The Long View
Noam Chomsky interviewed by The Irish Times
Noam Chomsky interviewed by
Denis Staunton

March 08, 2006
The Irish Times
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Staunton: First of all, I wanted to clear something up. I understand that some remarks you made about Bertie Ahern and "shoe shining" may have been reported inaccurately
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Chomsky: The Press Association story on December 26th said that on his way to Ireland, Noam Chomsky says that Bertie Ahern "shines the shoes" of the Americans. Well I knew there was no interview around that time and I checked back and I finally found there was one last May. In May I had an interview with a journalist and in it - I had no plans to go to Ireland - in it, I was talking about the Old Europe and New Europe business. And I did use the phrase, it had to do with taking part in the [IRAQ] war. Old Europe was the countries that just wouldn't take part in the war, New Europe was the countries that did take part in the war. Then I pointed out that the distinguishing characteristic was that in Old Europe, so called, that the governments took the position of a large majority of the population, which is what we usually call democracy. And In New Europe, they overruled an even larger majority of the population and were just shining the shoes of the Americans. And then he asked "Well, would you say that Bertie Ahern is shining the shoes of the Americans?" To tell you the truth, I'd never heard of Bertie Ahern, but I didn't want to say that, to be impolite. So the context was taking part in the war. So I asked, "I don't know what the polls are in Ireland. Is he following the polls?" And he said no. And I said, "Well, there's your answer ".

Staunton: The Irish Government obviously has a problem in that its received more explicit assurances than most other countries - because it asked for the assurances before the Americans stopped giving specific assurances about places - that no prisoners have gone through Irish airports.

You see there are several separate points here. I did an interview with someone else from The Irish Times and he asked me a very straightforward question - what do you think about the use of Shannon for military flights? And he said there was a suspicion that it's being used for rendition flights. So I said military flights are a complicated matter and by now it's not military flights for the war, it's military flights for the occupation, which is different. So I didn't say anything about military flights. But I said if they use it for rendition, it's completely shameful to take part in criminal acts like that. And I understand there are spotters at Shannon and at Heathrow who are picking up these Gulfstream flights which both governments deny. If either government or any government is giving any support whatsoever for what is just pure torture, there's nothing else to say about it.

Staunton: But what the Irish say is that the only information they have about these flights is that the Americans have told them that there are no prisoners on these flights going through Ireland. The question is what should the Irish do?

Refuse. It's an Irish airfield. If the United States wants to torture people, let them do it some other way.

Staunton: There's also the business that by asking, say, to search these planes, it would be an unfriendly gesture to a friendly power which is not only an important economic partner but has also played an important role in Northern Ireland and continues to do so.

So you have to make choices. It's true, a government has to make ugly choices. But there's a question of what decision you make in a complex situation. Sometimes you do things which in other circumstances require you to offend your moral principles. Yes, that happens in life. But we should be clear on the principles. I mean, conscious participation in anything as grotesque as rendition, which is just a euphemism for torture, is outrageous. Suppose they wanted to torture people in Ireland. Suppose they sent people to Ireland for torture. It's basically the same thing. You can say it's a friendly gesture but...

Staunton: Much of Ireland's foreign policy is now expressed through the European Union, and the United States has been ambivalent about the whole business of European integration, particularly the idea of a defence identity. What's your view of the course of European integration?

It's ambiguous. Actually, the United States has been ambivalent about it since the 1940s. On the one hand, the US has always pressed for some form of European unification for obvious reasons. I mean, if IBM is investing in Europe, they'd rather have one location with one currency and one language and so on than installations in 20 different places. A lot of this integration developed as a result of American multinational corporations. In fact, the Marshall Plan was the framework in which multinational corporations developed. It's one reason why it was pressed. It's openly discussed by the Commerce Department, for example. So yes, that's a pressure for integration. It's much better to have a big market with uniformity of practices and so on.

On the other hand, the US has always been concerned that Europe might go off in its own direction. It used to be called a "potential third force" during the Cold War. And by 1970 when the world had become economically tripolar - three major economic centres: Japan - based, German - based Europe, and North America, roughly on a par - these concerns became much more serious, and by now they're much more serious. So the questions of European integration, there are several dimensions to them. They are the centre of the industrial, financial, commercial power of Europe. It's Germany and France, it's not a big secret.
You bring in the old Russian satellites, they're likely to be more subordinated to the United States. Similarly, Spain and Italy are expected to be more subordinated even if they are not always so. So that's a way of diluting. It's the same with Turkey. The US has been pressing very hard for the inclusion of Turkey for years, not because they're in love with Turkey but because they want to ensure that the European Union is more controllable.

Same with the extension of NATO. NATO is basically under US control so if NATO extends, it extends the US control system. So from an international point of view, it's [European enlargement] dubious. But from the domestic point of view, I think it's a good thing for Europeans to be able to cross borders without paying any attention to have the common currency, and so on. That's all to the good. On the other hand, there are some things the European Union has done which I think are very negative. For example, the power of the European Central Bank, which is so outrageous that even conservatives in the United States can't believe it. It's way more than the Federal Reserve. And it's harmed European growth. They're ultra - inflation conscious. They've kept interest rates too high, they've slowed growth, they're completely unaccountable. That's negative.

The one, I think, beneficial unplanned consequence of the European Union is that it's stimulating a kind of regionalism - "Europe of the regions", so - called - which is a good thing. So in regions of Spain and in England and other places there's a revival of local cultures, local languages, some degree of autonomy in Catalonia and the Basque country. Scotland has limited autonomy. You hear Welsh spoken in Cardiff, which you didn't used to do. Those things are all positive. So like any complicated system it has positive and negative features to it.

Staunton: The Europeans have a different view of security from America. If you compare, for example the Security Strategy the Bush administration came out with and the document that Solana and Co [European Union diplomacy] came out with, the whole concept of intervention is different. Do you think it's useful for the world to have an alternative vision of security like the European one?

I don't think the US has a vision of security. It has a vision of dominance. So it acts quite consciously in ways that increase insecurity. Take, say, the invasion of Iraq. They understood that it was likely to increase the threat of terrorism and proliferation. That's transparent and by now they agree that that happened. Their own intelligence services agree that the invasion substantially increased the threat of terrorism, which is going to be a long - term threat. And it also, of course, increased proliferation.

Take Iran. Nobody wants to see Iran get nuclear weapons, no - one sane. On the other hand, it's very understandable. One of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, had an article in which he said "obviously we don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons and I don't know if they're developing them, but if they're not developing them, they're crazy ". The invasion of Iraq just instructed them to develop nuclear weapons. How are you going to deter a powerful state that claims it can do anything it wants? It's got nothing to do with security.

This goes way back. What Arthur Schlesinger called correctly "the most dangerous moment in human history" was in 1962, the [Cuban] missile crisis. The missile crisis had a lot of complicated features, but one element of it was Washington's terrorist war against Cuba which was a factor that led to an effort at deterrence. It was a lunatic effort that could have set off a nuclear war, but, lunacy aside, the logic is understandable.

Was the terrorist war an effort to increase US security? No, we know what it was for because we have a rich documentary record. It was because of what the State Department called Cuba's successful defiance of US policies going back to the Munroe Doctrine. It had nothing to do with security. In fact, to talk about security is very misleading. States don't seek security, they seek power. And the effort to extend power can increase insecurity.


Staunton: Let's talk about it a different way and speak about the use of force or military intervention. Are there benign examples of the use of military force that you can think of?

It depends on how you define them. There's very extensive legal literature on so - called humanitarian intervention. There are extensive studies. If you work through them, it's extremely hard to find a genuine example. I mean, there are examples of the use of military force which had benign consequences, definitely. In fact, in the last 50 years the two most dramatic cases are India's intervention in East Pakistan which did stop atrocities, and Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia which terminated Pol Pot's atrocities in fact just at the point that they were peaking. Those are the two most striking examples in the last half century of military intervention with benign consequences. And how did the West react? The US was infuriated in both cases. It imposed sanctions against India and sent a nuclear-armed aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal, threatening.

Kissinger was totally furious. The reason was that it spoilt some photo - ops he was hoping to get on a secret trip to China through Pakistan. But the reaction was very harsh and punitive. In the case of Vietnam it was worse. In the case of Pol Pot, the US and Britain immediately turned to supporting the Khmer Rouge. They supported a Chinese invasion to punish Vietnam for the crime of having terminated Pol Pot's atrocities. The press was denouncing them as the Prussians of Asia. The US imposed very harsh sanctions. So here are two cases. Now I wouldn't call those humanitarian interventions. They didn't intervene because they were trying to help people. They had their own reasons of state. In fact, in Vietnam's case, it was really defensive. Pol Pot was carrying out atrocities inside Vietnam and along the border so it was kind of a defensive reaction. But the consequences were very benign. And the West reacted with extreme harshness. I can't think of any other examples.

Staunton: I was thinking of something more recent and on a much smaller scale, like the European intervention in the Congo, most recently, which was a kind of fire - fighting operation.

That was under UN auspices. An intervention under UN auspices is something quite different. The framework of international law is not perfect but it's better than nothing. It's the best we have. Peacekeeping forces in the UN framework, even Chapter Seven which is occasionally used and which allows the use of military force, that can be legitimate. I don't say it's necessarily legitimate. If you take a look at Haiti for example, it had very ugly consequences. But, in principle, it's legitimate. The real issue comes from military intervention that has no UN sanction, that's in violation of international law. You can imagine it being benign, but try to find a case.

In fact, the West claims what's called a "responsibility to protect ". I think in Canada it's even an official doctrine. The world doesn't accept it. The UN summit last September flatly rejected it. And there was a high - level UN panel about a year before which had people like Gareth Evans and Brent Scowcroft, by no means a radical group. But they went through the Charter and they said they saw no reason whatsoever to change Article 51 which is the relevant one, and that no use of force is legitimate. I'm sure they had the bombing of Serbia in mind. The South Summit (pretty much the former non-aligned movement), which represents about 80 per cent of the population of the world - not democratically, but at least it's their governments - right after the bombing of Serbia they had their highest level meeting ever and produced a long document. One part of it was that they flatly reject the so - called "right of humanitarian intervention". They've had enough experience with it over the last couple of centuries.

And if you try to find cases, it's very, very hard. I mean, just to illustrate, perhaps the main scholarly work on so-called humanitarian intervention in the legal literature which covers the period of roughly the 20th century, found three cases of humanitarian intervention prior to the UN Charter. You know what they were? Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, Hitler's takeover of the Sudetenland, and Japan's invasion of Manchuria in North China. It's not that the author regarded them as humanitarian, it's that they were carried out with a very impressive humanitarian rhetoric and in fact a fair amount of support in the West, not open support, but tacit support. That's humanitarian intervention. Trace back the history and you find almost nothing. In the legal literature, the one case that's brought up over two centuries is an intervention in Lebanon and Syria in 1860, if I remember, by the French. It was to save the Christians from a massacre. But if you start taking a look at it, it was to establish their own interests and strengthen their own position. Maybe it saved the Christians too.

Staunton: One of the issues that has become more acute since 9/11 is the whole question of how to engage with Islam. What do you think are the principles that should govern our engagement with Islam ? And is it possible to have an alliance of civilisations as opposed to a clash?

As far as I know there are only two forces in the world that are pressing for a clash of civilisations. One is Osama bin Laden and the other is George Bush. Nobody else wants it. It's basically two powerful forces and what does it mean? Does the US have any problems with Islam? One of the oldest US allies is the most extreme, brutal, fundamentalist Islamic state in the world, Saudi Arabia. Do they [the US] care? As long as Saudi Arabia manages the oil properly, they can do what they want.

The largest Muslim state in the world is Indonesia. The US did have, and Britain had, a confrontation with Indonesia when it was independent. As soon as the Suharto coup came along and killed a couple of hundred thousand people, destroyed the political system, introduced a regime of torture and massacre, and invaded East Timor, and so on, it was just fine. Suharto was our kind of guy as the Clinton administration called him. A Muslim state? "Don't care".

And in the 1980s, the US was pretty much at war with the Catholic church in central America. Where's the clash of civilisations?

