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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You'all must listen to Ishmael's dicta about what is and what is not a conspiracy theory.
| The real conspiracy is the refusal of anyone in the British establishment to recognise that the vicious reaction to the Tamil uprising actually worked. |
No, this would be a simple error on the part of the British establishment. It is true that the 'British' are congenitally unwilling to recognise that most 'war-crimes' are a mixture of unavoidable blood lust and cold policy and tend to get too high up on their high horse. But there's no conspiracy here. Just a national failing of a liberal nation.
Since you raised the topic, it should be pointed out that, if it is true that the Sri Lankan army killed 50,000 civilians after the cessation of hostilities, this would still not necessarily be 'a bad thing'. When you come to the end of a particularly brutal conflict, you are always faced with a dilemma. Do you
a) invoke a lenience policy in the hope that the beaten foe will therefore gratefully reciprocate and settle down peacefully or do you
b) invoke a brutality policy in the hope that the beaten foe will therefore never dare rise up again?
For instance, after the last armed rising in Britain -- the Jacobites of 1745 -- we (and I include myself in this) decided on a brutality policy. A few thousand Highlanders butchered by Butcher Cumberland did the trick and we haven't heard from them since.
What price 50,000 Tamils? I don't know. I don't even know whether that is large price or a small one.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Britain's shameful solution in Ireland was to invite the terrorists into government and give them pensions. |
Seems to have worked.
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Brian Ambrose
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| Ishmael wrote: | Susan Lindauer (born 17 July 1963) is an American journalist, and antiwar activist.
In 2003 she was arrested and charged with conspiring to act as an unregistered agent for the Iraqi Intelligence Service....She was freed on bail in 2006. Citing expert testimony from both defense and prosecution witnesses that Lindauer suffered from paranoia and delusions of grandeur.... a second judge also said Lindauer was not fit for trial because she was "unable to understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against her or to assist properly in her defense."
....
...Judge Michael B. Mukasey...noted that the severity of Lindauer's mental illness, which he described as a "lengthy delusional history", weakened the prosecution's case. In his decision he wrote, "Lindauer ... could not act successfully as an agent of the Iraqi government without in some way influencing normal people .... There is no indication that Lindauer ever came close to influencing anyone, or could have.
--Wikipedia
Well Brian. If you are "normal", you've proven the Judge wrong. On the other hand.... |
I asked whether you guys find Susan Lindauer to be a credible witness, I'm relieved that at least one other person thinks she is. Ish, what you quoted from Wiki is exactly what she had already told us about herself, so that's a cheap shot. What really worries me is how you so uncritically accept the authorities' line, which makes no sense - they arrest her for conspiracy with the Iraqi government when in fact she is delusional and therefore they can have no evidence of any wrongdoing? They keep delusional patients in military prison nowadays? What does that say about state paranoia? I expect you will wave this away as mere government incompetence and choose to ignore all that Lindauer herself has to say.
In my opinion there is plenty to suggest she is not delusional. She is clearly nervous speaking out for the first time (you see a genuine moment of fear when something crashes off left), but also overjoyed to get the chance to tell her story. So she giggles, so what? She provides names and precise dates, and does not hesitate when responding to questions, which she welcomes. She is precise about things which would be very easy to contradict, something no liar dares do (I don't have the book yet, but it claims to have hundreds of verifiable references). Not a liar then, and I don't think she is mad - nor did the judge who finally let her out of prison. You'll say, if she knows so much why did they let her out, and why don't they bump her off? She herself tells us why - the cat is already out of the bag, the authorities did know in advance of a plot to crash planes into the WTC.
But I did ask for your opinion, so thanks, although I'd have liked to have had at least a hypothetical response to the second question.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This is not a simple problem. In the sixties the West was outraged by the Soviets putting political dissidents in mental hopsitals. The problem is that, looked at from a Soviet point of view, they genuinely thought that dissidents must be clinically insane. How else could they not see the benefits of the Soviet system?
And speaking for myself, you'd have to be clinically insane to suppose that by becoming a dissident in the Soviet Russia of the sixties you'd have any effect other than spending the rest of your life in an asylum or the gulag.
There's a modern version of this story. The Greenpeace protesters in Russian prisons are learning that their actions are fine in the west but don't wash against the Russkies. They'd have to be clinically insane to try this one on again. Bet they never do.
