The Thomas Confirmation Hearings
I still remember the visceral reaction I had to the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. They were televised, and a lot of people watched them as the controversy over his alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill was explored. And in watching the parade of people testifying for and against Thomas, in particular in watching Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas themselves testify, it became increasingly clear to me that she was telling the truth, and he was lying.
That was shocking enough. But then came the double-whammy: watching the senators on the judiciary committee close ranks behind Thomas, vilifying Hill and making speech after speech that (again, to my eyes and ears) was so out of touch with the reality I’d just watched as to leave me breathless.
I lost a lot of respect for elected officials generally, and those senators in particular, during those hearings. You young whippersnappers can relive those moments courtesy of this blog posting from Scout of First Draft: Anita Hill responds. Or you can go whole hog, and read the transcripts themselves: Hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:10 am
Are you saying that such allegations of sex acts and/or harassment should disqualify someone from public service?
OT – It’s been four months since the last graph comparing casualty numbers in Iraq to those of Vietnam. Is the data no longer pertinent?
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:26 pm
I’ve been wondering about the Vietnam monthlies as well.
October 4th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
It looks like JBC is busy, here are those numbers you guys have been looking for.
http://www.shcb.blogspot.com/
October 4th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
I didn’t include the Vietnam numbers, JBC has those. It doesn’t look like they are really very meaningful since these are two completely different wars fought in two completely different ways. The only real similarity between them is that liberals want to lose, just by a little mind you but they surely don’t want to win.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:06 am
Americans want to win.
Liberals, conservatives, independents we all want America free, proud, leading the world. Saying libtards want to lose (jes a lil bit pshaw!) is exactly why I am coming to despise 13%ers like dear ol rwnj. They listen to Rush Dimbulb and hate radio, read LGF and think Drudge is kinda left of center, espouse ridiculous divisive political and religious doctrines while exempting themselves from any of their own strictures or espoused morals.
Do you think torturing guys you pick up at a traffic stop is AOK?
then you are a right wing nut job
Do you think we found teh WMDz(!!!!!) in Iraq?
then u r a rwnj
Do you think nuking Mecca is a swell idea?
then u r a rwnj
Do you think Iranian President Unpronouncable is teh new Hitler!!!1!11! ? then u most definitely are a rwnj
Do you think invading Iraq was a Great Idea?
etc
–
I want my country to change course from the right wing disaster that is gwb/rwnj ideology. I find it ‘interesting’ that Magical September has the lowest casualty rate of the entire year. And the sudden drop in wounded from your chart rwnj? also very ‘interesting’
Other than making tons of money for corrupt croney’s of the current regime, Iraq has been a giant disaster. And a huge win for ienjs everwhar.
Oh, and re: Clarence Thomas? when Scalia thinks you are a nut bag, you are a very kooky nut indeed.
October 5th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
JBC’s vietnam comparison has never been about military similarity, only political similarity. I think it’s extremely relevant in that light.
October 5th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
enkidu,
Liberals want a free, proud, world leading America, they just don’t want to fight a war to get to that end and if you don’t fight, you won’t win. Therefore liberals want to lose, just a little mind you but they surely don’t want to win.
I give up what is LGF?
Answers:
No
Some
No
No, but his bosses are
Yes
How did I do?
The fatality number isn’t that that much lower than average so I’m not getting all that excited but the wounded number is great, but we have had single months that dropped suddenly, so we’ll just have to see. If these trends continue I think we can say that Iraq is turning into quite a successful operation wouldn’t you agree? Of course you don’t, you don’t want to win.
October 5th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Matt,
Very few aspects of these discussions have ever been about military anything, they are all political. I can’t read JBC’s mind but I think his intention when he started those charts was to draw a comparison to the Vietnam war, now you say duh! If I recall, when JBC started these charts we had been in Iraq about the same amount of time as we had been in Vietnam when the soldier and casualty count began to rise significantly (in Vietnam). The Democrats were trying to scare everyone into thinking we were going to start drafting young men, all the experts were saying we went in there with way too few troops, feeding the draft rumor, and talk was beginning in regards to the surge.
The comparisons to Vietnam were so seductive. Vietnam was the first war the American left had won, if all wars would end that way perhaps America would give up its warring ways and spend that money on….. So JBC wrote that piece in anticipation of the Iraq war going very badly for us, the US. This is where liberals have a conundrum, JBC isn’t a bad guy, he doesn’t want our boys hurt, but for his wish for this war to go badly for this administration 47,000 would have to die. So he was somehow hoping for the political fallout of 47,000 dead Americans without a single body bag. This is not possible of course but that never stopped a liberal. The average dead per month is 68, we have only doubled that amount twice and then just barely. This war has been one of the most successful in terms of low loss of life in relation to duration. When I saw his graph the first time I was amazed at how even the Iraq line was and I could see no reason save an attack with WMD’s or some sort or an attack where a large number of explosives got into the center of the Green Zone. Yet there was JBC pontificating that we were about to turn the corner to Vietnam like losses. It didn’t happen, and now that the war is in the wind down stages it is unlikely to happen except for the two exceptions above. That is why I say the comparison is irrelevant. JBC was simply so very wrong.
But as an engineer you know numbers should never be wasted so I am simply looking at them in other, more constructive ways. Why do they seem to go up in September through December? Why were they so high in 2004? What are we doing right in September?
My vision isn’t to see the numbers go so high that we crawl home with our tails between our knees, it is see the numbers go so low we can come home with our heads held high.
October 5th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
Correction;
When I saw his graph the first time I was amazed at how even the Iraq line was and I could see no reason THE TREND LINE WOULD CHANGE save an attack with WMD’s or some sort or an attack where a large number of explosives got into the center of the Green Zone .
October 5th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Actually, the consistently decreasing number of combat-related casualties in the last five months is remarkable.
May… 120
June…. 93
July….. 66
Aug….. 56
Sept…. 43
Of course, that trend could suddenly reverse, as could the similar trend of fewer civilian casualties, if we increased our troops numbers in combat zones… or… wait… we already did that… and it resulted in lower casualty numbers. How confusing…
shcb, you’re missing one other possibility:
The administrator of our local left-wing blog recently wrote, “We need a Gander-style incident to drive the casualty figures higher, since that would certainly increase the support for our opposition to Bush’s war.” Of course, he frequently proclaims his “patriotism” and his support of the military, and finds it hard to believe that posters don’t believe his hollow words to that effect. He removed the article (which had received no posted responses) after leaving it on the site for 3 days. Either he sobered up and read his own words, or he received lots of phone calls – probably from personnel at nearby Fort Campbell.
I have no reason to doubt that some of the frequent anti-Bush posters on this site share his wishes, and would actually celebrate such an occurrence.
October 5th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Good point TV, I had read that the combat deaths were in the low forties, which shows how well we are making the transition to the Iraqis handling their own destiny. When 1/3 of the casualties are non combat related, you are on the right path.
I’m sure there are some who would like to see us actually loose the old fashioned way, by incurring massive losses, but I really don’t think that number is very high. Hillary wants to give every newborn $5,000. In an interview, a woman said that every person in America has a $27,000 stake in the national debt and it would be nice if the government would give the kids five grand to mitigate a portion of that $27,000. Investors Business Daily pointed out in the story that the $5,000 would have to come from the general fund and would simply be added to the current debt with interest, then that amount would have to paid by that child when he was old enough to pay taxes.
One of the Democrats in congress, don’t remember which, said the SCHIP program would be paid for with cigarette taxes, but that would require an additional 20 million people start smoking 2 packs a day.
Most liberals aren’t bad people and don’t want bad things to happen to good folks, they just don’t look at the consequences, conservatives look at the consequences and accept them if they are unavoidable or manageable. Are there more terrorists now than before we invaded Iraq, probably, but that is unavoidable, we just have to deal with it. I’m sure you have scars from you reconstructive surgery that have virtually ruined your modeling career, but you had the procedures anyway.
October 6th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
shcb, I’m sorry to break it to you but I beleive you are wrong again.
When all is confirmed, projected US wounded in Iraq will be about 400 for September. Better than average, but too close to normal variations to break out the Cognac just yet.
Teachervet, I believe your numbers and related comments are wrong too, as deaths for September will likely be 71 once all is confirmed.
The projected figures are in the graph at the bottom of this page:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties.htm
Or, since you guys seem not so good with figures, here are some visuals:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/takeaction/wounded.php
http://www.michaelmoore.com/takeaction/deaths.php
Or, there is this eerily insightful depiction:
http://www.obleek.com/iraq/index.html
October 6th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
knarly, I think you argue only to see your name on the screen. I used the source link provided by jbc for his charts:
http://icasualties.org/oif/US_chart.aspx
Icasualties identifies 66 troop casualties, by name, with the date, location and circumstances. Your source gives only 62, with no identification or other data, plus 9 “pending” deaths. Neither source refutes the only numbers I cited for May through September, with 43 combat related casualties in September.
I know the numbers are more “impressive” if you choose to include accident victims, deaths from illnesses or natural causes, etc., but doing so doesn’t accurately (or honestly) reflect the number of deaths that are related to the war effort.
Lets suppose that someone wishes to illustrate a need to crack down on gun control by graphing a monthly mortality rate from firearm deaths over a span of several years. Would it provide a more accurate picture to (a) include only gunshot victims, or (b) to use figures that reflected all deaths (from all causes) over that period of time? Michael Moore and obleek.com would use the (b) option for shock effect and self-fulfilling entertainment value – but it wouldn’t be honest. Of course, that never stopped MM in the past.
Speaking of Michael Moore… come on, now. Even the 911″truthers” have a little bit (albeit a very little bit) more credibility than MM.
October 7th, 2007 at 8:59 am
Knarly,
The reason I used the 62 number is because it more closely matched the reports I was reading in news reports. Maybe AP is playing it safe or maybe they are lazy I don’t know. I put another graph on my page to show the two columns added together and the confirmed dead only. As you can see there is little difference. For this conversation the difference is irrelevant since we are discussing trends not actual numbers. I’m a little confused with Global Security’s numbers. For instance they still show 12 reported dead in April 2004, does that mean there are 12 guys who never had their families notified? The number of dead for October has risen from 1 to 4 since we started this discussion 4 days ago so they evidentially keep that number updated on a day to day basis but I don’t know if they keep some of the other items updated. As to the projected wounded chart, that obviously is just as it says, it is a projection based on past months. At some point they will get around to updating that chart and it will show a big downturn. I don’t think there are going to be 400 unreported wounded soldiers out there.
I wouldn’t get my hopes up that you will get a lot of help on this thread from any of the libs on this site. As you just illustrated it is hard to take an opposing view to TV and I on this issue without looking like you are siding with the enemy hoping for more carnage to our soldiers.
http://www.shcb.blogspot.com/
October 7th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
They explain their methodolgy here:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties_notes.htm
It would be good for you Americans if your casualty figures are going down, maybe it is a turning point where internecine warfare amoungst middle east locals will be the dominant theme and the foreigners in the green zone and those who venture out will not be so much the focus of violence.
October 7th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Knarly,
Thanks for the link, I’m not sure it answered my questions but it was interesting.
I hope we can leave Iraq in better shape than you are projecting, leaving it in a state of civil war won’t exactly be successful. My fear is if we leave it like that we will be returning to fight Iran on Iraqi soil after a nasty bloodbath. There seems to be some good political progress reported in the last week or two, but who knows, they could be sandbagging us, the Iraqis that is.
October 7th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Knarly, your source begins with a comparison between Iraq War casualties and those in the Spainish (sic) American War. They seem aghast that there were more KIA in the 1st year of the Iraq War than in the entire Spanish-American War – without mentioning that the entire campaign in 1898 only lasted 109 days. After reading that introductory paragraph, I immediately suspected that their intentions were to simply promote an agenda. That suspicion was confirmed with further reading.
“In most cases we had pretty high-quality reporting at the time that these deaths had occurred…” The language of that statement doesn’t exactly enhance their credibility for me.
Regarding April 2004 casualties, “By the end of the month the Pentagon had named 120 who had been killed, while we counted over 150 deaths. With closer analysis, we were able to conclude that some of the apparent 35[?] unidentified were probably multiple reports of single incidents.” Again, this is hardly a credibility enhancing statement. Later they added, “It is nonetheless possible for a few casualties to have been double-counted.” But they publish the figures as factual data…
I had to suppress a laugh when I first read this one: “Surely many of these [3 dozen “unidentified” casualties they include in their figures from one particular month] are due to some point of confusion in the initial reports [from their various sources] , but we are having a real hard time figuring out which ones. If anyone can spot any duplicates, please let us know.” Perhaps if they had spent five minutes to alphabetize the names for that month, they wouldn’t need the assistance of their readers. Of course, they would have to include the “unidentified” troops to make their numbers add up – many of whom have remained unidentified for at least 3 years. I think the relatives and friends of those assumed dead troops would have missed them by now. These folks need to read their own disclaimers, then remove the “double-counted” unidentified casualties from their lists, even if it makes their numbers less spectacular.
