According to the BBC, the mystery of the collapse of Tower Seven on September 11, 2001, is about to be cleared up. And the solution is discouraging news for 9/11 Liars (aka “Truthers”).
America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology has spent two years constructing computer models and exploring every avenue in order to explain why a steel skyscraper should collapse. Their conclusion: ordinary fires raging under extraordinary circumstances. Here’s an extract from the report’s findings, revealed by the BBC’s Mike Rudin, producer of the excellent Conspiracy Files:
[The report, published later this month] says Tower Seven had an unusual design, built over an electricity substation and a subway; there were many fires that burnt for hours; and crucially, fire fighters could not fight the fires in Tower 7, because they didn’t have enough water and focused on saving lives.
Investigators have focused on the east side where the long floor spans were under most stress.
They think fires burnt long enough to weaken and break many of the connections that held the steel structure together.
Most susceptible were the thinner floor beams which required less fireproofing, and the connections between the beams and the columns. As they heated up the connections failed and the beams sagged and failed, investigators say.
The collapse of the first of the Twin Towers does not seem to have caused any serious damage to Tower Seven, but the second collapse of the 1,368ft (417m) North Tower threw debris at Tower Seven, just 350ft (106m) away.
Tower Seven came down at 5.21pm. Until now most of the photographs have been of the three sides of the building that did not show much obvious physical damage. Now new photos of the south side of the building, which crucially faced the North Tower, show that whole side damaged and engulfed in smoke.
And so another piece of counterknowledge is eroded by facts. Of course, the ghastly “9/11 Truthers” will challenge the report’s findings and pronounce themselves unconvinced. But the more honest of them will be saying to themselves: “Damn. Back to the drawing board.”
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197 responses
While this is long overdue, and I have a significant amount of confidence in NIST’s ability to determine the most likely cause of what happened, I wouldn’t expect most ‘truthers’ (or whatever they like to call themselves) to be convinced by scientific or engineering arguments.
Few would even understand this report in the detail required to draw conclusions, and fewer still would accept them even if they did.
A large fly may have just landed in this soothing BBC ointment.
See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVHv4IyHMS0
Which is a report from Barry Jennings an Emergency Coordinator at 9/11 who states that he and a colleague witnessed explosions in WTC7 even before WTC1 and WTC2 were demolished!
When they were eventually rescued by firemen and managed to leave the building they apparently had to stride over dead bodies in the foyer of WTC7 which had been devastated by the explosions.
Perhaps the most rational assessment of Jennings’ testimony is also, unfortunately, the least exciting: he is merely slightly confused about the order of events. That Jennings is at least somewhat confused is, after all, obvious: he claims that “Tower One” collapsed first and “Tower Two” second. In reality, however, the opposite took place.
It’s quite possible that the “explosions” and subsequent devastation he describes – despite his memories – were actually the result of Towers One and Two collapsing, which, as noted in the original blog post above, cast debris into Building Seven causing significant damage.
Further, note that Jennings only describes [i]assuming[/i] that he was walking over bodies. He doesn’t actually claim to have seen them directly. Even so, Building Seven was used as a makeshift triage area for a period prior to the collapses. So, it’s possible that bodies had been left there previously.
Furthermore, adducing Jennings’ testimony as evidence of a controlled demolition is rather bizarre. Firstly, if Jennings had been in the building as it was being demolished, he would obviously have been killed. Secondly, Building Seven didn’t collapse until much later that afternoon. Yet controlled demolitions, of course, take but a matter of seconds. So, whatever Jennings is describing, it wasn’t a controlled demotion.
More generally, the way in which conspiracy theorists treat Jennings’ testimony is an example of the phenomenon of the “sacred witness”. When a small number of witnesses contradict the majority, it’s perhaps most rational to assume that those people are mistaken and that the majority are roughly correct. Conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, draw rather less parsimonious conclusions. Firstly they assume that the detractors are the only ones telling the truth – sacred witnesses – (even when they contradict each other, as then invariably do), and secondly they consequently suppose everyone else is lying, and thus part of some massive conspiracy.
In any event, there might be more from Jennings in the new episode of [i]Conspiracy Files[/i], so we may know more then.
Goodness, is the BBC still trying to prove that Building 7 collapsed of its own accord? I thought we were long passed that. Building 7 was brought down when someone said “Pull it”, wasn’t it? - which in demolition industry parlance means: “Blow it up”, which means it had already been rigged ready to be blown up. I thought our only question now was whether nuclear devices were used in Building 7, the way they seem to have been used in Buildings 1 and 2 (those two buildings exploding and turning into dust sure look like pictures of some of the nuclear tests I’ve seen). Has someone asked whoever shipped off the steel (before it could be examined) where it has gone? it should still be possible to test it for radioactivity even now. Charming, demolishing three buildings with nuclear devices (limited, “tactical”, fusion nuclear devices), in the middle of New York, where ordinary New Yorkers live their lives! It appears that cancer is rife amongst the first reponders and that the cancer rates in Manhattan are right up. I certainly wouldn’t like to be a New Yorker right now.
Sydney, Australia
I notice one Mr. Hoogenboom has advanced a small yet flavoursome salad of nonsense.
The claim that “pull it” is demolition industry terminology for “blow up the building” is, of course, simply a lie dreamt up by conspiracy theorists. The reference is to a phone call in which a fire chief informed the building’s owner that the blaze could not be contained and so the fire fighting effort would be withdrawn. The owner concurred, “we’ve had such terrible loss of life”, he said, “maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it”. In any event, quite why this fellow would be conspiring to surreptitiously blow up his building with a fire chief, of all people, is a question which boggles the mind. But that’s conspiracy theories for you.
Regardless of the above, Mr. Hoogenboom goes on to claim the towers were blown up with nuclear bombs. Thus, any further counterargument is likely superfluous: there is nothing rationalists need do with such claims other than underline them. What we now want are posts from people claiming that no planes took part in the attacks* and that the towers were brought down by death rays from outer space*. Then we’ll have the full contingent of nine/eleven crackpots.
* Yes. Some of these conspiracy theorists really do believe these things.
More generally, the comment makes use of a tactic common amongst irrationalists; I call it the “you must have been living in a cave” approach. It consists of the irrationalist acting as though his claims have been common knowledge for some time and affecting surprise that the reader is unaware of this. Here are two examples:
1. “The holocaust was shown to be a hoax. That’s been established for years now. Haven’t you heard?”
2. “Oh, you did know? Evolution was disproven recently. It was all over the news.”
Presumably the aim of this is to make the reader feel ignorant or uninformed and thus more likely to concede the point without objection. Even so, it always seems like a ploy as desperate as it is cynical.
I won’t address Hoogenboom’s comments, because Ed has just demolished them effectively by himself.
With reference to ‘Alpha’, I’ve just seen the programme and Jenning’s testimony. Firstly, he said that ‘it felt like’ he was walking over dead bodies when he reached the bottom of WTC7. He didn’t say he could identify them. He was clearly disoriented, exhausted and not a little bit scared on the day, and while offering his testimony in good faith it is clear that his account will be shaped by the stress he was under.
He was also adamant (when questioned) that he did not believe that the US government was responsible for 9/11, or that the three WTC towers were deliberately blown up. He also resented the fact that the ‘Loose Change’ team misrepresented his testimony and distorted his words.
So tell me then, ‘truthers’, is he now part of the conspiracy? Has he been got at? Is he delusional? Or is this just another case of you misusing evidence in supporting your threadbare ‘theories’?
I look forward to watching The Conspiracy Files myself. Thanks, Sackcloth.
It’s a good documentary, Ed. It cuts the feet from under the ‘truthers’. But then I expect that they’d respond to this the way the Black Knight did in ‘The Holy Grail’.
Ed wrote:
“The claim that “pull it” is demolition industry terminology for “blow up the building” is, of course, simply a lie dreamt up by conspiracy theorists. The reference is to a phone call in which a fire chief informed the building’s owner that the blaze could not be contained and so the fire fighting effort would be withdrawn. The owner concurred, “we’ve had such terrible loss of life”, he said, “maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it”.
The problem with this explanation is there were no firefighters in WTC 7.
The BBC article states that :
“….fire fighters could not fight the fires in Tower 7, because they didn’t have enough water and focused on saving lives.”
FEMAs own Building Performance Assessment Report says “manual firefighting efforts were stopped fairly early in the day”.
http://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch5.pdf
Click below to see a video of a New York policeman outside WTC 7 telling people to “Get back…… that buildings gonna blow-up…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9CXQY-bZn4
Ed: ‘Furthermore, adducing Jennings’ testimony as evidence of a controlled demolition is rather bizarre. Firstly, if Jennings had been in the building as it was being demolished, he would obviously have been killed. Secondly, Building Seven didn’t collapse until much later that afternoon. Yet controlled demolitions, of course, take but a matter of seconds. So, whatever Jennings is describing, it wasn’t a controlled demotion.’
=======================
Not bizarre at all. But this is where more investigation is needed. Hess also needs to tell his story of what happened.
2. ‘The owner concurred, “we’ve had such terrible loss of life”, he said, “maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it”. ‘
IT does not refer to people, either in the singlar or th plural. Its bizarre that you should believe IT refers to people.
3. ‘Regardless of the above, Mr. Hoogenboom goes on to claim the towers were blown up with nuclear bombs’
Hes entitled to his opinion, but clearly hes wrong. But then, so are you. Fire alone has never brought down a steel frame bldng, esp when the fires were very small, and the time was short.
Firstly, I pointed out above that the fire fighters were unable to contain the blaze. This, in part, was due to the inadequate water supply. Secondly, I didn’t claim that fire fighters were in Building Seven. They were attempting to douse the flames from opposing sidewalk.
“World Trade Center: This Is Their Story” Firehouse Magazine (August 2002). (Emphasis and ellipses mine.)
We went one block north over to Greenwich and then headed south. There was an engine company… right underneath building 7 and it was still burning at the time. They had a hose in operation, but you could tell there was no pressure. It was barely making it across the street… but eventually they pulled back too… We headed toward 7… and Butch Brandies came running up [and] said forget it, nobody’s going into 7, there’s creaking, there are noises coming out of there, so we just stopped… [A]bout 10 minutes after that… Visconti said nobody goes into 7, so that was the final thing and that [operation] was abandoned.
I notice, moreover, that you chose to ignore the fact that “pull it” simply is not demolition industry terminology for “blow up the building”. Nor do you explain why this fellow would be conspiring to surreptitiously blow up his building with a fire chief. Instead, as is typical with conspiracy theorists, you attempt to draw attention away from these problems by introducing yet more silly claims. In this case, a video of a first responder saying the “building’s gonna blow-up”. Well, what could he mean?
Glossary of Fire Terms.
Blow-Up: A sudden increase in fire intensity or rate of spread strong enough to prevent direct control or to upset control plans…
Why would a New York policeman be using a term employed to describe the behaviour of wildfires?
I think most people probably understand what the term “blow-up” means, but thanks for the link anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgoSOQ2xrbI
http://patriotsquestion911.com/
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=loosechange+final+cut&sitesearch=#
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=loosechange+final+cut&sitesearch=#q=truth%20rising&sitesearch=
Seemingly, you have now chosen to jettison the matter of “pull it” altogether, and have instead posted numerous links to conspiracy websites. I was hoping for at least a passing acknowledgement of my comments, but in lieu of that I will again address your subsequent claim.
Firstly, you will notice there is nothing about the concept of a “blow-up” that is unique to wildfires. Secondly, when you state you are confident most people “understand what the term ‘blow-up’ means”, you are, in essence, appealing to readers to ignore the evidence presented – i.e. disregard the fact “blow-up” has a specific meaning in a fire fighting context – and instead rely upon a prima facie and layman’s assessment. This devaluation of expertise and evidence is, again, emblematic of conspiracy theorists. Thirdly, why would a policeman be using a fire fighting term? Well, here are two of the myriad possibilities.
a. The policeman had been informed of the potential blow-up by a fire fighter.
b. He wasn’t; he meant “blow up” in the prosaic sense: despite, by that point, having lost hundreds of their men, elements of the fire department (and, presumably, of the police department) conspired with the owner to surreptitiously blow up his building as part of some massive overarching conspiracy.
Only one of these explanations is sane.
Thank you for your reply.
Fraser is lying through his teeth. The documentary is fortunately on Google video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9072062020229593250
Watch it between 20:45 mins and 23:30 (I’ll mention the timings because I know that ‘truthers’ have low attention spans, and can’t read lengthy books or watch hour-long documentaries), you’ll see that it is the NYFD Chief on the spot, Daniel Nigro, who called firemen away from the scene of WTC7, knowing that they could not contain the blaze.
So Fraser, is this fireman (who almost died in WTC2) part of the conspiracy? Or are you just being as spectacularly dense as any other ‘truther’?
BBC Hit Piece Edits Silverstein Comment In Dirty Tricks Scam
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Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
The BBC’s embarrassing attempt to dig itself out of a hole that keeps getting deeper was again exemplified during their latest yellow journalism hit piece on 9/11 truth, in which they played Larry Silverstein’s “pull it” comment but edited out the most important part of the statement, and in doing so changed its context altogether.
An army of informed truth activists are almost tripping over each other to point out the gargantuan number of errors, ad hominem smear tactics, bias and shoddy investigative techniques displayed in the program which aired Sunday in the UK.
Just one such example concerns WTC complex leaseholder Larry Silverstein’s infamous “pull it” comment which can be viewed in its entirety below with other clips included for context in confirming that the term “pull it” is industry jargon for deliberately demolishing a building.
etc
http://www.prisonplanet.com/bbc-hit-piece-edits-silverstein-comment-in-dirty-tricks-scam.html
How does that account for the fact that it was the Fire Chief on the spot (Daniel Nigro) who ordered all firemen to pull back, numbnuts?
‘Against stupidity, the gods themselves rail in vain’.
Sackloth
“Fraser is lying through his teeth.”
Specifically, what have I said which isn’t true ?
Brian,
Firstly, I gave two reasons as to why it is bizarre to adduce Jennings’ testimony as evidence of a controlled demolition. You merely respond with “Not bizarre at all”. However, a flat denial does not amount to a valid argument.
Secondly, from my post, it is fairly clear I believe the owner to have been referring to the fire fighting operation and agreeing it should be abandoned. In any event, the evidence for an extraordinary claim, as Pierre-Simon Laplace said, must be extraordinarily compelling. A grammatically dubious choice of pronoun would not seem to qualify. I notice, moreover, that, like Fraser before you, you chose to ignore the fact that “pull it” simply is not demolition industry terminology for “blow up the building”. Nor do you explain why this fellow would be conspiring to surreptitiously blow up his building with a fire chief. Instead, again, you attempt to draw attention away from these problems by introducing other issues.
Thirdly, you claim fire alone has never brought down a steel framed building. This is not only simply false, but would be banal even if true: when the circumstances are unprecedented, unprecedented results can scarcely be considered anomalous. Further, you say that the fires in Building Seven were “small”. It seems you must know better than the fire fighters themselves, who state that one could “see the flames going straight through from one side of the building to the other [i.e.] an entire block” and that the building was “fully involved in flames”, “free burning”, “really roaring”, “fully engulfed” and had “flames… coming out of every window” etc., etc., etc.
Ed
The world is not run on rational lines. And arguements are a way to avoid confronting some confronting evidence.
‘I believe the owner to have been referring to the fire fighting operation and agreeing it should be abandoned’
Well, belief is not what i ma interested in.
‘Thirdly, you claim fire alone has never brought down a steel framed building. This is not only simply false’
not so, and not when the fires were few and short in duration.
Pictures show a few fires…due to the collapseof WTC1 and 2. Nothing ‘really roaring’.
‘Specifically, what have I said which isn’t true ?’
Practically every word you’ve typed on this site, Fraser.
‘Pictures show a few fires…due to the collapseof WTC1 and 2. Nothing ‘really roaring’.’
Brian, I know that truthers have short attention spans, and can’t watch an hour-long documentary, so I’ll make this easy for you. Watch this programme from 38 minutes 10 seconds in to 43 minutes 25 seconds:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9072062020229593250
Now tell us that there were only a ‘few fires’ in WTC7.
‘I gave two reasons as to why it is bizarre to adduce Jennings’ testimony as evidence of a controlled demolition’.
The main reason, of course, is the fact that Jennings himself does not believe that it was a controlled demolition, or that 9/11 was an inside job. He also wanted footage of his interview removed from ‘Loose Change’ because it had been manipulated by the film makers (see the documentary, 47 minutes 30 seconds in).
So who do you believe? The high school drop-out making up his stories fourth-hand, or the man who narrowly escaped death in WTC7?
Sackcloth
I said:
‘Specifically, what have I said which isn’t true ?’
Sackcloth said:
“Practically every word you’ve typed on this site, Fraser. ”
Sackcloth, would you care to back-up that statement with some examples ?
Firstly, what have I said on this thread which isn’t true?
Specifically, what have I said which merited the comment “Fraser is lying through his teeth.” ?
Brian,
Firstly, you again simply ignore the two reasons I gave as to why it is bizarre to adduce Jennings’ testimony as evidence of a controlled demolition. Further, on watching the BBC documentary, I realised there is also the fact – as Sackcloth points out – that Jennings himself doesn’t believe a controlled demolition took place.
Secondly, you reject my request for a valid argument by saying the world “is not run on rational lines”. It is, I suppose, as refreshing as it is disheartening to see a conspiracy theorist cheerfully and openly reject rationality in such a way. Presumably you would have us jettison science and reason in favour of instinct, superstition, numerology and subjective interpretations of perceived anomalies. Well, at least we now know – if we didn’t already – where you are coming from and what informs your worldview. Further, your claim that rational argument is a way of avoiding evidence is equally curious: the former is so indispensible to and interwoven with the assessment of the latter, that your comment is akin claiming that “mathematics is a way of avoiding numbers”.
Thirdly, you tell me that my “belief is not what [you are] interested in”. In your penultimate comment, however, you told me that “it’s bizarre that you should believe ‘it’ refers to people”. So unless your whimsical interests have strayed between comments, yes, my belief is precisely what you are interested in. As such, I responded by saying I believe the owner to have been referring to the fire fighting operation and agreeing it should be abandoned, a context in which “it” is hardly outlandish. For the third time, moreover, you simply choose to ignore the issues you don’t like: the fact that, even if “it” was inappropriate, a grammatically dubious choice of pronoun does not constitute extraordinarily compelling evidence, the fact that “pull it” simply is not demolition industry terminology for “blow up the building” and the question of why this fellow would be conspiring to surreptitiously blow up his building with a fire chief.
Fourthly, you insist that fire alone has never brought down a steel framed building.
Case Study: Kader Factory Fire.
At approximately 4:00 p.m.… a small fire [was discovered] on the first floor near the south end of Building One… Despite the fire-fighters’ efforts, Building One collapsed completely at approximately 5:14 p.m.…Building Two reportedly collapsed at 5:30 p.m., and Building Three at 6:05 p.m.
WSWS : News & Analysis : Asia. 16 May 2003. By Peter Symonds.
The buildings themselves were death traps, constructed from un-insulated steel girders that buckled and gave way in less than 15 minutes.
Thus, you are, of course, straightforwardly wrong. The above is an example of a steel framed building that collapsed due to fire alone in only a fraction of the time fires burned in Building Seven. Further, the fireproofing in Building Seven was designed to withstand only a two or three hour fire. Once this limit had been exceeded (it burned for upward of seven hours), the steel was highly susceptible, in much the same way as in the Kader factory. In any event, characteristically, you simply fail to address the more important point. Even if it were true that fire alone has never brought down a steel framed building – which it obviously is not – the point would be banal: when the circumstances are unprecedented, unprecedented results can scarcely be considered anomalous.
Fifthly, I presented numerous pieces of testimony in which fire fighters state that the fires in Building Seven were enormous. I also provided the source for these, where many more such examples can be found. However, you persist in your rigid and dogmatic denial. If what you say is true, then the fire fighters must either be undergoing some massive shared dilution, or they are simply barefacedly lying. Perhaps you can enlighten us as to which of these you believe, and then provide your evidence for the same. (I would address your claim about the photographic/video evidence of these fires, but Sackcloth has done so in my absence.)
Fraser, I dealt with you on an earlier thread when all you could do is come up with bullshit factoids (e.g. ‘bin Laden met a CIA agent in the UAE prior to 9/11′, ‘two of the hijackers trained at Pensacola’ etc) which I refuted.
You refused to acknowledge that you had at best been credulous in treating the claims of the 9/11 ‘truth’ movement, and at worst had produced openly fabricated goods (e.g. a bogus ‘Newsweek’ article from a non-existent edition of said journal).
Like most if not all ‘truthers’ you have a psychopathic inability to engage in open, honest debate. Ever time your claims are debunked and disproved people like you simply press on with the same bullshit and the same lies, with the canard that you are ‘just asking questions’. Fantasists like you are a complete waste of time. You may not have a life beyond conspiracy theories, but the rest of us do. So put down or piss off.
Still unclear, after watching the bbc doco, how much material from the wreckage the NIST people had to work on in producing their model of the collapse of WTC7.
Is it admissible to suggest that a model, however scientific, is just a different order of fiction?
I can accept it’s a fire damage collapse that looks like a controlled demolition.
I’m also willing to be we’ll never see another collapse like.
The “be” should be “bet”, by the way.
Sackcloth
You have refuted nothing.
Just because the Newsweek article isn’t available from their website anymore, doesn’t mean it is “bogus” or “fabricated”.
Fortunately people cache these things.
“U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged hijackers of the planes that were used in Tuesday’s terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s.”
(Newsweek)
http://www.mywire.com/pubs/Newsweek/2001/09/15/316109?extID=10051
I also sourced the information from other mainstream newspapers…..
WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 — “Three of the men identified as the hijackers in the attacks on Tuesday have the same names as alumni of American military schools, the authorities said today. The men were identified as Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari and Saeed al-Ghamdi.
The Defense Department said Mr. Atta had gone to the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama; Mr. al-Omari to the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas; and Mr. al-Ghamdi to the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio in Monterey, Calif. ”
(New York Times)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0DEED7163BF935A2575AC0A9679C8B63
“Perhaps coincidentally, two men with names identical to those of two hijackers had lived or studied at Lackland Air Force Base. Pentagon sources confirmed that a man named Saeed Alghamdi graduated from the Defense Language Institute at Lackland, and that both Saeed and Ahmed Alghamdi appeared on a list for foreign military housing. (Men with the same names as other hijackers turned up at other bases in the south.) Whether the hijackers stole the identities of these men is as yet unknown.”
(Time)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1000899-2,00.html
“As the investigation gathered strength yesterday, unusual leads began to surface, among them the possibility that some of the hijackers may have received training at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida or other U.S. military facilities.”
(Washington Post)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A38270-2001Sep15
So, can you now tell me, what did I say, on this thread,which isn’t true ?
If you don’t mind.
Ed
Ah yes, the BBC ‘documentary’. You may be interested in this latest problem with it:
‘About this BBC “hit piece” story about WTC 7… THERE IS A HUGE CONTRADICTION HERE!
Sam Cubero
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
There are BIG mistakes everywhere in this story. Probably the biggest mistake
is the way the documentary argued that the NYFD firefighters could not fight the fires in
the burning WTC 7 because the collapse of the Twin Towers damaged water lines,
and the documentary even stated that THERE WAS NO WATER to put out the WTC 7
fires!!!
But then they argued that Larry Silverstein’s comment: ‘ They decided to pull it ‘ was
referring to ‘pulling out firefighting operations’…. but there were no firefighting operations
going on in WTC 7, because they previously said that THERE WAS NO WATER !!!
Even the firefighters said that they were not allowed to enter WTC 7 …
They cannot have it both ways… was there a firefighting operation in WTC 7, or not,
because they said there was no water, since the water lines were supposedly damaged.
etc
http://www.prisonplanet.com/about-this-bbc-hit-piece-story-about-wtc-7-there-is-a-huge-contradiction-here.html
‘It is, I suppose, as refreshing as it is disheartening to see a conspiracy theorist cheerfully and openly reject rationality in such a way.’
i dont object to rationality, except when its used for irrational purposes.
‘Presumably you would have us jettison science and reason in favour of instinct, superstition’
but its the science as in EVIDENCE that you are jetttisoning in favour of your ‘reasons’. Thats a clever way of making 2 +2 = 5.
‘Thirdly, you claim fire alone has never brought down a steel framed building. This is not only simply false, but would be banal even if true: when the circumstances are unprecedented, unprecedented results can scarcely be considered anomalous’
That is correct. If you can prove otherwise, please do so. Meanwhile, heres an eg of one that did not.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/venezuela_fire.html
that one burned 17 HOURS, and was a real inferno. Show me the inferno in WTC7, and show me it burning for even 5 hours.
Meanwhile here is a pic of WTC7:
http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/gr/images/large/wtc7-fires-close.jpg
here is WTC7 collapsing:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc7.html
Classic CD, as Danny Jowenko has informed us:
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7778438571360742389
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2007/220207_b_Jowenko.htm
‘The buildings themselves were death traps, constructed from un-insulated steel girders that buckled and gave way in less than 15 minutes’
are you seriously comparing bldgs called ‘death traps’ with WTC 1 2 and 7? ‘Uninsulated steel girders’, and ‘gave way in less than 15 minutes’?Is that an eg of your ‘reasoning’?
Kader was a toy factory, and had a huge fire, in a shonky building. it was no skyscraper.
You see why i dont hold your reason in high regard.
Go back and examine the Venezuela SKYSCRAPER on fire.
Sorry but thats desperation on the cusp of madness.
Fraser,
You will notice that not one of those reports makes a definite statement one way or the other. Rather, they are all extremely speculative and cursory: “perhaps coincidentally” matching names (albeit with “discrepancies” “either in the spellings of [the] names or with [the] birthdates”, some being “twenty years off”) “suggest” the hijackers “may” have trained at military bases, etc. Given the articles were all written during the first few weeks or even the few days following the attacks, a time at which the criminal investigation had only just begun, such uncertainly and correspondingly measured language is hardly surprising.
Picking over initial rumours, fallacious lines of inquiry and unconfirmed reports (which are characteristics common to the early days of any major investigation) is merely pseudohistory, especially if one also ignores subsequent, better informed and more definitive conclusions.
It has never been completely denied or disproved that they are the same people.
Believe what you want about all this Ed.
The point is, I’m not a liar.
Brian,
You stated that fire alone has never brought down a steel framed building. I then proved that fire alone has, in fact, brought down a steel framed building. Therefore, you are wrong.
Now, in my last post to you, there are upward of ten issues that have not yet been addressed. However, I am sure you are busily typing out the requisite material now. So, before moving on to your subsequent points, I will eagerly await its appearance.
Fraser,
If you wish to claim that the hijackers were trained by the United States’ military, then the burden of proof, of course, falls upon you. Whether the notion has ever been completely disproved is by the bye.
Nevertheless, I realise you were also responding to an accusation of lying. Well, I cannot know if you are a lair or not. Thus I will err on the side of not.
Ed
If the police suspect that someone has committed a crime, do they have to conclusively prove their case before they detain and question that person?
The above articles may not be absolute proof, but they are evidence, and grounds for suspicion.
In my opinion.
If the identities were so similar that identity theft was being considered, and it’s never been definitively denied that they are the same men, then I think we should know more.
Especially in light of Lt.Col. Steve Butlers comments about 9/11.
“Of course President Bush knew about the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. His daddy had Saddam and he needed Osama.”
