The comfort of the conspiracy

This is a thread that will mention the events of 9/11, but it's not exactly a 9/11 thread...it's more of a thread about the conspiracy (if it exists) than about the events themseles.

It's fairly obvious that the events of 9/11 are a popular subject of discussion, and a popular spawning point for conspiracy theorists. In fact, looking at all of the things that can be 'conclusively proved' by 'an objective examination of the evidence and an open mind', I almost have to wonder how many times the towers actually collapsed...and why *somebody* hated those poor buildings badly enough to hit them with:

1) Flying airplanes full of jet fuel (the official version)
2) One set of controlled demolition charges that were put in place as the buildings were constructed.
3) A second set of controlled demolition charges that were put in place between Sept 4 and Sept 10, 2001.
4) Thermite cutting charges set in place while the buildings were under construction
5) Thermite charges placed between Sept 4 and Sept 10, 2001.
6) Nuclear weapons placed in the basements
7) Laser-guided missiles

I'm leaving out some of the even more 'out there' ideas like directed energy weapons and airplanes fitted with depleted uranium nose-caps...but my main point here is that people will believe seemingly *anything* about what brought the towers down. No matter how outlandish, strange, or down-right implausible the theory, someone will make it work.

My question is...why?

My answer, and the thing that I'd really like to discuss (after a far-too-long lead in, perhaps) is my personal belief that 9-11 is so popular with conspiracy theorists because after Watergate (my age is now showing!), Iran-Contragate, Travelgate, Plamegate, and, in general, more "gates" than you'll find on your average cattle ranch, we've come to expect our politicians to be crooks, liars, and general scum....and we find it much easier to believe that they'd do *anything*, no matter how horrible, no matter how destructive, no matter how heinous to maintain or expand their power than to believe that a group of people hate us enough to do something like that to us. The simple fact is that the conspiracy is more comforting than the reality.

Who hates us? Arabs? Why shouldnt they, even though they didnt fly planes into buildings, they still have a right to hate us for what weve been doing to them for decades.

If you had a billion dollars, and you and a bunch of friends wanted to hijack planes and fly them into buildings, do you think you would be successful? Even with a billion dollar budget.

The CIA admits they were tracking Bin Ladens phone calls...in 1998 they reported they were tapping his calls, you think they wouldnt know, or at least get hint of, a plan to do these attacks?

They claim they were taken completely by surprise, nonsense...

During the Clinton Administration, the Sudanese government offered to turn over all its information about Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda, to the American authorities.

How did Clinton answer? He refused to take the information, and in fact was angry at this, and responded by bombing Sudans main aspirin factory, which was supplying 1/3 of Africa with medicine...

If they didnt plan it out and do it themselves, the government let it happen. There is no way in the world, on the word of former FBI agent Ted Gunderson, there is no way in the world an operation of that magnitude can be carried out without our people knowing about it. It is just ridiculous to think that nobody knew about it..

I don't find *any* of the theories satisfactory, frankly...most of the conspiracies seem to requre everybody and his brother to be part of the cover up, and the official story (as you point out) has some serious holes in it as well. Call me a universal skeptic :-D

What I'm finding interesting about the 9/11 mess is the continued proliferation of theories....all of which seem to claim 'conclusive proof', and several of which seem to be mutually exclusive. I guess the best way to clarify what I'm talking about would be to compare 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination. Both were events seen by thousands, either live or on television, both produced a period of national shock, and both (within days) began spawning whole rafts of alternate explanations / conspiracies. At one point, you could find 'conclusive proof' of about 10-12 gunmen in various places, working for everybody from the Mafia to the CIA, with stops in Cuba, Moscow, and the Republican Party, all taking shots at JFK's motorcade. Similarly, soon after 9/11, there was a flood of theories about who and why and how. The difference being that, after a bit of time, most of the Kennedy Conspiracies have more or less died out...very few people are still holding forth for the rifleman (or riflemen) on the side of the plaza opposite the Book Depository, for example. With 9/11, that 'dying off' doesn't seem to be happening...instead, there's a new theory every week, it seems, and they seem to be getting wilder by the generation. I'm wondering why that is....and the only explanation I can think of is the one that I put in my first post. As for 'who hates us', that's not a simple question, so giving it a 'simple' answer is probably worse than giving it no answer at all...it might be interesting to start a list, though, and see how it stacks up against the primary actors in some of the various theories.

i don't think it's so much a case of people not wanting to believe that terrorists could hate the us that much, they clearly do, i think it could well be the case that most people just cannot believe that terrorists could pull off an operation like that, the logistics involved are mind boggling.

i mean a large group of men planning and executing any operation over a period of years without one of them feeling remorse or pity and turning informer is difficult to believe, to say the least, but basically untrained pilots navigating and flying a large jet aircraft half way across the country and hitting buildings dead on is a crazy notion.
then the whole thing is figured out by the government inside a week, or at least thats as i remember it, it just got stranger and stranger from then on culminating in the bush admin telling bare faced lies to get the country behind a war that seems to have no real objective other than being at war.

if the official line is that ludicrous the the tinfoil hat brigade were always going to have to go the extra mile to feel they had done a good job.

To me it was very obvious the events of 911 based on the articles I have researched and the documentaries I have seen.

The United States government knew that terrorists were planning to fly planes into building, they also knew that it was imminent. A report was flaunted with a title basically saying the same thing I just mentioned. The reason they gave why the report wasn't fully read, or read at all, was that the title of the report didn't show how imminent it was. It is very clear to me that someone was being lazy or too wrapped up in other stuff to barely even skim that terrorist report. At any given time there are how many threats to the US, that to pick one report out and say, AH HA we knew about it and so and so didn't do anything about it. I suppose after a while you start looking at these reports as general conspiracy theories like found on this board.

I saw the presidents reaction as he was told about the event, he was in a serous state of shock. He was in the middle of a publicity event where he was attending a story time event with children. After he was told about it he just sat there in a daze.

Once the damage was done and the buildings destroyed is when the true conspiracy theory emerged, they took this one 9-11 event to expand governmental powers and to begin a war, but the purpose of the war wasn't to really stop terrorism, it was to take over the oil in the persian gulf. If the government really wanted revenge they wouldn't have stopped until they found Osama Bin Laden, in fact I remember a press interview with George Bush Jr where he said, I am not really concerned about Osama.

Thats the truth according to me and I am sticking to it.