Apalling argumentative skills

Originally posted by rich23

Firstly, there's the possibility that Atta may have overstated his own competence to Keller to impress her. Secondly, I don't recall from her testimony that he "had licenses from numerous countries". If you can refer me to a link where that is stated I'd be grateful. Thirdly, being a hard-core sociopath doesn't necessarily translate into being the kind of fanatic who'll willingly lay down his life for jihad.

Firstly, if you're going to discredit the validity of Keller's testimony then you're necessarily discrediting all the other things she said the conspiracy proponents are relying on to support these conspiracy stories I.E. Atta's love of pork chops. You can't have double standards like that.

Secondly, I can do better than that. Here's the full quote-

"The thing the FBI was most interested in was his pilot bag. They asked about it a lot. He kept it locked, and they wanted to know whether I had ever seen anything in it. I told them yes. One day he opened it briefly, and there were a lot of papers in it, and there was a blue log book in a different language. Mohamed was fluent in almost any language you can think of. He had a kind of Daytimer in there, too. And a folder with all these different ID’s in it. And that’s when I saw one – because it fell out – a little blue and white thing the size of a driver’s license. It had his picture on it, and it looked like a mug shot, or a prison shot. And it didn’t look like him, and I asked him, 'Who is this?'

"And he said, 'that’s me.' He told me it had been taken back when he was in some kind of militia-type deal, like a military-type deal, he said. He compared it to our military only they teach you different tactics. He didn’t elaborate.

"He didn’t say where it was from, either. But the writing looked like a cross between Hebrew and Arabic, those frilly little lines. He told me he spoke Hebrew. I said bull#. So he started speaking it, and I guess he did.

"He told me that he went to different countries and studied. He had pilot’s license from several different countries. But all the pictures looked different. All the names were different. He had a license to fly from just about every country he had been to. He went to pilot’s school in all these countries."

Thirdly, the commission report never identified why Atta, et al, pulled off the attack. Even Lee Hamilton admitted they never found out why they did it. Nonetheless his dismembering her kittens goes a long way to explaining why he *would* be willing to kill off 3,000 people.

Atta could fly... but if he was so good, why did he and Marwan al-Shehhi abandon their Cessna having stalled it on the runway at Miami International?

The reason why there were so many rough edges around his training would be the same reason for Hanjour's rough edges-

Ultimately, administrators at the school told Mr. Hanjour that he would not qualify for the advanced certificate. But the ex-employee said Mr. Hanjour continued to pay to train on a simulator for Boeing 737 jets. ''He didn't care about the fact that he couldn't get through the course,'' the ex-employee said.

It should be blatantly obvious why Hanjour didn't care about getting through the course. He was there only to learn as much as it required to pull off the attack. He didn't care about learning how to take off, since the pilots did that. He didn't care about landing since it was a suicide attack. He didn't care about navigation since the automatic pilot did that. He didn't care about flight plans and communications since they wanted to keep it secret. The only thing he did care about was learnng how to steer and control the craft during flight.

As I said before, there are many, many more non-conspiracy reasons to explain why everything happened the way they did, than there are conspiracy reasons.

Originally posted by SPreston

On the morning of 9/11 on officially released passenger lists provided by the airlines to the media, not one of the alleged hijacker's names appears. No obvious Arabic names appear on the first passenger manifests supplied to the Mainstream Media on the morning of 9-11.

You are artfully misrepresenting the facts, here, or I should say, the websites you're getting this material from are artfully misrepresenting the facts, here, in order to better suit these conspiracy stories.

The "passenger lists released to the media "didn't have any hijackers listed on the passenger manifests becuase they were listing the names of the VICTIMS, which obviously won't include the names of the hijackers. It wasn't any "official passenger manifesto" that was released to the media so any claims that it WAS a passenger manifesto is being fraudulent. Lists of people killed in Nazi concentration camps obviously aren't going to include the names of SS guards that fell out of the guard towers.

The following will illustrate this better than I can. It DOES contain the actual passenger manifesto, and they DO contain the names of the hijackers.

Passenger lists vs. victims list

Originally posted by GoodOlDave

Originally posted by rich23

What a very odd thing to title your link. In fact, it's a smear. Where on the page you linked does he ask for money? He's published a book, but you yourself have admitted that you know what it contains because he's posted the summary on your link.

