FBI, the mob, and 9/11

[Len Colby]

I read that WTC6 had TWO BASEMENT levels. Apparently there were FOUR PARKING LEVELS below the

building basements. The building did not have six basement levels.

Jack

The photos I posted are definitely, to my eye, parking, not basement levels. They were also labeled as parking structure below WTC6. Note how each level has the vertical posts painted in a unique color per level - very common in parking structures, so you can find your car level - not done in basement levels,..

Although this may come as news to Jack and Peter a common use of basement space especially beneath large modern buildings is for parking*. I’m not sure what they think the semantic game proves. Jack’s claim that 6 only had 2 basement levels was false as was Peter’s that “It appears to have had 2, possibly a partial? 3rd,.”

What the basement space below the building was used for has no bearing on whether or not debris from above broke through its floors. The photo Peter posted shows only a small portion of the area under 6 WTC still standing near the end of the clean up process. This does not mean that a larger portion was not still standing when the other photos Jack and Peter posted were taken. But since the area was underneath the part of the building that did NOT collapse it proves nothing. The yellow lines in the images below ROUGHLY correspond to the area seen still standing in Peter’s photo

If it were heavy falling debris, why would it not fall all the way to the bottom of the bathtup…?

Basic physics, the falling debris would have lost energy each time it broke through a floor, on the other hand its mass would have increased, the former seems to have out weighed the latter. Why would you expect falling debris to do more damage than a bomb?

I find it strange [along with so much else that day] that what looks like a giant hammer [or explosion from below - or some partial controlled demo]

Funny Jack thinks the explosion came from one of the upper levels

So why did the 'damage' get limited to such a strange depth and in such a strange angular shape, with a few half-circle holes punched, as well?

WTC 6 was longer than WTC 1, the parts of the smaller building not immediately alnong side the other were reletive unscathed.

Why was no complete forensic study done on this building

RIF the ASCE report said the ruins were deemed unsafe, a more complete study was done of WTC 5 which was of similar construction and suffered similar damage. The reason for the partial collapses of small building in the complex is obvious to most people even many truthers

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&cli...amp;btnG=Search

[John Simkin]

Van Jones, a White House environmental adviser, has been forced to resign by the right-wing lobby. According to Glenn Beck, who works for Fox News, Jones is a "Marxist" and a "Leninist". He seems to have upset right-wing commentators by signing a 2004 letter claiming that George Bush might have knowingly allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen. Obama forced Jones to resign after conservatives uncovered a video from last year in which he described Republicans as "assholes".

[Evan Burton]

If he's a 9-11 Truther, I have no respect for him... but he shouldn't have resigned. He's entitled to his opinions, regardless of how wacky and silly they are.

[John Simkin]

Adele Stan, AlterNet at 10:24 AM on September 6, 2009.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/politics/142...y_oil_interests

White House adviser Van Jones resigned last night from his White House post as adviser on green-jobs creation, issuing a statement that decries "vicious smear campaign against me" launched by "opponents of clean energy." Prior to his White House appointment, Jones was the public face of the organization Green for All, which he founded.

Glenn Beck of FOX News has been relentless in his criticism of Jones, focusing on statements made by Jones earlier in his career, including a petition signed by Jones in early 2004 that called for an investigation of the 9/11 attacks, and whether members of the Bush administration had permitted the attack to happen. Jones says he was unaware that the 9/11 petition included that bit about possible government involvement.

Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, who lends his endorsement to Grassfire, an organization that organizes members of the armed Patriot movement through its ResistNet site, called on Jones to resign, saying, "His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate."

Grassfire is currently organizing ground-level opposition to the clean energy legislation -- especially its cap-and-trade mechanism -- supported by the White House.

AlterNet reported last month on the racist videos and statements posted on the ResistNet site, including a call for "white folks to riot in the streets" and a video that equates President Obama with Adolf Hitler. Van Jones is African-American.

Glenn Beck's boss, Rupert Murdoch, also has a dog in the cap-and-trade fight, and has allied his network, as AlterNet reported, with Americans for Prosperity, an astroturfing outfit financed by oil industry dollars.

Garance Franke-Ruta and Anne E. Kornbluth of the Washington Post have the story on Jones' resignation:

"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me," Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight Sunday. "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide."

