Dacia Iluministă

The Illuminati’s religion is the most highly developed expression of Gnosticism and is called Illumination (alternatively, Illuminism). Dedicated to the pursuit of enlightenment, it has many parallels with the Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. It rejects the Abrahamic religions of faith: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, considering these the work of the “Demiurge”; an inferior, cruel and wicked deity who deludes himself that he is the True God, and who has inflicted endless horrors on humanity.

If you wish to judge for yourself how deranged the Demiurge is, you need only read the Old Testament, the story of the Demiurge’s involvement with his “Chosen People”, the Hebrews. You may wonder why the “God of All” entered into an exclusive and partisan Covenant with a tribe in the Middle East several thousand years ago, why he promised them a land (Canaan) that belonged to others, and why he then actively participated with them in a genocidal war against the Canaanites. Even more bizarrely, according to Christian theology, he then dispatched all of those Hebrews, whom he had supported so fanatically, to Limbo – the edge of Hell – when they died. They couldn’t go to Heaven because they were indelibly marked by the “Original Sin” of Adam and Eve. Only the atonement provided by the agonising death of God’s “son”, Jesus Christ, could wipe the slate clean and allow the Hebrews to be released from Limbo. But there was a catch. Only those who accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour were eligible for Paradise.

Of course, the Chosen People of “God” have almost entirely rejected Jesus Christ. Therefore, from the Christian perspective, nearly all of the Chosen People are now in hell proper. Don’t you find God’s behaviour distinctly odd? Indeed, unbelievable? Don’t alarm bells start ringing? Doesn’t the behaviour of this God sound rather more like what would be expected of Satan?

Remember that this same “God” ordered Abraham to perform human sacrifice on his own son, Isaac. Abraham, rather than rejecting this monstrous command, rather than denouncing the creature that gave it as evil incarnate, agreed to butcher his own flesh and blood to demonstrate how slavishly and mindlessly obedient he was – the prototype of all psychopathic, fanatical “believers”.

Does God’s command to Abraham sound like something that would ever pass the lips of the True God? We pity you if you think it does because you are surely a creature of the Demiurge and one of the legions of the damned. If, however, you doubt the credentials of the Abrahamic God, you may be receptive to the message of the Illuminati and our future-oriented, rational, scientific, mathematical and dialectical religion of light – Illumination.
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Quotation:

The McGuffin:

“It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ and the other answers, ‘Oh that’s a McGuffin.’ The first one asks, ‘What’s a McGuffin?’ ‘Well,’ the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands’. The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands’, and the other one answers, ‘Well, then that’s no McGuffin!’ So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.” –Alfred Hitchcock
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Inside-Dopesters:

Sociologist David Riesman defined an “inside-dopester” as a social type whose goal was “never to be taken in by any person, cause or event.” All conspiracy theorists are inside-dopesters. They have a pathological desire not to be fooled and that, of course, means they are the easiest people on earth to fool – as David Icke and other conspiracy theorist gurus prove every day with the deranged theories they peddle. No sane person could take the proposition of reptilian, shape-shifting Illuminati seriously, yet conspiracy theorists lap it up. They think they’ll be able to spot a reptilian a mile off! No one will ever take them by surprise… so they imagine.

Nietzsche said, “All things are subject to interpretation. Whatever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” Conspiracy theorists have no interest at all in the truth.

However, they are obsessed with feeling powerful – usually because they are so powerless in their everyday lives. In conspiracy theory land, they are masters of the universe, experts and geniuses, better than any PhDs.

It’s pointless trying to reason with them. They have long since departed the rational world. Anyone who agrees with them is telling the truth and anyone who disagrees with them is a liar and part of the conspiracy. This is exactly the way that Muslims think about the Koran: you’re going to hell if you reject the Koran and heaven if you agree with it. There’s no scope whatever for challenging the Koran, just as conspiracy theorists never subject their own theories to any criticism.

The conspiracy theorists call themselves “Truthers” but they are nothing but liars and, worst of all, they lie to themselves. They have no intellectual integrity or honesty and no respect for expert opinions and decades of experience (unless the expert opinions coincide with their own).

Their greatest obsession is 9/11 – the inside job that never was. All “Truthers” inhabit a world of supreme delusion and arrogance where they consider it impossible that anyone could successfully attack America other than Americans themselves. They think that America is loved all around the world and that Muslims would never be motivated to attack the “Great Satan.” Their ignorance of international affairs and Islam is spectacular. They have no interest in researching Islamic Jihad because it doesn’t tie in with their conviction that 9/11 was the ultimate act of American treachery. Not once do the Truthers contemplate that there might be legions of Muslims that detest the infidel Americans and maybe 19 fanatical Muslims really did hijack four planes and use them as suicide weapons to achieve personal martyrdom and avenge the Muslims in Palestine and all across the world who are the victims of Zionist-American foreign policy. Conspiracy Theories: A New Religion?

“Do you think it [the full moon] brings the crazies out?”

“They’re always out.”

(Clint Eastwood, Tightrope)

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” –Søren Kierkegaard

“Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself.” –Jean Baudrillard

Have conspiracy theories become a new religion, providing the wonders and wow factor that were once the sole province of conventional religion?

Baudrillard tells us that we’ve entered hyperreality, sometimes defined as the more real than real. It seems an odd concept, yet perhaps we can find a good illustration in the proliferation of conspiracy theories in the last few decades.

“RL” – Real Life – is often associated with accidents, cock-ups, laziness, ineptitude, bad luck, unforeseen circumstances, unintended consequences, coincidences…a miasma of mess, muddle, disorder, chaos, unconnectedness, the fog of war. Cause and effect exist, but not in a simple, satisfying way.