US interactions - or British or French, or whatever - interactions with the Islamic world are based on other principles. I mean, you could try to create a clash of civilisations - Osama and Bush are helping out in that endeavour - but there's actually no reason for it. It's a matter of other considerations that dominate.
And I don't think 9/11 had anything to do with it. It's claimed it changed the world. I don't think it changed the world very much.


Staunton: One of the issues that comes up is the idea that there are universal human rights and that we have a responsibility to put pressure on Muslim states to respect them.

It used to be called "Asian relativism" and "communist relativism" and now it's "Muslim relativism". The fact of the matter is that if we were honest we would recognise that there is relativism with regard to universal human rights, and one of the leaders of the relativist camp is the United States. And the United States and Ireland and Britain and most of the West flatly reject - the US mostly but the others more or less - a central component of the Universal Declaration. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has three components - civil and political rights, social and economic rights, and cultural rights, basically. Well, the United States publicly, flatly, officially rejects the socio - economic rights, explicitly. Jeane Kirkpatrick [former US ambassador to the UN] called them "a letter to Santa Claus". And Morris Abram, the US ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights vetoed the "right to development" because it paraphrased Article 25 of the Universal Declaration. And Paula Dobriansky, who's the current Under-Secretary for Global Affairs, she's very publicly explained that we have to eliminate the myth that there are social and economic rights which is poisoning the human rights discourse.

You take a look at the articles and you see why the US is opposed. They call for a right to healthcare, a right to food, a right to a decent job and so on. It's as much a part of the Universal Declaration as anything else. In fact if you look at the part [of the declaration] that the West claims to uphold, it doesn't. Take the civil and political rights, the part we're supposed to uphold and that we say the Asian relativists don't uphold. Do we uphold them? Does the United States support democratic governments? Is that why it overthrows them all over the world?

Take, say, the right of asylum, political asylum. Who accepts that? That's, I think, Article 9. Take a look at what happens. Take, say, Jack Straw. In the year 2000, as Home Secretary and in that capacity he had to approve asylum requests. Well one of them - this was actually published in the British press and I didn't think the government would be able to survive, but it passed very quietly - in 2000 there was a request from an Iraqi who had somehow escaped an Iraqi torture chamber and made it to England. He was applying for political asylum. Straw turned him down with a letter saying "we have faith in the integrity of the Iraqi judicial process and that you should have no concerns if you haven't done anything wrong ". In 2000!

Or take what's happening in Europe now with refugees. Or take, say, the United States. Under Carter, Haiti was under vicious dictatorship backed by the US and people were fleeing. The Carter administration informally, but the Reagan administration by agreement, essentially blockaded the island, totally illegally, to block Haitians from escaping from a brutal, vicious dictatorship. In fact the only break in that policy was when Aristide won a democratic election and the US, opposed to the Aristide government, and tried to destroy it. And one of the things they did was reverse the policy. They said now people who are fleeing from a democratic government were political refugees. Before that they were just economic refugees. They were fleeing from Duvalier's torturers. What happened to Article 9? And you can run through the list. The support [for human rights] is utter hypocrisy. If you look at it, who are the relativists?


Staunton: If you look at America and around the world, what would be the most hopeful signs that you see?

The populations. Take, say, the United States. One of the most hopeful signs in the United States - I think very hopeful - is that there is an enormous gap between public policy and public attitudes. In fact the gap is so strong that the press literally does not report the studies of public attitudes, literally.
I'll give you an example. The federal budget comes out around February every year for the next year. After the last federal budget last February, one of the major polling institutions in the world, the Program on International Policy Attitudes based in the University of Maryland, which does in - depth studies, did a study of people's attitudes to wards the budget. They were the reverse of the budget. Where the budget was going up, the population wanted it to go down. Where it was going down, they wanted it to go up.

The public was strongly opposed to increased military spending, supplementals for Iraq and Afghanistan. It was very strongly in favour of increases in social spending, health, education, renewable energy, support for United Nations peacekeeping operations... across the board. And it was almost the inverse of the budget.

Well I had a friend do a database search on that. Not a single newspaper in the country reported it. In a democratic society people should know what others believe. And it [the suppression of polls] is quite common. Right before the November 2004 elections, the same people, the Program on International Policy Attitudes in Maryland and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, which does the main monitoring of attitudes on international affairs, published a couple of big joint studies. They came out right before the election. They were barely mentioned in the press but they were very striking. Again they showed that both main political parties are far to the right of the population on a whole range of important issues, ranging from the Kyoto protocol to the "right of intervention", which the public opposes. It [the government] takes a pretty conservative view of the UN Charter. Yet support for the United Nations was very strong.
In fact, to my amazement, a small majority of the population thinks the US ought to give up the veto and follow general world opinion even if it doesn't like it.
[Public opinion] Strongly support s more social spending. Take, say, health care. It's the leading domestic issue in the United States, by far. People are really worried about it and it's a huge fiscal crisis when you have to deal with the most inefficient system in the industrialised world. A strong, large majority of the population wants some kind of national health care. Neither political party will touch it. In fact, when the press ever mentions it, it's called "politically impossible" or "lacking political support" or something. It tells you something about their attitude to democracy. But this gulf has implications. It means if the democratic deficit can be overcome, if the public can somehow, if public attitudes have some influence on public policy a lot of things could change. That's very hopeful. The general population is a lot more civilised than it was back in the 1960s or 1950s.


Staunton: The faults that you have identified a number of times in the mainstream media here in America, do you think they are shared elsewhere in the world? Do you think the European media are as bad?

I don't study them as intensively so I'm less competent but from what I've seen, they're as bad or worse. I spent a week in Germany last March and for a week I was reading the German press. It was appalling, kind of like Fox News with big words and references to philosophers and so on. But I think you couldn't even publish it here. I think the French media are horrible. The British, which I read a little more, is a sort of mixed story. The Irish I don't know about. From what I've seen, I think it's different, a little more diverse. There's a kind of diversity, at least in England. It's impressionistic but my impression is there's not a fundamental difference.


Staunton: The media in the US, the New York Times obviously, and perhaps the Washington Post, had a bad war shall we say, and we all know about that. But both of those papers in recent weeks have been essential in revealing both about the renditions and about the NSA spying [National Security Agency involvement in domestic phone-tapping]. Would you say you're being entirely fair on them in the sense that they obviously are useful?

Oh, sure they're useful. I mean if I had one newspaper in the world to read it would be the New York Times. Maybe the business press as well. Sure, they're very useful, yes. There's enormous coverage and if you read carefully, you can learn a lot. The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Financial Times and others. But the framework in which they present things, if it was in some enemy state, we would ridicule it.

It's true, they don't like governments spying, they don't like torture. But the business world doesn't either. Take a poll of CEOs in major corporations and - they don't want a state powerful enough to intrude into their affairs. They have no particular interest in torture. The general attitudes of CEOs - they're called liberal in the United States - is in favour of gay rights and they don't see anything wrong with abortion and so on and so forth. So sure, on those issues, the press will reflect the interests of its major constituency, which is concentrated private economic power.

On the other hand, take something like coverage of the Iraq war. I don't read everything but I follow it pretty carefully and I listen to NPR [the US National Public Radio] which is supposed to be liberal and so on. But it's at the level of a high school newspaper cheering the local football team. And the only question that can come up, the only question is how well are we doing? Did the coach make a mistake? Should he have substituted somebody else? The question whether we should invade - it's after all the supreme crime at Nuremberg, leaders are supposed to be hanged for that - you can't even raise that question. Did we have a right? The only, the framework is "how do we gain victory?" Is that the only question that arises when, say, Russia invades Afghanistan? In fact, if I had the resources - I don't - but somebody ought to compare the US media on Iraq and the Russian media on the invasion of Afghanistan. I bet you it would be pretty similar. You know, agonising stories about the suffering of soldiers and how they're trying to do great things for the Afghans, fighting these hideous terrorists, which was all true, the deeply humanitarian aims and how could Russia gain victory, for the benefit of the Afghans of course. I think it's pretty predictable that that's what the coverage would have been. That's what the coverage is here.


Staunton: Since I moved here [to the US] last August, everybody has told me that the problem that Europeans have is that we don't understand, we can't grasp just how deeply 9/11 affected Americans

It affected the Europeans too. It's understandable. For one thing it was a major atrocity. But for another thing, it runs counter to centuries of deeply - rooted imperial assumptions. This is the kind of thing that we do to them. They don't do it to us. And that is outrageous. In fact, take 9/11. Go south of the border. There they call it often "the second 9/11". September 11th 1973 [the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile], take a look at that. Translate it in per capita terms to the United States, OK, one change only. Imagine that Al Qaeda had bombed the White House, killed the president, carried out a military coup, destroyed the oldest democracy in the hemisphere, killed 50,000 - 100,000 people - that's the per capita equivalent - and tortured 700,000, established a major international terrorist centre which overthrew governments, installed neo - Nazi regimes, carried out assassinations all over the world, sent in a bunch of economists called the Kandahar Boys who took over the US economy, drove it into the worst disaster in US economic history within a few years.

Suppose all that had happened. Would that have been worse than 9/11? Incomparably worse. Well it did happen. The only change I made is change to the per capita equivalent. Yeah, that happened. But we did it to them, so therefore it doesn't matter. The US may not have instigated the coup but it was certainly up to its neck in it and both the United States and Britain strongly supported it. Pinochet was the darling of Thatcher and Reagan. Yeah, we did it, so therefore it doesn't really matter. But that's another 9/11. It's true that this 9/11 was a horror story, maybe the worst single terrorist atrocity in history. But you put it in the general framework, it's the kind of thing we do to the Third World all the time.


Staunton: But what I'm getting at is just the psychological impact that the event had on Americans....

The psychological impact was multiple. On the one hand it really frightened people - and correctly. I felt there was going to be further terrorist attacks. I was surprised there was only one. So, sure, people had a right to be frightened. For another, the United States has never been attacked and the last attack on US soil was in 1814, which is not part of US history. We're safe, we're not going to be attacked. We can't be attacked. We're ultra - secure. So, yes, it was a shock. And it led to kind of what is called patriotism, a lot of flags and that sort of thing. But there was another side to it. The United States is a very insular society. People don't know much about the outside world, nor do they care much about it. A lot of people couldn't tell you where France is. Maybe they know where Canada is, but not much more. This kind of opened a lot of people's minds. They said, we'd better start paying attention to what's going on in the outside world. The small presses, left presses, all of a sudden had to start reprinting their books from the 1980s which nobody had bought and were selling them all over the place.

I can tell it just personally - invitations for talks just escalated and audiences were huge. And it was everywhere around the country. It's not just Harvard Square, it's central Iowa. Anywhere. They said "we've just got to learn something, we don't know anything". The country became a lot more open - minded. That was a very positive development. So it's complex.


Staunton: The other big event recently of course was Hurricane Katrina. What do you think is the long - term effect of that event
Hurricane Katrina brought out very dramatically some facts about the United States - and it's the same in Ireland - that are usually pushed under the rug. There's a very sharp class difference which shows up all over the place.

In the United States, class and race are fairly closely correlated so there's also a race difference. But the poverty in the United States is very high, the highest in the industrial world and it's a scandal. But in New Orleans it was close to 30 per cent and the poor, black areas were of course devastated. And it was so dramatic that even the business press was covering it, it was such a horror. And then the government reaction. And then you start looking at the background and you find they didn't bother to deal with the levees. They knew there was going to be a catastrophe but they'd got other things in mind and so on, which was scandalous.

But even more scandalous was the reaction, and the immediate reaction of the administration in Washington was to try to ram through their favourite programmes to benefit the rich. So the first thing they did was rescind the Davis-Bacon Act which goes back to the ' 30s and calls for decent wages for construction. Then come the contracts for all the usual gangsters. Ten years from now there'll be a big corruption scandal about Halliburton and the rest of them for ripping off money.

Instead of putting money into schools they put it into vouchers with extra funding if you send your child to private school. So it's trying to destroy the public school system. They even tried to - they didn't get away with this - but they tried to use it as an opportunity to rescind the estate tax. Just what the poor blacks in New Orleans need. Only the cynicism was so extreme that plenty of people found it appalling.