He continued: "I have been inundated with calls -- from across the political spectrum -- urging me to 'stay and fight.' But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future."

Jones issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war" and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

[Len Colby]

That was unfortunate even I think Jones should have been allowed to stay on more surprisingly Pat Curley a pro-Bush Republican who is co-author of Screw Loose Change a leading debunking blog seems to feel the same way.

http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/2009/...r-american.html

What may have hurt him was that he was less than straight forward about the matter he claimed that the petition he signed was different one but the truther group that circulated it posted a scan of the paper he signed and he participated in a protest which promoted similar claims. (see link above).

[Craig Lamson]

That was unfortunate even I think Jones should have been allowed to stay on more surprisingly Pat Curley a pro-Bush Republican who is co-author of Screw Loose Change a leading debunking blog seems to feel the same way.

http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/2009/...r-american.html

What may have hurt him was that he was less than straight forward about the matter he claimed that the petition he signed was different one but the truther group that circulated it posted a scan of the paper he signed and he participated in a protest which promoted similar claims. (see link above).

What is unfortunate? The Whithouse has denied forcing Jones to resign, so it appears he left on his own. Clearly the words and deeds that got in in this mess where his own.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

[Craig Lamson]

Adele Stan, AlterNet at 10:24 AM on September 6, 2009.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/politics/142...y_oil_interests

White House adviser Van Jones resigned last night from his White House post as adviser on green-jobs creation, issuing a statement that decries "vicious smear campaign against me" launched by "opponents of clean energy." Prior to his White House appointment, Jones was the public face of the organization Green for All, which he founded.

Glenn Beck of FOX News has been relentless in his criticism of Jones, focusing on statements made by Jones earlier in his career, including a petition signed by Jones in early 2004 that called for an investigation of the 9/11 attacks, and whether members of the Bush administration had permitted the attack to happen. Jones says he was unaware that the 9/11 petition included that bit about possible government involvement.

Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, who lends his endorsement to Grassfire, an organization that organizes members of the armed Patriot movement through its ResistNet site, called on Jones to resign, saying, "His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate."

Grassfire is currently organizing ground-level opposition to the clean energy legislation -- especially its cap-and-trade mechanism -- supported by the White House.

AlterNet reported last month on the racist videos and statements posted on the ResistNet site, including a call for "white folks to riot in the streets" and a video that equates President Obama with Adolf Hitler. Van Jones is African-American.

Glenn Beck's boss, Rupert Murdoch, also has a dog in the cap-and-trade fight, and has allied his network, as AlterNet reported, with Americans for Prosperity, an astroturfing outfit financed by oil industry dollars.

Garance Franke-Ruta and Anne E. Kornbluth of the Washington Post have the story on Jones' resignation:

"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me," Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight Sunday. "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide."

He continued: "I have been inundated with calls -- from across the political spectrum -- urging me to 'stay and fight.' But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future."

Jones issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war" and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

Can anyone point out the "lies and distortions" about Van Jones? His own recorded words taken IN CONTEXT were what brought him down.

And what not have "white folks riot in the streets"? It's been a standard rallying call from BLACK american for years....

And Hitler...sheesh the left spent 8 years calling Bush Hitler, have they forgotten so soon?

[David G. Healy]

Adele Stan, AlterNet at 10:24 AM on September 6, 2009.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/politics/142...y_oil_interests

White House adviser Van Jones resigned last night from his White House post as adviser on green-jobs creation, issuing a statement that decries "vicious smear campaign against me" launched by "opponents of clean energy." Prior to his White House appointment, Jones was the public face of the organization Green for All, which he founded.

Glenn Beck of FOX News has been relentless in his criticism of Jones, focusing on statements made by Jones earlier in his career, including a petition signed by Jones in early 2004 that called for an investigation of the 9/11 attacks, and whether members of the Bush administration had permitted the attack to happen. Jones says he was unaware that the 9/11 petition included that bit about possible government involvement.

Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, who lends his endorsement to Grassfire, an organization that organizes members of the armed Patriot movement through its ResistNet site, called on Jones to resign, saying, "His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate."

Grassfire is currently organizing ground-level opposition to the clean energy legislation -- especially its cap-and-trade mechanism -- supported by the White House.