Regarding the difficulties they encountered in gathering data, many statements are prefaced with such phrases as “The first problem is…,” “Matters are further complicated by…,” “Another complication arises…,” etc. They appear to be making excuses for their subjectively inflated figures.
I think I’ll reject the antiwar truthers and stick with the verified numbers provided by the Icasualties site.
October 8th, 2007 at 4:55 am
TV
I’m not sure what to make of the Global Security people, I’ve read other articles on this site that seem to justify the campaign in Iraq. There are going to be slight differences in counts depending on how you base your methods, a guy gets shot on the 29th and doesn’t die until the 2nd, do you put him on this month or last? That type of thing. But as long as you are consistent the numbers will even out.
I read the bio’s of the principles in this group, it looks like this is an offshoot of The Federation of American Scientists. I’ve used FAS as a source for technical military data for almost a decade but I’ve never been on the same page with their analysis, they are a little anti war for me. But not kooky bad. Their credentials are pretty serious as well, no pajama clad bloggers here. One of them was a fellow at Cato and another worked at a medium high level position for the Clinton administration. So that should give you an idea of where they sit before they tell you where they stand. Probably more libertarian than right or left.
As to the disparity of these numbers, I think it is more that they are over analyzing than they have a want to inflate the numbers. Several of the top guys in this group have had high ranking military careers. I’m guessing they have many sources and sometimes they conflict, that is when the over analyzation sets in.
October 9th, 2007 at 9:12 am
TV,
Next time you have “to suppress a laugh…” when people are being honest about the background behind the data and the assumptions that have to be made, try pondering all the hidden assumptions that influence reports that you take for granted as being from authoritative sources but that are not explained in such detail.
shcb,
You probably are not going to find a totally unbiased source for these data, the best you can do is to choose one source and stick with it as long as they maintain the same methodoloogy and they make that and their assumptions known. Continuing jbc’s dataset as you did seems totally appropriate. Have their figures for September been finalized or are they still preliminary?
October 9th, 2007 at 11:58 am
Knarly, Icasualties doesn’t rely on assumptions in accounting for casualty data, and I’ve encountered no instances of double-counted casualties in their lists. I understand and respect the GlobalSecurity.com desire to insure that all casualties are counted, but, by their own admission, their methodology of reliance on many varied sources inevitably results in over-estimates.
Temporarily that’s fine, but I think their own disclaimers should justify adjusting their figures accordingly. As I stated earlier, some of those unaccounted-for casualties from months or years ago had to have been double-counted, since some friend or family member of those many troops (still shown as unaccounted for) would have long ago questioned why their loved one never came home or was not identified as a casualty.
I visit the Icasualty site via AntiWar.com; hardly a site that is tilted in favor of my own position, but one that uses Icasualty figures to support their very biased stance. The data for September appear to have been finalized, although, as evidenced in the past, they will later add any deaths that were the result of oversight. Their data is based on the date of death, not the date of the injury that eventually led to the death
October 9th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Knarly,
Actually TV is using the site JBC uses in his graphs. Your are right, everyone has a bias but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use accurate facts in your biased arguments. I can point to the sixty odd deaths last month and say that many were killed on Iwo Jima every day, and you can point less than that killed in Bosnia in the entire war, those statements may not be true, I’m just using them as examples. But if those statements are true, we would both be accurate with totally different views.
October 9th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
shcb – I agree.
TeacherVet – blah blah blah right back at you.
This is getting boring. You guys need something to chew on.
Here’s an email received today from an anonymous local for your consideration. Ignore it, read it and consider another viewpoint, read it and tear it to shreds: I do not care, but hope you enjoy…
October 9th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Knarly, sorry if I struck a nerve.
October 10th, 2007 at 4:37 am
Knarly,
I simply don’t have the hours it would take to deconstruct all the blather in this piece. This reminds me of the blanket email that goes around every few years that says don’t buy your gas from Shell/Conoco/Mobil/SevenEleven… because they buy their oil from Iran/Iraq/Saudi/Mexico…. By people who don’t understand the fungibility of commodities.
The first mistake is his comparison with the knights and kings and peasants. The kings and knights were strong, America is strong. The kings and knight brutalized the peasants, America brutalized the peasants, this is of course poppycock. The rest of the piece follows this same pattern of building a point from bad comparisons and false facts.
You did a good job of finding a piece that illustrates the flip side of what you and I were just talking about. This person is using false information, or comparisons in this case, to make his points. So we really can’t discuss these issues using this article as a springboard since so much of it is false. Much as the people who don’t want you to buy your gas from certain stations don’t understand basic economics, this person doesn’t understand basic history or logic. About all we could do is discuss his false assertions.
October 10th, 2007 at 11:23 am
shcb – re: brutalize the peasants, you could learn a thing or two by relating America’s “Shock and AWE” campaign to Naomi Klien’s study works released as “The Shock Doctrine”. There are strong similarities between the brutal treatment of people which you deny.
October 10th, 2007 at 11:23 am
TV, thank you (my nerves are fine but I appreciated the sentiment).
Shcb I understand your points, and your reluctance to address all the issues contains in this anonymous opinion piece of moderate length. Indeed, why bother?
Technically speaking, of course, you are correct in pointing out the inaccuracies, and you would win, fairly, such arguments if debating them in a structured venue.
Here there is little structure yet I do not wish to debate or belabour the arguments put forth in the original opinion piece. It is quoted mainly for T.V.’s & your amusement. We can probably agree that nothing you or I could say to each other would change the fact that I agree in general with the piece while recognizing its shortcomings and that you fundamentally reject it as wholly inaccurate and misleading.
Part of our different views are due to conflicts between your belief that (1) the aerial bombs (especially the “shock and awe” campaign) , depleted (sic) uranium munitions and troop actions are necessary to protect America and (2) are generally intended for the Iraqi’s own good and my belief that they are (1) fundamentally unnecessary and (20 wholly counterproductive in this situation to improving the welfare of humanity. I think we can agree to disagree on that.
We can probably also agree that the information we receive about the Iraq war, or choose to receive and/or believe, comes from different sources with different biases, which may be in large part due to your being an American living in America who enjoys right wing talk radio and me being the polar opposite. I have no problem with that as long as we can find a way to respect each other and not interfere with each other’s way of life. If Canada ever develops into a grave security problem or our Prime Minister declares a dictatorship, please do not automatically assume that we want bombs dropped on our infrastructure or US troops to invade, as you did to the Iraqi population. Canadians can work out our own solutions (e.g. we could compromise with the security threat using excess funds from our employment insurance program and we could bury any dictator under red tape.)
To me, the troubling part of our disagreement is your black and white thinking, of breaking everything down to either good or evil, (a.k.a. reductionism) and ignoring of subtleties that define most of what is. True, sometimes such an approach is the best, especially as it relates to specific disciplines in science or tangible problems such as building things, hence it is the stereotypical mindset of engineers. Yet engineers in general make lousy psychiatrists and political scientists because they usually fail to understand that their problem solving training (reductionism) does not always transfer well to other disciplines. Logically this is hard to explain, but some problems are not addressed best by stripping away all the uncertainties and non-central items to concentrate on the core (reductionism). Some problems are best addressed by gaining an appreciation of how infinitely intricate and myriad interactions of all the parts combine into an even greater whole and then adding a little something extra, a touch of magic or acts of kindness into that complexity to nudge it along in the general direction that you want it to go. Iraq was such a problem, a complex society with a myriad of tenuous linkages between sects, tribes, etc. which was analyzed by foreigners (US) using a two dimensional reductionistic model, acted upon with such great force that all but the most basic linkages were broken and now only fragments of the people remain to suffer intolerable conditions.
It is unfortunate that the opinion piece was not technically correct enough to withstand even your rudimentary reductinistic dissection of its basic assumptions. Your prior post about comparing fatality statistics from Bosnia, Guam and Iraq to make your point noted a possible technical inaccuracy in such figures, yet the point was still made. That lulled me into a subconscious assumption that, even though the opinion piece is a further step away from technical accuracy, you might still consider the truth within the opinion piece from a deeper and more metaphorical perspective.
October 10th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
rwnj, can you please point out where these false assertions may be?
thx
Most US casualties are caused by Sunni guns, bombs etc.
The Sunnis are backed by the Saudis.
The Shia are backed by the Iranians. Other than al Sadr, they have pretty much left US/coalition forces alone (ps – when the largest coalition partner – Britain – is just 3% of US forces deployed, can we stop pretending the rest of the world backs us on this boondoggle? hell, Iceland just yanked their one guy! coalition of the easily bribed and/or stupid)
We invaded a country ostensibly to prevent them from using all the WMDs and gigadeath our mis-leaders insisted were north, south, east and west of Baghdad and Tikrit (a direct quote from Don von Rumsfeld). Yet we haven’t found any significant quantities of any of that stuff.
October 10th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
stop it enkidu, reason will get you nowhere with these people. They believe in a fiath based way that the WMD are either yet to be discovered, are buried forever or were pulled into neighboring countries by Saracens on Camels or dark skinned tribesmen riding elephants.
October 10th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
Knarly,
If you would like to have a civil discussion as you suggested, I’m game.
Enkidu,
I really didn’t want to go into this piece issue by issue, I really don’t have the time and we’ve gone through this a million times but I will. It’s late so it’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
Knarly,
The correct response to the Kid would have been to either keep quiet or say “shut the f*&% up, Rick and I were about to have a civil conversation.” Now you are going to have to wait until I’m finished with the Kid.
October 11th, 2007 at 8:42 am
shcb, you misunderstood again. Sigh. My post to Enkid was a joke. I appreciate the direction Enkidu was taking this, as I am getting tired of explaining things that you either fail or intentionally refuse to understand for fear of it bursting your pre-school comic book rosy picture of a noble and valiant America fighting evil wherever it finds itself, and refusing to consider aspects that suggest the reality falls closer to an America that is the big kid in Lord of the Flies.
October 11th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
Knarly,
So this is the way I see it, you were going on as usual and thin I made this statement:
You suddenly got civil when you thought no one had your back, as soon as Enkidu slipped in one of his acidic misspelled posts (at least when I misspell something it is because of ignorance), at that point you decided you had help so you piled on. Now I don’t care, I’ve dealt with bullies and their sycophants most of my life, I’m pretty immune at this point, I just thought it was worth mentioning.
I’ll deconstruct the 4 pages of blather tonight and we’ll see where we go from there.
Remember the old Warner Brothers cartoon with the bulldog and the little kick me dog that bounced around the bulldog saying “George is my friend, George is my friend”?
October 11th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
shcb, I think you fail to understand once again, good try though and not your fault this time. My being “civil” or not so civil on this thread has had more to do with my mood over the last few days for external reasons rather than anything happening internally on this thread. You had no way of realizing that of course. Anyway, deconstruct the 4 pages if you must, but I’ve grown tired of this tediousness, so if Enkidu wants to point out the errrrrors of your RWNJ fanaticism I’m happy to leave it to him. If not, at this point I’m not inclined to join in (just as you were hesitant to bother with debating the opinion piece originally point by point.)
shcb, it seems you failed to notice that I had agreed with your initial reluctance: “indeed, why bother?” I wrote. I set out much of what we should agree to disagree with, since we should realize by now that our opinions are unlikely to change (my Oct 10, 11:23 post laid it all out, you might want to actually read that before wasting your time constructing arguments for deaf ears.)
In any event, I stand behind these words of my Oct 9 post that preceded the opinion piece:
To clarify, when I wrote: “… I do not care,… I meant I was so apathetic about what your response might be that I am unlikely to respond.
Sorry if I’m not being civil enough, I’ve got other things to do and I’m getting fed up with your defending of torturers and “knights” who drop “smart” (sic) bombs from the sky, or who have fired tons of “depleted” (sic) uranium ordinance.
October 11th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
I did find this amusing though!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa8sVGllQI
October 12th, 2007 at 4:34 am
Sorry if this reposts, my entry last night didn’t go through. I had hoped to get into a discussion of the differences of linear thinkers like myself and nuanced thinkers like yourself, but we can have that discussion anytime. When things settle down in your life maybe we will discuss it. Take care.
