Next Level BS #2: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories, From a Journalist's Point of View

a reply to: Darkblade71

Yeah, we debated even doing anything about 9/11. It's a no-win topic.

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

Just by doing it at all for or against conspiracies around it,
you are honoring those who died.



I'm glad it got covered.

originally posted by: SkepticOverlord
a reply to: smurfy

I don't think I understand your point… if there is one.

Thanks for that, now I know how I stand, in your opinion.

Great episode, interview, and 9-11 tribute all packaged together with that trademark NLBS.

Gonna be hard to outdo yourself if you keep up this kind of work!

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

Every topic is a win when you have a Karl Pilkington avatar!

In all seriousness though, I thought it was touching, sensitively put together, and worth the effort that clearly went into it.

I don't like how the outlandish style conspiracy style theorists are lumped together with the moderate theorists.

For example no planes hitting the buildings, verses the WTC7 collapse.
Come on by doing that you have fallen into a classic disinformation trap.

The montage at the end was excellent and very sad, there is one scene I had never saw before, video of 1st tower down close up while the other was still standing, and a fireman trying to perhaps locate survivors. It's eerie when you know very soon the other building will be coming down, makes me wonder if that fireman survived ?

a reply to: theNLBS

I have never heard of Mr. Knapp before. Now learning about him I do respect his work in the realm of UFO's.

I also get the point of having him come on to elaborate a little as to why investigative journalists have shied away from looking into 9/11 and his points have merit, naturally you would lose credibility amongst your peers.

However I do think that the episode would have been better received had you gotten someone who was considered an expert on 9/11, perhaps that would have been more difficult, I do not know.

What I do know is that every aspect of the official story is far more ludicrous to me than even the most extreme conspiracy theory, which to me is simple disinformation.

This is due to what the government has done to our Civil rights, which given more context they had been working towards for as long as one can remember, simply rewind the clock to the first World Trade Center incident in 1993.

Also what they have done in the middle east, I mean what is better than a never ending "war on terror" which in reality you are inflicting upon innocent people, thus creating the anger needed to justify the whole radical muslim image you cultivate in your average American.

Hopefully we get what he called for, that of a whistleblower with some kind of proof. Although I imagine they covered their tracks pretty well, was there not something to the offices that were in Building #7

originally posted by: Blue_Jay33
I don't like how the outlandish style conspiracy style theorists are lumped together with the moderate theorists.

For example no planes hitting the buildings, verses the WTC7 collapse.
Come on by doing that you have fallen into a classic disinformation trap.

The montage at the end was excellent and very sad, there is one scene I had never saw before, video of 1st tower down close up while the other was still standing, and a fireman trying to perhaps locate survivors. It's eerie when you know very soon the other building will be coming down, makes me wonder if that fireman survived ?

Yes I noticed that too about the fireman, and wondered. To me, sometimes we lose the plot on ATS when we see people like that doing their job exactly as they are supposed to do, yet and all many with no basic protective equipment in the aftermath, and no matter what, many are still probably paying the price for their efforts. That's what gets me about this thread, it addresses nothing about the before, the in between or the aftermath, and only a very singular journalist's view on the subject, as good as George is.
No matter what, I do care about people dying in this way, the hard men will say why should you care, but I do..end of.

a reply to: BornAgainAlien

He's a JOURNALIST, a world class, best among the best journalist, not a scientist, not an engineer, and exactly as he stated, NOT an "expert on 9/11", regardless of how that or he "seemed" to you. Seriously, this stuff requires a certain amount of basic understanding of societal and scholarly realities.

He IS an EXPERT on JOURNALISM. That's why we asked him to comment on JOURNALISM and the 9/11 conspiracy theories. We didn't ask him to comment on anything but journalism and you know what? He didn't.

originally posted by: SkepticOverlord
a reply to: Darkblade71

Yeah, we debated even doing anything about 9/11. It's a no-win topic.

Told you so.

a reply to: theNLBS

Great!! I truly enjoyed it.

a reply to: Springer

But he did...

