Slate: Why America Hasn't Been Attacked Since 9/11
Jennifer says:
Slate just published a special series from Timothy Noah about why America hasn’t been attacked since 9/11. For over six weeks, Noah studied literature and interviewed terrorism experts about why the dire predictions of a 9/11 sequel proved untrue. He concludes that it’s impossible to answer with certainty, but he comes up with eight theories—ranging from fairly reassuring to deeply worrying—on why we haven’t been attacked.Why America Hasn’t Been Attacked Since 9/11Beginning today and over the next seven days, Noah will explain one theory a day. Today he examines the “Terrorists-Are-Dumb” theory.
the latest
latest episodes
Because we've already done it to ourselves? The terrorists have won.
The goal wasn't to knock down some buildings; it was to make us retarded-scared and tear apart the fabric of our own civil society. (As payback, er blowback, for military presence in Saudi Arabia.) When will the USAPATRIOT Act be repealed, again?
You'd think most people have seen The Shelter or The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street from Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone by now, but apparently not.
The names of all the theories are viewable for a short instant after page-load. I captured them with a luckily-timed PrintScrn.
From 'worry a little' to 'worry a lot' they are:
The Terrorists-Are-Dumb Theory
The Near-Enemy Theory
The Melting-Pot Theory
The Burden-Of-Success Theory
The Flypaper Theory
The Bush-Kept-Us-Safe Theory
The Electoral-Cycle Theory
The Time-Space Theory
Thoughts? Theories?
How about the "We suck at statistics" theory.
The USA experienced a once in 200 years event, and we're asking why another one hasn't showed up?
There's a couple ways to look at the situation. One is to remember that while the United States wasn't attacked successfully in the past nine years, there have been successful attacks across the world of no minor importance (ie, the London bombing, the Madrid Train attack and so forth). Terrorists don't have to 'hit their target' to succeed in their attacks. They have to great fear, and as the previous poster mentioned, cause a massive over-reply in the government.
The other is to remember that a lot of successful attacks around the world for the past decade were not coordinated by any thing like Al Queda, but were instead, perversely, inspired by the organization.
Also, I'm wondering if the article is going to mention the sad reality that more then just religious extremists were involved in the attack on 9-11.
I'm not going to read it. Maybe it contains this reason:
We were a peaceful nation in 2001.
Terrorists attack because they WANT TO START A WAR. They want power, when people in their countries get forced to pick their side.
Since 2001, we have been committed to total war, on two fronts. So there is no incentive to attack us - we can't get any _more_ warlike.
The global incidences of terrorism, however, have gone up, because terrorists want to push more people towards themselves...
I can't believe all of you people! it is obvious the terrorists have been repelled by all my ever-so-powerful PRAYERS I do every night before bed.
The Usama Bin Laden voodoo doll must also be working.
Anthrax anyone?
The reason we haven't been attacked is because the initial attack served its purpose -- to trick the American public into thinking we needed yet another war against people of color to protect our "freedoms."
If you haven't read 9/11 SYNTHETIC TERRORISM
MADE IN USA by Webster Griffin Tarpley yet, I suggest you do so post-haste.
Bottom-line, 9/11 was a "false flag" operation planned and carried out by agents of the Illuminati both here (Rockefellers) and abroad (Rothschilds) operating secretly within the CIA and MI-6.
(The British Royal Family invented false flag terrorism in the 16th century when they set up Guy Fawkes as a patsy in the Gunpowder Plot, and they've been using the same playbook ever since -- Osama Bin Laden is just the latest in a long line of such patsies.)
Aside from "world domination," the ultimate reason for the synthetic creation of ALL modern wars is to provide food -- in the form of highly charged emotional energy that arises from acts of violence -- for Earth- and Orion-based transdimensional reptilian beings.
These reptilian beings represent the last vestiges of a galactic "Old Empire" which has been imprisoning overly creative or overly psychotic souls on planet Earth for millions of years, by first erasing their memories of their true origins on other planets, then erasing their memories every time their biological containers "die," and then returning their souls to "Planet Earth Prison" where they are reincarnated and forced to repeat the process ad infinitum.
By imprisoning these "bothersome" souls in one place, they get a "two for one" deal -- not having to deal with the societal problems these souls might create, and access to a virtually inexhaustible source of nutrition, as our amnesiac souls are prodded time and again into "killing" their respective biological containers.