AlterNet reported last month on the racist videos and statements posted on the ResistNet site, including a call for "white folks to riot in the streets" and a video that equates President Obama with Adolf Hitler. Van Jones is African-American.

Glenn Beck's boss, Rupert Murdoch, also has a dog in the cap-and-trade fight, and has allied his network, as AlterNet reported, with Americans for Prosperity, an astroturfing outfit financed by oil industry dollars.

Garance Franke-Ruta and Anne E. Kornbluth of the Washington Post have the story on Jones' resignation:

"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me," Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight Sunday. "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide."

He continued: "I have been inundated with calls -- from across the political spectrum -- urging me to 'stay and fight.' But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future."

Jones issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war" and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

Can anyone point out the "lies and distortions" about Van Jones? His own recorded words taken IN CONTEXT were what brought him down.

And what not have "white folks riot in the streets"? It's been a standard rallying call from BLACK american for years....

And Hitler...sheesh the left spent 8 years calling Bush Hitler, have they forgotten so soon?

first time I've heard any liberal calling George dashrub, Hitler! Moron, idiot, brainless -- yes, but Hitler? Nah! Of course I've heard the reich-wing call Obama Hitler say 4-500 times over the past 6 months.... You still wandering in the dark out there laddie? You nutter-trolls need a few new scripts, there Craigster!

[Ron Ecker]

If he's a 9-11 Truther, I have no respect for him.

I have no respect for him either, not because he's a 9/11 truther but because he's a bald-faced xxxx, claiming he didn't know what he was signing about 9/11. I wonder how he got through Yale law school. The dude can't read.

[Craig Lamson]

Adele Stan, AlterNet at 10:24 AM on September 6, 2009.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/politics/142...y_oil_interests

White House adviser Van Jones resigned last night from his White House post as adviser on green-jobs creation, issuing a statement that decries "vicious smear campaign against me" launched by "opponents of clean energy." Prior to his White House appointment, Jones was the public face of the organization Green for All, which he founded.

Glenn Beck of FOX News has been relentless in his criticism of Jones, focusing on statements made by Jones earlier in his career, including a petition signed by Jones in early 2004 that called for an investigation of the 9/11 attacks, and whether members of the Bush administration had permitted the attack to happen. Jones says he was unaware that the 9/11 petition included that bit about possible government involvement.

Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, who lends his endorsement to Grassfire, an organization that organizes members of the armed Patriot movement through its ResistNet site, called on Jones to resign, saying, "His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate."

Grassfire is currently organizing ground-level opposition to the clean energy legislation -- especially its cap-and-trade mechanism -- supported by the White House.

AlterNet reported last month on the racist videos and statements posted on the ResistNet site, including a call for "white folks to riot in the streets" and a video that equates President Obama with Adolf Hitler. Van Jones is African-American.

Glenn Beck's boss, Rupert Murdoch, also has a dog in the cap-and-trade fight, and has allied his network, as AlterNet reported, with Americans for Prosperity, an astroturfing outfit financed by oil industry dollars.

Garance Franke-Ruta and Anne E. Kornbluth of the Washington Post have the story on Jones' resignation:

"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me," Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight Sunday. "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide."

He continued: "I have been inundated with calls -- from across the political spectrum -- urging me to 'stay and fight.' But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future."

Jones issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war" and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

Can anyone point out the "lies and distortions" about Van Jones? His own recorded words taken IN CONTEXT were what brought him down.

And what not have "white folks riot in the streets"? It's been a standard rallying call from BLACK american for years....

And Hitler...sheesh the left spent 8 years calling Bush Hitler, have they forgotten so soon?

first time I've heard any liberal calling George dashrub, Hitler! Moron, idiot, brainless -- yes, but Hitler? Nah! Of course I've heard the reich-wing call Obama Hitler say 4-500 times over the past 6 months.... You still wandering in the dark out there laddie? You nutter-trolls need a few new scripts, there Craigster!

