Hm, I try not to get involved in these kind of discussions online, very rarely do......I know how quickly these can spiral into negativity & unpleasantness.....but I just can't resist unburdening today ;)"Conspiracy theories/ist" is SUCH an unfortunate term and does injustice to all sides....but it's the term we've got so I'll use it.
I find that, generally, the more popular "conspiracy theories" are a product of the art of connecting the dots (of selective data points in an ocean of data) to create a narrative that tends to be reflective in some ways of the believer's "inner" psychological/emotional/paradigmatic worldview etc. Those dots or points of data which do not conform to the over-arching narrative are ignored/misunderstood/dismissed. And the gaps between the dots or data points, ie. what we do not know, are filled with plenty of imaginative & self-convincing speculation in support of the over-arching narrative (don't understand this anomaly of physics = aliens nuked the ancient civilisation on mars).
The problem is, we KNOW there are & have been "conspiracy theories" throughout history that are indeed true. We know our own governments (US, UK et al), from the last 50 years alone, have colluded in outrageous & despicable "conspiracies" of the most sinister sort that no decent citizen/human being would agree to/with. These are just the documented & admitted ones! Personally, I never cease to be amazed at how little credible coverage is given to the conspiracies which are conducted in plain sight.....usually it is these openly known, news item conspiracies in plain sight which are overlaid with more credulous, unlikely, speculative, mixed in with deeply questionable agendas, absurd sounding (etc etc) conspiracy theories which become, for some odd reason, far more popular a "cause" than the actual, real conspiracy.......
For me "9/11" is a weird one. Because in August 1998 I made a prediction to my mother saying that Osama bin Laden would commit a terrorist attack on US soil within 5 years that would be beyond anything we've seen before in the West and that would change the world we live in (she had no comprehension what I was blabbering on about!). When I've mentioned this to friends during 9/11 conspiracy debates years later (around 80% of all the people I know outside of work believe it WAS a conspiracy, which I think tends to reflect the type of people I associate with, rather than intelligence or objectivity, which I think in itself tells a story), they've said on more than one occassion "oh, you had a psychic vision did you". I always laugh and say "no, not at all. I was just deeply political at that time and was OBSERVING what was going on in the world". In August 1998 Clinton killed civilians at a factory in Sudan under the pretense of attacking al qaeda. It just so happened it made for an excellent diversion from his upcoming trial or whatever to do with Lewinsky. That was the day I made that prediction.
On the day of September 11th 2001, I was already aware of much of what would later become part of the 9/11 "conspiracy theories", such as Osama's association with the CIA, family business relations between the Bush & Laden families, oil politics etc This was all openly available knowledge & news after all! I was actually immediately suspicious - on the same day and before ANY kind of exposure or even knowledge of "conspiracy theories" - of what I was witnessing.
I guess my suspicion of official narratives in regards to war and politics goes back to 1990/1 when I was 12/13 years old. My dad used to read several UK broadsheet papers every day, and I used to pick them up afterwards and read....The Times was his favourite. IIRC just during the buildup to the first Iraq war, or perhaps during or just after, there was a small article in the Times which basically said the then US ambassador to Iraq (I forget her name) was proven to have given explicit approval to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the USA to invade Kuwait, and for doing so (after the war) she had been quietly removed from her position and given a lot of money/very expensive property to stay out of the limelight. This was a respected newspaper providing what seemed to be facts and it blew my mind completely......that I never heard about this ever again ANYWHERE, something which completely shifted, put into question the official mainstream narrative, and all it's simplistic, jingoistic notions, about the Iraq war. This one experience created a cognitive dissonance in my young mind which I think effects me to this day.....
Annnyways, despite all this, I really don't understand the general form of arguments "9/11 truthers" take up. There ARE plenty of "plain sight" conspiracies here, and nobody seems to care. Literally the same people (Rumsfeld, Bush et al) who train them, then go to war with them (Saddam and Laden). I don't believe this necessarily means they've trained them to attack the US. But I think it OBVIOUSLY implies these guys are completely & utterly incompetent when it comes to foreign policy & imperialistic designs and clearly shouldn't be making further decisions, let alone running the entire country & war.