As long as humans think that Earthly problems can be solved by killing other humans for ANY reason, we will be condemned to an endless cycle of birth/death/imprisonment.
Our only hope for freedom from reptilian domination is to renounce all violence and dedicate ourselves to peaceful conflict resolution.
Without violence, the reptilians will starve, and be forced to look elsewhere for their "daily bread."
Srsly, if one of the reasons ISN'T "there really isn't much of a threat in the first place", then this is nothing but a week worth of bullshit.
i agree with ZUZU. because they have already won. draconian laws that piss on your rights have already been passed and will never be taken back. the western world went back 50 years in terms of civil liberties and free speach.
when they kill the Dutch guy for criticizing islam and as a reply the Danish take down cartoons and the British call personna non grata a Dutch member of parliament the terrorists have won. don't take me wrong i am not bashing islam per se. i am sincerely depressed by the response of western democracies to a threat. instead of defending our way of life we try to appease the agressor and to do so we kill our core values.
instead of "exporting democracy" we actually kneel before religious "sensibilities". the laic state is dead, what more could you accomplish with more attacks?
The truth is that 911 was a decades old plan created and executed by the CIA and Zionists by manipulating, Middle Eastern Terrorist groups to do the dirty work and take the blame. The CIA would interfere other groups from stopping 911 from happening.
That way corporate group like Carlyle and Cerebus, and companies like Halliburton and Bechtel can make billions off the war.
#7 Your comedic response SLAYED me. I bow down to your hilarious sarcastic comment. You sir, are the king!
I started to smile broadly when you said "post-haste" OLD SCHOOL GOLD!
But then you had me giggling when I actually saw you had typed "illimunati"! ZING!
Out right laughter ocurred when you pointed out our emotions are food "for Earth- and Orion-based transdimensional reptilian beings. CHAMPIONSHIP!
"Oh I hate the Colonel with his wee beady eyes! He puts a chemical in his chicken that makes you crave it fort-nightly smart ass!"
...I take it all back!!! It's true, there is a consipracy...I should know. Soon after my last post I was visitied by a large lizard like creature with a Pyramid head and one giant eye. he threatened to sodomize me right here in my cubicle if I meesed with the system and mocked the Illuminatti!
This eye opening experience really brought some things to light for me.
my apologies.
Kark Rove is posting as Ballardmedia?
As funny as parodying David Icke et. al. can be, crowd psychology and agenda-setting are real problems we confront in our eternal vigil of liberty.
(Watch the full episode of The Shelter on CBS.)
[eyes dart around] I hope there has been some parody going on here. Because otherwise, a whole lotta crazy just rushed right in.
ZuZu...I have also seen LOST, FRINGE and X-Files. My all-time favorite TV show will always be Cheers, where everybody knows your name and they always have something Cold and German on tap. It is also in the basement...kind of like your Shelter I guess.
America hasn't been attacked.
The DC snipers?
The SUV student?
The Ft. Dix plot?
The Seattle Jewish community center shooter?
The attacks may not be as spectacular as 9/11, and they may not be directly funded by Al-Quaeda as supported by the Taliban, but we've had multiple attacks by Islamic terrorists.
As for why they haven't managed to mount another operation the size of 9/11, well... they've been kind of occupied, haven't they?
how about "Because they haven't tried again."
I agree with ZUZU too.
Zuzu is dead on in #1.
They succeeded in unhinging our society. Mission accomplished.
#5 PHLIP
"I'm not going to read it."
Why, that kind of attitude leads to ignorance and blind acceptence of the norms fed to you by your government and main stream media..
"We were a peaceful nation in 2001."
Oh. Too late.
Phlip. Phlippy Phlip. Just because the beast pauses for breath doesn't mean it has decided not to eat you. And just because it sneaks silently in the night, unbeknownst to you, doesn't mean it no longer hunts for food.
Also, I agree with ZuZu@1..
And BallardMedia? Mu-hahahahhahhaa!
How about a far simpler theory.
Rather than there being countless mindless zombie legions out there aching to destroy America, perhaps on 9/11 the supply of men capable of enough rational thought to pilot a jet aircraft and yet willing to kill themselves with an entire airplane full of people was pretty much depleted.
