downhole's Journal: Why 9/11 was not a government conspiracy

The thing that most people do wrong when arguing about 9/11 is paying too much attention to the technical details of things. Start talking about construction techniques, steel alloys, flame temps, etc. and you just get bogged down in techno-babble that doesn't convince anyone. An argument based on people and their motives, plans, and actions is much simpler and much more effective proof. To form this argument, ask 3 questions that no troofer will be able to answer meaningfully:

1. Who planned the attacks of 9/11?
2. What did the plotters hope to gain from the attacks?
3. Why did the plotters decide that the attack plan executed on 9/11 was the best way to achieve the goals stated in #2?

Number 3 is the key - it just doesn't make sense for anyone else. The whole attack plan was so risky and out-there that only someone who thought they had nothing to lose and needed to impress lots of people would do it.

Let's say the people behind the attack were some shadowy group of Americans. Within or outside of the Government, whatever. And their goal is to trick the American people into going to war for... some reason or other. The whole reason their group is secretive and shadowy would be that they have a lot to lose if anyone ever figured out who they were and what they were doing.

Let's take a quick look at the nature of the attacks, sticking to high-level stuff. Hijacking planes and flying them into buildings - very risky, lots of people involved any way you do it, lots of ways for it to go wrong. If it was by the book, you'd need a couple dozen people who are fairly smart and willing to perform suicide attacks. Going into the alternates proposed just makes it even more complex and involves more people. Setting demolition charges to do something like that requires a team of experts, and there's only a handful of them in the world. Remote control aircraft involves lots of engineering and testing work, someone to buy and set up the hardware, etc, and you still have to do something with the original planes and the people on them. Using missiles requires people to take them out of inventory, load them, arm them, target them, etc. It just spirals into impossible complexity.

So you're a small group of conspirators that needs to keep themselves and their plans secret while carrying out a false-flag terrorist attack that will drive the US to war. What do you do? A truck bomb requires maybe 3-4 people, a few tens of thousands of dollars, and none of them have to die if it's planned right. A Mumbai-style shooting spree takes like 5-6 people and probably not more then a few thousand dollars in gear. There's tons of other cheap and simple plans that involve minimal people and money and are very low-risk for a well-organized group. But we're supposed to believe that our group of conspirators looked at all of those options and said to themselves that some plan involving rigging up remote control aircraft, firing missiles, rigging up demolition charges, and disappearing multiple aircraft carrying hundreds of people, which would require hundreds, maybe thousands of conspirators, many of which had very specialized skills and very specific jobs, and would cost tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars, was a much better idea? Are you guys insane?

In addition to the sheer complexity of the attacks, there's also the implied organization. You can pass off a truck bombing or a shooting as the acts of a handful of nutjobs. That's why that's the kind of attack that Pakistan carries out against India - they don't want to provoke India into a shooting war with them. A complex attack like 9/11 pretty much announces that there is a well-organized group behind it. If you are a group of American conspirators, that's the last thing that you want - ideally, you want nobody to be aware of your existence at all.

An attack like that is carried out by a group that needs to advertise it's existence, to make the other side fear it, to increase it's own prestige, leading to more support, recruits, and money. All stuff that Al-Quada wanted to do, and that no group of American conspirators would ever want to do.

While we're on the subject, I'm also kinda fuzzy on number 2. Exactly how has any group really profited from the wars? Yeah, some companies made money, but if that was the real goal, it would have been a hell of a lot easier to just give that company money straight out of the treasury for some reason or other, which happens all the time to thousands of companies, than to carry out a ridiculously complex false-flag terrorist attack, hope nobody figures it out, and go to war, causing many thousands of American casualties, not to mention foreign solders, insurgents, and civilians, and undego massively complex changes in the international order.

BTW, I'm happy to debate anyone who posts with a username and makes some attempt to address the points I made.