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<font size="3"><u><b>The
9/11 conspiracists: vindicated at last?</b></u></font>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">We're
homing in on the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the
World
Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon. One in seven
Americans
and one in four among those aged 16-24 believe that there was a
vast
conspiracy in which the US government was involved. But across
those
10 years have the charges that it was an "inside job" – a
favored phrase of the self-styled "truthers" - received any
serious buttress?</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">The
answer is No.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">Did
the twin towers fall because they were badly built as a
consequence
of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port
Authority, and because they were struck by huge planes loaded
with
jet fuel?</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">No,
shout the conspiracists, they "pancaked" because Dick
Cheney's agents – scores of them – methodically planted
demolition charges in the preceding days, inserting the
explosives in
the relevant floors of three vast buildings, (moving day after
day
among the unsuspecting office workers), then on 9/11 activating
the
detonators. It was a conspiracy of thousands, all of whom, party
to
mass murder, have held their tongues ever since.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">Take
the plane that struck the Pentagon. Many conspiracists say it
wasn't
a plane but a missile. Eye-witnesses of a large plane hitting
the
Pentagon are contemptuously brushed aside. There are some photos
of
the impact of the "object" - i.e. the Boeing 757, flight 77
- which seem to show the sort of hole a missile might make.
Ergo, the
Pentagon wasn't hit by a 757 but by a missile.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">And
yet images exist of the 757 plane hitting the Pentagon, taken by
the
surveillance cameras at Pentagon's heliport, which was right
next to
the impact point. Chuck Spinney, now retired after years of
brilliant
government service exposing the Pentagon's budgetary outrages,
tells
me: "I have seen them both - stills and moving pictures. I just
missed seeing it [the moment of impact] personally, but the
driver of
the van I just got out of in South Parking saw it so closely
that he
could see the terrified faces of passengers in the windows. I
knew
two people who were on the plane. One was ID'd by dental remains
found in the Pentagon."</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">This
won't faze the conspiracists. They're immune to any reality
check.
Spinney "worked for the government". They switched the
dental records. The Boeing 757 was flown to Nebraska for a
rendezvous
with President Bush, who shot the passengers, burned the bodies
on
the tarmac and gave Spinney's friend's teeth to Dick Cheney to
drop
through a hole in his trousers amid the debris in the Pentagon.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">Of
course there are conspiracies. The allegations that Saddam
Hussein
had WMD amounted to just such a one. I think there is strong
evidence
that FDR did have knowledge that a Japanese naval force in the
north
Pacific was going to launch an attack on Pearl Harbor. It's
quite
possible Roosevelt thought it would be a relatively mild assault
and
that it would provide the final green light to get the US into
the
war.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">It's
entirely plausible to assume that the FBI, US military
intelligence
and the CIA - as has just been rather convincingly claimed again
in
the latter instance - had penetrated the al-Qaeda team planning
the
9/11 attacks; intelligence reports piled up in various
Washington
bureaucracies pointed to the impending onslaught and even the
manner
in which it might be carried out. The history of intelligence
operations is profuse with examples of successful intelligence
collection, but also fatal slowness to act on the intelligence,
along
with eagerness not to compromise the security and future
usefulness
of the informant, who has to prove his own credentials by even
pressing for prompt action by the plotters. Sometimes an
undercover
agent will actually propose an action, either to deflect efforts
away
from some graver threat, or to put the plotters in a position
where
they can be caught red-handed.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">There
is not the slightest need to postulate pre-placed explosive
charges
to explain why the towers collapsed at near free-fall speeds. As
Pierre Sprey, a former plane and weapons designer who knows a
great
deal about explosions, told me: "To ensure the collapse of a
major building requires very sizable demolition charges, charges
that
are large enough to do a lot more than emit the 'puffs of smoke'
cited as evidence for the explosives hypothesis.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">"Take
a look at live and filmed explosive building demolitions. Each
explosion is accompanied by a very visible shower of heavy
rubble and
a dense cloud of smoke and dust. Just that fact alone makes the
explosives hypothesis untenable; no demolitions expert in the