(Lt Col.Steve Butler, vice chancellor for student affairs at the Defense Language Institute)
http://web.petabox.bibalex.org/web/20021001201748/http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mcherald/3406502.htm
http://patriotsquestion911.com/
‘You stated that fire alone has never brought down a steel framed building. I then proved that fire alone has, in fact, brought down a steel framed building. Therefore, you are wrong.’
AS i expected: a tricky rascal. You had to go to a badly built non-skyscraper building in Thailand, to try to score points. SO show me other steel framed sckcrapers that have collapsed thru fires, esp fires that last less than a few hours.
You ignored the Caracasa towering inferno ( a real one) NOW by your reasoning,and using your thailand lego model as an eg, why didnt the venezuela building collapse?
I will be keen to see where you send me next!
You have real cheek Ed:
‘It seems you must know better than the fire fighters themselves, who state that one could “see the flames going straight through from one side of the building to the other [i.e.] an entire block” and that the building was “fully involved in flames”, “free burning”, “really roaring”, “fully engulfed” and had “flames… coming out of every window’
Show me one picture with flames coming out of ever window! Your link doesn point to the individual testimonies..so i cant tell if you manipulated them or not. I bet you did. But show me any picture with WTC7 ‘fully engulfed’.
Here is wiki:
‘After the North Tower collapsed, some firefighters entered 7 World Trade Center to search the building. They attempted to extinguish small pockets of fire, but low water pressure hindered their efforts.[29] A massive fire burned into the afternoon on the 11th and 12th floors of 7 World Trade Center, the flames visible on the east side of the building.[30][31] During the afternoon, fire was also seen on floors 6–10, 13–14, 19–22, and 29–30.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_World_Trade_Center
SO not ‘fully engulfed’ at any stage. Nor are there any pictures showing this. For comparison, here is a building ‘fully engulfed’ in fire:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/venezuela_fire.html
Here is WTC7:
http://www.truthalliance.net/Portals/0/Archive/Gallery/26/wtc7-fires-close.jpg
i dont know about you, but i see fires on two floors.
Brian, did you watch the documentary - particularly the part of it where I directed you to the footage showing WTC7 ablaze? If you did, you would not see ‘fires on two floors’.
Did you take note of the commentary from the two senior FDNY officers and the photographer who stated categorically that the building was burning furiously?
Did you take note of the fact that it was the senior fire officer on the scene - NOT LARRY SILVERSTEIN (I put that in capitals, so that there is no confusion on your part whatsoever) - who ordered his subordinates to pull out?
Who do you believe? Men who were on the scene at the time, and risked their lives trying to put out the fire and save lives, or snake-oil merchants like Richard Gage and Alex Jones?
As for you Fraser, I pointed you in the direction of this piece on the supposed confused identities:
http://www.911myths.com/html/trained.html
and also pointed out that the ‘Newsweek’ report you provided me came from a non-existent edition of the journal. I was able to check back issues with my college library, and neither the story or the edition it appeared in existed. It had been fabricated.
So, having had these drawn to your attention, you still repeat these bullshit claims ad nauseam. This either makes you a cretin or a liar. Which is it?
Oh, and perhaps you can tell me what stunning insights Lt Col Butler acquired from the Bush administration’s machinations from his position of responsibility at the strategic centre of decision-making in the DoD - namely, their foreign language school. But then I’ve asked you that question before as well, haven’t I?
Incidentally, if you take a closer look at the ‘Patriots Question 9/11′ site that Fraser links to, it’s worth checking the names of the scholars who’ve signed up to it. Most of them are theologians and philosophers, who know doubt know that 9/11 was an inside job because God told them it was.
The one ‘historian’ I can find is the Swiss citizen Daniele Ganser (as a non-American, can he be a ‘patriot for 9/11′?). Ganser’s finest achievement was to write a book called ‘NATO’s Secret Armies’, for which the only primary piece of documentary evidence was a supposed US military manual, FM30-31B, which turned out to have been faked by the KGB in the 1970s:
http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2006/Jan/20-127177.html on FM30-31B
The subject of ’stay-behind’ forces was dealt with by a recent edition of the ‘Journal of Strategic Studies’, a respected, academically peer-reviewed journal (it’s Issue 30/6, December 2007). Unfortunately the journal is accessible online by subscription-only, so I cannot link directly to discussions by the authors on Ganser’s work. However, I can add the following comment by Leopoldo Nuti and Olav Riste, two of the finest Cold War scholars in continental Europe, who state that:
‘[A] young Swiss researcher, Daniele Ganser, has published what purports to be the most comprehensive assessment so far of the whole stay-behind organization, in a book whose ambitious conclusions do not seem to be entirely corroborated by a sound examination of the sources available’.
(Nuti & Riste, ‘Introduction – Strategy of ‘Stay Behind’’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 30/6 (2007), p.930).
For the non-academics amongst you, that’s a polite way of saying that someone’s findings are a fraud.
This is the kind of ’scholar’ that the 9/11 ‘truth’ movement attracts. Namely, someone that is careless with his sources, and who cherry-picks evidence to suit his preconceived and half-baked theories. I wonder how many other ‘truthers’ turn out to be purveyors of pseudo-scholarship?
Ed sez: “If you wish to claim that the hijackers were trained by the United States’ military, then the burden of proof, of course, falls upon you.”
Not at all, Ed!
Speculation requires no proof. That’s the grand thing about speculation. Proof is for courts of law.
“Whether the notion has ever been completely disproved is by the bye.”
If you believe, as you assert, that a speculative claim must be backed up with proof, then surely you should be arguing that any counter claim, however rational-sounding, or even speculative, must likewise be backed up with proof.
It never ceases not to amaze me that those who prefer to argue in tandem with authority figures against outsiders speculating always call for full explanations from those least likely to have them.
Leave speculation as speculation?
@ Sackcloth on Daniel Ganser
I checked and you’ve mentioned Ganser in a previous post:
http://counterknowledge.com/?p=69
I’ve not read the stay-behind book, so don’t know his stance on the material he discusses. What did you think of his book?
To be fair to the Ganser, as one post response says, he has been published in peer-reviewed journals.
If you’re in the business of slating academics on the basis of adverse criticism from fellow academics in their fields, you’ll never be out of work! But it’s probably not the soundest reason — or even morally responsible — to bar someone’s opinion generally.
Sackcloth
You continue you claim that the Newsweek article is “fabricated”.
Here (again) is a link to the archived article, dated 15/9/2001.
http://www.mywire.com/pubs/Newsweek/2001/09/15/316109?extID=10051
Does it really seem likely to you that this article has been “fabricated” by 9/11 Truthers ?
Why would someone fabricate an article which only contains information which was already widely reported in other publications ?
Can you now answer my question please Sackcloth.
You accused me of “lying” about something on this thread.
Again, what have I said, on this thread, which prompted you to make the comment “Fraser is lying through his teeth”.
I look forward to your reply.
Vinny, I have read ‘NATO’s Secret Armies’, and the book is utter rubbish. Ganser has been published in peer-reviewed journals (e.g. in ‘Intelligence and National Security’), but in these particular articles he’s shied away from the more extravagent claims he made in his book.
The main problem with ‘NATO’s Secret Armies’ is not its subject matter - e.g. ’stay-behind’ armies such as Gladio (established in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe in the 1940s), and their potential involvement in far-right terrorism in Italy, Greece, Belgium and Turkey. The real problem is that - on the basis of evidence that is flimsy at best - he concocts a pan-Western conspiracy to destroy European democracy.
In many cases, his sources are far-left journals such as the British magazine ‘Lobster’ (which has admitted that the product of much of its output has been disinformation) and the Danish Communist party paper ‘Land og Folk’ - I’d be very uneasy if I had to base any historical study of post-1945 European politics on sources like these. His only primary source evidence is the forged Field Manual (noted above) which was identified by the US Congress as a KGB fake during the late 1970s (parenthetically, this was the same Congress that went through CIA covert ops with a fine tooth comb during the ‘Year of Intelligence’ in 1975, and therefore had a sceptical post-Watergate and post-Tonkin Gulf attitude towards official US claims related to the Cold War and the Soviet adversary. If the Congress of Representative Otis Pike and Senator Frank Church thought that FM30-31B was bogus, then the chances are that it was).
A flavour of the Ganser approach to evidence can be gained from two issues, one minor and one major. The minor one concerns the recycling of John Pilger’s story about the SAS training the Khmer Rouge - even though that claim got him a libel suit that had to be settled out of court. A good scholar might have followed that up and discounted the story. A bad one (i.e. one taken in by a 30 year old Soviet forgery) would not.
The second concerns his chapter on France, in which he makes the claim that the CIA plotted with the OAS to overthrow de Gaulle. Ganser’s claim is unsupported by the evidence, and goes against practically every reputable account of US-French relations in the early 1960s. As much of a nuisance as Charles de Gaulle could be for the USA and NATO, the Kennedy administration rightly decided that it was a key US interest for the Fifth Republic, and French democracy, to survive, and actually backed de Gaulle during the military putsch of 1961 (going as far as to offer the French President military assistance if he needed it). De Gaulle, for his part, had no hesitation backing the USA during the Cuban missile crisis the following year. There is simply no way that the US government would have covertly ordered de Gaulle’s overthrow, or that the then DCI John McCone would have conducted such an action without a Presidential finding. Ganser would have known this if he had made himself familiary with the historical literature on this subject, and had he consulted the US and French archives. But he failed to do this.
I could carry on, but instead I would encourage you - if you can get hold of it - to read the edition of ‘Strategic Studies’ I refer to and the articles printed within. ‘Stay behind’ is a worthy area of study, but it requires careful engagement with the sources, thorough and extensive research, and a sceptical mind. Ganser has not done the first and the second, and he doesn’t have the third.
Fraser, the original article you referred me to was dated 14th September 2001 and was supposed to be in the print edition. That was a phantom article. I know that dates and sources don’t matter much to people like you, but if you’re trying to verify facts and evidence it does matter.
As for your link, it doesn’t explain the discrepancy between name spellings (and notice the fact that there is no standard way of transliterating Arabic into English) and the ages of the hijackers, and the personnel trained at Pensacola, as this commentary makes clear:
http://www.911myths.com/html/trained.html
If we are to believe your bullshit, then Sayid Alghamdi learned to fly at the age of 17, which might work for the film ‘Iron Eagle’ but doesn’t actually happen in real life.
Ahmed Alnami would also have learned to fly at the age of 18, which again lacks a certain credibility.
Incidentally, the two men (along with Sayid’s brother, Hamza) are supposed to have lived in Florida ‘on and off’ since 1992 - when they would have been 12 or 13. What marvellous forethought the US government had in recruiting their patsies when they were in their early teens?
Furthermore, neither Alghamdi or Alnami were used as pilots on United 93, the plane they helped hijack. The pilot was Ziad Jarrah.
You have been made aware of these discrepancies which blow your conspiracy theorising to shreds. And yet you persist in rehashing the same old tired crap. The most polite way of explaining this is that you are a fool. The most impolite - and the most likely - is that you are fully aware that your allegations of prior training at a US military establishment are not true, but you continue to make them nonetheless. That makes you a liar.
sorry sackckoth, but im not able to watch that video from here, so why not show me still photos of what you claim is a WTC7 ablaze..BUT before you do, let me show you the WTC7 just prior to its collapse, and you tell me if you see a WTC7 ablaze:
http://www.wtc7.net/articles/FEMA/WTC_ch5.htm
has photos and videos, and an analysis of your ‘blaze’.
“Fraser, the original article you referred me to was dated 14th September 2001″
Here is a link to the other thread containing my original post.
http://counterknowledge.com/?p=69#comments
As you (and anyone else) can see, the date attached to the article is 15/9/2001.
Now will you tell me what I said, on this thread, which prompted you to accuse me of lying?
How many more times do I have to ask ?
more photos of WTC7 prior to collapse: no blaze!
http://www.studyof911.com/articles/winstonwtc7collapse/
sackcloth and ashes: ‘Who do you believe? Men who were on the scene at the time, and risked their lives trying to put out the fire and save lives, or snake-oil merchants like Richard Gage and Alex Jones?’
——————————————
Men on the scene…lets do that. Lets go to the men on the scene, and see what they say:
1. Barry Jennings,on the scene at WTC7:
‘The Alex Jones Radio Show had Jason Bermas back on to go over the latest news about World Trade Center Tower 7. Although Bermas slipped and said his first name on national radio, (with an international Internet audience) he is still refusing to confirm the identity of his source, or release the full 20 minute interview (until the unscheduled release of the Final Cut). Some people do not believe a movie release date is the proper timetable for truth. It is clear that the man on the tape is Barry Jennings, Deputy Director, Emergency Services Department, New York City Housing Authority. Mr. Jennings has already gone on the record. On 911 he was on the news covered with debris, like many survivors seen on television that day. Barry Jennings has put his full story on the record with Loose Change, and wanted to remain anonymous until the movie is released. If Jason Bermas had not said his name, that may have been possible, but that is no longer the case.
On the morning of 911 Barry Jennings with Mr. Hess, one of Rudy Giuliani’s highest ranking appointed officials, New York city’s corporation counsel, (Hess is a Yale and Harvard graduate, a lawyer who has represented the United States in numerous major cases).
It was just after the first attack on the North tower, but before the second plane hit the South Tower, when Barry Jennings escorted Michael Hess to the World Trade Center Tower 7. Mr. Jennings recalls a large number of police officers in the lobby of WTC 7 when they arrived. The two men went up to the 23rd floor, but could not get in, so they went back to the lobby and the police took them up in the freight elevator for a second try. When they arrived on level 23, at the Office of Emergency Management they found it had been recently deserted, “coffee that was on the desk, smoke was still coming off the coffee, I saw half eaten sandwiches”.
At that point he made some phone calls, and an un-named individual told them to “leave, and leave right away”. Jennings and Hess then proceeded to the stairs, and made it to level 6, when there was an explosion, and the stairwell collapsed from under their feet, Mr. Jennings was actually hanging, and had to climb back up. They made it back up to level 8, where Barry Jennings had a view of the twin towers, both buildings were still standing. This is an important detail, as many debunkers have used Mr. Jennings statements out of context to claim the damage came to WTC 7 from the towers collapsing, not the case according, to Mr. Jennings.
The interview has been cut off where they say how they made it to the lobby, but when they did make it down, Mr. Jennings found it destroyed and littered with dead bodies. He said it looked like, “King Kong had came through it and stepped on it, so destroyed, I didn’t know where I was. So destroyed that they had to take me out through a hole in the wall, that I believe the fire department made to get me out.” Shortly after he made it out, he was seen on several news channels telling his story.
Mr. Jennings is still confused as to why Building 7 had to come down at all, and does not accept the official reason that the noises he heard were from a fuel oil tank, “I know what I heard, I heard explosions”. Michael Hess has not made any public statements about that morning with Barry Jennings, perhaps we can call on wearechange.org to document Michael Hess’s account of the events on 911. ‘
etc
http://www.mujca.com/jennings.htm
Men on the scene 2:
WTC1:
‘World Trade Center 1:
There Was No Inferno
The official story of WTC 1’s inferno:
“The real damage in the World Trade Center resulted from the size of the fire. Each floor was about an acre, and the fire covered the whole floor within a few seconds.” [Nova] “The way [the mast of WTC 1] fell suggests it was failure of the inner core that began the collapse … The 767 had smashed through the outer wall and hit the inner core directly destroying the fire protection. The intense fire that followed had then concentrated around the core [between floors 93 & 98].” [BBC]
Okay, let’s take a look…
Twelve employees of the American Bureau of Shipping … were on the 91st floor of the north tower when the first plane hit almost exactly at their level. But they were on the northwest corner of the building. The bulk of the plane’s fuselage entered the building about 100 feet south of them. The plane’s left wing, banked toward the ground, wiped out the east side of the floor. But the plane’s right wing, banked toward the sky, sliced through the office above them.
George Sleigh had been at work at ABS since about 7:30 a.m. He was in his cubicle, surrounded by technical shipping manuals. “I heard this unusual sound. A roaring sound,” he said. “As I looked up I saw the plane. I thought: ‘This guy is really low.’ ”
A wing flashed past his eyes, followed by the plane’s smooth belly. Then the world caved in. Down the hall from ABS, an office was obliterated. Above them, Marsh USA Inc., an insurance and risk management firm that occupied the 93rd through 100th floors, was hit badly. It would later report as many as 400 workers missing.
Sleigh, who occupied the easternmost desk in the ABS office, was buried under a pile of ceiling tiles and bookshelves. His colleagues were fine, as surprised they were still alive as they were that a plane had just crashed into their building. They dug Sleigh out, and they all escaped. [Los Angeles Times]
…
Why weren’t the above WTC survivors affected by the searing heat of an 800?C inferno?
Click image for full size
95TH FLOOR
Patricia Alonso, victim
Marsh & McLennan
She managed one phone call to her husband, Robert. This is his brief account:
She worked in Tower 1, 95th floor. She was on the southeast side looking over the Brooklyn Bridge. I talked to her while she was evacuating. She called me on her cell phone at 9:07. She said she was leaving. She was evacuating.
I said, “I’m coming down to get you.” And I told her I loved her. And she told me she loved me. She didn’t know that a plane had hit the building. She just said there was smoke. [New York Times]
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc1_fire.html
Strange, survivors from the very floors that should have been ablaze in WTC1.
Men/women on the scene 3:
Explosions:
‘Eyewitness Reports Of Explosions
Before WTC Collapses
Edmund McNally, WTC 2 victim, 97th floor
Edmund McNally phoned his wife Liz twice following the aircraft impact. Mr McNally said in his second phone call “Liz, this was a terrorist attack. I can hear explosions below me.”
Louie Cacchioli, a firefighter assigned to Engine 47 in Harlem
On the last trip up a bomb went off. We think there was bombs set in the building.
Kim White, WTC 1 survivor, on 80th floor at time of impact
We got down as far as the 74th floor [...] Then there was another explosion, so we left again by the stairwell.
The above account ties in with the following news broadcast:
9/11 NBC News broadcast
211KB mp3 - to download file right click the link and select ‘Save Target As’
“Shortly after 9 o’clock [...] [Albert Turi the Chief of Safety for the New York Fire Department] received word of the possibility of a secondary device, that is another bomb going off. He tried to get his men out as quickly as he could, but he said there was another explosion which took place, and then an hour after the first hit, the first crash that took place, he said there was another explosion that took place in one of the towers here, so obviously according to his theory he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building.
One of the secondary devices he thinks that took place after the initial impact he thinks may have been on the plane that crashed into one of the towers. The second device, he thinks, he speculates, was probably planted in the building.”
——————————————————————————–
One eyewitness whose office is near the World Trade Center told AFP that he was standing among a crowd of people on Church Street, about two-and-a-half blocks from the South tower, when he saw “a number of brief light sources being emitted from inside the building between floors 10 and 15.” He saw about six of these brief flashes, accompanied by “a crackling sound” before the tower collapsed. Each tower had six central support columns. [American Free Press]
Note: See The Oklahoma City Bombing for an explanation of the “crackling sound”.
etc etc
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/eyewitness.html
Now thats interesting….these eyewitnesses testify to explosions
as did these:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc2_cutter.html
Men on the scene4:
”Explosions
Several individuals reported that they witnessed an explosion just before one of the towers collapsed. Battalion Chief John Sudnik said: “we heard . . . what sounded like a loud explosion and looked up and I saw tower two start coming down” (NYT, Sudnick, p. 4).
Several people reported multiple explosions. Paramedic Kevin Darnowski said: “I heard three explosions, and then . . . tower two started to come down” (NYT, Darnowski, p. 8).
Firefighter Thomas Turilli said, “it almost sounded like bombs going off, like boom, boom, boom, like seven or eight” (NYT, Turilli, p. 4).
Craig Carlsen said that he and other firefighters “heard explosions coming from . . . the south tower. . . . There were about ten explosions. . . . We then realized the building started to come down” (NYT, Carlsen, pp. 5-6).
Firefighter Joseph Meola said, “it looked like the building was blowing out on all four sides. We actually heard the pops” (NYT, Meola, p. 5).
Paramedic Daniel Rivera also mentioned “pops.” Asked how he knew that the south tower was coming down, he said:
It was a frigging noise. At first I thought it was—do you ever see professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear ‘Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop’? . . . I thought it was that. (NYT, Rivera, p. 9)
Collapse Beginning below the Strike Zone and Fire
According to the official account, the “pancaking” began when the floors above the hole caused by the airplane fell on the floors below. Some witnesses reported, however, that the collapse of the south tower began somewhat lower.
Timothy Burke said that “the building popped, lower than the fire. . . . I was going oh, my god, there is a secondary device because the way the building popped. I thought it was an explosion” (NYT, Burke, pp. 8-9).
Firefighter Edward Cachia said: “It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit. . . . [W]e originally had thought there was like an internal detonation, explosives, because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down” (NYT, Cachia, p. 5).
The importance of these observations is reinforced by the fact that the authors of the NIST Report, after having released a draft to the public, felt the need to add the following statement to the Executive Summary:
NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001. . . . Instead, photos and videos from several angles clearly showed that the collapse initiated at the fire and impact floors and that the collapse progressed from the initiating floors downward.
Firefighters Burke and Cachia presumably now need to ask themselves: What are you going to believe, your own eyes or an official government report? ‘
http://911review.com/articles/griffin/nyc1.html
SO, good question…who do YOU believe.These people who were there, or bureaucrats who werent, including nameless sackcloths on websites?
‘To be fair to the Ganser, as one post response says, he has been published in peer-reviewed journals.’
Before we get too excited about peer reviewing, lets just be sure we unstand it a little more:
‘You’ve probably come across the expression “peer-reviewed” a lot recently, especially in discussions on GM food, mobile phones, or organic farming. It’s almost always used as part of a sentence that begins “There is no peer-reviewed evidence for …” or “There is nothing about this in any peer-reviewed journal …”
What you’re meant to understand by that is: “there is no credible evidence for whatever it is, and you can safely ignore anything you’ve heard about it.” When the question is about safety, as it often is, it means the regulatory authorities are not going to look into it.
A lot of people take peer review very seriously, or at least they say they do. When Sir David King, then the Chief Scientific Adviser to the British government, put forward a code of ethics for scientists, one of his chief examples of unethical behaviour, right up there with plagiarism, was “disseminating work before it has been peer reviewed”. You may remember Arpad Pusztai who spoke for 150 seconds in a television programme on unpublished results indicating that genetically modified (GM) potatoes were harmful to rats, because he saw it his duty to warn the public. He was subjected to fierce attacks from the scientific establishment (led by the Royal Society) that continue to the present day.
The scientific establishment’s double standard
The scientific establishment may claim to oppose disseminating results that have not been peer-reviewed, but there is a blatant double standard being applied, and all too often. Just recently, a UK government research funding agency, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) put out a press release that was not only highly misleading about farmers being upbeat about GM crops (”UK Farmers Upbeat about GM Crops” Debunked and Marketing Masquerading as Scientific Survey , SiS 38); but was also based on research that had not been peer-reviewed, according to the ESRC’s own web site.
Another recent example came from the top mainstream journal Nature Biotechnology. In an editorial, it criticised the Italian National Research Institution for Food and Nutrition (INRAN) for not publishing some results that were allegedly favourable to GM crops.
The director of the project in question, Giovanni Monasatra, wrote to the journal to put the story straight, and his letter was published along with a response from the editor, Andrew Marshall. In his letter, Monastra dealt with the points raised in the editorial and expressed his surprise that Marshall, far from criticising Salute, Agricolura, Ricerca (SAGRI) for organising a press conference to publicise data that were, according to Marshall, “too preliminary for peer-reviewed publication,” instead complained that the Italian media did not give it even more coverage than they did.
Marshall’s response is that the data had [his italics] to be press released by SAGRI because they were of interest to the public and political debate. Yet, in 1999, Marshall had written in Nature Biotechnology that Arpad Pusztai’s work should be submitted for peer review before it could be considered, even when safety was at stake. The difference is that he was then writing about results that were against the interests of the biotech industry.
It is not at all unusual for scientific bodies and lobby groups to issue press releases and hold press conferences on non-reviewed material. The people who set themselves up as the guardians of sound science either say nothing or even join in, except when it is a matter of things the corporations don’t want the public to hear. In that case, they suddenly rediscover their strong objection to the practice.
Peer review is a useful part of the scientific process, but it is not as effective, as important, or as universal as some would have us believe, and it needs to be put in perspective.
etc
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/peerReviewUnderTheSpotlight.php
Very interesting article.
more on the fires of WTC 7:
The Fires in Building 7
Building 7 had a number of fires of limited extent and unknown duration before its precipitous total collapse at 5:20 PM. Official reports assume that debris from the fall of the North Tower ignited fires at 10:29 AM.
This photograph from FEMA’s report, and others like it, appear to be the only evidence of emergent flames.
Photographs of the building’s north face show only small, barely visible fires. Photographs of the building’s east face, apparently from the mid-afternoon, show flames emerging from an isolated section of the 11th floor. Photographs of the building’s west face, apparently from the late afternoon, show several areas with smoke stains, but don’t show any flames. There appear to be no photographs of Building 7 from a time shortly before its collapse that show large active fires. The photograph below, taken in the afternoon, shows the upper half of Building 7 from the south. There are no signs of fire.
FEMA’s report blamed the collapse of Building 7 primarily on fires, though it was inconclusive. NIST’s investigation placed much more weight on claims of severe structural damage to the building. Nonetheless, all theories of the collapse that exclude demolition are necessarily primarily fire theories, since the building collapsed almost seven hours after incurring any structural damage from North Tower fallout. It is thus striking that other skyscraper fires exhibited fires that were far more extensive and long-lasting that Building 7’s, but none of these other buildings collapsed.
Despite the fact that the fires in Building 7 were relatively small and short-lasting compared to other office fires, a decision was made not to fight them. Chapter 5 of FEMA’s Report implies that lack of water was the basis for this decision:
It appeared that water on site was limited due to a 20-inch broken water main in Vesey Street. Although WTC 7 was sprinklered, it did not appear that there would have been a sufficient quantity of water to control the growth and spread of the fires on multiple floors. In addition, the firefighters made the decision fairly early on not to attempt to fight the fires, due in part to the damage to WTC 7 from the collapsing towers. Hence, the fire progressed throughout the day fairly unimpeded by automatic or manual suppression activities.
This explanation is highly dubious given that Building 7 was only about two blocks from the Hudson.
http://www.wtc7.net/b7fires.html
On Mark Loizeaux of CDI:
‘Although reports of molten steel are consistent with the persistent heat at Ground Zero in the months following the attack, we find the American Free Press report suspect for two reasons. First, Tully Construction was one of four companies awarded contracts by New York City’s Department of Design and Construction to dispose of the rubble at Ground Zero, and CDI was subcontracted by Tully and was instrumental in devising a plan to recycle the steel. The involvement of Steve Tully and Mark Loizeaux in the destruction of the evidence of the unprecedented collapses would seem to disqualify them as objective reporters of evidence. Interestingly, CDI was also hired to bury the rubble of the Murrah Building in the wake of the Oklahoma City Bombing. That Loizeaux stood trial on charges of illegal campaign contributions casts further doubt on his credibility. 1
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/moltensteel.html
‘Now will you tell me what I said, on this thread, which prompted you to accuse me of lying?
How many more times do I have to ask ?’
As I have said, I have told you that there is a discrepancy between the ages of the hijackers, and of the Arab service personnel (of indeterminate nationality) who trained at Pensacola, making it highly unlikely - to say the least - that they are the same people. The fact that you have been informed of this flaw in your theorising, and that you are unable to accept this means that you are either clinically dense, or you are being deliberately dishonest. Which is it?