In other words, there just aren't that many people out there willing to do this, much less Muslims who are, in general, very people-oriented people.
Then again, that's kinda what terrorism is for, isn't it? To give a small number of people a disproportiate voice via a very publically-visible act.
Dear Odin861,
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Mahatma Gandhi (Indian Philosopher, internationally esteemed for his doctrine of nonviolent protest, 1869-1948)
Phases 1 and 2 complete, looking forward to Phases 3 and 4.
"Then again, that's kinda what terrorism is for, isn't it? To give a small number of people a disproportiate voice via a very publically-visible act."
Or indeed, a large number of people a deserved voice against a small number of oppressors. (No relation to the story at hand though).
Unfortunately, winning a fight doesn't prove your truth. For that you will need a Tardis, a Fisher-Price 'My First Genetics Kit', some lizards, a terraformer, a transdimensional gateway of some kind..
And the really difficult one, of course; you will have to install competent conspirators in government.
Dear Ballardmedia,
Are you suggesting I fight you? Following your logic I think you just asked me to step outside? Let's do this. I'll meet you in the playground after school...lizards permitting.
careful Odin;
http://www.ballardmedia.net/uploads/legoland_david_ballard.mp3
Because it was an inside job?
Zeitgeist, The Movie - Remastered / Final Edition
Coincidences 9/11/2001
Yeah, Zuzu nailed it. The only country strong enough to destroy America is... America. So the terrorists tricked us into pissing away the historical sources of our strength: Civil liberties, small government, the moral high ground, and the welcome mat for ambitious immigrants. But the terrorists also had a little help from a neocon cabal that hates us for our freedoms. Which brings us to a truly worrying theory on why we haven't been attacked:
Bin Laden and his neocon buddies were didn't want any attacks during the Bush administration. They wanted to save it for a Democratic administration, so that they can convince Americans that we need less freedoms and more douchebag neocon politicians. For our own "protection", of course.
We conveniently forget that the number of people killed by terrorists over the last century is less than a thousandth of the number of people killed by their own government, usually in the name of fighting evil foreigners.
I've been watching the recent news reports about plane crashes (seems like the BoingBoing article about how safe air travel was just the catalyst) and I keep thinking back to Flight 97...
How can people today see the wreckage of these recent plane crashes and see the entire plane on the ground broken into segments and NOT start to questions the story of Flight 97? They said Flight 97 vaproized on impact with the ground... same with the Pentagon plane crash - and yet today we have planes hitting the ground and 'miraculously' none of their wreckage is being vaporized... Maybe I just need to watch the movie again.... *rolls eyes*
Exactly. Like in some earthquakes, houses fall down. But in other earthquakes they don't. So obviously, when houses fall down in some earthquakes it's because shadowy government agents sabotaged the foundations in order to undermine the housing market so that the economic collapse will provide a window of opportunity for the Templars to seize control of the New World Order. Duh.
The media has covered this already.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/after_5_years_in_u_s_terrorist
Dear Odin861,
I merely predicted that you would want to fight me -- thanks for proving me right!
However, I'm not one to gloat, and in general prefer brains over brawn to solve problems (remember that part of my initial post about how we need to resolve conflicts NON-violently if we are ever to achieve true freedom?)
Here's an idea -- why don't you offer the readers of this string YOUR comprehensive overview of what's currently going on here on planet Earth, and do it in nine paragraphs like I did?
I'm sure we are all looking forward to being bowled over by your scintillating intellect and comprehensive overview of world affairs.
It is EXTREMELY unlikely that two planes brought down three buildings without help (bombs placed in the buildings beforehand). This is especially true of Building No.7, which wasn't hit by a plane or even very near the others. It did house some rather key CIA offices however. There's PLENTY about this on the internet.
The terrorism really started after the 9/11 incident, with Bush, Cheney and the rest of the wrecking crew doing their damnedest to reduce everyone in the States to a quivering jelly.
Compare the situation now with before 9/11.
Is there an increase of freedom?
Is it safer?
Is the U.S.A. more or less popular in the world?
Has it helped the economy?
BallardMedia@35
Odin could just mash the keyboard with his/her monkey fist, and still have a more coherent 9 paragraphs than yours @8.
