There is no conspiracy. PERIOD.

1) Flight 77 was a large passenger plane. According to Boeing, a 757 has between 200 and 243 seats depending if it's a 757-200 or 757-300, and it would have been carrying a good amount of luggage. Sense the photos of the Pentagon crash clearly show office furniture in the building, it's safe to say that the fire wasn't hot enough to incinerate all the furniture within close distance of the plane. I would then assume that it would be safe to say that it wasn't hot enough to completely vaporize all 200-243 seats in the plane. This is made even more apparent by the fact that the fireball from the crash shot out from the hole created by the jet backwards, while the seats would have remained in a forward motion scattering into the building. Why have we not seen what appears to be a large number of passenger airliner seats in the photos taken of the pentagon? Also, why are there no photos of luggage? 200-243 seats is a lot to just disappear into kerosene smoke, especially when wood furniture can be seen to be unburnt.

2) Why didn't the Pentagon scramble jets to intersect the two hijacked flights? And then, after these planes hit WTC1&2, why did they still not send jets to attack flight 77 and 93 when it was clear at that point that they were hostile and would probably be used as weapons?

3) The Pentagon got attacked? The Pentagon went completely unprotected in DC airspace, probably the most guarded airspace known to man. Even if they didn't have the fighter jets to shoot the plane down are we really to assume that THE PENTAGON doesn't have other forms of defense that, when necessary, could have prevented a plane from crashing into it? Or at least evacuate people, especially after two planes have been used as weapons in a terrorist attack not moments earlier (yes, that last bit was an exaggeration because off the top of my head I don't remember what the actual time difference was, and I'm feeling too lazy to find out. Sorry.)?

These are just a couple of questions that I have about this subject. Again, I'm simply asking, not presenting an argument.

Dave Longo's comment, in addition to what you see above, originally included a long list of links to conspiracy sites, with no additional commentary from him. I've approved the comment, but deleted that list of links. The purpose of comment threads is to foster constructive discussion, not so people who disagree can splatter my site with links to other pages; I consider that spam and will treat it as such.

Just to be absolutely clear, I have no objection to people who disagree with my posts using the comments to make a counterargument. I also have no objection to said people supporting those arguments with judiciously selected links to external evidence (in fact I insist on that). But I do object to people who post long lists of links to other sites in lieu of making an argument in their own words. I trust that my readers can discern the difference.

As far as the substance of Dave's post, I consider it another illustrative example of the unexplained sinister assertion, born from the conspiracy-inclined mind's tendency to seek patterns in noise by grasping at every possible connection, no matter how tenuous or irrelevant. Let's say Dave's claims are correct. And? What does that prove? Why is that something that a sinister conspiracy capable of carrying out these attacks would do? (I note that his second assertion would imply that Saddam Hussein was in on the conspiracy, something which strikes me as rather unlikely.)

The Brits find an infected bird while running a Bird Flu 'drill'

Saddam invades another country while we are running a drill of saddam invading another country

The exact train and car is bombed in London AT THE EXACT MOMENT a drill is being run for that exact scenario

Planes are high jacked and fly into buildings on 9/11 while the gov is running drills of planes being high jacked and flown into buildings

9/11 was a gift to the Bush administration; how they interpreted it to the public and used it (even though a poor fit) to justify the Iraq invasion, is the real "conspiracy" here, if anyone can call such transparent bungling a conspiracy.

Without admitting to a Roosevelt conspiracy (a staple of rightwingers since
America First), I suspect that US authorities knew something was in the wind before Pearl Harbor. After all, US and Japanese imperialist expansions were on a collision course. But, like the British in Malaysia, they underestimated the scale and sophistication of the Japanese opening gambit, due perhaps to their denigration of non-white capabilities. It could not have been part of their plan that such a significant portion of the fleet was wiped out, and they very well realized that it could have been much worse. It may be possible something roughly parallel happened in developments leading up to 9/11.

I remain agnostic on the question of a pre-9/11 Bush conspiracy of any kind, but do find it hard to believe that people who could not even put over the Plame affair would be clever enough to pull it off. Most can agree that the administration has conspired to twist all advantage possible for itself from the event once it
happened.