People dislike the unadorned real. They’re always looking for patterns that make sense: easy-to-understand cause and effect. Even when they look at the clouds, they imagine they’re seeing definite shapes (like faces or animals) rather than amorphous blobs. They can’t help ourselves – human minds are wired that way. When they can’t find obvious cause and effect, they’re left baffled. Even distressed.

But their anxiety is relatively easy to cure. They simply invent an appropriate cause and effect and impose it on the problematic situation. The more cause and effect they can cram in, the happier they are. They feel they are understanding the world. They resist the notion that the truth, in a form they can grasp, is not out there. There must be some comprehensible pattern of cause and effect that explains everything.

Enter conspiracy theories. Nothing’s an accident. Nothing’s a cock-up. There are no lone nutters with high-powered rifles. Mad people don’t do mad things. Instead, everything is rationalised, put in a nice, tidy box and tied up in a lovely pink bow. The gift-wrapped parcel is presented to the world and everyone nods and smiles because now the world makes sense. Sanity restored. Everything does have a sensible cause.

Of course, there may be many inconvenient facts that don’t support the various conspiracy theories. But isn’t it those who are in on the conspiracy who manufacture those “facts”? Six million died in the Holocaust. “Who says?” the Holocaust deniers ask. “Jews say,” is their answer. Why? Why, to promote a Zionist agenda, of course. And aren’t the Jews secretly controlling the world? Weren’t we told so in the secret protocols of the elders of Zion? Those were forged, of course. But by whom? Well, by the elders of Zion, naturally, to cunningly disguise the truth. The best fake is the fake that isn’t faked at all. Or the truth faked to look fake.

To tell the truth of the “Jewish conspiracy” is, according to the Holocaust deniers, to be accused of believing in a “proven” forgery, which was not forged at all, but deliberately distributed as a simulated forgery.

Nowadays, no one can ever discuss the “Jewish conspiracy” for fear of being branded anti-Semitic, and credulously and perversely accepting forgeries…which was the whole point of the forgery in the first place. Except, as noted, it wasn’t a forgery, but merely a simulacrum of a forgery. The genius behind this conspiracy!

Well, that’s how some people see it, and there’s nothing you can say or do to change their minds. And even to try is to demonstrate that you’re part of the conspiracy. There are those who claim that facts can dispel conspiracy theories. What planet are these people living on? As Nietzsche said, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” He might have come up with an even more extreme formulation: “There are no facts, only misinterpretations.”

Facts have long since stopped being objective, real things. (They are ultimately nothing but electrical signals in the human brain in any case, assuming we accept the facts of science.) Facts, we now realise, are beliefs. They can be used to support anything. People hold religious beliefs precisely because “facts” are so malleable. You can pick your own from all those on offer, the ultimate pick ‘n’ mix. You can disregard every fact you dislike. It’s a precondition of faith. (Was Jesus Christ the Son of God? Or the Son of Man? Did he raise people from the dead, and rise from the dead himself? Are these facts? Or was Jesus Christ actually Yehoshua ben Yosef, and didn’t perform any miracles, and was an ordinary human being? Did he even exist? Is King Arthur any less real than Jesus Christ?)

Conspiracy theories operate in the same territory. These are belief systems too. Nothing can overcome them. Indeed, it’s a prediction of Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory that the more conclusively people’s beliefs are refuted, the more likely many of those people are to redouble their faith in their disproven beliefs.

You see, it’s all hyperreal. Conspiracy theories, like religions, offer much more emotionally satisfying explanations. They close the big, scary, open-ended questions. Who, other than rational people, wants to believe that a drunk driver in a Paris tunnel killed Diana Spencer in a mundane car accident? Her followers won’t accept that. Their precious princess couldn’t possibly have died in such humdrum fashion like all the plebs. So all hail the elaborate conspiracy theory.

Diana died for specific reasons, for a rational agenda – not because of some cheap and vulgar automobile accident of the type that happens scores of times a day all over the world. No, that simply won’t do. We can’t have that. The world does not operate like that. Gods and goddesses must have divine deaths. Even in death, they must transcend the herd.

The dinosaur thinkers who write books “disproving” conspiracy theories had better get real. Or rather hyperreal. Their ludicrous facts became extinct long ago, assuming they ever existed in the first place (which they didn’t.) There’s no point in discussing the truth or otherwise of conspiracy theories. It’s as futile as trying to disprove religions.

Religious believers often say, “But you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist.” They never tell you what they would accept as proof. And in fact, they would accept nothing. They can’t conceive of disproof of their beliefs. They can’t acknowledge that they may be WRONG. Same game with the conspiracy theorists.

Of course, we’re all familiar with the very first human conspiracy – when the first woman talked the first man into stealing an apple from a special tree: the Tree of Knowledge. The facts never got in the way of that conspiracy, did they?

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.” –Søren Kierkegaard
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Narcissism:

We often receive messages from people who believe that they are the “Chosen One” and that we should be offering them our assistance.

Sorry to disillusion these people, but we are not advocates of Chosen Ones. The world has had quite enough Messiahs. In any case, they always arrive too late:

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last. –Kafka

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No one’s coming to save the world. Not Jesus Christ, not anyone. If the world is going to be saved then it’s our collective responsibility, no one else’s. The very act of believing in a Saviour is a disgrace. It’s cowardice and laziness, an abdication of our personal obligations.

The logic of our central theme of “becoming God” is that each of us must don the divine mantle. Salvation is our business – each of us, individually – not someone else’s. It’s time to be active, not passive.

It’s time to make things happen: not sit back and wait for others. It’s time to create our own “Rapture”, not pray to someone else to make it happen. We have to stop being alienated from our divine spark. It’s time to burnish it and let it illuminate the world.

There’s no point in waiting for Godot. He never arrives. That’s the whole point. In Dante’s Limbo, the Ignavi are always waiting. Their crime in life was that they preferred to wait until everything was decided rather than commit themselves to a cause when its prospects were uncertain, and now they are condemned to wait forever in the vestibule of hell. Anyone can jump on a bandwagon. The heroes are those who got involved long before the bandwagon arrived. You have to find a cause and commit yourself fully. That’s the first step in giving meaning to your life.