Dear Odin861 and Arkizzle,
So this is what passes for intellectual discourse on Boing Boing strings?
No wonder I never bothered to do it before, thanks for letting me play in your sandbox kids!
MAY ALL BE WELL
If we haven't had any terrorist attacks, why have the airlines charged over 200 people with terrorist actions under the Patrior Act?
ballardmedia,
I think that not everybody quite got the reptilian overlords references. Personally, my dewlap is tingling with delight.
Have I ever mentioned that I used to work for the Illuminati?
I've been inclined to favor the "terrorists are stupid" theory, myself. Al Qaeda had a remarkable run of dumb luck, and succeeded in terrorizing a lot of people, but 9/11 didn't get them what they wanted. In fact, most terrorists are stupid, because terrorizing lots of people almost never gets anyone what they want.
Look at Timothy McVeigh. All his terrorism did was discredit his political agenda. Furthermore, he'd have been caught even if the FBI hadn't traced the truck and connected him with the bombing in nothing flat, because he was trying to make his getaway in a car with no license plates. Brilliant, eh? Do something that's guaranteed to get you noticed and stopped by every officer in line of sight. Or look at Iyman Faris, who was arrested for being part of a bone-headed plot to cut the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. You can make a case for that being a lucky break for Faris, since otherwise he might have been seriously hurt.
Buncha maroons. Terrorism isn't diabolically intelligent; it grows out of the stupidity produced by frustration.
Mind, we're not immune to fits of stupidity ourselves.
===
John in Sapporo: Oh, my goodness. Are we going to have to hear about 7 World Trade again? It fell down. Like the World Trade Center, it had a tricksy clever internal support structure, not that boring ol' framework of steel girders, boxes on boxes, used in so many other skyscrapers.
There's plenty of evidence supporting the view that 7 World Trade's structure was compromised. The building had taken a lot more damage on the side facing the WTC than many people initially realized. Why? Because on that day, standing in a place where you could get a good shot of the damaged side was a good way to get killed. That's why the area was blocked off. What was visible was that the building was literally leaning off true, well before it collapsed.
I've seen the "analyses" of how 7 World Trade was supposedly wired up with demolition charges, and that that's what suppposedly made it implode into its own footprint. Know what? It didn't do that. What happened wasn't a tidy implosion, and the building sure as hell didn't fall down inside its own footprint. I saw it, me personally, not long after. The wreckage was like a mountain made of giant pick-up sticks that pointed every which way, and it had bashed into and piled up against every other building facing it.
But that's all secondary. The real point is that if there were a conspiracy to take down 7 World Trade with explosives on that day, the FDNY would have had to have been in on the plot, because they were in control of the site throughout. They're a very close-knit organization. No way in hell would the FDNY have been in on a conspiracy that killed 343 firefighters and EMTs in one day.
As for the idea that the main towers had been rigged up with demolition charges -- again, no way. That kind of demolition implosion takes a lot of explosives, and they have to be precisely placed right on the structural members at spots all over the building. Other structural members have to be sawed through or otherwise weakened. That would have been a huge job, requiring major supplies and equipment of all kinds. Some of the work would have had to be done in normally closed-off spaces that were full of asbestos insulation. Other work would have been done in fully finished, furnished, and tenanted offices. There is no way that could have been going on without anyone noticing it.
Finally, the explosives theory requires that all this be happening in a building that had suffered a major terrorist attack seven years earlier, and was highly conscious of security issues. You think it's hard to believe the planes did it? For me, believing that is easy. All it takes is physics and chemistry and engineering. Believing the scenario whereby the World Trade Center was taken down with explosives is much, much harder.
Note: I'm not saying no one's allowed to argue otherwise. For example, I respect Phikus, in spite of his belief that 7 World Trade was brought down with explosives. He and I went several rounds on the question a while back. I guess I'm just saying that if what you're primarily familiar with are the conspiracy theories, you should get some idea how big a burden of proof you'll be be undertaking in defending them.
It's because we have the terrorist-repelling rock. Duh.
Hmmm, I would like to purchase your rock for $5000.
Dear Ballardmedia,
First, I am not to clear on how you think 9 paragraphs of some of some batshit crazy ideas about Lizards is a good reflection on you and your little business, but then I don't live in California. Perhaps your ideas are common place there.
