< Was 9
Subject classification: this is a history resource.

The September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City and Washington D.C. forever changed the landscape of American culture and geopolitics around the globe. Is the official explanation of who conducted the attacks accurate and reliable? Or is it possible that some government agents had inside information or even planned the attack itself?

9/11 was an inside job

Arguments for

  • Argument for Besides the twin towers, one more building in the World Trade Center complex collapsed, namely the 7 World Trade Center. This building was not hit by any plane, nor did it receive much more debris damage than any of the other buildings surrounding the twin towers. It did catch on fire and burn for some hours, but not nearly enough to make the building collapse as completely and as fast as it did, at nearly free fall speed for the first few seconds of its collapse.[1] Prior to 9/11 no steel-framed high rise building had ever collapsed because of fire. But if the fire didn't cause the collapse, then the only remaining explanation is a controlled demolition, which would implicate high-level government officials. As extra support, some suspicious "drills" were reported that day on the building.
    • Objection The fires did not knock out all of the supports at once. They weakened the supports around column 79, causing floors 8 to 14 to collapse in the inside of the building. This then led to column 79 failing, causing the east penthouse to collapse, damaging surrounding columns. This set off a chain reaction of columns failing from the east side to the west side. This meant that the full weight of the building was loaded onto the perimeter support, which buckled between floors 7 and 17 eight seconds after the east penthouse collapsed, causing the remaining exterior of the building to collapse as a single unit.[2] So the collapse was not instant and can be explained by fires. You then say that this is unheard of and I cannot provide an example of a similar collapse. That's absolutely correct. It was completely unheard of for a high rise to have its lower floors on fire for many hours without firefighters stopping the fire. But it happened on 9/11.
    • Objection There was no evidence of the explosives required for a controlled demolition.
      • Objection Seriously? [3] [4]
      • Argument for Husley, L. 2019. A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7. Institute of Northern Engineering: "...The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building...."
      • Objection No tests were conducted for the presence of explosives residue and operational protocol (not to mention basic common sense) stipulates that these tests should have occurred. Without either being inside the building or having video footage of the interior of the building at the time, there is no reliable way for you to reach the conclusions you have reached, making the specificity of your claims outright preposterous. You are certainly correct that there was a chain reaction; however, this chain reaction could have been caused by the building's resistance to gravity being compromised by explosives.
  • Argument for The September 11 attacks were a thinly-veiled excuse to invade Iraq in order to establish American dominance, get oil, and to vindicate the first Bush Presidency's defense of Kuwait in the 1990s during the first Persian Gulf War.
    • Objection Although the United States may have used this terrorist attack as a pretense for empire-building, that doesn't mean they caused it or allowed it to happen with prior knowledge. It's possible and even plausible that once the attack occurred they simply saw an opportunity and took it. It's also reasonable that different actors in the federal government had some complex motivations including retribution for the attacks as well as expansionism.
    • Objection The USA imports little oil from the Middle East, with around 50% coming from North America and less than 15% from the Persian Gulf. It's not cheap oil if it requires shipping across the 12,000 miles between the two locations, and so Oil is not a good explanation for the attack to have been planned.
  • Argument for Osama Bin Laden had been an ally of the CIA before, if anyone remembers the Afghan-Soviet war, so it would be plausible that he had a connection with the US government in order to mount the attack via his terrorist cell and give the government an excuse for invasion in the middle east, an invasion which did produce many exclusive oil contracts afterwards, including those of Halliburton, an enterprise related to Dick Cheney and the Bush administration. Besides, it took quite a while for the US to find and kill Osama, not until the Obama administration.

Arguments against

  • Argument against Any possible motive for the government to do this would not need to be executed in this way.
    • Objection Citizens experiencing fear/anger are easier to manipulate, and this is being used as a tool to herd the populace into further wars.
  • Argument against The events of 9/11 can be explained far more simply as terrorist attacks than a complex conspiracy with unclear motivation.
  • Argument against There is no evidence of members of the conspiracy, even though this would require the perfect silence of a large amount of individuals at different levels of government, when the government has a difficult time keeping far less scandalous secrets hidden. Such theories strain credulity and there is simply no reason to accept them other than the desire to believe them.
    • Objection You haven't provided an argument here so much as an abuse of language. What the US government claimed happened was a complex conspiracy involving an international terrorist organisation. The US government has so far been unable to prove this is what happened, making it a theory. Somehow, many people in America (and worldwide) seem to have been convinced that critically questioning the US government's theory about an al Qaeda conspiracy makes one a conspiracy theorist. The very logic of language itself reveals the lunacy in slandering those who dispute the US government's 9/11 narrative with egregious smear attacks like, "conspiracy theorist" or "twoofer". These are just simple lawyer's tricks, purpose-built to attack the credibility of the opposition.
  • Argument against Soon after the event, Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack.
    • Objection Al-Qaeda are probably not above claiming responsibility for something they didn't actually do if it furthers their organisation's goals. If 9/11 were an inside job, Al-Qaeda would probably claim responsibility anyway either unprompted or at the suggestion of whatever secretive cabal really did it.
    • Objection This is simply false. Whoever perpetrated the attack tried to fabricate evidence implicating the leader of al Qaeda in the form of a video tape. This video tape has been declared fraudulent by numerous scholars, including Professor Bruce Lawrence who, according to the Daily Mirror (UK), is the world's "foremost authority on (Osama) bin Laden". The actual Osama bin Laden gave two public interviews after 9/11 occurred in which his identity was confirmed. He categorically denied all involvement in both. The solitary link the US government has between al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks is the written confession of a man claiming to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who provided his confession after being waterboarded a reported 183 times at Guantanamo Bay. Moreover, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was reported by the Asian Press to have died during an ISI raid in Karachi in 2002. There is literally no proof the man being held in US custody is even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the first place.
      • Objection Professor Bruce Lawrence, the gentleman who you claimed to have made a comment about the allegedly "fraudulent" video from al-Qaeda, is a Humanities Professor of Religion at Duke University and publishes books about the Islamic faith. The only public comment he has ever made even slightly related to the 9/11 attacks is that he believes that Islam has no connection with terrorism. Besides, The Daily Mirror is a British tabloid that has published stories that were later revealed to be a hoax.
  • Argument against It would be impossible to keep a conspiracy this large secret. Someone would have leaked reliable and verifiable information at some point and every journalist in the world would be keen to break the biggest story in the 21st century.
    • Objection The conspiracy that official story says committed the 9/11 attacks was a single Al-Qaeda cell, why should the conspiracy that really did it necessarily be much bigger to the point that discovery is inevitable?

See also

Notes and references

  1. WTC911demolition (2011-10-02), WTC Building 7 Collapse - 23 angles, retrieved 2019-06-16
  2. Thompson, Kristy D. (2011-06-30). "Final Reports from the NIST World Trade Center Disaster Investigation". NIST. Retrieved 2019-06-16.
  3. "How to Debunk WTC Thermite".
  4. "Environmental anomalies at the World Trade Center - evidence for energetic materials" (PDF).
This article is issued from Wikiversity. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.