What did you do davie, spend GWB years with your head where the sun don't shine? SHeesh...you are one observant old cuss. [/sarcasm]

http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=612

Edited September 8, 2009 by Craig Lamson

[Guest]

In his new book David Aaronovitch debunks the world's greatest conspiracy theories. Here he deconstructs those that followed 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_an...icle6187493.ece

"The internet has created shadow armies whose size and power are unknowable. Cyberspace communities of semi- anonymous and occasionally self-invented individuals have grown up, some of them permitting contact between people who in previous times might have thought each other's interests impossibly exotic or even mad. At the same time, the democratic quality of the net has permitted the release of a mass of undifferentiated information, some of it authoritative, some speculative, some absurd. But, increasingly, material originating on the net has turned up in popular culture - a millennial version of the word-of-mouth route to popularity. The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has, at the time of writing, become a first resource for many students, despite the amusing randomness of its reliability.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of English-language websites have sprung up specifically devoted to proselytising for the 9/11 Truth movement. In addition many “independent” or “alternative” media sites routinely replicate 9/11 conspiracy material uncritically, and many of these sites link to or cite each other. Sites endorsing 9/ll conspiracy theories, and those subscribing to them in passing, far outnumber sites devoted to debunking or refuting such theories.

The construction and circulation of audio and visual material devoted to 9/ll revisionism is easy on the internet. Cheap movies, often made using material not cleared for copyright, made and narrated by non-professional film-makers, have been posted on Google video, YouTube and other sites specialising in moving pictures. Invariably such items make the same claims to accuracy and balance as do mainstream TV programmes, but have been concocted with the smallest fraction of research and resource, though no little ingenuity.

A Scripps Howard poll of July 2006 (which measured belief in a Kennedy conspiracy at 40 per cent) had 36 per cent of respondents suspecting government participation of some kind in the attacks, with just over one in six believing that explosives had been used to bring down the twin towers. A summary of what a made-it-happen-on-purpose 9/ll Truth activist is likely to believe goes something like this. Certain forces in the Bush Administration wanted a pretext to use overwhelming military force in the Caspian area and the Middle East, either to procure oil supplies, to weaken opposition to Israel or both. Accordingly they or their agents organised a false-flag operation, which would accomplish what Pearl Harbour was supposed to have accomplished for the Rooseveltian war party in 1941, causing a large number of Americans to die on the territory of the United States itself with the blame wrongly being put on Islamist extremists. The plot they devised involved three airliners being flown into the World Trade Centre main towers and, possibly, a Washington target.

There were either no hijackers or the ones on board were patsies, and two of the planes were guided remotely into the World Trade Centre. What brought the towers down, however was a “controlled demolition” using explosives planted there at some earlier time. The same devices also brought down the structure called World Trade Centre 7, though no plane flew into that building. The Pentagon was not hit by an airliner but by a guided missile. The fourth airliner, United 93, possibly heading for the capital, was either shot down because the passengers threatened to land it successfully thus exposing the plot, or else it was never found. Various ruses, including faked mobile phone calls and fraudulent claims of such calls were used to disguise the true nature of the crime.

That was the basic theory, although different people in the Truth movement might agree or disagree with various parts of it. To accept it, you have to believe that elements of the US Government engaged in a conspiracy of exceptional complexity and enormous risk of failure. This group of conspirators would have had to suborn, dupe or train 19 hijackers, create elaborate background stories for them, send them to flying schools to be seen around Florida and other parts of the US, before disposing of them either in the crashes or, in the case of Flight 77, in a manner unknown.

The conspirators would have had to have sent experts in to rig the two main towers and WTC7 with sufficient explosives to be sure of bringing the first two buildings down some time after the planes had hit them, and WTC7 whenever it was felt expedient to do so. But the explosives had to be sufficiently inert not to be triggered either by the impacts of the planes or by the thousands of gallons of burning aviation fuel, an especially tricky proposition since no precedent existed for the crashing of a large civil airliner into a 1,000ft skyscraper. The planes also had to be guided into the exact locations of the explosives. The towers had to come down because the destruction by terrorists of planes full of passengers and the unknowable number of casualities in the areas of the towers hit by the aircraft might not, in themselves, have been sufficiently provoking to cause the reaction needed by the plotters. On the other hand it was apparently thought OTT to rig the towers in such a way as to have them topple over and possibly destroy half of south Manhattan. A balance had to be struck.

