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.

“It’s in the Bible”, is what my boss at one time believed.

I started there a few years after the events and wondered why this guy kept a 9/12 newspaper front page on display. I thought it was in poor taste but so be it. Eventually the topic came up and he started spitting out bible quotes to explain it all clear as day. He also laughed at dinosaurs!

Sadly, enough of the others there were bible toters too and did not disagree. I moved on before the Trump and covid fun began but I’m sure it was nuts.

That office changed me to my core. Seeing people living so deep in their own fantasy world that they would apply those fantasies to real world events was truly depressing.

These were professional engineers. Not kooks. My time there made me lose any respect for religion. Fanatics and conspiracy theorists are all attention seeking story tellers in need of gullible listeners.

From my understanding it’s pretty widely known that most intelligence agencies though something could happen but not the specifics, and chose not to act on that information or communicate with one another.

The exact reasons aren’t known obviously. My gut tells me incompetence/apathy from government agencies. That’s not a very cinematic or compelling answer, though, and I think a lot of people look for more interesting narratives.

Whenever a big tragedy like 9/11 happens, people tend to try and look for the Chekhov’s gun that shows a deeper meaning or dramatic orchestration. That’s just not real life though.

I still believe 9/11 was an inside job or at least high level officials, including Bush, were aware it was going to happen

Crazy talk. This was absolutely not a widely held opinion.

not in my circles. Certainly taken advantage of big time though with bad laws.

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.

There are many people who like to fill in the gaps of things they don’t understand with conspiracy theories. It takes some degree of understanding of physics to understand why the buildings collapsed in the manner that they did, why hollow aluminium airliners accelerating to extreme speeds imposed so much damage to the buildings, and also why there is typically less aircraft wreckage to be found when especially high speed crashes are involved.

In your case, it’s probably just your social circle as none of my friends believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories.

I’ve always thought the conspiracy theories like “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams!” Were just memes, personally

There was a conspiracy involving 9/11, but it had nothing to do with secret thermite demolition or Israel or holograms or any of that nonsense. People were rightfully questioning how these hijackers were able to enter the US and stay under the radar while training for and executing the attack. We now know that Saudi officials helped them.

It’s also worth noting that the Bush family has very, very deep ties to Saudi Arabia, which may have affected the investigation and how information concerning Saudi complicity was handled.

I certainly heard a lot of conspiracy theories at the time, but I didn’t know anyone who believed them. But I don’t and didn’t really hang out with the type of people that believe stuff like that in general. My friends and family are generally empirical evidence people, logical thinkers rather than emotional.

It’s not accurate to say Afghanistan had nothing to do with it. The Taliban government were directly helping to hide Bin Laden after the fact, and obviously it was not going to do anything to stop violent extremism, rather it was going to reward and encourage it.

I didn’t support it when it started, and I certainly didn’t support the all twenty of the years we spent there, but I believe now that the decision to overthrow the Taliban at least initially was the right one. Maybe some people in Washington pushed went along with it as a handout to the oil and defense industries, but I think most of the legislators went with it because they truly believed, as I do, that overthrowing the Taliban and helping the people build a new state, with real institutions, was a path towards securing lasting human rights to millions of people. No religious dictatorship can grant human rights, it’s not theirs to give.

9/11 in itself would not be as sketchy if they did not use it as pretext to force through a ton of privacy violation laws which just so happened to be ready and only needed an excuse. And invade the middle east with a convenient pretext. And the FBI having advance warnings about 9/11 which were ignored.

I don’t care about whether it was jet fuel or pre planted explosives. 9/11 was used as an excuse to invade countries which we now know had nothing to do with it. And at the time the government knew they were lying about those countries complicity. So I still believe there is more to the story than what is made public.

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”.

There are a few conspiracy theories remember hearing a lot about (aside from steel fuel melting jet beams and tower 7) that I never quite followed up on. If know of evidence debunking these please share…

1. CIA confiscating Security cam footage from a gas state across the street from the Pentagon which shows an American cruise missile hitting it instead of an airplane.

2. No plane debris found at the Pentagon

3. That entire wing of the Pentagon which was hit was “conveniently” closed for renovations

4. No plane debris at the crash site in PA, which is said to have went down because the pilots bravely crashed on purpose to thwart the terrorist plans

5. The owners of the twin towers updated huge insurance policies the day(s) leading up to 9/11.

I still do, at least when it comes to the pentagon. There was also evidence of high frequency trading that occurred right before the attack.