So I'll say this: if you believe AI is advanced, then in 2022 it's not possible to take this video for granted and you have to take into account that all evidence surfacing from now may be deepfakes. I'm not saying they are: I'm saying you have to keep that in mind.
I was in seventh grade when all this went down. It was around the time that they first started putting TVs in classrooms. The teacher flipped the channel to the news when it was announced that an accident occurred and a plane flew into the WTC. Then they kept coming live on TV. In subsequent days I listened to final phone calls between people and their families. The internet was so congested I could barely use it, and a huge part of that was because of services provided out of the WTC.
It is well documented through declassified documents that were written two decades ago that these were Saudi nationals who had moved to America under the guise of learning to fly. They were aided by Al Qaeda and "happenstance" Saudi officials. Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi national, the leader, and one of the founding members of Al Qaeda.
These are barebone facts. Please do not encourage further mythology around 9/11 - the kind of Loose Change-esque rhetoric that is obviously designed more for entertainment than actual productivity. 9/11 happened, everyone saw it, and a new angle isn't anything groundbreaking, therefore there's zero reason to fake it. It won't change our relationship with the Saudis, it won't bring us back into war, etc
FYI, I attended an elementary school that had TVs in all the classrooms back in 1970.
So, given all that and most of those millions of people probably never seeing anything more detailed than Loose Change they have lost all trust in government. This is one of the core elements of our modern day populist uprising.
I had not even been aware of some of the sound explanations I have heard in this thread today. I watched the towers fall live, I watched the hideous war drumming and lying to start the Iraq war, live. In those days (I was 25) as someone who meticulously kept up with all open source material on world events previous, during, and after, I lost any and all faith in government.
Since then, the opioid epidemic has been exposed and was something I lived through as well...all of it. I lost my dad, brother, closest uncle, and my cousin (brother-cuz) to that fucking nightmare.
I know my experience is the tip of the ice berg. I'm smart and I can feel my way through misinformation but it is still tuff to do. I think people greatly misunderstand the impact of these events and how they are still lighting fires to this very day.
It ain't over.
One of the things I also remember from this time period was about why 9/11 happened even though some individual agencies had bits of information. It was discovered these agencies didn't share information so as to protect it. FISA and The Dept of Homeland Security are direct reflections of their own internal criticism.
I was raised never to trust the government. I served in Afghanistan under two different presidents and I definitely get what it's like to witness lies and misinformation spewed across TV stations while your reality on the ground is very different. These days I have a healthy distrust for government still, however, I expect to see reports and trajectories change when those institutions mess things up. This is what composes "trust" for me now. That's the best I feel that I can expect from any large bureaucratic organization government or otherwise.
Those schematics of the WMD-factory-trucks that I remember seeing on TV and the assertion that saddam had a bunch of them churning out WMDs sure seem a hell of a lot like lies. Maybe someone can explain to me how they weren't.
> I was raised never to trust the government. I served in Afghanistan under two different presidents
These two statements would seem to contradict each other.
Those pictures come from somewhere and I believe the Wikipedia article touches on it. The Intel community testified that while this intelligence was provided, it wasn't necessarily an indicator that they were being produced.
> I was raised never to trust the government. I served in Afghanistan under two different presidents
2008/9 was an economic crisis and I lost the job that allowed me to pay for college. I did what paid the bills and what allowed me to live a life with credit defaults.
If the intel community didn't say that saddam had those trucks, then Colin Powell must have lied when he presented those schematics to the UN as something that saddam totally had... right?
> I did what paid the bills and what allowed me to live a life with credit defaults.
Makes sense, I understand and apologise for my snark. That must have sucked :)