’sorry sackckoth, but im not able to watch that video from here,’
You can’t get hold of Google video? Well isn’t that highly convenient for you. Perhaps you can try watching it on the iPlayer, or does your computer not allow you to do that as well?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/conspiracy_files/
Oh, and with reference to Barry Jennings - he states unequivocally that he does not believe that there was a controlled demolition of WTC7, he does not believe that 9/11 was an inside job, and he accuses the makers of ‘Loose Change’ of deliberately distorting his testimony. He also stated that it ‘felt’ like he was stepping over bodies when he got to the ground floor, not that he saw them. So he does actually accept the ‘official’ version of 9/11, contrary to what you claim.
‘It said it felt like I was stepping over people, but I never saw them. You know, that’s the way they [the 'Loose Change' makers] portrayed me and I didn’t appreciate that so I told them to pull my interview. Do I think that our government would do something like that to its people? No. I honestly don’t believe that’ (47:36-47:51).
Those are Barry Jennings’ own words, unreported by the ‘truth’ movement. He’s saying that there was no inside job and that Dylan Avery, Alex Jones et al are distorting his testimony. Is he a liar?
Also, for you to be correct, you are basically alleging that the FDNY people on the scene and other first responders are lying about (1) the damage done to WTC7, (2) the fact that it was so badly burning that it was on the verge of collapse, and (3) that there were no fatalities in the building. Are you accusing all these people of being part of a plot involving mass murder, yes or no?
Just to follow up a point for ‘Vinny’ - re: Pilger and the libel claim concerning the SAS and Khmer Rouge training, ‘The Guardian’ reported him having to pay ‘very substantial’ libel damages on 6th July 1991.
Once upon a time before the internet, people who couldn’t substantiate their slanders and lies actually got penalised for it.
Sackcloth wrote
“Fraser is lying through his teeth. The documentary is fortunately on Google video”
You accused me of lying about something on this this thread.
Something covered by the BBC documentary apparently.
I’ve asked you several times to tell me what it is, yet for some reason every time I ask, you start talking about some old post on a different thread.
Once again, what have I said on this thread, which isn’t true ?
Sackcloth, re: Pilger/SAS/Cambodia
A 2000 report, by Pilger (see here: http://www.newstatesman.com/200004170017) suggests that the British government admitted that British personnel had been involved in Cambodia.
Don’t know if true. If yes, I hope he got his libel money back and received an apology.
That’s very interesting, Vinny. He’s essentially repeating the same claim that got him sued (successfully) for damages. As far as I know, he hasn’t claimed his money back. Maybe he’s too minted to care, or maybe he knows that his case doesn’t stand up.
It just goes to show that Pilger - although not a ‘truther’ - has their same standards as regards verifiable evidence. In other words, he’ll keep repeating the same old lie even if he’s been caught out. Incidentally, Pilger’s claims about US-Western assistance to the Khmer Rouge are refuted by Stephen Morris in ‘The Atlantic Monthly’ in January 1985, and Nate Thayer in the Spring 1991 edition of ‘Washington Quarterly’. The US and British governments did arm and assist Prince Sihanouk’s non-Communist (and non-KR) guerrillas - see ‘Far Eastern Economic Review’, 22 December 1988.
Pilger’s standards of evidence are also dealt with here:
http://blog.z-word.com/2008/07/john-pilger-never-let-the-facts-get-in-the-way/
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/thunderer/article644530.ece
http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/2007/12/14/john-pilger-and-the-tasmanian-genocide/
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/hafa3/pilger.htm
http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/celebrating_joh.html
http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2007/12/pilger-and-his.html
As for you Fraser, you are lying when you claim you have evidence that three of the hijackers were trained by the US military, and you are lying in insinuating that WTC7 was a controlled demolition. Is that clear enough for you?
Vinny,
People are quite free to indulge their own whims speculating over what they please.
However, Fraser claims that the articles in question serve as compelling evidence that the hijackers were trained by the United States’ military. You seem to be saying that this public assertion of fact should be shielded from rational criticism, in much the same way the plot of a novel would. This is a view with which I cannot sympathise.
Brian,
Firstly, I will clarify my comments. On second thoughts, they were quite clear enough, so I will just repeat them. You stated that fire alone has never brought down a steel framed building. I then proved that fire alone has, in fact, brought down a steel framed building. Therefore, you are wrong. What follows from this is the following: Structural steel is inherently susceptible to failure due to effects of fire. Is this something with which you can agree?
Secondly, you claim that my link did not point to individual testimonies. On the contrary, it points to a positive wealth of individual testimonies, testimonies in which a determined truth-seeker would presumably take a fervent interest. However, instead of simply reading them, you choose to accuse me of fabrication. I wonder, will I receive an apology? In any event, the quotations I have already cited were from, respectively, Firefighter Tiernach Cassidy, Lieutenant James McGlynn, Captain Robert Sohmer, Chief Medical Officer Kerry Kelly and, again, Firefighter Tiernach Cassidy. Here, moreover, are some further testimonies for your perusal:
Lieutenant Robert Larocco:
“We walked over by number Seven World Trade Center as it was burning and saw this 40-plus story building with fire on nearly all floors.”
Firefighter Vincent Massa:
“At this point Seven World Trade was going heavy, and they weren’t letting anybody get too close. Everybody was expecting that to come down.”
Firefighter Eugene Kelty Jr.
“7 World Trade was burning up at the time.”
“[T]he fire at 7 World Trade was working its way from the front of the building northbound to the back of the building.”
Firefighter Kevin Howe:
“7 World Trade Center was roaring.”
Paramedic Louis Cook:
“‘There’s number Seven World Trade…’… We looked over, and it’s engulfed in flames and starting to collapse.”
Once again, if what you say is true, then the fire fighters must either be undergoing some massive shared dilution, or they are simply barefacedly lying. Perhaps you can enlighten us as to which of these you believe, and then provide your evidence for the same.
I will attend to your newer points once you have addressed the rest of those still outstanding.
Ed: “You seem to be saying that this public assertion of fact should be shielded from rational criticism, in much the same way the plot of a novel would.”
Not at all. Criticism, rational or otherwise is always good to hear. It’s just that I’m always unsettled when the weight of history, politics and heaven knows what else is brought to bear on people with outsider views of events.
If your concern is that unchecked repetition of unchecked factoids will lead to wider acceptance of certain ideas, perhaps take a step back and notice that far more people are repeating the official version in far more media outlets, reaching an enormous total number of people. Even if people find other versions titillating, mildly interesting, life-changing or just plain stupid, they’re very unlikely to buy the alternative over the official version.
Plots of novels, characters, and whole narratives, are of course not shielded from criticism in any way: just ask generations of book reviewers and Eng Lit graduates, the former going back a couple of hundred years and and the latter some 100.
Vinny,
Firstly, your terminology is slightly cryptic. Thus, I am unsure as to what you mean when you talk of the “weight” of certain subjects and “outsider views of events”. Perhaps you believe that, when it comes to substantiating their claims, those in less powerful positions should be excused some or all of their intellectual responsibilities; perhaps you are someone who is likely to talk of “outsider epistemologies”, which, despite being “contra-hegemonic”, are “equally valid”. I hope not; but I do not know.
Secondly, my concern was simply this: someone was claiming that certain articles serve as compelling evidence of their theory; however, they do not. Highlighting this fact in no way seems improper, especially given this is a website devoted, in part, to rationality, evidence and critical thinking.
Thirdly, I have no idea as to why you have brought up the issue of literary criticism. I did not as much as mention the subject. Rather, I made reference to the fact that novels are not subjected to “rational criticism”. In other words, no one is pointing out that “Open the pod bay doors, HAL” is not a well sourced quotation, that travelling faster than light is implausible, that Ivan Karamazov’s existence is doubtful, etc.
Ed: “those in less powerful positions should be excused some or all of their intellectual responsibilities”
Those without established positions and without professional stakes in discussions should feel free to ask any questions they like and examine any piece of information from any angle: it’s not as if their views will be considered important enough to act on, surely.
Intellectual responsibility is a hierarchical notion that gives those in the upper echelons a means of justifying their elevated positions. It’s not ‘fact’ or ‘knowledge’, but a moral position in respect of those ideas. Its tenets change over time. It’s not one thing set in stone. It’s created and maintained by more or less faulty people.
Intellectual responsibility can be set aside in the public interest or for any number of reasons. I suppose you’d no more tolerate the dumping of intellectual responsibility exemplified by the Blair government’s ’sexed up’ dodgy dossier than anyone else. Some might regard that as old news and say that that piece of evidence for war has been exposed as a lie. In fact, you may say this dossier is exactly the kind of thing you’d like to prevent with an overarching idea of intellectual responsibility.
It’s a lovely idea, setting the bar high so as to facilitate humanity’s rational progress, and I’m all for it, as a guiding principle.
But government decision makers ease up on it every now and then, and I think the rest of us should be given a bit of slack, too. Especially when we’re not likely to start wars and that.
I see what you’re getting at in respect of novels: that the stuff of fictional narrative can’t be subjected to rational criticism. Many materialist-minded souls would disagree with you on that and take you to task further in that regard. I’m a civilian without tenure to defend and no intellectual grievance to air, therefore I decline to do so!
Sackcloth
“As for you Fraser, you are lying when you claim you have evidence that three of the hijackers were trained by the US military”
The newspaper articles are evidence.
Maybe you disagree with my interpretation of this evidence, but nonetheless, it is evidence and I certainly haven’t lied about anything.
The information in these articles has never been retracted, disproved, or even completely denied.
All we’ve been told is they’re “probably” not the same people and told some vague stuff about the details of some of the individuals being different, but no detailed information has been released.
“….and you are lying in insinuating that WTC7 was a controlled demolition. Is that clear enough for you?”
There is, as yet no full explanation of the collapse, and no-one actually knows what happened.
Simply having an opinion which is different from yours about the existing publicly available evidence does not make me a liar.
Here is part of your original post in which you accuse me of lying:
“Fraser is lying through his teeth. The documentary is fortunately on Google video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9072062020229593250
Watch it between 20:45 mins and 23:30 (I’ll mention the timings because I know that ‘truthers’ have low attention spans, and can’t read lengthy books or watch hour-long documentaries), you’ll see that it is the NYFD Chief on the spot, Daniel Nigro, who called firemen away from the scene of WTC7, knowing that they could not contain the blaze.”
Now, what have I said, which is disproved by this video clip?
What have I said in connection to WTC7 which isn’t true?
“I used to be in charge of the visa section at the CIA’s Consulate in Jeddah. … There for a year and a half I issued visas to terrorists recruited by the CIA and its asset Osama Bin Laden. … Fifteen of the nineteen people who allegedly flew airplanes into buildings in the United States got their visas from the same CIA Consulate at Jeddah.”
(J. Michael Springmann – Former career Foreign Service Officer with the State Department and the International Foreign Trade Administration of the Commerce Department. Former Consular Officer in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he supervised the issuance of visas. 20-year Federal Government career.)
http://patriotsquestion911.com/
Fraser,
You state that the “newspaper articles are evidence” and that the problem is perhaps that we merely “disagree with [your] interpretation of this evidence”. I am reminded of the following scene from The Simpsons:
Judge: Mr. Hutz, we’ve been in here for four hours. Do you have any evidence at all?
Hutz: Well, Your Honour. We have plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence.
Slightly more seriously, however, you point out that none of these articles have been “retracted”. There is a perfectly uncomplicated reason for this: there is nothing to retract. Not one of them, as I said, makes a definite statement one way or the other.
Ed
Obviously, these articles do not constitute proof that the hijackers were trained by the US military, but in light of all the other evidence of the US government recruiting, training and employing Islamic terrorists, it is suspicious.
Why has no-one in the government made a “definitive statement one way or the other” ?
“The media dropped the story after the Air Force officials issued a cursory statement aimed at preventing any further inquiry into links between the US military and the terrorists. While acknowledging that some of the suspected terrorists “had similar names to foreign alumni of U.S. military courses,” the statement said discrepancies in biographical information, such as birth dates and name spellings, “indicate we are probably not talking about the same people.” Without providing any substantiation, the statement suggested the hijackers may have stolen the identities of foreign military personnel who received training at the bases.
Following this less than convincing explanation, the Air Force refused to release the ages, countries of origin or any other information about the individuals whose names matched those of the alleged hijackers—making it virtually impossible to verify the claim that these were not the same individuals.
Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FBI also refused to make public any information. Asked by Florida Senator Bill Nelson whether any of the hijackers were trained at the Pensacola base, the Justice Department refused to give a definitive answer, and the FBI said it could not respond until it could “sort through something complicated and difficult,” according to the senator’s representative.”
http://eldib.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/air-force-officer-disciplined-for-saying-bush-allowed-september-11-attacks/
If they’re clearly not the same people, why is so “complicated”?
Fraser,
There are numberless outstanding issues you continue to ignore, so I am loathed to address any more of this twaddle.
From the quotation you present, one could be forgiven for thinking this Mr. Springman was working at the consulate in question at the time the hijackers obtained their visas, or even that he was ordered to issue them himself. This is not so. He had not worked in said consulate since the mid-eighties. To my knowledge, moreover, his subsequent claims that, at that time, the people in question were terrorists and/or connected to Osama bin Laden are based on nothing more than his own arbitrary assumption.
This CBC interviewer phrased it well:
“[W]hen you take the events of 1987, when visas were being issued to people unqualified for them, and suggest that happened again to the same people responsible for the attacks in New York and Washington: that’s a quantum leap. How do you justify that?”
Suffice to say, Springman does not offer an answer.
sackcloth: ‘Oh, and with reference to Barry Jennings - he states unequivocally that he does not believe that there was a controlled demolition of WTC7, he does not believe that 9/11 was an inside job, and he accuses the makers of ‘Loose Change’ of deliberately distorting his testimony. He also stated that it ‘felt’ like he was stepping over bodies when he got to the ground floor, not that he saw them. So he does actually accept the ‘official’ version of 9/11, contrary to what you claim.’
Not so, here is what he said first, between then and BBC, he claims he received death threats:
here is Jennings before the death threats:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NttM3oUrNmE
He clearly says the two towers were still standing. That he was confused why the WTC7 went down at all.
he says: ‘i know what i heard, i heard explosions…the explanation i got was it was the fuel oil tank….Im an old boiler guy…if it was a fuel oil tank, it would have been one side of the building…when i got to the lobby,the lobby was totally destroyed.It looked like King ong had stepped on it..
NOW:
‘”The writer and director of Loose Change, Dylan Avery, told The Conspiracy Files: “The amount of detail that Barry gave us in this interview was unreal. He says he was stepping over dead bodies in the lobby.”
Barry Jennings himself disagrees with their interpretation of his words. Barry Jennings told the BBC: “I didn’t like the way you know I was portrayed. They portrayed me as seeing dead bodies. I never saw dead bodies”
Dylan Avery is adamant that he didn’t take anything out of context. He played The Conspiracy Files a recording of Barry Jennings words: “The fire fighter who took us down kept saying do not look down. And I kept saying why.
“He said do not look down. And we’re stepping over people and you know you could feel when you’re stepping over people.”
However, Barry Jennings told the BBC: “I said it felt like I was stepping over them but I never saw any.
http://www.911blogger.com/node/16505
What happened between the two interviews: DEATH THREATS…(perphaps frm people like Sackcloth)
‘The clip, which was originally intended to feature in Loose Change Final Cut but had to be withdrawn according to Jennings’ wishes after he had received threats, has now been made public in anticipation of a BBC documentary about Building 7 which is expected to skew Jennings’ account in an attempt to reinforce the official story.
http://www.fogcityjournal.com/wordpress/2008/06/24/emergency-official-witnessed-dead-bodies-in-wtc-7/
Here is jason Bermas with the interview with Jennings and the context of the BBC interview.
So what you have left out is both the fact that Jennings had NOT been misrepresented, BUT that he had recevied death threats after his story was made public.
Were you one of those who threatened him?
BARRY JENNINGS THE ORIGINAL INTERVIEW:
http://www.fogcityjournal.com/wordpress/2008/06/24/emergency-official-witnessed-dead-bodies-in-wtc-7/
So,Sackcloth…WHY ARE YOU LYING? Havent you seen the original Jennings interview?If not i suggest you do so.
‘Footage inside the Millennium Hilton building lobby, which was closer to the WTC twin towers than Building 7, shows minimal damage after both towers had collapsed in comparison with devastating damage in the lobby of WTC 7, as reported by Jennings, before either tower had even collapsed.
Jennings’ eyewitness report of explosions inside WTC 7 before the towers had collapsed as well as dead bodies inside the building completely contradicts the official story, which maintains that there were no fatalities inside Building 7.
If WTC 7 collapsed as a result of damage it sustained from the fall of the twin towers, as the official version claims, then why were explosions taking place inside the building before either tower had collapsed?
The BBC hit piece documentary, which airs on July 6th, features an interview with Jennings but according to Loose Change’s Jason Bermas, the program will distort Jennings’ comments in an attempt to sideline the shocking nature of what he witnessed and the blatant manner in which his experiences contradict the official story.
According to Bermas, during their interview with members of Loose Change, the BBC denied that Jennings had stepped over dead bodies when he left the building, a claim disproved by Jennings’ own statements in the video above.’
http://www.fogcityjournal.com/wordpress/2008/06/24/emergency-official-witnessed-dead-bodies-in-wtc-7/
‘
Ed
Are you trying to say that the US government doesn’t fund, arm and train Islamic terrorist groups ?
Ed:’Structural steel is inherently susceptible to failure due to effects of fire. Is this something with which you can agree?’
Thats an eg of your deceitful reasoning. What sort of fire? Does your barbecue fail every time you light it? Its not ‘inherently susceptible to failure’ every time you light it. The WTC buildings suffered suffered small dhort duration kerosene(jet fuel) fires, that permitted people to survive who were in the v ercinity. SO they were that hot.
So your statement is bogus, had you said :
”Structural steel is inherently susceptible to failure due to effects of fire that is of long duration at or above the temp that steel fails,, then i might agree.
WTC7 here is what Steve spak shows in his video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfdN0L0Q19w
Building 7 can be seen in certain shots, BUT it shows fire on only two floors,that i can see. Steve does NOT show fires on highers floors. The other building burning is wtc6, WHICH did not collapse!
As for your fireman who said:
‘Lieutenant Robert Larocco:
“We walked over by number Seven World Trade Center as it was burning and saw this 40-plus story building with fire on nearly all floors.”’
Sorry Robert, but i see no visual evidence of that at all. You must be referring to WTC6:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:WTC_Building_Arrangement_and_Site_Plan.svg
here is another Steve Spak video, he spends a lot of time early in i on WTC7, where fires can be seen first on ONE floor, then later on another. At 6.23, he says showing a pic of WTC7 ‘fires on numerous floors’. Really? Thats not what i see! The side facing us shows dark windows….no bright fires burning. Maybe there are on the side facinng right, but thats in smoke and sun. But facing us, AS HE IS SAYING IT there are no fires on the upper half of the building.
We can see smoke billowing but this was explained by Richard Gage in the BBC video, as smoke from other buildings like WTC6 that DID have massive fires, and didnt collapse.
The Steve Spak video contradicts Lieutenant Robert Larocco:
“We walked over by number Seven World Trade Center as it was burning and saw this 40-plus story building with fire on nearly all floors.”’
=================================
‘The “Raging” Fires At WTC Tower Seven.
Below is a picture of the “raging” fires at WTC 7, moments before the collapse (it should be noted that the smoke in the background, behind WTC 7, is mainly from the fires in ruins of WTC 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6).
For larger images click here and here.
You can be forgiven for not being able to find the fires. To help you out, we present some closeup photos.
For larger images click here and here and here.
Unfortunately, we only have photos of the north and east faces of WTC 7. The official media/government lie suggests that a fire was raging only on the south side of the building, and that this fire never spread to the north face (apart from the minor fires pictured above). However, they do not provide any evidence to back this up, and on the surface this claim seems ludicrous. One also wonders how such small fires managed to start on the north face (the rest of the World Trade Center was to the south and consequently the collapse of the towers should not have impacted the north face of WTC 7 at all).
http://images.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/gr/images/large/wtc7-fires-close.jpg&imgrefurl=http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/gr/523.htm&h=465&w=712&sz=33&hl=en&start=13&um=1&tbnid=HnBzrdYrUYzreM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=140&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dwtc6%2Bfires%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN
SO, Robert Larocco not withstanding, there were NO raging fires in WTC7 that engulfed the entire building.
Brian,
Firstly, Lieutenant Larocco could not have been talking about World Trade Center 6. He specifically states that he is referring to “Seven World Trade Center”, and that it was a “forty-plus storey building”; World Trade Center 6, in contrast, consisted of merely nine storeys. In any event, it will be interesting to see what you have to say about the rest of the testimonies. Remember, you need to show that, despite what the fire fighters say, the fires were “small”.
Secondly, I am aware that Mr. Gage believes that the smoke which appears to be coming from World Trade Center 7 was actually coming from somewhere else. If you can prove this, then by all means do so.
Barry Jennings UNCUT
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=qwvxt3_k7WM
‘Firstly, Lieutenant Larocco could not have been talking about World Trade Center 6. He specifically states that he is referring to “Seven World Trade Center”, and that it was a “forty-plus storey building”; World Trade Center 6, in contrast, consisted of merely nine storeys.’
well, if he cant show documented evidence of his statement, then he has no evidence…its anecdotal,, which as you SHOULD be aware is not scientifically acceptable..right?
‘Remember, you need to show that, despite what the fire fighters say, the fires were “small”.’
Just see Spaks video…show me BIG fires in WTC7, and fires engulfing the building.
‘Secondly, I am aware that Mr. Gage believes that the smoke which appears to be coming from World Trade Center 7 was actually coming from somewhere else. If you can prove this, then by all means do so.’
why are u even asking this, ED. Go ask Gage!
From Loose change crew:
‘I’ve been sitting on this interview for a while, but after viewing the latest BBC piece on WTC7, I feel the time has come to release it in its entirety.
After locating Barry in mid 2007, Jason and I visited him and he graciously granted us an interview during a lunch break. He had agreed to grant us an interview under the conditions that we, at no time, associate his interview with his place of employment.
Jason and I were so thrilled with the content of the interview that we decided to release a few bits and pieces of it on both our show and Alex’s.
A few months later, as the film was nearing completion, I called Barry again to touch base and see how things were going. It took him a bit to remember who I was, but as soon as he did, he began complaining about phone calls to his place of employment and that he was in danger of losing his job. He requested to have his interview pulled from Loose Change, and I honored his request.
Fast forward to February, 2008, where I’m doing an interview with the BBC, and I’m informed by their crew that Barry told them the reason he asked for it to be pulled was because of the article on Prisonplanet claiming he was stepping over dead bodies, which he denies saying. I call Barry to attempt to rectify the situation, and he is adamant that he did not use the phrase “we were stepping over people”
Fast forward one more time to two days ago, when the BBC piece finally aired. I now feel an obligation to release his interview, in its entirety, into the public where it belongs for three reasons:
1) To see the difference between the interview he gave us, and the interview he gave the BBC.
2) To establish Barry’s timeline in his own words.
3) To preserve his testimony, in his own words, for the historical record.
I have remained true to my word and kept his interview out of the film, however, I can no longer keep it from the public. They deserve to hear Barry’s story, out of his own mouth.
As I say in the end of the video, I would appreciate it if Barry could enjoy his privacy and live his life in peace. My intention with releasing this is so his story can be told, not to cause him any further grief or suffering.’
http://www.911blogger.com/node/16573
did a small plane (cesna) hit WTC 1 on 9-11?
Why Was This Russian Pilot Allowed To Fly Up To And Right By The WTC AFTER It Was Under Attack On 9/11?
Amazing New Pictures Raise Questions
[left] First Take A look at this amazing sequence of images taken from the air on 9/11.
…
The images were taken by a Russian pilot, living in the USA who flew his cessna 172SP to within hundreds of feet of the towers and snapped off the shots. By chance he was right by the towers as flight 175 came in and struck the South Tower.
Taken from this Russian website
[/left]
When he approached to George Washington Bridge he tuned to a local 1010 WINS news radio station. He says that at that time there was news that “a small plane hit WTC”. Then he switched to hear what other pilots flying above Gudson are talking about, but they discussed same thing “a small commuter that hit WTC”.
He got even more closer and noticed another BOEING 737. He says that the BOEING was flying the same way it usually does when going to landing from La Guardia destination, probably a little bit lower than usual.
And then suddenly this BOEING 737 changes his course making a very sharp curve, targeting the South WTC tower.
He shot it at the moment it hit the building.
[left]
The pilot has reportedly stated that he does not believe that the maneuver he witnessed the plane perform up close could have been carried out by someone who had only received cursory flight training in a cessna like his own. He is apparently of the opinion that it was “some very experiencedmilitary pilot making his last kamikaze mission.”
The official timeline on 9/11 states that NEADS received notice of the hijacking of Flight 11 nine minutes before it struck the North Tower. NORAD initially claimed it was notified by Boston Flight control that Flight 175 had been hijacked at 8:43 a.m. After 9/11, NORAD and other sources claimed that NORAD was notified at this time that Flight 175 had been hijacked. The 9/11 Commission, however, later concluded that New York flight control gave NEADS its first notification that Flight 175 had been hijacked at 9:03 a.m.
Also at 8.46am FAA air traffic control in New York picked up an abnormality on Flight 175: its beacon codes changed twice within one minute. New York flight controller Dave Bottoglia was in charge of monitoring both Flights 11 and 175. He had just watched Flight 11’s radar blip disappear over New York City, but did not realize the plane had crashed. “Within seconds” of losing Flight 11’s blip, he realized that Flight 175 was also missing. He had another controller take over all his other planes so he could focus on finding Flight 175. He tried contacting the planes several times unsuccessfully. Just as Bottoglia noticed an unidentified blip on his radar, its transponder signal came back on, but at a different signal than before. “There is no longer any question in Bottoglia’s mind that he’s looking at a second hijacked airliner,” according to later MSNBC reports.
The head of the NY flight control center, Mike McCormick, later told CNN that he saw the burning WTC live on TV, he said, “Probably one of the most difficult moments of my life was the 11 minutes from the point I watched that aircraft, when we first lost communications until the point that aircraft hit the World Trade Center. For those 11 minutes, I knew, we knew, what was going to happen, and that was difficult.”.
This means that he decided at 8:52 a.m. that Flight 175 had been hijacked and was on a suicide run to New York City. Still, according to the 9/11 Commission, NORAD was not informed until after 175 had crashed.
With all this in mind why was the Russian Cessna pilot, and presumably others that were airborne, allowed to keep flying a course directly towards the twin towers? All the time this pilot got closer it was known that flight 11 was missing, a plane (which some had said was a cessna) had crashed into the North Tower and 175 was hijacked and heading towards New York.
You’d think he would have been told in no uncertain terms to stay the hell away from the area, but no, he was allowed to fly directly toward the towers and pass within a few hundred feet without incident.
Perhaps it was the same reason why airborne fighters were not sent to Manhattan until at least ten minutes after the second tower was hit and did not arrive there until twenty two minutes after the second hit, even though logically they could have been there BEFORE flight 175.
The pictures have emerged at the same time as A former Boston Center air traffic controller has gone public on his assertion that 9/11 was an inside job and that Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon tracked three of the four flights from the point of their hijacking to hitting their targets.
After the Russian pilot had passed the Towers he tried to land but was told to fly on to New Jersey and land there. He then hid his camera so nobody could know he was filming.
