Is anyone interested in Apollo missions...

[Len Colby]

To try and return to the original thrust of this topic, research, like any scientific discipline, needs to be constantly tested using ones original hypothesis. ie my hypothesis might be stated as, "It is a provable fact that historically governments have acted against the best interests of their citizens for strategic, and finacial considerations. Given their stated aims, (PNAC) and their desire to control oil interests in the middle east I BELIEVE that the Bush administration deliberately created an environment that invited terrorist attacks against mainland America, and used such as a justification for 1, invasion of Afganistan, and Iraq. 2, to demonise political opponents as unpatriotic. 3, to portray Bush in a more positive light as a war leader. 4, to allow easy passage of anti-democratic legislation (Patriot act) 5, for the continued enrichment of political fellow travellers, and corporate America in general."

My research journey thus far has taken me to some strange shores, it now appears to me that at their farthest ends it is almost impossible to distinguish left, from right, and a constant theme here is anti-semitism "protocols of the elders of zion" The Illuminatti""One World government" through either Communism, facism, Capitalism, or a strange hybrid of all three, with of course Jews at the head. People who fail to constantly test their hypothesis inlight of new information, or who simply want easy answers find this strange brew compelling, it requires little of them, and as Len stated at the beginning of this thread resembles, at its end, the more dogmatic of religious belief. researchers need to beware who they get into bed with philosophically, as the old saying goes, "never make friends in the dark. Steve.

Hi Steve,

"It is a provable fact that historically governments have acted against the best interests of their citizens for strategic, and financial considerations"

IMHO you're over stating the case at least regarding democratic countries. This might be a good subject for a new thread.

I BELIEVE that the Bush administration deliberately created an environment that invited terrorist attacks against mainland America, and used such as a justification for...

Atta started contacting flight schools in March 2000, 10 months before Bush came to power and 8 months before he "won" the election. Presumambly the plan had been made before then. Also IIRC Bush's pre 9/11 Middle East policy wasn't that different from Clinton's. I think he used the attacks for justification to do all the things you mentioned. They seem to have had these ideas "on the shelf" waiting for the right moment.

It is also possible that they found out about the attacks and did nothing to prevent them though I haven't seen any strong evidence to indicate that. At the least the Bush administration was woefully negligent and Clinton isn't off the hook either

I agree with the rest of what you said

[Len Colby]

Jack [and other 9/11 CTists]

I am still waiting for you to name one expert who backs your views about the collapse of the Towers and damage to the Pentagon.

Since neither you nor anyother CTist can find any lets presume there are none doesn't that put your little theories into a bad light? Doesn't this justify my comparrison of such ideas to Creation "science" and Holocaust denial?

[Len Colby]

Len, I think I may know why Bush told this lie. (If lie it was) ...Its just a shame that the craven lap-dogs of the Media did not ask him to explain himself when he first uttered this immortal phrase.. Steve.

IF lie it was???

You're the one who convinced me he lied. Now you say "if"?

How can his statements be classified if not as a lie?

immortal phrase

immortal or immoral?

Edited October 27, 2005 by Len Colby

[Guest Stephen Turner]

Len, I think I may know why Bush told this lie. (If lie it was) ...Its just a shame that the craven lap-dogs of the Media did not ask him to explain himself when he first uttered this immortal phrase.. Steve.

IF lie it was???

You're the one who convinced me he lied. Now you say "if"?

How can his statements be classified if not as a lie?

immortal phrase

immortal or immoral?

Len, two remote possibilities present themselves.

1,As Steve Ulman has pointed out sometimes what comes out of GWB,s mouth has a mere tenious link to reality, as most of us perceive that term. So do I think That he misspoke? NO, can I prove it,NO.

2, Jack believes that there was some kind of live feed to the Limo, enabling Bush to witness the first strike. Do I believe this? NO, can I prove it false, NO.

My belief is that, for what ever reason, Bush told a bare faced lie, and having told it once, had to tell it again. Looks like me and you have caught George with his metaphorical pants down.

Yes, immoral better suits the cicumstances. Steve.

[Guest Stephen Turner]

Hi Steve,

"It is a provable fact that historically governments have acted against the best interests of their citizens for strategic, and financial considerations"

IMHO you're over stating the case at least regarding democratic countries. This might be a good subject for a new thread.

