Interesting LIHOP justification

[GwionX]

I was ushered to this thread on ATS today.

Looks like the guy put a lot of work in this post. And to my surprise, no prisonplanet source links.

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread275547/pg1

[Foolmewunz]

What's interesting about it? He/She introduces the topic by saying there's not going to be hard evidence of such dastardly deeds (I guess never having heard of Iran Contra or Watergate), so "I'm going to connect the dots on a whole bunch of coincidences"....

I was in Chile during the student riots against Pinnochet, and in Johannesburg during one of the rounds of Soweto riots. Coincidence? To be sure(I was working on selling a consolidated freight service at the time.) But this character could link that coincidence to me being involved in both upheavals.

There are elements of LIHOP Lite that appeal to me, viscerally. I am capable of believing that there's an element that would look forward to a war in Iraq for the business opportunities, for instance. And there are a lot of questions about foreknowledge and our own history in Pakistan and Afghanistan, of course. But wondering about those things and hoping that the documentation/evidence will become available is a far cry from speculating from a string of coincidences and reaching the conclusion that Cheney, Bush, Condie, and the NWO murdered Americans to pad their bank accounts.

[FactCheck]

I want to see a memo or someone coming forward who actually was a part of the plan. Someone who is dropping names, places and times of meetings and such. Something which can be verified.

Have you heard about the innocent people on death row who are now being released because of DNA evidence? She is EXACTLY the kind of person who would put them in jail for murder without hard evidence. Maybe the prosecutor who brought the "coincidences" without hard evidence to the jury.

[GwionX]

I guess what I found interesting about it was the number of references made to build the claim-- no matter how much the evidence is lacking. It must have been time consuming cherry-picking those particular slants in predominately mainstream sources.

Just to be clear--I don't prescribe to finding truth in chicken bones, cloud formations, or coincidence. It seems all the CT's over on ATS are gushing about this, and I just wanted to point it out, and get some other opinions.

[T.A.M.]

We gotcha GwionX. Your posting on this forum is clear enough that we know you are not a promoter of the "inside job" or anything even close.

Throw enough dots onto a piece of paper, and you can connect them to form any image you like.

TAM:)

[jon]

It's also interesting that it almost 'proves' too much, and the relatively small role that September 11 plays in the ATS 'theory'.

If you string coincidences together like that, you could 'prove' that almost any attack on the US was LIHOP (were the 98 embassy bombings LIHOP in order to let Clinton distract the public from his sex life, show how accurately Cruise missiles could work, etc? btw, I don't believe this, but you could 'prove' it just as well by stringing together coincidences...)

The other interesting thing about the ATS piece is that it offers lots of reasons why the Bush administration are a bunch of rule 8s (I'd agree with this, though not for the reasons given ;) ). Their supposed complicity in the events of 9/11 is only one part in this story - the ATS piece offers lots of reasons to dislike, oppose and remove Bush. If people believe all the ATS piece's argument, that would actually be a reason not to worry too much about whether 9/11 was LIHOP or blunder, and just get on with taking action against the Bush administration, US foreign policy, etc.
Somehow, though, my psychic powers lead me to foretell that this is just going to feed into claims that we need another investigation, that we need 'truth', etc - CT as a way to avoid actually doing anything useful :rolleyes:

[Brainster]

You look at his list of "co-incidences":

1. Bush's election. Note particularly this stupid bit:

Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters."
- Washington Post Sunday , November 12, 2000 ; Page A22

Jeez, imagine that! If only the Washington Post hadn't buried this story on page A22! How could the Democrats have forgotten about this?

Answer: it was an error and it got corrected. It was extremely well-reported at the time and arguments about why it happened may be valid, but to pretend that somehow this was missed in the hand recounts reveals how shoddy this analysis is going to be.

Note as well, that his third claim in this section goes to a "Bush Crime Family" article that does not appear to be bylined and which has links to many very questionable sources, including Conspiray Planet.

2. Bush intended to invade Iraq.

Let's just grant this. Not worth the debate.

3. Bush had plenty of warning of 9-11.

First link goes to statement by John Edwards. Okay, so they got a Democrat to say something bad about George Bush. Second link goes to Raw Story, which, I'm sorry, is not a credible source. If you follow to the SF Chronicle article about all you can say is that it appears that the 9-11 Commission was told about a meeting between Tenet and Rice.

I think we can grant many of the reports cited warning about the possibility of terrorist attacks. I think we can grant that the FISA Court blew it on Moussaoui's computer, although of course few choose to fault them when it came to the question of those in the US receiving phone calls from Al Qaeda abroad.

4. Bush Administration lied about WMD in Iraq.

Certainly arguable. Now the question I have though is, is it not arguable that the Bush Administration would have lied (if you believe they lied) about WMD regardless of whether LIHOP is true or not? In other words, this contributes nothing to the LIHOP "proof".

5. The Bush Administration benefitted.

Hilariously, he claims that Cheney received financial benefit from Halliburton's performance. In actuality, Cheney had deferred compensation due him from his time at Halliburton which was paid for via an annuity from a separate life insurance company with a prepaid premium from Halliburton, so that there was no remaining financial tie to the company. Cheney did have stock options, which he has exercised and donated 100% of the proceeds to charity per an agreement he worked out beforehand. In fact, one blogger even griped that Cheney was donating too much to charity (http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2006/04/kirsch_cheney_t.html) in 2005, taking advantage of a tax law that year that allowed more to be donated and deducted.

[The Doc]

Just a little background on ATS. I was a member of ATS for about 2 years at one stage.

I don't want to stereotype, but you get a lot of typical foil-heads over there. It's not just a 9/11 conspiracy forum, so you get heaps of people who also believe in UFO's, Chemtrails, Ghosts etc. They buy into almost anything.

Just to show how they've been inaccurate before, in 2005 there was at least 2 "predictions" a month that made the 'popular' posts section of the site that predicted the USA would be invaded by China within the next week. The same happened for predictions stating Iran would nuke the USA. They all seemed convincing at first, and had references. They also claimed they had indisputable evidence that George Bush senior killed JFK. That turned out to be untrue.

I will look at the post at some stage, but I would take everything that comes out of there as a grain of salt.