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t84279.html
Here is a list of the fire duration of various fire incidents in steel-frame buildings:
Building — Date — Fire Duration (hours)
World Trade Center North Tower — February 13, 1975 — 3 to 4
World Trade Center North Tower — September 11, 2001 — 1.75 *
World Trade Center South Tower — September 11, 2001 — 1 *
World Trade Center Seven — September 11, 2001 — **
1st Interstate Bank Building — May 4-5, — 1988 — 3.5
Broadgate Phase 8 — June 23rd, 1990 — 4.5
1 New York Plaza Fire — August 5, 1970 — 6
One Meridian Plaza — February 23-24, 1991 — 19 (11 uncontrolled)
* The time after which the towers collapsed. Before September 11, 2001 no high-rise has ever collapsed due to fire.
** It is claimed that WTC Seven collapsed due to fire. Fire duation is unknown. Fire severity is unknown. Photos of small localized fires exist. No evidence of a large fire at WTC 7 exists. Though hundreds of photographers were taking photos of the ruins of the twin towers, none bothered to photograph the “raging” fire across the street (Vesey St) at World Trade Center Seven. I guess that a “raging” fire in a 47-story building, is such a commonplace occurrence in New York, that the photographers just ignored it, even though it was only a few hundred feet away from them. Just couldn’t see a good story in it.
http://images.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/gr/images/large/wtc7-fires-close.jpg&imgrefurl=http://m.domaindlx.com/LinuxHelp/gr/523.htm&h=465&w=712&sz=33&hl=en&start=13&um=1&tbnid=HnBzrdYrUYzreM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=140&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dwtc6%2Bfires%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN
a doozy:
26) Mark Loizeaux is quoted as saying; “I’d make a great terrorist.”
http://www.barrettforcongress.us/
Incidentally, here’s a piece from a not normally pro-Bush paper about how the ‘truth’ movement works:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/film-and-tv/tv-radio-reviews/the-weekends-tv-the-conspiracy-files-911-ndash-the-third-tower-sun-bbc2br-george-gently-sun-bbc2-861141.html
Brian,
Firstly, I have presented numerous pieces of eyewitness testimony from fire fighters who state that the fires in World Trade Center 7 were not – as you claim – small, but were instead significant. Once again, if what you say is true, then these fire fighters must either be undergoing some massive shared dilution, or they are simply barefacedly lying. Perhaps you can enlighten us as to which of these you believe, and then provide your evidence for the same.
Secondly, you are claiming that the dense smoke which straightforwardly appears to be billowing from practically the entire forty-seven-storey south face of World Trade Center 7 is due to some sort of optical illusion, and is actually coming from somewhere else, such as the nine-storey World Trade Center 6. Thus, you will need to identify a mechanism that could cause this phenomenon and also prove that, in this case, it did cause this phenomenon.
Vinny,
I have said nothing about laymen asking questions and examining evidence. It is, as I said, the matter of people making unfounded claims that concerns me.
I do not happen to agree with your quasi-poststructuralist assessment of “knowledge and power”; nor do I agree that irrationalism is essentially harmless or that one should perhaps not take these things at all seriously. However, both of these issues are beyond the scope of this thread.
When it comes to your general point, I am uncertain as to whether I understood it correctly. It would seem to be something along the lines of the following: governments have been and are intellectually lax or dishonest; therefore similar behaviour is acceptable in the context of conspiracy theories. However, that simply looks like a “two wrongs make a right” fallacy to me.
In any event, thank you for spending some time and thought on your reply.
Fraser,
Very clearly, I was merely “trying to say” that the Springman quotation is extremely misleading and, more generally, that the matter is spurious.
I’ve still got a comment help up in moderation that will hopefully be online soon. Rather than repeat myself the only points I’ve got are these.
(1) The only sources claiming that Jennings’ changed his testimony due to ‘death threats’ are Avery and the other ‘Loose Change’ makers. Given their cavalier attitude to evidence (as shown by this point-by-point refutation of their work), I’m inclined to believe that the three of them are being less than honest:
http://www.loosechangeguide.com/LooseChangeGuide.html
(2) Secondly, another canard from Fraser:
‘Are you trying to say that the US government doesn’t fund, arm and train Islamic terrorist groups ?’
Fraser is here alluding to the received wisdom about the CIA ‘training’ bin Laden and his fighters during the Afghan war in the 1980s, which are refuted by a body of academics and investigative journalists who have studied the al-Qaeda phenomenon since the early 1990s - well before 9/11. These authors specifically state that the Makhtab-al-Khidmat (’service bureau’) which Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden set up to support the few thousand or so Arab fighters who travelled to Pakistan in the 1980s worked autonomously, funded by private donations from the Gulf, and had no contact with the CIA or ISI:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Holy-War-Inc-Inside-Secret/dp/0753816687/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215883120&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Osama-Bin-Laden-Know-Al-Qaedas/dp/0743278917/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215883120&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Al-Qaeda-True-Story-Radical-Islam/dp/0141031360/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215883353&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ghost-Wars-Secret-History-Afghanistan/dp/0141020806/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215883520&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Inside-Al-Qaeda-Rohan-Gunaratna/dp/1850656711/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215883676&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Looming-Tower-Al-Qaedas-Road/dp/0141029358/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215883694&sr=1-1
I’ll provide some page references, because I know that ‘truthers’ are too lazy to actually read books:
Peter Bergen - There is ‘no evidence’ of any US funding or assistance to bin Laden, or ‘any evidence of CIA personnel meeting with bin Laden or anyone else in his circle’('The Osama bin Laden I knew’, pp.60-61).
Jason Burke - CIA funding for the anti-Soviet jihad went ‘exclusively to the Afghan mujahideen groups, not the Arab volunteers’ (p.59).
Steve Coll - OBL was ‘out of CIA eyesight’ during the 1980s (p.87).
Lawrence Wright - States in ‘The Looming Tower’ that the Makhtab-al-Khidmat and the Arab fighters operated autonomously from Peshawar (pp.100-108).
Milt Bearden (the CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986-1989, and a critic of the ‘war on terror’ and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan) stressed that US training was only offered to Afghans, not to any Arab or other foreign jihadis (’The Main Enemy’, (Random House 2003),p.243).
So, in the end, the CIA did not train al-Qaeda. So will you now admit that - yet again - you are mistaken, or will you continue to come out with the same old, same old?
(3) ‘Truthers’ constantly proclaim that if you believe the ‘official’ version of 9/11 (i.e. that AQ were responsible), then you are somehow a puppet of the US government and the Bush administration. This notion is in itself an insult. After all, you can believe that 9/11 was due to AQ, but say that the ultimate cause of the terrorist atrocities in New York and Washington were due to 50 years of US foreign policy meddling, and in particular America’s flawed and unjust Middle Eastern policy. You can oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and many right-thinking people do the latter) without thinking that 9/11 was an inside job. You can believe that the 9/11 Commission covered up official incompetence on the part of Bush and his national security (or indeed his Clintonian predecessors), but still believe that ultimately Osama bin Laden and his subordinates planned the attacks, and Atta et al executed them. You can castigate the Americans for their molly-coddling of the Saudi and Pakistani governments - despite their domestic records and their history of doing tactical deals with Islamists - but still blame 9/11 on AQ. You can be scornful of the incompetence of the CIA, FBI and other US government agencies, and their unwillingness to set aside internecine differences in the fight against terrorism prior to September 2001, and still argue that AQ suicide terrorists were responsible for killing up to 3,000 people on one morning. After all, an explanation for 9/11 which focusses on incompetence and petty bureaucratic wranglings in Washington is a hell of a lot more convincing than one which assumes that the US government - in collaboration with big business, other foreign powers, the international media, and all the first responders on the scene in New York and Washington - was able to concoct such an effective and coherent ‘false flag’ attack which fooled all but a brave handful of truth-seekers who swap bazaar rumours on internet forums.
(4) Let’s not forget that - when it comes down to it - bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are as adamant in insisting AQ’s guilt as any Pentagon spokesman:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/…,-I-did- it.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/upda…n_10-29- 04.html
http://www.newyorker.com/ reporti…currentPage=all ”
http://www.tnr.com/politics/stor…91- fd72bf6a9da1
Ed, thanks for your considerate response.
Just to clarify that I wasn’t positing a “two wrongs make a right” fallacy; I was suggesting that the same standard of criticism and a similar degree of tolerance should be applied to state actors and individuals. If we can ‘move on’, in current parlance, from the actuality of state mistakes and untruths, we can certainly call individuals to account and ‘move on’.
I think I’m at least as concerned as you are about the moral aspect of such debates, albeit for different reasons. The proliferation of discussions about truth, countertruth, knowledge and counterknowledge, ideology and counter-ideology in the wider forum of the internet (especially in the blogosphere) surely demands a critical response beyond engagement with the minutiae of various discursive elements, both by huge numbers of more or less informed individuals, whether impassioned, enthused or just very interested in various things, and, it has to be said, lesser numbers of better-connected people, who are more or less informed (journalists, politicos, etc) who may have expected in former times to have been read and listened to more attentively in relative silence, whether they’re opinions shed any light on things.
Whether a critical response should necessarily lead to more relative silence is the point at hand.
I’d like to see a rather more sanguine, humane approach to blogospheric discourse. For instance, it’s unnecessarily harsh to brand an individual who makes an untrue statement as a liar in all circumstances. Certainly, you’d think twice before trusting their view in future and one lie would call into question their reliability. And there’s a difference between repeating viewpoints on evidence, officially sanctioned or otherwise, and repeating false statements.
Vinny,
I agree; I am all for being equally critical of governments, when they indulge in irrationalism, as of individuals; I frequently am, in fact.
I did not understand much of the rest your post. In any event, if an individual is shown that their claims are unfounded or false, then perhaps their “relative silence” – on that particular matter, at least – should indeed ensue; if they then persist in those claims, then perhaps “liar” is an apt term, especially when they are slandering innocent people.
While we are on the subject, I wonder if Brian will ever apologise for falsely accusing me of fabrication!
Anyway, enough of this, I’m off to watch Bonekickers….
Anyway, enough of this, I’m off to watch Bonekickers…
‘Firstly, I have presented numerous pieces of eyewitness testimony from fire fighters who state that the fires in World Trade Center 7 were not – as you claim – small, but were instead significant. Once again, if what you say is true, then these fire fighters must either be undergoing some massive shared dilution, or they are simply barefacedly lying. Perhaps you can enlighten us as to which of these you believe, and then provide your evidence for the same’
========================
Ed, keep dodging. You may yet the bullets. Your ‘eyewitnesses’ are defeated by my photos, and your lack of photo evidence of extensive fires. AS we know, eyewitnesses can get it wrong. Show me photographic evidence of those fires.
Ed: ‘Secondly, you are claiming that the dense smoke which straightforwardly appears to be billowing from practically the entire forty-seven-storey south face of World Trade Center 7 is due to some sort of optical illusion, and is actually coming from somewhere else, such as the nine-storey World Trade Center 6. Thus, you will need to identify a mechanism that could cause this phenomenon and also prove that, in this case, it did cause this phenomenon’
=================================
Ed, i dont have to identify any ‘mechanism’. Richard Gage already did that, and that hasnt stopped u from continuing in your desperate efforts to deny the absence of photo evidence of extensive fires.
Your persistance in an illusion is fascinating. I guess that is consistent with this debunking site.
‘Show me photographic evidence of those fires’.
Aside from the footage in the BBC documentary (which you seem unwilling to consult), how about these?:
http://www.911myths.com/html/wtc7_fire.html
Oh, and two other points.
(1) How come the only references to Barry Jennings changing his testimony due to supposed ‘death threats’ come from conspiracy theory websites, not from the man himself? Could these be yet another invention of the ‘truthers’?
(2) With reference to the anonymous Russian pilot and his statement that only ’some very experienced military pilot making his last kamikaze mission’ could have crashed a jumbo into the South WTC tower, how is he in a position to judge? After all, military pilots are not usually trained to crash planes, but to take off, perform whatever task they’ve been ordered to do (combat air patrol, bombing/close air support, reconnaissance etc) and then land their plane so it can be refuelled, replennished and used again.
Furthermore, the hijacker pilots were not rookies - Atta and al-Shehhi (the two involved in the WTC attack) had both passed their commercial pilot tests and got their licenses in December 2000. Hanjour and Jarrah (the pilots for Flights 77 and 93) also qualified as pilots:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/911/911Report-243.html
http://www.faqs.org/docs/911/911Report-244.html
So they all knew how to fly, had logged hours on Boeing simulators, and were fanatical Islamists. That surely gives them the skills and the motivation to hit large, stationary and undefended targets such as the Towers and the Pentagon.
So, the witnesses say you’re wrong, the photographic evidence says you’re wrong, and the documentary evidence says you’re wrong. Only the voices inside your head are telling you that you’re right.
;Mark Loizeaux is quoted as saying; “I’d make a great terrorist.”’
This is a lesson to be learned. Never, ever, ever try to be ironic when dealing with ‘truthers’.
‘BUT that he had recevied death threats after his story was made public.
Were you one of those who threatened him?’
Now, what kind of people are on record either issuing death threats or physically assaulting people in the name of ‘9/11 truth’?:
http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/germanman3.pdf
How charming - a ‘truther’ assaulting an 18-year old girl with Cerebral Palsy.
There’s also the small matter of the assault on Irish MP Proinsias de Rossa by ‘We Are Change’, and the death threats issued against Danny Bonaduce and his family. Mark Loizeaux and his employees have also been targeted by an intimidation campaign waged by ‘truthers’ thanks to slander by people like Richard Gage.
Brian,
Well, it would appear, I am happy to say, that endgame is upon us.
Firstly, once again, I have presented numerous pieces of testimony from fire fighters who state that one could “see the flames going straight through from one side of the building to the other [i.e.] an entire block” and that the building was “fully involved in flames”, “free burning”, “really roaring”, “fully engulfed”, had “flames… coming out of every window”, etc. You, however, simply claim that these fire fighters must be wrong, and that you must be right.
Secondly, numerous pieces of photographic and even video evidence show plumes of smoke pouring from practically the entire south face of World Trade Center 7. Obviously, this evidence confirms the aforementioned testimonies. Nevertheless, you simply deny that these images show what they show. You flatly refuse, moreover, to expound upon this theory, and you ignore outright my requests that you prove it. Instead, you point to the fact that Mr. Gage – a conspiracy theorist figurehead with, incidentally, expertise in neither fire science nor image interpretation – said so.
All,
This is what the “Truth Movement” requires of you. It needs you to read numerous pieces of firsthand eyewitness testimony from trained professionals and, with a wave of the hand, simply declare these witnesses to be suffering some massive shared delusion. It demands that you stare at numerous images of smoke pouring from a building and, with a straight face, simply deny that you are looking at images of smoke pouring from a building. Our friend Brian has shown he is more than prepared to do just these things – to humiliate himself utterly in devotion to irrationalist ideology. It is not a pretty sight, is it?
Indeed not. It reminds me of this level of irrationality:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eMkth8FWno
Sackcloth,
“Aside from the footage in the BBC documentary (which you seem unwilling to consult), how about these?: http://www.911myths.com/html/wtc7_fire.html”
“Ignore what the forestry people say. They are all wrong. There is not much wood here. I can see only a few thin branches – fairly small pieces of wood. The rest is not wood but just leaves and trees, which are coming from somewhere else; someone told me so.”
http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/3420/450pxsherwoodforestparkde4.jpg
Ed, perhaps best to reign in on hurrying toward the endgame. Bear in mind that subsequent inquiries tend to bring out more evidence than first inquiries.
For example, the House Select Committee on Assassinations 1979 report differed significantly from the Warren Commission. And the Stevens inquiry, with its wider remit than Stalker (called at the time a paranoid crackpot), came to some rather startling conclusions that would previously only have been glimpsed in thrillers or An Phoblacht editorials.
Always premature to assume that the first inquiry is the last!
Vinny,
I was referring, as you already know, to the impracticality of any further rational discourse with Brian.
‘Show me photographic evidence of those fires’.
Aside from the footage in the BBC documentary (which you seem unwilling to consult), how about these?:’
Sackcloth…ive seen those, esp the bottom one. What do you se but a building face with windows intact,and NO FIRES. The fires we do see in WTC7 are on two lower floors.
What else you see on the adjacent side (south) is the smoke from neigboring buildings that are on fire.
But thanks for confirming what ive been saying. There are no photos of building 7 showing it consumed by fire.
No Ed:
‘Secondly, numerous pieces of photographic and even video evidence show plumes of smoke pouring from practically the entire south face of World Trade Center 7′
Thats NOT what a still photo shows. And the video evidence shows smokw but its origins cant be determined as WTC7..esp when the west face shows windows intact and NO FIRES.
So what does this tell mus of your ‘eyewitness’ testimony? That it worthless. The photo evidence testifies against it. Even Sackcloth has confirmed it with 9-11Myths very own photos! The 9-11Myth site actually confirms 911-Truth!
‘I was referring, as you already know, to the impracticality of any further rational discourse with Brian.’
What Ed has done is confirm the desperateness of his irrational discourse(disguised as critical reasonableness) in the face of contrary evidence. This pseudo-scientist refuses to look at the evidence, when it refutes his rational discourse.
so to throw down the gautlett, to prove your thesis that WTC7 is consumed by raging fires, that were necessary to cause it to collapse, youd need to show evidence of fires all around, on most if not all floors.
Heres Sackcloths useful pics:
http://www.911myths.com/html/wtc7_fire.html
Go ahead: make my day!
‘(1) How come the only references to Barry Jennings changing his testimony due to supposed ‘death threats’ come from conspiracy theory websites, not from the man himself? Could these be yet another invention of the ‘truthers’?’
================
What sort of question is that Sackcloth? Thats a question youd need to direct to Jennings.
‘Could these be yet another invention of the ‘truthers’?’
You mean like the lack of extensive fires in WTC7?
‘Furthermore, the hijacker pilots were not rookies - Atta and al-Shehhi (the two involved in the WTC attack) had both passed their commercial pilot tests and got their licenses in December 2000. Hanjour and Jarrah (the pilots for Flights 77 and 93) also qualified as pilots’
aide from the fact there is no evidence Atta or Hani et al were even on those planes, Hani was regarded as incompetent even on cesna:
And if you hate 9-11 Truth sites, here is the NYT:
‘Mr. Hanjour, who investigators contend piloted the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon, was reported to the aviation agency in February 2001 after instructors at his flight school in Phoenix had found his piloting skills so shoddy and his grasp of English so inadequate that they questioned whether his pilot’s license was genuine.
Records show a Hani Hanjour obtained a license in 1999 in Scottsdale, Ariz. Previous and sometimes contradictory reports said he failed in 1996 and 1997 to obtain a license at other schools.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00E0DC1E31F937A35756C0A9649C8B63
Sackcloth: ‘So they all knew how to fly, had logged hours on Boeing simulators, and were fanatical Islamists’
Fanatical islamists? Really? Then how do you explain away this:
‘Three men spewed anti-American sentiments in a bar and talked of impending bloodshed the night before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, a Daytona Beach strip club manager interviewed by the FBI said Thursday.
“They were talking about what a bad place America is. They said ‘Wait ’til tomorrow. America is going to see bloodshed,”‘ said John Kap, manager of the Pink Pony and Red Eyed Jack’s Sports Bar. Kap said they made the claims to a bartender and a patron.
Federal agents were investigating on several fronts in Florida on Thursday after searching homes and rental car documents and poring over flight school student records across the state.
The Boston Globe reported on its web site Thursday that it had obtained a copy of the complete manifest list of the planes hijacked from Boston.
…
The Globe reported the passenger list for United Air Lines Flight 175 shows that Marwan Alshehri got on the plane that left Boston and slammed into one of the Manhattan skyscrapers 15 minutes after Flight 11. An FAA pilot directory information spelled his name Marwan Alshehhi.
In Daytona Beach, Kap said he told FBI investigators the men in his bar spent $200 to $300 apiece on lap dances and drinks, paying with credit cards. Kap said he gave the FBI credit card receipts, photocopied driver’s licenses, a business card left by one man and a copy of the Quran - the sacred book of Islam - that was left at the bar.
http://newsmine.org/content.php?ol=9-11/suspects/suspects-in-daytona-beach-strip-club-night-before.txt
Thats from CBS: the news you can trust, right?
‘It demands that you stare at numerous images of smoke pouring from a building and, with a straight face, simply deny that you are looking at images of smoke pouring from a building. ‘
Ed, your reasoned discourse has inserted an opinion: that the smoke we see in front of south face WTC7 is ‘pouring’ from WTC7…the evidence does not allow you to say that BECAUSE the smoke obscures the south face.
Just thought i’d inject a little reasoned discourse…
sackcloth: ‘So, the witnesses say you’re wrong, the photographic evidence says you’re wrong, and the documentary evidence says you’re wrong. Only the voices inside your head are telling you that you’re right.’
The photo evidence contradicts your witnesses. Youve got a big problem
Here is ed and his and your witnesses: ‘It seems you must know better than the fire fighters themselves, who state that one could “see the flames going straight through from one side of the building to the other [i.e.] an entire block” and that the building was “fully involved in flames”, “free burning”, “really roaring”, “fully engulfed” and had “flames… coming out of every window’
EVERY WINDOW? Even your photos from 9-1 Myth show most windows in west face fire and smoke free and INTACT.
So, yes, your witnesses are lying, or are in serious need of glasses.
Brian, you’re talking out of your hoop. You have no idea what you’re discussing here, you infant.
‘Three men spewed anti-American sentiments in a bar and talked of impending bloodshed the night before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, a Daytona Beach strip club manager interviewed by the FBI said Thursday’.
Aside from the fact that this story is apocryphal (as it happened, the hijackers were not in Florida the night of 10th September 2001), what does it prove? Nothing.
Firstly, terrorists blend into the societies where they live, and as the record of the 7/7 bombers shows they are specifically instructed not to draw attention to themselves by living in an overtly devout or fundamentalist style. To take a British example, the Abu Hamzas of this world attract police and media attention, while the Mohamed Sidique Khans do not. This was a standard procedure for jihadis beyond the UK, and was evident both with the Madrid attackers and with the 9/11 hijackers themselves.
Moslem extremists who follow the ideology outlined in ‘Takfir wa Hijira’ (’Excommunication and Withdrawal’) claim the right to do two things. Firstly, to murder any Moslems they consider apostates. Secondly, in order to carry out their attacks in Western society they reserve the right to blend in entirely, even if this means acting in an un-Islamic manner (dealing drugs, drinking alcohol etc), as shown here:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,182746,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/31/spain
From the ‘Time’ piece:
‘Though al-Qaeda has its roots in Afghanistan, investigators now think that the “Afghan” nature of the group is subtly changing. The war against the Soviets ended in 1991. Increasingly, al-Qaeda’s captains in the field are too young ever to have fought in Afghanistan, though some may have joined Islamic brigades in Chechnya—or in Bosnia, as Abu Zubaydah did. Many of the new fighters were born and raised not in the Arab lands but in the Muslim communities of Europe, around which they travel with ease. And there is a growing sense that a number of them are “Takfiris,” followers of an extremist Islamic ideology called Takfir wal Hijra (Anathema and Exile). That’s bad news: by blending into host communities, Takfiris attempt to avoid suspicion. A French official says they come across as “regular, fun-loving guys—but they’d slit your throat or bomb your building in a second.” …
In Egypt in the 1960s, the Islamic ideology Takfir wal Hijra began to win adherents among extremist groups. One of them, the Society of Muslims, was led by Shukri Mustafa, an agricultural engineer. Mustafa denounced other Muslims as unbelievers and preached a “withdrawal” into a purity of the kind practiced by the Prophet Muhammad when he withdrew from Mecca to Medina. The ideology is particularly dangerous because it provides a religious justification for slaughtering not just unbelievers but also those who think of themselves as Muslim. Intensely undemocratic—for to accept the authority of anyone but God would be a blasphemy—Takfir wal Hijra is a sort of Islamic fascism.
‘The Takfir,” says [French counter-terrorism expert Roland] Jacquard, “are the hard core of the hard core: they are the ones who will be called upon to organize and execute the really big attacks.” French officials think that Takfiri beliefs have bred a distinct form of terrorism. “The goal of Takfir,” says one, “is to blend into corrupt societies in order to plot attacks against them better. Members live together, will drink alcohol, eat during Ramadan, become smart dressers and ladies’ men to show just how integrated they are.”‘
So much for the takfiri ideology, and the ability and willingness of jihadi terrorists to conceal their beliefs in order to conduct their attacks.
Now onto the pilots. Atta’s ability to fly is confirmed by the former pilot who ran the Opa Locka flight school, Henry George:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1340519/FBI-tracks-down-the-Florida-lair-of-flying-school-terrorists.html
George stated that:
‘I suppose Atta had just enough training to keep the plane in the air - how to make turns and move it up and down. He could not, however, have taxied a 757 or 767 from the gate, got it airborne or landed it safely.’
But then, as it happened, neither he nor the other Al-Qaeda pilots (Hanjour, al-Shehhi, Jarrah and Hanjour) needed to do any of the latter.
George was also quoted in Jane Corbin’s ‘The Base’ (Simon & Schuster 2003, p.169) stated that ‘It doesn’t take much to learn to do what they [Atta and al-Shehhi] ended up achieving - to fly a plane at a building, or to make a turn into a skyscraper’. He also noted that ‘They were actually overtrained for the task they performed. They already had about 300 hours flying time. What they got out of us [with the flight simulators] was exposure to a 727 - the ability to feel the performance of the plane’. George noted retrospectively that Atta and al-Shehhi ‘were just making sure that when they got into that jet they could complete the task successfully. I did not sense there was a passion for flying - they were just preparing to do a job’.
Ann Greaves, a student at the Huffman training school, recalled her envy at the fact that Atta qualified before her (same reference as above) - ‘I can remember watching him take off, fly round and come down again, and I was envious as he was more experienced’.
So much for Atta and al-Shehhi’s ability to perform a suicide attack.
Jarrah never had any problems with flying, but Hanjour wasn’t a natural. But if you’d actually read that ‘New York Times’ article properly, you’d realise that that didn’t matter:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00E0DC1E31F937A35756C0A9649C8B63
http://www.faqs.org/docs/911/911Report-259.html
‘Ms. Ladner said the Phoenix staff never suspected that Mr. Hanjour was a hijacker but feared that his skills were so weak that he could pose a safety hazard if he flew a commercial airliner’.
Well, he certainly was a ’safety hazard’ all right. He killed 64 people on board AA77 and 125 people in the Pentagon. The Pan Am International Flight Academy staff were right in thinking that Hanjour would have made a lousy commercial pilot, but that was not what he was training for.
In any case, what Hanjour was was persistent - again, indicating that he had the motivation to learn how to do a task which did not come naturally to him, which was to learn basic flying skills so that he could learn how to kill a lot of people in a suicide attack:
And as it happened, he managed to get the skills he required to carry out his attack on the Pentagon (assisted, of course, by the ‘muscle’ hijackers):
‘FBI agents have questioned and administered a lie detector test to one of Hanjour’s instructors in Arizona who was an Arab American and had signed off on Hanjour’s flight instruction credentials before he got his pilot’s license.
That instructor said he told agents that Hanjour was “a very average pilot, maybe struggling a little bit.” The instructor added, “Maybe his English wasn’t very good.”‘
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/10/attack/main508656.shtml
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/05/19/askthepilot186/
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/05/19/askthepilot186/index1.html
‘Hani Hanjour’s flying was hardly the show-quality demonstration often described. It was exceptional only in its recklessness. If anything, his loops and turns and spirals above the nation’s capital revealed him to be exactly the shitty pilot he by all accounts was. To hit the Pentagon squarely he needed only a bit of luck, and he got it, possibly with help from the 757’s autopilot. Striking a stationary object — even a large one like the Pentagon — at high speed and from a steep angle is very difficult. To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon’s lawn.