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Narcissistic Personality Disorder has become an epidemic in our society. Legions of people think they are Reality TV stars in the making. Facebook is full of photographs capturing every moment in our “wonderful lives”. Facebook isn’t full of philosophy, art, science, activism, political debate and a spiritual yearning for God. Instead, it’s a global cyber-shrine to vanity, trivia and narcissism. People sit for hours on end staring at pictures and videos of their friends and family, and, above all, of themselves. They are all, like Narcissus himself, perpetually staring at their own reflection, their eternal image, incapable of dragging themselves away. Facebook is the ultimate “vanity project”, a monument to egotism. The “image” has become all pervasive. The Society of the Spectacle is upon us. Our lives are mediated by images. The book – the word – is dying. The Old World Order (OWO), the privileged Elite that have always ruled us, use images to brainwash us. We are bombarded by hyperreal images of airbrushed and digitally enhanced “perfect” celebrities.

Everyone is caught on the treadmill of trying to live up to this perfection, and everyone is failing, so rates of depression are increasing. Everyone yearns for perfect friends and partners. Reality is no longer good enough. In this hyperreal age, reality is inevitably a disappointment. So, we pay top dollar to escape from reality. Women, in particular, spend a fortune on the “beauty” industry. What is the practical effect of this industry? – to make every woman on earth feel ugly if she is not plastered with beauty products. What is the other effect – to place vast amounts of money in the hands of those who control the beauty industry (or should that be the Ugly Business)?

Those who control the use and symbolic meaning of images, control our lives. They can make a fortune from us. They can shape society. They can impose their model of society on us.

We have to escape from the tyranny of image (and brand), in all of its manifestations. The advertising industry is one of the most sinister on earth because its sole purpose is to “persuade” us, through the use of overpoweringly seductive images, to do the bidding of the advertisers’ rich and powerful clients.

How to fight back? We need an Imagery of Subversion – images that undermine and subvert the images foisted upon us by the OWO. We need a Society of the Anti-Brand. Then the OWO will no longer be able to “brand” us with the lurid symbols of their mind control.

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Another type of message we get is from those who seek to show that they are cleverer than we are.

Here’s an example from “Barry”:

And to those who say beware of movements? What say you?

You have asked us to withhold questions until completion of the site…this in itself is a contradiction…a site, like god, is never complete…it is always becoming. What say you, M?

As for your glaring “9-11” (or is it 11-9?) contradiction (Zeitgeist demolition theory vs multiple simultaneous cells of brilliant Saudi boxcutter pilots???)…c’mon dudes. Is this one more thing yet to be revealed in “the final cut”? Or am I just supposed to ‘get it’?

yours sincerely,
the barry movement
beware

We’re not a debating society, so we normally ignore such messages. Also, the message is not intended to be constructive. The fact that “Barry” has made the effort to send us a message indicates that he is quite intrigued by our site, but equally, like the Ignavi, he cannot “commit” to it, so he tries to start an interaction, while showing that he’s too smart to be “taken in” by us. Of course, we’re not trying to take in anyone, so this type of approach is merely irritating. It wastes his time and ours. However, in this instance, we decided to reply:

“And to those who say beware of movements? What say you?”

Yes, we agree. And you know what Groucho Marx said; “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.”

“You have asked us to withhold questions until completion of the site…this in itself is a contradiction…a site, like god, is never complete…it is always becoming. What say you, M?”

Correct again. When we say, “finished”, we mean that we won’t be adding any new material. But, of course, that is not the same as “finishing” in an absolute sense.

“As for your glaring “9-11” (or is it 11-9?) vs. multiple simultaneous cells of brilliant Saudi boxcutter pilots???)…c’mon dudes. Is this one more thing yet to be revealed in “the final cut”? Or am I just supposed to ‘get it’?”

There are three main reasons for advocating the 9/11 demolition theory:

1) To deny that Muslims were the perpetrators of 9/11.

2) To undermine confidence in a particular American government and show that, given their track record, they were well capable of something so dastardly. Also, to attack a certain form of government (capitalist “democracy” based on unregulated markets).

3) To attack government per se. To assert that government is an intrinsic evil that must be overthrown. This is an attack on all forms of government, not just one particular type.

Zeitgeist subscribes to the second reason. It is entirely opposed to the prevailing style of government in America and the West. However, it has no interest in abolishing government but, rather, in replacing it with a far better type of government. The Zeitgeist case must be absolutely differentiated from that of anarcho-capitalists who want to demolish government of any description. They would be as opposed to the new form of government advocated by the Zeitgeist Movement as they would to the particular government of George W Bush.

The Zeitgeist Movement are not fellow travellers with Ayn Rand’s army of anarcho-capitalists. Quite the reverse.

Thesis (Zeitgeist): Government was capable of 9/11 and culpable for 9/11.

Antithesis (US Government): Government was not culpable for 9/11.

Synthesis: Government did not carry out the 9/11 attack, but was capable and culpable.

Perhaps dialectical logic has escaped someone like you with your zealous Aristotelian mindset. Good luck with that.

9-11…11-9: Very clever. You understand that different nations use different formats for dates. Are we supposed to bow to your genius at this point? Never quite sure with messages such as yours.

the barry movement
beware

One trusts that your “movement” will remain with a membership of one since you’re clearly not the type who wants to get serious about anything.

Goodbye.
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9/11 – The Ultimate McGuffin?:

The truth of 9/11 could not be simpler. Osama bin Laden did it and Bush and co were hoping he would do something of that nature to give them a pretext to invade oil-rich Iraq, give regional support to Israel, and try to start converting Islamic countries to puppet capitalist democracies under America’s control, thus extending the Old World Order’s power to regions of the world not yet fully under its heel.