But watch the media coverage decline. It sort of fades into the background and by now I think it's a memory. Something that was bad. It's still a horror story but not much about it.


Staunton: People don't like too much bad news here? They don't like to be depressed?

Life's hard enough, to face more bad news is not good. In fact, the media have become far more sensational. I think this is true of Europe too, but crime, for example, is featured in gory, grisly detail in a way which it wasn't when I was growing up. And that has a big effect on society. I mean, I happen to live in a suburban neighbourhood. We moved there because we couldn't afford the rents in the city and our kids were growing up and so on, and it was a nice place for kids. They'd play on the streets and parks. Take a walk around the neighbourhood now, you won't see any children. Parents are afraid. There's nothing to be afraid of. But children have to be inside or under supervision, organised activities. You don't see children just going out and playing in the park, it has to be organised.

I know it's the same in England. I happened to be there when some study came out, some government study, which showed that increasingly parents just keep their kids under control. They're not learning how to live on the streets because of fear.

And the fear is engendered by amplification of real stories. Like lightning bolts. If a child gets abducted somewhere, we're kind of asked to hide the children in the cellar. You know what "trick or treat" is? Well, for years - we were caught up in it too - we didn't want our children to go around without supervision because there were rumours circulating about poisoned apples and razor blades. It turned out there was absolutely nothing to it. It was just a, mostly media - sponsored scare story. This goes on all the time, partly through the sensationalisation of coverage, the commercialisation of the media. But it's a big social thing.


Staunton: One last question on a different subject. How would you describe the relationship between your academic work and your political activity? Is there one? [Chomsky's ground-breaking work in linguistics suggests that human beings have an innate grammar, an ability for language that is not just socially acquired

Almost nonexistent. At some very abstract level there's a connection which I've written about occasionally. If you go back, say, to the Enlightenment, the origins of classical liberalism and so on, there actually was a connection at the time. So if you look at people like Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the founders of classical liberalism and also the founder of the modern university system, or Rousseau for that matter in his more libertarian essays, others, they drew a connection which traces to Cartesian thought... between the essential - they're struck by an essential property of language.

This goes back to the Cartesians, in fact. There's something free and creative about it. What you and I are now doing is just free creation, expression of thoughts that maybe nobody ever had before, but if you say them I can understand them, and so on. And this is boundless, it's not controlled by internal states, it's not determined by external stimuli. As far as anyone knows, it's unique to humans. There's some kind of intrinsic, free, creative element to human nature which shows up most dramatically in language. Actually for the Cartesians, that was the prime criterion for mind as distinct from body. So it's very extensively thought about, investigated. And this, connected with political attitudes, with the idea that there's some sort of instinct for freedom and the core of human nature is to inquire and create and any external constraint that limits this is illegitimate and has to be overcome, out of this comes a lot of classical liberal thought and left - libertarian thought and so on.

There is a kind of a loose, abstract connection in the background. But if you look for practical connections, they're non - existent. I'd do the same political things if I was an algebraic topologist and somebody could have the same linguistic views as I do and be a fascist or a Stalinist. There'd be no contradiction.


http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=9868

This video explains the Pentagon crash in terms of it's full of bull crap.

The following link is as close to a smoking gun as I've been able to find. Opening the link immediately brings you to a playing video. It takes about a minute to open. The style is similar to Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11. Reviewers call it the film Michael Moore should have made. It is being distributed for free by its makers. I think it has high credibility and is quite provocative. Can't hurt to pass it on, before it's banned.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5137581991288263801&q=loose+change

2117


Debunking the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories



It is truly astonishing how many people believe the trash, misconceptions and outright lies concerning the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. There is widespread distrust of the current U.S. administration under President George W. Bush – and rightly so. Southern Cross Review has published many harshly criticizing articles in this direction, as our readers well know. But to extrapolate this mistrust to the point of accusing him and/or other individuals or organizations in the U.S. government of conspiring to destroy the World Trade Center and the thousands of people in it at the time is not only absurd, irrational and ignorant, but also inspires the administration’s defenders on other issues. The following investigation was carried out by the staff of “Popular Mechanics” magazine. It is reproduced in full here – except for the photos, which have appeared elsewhere in the press. We believe that the information contained herein in important, because it is the truth supported by expert evidence, and effectively debunks the irresponsible conspiracy theories which are polluting he the internet. We could of course have simply referred you to the PM website (see below), but one never knows how long the report will be there. It will remain in the SCR Back Issues archives as long as we feel necessary. [Ed.]



FROM THE MOMENT the first airplane crashed into the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, the world has asked one simple and compelling question: How could it happen?

Three and a half years later, not everyone is convinced we know the truth. Go to Google.com, type in the search phrase "World Trade Center conspiracy" and you'll get links to an estimated 628,000 Web sites. More than 3000 books on 9/11 have been published; many of them reject the official consensus that hijackers associated with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda flew passenger planes into U.S. landmarks.

Healthy skepticism, it seems, has curdled into paranoia. Wild conspiracy tales are peddled daily on the Internet, talk radio and in other media. Blurry photos, quotes taken out of context and sketchy eyewitness accounts have inspired a slew of elaborate theories: The Pentagon was struck by a missile; the World Trade Center was razed by demolition-style bombs; Flight 93 was shot down by a mysterious white jet. As outlandish as these claims may sound, they are increasingly accepted abroad and among extremists here in the United States.

To investigate 16 of the most prevalent claims made by conspiracy theorists, POPULAR MECHANICS assembled a team of nine researchers and reporters who, together with PM editors, consulted more than 70 professionals in fields that form the core content of this magazine, including aviation, engineering and the military.

In the end, we were able to debunk each of these assertions with hard evidence and a healthy dose of common sense. We learned that a few theories are based on something as innocent as a reporting error on that chaotic day. Others are the byproducts of cynical imaginations that aim to inject suspicion and animosity into public debate. Only by confronting such poisonous claims with irrefutable facts can we understand what really happened on a day that is forever seared into world history.--THE EDITORS [of Popular Mechanics]

The Planes
The widely accepted account that hijackers commandeered and crashed the four 9/11 planes is supported by reams of evidence, from cockpit recordings to forensics to the fact that crews and passengers never returned home. Nonetheless, conspiracy theorists seize on a handful of "facts" to argue a very different scenario: The jets that struck New York and Washington, D.C., weren't commercial planes, they say, but something else, perhaps refueling tankers or guided missiles. And the lack of military intervention? Theorists claim it proves the U.S. government instigated the assault or allowed it to occur in order to advance oil interests or a war agenda.

Where's The Pod?
CLAIM: Photographs and video footage shot just before United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) show an object underneath the fuselage at the base of the right wing. The film "911 In Plane Site" and the Web site LetsRoll911.org claim that no such object is found on a stock Boeing 767. They speculate that this "military pod" is a missile, a bomb or a piece of equipment on an air-refueling tanker. LetsRoll911.org points to this as evidence that the attacks were an "inside job" sanctioned by "President George Bush, who planned and engineered 9/11."

FACT: One of the clearest, most widely seen pictures of the doomed jet's undercarriage was taken by photographer Rob Howard and published in New York magazine and elsewhere (opening page). PM sent a digital scan of the original photo to Ronald Greeley, director of the Space Photography Laboratory at Arizona State University. Greeley is an expert at analyzing images to determine the shape and features of geological formations based on shadow and light effects. After studying the high-resolution image and comparing it to photos of a Boeing 767-200ER's undercarriage, Greeley dismissed the notion that the Howard photo reveals a "pod." In fact, the photo reveals only the Boeing's right fairing, a pronounced bulge that contains the landing gear. He concludes that sunlight glinting off the fairing gave it an exaggerated look. "Such a glint causes a blossoming (enlargement) on film," he writes in an e-mail to PM, "which tends to be amplified in digital versions of images--the pixels are saturated and tend to 'spill over' to adjacent pixels." When asked about pods attached to civilian aircraft, Fred E. Culick, professor of aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology, gave a blunter response: "That's bull. They're really stretching."

No Stand-Down Order
CLAIM: No fighter jets were scrambled from any of the 28 Air Force bases within close range of the four hijacked flights. "On 11 September Andrews had two squadrons of fighter jets with the job of protecting the skies over Washington D.C.," says the Web site emperors-clothes.com. "They failed to do their job." "There is only one explanation for this," writes Mark R. Elsis of StandDown.net. "Our Air Force was ordered to Stand Down on 9/11."

FACT: On 9/11 there were only 14 fighter jets on alert in the contiguous 48 states. No computer network or alarm automatically alerted the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) of missing planes. "They [civilian Air Traffic Control, or ATC] had to pick up the phone and literally dial us," says Maj. Douglas Martin, public affairs officer for NORAD. Boston Center, one of 22 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regional ATC facilities, called NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) three times: at 8:37 am EST to inform NEADS that Flight 11 was hijacked; at 9:21 am to inform the agency, mistakenly, that Flight 11 was headed for Washington (the plane had hit the North Tower 35 minutes earlier); and at 9:41 am to (erroneously) identify Delta Air Lines Flight 1989 from Boston as a possible hijacking. The New York ATC called NEADS at 9:03 am to report that United Flight 175 had been hijacked--the same time the plane slammed into the South Tower. Within minutes of that first call from Boston Center, NEADS scrambled two F-15s from Otis Air Force Base in Falmouth, Mass., and three F-16s from Langley Air National Guard Base in Hampton, Va. None of the fighters got anywhere near the pirated planes.

Why couldn't ATC find the hijacked flights? When the hijackers turned off the planes' transponders, which broadcast identifying signals, ATC had to search 4500 identical radar blips crisscrossing some of the country's busiest air corridors. And NORAD's sophisticated radar? It ringed the continent, looking outward for threats, not inward. "It was like a doughnut," Martin says. "There was no coverage in the middle." Pre-9/11, flights originating in the States were not seen as threats and NORAD wasn't prepared to track them.

Flight 175's Windows
CLAIM: On Sept. 11, FOX News broadcast a live phone interview with FOX employee Marc Birnbach. 911inplanesite.com states that "Bernback" saw the plane "crash into the South Tower." "It definitely did not look like a commercial plane," Birnbach said on air. "I didn't see any windows on the sides."

Coupled with photographs and videos of Flight 175 that lack the resolution to show windows, Birnbach's statement has fueled one of the most widely referenced 9/11 conspiracy theories--specifically, that the South Tower was struck by a military cargo plane or a fuel tanker.

FACT: Birnbach, who was a freelance videographer with FOX News at the time, tells PM that he was more than 2 miles southeast of the WTC, in Brooklyn, when he briefly saw a plane fly over. He says that, in fact, he did not see the plane strike the South Tower; he says he only heard the explosion.

While heading a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) probe into the collapse of the towers, W. Gene Corley studied the airplane wreckage. A licensed structural engineer with Construction Technology Laboratories, a consulting firm based in Skokie, Ill., Corley and his team photographed aircraft debris on the roof of WTC 5, including a chunk of fuselage that clearly had passenger windows. "It's ... from the United Airlines plane that hit Tower 2," Corley states flatly. In reviewing crash footage taken by an ABC news crew, Corley was able to track the trajectory of the fragments he studied--including a section of the landing gear and part of an engine--as they tore through the South Tower, exited from the building's north side and fell from the sky.

Intercepts Not Routine
CLAIM: "It has been standard operating procedures for decades to immediately intercept off-course planes that do not respond to communications from air traffic controllers," says the Web site oilempire.us. "When the Air Force 'scrambles' a fighter plane to intercept, they usually reach the plane in question in minutes."

FACT: In the decade before 9/11, NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet, in October 1999. With passengers and crew unconscious from cabin decompression, the plane lost radio contact but remained in transponder contact until it crashed. Even so, it took an F-16 1 hour and 22 minutes to reach the stricken jet. Rules in effect back then, and on 9/11, prohibited supersonic flight on intercepts. Prior to 9/11, all other NORAD interceptions were limited to offshore Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ). "Until 9/11 there was no domestic ADIZ," FAA spokesman Bill Schumann tells PM. After 9/11, NORAD and the FAA increased cooperation, setting up hotlines between ATCs and NORAD command centers, according to officials from both agencies. NORAD has also increased its fighter coverage and has installed radar to monitor airspace over the continent.