Second, I don't debate with crazy people. It is absolutely impossible to win a debate with someone who believes the Rothchilds and the Illuminatti are out to get us.
Thirdly, I come here for entertainment and am rarely disappointed. Boing Boing is not only a collection of wonderful things it is also a collection of wonderful people, you included. I find this site and the people in it very interesting and entertaining. I was also trying to be entertaining. Clearly my comments were all in jest. I think you would agree it would be difficult for us to meet in the playground for a fight since we are both adults and neither of us knows where the other lives.
This is now the start of my 4th paragraph. I certainly hope you are counting them.
Fifth paragraph now and I will actually address the story. Why do I think we have not been attacked? I think one commenter pointed out that we HAVE been attacked as have others around the world. Why not something as large as 9/11? I live in a city with the highest population of Muslims within the United States. Many of my Muslim friends say there has been a tremendous backlash in the Muslim world after 9/11. Others point to the "war on terror" and the seizure of billions of dollars from known terrorist organizations as the reason.
I have no Earthly idea why we haven't had something as horrific as 9/11 occur here again in the U.S. I think it is just a matter of time and something will happen again. Here ends paragraph six.
I choose not to live in fear. I choose not to believe in conspiracies, just as I choose not to believe in my Government. Governments have proven ineffective against stopping terrorism. Instead I choose to live my life, as short as it is, as happy as I possibly can while I am here.
The world is a harsh place with many evil people. It is also a place of good, decent people just trying to get by every day and smile at there friends and neighbors. That is who I choose to be.
I am sorry if I offended you by poking fun at your incredibly crazy idea full of Lizard aliens. It was all meant to be in fun. Relax, smile and enjoy life. Here end paragraph nine.
Good evening.
odin861,
Whooosh. I'm just sayin.
OK! Hands up in the air, officially confused.
I thought BallardMedia was taking the piss, and there was some witty reparte with Odin.
Next thing, BallardMedia is taking their bat and going home.
So I google "transdimensional reptillian race Orion", and get this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/0953881016
So, just to be sure, there actually is a theory that we are being manipulated by transdimensional shape-shifting reptiles from Orion, and BallardMedia thinks its bang on? Right? That's what I'm reading here?
Or, it's all a big joke and I'm a dick?
dick? isnt it "Icke? as in batshit crazy;
http://www.davidicke.com/index.php/
It's a joke. Well, not to some people, but I invoke the reptilian overlords all the time.
Well that just seems needlessly complicated...
That's the David Icke thing, not the joke thing, that seems needlessly complicated. The joke thing seems quite straight forward.
Never come across this before. Makes you wonder what you could get away with. It would be hard to top transdimensional reptile alien overlords who eat our suffering, though.
how about i lay a little occam on ya folks! why go all the way to america to kill infidels, when uncle sam will send the unclean bastards over to them! all they gotta do is haul themselves out of bed, and once thy are out the door, let the killin begin~! when one can just drop an ied off at the corner, or climb the nearest bell tower and become a beloved martyr( and take a few of the occupying infidels wit ya to boot!). all WITHOUT the cost of airfare.
Illuminati, Lizardmen, and even your missing socks... David Icke can explain it all.
I was very pleased when I saw that Teresa and I both believe in the "Terrorists are too dumb," theory.
I also believe that if terrorists are persistent, even dumb luck will give them another win - there's no way to avoid this so why worry about it? I haven't worried about it for a sec. - the smart thing to do is to try to make terrorists less pissed at us.
TX_ROOK said:
You've left one very important difference between flight 97/Pentagon crash and the recent airplane crashed: In flight 97/Pentagon crash, the "pilots" sped up their planes and aimed at the ground/building - in all the recent crashed, the pilots are trying very hard to "land" the planes.
Are you a student of the Rosie O'Donnell School of Metalurgy and Airframe Construction? ;^)
"even your missing socks... David Icke can explain it all."
OK, now I'm listening...
They couldn't have speeded up the planes that much. It's not like the planes flew at 600km/s. The difference between 200km/h and 600km/h is not that great. I doubt they vaporized.
A more useful comparison will be with planes that accidentally flew into the sides of mountains (at full speed). Or El Al flight 1862 that crash into two apartment blocks near Schiphol in 1992.
