"Who are the real terrorists here? The mythical nineteen Arab fanatics with boxcutters who somehow defeated all of NORAD on 9/11? Or our own government? "

OUR OWN GOVERNMENT!

GW's lies about Iraq has cost way more in both lives and money than 911.

I'm sorry, but in what way is the government using violence (or the threat thereof) to create fear/prevent people from "demanding impeachment and a reform of our election systems"?

I must be missing something here. You speak of "mythical Arab fanatics with boxcutters who somehow defeated all of NORAD on 9/11. . .."

If I read between the lines correctly, you are saying that nineteen terrorists did not take over four planes on 9/11. Again, if I read between the lines correctly, you are implying that this was actually a plot by officials and/or employees of the United States.

I'm sorry, but that's just a big pile of cow manure for which there is not ONE scintilla of evidence; This "theory" is, instead, the workings of the crazed minds of people who truly want to believe that our Government is an evil entity, flying out of control and perpetrating atrocities against its own citizens.

Having worked for 31 plus years for that government, in many different positions and areas, I can assure you that there is absolutely no way in which a crime of this magnitude could have been perpetrated by Federal employees without the entire plan's being leaked, either before, during, or after the event. The Government is a big sieve. The only time we even came close to this level of secrecy was the Manhattan Project, about which there were rumors even as the project leaders were working furiously to perfect their machines. My father was a journalist then. He knew something was going on (how the hell do you hide a new city in Tennessee!) and when he asked questions he was told that the story was too important to break; he agreed not to pursue the story, as did quite a few other journalists if I recall correctly. Why? Because it was for the good of the country.

But now we do not have that environment. The only way to keep a secret is to have only one person know it. And one person cannot fly four planes at the same time.

A project of the magnitude of 9/11 would have taken literally dozens of people to perpetrate. Just as the real terrorists had a large network behind them. But with a difference. It would be impossible to find that many US citizens who would keep quiet after the horror of 9/11 occurred. The very fact that we have no proof of such a conspiracy is, in fact, verification that there was no conspiracy. Someone would have sold the story to somebody.

Ted

Sorry Ted but you're wrong. It only took two government people to pull it off. When they knew the date the terrorists had the hijackings scheduled, one would cause the air defense system to be down and the other would hold the switches to the demolition charges planted in the three buildings. We know Cheney is the one who shut down the air defense. I wonder where Rumsfeld was while this was going on?

Lay off the kool-aid Ted before it's too late,it's pure poison.

Go back to sleep; lay off the koolaid.

Ad hominem responses: ridicule the person speaking instead of coming up with a cogent response; and the third says, "We know that Cheney is the one who shut down the air defense."

How do you "know" that? Even if he gave such an order (which he had no authority to do and which would have led to a response from the military to drop dead) can you expect the existence of such an order not to come to light? Certainly one person can give such an order, but it takes literally hundreds if not thousands to put it into effect. Certainly one of them would have blown the whistle.

And then we come to ". . .hold the switches to the demolition charges planted in the three buildings." I do not believe, nor has any credible authority posited, that there were such demolition charges planted in the buildings that fell in New York. If you have any conception of how truly big those buildings were you would know that it takes a lot of explosives to bring down a building of that size. The planned demolitions you see on television all take place in buildings that have been weakened to make them susceptible to relatively small charges. But the World Trade Center Buildings were functioning, robust buildings put together by people who knew how to build.

It would take dozens of people to plant and wire together demolition charges capable of pulling the buildings down. Certainly they were big buildings, but they were also full of people every day who would undoubtedly notice someone putting plastique around one of the columns. And if the charges were there, why not just wait until the buildings were completely full and then just set off the charges? Why go to all that trouble of putting together a bunch of "mythical" terrorists to fly planes into them when all you had to do was push a button and kill scores of thousands instead of only 3,000? And what are the chances that none of those mythical dozens of perpetrators would have spilled the beans? Somewhere between slim and none, and Slim just went off to the mountains.

Ted

I meant not to ridicule,my apologies.For a load of information to sift through I suggest you try,911truth or infowars or one of the many organizations who have researched and looked deep into the years leading up to Sept.11.I freely admit to being a skeptic but the official version is as full of holes as swiss cheese.Popular mechanics is just one of the glaringly false examinations of that days events.Slim is alive and well and his acronym is N.W.O.

A thought or two on some of your posted material:

1. The Reichstag fire in 1933 Germany.

The Nazis blamed it on anti-government elements, the popular mythology blames it on the Nazis themselves, but IIRC, a single nut-case was actually responsible.

2. The sinking of the Lusitania, which was carrying munitions in violation of international law.

IIRC, the German Embassy had published notices in several US newspapers warning travelers that the Lusitania was subject to attack

3. The sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor.

I think that the best research suggests that the Maine exploded as a result of the accumulation of fire-damp in her coal bunkers. This incident was the subject of a History Channel program within the last couple of years.

I believe that publisher William Randolph Hearst bragged that he would start a war over the incident.

4. Pearl Harbor, which was provoked and allowed to go forward to force our entry into WWII.

This is a popular notion among FDR haters, but seems to lack validity. How was it provoked? How was it allowed to go forward?

5. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which simply never happened.

The Tonkin Gulf incident did happen and there was a confrontation - just not the way the Johnson administration layed it out.

