User:Woozle/positions/2013/9-11

Position Quiz Answers

My answers to the position quiz (as of 2009-12-05):

• A1. Is the official story essentially true and complete? NO
• A2. Was the official investigation conducted in a reasonable way? NO
• A3. Is any further (re-)investigation a waste of time? NO
• A4. Have all the questions surrounding the events of 9/11 been answered satisfactorily? NO
• A5. In the days prior to 9/11, did the Bush administration respond appropriately to any warnings they might have received? NO
• A6. On the day of 9/11, were the Bush administration's actions reasonable, under the circumstances? NO
• A7. On the day of 9/11, did the military act appropriately? NO
• A7a. If not, was this an understandable lapse under the circumstances? NO
• A8. Is it reasonable to think that men carrying no weapon other than box cutters could overcome trained professional pilots and seize control of four commercial jets? NO MAYBE
  • revised to MAYBE 2010-02-28: Prior to 9/11, airlines allegedly had an explicit policy of not resisting hijackers, even if said hijackers were armed only lightly. This is partially confirmed by Wikipedia, but it's not clear if pilots would have relinquished control under the "Common Strategy".
    • 911 Research does not address this question.
    • Pilots for 9/11 Truth says "I find it hard to believe Capt. Burlingame gave up his ship to Hani Hanjour pointing a boxcutter at him. Pilots know The Common Strategy prior to 9/11. Capt. Burlingame would have taken them where they wanted to go, but only after seeing more than a "boxcutter" or knife. ... The pilots' number 1 priority is the safety of the passengers. Number 2 priority is to get them to their destination on time. Pilots dont just give up their airplane to someone with a knife.. regardless of what the press has told you about The Common Strategy prior to 9/11." Any rational refutations of this?
      • This would seem to imply that "cooperation" was limited to "piloting the plane to any destination requested", not "leaving the control cabin and letting the hijackers take over"; this matches my understanding as well.
    • There is also evidence that on one of the flights (AA11), the flight deck door was never opened during the flight. Faulty switch? Maybe.
• B1. Is there any reason to distrust the accuracy and even-handedness of mainstream news reporting, as it has existed for the past decade or so? YES
• B2. If available evidence points strongly towards a particular set of circumstances, is it reasonable to be skeptical of any conclusion which states that those circumstances did not occur? YES
• B2a. Is it necessary to explain how those circumstances could have arisen in order to successfully argue that the evidence indicates they did? NO
• B2b. If so, does that explanation need to be just as rigorous as the evidence pointing towards the circumstances? NO
• B3. Is there any reason to distrust statements made by the Bush administration? YES
• B4. Is there any reason to distrust conclusions reached by federal commissions? YES
• B5. As an explanation for the level of governmental incompetence displayed regarding Hurricane Katrina, do you think that malice might be a better explanation than stupidity/incompetence? YES
• B5a. If YES to B5, why do you believe this (what is the evidence)? the incompetence displayed by Bushco has been so systematically destructive that is difficult to explain as coincidence or accident, although this is still possible. David Brin, for example, has argued that said incompetence was a by-product of a "war on professionalism" waged by the Bush administration.
• B5b. If YES to B5, what do you think the motive might have been? two possible scenarios: (1) destruction/dismantling of the Federal Government, in accordance with neocon philosophy (Starve the beast); (2) less likely but still consistent with evidence is that Bush himself or key members of his administration were in the pay of foreign powers interested in limiting and manipulating democracy so as to neutralize threats to their existing power.
• B5c. Regardless of your answer to B5, do you believe that the levels of government malice OR stupidity/incompetence displayed regarding Katrina are consistent with whatever levels of government malice or stupidity/incompetence you believe were at work on 9/11? YES, the former is consistent with a range of possibilities for the latter. I would even say that this (the issue of consistency) argues against the idea that Bushco were "just doing the best they could" on 9/11, since they clearly didn't do this for Katrina.
• B5d. If the evidence pointed to a significantly different level of Administration competence on 9/11 than it does for Katrina, would this be grounds for (a) rejecting the evidence, (b) trying to determine what might have changed, (c) not worth worrying about, or (d) other? worth trying to reconcile, but not a show-stopper
• C1. Is it likely that WTC1 was hit by American Airlines flight 11? YES
• C2. Is it likely that WTC2 was hit by United Airlines flight 175? YES
• C3. Is it likely that the Pentagon was hit by American Airlines flight 77? YES
• C4. Is it likely that the source of the wreckage seen in Pennsylvania was United Airlines flight 175? YES
• C5. Is it likely that all of these were essentially normal civilian aircraft without any equipment having been installed specifically to aid their use as weapons of terror? YES

Further Comments

The official story of 9/11 is a mixed bag at best. It is also a cover-up of monstrous proportions, regardless of who the bad guys actually were: evidence was destroyed, evidence was ignored, explanations were non-explanations, and some things (e.g. WTC7) were just ignored altogether.

If you hide or destroy evidence making it difficult or impossible to solve a crime, you are culpable for some portion of the crime committed. On 9/11, nearly 3000 lives and billions of dollars were lost; the parties responsible for the cover-up are therefore complicit in those crimes, accessories after the fact at best. There may be some mitigating factors, but we need to know what those factors are before the mitigation can happen. Until then, if you concealed or destroyed evidence related to 9/11, that makes you complicit.

When I started investigating 9/11 back in 2005 or so, I believed the official story. The more I looked, however, the more I kept finding (among the chaff) consistent, sane, carefully-considered objections which provided evidence and held up under scrutiny -- and on the other side, a lot of glib counter-arguments which either addressed only the weakest and furthest-out theories or else gave quick non-explanations and considered their work done. There was definitely a core of "9/11 objectionists" who tended to make sense, and no consistent or believable rebuttals from the "9/11 party-liners".

A consolidated list of unanswered (and answered) questions is here.