Late to the party, very busy doing exceptionally complicated technical things that most people wouldn't understand, though I'm sure there's a Youtube video explaining how it's all my fault that begins with the words "I'm not an IT professional, but..." and then claiming common sense
TP Rich said:
So to start off... yes! I'm with the 54% that do not believe that 9/11 was an Al-Qaeda attack and the 15% who were blessed with "common" sense that believe the US government were responsible.
Feel free to keep your common sense, I'll stick with my extraordinary sense thanks
Okay, most of the "answering" has been done by engineers/physicists/chemists already... You know? Those people who start professional journals with phrases like "I am an engineer SO...", or "Being a chemist, I KNOW...", those annoying people who study a single subject for many years and actually know things.
So, I shall come at this from a different angle. You don't actually need to debunk any conspiracy theories from "proof on the ground" level. These people are essentially "Chicken Licken".
An acorn lands on the ground. Having no understanding of the life cycle of an oak tree or gravity, he assumes that the entire sky must be falling down and runs around to tell everyone. It's a typical "see the effect without understand the cause" principle at work.
What happens is that Chicken Licken has his acorn of proof. If I said to him "that's a tiny tree waiting to grow", he'd say "but I've seen trees and they're huge and nothing like this, that's just stupid". So I'd have to explain about how trees grow, photosynthesis, capillary action, osmosis and perhaps even the quantum physics bound within photosynthesis. I may have to start explaining about evolution.
The problem is, Chicken Licken doesn't really understand this, because "common sense" says that you can't grow giant oaks from tiny acorns. So he asks "Goosey Loosey", a kind of "Furie Curie says that acorns can just fall from the sky and the reason is because they grow into oaks!". Goosey Loosey says he's been around the farm yard for ten years and has never seen such a thing (okay, he lives on the other side of the farm were there are no trees, but we won't mention that as it might make people doubt him). So Chicken Licken presents that on a website that proves that acorns can't grow into oaks.
He then approaches Swanny Lonny who agrees that acorns can't fall from the sky because there can't be such a thing as gravity, after all, he can fly. If something as huge and lumbering as a swan can fly, then an acorn could very easily. It must have been pushed down by that evil Foxy Loxy.
All of a sudden you have a bad guy doing all of this.
The point is that you need to start from the other side. It's cause and effect, so you look at the cause to begin with.
Why is Foxy Loxy (George W Bush) throwing acorns at the farm animals? If he wanted to, he could simply just kill anyone he wanted, but instead went to great lengths to chuck nuts about. And let's face it, Foxy Loxy isn't the one chucking nuts about here.
Why kill 7,000 people in a massively extravagant multiple attack on your own people? Was it to try and justify a war? If it was, then why make such a huge lie when you could have just said "our intelligence services have evidence that there are nuclear arms in Iraq". It's a more elegant lie and does the same job with no loss of life. The US citizens didn't need a massacre to jump into a war. So what is the reason?
That's your "cause", once you have that you can then start to build up a profile of what happened and does it fit the cause. The problem is that people are using the effect and building a cause from it; "acorn on head, sky must be falling". The issue is that for it to work, you have to ignore experts on the subjects involved.
There's a "source" you quoted which said "I called some aircraft pilots and asked them and they said..." That's not evidence. Who were the aircraft pilots? What exactly did they say? Do you have the transcript of the interview? What is the experience of those pilots in area being questioned? Were they really 757 pilots or crop dusters pilots?
Yet when an expert in plane crash forensics presents a 200 page document of evidence and findings based on 20 years of professional learning and experience, they're ignored "because they must be working for government". When the evidence is debunked, call in the conspiracy. The problem is that everything relies completely on the conspiracy being true. Something nobody can actually prove, or even justify other than "the government is evil". It's all acorns being stacked to prove a cause rather than looking at the cause and seeing how well it fits the effect.
1. Some grainy CCTV and hearsay proves that the government conspired to murder thousands of their own people.
2. A terrorist organisation with a history of hatred towards the American people organise themselves well enough to create a hideous act of terrorism (which they are famed for) create a series of attacks that pan out exactly as we see them panning out, backed by both the terrorists involved and experts who studied the aftermath for official documents describing precisely what happened using professionalism, science, experience and above all intelligence.
The latter works without any need for anything to made up. You don't need imagination for it to work simply because it's true. As soon as you need to start inventing things, it starts to fall apart.
Imagine the two arguments as pyramids. The "it was a terror attack" argument is a normal pyramid with a wide, square base. The conspiracy theory is trying to demolish the pyramid starting at the point and working down. It chips away here and there, but the pyramid as a whole remains solid.
The conspiracy argument turns the pyramid upside down. It's already unbalanced with the huge "the rulers of the world are under control of the Masons" theory on the top that everything goes back to, but people debunking the conspiracy chip away at the point. One chip and it all falls down. So the conspiracy theorists rebuild it the same way again with a new argument, and it collapse again. There's no solid foundation so the argument can't sustain any damage.
The problem is confounded by conspiracy theorists using rubber mallets to chip away and everyone else is using a jack hammer against their pyramid.
Again, people need to learn about burden of proof. Anyone who believes this was a terrorist attack doesn't need to "prove it". It IS what happened and has been proven by experts. Until
experts disprove it, that's what happened. So far, there hasn't been any expert proof that disproves anything.
Was that long enough? Good job Pokemaniac and UC covered ground before me