This “neocon” agenda of America was well known. America’s support for Zion and Zionism is infamous throughout the world, but that doesn’t mean that the American government was behind 9/11.

Nevertheless, they certainly provoked it with their foreign policy choices and they were “happy” to do so since it allowed them to accomplish long-cherished strategic aims.

The key to the whole controversy of 9/11 is the collapse of the Twin Towers and Tower 7. The conspiracy theorists say that the hijacked planes couldn’t possibly have brought the towers down, therefore they must have been expertly demolished. Therefore it was an inside job and therefore the American government was responsible.

But the collapse of the towers is completely irrelevant. America would have relied on the fact that four airplanes were hijacked and used in suicide operations as sufficient pretext for their subsequent foreign policy (military) response. Whether or not the twin towers fell down would not have made the slightest difference and therefore could not have been part of any conspiracy.

To repeat, if everything had happened exactly as it did, except the Twin Towers and Tower 7 did not come down, the American reply would not have been one iota different. The hijacked planes slamming into highly symbolic American buildings and killing hundreds of American citizens was the only excuse the American government needed to carry out its policy. In other words, the collapse of the Twin Towers and Tower 7 – the so-called smoking gun – is completely irrelevant in terms of the government’s alleged conspiracy. Since the smoking gun is irrelevant, it’s crazy to conclude that it furnishes certain proof of government involvement.

Why would the government be so dumb as to carry out needless and dangerous demolitions when it already had the excuse it needed for a war? Any American officials allegedly sitting in a room planning a false flag attack would never have said, “Right, it’s not good enough simply to hijack planes and crash them into buildings, horrifically killing hundreds of people; we also need to demolish the Twin Towers, and, hey, why not demolish Tower 7 and Tower 5 while we’re at it, even though nothing is actually going to hit them and it will look as suspicious as hell?”

It’s INSANE.

The collapse of the Twin Towers and Tower 7 is the biggest red herring in history. The buildings collapsed for reasons that are now quite well understood in engineering terms. No demolitions took place.

American policy would have to have been dependent on the collapse of the Twin Towers for a conspiracy theory to have any credibility i.e. it is being asserted by the “Truth Movement” that America would not have responded as it did if the Towers did not fall. Clearly, this is entirely false – whether the Towers fell or not was neither here nor there in terms of providing a pretext for a war. Hence there was no government conspiracy.

American support for Israel is a disgrace, and the invasion of Iraq was a disgrace, but that doesn’t mean that the American government committed 9/11. The fact that 9/11 suited their agenda doesn’t make them guilty.

All thinking people should analyze the facts rationally. Any intelligent person should be able to detect a myriad of holes in the 9/11 conspiracy theory.

9/11 was, in truth, an unsophisticated, low-tech attack by 19 Muslim suicide bombers. Bin Laden wanted to strike back against America and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Airplanes had never been used as suicide weapons before, so America was taken by surprise. What’s so hard to grasp about that?

There are many videos and articles on the internet that debunk those who claim that the American government carried out this act. The people who hold the belief that the American government was responsible tend to be libertarian fanatics (Ayn Rand’s mad fan club) who hate the American government and wish it nothing but harm.

They are prepared to believe anything that points towards the guilt of the American government, and to ignore anything that does not. They are not “truth seekers”, but merely people with a political axe to grind and a burning hatred of the American government and any interference by the state in their lives.

We are in no way sympathetic towards the American government – quite the reverse – but that does not mean we will support any theory about their culpability that is refuted by all available evidence. There is not one shred of credible evidence that the American government carried out this act. There is, however, a great deal of evidence that they knew something like this was being planned, and they took no serious steps to prevent it. But these are two very different positions. However, it’s no disaster that many Americans believe that their government was capable of perpetrating 9/11. And this is exactly what Zeitgeist plays on. The “game” is to bring as many people as possible to a point where they no longer have any confidence in their government and no faith in the system. Only then is real change possible.

The Zeitgeist 9/11 sequence is designed to provoke you and get you to think. It has proved entirely successful. But anyone who, after some reflection, really believes that these buildings were rigged for demolition has lost the plot…
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2/9

Twin Towers:

Conspiracy Theorist (CT): There is NO WAY that the twin towers came down as a result of the plane impacts. Preposterous. Jet fuel does not burn hot enough to cut steel. Thermite does. It’s the standard demolition explosive and the collapses do indeed look like demolitions. You can see the flashes of the thermite charges going off in sequence and there are photos of the site afterwards showing thermite-cut steel girders among the wreckage. Then there’s the smoke; jet fuel burns with black smoke, thermite with white. The black smoke dissipates, then the white smoke goes off and the towers come down. And that’s without any Conspiracy Theory. That’s just common sense.

That’s the other reason I don’t believe in terrorists; if they meant it, they wouldn’t concoct some wacky super-villain scheme involving four simultaneous hijacked suicide planes. It’s far too elaborate; why not put three teams of four guys in vans, equipped with appropriate explosives, to do a complete circuit of a city and cut every road, bridge and rail line in a single night? Billions in economic damage, low to zero loss of life, minimal logistics. For the effort and resources that went into 9/11, they could do that to every city in England in one night; War on Terror over and they won.

