Was it my imagination that most people believed in a 9/11 conspiracy?
Was it my imagination that most people believed in a 9/11 conspiracy?
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.
No, this was just your social circle. I know literally zero people who ever bought into any of that crap
Seriously, it was pretty fringe to be openly truther back then.
It wasn't till Obama that we started getting all these batshit insane morons on parade.
Birtherism really pushed it, but basically losing 2008 made the right desperate, they were willing to recruit from anybody, anywhere, right when social media started its upswing.
I think we can say most of our modern conspiracitardacy was fairly quiet till the social media wave.
That is not what I recall. What I do recall was both republicans and democrats having serious concerns that the government knew something we didn't and that we were attacking a country for the president's personal vendetta. This is based on my personal interactions with friends, family, and coworkers, as well as national and local news and newspapers. Granted, I'm from central NJ so perhaps we on higher alert and more "purple" than the rest of the country.
batshit insane morons
Was it birtherism or just Sarah Palin?
I think we can say most of our modern conspiracitardacy was fairly quiet till the social media wave.
I fully agree that social media has made things worse in this, and almost every, regard. Though, I'm trying to understand the mindset of Americans in 2001, not today, not post 2008.
The conspiracy around 9/11 was that the government knew more than they were telling us. That perhaps they were well aware of the event, possibly took part in it, and/or used it to manipulate public sentiment for invading Iraq for no other good reason or perhaps (ok, this I admit is crazy) setting up a new world order where we give up our rights for the sake of "national defense". There would be no Wikileaks if there was no 9/11.
I admit this are a bit fringe-sounding but we were all aware of this back then. Didn't most people believe there was some plausibility in these theories?
Don't most people today believe the government knows more about 9/11 than they've told us?
Well, this one is real
Bush attacked a country that had nothing to do with the event
Well, yeah. That's not really in the same category or ever really disputed
Im so glad archive.org exists. People keep trying to change history when you can just go to archive.org and see all the real actions people took those days.
I knew a dude who swore up and down the jets had missile launchers on the front they fired just before impact.
I remember seeing that gif pretty much right after the attacks. I don't know of it was fake or not but it did show the plane launch something into the building about a second before it hit.
I even remember the site I saw it on.
So your evidence that it was only spoken about in my social circle is that your social circle didn't talk about it?
No, that's my evidence that it wasn't ubiquitous and typical.
Maybe not just your social circle, but social-circle-specific.
The conspiracy is that the Saudi's funded it and the families of 9/11 are still going after them so I guess it's not a conspiracy. The stuff they found was pretty fucked up and deserves more investigation. Remember Bush protected Saudis and outed CIA agents probably to protect his obvious incompetence.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/11/us/9-11-families-saudi-arabia-lawsuit/index.html
so I guess it’s not a conspiracy.
It's not a theory* it is a conspiracy.
As I mention above, the central power in SA needs us to keep other regional powers at check and the Wahhabi in power.
Even if government officials where involved on the attacks, that would be against the direct interests of the Saudi Crown.
In all cases, 9/11 was stated by the perpetrators to be used as an attempt to take the US out of SA (sacred land for Muslims) and every one had allegiances with either the Muslim Brotherhood (and through it Iran), Al Qaeda or, like in Bin Laden's case, both.
This guy though fell from grace and started his campaign against the US during the Iraqi invasion, when the king and government decided that his plan of fighting with faith wasn't as sensible as US tanks and planes.
In fact he tried to convince the Saudi scholars to issue a fatwa against the US deployment, but they preferred to keep their necks.
What I'm trying to say is, the SA government is a cruel, despotic and brutal regime but had little to no benefit from aiding in 9/11. Did they fuck up? I guess royally so, but I don't see why would bite our hand.
Then again, I know nothing...
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?
"Conspiracy" covers a lot of area.
There's people that think explosives were planted because "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" and they've always been ridiculed.
There are people that look at facts that the different intelligence agencies had all the information to put it together, but due to Dick Cheney requiring each agency only report to him, he was the only one that saw every piece of the puzzle and would have known enough to stop it. GW didn't even know enough, because Cheney was the only one talking directly to GW.
So some people have always thought Cheney (whether on his own or not) allowed 9/11 to happen to justify the wars he started under Regean and HW to continue indefinitely.
There's people who claim Israel funded and caused it, when there isn't really any evidence.
There's people who claim Israeli spies were caught celebrating... But that was undocumented immigrants celebrating they got the day off work.
https://www.thejc.com/news/world/who-were-the-dancing-israelis-of-9-11-c7f9b960
That's how conspiracy theories spread.
They took a kernal.of truth and build on it till it becomes something completely out of control.