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Grant
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I suppose an Applied Epistemological explanation of the JKF murder would be to take Oswald at face value. He told everyone he was a pro Castro communist and hated Kennedy because of what Kennedy was doing to Cuba. See the following fascinating article in Slate:
[url]http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_spectator
/2013/11/philip_shenon_s_a_cruel_and_shocking_act_stunning
_reporting_in_new_book.html[/url]
[NB Some hard returns have been added to this URL to prevent undue width. Ed]
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Brian Ambrose
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| Ishmael wrote: | So this leaves us in a position where we have plenty of evidence for various ideas and yet, it will remain just as plausible that the correct idea has nothing to favour it!
What then do we do??
Forget the evidence. Just forget it. Put it all out of your mind. It's all useless.
The only thing of real value is principle. |
Ish, this is a not very sophisticated excuse to remain as stuck in your mindset as securely as you insist others are in theirs. You have concreted your own beliefs in a circular so-called AE principle that principle is more important than evidence. After ignoring the evidence, what would the principle be? The principle that you have decided applies - in this case that there is no conspiracy unless there is no evidence of a conspiracy; that if there is too much evidence there cannot be a conspiracy. You have no evidence for this conclusion, merely an assertion that it must be so, and it is circular because you disallow the very thing that would prove your conclusion false.
It would be useful to be able to have an intellectually honest and respectful discussion here about the evidence for conspiracy, especially on 9/11. I have always rejected it out of hand on no other grounds than it is outrageous, but in looking at some of the material again I wonder: can a 757 fly through a concrete and metal structure at 350mph in one piece? Maybe. Can a 757 fly into the side of the Pentagon past all its air defences and leave only a small hole and no debris? Doubtful. Can a steel tower collapse on itself and disintegrate because a small portion near the top drops by the height of one floor onto the floor below? Despite my outraged cognitive dissonance, I have to say, no. The unprecedented collapse of all the buildings in exactly the same way but for ostensibly different reasons is impossible. Isn't it?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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These questions you pose, Bri, sum up the central problem in all the 9/11 conspiracy theories. We simply don't know. It's very difficult arranging tests for flying airplanes into large buildings. This is what opens the doors for conspiracy nuts. Since we don't know, anything is possible. Once anything's possible then you can float any boat you like.
Ishmael is not very successfully pointing out that the principle AE cleaves to is that when you don't know it is best to lean towards the obvious. Conspiracy nuts use a don't know to open the floodgates to the truly weird.
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Brian Ambrose
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Yup, that makes it difficult. But we can intuit what is impossible, and all them buildings wot fell down like that, that sure looks impossible to me. Of course, being the gullible sort I'll believe anything, but are there any independent engineers who have tried to explain it?
when you don't know it is best to lean towards the obvious. |
A good maxim, but clearly what is obvious is not the same for everyone. Scientifically speaking, there is nothing un-obvious about a high level plot to create a new war. Put it this way, a tree is known by its fruits. What were the fruits of 9/11? How many people dead? Who benefitted? Obvious, init?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You are (perhaps willfully) misunderstanding. If we accept that we genuinely don't know what happens to large buildings bashed into by airliners then it is pointless arguing one way or the other on this level.
So we move to the next level. We are being asked to choose between two scenarios:
1. Some Arabs conspired together and flew some airplanes into some buildings and died for their pains.
2. Some Americans conspired together and persuaded some Arabs to fly into some buildings on their behalf. The Americans would certainly have died (either by lynching or by lethal injection following a trial) if they had been discovered. The Arabs died as per Scenario One.
I'll have to ask Ishmael which one AE prefers.
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Brian Ambrose
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Whoa there cowboy, let's stick to this rootin tootin level for a minute. I didn't mean to misunderstand, maybe you misunderstood my misunderstanding. I don't know what happens to large buildings bashed into by airliners and nor do you. But engineers like to think they do (the WTC was designed to survive such an event, earthquakes and tornadoes too), and the independent ones seem to think that what happened was impossible. Steel buildings can have huge fires burning for days, they never collapse like both towers of the WTC did, which burnt at relatively low temperatures which could not melt steel. More importantly, what about the other building(s) that were not bashed into by airliners? They also collapsed in the same unprecedented way. If independent engineers say this is all impossible without additional energy input, there is no need for level two - we have prima facie evidence of a cover up.
Alright, since you insist, level two. Any scenario needs to include the salient details before one can evaluate which is more likely. Scenario one neglects to mention a hundred anomalies which make it rather less likely, for example that a different bunch of Arabs must have wired up the WTC with military grade thermite prior to the plane attack, otherwise the towers would not have so spectacularly collapsed. Scenario two makes a lot of assumptions that any half decent conspiracy theorist would challenge.
