Random 9/11 Conspiracy Theories (19 items)

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  (#17) 'September 11th Was A False Flag To Start The Iraq War'

  Members of the Bush administration, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and President Bush himself, have all been accused of planning September 11th as a "new Pearl Harbor" to galvanize support for a conflict in Iraq. While the description is real, it's been taken out of context by conspiracy theorists.

  The line, used in a report by conservative think tank Project for a New American Century, says that only an event on the level would allow for the societal transformation they were seeking. It's more a statement of fact than a wish. As it stands, the wheels to invade Iraq were already turning, September 11th just made them turn faster. The strikes were seized on as an opportunity to do what Bush sought to do anyway - invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein - not a reason to do it in the first place.
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  (#1) 'The Government Made It Happen'

  Conspiracy theories that the September 11th strikes were an inside job pulled off by the US government started on the internet hours after the planes made impact. Since then, rumors have run rampant that elements in the government planned the incident, arranged for the planes to get hijacked, destroyed the buildings through "controlled demolition," and did it all to make money and/or create an excuse to invade Iraq.

  After George W. Bush left office, these rumors started to wane, but they still have a considerable presence - despite absolutely no credible evidence ever being found that corroborates the idea the government made the strikes happen on purpose. If it is true, then the conspiracy would have involved thousands of people scattered across numerous branches of government and in multiple locations rigging the Twin Towers with eruptive material without anyone finding out, hiring hijackers (or actors who were willing to perish), faking untold quantities of evidence, enlisting countless experts to play along, and never letting a word of it out into the public.

  This is a conspiracy so sprawling it strains the very basics of logic.
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  (#6) 'There Was Actually a Mini-Nuke In The Basement'

  A small but vocal contingent of internet conspiracy theorists claims that the Twin Towers were actually destroyed not by planes, but by a small nuclear bomb in the basements or center columns of the buildings. They claim this because apparently water collected from the basement of WTC 6 contained a larger than normal amount of tritium, a byproduct of nuclear fusion.

  This would appear to be the only evidence of a nuclear eruption, as none of the other hallmarks of such an event were present in any form. No flash, no heat pulse, no EMP, no seismic readings, and no radioactive fallout. As it stands, the small spike in tritium is something not easily explained, but not evidence on its own of a nuclear blast.
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  (#12) 'The Pentagon Has Defenses That Would Have Shot A Plane Down'

  A conspiracy theory that emerged soon after the incident, echoed by September 11th truthers, is that the Pentagon has extensive missile defense systems that didn't go into action on September 11, 2001, meaning the government either planned the strike or knew it was going to happen.

  The problem with this theory is that it presumes facts not in evidence. In this case, the facts are that the Pentagon does not have such a defense system. No pictures have ever been produced of one, nobody has ever claimed to have worked on it or trained on it, and nobody at the Pentagon has ever complained about it not being used - because it's not real.

  Beyond the problematic issue of rigging a facility in a crowded city with weapons, there's the issue of Reagan International Airport, which is directly in the flight path of the Pentagon. Any theoretical system would have just seconds to determine if a plane heading toward the Pentagon was hostile, or simply a flight from or to Reagan. The risk of an accidental launch is far higher than the benefit of possibly being able to shoot down an oncoming plane.
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  (#10) 'The Pentagon Was Hit By A Missile, Not Flight 77'

  This is an extremely popular conspiracy theory, but putting aside the usual questions about theories like this (Who fired it? Where did it come from? Why did nobody see it before it hit?), this is based on a simple bit of misinformation - that the exterior of the Pentagon didn't "look" like it was hit by a plane.

  Except it did. Pictures of the crash site clearly show the hole where the plane's fuselage hit the building, and corroborating evidence shows how all five layers of the Pentagon were damaged, not just the outer wall. The damage done to the building simply couldn't have been done by any rocket that wouldn't have destroyed the entire building. Not only that, but the front lawn of the Pentagon was scattered with huge amounts of wreckage that corresponds to the pieces of an airplane. Such wreckage was also found in the building itself - all of it matching up perfectly to a 767 jet plane.

  There's also the matter of the missing plane and the missing passengers. If a projectile was fired at the Pentagon, what happened to Flight 77 and its passengers? Unless you believe all of these were faked in a massive conspiracy that has no paper trail, then you have to stick with the "original story" - that the Pentagon was hit by Flight 77.
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  (#9) 'The Planes Didn't Exist - They Were Holograms'

  Possibly the smallest faction of September 11th truthers believes that it wasn't planes that hit the towers at all, but missiles with holograms around them. They also believe the planes never existed, and that the supposed "victims" were simulated by the government ("VicSims" is their nomenclature).

  Most of these theories are based on artifacts of video images, such as perceived glitches in "image layering," and corroborated with strange examinations of pictures of September 11th victims with arrows and circles noting various things that "don't make sense." But none of these things are actually evidence, and the plot demands the use of magical technology that doesn't actually exist. Until some actual evidence surfaces that proves the passengers on the planes were fake and that the planes were actually rockets, this is simply a far-out conspiracy theory.

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