OUR COMMENT (OC): Imagine the planning committee for the alleged 9/11 government conspiracy (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc)… “Right, guys, we’re going to use 20 Muslim fanatics to hijack four planes using, er, box cutters. Then we’re going to have the twin towers rigged to blow. Those rag heads had better do a good job or our demolition squad will look a bit dumb! We’ll also have the Pentagon rigged for explosion, and the White House and Capitol Hill too (glad no one noticed while the demolition squad were setting up their stuff). Right, we’ll also take out Tower 7 because we have some dodgy Enron records there. Might as well get rid of Tower 5 while we’re at it. In fact, let’s clear the whole site. We took out insurance, guys, didn’t we? How many deaths do we want? – er, anything over 100 will be fine, but thousands would be much better. Better make sure all of the important guys are out of the Pentagon, and – obviously – the White House – don’t want to be hoist with our own petard, huh? Then we can launch a full-scale attack on those Muslim bastards in Afghanistan and Iraq and grab their oil, and anything else they’ve got. We’ll be helping our Zionist buddies, of course. It’s the ultimate winwin situation. A few of our people will have to be sacrificed, but big deal.”

Doesn’t this sound a bit far-fetched? No sophisticated conspiracy plan would ever involve something as primitive as box cutters, yet we know these were the weapons used (together with fake bombs). This was no grand, well-oiled, massively funded operation. It was a bunch of near-amateurs using whatever they could smuggle past airport security. If there had been a genuine conspiracy they would have been allowed to take guns and real bombs on board.

And the twentieth hijacker never even made it, having been previously arrested by the authorities. (Strange how the American conspirators sabotaged their own conspiracy by arresting this man.)

He’s in jail now – having confessed to the whole thing. If his case had been properly handled, 9/11 would never have happened:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zacarias_Moussaoui#Capture

“Had that happened, the Report opined, the U.S. might conceivably have disrupted or derailed the September 11 attacks altogether.”

The fact that George W Bush was visibly astonished when he heard the 9/11 news demonstrates that he was fully in on the plan and gave it his personal authorization, doesn’t it? Er, doh!

The Muslims had previously targeted the Twin Towers – the failed truck-bomb attack of 1993. Was that part of the conspiracy too?

CT: For me, the War on Terror stands or falls on 9/11. If the official story is true then everything that’s happened since, massively profitable as it has been for the supposedly aggrieved party, the US, and much as it has cost us in ‘Civil Liberties’, which used to be called ‘Rights’, is totally reasonable.

If it were true, then OF COURSE we’d embark on the current course. Except that line of thinking leads pretty quickly to the idea that a good deal of modern history is actually wrong, governments don’t lie to people, the only wars we’ve ever fought are just wars and Johnny Foreigner has it coming for one reason or another; in this case, “They hate our freedom.”

OC: Your entire stance seems to be predicated on the necessity of false flag attacks in order for governments to justify their actions. Are you actually willing to accept that non-Westerners can ever attack Western nations? Don’t you think plenty of people have plenty of reasons for wanting to attack America and the West? The West doesn’t need to perform any false flag attacks, frankly.

CT: What we’re being told is that Osama and Omar were sitting in their cave one day, having a bit of a break from oppressing women and worshipping Allah, when they conceived a grand scheme to destroy the Great Satan.

OC: It was a propaganda stunt for the TV cameras and to rally and inspire the Islamic holy warriors all over the world. Slamming hijacked planes into prestigious buildings isn’t a “grand scheme”. It’s a crude extension of the pro-Palestinian plane hijackings of the 1970s and 80s.

CT: Perhaps they were smoking opium, I don’t know, but they’re these two guys who just happen to be ex-mercenaries each in command of a gang of fanatical followers, and they start kicking this idea around for blowing up the World Trade Center. And all the basic questions get answered; fanatical suicide commandos:

CHECK; network of agents already in place in US to ease infiltration: CHECK; insider with a commercial airline to get Intel and flying lessons: CHECK; budget for all this: CHECK; and they’re ready to go just like that; America is doomed. Until Omar says to Osama, “Hey, after the WTC goes down what then?” Osama replies, “Why then, all praise to Allah!”

OC: That’s pretty much how it went down! Except this had been planned for years. Ever heard of sleeper cells? How expensive is it to send twenty Muslims to America? Bin Laden’s millions would certainly have covered it. Suicide bombers? There are thousands of them queuing up to martyr themselves! Have you not been watching the news for the last ten years?

They did it for the same reason that Palestinian suicide bombers go to Israel and achieve counter-productive outcomes – pure desperation.

Also, news flash – these people really believe in martyrdom and in getting on the fast track to Allah for their allocation of seventy-two virgins! Winning isn’t the point – it’s showing Allah that you have faith that is the most important thing. Christians worship a Jewish carpenter who was hung on a cross – great plan, that one. Shia Muslims idolise a guy who was surrounded and slaughtered by his enemies. The Serbians revere Kosova – a battle they lost, the British the Somme, the Scots Flodden and Culloden etc. Look at the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Little Big Horn, Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, the Irish Easter uprising etc. Glorious defeat is inspirational and can often trigger real and meaningful change in the long term. It’s better than getting shafted forever.

The charge that the American government perpetrated 9/11 could not be more serious. It is high treason demanding the death penalty and the overthrow of the whole American system of government. Why would anyone buy into the most disturbing conclusion imaginable if the evidence is so weak? The official story doesn’t seem wacky – the idea of the American government deliberately killing its own innocent citizens certainly does.

CT: I don’t think that 9/11 was a grand conspiracy concocted by Bush et al, so much as that the origins of it were in Washington and that the CIA had a hand in it all; otherwise I don’t see how these Afghani troglodytes could possibly have pulled it off. And I don’t think putting thermite in the building would have been a bigdeal; Navy SEALS dressed as workmen? Special Forces guys would not talk. But I’m speculating as to how; I just see those explosives going off inside the windows and I see how the buildings fell, and I know that jet fuel cannot bring down a skyscraper. Were they piloting the plane? Different question, obviously someone was, and he must have been suicidal. It would just be so much easier to get him in there and teach him to fly if the CIA helped.

