The left is very funny when they think there preaching to their quire.

A liberal with the brain! unbelievable!!!! This was posted on line on
http://www.progressive.org/
and
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0912-20.htm
I browse these commie wacko left sites for comedic amusement, The left is
very funny when they think there preaching to their quire.

A liberal with the brain! unbelievable!!!! This was posted on line on
http://www.progressive.org/
and
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0912-20.htm
I browse these commie wacko left sites for comedic amusement, The left is
very funny when they think there preaching to their quire.

laughing at them, not with them). Matt uses a little common sense
(normally a Right wing attribute)

------------

Published on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 by The Progressive
Enough of the 9/11 Conspiracies, Already
by Matthew Rothschild


At almost every progressive gathering where there’s a question and answer
period, someone or other vehemently raises 9/11 and espouses a grand
conspiracy theory.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of enduring these rants, please let me
share.

Here’s what the conspiracists believe:

9/11 was an inside job.

Members of the Bush Administration ordered it, not Osama bin Laden.

Arab hijackers may not have done the deed.

On top of that, the Twin Towers fell not because of the impact of the
airplanes and the ensuing fires but because the Bush Administration got
agents to plant explosives at the base of those buildings.

Building 7, another high-rise at the World Trade Center that fell on 9/11,
also came down by planted explosives.

The Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines Flight 77 but by a smaller
plane or a missile.

And the Pennsylvania plane did not crash as a result of the revolt by the
passengers but was brought down by the military.

I’m amazed at how many people give credence to these theories. Everyone’s
an engineer. People who never even took one college science course can now
hold forth at great length on how the buildings at the World Trade Center
could not possibly have collapsed in the way they did and why the Pentagon
could not have been struck by that American Airlines jet.

Problem is, some of the best engineers in the country have studied these
questions and come up with perfectly logical, scientific explanations for
what happened.

The American Society of Civil Engineers and FEMA conducted an in-depth
investigation of the World Trade Center. The team members included the
director of the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society
of Civil Engineers, the senior fire investigator for the National Fire
Protection Association, professors of fire safety, and leaders of some of
the top building design and engineering firms, including Skidmore Owings &
Merrill in Chicago, Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire in Seattle, and
Greenhorne & O’Mara in Maryland.

It concluded that massive structural damage caused by the crashing of the
aircrafts into the buildings, combined with the subsequent fires, “were
sufficient to induce the collapse of both structures.”

The National Institute of Standards and Technology did its own forty-three
volume study of the Twin Towers. “Some 200 technical experts . . .
reviewed tens of thousands of documents, interviewed more than 1,000
people, reviewed 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs,
analyzed 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage, [and] performed laboratory
tests and sophisticated computer simulations,” the institute says.

It also concluded that a combination of the crash and the subsequent fires
brought the towers down: “In each tower, a different combination of impact
damage and heat-weakened structural components contributed to the abrupt
structural collapse.”

Popular Mechanics, first in its March 2005 cover story and now in its
expanded book, Debunking 9/11 Myths, after interviewing scores of other
experts in the engineering field, takes apart the most popular contentions
of the conspiracists. “In every case we examined, the key claims made by
conspiracy theorists turned out to be mistaken, misinterpreted, or
deliberately falsified,” the book says.

I made a few calls myself, including to Gene Corley, who conducted the
American Society of Civil Engineers/FEMA study, and to Mete Sozen,
structural engineering professor at Purdue, who was one of the principal
authors of “The Pentagon Building Performance Report” of January 2003,
which was done under the auspices of the American Society of Civil
Engineers and the Structural Engineering Institute. I also contacted
engineering professors at MIT and other leading universities in the
country, and none of them puts any stock in the 9/11 conspiracy theories.
In fact, they view them as a huge waste of time. They are busy trying to
figure out how to prevent buildings from falling in the future.

Of course, any conspiracy theorist worth his or her salt will claim that
all these people are in on the plot.

And that I am in on it, too.

Get over it.

The guru of the 9/11 conspiracy movement is David Ray Griffin, an emeritus
professor not of engineering but of philosophy and theology at the
Claremont School of Theology. First in The New Pearl Harbor and then in
The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions and now in Christian
Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11, Griffin has peddled his conspiracy
theory.

