Why do you believe the official story of September 11, 2001?

Question

Do you believe it because it is what you have been told, or did you listen to the news and draw conclusions, or did you count on our government to fill in the details? The reason I'm asking is, I'd like to know how many people out there have REALLY investigated the matter for themselves, instead of being followers of the crowd.

Answer 1

We can't all examine the physical evidence ourselves, and we're not all trained engineers. I an a trained engineer though, and I have followed the investigations performed by a number of reputable sources, some of them politically neutral, and some of them actually antagonistic toward the administration. All of the sources I have relied on agree with the "official" story, and their descriptions of building failures, etc. are consistent with my understanding of science and mechanics.

Taken in conjunction with Al Qaeda ADMISSION of responsibility, in my mind there is no longer any question of how or why this tragedy occurred.

Consider this: For the conspiracists to be correct, the Bush administration would have had to plan the operation, recruit and train hundreds of individuals, and then execute the plan, all in less than nine months. (Imagine the time and effort it would have required to sneak in the the WTC towers night after night, planting thousands of explosive charges, and doing it all so perfectly that not a single tenant ever noticed anything out of place.) And in the five years since not a single person has come forward to admit their participation. When has ANY administration ever been able to keep that big a secret, for so long?

Answer 2

You phrase the question in such a way that it seems that you don't believe the official story. I've listened to the conspiracy theories, and they're a little outlandish. Alex Jones and his like all think that the government was complicent in the events of that day. Just how much investigation can one person do anyway? Particularly about something of this magnititude. And let's face it, you cannot count on ANY government, republican or democrat, to tell you the "truth" - look at all the JFK conspiracies that still swirl around 43 years after the fact. If the government has an answer to that they're not telling, are they? And they certainly won't admit to any compliance in a "plot" to kill innocent Americans.

Answer 3

I've investigated it the best I am able, given that I can't do it first hand. I haven't seen anything that would lead me to conclude that it was a conspiracy by people in the U.S. government. Have you done your own investigation, or are you just following the 'other' crowd because you like better any theory that impugns a Republican administration?

Answer 4

i believe the official story of September 11.but i do have some doubts on whether or not the government was involved or not or they at least knew about it.the united states were aware of pearl harbor and that was back in the 40's.you can't tell me that the u.s had better intelligence in the 40's than in 2001.

Answer 5

I generally believe what you call the "official story" because all the alternative explanations I've seen are standard PCTs (paranoid conspiracy theories). Like all PCTs, they distort the facts and promote the weird notion that just because you can think of a sinister explanation, that sinister explanation must be true, whether it makes sense or not. I've linked a couple of articles from the Skeptic's Dictionary that you might want to read. One is about 9/11 conspiracies, the second is a look at PCTs in general.

JMB

Answer 6

I live close to Washington D.C. I know people that work at he Pentagon and just across the street in Crystal City. I know people that were on the highway that runs parallel to the Pentagon. One acquaintance who worked at the Pentagon was actually involved in helping people out of the Pentagon.
My best friend's aunt was in N.Y. and saw the second plane hit the Towers because she was watching the smoke from the first hit at the time. Her hotel was so close to the towers that she was evacuated and had to get on a train to D.C. without shoes.
Are all my friends an acquaintances lying to me? How were they all trained to tell that lie. Why would they have all gone along with the lie? Why should I believe you more than them. Makes no sense to those of us who were close to one of the areas?

Answer 7

I don't always believe the media, nor do I believe conspiracy theorists. So I investigated the matter for myself as much as I could and found no evidence that our government had anything to do with the attacks on 9/11. Every single bit of believable evidence I've seen points to Saudi-born terrorists hijacking planes and deliberately crashing them into the WTC, Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field.

Answer 8

Uh, which version of the official story are you speaking of?

All I know is extremists successfully attacked the towers.

As far as anything else, I try to believe as little as possible when it comes to the government. This way I am not shocked, dissapointed and dissillusioned when something turns out to be false.

Answer 9

If I thought that it would make any difference to the dead I might have gone into the matter more deeply.
But it won't.
We seem to have this deep seated need these days to have our goverments wrong footed all the time.
If we don't trust them , why do we continue to vote for them, listen to their speeches and spend our time debating if our leaders have a brain to pass between them?
It happened. We mourn. We should walk with our eyes wide open from now on. That is enough.

Answer 10

I believe the official story in that several violent members of an muslim extremist terror organization exploited loopholes in our immigration and airline security systems for the purpose of killing a bunch of people in a very public way.

I watched the events on television. I spoke personally to someone who was there. I watched the news, several documentaries and even checked out some alternative theory websites, which I determined were unreliable and in some cases deliberately misleading.