And how? Because they can’t keep that idiot Assange from spilling half their secrets.

Somehow, in the end, it’s always all about guns with you, ain’t it, Bubba. Nasty, sinister, frightening, aggressively phallic-shaped *guns*. How did Faulkner put it? Ah, yes: “I have heard this [notion] expressed by others, but never before by a man. The others were woman, usually northern or middle western women, in their 50′s and 60′s. I don’t know what a psychiatrist would make of this.” Now I ask you, who doesn’t love Faulkner?

Also, “There is no conspiracy”. Really. – and you know this….how, exactly?

They’re mixing entirely different types of statistic (self-reported and police-reported) to create a story which is basically a fabrication.

Also, bluntly lol @ the conspiracy theories. There is no conspiracy, there is only people fucking the hell up. (Repeatedly!)

+1

I am not a Truther, but Truthers always seem at least as sane and sensoible to me as “Mainstreamers” like albatross.

*cough* TWA 800 *cough*

I know a man who spent 30 years piloting 747′s overseas, 23 of them as captain. Just the mere mention of TWA 800 was enough to send him and his pilot buddies into a foaming rage. Their unanimous opinion was the official story was bullshit, and low-grade bullshit at that. They also knew, and complained loudly, about the 150+ “credible” [per FBI assessment] witnesses who all say they saw a missile heading towards that plane; or destroy it; or both.

As far as the difficulty of an NTSB investigation being “subverted”, you’re talking about a gaggle of careerist bureaucrats running & manning that agency. Are we *really* supposed to believe any one of them would risk his career and Sacred Pension by defying a ‘tell ‘em a lie’ phonecall from Washington? Federal investigations into JFK, Waco, OKC, and 9/11 have all proven to be nothing but ass-covering jokes that a) lie when necessary b) just ignore any inconvenient facts c) ‘lose’ any troublesome evidence contradicting their official whopper. (Whatever happened to the front door of the Mt. Carmel complex in Waco? JFK autopsy photos & X-rays? RFK murder site photos? ATC radar track tapes for the planes of 9/11? “it, uh, got lost.” Oh, OK.)(and there are literally dozens more examples of this crap that could be named.)

It’s been done before, successfully. A lot. *cough* Sandy Berger *cough* So why couldn’t they do it again any time they want to?

As far as “let it happen on purpose,” I don’t see how we would ever know, but it seems very unlikely to me as a political decision from the top. I don’t think anyone could really be *sure* that the worst terrorist attack in history happening on W’s watch would increase his power–it seems just as plausible to me that it could have seen him hounded out of office for incompetence, or crippled for the rest of his term by the contempt of the public. (Note how well the financial meltdown worked out for his party, a few years later.)

Compounding this, anyone who was plausibly asleep at the switch and let the 9/11 attacks slip past them has an immense personal motive for both covering up their screwup and for finding a way to make themselves believe they weren’t really responsible. And it is clear that there were people who were asleep at the switch, one way or another–there were a couple FBI agents who wanted to pursue tips about Arab guys taking flight classes who didn’t want to learn how to land, but were stymied by their bureaucracy, for example.

Whether flight 93 was shot down and whether that plane crash in October were terrorist attacks really turns on whether you think the NTSB investigations could have been completely subverted. I am extremely skeptical of that, though I don’t know enough to be sure. But I am pretty sure that the investigators would be able to tell a bomb or missile explosion from an engine falling off or crashing a plane into the ground, so having the official story be wrong there requires compromising basically everyone on the NTSB team that investigated them.

a. Placing explosives in a building for demolition without anyone noticing in the days before the attack.

b. Hijacking two planes

c. Crashing them into nearby buildings

d. Waiting for those buildings to collapse

e. Setting off your explosives (in the midst of a huge disaster, after big impacts have shaken all kinds of stuff in your setup apart, with firemen and policemen and news reporters and bystanders all around) in a way that is plausibly enough like an accidental collapse to be convincing.

is a plan that is counting on an insane sequence of things going just right for you. If the explosives don’t go off, and they’re discovered a few days later as the fire department or building inspectors or insurance adjusters check out the building, you, personally, have just become America’s Most Wanted. If anyone noticed you placing the explosives before, and (say) took a picture or two, again, there is no place safe for you to hide. And so on. Incompetence is a constant in all human actions, but I think someone stupid enough to try that plot would be too stupid to carry it off.