It’s true there’s only a vestigial similarity between the cockpit of a light trainer and the flight deck of a Boeing. To put it mildly, the attackers, as private pilots, were completely out of their league. However, they were not setting out to perform single-engine missed approaches or Category 3 instrument landings with a failed hydraulic system. For good measure, at least two of the terrorist pilots had rented simulator time in jet aircraft, but striking the Pentagon, or navigating along the Hudson River to Manhattan on a cloudless morning, with the sole intention of steering head-on into a building, did not require a mastery of airmanship. The perpetrators had purchased manuals and videos describing the flight management systems of the 757/767, and as any desktop simulator enthusiast will tell you, elementary operation of the planes’ navigational units and autopilots is chiefly an exercise in data programming. You can learn it at home. You won’t be good, but you’ll be good enough.
“They’d done their homework and they had what they needed,” says a United Airlines pilot (name withheld on request), who has flown every model of Boeing from the 737 up. “Rudimentary knowledge and fearlessness.”
“As everyone saw, their flying was sloppy and aggressive,” says Michael (last name withheld), a pilot with several thousand hours in 757s and 767s. “Their skills and experience, or lack thereof, just weren’t relevant.”
“The hijackers required only the shallow understanding of the aircraft,” agrees Ken Hertz, an airline pilot rated on the 757/767. “In much the same way that a person needn’t be an experienced physician in order to perform CPR or set a broken bone.”
That sentiment is echoed by Joe d’Eon, airline pilot and host of the “Fly With Me” podcast series. “It’s the difference between a doctor and a butcher,” says d’Eon.’
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/05/19/askthepilot186/index2.html
http://www.911myths.com/Another_Expert.pdf
That’s what the pilots say. Finally, it is worth noting that Hani Hanjour’s earlier flight training in the USA (which
he passed in April 1999) was supposed to be the first step for his career as a commercial pilot with Saudi Arabian Airlines, but his application for the aviation academy at Jeddah was rejected. It was this, according to his brother Yasser, which lead to his radicalisation:
http://www.boston.com/news/packages/underattack/news/driving_a_wedge/part1.shtml
‘Later, Hanjour’s brother, Yasser, agreed to speak briefly on the phone and offered the outlines of the life of one of the hijackers. Based on these conversations, Hani Hanjour emerges as a frustrated young Saudi who wanted desperately - but never succeeded - to become a pilot for the Saudi national airline.
The Saudi carrier required Saudi pilots to be FAA-certified in the United States. (This, Saudi officials point out, explains why so many Saudis were in US flight schools. Since Sept. 11, the Saudi regulation has been changed.)
So Hanjour went to the United States in 1999 and received his certificate, but came home and still couldn’t land a job with the airline.
His frustration at failing to get the job he dreamed of derailed him for nearly a year, his friends said. He spent hours online at a family-owned Internet cafe. He read voraciously about piloting, and increasingly turned his attention toward religious texts and cassette tapes of militant Islamic preachers.’
So much for the motivation, and the skills, of the late Hani Hanjour.
Now to WTC7:
‘So, yes, your witnesses are lying, or are in serious need of glasses.’
‘What do you se but a building face with windows intact,and NO FIRES. The fires we do see in WTC7 are on two lower floors.’
The arrogance of these statements is breathtaking. I give you visual evidence in the form of a video you refuse to watch (did you try the BBC iPlayer like I recommended - of course you didn’t? And you claim that you can’t access Google video - are you using a ZX Spectrum or something?).
I give you photographic evidence showing that there is far more than fires on ‘two lower floors’, and shows the South and East side of the building in flames.
Both I and Ed referred you to the witnesses - firemen and other first responders on the scene - who actually fought the fire and tried to save the building (AND RISKED THEIR LIVES IN THE PROCESS), not to mention those who went inside the building, noted that it had been gutted, and that it was on the verge of collapse … and you insist in dubbing them either liars or incompetent fools who don’t know how to do their jobs.
You are the ultimate epitome of the truther. You do not let ignorance and blinkered prejudices get in the way of your readiness to pronounce judgement on subjects in which you remain technically and professionally unaware. You are unwilling to actually engage in the wealth of evidence which confirms AQ’s involvement in and execution of the 9/11 tasks, whether it is the evidence of the plotters’ preparations and training, the ideological underpinning of their jihad, and the sheer impossibility that the destruction of the WTC buildings and part of the Pentagon was due to anything other than terrorist action. You ignore the testimonies of those who actually know about fire damage or controlled demolition, and mores to the point you ignore the testimonies of all the witnesses whose recollections show your beliefs to be a bunch of fairy tales.
I know full well that you and other ‘truthers’ will never accept that you are wrong, because that involves a degree of self-awareness, intelligence and intellectual honesty that you lack. But I will not cease to refute your lies at length whenever I have the opportunity, just so that anyone else who happens to read this thread can see that you are at best a fool, and at worst a rather deceitful and unpleasant little freak.
Sackcloth:
‘Aside from the fact that this story is apocryphal (as it happened, the hijackers were not in Florida the night of 10th September 2001), what does it prove? Nothing.’
It was in the press…Now you decide it didnt happen. Sorry, but your opinion carries no weight.
‘Firstly, terrorists blend into the societies where they live, and as the record of the 7/7 bombers shows they are specifically instructed not to draw attention to themselves by living in an overtly devout or fundamentalist style.’
right…the alleged hijackers of 9-11 could hardly speak english, and yet they are to ‘blend in’. That was an excsue given for the lap dances! Better to blend in than lie low.
Your al-qaeda articles fulfil their role of manufacturing the al-Q myth. The NYT is on record of having its stories vetted by the Pentagon. So the western media is already compromised in its ‘journalism’ on al-Q.
Next:
‘Well, he certainly was a ’safety hazard’ all right. He killed 64 people on board AA77 and 125 people in the Pentagon. The Pan Am International Flight Academy staff were right in thinking that Hanjour would have made a lousy commercial pilot, but that was not what he was training for.
In any case, what Hanjour was was persistent - again, indicating that he had the motivation to learn how to do a task which did not come naturally to him, which was to learn basic flying skills so that he could learn how to kill a lot of people in a suicide attack:
And as it happened, he managed to get the skills he required to carry out his attack on the Pentagon (assisted, of course, by the ‘muscle’ hijackers):’
This is all laughable. You couldn’t make this up, yet that’s what this is. Supposition. What do they know ‘what he was training for’? We know he was a lousy pilot. As for ‘muscle hijackers’ they were all undersized, and no match for the pilots like Burlingham of flight 77.
This: ’so that he could learn how to kill a lot of people in a suicide attack’ is pure racist supposition. But necessary to create the legend of 9-11.
‘To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon’s lawn.’
This is not even good fiction.
‘You are the ultimate epitome of the truther. You do not let ignorance and blinkered prejudices get in the way of your readiness to pronounce judgement on subjects in which you remain technically and professionally unaware. You are unwilling to actually engage in the wealth of evidence which confirms AQ’s involvement in and execution of the 9/11 tasks’
Why thank you. But the rest of your tirade is as bad as the 9-11 media driven fiction. A-Qs involvement is unsubstantiated. FBI denies it has any evidence of OBLs involvement, And the fellow in Guantanamo, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was tortured, so his confessoins are worthless. Since you like to quote from Salon, lets go to them:
‘It should have been a great day for justice. The alleged perpetrators of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were finally appearing in court. This was their arraignment, at which they were to be formally charged of conspiring to cause the death of 2,973 people in the United States.
But this was no ordinary court at all: It was a military commission, taking place more than six years after the terrorist attacks. And the quality of justice that the defendants were due to receive was in serious doubt.
…
The U.S. government’s sensitivity to those two topics is familiar to observers of these cases. The government fears that the defendants might divulge details about the way in which they were treated — or, more to the point, tortured — and about the countries in which they were held.
Mohammed and the other four detainees being arraigned Thursday were originally captured in 2002 and 2003, held for years in the custody of the CIA or the abusive foreign regimes working as its allies, and not transferred to Guantánamo until September 2006. In February 2008 the CIA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, acknowledged that Mohammed had been subjected to waterboarding, a form of mock drowning. Others were reportedly subjected to other abusive interrogation methods while in CIA custody, including extended sleep deprivation, the imposition of painful stress positions, and forced nudity
etc
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/07/gitmo_ksm/
Like the US govt , you have no case, sackcloth.
So the NYT has it’s stories vetted by the Pentagon, does it, Brian? Then why did you rely on one of their stories to support an earlier argument?
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00E0DC1E31F937A35756C0A9649C8B63
http://www.faqs.org/docs/911/911Report-259.html
This was a source that you offered - it wasn’t mine. Or have you forgotten that already?
As for your comments above, the fact remains that the quote you offered was apocryphal because the hijackers were not in Florida on 10th September. Fact.
Thirdly, my comments on the hijackers and the takfiri attitudes of AQ and other affiliated groups (which are in fact bitterly opposed by mainstream Moslems) do not come from ‘racist supposition’, but from the writings of academic experts on radical Islamism - I would refer you to Gilles Kepel’s ‘Jihad: Expansion et declin de l’Islamisme’ (Paris: Gallimard 2000), pp.63-64, pp.140-142, p.394, but then I suspect your general ignorance extends to French. In fact, even if it was in English, you’d still ignore what he and other accredited experts on the phenomenon of radical Islam have to say.
Oh, and Moslems aren’t a racial group, they are adherents of a religion, and Islam incorporates worshippers from all ethnic groups. Islamism (the adaption of Islam as a faith to make it a political doctrine) is distinct from Islam, and it’s strands include the more extreme Salafi/takfiri sentiments that fuel Al-Qaeda. So take your comments about ‘racism’ and shove them.
As for your efforts to dismiss the expertise of pilots as ‘laughable’, perhaps you can share with us your years of expertise in aviation to back that up.
As far as the muscle hijackers were concerned, there’s the small matter of them being armed with stanley knives and actually using them on passengers in the four flights. You seem to pour scorn on the victims on those planes for not being able to take the terrorists on? Have you ever fought someone with a knife? Have you ever been confronted with the prospect of a stabbing? Of course not. You’re just another armchair hero who conducts his fights online.
Finally, your Salon quote. If you read it properly you will see that the point the author is making is that the case for Khalid Sheikh Mohamed’s guilt (which all but the truthers accept is indisputable) have been tainted by the fact that he was waterboarded. As it happens, it’s a statement I agree with. But his concern is that KSM’s rights have been violated, not that he’s being fitted up.
If you had basic comprehension skills, you’d recognise that. But not for the first time, you take an article/source and distort its content.
But then, as noted before, KSM was frank about his responsibility for 9/11 well before his arrest and incarceration. He also admitted the murder of Daniel Pearl:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/mar/04/alqaida.terrorism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/15/alqaida.terrorism
You are the one who has no case, ‘Brian’. Everything you’ve said has been refuted by Ed or myself. Go and troll on ‘9/11ghoulsrus.com’ or some other website for graverobbing creeps, if you want to avoid having your ‘theories’ torn to shreds again.
‘the alleged hijackers of 9-11 could hardly speak english, and yet they are to ‘blend in’.’
Ever been to London, Brian? Ever been to any major city? Chances are you’ll find more than a few people who don’t speak the local language very well. Of course they’ll blend in. The hijackers weren’t exactly living in Hicksville Arkansas.
‘’so that he could learn how to kill a lot of people in a suicide attack’’
Of course this is far-fetched. Attacks like these have never happened before, or since:
http://news.billinge.com/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/23/newsid_2489000/2489117.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Israeli_Embassy_attack_in_Buenos_Aires
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200306/hoffman
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2004/03/04/1058458.htm
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/752/fr4.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6603905.stm
And, of course, no Salafi Islamist has ever, ever thought about crashing a plane in the middle of a city at any time:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/age_of_terror/7306318.stm
Jason Burke, ‘Al Qaeda’ (Penguin 2007), p.236 - ‘In a fatwa published in the summer of 2001, Ahmed Abdallah al-Ali, a leading Kuwaiti Wahhabi cleric, discussed the legality of the death of a ‘mujahed’ who died ‘while crashing an aircraft into an important city”.
Go and put your tin-foil hat and blinkers back on, Brian. It’s easier for you to cope that way.
The final word on the training and ideology of the hijackers:
9/11 Report (St Martin’s Press 2004), p.341.
‘KSM claims that the most important quality for any al Qaeda operative was willingness to martyr himself. Khallad agrees, and claims that this criterion had preeminence in selecting the planes operation participants. The second most important criterion was demonstrable patience, Khallad says, because the planning for such attacks could take years.100
Khallad claims it did not matter whether the hijackers had fought in jihad previously, since he believes that U.S. authorities were not looking for such operatives before 9/11. But KSM asserts that young mujahideen with clean records were chosen to avoid raising alerts during travel. The al Qaeda training camp head mentioned above adds that operatives with no prior involvement in activities likely to be known to international security agencies were purposefully selected for the 9/11 attacks.101
Most of the muscle hijackers first underwent basic training similar to that given other al Qaeda recruits. This included training in firearms, heavy weapons, explosives, and topography. Recruits learned discipline and military life. They were subjected to artificial stresses to measure their psychological fitness and commitment to jihad. At least seven of the Saudi muscle hijackers took this basic training regime at the al Faruq camp near Kandahar. This particular camp appears to have been the preferred location for vetting and training the potential muscle hijackers because of its proximity to Bin Ladin and senior al Qaeda leadership. Two others-Suqami and Moqed-trained at Khaldan, another large basic training facility located near Kabul, where Mihdhar had trained in the mid-1990s.102 …
Having acquired U.S. visas in Saudi Arabia, the muscle hijackers returned to Afghanistan for special training in late 2000 to early 2001.The training reportedly was conducted at the al Matar complex by Abu Turab al Jordani, one of only a handful of al Qaeda operatives who, according to KSM, was aware of the full details of the planned planes operation. Abu Turab taught the operatives how to conduct hijackings, disarm air marshals, and handle explosives. He also trained them in bodybuilding and provided them with a few basic English words and phrases.108
According to KSM,Abu Turab even had the trainees butcher a sheep and a camel with a knife to prepare to use knives during the hijackings. The recruits learned to focus on storming the cockpit at the earliest opportunity when the doors first opened, and to worry about seizing control over the rest of the plane later. The operatives were taught about other kinds of attack as well, such as truck bombing, so that they would not be able to disclose the exact nature of their operation if they were caught. According to KSM, the muscle did not learn the full details-including the plan to hijack planes and fly them into buildings-before reaching the United States.109
100. Intelligence report, interrogation of KSM, Feb. 18, 2004; Intelligence report, interrogation of Khallad, Jan. 8, 2004.
101. Intelligence report, interrogation of Khallad, Feb. 18, 2004; Intelligence report, interrogation of KSM, Jan. 7, 2004; Intelligence report, interrogation of detainee, Feb. 8, 2003.
102. CIA analytic report,”Afghanistan Camps Central to 11 September Plot,” June 20, 2003, pp. 2-3.
108. On the few operatives fully aware of the plot and Abu Turab’s training, see Intelligence report, interrogation of KSM, Feb. 23, 2004.Abu Turab was the son-in-law of Ayman al Zawahiri. Intelligence report, interrogation of Zubaydah, Feb. 18, 2004. KSM also taught the muscle hijackers English and provided lessons about airplanes. Intelligence report, interrogation of KSM, Apr. 2, 2004. Binalshibh also has discussed this training in post-capture statements, describing it as hand-to-hand combat training. Intelligence report, interrogation of Binalshibh, Jan. 8, 2004. According to Binalshibh, after returning to Afghanistan, muscle hijacker recruits fought on the front lines alongside the Taliban and participated in the March 2001 destruction of the giant Buddha statues in Bamian Province, Afghanistan. Intelligence report, interrogation of Binalshibh, Mar. 31, 2004.
109. Intelligence report, interrogation of KSM, Feb. 23, 2004.According to KSM, the muscle hijackers learned about the specific targets and the Atta’s completed operational plan only in late August. Intelligence report, interrogation of KSM, Apr. 2, 2004.’
From Burke, ‘Al Qaeda’, p.248:
‘Ahmed al-Haznawi [one of the UA93 hijackers] recorded a martyrdom video [in Afghanistan] in March 2001. ‘It is time to kill the Americans on their own ground’, al-Haznawi, wearing combat dress and a black and white headdress, said.’
This is how you deal with ‘truthers’. Be persistent, keep exposing their inadequate knowledge and blatant falsehoods, keep showing them that they don’t know what they’re talking about and are ignoring and distorting the evidence, and eventually they’ll give up and crawl back to their holes.
‘Here is a link to the other thread containing my original post.
http://counterknowledge.com/?p=69#comments
As you (and anyone else) can see, the date attached to the article is 15/9/2001.’
Just to follow up on Fraser’s point, the date was actually correct, but the journal wasn’t ‘Newsweek’ - it was the NYT.
A slight discrepancy, perhaps, but then it just goes to show how slack the ‘truthers’ are at verifying their sources.
‘So the NYT has it’s stories vetted by the Pentagon, does it, Brian? Then why did you rely on one of their stories to support an earlier argument?’
================
Because its a story that doesnt involve the pentagon.
By Stanley knives i guess you mean boxcutters.What evidence do you have there were any on board? If they were on board, how did they get past security? or does the fact that security was operated by israel firm help the ‘hijackers’
‘It’s one of those times when an innocuous comment in an unrelated news report triggers a revelation.
In the article at http://afrocubaweb.com/news/israelispying.htm there is the following paragraph:
“To make the situation worse, a private security company called ICTS, owned by an Israeli, Ezra Harel, and registered in the Netherlands, was employed at Charles de Gaulle airport to screen passengers boarding US planes. Most of its personnel are ex-Shin Bet officers. The company covers security at Boston’s Logan airport, where the American Airlines plane came down after flight attendants and passengers overpowered Reid.”
The point of the article was that ICTS knew shoe bomber Richard Reid was dangerous, but allowed him on board a flight from Tel Aviv to Paris. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. But the idea that an Israeli owned company had inside access to the airport used to launch an abortive terror attack brought to mind the strange message Odigo Systems, another Israeli owned company with offices near the World Trade Towers, received that warned of the impending attacks before the hijacked planes had even left the ground.
So, I went back to another story that had surfaced briefly, reported at http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26626 about how at least one hijacker had smuggled a GUN aboard one of the hijacked planes. Even prior to 9-11, getting a gun on board a passenger plane represented a serious lapse of security. I wondered why this story of a gun was being concealed behind talk of box cutters and screwdrivers.
Then I went back to the first article and its mention that ICTS handled security at Logan International Airport, from which two of the 9-11 hijacked planes had departed.
Sure enough, a visit to ICTS’ own web site at http://www.icts-int.com/ confirms that ICTS is in fact an Israeli owned company, and that it sells services to every airport from which the hijacked planes operated, including security, sometimes through wholly owned subsidiaries like Huntleigh USA Corporation.
It has been suggested that the incredible feat of hijacking four aircraft without a single arrest at the gate would require the resources of a nation-state. This is even more true with the revelation that at least one gun had managed to be aboard a hijacked plane. One company had automatic inside access to all of the airports from which hijacked planes departed on 9-11, and to the airports used by Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. An Israeli company. One that Mossad agents could easily find employment with without the management knowing who they were or what their purpose really was.
But one thing is clear. By virtue of the Odigo warning, someone knew enough about the planned attacks to warn Odigo before the planes had even departed the airport gates, yet they did not call the Israeli security company at the airports which could have stopped the flights from leaving.
Think about that one for a while. ‘
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ICTS.html
More on box cutters:
‘According to ABC’s 20/20, when the van belonging to the cheering Israelis was stopped by the police, the driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers:
“We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem.” (10)
Why did he feel that Palestinians were a problem for the NYPD?
The police and FBI field agents became very suspicious when they found maps of the city with certain places highlighted, box cutters (the same items that the hijackers supposedly used), …’
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/fiveisraelis.html
Intersting, isnt it.
The sole source of box cutters are the cell phone calls, which probably didnt even occur.
KSM, thats the guy who was tortured by the US in Guantanamo.
Hardly the person to go to for the ‘final word’[ on 9-11.
I much prefer this person: Barry Jennings
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVHv4IyHMS0
http://www.mujca.com/jennings.htm
‘But then, as noted before, KSM was frank about his responsibility for 9/11 well before his arrest and incarceration’
what ever happened to Osama Bin Laden, for whose part in the attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan? He is no longer even a person of interest.
As for suicide bombings, what makes you think your egs are suicide bombings. Consider this:
‘The former collaborator said that the Americans have a unit for “dirty jobs.” That unit is a mix of Iraqis, Americans, and foreigners and of the security detachments that are deployed in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. This unit doesn’t only carry out assassinations, but some of them specialize in planting bombs and car bombs in neighborhoods and markets. This unit carries out operations in which wanted people whom the American army does not want killed are arrested.
The former collaborator said that “operations of planting car bombs and blowing up explosives in markets are carried out in various ways, the best-known and most famous among the US troops is placing a bomb inside cars as they are being searched at checkpoints. Another way is to put bombs in the cars during interrogations. After the desired person is summoned to one of the US bases, a bomb is place in his car and he is asked to drive to a police station or a marked for some purpose and there his car blows up.”
The testimony of the former collaborator is consistent with some western reports that have disclosed the involvement of US military personnel in bombings that target Iraqi civilians. The British reporter Robert Fisk, AMSI noted, had recently met with Iraqis in Syria concerning such “black operations” carried out by the Americans.
etc
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m32812&hd=&size=1&l=e
Interesting, isnt it.
And complete bollocks as well, of the kind that only stupid c***ts like you would believe.
Oh, and Fisk is such a brilliant reporter that he noted in 2 March 2004 (after the Ashura bombings) that ‘there has never been a civil war in Iraq’, and no record of sectarian or ethnic violence in the country, which must have come as a big surprise to the Kurds, let alone the Shia slaughtered in the spring of 1991.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19950822/ai_n14001734
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/17/1050172713559.html
Fisk’s standards of evidence are dealt with here, with this story:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-mystery-of-israels-secret-uranium-bomb-421960.html
being completely undermined by this:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200611/s1783385.htm
I could provide more examples of Fisk’s - shall we say bias? - in reporting, not that you’d care.
‘So the NYT has it’s stories vetted by the Pentagon, does it, Brian? Then why did you rely on one of their stories to support an earlier argument?’
================
Because its a story that doesnt involve the pentagon. ‘
I almost spilt my coffee when I read that one. Priceless.
‘By Stanley knives i guess you mean boxcutters.What evidence do you have there were any on board?’
Because passengers were stabbed by them?
Betty Ong on American 11 at 8.19am, 11/9/01:
‘The cockpit is not answering, somebody’s stabbed in business class - and I think there’s Mace - that we can’t breathe. I think we are being hijacked’. Ong later confirmed that two flight attendents were stabbed.
(9/11 Commission Report, p.9).
On United 175, at 9.00am, 11/9/01, Peter Hanson called his father (moments before UA175 struck the South Tower) on the airphone:
‘It’s getting bad, Dad - A stewardess was stabbed - They seem to have knives and Mace’ (same source, p.13).
‘If they were on board, how did they get past security?’
I travelled by domestic flights in the States in the autumn of 2000, and I can tell you how they got past security - because it was completely inadequate.
‘or does the fact that security was operated by israel firm help the ‘hijackers’’
Aha. Scratch a 9/11 denialist, find an anti-Semite. It was the Joooooos who did it!
The Odigo forewarning claim is dealt with here:
http://www.911myths.com/html/odigo.html
And on other Israel-directed conspiracy theories:
http://www.911myths.com/html/zim_shipping.html
http://www.911myths.com/html/4000_israelis.html
http://www.911myths.com/html/dancing_israelis.html
http://www.nocturne.org/~terry/wtc_4000_Israeli.html
You also have nothing, other than innuendo, to link ICTS to the hijackers, and as for this comment:
‘It has been suggested that the incredible feat of hijacking four aircraft without a single arrest at the gate would require the resources of a nation-state’.
Who has suggested it? And are there no precedents whatsoever for a non-state terrorist group doing a multiple aircraft hijacking?:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/uk_confidential/1089694.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson%27s_Field_hijackings
Oh what a bummer, there is. And as was the case in 9/11, poor airport security and no protective measures on the planes meant that they were easily taken over.
‘The sole source of box cutters are the cell phone calls, which probably didnt even occur’.
They weren’t cellphones, they were airphones. And the conversations were interactive (people on the flights spoke to, and responded to, their loved ones). There is no way they could have been pre-recorded.
‘KSM, thats the guy who was tortured by the US in Guantanamo.
Hardly the person to go to for the ‘final word’[ on 9-11.’
Except as I’ve already shown you, he admitted responsibility prior to his arrest. D’Oh!!!!!!
‘As for suicide bombings, what makes you think your egs are suicide bombings’.
The fact that even Ayman al-Zawahiri complained about them to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?
http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/report/2005/zawahiri-zarqawi-letter_9jul2005.htm
‘We must repeat what we mentioned previously, that the majority of Muslims don’t comprehend this and possibly could not even imagine it. For that reason, many of your Muslim admirers amongst the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia. The sharpness of this questioning increases when the attacks are on one of their mosques, and it increases more when the attacks are on the mausoleum of Imam Ali Bin Abi Talib, may God honor him. My opinion is that this matter won’t be acceptable to the Muslim populace however much you have tried to explain it, and aversion to this will continue.’
Zarqawi and other AQ fighters in Iraq never denied their responsibility for suicide attacks against civilians. In fact, he and his associates justified them and revelled in them (which explains why Iraqi Sunnis in Al-Anbar and other provinces turned against them from 2006 onwards):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/15/AR2006041501130_pf.html
‘Iraqi chiefs vow to fight Al-Qaeda’, 18th Sept 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5357340.stm.
So yet again, your claims are refuted.
‘As for suicide bombings, what makes you think your egs are suicide bombings’.
The fact that even Ayman al-Zawahiri complained about them to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?
http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/report/2005/zawahiri-zarqawi-letter_9jul2005.htm
‘We must repeat what we mentioned previously, that the majority of Muslims don’t comprehend this and possibly could not even imagine it. For that reason, many of your Muslim admirers amongst the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia. The sharpness of this questioning increases when the attacks are on one of their mosques, and it increases more when the attacks are on the mausoleum of Imam Ali Bin Abi Talib, may God honor him. My opinion is that this matter won’t be acceptable to the Muslim populace however much you have tried to explain it, and aversion to this will continue.’
Zarqawi and other AQ fighters in Iraq never denied their responsibility for suicide attacks against civilians. In fact, he and his associates justified them and revelled in them (which explains why Iraqi Sunnis in Al-Anbar and other provinces turned against them from 2006 onwards):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/15/AR2006041501130_pf.html
‘Iraqi chiefs vow to fight Al-Qaeda’, 18th Sept 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5357340.stm.
So yet again, your claims are refuted.
Whoops, a double posting there.
Brian, this is futile. If this were a boxing match, the referee would have called time, and you’d be on a stretcher, being carried out of the ring before your meagre excuse for a brain suffered terminal damage. You have been unable to sustain any of your claims with any verifiable evidence (other than from the wierdo sites you people spend your lives trolling on), or able to address any of my rebuttals of ‘truther’ claims. Just give up and go home.
