explanation, leaving her frantic.



His disappearances, like changes in the other men's lives, were traceable to his discovery of radical Islam and jihad -- not jihad as "the individual's daily struggle for his own soul," but jihad as a Muslim's " obligation to fight on behalf of his beliefs, against nonbelievers and corrupters of belief." Eventually he too found his way to Hamburg, where he joined many other young Muslims in prayer and discussion, sometimes at a mosque called al Quds (the Arabic name for Jerusalem), sometimes in one of the various group houses where the men lived austerely and piously: "The Hamburg men who joined their plights to that of fundamentalist Islam chose not simply a new mosque or religious doctrine but an entry to a new way of life, the acquisition of a new world view, in fact, of a new world." To Atta and a friend who called himself Omar (ultimately he became the backstage coordinator of the 2001 attacks under his real name, Ramzi Binalshibh), "no matter where they fought, their real enemies were the Jews, and ultimately the Americans. 'One has to do something about America,' Omar said."



For all of them, radical Islam and jihad soon became obsessions, eclipsing everything else. Studies were abandoned, families ignored, the outer world denied as they plunged themselves into their fanatical version of faith. As a German investigator put it: "They are not talking about daily life stuff, such as buying cars -- they buy cars, but they don't talk about it, they talk about religion most of the time . . . these people are just living for their religion, meaning for them that they just live now for their life after death, the paradise. They want to live obeying their God, so they can enter paradise. Everything else doesn't matter." Talking one week of Kosovo, the next of Chechnya or Afghanistan, the "men were agreed: they wanted to fight -- they just didn't know which war."



It was, of course, Osama bin Laden who gave them their war. A preview of it had been staged in early 1993, when an ad hoc jihadist group under the leadership of the "master terrorist," Abdul Basit Abdul Karim, a.k.a. Ramzi Yousef, planted a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center's North Tower, "killing six people, injuring 1,000, and causing $300 million in damage." The United States was shocked, but clueless:



"To a considerable extent, America did not recognize the advent of a new age but whether anyone knew it or not, an era of religious terror had arrived. Intermingling religious and political goals had been the norm for most of human history. Islam itself came into the world with secular as well as sacred aims. What had changed in this latest incarnation had more to do with the world it was in than Islam itself. By the latter half of the twentieth century, the movement toward secular government had triumphed almost everywhere except in the Islamic world. The advocates of political Islam became aberrant simply by outlasting the political ambitions and empires of other religions. They might have been mere curious anachronisms had not the modern world provided them the means to wed their old beliefs to new, readily accessible technologies. The outcome of that union is terror on a scale not previously known."



Al Qaeda, McDermott argues, was almost ideally suited to waging this new war. Insisting that "all states in the Muslim world . . . be returned to Muslim doctrine" as they saw it and preaching "violent revolt against insufficiently Islamist regimes in the Middle East," al Qaeda came up with a doctrine perfectly suited to young, pious, single-minded men, and it had the organizational apparatus to mobilize them. It "was never the huge organization its opponents sometimes portrayed," having a core of "at most a couple hundred men," and its operations often were "crude," but its small size was one of its great strengths: "If Al Qaeda were a nation with all of the infrastructure that implies, it would have been more vulnerable to penetration by American intelligence. . . . The September 11 attacks were by far the biggest thing it had ever attempted, but even at that, the number of people involved in the plot could be counted by the handful. The scale helped keep it hidden."



Among that handful were the 15 hijackers who joined the pilots aboard the four airplanes. All but one were from Saudi Arabia, most "were from families headed by tradesmen and civil servants, well-off, but not wealthy," mostly "unexceptionable men," none of whom "stood out for their religious or political activism." As McDermott writes, "that young men from good backgrounds would leave homes and families without fanfare or discouragement was evidence of the broad support within Saudi Arabia for jihad." Contrary to rumor, McDermott says they knew they would die and welcomed martyrdom: "The men were trained in hand-to-hand combat in the Al Qaeda camps [in Afghanistan], taught the physical skills they would need for the sole task given them -- to physically overpower flight crews. The pilots were the leaders. The new men would be the muscle."