It is impossible to say what is 'obvious' without a reasonably accurate definition of scenarios. Which of course is the problem.
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Tilo Rebar
In: Sussex
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | ...2. Some Americans conspired together and persuaded some Arabs to fly into some buildings on their behalf. The Americans would certainly have died (either by lynching or by lethal injection following a trial) if they had been discovered. The Arabs died as per Scenario One. |
I don't think either of the two scenarios have much credibility, but scenario 2 could fit the bill with a few small but important changes.
Why would the USA possibly want to kill so many of its own people just to have a false flag operation to facilitate more interference in the Middle East? There are many, many less complicated ways to do this without so much loss of life (2,996 immediate deaths plus 1,140 workers diagnosed with cancer caused by toxic dust and smoke).
However a small change to Sc2, works for me...
3. Some Israelis conspired together and tricked or coerced some Arabs to fly into some heavily insured Israeli owned buildings in New York on their behalf. These buildings had likely been fitted with demolition charges over the previous months by Mossad operatives posing as maintenance personnel.
The Israelis would certainly have died (either by lynching or by lethal injection following a trial) in the unlikely event they had been caught - they had long left the scene of the crime and were safely back in Tel Aviv, possibly watching TV. The Arabs died as per Scenario One.
Odd that although most of the Arab operatives were Saudis, the USA vented its anger on Iraq and Afghanistan. Strange that Osama Bin Laden did not immediately claim responsibility for the attacks. Also strange that the USA pulled most of its troops out of Saudi Arabia early 2003 after being there since the first Gulf War.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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There's a slight weakness in your theory, Tilo. If the Israelis had been caught it wouldn't have been a case of a few lynchings or executions, it would have been the end of the state of Israel since even the gullible Yanks wouldn't have tolerated several thousands of their citizens being killed by a foreign government. After all, the Yanks did take out the Afghani government at the time and that was only for the secondary crime of not handing over the bombers.
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Tilo Rebar
In: Sussex
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | ... If the Israelis had been caught it wouldn't have been a case of a few lynchings or executions, it would have been the end of the state of Israel... |
Yes, I'm sure you're correct. However, the Israelis were concerned about Iraq and other Arab nations and had to risk the low probability of being caught against the perceived threat to their nation's security. I suspect that deep down they blamed the USA for not giving them enough support through direct intervention of US boots-on-the-ground in the Middle East.
They also had the ideal patsy primed to go in the guise of Osama Bin Laden and were in a good position to feed in false information about Al Qaeda to the USA leadership via the intimate links between Mossad, the CIA. and MI6.
Typical low risk, high reward decision that nations who feel threatened sometimes take. In this case it seems to have paid off, with the domino effect of the 'Arab Spring' and its aftermath strengthening the Israeli position. Just Syria and Iran to go.
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Grant
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The collapse of WTC 7 is the strongest evidence that there was no treacherous conspiracy. Imagine that you were the planner of the greatest terrorist event in history - presumably sitting in your office in Tel Aviv. Would you say "Now, we're going to blow up two of the world's tallest buildings in full view of billions of people. But I don't think that's enough. We need to find a cunning way to blow up WTC 7, you know, that building no-one's ever heard of. Oh, and we'll do it after the two main towers have gone so it won't even be noticed."
The real mystery is whether Osama Bin Laden was involved. Immediately after 9/11 he denied it, and when the Americans could easily have captured him, they chose to kill him instead.
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Tilo Rebar
In: Sussex
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| Grant wrote: | | The collapse of WTC 7 is the strongest evidence that there was no treacherous conspiracy... |
There was a fire in WTC 7 and the building was structurally damaged near the ground. This quote from FDNY firefighter Richard Banaciski in the New York Times is revealing...
"They told us to get out of there because they were worried about 7 World Trade Centre, which is right behind it, coming down. We were up on the upper floors of the Verizon building looking at it. You could just see the whole bottom corner of the building was gone.
We could look right out over to where the Trade Centers were because we were that high up. Looking over the smaller buildings. I just remember it was tremendous, tremendous fires going on.
Finally they pulled us out. They said all right, get out of that building because that 7, they were really worried about. They pulled us out of there and then they regrouped everybody on Vesey Street, between the water and West Street.
Other FDNY firemen in the same group confirmed this statement.
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