It’s a bit shocking to me when I see people online putting 9/11 conspiracies in the same box as “MAGA” conspiracies (for lack of a better term, sorry).
For reference, I was 24 in 2001 living in central NJ. Even without social media or fake news websites or what cable news has become today, I have vivid memories of people having the firm belief that there was something up with the attack on 9/11. Was this just my social circle?
Jet fuel melting steel beams was one of the more fringe and unfounded (and quickly debunked) ideas but the rest of everything on that day was questionable. Tower seven falling, the missing plane debris at the pentagon and central PA, the military / president not responding to known threats, if a person with limited flight time could hit a tower, the fact that Bush attacked a country that had nothing to do with the event, and so much more are still, I thought, reasonable questions - especially when looked at together.
This is not about rehashing each theory. Or maybe it is? Have I missed that everything has been debunked?
I mean, I still believe 9/11 was an inside job or at least high level officials, including Bush, were aware it was going to happen and did nothing to stop it. I thought this was still a common opinion of most or many Americans over the age of forty.
I still believe 9/11 was an inside job or at least high level officials, including Bush, were aware it was going to happen
Crazy talk. This was absolutely not a widely held opinion.
not in my circles. Certainly taken advantage of big time though with bad laws.
Aren’t we lucky to be living in the age of human history in which governments are good and honest? Not like those old, backwards governments in history books who would dress up their soldiers as the enemy’s and order them to do something heinous.
“It’s in the Bible”, is what my boss at one time believed.
I started there a few years after the events and wondered why this guy kept a 9/12 newspaper front page on display. I thought it was in poor taste but so be it. Eventually the topic came up and he started spitting out bible quotes to explain it all clear as day. He also laughed at dinosaurs!
Sadly, enough of the others there were bible toters too and did not disagree. I moved on before the Trump and covid fun began but I’m sure it was nuts.
That office changed me to my core. Seeing people living so deep in their own fantasy world that they would apply those fantasies to real world events was truly depressing.
These were professional engineers. Not kooks. My time there made me lose any respect for religion. Fanatics and conspiracy theorists are all attention seeking story tellers in need of gullible listeners.
From my understanding it’s pretty widely known that most intelligence agencies though something could happen but not the specifics, and chose not to act on that information or communicate with one another.
The exact reasons aren’t known obviously. My gut tells me incompetence/apathy from government agencies. That’s not a very cinematic or compelling answer, though, and I think a lot of people look for more interesting narratives.
Whenever a big tragedy like 9/11 happens, people tend to try and look for the Chekhov’s gun that shows a deeper meaning or dramatic orchestration. That’s just not real life though.
In my circle yeah we all said Bush did 9/11. Was def taken as fact by edgy skaters/stoners who watched a lot of early YouTube.
And with good reason. It didn’t help that Dubya was a sketchy sob!
Loose Change comes to mind.
IYKYK.
There are many people who like to fill in the gaps of things they don’t understand with conspiracy theories. It takes some degree of understanding of physics to understand why the buildings collapsed in the manner that they did, why hollow aluminium airliners accelerating to extreme speeds imposed so much damage to the buildings, and also why there is typically less aircraft wreckage to be found when especially high speed crashes are involved.
In your case, it’s probably just your social circle as none of my friends believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories.
I’ve always thought the conspiracy theories like “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams!” Were just memes, personally
I think to the majority they were. But as with most online jokes, sometimes people believe them.
There was a conspiracy involving 9/11, but it had nothing to do with secret thermite demolition or Israel or holograms or any of that nonsense. People were rightfully questioning how these hijackers were able to enter the US and stay under the radar while training for and executing the attack. We now know that Saudi officials helped them.
It’s also worth noting that the Bush family has very, very deep ties to Saudi Arabia.
This exactly. It represented such a huge intelligence failure that it’s very hard to believe that it wasn’t allowed to happen to create an argument for war, that and it kinda rhymes with another (arguably preventable) event in history that was used to create a pretext for war… Pearl harbor. IMHO that was justified though, Nazis being pretty bad and all.
Also tower 7 seemed very sketchy, and I never believed that there was a whole plane’s worth of rubble at the Pentagon.
The Patriot act was also a product of that, which if you’ll recall is part of what Snowden uncovered.
I certainly heard a lot of conspiracy theories at the time, but I didn’t know anyone who believed them. But I don’t and didn’t really hang out with the type of people that believe stuff like that in general. My friends and family are generally empirical evidence people, logical thinkers rather than emotional.
I’d be curious to know how some of your friends and family responded to the shot taken at Trump’s ear.
I would assume reasonably and reservedly, rather than jumping the gun. It’s certainly how I responded. Not sure what you really mean to ask though.
It’s not accurate to say Afghanistan had nothing to do with it. The Taliban government were directly helping to hide Bin Laden after the fact, and obviously it was not going to do anything to stop violent extremism, rather it was going to reward and encourage it.