"For over six weeks, Noah studied literature"
"it’s impossible to answer with certainty"
Wow, six weeks. I'm sure the CIA NSA and FBI didn't put in those sort of mad hours.
@56 - Dainel
They couldn't have speeded up the planes that much. It's not like the planes flew at 600km/s. The difference between 200km/h and 600km/h is not that great. I doubt they vaporized.
Boeing 757 crusing speed is 850km/h (mach 0.8) - presumably considerably faster in a dive. Landing speed is 245km/h (source: http://www.janes.com/aerospace/civil/news/jawa/boeing_757-200.shtml)
3.5 time faster sounds like enough to make a difference to how much wreckage is left over after a crash.
Maybe its totally gauche of me to comment on my own comment, but flipping through the other comments of conspiracy theories versus, I don't know, not conspiracy theories(?) I have something to throw into this mess. You don't have to believe in the Illuminati, International Space Aliens, nuclear bomb in Tower 2 theories to see that there was an international conspiracy to attack New York City and Washington D.C. on September 11th, 2001. In fact, even if you accept the entire (poorly investigated) official story, you still believe there is an international conspiracy, which, in that case, is Al-Queada. I don't proscribe to the detonation, In-side job theories, but the events leading up to that day, and all those involved have still never fully been investigated. There's no huge leap in faith when someone claims more then a group of 200 poorly armed and connected militants in the poorest country on the planet planned and executed those attacks.
DANIEL said:
Who said they vaporized? Go to the crash site for Flight 97 with a metal detector and I bet you'll find plenty of metal shards and scrap, even after the NIST, FBI, and other investigators combed the area.
Take a model of an airplane and throw it across the room, it will skid on it's belly and a few bits will come off. Take that same model and throw it just as hard nose first into the floor, the model will shatter and the pieces will go everywhere. Speed up the model as it hurtles towards the ground nose first, and the effect is amplified. I think the same principles involved would ramp up to a Boeing 747.
This is the best example I can find on Youtube of a large plane hitting the ground, here is another, unfortunately, both planes go in at an angle, not straight-down, nose first. In both cases the planes appear to be utterly destroyed, not just cracked fuselages on the ground as our recent crashes have been.
Why haven't we been attacked since 9/11?
If you figure that the St. Albans Raid of 1864, Pancho Villa's attacks on Columbus, NM, and Glen Springs and San Ygnacio, TX in 1916, and the Japanese Balloon Offensive of 1944 were acts of war, and that the Pig Wars of 1841 and 1859 never got to the point of shooting at humans (and anyway weren't intended as terrorism), you've whittled your instances of arguably terrorist attacks by foreign nationals on U.S. soil down to a single incident: the attack on the U.S. House of Representatives in 1954 by four Puerto Rican nationalists. (Final score: five Representatives wounded, one seriously, though he survived; all four shooters apprehended, tried, and convicted.)
That is: in the 225 years prior to 9/11, the United States suffered one terrorist attack on its own soil by foreign nationals. During that same period, Halley's Comet turned up three times. If you figure it in terms of all incidents to date, in 233 years there've been two terrorist attacks on U.S. soil by foreign nationals, respectively eight and 55 years ago, and Halley's Comet is still ahead by one.
Why haven't we been attacked since 9/11? No doubt we'll be attacked again at some point in the future; but the biggest reason it hasn't happened yet is that these things just don't happen very often.
"al-Qaeda did it" is, as Urshrew said, itself a "conspiracy theory".
The question, as always, is which theories do the empirical facts best support (and which do they rule out).
Ernunnos says that America has endured multiple attacks by Islamic terrorists. Specifically, he names the DC snipers, the SUV student (not sure what that is), the Ft. Dix plot, and the Seattle Jewish community center shooter. Somehow the hundreds of attacks on Mosques all over the country didn't make his radar, I notice.
See, Ernunnos, what you are missing out on here is that all those attacks you mention were carried out by Deros and their proxies. They want to place the blame on our bizarre-looking but friendly local Lizardmen, of course, but we're not going to fall for that, are we?