Did you not even read the link? The whole reason he wrote that was to entice people to buy his book. That's why he only posted a summary, with page identifiers to Learn more.

Yes I did read the link, that's how I know how many omissions and distortions he cited, and that's how I know that #1 was that some of the hijackers had turned up alive.

And it didn't look like a hard sell to me at all. He gave a summary of each point and referenced it to his book. But there will always be people like yourself who say "he's only in it for the money", even though it doesn't look like that to me at all. There are links for donations to the site, and the book is available in the bookstore... those who want to check out the link for themselves can make up their own minds.

I still think you're smearing him.

Don't you find it even remotely odd that this guy is promoting the idea that the gov't murdered 3,000 people and you need to pay him to find out "the truth"? Heck, you can get the 9/11 Commission report for free.

Who was it said, "I don't pay taxes to buy lies"? Comparing the two is ridiculous: the commissioners were paid for what they did, and although I haven't bought Griffin's book I don't begrudge him trying to shift a few copies to reimburse him for his time.

And going on the page you linked, again, I have to say, it's not a hard sell.

The link is also useful because it lists 115 points, of which the first one is that some of the alleged hijackers are still alive. This is irrefutable and I'm glad you don't try, in your cherrypicking way, to refute it, simply because it would have been embarrassing.

Talk about cherry picking. This does not refute the fact that the main ringleaders (I.E. Atta, Hanjour, etc.) were correctly identified.

Now who's cherrypicking? Two hijackers out of an alleged nineteen?

Instead of trying to refute Atta having extensive flying skills and training, because we both know he can't, he instead has to focus on the minor players, who had a less critical involvement in the plot.

He's picked 115 holes in the official version. That simple statement about the hijackers' identities has a lot of implications you're happy to ignore. None of the alleged hijackers on flight 93 seem to have proper identities, for example.

You're admitting yourself that these people may have had their identities stolen by the actual hijackers.

No, I'm stating as fact that some people came forward claiming identity theft. I'm not convinced that there were 19 hijackers. I don't know either way but I know the scent of rotting fish when I smell it.

And I'm afraid I thought it was controlled demolition from the moment I saw the towers fall. All the evidence I've seen since has bolstered that hypothesis and the official explanations don't remotely cut it.

Thanks for providing this link:
Yet another conspiracy story smack down

But it's not quite the smack down you seem to think. It even quotes David Ray Griffin's book as a source!

And I don't find the explanations convincing. When they released the first list of names, did they just remove any that sounded Arabic? Is that how they identified the hijackers? This is just not plausible, frankly.

One of the warning signs on the day that made me suspicious was the speed with which OBL's name came into the frame, and the speed with which they found "incriminating evidence" in the trunk of a car at an airport. What, did they search every trunk of every car in the car park? And suppose the hijackers had arrived by taxi? Didn't some of them have connecting flights?

No... they found all the evidence they needed miraculously quickly. And the airlines were somehow able to distinguish hijackers and victims so their very first release of names was hijacker-free. Did they call in a psychic?

Originally posted by GoodOlDave

Originally posted by rich23

Firstly, there's the possibility that Atta may have overstated his own competence to Keller to impress her. Secondly, I don't recall from her testimony that he "had licenses from numerous countries". If you can refer me to a link where that is stated I'd be grateful. Thirdly, being a hard-core sociopath doesn't necessarily translate into being the kind of fanatic who'll willingly lay down his life for jihad.

Firstly, if you're going to discredit the validity of Keller's testimony then you're necessarily discrediting all the other things she said...

That is simply not true. First, I'm not trying to discredit the validity of Keller's testimony, I'm saying that while she might have been telling the truth, Atta may have been bragging. It's the kind of macho posturing that fits with what little we know of him.

Second, logically, if Atta did lie to her about something, it doesn't discredit her testimony. It just means she relayed truthfully what Atta said. It doesn't invalidate the rest of her testimony.

Secondly, I can do better than that. Here's the full quote-

Source, please?

Thirdly, the commission report never identified why Atta, et al, pulled off the attack.

Not much of a report, really, is it? It can't tell us who did it or why.

Atta could fly... but if he was so good, why did he and Marwan al-Shehhi abandon their Cessna having stalled it on the runway at Miami International?