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
The collapse of both World Trade Center towers--and the smaller WTC 7 a few hours later--initially surprised even some experts. But subsequent studies have shown that the WTC's structural integrity was destroyed by intense fire as well as the severe damage inflicted by the planes. That explanation hasn't swayed conspiracy theorists, who contend that all three buildings were wired with explosives in advance and razed in a series of controlled demolitions.

Widespread Damage
CLAIM: The first hijacked plane crashed through the 94th to the 98th floors of the World Trade Center's 110-story North Tower; the second jet slammed into the 78th to the 84th floors of the 110-story South Tower. The impact and ensuing fires disrupted elevator service in both buildings. Plus, the lobbies of both buildings were visibly damaged before the towers collapsed. "There is NO WAY the impact of the jet caused such widespread damage 80 stories below," claims a posting on the San Diego Independent Media Center Web site (sandiego.indymedia.org). "It is OBVIOUS and irrefutable that OTHER EXPLOSIVES (... such as concussion bombs) HAD ALREADY BEEN DETONATED in the lower levels of tower one at the same time as the plane crash."

FACT: Following up on a May 2002 preliminary report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a major study will be released in spring 2005 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST shared its initial findings with PM and made its lead researcher available to our team of reporters.

The NIST investigation revealed that plane debris sliced through the utility shafts at the North Tower's core, creating a conduit for burning jet fuel--and fiery destruction throughout the building. "It's very hard to document where the fuel went," says Forman Williams, a NIST adviser and a combustion expert, "but if it's atomized and combustible and gets to an ignition source, it'll go off."

Burning fuel traveling down the elevator shafts would have disrupted the elevator systems and caused extensive damage to the lobbies. NIST heard first-person testimony that "some elevators slammed right down" to the ground floor. "The doors cracked open on the lobby floor and flames came out and people died," says James Quintiere, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland and a NIST adviser. A similar observation was made in the French documentary "9/11," by Jules and Gedeon Naudet. As Jules Naudet entered the North Tower lobby, minutes after the first aircraft struck, he saw victims on fire, a scene he found too horrific to film.

"Melted" Steel
CLAIM: "We have been lied to," announces the Web site AttackOnAmerica.net. "The first lie was that the load of fuel from the aircraft was the cause of structural failure. No kerosene fire can burn hot enough to melt steel." The posting is entitled "Proof Of Controlled Demolition At The WTC."

FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength--and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."

"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.

But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.

"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."

Puffs Of Dust
CLAIM: As each tower collapsed, clearly visible puffs of dust and debris were ejected from the sides of the buildings. An advertisement in The New York Times for the book Painful Questions: An Analysis Of The September 11th Attack made this claim: "The concrete clouds shooting out of the buildings are not possible from a mere collapse. They do occur from explosions." Numerous conspiracy theorists cite Van Romero, an explosives expert and vice president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, who was quoted on 9/11 by the Albuquerque Journal as saying "there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse." The article continues, "Romero said the collapse of the structures resembled those of controlled implosions used to demolish old structures."

FACT: Once each tower began to collapse, the weight of all the floors above the collapsed zone bore down with pulverizing force on the highest intact floor. Unable to absorb the massive energy, that floor would fail, transmitting the forces to the floor below, allowing the collapse to progress downward through the building in a chain reaction. Engineers call the process "pancaking," and it does not require an explosion to begin, according to David Biggs, a structural engineer at Ryan-Biggs Associates and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) team that worked on the FEMA report.

Like all office buildings, the WTC towers contained a huge volume of air. As they pancaked, all that air--along with the concrete and other debris pulverized by the force of the collapse--was ejected with enormous energy. "When you have a significant portion of a floor collapsing, it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window," NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder tells PM. Those clouds of dust may create the impression of a controlled demolition, Sunder adds, "but it is the floor pancaking that leads to that perception."

Demolition expert Romero regrets that his comments to the Albuquerque Journal became fodder for conspiracy theorists. "I was misquoted in saying that I thought it was explosives that brought down the building," he tells PM. "I only said that that's what it looked like."

Romero, who agrees with the scientific conclusion that fire triggered the collapses, demanded a retraction from the Journal. It was printed Sept. 22, 2001. "I felt like my scientific reputation was on the line." But emperors-clothes.com saw something else: "The paymaster of Romero's research institute is the Pentagon. Directly or indirectly, pressure was brought to bear, forcing Romero to retract his original statement." Romero responds: "Conspiracy theorists came out saying that the government got to me. That is the farthest thing from the truth. This has been an albatross around my neck for three years."

Seismic Spikes
CLAIM: Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded the events of 9/11. "The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of the collapses, well before falling debris struck the earth," reports the Web site WhatReallyHappened.com.

A columnist on Prisonplanet.com, a Web site run by radio talk show host Alex Jones, claims the seismic spikes (boxed area on Graph 1) are "indisputable proof that massive explosions brought down" the towers. The Web site says its findings are supported by two seismologists at the observatory, Won-Young Kim and Arthur Lerner-Lam. Each "sharp spike of short duration," says Prisonplanet.com, was consistent with a "demolition-style implosion."

FACT: "There is no scientific basis for the conclusion that explosions brought down the towers," Lerner-Lam tells PM. "That representation of our work is categorically incorrect and not in context."

The report issued by Lamont-Doherty includes various graphs showing the seismic readings produced by the planes crashing into the two towers as well as the later collapse of both buildings. WhatReallyHappened.com chooses to display only one graph (Graph 1), which shows the readings over a 30-minute time span.

On that graph, the 8- and 10-second collapses appear--misleadingly--as a pair of sudden spikes. Lamont-Doherty's 40-second plot of the same data (Graph 2) gives a much more detailed picture: The seismic waves--blue for the South Tower, red for the North Tower--start small and then escalate as the buildings rumble to the ground. Translation: no bombs.

WTC 7 Collapse
CLAIM: Seven hours after the two towers fell, the 47-story WTC 7 collapsed. According to 911review.org: "The video clearly shows that it was not a collapse subsequent to a fire, but rather a controlled demolition: amongst the Internet investigators, the jury is in on this one."

FACT: Many conspiracy theorists point to FEMA's preliminary report, which said there was relatively light damage to WTC 7 prior to its collapse. With the benefit of more time and resources, NIST researchers now support the working hypothesis that WTC 7 was far more compromised by falling debris than the FEMA report indicated. "The most important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7," NIST's Sunder tells PM. "On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom--approximately 10 stories--about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out." NIST also discovered previously undocumented damage to WTC 7's upper stories and its southwest corner.

NIST investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe structural damage contributed to the collapse, though assigning the exact proportion requires more research. But NIST's analysis suggests the fall of WTC 7 was an example of "progressive collapse," a process in which the failure of parts of a structure ultimately creates strains that cause the entire building to come down. Videos of the fall of WTC 7 show cracks, or "kinks," in the building's facade just before the two penthouses disappeared into the structure, one after the other. The entire building fell in on itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.

According to NIST, there was one primary reason for the building's failure: In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were carrying exceptionally large loads, roughly 2000 sq. ft. of floor area for each floor. "What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors," Sunder notes, "it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down."

There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation: First, trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed to transfer loads from one set of columns to another. With columns on the south face apparently damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing capacities.

Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to 7 hours. "There was no firefighting in WTC 7," Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time."

WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the fire that burned for hours, but those combined factors--along with the building's unusual construction--were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse.

THE PENTAGON
At 9:37 am on 9/11, 51 minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center, the Pentagon was similarly attacked. Though dozens of witnesses saw a Boeing 757 hit the building, conspiracy advocates insist there is evidence that a missile or a different type of plane smashed into the Pentagon.

Big Plane, Small Holes
CLAIM: Two holes were visible in the Pentagon immediately after the attack: a 75-ft.-wide entry hole in the building's exterior wall, and a 16-ft.-wide hole in Ring C, the Pentagon's middle ring. Conspiracy theorists claim both holes are far too small to have been made by a Boeing 757. "How does a plane 125 ft. wide and 155 ft. long fit into a hole which is only 16 ft. across?" asks reopen911.org, a Web site "dedicated to discovering the bottom line truth to what really occurred on September 11, 2001."

The truth is of even less importance to French author Thierry Meyssan, whose baseless assertions are fodder for even mainstream European and Middle Eastern media. In his book The Big Lie, Meyssan concludes that the Pentagon was struck by a satellite-guided missile--part of an elaborate U.S. military coup. "This attack," he writes, "could only be committed by United States military personnel against other U.S. military personnel."

FACT: When American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon's exterior wall, Ring E, it created a hole approximately 75 ft. wide, according to the ASCE Pentagon Building Performance Report. The exterior facade collapsed about 20 minutes after impact, but ASCE based its measurements of the original hole on the number of first-floor support columns that were destroyed or damaged. Computer simulations confirmed the findings.

Why wasn't the hole as wide as a 757's 124-ft.-10-in. wingspan? A crashing jet doesn't punch a cartoon-like outline of itself into a reinforced concrete building, says ASCE team member Mete Sozen, a professor of structural engineering at Purdue University. In this case, one wing hit the ground; the other was sheared off by the force of the impact with the Pentagon's load-bearing columns, explains Sozen, who specializes in the behavior of concrete buildings. What was left of the plane flowed into the structure in a state closer to a liquid than a solid mass. "If you expected the entire wing to cut into the building," Sozen tells PM, "it didn't happen."

The tidy hole in Ring C was 12 ft. wide--not 16 ft. ASCE concludes it was made by the jet's landing gear, not by the fuselage.

Intact Windows
CLAIM: Many Pentagon windows remained in one piece--even those just above the point of impact from the Boeing 757 passenger plane. Pentagonstrike.co.uk, an online animation widely circulated in the United States and Europe, claims that photographs showing "intact windows" directly above the crash site prove "a missile" or "a craft much smaller than a 757" struck the Pentagon.

FACT: Some windows near the impact area did indeed survive the crash. But that's what the windows were supposed to do--they're blast-resistant.

"A blast-resistant window must be designed to resist a force significantly higher than a hurricane that's hitting instantaneously," says Ken Hays, executive vice president of Masonry Arts, the Bessemer, Ala., company that designed, manufactured and installed the Pentagon windows. Some were knocked out of the walls by the crash and the outer ring's later collapse. "They were not designed to receive wracking seismic force," Hays notes. "They were designed to take in inward pressure from a blast event, which apparently they did: [Before the collapse] the blinds were still stacked neatly behind the window glass."

Flight 77 Debris
CLAIM: Conspiracy theorists insist there was no plane wreckage at the Pentagon. "In reality, a Boeing 757 was never found," claims pentagonstrike.co.uk, which asks the question, "What hit the Pentagon on 9/11?"

FACT: Blast expert Allyn E. Kilsheimer was the first structural engineer to arrive at the Pentagon after the crash and helped coordinate the emergency response. "It was absolutely a plane, and I'll tell you why," says Kilsheimer, CEO of KCE Structural Engineers PC, Washington, D.C. "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box." Kilsheimer's eyewitness account is backed up by photos of plane wreckage inside and outside the building. Kilsheimer adds: "I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts. Okay?"

FLIGHT 93
Cockpit recordings indicate the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 teamed up to attack their hijackers, forcing down the plane near Shanksville, in southwestern Pennsylvania. But conspiracy theorists assert Flight 93 was destroyed by a heat-seeking missile from an F-16 or a mysterious white plane. Some theorists add far-fetched elaborations: No terrorists were aboard, or the passengers were drugged. The wildest is the "bumble planes" theory, which holds that passengers from Flights 11, 175 and 77 were loaded onto Flight 93 so the U.S. government could kill them.