He’s not alone, of course. A myriad of websites devote themselves to this
subject, and several films are circulating on it, including Loose Change.
There’s even a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which insists “the
World Trade Center was almost certainly brought down by controlled
demolitions.” Most prominent among these is Steven E. Jones, professor of
physics and astronomy at Brigham Young University, whose primary field is
not engineering but cold fusion, according to Debunking 9/11 Myths.

The conspiracy theories are particularly popular on the left for a couple
of understandable reasons. It’s undeniable that Bush has ceaselessly
seized on 9/11 to justify his warmaking abroad and his repressive policies
at home. And then there’s the notorious phrase in a document of the
Project for the New American Century, the fount of neoconservativism,
whose members included ***** Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz,
Douglas Feith, and a host of other hawks who flew into the Bush
Administration. That line, from the September 2000 study “Rebuilding
America’s Defenses,” argues for transforming the U.S. military posture
into a much more aggressive one, and for expanding the Pentagon’s budget
to reach $500 billion a year. The authors recognized that this
transformation would be difficult to achieve quickly “absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Griffin and other leftwing conspiracy theorists put the two together, and
voila. The attacks “were orchestrated in order to pave the way for
launching unprovoked wars on two countries that provided no threat,
whether imminent or long-term, to the people of the United States,” he
writes in Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11. “The Administration
and its Pentagon even planned to use 9/11 as a pretext . . . to attack
still more countries. The U.S. government was planning, therefore, to use
the deaths of some 3,000 people (whom itself had killed) to justify wars
that would most likely kill and maim many hundreds of thousands of people,
perhaps millions.”

Before taking some of the major conspiracy claims one by one, let’s
examine how outlandish the conspiracy theory is on its face.

First, Osama bin Laden has already claimed responsibility for the attack
several times and boasted of the prowess of the suicide bombers who
hijacked those planes. Why not take him at his word? And if bin Laden were
working in cahoots with the Bush Administration, why was the President
warned on August 6, 2001, in a Presidential daily briefing that Osama bin
Laden was about to attack the United States? Wouldn’t that risk exposing
the conspiracy?

Second, if the Bush Administration plotters carried out 9/11 to justify
attacking Iraq, why didn’t they have Iraqi hijackers do the deed? In
actuality, there was not a single Iraqi hijacker, and Bush propagandists
had to do all sorts of gymnastics to link Iraq to the actual attackers.

Third, for this conspiracy to have succeeded, it would have had to have
been amazingly vast: not only the high level members of the Bush
Administration (including the head of the Secret Service, Griffin says in
Christian Faith) and the explosives teams, but also many others.

Griffin, in Pearl Harbor, for instance, alleges that Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani may have been involved. Griffin quotes Giuliani telling ABC News,
“We were operating out of there [Building 7] when we were told that the
World Trade Center was gonna collapse.” Griffin says Giuliani had no
obvious way of knowing that, and concludes: “Giuliani’s statement
provides, therefore, evidence someone, perhaps he himself, knew something
that the firemen in the buildings did not know—which was perhaps that
explosives had been placed in the buildings and were about to be set off.”
Is that really evidence? Isn’t it much more likely that the firefighters
told the mayor to leave because the fire itself was jeopardizing the
building?

Griffin also alleges that Larry Silverstein, who leased the World Trade
Center complex, was in on the deal so he could collect the insurance.
(This claim—which he might as well have called “The Jew Cashed
In”—dovetails with the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory popular in the
Middle East that the Mossad blew up the towers and warned the thousands of
Jews who would have been working there to stay home.)

In Pearl Harbor, Griffin quotes Silverstein in a 2002 PBS documentary
recalling a conversation from the fire department commander on September
11 “telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain
the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the
smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and
we watched the building collapse.” Griffin, who writes that Silverstein
“made almost $500 million in profit from the collapse of Building 7,” says
by “pull it” Silverstein was recommending that the building be demolished
by explosives. Silverstein has flat-out denied that. By “pulling it,” he
has said that he meant giving up on the firefighters’ efforts to save the
building.

