The 9/11 conspirators: Vindicated after all these years?
Alexander Cockburn
We are homing in on the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the
Wall Street Trade Towers and the attack on the Pentagon. One in seven
Americans and one in four among those aged 16-24, (so a recent poll
commissioned by the BBC tells us) believe that there was a vast
conspiracy in which the U.S. government was involved. But across
those ten years have the charges that it was an "inside job"—a
favoured phrase of the self-styled "truthers" — received any serious
buttress? The answer is no.
Did the Trade Towers fall because they were badly built as a
consequence of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the
Port Authority, and because they were struck by huge planes loaded
with jet fuel?
Explosives planted
No, shout the conspiracists, they "pancaked" because Dick Cheney's
agents–scores of them–methodically planted demolition charges in the
preceding days inserting the explosives in the relevant floors of
three vast buildings, (moving day after day among the unsuspecting
office workers), then on 9/11 activating the detonators. It was a
conspiracy of thousands, all of whom–party to mass murder–have held
their tongues ever since.
What has been the goal of the 9/11 conspiracists? They ask questions,
yes, but they never answer them. They never put forward an overall
scenario of the alleged conspiracy. They say that's not up to them. So
who is it up to? Whom do they expect to answer their questions? When
answers are put forward, they are dismissed as fabrications or they
simply rebound with another question.
Like most cultic persuasions they excitedly invoke important converts
to their faith and the "1500 architects and engineers in the USA" who
say the NIST official report is not thorough and needs another
investigation. It's a tiny proportion of the overall members of their
profession. At least 80 per cent of faculty economists in the US
believe stoutly in long-discredited theories that have blighted the
lives of millions around the world for decades. Their numbers don't
equate with intelligence, let along conclusive analysis.
The 9/11 conspiracists seize on coincidences and force them into
sequences they deem to be logical and significant. Their treatment of
eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence is whimsical. Apparent
anomalies that seem to nourish their theories are brandished
excitedly; testimony that undermines their theories–like witnesses of
a large plane hitting the Pentagon — is dismissed.
Many conspiracists say it wasn't a plane but a missile. (Other
conspiracists denounce the "no plane" Pentagon as wacko.)
Eye-witnesses of a large plane hitting the Pentagon — are
contemptuously brushed aside.
There are some photos of the impact of the "object" — i.e. the Boeing
757, flight 77 — that seem to show the sort of hole a missile might
make. Ergo, 757 didn't hit the Pentagon. It WAS a missile. It wasn't
smoke in some photographs obscuring a larger rupture in the fortified
Pentagon wall.
On this last matter, Chuck Spinney, now retired after years of
brilliant government service exposing the Pentagon's budgetary
outrages, tells me that "there ARE pictures taken of the 757 plane
hitting Pentagon — they were taken by the surveillance cameras at
Pentagon's heliport, which was right next to impact point. I have seen
them both — stills and moving pictures. I just missed seeing it
personally, but the driver of the van I just got out of in South
Parking saw it so closely that he could see the terrified faces of
passengers in windows. I knew two people who were on the plane. One
was ID'd by dental remains found in the Pentagon."
In fact hundreds of people saw the plane — people who know the
difference between a plane and a cruise missile. The wreckage of the
plane was hauled out from the site. Why does the obvious have to be
proved? Would those who were wounded or who lost friends and
colleagues that day assist in the cover up of a missile strike? Why
risk using a missile, when you had a plane in the air and - to take
one bizarre construct of the conspiracists — had successfully crashed
(by remote control!) two into much more difficult targets–the Trade
Towers?
This doesn't disturb the conspiracists. They're immune to any reality
check. Spinney "worked for the government." They switched the dental
records. The Boeing 757 was flown to Nebraska for a rendezvous with
President Bush, who shot the passengers, burned the bodies on the
tarmac and gave Spinney's friend's teeth to Dick Cheney to drop
through a hole in his trousers amid the debris in the Pentagon.
Saddam had WMD!
Of course there are conspiracies. The allegations that Saddam Hussein
had WMD amounted to just such a one. I think there is strong evidence
that FDR did have knowledge that a Japanese naval force in the north
Pacific was going to launch an attack on Pearl Harbour. It's quite
possible Roosevelt thought it would be a relatively mild assault and
thought it would be the final green light to get the US into the war.
It's entirely plausible to assume that the FBI, US military
intelligence, and the CIA, — as has just been rather convincingly
claimed again in the latter instance — had penetrated the Al Qaeda
team planning the 9/11 attacks; intelligence reports piled up in
various Washington bureaucracies pointing to the impending onslaught
and even the manner in which it might be carried out.