The White Jet
CLAIM: At least six eyewitnesses say they saw a small white jet flying low over the crash area almost immediately after Flight 93 went down. BlogD.com theorizes that the aircraft was downed by "either a missile fired from an Air Force jet, or via an electronic assault made by a U.S. Customs airplane reported to have been seen near the site minutes after Flight 93 crashed." WorldNetDaily.com weighs in: "Witnesses to this low-flying jet ... told their story to journalists. Shortly thereafter, the FBI began to attack the witnesses with perhaps the most inane disinformation ever--alleging the witnesses actually observed a private jet at 34,000 ft. The FBI says the jet was asked to come down to 5000 ft. and try to find the crash site. This would require about 20 minutes to descend."

FACT: There was such a jet in the vicinity--a Dassault Falcon 20 business jet owned by the VF Corp. of Greensboro, N.C., an apparel company that markets Wrangler jeans and other brands. The VF plane was flying into Johnstown-Cambria airport, 20 miles north of Shanksville. According to David Newell, VF's director of aviation and travel, the FAA's Cleveland Center contacted copilot Yates Gladwell when the Falcon was at an altitude "in the neighborhood of 3000 to 4000 ft."--not 34,000 ft. "They were in a descent already going into Johnstown," Newell adds. "The FAA asked them to investigate and they did. They got down within 1500 ft. of the ground when they circled. They saw a hole in the ground with smoke coming out of it. They pinpointed the location and then continued on." Reached by PM, Gladwell confirmed this account but, concerned about ongoing harassment by conspiracy theorists, asked not to be quoted directly.

Roving Engine
CLAIM: One of Flight 93's engines was found "at a considerable distance from the crash site," according to Lyle Szupinka, a state police officer on the scene who was quoted in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Offering no evidence, a posting on Rense.com claimed: "The main body of the engine ... was found miles away from the main wreckage site with damage comparable to that which a heat-seeking missile would do to an airliner."

FACT: Experts on the scene tell PM that a fan from one of the engines was recovered in a catchment basin, downhill from the crash site. Jeff Reinbold, the National Park Service representative responsible for the Flight 93 National Memorial, confirms the direction and distance from the crash site to the basin: just over 300 yards south, which means the fan landed in the direction the jet was traveling. "It's not unusual for an engine to move or tumble across the ground," says Michael K. Hynes, an airline accident expert who investigated the crash of TWA Flight 800 out of New York City in 1996. "When you have very high velocities, 500 mph or more," Hynes says, "you are talking about 700 to 800 ft. per second. For something to hit the ground with that kind of energy, it would only take a few seconds to bounce up and travel 300 yards." Numerous crash analysts contacted by PM concur.

Indian Lake
CLAIM: "Residents and workers at businesses outside Shanksville, Somerset County, reported discovering clothing, books, papers and what appeared to be human remains," states a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article dated Sept. 13, 2001. "Others reported what appeared to be crash debris floating in Indian Lake, nearly 6 miles from the immediate crash scene." Commenting on reports that Indian Lake residents collected debris, Think AndAsk.com speculates: "On Sept. 10, 2001, a strong cold front pushed through the area, and behind it--winds blew northerly. Since Flight 93 crashed west-southwest of Indian Lake, it was impossible for debris to fly perpendicular to wind direction. ... The FBI lied." And the significance of widespread debris? Theorists claim the plane was breaking up before it crashed. TheForbiddenKnowledge.com states bluntly: "Without a doubt, Flight 93 was shot down."

FACT: Wallace Miller, Somerset County coroner, tells PM no body parts were found in Indian Lake. Human remains were confined to a 70-acre area directly surrounding the crash site. Paper and tiny scraps of sheetmetal, however, did land in the lake. "Very light debris will fly into the air, because of the concussion," says former National Transportation Safety Board investigator Matthew McCormick. Indian Lake is less than 1.5 miles southeast of the impact crater--not 6 miles--easily within range of debris blasted skyward by the heat of the explosion from the crash. And the wind that day was northwesterly, at 9 to 12 mph, which means it was blowing from the northwest--toward Indian Lake.

F-16 Pilot
CLAIM: In February 2004, retired Army Col. Donn de Grand-Pre said on "The Alex Jones Show," a radio talk show broadcast on 42 stations: "It [Flight 93] was taken out by the North Dakota Air Guard. I know the pilot who fired those two missiles to take down 93." LetsRoll911.org, citing de Grand-Pre, identifies the pilot: "Major Rick Gibney fired two Sidewinder missiles at the aircraft and destroyed it in midflight at precisely 0958."

FACT: Saying he was reluctant to fuel debate by responding to unsubstantiated charges, Gibney (a lieutenant colonel, not a major) declined to comment. According to Air National Guard spokesman Master Sgt. David Somdahl, Gibney flew an F-16 that morning--but nowhere near Shanksville. He took off from Fargo, N.D., and flew to Bozeman, Mont., to pick up Ed Jacoby Jr., the director of the New York State Emergency Management Office. Gibney then flew Jacoby from Montana to Albany, N.Y., so Jacoby could coordinate 17,000 rescue workers engaged in the state's response to 9/11. Jacoby confirms the day's events. "I was in Big Sky for an emergency managers meeting. Someone called to say an F-16 was landing in Bozeman. From there we flew to Albany." Jacoby is outraged by the claim that Gibney shot down Flight 93. "I summarily dismiss that because Lt. Col. Gibney was with me at that time. It disgusts me to see this because the public is being misled. More than anything else it disgusts me because it brings up fears. It brings up hopes--it brings up all sorts of feelings, not only to the victims' families but to all the individuals throughout the country, and the world for that matter. I get angry at the misinformation out there."

Popular Mechanics consulted more than 300 experts and organizations in its investigation into 9/11 conspiracy theories. The following were particularly helpful.

Air Crash Analysis
Cleveland Center regional air traffic control

Bill Crowley special agent, FBI

Ron Dokell president, Demolition Consultants

Richard Gazarik staff writer, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Yates Gladwell pilot, VF Corp.

Michael K. Hynes, Ed.D.,
ATP, CFI, A&P/IA president, Hynes Aviation Services; expert, aviation crashes

Ed Jacoby Jr. director,
New York State Emergency Management Office (Ret.); chairman, New York State Disaster Preparedness Commission (Ret.)

Johnstown-Cambria County Airport Authority

Cindi Lash staff writer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Matthew McCormick manager, survival factors division, National Transportation Safety Board (Ret.)

Wallace Miller coroner, Somerset County, PA

Robert Nagan meteorological technician, Climate Services Branch, National Climatic Data Center

Dave Newell director, aviation and travel, VF Corp.

James O’Toole politics editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pennsylvania State Police Public Information Office

Jeff Pillets senior writer,
The Record, Hackensack, NJ

Jeff Rienbold director, Flight 93 National Memorial, National Park Service

Dennis Roddy staff writer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Master Sgt. David Somdahl public affairs officer,
119th Wing, North Dakota
Air National Guard

Mark Stahl photographer; eyewitness, United Airlines Flight 93 crash scene

Air Defense
Lt. Col. Skip Aldous (Ret.) squadron commander,
U.S. Air Force

Tech. Sgt. Laura Bosco public affairs officer,
Tyndall Air Force Base

Boston Center regional air traffic control

Laura Brown spokeswoman,
Federal Aviation Administration

Todd Curtis, Ph.D. founder, Airsafe.com; president, Airsafe.com Foundation

Keith Halloway public affairs officer, National Transportation Safety Board

Ted Lopatkiewicz director, public affairs, National Transportation Safety Board

Maj. Douglas Martin public affairs officer,
North American Aerospace Defense Command

Lt. Herbert McConnell public affairs officer,
Andrews AFB

Michael Perini public affairs officer, North American Aerospace Defense Command

John Pike director, GlobalSecurity.org

Hank Price spokesman, Federal
Aviation Administration

Warren Robak RAND Corp.

Bill Shumann spokesman,
Federal Aviation Administration

Louis Walsh public affairs officer, Eglin AFB

Chris Yates aviation security editor, analyst, Jane’s Transport

Aviation
Fred E.C. Culick, Ph.D., S.B., S.M. professor of aeronautics, California Institute of Technology

Robert Everdeen public affairs, Northrop Grumman

Clint Oster professor of public and environmental affairs, Indiana University; aviation safety expert

Capt. Bill Scott (Ret. USAF) Rocky Mountain bureau chief, Aviation Week
Bill Uher News Media Office, NASA Langley Research Center

Col. Ed Walby (Ret. USAF)
director, business development, HALE Systems Enterprise, Unmanned Systems, Northrop Grumman

Image Analysis
William F. Baker member, FEMA Probe Team; partner, Skidmore, Owings, Merrill

W. Gene Corley, Ph.D., P.E., S.E. senior vice president, CTL Group; director,
FEMA Probe Team

Bill Daly senior vice president, Control Risks Group

Steve Douglass image analysis consultant, Aviation Week

Thomas R. Edwards, Ph.D. founder, TREC; video forensics expert.

Ronald Greeley, Ph.D. professor of geology, Arizona State University

Rob Howard freelance photographer; WTC eyewitness

Robert L. Parker, Ph.D. professor of geophysics,
University of California, San Diego

Structural Engineering / Building Collapse
Farid Alfawakhiri, Ph.D. senior engineer, American Institute of Steel Construction

David Biggs, P.E. structural engineer, Ryan-Biggs Associates; member, ASCE team for FEMA report

Robert Clarke structural engineer, Controlled Demolitions Group Ltd.

Glenn Corbett technical editor, Fire Engineering; member, NIST advisory committee

Vincent Dunn deputy fire chief (Ret.), FDNY; author, The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety

John Fisher, Ph.D. professor of civil engineering, Lehigh University; professor emeritus, Center for Advanced Technology; member, FEMA Probe Team

Ken Hays executive vice president, Masonry Arts

Christoph Hoffmann, Ph.D. professor of computer science, Purdue University; project director, September 11 Pentagon Attack Simulations Using LS-Dyna, Purdue University

Allyn E. Kilsheimer, P.E.
CEO, KCE Structural Engineers PC; chief structural engineer, Phoenix project; expert in blast recovery, concrete structures, emergency response

Won-Young Kim, Ph.D. seismologist, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University

William Koplitz photo desk manager, FEMA

John Labriola freelance photographer, WTC survivor

Arthur Lerner-Lam, Ph.D. seismologist; director,
Earth Institute, Center for Hazards and Risk Research, Columbia University

James Quintiere, Ph.D. professor of engineering, University of Maryland member, NIST advisory committee

Steve Riskus freelance photographer; eyewitness, Pentagon crash

Van Romero, Ph.D. vice president, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

Christine Shaffer spokesperson, Viracon

Mete Sozen, Ph.D., S.E. Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering, Purdue University; member, Pentagon Building Performance Report; project conception, September 11 Pentagon Attack Simulations Using LS-Dyna, Purdue University

Shyam Sunder, Sc.D.
acting deputy director, lead investigator, Building and Fire Research Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Mary Tobin science writer, media relations, Earth Institute, Columbia University

Forman Williams, Ph.D. professor of engineering, physics, combustion, University of California,
San Diego; member, advisory committee, National Institute of Standards and Technology




http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=1&c=y




.







web page

NPR features Alex Jones Response to Popular Mechanics' 911 Disinfo
http://www.parapolitics.info/phorum/read.php?f=41&i=4&t=4


Alex Jones' response to Popular Mechanics article:
http://www.prisonplanet.tv/audio/090305alexresponds.htm

Popular Mechanics Attacks Its
"9/11 LIES" Straw Man
by Jim Hoffman
Version 1.2, February 9, 2005

2/07/05: 911Research publishes Version 1 of this critique
2/09/05: Popular Mechanics publishes online edition of article
2/10/05: 911Review.com publishes critique of online edition
6/15/05: 911Research publishes Popular Mechanics' Assault on 9/11 Truth

The Hearst-owned Popular Mechanics magazine takes aim at the 9/11 Truth Movement (without ever acknowledging it by that name) with a cover story in its March 2005 edition. Sandwiched between ads and features for monster trucks, NASCAR paraphernalia, and off-road racing are twelve dense and brilliantly designed pages purporting to debunk the myths of 9/11.