Immediately after 9/11 everyone had questions and that's 100% normal, I think that's what you're remembering.
It's not the same as insisiting an unfounded conspiracy theory was true based on spurious evidence.
Thank you for the most thoughtful and direct answer.
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.
There is some evidence to suggest that the Saudis were involved in setting it up. Beyond that, there were endless conspiracy theories, none of which were widely believed. I've talked about it with a lot of people over the years and have yet to meet a single conspiracy theorist. The vast majority have never believed in a 9/11 conspiracy.
Not some evidence, clear and convincing evidence.
The problem is that the Saudi "government" is essentially comprised of competing factions of slave owning inbred cousins.
So saying the Saudi government was involved isn't as clear cut as it sounds for the purpose of adjudicating any "punishment".
Now, if KSA wasn't the lynchpin of America's Middle Eastern security apparatus, and viewed as integral to the entire American imperial project, then the US Security State's response would have likely been much different.
I’ve talked about it with a lot of people over the years and have yet to meet a single conspiracy theorist.
These theories were floated, with legitimacy, on local and national news, at the time. Not in the sense of, “it’s theorized that there were antifa plants at Jan 6” but “look here at this video and you could see how some implosion experts are saying this is the pattern for a scheduled building collapse”. They were interviewing people in manhattan who had concerns about a government coverup.
At the time, the regular news (before it got ridiculous) was pulling together all these theories and presenting them together. It was overwhelming that there was much more to this event. And it seems to have all been forgotten.
Whom in the Saudis wanted to take such a risk? I mean the Wahhabi needs us to keep the cash and weapon flow going if they want to keep in check their rivals.
I'm not disagreeing, just want to understand their motivations.
After all, Bin Laden was not Wahhabi at all, at odds with the Royal Family and had an upbringing at Muslim Brotherhood camps, which at the end of the day are managed by Iran, one of the main powers in the region and the biggest threat to SA.
In that regard, intentionally or not, Bin Laden strategy would weaken SA, which fits with what the Brotherhood wanted and ultimately fits with Iran's regional objectives. But I can't see how someone in power would want that unless they had pretensions to the crown, or rather following the Iranian philosophy, a possible republic's government.
Never known a real person to think it was an inside job, just internet whackos...so yea same as the Maga crowd - or any other whackjob conspiracy like flat earth, big foot, vaccines cause autism...
Central NJ - it's so close... so to me its no surprise ppl are speculating and then that transitions into conspiracy theories that are perceived as fact.
Idk, I am similar to OP I think? From my perspective and memory, almost all of my social circle has some amount of confusion about different parts of the whole attack. Like how the fuck building 7 fell like it did or various aspects of the pentagon plane, or how we ended up in all the countries we did after the attack. But no, they weren’t “truthers” spewing these theories on Facebook or accusing some single government authority as the ones behind it.
I can't say this was super prevalent in my social circle at the time in the suburbs of Boston. The only part of it that some people sorta didn't exclude was the possibility that Flight 93 was shot down and we weren't being told.
Yeah, I didn't necessarily believe that, but I figured if they did, that was understandable in the circumstances.
I was 31 when the attacks happened.
While I do think that there was an awareness that an attack was possible, or even in the works. I sincerely doubt that anyone truly thought that 3 airplanes were going to be flown into buildings on that day and one crash in a PA field. The US had the attitude that we were isolated and well defended enough that such attacks were unthinkable. The complete one sidedness of Gulf War 1 really gave the US an out of proportion notion of being invulnerable. Even though the WTC was bombed 9 years prior, two years after the end of GW1.
Conspiracy denotes malicious intelligent intent. The reality is closer to stupidly complacent. Sometimes the two are hardly indistinguishable.
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.
This exactly. It represented such a huge intelligence failure that it's very hard to believe that it wasn't allowed to happen to create an argument for war, that and it kinda rhymes with another (arguably preventable) event in history that was used to create a pretext for war... Pearl harbor. IMHO that was justified though, Nazis being pretty bad and all.
Also tower 7 seemed very sketchy, and I never believed that there was a whole plane's worth of rubble at the Pentagon.
The Patriot act was also a product of that, which if you'll recall is part of what Snowden uncovered.
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.
A lot of people made fun of those theories and sarcastically pretended to believe in them. Maybe that's what you remember. Our human memories are not very reliable.
The only conspiracy that I or people I know may have given credence to is the idea that people high up in the House of Saud knew about, condoned and/or funded the attacks.
And there’s actual evidence that it’s not just a theory.
not just a theory
You mean like gravity?
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.
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.
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.
For the first few weeks, everybody wanted answers, and when people don't get answers, we make them up.
