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.
The only thing I remember people being remotely close to believing was that Bush was so incompetent that he allowed a terrorist attack to happen.
It’s not really a theory that Bush was an incompetent fuckwit, but it’s highly debatable if they knew enough to stop it.
Well, the theory that was floated at the time was that they didn’t want to stop it. The very fringe suggested it was entirely planned by the US. They (Bush et al) knew this would provoke our military and provide an excuse to attack the Middle East. To finish was Bush senior didn’t.
Again, I don’t really want to get down a rabbit hole of validating theories. I want to know if others recall this being a national conversation or if it was just the hundreds of people I knew and news outlets I was watching.
In my mind, it’s not that the intelligence community had indisputable evidence that said “these people are going to hijack these plans at this time and simultaneously crash them into these buildings”…but moreso “there is chatter about an upcoming attack involving hijacked planes” but they didn’t have enough to act on it.
Now…with that part said, I 100% fully agree that this attack was used as a blank-check excuse to invade the Middle East carte clanche.
True. What ultimate came out of the event was the revelation that our intelligence communities were siloed from each other. This (embarrassing) point of failure may aid in explaining some of the questions in regard to preparedness.
I definitely remember some people screeing about Bush and Cheney wanting it, but IIRC, everyone was treating it like suspicion at most.
The Epstein conspiracy theory was accepted FAR more readily, but then that’s basically guaranteed to be true to some degree, even if it was truly just the jailors being incompetent fuckwits that wanted to take justice in to their own hands.