OC: The Taliban didn’t do anything apart from provide training camps to Bin Laden, and give him a guarantee of protection. Bin Laden sent a small group of his suicide fanatics (like the Islamic Assassins of history) to the States to carry out a low-tech attack using a brand new weapon sure to take the enemy by complete surprise – suicide hijacking. There’s no mystery, no puzzle, no false flag component. Bin Laden had both the capability (the money, the resources, the suicide hijackers), and the motive – he was already one of America’s most wanted enemies before 9/11. Bill Clinton had tried to assassinate him. He was behind the bombings of the American embassies in Africa. This guy’s fingerprints were all over 9/11 in an irrefutable way. You could argue, in Conspiracy Theory world, that he was actually a CIA operative, ordered by Bush to carry out this attack against America. Then again, you can argue anything you like in CT world.

CT: And then, next question, how? By hijacking four planes… desperate and daft.

OC: Desperate, yes. Daft? How so? It worked brilliantly. It is still hailed by Muslims everywhere as a great blow against the Satanic West. And are you implying that the hijackings had nothing to do with the American government’s conspiracy? After all, why would they make a dangerous and daft act the sine qua non of the conspiracy? Haven’t you just shot yourself in the foot?

CT: These guys are desert fighters, they fight in the desert; crossing half the world in an elaborate plot worthy of Sax Rohmer to strike a purely symbolic blow against the Great Satan… it’s like something cooked up by Fu Manchu, the opener to a grand scheme involving the heroin trade and the bold forces of Interpol, back up by our Yankee allies, the CIA, off to shoulder the ‘White Man’s Burden’.

OC: The hijackers were middle-class, westernised Saudi Arabians. The Palestinians hijacked loads of planes back in the day. Aren’t they Arabs like the Saudi Arabians? The only new ingredient was the suicide angle. Bin Laden would have been delighted with this plan, and with its outcome. He’s not Fu Manchu!

CT: There are some who think it was a huge media scam, the towers were hit by missiles or nuked from the basement, and that the planes were put in by CGI on the news. Now that’s a Conspiracy. I have a friend who thinks they were demolished afterwards, that the smoke and so on was literally a smokescreen. I’ve tried to convince him otherwise.

OC: This is exactly what happens when CTers are let loose.

CT: Israel IS allied to the Great Satan and much nearer, besides being smaller and hated in its own right by 99% of the Muslim world. Why didn’t they attack Israel?

OC: They’ve been trying to get Israel since 1948!!!!! The time had come when they decided that it was better to attack the paymaster – the USA.

CT: And if Bush, Cheney et al are callous enough to spin a big fat dollar out of the War on Terror, simply using 9/11 as an excuse handed to them by happy chance, then they’re more than nasty enough to engineer the plot in the first place.

OC: That’s hardly an airtight argument!

CT: Bush needn’t even have known; we could be looking at a modern Thomas Beckett scenario; an unguarded remark by Bush to the wrong CIA agent (and he has dropped some clangers), and all those Black Ops guys swing into action.

OC: There was no accident about Beckett’s death!!! And no one would take a decision like 9/11 without the highest possible authority, signed in triplicate. There are no rogue units doing ludicrous things on that scale. It would mean the death penalty and perpetual infamy for you if you got it wrong and were caught. What’s your excuse going to be? – “Oh, I thought the President had given me an order by winking at me!” Yeah, right.

CT: I don’t see how these Afghani troglodytes could possibly have pulled it off.

OC: They didn’t. It was middle class, well-educated Saudi Arabian fanatics.

CT: And I don’t think putting thermite in the building would have been a big deal; Navy SEALS dressed as workmen?

OC: You think blowing up three thousand of your own citizens is standard Special Forces drill, do you? “Hi dear, just back from work – boy, that thermite is good. Killed three thousand scumbag Americans today.”

“But, honey…you’re an American too.”

“Well, I was given my orders. You know what it’s like.”

“Sure I do, honey. Put your feet up. Bottle of Bud? Want to watch American Idol?”

Yeah, right.

CT: I simply don’t believe the official story on 9/11; skyscrapers don’t collapse from fire. Everything else is detail, the basic fact is it would be a freakish miracle, on top of the attacks happening at all, for the towers to collapse.

OC: So, now we have it. The entire basis of your case is that you are a self-proclaimed expert on civil engineering and materials science. If a jet were flown into any tower on earth, the tower wouldn’t collapse, you say. You know that for a fact. So, all of the recognized civil engineers and material scientists who support the official version are liars and are part of the conspiracy. I think I’d be more inclined to support the experts than the speculators.

Because you don’t believe in skyscrapers collapsing after being hit at high speed by jets with full fuel-loads, you are prepared to believe that America hired Bin Laden to get a group of suicidal hijackers together to attack America – to destroy the Twin Towers, the White House/Capitol Hill and the Pentagon? Oh, and the Navy Seals had to be inside the Twin Towers soon afterwards with thermite to bring the buildings down. Er, why exactly? The false flag attack had already worked. Why bring the towers down? Gilding the lily, surely?

American reaction would have been exactly the same regardless of whether the towers came down so deliberately bringing the towers down is, frankly, absurd, pointless and incredibly risky. Which great American strategist said, months in advance of 9/11, “Once our guy Bin Laden’s done his stuff, let’s bring the frigging towers down. That ‘ill show ‘em.” I think I’ll go with the skyscrapers falling down on their own scenario.

Your whole case is that it was somehow necessary for the Twin Towers to be brought down. As if anyone cares. It wouldn’t have made ANY DIFFERENCE AT ALL to me whether the towers came down, and nor to the American people. It was the hijacked suicide planes crashing into the towers that 9/11 was all about. Your whole conspiracy theory is based on a meaningless technical curiosity that the twin towers collapsed in the manner of a controlled demolition. So what? Are you telling me that the American reaction was based on the collapse of the Twin Towers and not on the fact that they were struck by suicidal Islamic hijackers? That’s what I call a crazy theory. Since the American reaction was not predicated on the fall of the towers – everything would have proceeded in precisely the same way had they not collapsed – the authorities plainly weren’t involved. Same goes for Tower 7. You’ve been chasing the wrong hare.