If I was an American sociopath hyponotized by Deros, I'd declare myself a Muslim too. It's the best way to keep xenophobic anti-Islamic hatred on the boil in the US - you don't want people to notice that the majority of criminals in the US are not Muslim, after all, or that most American Islamic communities are far more peaceful and productive than the average all-white all-christian cracker town.
Be careful - there are Deros everywhere. You need to be very, very afraid. And buy pepsi products, they hate that. And hummers.
@61 ZUZU
"The question, as always, is which theories do the empirical facts best support (and which do they rule out)."
That's why a better investigation should have been done. Now, the only ones investigating have axes to grind or pet theories to put forth. So many other people have dusted their hands of the whole thing as if the official story has been laid to rest, and for many sections of the public, it has. The real tragedy is that those whom lost loved ones in this will have to either finance their own investigations or wait for some journalist or researcher to come up with the facts.
Six weeks of study on such a complex issue is probably not sufficient to come up with anything new.
Eight theories, eh? That basically means we have no idea. I'm not convinced the same 8 theories wouldn't have emerged from interviewing people in a Starbucks over a few days. (By contrast, I think Commenter #3's theory would be less likely to come out of such a project.)
It may be more useful to investigate the plausibility of any one of these theories.
From the article: "In December 2008, the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism said it was 'more likely than not' that by the end of 2013, terrorists would attack somewhere in the world using a chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon."
News flash: Terrorists already have. E.g., sarin in Japan in 1995 and anthrax in the US in 2001. It probably didn't take a Commission to tell us that it could happen again.
Daniel, aircraft designers and commercial airlines don't play this up, for obvious reasons, but airplane skins are fragile things -- and, with a couple of notable exceptions, the rest of their structures aren't massively sturdy either. That's why the jets that hit the WTC left most of their skins behind, and only heavy stuff like engines and landing gear punched through.
You can see the same thing happening in other cases where airplanes have flown into buildings. In October 2006 a single-engine plane carrying Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor bashed into a Manhattan apartment building. It did plenty of damage to the building, but most of the plane wound up on the sidewalk out front, as you can see in the Newsday slideshow.
In January 2002, a single-engine plane hit a bank in Tampa, Florida. The plane wound up with its nose wedged into an upper-floor window and the rest of its fuselage sticking out into the air. Its wings crumpled like tinfoil.
In 1945, a trainee pilot flew a bomber into the side of the Empire State Building. That's a sturdier plane, but the same thing happened: airplane skin and lightweight bits peeled off and landed in the street; the wings broke off as the bulk of the plane wedged itself into the outer wall of the building; the fuel caused a fire (and most of the fatalities); and the only parts that came out the other side of the building were an engine and some landing gear.
In December of 1960 a United DC-8 crashed at Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Either luck or the pilot laid it down along the centerline of Sterling Place. The wings crumpled on impact, and the body of the plane fell to pieces. The crash took out the buildings on the NW and SW corners of the intersection; but because the plane shredded when it hit, the replacement apartment buildings on those corners are to this day surrounded on all sides by surviving 19th C. buildings.
The F-4 crash test page has a fascinating sidebar photo series -- one, two, three, four -- showing the aftermath of a December 2005 crash in Tehran. A big C-130 Hercules with full fuel tanks reported trouble shortly after takeoff. It tried to make an emergency landing but instead clipped a ten-story apartment building (an unconfirmed report said one of its wings was lying on the ground in front of the building), where its spilled fuel led to building fire led to most of the ground casualties.
Now have another look at the third and fourth photos. The plane was described as having crashed "just short of the runway," so I think that's an airport parking lot. A C-130 is a big plane. You can absolutely see where it went. What you can't see is the plane itself. All that's left of it is a terminal moraine of debris and wrecked cars.
Airplanes are fragile. Try not to think about it too much, next time you fly.
Anti,
I definitey got the Icke references and the reptilian overlords gag.. but Ballard wasn't joking.
Not Joking!
Teresa Nielsen Hayden said:
Absolutely - the skin of the plane is there to cut down on noise, control wind - not to preserve the plane in the case of a crash. A plane has no crumple zones - the whole plane is a crumple zone!
Easy, Arky, it's just Lyndon LaRouche up to his old shenanigans.
Hiya, Marcus; how's it hangin'?
Perhaps there's been no attacks because the US has withdrawn its soldiers from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - which IIRC was Bin Laden's first demand.