3/13/2004: Madrid terrorism protest

And so millions of people in Madrid go to the streets in grief and anger in a massive protest against terrorism.

Reuters story

My God, think of the damage a couple of suicide bombers or a poison gas cloud could do, to that crowd.

I imagine they have all thought of that and it didn't stop them turning out.

Those of us who lived or worked in London throughout thirty years of bombing by Irish and other terrorists continued every day in the knowledge that the next one might have our name on it. This is a wonderful pictorial record of the courage and steadfastness of people hurt and angered by the cowardice of the bomb planters, my heart and solidarity goes straight to them.

That is an interesting reaction, especially considering how we Americans cowered in our houses after 9-11.

Just to let you know that this have been the biggest protest ever in Spain. In Madrid (population 4 million) there was an estimation of 2,3 million. And the same in all cities in Spain.

Imagine losing a contact...

Quzah.

Q, you have proven several times today (this and the lame suicide bomber conversation ... left a nasty stain on the carpet!!) that you are indeed funny.

No, I'm pretty sure the americans didn't cower in their houses.... In fact, if memory serves me correctly, they sent out a good whack of their population half way around the world to try and meet the threat head-on...

was it the right thing to do? ... were they successful? ...

history will be the judge, I suppose...

I could have chosen my words better there, but I don't recall 2.3 million New Yorkers getting together immediately after the mass murder. I recall all our media looking to our political leaders to tell us what to do instead asking us to look into ourselves. I never really thought about 9-11 as a media driven mass culture event before so I'm just thinking out loud here.

hah, fair enough.. I don't even live in america, but let me tell you: I was cowering plenty...

the thing about 9/11 that kind of makes it different than other the other terrorist attacks, for me at least, is that you had multiple things going on in a very short span of time...

the first plane into the tower... people were like "wow, that's a hell of an accident"... but then the next one hit, and people were like "Jesus, what's going on?" ... and then the next plane hit the pentagon, and people were really starting to panic.. and the the tower fell, and people were positive the world was going to end.. and there was still the plane in pennsylvania that those brave dudes managed to stop.. bound for the whitehouse I guess...

but the the point is that people started to think "holy shit.. what's next?" ... I mean, they destroyed the twin towers with airplanes!!! that's INSANE! .. These dudes are CRAZY... they could pretty much do ANYTHING after this...

so yeah... I think people were justified in being paranoid...

it would have been nice if they'd protested I guess... but ... what are they protesting? terrorism ? .... I'm not sure that's very effective.. .. I mean, you don't see a lot of pro-terrorism rallies... .. .... I'm not sure that they're getting their message to the right people by just having a protest..

i see stupid people

I'm gonna need to put on my tinfoil hat before I start doing the research on this, though.

I'm sure you've looked around, but this certainly shows some debris. Probably a really convincing job of Photoshopping, though. Big cover up and all.

So there was one engine and a landing gear? Where's the rest of the plane? This wasn't supposedly some tiny cesna. It's a fucking jet. Ok, so there's a handful of scrap metal. Where are the bodies? None were ever recovered.

...This post is a work in progress...

Someone's rant on the explosion at the time of occurance is here. Notice the grass in the bottom pictures. More photos.

Yet more. Interesting to note that in these photos, or a number of them, they seem to indicate that the aircraft should be mainly outside of the pentagon, not inside. In either case, the wings themselves should have done more damage than they supposedly did, since they store all the fuel. And as we know, that fuel is potent enough to take down a steel tower...

Here is a tinfoil hat site that shows a decent summary of pictures. Again, note no wing impacts in the close up pictures.

Anyway... Way to Hijack a thread eh? Ehehe.

Quzah.

A plane full of fuel flying at 250 mph and crashing into a reinforced concrete building (several walls worth of reinforced concrete, as well as supporting columns) is going to essentially vaporize. A great deal of the resulting shredded aluminum will burn completely in the subsequent fire (I have burned beer cans in campfires before, so I know this can be done). Other sites clearly show a landing gear, wheel, turbofan parts, tire tread, primered metal known to match the aircraft type, etc, etc.

Also, a hell of a lot of witnesses saw it happen. Pretty hard to confuse a commercial airliner with anything else.

I like the theory I saw on one site, though. That the government planted the "no plane" conspiracy theory so they could then discredit it, making those who adhered to it look like loonies.

Occam's Razor should apply here, at least. We *saw* two planes crash into the WTC towers. We saw the wreckage of a third in a field on the same day. Why should we doubt that this was just another plane? What about all the relatives of the dead who put their loved ones on the plane that morning and drove off? The plane and their families went *somewhere*, never to return...

All this shit was started by a French book that came out in 2002. It was thoroughly debunked. If you start to believe in this kind of thing you should start questionning your sources harder. There is a ton of evidence in one direction and only a few stupid questions in the other. Like spode said, Occam applies here. Everyone is trying to introduce noise into your belief system. Don't help them.

The real plane and passengers are hidden in the studio where then filmed the moon landings.

I'm going to file this alongside "The Holocaust never happened" and "The moon landing was faked by Hollywood."

Here's the Snopes page on this item btw.