Two books later, Griffin removes any ambiguity Silverstein’s “assertion
that Building 7 was brought down by explosives, whatever the motive behind
it, explains why and how it collapsed,” Griffin writes in Christian Faith
and the Truth Behind 9/11. But Silverstein never made such an assertion,
and for Griffin to claim he did is, to say the least, a distortion.

The problems with a vast conspiracy theory are obvious. There’s the
likelihood that someone along the chain would squeal. Members of the
government have been engaged in far less treasonous plots (such as Bush’s
designs on Iran), and whistleblowers have managed to get the information
out to the likes of Seymour Hersh over at The New Yorker. And, on top of
that, we’re supposed to believe that this incompetent Administration,
which brought you Katrina, was somehow able to execute this grand
conspiracy?

“The government is not sufficiently competent to pull off such
conspiracies and too leaky to keep them secret,” said Richard Clarke, the
one-time counterterrorism czar for Clinton and Bush, in a blurb for
Debunking 9/11 Myths. Clarke has been a harsh critic of Bush, and he was a
strong supporter of John Kerry. Don’t you think Clarke would have blown
the whistle had he known? And who was in a better position than he to
know?

Finally, in Pearl Harbor, Griffin acknowledges one enormous, unfillable
hole in the conspiracists’ theory: If Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon,
where did it go? And where did all sixty-four people on board go? Griffin
pathetically answers: “One cannot expect that the revisionists, being
independent researchers with limited budgets and no power to subpoena
testimony, could answer all the questions raised by their alternative
scenario.” But that doesn’t stop him from speculating, in a ghoulish way,
about one piece of evidence that contradicts his Flight 77 notion: the
phone calls from conservative Barbara Olson, who was on Flight 77, to her
husband, Ted Olson, Bush’s solicitor general. Griffin casts doubt on
whether the phone calls actually happened, noting that Olson “is very
close to the Bush Administration.” At least in Pearl Harbor, Griffin
recognizes the weakness of this argument. The conspiracy theorists “still
need to explain, of course, what became of Barbara Olson, and also whether
it is plausible that Ted Olson would have participated in a plan with that
outcome,” he writes. In his latest book, though, Griffin does not appear
bothered in the least, as he continues to cast doubt on Ted Olson’s
account. He has swept Barbara Olson and sixty-three other people under the
rug.

On to some of Griffin’s most oft-cited questions.

Why did dust clouds shoot out of the Twin Towers as they fell?

Or, as Griffin poses it in Pearl Harbor: “What other than explosives could
turn concrete into powder and then eject it horizontally 150 feet or
more?”

Corley, who headed up the investigation for the American Society of Civil
Engineers and FEMA, gives a quick response to that. “That is simply the
air pressure being pushed down,” he says. “Once the collapse started, then
you had roughly a twenty-story building and roughly a thirty-story
building acting as a very large mass to push everything down. The air
pressure gets quite something, and the windows on the lower floors break,
and you see puffs of smoke coming out of them.” Debunking 9/11 Myths
offers the same explanation and cites structural engineer Jon Magnusson,
who says this expulsion of air and debris is fairly common when buildings
collapse.

Why did the tower that was hit second fall first?

“All other things being equal, then, the tower that was struck first
should have collapsed first. And yet, although the South Tower was struck
seventeen minutes later than the North Tower, it collapsed twenty-nine
minutes earlier,” writes Griffin in Pearl Harbor. The fact that the South
Tower fell first, he concludes, “suggests that the collapse of these
buildings was caused by something other than the fires.”

But all things weren’t equal. “The damage done to the second building was
more serious than the damage done to the first,” says Corley.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology concurs. Its “Final
Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers” notes that ten
core columns were severed in the South Tower, whereas only six were
severed in the North. And 20,000 more square feet of insulation was
stripped from the trusses in the South Tower than the North. The report
“found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting
that the WTC were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives
planted prior to September 11, 2001.”

What about Building 7?

This is a favorite of the conspiracy theorists, since the planes did not
strike this structure. But the building did sustain damage from the debris
of the Twin Towers. “On about a third of the face to the center and to the
bottom—approximately ten stories—about 25 percent of the depth of the
building was scooped out,” Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator for the
National Institute of Standards and Technology, told Popular Mechanics.