I BELIEVE that the Bush administration deliberately created an environment that invited terrorist attacks against mainland America, and used such as a justification for...

Atta started contacting flight schools in March 2000, 10 months before Bush came to power and 8 months before he "won" the election. Presumambly the plan had been made before then. Also IIRC Bush's pre 9/11 Middle East policy wasn't that different from Clinton's. I think he used the attacks for justification to do all the things you mentioned. They seem to have had these ideas "on the shelf" waiting for the right moment.

It is also possible that they found out about the attacks and did nothing to prevent them though I haven't seen any strong evidence to indicate that. At the least the Bush administration was woefully negligent and Clinton isn't off the hook either

I agree with the rest of what you said

Len.

You are correct, the first point you raise is debate on its own. I will start a new thread when time permits, the name Maggie Thatcher will, I promise, feature heavily. My contention here is not that Governments are constantly engineering events like 911, that would be ridiculous,but that policy reflects, more often than not, the needs of the minority(rich) over the needs of the Democratic majority, not just in America, but across the World.

point taken as regards Atta,s contacting of flight schools in March of 2000,It now appears that Homeland security had been neglected for decades. Whats that old saying about trying to get the Djin back into the bottle? regards, Steve.

[Len Colby]

Len, two remote possibilities present themselves.

1,As Steve Ulman has pointed out sometimes what comes out of GWB,s mouth has a mere tenious link to reality, as most of us perceive that term. So do I think That he misspoke? NO, can I prove it,NO.

2, Jack believes that there was some kind of live feed to the Limo, enabling Bush to witness the first strike. Do I believe this? NO, can I prove it false, NO.

My belief is that, for what ever reason, Bush told a bare faced lie, and having told it once, had to tell it again. Looks like me and you have caught George with his metaphorical pants down.

Yes, immoral better suits the cicumstances. Steve.

1. I don't know if Steve [ullman] still backs that idea. Once all the details are out defending GWB's comments as a misspeak are untenable.

2. Besides the ludicrousness of Jack's claims GWB would still be lying because he said he saw it at the school. Of course that ignores the bigger picture Bush would have been lying about everything about 9/11, a traitor to his country and a mass murderer.

[Guest Stephen Turner]

Fair comments, the only fact that can be proven is that GWB lied about the nature of what he saw.

Do you have any thoughts about why he lied, when telling the truth would have been so much simpler? I believe its just in his nature to "Big up" his part.

[Len Colby]

Fair comments, the only fact that can be proven is that GWB lied about the nature of what he saw.

Do you have any thoughts about why he lied, when telling the truth would have been so much simpler? I believe its just in his nature to "Big up" his part.

Part of his "just an ordinary guy" stick like you said???

[Len Colby]

I thought it would be interesting to get a Republican POV on this thread so I PMed Tim Gratz and John Gillespe.

Here's Gillespe's reply

John - As one of the Ed. Forum's "House Republicans" I though you might like to defend your guy Bush from the accusation that he lied about what he saw on 9/11. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...st=0#entry43156 Len

Hi Len, That's cute but, much to the chagrin of the Progressives here, I am no Republican (no Democrat, either). But, more to the point, I certainly am no Len, Jack, Nic, or any other of the collection of cretins that constitute the majority of members on this, the Re-Education Forum. The above is awfully presumptive of you, Len. Shall I assume that woman with you is your sister? Oh, I guess I've got your attention. Your little hate piece is typical of why I have shied away from reading ANYTHING on the Re-education Forum. The level of willful anti-intellectualism is astounding. Here's a tip: the Elites, who gain ground on what is left of our freedoms every single day - and who care NOTHING of our views and emotions regarding social issues - love the fact that so many fight with each other over this Left/Right paradigm. Congratulations, Len, you play right into their hands. I have no doubt you believe all the ills of the world have come from whatever it is you think it means when you say "Right Wing." I became a member to be among noted and respected authors and investigative researchers. Quite frankly, that is precisely where I belong. At this point of my life, reflective of my accomplishments, I certainly do NOT feel the need to share anything with you and the other bourgeoisie that I've had to trip over to get to those worth knowing. You wouldn't get it, anyway. Now that I am among the cognoscenti it makes me wonder why I simply don't delete missives from you fools automatically. But you know what, Len, I'm really glad I had this opportunity to tell you off. I leave you to yourselves. Oh, don't bother to write. I won't be reading.

