Well, Jack, for what its worth, you're not alone:

http://middleeastdialogue.org/200110t/paknews.html

http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/WTCspiracy.htm

http://www.thepowerhour.com/wagwtc.htm

(You'll like that one, it has all sorts of stuff in it about how the WTC was actually demolished using explosives)

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?ChannelID=89

(this one is good, because it talks about Cheney misleading people on TV about how only the President can order jets to shoot down airliners)

I've posted all this to see if there really was something in the mainstream media that we're all missing. And most of it is as crazy as saying that Neil Armstrong didn't go to the moon (which some people do believe, but anyway...). You might like to look at those, as they might support your argument.

But this is the one you should really read, from the Boston Globe:

quote:

Pakistan:
Improbable theories have wide acceptance

By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff, 9/23/2001

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - The manager of a deluxe hotel, a man of polish and broad exposure to the West, pulled a journalist into his office the other day to offer the real lowdown: It was the Jews that did it.

In these dangerous days in a desperate land, rumors are flying thick, fast, and outlandish.

Except they are believed deeply and widely across the Islamic world. Nowhere more so than in this South Asian nation caught in the whirlwind of Western outrage at the suicide attacks in New York and Washington.

Take the tale of ''the 4,000,'' reported even in the mainstream Pakistani press as a theory at least as plausible as the notion of murderous hijackings orchestrated by an exiled Saudi Arabian multimillionaire on the lam in Afghanistan, which lies next door to Pakistan.

Just before dawn on Sept. 11, so the story goes, 4,000 Jews working in the World Trade Center literally got a wake-up call from agents of Mossad, the Israeli spy agency. Or maybe it was the CIA. Or perhaps some shadowy cabal of international bankers and American arms manufacturers.

Versions vary, except on the curious (an unexplained) number: Precisely 4,000 people - all Jews - are said to have received the life-saving tip-off.

What makes such a preposterous tale seem a horrifying metaphor for the estrangement of Muslim and Western societies is the calm and matter-of-fact way it is related by people from every walk of life.

''They were warned, `Don't go to work today,''' said a professor of medicine at an elite teaching hospital.

Did the doctor, a liberal Muslim educated in the West, really believe such a thing?

''I am not 100 percent believing it, but I am 75 percent believing it,'' he said with a shrug. ''Americans have their theories. We have ours.''

The hottest theory in Pakistan these days is that either the Israeli government or a secret society of American Jews engineered the bloody attacks.

''Everyone suspects Jewish involvement. It's a possibility that cannot be denied,'' said Mohammad Afra, owner of an electronics shop.

But why on earth would Israel want to hijack airliners flying the skies of its close ally, destroy the World Trade Center, and smash the Pentagon?

That's a no-brainer to Sartaj Qadari, who sells tea from a pushcart along a busy Islamabad thoroughfare. Turning down the newscast blaring from his battery radio, Qadari was happy to relate the street buzz.

''Israel was badly embarrassed by the uprising in Palestine, all those terrible pictures of Muslim people shot dead,'' he said. ''So they organize these actions to turn away attention. Now all the media men come to Pakistan, and who hears of Gaza or the West Bank? Mossad is sly, very sly.''

Remarks that in the Western world would be taken as grotesque anti-Semitism are the stuff of everyday conversation in a land where even the best educated, sophisticated individuals doubt that the Nazi Holocaust occurred and regard Israel's policies toward Palestinians as by far the worst human rights atrocity of modern times.

Meanwhile, the tales circulating through Pakistan are taken at least as seriously as the United States' contention that Islamic militant Osama bin Laden plotted the murderous assault from a remote hide-out in the Hindu Kush, the forbidding mountains that cover much of Afghanistan.

''People in Pakistan really can't accept the idea that the skyscrapers were collapsed by this one fundamentalist man living in hiding,'' said a political writer with a respected Pakistan newspaper.

''From the view of proof, these stories about bin Laden seem nothing more than claims by your President Bush,'' he said. ''I don't give them any more, or less, credence than I give the stories about Jewish involvement.''