The article's approach is to identify and attack a series of claims which it asserts represent the whole of 9/11 skepticism. It gives the false impression that these claims, several of which are clearly absurd, represent the breadth of challenges to the official account of the flights, the World Trade Center attack, and the Pentagon attack. Meanwhile it entirely ignores vast bodies of evidence showing that only insiders had the means, motive, and opportunity to carry out the attack.

The article gives no hint of the put options on the targeted airlines, warnings received by government and corporate officials, complicit behavior by top officials, obstruction of justice by a much larger group, or obvious frauds in the official story. Instead it attacks a mere 16 claims of its choosing, which it asserts are the "most prevalent" among "conspiracy theorists." The claims are grouped into topics which cover some of the subjects central to the analysis of 9-11 Research. However, for each topic, the article presents specious claims to divert the reader from understanding the issue. For example, the three pages devoted to attacking the Twin Towers' demolition present three red-herring claims and avoid the dozens of points I feature in my presentations, such as the Twin Towers' Demolition.

The article brackets its distortion of the issues highlighted by 9/11 skeptics with smears against the skeptics themselves, whom it dehumanizes and accuses of "disgracing the memories" of the victims.

More important, it misrepresents skeptics' views by implying that the skeptics' community is an undifferentiated "army" that wholly embraces the article's sixteen "poisonous claims," which it asserts are "at the root of virtually every 9/11 alternative scenario." In fact much of the 9/11 truth community has been working to expose many of these claims as disinformation.
"The Lies Are Out There"
James Meigs, appointed editor of Popular Mechanics in May 2004, trashes skeptics of the official story of 9/11/01 as irresponsible disgracers of the memories of victims, apart from "we as a society."

This article has a page of Editor's Notes, "The Lies Are Out There," written by James Meigs, whose previous columns have praised military technology (such as the UAVs used in Fallujah). Meigs places outside of society anyone who questions the official version of events of 9/11/01:

We as a society accept the basic premise that a group of Islamist terrorists hijacked four airplanes and turned them into weapons against us. ... Sadly, the noble search for truth is now being hijacked by a growing army of conspiracy theorists.

Meigs throws a series of insults at the "conspiracy theorists," saying they ignore the facts and engage in "elaborate, shadowy theorizing," and concludes his diatribe by saying:

[T]hose who peddle fantasies that this country encouraged, permitted or actually carried out the attacks are libeling the truth -- and disgracing the memories of the thousands who died that day.

Besides trashing the skeptics, and conflating "this country" with its corrupt leaders, Meig's piece attempts to legitimate PM's "investigation." It reads:

We assembled a team of reporters and researchers, including professional fact checkers and the editors of PM, and methodically analyzed all 16 conspiracy claims. We interviewed scores of engineers, aviation experts, military officials, eyewitnesses and members of the investigative teams who have held the wreckage of the attacks in their own hands. We pored over photography, maps, blueprints, aviation logs and transcripts. In every single instance, we found that the facts used by the conspiracy theorists to support their fantasies were mistaken, misunderstood, or deliberately falsified.

This sounds impressive, but the article provides no evidence to back up these claims. It provides no footnotes to source its many assertions, and despite the scores of experts listed in its final section, the article cites only a few "experts," who would themselves likely be suspects if normal criminal justice procedures were used to investigate the crime.

Moreover, glaring errors in the article -- such as the assertion that there was only a single interception in the decade before 9/11/01 -- don't inspire confidence in PM's "professional fact checkers." It echoes the discredited assertions of official reports such as the FEMA WTC Building Performance Study and the 9/11 Commission Report, and provides no evidence that it is anything but a well-orchestrated hit piece to perpetuate the 9/11 cover-up.
"9/11: DEBUNKING the MYTHS"

The main article consists of six two-page spreads, each devoted to a topic. Spanning these spreads are a series of sixteen "poisonous claims," which the article purports to refute, while it implicitly identifies them as the beliefs of all in the "growing army" of "conspiracy theorists." The two-page spreads, beginning on page 70, are as follows:

* Introduction
* THE PLANES
* THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
* THE WORLD TRADE CENTER (continued)
* THE PENTAGON
* FLIGHT 93

Superficially, the topics appear to address the major physical evidence issues brought up by the skeptics (while ignoring the mountains of evidence of foreknowledge, motive, and unique means possessed by insiders). However, the sixteen "most prevalent claims made by conspiracy theorists" which it attacks are mostly specious claims, many of which were probably invented to discredit skepticism of the official story in the first place. The article debunks the more specious claims, and uses distortion and falsehoods to counter serious claims.

Thus the main approach of the article is to set up and attack a straw man of claims that it pretends represent the entirety of the skeptics' movement. The list includes many of the same claims that are debunked on the companion to this site, 911review.com. The article gives no hint of the questions raised by the evidence in this site, nor any sense of the issues raised by the broader 9/11 truth movement.

Before proceeding to its 16 points, the article's introduction levels more insults at the skeptics -- "extremists", some of whose theories are "byproducts of cynical imaginations that aim to inject suspicion and animosity into public debate." It begins by asking you to type "World Trade Center conspiracy" into Google.com, and claims that "More than 3000 books on 9/11 have been published" -- an incredible claim. (Of these supposed 3000 titles, we recommend only a few, listed here.)

The sixteen "claims" attacked by the article are described here under the headings taken from the article, which indicate either the claim, the counter-claim, or a broader issue.

THE PLANES

1. Where's The Pod
This image, which appears in the article, is found (with the same red oval) on a pod-debunking page of QuestionsQuestions.net, yet the article contains no mention of the site.
The pod-plane idea has been used for over a year to discredit skepticism of the official story. It's not surprising that the article gives it top billing. See ERROR: A Pod Was Attached to the South Tower Plane. The article mentions the site LetsRoll911.org and the video In Plane Site, implying they are representative of the skeptics. Of course it makes no reference to skeptics' sites debunking these productions and the pod-plane idea they feature, such as this page on OilEmpire.us, or this page on QuestionsQuestions.net.


2. No Stand-Down Order
Here, the article falsely implies that emperors-clothes.com and StandDown.net both claim that no jets were scrambled to pursue any of the four commandeered jets. It then attacks this straw man by relating some details of the Commission's timeline (without sourcing the Commission's Report) to suggest that interceptors were scrambled, but that ATC couldn't find the hijacked flights because there were too many radar blips. The article makes no mention of the many problems with NORAD's account of the failed intercepts, but relates the following incredible assertion by NORAD public affairs officer Maj. Douglas Martin that there was a hole in NORAD's radar coverage:

It was like a doughnut. There was no coverage in the middle.

This absurd idea that NORAD had no radar coverage over much of the continental US is distilled from the 9/11 Commission Report. Predictably, the article makes no mention of evidence that war games were planned for the day of 9/11/01. See Multiple War Games on 9/11/01 Helped to Disable Air Defense.


3. Intercepts Not Routine
This section quotes the following excerpt from OilEmpire.us:

It has been standard operating procedures for decades to immediately intercept off-course planes that do not respond to communications from air traffic controllers. When the Air Force 'scrambles' a fighter plane to intercept, they usually reach the plane in question in minutes.

It then dismisses this 'claim' with the following sweeping 'fact':

In the decade before 9/11 NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet, in October 1999.

This bold assertion flies in the face of a published report of scramble frequencies that quotes the same Maj. Douglas Martin that is one of PM's cited experts!

From Sept. 11 to June, NORAD scrambled jets or diverted combat air patrols 462 times, almost seven times as often as the 67 scrambles from September 2000 to June 2001, Martin said.

It is safe to assume that a significant fraction of scrambles lead to intercepts, so the fact that there were 67 scrambles in a 9-month period before 9/11/01 suggests that there are dozens of intercepts per year. To its assertion that there was only one intercept in a decade, the article adds that "rules in effect ... prohibited supersonic flight on intercepts," and the suggestion that there were no hotlines between ATCs and NORAD.


4. Flight 175's Windows
That the South Tower plane had no windows is one of several ludicrous claims made by the In Plane Site video, and, like the pod-planes claim, is dismissed by the simplest analysis. See The Windowless Plane.


THE WORLD TRADE CENTER

5. Widespread Damage
The article's lead point in the World Trade Center topic is an obscure idea that explosives in the basements of the towers damaged the lobbies at about the time the planes hit. With only sparse evidence to support it, this contention is only mentioned by a few researchers. Indeed it is entirely distinct -- in both the support that exists for it, and the support that it provides for "conspiracy theories" -- from the contention that explosives brought down the towers (56 and 102 minutes after the plane crashes).


6. Puffs Of Dust
The article features this image of the South Tower's collapse, taken about 2.5 seconds after the top started to plunge. It was taken by Gulnara Samoilova, who risked her life to take the photograph from a vantage point that would be engulfed by thick toxic dust in under 20 seconds.
Here the article cites this quote from an advertisement for the book Painful Questions:

The concrete clouds shooting out of the buildings are not possible from a mere collapse. They do occur from explosions.

By titling this section "Puffs Of Dust," rather than "explosions of concrete," and by showing only a collapse photograph from early in the South Tower's destruction, the article minimizes the explosiveness of the event, but nonetheless goes to lengths to explain these "puffs." It quotes NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder saying "When you have a significant portion of of a floor collapsing it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window" without explaining where the concrete dust came from, or even attempting to quantify the amount of dust that should be expected in the absence of explosives.

The article mentions none of the other features of the collapses that indicate controlled demolition, such as:
* The towers fell straight down through themselves maintaining radial symmetry,
* The towers' tops mushroomed into vast clouds of pulverized concrete and shattered steel.
* The collapses exhibited demolition squibs shooting out of the towers well below the zones of total destruction.
* The collapses generated vast dust clouds that expanded to many times the towers' volumes -- more than occurs in typical controlled demolitions.
* The towers came down suddenly and completely, at a rate only slightly slower than free fall in a vacuum. The flat top of the North Tower's rubble cloud revealed in these photos show the rubble falling at the same speed inside and outside the former building's profile, an impossibility unless demolition were removing the building's structure ahead of the falling rubble.
* The explosions of the towers were characterized by intense blast waves that shattered windows in buildings 400 feet away.
* The steel skeletons were consistently shredded into short pieces which could be carried easily by the equipment used to dispose of the evidence.
* Eyewitnesses reported explosions before and at the outset of the collapses.


7. "Melted Steel"
The article implies that skeptics' criticism of the official account that fires weakened the towers' structures is based on the erroneous assumption that the official story requires that the fires melted the steel.

In fact the fire-melts-steel claim was first introduced by apologists for the official story on the day of the attack, by no less than a structural engineer. The more sophisticated column failure and truss failure theories, advanced in subsequent days and weeks, are the subject of detailed analysis and debunking here.


8. Seismic Spikes
The idea that seismic spikes preceded the collapses of the towers is the subject of the page, ERROR: Seismic Spikes Preceded Collapses. Unfortunately a number of web sites seized upon this idea without critically evaluating it. The article takes advantage of this red herring by pointing out that PrisonPlanet.com and WhatReallyHappened.com support it, while ignoring the much larger bodies of valid evidence of demolition that these sites present.


9. WTC 7 Collapse
Here the article cites 911review.org, a site that promotes discrediting ideas but purports to speak for the 9/11 skeptics' community. The article simply repeats the site's claim that "the video clearly shows that it was not a collapse subsequent to fire, but rather a controlled demolition," without directing the reader to where they can see videos, such as on WTC7.net. The article makes no mention of the facts that skeptics most often cite as evidence that the collapse was a controlled demolition:
* The building collapsed with precisely vertical fashion.
* The building collapsed at almost the rate of free-fall.
* The building collapsed into a tidy pile of rubble.

The article lets NIST's Shyam Sunder sell the "progressive collapse" of Building 7:

What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors, it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down.

Note the guarded language Sunder uses to describe the extent of the collapse. The reader is led to believe that the collapse of a "section" could lead to the total collapse of the building, when in fact there are no examples of total progressive collapse of steel-framed buildings outside of the alleged cases of the Twin Towers and Building 7.


