to think the conspiracy theorists on the bbc3 doc are actually a tad disrespectful?

[Misspixietrix]

the polly pocket human in the corner who sulked in the corner instead of intellectually listening to the expert....infuriated me!

The thing is that is you believe the conspiracy theories then you believe

• Everyone in the US and UK governments from 2001 to the present day is complicit in the cover up

• Everyone in the US and UK governments is therefore evil

• All elections/ civil service interviews must be completely rigged so that only people who are sufficiently evil can get into the government/civil service

Does that mean you can't believe just a little bit of conspiracy is going on Bride?

It's an all or nothing situation?

What if 4/5 people, who have their whole lives invested in the present state of political affairs, knew 9/11 was going to happen, but for some reason didn't think it'd be within Americas interest (or could be used to their advantage, if they used it to invade another country) to stop it from happening.

I can't guess at why they'd want to do it apart from the financial and political gains, nor that I think it has happened, but that's not to say that people can't be evil for an overall good purpose.

And have you seen the engineered theatrics that go into an American election?

Wasn't there a bit of a kerfuffle about the counting of votes not long back?

I don't dare watch this!

These people make me so damn angry, if only because I cannot abide that level of stupidity!

ITNG - I don't actually dismiss all conspiracy theorists or at least didn't when they first started) but I have looked into everyone that I've heard as it came out and haven't yet come across a credible one. Added to which if you had seen the programme you would understand why we're being dismissive and rude particularly about a couple of the people involved because they were ignorant, rude and a sandwich short of a picnic. They don't deserve the courtesy of being taken seriously because they were totally uninterested in considering another point of view and judging it on its merits. If they had done that and concluded they hadn't changed their position becasue X and Y I would at least do them teh courtesy of listening and giving them some respect. I don't expect everyone to agree with me about everything. Instead they behaved like petulant toddlers and don't deserve to be given any attention until they learn to talk nicely to grown-ups.

Of course there are going to be anomalies and unexplained things. Not everything is expalinable and no-one has any experience of flying four full passengers jets into populated areas at differnt angles/speeds/buildings etc and strangely enough nobody seems keen to replicate it!

Of course its entirely possible that a very small group of influential people wanted to gain some political capital out of a terrorist attack but there would have been any number of ways to acheive that aim without actually flying four jets into American civilians including discovering the plot at the last minute (and being heros rather than looking like incompetant idiots), flying one plane into the ground (a la flight 93) and only killing the people on the plane and "discovering" the rest. Also if the aim (as most frequently stated) was to give the US the excuse to intervene in Iraq - why set up Al Quaeda to be the fall guy and attack Afghanistan for harbouring terrorists which is neither in teh middle East nor has oil. Why not just plant a link directly to Sadam Hussein. It took many more years and another conspiracy (which I beleive becasue there is plenty of evidence and lots of people blabbed) to manufacture enough evidence to invade Iraq.

I think the only halfway plausible conspiracy theory is that flight 93 was shot down but the govt won;t admit it because of the potential bad publicity. ON balance I think not - there is plenty of evidence that the passengers intended to try t take the plane back, they already knew that the other planes had flown into the TT's by then so they had nothing to lose. The flight voice recorder shows that they had either broken into the cockpit or that the pilot thought they were going to break in imminently. There is also evidence that there were very few fighter jets which were quite some way away and were sent off on a wild goose chase to find one of the planes which had already crashed. I think it possible I just don;t personally thing its probably given the evidence. In that one case I accept people might find the evidence less persuasive and ultimately I'm not sure it makes a great deal of differnce. Those passengers were going to die, someon made a very difficult (and brave decision) to ake some control away form teh hijackers and ensured no more people than absolutely necessary dies. Whether it was the passengers or the pilot of an airforce plane/his superiors doesn't really change the result and doesn't in my mind speak to any sinister cover up.

I'm going off to research the passport issue as thats interesting.

What Kew said.
I can't believe that even if the least spectacular conspiracy theory were true i.e. that the US government knew this was going to happen and did nothing to stop it, we wouldn't have had a leak about it by now. The number of people required to cover up something like that would in my opinion mean someone would have talked by now.
I vehemently disagree with many of Bush's policies but I'm afraid I refuse to believe that everyone from the lowest agent in the FBI or CIA who first uncovered the plot would be cold hearted/ evil enough to countenance turning a blind eye.
I don't dismiss all conspiracy theories out of hand but this one makes no sense.
For an interesting conspiracy read try 'The Men Who Murdered Marilyn'.

But 'they' don't have to have made a conscious 'we're going to let this go ahead for X reasons' decision with accompanying sinister whispering in corners, Fuzzy.

A decision that there wasn't sufficient corroboration of the intelligence gathered to bring in wide ranging (and expensive) security measures, would do the same job.

Which is what happened.

but a conspiracy is more than one person colluding in something to acheive an end result (isnt it?).

A simple decision that series of facts didn;t merit a centain action isn';t a conspiracy unless they had a clear result in mind and I don't see what result that might be.

Very interesting hearing the discussion of some of the people in the intelligence field at the time intereviewd on (was it newsnightI can;t remember) and their total frustation with George W's advisors who were predominantly his fathers and set in a totally differnt mindset and really didn;t accept the danger presented by Al Quaeda. They were far more interested in danger from sovereign states like Russia and CHina and were focussed on maintining teh Star wars defence system - no doubt entirely partially due to the financial ramifications to their mates teh Amercian defence industry. but still in my mind amounts to incompetence not conspiracy.

To mind mind it totally explained why Bush went totally over board after the inital strike on Afghanistan with his desire to punish anyone who he deemd to be harbouring terrorists. It was displacement anger because he knew damn well he and his advisors dropped the ball spectacularly. Of course he was totally blinkered to what anyone in the know said about Iraq not having WMD just as much as he was about the threat Al Quaeda posed. Exactly the same character flaw with differnt but equally catastrophic results.

Still unconvinced that it was a conspiracy.

I guess the point I'm trying to ineloquently make is that some of the people on the programme were suggesting that there was a conspiracy specific to this plot within the US government. That is, that they wanted this to succeed to give them a reason to invade Iraq/ Afghanistan. For that to succeed in my opinion you would need to involve numerous people. The more subtle and less involved theory that a very few people at the top were hoping something like this would happen and designed intelligence and security policies to make it as likely as possible is a different proposition and I agree this would involve significantly fewer people.
I don't know maybe I'm too willing to try to find the good in people but I'd like to think that neither of these things happened and it was 'just' a monumental cock up. I sleep more easily at night that way .

Widespread panic/loss of confidence in a government can be a good persuader to keep traps shut Fuzzy.

Is it just me? Or does anyone else find it a bit strange for a thread in AIBU, about an emotive topic, not to have descended into namecalling and deletions?

All the talk about CIA agents and Ruski spies may have been a case of 'never a truer word spoken in jest' eh?

Looking at the facts and evidence surrounding the AIBU section, I detect the faint whiff of rat...

Couldn't agree more Zigzag it's easier the less number of traps involved though.

Tis bizarre that this thread is still so polite particularly when it was started on a Friday night.
Checks for suspicious looking spy type people hanging around the house

I've got an unsavoury looking character who's been loitering about the house for a while...hang on...that's my grizzly unshaven DH

Thought he had a familiar look about him.

She was deeply stupid, rude and arrogant.

It seems like her and Rodney were desperate to prove there mad theories had an inch of truth to them.