All 19 of these "perfect soldiers" now are dead. Whether they are in the paradise to which they believed their attack would deliver them we cannot possibly know, but McDermott's well-told, meticulously researched cautionary tale makes one thing clear: There are more of them. Whether we are more prepared for their next strike than we were for their last is something else we cannot know, but this much is certain: It will happen. ·





source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...801315_pf.html

[bobjuice]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

Terry McDermott?

[bobjuice]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

Can you tell me how you know who was flying those planes John?

[floridaorange]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

^Well I wasn't in the planes if that what you're asking? But I was living in San Diego, where one of the hijackers were renting an apartment.

Are you then telling me that you don't think Muslim extremists hijacked those planes full of American passengers? Then who do you think did Bob?

[bobjuice]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

^Well I wasn't in the planes if that what you're asking? But I was living in San Diego, where one of the hijackers were renting an apartment.

Are you then telling me that you don't think Muslim extremists hijacked those planes full of American passengers? Then who do you think did Bob?

I didn't think for a moment you were on one of those planes my old fruit
One of the guys lived in an apartment in San Diego where you lived at the time? Ok. So what?

It doesn't matter whether or not i think Muslim extremists did it. I'll happily admit that i have no way in the world of knowing who was behind the controls. I was just asking how you, or anyone else for that matter knows who flew the planes into the buildings?

Not think or believe, know

[bobjuice]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

So just keeping in mind that you, or me or anyone else for that matter doesn't know who the planes were being flown by - apart from the information we've been fed which is nothing like proof or solid fact, it's just info. With that in mind re-read your post above about the perfect soldiers etc and it reads a little differently don't you think? I'm not dismissing it out of hand but for you to say you can promise people they are wrong on the strength of it simply doesn't hold up.

[floridaorange]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

^Bob they know who were on the planes via who bought tickets, they have video of the hijackers boarding the planes, they have cell phone calls with people describing what they saw.

It's hard for me to argue this with you because it's already been laid out for everyone.

[chunky]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

^Bob they know who were on the planes via who bought tickets, they have video of the hijackers boarding the planes, they have cell phone calls with people describing what they saw.

It's hard for me to argue this with you because it's already been laid out for everyone.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/1559151.stm

Hijack 'suspects' alive and well

A man called Waleed Al Shehri says he left the US a year ago



Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well.
The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt.
Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September.
His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world.
Hijacking suspects
Flight 175: Marwan Al-Shehhi, Fayez Ahmed, Mohald Alshehri, Hamza Alghamdi and Ahmed Alghamdi

Flight 11: Waleed M Alshehri, Wail Alshehri, Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz Alomari and Satam Al Suqami

Flight 77: Khalid Al-Midhar, Majed Moqed, Nawaq Alhamzi, Salem Alhamzi and Hani Hanjour

Flight 93: Ahmed Alhaznawi, Ahmed Alnami, Ziad Jarrahi and Saeed Alghamdi


Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco.
He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports.
He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring.
But, he says, he left the United States in September last year, became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in Morocco.
Mistaken identity

Abdulaziz Al Omari, another of the Flight 11 hijack suspects, has also been quoted in Arab news reports.
Abdelaziz Al Omari 'lost his passport in Denver'

He says he is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and that he lost his passport while studying in Denver.
Another man with exactly the same name surfaced on the pages of the English-language Arab News.
The second Abdulaziz Al Omari is a pilot for Saudi Arabian Airlines, the report says.
Meanwhile, Asharq Al Awsat newspaper, a London-based Arabic daily, says it has interviewed Saeed Alghamdi.
Khalid Al-Midhar may also be alive


He was listed by the FBI as a hijacker in the United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
And there are suggestions that another suspect, Khalid Al Midhar, may also be alive. FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.