- He did comment about the evidence being rather flimsy. It doesn`t matter if he uses it as an excuse of why there haven`t been MSM reporting about it...the comment is still being made by him

- He comments that he thinks 9/11 is not one off the conspiracies

- He comments that he thinks the 9/11 conspiracy harm other conspiracies

- He makes a comment about the W7 building "explanation" he got working for him, for whatever that was

- He comments about Bush probably not being behind it

- He comments about Israelis probably not being behind it

- He comments about people who are behind 9/11 conspiracies doing harm to the country

- He comments that the people who have done this have been brought to justice

So listen to it again and you hear a lot of comments coming from him.

I have a lot of respect for George Knapp, been listening to his shows on C2C AM for a lot of years. He knows about cover-ups and all that jazz.
Initially, I held the same view as Art Bell on the issue of conspiracy theories---I don't WANT to believe that anyone in our government could be complicit in such an undertaking.

Like others, I get a bit irritated with folks who lump all those who are questioning the "official" report as "those conspiracy nut-jobs" or "Truthers" as though asking questions about things which appear contradictory is somehow a pathology.
When I heard reports of cell phone calls from one of the planes a flag went up in my mind. Nobody yet has been able to explain that bit of reporting to me.
When I heard that the passports of the bad guys were found at the base of the towers---I thought that was really, really, really convenient! It's true that I was born at night---but not last night.
I knew nothing of the attack until noon that day. My neighbor, knowing that we aren't morning people and aren't TV people, called us about noon and said, "I know you don't turn on the TV as a general rule so have you heard any news today?" then proceeded to tell us to check the news because a war had begun. Knowing that if we turned on the TV we would be glued to it for the rest of the day, we decided to listen to the radio instead. I took a portable radio and went outside and began exterminating weeds in my gardens while the drama continued to unfold. Each weed represented to me, in my state of shock, a participant in this assault. It was a glorious September day in western Kentucky and by the time 4:22 rolled around I had a pile of weeds almost as high as my head. I was gazing at it and cursing the women who gave birth to such monsters when I heard of the collapse of Building 7. I headed into the house and met my husband coming out to ask what in the world was going on, that he was going to break down and turn on the TV to see if he make some sense of what we were hearing.
I'm still waiting to make sense of it. I'm highly skeptical of a lot of the theories I've heard but I'm also highly skeptical of the official story.
I've been waiting to hear the truth about the JFK assassination since I heard my father questioning the official report on that event.

originally posted by: elementalgrove
What I do know is that every aspect of the official story is far more ludicrous to me than even the most extreme conspiracy theory, which to me is simple disinformation.

I see it differently. I always have.

While not intended as an admission that I believe all aspects of the "official story," I can accept all aspects of the "official story," and still consider a very deep and troubling conspiracy behind the events.



Walk with me, for what might be part one of the grand conspiracy…


If I were to accept all aspects of the "official story," and put that on a shelf as the known above-water facts, this is my version of what could have happened below the surface -- based in large part on being in NYC at the time, being predisposed to consider conspiracies at the time, and while also being pragmatic about such conspiracies.

Three important facts to remember, and these are very important:

1) The people in government you hear about, are generally incompetent fools.

2) The most competent people "in government" are those you never hear about.

3) No more than three people can keep a conspiracy, if one kills the other two -- G. Gordon Liddy


The #2, the competent ones, are often those quiet champions of an ideal we may not agree with, doing bad things for the greater good. They possess a laser-focused sense of direction with long-term goals and exceptional patience. Some of these people are serious men who have a long history of experience in doing those bad things for the greater good. And it's small team of precisely those people who set events into motion.

Somewhere, soon after the election, in the quiet mists of a private clubhouse overlooking the seventh green; Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tenet (with others unknown) decided that "something" needed to happen to get troops back into Iraq and rechurn the military industrial complex. After all, there hasn't been much real war lately. They all agreed, Bush looked at Tenet and said, "Brother George, make it happen." From there, the simple "make it happen" went quietly to a small group of serious men no one knows about. Nothing ever made back up the chain even close to Tenet, much less the White House.

These men knew Bin Laden… knew him well. After all, Charlie Wilson paved the way for Bin Laden to be acquired as a CIA asset decades ago. This is known.