The reason why there were so many rough edges around his training would be the same reason for Hanjour's rough edges-

Now you're trying to have it both ways. You can't say that Atta was a highly qualified pilot with licenses from many countries and then equate him with Hanjour, whom everyone agreed was a terrible pilot. If Atta and Hanjour were both in the plane, either Atta was not as experienced as he claimed to Keller according to the testimony you've quoted, and as you seem to want him to be, or for some reason he just couldn't be bothered to do anything sensible like stay with the plane and not draw attention to himself.

It should be blatantly obvious why Hanjour didn't care about getting through the course. He was there only to learn as much as it required to pull off the attack.

It doesn't seem plausible, then, that he was able to force his airframe into a tight 270-degree turn and hit the Pentagon so precisely that it didn't even mark the lawns: much less deal with the ground effect that would tend to bounce a plane back up.

If you believe the official story you have to believe that Hanjour pulled off what amounts to an incredibly skilled landing. He placed the aircraft only a few feet off the ground after a very tight turn. It's the equivalent not only of landing on a runway but in fact landing on an exact point along the runway.

My current thinking is that the hijackers were participating in the live-fly exercise and Able Danger were monitoring them and keeping them out of jail. It's possible that Atta (who was being run by CIA agent Wolfgang Bohringer) knew as much: and if Hani Hanjour knew it too then it's even possible he knew he'd never have to really fly the plane because it would be done for him by Global Hawk technology.

Originally posted by rich23
Yes I did read the link, that's how I know how many omissions and distortions he cited, and that's how I know that #1 was that some of the hijackers had turned up alive.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but he himself said that these supposedly living hijackers claim they had their identities stolen. One even says outright that he lost his identification during his trip to the states. At best, all this proves is that the real hijackers have yet to be identified, and at worst, you're only creating MORE questions on why the gov't insiders would have been so stupid as to deliberately identify people they knew full well were still alive.

And it didn't look like a hard sell to me at all. He gave a summary of each point and referenced it to his book. But there will always be people like yourself who say "he's only in it for the money", even though it doesn't look like that to me at all. There are links for donations to the site, and the book is available in the bookstore... those who want to check out the link for themselves can make up their own minds.

Of *course* he's in it for the money. He's not accusing the gov't of throwing a rock through your front window. He's accusing the gov't of deliberately murdering 3,000 Americans, and if he genuinely believed that he'd be screaming it out to everyoen who'd listen, not make you give him money to find out "the truth". If you witnessed a murder, would YOU charge the police $19.95 for your testimony against the culprit?

Who was it said, "I don't pay taxes to buy lies"? Comparing the two is ridiculous: the commissioners were paid for what they did, and although I haven't bought Griffin's book I don't begrudge him trying to shift a few copies to reimburse him for his time.

"Reimburse him for his time"?!? Noone is asking him to write and publish his book, he's doing it all on his own. You're all but admitting that the driving force behind his writing and publishing a book wasn't to expose any gov't conspiracy, but to make a few bucks off the 9/11 controversy.

Now who's cherrypicking? Two hijackers out of an alleged nineteen?

You are, actually. Out of the nineteen, there are six that are being refuted. The other thirteen apparently *have* been correctly identified, or at least, they aren't being refuted.

He's picked 115 holes in the official version. That simple statement about the hijackers' identities has a lot of implications you're happy to ignore. None of the alleged hijackers on flight 93 seem to have proper identities, for example.

On the contrary, I'm willing to discuss anything, as I don't believe there is such a thing as dangerous information. It is you who's happy to ignore all the reasonable explanations (I.e. identity theft), in favor of the explanation you want to be true (I.E. gov't conspiracy). Statistics alone shows that identity theft occurs much more frequently than gov't conspiracies that blow up skyscrapers.

But it's not quite the smack down you seem to think. It even quotes David Ray Griffin's book as a source!

The passage you're referring to is concerning the named hijackers who are still alive, which I do not refute. What I refute is the idea that this somehow translates into the idea there were no hijackers *at all*.

No... they found all the evidence they needed miraculously quickly. And the airlines were somehow able to distinguish hijackers and victims so their very first release of names was hijacker-free. Did they call in a psychic?

When, while reading the passenger list of a hijacked aircraft, you see the names "Joe Smith", Mary Jones" and "Mohammed Atta", you don't have to be a psychic to see that it'd be a good idea to investigate what Mohammed Atta had been up to recently.