The ''4,000 Jews'' rumor has been reported as straight news in the nation's Urdu-language press. The stories cite vaguely identified ''press accounts'' from Canada and Germany, apparently nothing more than rantings plucked from anti-Semitic Web sites posted in British Columbia and Hamburg. Oddly, however, the mere fact that allegations of Jewish schemes can be attributed to Western sources makes them seem all the more reliable to Pakistanis.

What is perhaps most striking about the bizarre yarns is how widespread they are and the almost ho-hum tone in which they are related.

''I was sort of sickened the first time I heard this, but I also just dismissed as weird anti-Jewish stuff,'' said Steve Caplan, a Canadian aid worker with a Western relief agency. ''Now I've heard it dozens of times from every kind of Pakistani, and I am even more appalled. Something is way out of kilter between Muslim and Western cultures if ordinary people easily believe such lunacy.''

Plenty of other rumors are riding the winds. At yesterday's daily press briefing by the Pakistan Foreign Ministry, reporters from Muslim nations raised frantic questions about ''George Bush's promise to lead a Christian crusade against Islam'' or ''George Bush's statement that all Muslims should be killed.''

Until the ministry's spokesman, Riaz Mohammad Khan, finally got fed up: ''Where do these rumors fly from? There are so many irresponsible reports and stories. Why so much trash when the truth is terrible enough?''

This story ran on page A21 of the Boston Globe on 9/23/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

So these guys don't blame oil barons, they have a much better motive and suspect - Zionism is to blame. Its a Jewish conspiracy, leading to a Christian crusade into Afghanistan, to divert attention away from Palestine.

And, Jack, they are just as credible as you are.

quote:
Originally posted by Jack, the Little Death:
Okay. It's darker now. The night is halfway cool. It's no longer hotter than shit in here. Feeling my second wind.

#1: Of course I'm not saying that cops get a pay-off when the convenience store gets robbed (unless they do -- weirder things have happened). What I'm saying is that if you know for a fact that the cop makes money when the convenience store gets robbed, you have to wonder about whether or not the cop is gonna look the other way when a guy with a gun walks in. You've accepted, I presume, that the Shrub and his buddies do make money off of this pipeline, and that what the terrorists did leads directly to the installation of that pipeline. Your only response was "Welcome to capitalism, Afghanistan," and quite frankly you wouldn't have let me get away with a lame response like that. Capitalism is a motive.
I think you've got the cause and the effect mixed. The effect of the installation of a moderate Afghan government is foreign investment (and you were being glib in not acknowledging that is what I meant), not the cause.

quote:

#2: And by the way, I'd like to take an opportunity to make a funny face at Britney. You said something about how we're giving Afghanistan an economy and feeding them. How 'bout this -- go beat somebody to death with a crowbar, then leave five bucks and a Snickers bar on their corpse. See how it helps your conscience and the jury's opinion.
I have said elsewhere that the number of people killed in the attack on the Taleban equals the number of people killed in the WTC attacks. This is extremely lamentable.
quote:


#3: You still haven't explained why underfunding made the planes late to show up. We're talking about New York and Washington, D.C. This isn't some plane flying over Anarctica, this is a situation where the two most obvious targets for terrorism in the entire universe, as far as cities go, with the possible exceptions of Israel or the Vatican, have got planes moving overhead -- and we're supposed to believe that they were caught flat-footed? We're supposed to accept the thinly-veiled implication that it's all the fault of us stingy liberals? "Lousy left-wingers would rather spend money on baby-producing crack-whores than jetplanes!"
I don't think that is the point.

If there was a Soviet Union to contend with, the prospect of MiGs flying in from the Arctic circle or something, then the USAF would have been more or alert. But this was the sneakiest of attacks - the enemy used US civilian planes as their weapons. They didn't have to fly in from foreign airspace. They didn't have to bring an aircraft carrier nearby. This is something I have no problems with, at all.

quote:


