My favorite line from one of these folks was this:

“I don’t deal in ‘conspiracy theory,’ I deal in conspiracy fact.”

Her “facts” were as dubious as any.

Tim

Check out the following stories on Slashdot, which hosts an interesting collection of science nerds & geeks.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/18/0220201

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/09/1724246

In short, nothing to see here… move along.

Tim

First, thanks for reading and commenting.

With regard to questions about the US Government and cover-ups, the most compelling argument against such things is the massive amount of coordination necessary, and the number of people that must be complicit, at a ridiculous number of levels. Consider, for example, Anne Northrup, former congressperson for Kentucky. I worked with Anne’s husband, and followed her political career in this region. One of my co-workers is a close friend of her family. Sprinkled throughout the US Government are people just like Ms. Northrup, who go from being ordinary citizens to a part of a huge political machine.

For a cover-up of the magnitude of the Pentagon attack, several things would have to be dealt with. First, you have the huge number of people who saw the plane go overhead, and hundreds of witnesses to the actual crash. These eyewitness accounts are rarely discussed, because the people who saw the event don’t see the point in testifying about something that was blatantly obvious.

Second, you have to deal with the hundreds of civilians who work in the Pentagon building every day. I’ve been to the Pentagon as a civilian contractor, and the processing of the many other contractors was a non-trivial process. We’re not talking about a handful of people going in and out of this building each day. These people, several of whom I worked with at a previous job, were on-site when the event happened. When I went to the Pentagon, we were working on some additional security measures, which the local staff took very seriously, because they had lived through the attack. With all due respect to your opinion, it is insulting to these people to suggest that people who were not there have a better understanding of these events than people who worked in the rubble, and helped with the rebuilding process.

(On a completely different note, if you’ve never been in the Pentagon building, it’s hard to imagine the scale of how large the place is. Seeing pictures of the building does not give you any indication of how huge the building really is.)

Third, you have to involve ordinary citizens, who are constantly going in and out of various committees in Congress, any number of whom might bump up against some of the “real information,” and therefore must be complicit. This further suggests that the government has some kind of amazing leverage against these and others, to keep ALL of them amazingly quiet. Do you know people that are that good at keeping secrets? Why then, would hundreds of people voluntarily agree to keep silent about something so horrendous?

Now with regard to the black/white issues presented on the pentagonstrike site, this is a common (but flawed) argument technique, to suggest that something MUST be either A or B. They point to unbroken windows, or spools of wire that were apparently undisturbed, and pronounce “this wasn’t an 80 ton aircraft.” They leave no other room for other explanations, such as the spools having been elsewhere (and moving as a result of the impact), and so on. They also point to the hole and say “one small hole.” Again, this sounds like someone who’s never been to the building. The scale of the destruction (I walked through the area that had been rebuilt) was beyond your imagination. One small hole?

I have to say that the libertythink site strikes me the exact same way. Any number of rational explanations are possible, but rather than waste time going after them, I’ll simply point out that human nature is such that we prefer to believe that there is something mysterious. We prefer to believe that a huge entity like the US Government is hiding information, intentionally misleading the public, and covertly presenting a “reality” that only a “true thinker” can see past.

The truth is, our politicians aren’t that smart, and the system isn’t that good. When we try to cover things up, and we try to manufacture information, we are so incredibly horrible at it, everyone figures it out.

In summary, when our government is made up of people smarter than me, and not my neighbors, then I’ll start to believe that widespread conspiracies are plausible. Until then, sites like Houston 9/11 Truth, PentagonStrike, and BlueMars simply provide me with an endless source of entertainment. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Tim

My question to you is this:
With regards to 9/11, and without pointing fingers there are now several websites, claiming, with often very compelling evidence that there was an enormous cover up of the Pentagon Strike. Here being one of these sites: http://www.pentagonstrike.co.uk/flash.htm

By watching something like this we are forced to either assume that the entire this is a hoax, meaning false quotations and many photoshoped images or that it is true. There can not be, in this situation, a grey perception.

There is a growing number of sites, revealing in a extremely compelling way that the U.S. government does lie, does cover up and that is does it, very often, for reasons we can not understand. Take this site for example: http://www.libertythink.com/totalinformation/BlueMars.htm
Another example, where if what they are claiming is true, then we can only speculate as to why there is a cover-up.

regards