Hijack 'suspects' alive and well

A man called Waleed Al Shehri says he left the US a year ago



Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well.
The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt.
Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September.
His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world.
Hijacking suspects
Flight 175: Marwan Al-Shehhi, Fayez Ahmed, Mohald Alshehri, Hamza Alghamdi and Ahmed Alghamdi

Flight 11: Waleed M Alshehri, Wail Alshehri, Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz Alomari and Satam Al Suqami

Flight 77: Khalid Al-Midhar, Majed Moqed, Nawaq Alhamzi, Salem Alhamzi and Hani Hanjour

Flight 93: Ahmed Alhaznawi, Ahmed Alnami, Ziad Jarrahi and Saeed Alghamdi


Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco.
He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports.
He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring.
But, he says, he left the United States in September last year, became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in Morocco.
Mistaken identity

Abdulaziz Al Omari, another of the Flight 11 hijack suspects, has also been quoted in Arab news reports.
Abdelaziz Al Omari 'lost his passport in Denver'

He says he is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and that he lost his passport while studying in Denver.
Another man with exactly the same name surfaced on the pages of the English-language Arab News.
The second Abdulaziz Al Omari is a pilot for Saudi Arabian Airlines, the report says.
Meanwhile, Asharq Al Awsat newspaper, a London-based Arabic daily, says it has interviewed Saeed Alghamdi.
Khalid Al-Midhar may also be alive


He was listed by the FBI as a hijacker in the United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
And there are suggestions that another suspect, Khalid Al Midhar, may also be alive. FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.

[trick12]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

^Bob they know who were on the planes via who bought tickets, they have video of the hijackers boarding the planes, they have cell phone calls with people describing what they saw.

they were just the tools, they could have well been manipulated into doing something and not knowing the real purpose for it

[bobjuice]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

^Bob they know who were on the planes via who bought tickets, they have video of the hijackers boarding the planes,

The knowledge that someone bought a ticket or boarded a plane doesn't stand up as evidence that they were behind the controls when the planes hit, or were even aware of unfolding events.

We are expected to believe the same here (UK) regarding the London bombings of 2005. People accept as fact who the bombers were because they were filmed entering a train station at Luton (not London) that morning, they were of Eastern/Asian appearance and carried backpacks. Nothing else!

[Localizer]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

Ya, I have to agree that some part of 9/11 was set up. I will firmly agree that administrations, past and present, end up being good old boys clubs, handing out bids and contracts to their friends, whom all of which also know other companies or who own/operate smaller subsidiary companies that can take on other bids/contracts. The game really is about who your friends are and if they can get you that big contract.

As an aside, everytime I see Hillary Clinton, or even Bill, I think to myself 'what caniving sons of bitches.' Trust no politician; they are NOT your friends.

[trick12]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

The knowledge that someone bought a ticket or boarded a plane doesn't stand up as evidence that they were behind the controls when the planes hit, or were even aware of unfolding events.

exactly, and u should also google "tim osman" and put the pieces of the puzzle urself, put yourself in a neutral position and think it out, see who benefited the most from the attacks, and know that if something is too obvious and easy that it could well not be the truth and it was all staged and prepared even the video of the attack itself. i learned that if something is all over the media and they were so quick to come to the conclusions then thats is all part of a plan, just think about it who owns the media? sometimes people need to create a facade to hide behind it so that people will not question their post actions, and the easiest way to do this is through a small screen in ur house between ur two favorite shows, knowing that most americans will follow blindly and get back to their mundane life and voila they created a fake enemy for the next generations and its not new its just history repeating itself, just different people at a different time but the same process...

[floridaorange]

Re: you know what's astonishing?

You guys are fucking paranoid... 9/11 was not staged, and the hijackers are not alive still, give me a fucking break America might be a lot of things but its not a country that has a government that will bomb its own people with planes...

My whole point in starting this thread was that I learned how much people in other countries mistrust their governments. Yes right now Americans don't exactly love the Obama Admin or Ben Bernake, etc, but in other countries you guys seem to really think your government have it out for you, and perhaps they do?... (especially in Runningmans case, talk about a man scorned )

Anyway, Chunky this one's for you:



The story...