world
would be willing to promise his client that he could bring down
a
tall building with explosions guaranteed to be indistinguishable
from
the effects of an aircraft impact."</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">Herman
Soifer, a retired structural engineer, summarized the collapse
of WTC
Buildings 1 and 2 succinctly, in a letter to me, remarking that
since
he had followed the plans and engineering of the Twin Towers
during
construction he was able to explain the collapses to his wife a
few
hours after the buildings went down.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">"The
towers were basically tubes, essentially hollow. Tubes can be
very
efficient structures, strong and economical. The Trade Center
tubes
effectively resisted vertical loads, wind loads and vibrations
and
could probably have done very well against earthquakes. However,
the
relatively thin skin of the hollow tube must be braced at
intervals
to prevent local buckling of the skin under various possible
loads,
otherwise the tube itself can go out of shape and lose its
strength.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">"For
their interior bracing, the thin-walled tubes of the Trade
Center
towers depended primarily on the interior floors being tied to
the
outer wall shells. These floor beam structures were basically
open-web joists, adequate for the floor loads normally to be
expected. These joist ends rested on steel angle clips attached
to
the outer walls.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">"As
the floors at the level of airplane impact caught fire, the open
web
joists, which could not be expected to resist such fires,
softened
under the heat, sagged and pulled away from their attachments to
the
walls. Their weight and the loads they were carrying, caused
them to
drop onto the next lower floor, which was then carrying double
loads
also becoming exposed to the heat. Then that floor collapsed,
and so
it went. But as the floors dropped, they no longer served as
bracing
for the thin-walled main tubes. </font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">"This
loss of bracing permitted the walls to buckle outward in
successive
sections and thus the house of cards effect."</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">The
conspiracists' last card is the collapse of the adjacent WTC
building
number 7 some hours after the morning attacks. But here again,
as
with the Twin Towers, the explanation offered by the US
government's
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is more
than
adequate.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">"Collapse
was caused by the rupturing of the building's metal framework
due to
the thermal expansion of its floor beams, which were heated by
uncontrolled fires because the water main that supplied the
building's fire suppression system had been cut by the collapse
of
WTC 1."</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">The
NIST team said that the smallest blast event capable of
crippling the
critical column would have produced "a sound level of 130 to 140
decibels at a distance of half a mile". Yet no noise this loud
was reported by witnesses or recorded on videos. Sound at 130 to
140
decibels is about as loud as humans can tolerate.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">High
grade steel can bend disastrously under extreme heat. As
discussed in
Wayne Barrett and Dan Collin's excellent book Grand Illusion,
about
New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, helicopter pilots
radioed
warnings nine minutes before the final collapse that the South
Tower
might well go down and, repeatedly, as much as 25 minutes before
the
North Tower's fall.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">What
Barrett and Collins brilliantly show are the actual corrupt
conspiracies on Giuliani's watch: the favoritism to Motorola
which
saddled the firemen with radios that didn't work; the ability of
the
Port Authority to skimp on fire protection; the mayor's
catastrophic
failure in the years before 9/11/2001 to organize an effective
unified emergency command that would have meant that cops and
firemen
could have communicated; that many firemen wouldn't have
unnecessarily entered the Towers; that people in the Towers
wouldn't
have been told by 911 emergency operators to stay in place; and
that
firemen could have heard the helicopter warnings and the final
Mayday
messages that prompted most of the NYPD men to flee the Towers.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 10pt" size="2">That's
the real political world, in which Mayor Giuliani and others
have
never been held accountable. The conspiracists disdain the real
world
because they wanted to promote Bush, Cheney and the neo-cons to
an
elevated status as the arch demons of American history, instead
of
being just one more team running the American empire, a team of
more
than usual stupidity and incompetence (characteristics I
personally
favor in imperial leaders). There are plenty of real
conspiracies in
America. Why make up fake ones? </font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="RIGHT"><font style="font-size:
10pt" size="2">--Alexander
Cockburn</font></p>
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