For reasons unknown (a liking for variety, perhaps) the plotters decided not to repeat the trick in Washington. Believing that an attack that could kill up to 30,000 people in New York might not provide an adequate casus belli, the plotters trained a missile, or an explosives-laden small military plane, on the Pentagon, trusting that onlookers would accept that it must have been an airliner, either for the positive reason that Washingtonians are more suggestible than New Yorkers, or the negative one that it was too tall an order to get a big plane to strike the Pentagon in the right way.

There was, however, quite possibly a plane targeted on another Washington building (perhaps you don't want too much variety), Flight 93. This was the one that supposedly crashed into a Pennsylvanian field. Not so. It had to be shot down by the Government when the passengers unfortunately got wind of what was planned and stormed the cockpit - to find the autopilot, or the patsies, or whatever they found. Although another theory, favoured by the makers of [the internet documentary series] Loose Change, is that Flight 93 didn't crash and wasn't shot down, but, like Flight 77, was made to disappear. Of course, it was essential that no air defences were deployed properly against the two or three planes containing “hijackers”, because the premature destruction of these aircraft would have meant the towers would have had to be blown with no obvious culprit. So it was necessary effectively to stand down those defences, by scrambling fighters deliberately late and issuing them with intentionally vague orders.

Then there was post-production. One aspect of this was simple: the faking of videos of Osama bin Laden and others claiming responsibility for the attacks. Another was more complex: the passengers of Flight 77 and possibly Flight 93 were either murdered in a secret location and their bodies disposed of beyond any chance of discovery, or else they were relocated, lost for ever to their families and friends, somewhere they could never be found. This would have been slightly easier if, as the millionaire 9/ll Truth activist Jimmy Walter has claimed, they were all “working for the government”. Finally, investigators belonging to the disaster agency FEMA, to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to the fire, police and other emergency services, were paid off or intimidated to produce reports favourable to the official version.

Although the ingenious A.K. Dewdney, a professor of computer science at the University of Western Ontario, has calculated that this whole plot would only require 44 agents, it seems obvious that the intimidation alone would need as many if not more operatives than that. Hundreds, if not thousands, would have to have been directly involved in different aspects of the conspiracy. And all of them would have to have been either fanatically committed to the project or else almost unimaginably immoral. Think for a moment about the men who rigged the twin towers with explosives.

As if this plot wasn't sufficiently challenging, there were Truth activists who became persuaded of even more technologically complex possibilities. On the fifth anniversary of the attacks, the New Statesman carried an interview with David Shayler and his partner Annie Machon, the former employees of MI5. The interviewer describes Machon as looking uncomfortable when Shayler decides to reveal his true opinion. “‘Oh f*** it, I'm just going to say this', (Shayler) tells her. ‘Yes, I believe no planes were involved in 9/ll.' But we all saw with our own eyes the two planes crash into the WTC. ‘The only explanation is that they were missiles surrounded by holograms made to look like planes,' he says. ‘Watch footage frame by frame and you will see a cigar-shaped missile hitting the World Trade Center.' He must notice that my jaw has dropped. ‘I know it sounds weird, but this is what I believe.'”

It seems likely that Shayler hadn't seen the pictures of wreckage from Flight 175 on top of WTC5. Even so, this “intelligence expert” believed that a cabal that couldn't plant weapons of mass destruction in the vastnesses of the Iraqi desert could fly hologram-shrouded missiles in plain daylight into one of the most public places in the world.

Inevitably, the London bombs that killed 56 people on July 7, 2005 gave rise to a whole raft of speculation about government involvement, and in 2006 two British versions of Loose Change appeared on the net. One was called Ludicrous Diversion, and the other Mind the Gap. David Shayler was the author of the second, arguing in it that the 7/7 bombings were probably a false-flag operation designed to instil a false fear of terrorism into the British people and permit the government to do whatever nefarious thing it had on its collective mind at the time. Mind the Gap came complete with supposed warnings to Israelis, disturbing questions about evidence and photographs, and CCTV shots allegedly so badly forged that they were evidence of elements in the new world order wanting to reveal themselves, saying, “Look we're sick of lying. We've had enough.” The aftermath of the bomb blasts didn't look like the product of peroxide bombs to Shayler, who as a deskbound operative for MI5 would, one must imagine, have seen very few peroxide bombs exploding. What was more, the so-called bombers were nice boys who liked cricket, and the train timetables for the jihadists to arrive in London were all wrong.