The history of intelligence operations is profuse with example of
successful intelligence collection, but also fatal slowness to act on
the intelligence, along with eagerness not to compromise the security
and future usefulness of the informant, who has to prove his own
credentials by even pressing for prompt action by the plotters.
Sometime an undercover agent will actually propose an action, either
to deflect efforts away from some graver threat, or to put the
plotters in a position where they can be caught red-handed.
There is not the slightest need to postulate pre-placed explosive
charges to explain why the towers collapsed at near free fall speeds.
As Pierre Sprey, a former plane and weapons designer who knows a great
deal about explosions, told me:
Concocted plan
"1. Any demolitions expert concocting a plan to hit a tall building
with an airplane and then use pre-placed explosives to UNDETECTABLY
ensure the collapse of the building would never place the explosives
20, 30 and 60 floors below the impact point. Obviously, he would put
the explosives on one or more floors as close as possible to the
planned impact level.
"2. It is inconceivable that our demolitions expert would time his
surreptitious explosions to occur HOURS after the aircraft impact. He
couldn't possibly be absolutely certain that the impact fires would
even last an hour. Quite the opposite: to mask the booster explosions,
he'd time them to follow right on the heels of the impact.
"3. To ensure collapse of a major building requires very sizable
demolition charges, charges that are large enough to do a lot more
than emit the "puffs of smoke" cited as evidence for the explosives
hypothesis. I've seen both live and filmed explosive building
demolitions. Each explosion is accompanied by a very visible shower of
heavy rubble and a dense cloud of smoke and dust. Just that fact alone
makes the explosives hypothesis untenable; no demolitions expert in
the world would be willing to promise his client that he could bring
down a tall building with explosions guaranteed to be
indistinguishable from the effects of an aircraft impact."
Herman Soifer, a retired structural engineer, summarized the collapse
of Buildings 1 and 2 succinctly, in a letter to me, remarking that
since he had followed the plans and engineering of the Towers during
construction he was able to explain the collapses to his wife a few
hours after the buildings went down.
"The towers were basically tubes, essentially hollow. Tubes can be
very efficient structures, strong and economical. The Trade Centre
tubes effectively resisted vertical loads, wind loads and vibrations
and could probably have done very well against earthquakes. However,
the relatively thin skin of the hollow tube must be braced at
intervals to prevent local buckling of the skin under various possible
loads, otherwise the tube itself can go out of shape and lose its
strength.
"For their interior bracing, the thin-walled tubes of the Twin Towers
depended primarily on the interior floors being tied to the outer wall
shells. These floor beam structures were basically open web joists,
adequate for the floor loads normally to be expected. These joist ends
rested on steel angle clips attached to the outer walls.
"As the floors at the level of airplane impact caught fire, the open
web joists, which could not be expected to resist such fires, softened
under the heat, sagged and pulled away from their attachments to the
walls. Their weight and the loads they were carrying, caused them to
drop onto the next lower floor, which was then carrying double loads
also becoming exposed to the heat. Then that floor collapsed, and so
it went. But as the floors dropped, they no longer served as bracing
for the thin-walled main tubes. This loss of bracing permitted the
walls to buckle outward in successive sections and thus the house of
cards effect."
High grade steel can bend disastrously under extreme heat. The types
of steel used in the WTC Towers (plain carbon, and vanadium) lose
steel lose half their strength when heated to about 570 C , and even
more as temperatures rise, as they did in WTC 1 and 2, to 1100 C.
The conspiracists' last card is the collapse of WTC building number 7
some hours after the morning attacks. But here again, as with the
other two buildings, the explanations offered by the US government's
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are more than
adequate. Collapse was caused by the rupturing of the building's metal
framework due to the thermal expansion of its floor beams, which were
heated by uncontrolled fires because the water main that supplied the
building's fire suppression system had been cut by the collapse of WTC
1.
The NIST team said that the smallest blast event capable of crippling
the critical column would have produced a 'sound level of 130 to 140
decibels at a distance of half a mile,' yet no noise this loud was
reported by witnesses or recorded on videos. Sound at 130 to 140
decibels is about as loud as humans can tolerate, beyond this power
one is really encountering a blast wave, a jump in pressure that
delivers sensible force. Examples of loud sounds and their effects
include: a jet engine at 100 meters (110-140 dB), hearing damage due
to short term exposure, for example front row at a rock concert (120
dB), threshold of pain (130 dB), a rifle being fired at 1 meter (140
dB).
As discussed in Wayne Barrett and Dan Collin's excellent book Grand
Illusion, about Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, helicopter pilots radioed
warnings nine minutes before the final collapse that the South Tower
might well go down and, repeatedly, as much as 25 minutes before the
North Tower's fall.
