911: Alternative inquiries. It was personal.

After being a silent observer, I finally have to throw my two cents in about 9/11. The reason that I have avoided these discussions is that 9/11 was a personal event to me. In September 2001, my office was in lower Manhattan just a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center. I was supposed to meet some friends for lunch that week of 9/11 at the WTC but I decided on the Friday before 9/11 to head out of town and take a week off to spend time with my young children. At that time I lived in another city and would commute into the office in NYC every other week or so.

I spent most of the day of 9/11 on the phone trying to locate my co-workers, especially those who had taken the PATH train in from New Jersey and normally got off at the WTC to walk over to the office. Thankfully none of our people were injured or killed.

It was the Monday September 24th when I arrived back in the office, after passing through barricades of soldiers and police armed with automatic weapons, that the full weight of the event finally hit me. People who had passed each other on the streets without a thought before were now stopping and asking each other “Did you know anyone?” The rest of the question was unnecessary. Over that week, I started to see familiar faces missing from my day; Carlos who did the electrical work in the building, Maria the receptionist for one of our clients, and many others. You didn't even have to ask, a questioning look was enough to bring a tearful shake of the head. We all spoke a language of shared loss that didn't need words.

So for me, and many others, 9/11 was not a terrorist attack or political event or whatever the analysts, politicians, pundits and generals choose to call it. It was emotional rape. It was defilement. It was horror. It left wounds and scars. It is personal even today. 9/11 took the very best people, the Carloses and Marias – the people that put in a honest, hard day's work, probably for less than the executives around them made in 10 minutes, but always with a warm smile, a cheerful greeting and that joy that comes from just being alive. Above all else, 9/11 was unfair in who it took from us.

I have been disgusted with both the US government official story and the 9/11 truthers' web of conspiracies. The events of that day have become an ego inflating intellectual game of arguing hypotheses, reveling in weaving fantastic scenarios and gleeful “debunking” of others' scenarios . But 9/11 is not a puzzle to be solved – it is not a “Professor Plum in the library with a candlestick” where there is nice clean answer in black in white. The events of that day, as in the world in general, are a complex web of both interconnected and synchronistic events driven by murky gray-scale motives that are played out within nebulous cast of people, circumstances and sheer chance events. It is not a case of the bad guys versus the good guys, since it now seems that the notion of good guys and bad guys is at best a naive fiction.

The blood and lives of our families and friends has been used for everything from the Machiavellian justifications from the White House for the invasion of Iraq to feeding the paranoid rantings of Alex Jones about the Illuminati and global world domination. After a while, I kept my mouth shut as those around me, usually those for whom 9/11 was a television special, started labeling me as either a truther or a government shill.

But I have watched and listened for years. Most of what I hear and read is crap or a re-hash of the patently obvious, but occasionally something jumps out at me, something that doesn't fit. In this thread I'm going to mention what those things are, and also suggest some scenarios that seem obvious alternatives to the extreme versions of 9/11 but which are lost in the self aggrandizing babble between the truthers and the supporters of the official story.

Why say something now? I don't really know, but I do know that I that I do owe it to Carlos and Maria and the others. Maybe there are others like me who are tired of it all and want to see some closure, at least I do while I can close my eyes and still remember their faces. The truest thing said since 9/11 was what Richard Clark told the 9/11 families at the 9/11 commission hearings. "Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard. But that doesn't matter, because we failed.”

In this thread I want to explore three main themes. The first is “What would a cover-up cover up?” I suggest that there are four possible motives for a cover-up, all of which do not invalidate the core of the official story nor do they suggest the government did it. I don't like these motives but human nature being what it is.. I see them or some combination of them as being very possible.

The second is to think through some alternative scenarios that lie between the official story and the extreme truther claims of a a false flag operation by the US government. I find all the alternative scenarios equally disturbing, but we do have to always be careful to avoid the fallacy of the excluded middle.

The third, which will be somewhat later, is to look at the facts that I feel need explanation and that are not explained by the official story, nor do I feel are explained satisfactorily by the extreme conspiracy version.

So... off we go....

Is there a 9/11 cover up? Absolutely. But almost everything I have read take the position that 9/11 unfolded in one of two ways, the official story which I call the blue version and the hard core conspiracy theory story which I call the red version. These two versions represent two extreme points of the continuum of 9/11 version. Just to be clear, we have:

The blue version. This is the official story which claims that it happened just the way Bush and Cheney said it did. Osama bin Laden acted independently with a group of Al Qaeda operatives. No one saw it coming. There was nothing we could have done. The government and all of its agencies were all caught unaware. There was no involvement or collusion by anyone on the part of the government. Everything that happened was a direct result of the impacts of four planes.