October 12th, 2007 at 5:23 am
Enkidu,
I went through the whole Anonymous piece and margin noted it all but I’m just going to pick a few items.
In this first statement you can already see which direction he is going to take you, he has shown his bias. The rich and powerful are bad, the poor and weak are good, no matter what their intentions or actions.
In this section he continues this theme of the powerful being bad. Now of course if you read this without the first section, you would think he was talking about our enemies since these are the tactics of the Arabs, control the masses with brutal terror. This is why it is so important for him to get this America is big and strong, the rest of the world is small and weak established before he used this example. He continues this theme throughout the piece having established his false premise. This is why I said this piece is hard to discuss since the whole thing is built around that false premise.
Maybe in WWII, but we use guided bombs now for the express purpose of limiting these losses.
Completely inaccurate, the highest number I have heard from legitimate sources is 80,000 but more than likely 30,000 and most of those at the hands of our enemies through the use of land based indiscriminate bombs and the habit of hiding behind women and children.
Have fun.
October 12th, 2007 at 8:07 am
well, that didn’t go thru, so here is my reply in pieces:
October 12th, 2007 at 8:07 am
So, you dispute that the victor always tells their side of the story as virtuous and noble? What planet do you live on again? Because that isn’t the way things have worked for millennia here on Earth (3rd stone from the sun, Sol system, Milky Way galaxy… mb you live in some magical faith based universe of unicorns and whatnot). Forgive me if I bring up a famous dictator from Earth’s recent history, but Hitler made the German people out to be the oppressed and the defenders of Christiandom. That didn’t work out so well, eh?
So in your 3rd paragraph, you rail that the author’s description of the Norman invasion is false. Again, do you actually read history? Understand? Because his description pretty much matches historical accounts of William the Conqueror. What exactly is false? That power = bad? Well, that is an opinion one way or the other, so ‘truthiness’ is only a measure of belief. go read Against the English Resistance on wiki entry William the Conqueror, or this link for a historical account of The Harrying of the North.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrying_of_the_North
October 12th, 2007 at 8:08 am
True, guided bombs are more accurate, but they still kill lots of innocent people (like women and children). Especially if you don’t know who you are bombing and are getting the intel from suspect sources. This was recently in the news:
Today the number of dead is over 25 from that airstrike (2 actually, one heli and one fixed wing). If you bother to read anything other than Mann Coulter, you could try the wiki’s page on Iraqi casualties. The numbers range from 1.2 million to about 70,000 to 80,000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_conflict_in_Iraq_since_2003
Another interesting item this page points out is that the causes of death were as follows: “601,027 deaths (range of 426,369 to 793,663 using a 95% confidence interval) were estimated to be due to violence. 31% of those were attributed to the Coalition, 24% to others, 46% unknown. The causes of violent deaths were gunshot (56%), car bomb (13%), other explosion/ordnance (14%), air strike (13%), accident (2%), unknown (2%). from Lancet.
That breakdown is echoed by other Iraqi casualty studies, but rwnjs just won’t believe anything that doesn’t fit their blinkered partisan worldview.
A third of Iraqi deaths are due to ‘Coalition Forces’. Better work on your aim there Tex.
So where exactly are the falsehoods?
Your opinion doesn’t match the facts. You don’t ‘believe’ the ORB, the IBC, the UN or the Lancet studies, instead ‘believing’ some wishful thinking and outright bullshit.
October 12th, 2007 at 8:08 am
Oh and take a good look at the trend lines here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:DoD_PERSONNEL_%26_PROCUREMENT_STATISTICS_-_Personnel_%26_Procurement_Reports_and_Data_Files_-_GLOBAL_WAR_ON_TERRORISM_-_OPERATION_IRAQI_FREEDOM_by_month_March_19%2C_2003_through_September_1%2C_2007_-_killed_in_action%2C_died_of_wounds%2C_accidents.jpg
October 12th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Enk,
Interesting trend lines, pretty clear evidence that deaths and injuries have beein increasing rather than decreasing over the broader time period. Let’s hope that recent declines continue but we’ll let shcb and TV be the ones to hold their breath.
October 12th, 2007 at 11:39 am
shcb, (i’ve tried to post versions of this 4 times already, this is try #5)
Have you had any further thoughts on why there was molten metal exhibiting molten steel characteristics below all 3 demolished WTC buildings, or the implications of that reality and the implications of the official investigations studiously ignoring it?
I had thought the weakest evidence of 911 being a flase flag operation was the controversy over the cell phone calls from airplanes on 9/11/2001; however, recently the FBI has directly contradicted the Justice Department in a most damning manner about these phone conversations. The implications are even more profound than the molten metal evidence.
Please take your time to read this carefully and deliberately (just copy into your browser and replace the “dot” with a “.”) :
www dot rinf.com/alt-news/911-truth/new-evidence-that-the-official-story-about-911-is-indefensible/1449
October 12th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Philip Zelikow was a virtual member of the Bush administration? Huh? As a “virtual” member of the administration, was he able to control the members of the commission?
The “temperature required to melt steel” is getting old – because it’s bogus. The steel only had to be heated sufficiently to weaken it before that weakened state, combined with the massive weight above the weakened area, resulted in the domino effect we witnessed on 911.
Voice morphing? Was this author a writer for Star Trek, or for Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone? Now we can add more folks to the thousands who were needed to remain silent following the mass murder of 3,000 of our citizens.
Something I’ve always wondered… If all the speculative possibilities of the “truthers” is to be given any credibility (and I give it none), what evidence have they ever given that Bushco members were the only possible culprits? In particular, the planted explosives scenario: Have they explored the possibility that members of an existing al Qaeda cell in the U.S. had gained accessibility to the building to plant explosives prior to the events of 911, or does exploration of that potential scenario not fit into their agenda? Yeah, I know, I’m committing the Cardinal Sin of questioning the validity of “official truther” excogitation, and I’ll probably pay for it with volumes of redundant, required reading.
October 12th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
TV,
Your ignorance is so vast one hardly knows where to begin with you.
Re: Philip Zelikow …
That is an ignorant question. An intelligent question would have been whether he had any influence on what was and what was not investigated? The answer to that is yes, he had enormous power in directing the researchers to investigate this and not to investigate that.
Re: Steel melting. You show an ignorance of galactic proportions here. It has been established: (a) temperatures were not achieved sufficient to melt steel; (b) large pools of molten metal exhibiting all the characteristics of molten steel were present below all 3 demolished buildings; (c) there is no explanation in the official account of 911 for where the energy required to produce these molten pools came from. High explosives is the best explanation (and currently the only viable explanation) for the molten metal pools. TV, you seriously need to a read a good book.
Re: your Voice morphing? The author has demonstrated how utterly simple this is with the technology available in 2001, and has provided a sufficient overview for even you, with your all-encompassing ignorance, to understand. Re-read the article and if you still fail to comprehend then research his original sources.
Re: your repetition of the bogus and tired old claim that thousands of people would need to remain silent, you need to read David Ray Griffin’s rebuttal to that (educate yourself) or for a hint at why you are so wrong review “Scenario 404” to which I have provided references to in a couple previous discussions with shcb.
Re: what evidence have they ever given that Bushco members were the only possible culprits? In particular, the planted explosives scenario: Have they explored the possibility that members of an existing al Qaeda cell in the U.S. had gained accessibility to the building to plant explosives prior to the events of 911, or does exploration of that potential scenario not fit into their agenda? TV, glad you are at least wondering. The answer is yes, that has been considered, and no, no-one knows whether Bush was involved or not. Cheney appears quite guilty, there is less of a consensus on Bush’s role. Al Qaeda did not have the MEANS to alone access the buildings in the manner required nor to manipulate the responses of the way events transpired on 911 to have been acting independently without some assistance. And remember, al Qaeda is also known as Al-CIA-duh in some circles for good reason.
Seriously man, you are very uneducated in these matters I am embarrassed for you to be making such ignorant comments in public. Get a clue before you mislead or waste anyone else’s time further with your pathetic denials of basic facts like molten metal pools.
October 12th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
I can think of one source of energy that could account for some melted metal under the buildings. Maybe when massive amounts of steel fall hundreds of feet there can be enough kenetic energy built up to cause massive amounts of friction and resultant heat when they slam into the ground (or lower floors ‘pancaking’?). Without a thorough investigation, including fringe theories, we may never really know the science of what happened to those buildings.
On the other hand, you would expect if the airliner did such catastrophic damage (they were designed to take a full 727 (707?) and stay up) to one side of the tower, wouldn’t you expect it to topple to one side rather than to fall into its own footprint? Why did all three buildings demolish themselves from highly asymmetric damage profiles? One of the WTC buildings took it in the corner, pretty much avoiding the central structural service column mesh, yet it collapsed into an amazingly small footprint. That just does not compute.
Modern buildings are not built to withstand centuries, but specific loads and finite tolerances. Weakening a steel frame building that is pushing the envelope like WTC1 and WTC2 could be enough to make it fall.
The simplest answer is usually the right one: a small cabal of ultra-right-PatrIDIOTS wanted this to happen to help them consolidate power. So they made it happen or let it happen. It doesn’t take a cast of thousands. Why did they do it? For the power of course, and to make a ton of money: oil is now $85 a barrel. Can any rwnj recall when it was $9 to $10 a barrel under Clinton? No? Reality must be awfully painful for rwnjs these days.
If the bushco junta just stamps their feet hard enough and threatens loud enough, I am sure they can get it over $100 a barrel. Bombing Iran would definitely do it. The Saudis are really enjoying this whole Democracy in the Middle East thing!
October 12th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
A couple new graphs showing a different trend line.
http://shcb.blogspot.com/
Intelligence is not only seeing what you see but understanding what you see.
October 12th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
so you show a trend line going down for the year so far
without magical September that line would still be going up
I note you don’t site your source
the overall trend line for the war is going up, as per the DoD data I linked to. You seem to be saying Glorius George’s Surge o Glory is working, but it is also grinding down our Army.
Your numbers don’t match the DoD data…
and your numbers don’t match this link
(of course your KIA # is much lower, surprise surprise surprise!)
http://icasualties.org/oif/
October 12th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
shcb,
LOL, you shrink the time period to find a trend line that fits your wish to show falling fatalities.
Understanding what you see is what I would call subaverage to average intelligence. Understanding that there is more, much more out there than what we can see is slightly above average intelligence. Understanding what one cannot see is real intelligence. By your own admission, you rate as subaverage to average intelligence on that scale.
Enkidu, friction, even of the sort from a skyscraper building collapsing, cannot create the molten pools present. Your theories about the strength of the buildings relative to the damage done are light years behind the architects and engineers determinations, you are best not to express your ignorance on those matters – read up on their findings first.
October 12th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Globalsecurity.org
The first graph was with October numbers, 4 so far, of course the month is young this is how Michael Moore gives data. The second graph is without October, September was magical on wounded, not deaths, try and keep up. September was only a few deaths off the war average. But the trend line is going down this year and up for the war as a whole no matter whose numbers you use. Do you realize if you guys got your wish and we pulled the troops out at the end of the month and we have a slightly below average month this month it will be the end of March before that trend line levels out. To push the absurd to its limits, if all the months after this month had a goose egg, it would be the end of March 2010 before that trend line crossed the base line of 0. (the graph is on my blog of course)
When I put a trend line in my numbers for the whole war it matches the line in your example, they may not jive exactly but the trends match.
The point of this pointless exercise is that we have to use statistics to determine progress and trend lines are an important tool but you have to know when and how to interpret them.
Knarly,
On your intelligence scale, I can live with that, it’s about two steps above what my wife would give me.
October 12th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
shcb,
To digress back to those melted pools of metal under the demolished WTC #1, #2, and #3: DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU SEE?
Anyway, if I may draw your attention back to D.R. Griffin’s findings:
www dot rinf.com/alt-news/911-truth/new-evidence-that-the-official-story-about-911-is-indefensible/1449/
…has thus far not been reported by any mainstream publication. not been reported
So shcb, are you starting to understand that there is more going on than you can see, and are you starting to understand a little of that which you can not see?
No? Or perhaps you disagree? Okay. Let’s try something a little simpler. If “Intelligence is not only seeing what you see, but understanding what you see,” then can you use your intelligence to help me with something?
The FBI says there were five Arab hijackers on flight 77:
1.Khalid Almihdhar
2. Majed Moqed
3. Nawaf Alhazmi
4. Salem Alhazmi
5. Hani Hanjour
My problem is that I can not see any Arabs on flight 77. Perhaps you can see them, or can use your intelligence to tell me where they are? This is the American Airlines list of passengers for flight 77: www dot edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/AA77.victims.html
I can’t see them, and I must not be very smart because in this case I do not understand that which I can not see. Maybe you can help? I looked into what others were thinking about this, such as this guy who even cross checked the Airline list with the autopsy report, but he doesn’t seem to have any answers:
www dot sierratimes.com/03/07/02/article_tro.htm
Maybe you have an answer?