I remember hearing and seriously considering nearly all of the theories you mentioned, but as we started to get more answers, most people just forgot about, or stopped listening to the conspiracies.
Unless, of course, you were DEDICATED to one of the conspiracies, and surrounded yourself with like minded people who dismissed any evidence that went against their beliefs. Much like MAGA when you mention all the evidence that Trump lost the last election, or committed over 34 felonies.
most people just forgot about, or stopped listening to the conspiracies.
This is what I think happened. People just stopped caring and defaulted back to "trusting the government" or were distracted by other things like the war in Afghanistan and the 2008 financial crisis.
In my mind, these theories were still prevalent for at least a few years after the attacks. And now, 20 years later, people forgot so much that they've accepted that only weirdo internet trolls believe in these fringe theories.
In hindsight, there were signs that could have prevented or lessened the damage of 9-11, had we taken them seriously, but you never know which leads need to be seriously investigated, and which are baseless.
Bush didn't do 9-11. In an alternate timeline, it could have been prevented, but the systemic failures that allowed it to happen were more than we can put on any person or dept.
I’ve always thought the conspiracy theories like “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams!” Were just memes, personally
I think to the majority they were. But as with most online jokes, sometimes people believe them.
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.
And with good reason. It didn't help that Dubya was a sketchy sob!
Loose Change comes to mind.
IYKYK.
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.
It wasn't most people, but there were a lot.
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.
Everyone who is aware of the facts agrees that the big terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were the result of a conspiracy. That the American president was in on it seems unlikely. Some of your "reasonable" questions seem ridiculous, such as the idea that a person having "limited flight time" makes any difference at all. The invasion of Iraq was the result of another conspiracy, one which was ongoing at the time and ready to use any convenient excuse to get started.
not in my circles. Certainly taken advantage of big time though with bad laws.
"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.
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 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 and 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.
Everyone has forgotten about the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)
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.
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".
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.
I'd be curious to know how some of your friends and family responded to the shot taken at Trump's ear.
I would assume reasonably and reservedly, rather than jumping the gun. It's certainly how I responded. Not sure what you really mean to ask though.
If you mean about conspiracy theories, I can pretty much assure they waited to see what was actually the case rather than believe the first thing they heard.
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 you know of evidence debunking any these please share. I DO NOT BELIEVE THESE THEORIES MYSELF, THESE ARE JUST ONES THAT PEOPEL I KNOW HAVE BEEN SPOUTING OFF OVER THE YEARS.
-
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.
-
No plane debris found at the Pentagon
-
That entire wing of the Pentagon which was hit was "conveniently" closed for renovations
-
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
-
The owners of the twin towers updated huge insurance policies the day(s) leading up to 9/11.
What's the point of the government hijacking three airliners but then deciding to use a cruise missile on the Pentagon? The explosive dynamics of a cruise missile and a giant hollow tube which carries people are different and both look nothing alike.
Luck.
Flight 93 left wreckage when it crashed. The FDR and CVR were located around 20 feet/6 meters underground. The reason the parts are small is because the plane was put into a nose dive at a steep angle and crashed with a very high amount of force.
Coincidence. It's a building which would be one of the first targets for a major terrorist attack.
The jet fuel burning steal beams is an interesting one. I remember, perhaps weeks after the event, if not days, scientists being interviewed on national news explaining the science about this and being very clear that this was certainly plausible - it wasn't just the jet fuel but the surrounding materials and chimney like effect of the building which increased the fire's temperature (don't quote me on these details).
How it became the most prominent conspiracy theory is wild to me. Not dissimilar from a random xenophobic Facebook post about illegal immigrants eat pets becoming a major talking point during a presidential debate. Or how it was verified that the 2020 election was the most secure in our nation's history yet more than half of Americans believe voter fraud is a serious threat.
As you've pointed out, that's just a fraction of the "coincidences" surrounding this event. Individually, I could understand they'd be forgotten or swept under the rug but as a whole, it's just a lot of stuff to swallow if you want to believe the "official" report. At the same time, I acknowledge that for this many "coincidences" to be planned out would probably be impossible to cover up.
In comparison, consider what's know and still covered up about the JFK assassination. This is relatively small potatoes in scale compared to 9/11.
How it became the most prominent conspiracy theory is wild to me.
Every word in "Jet fuel can't melt steel beams" is a single syllable. Very easy to rattle around in an empty head. I mean, heck, it's still rattling around in mine...
-
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.
not at all your imagination, most of the stuff you listed is established fact.
A lot of people don't believe in "conspiracies" unless they already "know" that the conspiracy is true, in which case they believe it was never a "conspiracy", even though something like 9/11 was obviously a secret plan that a small group plotted to cause harm.