Well, I know that you and I didn't see it happen...but I'm still going with the least complex theory until someone gives me an explanation of why we would kill our own people and endanger our own military HQ. Wait, let rephrase that. I'll need an explanation from someone who hasn't been off their meds for awhile.

Our government can't even keep the fucking highways paved. I don't think they could make a conspiracy this large and keep it secret. Clinton couldn't even keep getting his knob polished by his intern a secret, after all.

Reports that the WTC did not collapse because of damage caused by the planes, but because Silverstein and FDNY decided to set off the charges that were built into the buildings and "pull them" down before they fell down.

Streaming footage.
Link Here

This is a HELL of a page about the Warren Commission's coverup about the Kennedy Assasination.

I'm finding all this stuff linked off other Conspiracy Theory sites. It's really interesting.

I remember watching TV on sept 11, and there were all kinds of reports about a "5th plane" ... and then all of a sudden you just heard NOTHING about it... they didn't even make a retraction, like "Oh, we're getting reports now that the 5th plane we mentioned was fine", or whatever.

I think it was somewhere near denver, or it had departed from denver, or something like that..

And you never hear anyone mention it.

Just sloppy reporting?

I also heard CNN say it was a truck bomb that hit the pentagon. Then they said it was a plane. How do you get truck bomb from a 757?

I distinctly remember hearing that one plane was shot down by the Air Force, and that a bomb went off at the State Dept. that morning...I still have a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer that shows the latter.

It isn't the first time the media has fucked up...won't be the last.

(EDIT: Sorry...I initially posted this about 20 minutes before the time listed to the left...was checking to see if I was still having a problem with deleting posts. No problem here or in Jimbo's forum, but I definitely can't delete posts in Politics and Current Events.)

Where's the black box?

Quzah.

***raises her hand***

Yep, parts were blocked off for sure.

So if 9/11 was a fluke, what was the 1993 WTC bombing?

Oh. My. God.

From reading that forum and links I found a site with pictures of people who jumped from the towers.

I cannot imagine having to make that choice. Beware. Disturbing.

Just a quick disclaimer, the purpose of that link was to see some fascinating pictures of a close up shot of one of the towers, and the debate about what is there or not there.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no jumper pics in the actual thread itself.....I know at would be very disturbing for some. Although the pictures there aren't real graphic, they can be disturbing.

Oh..yeah, I hope I was clear the the jumper pics were not on the forum itself, but link from a link.

I've seen the jumper pics many, many times.

What was more disturbing was watching the documentary 9-11-01 that was made by that french film crew ... during one of the segments filmed in the Battallion Command Post in the South Tower Lobby, you could hear the sound of the bodies hitting the ground (the narration including the explanation of the noise, that it wasn't just falling debris). That's chilling.

No wolf, I mean, were the CIA and FBI playing games when that one happened?

Not to derail this back to the topic of Spain, but here's an article on why they voted the Popular Party out.

NYTimes Link (reg req'd)

OK, by my count, that's the 3rd country.

1) Pakistan held local elections shortly after the Afghan war in which many local pro-taliban leaders were elected as a direct result of that country's pro-US stance.

2) In South Korea, the winner of that election won based almost entirely on an anti-Bush platform.

3) Now Spain is the third country to toss out its leaders because they were in bed with Bush.

The British aren't too happy with Blair, but the US is having the next election, so we'll see who's next.

Germany was in there: Schroeder rode in on anti-US sentiment.

I'd say to be careful about whether it's anti-Bush or anti-US.

It's anti-Bush. The sentiment was primarily pro-US in Europe in the timeframe between 9-11 and Bush's Iraq adventure. And even before 9-11, the sentiment was much more pro-US than it is now. And even more so again when Clinton was in office.

That's not to say that we were loved, but Bush has been a massive wedge in all of the cracks between the US and the rest of the world.

When would you say it turned, exactly? When the UN passed 1441, or when the first bombs fell?

I'd say it started turning the second Bush started talking about Iraq, and each subsequent step (pushing the resolutions, badmouthing the inspectors, censoring Iraq's response document before distribution, kicking out the inspectors, lying in the SOTU, starting the Iraq war, setting up the "Coalition of the Willing", Freedom Fries, etc) made it worse, even in the so-called "willing" countries.

Bush also created some ill will in the Afghanistan war with the secret indefinate detentions, but Iraq was the primary force.

Referring to my perceived Pollyanna attitude toward my government...I don't have one. I just don't think that the bumbling juggernaut that is the US Federal Governement could ever hope to keep such a large conspiracy secret. They aren't that competent.

I'll second that, Els.

So (back to HM) what Europe really doesn't like is not that it was or wasn't Iraq, nor that it was or wasn't war, nor that it was or wasn't necessary, but that the US was throwing its weight around basically without check.

I think you're putting words in my keyboard there. I can't figure out how you get that from my post.

First, notice that I was talking about Iraq, and not Afghanistan. The fact that Iraq was irrelevant to 9-11 was definitely an issue.

And then each instance of the US throwing its weight around (rather than using diplomacy) to push the dubious goal poisoned both US prestige and any legitimacy of the goal.

Yeah, basically we're at the same point on that. I wasn't putting words in your mouth so much as extending on it.