One piece of evidence, a potential magic bullet, was accepted by all the 7/7 conspiracies, and this was the impossible locations of the blasts. The official version was that the lethal explosives had been carried in backpacks by the bombers who set them off on three trains and a bus, killing themselves and the people around them. But if the bombs could be shown to have detonated somewhere else - underneath the trains, for example - then they couldn't have been associated with the so-called terrorists. This, claimed the theorists, was exactly what eyewitnesses had claimed to see happen when the bombs exploded.

Ultimately all such reports could be sourced to one place, a Guardian journalist called Mark Honigsbaum. In June 2006 Honigsbaum gave an account of how the idea of the blast from below had come into existence. On July 7 he had been sent by his newsdesk to Edgware Road, the site of one of the explosions, where among scenes of complete confusion he had managed to grab quick interviews with some of the survivors as they left a makeshift triage centre in a local store.

Two of them told Honigsbaum that when the bomb exploded, the covering on the floor of the carriage had “raised up”.

With no time to check what the passengers had said, Honigsbaum phoned in an audio report to The Guardian, which was used on its website. It was Honigsbaum who added the elaboration that it “was believed” that the explosion had happened underneath the train, and “some passengers described how the tiles, the covers on the floors of the train, flew up, raised up”. After filing Honigsbaum spoke at greater length to more survivors who had been much closer to the blast, and they told him that the explosion had happened inside the carriage. His earlier report, admitted Honigsbaum, had been “flawed”, but unfortunately “my comments, disseminated over the internet where they could be replayed ad nauseam, were already taking on a life of their own”. Ruefully, the reporter concluded that in the old days of telephones and books it would have taken some time for rumour to paint itself full of tongues, but today “such networks can be created instantaneously with a few clicks of a mouse”.

[Evan Burton]

I was a little surprised to hear of results of a poll regarding beliefs. I expected that belief in conspiracy theories would predispose someone towards belief in the paranormal or supernatural. Turns out it isn't so - at least in Queensland, where the poll was taken.

I would be interested, though, in the correlation of belief in one conspiracy theory to the belief in another / other conspiracy beliefs. I'm unsure if a rigorous poll has been undertaken.

[Guest Stephen Turner]

I would be interested, though, in the correlation of belief in one conspiracy theory to the belief in another / other conspiracy beliefs. I'm unsure if a rigorous poll has been undertaken.

Evan, the real question here is "do I trust those in power NOT to conspire for their own ends" As history proves, anyone who can truthfully answer yes, is at best naive. Conspracies occur all the time, but usualy not of the tight knit nature found discussed on these threads. Bankers have conspired to willfully increase their own wealth beyond any measure that was supported by their economic activity, and with no thought to the ramifications for broader Society. That is not to say that a cabal of top Bankers got together and planned every move in this disasterous game, all that was needed was deregulation of the finacial sector, encouragement from Governments, and good old fasioned greed. The real conspracy here ids how power begats power, generation after generation, and the methods they use to ensure this happens.

[Evan Burton]

Good point. We see evidence / examples / exposure of conspiracies most every day in the paper. How should one describe the... 'larger' conspiracy claims?

[Guest Stephen Turner]

Good point. We see evidence / examples / exposure of conspiracies most every day in the paper. How should one describe the... 'larger' conspiracy claims?

By larger I take it you mean 911, JFK etc. Lets take 911 as an example. Firstly what is claimed by conspiracy believers, well multiple things, That the Govenment and its agencies let it happen on purpose for Geo-political ends that are obvious, that the CIA was, and in all probability still is, running Bin Laden and his assorted loonies, That the planes were military rather than civil, that explosions brought down the twin towers, that several Hi-jackers are still alive, that no planes hit the towers, but rather a thing of smoke and mirrors, etc, etc. The problem here is that there is no one C/T, but rater several made up from all or some of the above. The problem with all this is proof (or lack of) And in the abscence of proof speculation abounds, it tends to go thusly, "are bush and his gang capable of murdering 3,000 civilians as a mask to attempt full Global reach, answer yes" Was 911 therefore convienient to achiveing this reach, answer yes add in the Bush families close ties to the Bin Ladens, the CIAs backing of the Afgan rebels war against the Soviet Union, and it can start to look like the fix is in.