What’s more, the fire in the building lasted for about eight hours, in
part because there were fuel tanks in the basement and on some of the
floors. “The building was designed for a fire duration of no more than
about three hours,” says Corley. “Eight hours was way more than what that
building was designed for.” (Corley, by the way, also headed up the
investigation of the Murrah Building’s collapse in Oklahoma City.)

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is still studying the
collapse of Building 7, but its initial report says: “NIST has seen no
evidence that the collapse of WTC 7 was caused by bombs, missiles, or
controlled demolition.”

What about the Pentagon?

Conspiracy theorists will bend your ear explaining that the American
Airlines Boeing 757 couldn’t possibly have made such a small hole in the
Pentagon. Griffin in Pearl Harbor: “The orifice created by the impact . .
. was at most eighteen feet in diameter. Is it not absurd to suggest that
a Boeing 757 created and then disappeared into such a small hole? . . .
Can anyone seriously believe that a 125-foot-wide airplane created and
then went inside a hole less than twenty-feet wide?”

First of all, the hole was actually ninety feet wide, according to the
“Pentagon Building Performance Report” of January 2003, which the American
Society of Civil Engineers and the Structural Engineering Institute put
out. And Professor Sozen of Purdue, one of the authors of that report, has
an explanation.

“The reinforced columns of the Pentagon destroyed the wings,” says Sozen.
“That’s why the hole is smaller. It had to be smaller.” Since working on
that report, Sozen has designed simulations at Purdue, and his results
correspond with what happened to Flight 77, he says. Sozen, who identifies
himself as a progressive, says it is “ridiculous to deny” that the
American Airlines plane hit the Pentagon. And, he adds, if Flight 77 didn’t
hit the Pentagon, where did it go and “what happened to the people in that
plane”?

But we know what happened to them. They died at the Pentagon. “All but
five of the 189 people who died on the aircraft and in the Pentagon were
later identified through DNA testing,” according to Debunking 9/11 Myths.

Finally, was Flight 93 shot down?

Griffin and many other conspiracists allege that Flight 93, which crashed
in Pennsylvania, was brought down not by the passengers struggling with
the hijackers but by a U.S. missile. But we know from cell phone
conversations that passengers on board that plane planned on confronting
the hijackers. And, as Debunking 9/11 Myths notes, “a Cleveland air
traffic controller assigned to Flight 93 heard signs of a struggle in the
cockpit, followed shortly by screaming.”

Tapes of the conversations at the northeast regional headquarters for the
North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) confirm this, as Michael
Bronner has shown in his August article for Vanity Fair entitled “9/11
Live: The NORAD Tapes.” Major Kevin Nasypany was the facility’s
mission-crew commander that day, and the tapes show him frantically trying
to figure what was going on and whether he had orders to shoot Flight 93
down.

“Gimme the call sign,” he says at 10:07. “Gimme the whole nine yards. . .
. Let’s get some info, real quick. They got a bomb?”

But, as Bronner reports, by then “everyone on board is already dead.
Following the passengers’ counterattack, the plane crashed in a field in
Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m.”

The man who headed up the crash site investigation there was Matthew
McCormick, a thirty-three-year veteran at the National Transportation
Safety Board. “From my investigation there was no pre-impact stress to the
airplane,” he told the Debunking authors.

To be sure, there are discrepancies and omissions in The 9/11 Commission
Report, and the Pentagon and FAA appear to have not been fully truthful
and forthcoming about what happened that day. Not every riddle that
Griffin and other conspiracists pose has a ready answer. But almost all of
their major assertions are baseless. And their own theories have such
gigantic holes and require such monumental leaps of logic that they
discredit themselves.

At bottom, the 9/11 conspiracy theories are profoundly irrational and
unscientific. It is more than passing strange that progressives, who so
revere science on such issues as tobacco, stem cells, evolution, and
global warming, are so willing to abandon science and give in to fantasy
on the subject of 9/11.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a cul-de-sac. They lead nowhere. And they
aren’t necessary to prove the venality of the Bush Administration. There’s
plenty of that proof lying around. We don’t need to make it up.

© 2006 The Progressive

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