First, I’m going to point out that I’m from New Zealand. Therefore I’m not even going to pretend I know very much about what happened on 9/11 except for what I saw on the news.
I’ve read a bit about some of the theories, and I do think that some of the ‘theories’ thrown around are speculation, and come from people with big imaginations.
I do remember hearing somewhere though, that the building WOULD be likely to collapse the way it did without bombs being planted - as the building was not designed to handle a side on collision like that.
But then, I also believe there HAS been a lot of things about 9/11 that have been covered up.
My opinion here, is that the American government don’t want a secure answer. They WANT the doubt to be spread through the American population.
Al Qaeda no longer exists - it was a small group of people that dispersed long ago. Now you just get some groups *claiming* to be Al Qaeda, or the media just calling all terrorists ‘Al Qaeda’ because it’s a known name and it puts fear into people.
All the fighting that’s going on.. They’re calling it a “war on terror”. “a war against terrorism” ....
That’s not a war. You can’t have a war without an enemy. Terrorists aren’t like a country. Terrorists can come from anywhere, and be anyone. Hell, you can stage an attack yourself and claim terrorists did it!
War = profits. the government can get funds from anywhere saying it’s to aid the war efforts.
Anyway, thats just my opinion. Dunno whether I’m right, wrong or completely insane.
And frankly, I don’t really care.
If I’m wrong, great! I’ll be happy to say I’m wrong if I get shown I’m wrong.
If I’m right, I just got lucky.
In a sense, I feel you are right in that “The War on Terror” following 9/11 has become a vehicle used by opportunists in politics and the military to further their own goals. There has been a steady erosion of civil rights and privacy in both the US and Europe following 9/11. The ease with which, and the amount of, information gathering/gathered by various government agencies has been sanctioned in legislation post 9/11 is quite significant.
Al Qaeda no longer exists - it was a small group of people that dispersed long ago. Now you just get some groups *claiming* to be Al Qaeda, or the media just calling all terrorists ‘Al Qaeda’ because it’s a known name and it puts fear into people.
The thing about Al Qaeda (and many similar groups) is that they’re not really an organisation in the way that most people think of one. Any good terrorist organisation isn’t really all that organised. That way they aren’t hurt so bad if they lose some people, and it’s harder for anybody to get a clear idea of what the group is planning. They’ll have a small core of well-organised people, but that’s about it. And those people take care to remain well-hidden as well, and for some strange reason never seem to be the ones doing the suicide-bombings and stuff like that. . .
Al Qaeda was (and maybe still is) a rather good-sized group, and it didn’t exactly have registration lists and things like that. Individuals would recruit other individuals without anybody informing people higher up in the chain of command. . .partly because there wasn’t really much of a chain of command. Some people would even start up their own individual Al Qaeda cells without being recruited by anybody, and nobody else in the group would even know that they existed. So defining who is Al Qaeda and who isn’t is not an exact science. And it’s not helped by the media often labelling any vaguely Muslim terrorist as being Al Qaeda.
A good example of this sort of organization is PETA. They put forward the plattitudes and ideas, but there is nobody in charge, beyond maybe a few celebrity figureheads to shout slogans in front of cameras. Instead, you have some manifestos that boil down to ‘if you think the way we do, welcome to the club, go support these ideas’.
Most people seem to think Al-Qaeda is like SPECTRE, organised, ruthlessly efficient and centrally controlled by a Blofeld-esque Bin laden, who probably has secret meetings at a big table with his subordinates, referred to only by number, stroking a white persian cat.
In reality, it’s a word used to describe loose groups of terror cells that are, at very best, assosciated rather than the same.
It made them (the ubiquitous them as opposed to us) the new Commies, the new Mafia. Al-Quaeda allows them to be indentified, card-carrying members of this organisation are bad guys. Like they’re members of a really, really evil Ninja Turtles Fan Club with secret decoder and invisibvle ink pen. In reality, any danger comes from the mindset of an extremist, not an organisation. Most of the terrorists who actually drive into Glasgow Airport, make car bombs, or blow up trains don’t have a membership card and don’t get the newsletter- they maybe go to a training camp they found out about online, download pipe bomb instructions from a website and do it themselves.
And to make it easy for Joe Public to understand, they call them Al-Quaeda.
Any REAL Al-Quaeda members are in a cave in the Pakistan-Afghan border.
You guys make a lot of good points, stuff I hadn’t considered. Thanks very much!
It just kinda irks me that ANY ‘terrorist’ activities that go on from that area are ALWAYS linked to Al Qaeda. I honestly don’t think that ALL of them are related to that group.