In order to "make it happen," these serious men ensured some funding, intelligence, and most-importantly; confusion and miscommunication between US anti-terror agencies. All they needed was a big attack. Bin Laden, still having hard feelings from being abandoned in Afghanistan, was eager to make sure it was a really big attack. The "serous men" knew he was no longer "on our side," but they didn't care, all they cared about was making it happen.

The results were far bigger than anyone anticipated. WTC downed. Pentagon crippled. Economy on its knees. The original circle of 4+ knew no details, and probably weren't even sure that the results of their decision were the attacks on 9/11/2001. But, no matter, importantly, the nature of the attack exposed them to scrutiny. Serious scrutiny. Death sentence scrutiny. It turned out there were some holes, the attacks were too easy.

In crisis politics, the motto is simply, "Win the day." If you win the day, no matter the cost, you survive for tomorrow's battle. The upper tiers of the Bush administration -- and to some extent, the CIA and FBI -- were in crisis politics like they've never seen before. The strategy had to be broad… and it probably played like this:

1) The first investigative salvos in NYC (NY Times, on 9/15/2001) exposed fraud, corruption, and collusion with organized crime throughout the NYC government related to collusion with organized crime and a possible poorly constructed WTC. The narrative needed a drastic change, the topic must start to become taboo. Enter The Frenchman and some of the craziest early conspiracies. These exploded in October after tentative starts in late September.

(FYI: The "Frenchman" produced 3D rendered TV commercials which were the first to show falsified evidence that looked good, that missiles were used on the WTC and Pentagon. They ran throughout the country as TV ads on late-night cable channels. Someone once calculated the total coast of the national ad campaign, where the ads were seen, would have been over $5 million dollars. 90 days later, the "Frenchman" disappeared.)

1a) lucky strike extra -- dismiss conspiracy theorists as crazy in an address to the nation from congress.

2) Blame someone right away: Bin Laden was ready for the blame, but underestimated the extent of the double-cross… probably because he went beyond the assumed mandate -- the attack was way too big. The narrative changed again with troops dying in Afghanistan… no one will investigate culpability/cover-ups with conspiracy lunatics on one side, and troops fighting for freedom on the other.

3) Start a sham investigation, but make it look good enough. Nearly ten times as much money was spent on investigating steroid use in baseball, than was spent investigating 9/11.

4) After this, the rest goes on auto-pilot as "the Internet" becomes aflame with all manner of outlandish conspiracy theories, including many that feature fabricated false evidence. Thus, as George mention, a smoke screen.




There. A plausible conspiracy that fits perfectly with the narrative presented as the official story, and fits within the framework of known previous conspiracies.

...George W. Bush became a hermit painter and Rudy Giuliani started his own very successful Security firm... THE END.


Golly gee, Mr. Knapp! If you had nothing to say, why do the interview?

I'm not a big poster I rarely log in at all. The first episodes weren't that great but waranted watching this thing progress (hate the name btw). This one got me, it seems to make an honest effort to not be biased. I'm not sure I've seen information presented without bias in my adult life, I hope I finally found some. Please try and stradle the road in the future as well.

Are there any plans to actively go out and seek truth, boots on the ground?

originally posted by: Marvison
Are there any plans to actively go out and seek truth, boots on the ground?

Potentially. That requires an investment in equipment, time, and even additional people we simply can't make yet… but perhaps, in the future, we can.

a reply to: Compressor35

Golly gee, Mr. Knapp! If you had nothing to say, why do the interview?

thats what i got from it.....he basically says i am not qualified to answer these questions but here you go i will answer them anyway

his own testament is he believes the official story and has no reason not to...and also tells us he is not an expert nor has he done any real investigation except for reading a few tidbits...

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

Haha!!

Loved it!

This right here was very well thought out and as you said plausible!

I suppose Cheney's role in all of this is one of the things that could be brought in to make that theory a little less plausible.

1. The stand down order/exercises being at such a coincidental time, which only those in the top levels of our government/military could have control over.

2. Halliburtons 40 Billion dollars worth of profits off of the war that was to come because of all this.

Thank you for that though! I definitely enjoyed the walk!

However far too many of the social engineers plans came to fruition after that fatefull day for me to believe that it was left up to anyone,but those that had a vested interest creating the America we have today.