I mean, the reason the anthrax mailing case could plausibly be a conspiracy is because it didn’t necessarily need a huge footprint. Someone takes spores from Ivins’ lab and takes them somewhere else, cultures anthrax and makes new spores, maybe weaponizes them[1], and mails them. You’re probably looking at a conspiracy size of like one to four people, who could do their work far from anyplace anyone was looking for them. And maybe Ivins did it himself, or with one other guy. Hell, maybe Hatfill did it and slipped past the FBI’s investigation and media leaking campaign that otherwise wrecked his life, though that seems very unlikely.

My best guess, honestly, is that the FBI had no f–king clue who did it, and that they waited till someone plausibly a suspect committed suicide or did some other interestingly incriminating action, and then declared the case closed as an alternative to having to acknowledge that they didn’t really know who did it. But again, we will probably never know.

[1] I’ve seen reports that the spores were not weaponized–they were in two batches of very different quality, perhaps representing a learning curve for the terrorist who prepared them, and there is evidence that the silicon present was incorporated into spores by the bacteria, rather than being added in the right way to increase the ability of the spores to stay airborne for a long time. But this is all miles outside my expertise.

Then there are three classes of ppl who are sometimes called Truthers, but probably really aren’t:

1. 9/11 agnostics who think that the true cause of the fall of Twin Towers cannot be known (at least not by a regular person). I, personally, am not a 9/11 agnostic.

2. LIHOP’ers (stands for Let It Happen On Purpose). These people think the US government had specific knowledge that actual bona fide terrorists were going to do 9/11 and the government decided not to stop the attacks. The thing with LIHOP’ers is that are infinite shades of variation as to what specific degree of knowledge the government had. For example, we all know now about the memo that said terrorists determined to strike in the US. In that broad sense, everbody is a LIHOP’er. However, as a person begins to think that the government had knowledge more specific than that, they begin to be a LIHOP’er in a more strict sense of that term. Personally, I think it is quite possible that there were people in the US government who knew quite a bit more than we realize, but, even if that is true (and it may or may not be), then I don’t think the foreknowledge will ever be provable or proven.

3. Those who believe in some ancillary conspiracies or coverups. One possible coverup is that WTC7 (not one of the Twin Towers) was brought down by controlled demolition on 9/11. I personally think this is probably true. Another is the possibility that Flight 93 was shot down. Again, I think this was probably true — in fact I am pretty sure of it. Another is the possibility that the anthrax attacks were not the work of a lone nut and were a government operation. Again, I think this is probably true. Another is whether flight 587 was brought down by an Muslim terrorist bomber’s shoe bomb in October 2001. I don’t have much idea about this one way or the other. However, I don’t think that believing in any or all of these ancillary conspiracies / cover-ups really qualify one as a Truther.

Since you seem to have a handle on this, could you please explain to me what a “Truther” is?

Since you seem to have a handle on this, could you please explain to me what a “Truther” is?

http://www.news-press.com/article/20120725/CRIME/120725029/

———–
Damn, what would cops do without that adjective inadvertent?
Shootings, dead dogs, missing videotapes…
Gives them so much more wiggle room.

Besides the EXTREMELY and perfectly “apples to apples” Todd #31 gave you there’s also this:

The latest United Nations homicide data show that America tied Argentina for the 50th most violent country, again using murder as an indicator. Like Klein’s graph, this dataset consists of OECD member countries, except for Tajikistan, which had a lower murder rate and didn’t affect our ranking.

Including Small Arms Survey’s firearms inventory research destroys the “guns equals violence” premise. (SAS is a pro-gun control, UN-affiliated organization.) All countries with higher murder rates—and more gun control—have much lower rates of gun ownership than America. The graph below shows a downward trend in murder rates as firearms ownership increases (more guns, less murder).

The links:
- murder rate from the UN: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html

- firearm ownership: http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/2007/en/Small-Arms-Survey-2007-Chapter-02-annexe-4-EN.pdf

Link to SAS mission statement (to show they are indeed pro gun control): http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/about-us/mission.html

Then there’s a graph of those two tables: murder rate vs firearm ownership, and to be fair, while yes, technically, it does slope the right direction (downward as guns increase), it’s not by much AT ALL, and looks really almost random.