Just to reiterate. Your case is based on a disbelief that steel acts as if cut when subjected to a massive impact, a huge explosion, an intense jet-fuel fire, and the weight of a hundred floors of incredibly heavy concrete. But, as I’ve said, the collapse of the towers is irrelevant, and clearly would have formed no part of any false flag operation. So, there is no reason to disbelieve the official story, is there? You don’t disagree that the planes that slammed into the twin towers were viable killing machines that slaughtered hundreds on their own account. So, were the hijackers fake Islamic terrorists bravely giving their lives for the great CIA? What planet do CTers inhabit? Whatever happened to Occam’s Razor?

CT: The Towers were built to resist an airplane crash and fires.

OC: CTers have a touchingly high regard for the infallibility of engineers and scientists, except of course when they contradict the CTers, at which point they become part of the conspiracy. Impact tests and fire predictions are based on many assumptions and computer simulations. The more data that goes into the models the better. Next time, the models will be much more accurate since they have all that 9/11 data now.

As everyone knows, a structure is only as strong as its weakest link. What’s wrong with the official version?…

“The report concluded that the fireproofing on the Twin Towers’ steel infrastructures was blown off by the initial impact of the planes and that, if this had not occurred, the towers would likely have remained standing. This was confirmed by an independent study by Purdue University. W. Gene Corley, the director of the original investigation, commented that ‘the towers really did amazingly well.

The terrorist aircraft didn’t bring the buildings down; it was the fire which followed. It was proven that you could take out two thirds of the columns in a tower and the building would still stand.’ The fires weakened the trusses supporting the floors, making the floors sag. The sagging floors pulled on the exterior steel columns to the point where exterior columns bowed inward. With the damage to the core columns, the buckling exterior columns could no longer support the buildings, causing them to collapse.

CT: Special Forces guys would not talk.

OT: Yes they would. An American helicopter pilot turned his guns on his own troops at the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam. He reported them all to the authorities. Do you think Special Forces guys are psychopaths? They’re elite soldiers, not people who unquestioningly go around killing their own friends, relatives and fellow citizens.

CT: If my argument boils down to a non sequitur then yours is based on a fallaciously high burden of proof. You’re working from the position that the official story is automatically the truth and requiring a level of evidence to refute it far in excess of what you could present in its support.

OC: The official story has been verified in the following ways:

1) Government commissions.
2) The trial of the “20th hijacker”.
3) The court of general public opinion.
4) The prima facie events of the day.
5) The admissions of Osama bin Laden.
6) The delighted reaction of PLO supporters on 9/11.
7) The extensive debunking of the debunkers.
8) General scientific and engineering opinion of the academic community.
9) Common sense.
10) The prevailing political situation.
11) Occam’s Razor.

None of these is infallible, of course… but they constitute a high bar for the CTers to surpass. The CTers can’t offer a case that amounts to much less than the evidence supplied by the official position and expect to be taken seriously. You are being challenged to present a case that is as persuasive as the official version. You are not being subjected to a higher requirement.

All of the points you have put forward have already been comprehensively debunked by any number of YouTube videos. Also, if the CTers show themselves susceptible to the sort of thinking that lends itself to invisible, pan-dimensional aliens, hollow earth, Nibiru, etc…they have put themselves outside the bounds of logic and science and placed themselves firmly in the religious camp. The official case does not rely on anything outwith conventional, widely accepted science and engineering practice.

CT: Am I required to be an expert in engineering (or indeed military history, politics, guerrilla warfare, etc, etc) to make common sense observations? No, not at all. My assertion was not that steel does not behave as if cut etc; jet fuel does not burn at a sufficiently high temperature to cut steel. That is a fact. To obviate that, you would need to prove that back draft from the fireball combined with the air-con in the building to focus the flame to a cutting torch. Conceivable, but entirely impossible to prove and highly unlikely to occur in both buildings, while giving no explanation for Tower 7. But that’s what would have to happen for burning jet fuel to cut steel.

OC: The common sense case is the opposite of your one. Where’s your evidence that steel was cut? That’s supposition, not fact. Check the debunking material which shows that 9/11 workers used high temperature torches in the clean-up operation. How can you differentiate this type of steel cutting from what you propose? (Link removed)

CT: Jet fuel does not burn at a sufficiently high temperature to cut steel.

OC: No one said it did. The question is whether the circumstances of the event can lead to the collapse of the steel framework. You have to establish that they cannot: a commission of experts has already found that they can.

Rather than address the findings of the commission, you will simply claim that they are part of the conspiracy. You are refusing to engage with the facts. There is no evidence that any steel was cut prior to clean-up operations commencing. Also…how would you differentiate cut steel (thermite does not produce laser cuts as you seem to believe) from steel that has been severed by a huge shearing force? (a tower collapsing!)

CT: I also made no mention of Navy SEALS in the building AFTER the planes; that’s just silly. It would be quite simple for Special Forces to enter the building months in advance among genuine contractors during normal renovation. That’s easy; lay the charges in advance. The other idea is that high-tech modern Ninjas assailed the burning towers in the midst of the crisis (possibly parachuting in from the invisible fifth plane), to set thermite charges and somehow escape the building’s subsequent collapse. That would be a suicide mission or the plot of a really bad action movie (I’m imagining a team-up featuring Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal, Brad Pitt, Vin Diesel and The Rock). The argument that special ops couldn’t or wouldn’t do that is fallacious; they can and do perform those kinds of missions on enemy nations. If ordered to do so, they would attack a friendly target; soldiers are trained not to reason why, just to obey. The question is whether those orders given, and if so, why?

