Reply #22: The way they are listed makes it seem as if they are all included [View All]

[Nikki Stone 1]

If there are options, that should be stated. Also, how many of these factors do you need to be a conspiracy theory? Clearly not ALL since you can't have #13 and #14 at the same time. So do you need 10? 8? 2? And who judges some of those factors?

The problem I have with the whole notion of "conspiracy theory" is that sometimes there ARE conspiracies (like Watergate for example) and every investigation of a conspiracy at some point produces a theory; otherwise, there'd be no guide to the investigation.

The notion that conspiracy theory equals urban legend is faulty for this reason. Perhaps, there should be a subset of urban legend designated for conspiracy "beliefs".

I can tell you that I think some suspicions about 9/11 are more well-founded than others. The idea that the Pentagon was NOT hit by a plane seems less likely to me for the simple reason that there were some eyewitnesses who actually saw the plane and that planes had just been used as weapons in NYC. The French theory that there was no plane just doesn't hold water for me.

But the complete lack of reaction from the military; the complete lack of reaction by the Secret Service as the Junior Bush sat and read My Pet Goat (even after he knew that two planes had hit the WTC); the 9/11 commission testimony that Cheney was, in fact, monitoring the plane headed toward the Pentagon but ordered no military jet to intercept it--all of these are just bizarre to me. Add to that Colleen Rowley's testimony (Minneapolis FBI office) about being completely stonewalled by the central FBI management in regard to a FISA warrant for Moussaoui's laptop in the summer of 2001 and the complete ignoring of the Phoenix FBI's report on the training of ME pilots around the same time, even when there was an intelligence report in August 2001 stating that Binladin intended to hit the US and the fact that the government was aware of such terrorist plans as Project Bojinka (1995, I think) which called for hijacking planes and crashing into buildings.

There are too many government irregularities. One could argue that the FBI was grossly incompetent, but that the FBI (on two separate occasions), and the US military and the Secret Service should all be thoroughly incompetent around a single event causes one to think.