The red version. This is the extreme conspiracy story which claims that the US government planned and executed 9/11 with special operatives bringing down both towers and attacking the pentagon with explosives and other black ops technology. Al Qaeda had nothing to do with 9/11, they were just a cover story. There was no hijacking and the planes that were flown into the WTC were not the ones that were hijacked. No plane hit the pentagon and no plane crashed in Pennsylvania. In this version, 9/11 is a false flag operation to allow the government to enact the Patriot act and move the US towards the neo-conservative goals outlined in the “New American Century” We can also tint this version into different hues of red by adding in Mossad agents, Bavarian bankers, Masons, and I'm sure someone even has a version involving Rodeo clowns.

Red version supporters point to specific incidents that suggest a cover up or conspiracy as proof of the red version; facts like the spiriting away of the steel debris, the fact that most of the alleged 9/11 hijackers were actually still alive the next day in other parts of the world and quite disturbed to find that they had been reported as hijackers, the magically appearing undamaged passport of a hijacker in the WTC rubble, the failure to release more that five frames of security camera footage from the Pentagon and so on.

There clearly is evidence that is suggestive of a cover-up, but the question I have is “What is it exactly that is being covered up?” The red version proponents claim that it is fact that the red scenario is right. But what else might be covered up? I have four other possible motives that might explain the existence of a cover-up while still being consistent with the blue version. This does not mean that I think the blue version is correct (I'll deal with the other alternatives to red and blue next) but existence of a cover-up does not automatically invalidate the blue scenario.

Incompetence. Assume the blue version is true. As with the Katerina debacle later on, people in key positions in the government who were supposed to keep us safe were actually totally incompetent and missed all the signs pointing to 9/11. They totally blew it. They ignored warnings from foreign intelligence services, rejected FBI field agent warnings, and didn't read national security briefings for a start.

How could they be so incompetent? Well, perhaps the people in these positions got there because they were being rewarded for helping people get elected or perhaps for being ideologically “right,” after all it seems to have worked in the Bush Justice Department. Or maybe it was just plain old patronage appointments or political pay-offs. But they were incompetent and after 9/11, those bumbling buffoons suddenly realized that their butts were on the line and they were going to be exposed for the frauds they were, and maybe even be held accountable for over 3000 dead. So what do you do when you're a teenager who had a party when your parents were away? You hide the evidence; you cover it up to save your butt. Same principle applies here.

Systemic Failure. Again assume that the blue version is true. In this case, it is not the people who are incompetent but the flawed systems and dysfunctional procedures of the FBI, CIA and other agencies that allowed 9/11 to slip through the cracks. Good people were trying to do the best they could in a dysfunctional system but without the resources or support that they needed to do their jobs. It was well known that the sharing of critical intelligence information between agencies was abysmal, that the IT systems were poorly designed and implemented as a result of a flawed contracting process, and that intelligence polices were holdovers the cold war and fighting the Soviets. This resulted in good people not having the tools, budgets and resources necessary to deal with Al Qaeda – perhaps too many Russian speaking analysts and not enough Arabic speaking ones for example.

After the attack, it dawned on those in the intelligence community and high circles of government that the US was totally unprepared to deal with any terrorist threat. But if that news got out, then the terrorists would know that it was open season on the US and the American public would panic. So the had to cover it up to hide the security weaknesses and incompetence of the government, which of course means you don't want people looking too closely at what happened on 9/11 for fear of what they will find.

Infiltration. Again assume the blue scenario. But now let's suppose that Al Qaeda has infiltrated the US security establishment. Top secret information is hemorrhaging out of the government into the hands of Al Qaeda, information that allows them to plan devastating attacks. For example, the fact that the attacks occurred during defense exercises Northern Vigilance and Vigilant Warrior which led to confusion among groups trying to figure out if the attacks were real or not, is used by the red version adherents to claim that the government scheduled the exercises to camouflage their attacks. But what if it was the other way around? What if the Al Qaeda infiltrators leaned of the exercise and planned the attacks under cover of those exercises? And what if key people in the response to 9/11 were compromised by Al Qaeda, through bribery or blackmail for example, to delay a key reaction, or maybe flip the wrong switch on a communications system at a critical moment?


