'A small plane carrying New York Yankee Cory Lidle slammed into a 50-story apartment building Wednesday after issuing a distress call, killing the pitcher and a second person in a crash that rained flaming debris onto the sidewalks and briefly raised fears of another terrorist attack.

A law enforcement official in Washington said Lidle – an avid pilot who got his license during last year's offseason – was aboard the single-engine aircraft when it plowed into the 30th and 31st floors of the condominium high-rise on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said both people aboard were killed.

Lidle's passport was found on the street, according to a federal official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.'

Actually, I didn't say that I believed the government as an entity was complicit in the attacks. I just said that there is too much evidence to believe the conventional version of the attacks.

Honestly, if you believe the testimony of the government that one of the passports of a 9/11 hijacker survived the plane crash, ball of fire and subsequent steel-melting inferno, and fluttered to the streets of New York virtually unscathed, then you took the blue pill.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/ame/911/911tr/012604.htm

“MS. SUSAN GINSBURG: Beginning with passports. Four of the hijackers passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered from the crash site of United Airlines flight 93 in Pennsylvania. These are the passports of Ziad Jarrah and Saeed al Ghamdi. One belonged to a hijacker on American Airlines flight 11. This is the passport of Satam al Suqami. A passerby picked it up and gave it to a NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. A fourth passport was recovered from luggage that did not make it from a Portland flight to Boston on to the connecting flight which was American Airlines flight 11. This is the passport of Abdul Aziz al Omari.

In addition to these four, some digital copies of the hijackers passports were recovered in post-9/11 operations. Two of the passports that have survived, those of Satam al Suqami and Abdul Aziz al Omari, were clearly doctored. To avoid getting into classified detail, we will just state that these were manipulated in a fraudulent manner in ways that have been associated with al Qaeda.”

Hi Charlie,

Obviously, I am not an expert in physics, and have little or no ability to determine whether the NIS or Steven Jones have persuasive arguments. However, just because Jones is an underdog, that does not mean he's wrong. Committees and institutes of distinguished people are wrong all the time.

As far as 9/11, I am simply claiming that I do not believe that the government's version is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, due to the many pieces of information we have been told that seem questionable, or even absurd.

Five or six of the supposed hijackers whose pictures we saw in the newspaper are alive and the victims of identity theft, according to reputable sources. So who were the hijackers using those false identities? Where were they from? Does it make a difference if we don't even know who some of the hijackers actually were?

Professional pilots have claimed that even highly trained individuals would have had difficulty performing the manuevers those planes had to do to hit the buildings. The flight school trainers who worked with the 9/11 hijackers said they could hardly fly a Cessna.

Sceptics include (from Wikipedia):

Dr. Robert M. Bowman Director of Advanced Space Programs Development for DOD and retired Lt. Col for United States Air Force, a combat pilot who flew 101 missions in the Vietnam War

Andreas von Bulow is a former assistant German defense minister and former Minister for Research and Technology in the cabinet of German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. He served for 25 years as an SPD member of the German parliament and was ranking member of the parliamentary committee on intelligence services.

Bill Christison a former senior official of the CIA, was a National Intelligence Officer and the Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis before he retired in 1979. He has written numerous articles on U.S. foreign policies.

Jean-Pierre Desmoulins is a French engineer, now working as a university professor, who analysed the crash of flight 77 on the Pentagon on 9/11.

Kenneth L. Kuttler, Professor of Mathematics at Brigham Young University, has written a paper WTC 7: A short computation

John Newman spent 21 years in Army Intelligence and served as Assistant to the Director of the National Security Agency. He also served as an attaché in China. He is a history professor at UMD and has been teaching courses on counterterrorism for 10 years.

Morgan Reynolds, a former chief economist for the United States Department of Labor during the administration of George W. Bush, is the highest-ranking public official to criticize the government account of 9/11, calling the government story “bogus” and saying the WTC towers most likely fell from a controlled demolition.

Gordon Ross holds degrees in both Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, graduating from Liverpool John Moores University.

Here’s a prominent conservative:

“Paul Craig Roberts was the assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Ronald Reagan where he developed the theory of economics that came to be called “Reaganomics.”. Dr. Roberts is Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review.”

Roberts says:
“I know many qualified engineers and scientists have said the WTC collapsed from explosives. In fact, if you look at the manner in which it fell, you have to give their conclusions credibility.”

Are these people anti-authoritarian fruitcakes? I think not.

Many of them describe their feelings as “disturbed” in the sense that they would prefer to believe the conventional version of 9/11 and do not like to think that their government lied to them.

I personally feel the same way.

But I also think there's something even more deeply rooted historically and psychologically. Many folks who are now susceptible to conspiracy thinking came of age in the 1960s. The 60s were the rebirth of the optimism of progressives whose earlier faith in human progress stemmed from the Enlightenment but was more or less dashed by the combintation of WWI, the Depression, and WWII.

With the 60s progressive/liberal religion, sexual ethics, and politics combined to give a lot of people their worldview fueled by a faith that things were just going to get better and better (“Don't stop believing in tomorrow”).

What happened? First Nixon. Imagine what a shock to the system that must have been for him merely to be elected. And then to find out there really was a conspiracy and he really was a crook (albeit a very gifted politician).

But Nixon was only a slap in the face. Reagan was a body slam. 60s era progressives were blown away by how popular Reagan was. This explains, I think, why so many feminists and others were 100% behind Clinton, even after all the sex stuff that would have set them on a Republican like piranahs on Mr. Ed. With Clinton's ascendancy perhaps Reagan too could be described as an aberration.

But with the 94 GOP take over, Bush II, 9/11, the abortion regime falling in popular opinion, etc. etc., the notion that these are merely set-backs and not a sea-change is becoming harder and harder to deny. The notion that the dreams of the 60s are more or less dead and the country has become more conservative is a very difficult pill to swallow.

And some just can't do it. So it must be something else. It can't be that people are genuinely disenchanted with progressive politics (which is more the case than anyone being impressed with GOP politics I'm afraid). So, what can explain it? The paradigm was set with Nixon. There must be dirty tricks going on. Conspiracies. This is much easier to believe than that one's side has actually lost.

Add to this the psychological pull of being part of what Lewis described as the Inner Ring (those who know the real deal, an oddly modern form of gnosticism), and the TV and the accusations of bad faith and false consciousness, and you have a perfect storm for conspiracy mongering.

I go with the latter. And I guess I'd trace the rise of conspiracies to the abandonment of Christianity with its belief in revealed and unalterable Truth for agnosticism and/or spiritual orientations in which adherents create their own truths. Which goes back to post-modernism's belief that no text or message has any absolute meaning, only meaning dependent on the hearer. Perhaps the answer to “Why now?” is that we've reached a tipping point in thought where skepticism is more common than belief.

I know that for a long time now we have trained children to be skeptical of what was previously held as fact. Perhaps this is what a skeptical society does — it disbelieves everything conventional and embraces everything fantastic.