Oh, and by the way, Barry Jennings says 9/11 was not an inside job, WTC7 was not a controlled demolition, and Dylan Avery and other truthers have distorted his evidence. Either he’s lying, or the ‘truth movement’ is. I know where I’m putting my money.
KSM’s links with bin Laden during the 1990s, and his role in planning 9/11, are dealt with in Steve Coll, ‘Ghost Wars’ (Penguin 2005), pp.476-477. I find people like him a more reliable source than nutters like you, Brian.
IS steve coll aware KSM was tortured in Guantanamo?
Since i dont know SC i cant tell how honest he is. But if he is american, chances are he is as patriotically clueless as that breed tends to be.
Your attacks on Fisk dont undermine his observations, as these backed by others. Your efforts to discredit him, are ironic as he is the most widely admired middles east reporter.
So lets look at the DU issue. From your post:
‘But scientific evidence gathered from at least two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri, the scene of fierce fighting between Hizbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops last July and August, suggests that uranium-based munitions may now also be included in Israel’s weapons inventory - and were used against targets in Lebanon. According to Dr Chris Busby, the British Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, two soil samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs showed “elevated radiation signatures”. Both have been forwarded for further examination to the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire for mass spectrometry - used by the Ministry of Defence - which has confirmed the concentration of uranium isotopes in the samples.
Dr Busby’s initial report states that there are two possible reasons for the contamination. “The first is that the weapon was some novel small experimental nuclear fission device or other experimental weapon (eg, a thermobaric weapon) based on the high temperature of a uranium oxidation flash … The second is that the weapon was a bunker-busting conventional uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium rather than depleted uranium.” A photograph of the explosion of the first bomb shows large clouds of black smoke that might result from burning uranium.
…
Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth about its use of weapons in Lebanon. In 1982, it denied using phosphorous munitions on civilian areas - until journalists discovered dying and dead civilians whose wounds caught fire when exposed to air
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-mystery-of-israels-secret-uranium-bomb-421960.html
Which is sound investigative journalism. You may not think so,but then investigative journalism is like sunlight to a vampire.
NOW, Israel HAS DU as reported by the same british media back in 1993:
‘LEBANON: Israel uses depleted uranium
17 November 1993
According to Doug Rokke, the former director of the US Army’s depleted uranium project, the US’s delivery of 100 GBU 28 laser-guided bunker-buster bombs with depleted uranium warheads to Israel for use in its brutal offensive against Lebanon will cause major health and environmental damage throughout the Middle East. The British media reported that US cargo planes filled with depleted uranium munitions had landed at Prestwick airport, near Glasgow, for refuelling before delivering the weapons to the Israeli armed forces. On July 21, Indymedia UK reported that photos taken near the Lebanese border on July 14 by David Silverman showed Israeli soldiers loading DU shells into tanks.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/677/8165
Here is a fully investigation:
http://www.bandepleteduranium.org/en/a/102.html
So, YOUR issue is that Fisk is not a good reporter, whereas the above shows that he is. The reports of radioactivity were credible(reported by scientists), and so worth reporting. Thats how it works. The issue of Israels use of DU was still not resolved at end ot 2006.
Your attacks on Fisk show a mean spirited partisanship that undermines your credibility, Sackcloth.
‘Because passengers were stabbed by them?
Betty Ong on American 11 at 8.19am, 11/9/01:
‘The cockpit is not answering, somebody’s stabbed in business class - and I think there’s Mace - that we can’t breathe. I think we are being hijacked’. Ong later confirmed that two flight attendents were stabbed.’
============
Allow me a hearty laugh at your standards of reporting and evidence: ‘Betty’ is your sole source?? Since this is one of those ‘cell phone’ calls, we cant even be sure it is Betty. But her use of ‘mace’??? ‘I think theres Mace’…sure ‘Betty’.
Youve got your nerve criticising Fisk while using a source as dodgy as ‘Betty’.
Prove that Betty even made any cell phone call…For that you should try to locate her cell phone records.
‘On United 175, at 9.00am, 11/9/01, Peter Hanson called his father (moments before UA175 struck the South Tower) on the airphone:
‘It’s getting bad, Dad - A stewardess was stabbed - They seem to have knives and Mace’ (same source, p.13).
====================
‘Even on elementary issues, the Report is woeful. Minor shortcomings abound. On Flight 11, which allegedly struck the World Trade Center’s North Tower at 8:46 after departing Boston’s Logan airport, the Report tells us that alleged hijackers “stabbed the two unarmed flight attendants” (p. 5). With what? Knives apparently, but how did they get them on board? Did hijackers smuggle them past screeners? Or was it an inside job, with knives smuggled on board earlier by someone? If so, by whom? The Commission never asks, so we get no answers. The incurious narrative skates by difficult questions throughout chapters 1 and 9, the only material submitted about the events of 9/11 itself.
The Flight 11 hijackers supposedly “sprayed Mace, pepper spray or some other irritant in the first-class cabin.” Where’d passengers gain access to that? Again, no explanation offered. Nor does the Commission “know exactly how the hijackers gained access to the [locked] cockpit.” Pretty amazing. Nearly three years after 9/11 and this is the best government’s apologists can do?
‘
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/reynolds6.html
Your own anecdotal report of security in 2000 is another woeful eg of your lax standards of evidence. Sorry, but thats not credible. nor are stories of MACE, the sole source being cell phone calls that we have no proof were even made…youd need cell phone records for that. Lets see you provide them.
No celle phone records, no cell phone calls.
The odigo story is indeed dealt with and even the dodgy 911myths site confirms it.
And your ‘jooos did it’ is typical of of jewish denial. once again you dodge an issue, an israeli company that employs Shin bet for security on 9-11.
Ezra Harel, its owner has the same surname as another Harel, former head of Mossad.
Its a small world
Barry Jennings:
‘Oh, and by the way, Barry Jennings says 9/11 was not an inside job, WTC7 was not a controlled demolition, and Dylan Avery and other truthers have distorted his evidence. Either he’s lying, or the ‘truth movement’ is. I know where I’m putting my money’
Here is what BJ said before he was threatened:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVHv4IyHMS0
So why did he say one thing then and another to BBC? Hmm. In between, the cowardly fellow said he was threatened. So, yes he is lying..you would if you had been threatened.
‘The fact that even Ayman al-Zawahiri complained about them to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?’
another eg of your lax standard of evidence. And you want to slag off on Fisk! Ha!
We hear the media reporting suicide bombings, but we dont see evidence of suicide bombing. As we know from elsewhere, there are reports of bombs planted in cars, that offers a different interpretation,
‘In May 2005 ‘Riverbend’, the Baghdad author of the widely-read blog Baghdad Burning, reported that what the international press was reporting as suicide bombings were often in fact “car bombs that are either being remotely detonated or maybe time bombs.” After one of the larger recent blasts, which occurred in the middle-class Ma’moun area of west Baghdad, a man living in a house in front of the blast site was reportedly arrested for having sniped an Iraqi National Guardsman. But according to ‘Riverbend’, his neighbours had a different story:
“People from the area claim that the man was taken away not because he shot anyone, but because he knew too much about the bomb. Rumor has it that he saw an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion. Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued. He ran out of his house screaming to the neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing about it. He was promptly taken away.”
(http://riverbendblog.blogspit.com/2005_05_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#111636281930496496)
Also in May 2005, Imad Khadduri, the Iraqi-exile physicist whose writings helped to discredit American and British fabrications about weapons of mass destruction, reported a story that in Baghdad a driver whose license had been confiscated at an American check-point was told “to report to an American military camp near Baghdad airport for interrogation and in order to retrieve his license.” After being questioned for half an hour, he was informed that there was nothing against him, but that his license had been forwarded to the Iraqi police at the al-Khadimiya station “for processing”—and that he should get there quickly before the lieutenant whose name he was given went off his shift.
“The driver did leave in a hurry, but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car was driving as if carrying a heavy load, and he also became suspicious of a low flying helicopter that kept hovering overhead, as if trailing him. He stopped the car and inspected it carefully. He found nearly 100 kilograms of explosives hidden in the back seat and along the two back doors. The only feasible explanation for this incident is that the car was indeed booby trapped by the Americans and intended for the al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad. The helicopter was monitoring his movement and witnessing the anticipated ‘hideous attack by foreign elements’.”
(http://www.albasrah.net/maqalat/english/0505/Combat-terrorism_160505.htm)
According to Khadduri, “The same scenario was repeated in Mosul, in the north of Iraq.” On this occasion, the driver’s life was saved when his car broke down on the way to the police station where he was supposed to reclaim his license, and when the mechanic to whom he had recourse “discovered that the spare tire was fully laden with explosives.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=994
Interesting, isnt it.
on the DU and Israel issue:
‘The sample was sent for analysis at the Harwell Laboratory in Oxfordshire, which is used by the Ministry of Defence. “We are concerned that UNEP don’t know what they are doing. Earlier [in 2001] they were useless at finding depleted uranium in Kosovo due to wrong choice of instrumentation,” Dr Busby said.’
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/phosphorus-shells-used-in-lebanon-invasion-un-says-423414.html
Thats an interesting rejoinder..Was the UNEP team inept? Wrong choice of instruments!
‘Zarqawi and other AQ fighters in Iraq never denied their responsibility for suicide attacks against civilians’
but what evidence is there any of the ’suicide attacks in the media ARE suicide attacks?
take this case:
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/02/28/iraq.main/
No evidence it was a suicide bombing. Theres an explosion, a car is involved, but no way to tell if it is a suicide bombing. Esp as the victims are ordinary people…a market is right nearby. These market bombings are precisely why these bombings are not suicide bombings. Car bombings tho are a mossad speciality.
‘Allow me a hearty laugh at your standards of reporting and evidence: ‘Betty’ is your sole source?? Since this is one of those ‘cell phone’ calls, we cant even be sure it is Betty. But her use of ‘mace’??? ‘I think theres Mace’…sure ‘Betty’.’
You sick motherfucker. Let’s all jeer at the dead.
This is what you truthers are like when push comes to shove.
Oh, and my final points on this:
(1) The only sources who claim Barry Jennings was ‘threatened’ into changing his testimony are the ‘truthers’. I don’t believe them.
(2) KSM - as my links show - admitted his and AQ’s responsibility for 9/11 before his arrest.
(3) You’ve also outed yourself as an anti-Semite.
‘And your ‘jooos did it’ is typical of of jewish denial’.
(4) Your comments denying that suicide bombers are at work in Iraq are below contempt.
(5) Fisk’s DU claims were refuted by UN specialists, and it’s not the first time he’s been shown to lie:
‘The samples taken by the UNEP scientists show no evidence of penetrators or metal made of DU or other radioactive material,” UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said in a statement.
“In addition, no DU shrapnel, or other radioactive residue was found. The analysis of all smear samples taken shows no DU, nor enriched uranium nor higher than natural uranium content in the samples.”‘
(6) Crawl back into your fucking sewer and stay there.
‘(6) Crawl back into your fucking sewer and stay there.’
nice…but i think hes cracking…
I wasnt jeering at the dead, witless one. i was jeering at the living.
‘2) KSM - as my links show - admitted his and AQ’s responsibility for 9/11 before his arrest. ‘
He has not done so. Nor is there any evidence linking him to 9-11.
‘(3) You’ve also outed yourself as an anti-Semite.’
on antisemitism, allow me to show you a sample:
‘Israeli army has resumed its kidnapping campaign against Palestinians in the West Bank, abducting dozens of civilians including a lawmaker.
Israeli forces, in the West Bank city of Nablus, kidnapped thirty civilians including a female lawmaker and several other prominent business people, a Press TV correspondent reported.
Israeli forces also raided the Nablus shopping mall and arrested several business people including the mall’s manager under the pretext that the center is raising funds for Hamas.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniya condemned the Israeli raids and said Israel is trying to target the Palestinian infrastructure and economy.
The recent arrests in Nablus have raised the number of imprisoned Palestinian parliamentarians to forty
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=64394§ionid=351020202
‘(5) Fisk’s DU claims were refuted by UN specialists, and it’s not the first time he’s been shown to lie:’
Fisk was reporting news, so he was not lying, something you do constantly, as ive shown. Your UN specialists got it wrong in Kosovo:
‘Earlier [in 2001] they were useless at finding depleted uranium in Kosovo due to wrong choice of instrumentation,” Dr Busby said.’’
So much for UNEP!
Heres another bit of 9-11 Truth that you may not be aware of:
‘NYPD radio:
officer: “I got a message on that uh plane, it’s a big truck with a mural painted of a of a airplane diving into New York City and exploding [inaudible] know what’s in the truck, the truck is in between 6th and 7th on King Street“
officer: [inaudible] are you holding those two guys [inaudible] (kay?)
multiple voices/commotion: [inaudible] fucking beat the shit out of him.
[..]
multiple voices/commotion: [inaudible] fucking shit out of him [inaudible]
officer: all right listen you need any [inaudible] on those two guys over there? you all right over there kay?
officer: “we got both suspects under kay, we have the suspects who drive…drove in the van and that exploded we have both of them under kay let’s get some help over here”
(source)
By examining the NYPD transmissions we learn that two suspects detonated a mural-van-bomb and were captured. It’s clear that both were beaten by police and arrested.
http://culhavoc.blogsome.com/2006/05/03/confirming-the-exploding-mural-van-coverup/
http://www.infowars.net/articles/april2007/230407vans.htm
The suspects were described aas ‘middle eastern’, as were the israel jews who were arrested later. This means this lot were israelis as well.
your own ‘use’ of facts is very interesting. rather faithful, but i suppose you have to be so, based on your position.
ultimately you may be a victim of what might eventually be exposed as ‘counterknowledge’ yourself! not that this fazes you, since it has happened to you before, to varying extents.
for clarification, i do not really care what/WHO caused the events of 9/11. i am merely relatively certain that these events took place, having seen that particular area of NY both before and after said events. thus with respect to the event i have no particular views on it beyond my acceptance of its happenstance.
i’d like to know how, exactly you diffrentiate between your ‘facts’ and ‘fancies’, and how you choose to qualify each particular set, especially since this is a rather murky thing with reference to how you use each particular set in some of your arguments.
good show though, entertaining stuff.
I thought I told you to crawl back into your sewer, you turd. Go and play with other sick-minded ‘deniers’ - take your moody links to your sordid little websites and go get your cheapies elsewhere.
‘I thought I told you to crawl back into your sewer, you turd’
You are cracking. Your lame attempts at reasoned debate are coming unstuck in the face of evidence that contradicts you.
How do you live with yourself, when you are impressed with evidence that makes your views look like folly.
‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you then they fight you then you win’: Gandhi.
I gave up having a ‘debate’ with you a long time ago. You can’t debate with a psychopathic liar who ignores evidence and arguments offered by the other side, wilfully disregards first hand and expert testimony undermining his ‘theories’, distorts and makes up ‘evidence’ supporting his case, and resorts to postings from fringe websites run by lunatics who - when they’re not busy quotemining online from Google - are outside howling at the moon.
You quote Gandhi as if a man who led a non-violent, mass movement campaign for freedom and independence is in any way comparable with a sad bunch of liars whose efforts to ‘prove’ that 9/11 was committed by the Bush administration / the Jews / the Illuminati (delete as applicable) have gone nowhere in 7 years, and whose ‘theories’ only acquire support from the fringes of the extreme left and the extreme right.
This, ultimately, is all you are, and all you ever will be. You will never get your Gandhi moment, because he was able to inspire millions to follow him, while the broad mass of the public have enough common sense to see you for the shysters that you are. He spoke honestly about people’s rights for self-determination and sovereignty, while you spin deceitful smears that claim that dead passengers are still alive, and that emergency workers are complicit in mass murder. Gandhi spoke of humanity and brotherhood, while you thrive on petty hatreds and spite.
Seven years, and no results. You can keep at it for 14, 28, even 70 years, and you will still get nowhere in convincing anyone outside your deranged little circle that your ‘theories’ are anything more than the product of psychotic group think. You will continue to fail, because in the end the 9/11 ‘truth’ movement made a decisive break with truth and fact the day it emerged.
Enjoy your descent down the u-bend, you turd.
Gandhi rephrased for the ‘truthers’.
‘First they shake their heads in astonishment at your claims. Then they refute them. Then they realise that you don’t care even though your ‘theories’ rest on fantasy and distorted fragments of evidence. Then they see you locked away in a padded room where you belong, and then you lose’.
‘I gave up having a ‘debate’ with you a long time ago. You can’t debate with a psychopathic liar who ignores evidence and arguments offered by the other side, wilfully disregards first hand and expert testimony undermining his ‘theories’, distorts and makes up ‘evidence’ supporting his case, and resorts to postings from fringe websites run by lunatics who - when they’re not busy quotemining online from Google - are outside howling at the moon’
================================
I can hear you howling now.
This comment of yours applies to you. Youve ignored the evidence that there were no extensive fires in WTC7. That evidence contradicted the ‘eyewitnesses’.
Sackcloth how he plays fast and loose with the truth:
‘Gandhi rephrased for the ‘truthers’.
‘First they shake their heads in astonishment at your claims. Then they refute them. Then they realise that you don’t care even though your ‘theories’ rest on fantasy and distorted fragments of evidence. Then they see you locked away in a padded room where you belong, and then you lose’.’
============================
Thanks Sackcloth, for confirming that youve been manipulating 9-11 Truth, as you do Gandhis words.
‘Youve ignored the evidence that there were no extensive fires in WTC7. That evidence contradicted the ‘eyewitnesses’.’
This is your response to a video posting, photographic evidence, and the testimony of the firefighters - all of which demonstrate that WTC7 collapsed because of a catastrophic fire, and that you and people like you are either cretins or slanderers.
‘‘First they shake their heads in astonishment at your claims. Then they refute them. Then they realise that you don’t care even though your ‘theories’ rest on fantasy and distorted fragments of evidence. Then they see you locked away in a padded room where you belong, and then you lose’.’’
The ‘they’ is the vast majority of people (including myself) who know that the 9/11 conspiracy theories lunatics like you peddle are bullshit. The ‘you’ is you, Brian.
Let me know where the ‘truth movement’ is in another 7 years time, you ringpiece.
‘This is your response to a video posting, photographic evidence, and the testimony of the firefighters - all of which demonstrate that WTC7 collapsed because of a catastrophic fire, and that you and people like you are either cretins or slanderers’
the photographic evidence..YOUR POSTED evidence does nothing of the sort. Show me fire coming from ALL the windows. Thats what your ‘eyewitnesses’ testify to.
‘Let me know where the ‘truth movement’ is in another 7 years time, you ringpiece.’
Its where it continues to be: knocking over twits like yourself, with your ‘eyewitnesses’ contradicted by your own evidence!
And as you proved: you have a talent for manipuakying evidence.,..Look at how casually you twisted Gandhi’s words.
‘Look at how casually you twisted Gandhi’s words.’
It’s called a ‘parody’, fuckhead, and it was intended to show you what a cupid stunt you are.
The gulf between your crackpot ‘theories’ and reality grows ever wider. In years to come, psychiatrists will debate the exact reasons why a minority of nutters persisted in ‘9/11 ”truth”’ despite the fact that they had no case whatsover, and people like you will arouse the same derision as the flat earthers.
Enjoy the ridicule, numbnuts. You’ll be experiencing a lot of it for the rest of your life.
‘It’s called a ‘parody’, fuckhead, and it was intended to show you what a cupid stunt you are. ‘
everything you write is a parody, Sackcloth. A parody of the truth.
‘The gulf between your crackpot ‘theories’ and reality grows ever wider’
the biggest crackpot theory is that Bin Laden orchestrated 19 muslim fundamentalists to attack the US. Even the FBI doesnt believe that any more. And the evidence is solidly against it.
So just keep on doing what you do best: Countering knowledge.
‘the biggest crackpot theory is that Bin Laden orchestrated 19 muslim fundamentalists to attack the US.’:
Is that so?:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7119803.stm
‘Even the FBI doesnt believe that any more’:
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/11/30/Worldandnation/Bin_Laden_to_Europe__.shtml
Note the following:
‘”As the FBI has said since 9/11, bin Laden was responsible for the attack,” [FBI spokesman Richard] Kolko said in a statement. “In this latest tape, he again acknowledged his responsibility. This should help to clarify for all the conspiracy theorists, again - the 9/11 attack was done by bin Laden and al-Qaida.”‘
Give it up, get a job, and get a life.
‘‘the biggest crackpot theory is that Bin Laden orchestrated 19 muslim fundamentalists to attack the US.’:
Is that so?:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7119803.stm
‘Even the FBI doesnt believe that any more’:
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/11/30/Worldandnation/Bin_Laden_to_Europe__.shtml
=================================
Yes, thats so. Here is the FBIs very own OBL entry. See if you can find mention of 9-11.
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/fugitives/laden.htm
AND if thats too difficult., a journalist has done the work for you:
‘On June 5, 2006, the Muckraker Report contacted the FBI Headquarters, (202) 324-3000, to learn why Bin Laden’s Most Wanted poster did not indicate that Usama was also wanted in connection with 9/11. The Muckraker Report spoke with Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI. When asked why there is no mention of 9/11 on Bin Laden’s Most Wanted web page, Tomb said, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”
Surprised by the ease in which this FBI spokesman made such an astonishing statement, I asked, “How this was possible?” Tomb continued, “Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11.” I asked, “How does that work?” Tomb continued, “The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice than decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, Bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connected Bin Laden to 9/11.”
It shouldn’t take long before the full meaning of these FBI statements start to prick your brain and raise your blood pressure. If you think the way I think, in quick order you will be wrestling with a barrage of very powerful questions that must be answered. First and foremost, if the U.S. government does not have enough hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11, how is it possible that it had enough evidence to invade Afghanistan to “smoke him out of his cave?” The federal government claims to have invaded Afghanistan to “root out” Bin Laden and the Taliban. Through the talking heads in the mainstream media, the Bush Administration told the American people that Usama Bin Laden was Public Enemy Number One and responsible for the deaths of nearly 3000 people on September 11, 2001. Yet nearly five years later, the FBI says that it has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.
etc
http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html
meanwhile, Kolko is aliar. From your link:
‘FBI analysts were reviewing the tape. Spokesman Richard Kolko said it was being examined “to determine if it is authentic and for any intelligence value.”
“As the FBI has said since 9/11, bin Laden was responsible for the attack,” Kolko said in a statement. “In this latest tape, he again acknowledged his responsibility. This should help to clarify for all the conspiracy theorists, again - the 9/11 attack was done by bin Laden and al-Qaida.”
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/11/30/Worldandnation/Bin_Laden_to_Europe__.shtml
The FBI has most certainly not adopted Kolkos views, as the web page on OBL demonstrates, and the interview with Haas confirms.
Not only is Kolko lying, but the audio tape is not even authenticated as by OBL! Like DUH! What is the tapes source? Whose hands has it passed thru?
is he even alive?
‘The message appeared to be another attempt by bin Laden to influence public opinion in the West.’
Before 2002, he gave interviews to journalists face to face, Since the start of 2002, he has given no face to face interviews. Like Orwells Goldstein, he is the face/voice that is used by Big Brother to stir the two minutes hates in the people.
SO let me reiterate, there is no evidence OBL is even alive post 2001.Your article is neither evidence nor proof.
Hang on, Brian, what are you saying here? Firstly, you tell me that the FBI has given up the search for OBL, and that they don’t even believe that he’s responsible for 9/11. Then (when I show you a link dated November 2007) showing the opposite, you’re telling me not to believe a word the Feds say.
Anyway, let’s take a look at your ‘muckraker’ story, and let’s see how it was reported in the real world (incidentally, this link comes courtesy of a fellow ‘truther’, who evidently didn’t have time to read it properly):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/27/AR2006082700687.html
Firstly, Rex Tomb is a spokesmen, not a ‘Chief of Investigative Publicity’ (a post which appears not to exist within the Bureau’).
Secondly, let’s check the end of this particular report (which your ‘muckraker’ misses out):
‘”The indictments currently listed on the posters allow them to be arrested and brought to justice,” the FBI says in a note accompanying the terrorist list on its Web site. “Future indictments may be handed down as various investigations proceed in connection to other terrorist incidents, for example, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.”‘
In other words, the FBI already have an outstanding warrant for the August 1998 Nairobi and Dar e-Salaam bombings. They are not saying they have no evidence on Al-Qaeda’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks:
‘The absence has also provided fodder for conspiracy theorists who think the U.S. government or another power was behind the Sept. 11 hijackings. From this point of view, the lack of a Sept. 11 reference suggests that the connection to al-Qaeda is uncertain.
Exhaustive government and independent investigations have concluded otherwise, of course, and bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders have proudly taken responsibility for the hijackings. FBI officials say the wanted poster merely reflects the government’s long-standing practice of relying on actual criminal charges in the notices.’
What’s the betting that ‘team liberty’ deliberately distorted Mr Tomb’s comments to the press. Pretty high, I’d say.
‘Before 2002, he gave interviews to journalists face to face, Since the start of 2002, he has given no face to face interviews’.
Wow, what an amazing insight. Could that possibly be because - erm - he’s trying not to get captured?
This may be a bit before your time, but you might have seen a reference to a bloke called Radovan Karadzic being arrested after 13 years as a wanted war criminal. Karadzic was hiding in plain sight firstly amongst sympathetic Bosnian Serbs (in spite of the presence of NATO forces), and then subsequently in Belgrade. Imagine how difficult it must be to find someone (who doesn’t want to be found) in the FATA region of Pakistan - somewhere where the Pakistani army has lost around 1,000 troops fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
So Bin Laden is no ‘Goldstein’ (nice little literary reference there - gives you the faint veneer of intellect to the uninitiated). He and the organisation he has built up since the early 1990s are real, and even if he is dead or incapacited, AQ will continue to function in the foreseeable future.
And if you want to quote George Orwell, I can do the same. He once said that ‘[to] see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle’, but I can see that that’s a battle you, and all the other ‘truthers’, lost a long time ago. One of Orwell’s main gifts to English literature was to note the ease in which people could twist reality to suit their own distorted ideological preconceptions, and kid others into following them. I can’t exactly tell you who your Napoleons and Squealers are, but I know that you’re one of the ‘truth movement’s sheep whose only contribution to threads like these can be boiled down to ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’.
Anyway, a little bit of advice. Walmart may not pay well, but you will be earning some money, and you won’t have to live with your parents anymore. Everyone’s a winner.
‘Hang on, Brian, what are you saying here? Firstly, you tell me that the FBI has given up the search for OBL, and that they don’t even believe that he’s responsible for 9/11. Then (when I show you a link dated November 2007) showing the opposite, you’re telling me not to believe a word the Feds say’
====================
once again, you are lying. Show me where i said:
‘you tell me that the FBI has given up the search for OBL,
What i said was that th FBI says it has no evidence connecting OBL to the events of 9-11. And this is shown further by the concentration on KSM as the mastermind.
‘In other words, the FBI already have an outstanding warrant for the August 1998 Nairobi and Dar e-Salaam bombings. They are not saying they have no evidence on Al-Qaeda’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks:’
From Bin Laden to Al-Qaeda….more sleight-of-hand. You twist and distrt everything you touch, Sackcloth. Go back and read the FBI webpage on Bin Laden and tell me if you can see any mention of 9-11.
‘He and the organisation he has built up since the early 1990s are real, and even if he is dead or incapacited, AQ will continue to function in the foreseeable future.’
So you admit you arent sure if he is alive or dead….thats a step in the right direction. as for AQ: The documentary: The Power of Nightmares:
http://www.wanttoknow.info/powerofnightmares
‘Wow, what an amazing insight. Could that possibly be because - erm - he’s trying not to get captured?