Corrupt conspiracies
What Barrett and Collins brilliantly showed are the actual corrupt
conspiracies on Giuliani's watch: the favouritism to Motorola which
saddled the firemen with radios that didn't work; the ability of the
Port Authority to skimp on fire protection, the mayor's catastrophic
failure in the years before 9/11/2001 to organize an effective unified
emergency command that would have meant that cops and firemen could
have communicated; that many firemen wouldn't have unnecessarily
entered the Towers; that people in the Towers wouldn't have been told
by 911 emergency operators to stay in place; and that firemen could
have heard the helicopter warnings and the final Mayday messages that
prompted most of the NYPD men to flee the Towers.
That's the real political world, in which Giuliani and others have
never been held accountable. The conspiracists disdained the real
world because they wanted to promote Bush, Cheney and the Neo-Cons to
an elevated status as the Arch Demons of American history, instead of
being just one more team running the American empire, a team of more
than usual stupidity and incompetence (characteristics I personally
favour in imperial leaders). Actually, what Bush and Cheney never
demonstrated was the slightest degree of competence to pull anything
like this off. They couldn't even manufacture weapons of mass
destruction after US troops had invaded Iraq, and when any box
labelled "WMD" would have been happily photographed by the embedded
U.S. press as conclusive testimony. Arch-demon Cheney and his retinue
of neo-cons couldn't even contrive a provocation sufficient to justify
his aim of waging war on Iran or giving Israel the green light to do
so. Each day he gnashed his teeth as Bush, Condoleezza Rice and the
Joint Chiefs of Staff foiled his machinations.
At least what Obama may have done is remind the left – at least those
not forever besotted — that Bush and Cheney are not that much
different from the politicians and overlords of U.S. foreign policy
who preceded them or followed them.
Scarcely surprising
9/11 conspiracism, perhaps at last somewhat on the wane, penetrated
deep into the American left. It has also been widespread on the
libertarian and populist right, but that is scarcely surprising, since
the American populist right instinctively mistrusts government to a
far greater degree than the left, and matches conspiracies to its
demon of preference, whether the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, Black Helicopters or the Jews and now
Muslims.
These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political
economy from Marx. Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a
diffuse, peripatic conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate
ruling class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, or the
falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale
(the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos) or supposedly
"rogue" agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The 9/11
"conspiracy", or "inside job", is the Summa of all this foolishness.
One trips over a fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists in the
first paragraph of the opening page of the book by one of their high
priests, David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbour. "In many respects,"
Griffin writes, "the strongest evidence provided by critics of the
official account involves the events of 9/11 itself in light of
standard procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes not one of
these planes should have reached its target, let alone all three of
them."
The operative word here is "should". A central characteristic of the
conspiracists is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous belief
in American efficiency. Many of them start with the racist
premise–frequently voiced in as many words in their writings — that
"Arabs in caves" weren't capable of the mission.
They believe that military systems should work they way Pentagon press
flacks and aerospace salesmen say they should work.
They believe that at 8.14 am, when AA flight 11 switched off its radio
and transponder, an FAA flight controller should have called the
National Military Command centre and NORAD.
US Air Force
They believe, citing reverently (this is high priest Griffin, who has
written no less than ten books on 9/11) "the US Air Force's own
website," that an F-15 could have intercepted AA flight 11 "by 8.24,
and certainly no later than 8.30."??They appear to have read no
military history, which is too bad because if they did they'd know
that minutely planned operations–let alone by-the-book responses to an
unprecedented emergency — screw up with monotonous regularity, by
reason of stupidity, cowardice, venality and all the other failings,
not excepting sudden changes in the weather.
History is generous with such examples. According to the minutely
prepared plans of the Strategic Air Command, an impending Soviet
attack would have prompted the missile silos in North Dakota to open,
and the ICBMs to arc towards Moscow and kindred targets. The four test
launches actually attempted all failed, whereupon the SAC gave up
testing. Was it badly designed equipment, human incompetence, defence
contractor venality or conspiracy?
Did the April 24, 1980 effort to rescue the hostages in the US embassy
in Teheran fail because a sandstorm disabled three of the eight
helicopters, or because the helicopters were poorly made, or because
of agents of William Casey and the Republican National Committee
poured sugar into their gas tanks in yet another conspiracy? Have the
US military's varying attempts to explain why F-15s didn't intercept
and shoot down the hijacked planes stemmed from absolutely predictable
attempts to cover up the usual screw-ups, or because of conspiracy? Is
Mr Cohen in his little store at the end of the block hiking his prices
because he wants to make a buck, or because his rent just went up or
because the Jews want to take over the world? Bebel said anti-Semitism
is the socialism of the fools.