If you do, then maybe you can answer me this: Why didn’t the FBI make up a phony cell call list for the court?
October 12th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
A little house cleaning:Enky, 8:07amI don’t dispute victors tell their side of the story as virtuous, so do losers, that is why it is so important that historians be as unbiased as possible. I don’t have a problem with the authors historical correctness, although I don’t know enough about that period to say he is right or wrong, I have a problem with his comparison of us to the bad guys in his story. Here is how it goes one more time.Kings and Knights = power (a)Peasants= weakness (b)America=power (c)Arabs=weakness (d)Kings and Knights=brutal pillagers, rapists, and thugs (e)America=brutal pillagers, rapists and thugs (f)But just because a and b are correct and resulted in e doesn’t mean that just because c and d are correct f is also correct. And the rest of his piece is built around that assumption.Power can be used for good or bad, in this case we are using it for good, and at times in our history we have used it for bad. Now on to the 650,000 dead. The war started March 30 2003 the Lancet report came out October 11 2006, 1301 days. So get your calculators out boys and girls, 650,000 divided by 1301 equals 499.61, we’ll call it 500. So in your story of collateral damage, which I’m not disputing, there were 15 innocents and 15 bad guys, I’ll give you both, so 30, back to the calculators 500 divided by 30, this tragedy would have to be repeated over 16 times EVERY SINGLE DAY for three and a half years. I think that would get noticed.TV,Wouldn’t it be a hoot if Knarly were partially correct and there were hundreds or thousands of pounds of thermite wrapped around columns in the WTC, but it wasn’t placed there by Bush or Cheney but by Arabs before the first bombing of the WTC in the Clinton administration. Unfortunately the terrorist bosses put Richard Reid in charge of detonating those charges because he insisted on using the traditional methods of Mohammad, no fancy cell phone detonators for Reid, no sir, only a fuse lit by the holy book of matches that had been blessed by the holy man in Mecca with holy water would do. So some secretary named Marge sat and filed her nails with nothing but 5/8 inch of drywall between her and enough explosives to down the building for almost a decade.Question, I think I remember in one of Knarly’s links a picture of the mysterious molten metal and sparks were just below the hole where the plane entered the building, this was supposedly the thermite charge. But earlier there were reports of “hundreds” of people that heard explosions on the first several floors, is that correct? Bush being in better shape than Cheney probably took the upper floors when they were setting the explosives.
October 12th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
sorry that didn’t post right, for some reason it missed all the returns, I repasted it in the submit box and was right so it probably won’t do any good to repost.
October 12th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
I put it over on my site if it is too confusing
October 12th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Knarly,
You are always talking about the “scientific method”, I doubt you have ever used it, don’t worry most people haven’t. A scientist (or engineer) doesn’t have to have an answer to every question to advance a theory. As more information is available your theory either gets stronger or weaker, but the one thing you don’t do is assume information is more valid that it actually is, no matter how seductive it is in making your theory stronger. If there is something we don’t understand, well, we don’t understand it, but someday we will. Faith based entities like religion and conspiracies try and fill those gaps for people who have to have all the answers. I don’t know what caused the molten metal, I think the friction theory is the most viable, the thermite sustaining heat for weeks doesn’t make sense, Photo Shop is another possibility.
My best guess on the flight list is they used fake id’s? Of course that would be the first time a criminal tried that.
October 13th, 2007 at 7:08 am
KK, if uneducated and ignorant describes one who has not devoted years of their lives to study of the redundant “truther” speculation, I’m certainly uneducated and ignorant. I’m quite content to stay that way, and will easily reject any temptations that might lead to such an obsessive disorder.
October 13th, 2007 at 7:14 am
Btw, since last night Icasualties posted 3 more troop deaths from this past Wednesday, with no names given until notification of next-of-kin.
October 13th, 2007 at 8:12 am
Just for kicks I put a chart out there comparing Icasualty to Global Security
http://www.shcb.blogspot.com/
October 13th, 2007 at 8:45 am
shcb,
Fake Ids? Are you a complete idiot? 1. Take a look at the flight list, it does not take long to scan the bio’s of each. Can you find ONE person on that list (let alone FIVE) that the five hijackers could possibly impersonate??? ! 2. The autopsy report verified each and every crew member and passenger, so there were no imposters. shcb you should not be so flippant with such important matters, it highlights your willingness to be deceived by your political masters.
October 13th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Knarly,
The fake ID’s could have matched
Mj Booth
William Caswell
Eddie Dillard
Charles Dros
Richard Gabriel
…
Since none of them have bios
….or it could have been one of the 8 souls not mentioned on the list.
I used the scientific method and counted the names, 56.
Like shoot’n ducks in a barrel.
Or maybe CNN didn’t think it proper to include the Arab murderers in the list of good folks going about their business of leading productive lives. Hats off to CNN
October 13th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
From your other link;
These names weren’t in the original list, plus the five Arabs, 64. All accounted for.
October 13th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Been working on a reply all night haven’t you? Looking through all your notes, burning a hole in Google. Your political masters couldn’t have let you down again could they? First it was the maneuver that a plane can’t make, but this dumb farm kid from Kansas proved it could, then the hole you couldn’t fit a pane through is on the wrong side of building, now they can’t even count to 64. Start’n to rethink the thermite aren’t you? Were there reports of explosions on the lower floors and the upper floors? I don’t know about you but I haven’t seen that much explosives in one place since I was at the Promontory plant (that is where they refill the shuttle boosters). So the question you have to ask yourself is how strong is your faith, if your masters have been lying to you what is next, maybe you’ll have to admit Bush isn’t such a bad guy? Nooooooooo!!!!!!!
October 13th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
oops, forgot about those 600 or was it 650, or was it 700 thousand dead civilians
October 13th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Oops, forgot about that Palestinian woman and the highway of death absurd body count and those poor Palestinian tourists that got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
October 14th, 2007 at 12:55 am
shcb,
I’m just getting around to your response to my asking if you were a complete idiot for suggesting fake Id’s. It has been a long day, we had to put our old dog down this afternoon.
So let’s address your two theories. The first is your FAKE ID THEORY. Besides contradicting the 911 Commission Report, your theory might mean that Hani Hanjour would have used fake Id saying he was, to pick one of your suggestions, the supposed passenger MJ Booth?
That would mean MJ (Mary Jane) Booth was not on the flight. That would be a relief for Mary Jane’s relatives: http://www.september11victims.com/september11victims/VictimInfo.asp?ID=96
Likewise:
Majed Moqedprobably may have been pretending to be William Caswell, the US Navy Physicist
Khalid Almihdhar might have used Eddie Dillard’s Id
http://www.september11victims.com/september11victims/VictimInfo.asp?ID=104
Nawaf Alhazmi could have pretended to be William Droz http://www.september11victims.com/september11victims/VictimInfo.asp?ID=105
Therefore Salem Alhazmi pretended to be Richard Gabriel. http://www.september11victims.com/september11Victims/VictimInfo.asp?ID=113
Guess that is just another of your wild conspiracy theories, huh shcb?
That leaves your other theory, which is that the American Airlines passenger list (flight manifest) is not one list but several.
AA originally announced that there were 58 passengers, 4 flight attendants, 2 pilots, TOTAL : 64 persons on Flight 77 (no names published). Then AA handed the flight manifest over to the FBI (AA did not release the actual manifest.)
The FBI then released the list of names for the crew and passengers, which totals 56 people. The FBI supplies the names (complete with pictures) of hijackers and it contains 5 people. Total so far is 61 people on board.
Then, we have the forensic list, compiled by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in complete secrecy with no independent oversight, and they identify 55 of the 56 original passengers listed on the flight manifest (couldn’t find the remains of a young child) plus an additional three (non-hijacker) passengers, so, because either (a) AFIP will know better than AA who was on their flight (?) or (b) the FBI screwed up the first list, we can now revise the AA passenger list to a total of 59 people plus the 5 hijackers that the FBI say were on the plane, for a total of 64 persons.
That matches the number that AA originally said were on the flight, except at the beginning AA told us that there were 58 passengers plus 6 crew to total 64 and now the FBI tells us it is 59 passengers and crew plus 5 hijackers.
Let’s recap:
AA announces that there were 58 passengers, 4 flight attendants, 2 pilots, TOTAL : 64 persons on Flight 77.
The FBI releases a list of 56 names including the crew plus 5 named hijackers (total 61 people).
AFIP adds 3 names, so the list of names balances out at 59 including crew, plus 5 hijackers (total 64 people) the same total as the original reported by AA, except that in the beginning it was 58 passengers (apparently including the 5 hijackers) but not including the 6 crew (64 total.)
The figures add up but still don’t make any sense. I’m ready to give up on the flight 77 tally, and thanks for your help.
Which brings us full circle:
Remember?
I had thought the weakest evidence of 911 being a flase flag operation was the controversy over the cell phone calls from airplanes on 9/11/2001; however, recently the FBI has directly contradicted the Justice Department in a most damning manner about these phone conversations. The implications are even more profound than the molten metal evidence. Please take your time to read this carefully and deliberately (just copy into your browser and replace the “dot” with a “.”):
www dot rinf.com/alt-news/911-truth/new-evidence-that-the-official-story-about-911-is-indefensible/1449
October 14th, 2007 at 1:00 am
Sorry to repost, but it is germain to the preceding:
Anyway, if I may draw your attention back to D.R. Griffin’s findings:
…, the FBI had in 2006 presented, as evidence in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (sometimes called “the 20th hijacker”), a report on phone calls from the four airliners. According to this report, there were only two cell phone calls from United 93, and they were made at 9:58, shortly before the plane crashed, when it was down to 5,000 feet. When the FBI had to present evidence in a court of law, therefore, it would not claim that any high-altitude cell phone calls had occurred.
(These two low-altitude calls from Flight 93 were, according to the FBI report, the only two cell phone calls made from all four flights).
The most well known of the reported cell phone calls from Flight 93 were four calls that Deena Burnett reported receiving from her husband, Tom Burnett.
She knew that he had used his cell phone, she reported on several TV shows and later in her book, because she saw his Caller ID number. However, as I reported, there are now devices, such as “FoneFaker,” that will produce the person’s Caller ID as well as his or her voice. Deena Burnett and the others, I believe, were not lying; they were duped.
The most famous of the reported calls from the flights supposedly came from Barbara Olson, the well-known commentator on CNN who was married to Ted Olson, who was then the US solicitor general. Olson reported that his wife had called him twice from American Airlines Flight 77, stating that hijackers with knives and boxcutters had taken over the plane. Besides providing evidence of hijackers, this call also provided the only evidence that Flight 77 was still aloft (it had disappeared from radar and there had been reports of an airliner crash nearby).
… new evidence, including a statement made by American Airlines in 2006 that their 757s in 2001 had had no onboard phones, so that anyone calling out from Flight 77 had needed to use a cell phone. …
However, the evidence from the Moussaoui trial ruled out this possibility. In its report on AA 77, it listed one attempted call from Barbara Olson, which was “unconnected” and hence lasted “0 seconds.”
This was an astounding discovery. The FBI is part of the Department of Justice. And yet it had undercut the testimony of the DOJ’s former solicitor general, saying in effect that the two calls that he reported had never happened. The implication is that unless Ted Olson had, like Deena Burnett, been duped, he had lied. Although this should have produced front-page headlines, it has thus far not been reported by any mainstream publication.
www dot rinf.com/alt-news/911-truth/new-evidence-that-the-official-story-about-911-is-indefensible/1449/
October 14th, 2007 at 6:22 am
Knarly,
Sorry to hear of your old dog, I may have mentioned my wife breeds Shepherds, so we are dog people. We have one old gal that probably won’t make it more than another year or so, putting her down will be the hardest thing I have ever done. As hard a time as I give you I consider you a friend, you have my sympathies.
Now back to the fight. This is what drives me crazy about conspiracy nuts, they take a bunch of reports that were probably just partial lists, or lists that were haphazardly put together by airlines that were going through the craziest days of their lives. Four planes downed, many crew killed, friends and co workers, are there going to be more? Will I be on the next plane? All flights were brought to the ground at once, that had never been done, there was no procedure to bring them all to the ground at once and turn the international flights around. Now we have to get them back up in the air and back on schedule, and I have a funeral for a friend that died in the towers today and one for Captain_____ tomorrow, need to call his wife too….