You mean he wasnt a wanted man BEFORE 9-11? The latest interviews took place in oct 2001…Not only that but it seems the US actually had him in their custody…
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/RIC111B.html
‘Exhaustive government and independent investigations have concluded otherwise, of course, and bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders have proudly taken responsibility for the hijackings.’
What? OBL in the only interviews post-911 has denied he was behind the attacks. Nor do you give evidence of these ‘Exhaustive government and independent investigations’. Why? Because they dont exist.
heres one of the interviews, with a real OBL:
http://911review.com/articles/usamah/khilafah.html
‘USAMA BIN LADEN: In the name of Allah (God),…
I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam. All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel. There is also a warning for those Muslim countries, which witnessed all these as a silent spectator. What had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya and Bosnia? Only one conclusion could be derived from the indifference of the United States and the West to these acts of terror and the patronage of the tyrants by these powers that America is an anti-Islamic power and it is patronizing the anti-Islamic forces. Its friendship with the Muslim countries is just a show, rather deceit.
etc
===============
Dan Eggans eagerness to aid the official conspiracy theory, does not answer the question of why OBL is not on the FBI list for 9-11. At that time, 2006, there was still no evidence linking him tom 9-11. Even Dan is forced to report that.
Here is Dans’s interpolation:
‘The curious omission underscores the Justice Department’s decision, so far, to not seek formal criminal charges against bin Laden for approving al-Qaeda’s most notorious and successful terrorist attack’
Its only ‘curious’ for those who have been brainwashed by the official conspiracy theory. No where does Dan provide evidence for the second part of his claim: that OBL approved the 9-11 attacks….But ‘approved’??? You mean he didnt mastermind it? Even Dan hasnt the gall to make that claim.
You cant seek formal criminal charges sans evidence!
Pity your attempts to dodge the Haas interview come apart so spectacularly.
FBI OBL page is still blank on 9-11. Ergo, no evidence.
Wow, one ‘interview’ on a website called Khilafa.com (linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir perhaps), which wasn’t even conducted face-to-face - the interviewee ’submitted questions for bin Laden to Taliban officials and received written replies’, with no guarantee as to whether the responses actually came from OBL.
That must be what the 9/11 Lies ‘movement’ calls an unimpeachable source.
But then let’s look at the evidence again, shall we?:
http://www.911myths.com/html/responsibility.html
And let’s have a look at the latest statements from Ayman al-Zawahiri, defending AQ’s actions against growing criticisms from Moslems (including ex-radicals such as the former leader of Al-Jihad, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, AKA ‘Dr Fadl’:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/02/080602fa_fact_wright
‘In presenting Al Qaeda’s defense [against critics like Dr Fadl], Zawahiri clearly displays the moral relativism that has taken over the organization. “Keep in mind that we have the right to do to the infidels what they have done to us,” he writes. “We bomb them as they bomb us, even if we kill someone who is not permitted to be killed.” He compares 9/11 to the 1998 American bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, in retaliation for Al Qaeda’s destruction of two American embassies in East Africa. (The U.S. mistakenly believed that the plant was producing chemical weapons.) “I see no difference between the two operations, except that the money used to build the factory was Muslim money and the workers who died in the factory’s rubble”—actually, a single night watchman—“were Muslims, while the money that was spent on the buildings that those hijackers destroyed was infidel money and the people who died in the explosion were infidels.” …
Zawahiri makes some telling psychological points; for instance, he says that the imprisoned Fadl is projecting his own weakness on the mujahideen, who have grown stronger since Fadl deserted them, fifteen years earlier. “The Islamic mujahid movement was not defeated, by the grace of God; indeed, because of its patience, steadfastness, and thoughtfulness, it is headed toward victory,” he writes. He cites the strikes on 9/11 and the ongoing battles in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, which he says are wearing America down…
As for 9/11, Zawahiri writes, “The mujahideen didn’t attack the West in its home country with suicide attacks in order to break treaties, or out of a desire to spill blood, or because they were half-mad, or because they suffer from frustration and failure, as many imagine. They attacked it because they were forced to defend their community and their sacred religion from centuries of aggression. They had no means other than suicide attacks to defend themselves.”’
And as his son recalls, ‘Dr Fadl’ never had any doubts about who was responsible for 9/11:
‘Dr. Fadl was practicing surgery in Ibb [Yemen] when the 9/11 attacks took place. “We heard the reports first on BBC Radio,” his son Ismail al-Sharif recalls. After his shift ended, Fadl returned home and watched the television coverage with his family. They asked him who he thought was responsible. “This action is from Al Qaeda, because there is no other group in the world that will kill themselves in a plane,” he responded.’
So much for the question of Al-Qaeda’s responsibility.
I understand full well that ‘The Power of Nightmares’ is an attractive source for a conspiracy theorist, being flashily presented but fact-poor, but it’s central idea is that the threat of terrorism is exaggerated, not that AQ doesn’t exist. Even this began to look seriously out of date soon after it was broadcast in late 2004 - particularly after London came under two waves of suicide attacks (one successful, one not) in July the following year. I can think of no better refutation of Adam Curtis’ ideas than this:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050620/bergen/3
But
The ‘bin Laden in a Dubai hospital in July 2001′ canard is also refuted here:
http://www.911myths.com/html/bin_ladin_met_the_cia.html
yoru 9-11 Myths sites with its seledctive quotation, lets go to the full article:
‘Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban said now that U.S. retaliatory attacks have begun, they are lifting all restrictions on Osama bin Laden and he is free to wage a holy war against the United States.
Taliban spokesman Abdul Hai Mutmaen made the announcement on Wednesday. Earlier in the day, bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network said that by striking Afghanistan, the U.S. has opened up a new door of animosity that will never be closed.
Spokesperson Suleiman Abu-Ghaith delivered the message on Qatar-based Al Jazeera television Tuesday.
Suleiman Abu-Ghaith
He addressed the “entire Islamic nation”, claiming U.S. President George W. Bush and his allies have banded together against the nations of Islam.
“This is the crusade Bush has promised us,” said Abu-Ghaith.
“The jihad is a duty of every Muslim. God says fight for the sake of God, and uphold the name of God.”
He issued a chilling warning to the U.S., saying there would be no peace until it stops supporting Israel and ends blockades against Iraq.
“The youths who did what they did and destroyed America, they have done a good deed,” he said. “The storm of airplanes will not stop. There are thousands of young people who look forward to death like the Americans look forward to living.”
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2001/10/09/alqaeda_warn011009.html
SO, it seems the US invaded afghanistan,and that led the taliban (not AQ) to unleashing Bin laden…Note, no mention here of OBLs being behind 9-11.
ah yes London. You may like to review the documentary: Ludicrous Diversions,:
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4943675105275097719
another false flag op, with little evidence of muslim involvement, and more 9-11 type anomalies. Like no video footage of the alleged bombers, and CCTV camera (4 of them) on the bus that was blown up, not working that day!
http://www.julyseventh.co.uk/7-7-cctv-evidence.html
Ive read Bergen, His efforts to refute Curtiss show him ann interesting patsy.
and as for al-Zarqawi…does he even exist?
‘The Zarqawi Phenomenon
by Dahr Jamail
A remarkable proportion of the violence taking place in Iraq is regularly credited to the Jordanian Ahmad al-Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and his organization al-Qaeda in Iraq. Sometimes it seems no car bomb goes off, no ambush occurs that isn’t claimed in his name or attributed to him by the Bush administration. Bush and his top officials have, in fact, made good use of him, lifting his reputed feats of terrorism to epic, even mythic, proportions (much aided by various mainstream media outlets). Given that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be based upon administration lies and manipulations, I had begun to wonder if the vaunted Zarqawi even existed.
In Amman, where I was recently based, random interviews with Jordanians only generated more questions and no answers about Zarqawi. As it happens, though, the Jordanian capital is just a short cab ride from Zarqa, the city Zarqawi is said to be from. So I decided to slake my curiosity about him by traveling there and nosing around his old neighborhood.
“Zarqawi, I don’t even know if he exists,” said a scruffy taxi driver in Amman, and his was a typical comment. “He’s like bin Laden, we don’t even know if he exists; but if he does, I support that he fights the U.S. occupation of Iraq.”
etc
http://antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=6552
Read the rest and consider that AZ like AQ is creation of the Evil Empire, to justify its invasion of and presence in the middle east.
Another middle east Scarlet Pimpernel:
‘American military forces said they nearly captured Mr. Zarqawi himself earlier this spring. He escaped only by he leaping from a moving vehicle, the military has said, leaving behind his computer, pistols and ammunition. His driver, Abu Usama, was captured in the incident.
Recent postings on Islamist Web sites had asserted that Mr. Zarqawi was badly wounded. A posting last month said he was in serious but stable condition with a bullet wound in his right lung and had fled Iraq. But in a subsequent statement attributed to Mr. Zarqawi, he assured followers that he had been only slightly wounded and was still in command of his forces in Iraq. It is impossible to ascertain his true condition or whereabouts.
American military officials said last month that they had killed or captured at least 20 of Mr. Zarqawi’s top lieutenants recently, including bomb makers, cell leaders and propaganda chiefs. They also say they have been getting more tips from Iraqis on the location of guerrillas
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/international/middleeast/16cnd-capture.html
Its amazing how the US is never able to capture such wanted men! Maybe thats the idea…They are the Evil Empire’s Immanuel Goldstein.
Sorry but Zarqwawi is hardly a trustworthy source of info. That you use him only serves to confirm he is a tool for the Empire.
a recent sample of confusion, that serves more to keep AQ in the news than prove it exists:
A U.S. military spokesman said a man detained Thursday in northern Iraq is not wanted terrorist Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of the Sunni insurgent group al Qaeda in Iraq.
“It’s not him,” the military spokesman said.
Iraqi police announced early Friday that al-Masri, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, had been found sleeping during a midnight raid of a house in the northern city of Mosul and had confessed his identity in an interrogation - a development that would have been a significant coup for Iraqi security forces.
The U.S. military spokesman, however, said there was apparently confusion because the man who was captured has a similar name.
etc
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/10/MN5F10K3RT.DTL
Zarqawi..another Immanuel Goldstein:
Emmanuel Goldstein is killed and then escapes again
by gjohnsit
Sun Nov 20, 2005 at 02:40:35 PM PDT
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by American troops yesterday in Iraq.
He was killed by American troops in March 2004 as well.
A muslim cleric says that al-Zarqawi was killed in 2003 by an American bombing mission.
You can be certain that he will be killed over and over again by our brave American troops in the years to come.
If this all sounds familiar then you probably read George Orwell’s 1984 in school.
al-Zarqawi has become a modern-day Emmanel Goldstein.
gjohnsit’s diary :: ::
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. [...] Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even — so it was occasionally rumoured — in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Orwell’s Goldstein character was modeled on a national leader like Trotsky, not some obscure terrorist from Jordan. However, the same propaganda methods are being used here.
…the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State.
Of course I’m not the only one who doubts the existence of al-Zarqawi. Just like Orwell’s Julia didn’t believe that Goldstein existed, many middle-east experts doubt the existence of al-Zarqawi.
Loretta Napoleoni, a terrorism expert and author of “Insurgent Iraq”, says that Abu Mus’ab Al Zarqawi, the alleged leader of armed groups in Iraq, is nothing but a myth created by the United States.
Al Zarqawi’s myth was born on February 2003, when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the UN Security Council the case for war with Iraq, said a United Press International editorial.
Speaking to reporters last week, Napoleoni said that Powell’s argument falsely exploited Zarqawi to support a fake link between the toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda network.
She said that through fabrications of Zarqawi, born in October 1966 in the Jordanian city of Zarqa, “the myth became the reality” - a self-fulfilling prophecy, the editorial said.
“He became what we wanted him to be. We put him there, not the Jihadists,” Napoleoni said. [...]
The United States has been using the Jordanian born rebel as a shadow to follow in every region inside or outside Iraq where it deems interference in necessary.
“Sometimes it seems no car bomb goes off, no ambush occurs that isn’t claimed in his name or attributed to him by the Bush administration. Bush and his top officials have, in fact, made good use of him. Given that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be based on administration lies and manipulations, I begun to wonder if the vaunted Zarqawi even existed,” stated an article by Dahr Jamail.
But wait! Isn’t this all tinfoil hat theories? No real country would actually do this sort of thing, right?
Wrong.
Back in the summer of 1954 Britain was occupying the Suez Canal and pressure was building for them to withdraw. Israel, Britain’s allie in this mid-east military adventure, opposed that withdrawl. So they launched Operation Suzannah. “The goal of the Operation was to carry out bombings and other acts of sabotage in Egypt with the aim of creating an atmosphere in which the British and American opponents of British withdrawal from Egypt would be able to gain the upper hand and block the withdrawal.”
The bombings caused little damage and no casualties, but once the Israeli agents were caught it evolved in the the ‘Levon Affair’. Several Israeli politicians had their careers ended.
Closer to home there was Operation Northwoods. The operation never actually happened, but the plan “called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.”
The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms.
Orwell’s future is not ours. Big Brother does not exist.
Quite simply, our government isn’t nearly competent enough to carry on this charade for long. One day al-Zarqawi won’t rise from the dead, and no one will take his place.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/11/20/174035/40
Zakqawi also died in 2006, as US sources:
Air raid kills al-Zarqawi
U.S. says it found most-wanted militant by tracking his spiritual adviser
The Associated Press
updated 4:37 p.m. ET June 8, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida leader in Iraq who waged a bloody campaign of suicide bombings and beheadings, was killed overnight by F-16 jets dropping two 500-pound bombs, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Thursday. It was a long-sought victory in the war in Iraq.
Al-Zarqawi and seven aides, including spiritual adviser Sheik Abdul Rahman, were killed inside a building in a remote area 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, officials said.
U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell showed what he said was a picture of al-Zarqawi after he was killed, and a videotape of an attack in which he said F-16 fighter jets dropped two 500-pound bombs on the site.
“We had absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Zarqawi was in the house,” Caldwell said.
‘Painstaking intelligence effort’
The spokesman said U.S. and Iraqi intelligence found al-Zarqawi by following his spiritual adviser.
“Through a painstaking intelligence effort, we were able to start tracking him, monitor his movements and establish when he was doing his linkup with al-Zarqawi,” he said. “What everyone needs to understand is the strike last night did not occur in a 24-hour period.”
Caldwell also said U.S. and Iraqi troops carried out 17 raids around Baghdad following al-Zarqawi’s killing.
“It truly was a very long, painstaking, deliberate exploitation of intelligence, information gathering, human sources, electronics, signal intelligence that was done over a period of time, many, many weeks,” Caldwell said.
Earlier Thursday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had called a press conference to announce that “al-Zarqawi was terminated.”
At the White House, President Bush hailed the killing as “a severe blow to al-Qaida and it is a significant victory in the war on terror.”
But he cautioned, “We have tough days ahead of us in Iraq that will require the continuing patience of the American people.”
Al-Qaida in Iraq confirmed al-Zarqawi’s death and vowed to continue its “holy war,” according to a statement posted on a Web site.
“We want to give you the joyous news of the martyrdom of the mujahed sheik Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
“The death of our leaders is life for us. It will only increase our persistence in continuing holy war so that the word of God will be supreme.”
Identification efforts
Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said the hunt for al-Zarqawi began two weeks ago, and his body was identified by fingerprints and facial recognition.
Forensic experts are conducting a DNA test on Zarqawi and results are expected in 48 hours, he said.
There were six people in the house bombed by U.S. warplanes, including a woman and a child, but only Zarqawi and Abdul-Rahman have been identified. Zarqawi’s identification was verified at 3:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, Caldwell said.
Two photographs of the corpse of the bearded Zarqawi with his eyes shut were displayed at the news conference. His body lay in a pool of blood. His nostrils were filled with blood and there were gashes to his cheek and forehead.
Video from the scene of the attack showed children scrambling over a flattened jumble of cinderblocks, concrete reinforcing bars, blankets, blue plastic bowls and other debris. A pickup truck was scorched and crushed.
Two young members of the crowd held up a child’s sandal, a backpack with a teddy bear on it and a stuffed animal. The rubble was across a dirt road from a grove of palm trees.
Jordanian intelligence
The news came amid more reports of violence in Iraq, with three bombs in Baghdad killing at least 25 people and wounding more than 55.
The announcement about al-Zarqawi’s death came six days after he issued an audiotape on the Internet, railing against Shiites in Iraq and saying militias were raping women and killing Sunnis. He urged the community to fight back.
The Jordanian-born terrorist was Iraq’s most-wanted militant — as notorious as Osama bin Laden, to whom he swore allegiance in 2004. The United States put a $25 million bounty on his head, the same as bin Laden. Al-Maliki told al-Arabiya television the bounty would be honored, saying “we will meet our promise,” without elaborating.
Al-Zarqawi is believed to have beheaded two Americans — Nicholas Berg of West Chester, Pa., and Eugene Armstrong, formerly of Hillsdale, Mich. — prompting supporters to dub him “the slaughtering sheik.”
Al-Maliki said the Wednesday night airstrike by U.S. forces was based on intelligence reports provided to Iraqi security forces by area residents.
A Jordanian official said the kingdom also provided the U.S. military with information that helped track down al-Zarqawi, who claimed responsibility for a November triple suicide bombing against Amman hotels that killed 60.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was addressing intelligence issues, would not elaborate, but Jordan is known to have agents operating in Iraq to hunt down Islamic militants.
Some of the information came from Jordan’s sources inside Iraq and led the U.S. military to the area of Baqouba, the official said.
‘An open battle’
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said a serious effort to find al-Zarqawi had been underway since he appeared in a videotape in late April — the same week messages were broadcast by bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri.
He said the location in which al-Zarqawi appeared in the videotape had been “pinpointed,” without elaborating.
Baqouba has in recent weeks seen a spike in sectarian violence, including the discovery of 17 severed heads in fruit boxes. It also was near the site of a sectarian atrocity last week in which masked gunmen killed 21 Shiites, including a dozen students pulled from minibuses, after separating out four Sunni Arabs.
“Those who disrupt the course of life, like al-Zarqawi, will have a tragic end,” al-Maliki said. He also warned those who would follow the militant’s lead that “whenever there is a new al-Zarqawi, we will kill him.”
“This is a message for all those who embrace violence, killing and destruction to stop and to (retreat) before it’s too late,” he said. “It is an open battle with all those who incite sectarianism.”
A U.S. defense intelligence official, who requested anonymity while events were unfolding, said there is no intelligence indicating that extremists planned attacks that would be triggered by al-Zarqawi’s death.
However, the official said, with his death, there may be some retaliation.
Blair: ‘A significant step’
It was not clear to American authorities who would succeed al-Zarqawi as the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. The official noted that a number of al-Zarqawi’s deputies have been taken out in recent months, which could cause chaos among the group’s top tier.
In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said al-Zarqawi’s death “was very good news because a blow against al-Qaida in Iraq was a blow against al-Qaida everywhere.”
In Jordan, al-Zarqawi’s older brother said the insurgent leader was a martyr, and the family had long expected his death. Al-Zarqawi’s family had renounced him in the wake of the Amman bombings.
Al-Zarqawi oversaw a wave of kidnappings of foreigners and the killings of at least a dozen, including Arab diplomats and three Americans. He also was a master Internet propagandist, spreading the call for Islamic extremists to join the “jihad,” or holy war, in Iraq. His group posted gruesome images of beheadings, speeches by al-Zarqawi and recruitment videos depicting the planning and execution of its most daring attacks.
Iraqi citizens had mixed reactions to the news of al-Zarqawi’s death.
Thamir Abdulhussein, a college student in Baghdad, said he hoped the killing would promote peace between the fractured ethnic and sectarian groups.
“If it’s true al-Zarqawi was killed, that will be a big happiness for all the Iraqis,” he said. “He was behind all the killings of Sunni and Shiites. Iraqis should now move toward reconciliation. They should stop the violence.”
Amir Muhammed Ali, a 45-year-old stock broker in Baghdad, was skeptical that al-Zarqawi’s death would end the unrelenting sectarian violence and said the Iraqi resistance to U.S.-led forces likely would continue.
“He didn’t represent the resistance, someone will replace him and the operations will go on,” he said.
Missed chances
In the past year, al-Zarqawi moved his campaign beyond Iraq’s borders to Jordan and Lebanon, where he claimed responsibility for a rocket attack from Lebanon into northern Israel.
U.S. forces and their allies came close to capturing al-Zarqawi several times since his campaign began in mid-2003.
The closest brush may have come in late 2004. Deputy Interior Ministry Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal said Iraqi security forces caught al-Zarqawi near the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah but then released him because they did not realize who he was.
In May 2005, Web statements by his group said al-Zarqawi had been wounded in fighting with Americans and was being treated in a hospital abroad — raising speculation over a successor among his lieutenants. But days later, a statement said al-Zarqawi was fine and had returned to Iraq. There was never any independent confirmation that he was wounded.
U.S. forces believe they just missed capturing al-Zarqawi in a Feb. 20, 2005, raid in which troops closed in on his vehicle west of Baghdad near the Euphrates River. His driver and another associate were captured and al-Zarqawi’s computer was seized along with pistols and ammunition.
© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13195017/
‘Zarqawi took responsibility, on several audio- and videotapes, for numerous acts of violence in Iraq including suicide bombings and hostage executions’
no evidence that these were authentic, and no way to show whose hands the tapes had passed thru…So not proof of anything.
‘believed’ ’seems’ words used for Zarqawi:
‘He is believed responsible for dispatching numerous suicide bombers throughout Iraq to attack American soldiers and areas with large concentrations of Shia militias. He is also believed responsible for the 2005 bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan.[2] He was not a Jordanian by nation but he seems to be an Iraqi born national and his place of birth is said to be Til Afar on the western boundary of Iraq.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi
No evidence he did anything that he ‘claimed’ on the videos/audios or that the US ascribes to him.
‘On May 24, 2005, it was reported on an Islamic website that a deputy would take command of Al-Qaeda while Zarqawi recovered from injuries sustained in an attack.[112] Later that week the Iraqi government confirmed that Zarqawi had been wounded by U.S. forces, although the battalion did not realize it at the time. The extent of his injuries is not known, although some radical Islamic websites called for prayers for his health.[112] There are reports that a local hospital treated a man, suspected to be Zarqawi, with severe injuries. He was also said to have subsequently left Iraq for a neighbouring country, accompanied by two physicians. However, later that week the radical Islamic website retracted its report about his injuries and claimed that he was in fine health and was running the jihad operation.’==
‘Islamic’ website cant make its mind up?
Sackcloth and Ashes wrote:
“Fraser is here alluding to the received wisdom about the CIA ‘training’ bin Laden and his fighters during the Afghan war in the 1980s”
Actually I was thinking more of the US support for the terrorist organisations such as MEK and Jundullah who are currently attempting to cause chaos in Iran.
“US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1543798/US-funds-terror-groups-to-sow-chaos-in-Iran.html
http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/5551
Seymour Hersh: US Training Jondollah and MEK for Bombing preparation | Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh
Annals of National Security: Preparing the Battlefield: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92025860
Seymour Hersh On Covert Operations In Iran : NPR
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1552784/Bush-sanctions-%27black-ops%27-against-Iran.html
Bush sanctions ‘black ops’ against Iran - Telegraph
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/31/cheney-proposal-for-iran-war/
Think Progress » EXCLUSIVE: To Provoke War, Cheney Considered Proposal To Dress Up Navy Seals As Iranians And Shoot At Them
You still here, Brian?
‘Sorry but Zarqwawi is hardly a trustworthy source of info. That you use him only serves to confirm he is a tool for the Empire.’
I’d take you a bit more seriously if you could (1) spell and (2) differentiate between Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who you clearly think are the same person. But then that just goes to show how superficial your understanding of all these issues is. Which is why you keep at this obsessively even though every single claim you make has been refuted.
‘Islamic’ website cant make its mind up?’
Well, neither can you Brian. After all, in the course of this thread you have first claimed that the hijackers were patsies, then that they were Mossad collaborators; that there were no fires in WTC7, and then that there was no evidence of ‘fires in all windows’; that AQ does not exist, that it does exist but that it’s a CIA creation; that the New York Times is a Pentagon shill (except when you cite its articles) … I could go on.
When it comes down to it, you ‘truthers’ aren’t even capable of offering any coherent theory except ‘It’s a conspiracy, waaagh!’. At least the kooks who got fixated on JFK actually came up with a concept other than ‘just asking questions’.
Any luck with the Walmart job yet?
Fraser, just for once, you may actually be correct in something, except that Jundollah and MEK are not Islamist groups. In any case, if you were to look into the plight of ethnic Arabs and Baluchis in Iran more closely, you might actually realise that they have their own reasons for taking up arms against Iran’s theocracy (Ahvaz Arab terrorists were, after all, the people who took over the Iranian embassy in London in May 1980). In any case, if they’re running around slotting members of the Pasdaran, am I seriously upset? No. It’s called national liberation, stupid.
Incidentally, the articles you cite are more equivocal on suspected US assistance than you imply. You do have a problem with actually reading and comprehending your sources, Fraser. Maybe those few extra seconds spend reading beyond the quotes you mined might help:
A row has also broken out in Washington over whether to “unleash” the military wing of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iraq-based Iranian opposition group with a long and bloody history of armed opposition to the Iranian regime.
The group is currently listed by the US state department as terrorist organisation, but Mr Pike said: “A faction in the Defence Department wants to unleash them. They could never overthrow the current Iranian regime but they might cause a lot of damage.”
In other words, assistance to dissident Iranian groups is being debated.
There’s also the time-honoured manner of fitting people up, and of inventing internal threats, which the Iranians have been particularly prone to do. The funny thing you ‘truthers’ don’t pick up on is that there are governments who will do false flag operations and staged bombings, but seeing as they usually tend to be anti-Western you don’t really pick up on that, do you?
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE13/005/2007/en/dom-MDE130052007en.html
“Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally “the database”, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden’s organisation would turn its attention to the west.”
(Robin Cook MP, The Guardian, Friday July 8 2005)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jul/08/july7.development
Robin Cook: The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means | UK news | The Guardian
“In an interview, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser, admits that it was US policy to support radical Islamists to undermine Russia. He admits that US covert action drew Russia into starting the Afghan war in 1979 (see July 3, 1979). Asked if he has regrets about this, he responds, “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Then he is asked if he regrets “having given arms and advice to future terrorists,” and he responds, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” The interviewer then says, “Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.” But Brzezinski responds, “Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam….”
(History Commons)
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a011598stirredup#a011598stirredup
Context of ‘January 15, 1998: Former National Security Adviser Has No Regrets Giving ‘Arms and Advice to Future Terrorists’’
Sackcloth wrote:
“Just to follow up on Fraser’s point, the date was actually correct, but the journal wasn’t ‘Newsweek’ - it was the NYT.
A slight discrepancy, perhaps, but then it just goes to show how slack the ‘truthers’ are at verifying their sources.”
Here, again is a link to the article………
http://www.mywire.com/pubs/Newsweek/2001/09/15/316109?extID=10051
MyWire | Newsweek: Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained at U.S. Bases
Newsweek.
15th September 2001
Ok ?
A great deal of speculation over the whole 911 issue is founded not on counterknowledge, but on knowledge. I believe many of vanguards of the 911 government complicity thing have a good insight into the workings of US policy.
The Washington think tank document called Project for a new American Century, makes interesting reading. Add to it the subsequent American foreign and domestic policies after 911 and it would arouse suspicion in any rational person.
The humanitarian issue does not really wash, when you look into the USA’s humanitarian attrocities. worldwide under the cover of puppet regimes.
The US is a little bit in the poop, perhaps Europe as well.