I didn’t support it when it started, and I certainly didn’t support the all twenty of the years we spent there, but I believe now that the decision to overthrow the Taliban at least initially was the right one. Maybe some people in Washington pushed went along with it as a handout to the oil and defense industries, but I think most of the legislators went with it because they truly believed, as I do, that overthrowing the Taliban and helping the people build a new state, with real institutions, was a path towards securing lasting human rights to millions of people. No religious dictatorship can grant human rights, it’s not theirs to give.
Everyone has forgotten about the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)
9/11 in itself would not be as sketchy if they did not use it as pretext to force through a ton of privacy violation laws which just so happened to be ready and only needed an excuse, and invade the middle east. And the FBI having advance warnings about 9/11 which were ignored.
I don’t care about whether it was jet fuel or pre planted explosives. 9/11 was used as an excuse to invade countries which we now know had nothing to do with it. And at the time the government knew they were lying about those countries complicity. So I still believe there is more to the story than what is made public.
You aren’t imagining things. People got caught up in the weird details, the fact that the plane meant for the white house just happened to not reach its destination (even though George W. Bush who was president at the time was in Florida anyways), the supposed untrustworthiness of the US government (staging terrorist attacks to garner support for things wasn’t even a new feature among American agencies, though all confirmed proposals had been rejected by the president), the fact this resembles something out of Nero Caesar’s playbook (which would make the whole thing kind of well-established at this point), and the fact that Osama Bin Laden’s response message to Americans was “released” just before the next election (almost like they were trying to then garner support for an election).
Seek out reasons to conspiracy-theorize though and you will find an Achilles Heel one out of ten times, and people here conjure them at a megafactory’s pace. Raising an eyebrow towards the conspiracy theorists is the fact the circumstances from the Middle Eastern perspective that led to the attack though, as well as the fact there even was direct acknowledgement by Osama Bin Laden and later their hosts in Pakistan at all, make it so that, even if it had been American agents who carried it out, it still might as well have been carried out by Osama Bin Laden by some form of proxy/tribute (in other words, his nation made it impossible to say they hadn’t looked forward to overseeing it, and from a war standpoint it would have been an act of war in a way either way, plus there are the witness accounts of the plane passengers, like we should ignore those), and it skews matters that both planes and buildings in New York City were not built to code (absolutely every liberty was taken even considering the more lenient building code at the time, for example the stairs were like motel stairs and the anti-fire system was inadequate), which throws a wrench into discussions of architectural physics (of note, I consider it odd people use physics to determine the suspects, that’s more of something that merely makes one wonder the “how” about something we all know physically happened).
Rule of thumb, when people go about this, I would think one should think in terms of a court of law. You’re a prosecutor making a case against or in favor or a suspect. Are you going to say “look at the physics of something that clearly happened, that doesn’t look right” or “but Emperor Nero did it” or “the person I’m accusing has a track record” or “some things seem awfully convenient”? Maybe you would, but that’s you, and testimony would become your nightmare. Also note that I’m sure nobody is saying agnosticism isn’t completely possible, even though people would think “alright, either you think they did this or that person did it”.
For the first few weeks, everybody wanted answers, and when people don’t get answers, we make them up.
I remember hearing and seriously considering nearly all of the theories you mentioned, but as we started to get more answers, most people just forgot about, or stopped listening to the conspiracies.
Unless, of course, you were DEDICATED to one of the conspiracies, and surrounded yourself with like minded people who dismissed any evidence that went against their beliefs. Much like MAGA when you mention all the evidence that Trump lost the last election, or committed over 34 felonies.
most people just forgot about, or stopped listening to the conspiracies.
This is what I think happened. People just stopped caring and defaulted back to “trusting the government” or were distracted by other things like the war in Afghanistan and the 2008 financial crisis.
In my mind, these theories were still prevalent for at least a few years after the attacks. And now, 20 years later, people forgot so much that they’ve accepted that only weirdo internet trolls believe in these fringe theories.
In hindsight, there were signs that could have prevented or lessened the damage of 9-11, had we taken them seriously, but you never know which leads need to be seriously investigated, and which are baseless.
Bush didn’t do 9-11. In an alternate timeline, it could have been prevented, but the systemic failures that allowed it to happen were more than we can put on any person or dept.
I was 31 when the attacks happened.
While I do think that there was an awareness that an attack was possible, or even in the works. I sincerely doubt that anyone truly thought that 3 airplanes were going to be flown into buildings on that day and one crash in a PA field. The US had the attitude that we were isolated and well defended enough that such attacks were unthinkable. The complete one sidedness of Gulf War 1 really gave the US an out of proportion notion of being invulnerable. Even though the WTC was bombed 9 years prior, two years after the end of GW1.
Conspiracy denotes malicious intelligent intent. The reality is closer to stupidly complacent. Sometimes the two are hardly indistinguishable.