Many of the hijackers as named by America are still alive.

Our take...

This has never struck us as an idea that made much sense, especially if you believe the US Government were behind 9/11. If you were constructing a fake terrorist attack because you wanted to attack Afghanistan, or Iraq, then wouldn’t you involve a few Afghans or Iraqis? But no, we’re supposed to believe that they made them inconvenient Saudis, instead.

Worse still, the planners picked live Saudis almost at random, despite the fact that they’d be sure to come forward and spoil the whole thing. Why would anyone do that?

What’s more, all these stories occurred very soon after 9/11. Once the FBI released their official list of hijackers, complete with photographs (on the 27th September), these stories disappeared. This suggests to us they were only ever a mixup over names, and once the photos appeared as well these individuals realised they weren’t wanted men after all.

We’ve not alone in this, either. A BBC story is constantly cited as evidence that some of those named as the hijackers are still alive, for instance, but the company has now said it was just a “confusion over names and identities”:
A five-year-old story from our archive has been the subject of some recent editorial discussion here. The story, written in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was about confusion at the time surrounding the names and identities of some of the hijackers. This confusion was widely reported and was also acknowledged by the FBI.

The story has been cited ever since by some as evidence that the 9/11 attacks were part of a US government conspiracy.

We later reported on the list of hijackers, thereby superseding the earlier report. In the intervening years we have also reported in detail on the investigation into the attacks, the 9/11 commission and its report.

We’ve carried the full report, executive summary and main findings and, as part of the recent fifth anniversary coverage, a detailed guide to what’s known about what happened on the day. But conspiracy theories have persisted. The confusion over names and identities we reported back in 2001 may have arisen because these were common Arabic and Islamic names.

In an effort to make this clearer, we have made one small change to the original story. Under the FBI picture of Waleed al Shehri we have added the words "A man called Waleed Al Shehri..." to make it as clear as possible that there was confusion over the identity. The rest of the story remains as it was in the archive as a record of the situation at the time.

We recently asked the FBI for a statement, and this is, as things stand, the closest thing we have to a definitive view: The FBI is confident that it has positively identified the nineteen hijackers responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Also, the 9/11 investigation was thoroughly reviewed by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States and the House and Senate Joint Inquiry. Neither of these reviews ever raised the issue of doubt about the identity of the nineteen hijackers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2006/10/911_conspiracy_theory_1.html

And in fact if you look at the details, you’ll find that mistaken identity seems the most likely explanation. Read more in our analyses of the most common “still alive” stories: Abdulaziz Al Omari, Ahmed Al-Nami, Khalid Al Mihdhar, Mohammed Atta, Said al-Ghamdi, Salem Al-Hamzi, Wail Al-Shehri, Waleed Al-Shehri and Mohand Alshehri.

What’s more, Saudi Arabia have now accepted that their citizens, as named by the US, were involved. Why would they do that if any of them were still alive, and so plainly innocent?
Saudi Arabia acknowledged for the first time that 15 of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers were Saudi citizens...

Previously, Saudi Arabia had said the citizenship of 15 of the 19 hijackers was in doubt despite U.S. insistence they were Saudis. But Interior Minister Prince Nayef told The Associated Press that Saudi leaders were shocked to learn 15 of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.

"The names that we got confirmed that," Nayef said in an interview. "Their families have been notified."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002/02/06/saudi.htm

And subsequently a video called “the 19 Martyrs” was released and partly aired on al Jazeera, which reportedly featured photographs of hijackers, and included bin Ladin giving a brief description of each. There was a detailed page on the video at ee.1asphost.com/raehatualmisk/19.html , and that’s gone now, but we saved a copy locally for posterity. We don’t know if the video is real, or this is an accurate account of it, but if true then it is another indication that the named hijackers were involved, and they’re now all dead.

SOURCE