I wonder exactly where has this nut case ever shown his intellectual abilities to justify his delusion that his place is "to be among noted and respected authors and investigative researchers"

I know I'm not supposed to post PMs but feel the obnoxiousness of his reply warrants an exception.

[Len Colby]

A participant in this forum who wishes to remain anonymous sent me a few e-mails about Bushes comments. I cobbled them together, the credit is all hers

Len,

I'm not fan of Bush, believe me, but I think that rather than lying, he was victim of a memory error that's so common the memory researchers have a name for it -- source misattribution. If you Google for that phrase with "Memory" or "source monitoring," you'll find a lot of discussion about it. For instance, there's a study done in Denmark concerning the crash of an airplane into an apartment building, which then burned. There was NO film of this accident, yet when people were asked months later if they'd seen the plane crash into the building, more than half said yes, and some gave vivid descriptions. Lying? No, they'd pictured the event in their minds and then "recalled" those pictures, thus misattributing the source of their "memory." Bush undoubtedly saw many replays of the planes crashing into the towers, but misremembered when, in my opinion

and later a link to this article which originally appeared in Newsweek.

Sept. 20, 2004

Memory: Remember it right?

By STEVE FRIESS

It's well documented that President George W. Bush was in a Florida classroom on 9/11 when chief of staff Andrew Card told him a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. But how did Bush learn about the first crash?

Two of his recollections are similar, but factually impossible. On Dec. 4, 2001, and Jan. 5, 2002, Bush told audiences he saw the first plane hit the tower on TV before he entered the classroom. But he couldn't have seen it; nobody saw it live on TV. Between those recountings, on Dec. 20, Bush told The Washington Post that Karl Rove told him.

This isn't to say the president is a fabulist. He's just exhibiting a prominent example of a common memory glitch, says UCLA psychology fellow Dan Greenberg, who published a paper this summer in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology called "President Bush's False Flashbulb Memory of 9/11/01." Greenberg says this is more evidence that "flashbulb memories"—major events people remember "like it was yesterday"—are not as indelible as experts thought. (This was proved in a four-year study after the 1986 Challenger explosion, when witnesses dramatically altered their memories of the disaster.)

Greenberg thinks Bush saw the first-tower crash footage replayed so often that it seemed as if he had seen it as it happened. Greenberg struggles to explain why Bush, having remembered events differently in his second recounting, went back to the original version.

The White House declined to comment.

http://www.stevefriess.com/archive/newsweek/bushmemory.htm

The researcher's entire article is available online, but costs

$25. Here's the link:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin...639961/ABSTRACT

I found this in an article online:

On the evening of October 4, 1992, shortly after take-off, an El Al

Boeing 747 crashed directly into an eleven story Amsterdam apartment building.

The plane crashed almost straight nose-down, immediately burst into flames,

and fell to the ground. Media coverage never included the crash itself, but

began within the first hour after the crash, and included films of the

ensuing fire and rescue operations. Coverage continued for some time,

and reached most of the country.

In a study appropriately titled "Crashing memories and the

problem of source monitoring", Crombag, Wagenaar, and Van Koppen174 examined the

memories of Dutch citizens exposed to media accounts of the El Al

crash. The authors were interested in the potential for media accounts to cause

reasonably intelligent adults to believe they had witnessed the crash

they could not actually have seen themselves. Although the crash was not

filmed, and never shown on TV, many accounts were given in both television and

written media. In two separate surveys, ten months after the crash, the

authors asked respondents "Did you see the television film of the

moment the plane hit the apartment building?" Those who answered yes were then

asked whether they could remember how long it was until the plane caught

fire. Startlingly, notwithstanding the implausibility of the media having

caught the moment of the crash on film, more than half of the respondents

reported having seen the crash (55% and 66%, in the first and second surveys).

Of those who "remembered" seeing the crash, more than eighty percent

"remembered" when the fire started, although some did so incorrectly.