The guys making decisions to go to war or not (and by implication the lives of untold people & potential catastrophic global backlash lasting......well, let's see how long daesh last....) also happen to work on the board of corporations which which will get awarded multi-billion dollar contracts, from THEMSELVES, taken from the natural resources of the country they've invaded, thousands of miles from their own country?
The guys sell all kinds of weapons of "mass destruction" to a guy, then go back there a few years later using that as a pretext for war/rape of natural resource?
The guys say this terrible atrocity, 9/11, is why we should go to war with Saddam. Never mind Saddam and Laden hate each, and Laden must have been rubbing his hands in glee when the US invaded (and he was right to, daesh is the Jungian dark-shadow child of this right wing imperialistic ideology, imo). This was no secret prior to that war, everyone with an interest knew it! Which, kind of disproves some of the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Ity really was SUCH a non-sequitur to invade Iraq because of Bin Laden that it simply could not have been planned that way (irregardless of think tank manifestos from the 80s from many of Bush's staff)!! They just USED it as an opportunity, relying on the gullibility of the general public. It worked!
Tony Blair interrupts several main TV channels at 9pm in the UK the day prior to launching war with Iraq for a second time, and makes several very nice sounding promises to the sceptical British public, including that money raised from the natural resources of Iraq will go into an independent NATO or UN controlled fund, NOT the US or UK, and that there would be full transparency and fairness in any trade/contracts. He also said the Israel Palestine issued would be resolved, more or less. Neither of these things transpired, and neither of these claims or indeed any of that SPECIAL nationwide, multi channel broadcast from Blair ever mentioned again anywhere, by anyone, that I've ever noticed. Indeed, I seem to be the only person I know who even remembers it!
Plain sight conspiracies!!
But there were no passenger planes that flew into the towers, there was a controlled demolition, loose change & all that? I find all this kind of irrelevant and very poorly supported.
I've sat through several documentaries of these with friends like devout religious believers trying to convince me (with information they had learnt very recently from these poorly made docs that I knew years prior, but never mind!), and was surprised to notice that one segment would directly and mutually contradict & invalidate the segment immediately prior to it (within a minute or two!) but nobody noticed it because they kind of stopped thinking and just accepting what they were being told.......even if it was factually contradictory one minute to the next. It seemed as if the creators would take any position to contradict the official narrative, even if those positions contradicted each other (connect the dots, ignore the rest).
The absolute best documentary I've seen on the destruction of the towers was one made by either Discovery or History channel which was released within a month of the attack. It had dozens of highly respectable, leading scientists of many disciplines, including at least one of the actual blueprint designers of the towers I believe, from many different institutes and all over the world. This wasn't a doc to contradict any "conspiracy theories" because they were pretty much unknown then, just a "straight up" doc. However, many of the arguments I still hear to this day were covered, in extremely convincing depth, with diagrams & graphics & blueprints etc, in that doc from Sep/Oct 2001!
It's one thing to say there are many engineers who agree, without doubt or argument, it WAS a controlled demolition. But for a "neutral" this is hard to square with the many, many, many, including those who designed the towers themselves, who disagree? A simple google search brings this up. A quick read shows fairly convincing rebuttals to many arguments?:
http://www.implosionworld.com/Article-WTC STUDY 8-06 w clarif as of 9-8-06 .pdf
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/0112/eagar/eagar-0112.html
I believe there are many, many conspiracies right in plain, documented sight. I believe there is another type of "conspiracy" which only serves as a deflection from that, something to take all the "heat" and let the majority of people just scoff and scorn at them & by implication the whole idea of dishonest, manipulative governments and military not really concerned about the welfare of the majority of it's so called "democratic" citizens.
I heartily recommend going through all of Adam Curtis's documentaries, one by one in chronological order (well, at least from 1989), and perhaps throw in a bit of Noam Chomsky to get a taste of the conspiracies in plain sight. Absolutely magnificent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis#Filmography
Rant over!!