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.
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 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 thermite,
(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 and rotten some of our institutions have become that hope for a better society is possible.
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'd 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 - AKA group psychology? Isn't closure the easier path than grappling with a morass of contradictory data? 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?
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'd 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 - AKA group psychology? Isn't closure the easier path than grappling with a morass of contradictory data? 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 thermite,
(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 and rotten some of our institutions have become that hope for a better society is possible.
1 comments:
Thankyou for an informative and well-argued article.
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