And the FBI had more important things on their plates than passenger lists, keeping this from happening again two days later for one.
Three years later the pajama clad bloggers take these reports and turn them into the conspiracy that will prove beyond a doubt that Cheney had to go to the tall and big man’s shop to get his ninja suit. As far as I can see this whole 911 conspiracy is built around a few facts that together don’t mean anything with a bunch of garbage tying them together. Think of a classic spider web, the threads of the web that extend out from the center are actual facts, all the little concentric circles that tie those threads together are the garbage. The web needs the garbage to be complete, without that garbage the web is a few useless threads splaying into space. If a theory is to be plausible all the garbage has to hold up to scrutiny, at that point it is no longer garbage, it becomes the nuances of the black and white part of the argument.
What I am doing here is systematically removing the garbage one thread at a time until there is nothing left holding your web together. And it seems to be working, as you run out of arguments you typically say that that was not an important part of the theory, that “as usual” I picked up on the smallest detail, the easiest to defeat and attacked it, welcome to warfare Sun Tzu style.
October 14th, 2007 at 6:47 am
Since this didn’t fit in my last post, I split it out.
You just saw how the proper vetting of facts takes place. Provided all the information you gave me was true, I was given a set of evidence. It was a passenger list, my challenge was to determine who among the passengers were the Arabs. I gave the first 5 names that appeared to be men, one of them turned out to be a woman later but I didn’t know that at the time. Fake ID’s was my first theory because that would be the most plausible. If one of us gets caught with our box cutters the rest of us don’t want to be implicated so we get fake ID’s.
Theory two was the disparity of counts. You provided more information later that filled in some of those gaps as to the bio’s of the passengers and even eliminated one of them because she was a woman, that now makes theory two more plausible than one with a conspiracy way down the list. But I didn’t marry myself to theory one and jump through hoops to show it was right.
Even if we were to take this portion of the huge 911 conspiracy as a separate item a cover up by the FBI would be way down the list, possible but not even remotely plausible. At the very least we would have several layers of human error to cut through and then possible criminal connections by airline personnel. The FBI would be down the list around 20 or 30 I would think.
October 14th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
shcb, Regarding your last post, I agree with paragraph 1 and 2 (the difference between your “proper vetting of facts” and what you call the conspiracy theorists who hold dogmatically to their theories is simply (a) a tremendous number of facts have been withheld and evidence destroyed and (b) that what appears to be facts to you are fairy tales to others.
As for your third paragraph, I would agree with all, but in the present circumstances with all we know about the Sibel Edmunds case, etc. and everything else that begs proper answers it raises the suspicion over the FBI a whole bunch of notches.
October 14th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Re: the passenger list for flight 77.
Flown recently? Ever flown before 2001? Don’t tell me that American Airlines do not know who every person on every single one of their planes identified themselves as being and to which seat they were assigned. Any other major domestic US crash in living history had passenger lists. Next of kin are notified and the passenger list is vital evidence and put into the public domain.
We’ve hashed back and forth about flight 77 and determined a discrepancy: American Airlines originally said they had a total of 64 persons on Flight 77 comprised of 58 passengers and six crew members yet, months later after the forensic report at the Pentagon, the FBI tells us that actually there were 59 passengers and crew plus 5 hijackers. It still sounds fishy to me, but tomato/tomoto you say? Perhaps, even perhaps likely, but given the cloud of suspicion the least that American Airlines or the FBI could do would be to hand over the original list AA provided to the FBI.
In any event, your self-congratulations about debunking a conspiracy is inappropriate because I had only stated that it was something that I did not understand and humbly asked for your assistance. My exact words were:
So, Sherlock, you think you solved the “simpler” passenger list problem (well maybe you have or maybe you have not, but at least we’ve taken it as far as we can and determined it is a dead end.) That is much better than where we started. So what about the conflicting evidence from the FBI vs. Dept. of Justice (refer to a previous post for the full quote, its context and implications) :
October 15th, 2007 at 5:18 am
Knarly,
This one is baffling, I’ve been looking into it this weekend and I just don’t know. One of the problems with researching this on the net is that anything you search for gives you mostly hits for you conspiracy guys and the same quote you just offered, you have to go to page 5 or so before you get anything else and then you’re in that area where Google is picking up words from phrases that aren’t relevant. I don’t take anything I hear from truthers with a grain of salt, I take it with a fifty pound bag, just so you know where my bias starts from.
One guy said a plane acts as a shield that keeps the signal from leaving the plane, sounds reasonable. In an unrelated article I think it was CNN had an unscientific poll asking people if they had ever made a call from a plane, 7% said they had, they didn’t go into how high they were or even if they had left the ground. But it looks like it is at least possible. Another unrelated article was of a guy that called his wife from Everest, it was the highest cell phone call ever made, “except for calls from planes, hey it happens” as the author says.
One of the truthers asked why were only a few calls made from the planes, wouldn’t everyone be making calls? Maybe they were and only a few got through. That would make both statements true. It is nearly impossible to get a call out of a plane, and only a few calls got out.
It seems the rule of no cell phones in planes is more to protect the planes electronics and it seems a plane flying at high speed at a moderate altitude confuses the tracking circuitry of the cell network, causing a cascade effect that crashes the network.
As to Olsen, he is talking to his wife, she has just told him she is on a plane that is going to crash, she will die, “are you calling from your cell phone or a seat back phone dear?” If my wife were on that plane, and it landed safely and that is the final question I asked her, she would kill me, and not a jury in the land would convict.
All that said, we’re back to why make this so damn difficult? Voice morphing? Come on, this is like Austin Powers where Scott says “just shoot him, I’ve got a gun in my room, we’ll do it together” “you just don’t get it do you Scott?” set some explosives around the supports, throw a truck bomb in the basement for effect, knock the building down and blame the Arabs. Why all the theatrics?
So, nothing conclusive on this one, but given your track record I will say this is nothing but hogwash for now.
October 15th, 2007 at 11:51 am
shcb,
Thank you, but it seems you are a little off track. It might be helpful to focus on:
(a) the importance of the phone calls in establishing the storyline of the official conspiracy theory (the whole Arabs with boxcutters thing); and,
(b) why the FBI would not only fail to submit evidence in court to support the existence of the phone calls but in fact the FBI actually submitted evidence that shows such phone calls did NOT take place.
October 15th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Let me help you out, shcb.
This link shows that the presentation at trial showed five other calls (four which were connected calls) from unknown callers on the flight. So no, the FBI didn’t submit evidence that Barbara Olson could only have made one unconnected call. She could have made any of the verified but unidentified calls.
http://haloscan.com/tb/screwloosechange/4127821633852375151
The same website also includes an interview with the inventor of voice-morphing technology, who debunks the idea of simulating specific voices in this scenario. Also this fonefaker product does not claim that it can simulate a specific voice, just that it can alter the caller’s voice in general.
Don’t let knarly draw you into these window-dressing arguments. The only important thing is how the towers fell. And numerous professionals in the engineering field have submited overwhelming amounts of researched papers (that have been peer-reviewed by real authorities and published in real, world-renowned authoritative journals (not “friends of wackos” faux journals) that have agreed upon the plane/fire/weakened steel resolution.
Carry on.
October 15th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Thanks Craig,
I’ll read the site cover to cover if I have to. I don’t know why I torture myself by continuing with these conversations. I guess I have never liked to leave a job unfinished even though I know I will never convince these truthers (what a joke of a name), it has become a religion for them and you cannot convince religious zealots. As I eluded in the last post, it is so difficult to find information debunking these guys, they dominate anything I search for. I prefer to refute using information that is independent of the argument but sometimes you just have to have dueling experts.
October 15th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Craig,
That link didn’t work, do I have to be a member?
October 15th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
The website is “screwloosechange.com”. A free site.
October 15th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
thanks
October 15th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Craig,
that was a pretty useless site
October 15th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
That site tends to be a mix of snarky comments about some truther personalities and some good reference points. Other sites are more focused on direct refuting of conspiracy points (911debunking.com).
October 15th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
what am I doing wrong, I get “search results for’911debunking.com” and get listings for real estate and dating services, same thing happened with screwloosechange.com? I think I’m pretty computer literate, but…
October 15th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
I think i got it it’s debunking911 not 911debunking
October 16th, 2007 at 12:13 am
So, Websites that point out contradictions and that ask questions are annoying and bad, but websites that advertise their unscrupulous and biased intention right at the front of their name are good, such as “Screw” loose change?
Despite that, I actually agree with Craig on this one. Calls from airplanes are window dressings, and who can ever verify speculation like that, especially when statements or phone records or what have you can be so easily faked? Or how could one ever verify wild speculation like this entertaining post by Julie7:
Also, shcb while on the subject of speculating about that Flight 77 call from Mrs. Olson to Mr. Olson, I think you will enjoy this:
http://www.cattanga.typepad.com/tabby_cat_gamespace/2007/09/transcript.html
Just to be clear, after a little research I now think Dr. Griffin is out on a limb with his FBI contradicting the Justice Dept. claim, and the limb is going to snap bringing him and his otherwise mostly excellent 911 work into disrepute. Too bad.
October 16th, 2007 at 4:47 am
Knarly,
I take all advocacy sites with a grain of salt no matter what side they are on, that is why I try and verify their story with information that has nothing to do with their statements, or from actual transcripts. The pilots for 911 for instance. The calculator I was using for turn angle and g force was just a general aviation website, they had no dog in the fight. I will do the same with these sites. If I find a number of items that don’t make sense then I will have less and less faith on an exponential scale just as I have with you truthers.
The Cheney Olsen spoof was cute. I was never a fan of either Barbra or Ted but I certainly wouldn’t wish them ill.
October 16th, 2007 at 11:41 am
So I’m wondering if Craig can refer us to all these:
or if he was just pontificating with a bunch of fancy sounding words and insults?
If there are so many such papers, and he can refer us to them, I would like to see how independent they are in their consideration of the evidence, or if they simply copy the NIST approach or, perhaps just as bad, simply use some of the variables coming from such authoritative sounding but flawed models as NIST uses.
Here is the NIST approach in a nutshell:
1. Consider ONLY the evidence from the moment of impact to moment the initiation commenced, rule out all other evidence from the analysis (e.g. rule out molten metal pools that remained, the dynamics of the collapse, etc.).
2. Given the observable evidence that planes hit two towers, exploding and starting fires, and that the towers eventually collapsed, continue to adjust the assumed variables in the computer model to fit these observables until global collapse is initiated in the model.
3. If any assumed values for the variables do not fit the evidence collected, and there some that did not fit, they can be rationalized by criticizing the quality of the evidence collected because NIST knows that airplanes hit the buildings and the buildings fell (e.g. steel samples collected and analyzed did not experience the temperatures needed to be assumed by the model for sufficient weakening; NIST rationalizes that the steel samples collected and analyzed must therefore have been unsuitable samples or poorly chosen.)
October 16th, 2007 at 11:44 am
errata: should be “1. …from the moment of impact to the moment the collapse initiation commenced…”
October 16th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
gee Craig, that link was most insightful (and u find that collection of garbage helpful?) talk about bizarre and stupid
knarly – why does the truther movement have to set up more and more elaborate schemes for getting the job done? rwnjs wanted their New Pearl Harbor and they got it. It is much easier to preclude all the super duper spycraft gizmos and go for the simplest of solutions: they knew this was happening, they set up ‘exercises’ that simulated nearly exactly what was about to happen, on the same day, same time and they let it happen. The radical rwnjs wanted this to consolidate their hold on unbridled power. And it nearly worked. But their incompetence, greed and overreach (can u say hubris?) were their undoing.
With the deluge of corruption, lapses in judgement, morality and common sense, the Rethugs have made their ‘brand’ poison to anyone who isn’t a diehard 13%er nutjob.
October 16th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
I could buy into the notion that they (Bush admin) knew this was going to happen (anyone still remember the summer 2001 report titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US”?) and let it happen, to finally have their new “Pearl Harbour”.
Please note that this is my personal opinion, I have no desire to debate anyone about it. Just thought I’d toss it out there.
October 16th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
enkidu – that’s a pet peeve of mine too, but I am prone to making relatively simple things unduly complicated. Heck, even that sentence would have worked with “relatively” and “unduly” omitted, I just can’t win.
NL – I wouldn’t debate you, that would be like trying to outswim a shark. Anyway, I just have two words for you: “Operation Northwoods”.