The conspiracy virus is an old strand. The Russians couldn't possibly
build an A bomb without Commie traitors in the U.S. The Russians are
too dumb. Hitler couldn't have been defeated by the Red Army marching
across Eastern Europe and half Germany. Traitors let it happen. JFK
couldn't have been shot by Oswald — it had to be the CIA. RFK couldn't
have been shot by Sirhan–it had to be the CIA.
Cabals of white Christians
There are no end to examples seeking to prove that Russians, Arabs,
Viet Cong, Japanese, etc etc couldn't possibly match the brilliance
and cunning of secret cabals of white Christians.
Michael Neumann, a philosopher, and CounterPunch contributor, at the
University of Trent, in Ontario, remarked in a note to me:
"I think the problem of conspiracy nuttery has got worse, and is part
of a general trend. There really were serious questions about the
Kennedy assassination, an unusual number of them, and it wasn't too
crazy to come to the wrong conclusion. There wasn't a single serious
question about 9-11. The main engine of the 9-11 conspiracy cult is
nothing political; it's the death of any conception of evidence.
"This probably comes from the decline of Western power. Deep down,
almost everyone, across the political spectrum, is locked in a bigotry
which can only attribute that decline to some irrational or
supernatural power. The result is the ascendancy of magic over common
sense, let alone reason."
Yet some have discovered a silver lining in the 9/11 conspiracism. A
politically sophisticated leftist in Washington, DC, wrote to me,
agreeing with my ridiculing of the "inside job" scenarios, but adding,
"To me the most interesting thing (in the US) is how many people are
willing to believe that Bush either masterminded it [the 9/11 attacks]
or knew in advance and let it happen. If that number or anything close
to that is true, that's a huge base of people that are more than
deeply cynical about their elected officials. That would be the real
news story that the media is missing, and it's a big one."
"I'm not sure I see the silver lining about cynicism re government," I
answered. "People used to say the same thing about the JFK conspiracy
buffs and disbelief in the Warren Commission. Actually, it seems to
demobilize people from useful political activity. If the alleged
perpetrators are so efficiently devilish in their plots, all
resistance is futile. 9/11 conspiracism stemmed from despair and
political infantilism. There's no worthwhile energy to transfer from
such kookery. It's like saying some lunatic shouting to himself on a
street corner has the capacity to be a great orator.
Anyone whoever looked at the JFK assassination will know that there
are endless anomalies and loose ends. Eyewitness testimony is
conflicting, forensic evidence possibly misconstrued, mishandled or
just missing. But in my view, the Warren Commission, as confirmed in
almost all essentials by the House Committee on Assassinations in the
late 1970s, had it right and Oswald fired the fatal shots from the
Schoolbook Depository. The evidentiary chain for his guilt is
persuasive, and the cumulative scenarios of the conspiracists entirely
unconvincing. But of course–as the years roll by, and even though no
death bed confession has ever buttressed those vast, CIA-related
scenarios — the conspiracists keep on toiling away, their obsessions
as unflagging as ever.
Richard Aldrich's book on British intelligence, The Hidden Hand
(2002), describes how a report for the Pentagon on declassification
recommended that "interesting declassified material" such as
information about the JFK assassination "could be released and even
posted on the Internet, as a 'diversion,'" and used to "reduce the
unrestrained public appetite for 'secrets' by providing good faith
distraction material". Aldrich adds, "If investigative journalists and
contemporary historians were absorbed with the vexatious, but rather
tired, debates over the grassy knoll, they would not be busy probing
into areas where they were unwelcome."
The conspiracists have combined to produce a huge distraction, just as
Danny Sheehan did with his Complaint, that mesmerized and distracted
much of the Nicaraguan Solidarity Movement in the 1980s, and which
finally collapsed in a Florida courtroom almost as quickly as the
Towers.
There are plenty of real conspiracies in America. Why make up fake ones?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
This essay is drawn from the author's contribution to CounterPunch's
CounterPunch Special Report: Debunking the Myths of 9/11, where Manuel
Garcia Jr, physicist and engineer, presented his three reports,
undertaken for CounterPunch and where Joann Wypijewski wrote her
essay "Conversations at Ground Zero" after a day spent with people at
the site. Courtesy:CounterPunch.Org
http://www.weeklyholiday.net/Homepage/Pages/UserHome.aspx?ID=5&date=0#Tid=1270
------------------------------------
[Disclaimer: ALOCHONA Management is not liable for information contained in this message. The author takes full responsibility.]
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