9/11 Conspiracies: Intact passports can't melt dancing Israelis

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > 9/11 Conspiracies: Intact passports can't melt dancing Israelis

Uranium Phoenix: Jun 20, 2007; Boom.

Fame Douglas posted:

lmao

It's just the usual "the US is so strong, no way some goat herders could have overpowered this are amazing country!" bs. Might as well get into JFK conspiracies, those at least had more time to get well-rounded.

This doesn't even begin to characterize what the video says, or any of its claims. The entire point of the thread is to debunk conspiracy claims. You might bother to do that.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2021 03:18

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 18:58

Uranium Phoenix: Jun 20, 2007; Boom.

britishbornandbread posted:

The James Corbett 9/11 video is back on YouTube and, whilst I am not some sort of tinfoil hat wearing truther by any stretch, it is an interesting watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_QFYn_G1lc

Problem is, I would love to watch/read a rebuttal of the claims in the video, but nothing seems to exist. Are there any decent reading materials out there, possibly Longform articles, that takes on the conspiracy theories head on and dismantles them?

Obviously going through every claim is, well, what the thread is for, so I isolated two related claims to check on because it sounds pretty crazy! Here's the claims:
1. Donald Rumsfeld announced the pentagon had $2.3 trillion missing on Sept. 10, 2001
2. Flight 77 hit the budget office of the pentagon where researching the fate of this money was going on.

(1) is easy to start on. Donald Rumsfeld's speech on the Pentagon on September 10 is https://www.c-span.org/video/?165947-1/defense-business-practices - At 13:57 he starts talking and says "According to some estimates we cannot track two point three trillion dollars in transactions." (He goes on at some length before and after).

A CBS article in 2002 elaborates on the topic: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-war-on-waste/.

quote:

To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million.

"We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on," said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service.

Minnery, a former Marine turned whistle-blower, is risking his job by speaking out for the first time about the millions he noticed were missing from one defense agency's balance sheets. Minnery tried to follow the money trail, even crisscrossing the country looking for records.

"The director looked at me and said 'Why do you care about this stuff?' It took me aback, you know? My supervisor asking me why I care about doing a good job," said Minnery.

He was reassigned and says officials then covered up the problem by just writing it off.

"They have to cover it up," he said. "That's where the corruption comes in. They have to cover up the fact that they can't do the job."

The Pentagon's Inspector General "partially substantiated" several of Minnery's allegations but could not prove officials tried "to manipulate the financial statements."

Twenty years ago, Department of Defense Analyst Franklin C. Spinney made headlines exposing what he calls the "accounting games." He's still there, and although he does not speak for the Pentagon, he believes the problem has gotten worse.

"Those numbers are pie in the sky. The books are cooked routinely year after year," he said.

Another critic of Pentagon waste, Retired Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, commanded the Navy's 2nd Fleet the first time Donald Rumsfeld served as Defense Secretary, in 1976.

In his opinion, "With good financial oversight we could find $48 billion in loose change in that building, without having to hit the taxpayers."

Looking at a more modern claim of the Pentagon missing money, the NY Times valiantly comes to the defense of the Pentagon: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/us/politics/fact-check-pentagon-medicare-alexandria-ocasio-cortez.html:

quote:

In the 2015 fiscal year, the Army general fund reported making about $1 trillion worth of adjustments to its assets, according to the Defense Department�s inspector general. It also made about $1 trillion in adjustment to its liabilities.
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Together, that accounted for $2 trillion in adjustments � even though the actual dollar amounts potentially offset each other.

�I wouldn�t want the taxpayer to confuse that with not � with the loss of something like a trillion dollars. It�s not. That wouldn�t be accurate,� Mr. Norquist said. �But it�s an accounting problem that does need to be solved, because it can help hide other underlying issues.�

In an interview, Professor Skidmore faulted the Pentagon for its lack of transparency and expressed skepticism that mismatches in property evaluations could account for all $21 trillion. He noted that large state governments like New York and California will make similar adjustments, but equivalent to small percentages of their budgets � not magnitudes larger.

The Pentagon�s adjustments could well be �accounting gimmicks to reconcile accounts, fine � or something else, I don�t know,� Professor Skidmore said. �I�m just absolutely perplexed. Why not have the underlying information?�

The same article from The Nation that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez quoted also noted that Professor Skidmore�s analysis �does not contend that all of this $21 trillion was secret or misused funding� and that the transfers �are found on both the positive and the negative sides of the ledger, thus potentially netting each other out.�

Todd Harrison, the director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the $21 trillion figure �double and triple counts funding that is transferred internally.�

�And just because a transaction cannot be fully traced and documented does not mean it was fraudulent or wasted,� Mr. Harrison said. Instead, it means the Defense Department �has not been able to pass an audit,� he said.