But you can do your own analysis – the data is there.

Summary:

The US is first in civilian gun ownership, by a LOT, both in per capita and total.

The US is NOT REMOTELY first in terms of yearly murders by firearm per capita. Not even close (US rate hangs out just over 3/100,000 – there are dozens of countries with rates at 10+, and a good many with 20+ – heck, there’s a few with 30+, year after year). Even by absolute number, the US is not first, though obviously a lot closer.

That would be appear to be exactly, “apples to apples” evidence that you were asking for. Are you intellectually honest enough to change your position, or were you arguing in bad faith?

–October of 2001–

There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of conspiracy in the anthrax case, outside of the broad outline of the case smelling funny.

The reason that I know it is a conspracy is that the government knows when its own bioweapons are stolen. It is not like stealing a Smickers bar from the Circle K (although Circle K probably would catch you). Even if the US government didn’t have advance notice of the anthrax attacks, they certain could have quickly figured out who did it after the attack. By checking surveillance footage and inventory records and so on. Bioweapons are more secured even than fertilizer.

But, instead of simply outing the culprits in October of 2011, and saying that the US had let some bad apples get their hands on government bioweapons, the government obfuscated with fake investigations and a fake “suspect” (ooooooh, errr, I mean, person of interest).

There was only one plausible reason that they would not have wanted to find the anthrax terrorist (or, more likely, terrorists), and that would be because the attack was a government conspiracy.

They probably killed Ivins, too. I found it interesting that he died right about the time it became apparent that McCain / Palin was going to lose.

The anthrax conspiracy is exactly the type of thing that undercuts Mr. White’s assumptions about conspiracies. They aren’t always done perfectly. While the anthrax conspiracy did help tip the scale in a way that made it acceptable to make war on Iraq, it obviously didn’t work out quite as well as the person who wrote the nasty things about Israel in those letters wanted it to work out over the long run. What I don’t get is why Americans don’t care about this kind of thing.

I guess it is like trying to get a policeman to admit that policemen sometimes plant evidence. If they admit that then their whole worldview kind of collapses, so they conveniently forget about the anthrax when it is time to villify the Truthers.

Operation Northwoods

As to the WTC claims, I give great weight to the findings of Dr Steven Jones, a respected experimental physicist who was willing to sacrifice his career to say that the evidence flatly contradicts the Official Conspiracy Theory, and that it gives at least preliminary support to the belief that 9/11 was a false-flag operation run by or with the collusion of people at the highest levels of US government.

Small like this:
a) the anthrax in question had an enormously high concentration of silicon in it – the better for weaponization, my dear. But….
b) Ivins didn’t have the know-how to insert that degree of silicon into anthrax spores. Doing so is extremely difficult: that’s why siliconized anthrax is assumed to be from a state-sponsored actor & lab. That kind of thing was way out of Ivins’ skill set.
c) even if Ivins had been taking online classes on the sly, there’s another problem: siliconizing anthrax requires – in addition to those mad skillz I mentioned – it requires *very* specialized equipment. USAMRID, where Ivins worked, well….they didn’t….uh…”did not have the capability to add silicon to anthrax spores.” That quote came from Ivins’ boss.

There’s lots more, but the gist is that Epstein absolutely _eviscerates_ the FBI case against Ivins, who (conveniently?) committed suicide before they could get around to charging him. Eviscerated ‘em in print: in the mighty WSJ, in fact. Tellingly, the FBI made no comment on the fact they’d just gotten buttfucked on national TV. “Never believe anything until it has been officially denied” – Bismarck. (“Or is ignored in the hope it’ll go away with the complicity of the state-run media.” – El Coronado)

Behold: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004575011421223515284.html

I don’t even need your per capita. The Eighth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems lists three countries that have had more murders with firearms than the US: South Africa, Colombia and Thailand.

All three have more restrictive gun laws than the US.

Or he isn’t very bright and believes that. OTOH a politicians capacity for self delusion is nearly boundless. Hmmmm, on further reflection, so is jaw dropping dishonesty. Never mind. Carry on.