In the first post in this series, we saw that 7 World Trade Center building was the smoking gun of a possible conspiracy behind the 9/11 attack. The manner in which it collapsed and the way the collapse was investigated are strong indications of a conspiracy and a cover up. However, when I first heard of the conspiracy theory in any serious form, the first question I asked myself was why – what possible motive could any person or organization have to commit mass murder at this scale? I honestly couldn’t see any, and as long as you don’t see one, you cannot take these conspiracy theories seriously. Of course, if you buy the official story that the conspiracy actually originated in Afghanistan among terrorist monsters, you don’t need to look for any rational motives.
But if you believe (as I do) that there is more to 9/11 than meets the eye, you will want to find plausible motives before taking a serious look at the conspiracy theory. I think it is probably going to be impossible to know the real motives, and it will be equally impossible to guess what they were while avoiding slander and mud-slinging. After all, one would be accusing some people of complicity in mass murder. So let me start with an apology again to all those who might get the impression that they are being wrongly accused, or anybody who finds this line of thinking objectionable. And, let me make it clear that the list below is from Internet research. I have no direct evidence for any of the items. I will just list the changes that took place in the world as a result of 9/11 from various angles, and let you be the judge of whether they could have been motives for mass murder.
Financial
By the end of the 20th century, the Word Trade Center had become a major liability to its owners because of the asbestos it contained. Any routine repair work called for specialized experts and protective gear, and was therefore very expensive. Demolition and reconstruction was clearly not an option because the asbestos would end up in the air. The only way to tear it down would have been to dismantle it floor by floor, the cost of which was so astronomical that there was no estimate for it. As a result of 9/11, however, the most primest piece of real estate in the world suddenly became available for redevelopment with no cost to the owners. In fact, there was a demand of a seven billion dollar insurance payout, which I believe got settled for about 4.5 billion. So the owners made actually made a profit of about a billion dollars, as the video below shows.
Military
As an immediate aftermath of 9/11, we had two wars costing an estimated five trillion dollars. A significant chunk of it went to defense industries, as evidenced by the dramatic increase in the defense budget. On an inflation-adjusted, real per capita basis, the defense spending reached an all time peak in 2010.
Oil Contracts and Reconstruction
A large number of multi-national corporations, especially those on the right side of the administration, got preferential contracts and reconstruction projects. A cursory look at Halliburton will give you some idea of where your money went. Similar nepotism may have always existed, but the 9/11 conspiracy made such brazen money allocation so much easier because nobody would want to question a wartime president.
Neocon Ideology
A longer term consequence of 9/11 is the ideological wars and the hopeless polarization and demonization of the muslim world. If you look at the muslim world now, you can see nothing but unmitigated tragedy, with the promises of Arab Spring getting eclipsed by real threats of protracted civil wars, growth of radical and violent religious interpretations and so on. If somebody had wanted to intentionally hurt the muslim world, they could not have done it any better than 9/11. It was the perfect game plan.
Investigations
The 9/11 attacks effectively ended a few investigations into financial irregularities. The Internet tells me that there was 1.4 trillion (that is with a T) dollars unaccounted for in the Pentagon books, which Rumsfeld talked about just the day before 9/11 and the records and the investigators were housed in the location where the building collapsed. Some similar large scale investigations had to be called off because of the destruction of WTC7, apparently.
Let me take short detour to talk about counting money. It is not easy to visualize large sums of money and their relative difference. I have this trick to help you appreciate millions and billions. I think even this trick will fail in the case of trillions. Let’s say some kind soul gives you a million dollars and asks you to spend it at the rate of a dollar a second, with no break to sleep or eat or anything. How long do you think it will take? Well, it will take about 12 days before you run out of cash. Now let’s say they give you a billion dollars. How long will it last? It will last you almost 32 years! The difference between M and B is staggering. When it comes to a T, a trillion dollars will last you 315 centuries, which of course is a lot harder to imagine than 32 years. But suffice it to know that the concept of money didn’t exist for about 90% of that time span!
Here is another way to visualize a billion dollars, which I think is better:
Post 9/11 Cleanup
The attacks on the World Trade Center was one of the largest crime scenes on American soil, and you would have expected large yellow tapes all around it with nobody allowed to touch anything. But that’s not what happened. Almost all the material evidence got cleaned up right away. including almost all of the steel beams, which got sent to China or something to be melted down. In short, it was the largest evidence tampering that America has ever witnessed. In addition, the cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders (which are specifically designed to withstand crash conditions) from the planes that hit the WTC towers were either not found or unusable. But, miraculously and very conveniently, two of the alleged hijackers’ passports were found in the debris, although they didn’t have to carry the passports in a domestic flight.
All these points listed above (with no direct proof of my own, I must add; only with Internet testimonies and such) point to the possibility that 9/11 was a conspiracy. If you believe some of these points, you might be able to work out who was behind it, and how it was done. But I don’t think anybody would ever be able to prove anything.