Hence the push for economic globalization, or in other words domination of free markets overseas. Or military action on non compliant states…that dont have nukes!
Its revealing that so many people worldwide think so low of the US government that they suspect it may be complicit in mass murder of its own citizens.
You could always consult the evidence, Steve. I know that’s boring, and time consuming, and it’s easier to link to hooky websites, but still.
Oh, and Fraser, your Brzezinski quote refers to Islamist Afghan groups with parochial objectives, not al-Qaeda. In any case, if you’d consulted a history book, you’d see that ZB was only aware of Afghan covert ops for a short period of time - namely mid-1979 to January 1981 (when the Reagan administration came into office). Nice try, though,
Actually S & A, I tend to satisfy any mild curiosity I have on the issue with published literature, not “kooky websites”. So dont be labelling me and assume to discredit me as a kook conspiracy loon truther or whatever.
You come across as arrogant and presumptious, who are to you to presume I dont have the time or attention span to research an issue.
You dont even know what my take is on the issue, you just presume to know because I pointed out how the US exploited the event, and raisede an eyebrow at PNAC.
Not quite sure what youre getting at with the Islamic Afghan groups not being Al Qaeda.
Al qaeda is a western term,
Is there really any organisation that titles itself by this name ? ( carefull now…I will check).
I believe its a term coined as the new threat to the world, the new communism.
I would never claim that terrorism is not a problem…it always has been and always will be.
The IRA era, that was terror threat far in excess of what we now face in this new “Age of terror”.
The only terror attack in the US since 9/11 has been the anthrax attacks, perpetrated from within the government biowarfare dept (albeit by an alleged rogue element). Even this affair absolutely stinks of fish if you look in to it.
Anthrax attacks on US citizens from within its biowarfare dept………must be have been surefire counterknowledge once upon a time eh?
“Vinny” wrote:
“I see what you’re getting at in respect of novels: that the stuff of fictional narrative can’t be subjected to rational criticism. Many materialist-minded souls would disagree with you on that and take you to task further in that regard.”
So what is so bad about fiction presenting ideas that are not “rational”, anyway? It’s _fiction_, it’s not reality nor does it claim it is, and in that context it would seem perfectly okay to do. Why is it not?
“But government decision makers ease up on it every now and then, and I think the rest of us should be given a bit of slack, too. Especially when we’re not likely to start wars and that.”
But *not* because government decision-makers ease up on it, otherwise you’d be saying we should all be held to the same standards as the government who has way more power than any ordinary individual. And that’s just crazy.
‘You come across as arrogant and presumptious, who are to you to presume I dont have the time or attention span to research an issue.’
Well, Steve, you more or less prove my point with this comment.
‘Al qaeda is a western term,
Is there really any organisation that titles itself by this name ?’
Utterly wrong. ‘Al Qaeda’ translates from Arabic as either ‘the base’ or ‘the foundation’. As Burke notes, the latter term is usually applied, as it refers to the philosophical and ideological attitudes of those who share Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s inherent hostility to the West, and their radical Salafist beliefs. Al-Qaeda is more than just an organisation (and a very loosely configured one at that), it is a mindset and a belief system in its own right. And it is most assuredly not a Western invention.
Furthermore, if you had followed the pre-9/11 record of the USA’s counter-terrorist policies, you will have seen not a fixed determination to find a bogey-man and present AQ as ‘the new threat’, but a confused and half-hearted effort as competing bureaucracies in Washington struggled to come conceptually to grips with the idea of a security threat to their country that was not state-based. The same could be said of the manner in which the Major and Blair governments tolerated the activities of Abu Hamza and other jihadi preachers in the UK during the 1990s, even though they had a role in inciting terrorist attacks elsewhere. It was after all frustrated French counter-terrorism officials who coined the phrase ‘Londonistan’, not Mad Melanie Philips.
So you see that it is not ‘arrogant and presumptious’ of me to say that you don’t know what you’re talking about. I know from reading your comments that you don’t know jack shit.
I am quite aware of AQ’s literal meaning, and that it was not invented by the west.
It is a catch-all term over-used by western media to brand any and all islamic militant groups or individuals. As you rightly point out it was rarely refered to before 9/11, the war on Terror and the war for public opinion needed to wage war without UN support.
I am in no doubt about Burke’s credentials, If his book is any example he seems a very objective and unbiased writer / journalist and I wholly agree with your comments based on this.
Dont agree with you 100% on your delightful closing comment….but not to worry, no offense taken.
‘As you rightly point out it was rarely refered to before 9/11, the war on Terror and the war for public opinion needed to wage war without UN support.’
I distinctly recall the phrase ‘Al Qaeda’ being used by the US government and the international press (including the BBC, The Independent etc) to describe those responsible for the 7 August 1998 East Africa bombings, and the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000.
So, rarely then !
Truly dispicable acts of Terrorism as they all are, and apparently perpetrated by OBL or those with close association, hence fitting the description of AQ as we know it.
And I distinctly recall the US bombing Sudans main Pharmaceutical plant in retalliation, based on flawed intelligence.
Not to mention motivating a further terrorist attack in a Capetown Planet Hollywood, and alledgedly prompting Ayman al-Zawahiri to make a phone call to a Newsweek reporter, stating that “The war has only just begun; the Americans should now await the answer.”
‘So, rarely then !’
No, as often as AQ became newsworthy by their actions (I should also add that there were the millenium plots of 1999 as well). And given that most of the press was more concerned about Monica Lewinsky than they were about what was happening in Afghanistan, the lack of press attention should not be attributed to anything other than the superficiality of media coverage at the time.
‘Here, again is a link to the article………
http://www.mywire.com/pubs/Newsweek/2001/09/15/316109?extID=10051
MyWire | Newsweek: Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained at U.S. Bases
Newsweek.
15th September 2001
Ok ?’
That’s fine, Fraser, so long as you accept that it’s been completely rebutted, and there’s no shred of evidence to connect these individuals with the 9/11 hijackers:
http://www.911myths.com/html/trained.html
Incidentally, if we’re looking at coincidences with names, one of the Northern Alliance commanders in Afghanistan was also called Mohamed Atta. By Fraser’s standards of evidence, that would mean that the Afghan anti-Taliban commander and the Egyptian jihadi were one and the same.
So not even AQ & infinite reach could detract media attention from Billy poking his warhead where he shouldnt have been!
An example of the media averting attention from significant but bad press to the more trashy scandalous gutterpress type issues.
(Incidentaly I did read somewhere that over 5 times more money was spent investigating the Lewinsky thing than was spent on the 9/11 commision.)
Steve, I can’t say I disagree with you. But it does also reflect on the ‘truth’ movement as well, as I doubt very much that any of them would have heard about AQ - or have been able to point to Afghanistan on a map - prior to the attacks on NY and Washington exactly seven years ago.
Barry Jennings passes away Aug 19th 2008.
God bless his soul.
I have seen 9/11 ‘alternate explanation’ documentaries. I have seen the little explosions on the levels of the towers just before they collapse. I cannot pretend to have asked myself, ‘what the heck is going on here’? But I cannot draw any conclusions simply because I am not in command of all the facts. And even if I were, I cannot adequately analyse them. I am not an engineer; I am not a physicist; I am not a chemist; I am not a sociologist; I am not a psychologist; I am not a firefighter; I am not a police officer.
I think it unreasonable to believe that the Government is telling us everything. Governments mislead and outright lie. But not always for conspiratorial reasons. Sometimes they seek to avoid public panic and speculation. And yes, perhaps they seek to protect public officers who failed in their public duty to protect citizens and property. So I do not blindly believe governments.
However it makes no sense to explain the unexplained by a conspiracy. It is a monumental leap of judgement, hurtling over a chasm of rationality. The conspiracy explanations of 9/11 make no sense whatsoever. We have heard that it was engineering to provide a pretext for war. But thousands of lives is an especially bloody price for a war that, as far as the Bush administration was concerned, ALREADY HAD A PRETEXT! We have heard that it was used as a pretext to pass the Patriot Act that threatens American liberties. But anyone with eyes to see could be aware that the Administration was threatening civil rights long before 9/11. We have heard that the buildings were destroyed to claim the insurance. ???????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Why perpetrate such an elaborate, bloody, heartless scam when many businesspeople are making far much more money by dispossessing families, selling debts and selling worthless shares? And then you have the problem that all conspiracy theories have: why is everyone shutting up about it? No, George W. Bush may be a C average President. He may be misinformed, prejudiced, slanted by business interests, ifnorant, etc. But he is not a bloody monster in the mould of Hitler, Mugabe and Idi Amin.
What is important is that America, and the world, suffered a terrible human tragedy. The importance consideration is the people. If someone is shot by an arrow, you don’t immediately ask yourself who shot the person. First of all, you take the arrow out and tend the wound.
The Conspiracy Files (CF) was no Panorama. Branded on the BBC website in lurid green X files font, and set aside an alien eye, few in the 9/11 truth movement held out much hope that this would be a probing interrogation of authority, something the BBC doesn’t do so well since the Hutton whitewash. Having watched the third and presumably final of its 9/11 installations I was reminded of Mark Byford, the acting Director General after that fiasco when he said “The notion of exclusive here, exclusive there, exclusive everywhere is not appropriate for the BBC.” We can imagine then that fingering key officials from the boss side of the special Anglo American relationship as suspects in mass murder might have been deemed a particularly inappropriate exclusive. We could only be grateful that in certain key respects the format deviated sharply from its more primitive ancestor The Conspiracy Files 1 in which Popular Mechanics was touted as something of an authority. PM was then introduced as ‘a no nonsense nuts and bolts magazine’ as though David Ray Griffin’s Debunking 9/11 Debunking had not shown their book to have spouted so much nonsense that it made the comic book version of the 9/11 Commission report look like an exhaustive historical narrative. The BBC trundled on down the yellow journalism highway, faithfully using the PM template of straw men, well poisoners and downright falsehoods. Didn’t you know that locating the hijacked planes was like searching for ‘a needle in a haystack’ - one blip amongst 4,500 identical blips? It wasn’t. To see a briefer dismantling of the nuts and bolts of the PM propaganda juggernaut see http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/gopm/indexg.html
It is a given that within an hour long slot justice cannot be done to all the pertinent facts of a case as complex as 9/11.. It is nonetheless true however that the approach of the programme is revealed by the limited range of facts and witnesses it chooses to include as representative of the movement it purports to examine. The supreme confidence that no conspiracy other than the official one is possible, expressed in the blogs and interviews of editor Mike Rudin and producer Guy Smith is instructive as to whether bias was likely to creep into their programs. Sure enough the prejudice was extreme in the first Conspiracy Files episode with the viewer being told what to conclude in no uncertain terms. The bias was apparent even to my father, then a staunch believer in the four wonder pilots and friends directed by the dialysis patient in the cave take America by surprise shtick. The Truth about the Third Tower was more subtle than that.
At least we were no longer being represented by Jim ‘no planes’ Fetzer, pariah in chief to those seeking a new investigation and the only academic representative of the 9/11 truth movement in that first episode. Fetzer had looked every bit as maniacal as you would expect from someone who reckons invisible space beams blew up the towers. Consistent with the original however were the one sided claims of harassment of officials and offense to victims’ families which no doubt elicited a sympathetic bias in some technically overwhelmed viewers. The Conspiracy Files once again declined the opportunity to report the death threats aimed at dissident researchers , the illustrious careers ruined by politically incorrect convictions or the fact that it was the victims’ families themselves and their unanswered questions that generated and sustain the 9/11 truth movement. I wondered where the alleged comfort came from, ubiquitously proffered by so many would be Freuds in both episodes and all over the BBC website, of drawing a conclusion that ostracizes and brings accusations of aiding and abetting the enemy. This bizarre psychologising of ‘conspiratorial thinking’ as somehow being a need driven thought process can easily be turned on its head. How is it more comforting to believe that people within your own government will kill its own citizens? Is it not obviously true that it is always more comfortable and psychologically tempting to believe or at least profess similar beliefs to those around you? Do the impeccably credentialed experts within aviation, intelligence, the architects and engineers and former first rank government officials say that 9/11 was an inside job because they have a perverse need to believe they know something most people don’t or because they find the evidence persuasive and feel that it’s imperative that people know about it? If the BBC wanted to talk about the psychology of beliefs it might have started with wishful/fearful thinking, paradigmatic thinking and irrational patriotic mythologies. Most of us would prefer to get down to the facts, although by billing this as the ‘final mystery’ of 9/11 the BBC would have you believe they’d already done just that. Auntie beeb must have figured it all out: who profited from insider trading; what Mahmood Ahmed was doing meeting with US intelligence officials and CIA director George Tenet shortly after wiring $100,000 to Mohammad Atta - and so on and so forth. She just forgot to fill us in.
The Third Tower opened with a rundown of the Loose Change phenomenon, telling us that now there is a new edition for the ‘big screen’ (Loose Change Final Cut) conspiracy theories have become ‘big business’ and thereby planting the idea that the profit motive is a key factor in propagating doubts about the official story. Is this true? Are Dylan Avery and chums now living it up, flushed with the riches of their cynical exploits? Hardly, that smacks of being a lame conspiracy theory to me. The film was shown in independent theatres only and was soon available to watch for free on google video, something Miramax and Paramount don’t do last time I checked. In fact co creator Jason Bermas could be heard on the radio encouraging people to support the film makers by buying the original but also to burn copies and distribute them freely.
The Conspiracy Files blithely mentioned in passing the destroyed evidence of the world’s most spectacular and unprecedented building disaster. The programme makers were sufficiently lacking in curiosity to bother asking investigators why the first and most fundamental step in any investigation - preserving the evidence - was not followed in this case. Why did this betrayal of empiricism, this ‘half baked farce’ in the words of Fire Engineering magazine go unchallenged? Instead we were presented with alleged certainty about an internal collapse scenario that was invisible, a black box ostensibly made believable by computer simulation. It didn’t take a trained engineer’s eye to see however that the perimeter walls, heavily crashing inwards early on in the simulation didn’t remotely resemble what happened in reality. But I was reassured that these inferences were based on an impressive dossier of photographs that no one else is allowed to see. This was Bush science par excellence – NIST is an agency of the government’s Department of Commerce and its head is appointed by the president. See a preliminary critique of their simulation here http://www.911blogger.com/node/17794
Narrator Caroline Katz’s voice was imperious, almost hypnotic in its silky, snide authority. The rhetorical question came, triumphant ‘Early evidence of explosives or just debris from a falling skyscraper?’ Had it been truly intent on discovering the truth to this question the CF team might have asked Barry Jennings why he told the Loose change creators he looked out of the windows and saw both towers were still standing after he experienced the explosions. Given that it seemed to make a point of suggesting that Jennings was misrepresented by Dylan Avery, the BBC showed a notable lack of curiosity and journalistic rigour in failing to ask a simple follow up question here. Namely why did the firefighter keep telling Jennings not to look down if there were not indeed bodies in the lobby which in the Loose Change interview he clearly stated he could feel?. And what were his feet stepping into that resembled the sensation of human bodies? Did he make it all up? If his testimony was innocuous why did he cite threats to his job when asking the loose Change crew not to include his interview in the Final Cut? Sadly Jennings has now passed away and these glaring contradictions will remain unresolved, thanks in part to the Third Tower crew apparently dropping the ball on questions that would occur to any sixth form media student. Such lines of inquiry, fascinating and suspicious as they are, are peripheral in the face of unimpeachable physical evidence that all 3 towers were demolished.
Michael Hess, New York City’s corporation counsel and long time friend of Rudolph Giuliani broke a 7 year silence to chime in with a story that like Jennings, radically contradicted his earlier account which had left little room to interpret the explosions as being caused by the collapse of the north tower. Perhaps he now felt comfortable knowing that Jennings could no longer contradict the party line. NIST’s timeline (unmentioned but implicitly supported by the CF) stated that Jennings and Hess were only rescued at 12:10-12:15. The problem for NIST and the CF is that Hess had been interviewed by UPN 9 news about a half mile from WTC7 before noon on 9/11! Contrary to the vague revisionist assertions, be they wilful deception or wishful confabulation, the evidence from the day points to the explosions occurring well before the first tower fell and NIST’s timeline appears designed to deny this.
Referring to Danny Jowenko, the CF said ‘Loose change has found one demolition expert who thinks he knows what happened after looking at a video.’ The narrator emphasised the words ‘one’ (false) and ‘thinks’ in contrast to her emphasis on the word ‘certain’ when talking about government investigators, thereby subtly weighting the viewers’ bias towards the official investigators - a technique employed throughout the programme. The CF led the viewer to believe that Jowenko’s judgment was merely an instantaneous reaction by silencing the fact that Jowenko subsequently studied the towers blueprints and confirmed his conclusion in a later interview. The Conspiracy Files falsely implied that Jowenko is alone amongst demolition experts in believing building 7 was demolished. Furthermore by contrasting ‘one’ with ‘Other demolition experts disagree’ it remarkably conflated the silence of the huge majority with consensus, perhaps deluding itself as to the fishiness of the small circle of professionally interdependent individuals denouncing the vocal concerns of hundreds of professionally qualified ‘conspiracy theorists.’ The burgeoning body of evidence of these engineering and architectural ‘conspiracy theorists’ is now documented in established peer reviewed journals, although this is clearly a trifling matter as the CF decided not to tell you that. No, the crux of the matter was to show random protesters being accosted in the street and demanding that they precisely explain the ‘grand narrative’ of what happened that day, something they might be in a stronger position to do had journalists done their jobs - perhaps asking a few hundred useful questions such as why many of the masterful hijackers were given visas without even listing destinations, let alone addresses in their applications.
The CF allowed lead NIST investigator Shyam Sunder a free pass with the most flagrant sophistry when it allowed him to include the precipitous fall of the Penthouse at the top of the building in his calculation of the towers global rate of collapse. He then claimed that the towers fell at 40% slower than free fall speed. This is akin to concluding that Lewis Hamilton’s car never reached racing speed in a F1 race by factoring in a 15 mph amble to the starting line and then calculating an average speed. The fact that the initial penthouse drop and kink in the centre of the building is indicative of a demolition style implosion designed to pull the walls inwards passed unmentioned. Sunder’s conclusion that the building fell at 40 % slower than free fall speed was based on a further fallacious assumption. Namely “Assuming that the descent speed was approximately constant…” (NIST summary p40) but all calculations by other scientists I can find agree that it was not constant – it accelerated at a rate close enough to free fall as to be indistinguishable from known demolitions. One must ask why this years long study made such an ostensibly sloppy assumption when they confronted one of the most oft cited evidences for controlled demolition. See the frame by frame analysis presented by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth.
The deceptiveness of NIST’s starting point for countdown is revealed in this analysis of a clip from the offending programme. Note how cooly Sunder sells the 40% slower idea, unlike his colleague Gross below, denying molten steel.
So Mark Loizeaux was incredulous at the idea that nano thermites, which cut through steel like a hot knife through butter could make all the columns in the building fail simultaneously (a necessary fact for an instantaneous symmetric collapse), yet he is perfectly comfortable believing that random and sporadic fires largely confined to one side of the building could achieve this world first result? Can an unseated girder (NIST) cause the systematic and total failure of 400 structural syeel connections per second? Presumably Mr Loizeaux now fears for his demolitions business since anybody can get a fire going, identifying the one key column on which the whole structure depends and hey presto - a tidy demolition style global implosion to order! Loizeaux laboured the point of how complex and time consuming ‘wiring’ such a building would be with miles of rather conspicuous cabling. I had to ask here whether he was feigning oblivion to that modern wonder called radio control. Loizeaux’s fatal blow – that a demolition would have blasted out a whole lot of nearby windows echoed NIST’s singular answer to all the evidence favouring demolition – it would have caused a real racket. Leaving aside the fact that it did (see first responders Kevin McPadden and Bartimer) the NIST team of all people know perfectly well that no one is suggesting the building was taken down with conventional C4 plastic explosives. That would be pretty stupid, running a high risk of trace detection in the rubble, despite the fact the cleanup team were not looking for any evidence of explosives, violating fire code NFPA 921. (Contrary to the unchallenged claims of one interviewee in the CF, NIST have admitted this). The NIST team is expertly acquainted with the properties of nano thermites which are perfectly consistent with these features. See here.http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/Ryan_NIST_and_Nano-1.pdf.
The CF assured us that ‘unique to building 7‘s collapse was the phenomenon of thermal expansion’ (a ‘new’ phenomenon according to Sunder at NIST’s press conference). Unfortunately the programme never quite tells us how steel acquired a new physical property on and only on 9/11, thereby leaving property owners, engineers, architects and firefighters hanging as to whether they too might soon fall victim to this hitherto unknown and mysterious property of structural steel. Contemplate the injustice of the dreaded ‘conspiracy theorist’ pejorative not being tagged on those who claim the universe conspired to change the laws of physics on 9/11
The Conspiracy Files helpfully informed us that the steel hadn’t melted but cited Professor Richard Sisson’s new quote that it had ‘eroded’ or better yet ‘cooked’ in the rubble pile. This gave the uninitiated the impression that this is a gradual and natural process like overcooking the turkey. It was certainly odd that Professor Sisson chose to steer the public away from the dangerous meme that steel had melted since ‘intergranular melting’ and simply ‘melting’ were precisely the terms he himself had used as co author of Appendix C in the FEMA report on WTC7. In this report the steel in the summary for sample 1 is referred to as having been ‘liquefied’. Most would agree that when a solid turns to a liquid state it has melted and apparently Sisson once agreed too. Sisson and his colleagues had called for further study and access to more samples yet NIST played deaf to this request, not even mentioning the phenomenon in their report and slating another glaring 9/11 counter fact for the memory hole. Were it a natural, as yet unexplained and presumably localized anomaly, what are the odds that it was manifested in the one piece of steel retained from building 7? It was curious too to hear Sisson tell us in a paternal fashion that he ‘doesn’t find it strange at all’ that structural steel beams ‘turned to swiss cheese’ - supposedly under a smouldering oxygen- deficient rubble pile that was drenched with thousands of gallons of water. It was curious because:
(a) This has never been observed before except in the presence of accelerants such as nano thermates,
(b) There is no theoretical hypothesis, let alone tested hypothesis to explain the precise mirroring of the chemical signature of a thermate reaction.
(c) The earlier comments of Professor Sisson, a materials science professor reveals on the website of his own institution that the steel ‘shocked all of the fire wise professors’. This was after his analysis and report on the state of the steel. Professor Sisson was at that time asked whether the steel melted before or after the building was levelled. ‘We have no idea ‘ was his reply. Indeed Sisson’s FEMA study had concluded that it was ‘possible that the phenomenon started prior to collapse and accelerated the weakening of the steel structure.’
The Conspiracy Files viewer was kept in the dark on all of this.
There is no information on the public record that can explain the transition from Sisson’s disbelief in the state of the steel, describing it as a ‘highly unusual event’ to making such a bold claim as ‘it’s exactly what you would expect to find’ What could make a cautious scientist make such an emphatically unscientific claim? 9/11 seems to be a date unique for unaccountable overnight revolutions in opinion. See also Wallace Miller and Van Romero for starters.
All this fuss over the steel and the viewer would never know that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) had denied its very existence in their new draft report , stating unequivocally ‘No steel was recovered from WTC 7’ (NCSTAR1-3). Either NIST was unaware of this precious piece of forensic evidence, in which case their powers of investigation must be seriously called into question, or they lied. Which is more likely and what are the implications? Sunder was not able to ignore the matter entirely however. Fielding a question on the steel in a press conference, Sunder opted not to deny its existence but instead expressed the utmost faith in Sisson’s supposition (mentioned in the Third Tower but dropped from The Truth about the Third Tower) that the source of the high sulfur content (only one aspect of the thermate signature) in the melted steel was from the gypsum wall boards. This got me thinking whether it was such a great idea after all to routinely make walls in steel framed high rises from a substance that, combined with fire could bore holes through their supporting columns. Evidently Sisson and team hadn’t thought of the wallboards when they concluded their report for FEMA with ‘No clear source of the sulfur has been identified.’ So, we are left then with an absurd situation where in the wake of Steven Jones findings NIST are denying on paper that the steel exists, while telling the BBC it does exist but it’s no big deal. Meanwhile Sisson and the world class WPI team that did the initial tests for FEMA that left them shocked have quietly withdrawn requests for further testing. Apparently they too think it’s no big deal that office fires now melt steel. OK. so does anyone smell porky pies here? Surely it doesn’t take a behavioral psychologist to see that lead NIST investigator John Gross’ proverbial pants must be on fire in this clip.
Any meaningful debate in the programme fizzled out, critics of the official story on mute as a flurry of interviews described how devastating the fires were and we were treated to the absurd albatross of villain status for not sagely nodding in approval at blatant nonsense - for contradicting those who were there based on emergent facts that they will ilkely never expose themselves to. The shameful monopoly of witnesses buried those who saw no reason for the building to fall the way it did, despite the fact that a demolition was utterly unthinkable on the day and all present were psychologically primed for a collapse having seen the twin towers shockingly disintegrate. The suggestion, apparently transmitted from FEMA to a few fire chiefs that 7 would fall was doing the rounds before midday, the same FEMA that told Giuliani the twin towers would fall even as office workers were being told to go back to their desks by men with megaphones. How many viewers would have guessed that the upper floor fires reported by these witnesses had little to nothing to do with the ultimate demise of the building, even according to the official report. In fact ‘no fire was observed or reported in the afternoon on floors 1-5, 10 or above floor 13’ (NIST Interim report). The context of these witness reports was thus entirely absent and the timing of their presentation, towards the end of the show, gave an entirely false impression that these fires were the climactic and decisive events of the day.
One of the most remarkable facts of the NIST report, the admission that the combustible materials in any given location would have burned out within 20 minutes and hence were easily within the fireproofing specs also went ignored. The Third Tower never quite explained to us how conditions such as these led to catastrophic thermal expansion - something that was never an issue in the Cardington tests, rightly reported by the CF to have shown that steel framed building structures are far more resilient to fire than previously thought. The structures at Cardington endured much hotter temperatures throughout, for much longer.
A comprehensive critique of the programme might run to book length, such were the number of salient ommissions and distortions. However a point comes where multiplying proofs becomes redundant for those who won’t believe their own eyes. Sometimes you just want to say ‘look at that dust cloud dammit. Look at the debris pile for chrissakes.’ But there’s something about the brain and the attention faculty that screens out and minimises those things it doesn’t believe possible. This brings us to the astonishing brute fact that three skyscrapers were blown to bits while the whole world watched, all the while being described as ‘collapses.’ The mind’s ability to screen out details that confound its expectations is well described here: http://newhumanist.org.uk/1852
The perpetrators well understood too that this would be possible by a combination of shock induced suggestibilty and relentless repetition or ‘psychic driving.’ The BBC has continued this psychic driving in 2008 but the shock is wearing off as people see those terrible events with a clean pair of eyes. The awful reality revealed leaves people of conscience little choice but to press for critical mass, spurred on by seeing that it is only through recognising how truly broken some of our institutions have become that hope for a better society is possible.
“I see what you’re getting at in respect of novels: that the stuff of fictional narrative can’t be subjected to rational criticism. Many materialist-minded souls would disagree with you on that and take you to task further in that regard.”
And I “disagree” with “materialism”. Anyone can “disagree” with whatever they want, it doesn’t prove much.
And if the fiction is not “rational”, it’s not going to HURT anyone, you know. One can “criticize” fiction, of course, but if one thinks that less-than-”rational” fiction is actually _evil_, I’d disagree totally. If someone takes the fiction seriously enough to cause true harm, then that’s their problem, not that of the writer.
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