THE PENTAGON

10. Big Plane, Small Holes
Here the article cites the claim on reopen911.org that the hole in the Pentagon was "only 16ft. across," and mentions French author Thierry Meyssan, who helped to spawn the "no-757-crash theory", the subject of my earlier essay. The article again implies that this idea is gospel among 9/11 skeptics, giving no clue that there is controversy about the issue in 9/11 skeptics circles, and that many consider this claim that no jetliner hit the Pentagon a big distraction. The page ERROR: The Pentagon Attack Left Only a Small Impact Hole and others by 9/11 skeptics have long debunked Meyssan's wildly inaccurate description of a 16-foot-diameter entry hole.


11. Intact Windows
Here the article misrepresents an argument by skeptics of the official account of Flight 77's crash by stating that the issue is intact windows "near the impact area," when the skeptics point to unbroken windows in the trajectory of portions of the Boeing 757.

PM uses this part to backhandedly promote the Pentagon Strike flash animation, which appears to serve the same function as this article: discrediting skepticism by associating it with sloppy research and easily disproven ideas.


12. Flight 77 Debris
Here the article drops a URL for Pentagon Strike a second time, in case the reader missed the first one. The lack of aircraft debris following the Pentagon crash has been noted by many people as suspicious, but it is not surprising, considering the nature of the crash. See ERROR: Aircraft Crashes Always Leave Large Debris


FLIGHT 93

13. The White Jet
Here the article counters the idea that a small white jet reported by eyewitnesses had anything to do with the crash by relating a detailed account by the aviation director of the company that owned the business jet, David Newell. According to Newell, the co-pilot of the jet, Yates Gladwell, was contacted by FAA's Cleveland Center to investigate the crash immediately after it happened. According to PM:

Gladwell confirmed the account but, concerned about ongoing harassment by conspiracy theorists, asked not to be quoted directly.



14. Roving Engine
The far-flung debris field of the Flight 93 crash site along with the eyewitness accounts make a strong case that the plane was shot down. The article takes on this issue by first citing an article on Rense.com that makes the unsubstantiated claim that "the main body of the engine ... was found miles away from the main wreckage site." It then argues that engine parts being found 300 yards from the main site is reasonable for a simple crash, because airline accident expert Michael K. Hynes, who investigated the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, states parts could bounce that far "when you have high velocities, 500 mph or more." This theory is at odds with the eyewitness reports that the plane plummeted almost straight down, such as the following:
* He hears two loud bangs before watching the plane take a downward turn of nearly 90 degrees.
* It makes a high-pitched, screeching sound. The plane then makes a sharp, 90-degree downward turn and crashes.
* He hears a sound that "wasn't quite right" and looks up in the sky. "It dropped all of a sudden, like a stone."


15. Indian Lake
The article devotes this point to the confetti seen over Indian Lake, which is about two miles from the main crash site. It explains that this distance is "easily within range of debris blasted skyward by the heat of the explosion from the blast."


16. F-16 Pilot
In the final point, the article takes on the allegation by retired Army Col. Donn de Grand-Pre that the pilot who shot down Flight 93 was Major Rick Gibney. The article states that Gibney was flying an F-16 that day, but it was not on an intercept mission; rather it was to pick up Ed Jacoby Jr., the director of the New York State's Emergency Management Office, and fly him from Montana to Albany, NY.

PM delivers its closing ad hominem attack on skeptics in the voice of Ed Jacoby:

I summarily dismiss [allegations that Gibney shot down Flight 93] because Lt. Col. Gibney was with me at the time. It disgusts me to see this because the public is being misled. More than anything else it disgusts me because it brings up fears. It brings up hopes -- it brings up all sorts of feelings, not only to the victims' families but to all individuals throughout the country, and the world for that matter. I get angry at the misinformation out there.

"9/11 MYTHS DEBUNKED"

Having slain the conspiracy theory army's poison-spewing 16-headed dragon of 9/11 LIES -- PM declares the enemy vanquished, titling its final section "9/11 MYTHS DEBUNKED." On page 128, PM reveals its suit of armor -- a list of over 70 "experts" that it found "particularly helpful." The titles and names on this page are supposed to back the many assertions the article makes in the main section, but the article gives no indication of what experts or reports back up many of its key assertions.
911 World Trade Center Conspiracy

http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pm/index.html






A few of the many important sites covering 9/11 truth:

http://www.911truth.org/index.php
http://www.oilempire.us/
http://whatreallyhappened.com/
http://questionsquestions.net/
http://wtc7.net/

(1) No photos of bombs were ever found and no bomb parts.

(2) Why would Siverstine ever go on TV and admit he was part of murdering 3000 people?

(3) Why would he go on record a second time and admit he was part of murdering 3000 people?

(4) Why would the Fire Commander be involved in murdering 3000 people?

(5) When have you ever heard of Firefighters bombing buildings?

(6) Silverstein denies "Pull" means "Controlled demolition". He said it means "Pull" the teams out of the building.



Quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Pull it" means “PULL” the operations out…

Here is the interview which I'm sure you know about...

"I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, you know, 'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is just pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse."

-Fact which is undisputed by either side, he was talking to the fire commander

-Fact which is undisputed by either side, both are not in the demolition business

Silverstein's spokesperson, Mr. McQuillan, later clarified:

"In the afternoon of September 11, Mr. Silverstein spoke to the Fire Department Commander on site at Seven World Trade Center. The Commander told Mr. Silverstein that there were several firefighters in the building working to contain the fires. Mr. Silverstein expressed his view that the most important thing was to protect the safety of those firefighters, including, if necessary, to have them withdraw from the building."

He could be lying right? But here is the corroborating evidence...


Quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

No pics of the supposed damage from the fall of WTC 1 and 2. Wonder why?



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



"They told us to get out of there because they were worried about 7 World Trade Center, which is right behind it, coming down. We were up on the upper floors of the Verizon building looking at it. You could just see the whole bottom corner of the building was gone . We could look right out over to where the Trade Centers were because we were that high up. Looking over the smaller buildings. I just remember it was tremendous, tremendous fires going on. Finally they "pulled" us out. They said all right, get out of that building because that 7, they were really worried about. They pulled us out of there and then they regrouped everybody on Vesey Street, between the water and West Street. They put everybody back in there. Finally it did come down. From there - this is much later on in the day, because every day we were so worried about that building we didn't really want to get people close. They were trying to limit the amount of people that were in there. Finally it did come down." - Richard Banaciski


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

"(1) No photos of bombs were ever found and no bomb parts."

Cordite doesn't leave parts. People smelled cordite.






"(2) Why would Siverstine ever go on TV and admit he was part of murdering 3000 people? (3) Why would he go on record a second time and admit he was part of murdering 3000 people?"

Why do people assume the cunning rich are smart all the time?






"(4) Why would the Fire Commander be involved in murdering 3000 people?"

Just the one guy who died in WTC7. And power corrupts ... ever hear that one? What about the Battleship Maine - somebody had to be corrupt for that to happen. And ignoring warnings about the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Iraq invasion of Kuwait etc etc.



"(5) When have you ever heard of Firefighters bombing buildings?"

I didn't say they did. They just cleared out and the black ops guys did it.





"(6) Silverstein denies "Pull" means "Controlled demolition". He said it means "Pull" the teams out of the building."





Before either of the twin towers collapsed, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his associates were told to leave the headquarters they had set up within Building 7.

"We were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse," Rudolph Giuliani told Peter Jennings of ABC News that morning, "and it did collapse before we could get out of the building."

Despite this, Giuliani fled WTC 7 at least eight hours before it collapsed. How did he know that the twin towers were going to collapse if it was such an unprecedented occurance? Why didn't the firefighters on the ground get the same warning?

How Could The Explosives Have Been Placed Beforehand?

Ben Fountain, a financial analyst who worked in the World Trade Center Complex, told People Magazine that in the weeks before 9/11 there were numerous unnanounced and unusual drills where sections of both the twin towers and building 7 were evacuated for quote ‘security reasons’. This was obviously the perfect opportunity to place those explosives.


How Did Larry Silverstein Benefit from the Collapse of Building 7?

In February of 2002 Silverstein Properties won $861 million from Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC 7. Silverstein Properties' estimated investment in WTC 7 was $386 million. So: This building's collapse resulted in a profit of about $500 million!


Objections Raised to the Meaning of Silverstein's Comments

Listen again to Larry Silverstein's comments on the PBS documentary.

Michael Kane's comments appeared on Jeff Rense's website at http://www.rense.com.

He writes...

"I've said it once before, and I'll say it again, someone MUST call Larry Silverstein and get an official comment on this because LARRY DOES NOT SAY THAT WTC 7 WAS DEMOLISHED, OR "PULLED", ON SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2001.

What he says is that they made the DECISION to "pull" (meaning demolish) WTC 7 and SHORTLY AFTER THEY MADE THAT DECISION, Larry Silverstein says "they watched the building COLLAPSE.

Regardless of what really happened, what this man said does NOT say that the building was demolished.

He clearly says "the decision was made to pull" and then he says,

"and we watched the building collapse"

The connotation is that they were going to demolish it anyway, but golly-gee-wiz the building collapsed right when they made that decision so they DID NOT actually go through with the demolition.

So, when Jeremy Baker said in his article:

"Mr. Silverstein's comments imply that he and the FDNY threw together an expert demolition job in the space of a few short hours on the afternoon of 9/11"

This is not correct, Silverstein was very careful to NOT imply this in the way he worded what he said.

Silverstein's statement does not imply that was done - it is impossible to do that anyway and Silverstein did not walk into a trap like that; he covered his ass with the way in which he worded what he said.

I don't have time for this now, but I hope someone out there does (hopefully Jeremy Baker can do this to properly follow-up on his first piece, which was otherwise quite good)

CALL LARRY SILVERSTEIN,

GET HIM OR HIS PEOPLE TO COMMENT ON THIS

GET THE FDNY TO COMMENT ON THIS

That's what must happen. The above article by Jeremy Baker makes assumptions off of a statement which, in a court of law, can be defended the way I just interrupted above.

I guarantee when someone calls Mr. Silverstein he is going to say EXACTLY what I said above because it makes sense and still jives with the official story. Whoever calls and asks this should very thoroughly consider what their FOLLOW-UP questions will be because that is where we may get good information.

I applaud Jeremy Baker for writing a piece to scrutinize the Achilles heal of 9-11, but he (or someone) must follow up properly with calls to Larry Silverstein and whoever the head of FDNY was that day who he spoke to and clarify this. Without doing so, we will make no further progress."

My response....

Even if this is true and Silverstein meant that they were going to pull the building but it collapsed before they had the chance, there are still inconsistencies.

Whether he is saying they DID pull the building or merely INTENDED to pull the building, the questions remain the same.

Why would they even be considering pulling the building when it only had two small pockets of fire visible?

How could they safely and successfully demolish the building that day when it would take at least a few days to rig the explosives in a 47 story building?

Is Silverstein merely trying to cover his tracks by recognizing the demolition possibility while still claiming the collapse was natural? This would give him more credibility rather than if he just ignored all the questions about demolition altogether.

What remains clear is that THE BUILDING WAS DESTROYED BY EXPLOSIVES WITHIN THE BUILDING. There is no other explanation for its sudden, perfect, symmetrical fall.

Furthermore, go back to the top of the page and watch the video clip again. Silverstein's body language clearly indicates that they regrettably (sic) had to pull the building, NOT that they considered pulling it.

The bottom line is that Silverstein made $500 million as a result of the collapse. The building would not have collapsed on its own and the only reason that they would make the DECISION to destroy the building would not be to 'save lives' as Silverstein claimed, but to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the insurance.

Evidence of Explosives Used in the Twin Towers

The Firefighters' Tapes: Tapes reveal that fires were under control not raging infernos

The audio presented here is a recording of the firefighter's tapes on September 11th that have been released publically. A lot of the portions of the tapes have been classified. This portion lasts an hour and thirteen minutes, we have highlighted the interesting parts below with full transcripts. According to the Port Authority, this recording covers approximately 8:45 to 9:58 AM Eastern.

Open the following link and it should play in your media player.

911 Firefighter's tape

Now wait til it downloads and skip through to 39:00 and begin listening to the following:

9:25 a.m.
Ladder 15: "Go ahead, Irons."