It’s just generalisation. Sure, it’s an easy way to make Joe Public understand, but I think it’s a cop-out
Things were much simpler back when it was ‘The Soviets’, before the it was ‘Jerry’, before that it was ‘Jerry’ (again), before that it was ‘the Boer’ and before that it was ‘Everyone else’. And on it goes. I think people are used to having and enemy that’s easily identified. But still, the government(s) abuse it all.
You guys make a lot of good points, stuff I hadn’t considered. Thanks very much!
It just kinda irks me that ANY ‘terrorist’ activities that go on from that area are ALWAYS linked to Al Qaeda. I honestly don’t think that ALL of them are related to that group.
It’s just generalisation. Sure, it’s an easy way to make Joe Public understand, but I think it’s a cop-out
Keep in mind that Al Qaeda had a lot of advantages when it started up that most such organisations never get. They started up to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, and while they were doing that the rest of the world pretty much turned a blind eye on them and let them solidify. So they were able to organise (as much as they do organise) in relative security. Plus they had a huge amount of funding. So these weren’t like most other little terrorist groups who start up with barely any funds or material and have to constantly be hiding. Al Qaeda had the opportunity to really get the best of everything that they needed, and they took full advantage of that opportunity. And because they were popularly supported, well-financed, and all that sort of thing, they were able to recruit large numbers of people.
Once the Soviets finally packed up and went home, the world was left with an Al Qaeda that was well-known and respected among terrorists, that had plenty of state-of-the-art technology, that had huge amounts of funds, and that had contacts all over the globe. They weren’t just some small group of people huddled in a basement somewhere trying to build pipebombs out of fireworks. They were probably one of the most impressive terrorist organisations in history.
Think of it like this: most terrorist groups have to start off like rock music bands, playing at odd hours in their parents’ basement, squabbling over what to call themselves, and probably not ever accomplishing anything. Al Qaeda, on the other hand, came together and instantly became Led Zeppelin.
The main goal of Al Qaeda (or at least of most of the people who “run” it) is an idea called “pan-Islam”. Basically, they want all the current and former Muslim lands (North Africa, the Middle East, maybe the Balkans, and so forth) to be made into one vast Muslim nation, run by (their version of) Muslim rules. Once they no longer had the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to focus their attention on, they broadened their horizons to try to accomplish their overall goal. So now we have a well-funded, well-equipped, well-staffed, well-motivated, well-liked (in certain cultures) terrorist organisation acting wherever in the world they felt they should do so in order to accomplish their plan. Since they’re hugely more capable than any other such organisation around right now, they tend to be responsible for a proportionately larger number of terrorist acts.
Granted, I’m a bit out of the loop about people like Al Qaeda now, but as of maybe five years ago that’s how things stood. While some of the “Al Qaeda” stuff that the media reports isn’t really Al Qaeda, a good deal of it would be. Plus, Al Qaeda wouldn’t be at all shy about taking credit for something that some other smaller less-known group did; among its other abilities Al Qaeda was careful to build up a very efficient and effective propaganda administration.
The thing is that the smaller cells and groups will gladly let al-Qaeda take credit for their acts, as it’s a sort of recognition or approval from the higher-ups, or the media will attribute the group to al-Qaeda. This is both true (in that they’re following al-Qaeda ideals and would do whatever a high-up told them to do) and false in that they’re not ‘official’. But then there’s very few ‘official’ al-Qaeda members.
al-Qaeda, the true essence of it, is like a heart. All the other cells and networks are body parts. They’re connected and without the heart the rest won’t work. But at the same time the hands act independently of the heart. They’re not the same thing- hearts and hands and legs are different. But if you see them as a body they are all part of the same.
I think a lot of people don’t bother checking out conspiracy theories because they don’t feel confident enough in their own wits. Once some kind of authority has established that history went one way or the other, then they are comfortable believing that it went as the authority suggests. Conspiracy theories interest me because many of them turn out to have merit, and people smart enough to tell before any authority makes it official are shunned and ridiculed. It is painful to watch, but at the same time, it’s very enlightening.
It would be interesting to view a list of conspiracy theories that have proven to be have merit. This beginning of a list comes from Wikipedia:
* The French government’s attempted cover-up following Emile Zola’s accusations in the Dreyfus Affair
* The efforts by the Tsar’s secret police to foment anti-Semitism by presenting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an authentic text.[18]
* Operation Himmler and its Gleiwitz incident
* the MKULTRA mind control program
* the Watergate burglary and cover-up
* Operation Mockingbird
* Operation Northwoods
* Iran-Contra Affair
* Gulf of Tonkin Incident (which, oddly, has been removed)
I have noticed that anyone who points out that conspiracy theories sometimes have merit has met more criticism of late, and I assume this is because of the pervasiveness of the 9/11 conspiracy theories. What is very troubling here is that despite the museum’s best efforts, people do not have enlightening discussions of the evidence. It is as if belief controls the reasoning process rather than the other way around.
