It’s a bit shocking to me when I see people online putting 9/11 conspiracies in the same box as “MAGA” conspiracies (for lack of a better term, sorry).
For reference, I was 24 in 2001 living in central NJ. Even without social media or fake news websites or what cable news has become today, I have vivid memories of people having the firm belief that there was something up with the attack on 9/11. Was this just my social circle?
Jet fuel melting steel beams was one of the more fringe and unfounded (and quickly debunked) ideas but the rest of everything on that day was questionable. Tower seven falling, the missing plane debris at the pentagon and central PA, the military / president not responding to known threats, if a person with limited flight time could hit a tower, the fact that Bush attacked a country that had nothing to do with the event, and so much more are still, I thought, reasonable questions - especially when looked at together.
This is not about rehashing each theory. Or maybe it is? Have I missed that everything has been debunked?
I mean, I still believe 9/11 was an inside job or at least high level officials, including Bush, were aware it was going to happen and did nothing to stop it. I thought this was still a common opinion of most or many Americans over the age of forty.
not in my circles. Certainly taken advantage of big time though with bad laws.
Aren’t we lucky to be living in the age of human history in which governments are good and honest? Not like those old, backwards governments in history books who would dress up their soldiers as the enemy’s and order them to do something heinous.
I have vivid memories of people having the firm belief that there was something up with the attack on 9/11. Was this just my social circle?
“Conspiracy” covers a lot of area.
There’s people that think explosives were planted because “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” and they’ve always been ridiculed.
There are people that look at facts that the different intelligence agencies had all the information to put it together, but due to Dick Cheney requiring each agency only report to him, he was the only one that saw every piece of the puzzle and would have known enough to stop it. GW didn’t even know enough, because Cheney was the only one talking directly to GW.
So some people have always thought Cheney (whether on his own or not) allowed 9/11 to happen to justify the wars he started under Regean and HW to continue indefinitely.
There’s people who claim Israel funded and caused it, when there isn’t really any evidence.
There’s people who claim Israeli spies were caught celebrating… But that was undocumented immigrants celebrating they got the day off work.
https://www.thejc.com/news/world/who-were-the-dancing-israelis-of-9-11-c7f9b960
That’s how conspiracy theories spread.
They took a kernal.of truth and build on it till it becomes something completely out of control.
Immediately after 9/11 everyone had questions and that’s 100% normal, I think that’s what you’re remembering.
It’s not the same as insisiting an unfounded conspiracy theory was true based on spurious evidence.
Thank you for the most thoughtful and direct answer.
The conspiracy is that the Saudi’s funded it and the families of 9/11 are still going after them so I guess it’s not a conspiracy. The stuff they found was pretty fucked up and deserves more investigation. Remember Bush protected Saudis and outed CIA agents probably to protect his obvious incompetence.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/11/us/9-11-families-saudi-arabia-lawsuit/index.html
As I mention above, the central power in SA needs us to keep other regional powers at check and the Wahhabi in power.
Even if government officials where involved on the attacks, that would be against the direct interests of the Saudi Crown.
In all cases, 9/11 was stated by the perpetrators to be used as an attempt to take the US out of SA (sacred land for Muslims) and every one had allegiances with either the Muslim Brotherhood (and through it Iran), Al Qaeda or, like in Bin Laden’s case, both.
This guy though fell from grace and started his campaign against the US during the Iraqi invasion, when the king and government decided that his plan of fighting with faith wasn’t as sensible as US tanks and planes.
In fact he tried to convince the Saudi scholars to issue a fatwa against the US deployment, but they preferred to keep their necks.
What I’m trying to say is, the SA government is a cruel, despotic and brutal regime but had little to no benefit from aiding in 9/11. Did they fuck up? I guess royally so, but I don’t see why would bite our hand.
Then again, I know nothing…
I was 31 when the attacks happened.
While I do think that there was an awareness that an attack was possible, or even in the works. I sincerely doubt that anyone truly thought that 3 airplanes were going to be flown into buildings on that day and one crash in a PA field. The US had the attitude that we were isolated and well defended enough that such attacks were unthinkable. The complete one sidedness of Gulf War 1 really gave the US an out of proportion notion of being invulnerable. Even though the WTC was bombed 9 years prior, two years after the end of GW1.
Conspiracy denotes malicious intelligent intent. The reality is closer to stupidly complacent. Sometimes the two are hardly indistinguishable.
There is some evidence to suggest that the Saudis were involved in setting it up. Beyond that, there were endless conspiracy theories, none of which were widely believed. I’ve talked about it with a lot of people over the years and have yet to meet a single conspiracy theorist. The vast majority have never believed in a 9/11 conspiracy.
I’ve talked about it with a lot of people over the years and have yet to meet a single conspiracy theorist.
These theories were floated, with legitimacy, on local and national news, at the time. Not in the sense of, “it’s theorized that there were antifa plants at Jan 6” but “look here at this video and you could see how some implosion experts are saying this is the pattern for a scheduled building collapse”. They were interviewing people in manhattan who had concerns about a government coverup.