Many gave vividly detailed descriptions of the crash they could not have

actually seen.

Did these Dutch residents really remember seeing the crash? Did

they just report what they believed happened? If they did remember the

crash, how could these pseudomemories develop, and why didn't the residents

understand that they weren't real? These are the questions examined by memory

researchers concerned with the problem of "source monitoring".175

Crombag et al.'s176 dramatic illustration of the ease with which

we can "remember" things that never were is one among a growing literature

documenting the facility with which false memories can be created, and

the mechanisms through which they are produced.

Crombag et al.,177 for example, attributed the false "crashing

memories" of the Dutch citizens to problems of "source monitoring", or

failure to understand where the vivid images of the crash they

"remembered" came from. The authors argued that the false memories reported by their

respondents were based on vivid internal images the respondents had

created through imagining the various scenes described in the media.

Eventually, experiencing failures of "source monitoring", the respondents confused

these internally created images with actual memory for the event.

Crombag et al.178 suggested that source monitoring failure may be

even more common for memories of dramatic, highly publicized events such as

a plane crash than for more mundane events. Events tending to provoke

both publicity and discussion and to evoke vivid images are more likely to

impair our ability to accurately track the sources of these images.179

I even found a study in which about 45% of the participants

said they'd seen a (nonexistent) film of Princess Diana's car crash:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin...511509/ABSTRACT

[Guest Stephen Turner]

Len, thats a typical Gillespie rant, the fact that he lumps you and Jack together shows how much attention he really pays to these threads. Think of him as a old dog, mindlessly barking in the night.

As regards your other post, yes I suppose that might have been what happened. Lets just bear in mind two things though.1, The people in the examples given were not possessed of an army of advisors to remind them of the truth of the matter. 2, "I saw the first plane hit the tower, and I thought what a terrible pilot" By the time Bush says these words he is well aware that it was not pilot error. and BTW, in a later interview he says. " Immediately after the first tower was hit I gave orders for our emergency responce to be put into action" How does this square with his earlier statement that he thought it was an accident. Steve.

[Len Colby]

My votes were Q1 - 3, Q2 - 2, Q3 - 3

[Steve Ulman]

No official vote - My choice for #1 was not presented -

I believe the answer to #1 is that both administrations made mistakes and blunders - but given US law and sentiment prior to 9-11, I do not believe that either administration could have prevented a major attack.

Q2=3, Q3=5

[Steve Ulman]

Re-reading question #2 I'm not really happy with the choices there either - Answer #3 is too broad - I think some strengthening of the law enforcement community's ability to gather intelligence is warranted, which is what I believe the Patriot Act does, whole-sale revocation privacy rights, which is what the question implies, is not warranted.

This is one of the most problematic issues we face when our country is at war - how much of our personal rights should or must be sacrificed in order to protect the greater good. We could devote an entire forum on this one topic. There are no easy answers, and 30 second sound bites (from both sides) just don't cut it.

By the way - to answer the the real question presented in the title of this thread - "Who was responsible for 9/11 Bush or bin Ladden." - bin Ladden.

There is no question that al qaeda declared war on the USA and the west in general many years prior to 2001, then planned and carried out the 9-11 attacks. Could the US government acted to have prevented the attacks - I doubt it.

[Len Colby]

Re-reading question #2 I'm not really happy with the choices there either - Answer #3 is too broad - I think some strengthening of the law enforcement community's ability to gather intelligence is warranted, which is what I believe the Patriot Act does, whole-sale revocation privacy rights, which is what the question implies, is not warranted.

This is one of the most problematic issues we face when our country is at war - how much of our personal rights should or must be sacrificed in order to protect the greater good. We could devote an entire forum on this one topic. There are no easy answers, and 30 second sound bites (from both sides) just don't cut it.

By the way - to answer the the real question presented in the title of this thread - "Who was responsible for 9/11 Bush or bin Ladden." - bin Ladden.

There is no question that al qaeda declared war on the USA and the west in general many years prior to 2001, then planned and carried out the 9-11 attacks. Could the US government acted to have prevented the attacks - I doubt it.

Steve -There were inumerous various especially to Q.1 I had to limit them which is why I ask people to choose the answer that best refelected their views.

Thanks for participating