Ladder 15 Irons: "Just got a report from the director of Morgan Stanley. Seventy-eight seems to have taken the brunt of this stuff, there's a lot of bodies, they say the stairway is clear all the way up, though."

Ladder 15: "Alright, ten-four Scott. What, what floor are you on?"

Ladder 15 Irons: "Forty-eight right now."

Ladder 15: "Alright, we're coming up behind you."

Now skip another six minutes to 45:52 and listen:

9:31 a.m.
Battalion Seven Aide: "Battalion Seven, you want me to relay?"

Ladder 15: "Yeah, Steve tell Chief Palmer they got reports that there's more planes in the area, we may have to back down here."

Battalion Seven Aide: "Ten-four."

"Seven Alpha to Seven."

Battalion Seven: "Steve. Seven to Seven Alpha."

Ladder 15: "Fifteen to 15 Roof."

"Fifteen Roof."

Ladder 15: "We got reports of another incoming plane. We may have to take cover. Stay in the stairwell."

Ladder 15 Roof: "Ten-four."

Ladder 15: "Fifteen to 15 Roof. That plane's ours. I repeat. It's ours. What floor are you on, Scotty?"

Ladder 15 Roof: "Fifty-four."

Ladder 15: "Alright. Keep making your way up. We're behind you."

Ladder 15 Roof: "Ten-four."

The officers then describe where they are headed, where they believe the fires to be...

Now skip to 54:02...

9:37 a.m.
Ladder 15 Lieutenant: "Tommy, listen carefully. I'm sending all the injured down to you on 40. You're going to have to get'em down to the elevator. There's about 10 to 15 people coming down to you."

Ladder 15 Firefighter: "Okay."

Ladder 15 Lieutenant: "Ten civilians coming down. Fifteen to OV."

Ladder 15 Firefighter: "Got that, I'm on 40 right now, Lieu."

9:39 a.m.

Ladder 15 Lieutenant: "Alright Tommy, when you take people down to the lobby, try to get an EMS crew back."

Ladder 15 Firefighter: "Definitely."
Now skip to 57:20...
9:43 a.m.
Battalion Seven Chief: "Battalion Seven to Ladder 15 Roof, what's your progress?"

Ladder 15 Roof: "Sixty-three, Battalion."

Battalion Seven Chief: "Ten-four."

Battaltion Nine Chief: "Battalion Nine to Battalion Seven."

Battalion Seven Chief: "Go ahead Battaltion Nine."

Battalion Nine Chief: "Orio, I couldn't find a bank to bring you up any highter. I'm on the 40th floor, what can I do for you?"

Battalion Seven Chief: "We're going to have to hoof it. I'm on 69 now, but we need a higher bank, kay."

Battalion Nine Chief: "What stairway you in Orio?"

Battalion Seven Chief: "The center of the building, boy, boy."

"Tac One to Tac One Alpha."

Battalion Seven Chief: "Battalion Seven to Ladder 15 Roof, what floor?"

Battalion Nine Chief: "Battalion Nine to Battalion Seven."

Battalion Seven Chief: "...Battalion Nine."

Battalion Nine Chief: "Orio, I'm going to try and get a couple of CFRD engines on the 40th floor so send any victims down here, I'll start up a staging area."

Battalion Seven Chief: "...find a fireman service elevator close to 40, if we get some more cars in that bank, we'll be alright."

Now skip to 01:02:40. This is where the fires are discovered and described as "two isolated pockets"

9:48 a.m.
Ladder 15: "Battalion Fifteen to Battalion Seven."

Battalion Seven: "Go Ladder 15."

Ladder 15: "What do you got up there, Chief?"

Battalion Seven Chief: "I'm still in boy stair 74th floor. No smoke or fire problems, walls are breached, so be careful."

Ladder 15: "Yeah Ten-Four, I saw that on 68. Alright, we're on 71 we're coming up behind you."

Battalion Seven Chief: "Ten-four. Six more to go."

Ladder 15: "Let me know when you see more fire."

Battalion Seven Chief: "I found a marshall on 75."

9:49 a.m.
Ladder 15: "Fifteen to 15 OV. Fifteen to 15 OV.

"Fifteen OV."

Ladder 15: "Tommy, have you made it back down to the lobbby yet?"

Ladder 15 OV: "The elevator's screwed up."

Ladder 15: "You can't move it?"

Ladder 15 OV: "I don't want to get stuck in the shaft."

9:50 a.m.

Ladder 15: "Alright Tommy. It's imperative that you go down to the lobby command post and get some people up to 40. We got injured people up here on 70. If you make it to the lobby command post see if they can somehow get elevators past the 40th floor. We got people injured all the way up here."

Battalion Seven Aide: "Battaltion Seven Alpha to Seven."

Battalion Seven Chief: "Go Steve."

Battalion Seven Aide: "Yeah Chief, I'm on 55, I got to rest. I'll try to get up there as soon as possible."

Battalion Seven Chief: "Ten-four."


9:50 a.m.
"Anybody see the highway one car? Highway one car we need it for an escort to the hospital for a fireman."

Battalion Seven Chief: "Battalion Seven to Ladder 15."

"15 Irons."

Ladder 15: "Fifteen to 15 Roof and Irons."

Battalion Six Chief: "Battalion Six to command post."

9:52 a.m.

Battalion Seven Chief: "Battalion Seven to Battalion Seven Alpha."

"Freddie, come on over. Freddie, come on over by us."

Battalion Seven Chief: "Battalion Seven ... Ladder 15, we've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines. Radio that, 78th floor numerous 10-45 Code Ones."

Ladder 15: "What stair are you in, Orio?"

Battalion Seven Aide: "Seven Alpha to lobby command post."

Ladder Fifteen: "Fifteen to Battalion Seven."

Battalion Seven Chief: "... Ladder 15."

Ladder 15: "Chief, what stair you in?"

Battalion Seven Chief: "South stairway Adam, South Tower."

Ladder 15: "Floor 78?"

Battalion Seven Chief: "Ten-four, numerous civilians, we gonna need two engines up here."

Ladder 15: "Alright ten-four, we're on our way."


9:52 a.m.
Battalion Seven Aide: "Seven Alpha for Battalion Seven."

Battalion Seven Chief: "South tower, Steve, south tower, tell them...Tower one. Battalion Seven to Ladder 15.

"Fifteen."

Battalion Seven Chief: "I'm going to need two of your firefighters Adam stairway to knock down two fires. We have a house line stretched we could use some water on it, knock it down, kay."

Ladder 15: "Alright ten-four, we're coming up the stairs. We're on 77 now in the B stair, I'll be right to you."

Ladder 15 Roof: "Fifteen Roof to 15. We're on 71. We're coming right up."

Now skip to 01:11:22...

9:57 a.m.
"Division 3 ... lobby command, to the Fieldcom command post."

Battalion Seven Chief: "Operations Tower One to floor above Battalion Nine."

Battalion Nine Chief: "Battalion Nine to command post."

Battalion Seven Operations Tower One: "Battalion Seven Operations Tower One to Battalion Nine, need you on floor above 79. We have access stairs going up to 79, kay."

Battalion Nine: "Alright, I'm on my way up Orio."

Ladder 15 OV: "Fifteen OV to Fifteen."

Ladder 15: "Go ahead Fifteen OV, Battalion Seven Operations Tower One."

Ladder 15 OV: "Stuck in the elevator, in the elevator shaft, you're going to have to get a difference elevator. We're chopping through the wall to get out."

Battalion Seven Chief: "Radio lobby command with that Tower One."

9:58 a.m.

Battalion Seven Chief: "Battalion Seven to Ladder 15."

(END OF TAPE)

These tapes reveal the fact that the firefighters were not overly concerned with the strength of the fires and believed they could control them. They were not raging infernos that could melt steel. These tapes alone prove that the official story of the collapse of the World Trade Towers is a complete and total lie. Why have the rest of the tapes been classified? Because they reveal the truth, that 's why.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/011904wtc7.html



Quote:
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No pics of the supposed damage from the fall of WTC 1 and 2. Wonder why?



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"They told us to get out of there because they were worried about 7 World Trade Center, which is right behind it, coming down. We were up on the upper floors of the Verizon building looking at it. You could just see the whole bottom corner of the building was gone . We could look right out over to where the Trade Centers were because we were that high up. Looking over the smaller buildings. I just remember it was tremendous, tremendous fires going on. Finally they "pulled" us out. They said all right, get out of that building because that 7, they were really worried about. They pulled us out of there and then they regrouped everybody on Vesey Street, between the water and West Street. They put everybody back in there. Finally it did come down. From there - this is much later on in the day, because every day we were so worried about that building we didn't really want to get people close. They were trying to limit the amount of people that were in there. Finally it did come down." - Richard Banaciski

1) Nice quote. No source, no date - could have been said afterwards to cover Silverstine's fuckup.

2) Doesn't answer the "no pics" question at all.



There is also the fact that most of the structures destroyed by falling debris were directly under the twin towers, and none of them caught fire. WTC 7 was not only a full city block away from Tower 1 but WTC 6 stood directly between the two buildings and certainly absorbed most of the damage.

In addition, WTC 7 suffered a strangely thorough and complete collapse, leaving only a leveled lot where it once stood. Although it was a much smaller structure, WTC 6's 8-story carcass stood for months afterwards, even after being gutted by Tower 1.

http://www.infowars.com/print/Sept11/FDNY.htm

Quote:

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I didn't say they did. They just cleared out and the black ops guys did it.

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David, what a load of crap!

Look how you conspiracy nuts never post this conversation because it uses the word "pull" as in getting out and tells of a large portion of building 7 gone! This does not fit your theory.

http://us.geocities.com/debunking911/pull.htm
Quote:
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"They told us to get out of there because they were worried about 7 World Trade Center, which is right behind it, coming down. We were up on the upper floors of the Verizon building looking at it. You could just see the whole bottom corner of the building was gone. We could look right out over to where the Trade Centers were because we were that high up. Looking over the smaller buildings. I just remember it was tremendous, tremendous fires going on. Finally they "PULLED" us out. They said all right, GET OUT of that building because that 7, they were really worried about. THEY PULLED us out of there and then they regrouped everybody on Vesey Street, between the water and West Street. They put everybody back in there. Finally it did come down. From there - this is much later on in the day, because every day we were so worried about that building we didn't really want to get people close. They were trying to limit the amount of people that were in there. Finally it did come down." - Richard Banaciski

Boyle: There was a huge gaping hole and it was scattered throughout there. It was a HUGE HOLE. I would say it was probably about A THIRD OF IT, right in the middle of it. And so after Visconti came down and said nobody goes in 7, we said all right, we’ll head back to the command post. We lost touch with him. I never saw him again that day.

http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/911/mag...e/gz/boyle.html

This proves there was a big hole on the south side. It's in the middle of the building and goes up about 20 stories...

Hayden: Yeah. There was enough there and we were marking off. There were a lot of damaged apparatus there that were covered. We tried to get searches in those areas. By now, this is going on into the afternoon, and we were concerned about additional collapse, not only of the Marriott, because there was a good portion of the Marriott still standing, but also we were pretty sure that 7 World Trade Center would collapse . Early on, we saw a bulge in the southwest corner between floors 10 and 13, and we had put a transit on that and we were pretty sure she was going to collapse. You actually could see there was a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors. It came down about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, but by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse.

Firehouse: Was there heavy fire in there right away?

Hayden: No, not right away, and that’s probably why it stood for so long because it took a while for that fire to develop. It was a heavy body of fire in there and then we didn’t make any attempt to fight it. That was just one of those wars we were just going to lose. We were concerned about the collapse of a 47-story building there. We were worried about additional collapse there of what was remaining standing of the towers and the Marriott, so we started PULLING the people back after a couple of hours of surface removal and searches along the surface of the debris. We started to PULL guys back because we were concerned for their safety.

Firehouse: Chief Nigro said they made a collapse zone and wanted everybody away from number 7


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http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/

According to Newton's 1st law of motion, the Law of Inertia, and object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Since the intact top section did not fall into the street, the unbalanced force of explosions pulverizing it from the bottom up must be responsible for it's change of motion from tipping sideways to falling straight downward.