At the time, the regular news (before it got ridiculous) was pulling together all these theories and presenting them together. It was overwhelming that there was much more to this event. And it seems to have all been forgotten.
Whom in the Saudis wanted to take such a risk? I mean the Wahhabi needs us to keep the cash and weapon flow going if they want to keep in check their rivals.
I’m not disagreeing, just want to understand their motivations.
After all, Bin Laden was not Wahhabi at all, at odds with the Royal Family and had an upbringing at Muslim Brotherhood camps, which at the end of the day are managed by Iran, one of the main powers in the region and the biggest threat to SA.
In that regard, intentionally or not, Bin Laden strategy would weaken SA, which fits with what the Brotherhood wanted and ultimately fits with Iran’s regional objectives. But I can’t see how someone in power would want that unless they had pretensions to the crown, or rather following the Iranian philosophy, a possible republic’s government.
Never known a real person to think it was an inside job, just internet whackos…so yea same as the Maga crowd - or any other whackjob conspiracy like flat earth, big foot, vaccines cause autism…
Central NJ - it’s so close… so to me its no surprise ppl are speculating and then that transitions into conspiracy theories that are perceived as fact.
Idk, I am similar to OP I think? From my perspective and memory, almost all of my social circle has some amount of confusion about different parts of the whole attack. Like how the fuck building 7 fell like it did or various aspects of the pentagon plane, or how we ended up in all the countries we did after the attack. But no, they weren’t “truthers” spewing these theories on Facebook or accusing some single government authority as the ones behind it.
I can’t say this was super prevalent in my social circle at the time in the suburbs of Boston. The only part of it that some people sorta didn’t exclude was the possibility that Flight 93 was shot down and we weren’t being told.
A lot of people made fun of those theories and sarcastically pretended to believe in them. Maybe that’s what you remember. Our human memories are not very reliable.
The only conspiracy that I or people I know may have given credence to is the idea that people high up in the House of Saud knew about, condoned and/or funded the attacks.
And there’s actual evidence that it’s not just a theory.
I’ve always thought the conspiracy theories like “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams!” Were just memes, personally
I think to the majority they were. But as with most online jokes, sometimes people believe them.
In my circle yeah we all said Bush did 9/11. Was def taken as fact by edgy skaters/stoners who watched a lot of early YouTube.
It wasn’t most people, but there were a lot.
Everyone who is aware of the facts agrees that the big terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were the result of a conspiracy. That the American president was in on it seems unlikely. Some of your “reasonable” questions seem ridiculous, such as the idea that a person having “limited flight time” makes any difference at all. The invasion of Iraq was the result of another conspiracy, one which was ongoing at the time and ready to use any convenient excuse to get started.
You aren’t imagining things. People got caught up in the weird details, the fact that the plane meant for the white house just happened to not reach its destination (even though George W. Bush who was president at the time was in Florida anyways), the supposed untrustworthiness of the US government (staging terrorist attacks to garner support for things wasn’t even a new feature among American agencies, though all confirmed proposals had been rejected by the president), the fact this resembles something out of Nero Caesar’s playbook (which would make the whole thing kind of well-established at this point), and the fact that Osama Bin Laden’s response message to Americans was “released” just before the next election (almost like they were trying to then garner support for an election).
Seek out reasons to conspiracy-theorize though and you will find an Achilles Heel one out of ten times, and people here conjure them at a megafactory’s pace. Raising an eyebrow towards the conspiracy theorists is the fact the circumstances from the Middle Eastern perspective that led to the attack though, as well as the fact there even was direct acknowledgement by Osama Bin Laden and later their hosts in Pakistan at all, make it so that, even if it had been American agents who carried it out, it still might as well have been carried out by Osama Bin Laden by some form of proxy/tribute (in other words, his nation made it impossible to say they hadn’t looked forward to overseeing it, and from a war standpoint it would have been an act of war in a way either way, plus there are the witness accounts of the plane passengers, like we should ignore those), and it skews matters that both planes and buildings in New York City were not built to code (absolutely every liberty was taken even considering the more lenient building code at the time, for example the stairs were like motel stairs and the anti-fire system was inadequate), which throws a wrench into discussions of architectural physics (of note, I consider it odd people use physics to determine the suspects, that’s more of something that merely makes one wonder the “how” about something we all know physically happened).
Rule of thumb, when people go about this, I would think one should think in terms of a court of law. You’re a prosecutor making a case against or in favor or a suspect. Are you going to say “look at the physics of something that clearly happened, that doesn’t look right” or “but Emperor Nero did it” or “the person I’m accusing has a track record” or “some things seem awfully convenient”? Maybe you would, but that’s you, and testimony would become your nightmare. Also note that I’m sure nobody is saying agnosticism isn’t completely possible, even though people would think “alright, either you think they did this or that person did it”.
