Sunday, January 31, 2016

How Many Conspirators is Too Many?

This link is courtesy of Screw Loose Change. I don't understand the math of it, but I'll take their word for it since they're not saying loony tune stuff about 9/11.

He then looked at the maximum number of people who could take part in an intrigue in order to maintain it. For a plot to last five years, the maximum was 2521 people. To keep a scheme operating undetected for more than a decade, fewer than 1000 people can be involved. A century-long deception should ideally include fewer than 125 collaborators. Even a straightforward cover-up of a single event, requiring no more complex machinations than everyone keeping their mouth shut, is likely to be blown if more than 650 people are accomplices.

And how many people would have to have been involved in the 9/11 conspiracy? About half the people in the United States. 

4 comments:

  1. I've invoked that logic regarding moon landing denial... thousands of people directly involved for years, the media of the entire planet watching, and at the height of cold war scrutiny where the USSR would have called it out... it'd be vastly harder to fake than simply to do.
    9/11 however is more complex, because no-one denies it happened, and while we might know 99% of what happened there is still the remainder. And even if one person put one put option on one whisper of 'I saw a report that no-one wanted to read'... then I want to know.

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  2. I watched Loose Change probably soon after it came out and for a few minutes afterward it sounded kind of reasonable. Once you start thinking of the number of people that would have to be involved it gets incredibly complex, tho. And it's not just that it would require many 1000's, they would all have to be psychopaths, too.

    To the average person the towers look imploded. I've seen it said by those who know that they collapsed from the top down and in an actual implosion it is from the bottom up. Both of which make sense.

    There likely is stuff that we don't know, but I believe that it's incumbent upon people that are going to present a conspiracy theory to actually have a theory and not just conspiracy anomalies.

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  3. I don’t really go with the collapse doubts – I saw planes take out several floors with an immensely heavy chunk of skyscraper immediately above… Doesn’t happen a lot. WTC7 is trickier I grant.

    IF… I were to kick this around of an evening over beer… I would be more interested in this as a deviation to how crimes tend to unfold.

    These hijackers were in the States for a while and yet no other person - outside of a cave across the world - has ever been officially implicated in knowing ANYTHING. The guilt is hermetically sealed with these guys – whereas in most crimes committed by an organised group the investigators would find some level of facilitation somewhere. Or just people who know a part of something that connects to it.
    Granted… 9/11 is not “most crimes” and maybe that’s the answer, but consideration of the possibilities of detail is not trutherism.

    I agree that anomalies do not a conspiracy make.
    People can be far too telescopic in focussing on anomalies. It’s like saying “oh I can see a tiny little space above me – therefore I could be sitting in a room with no roof”.
    Stretching the burdens of proof to unreasonable extremes while simultaneously accepting lines between dots on the most tenuous and circumstantial evidence in order to arrive at alternate explanations (usually called conspiracy theories).
    9/11 has so many moving parts that anomalies are inevitable.

    But what I’m getting at is that just as one thief on a ship does not a pirate vessel make… neither does an honest crew make any individual passenger beyond suspicion.
    If there was even one bad person in the military or the government the cascade of consequences for public perception - at that time - would have been catastrophic. It doesn’t need to be Bush or Cheney or anyone we’ve ever heard of.

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  4. I'm certainly open to the possibility, probability, that there are many known unknowns about 9/11. What amazes me is that the Truthers seem to focus on stuff that is so easily answered. It was such an unprecedented event that it gave these guys so much to focus on.

    The BBC reported 20 minutes early on the Tower 7 collapse. It had been burning all day and the collapse was imminent. The leasee of the bldg used the phrase "pull it" in talking to the head of the firefighters. Conspiracists will take stuff like that as proof there was treachery afoot.

    I guess folks have to have faith in something. I'm remaining agnostic about everything. I have faith in doubt.

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