October 16th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
I think this debunking911 site if pretty good, thanks Craig. I don’t agree with all its points, but I rarely do, I’ve even been known to disagree with myself. They seem to be pretty rational, and yes Knarly it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it probably is, even if Dick Cheney is holding it.
Of course we knew they were going to attack us, they had been attacking us since the Carter administration on a pretty regular basis, it was only a matter of time before they got lucky on a grand scale. By the way, it is only a matter of time before they get that lucky again, unless we kill them first. Gunny Bob Newman said at one point that he was part of a commission that was charged with coming up with scenarios that could be possible large scale terrorist attacks, this was one of several they concocted. The only major difference was they thought the Arabs would use cargo planes. So this particular plan and many others was considered. The problem in an open and free society is there is no way to protect against every threat except eliminating that threat at the source.
They knew a Pearl Harbor like event was going to happen at some time, they would have preferred to kick the Arabs butts without that loss of life but knew it would take a massively successful attack for the lackadaisical American public to understand the threat. But kind of like you guys don’t want our guys hurt but you want is to suffer defeat in Iraq, they didn’t want this attack but hoped something like it would awaken the sleeping giant.
No one in this administration knew this specific attack was going to happen and let it, that is a totally ridiculous and irresponsible statement. These are good honest people, they are politicians, with all the character traits that go along with that profession, but they wouldn’t let thousands of people die.
October 16th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
For those interested, this link for “debunking911.com” has a specific peer-reviewed paper that discusses how the mainstream explanation is fully sufficient to explain the towers falling, and specifically that demolition is not involved and/or is not necessary for this to occur.
http://www.debunking911.com/paper.htm
The last link on the left-hand column (on the above link) called “debunking 911 links”, lists, at the bottom of that page, a number of other peer-reviewed articles in well-renown journals that also discuss and agree with the prevalent reasoning for the fall. Unfortunately, most of them require a log-in or a subscription to view them. Your bigger local libraries (and university libraries) would also likely have some of these journals as well.
For those who wish to read further, have at it. This is what I’ve uncovered in my limited search for legitimate peer-reviewed articles and the involvement in widely-accepted professional publications and research journals.
October 16th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Craig,
Thanks for the link. You might think it sounds impressive to use adjectives such as “legitimate” and “mainstream” to prop up the face value acceptability of your preferred references, however the paradoxical and paradigm altering nature of 911 Truth is that there has been a concerted blackout or suppression on reporting or publishing things that present a logical criticism of the official conspiracy theory (OCT) as presented and accepted with virtualy zero questioning by “legitimate” or “mainstream” publications.
Neither you nor I are interested in debating this topic, but let me make just a couple further points.
One is that you use the term “peer review”. Peer review is a good, it allows a theory to be criticised and honed to perfection or criticized and eventually rejected in favour of theories that fit better. However, this does not appear to be present in the “mainstream” literature you’ve cited as the accolades are published but the criticisms seem to be repressed by the editors who favour the OCT.
Second, about the references you provided. I’ve done a cursory scan so far and many seem to rely heavily on or repeat the mathematical based theory of collapse presented within the Bazant paper. That’s something I looked at earlier this year and went into some detail reading debate back and forth between Bazant and others, I think it was over at the scholars stj911 or some such site. It was apparent to me that his work had fundamental problems and rather than own up to them Bazant became arrogantly dismissive and ceased communicating. That whole debate, and the dearth of interest from the “mainstream” into the fairly obvious problems with fundamental assumptions to his theory that were raised, has made me more cynical about the control and flow of basic information than anything else. Enough said, I’ll close with a fairly random sample of just one of many devastating criticisms of Bazant’s defense of his theory:
http://www.911blogger.com/node/9154?page=2
October 18th, 2007 at 5:19 am
Knarly, what am I going to do with you, in the months I have been writing here, you have wanted to nothing but debate the 911 conspiracy. We can be discussing the finer points of tidily winks and you sign off with a link to …911…(dot)com. A couple guys say they don’t want to debate this, but… and you say, I don’t want to debate this, but… You will follow anyone anywhere and then say everyone else is blindly following their masters.
I looked at the link you provided, the guy writing this uses one false premise after another. He says the buildings were divided into two parts, the upper and lower sections, they were divided into three sections, the upper and lower structurally sound sections and a mid section that was heavily damaged and weakened by fire. He says for Bazant’s numbers to work the upper floors would have had to transmit all the force through the columns and it obviously didn’t, but it obviously did. But he has set up the second false statement by making the first, if there were only 2 sections of the building, the top section would have collapsed on the bottom, in which case the energy would have been dissipated as he says. But the top remained solid long enough to form a gigantic hammer head, it then built up enough speed as it passed through the mid section to overcome the strength of the lower section. And remember the force of a hammer goes up exponentially as speed increases. He says his photo evidence proves the top section disintegrated. I look at it and clearly see the top section in one piece in the first photo and then I don’t see it, because it is inside the building and smoke.
I remember when I was a young lad asking the nun a bunch of questions about the Catholic religion, things that just didn’t make sense to me. In an exasperated voice she said it was just part of faith, everything didn’t have to make sense, you just believed it because it was part of the faith. That’s you. I now understand that everything doesn’t have to make sense, but I don’t have to believe anything or everything to fill that gap. At some point someone will probably fill in that gap, I may not be alive to see it but the question will probably be answered. Or maybe not.
October 18th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
shcb,
That’s an abysmally poor understanding of the link (and why it was provided.) The pictures show what apparently only you do not see but in any event the the original videos show even more clearly (e.g. the NBC video of the south tower where the top section starts to collapse and starts to leans and rotates as it falls but then inexplicably it’s rotational momentum STOPS as the upper portio disintegrates); and, I provided the link as a sample of the debate (involving Byzant and supporters, letters at stj911.)
You need to take a remedial reading course, because THIS is what he stated: He assumes that all of the energy of the upper section will be somehow transferred to act only on the uppermost storey of the lower section. He DID NOT, as you claim, state that: He says for Bazantès numbers to work the upper floors would have to transmit all the force through the columns …
So shcb, either you need remedial reading or you are outright lying. In any event, you are not worthy of debate on this matter.
October 19th, 2007 at 5:25 am
I think my reading skills are fine,
Here is more later in the piece
Look at the small puff of smoke or dust below the large cloud, to the right side of the picture, this cloud is moving horizontal, telling of a great deal of force being pushed to the side, this is being caused by compressed air as the floors pancake.
He is right in one aspect, the damage to the lower floors of the upper section would be about equal to the damage of the upper floors of the lower section as they fall. But remember. The force goes up by the square of the speed of the falling object so if the speed triples the force is nine times greater. A building is designed for this speed to be close to 0 so any speed whatever will quickly exceed design specs. As the upper and lower floors crush on themselves they form a moving debris field that loads the next floor, the key here is the word moving. He is also eluding that the floors underneath this mass would support it because the weight would be transferred to all the columns. He is sort of right here, the floors below are designed to support the floors above, but only the floors above so the building gets stronger in the lower floors. However the moving mass only has to have enough force to crush the floor below it, well a little more the floors below are offering support, but the amount of resistance they will offer to this kinetic energy is also going to diminish exponentially as we go down through the floors. In a static situation they would support all the weight but not in a dynamic one. Then we are just left with a fight of forces, is the dynamic force of the mass of steel and concrete and furniture and bodies greater than the static strength of the floor below it. The strength of the floors below are growing linearly and the force above is growing both linearly and exponentially.
October 19th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
shcb, You are a liar then. In the first quote you purposely left out less damaged… columns without themselves absorbing any energy whatsoever. Leaving that out is critical to your defence of Bazant’s theory, because Byzant’s theory did not account for that.
The whole premise of Bazant is that the entire force of the upper stories IMPACT the entire UPPERMOST story of the next floor over an impact time period which is near instantaneous.
Bazant improperly described the transfer of energy from the segment above and did not consider the distribution of energy throughout the steel structure below and other diffusions of the gravitational energy through thermal (you’ve argued before that there was enough friction to melt steel LOL!) and other energy diffusions such as occurs over the time interval much larger than the near instantaneous ASSumption that Bazant made for when the floors below the impact zone started to collapse as well.
In your post before your latest you stated that: I look at it and clearly see the top section in one piece in the first photo and then I don’t see it, because it is inside the building and smoke. You are arguing, in essence, that the upper portion of the tower disappeared into a dust cloud one third as tall as the height of the upper portion of the tower, without disturbing the exterior columns or the upper portion going through a crumbling process over the time it takes to fall those 20-odd storeys ! That demonstrates either a mastery of self-deception or complete ignorance about what Byzant was trying to say in support of the official fictional narrative.
Later in your last post you then go on to describe collapse forces that is hardly in line with Byzant and far more in line with what the critics were saying that Bazant failed to account for. Your description is in essence a condemnation of the assumptions used by Bazant. Your description differs from the other critics in that you have provided no calculations and the critics have demonstrated that for the first floor impacted after collapse initiation the diffusion of energy would have slowed the collapse significantly.
Finally, you have offered this:
1. “Great deal of force being pushed to the side” This totally undermines Bazant’s calculations.
2. “caused by compressed air” That fits, if there was in fact a pancake collapse, which there was not despite what Byzant and you say. So without the pancake collapse, the lateral ejection of debris was not caused by compressed air concentrated on single floors but rather was vented out the top, amoungst many many of the lower floors, etc. Besides, how could compressed air throw steel beams and other debris hundreds of feet away (to impact WTC7 for instance (and still retain the energy required for Byzant’s model?)
3. “as the floors pancake” NIST has disavowed the pancake theory, so now you are arguing with NIST? Here is what NIST says in their otherwise ridiculous Q and A:
October 19th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Knarly,
In the first place I’m not a civil, nor a structural engineer, I’m a mechanical engineer, I build automated production lines. I don’t know what you do but you are obviously no more qualified than me to determine the capacity of an individual column, beam, support, perlin, brace, rivet or weld. Especially since no one living saw those structural members, we don’t know where that multi ton Pratt and Whitney ended up or what it hit in its travels bouncing around the floors’ we don’t know where the fuel puddled, or where the leather office chair ended up coming to rest. We can only talk in general terms, but as usual you are making things more difficult than they need to be.
I’ve read your post a few times and I think I catch your point in a couple places but for the most part it is to paraphrase a James Bond movie, “for your mind only” but please don’t repeat it, that would be too painful. It probably makes sense to you but it doesn’t to me.
October 20th, 2007 at 9:46 am
I won’t repeat. In future I’ll try harder to be even more precise in my descriptions for you, because when two people start from such radically different perspectives it is critical to take very small steps and be precise in explanations.
My educational background is a degree in economics, which fortunately fits well with being a nuanced generalized thinker. I had started towards a science degree, so I’ve taken all the basic first year science courses – and beyond – but in my third year I decided to basically start over to get a more marketable (at the time) degree in economics. At that time my math skills were probably at least as good as yours are now, but since then they’ve languished while I concentrated on other skills. By the way, my father was a chemical engineer and you of anyone might know what I mean when I say that he raised me to be an engineer.
Re: the leather chair, according to workers cleaning up the site (and indeed the governors description of the debris in the day or two following) everything was pulverized; besides paper floating around the largest office supplies in the rubble were small. One person reported that the largest office item during the days and days searching through the rubble that he found was half a telephone keypad.
Re: since no one saw those structural members, we do not know where that multi ton Pratt and Whitney ended up or where it hit in its travels … – Therefore you also disagree with the Purdue University simulation which supposedly explains all that with a high degree of certainty (in addition to your disagreeing with Byzant about the initial collapse impacts.)
You have done a good job of supporting my initial position shcb, thanks.
October 20th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Glad I could be of help. My math skills aren’t what they used to be either, computers have taken the rigors out of actually doing the equations. As with you, the more advanced you seem to get the more you tend to move into the management side of things. I am to the point where they pretty much use me for the conceptual and finishing phases of projects and more junior members of the team fill in the gaps. So they do the boring parts, but I can sure see a drop off in some of my more basic skills.
Maybe I’m just old school but I don’t put a lot of stock in all but the most basic computer simulations. I was just being silly with the leather chair by the way. I’m sure they give a pretty good general view of what happened but I think after you have spent countless hours refining them you get to thinking they are infallible, and then you start to make statements like “the wing was tore off the plane when it hit the fourth column from the left”. So whether you are talking about the Purdue, Bazant, or Ross simulation (that was the name of the author wasn’t it) whoever simulated it, it is only a tool. And to be honest, it probably isn’t much different than what some fire chief looking through a pair of binoculars at the hole would have deduced after looking at the building for two minutes.