OC: If the thermite explosives were planted beforehand, how could the bombers be sure that the bombs wouldn’t malfunction and detonate unexpectedly, as many do? How could the government possibly explain that one? What if the materials degraded? What is your timescale for when the thermite was planted? The day before? (What if the weather was bad next day and planes couldn’t fly?) Six months before? Were they to be detonated by timer or remote control? What if something went wrong with the timers or detonation signal? Also, why didn’t the bombers detonate the thermite as soon as the planes hit (in an attempt to make it look as though the impact and explosion brought down the towers)? Why wait an hour? What agenda did a delay serve?

Soldiers are trained to obey lawful orders…not insane orders that would represent high treason against their nation and merit the death penalty if they were caught. You have an extremely odd idea about soldiers. Do you imagine the SS would have exterminated ordinary German citizens in the death camps? It’s ridiculous. You kill your perceived enemies, not your fellow citizens. There is no military group on earth that would obey orders to kill its own people, other than in incidents involving serious riots and widespread disorder. Give me a single example from history where, in peacetime, soldiers have killed their own citizens on a huge scale without one iota of provocation. Sure, soldiers are not the friends of the people and will kill them in certain situations, but not in the circumstances of 9/11.

No one gave any such orders…no soldier would ever carry out such orders to kill thousands of his own countrymen without any attempt at justification…so there is no “why” except in the minds of the CTers. If 9/11 was in fact a false flag attack, no conceivable purpose would have been served by bringing down the towers. The pretext for an aggressive response by America was furnished by the two planes hitting the two towers, not by the towers coming down. No covert operation would carry out needless and highly risky actions.

What if the hijackings failed and no planes stuck? What would the covert ops group have done then? Detonated regardless? Left their explosives indefinitely? Tried another hijacking another day? None of this makes any sense. Think it through. Provide a sensible scenario in accordance with sane covert operations thinking. What was the contingency plan? Why demolish towers for no useful reason?

Remember, elite soldiers would have to sign up to this and carry out the detailed planning. So, once again, why was the collapse of the twin towers a necessary component of this plot? Could it have succeeded without this being done? If so, why do it? Weren’t the plane strikes sufficient? Why not? What was the military reason for bringing down the towers? Why expend resources and take risks on this task? You must plausibly demonstrate why the whole operation hinged on this – because the main part of your case seems to be your disbelief that towers can collapse.

CT: The ‘why’ would be money; you said you can see no reason why America would want to stage a false flag attack and no benefit derived since. Strange, because it should be pretty obvious that the budgets of police, military and intelligence agencies has sky-rocketed since 9/11, and ‘Anti-Terrorism’ can now be used by any petty official to enforce any petty injunction (such as banning trainspotters because photographing trains poses a ‘security risk’). I should have thought these were taken as read, that 9/11 was the catalyst event to the War on Terror and has been used to justify the immensely profitable wars of invasion being waged worldwide.

OC: After an attack on America, all of the things you have mentioned would happen i.e. budgets would go up for all of these groups. You can’t argue that because budgets have gone up this must mean that a false flag attack was carried out. America is withdrawing from Iraq having failed in all of its strategic objectives…Iraq has not become a puppet American state in the Middle East, a friend and ally of Israel, a beacon of glorious American capitalist democracy in the Islamic world, a supplier of copious cheap oil to America. America will also withdraw from Afghanistan. The wars, especially in Iraq, were exceptionally unpopular…and extremely costly in terms of the hardpressed taxpayers. The America military has emerged with little credit. The CIA has been mocked and ridiculed. America was following a neocon agenda that, in particular, was very keen to target Iraq. If conspirators were conducting a false flag attack, they would have made sure that Iraq was the unambiguous main suspect with its hands all over the murder weapon – the 9/11 event. In fact, there are no links between Iraq and 9/11.

What you describe is the most half-arsed, unbelievable, sloppy, illdefined, confused and confusing false flag operation ever launched in human history. No expert in covert operations would ever subscribe to such a shambles. Read Clausewitz. They teach him at West Point. For 9/11 to be a false flag attack would mean that every part of military wisdom had been flouted. No military person would ever carry out 9/11, on military grounds alone never mind anything else.

CT: Motive, I can prove; ‘Mens Rea’, guilty mind, our suspects (Bush or Bin Laden)… both have that; money, money, money.

OC: Money is “guilty mind”? Do you mean that Bush and Bin Laden were in desperate need of money, hence had to carry out this action to get money? How would Bin Laden get any money out of this, and wasn’t he a rich man anyway? Clearly, the desire for money was no part of Bin Laden’s thinking. As for Bush – a very rich man from a very rich family, what does he need money for?

CT: Actus Reas is the problem; guilty deed. The only actual facts are that the WTC towers were hit by two planes and subsequently collapsed. Those are facts because virtually the whole world saw the events unfold on the news and there’s a bloody big crater to prove that the towers are indeed gone.

Everything else is speculation, supposition and rumour. I personally think that the impossibility of cutting steel with jet fuel is a fact, but I’m aware that experts have come forward on both sides to support or refute that.”

OC: Far more experts are on the side of the official verdict. Far more evidence is on the side of the official verdict. The conspiracy theory makes no sense.

CT: On the other you have a conspiracy theory. That the official story is in itself a conspiracy theory goes unremarked.

OC: There is no such situation. The official version makes perfect sense. The counter conspiracy theory is nothing more than a bizarre assemblage of minor details, virtually all of which have been accounted for, and the remainder are covered by the fog of any massive disaster where, for sure, odd, unexpected things will happen. Why is the official version itself a conspiracy theory if it accords with all known facts and is supported by virtually everyone other than the CTers? There’s only one conspiracy theory…and it’s yours. At most, 9/11 might be called a second-level false flag attack since Bush wanted something like that to happen to justify his neocon agenda in the Middle East. But he certainly wasn’t the Prime Mover of 9/11. That was Osama bin Laden.
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