6. The babies and incubator testimony which launched Gulf War I.

We were going to war in any case, and it was over oil. We bought equally dubious BS over supposed WMDs from an Iraqi trying to curry favor and money.

Most respectfully,

T. J. Flapsaddle

The original question was...

Is It Becoming a Crime to Think?

Somehow, however, the treatise morphed into the final question, "who were the terrorists?" Along the way the notion of terrorism-equaling-crime was raised, which leads inevitably to our War-on-Crime, the rhetoric of which remains rooted in terrorism... no doubt to allow such actions as the debut of the Patriot Act, FISA, Protect America Act, et al, the upshot being assault on our freedom, assault on our wealth, assault on our sovereignty, etc. The war on crime is no different than the war on drugs... ineffective for its stated purpose, but very effective for the purposes of those who assault us. They're all terrorists in my book.

Is it a crime to think?

Yes, Ted, those buildings were way too big to come down when a plane hit them. That is exactly the point! They were built to withstand the biggest plane. So why did they fall? And what about building 7? Go to loosechange911.com or watch their new DVD, Loose Change Final Cut. Food for thought. And it isn't a crime to think--yet.

Ted, I submit to you that you are correct in your assertion that a crime of this magnitude could never be engineered or pulled off in such secrecy solely by government.

But let's lose the controls currently impinging upon the question for a moment shall we?

WHO EVER SAID that it WAS "solely those in government" anyway?

It might be impossible to hatch a false flag of this magnitude and conduct it purely within government but in the world of corporate espionage, a 9-11 WTC attack amounts to little more than a flubbed real estate deal and a crappy demo job with a poor choice in demolition contractors.

Corporate secrecy could handle a plan fifty thousand times the size of 9-11 in both outright size, scope, budget and calculation on a three martini lunch hour.

And the lines, I submit to you sir, between GUBMINT and
BIG BIDNISS are so blurred that they could be used as
a filter behind the lens to make Lucille Ball look 21 again*.

*(obscure reference to Karl Freund, ASC cinematographer)

Even now.

No...9-11 wasn't an "inside job" cooked up by black robed grinning hooded figures sitting in some secret Bush administration underground star chamber.

9-11 wasn't a (GASP!) "kin-spee-ri-see!".

9-11 wasn't even personal.

It was just a plain old business decision.
And "a few good men" in gubmint just happened to "let it happen on purpose".

Gubmint is large in some ways but small in many others.
Gubmint is weak and ineffectual.
Gubmint is inefficient and as leaky as an old sieve.

Big business however, OWNS government and big business is
lean, mean, powerful and utterly without mercy.
It always has been, and it always has been in control around these here parts, at least for the last century or so.

The key to controlling the 9-11 debate rests with the conventional wisdom and classical definitions of government.

I am simply saying that that wisdom and those definitions never existed, not in over a hundred years, except in some fairy tales our civics teachers told us.

The truth behind the 9-11 attacks lie partly in the hints being dropped by our very own leaders from time to time...
They continually tell us that "the war on terra is war like no other".

Well...the extraordinary attacks we have witnessed over the last century and change have been attacks like no other either. And the sources behind them are sources such as has never been imagined because we are routinely compelled to think in classical terms about them.

There is always an element of truth behind these earth shattering events. Hitler was a true evil dictator, Saddam, also a really really bad guy, the Communists were indeed intent on world domination and might conceivably be in favor of a game of DOMINOS!

But as Arthur Jensen says to Howard Beale in "Network",

"What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions, just like we do."

War is good good business and every war needs a "promulgating event", in the paraphrased words of Henry Kissinger, and to date we have witnessed a century long "train of abuses invariably pursuing the same object".

Cheers,
JeffH in "Occupied" Texas

JeffH--

Assuming that you are correct that big businesses are capable of organizing such a complex plot, why would they do such a thing? How could they benefit so much that they deemed the risk to be worthwhile?

Also, how could they be sure they would not be caught? Let's say that GM decided to do such a thing and got caught. Can you imagine what would be left after the American people rose up in righteous wrath and stomped their sorry asses into the pavement?

No, Bill's Bet, also known as Ockham's Razor, is of paramount importance. Bet on the simple solution.

I have looked at the websites you and others have cited, and what I see is that someone somewhere came up with a bunch of wild theories and all of these internet sites feed on one another, constantly citing one another to "prove" their points.

I will ask again: If the charges were all planted in advance, why bother with the planes? Just wait until the buildings are really full, say half an hour before lunch, and then blow all of them up at the same time. The planes would have just been an unacceptably risky venture, when a much bigger impact could have been had just by pushing a button.

If this theory is correct, there would have been charges placed at the Pentagon to "finish the job" after the plane crashed into it. There were no such explosives.

Likewise there were no explosives found at the probable targets of the fourth plane, the White House and the Capitol.

I keep wondering if the reason behind all these strange theories is because people do not want to believe that a bunch of Muslim fanatics could have pulled it off. Note that Moussaoui was in custody; the other 19 conspirators must have been sweating blood that he would talk; also, the attack was only 3/4 successful in that the fourth plane was apparently brought down by the actions of passenger-victims. That plane was apparently the only one on which there was a level of knowledge of what had already happened that day, so the people had an incentive to act.

And then there's this crazy theory that the vehicle that hit the Pentagon was not a plane but a cruise missile. Bullpuckies. It happened in broad daylight and dozens of eyewitnesses saw the damned plane. End of story.

Ted