You know, no one would probably do it but it would be interesting if someone destroying an old building would allow the demo crew to simulate this say a quarter of the way down, see if the building would indeed pancake. There would probably be too much danger of damage to nearby buildings for that.
October 20th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
i agree, especially in regard to computer simulations. It was a long time before programmers perfected the code to beat a chess master. I’ve worked on enough computer models myself to know how all the assumptions and caveats of the designers get dropped from the executive summary and subsequent reporting of the results to decision makers. Always suspect trickery when simulations are done instead of real world experiments, especially when the latter is feasible. A fire chief with binoculars and an understanding of where those core columns were located would be scratching his head in amazment that tower one got hit head on taking out core columns and burned for an hour and forty minutes, whereas tower 2 was impacted through a corner losing few core columns and collapsed first after burning about half an hour.
The reason so many firemen were up there in the first place is because wrc 1 and 2, while damaged were standing firm showing no signs of failing and from that perspective the fires – billowing black smoke until the appearance of what seems to be cutter charges just before the collapse – was no threat to a steel building, based on 100 years of history. (Watch the video of the Madrid hotel fire that was a blazing inferno before you argue with anyone on that point again.)
I’ve seen a top down demolition on video that was successful. If I can find it I’ll post it for you in case you are interested.
I understand your leather chair comment but it rang a bell, and by serendipity I came across video testimony within another video from one of the guys who made the comments about the pulverization of building contents. It is worth a look, his comments are at about the 2:20 minute mark in the video (you’ll also be enlightened by short discussion of molten pools at the 15 minute mark.)
http://www.video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7160790539111319889&hl=en
October 20th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
I would be interested in that top down demolition if it is handy, don’t go to too much trouble I trust you. Thanks for the time locations, as you know I only last about 30 seconds into one of your videos. I’ve seen and read all I need to make up my mind that this is just as it seems, a bunch of guys hijacked some planes and flew them into buildings and the buildings fell down, unless some really new information were to come to light.
But since we are being civil here I have a couple questions, and I mean them seriously, I’m just asking your opinion as someone who has spent many hours researching this. I really don’t need a bunch of links and I’m not being combative. Early on in these discussions you said there were explosions heard on the ground floors and that seemed to be the place the controlled demolition took place. Now it seems the focus is on the mysterious liquid metal just under the crash site. It seems unlikely there would be charges set at both locations. Are there two camps in the conspiracy theorists, one who thinks the explosions were on the ground floor and one that thinks the upper levels were rigged, or do they think there were devices at both locations?
My second question is that it seems the cutting charges were directly under the crash site, how did they know where to place them? Do they believe the Arabs were good enough to hit a precise spot? If it were expert pilots how would they even know given the homogenous exterior of the buildings?
Or have these points ever been brought up?
October 21st, 2007 at 12:19 am
Yes, there has been much discussion. And of course no-one knows the answers to your questions, unless there was such a conspiracy and then some of the perpetrators know. What I would like is an investigation that might answer the types of questions you and others ask. There are tons of other questions, like why those buildings, those asbestos laden beacons of America’s commerce were selected for destruction? Why then were the two other airliners also hijacked if the WTC towers were the target? I’m not sure, but I have my suspicions, and perhaps the terrorist motives were addressed in the 911 commission report but I don’t recall any convincing explanations there.
Back to your questions. To bring down the buildings into their own footprints (a highly technical feat more commonly known as a controlled demolition) lots of high explosives were required. More than just some bombs at the base, as that would cause the buildings to topple all over Manhattan. Messy. It seems they wanted a spectacle for the cameras, and 911 was horrific but thankfully a Godzilla invades Manhatten sort of spectacle was not picked.
The three WTC buildings collapsing so neatly by terrorist bombs could not be explained easily either, it would be suspicious as to how terrorists could possibly gain access to “secure” buildings long enough and at the right locations to set the charges.
But hijacked jetliner crashes, now that would be a spectacle of shock and awe that would befuddle and stymie any real investigation and would have the added enormous psychological effect that we indeed witnessed.
Explosives were placed throughout WTC 1 and 2 buildings’ 47 core columns and perhaps the 240 or so perimeter ones too at whatever floor intervals were calculated as being required. I’ve read reasonable accounts of how that might have been accomplished. Contingencies would be made for planes striking slightly off target. Planes were hijacked, but cockpit control was disabled and transferred to remote control (technology tested and proven in years preceding 2001), hence crash location on buildings were bulls-eyes or close to targets. Perhaps a control room in WTC 7 was where the real pilots were sitting.
I do not know why there were reported explosions in basement floors prior to the impact of the planes (per William Rodriguez and others testimony). I’m not a demolition expert, and I do not understand why explosions at the base of the building seemed to occur first. This is my pure speculation, so I am not going to defend this theory, but perhaps the original plan was for the towers to collapse immediately upon plane impact (which if memory serves correctly took out at most a half dozen of the 47 core columns in WTC1 and one or two in WTC2) and it was thought that if the base supports were first compromised then the towers would start to fall with the plane impacts, and then the subsequent charges could pulverize the buildings as they fell. However, the first plane impact did not initiate such a collapse sequence, and that might have been unexpected to the perpetrators. Maybe they decided to wait for the second plane to cause the south tower to collapse and they would then pull the north tower immediately after. But the second plane also failed to dislodge the second tower, and it took them a half hour or so to decide and agree on the detonation sequences for the remaining charges, to bring the towers down, and that was what we saw. (You saw dust being compressed out windows, I saw squibs dozens of stories below and steel beams ejected hundreds of feet due to enormous explosive energy.)
Anyway, here is a top down demolition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ1E2NPl-s8
Now imagine how it would look if they hadn’t stripped the walls and done everything that’s required for a legal safe demolition, maybe it would have looked a lot like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atSd7mxgsGY
October 21st, 2007 at 7:02 am
True to my word, I won’t get into the obvious and repeated critique of your theories, at least not on this thread, I’m sure we will have other chances for that. I asked because I find these discussions interesting as discussions themselves. One of the things I have noticed over the years is many times is people on the opposing side, we’ll call them the non believers, see conflicting statements by your side, the believers. And this could be most any political, religious, or even sports or business related discussion. So the believers say “wait a minute, you guys are making two contradictory statements” but in reality there is fight inside the believer’s legions over which concept is right, but very few if any would consider both to be correct. So the non believers are use this conflict as a weapon against the believers, maybe this is done through ignorance, maybe through malicious intent
My answer to your first paragraph questions would be quite simple, would be that were the symbols you say, nothing more. All the other targets were symbols too. The Pentagon, the Capital or White House, wherever flight 93 was headed. This is terrorism, the idea is that you don’t have the physical power to accomplish your goals so you attack highly visible targets and try and get your enemy to ask “am I next” every day.
In Vietnam the story goes that the Vietcong would sneak into a barracks and slit the throat of only one soldier as he slept, knowing that killing everyone in the barracks would simply bring the wrath of the entire army on them, but the loss of one soldier wouldn’t, but it would make every soldier say ”am I next?” and maybe loose a couple hours sleep. Just a little of an edge. Now I don’t even know if that story is true, if it isn’t, it still accomplished it’s desired effects.
One last point, as I recall, the purpose of the 911 commission was to investigate the intelligence failures. The discussions of the attack itself was just for background.
Combative section:
The first video shows pancakeing is not only possible but probable, the second again puts the false premise on display. He says he reassembled the film frame by frame then says the building is falling several stories at a time, he is just missing the intermediate floors between frames.
October 21st, 2007 at 1:07 pm
First, let me say I really appreciate this non-combative tone, maybe you and I have learned to disagree on facts and opinions without trying to prove the other wrong.
Re: your answers to questions – To me the questions were rhetorical, we each have different answers, and motives for selecting the targets may be different for each person involved in deciding on those targets. For the Arab “terrorists”, your answers are good bets. Attacking highly symbolic, protected targets might make others wonder “am I next?” but more precisely it nails home the point that no matter how well defended the people are told that they are, the existing defenses are useless to the cunning of the terrorists. But I think that is simply the immediate intended effect. There is an even greater hope by the terrrorists: that the attack will provoke a knee jerk response by the security apparatus of the attacked that is so heavy handed and disproportionate that it provides the terrorists with a blatant example, i.e. evidence or “proof” (sic) of the imperialism and oppression under which they live, thereby giving the terrorists’ fight the justification it otherwise lacks.
Heard that Vietnam story before, maybe in some movie. Could be true. Highly effective tactic if you want to freak out the enemy and impact their emotional ability to fight effectively, fearlessly and cohesively. Makes sense in such a combat zone. Not so sure it is that effective on a larger scale, because what does a freaked out public demand? Certainly not to give in to the terrorists wishes, a freaked out public demands more security including that the terrorists be caught and punished.
You recall correctly the purpose of the 911 commission. Too bad they didn’t have more resources to ensure they got the background right. Then again maybe that was for the better considering how the research was politicised; it will be better use of the resources when a truly independent investigation can be conducted.
re: your combative section, not sure why you are trying so hard to defend the pancaking theory since even NIST has disavowed it. Missing intermediate frames between floors? So you are saying that when I observe in that video two or three floors collapsing at once that is occuring between frames? In other words, the building collapsed 30 or 45 feet in about a sixtieth of a second? I don’t want to do the math but that sounds ridiculously fast to me (is it?).
At about the 1:56 mark in the NBC video of the same collapse it also shows several stories collapsing at a time, but from this angle you can see the lateral and even upward lateral explosive forces more clearly. The advantage of the first video is that it is taken from below the pulverized dust cloud so you can see the floors more clearly.
October 21st, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Oops forgot the NBC link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP6MlrfbCvQ
October 21st, 2007 at 1:29 pm
This one is actually better to show that, also check out the squib at the lower part of the picture at the 2:30 minute mark, repeated at the 2:50 minute mark in slow motion, and 2:55 slow motion and zoomed (there are two visible a big one a few stories below the collapse front and a smaller squib near the bottom of the camera shot.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GINcwsjCAw
October 21st, 2007 at 6:52 pm
If my calculations are right, the building would fall about 4 feet per frame, so my theory of the floors collapsing between frames is pretty much junk unless this was taken with the worlds slowest camera. I think your theory of charges set every 4 or 5 floors is only slightly more possible. To gain access to a floor for a week or two to disassemble and reassemble the walls and set charges is in itself highly implausible but possible. To repeat that feat 20 times per building is so close to impossible to call it impossible.
If I were going to subscribe to this controlled demolition theory, I would pick either the top or bottom but not both. I would then separate myself from anyone that picked both. My money would be on the lower floors, that is the most practical. I would then tailor my evidence to fit the US government handling the explosives on the ground floors and the Arabs doing the planes. With a very secretive collusion between the two. Then the accuracy of the planes is not important, you could even say the explosive charges were only as a last resort, they hoped the planes themselves would bring the buildings down. You could even make the point that OBL bought into this because the administration promised him control of Iraq after Sadam was killed, and them reneged on that promise.
That would be my story.
October 21st, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Why do you assume that access to a floor for a week or two was required, and why do you assume that walls needed to be disassembled?
Were not the core columns accessible from the elevator shafts and didn’t the high vacancy rate allow many floors to be accessed in the preceding months even during office hours?
I’m glad that you are not subscribing to this controlled demolition theory, because your apparent obsession on speculations and adding more and more conspiracy theories would get in the way and divert attention from: (a) getting people to look at the evidence (13 key items according to Dr. Jones) that fit exactly the characteristics of a controlled demolition; (b) publicising the holes in the official conspiracy theory; and, (c) efforts to get a real investigation underway.
Anyone who seriously considered the design of the buildings, examined the construction photos of the steel framework and the testimony of the original architects who originally claimed the design could handle multiple jetliner impacts would never have been so naive to hope that the planes themselves could bring the buildings down. Even if someone imagined that to be possible, a vertical collapse would have been inconceivable given the asymetric damage on the impact side compared to the opposite side, if damage from the impact/fires alone were responsible the towers would have toppled over at the point of impact rather than vertically collapse.
Here’s a question. What is built to better withstand variable loads, and windshears, and even impacts by other objects: (a) a section of the WTC towers 1 and 2; or, (b) a train boxcar stood on end? Feel free to shrink the WTC model down to boxcar size or scale up the boxcar to WTC dimensions, in either case the answer is the same: the WTC towers.
Now, think about stacking four train boxcars on edge (filled with anything you like, leather chairs, pillows, or bricks) and driving a remote controlled motorcycle (any weight you choose and packed with as much fuel as you wish) at any speed (yes, even an impossible land speed of 500 mph) over a jump to hit the stack anywhere on the top two boxcars.