[edit on 10-9-2009 by metamagic]

After the attacks, the government realized that it had been compromised. That lapse in security had to be covered up for several reasons. First, if the public knew, then their confidence in the government would collapse, perhaps even bringing down the government. Second, just like systemic failure, it would tell enemies of the US that the country was wide open and defenseless against further attacks.

We screwed the pooch. We might call this the Ultra blue scenario. Yes there were explosives planted in the WTC Towers and WTC 7 that brought them down. and a missile was used to attack the Pentagon. But in this case, the explosives were planted by Al Qaeda and the missile was stolen by Al Qaeda and used by them in the attack. Perhaps Al Qaeda decided that the planes crashing into the WTC and Pentagon were necessary to increase the terror and theatrical effect of the event. But since it was too risky relying on the plans to all be hijacked and successfully flown into the targets, the real damage was to be done with explosives and missiles. As it happened, one of the Pentagon planes didn't make it and maybe the plane that was supposed to crash into WTC 7 never got hijacked, but WTC 7 came down anyway.

After 9/11, the powers that be suddenly realize that Al Qaeda owned them. They were out maneuvered and beaten by these guys, but, like the previous several alternatives, admitting to this would show just how incompetent and vulnerable the US was to further attacks and would also increase the fear of another attack among the general population. “My god, terrorists can sneak in and plant bombs in our office buildings and the government can't so anything bout it!”

The existence of the cover-up itself is not proof of the red scenario, but it does weaken the blue position and suggest several other alternative scenarios other than the red, alternative scenarios that incorporate these themes.

Alternative scenarios.

The Green Version. Through a combination of incompetence, poor intelligence planning and systems, Al Qaeda manages to outplay the US intelligence services and execute a massive, devastating and brilliantly executed terror attack. In the aftermath of the attack, the US government realizes that international and public reaction to the truth will be more damaging than the attacks themselves. Cover stories are quickly concocted, evidence of the government failures is spirited away and story spun using planted evidence about how effectively the US responded. This facade is intended to buy the government enough time to try and get its act together before another attack is launched, one which they would be hard pressed to stop – all the time trying to keep the economy and general functioning of the country from plummeting into chaos. In this version, it is a Richard Clark “Your government failed you” event. But they also refuse to admit it and instead launch a cover-up operation.

The Yellow Version. The US government learns of the impending attacks. The overwhelming feeling among those that are responsible for security is that it is not all that serious a threat. But some in the government see an attempted terror attack on the US as a great way to push forward some of their own interests, which could range from increased budgets for their departments, to making a rival look foolish, to getting public support for a neoconservative agenda. Flush with confidence that they are in control of the situation, they decide to play politics with these camel driving rubes and perhaps even go so far as to block a couple of attempts to bring down these Al Qaeda guys. The only problem is that it all goes horribly wrong because they totally underestimate the ability of Al Qaeda to pull it off, and they over estimate their ability to keep it contained. Maybe they didn't realize the extent to which they had been infiltrated. Now they have to cover up the fact that they screwed up big time and lots of people are dead as a result. Evidence is planted or destroyed as necessary to make it look like the government was taken by surprise but responded quickly and decisively.

The Orange Version. The US government learns of impending attacks. Elements within the government make a calculated decision to let the attacks proceed to further their own interests. It might be the dream of the Neoconservatives for a new Pearl Harbor, or it might be seen as a diversion away from something else, like a major scandal in the government. Peace can be really bad for poll numbers, and certain industries that are really big campaign contribute need a good war to keep those profits and government contracts coming in. And a never ending war on terror certainly has a lot of benefits for all kinds of people in the government. So the decision is made to let the attacks proceed, and maybe even help them along a bit. The payoffs are just too big to ignore.

The Pink Version. Well connected individuals in the private sector learn of the Al Qaeda plans and realize that there is a ton of money to be made if the US is in a perpetual state of war. Peace sucks for profits. Certain leaders in some parts of the world also realize that if the US were involved in a self-consuming crisis, then opportunities for political and economic expansion would become available in other parts of the world. Osama suddenly finds himself with a host of benefactors in the form of multinational companies who with the support of governments they have bought, help turn a flaky Saudi fundamentalist into a world class terrorist. Of course the plan succeeds brilliantly because of the ability of the private benefactors to pull the right strings at the right time within the US government.