The Pentagon did indeed fail an audit in November.

Essentially, it's possible that everything was above board in the Pentagon. Adjustments may not be hiding anything, merely compensating for the arcane, dysfunctional systems that make tracking budgets impossible in the Pentagon. However, it's clear that there are major problems with the Pentagon, which cannot audit itself nor even complete an audit:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud/

quote:

On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government�s largest discretionary cost center�the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations�after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD�s financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible.

In an institution that can't be audited, corruption and fraud almost certainly are taking place. Claim (1) speaks to an institutional problem with the DoD that was not new in 2001, nor, does it seem, that there has been progress made in 2021, and is clearly true. The video isolates this fact without that context, which is misleading. In looking at the larger context of a 9/11 conspiracy claim, I doubt it causes anyone to budge from a held position one way or another: A 9/11 conspiracy believer can clearly see institutional corruption at work. A 9/11 conspiracy denier can just as easily point to the problem as a long term, unrelated thing that both preceded Bush and that continues on to this day.

Claim (2) is that it hit the budget office.
https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/pentagon/Pentagon9-11.pdf - I'm going to assume that a defense.gov source from the Office of the Secretary of Defense is a conservative enough source of facts for everyone.
Page 14 - 16 cover the route of the plane, including the corkscrew maneuver done just before impact and witness statements and evidence (such as damaged light poles) that speak to how low the plane was flying just prior to impact. However, investigating a third claim, which casts doubt on the official story by alluding to the difficulty of this maneuver and the ability of the hijacker pilot, is beyond the scope of our investigation here. The report continues, describing the section of the Pentagon hit on page 17: First floor, wedge 1, and then in. (Page 7 and 18 have maps and diagrams; Page 21 shows the path of the aircraft through the first floor). By page 28, we get some evidence for the claim:

quote:

RSW [Resource Service's Washington]'s Program and Budget Division, hit especially hard, lost 25 of its 28 members. Across the E Ring hallway, along the outside wall of the building, the jet's impact proved almost as lethaL Of the Managerial Accounting Division's 12 members present, only 3 survived. For these three the fireball and partial collapse of a wall almost proved their undoing; not one escaped without injury. All told, 34 of the 40 members of the Program and Budget and Managerial Accounting Divisions present that morning perished.

We can certainly say, then, that budget related offices were hit, so claim 2 is at least partially true. Were those offices researching discrepancies? Well, for a clearly large chunk of staff, knowing what they were working on is impossible, because they died. I haven't done enough research at this point to say if the budget offices were working on the transaction gaps specifically.

However, even if we take (2) as totally true, the claims in the video of (1) and (2) are designed to arouse suspicion in the viewer; of course they cannot prove conspiracy without a doubt. Even if we do assume 9/11 was a conspiracy and that, say, Bush was remotely piloting flight 77 himself, the location of the Pentagon that was hit could be coincidental and the budget problems unrelated. After all, any analysis of conspiracy should be able to point out objectives the conspiracy was to accomplish (which would be a much larger discussion, also beyond the scope of this post). Either way, the tactic of the video is obviously to raise enough incongruities with the official story that the viewer begins to see a pattern of coincidences so unlikely that they can't help but suspect a more sinister plan in the background, and perhaps does more research.

That said, researching this and typing this all up takes way too long so that's enough for today.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2021 06:39

Uranium Phoenix: Jun 20, 2007; Boom.

lurker2006 posted:

Can you explain the video evidence and eye witness testimony of numerous explosions occurring out of sync with the planes, one occurring before they had even hit? Specifically eye witness testimony of an explosion in world trade center 7?
Can you explain the video evidence of squibs occurring dozens of floors below the pancaking collapse?
Can you explain the fact that out of dozens of cameras filming the section of the pentagon hit, only one with suspiciously missing frames was released?
Can you explain the fact that no timestamped video evidence of the hijackers getting on the planes has ever been released?
I was where you guys were a week ago, the most I'd indulge was there being some covered eyes and crossed fingers from the usual suspects, this poo poo isn't even a well kept secret, it's a joke. I took the grillpill but please don't be a willing patsy.

If you want to post examples of witness testimony (and their sources) and/or a video or video series that supports a claim, and perhaps discuss, or post a source that discusses, why an official explanation for something is insufficient, that would be more useful than a drive-by post like this. For example, why is the missing video footage of the Pentagon getting hit suspicious? What does that imply? Or you could go into building 7 stuff. But you'll need to present something with substance to give people something to work with.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2021 14:36

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