No. I'm sorry. This kind of incompetence beggars belief, and Occam's Razor works against it. The simplest explanation is not that people who live in D.C. elected to put the ready-to-scramble jets in Detroit, or something. If what you're saying is true, and "underfunding" is somehow responsible for those planes not making it to their targets on time, that's just a different kind of conspiracy. That means that our territorial military bases are completely useless and serve no function whatsoever. That means that the world's most expensive military had no defense against this kind of attack -- and if you believe this, I'm sorry, but you're a moron.
Now now, no name calling. Attack the argument, not the man. You forget what the military were preoccupied with back then. "Hmm, North Korea is testing missiles, flying them over Hokkaido. We needs lasers in space to knock them out." As opposed to, "Lets frisk the shit out of everyone who gets on board a plane" (which happened to me in Kuala Lumpar airport on 14 Sept.). And I think you think that the US military flies patrols over its own airspace. I've not heard of that before. If you can find evidence suggesting that there should have been planes guarding the Pentagon and they weren't there, then I'd have to give you some credibility points.

quote:

#4: Comparing my argument to the ol' "marijuana leads to shooting battery acid and eating your kittens" argument? I don't think I'm the one guilty of misdirection, here.
It was an analogy, so you'd know what I was talking about.

quote:

This is not a slippery slope, this is a clear and obvious pattern of behavior. I defy you to find a single Shrub policy that doesn't make one person rich at the expense of somebody else's ability to go on breathing. His own administration tells him that pollution is a real problem, and he just blows it off, calling it "bureaucratic." There are people in the world who can bitch about bureaucracy and sound like they mean it, but when this guy talks, his own behavior makes it clear that he's just out to consolidate power. Every single move this guy makes is either to increase his own power or to show that he's already got it. He's done absolutely nothing else since taking office. If he were using a scalpel rather than the Oval Office, he'd be guilty of malpractice. If it were a knife, he'd be a serial killer.
You can be critical of Republicans all you like - shit, I think he is a bare faced hypocritical liar for imposing steel tariffs for all his talk on free trade, and knocking over Canadians on wood. Looking after special interest groups doesn't make someone a mass murderer. There is no logical sequence there. Its like saying, "Rob Kamphausen reads comics on the toilet. Therefore, he is capable of farting the national anthem." It doesn't flow as a consequence.

quote:

Marijuana has not killed a single person, ever. The Shrub has killed thousands. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

#5: Not conceding the point that you were trying to make by quoting that article is not a "lack of style." It's called "reading the whole article." If you missed the obvious and blatant discrepancy in what they were saying, I'm sorry. That's not my fault, though. It just makes it harder than hell to explain anything, when you're going to be so deliberately obtuse.
Dealt with this, above.

quote:

I left this board a little while ago feeling frustrated because I just knew I wasn't going to find the words to explain anything to anybody that just didn't want to listen. B y'know what? It's just not my job to convince you. If you don't want to believe, fine. You're still wrong. These are not flaws in my logic, this is deliberate and pathological avoidance of reality on your part.

I'm not giving up, simply because I'm right -- and because if these guys succeed in destroying America, it isn't gonna be because I was too busy bleating like a sheep to try to make the obvious truth a little more clear.

And no, Rob. I don't "need a conspiracy." What's going on is that you reach instinctively for the blinders, because sticking your head in the sand in easier than doing anything about the world's problems -- which is precisely why assholes like the Shrub generally get away with their crap.
>Sigh< I had an argument at www.straightdope.com about 6 months back with a guy who was convinced that the Chinese People's Liberation Army were supporting the Taleban during the US attack on Afghanistan, because they had the motive of weakening the US because the US couldn't fight two wars at once. It was absolute bullshit, because

(a) Jiang Zemin's horror at the WTC attack was well known (he was shit scared it was going to happen to him next, I mean)

(b) China is repressing its Muslim minority in the east, so they have no real motive.

(c) now the US are there, there is no proof of PLA involvement.

The guy just refused to see otherwise, even though three of us (all living in different cities in China) were pounding his arguments.

Its all conjecture. I could mount a Jack-esque argument that Bill Clinton purposively got busted getting head because he wanted to divert attention away from, I don't know, his failure to solve the health care system's problems. It must be true, because he has the FBI and the CIA at his disposal, and they would've covered it up unless he wanted it public.

I shouldn't mock you, Jack, but what you're saying is devoid of evidence. Find some evidence, and you'll get some credibility.