Once you run that through your mind, explain to me how that would collapse vertically, crumpling all four boxcars and leaving molten pools of metal under the wreckage.
October 22nd, 2007 at 4:58 am
Why it would take a week or two or more to set charges? Because that is what it would take, now you have guys on ropes inside elevator shafts?
I don’t understand your statement about my obsession with adding more and more conspiracy theories. There are no conspiracy theories in the official explanation, the one I subscribe to. A bunch of Arabs hijacked a plane, an art they had been perfecting for thirty years, they then used minimal flight training to fly them into the side of a building. There is no conspiracy there, just a well planned, well executed military operation. I doubt they cared that they fell, I think the primary target was the capital anyway, that was the building they hoped to destroy, but a few cowboys kept that from happening. So on balance it was a good day for the Arabs that day, they got more than they bargained for in New York, and less in Washington.
Your boxcar analogy is silly, you have already shown that pancaking is possible with your video.
October 22nd, 2007 at 8:02 am
Shcb,
Stick with that debunking911 site regarding your debate on the collapse, especially the false notion that the NIST rejects pancaking as ever happening. See the link on the left-side of the home page titled The Twin Towers” then go to the sublink called Towers Collapse. Actually, that whole Twin Towers section on that website is very enlightening.
Knarly, I have to say this brief comment. If I didn’t know that you are deadly serious about your conspiracy obession, I’d have thought that the whole towers/plane vs. boxcars/motorcycle analogy was an attempt at self-parody.
Carry on.
October 22nd, 2007 at 10:42 am
Thanks again Craig, you’re kind of sitting out there in the shadows playing the puppet master aren’t you? (little smiley face thing). This statement that the buildings were designed to withstand multiple airline hits, they did. The explanation I heard was buildings are designed to withstand the initial impact and stay standing long enough for as many survivors as possible to evacuate. Kind of like a ship is not touted as “unsinkable” any more, but are designed to stay afloat long enough for everyone to get into a life boat. I don’t know where I heard this so I don’t have any documentation.
This is the problem with these guys, so much of their information is based on things that are not true or nearly impossible.
October 22nd, 2007 at 3:45 pm
And the problem with you shcb is that so many of your beliefs are founded on hearsay or imaginary voices like your latest statement: “The explanation I heard was buildings are designed to withstand the initial impact and stay standing long enough for as many survivors as possible to evacuate.”
So ropes in elevator shafts sounds silly to you and you call yourself an engineer? There are ladders built into elevator shafts, you can ride on top of the elevators, and any extra climbing equipment is pretty common, heck even window washers use a harness in our downtown. Pretty simple stuff.
As for NIST’s disavowing pancake collapse, read there own words here (Item 2, 4th paragraph):
http://www.wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
So much for civility, you are now starting to talk like the morans you worship.
October 22nd, 2007 at 3:45 pm
their
October 22nd, 2007 at 4:24 pm
that link didn’t work
October 22nd, 2007 at 5:09 pm
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
October 23rd, 2007 at 5:07 am
From the NIST page Knarly provided:
The debunking911 site is claiming that this statement is only referring to what caused the building to start to fall.
If you take the whole paragraph from the NIST page in context….
…It doesn’t really answer the narrow question of if the buildings pancaked. But the email response does. I think to definitively answer this question you would have to read the whole report, and even then I’m not sure you would have your answer.
But in the end it really doesn’t matter that much because the NIST report says that there is no evidence that explosives were used to bring the towers down. So it seems the question would be did planes hit the buildings and the floors fall on top of each other on the way down, or did planes hit the buildings and the center supports collapsed pulling the floors to the center like the vortex of a whirlpool. And that would only be the case if the E-mail response from the NIST is a fake. If that e-mail is legit, both could be the co-exist.
The disingenuous part of the truthers is taking this statement and using it as evidence to support the set charges argument.
Sorry Knarly, you may have a small technical point here, but you loose this point anyway, this also counts against your group in the general dishonesty category.
October 23rd, 2007 at 4:15 pm
shcb, wrong again.
That squib in the video 30 odd floors or so below the point of collapse really got you all twisted up inside, didn’t it shcb?
You might want to take another look:
Ever since that video you’ve shifted gears to pull together all the loose ends of your pet theory which are floating away in different directions. Now you are starting to get nasty by insinuating that I belong to a group and then calling that group dishonest. You are pissing into the wind again, moran.
Back to the matter at hand. Here’s why you are wrong again.
First, NIST found no evidence of explosives because they explicitly did not look for evidence of explosives. It is they who are being disingenuous here. Their study explicitly ruled out the molten metal and other evidence. They did not conduct other tests which could have indicated the presence of explosives. Their mandate was restricted to examining what happened from the moment of plane impact to the moment of collapse initiation, anything outside of that timeframe was NOT studied. They started with the premise (a) everyone saw the planes hit, and (b) the buildings collapsed. Their entire effort was to create a construct of how (a) caused (b). No wonder then that it took them $20 million dollars to arrive at a scenario to “fit” (sic) what they “concluded” (or that they have been forced to admit that their explanation for the WTC 7 collapse is an unlikely explanation.
Second, perimeter columns bowing inward would tend to provide additional resistance to the floors becoming disconnected. Now, if only NBIST concluded that the perimeter columns bowed outwards, pulling away from the floor connections, well then that might better support your wish to cling tightly to the official explanations.
No mention of the 50 or so core columns in your NIST email, huh? A few in WTC 1 and i think it was one in WTC 2 got taken out or weakened according to NIST. They’d mostly still be standing unless something cut them apart. You as the engineer might speculate that it was high explosives, but me I think it was a new breed of steel eating termites developed by the Taliban.
Third, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If collapse initiation was due to bowing and other stress warping of the perimeter columns, then there would be multiple venues for air to escape upwards outwards and for pressures to equalize amongst dozens of floors at a time. The “piston-like” conditions required for your October 25 5:25 pm explanation of why the “squibs” were not squibs but rather compressed air escaping no longer exists of the perimeter columns were warping to the extent that NIST requires them to warp in order to model a collapse.
It’s peculiar that you would question the NIST email as possibly being a fake, apparently you don’t have 100% faith in the links Craig provides.
So shcb, you say I have a small technical point here. I think it is a major point going back to our discussion four days ago. Let’s examine when you first used “pancaking”, shall we? I had said you were not worthy of debating about Bazant’s theory because you either needed remedial reading or were outright lying about the article criticising Bazant. You were misunderstanding or misrepresenting the criticism that Bazant had used a pancaking theory of collapse at the point immediately below the planes’ impact and the criticism that Bazant had assumed that the entire load would transfer (virtually simultaneously) ONLY to the uppermost storey of the upper section. The criticism is that Bazant assumes a Pancake theory of collapse initiation. Bazant, among other significant errors, does not incorporate any transfer of energy below the uppermost storey to significantly warp or bow inwards the perimeter columns.
That was a major point shcb, and it discredits every subsequent study that relies upon or repeats Bazant’s arguments, many of which were quoted in that “debunking” site that Craig provided.
Then you said:
Perhaps you should re-examine your explanation for the squibs not being squibs now that you have established for yourself that the pancaking, if indeed that is what you still maintain happened, was pancaking in a compromised chamber where the air had multitudes of lower pressure avenues of escape.
Also, you said:
Right there you have disproved Bazant AGAIN as a basis for support of the official theory of collapse.
October 24th, 2007 at 5:16 am
I’m not changing my theories, it’s the same one I’ve always had; Arabs run into buildings, buildings fall down. The rest of exactly what pushed or pulled the buildings is interesting on it’s own but the fact remains there was no US Government conspiracy and no explosives. The squib’s don’t have me twisted because, they weren’t there. One of the reasons people at the scene at that time didn’t go out of there way to look for explosives is simply because this was a very serious situation they had a limited amount of time to gather whatever evidence they could get. After the fact they still had the serious task of finding out what happened. They probably had the same conversation as we are having and decided in a few minutes that it would be ridiculous to think that anyone could set the number of charges required to bring down a building this size, scratch that, three buildings this size and not get caught. So there was no need to spend valuable time looking further.
I have always thought your group was made up of dishonest people and dupes that blindly follow, that is nothing new, I’m not just starting to make those remarks.
The rest is just too convoluted to follow, for the most part, so I’m going to have to call, I’ll put my statements against yours. May the best theory win.
October 24th, 2007 at 8:31 am
And why, pray tell, did they have a limited amount of time to gather evidence? You would think with a crime of this magnitude the forensic examination would have been methodical and thorough, not rushed. Why was it rushed shcb?
October 24th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Initially it was a rescue effort so that would obviously take precedence. Once it started to be a cleanup operation certainly every reasonable measure was taken to preserve any evidence that was found, but you would want them to meticulously inspect every square inch of rubble with an electron microscope, I’m exaggerating of course but not by much. It is and was obvious what happened that day. For one thing, by that time the Arabs had admitted doing it. There were 3000 dead bodies in that rubble, winter was approaching, the city needed to get the mess cleaned up so the rebuilding could begin. If it were up to you they would still be sifting through the rubble with the sole purpose of finding that one elusive piece of plastic that could possibly be a part of a squib that could be traced directly to George Bush, the most evil man on the planet.
At some point early on it was obvious who did what and why. Then it was more a question of what can we learn from this tragedy so this loss of life can be mitigated in the future.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Your previous post was, as usual, full of opinions, speculations denials without proof, ridicule, assertions, and utterly lacking in facts.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:55 am
I was referring to your post before your last one, but the comment applies fairly well to your latest one too.
October 24th, 2007 at 11:24 am
shcb has faith that there was full preservation of evidence. Faith versus what actually happened:
And more specifically:
Were no squibs you say? Squibs, or “mistimed” explosions, 40 floors below the “collapsing” building are seen in all the videos!
Keep that mind and those eyes shut tight shcb, there is more than just squibs:
Here are some characteristics of destruction by explosions seen in the WTC collapses:
1. Extremely rapid onset of “collapse”
2. Sounds of explosions at plane impact zone — a full second prior to collapse (heard by 118 first responders as well as by media reporters)
3. Observations of flashes (seen by numerous professionals)
4. Squibs, or “mistimed” explosions, 40 floors below the “collapsing” building seen in all the videos
5. Mid-air pulverization of all the 90,000 tons of concrete and steel decking, filing cabinets & 1000 people – mostly to dust
6. Massive volume of expanding pyroclastic dust clouds
7. Vertical progression of full building perimeter demolition waves
8. Symmetrical collapse – through the path of greatest resistance – at nearly free-fall speed — the columns gave no resistance
9. 1,400 foot diameter field of equally distributed debris – outside of building footprint
10. Blast waves blew out windows in buildings 400 feet away
11. Lateral ejection of thousands of individual 20 – 50 ton steel beams up to 500 feet
12. Total destruction of the building down to individual structural steel elements – obliterating the steel core structure.
13. Tons of molten Metal found by FDNY under all 3 high-rises (no other possible source other than an incendiary cutting charge such as Thermate)
14. Chemical signature of Thermate (high tech incendiary) found in slag, solidified molten metal, and dust samples by Physics professor Steven Jones, PhD.
15. FEMA finds rapid oxidation and intergranular melting on structural steel samples
16. More than 1000 Bodies are unaccounted for — 700 tiny bone fragments found on top of nearby buildings
And exhibited none of the characteristics of destruction by fire, i.e.
1. Slow onset with large visible deformations
2. Asymmetrical collapse which follows the path of least resistance (laws of conservation of momentum would cause a falling, intact, from the point of plane impact, to the side most damaged by the fires)
3. Evidence of fire temperatures capable of softening steel
4. High-rise buildings with much larger, hotter, and longer lasting fires have never “collapsed”
October 24th, 2007 at 11:33 am
You can have your faith in the official 911 coverup story, someday you may need it to soothe your conscience over the atrocities being committed in your name based on your group’s phony rationalizations about 911.
October 24th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Well I guess someone got away with the crime of the century, damn those rascally Republicans.
October 24th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
I recognize the sarcasm and find it a very redeeming feature in you, shcb.
Cheers.
October 24th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
thanks kk
October 24th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Check out John Gross, NIST investigator, for his explanation (denial) of molten steel at the 5:35 countdown in this video until the 3:23 mark.
Actually, the whole video is recommended as a simple condensed version of compelling witness statements omitted from the official explanation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDKa1Q1GwTQ
October 26th, 2007 at 10:27 am
And if you wonder why you never hear about any of this stuff on the “real” news, there are plenty of points to ponder here:
http://www.911blogger.com/node/12188
Sample: