(Note: This entire article has been duplicated from activistnyc.wordpress.com
. It can be read in full with this link)
Every now and then I get a wave of “debunkers” visiting this blog.
They’re welcome to post here; I’ve learned a lot from them. But, in the
future, I would like to try to avoid certain repetitious arguments, or
at least confine those particular arguments to relevant threads such as
this one.
There are some
a priori arguments they almost always bring up in an effort to prove that there
could not
have been any government complicity in the attacks of 9/11. In recent
debates here, those arguments got jumbled together with other, meatier
issues in comment threads.
To avoid such jumbling in the future, I’ve decided to devote this post to the more common
a priori arguments. I’ll then add a rule to my
comment policy requiring that, in the future, these and similar
a priori
arguments be discussed only in comments below this post (or other posts
on these same topics), rather than jumbled together with other, more
substantive discussions.
In this post I’ll also provide a brief review of my debates with
“debunkers” in general, for the benefit of “debunkers” visiting this
blog for the first time. Some of the discussions we’ve had here
have been very worthwhile.
The most common a priori arguments
The most common
a priori argument is a claim that the culprits
could not have gotten away with it.
The usual form of this is the
“someone would have talked” argument. Related to this is the “too many
people” argument, the claim that too many people would have to have been
in on the plot, or at least would have noticed something strange going
on, thereby making it impossible to keep a secret.
Also common are arguments from authority, It is claimed that we
should not question the experts who say that WTC 1, 2, and 7 all
collapsed as a result of nothing more than two jet crashes and the
resulting fires.
Also it is often claimed that there were no likely motives, either
for government complicity in the 9/11 attacks in general or for the
destruction of WTC 7 in particular. And, in my opinion, many 9/11 Truth
activists don’t do the best possible job of stating the likely motives.
I will try to remedy what I see as some deficiencies in that regard.
One type of complicity hypothesis, defended here
In this post I’ll be defending the feasibility of one particular type
of hypothesis about possible government complicity in the 9/11 attack.
The type of hypothesis outlined below would be
categorized by Nicholas Levis as “LIHOP plus”:
There were real hijackers. Al Qaeda is a real organization, but
heavily infiltrated by the FBI, the CIA, and intelligence agencies from
various other countries around the world. The infiltrators likely
include agent provocateurs as well as just plain spies. At least a few
high U.S. officials had very specific and detailed foreknowledge, which
might have come to them not only via the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc.,
but also via warnings from foreign governments, plus informal high-level
channels such as, perhaps, the Bush / bin Laden family friendship. The
attacks were aided and supplemented in various ways by one or more high
officials and a handful of other people, e.g. by preventing FBI
interference in the hijackers’ plot, slowing down the air defense system
to allow the hijackers to reach their targets, and possibly by either
demolishing the WTC buildings or at least supplementing the attack on
the WTC buildings via bombs or arson.
I do not necessarily believe that any particular hypothesis along the
above lines actually happened, but I do believe it to be a real
possibility, one of many possible scenarios that might lie behind the
9/11 coverup. The point of this post is not to prove that anything in
particular actually did happen, but merely to show that hypotheses of
the above type are possible.
Could this sort of thing have actually happened? Or would it have
entailed too many people, who would have talked? I’ll explore these
questions below.
But first, I should note that not everyone in the 9/11 Truth movement
agrees with hypotheses of the above type. Not everyone in the 9/11
Truth movement advocates the WTC demolition idea. Some focus only on
air defense issues, warnings and foreknowledge, etc. On the other hand,
there are many other people in the 9/11 Truth movement who hold a pure
“MIHOP” view, according to which there were no hijackers, and the planes
were just remote-controlled, or something. I will not be defending the
latter view here.
I’m currently agnostic on the question of what was done to the WTC buildings. In this post, I will defend the
possibility that the collapses of WTC 1, 2, and 7
could
have been something other than purely natural consequences of the two
jet crashes. (In this post, I won’t discuss the arguments against the
purely natural collapse idea. I’ll discuss those in future posts.)
Letting the hijackers do their thing: People DID talk!
In my opinion, the only parts of the above “LIHOP plus” scenario that
would need to have been known by more than a handful of people would
have been (1) the foreknowledge by the FBI and by the intelligence
agencies, and (2) the prevention of FBI and airport-security
interference in the hijackers’ plot.
On these matters, lo and behold, there are people who
have talked, such as FBI whistleblower
Sibel Edmonds and others listed on
this page of the
National Security Whistleblowers Coalition
site. The Jersey Girls have reported that they were approached by
quite a few other whistleblowers who wanted to be called to testify
before the 9/11 Commission, but who were never called, for whatever
reason.
Also there has been quite a bit of talk about Able Danger, a military
intelligence program which is said to have identified at least some of
the 9/11 hijackers over a year before 9/11/2001.
FAA whistleblower Bogdan Dzakovic has remarked, “Since 9/11, I
learned to have less contempt for the terrorists than I do for the
bureaucrats and politicians who could have prevented 9/11 but didn’t.
They served in very pivotal positions of influence but due to gross
incompetence or the fear of actually fulfilling their oaths of office to
defend this country or possibly even something a bit more sinister,
they failed to take any action. … Many of the FAA bureaucrats that
actively thwarted improvements in security prior to 9/11 have been
promoted by FAA or the Transportation Security Administration.” (
Flying the deadly skies: Whistle-blower thinks the state of U.S. aviation security invites another attack by Bill Katovsky,
San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, July 9, 2006.)
Alas, whistleblowers too often don’t get listened to, as discussed in
9/11 whistleblowers ignored, retaliated against
by Michael Hampton, who concludes, “It’s clear now to anyone paying the
least bit of attention that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
were completely preventable.”
One could argue that the problems here were (and still are) just
incompetence, negligence, and cronyism. Perhaps. Then again, that very
same incompetence, negligence, and cronyism, on the part of the
relevant bureaucracies as a whole, could also have enabled a few people
at the top to get away with a whole lot worse. More about this below.
Air defense failures: Hiding any interference?
Was something done to slow down NORAD’s response? Was something done
to prevent the hijacked planes from being even intercepted, let alone
shot down? If so, how many people would have been needed to accomplish
that?
Not very many. On a matter such as air defense, where every second
counts, it takes only a few lackadaisical people in top positions to
slow everything to a crawl.
According to
Chapter 1 of the
9/11 Commission Report:
The FAA, the White House, and the Defense Department each
initiated a multiagency teleconference before 9:30. Because none of
these teleconferences – at least before 10:00 – included the right
officials from both the FAA and Defense Department, none succeeded in
meaningfully coordinating the military and FAA response to the
hijackings.
Why were “the right officials” unavailable for so long? It was
already obvious, by the time the second plane hit WTC 2 at 9:03 AM, that
“America is under attack,” as Andrew Card informed George Bush at 9:05
AM. By that time it was already known that American Airlines Flight 77
had been hijacked too.
It is hard to believe that “the right officials” could genuinely have been
that incompetent. Even if they really were just
that incompetent, they should have been at least fired, if not prosecuted for negligence.
Everyone can see that “the right officials” were, at the very least,
criminally negligent. That obvious fact cannot be hidden. The only
question is whether their crime was something worse than mere
negligence.
Had NORAD succeeded in intercepting any of the planes, there were
only two people who could then authorize a shoot-down: the President
and the Secretary of Defense. Both Bush and Rumsfeld were less than
diligent about making themselves available for consultation on such an
every-second-counts decision. (See my posts
Bush at Booker School on the morning of 9/11 George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Myers: Their whereabouts on 9/11, and see the comment threads below these posts for more details.)
An even more important question is why no planes were even
intercepted in the first place. Some people in the 9/11 Truth movement
have speculated that someone may have deliberately created extra
confusion for NORAD/NEADS, e.g. via false blips on their radar screens.
If indeed something like that was done, it probably would
not have been difficult to hide. It could have been done by just one
person plus whoever gave that person access.
In any case, we do know that we’ve been lied to about the air defense failures. (See the section
The lack of air defense in my post
My main reasons for being suspicious about 9/11.) We just don’t know exactly
what was covered up.
WTC: Hiding the planting of explosives, incendiaries, etc.?
Many people in the 9/11 Truth movement believe that other things were
deliberately done to World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7, besides
just crashing planes into the Twin Towers.
A common objection to this idea, by “debunkers,” is that the perpetrators’ activities could not have gone unnoticed.
But it seems to me that their work could easily have been disguised
as some sort of maintenance or upgrade, provided that their entry into
the building was authorized by someone in a position of authority at the
WTC complex.
Six weeks before 9/11/2001, Larry Silverstein became the new
leaseholder for the entire WTC complex (except for WTC 7, which he
already owned). Given the change in management, it was only to be
expected that there might be some new contractors as well, or perhaps
some special maintenance consultants. So, the entry of some new and
unusual (but authorized) contractors would not have raised any eyebrows
on the part of the security staff.
Any work involving the core columns could easily have been disguised as some sort of elevator work.
The perimeter spandrels could perhaps have been accessed via crawlspaces (ceiling chambers).
Any work involving perimeter columns would have been a bit more
difficult to hide, because it would have required going into offices,
meaning that the tenants would have known that there was some sort of
work being done in their offices. But it could have been disguised as
some sort of maintenance that required drilling holes in walls, such as
electrical work, and it could have been done late at night when the
office staff was absent.
I will assume that it was not necessary to access perimeter columns on
every
floor, but only on a minority of the floors, if indeed that was done at
all. Thus the workers could easily have avoided those relatively few
offices that were open 24 hours a day.
Whatever was done, it need not have required anywhere nearly as much
work as a standard controlled demolition. The perpetrators need not
have concerned themselves with various safety issues that
are
of concern to commercial demolition contractors. The collapse of the
Twin Towers, and to a lesser extent WTC 7 too, spewed debris all over
the place, damaging surrounding buildings, which is something a standard
controlled domolition aims to avoid.
So I think it’s possible that the work could have done by as few as three or four people, maybe at most six or so.
(Reminder to “debunkers”: The point of the above is only to defend the
possibility
that the WTC collapses may have had a little extra help. I’m aware
that my speculation does not prove that any such thing was actually
done. Actual evidence for any such scenario is a separate topic, to be
discussed in other posts.)
(P.S., 3/6/2008: The above is a summary of my replies to westprog99, originally in the comment thread following my post
He oughta know better: Mark Roberts and the iron spherules, recently transplanted to my new post
Hiding the planting of incendiaries, explosives, or whatever? Response to a common a priori objection. Comments on this topic should be posted underneath the latter post rather than here on this page.)
WTC: Why were no devices found in the rubble?
Another common objection by “debunkers” is that no remnants of
explosive or incendiary devices were found in the rubble. Or, at least,
no such remnants were
noticed and publicly commented on.
In the first place, any such devices would most likely have gotten pulverized, along with nearly everything else.
Of course, they might not have
all gotten pulverized.
Perhaps some remnants of devices
were found, but people
might have assumed that they were something else. A lot would depend
on exactly what these devices looked like.
Another thing to consider is that the CIA was openly involved in the
cleanup. The CIA had had an office in WTC 7 and searched the rubble
during the cleanup, presumably to ensure that no classified documents
went astray. (See the
New York Times article
The Intelligence Agency: Secret C.I.A. Site in New York Was Destroyed on Sept. 11 by James Risen, November 5, 2001. A copy of the printed version of this article is shown in the WTC 7 section of the video
Loose Change Final Cut.)
If, by any chance, the CIA was in any way involved in the destruction
of the WTC buildings, then, in addition to searching for classified
documents, the same CIA agents could have searched for other things too,
preventing those other things, too, from falling into the hands of
other people. Those other things could have included … well, who knows
what. Whatever the CIA agents might have been searching for besides
papers, they had a perfect excuse to search the rubble
thoroughly.
And most likely they were around during pretty much the entire
cleanup. How else could they have ensured that no classified documents
fell into the wrong hands?
The CIA agents who searched the rubble might not, themselves, have
known exactly what these mysterious objects were that they were
searching for. They might have just been shown pictures and told to
retrieve any objects that looked like thus-and-so, without being told
exactly what those objects were. In that case, they would simply have
accepted that they didn’t need to know what the objects were. I would
expect that kind of compartmentalization to be commonplace in
intelligence agencies.
Then again, the above hypothesis about CIA involvement in the cleanup
might not have been necessary, if the devices themselves were
sufficiently well-disguised.
Likewise, residues may or may not have been easily detectable,
depending on what was used. For example, thermite leaves a residue
consisting mostly of iron and aluminum oxide, both of which would have
been present in the rubble anyway. So, to detect thermite residue, one
would also need to look for other evidence, e.g. evidence that
sufficiently high temperatures were reached in at least a few places.
(Reminder to “debunkers”: Again, the point of the above is only to defend only the
possibility
of an inside-job hypothesis regarding the destruction of the WTC
buildings. I don’t claim to know what actually happened to the WTC
buildings, or whether the CIA was in any way involved.)
Structural engineers and arguments from authority
A common response to WTC demolition hypotheses is: “Not a single
structural engineer in the entire world agree with you! Every
structural engineer in the entire world says that the WTC buildings
collapsed solely due to jet impacts and resulting fires.”
First, that’s not true. There
are some structural
engineers who are members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
Admittedly, not very many yet, but we’ll see who else joins.
When that’s pointed out, a “debunker” will usually reply, “Well, every single one of the world’s
other
structural engineers, besides the very few listed on the AE911T
website, agrees that the WTC buildings collapsed solely due to jet
impacts and fire.”
Well, that’s probably not accurate either.
First, the majority of the world’s structural engineers have probably
not studied the WTC collapses themselves, beyond reading the
pronouncements of mainstream experts. Most structural engineers
probably have not even read the entire NIST report, for example. And,
as the “debunkers” themselves are fond of pointing out in other contexts
(e.g. in response to the argument that no steel-frame skyscraper has
ever collapsed due to fire), every building is unique, with its own
strengths and vulnerabilities. So, a structural engineer would have to
have studied the WTC buildings oneself in order to have an informed
opinion about them.
If one is going to do a numbers comparison, it would be fair to compare only those on both sides who have actually
studied the WTC buildings and the WTC collapses on their own, rather than just reading summary reports in trade journals.
Furthermore, it’s likely that there exist at least a few structural
engineers who agree with AE911T but who hesitate to join, out of fear of
having their full legal names published on a controversial website. (I
myself have not joined AE911T for that very reason. I’m playing it
safe in that regard, given how some 9/11 Truth activists here in New
York have been personally harassed. I’m not a structural engineer, but I
do have a different kind of engineering background. It wouldn’t
surprise me if at least a few structural engineers preferred to support
the 9/11 Truth movement in more anonymous ways too.)
However, as far as I am aware, the “debunkers”
are indeed correct that the purely-natural collapse hypothesis is the unanimously accepted orthodoxy in structural engineering
journals.
So the question now is whether the consensus in structural engineering
journals
should be considered infallible – or, at least, sufficiently close to
infallible that no one, and especially no one outside the field of
structural engineering itself, should ever presume to question it.
(P.S., 2/28/2008: The remainder of this section is mis-stated. See
the P.S. after this section, and see the discussion in comments below
this thread.)
Well, let’s consider what kind of a field structural engineering is.
In their more honest moments, structural engineers will admit that
their field is on a somewhat less sound scientific experimental footing
than most other kinds of engineering. For example,
this post in the JREF forum, by Newton’s Bit, ends with the following quote:
“Structural Engineering is the art of molding materials
we do not wholly understand into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so
as to understand forces we cannot really assess in such a way that the
community at large has no reason to suspect the extent of our own
ignorance.” James E Amrhein
The problem is this: In almost any other kind of engineering,
complete prototypes of any given product are built and thoroughly tested
before the product is mass-produced and sold. If structural
engineering were like almost every other kind of engineering, complete
prototypes would be built and thoroughly built and tested, not
necessarily for every single building, but at least for every building
of a new and unusual design. Alas, that would be prohibitively
expensive. For skyscrapers, it’s common to build and test prototype
floor assemblies, but not a prototype for the entire building.
If structural engineering were like almost every other kind of
engineering, there would be frequent experiments in which buildings, of
various different kinds, were built for the purpose of setting them on
fire to see whether and how they collapse. Such experiments have been
done occasionally (e.g.
Cardington Fire Test: The Behaviour of a Multi-storey Steel Framed Building Subjected to Fire Attack), but not very often. There’s just not enough funding for such experiments.
Ditto for experiments involving other kinds of damage to buildings.
Also, there has not been much experimental study of the phenomenon of
progressive collapse, which is said to have brought down WTC 1, 2, and
7. (Regarding the rarity of such study, see, for example,
The science of how buildings fall down by Colin Nickerson,
Boston Globe, December 3, 2007.)
For more about this matter, please see my post
Engineers were surprised by the WTC collapses, December 7, 2007.
Another problem is this: In a field with relatively little hard
scientific data (compared to what one might expect in other engineering
disciplines that have been around for a long time), there’s lots of
wiggle room for as-yet-unfalsified hypotheses. And, given whatever
wiggle room they may have, most people will wiggle in a direction which
they see as beneficial to their careers, and which avoids any
boat-rocking. This factor might well have inflated the consensus in
favor of the official story.
Even one of the most knowledgeable and articulate “debunkers,” Frank
Greening, has acknowledged that institutional bias can be a problem.
He’s a co-author of the latest Bazant paper, but he is nevertheless
highly critical of the NIST report. (See his fascinating post
Confessions of a 9/11 Agnostic, on page 6 of the thread
Debate! What debate?
in the JREF forum.) As far as I can tell, he suspects a coverup, not
of 9/11 being an inside job, but of possible flaws in the design of the
WTC buildings. (See also
this post of his in the JREF forum thread
Another engineer criticizes NIST & FEMA.)
So, an orthodoxy in the field of structural engineering should not be regarded as beyond question.
At the same time, those of us who question that consensus should
certainly not regard ourselves as infallible either. The collapses of
the WTC buildings involved many factors that need to be examined
cautiously and in quantitative detail, and on which too many people in
the 9/11 Truth movement have jumped to premature conclusions. (See my
post
Demolition of WTC: Let’s not overstate the case, please.)
We should not simply dismiss the orthodox view; we should at least try
to understand it, to the best of our ability. And we should recognize
that we ourselves do not have the final word. If we ourselves do not
have the expertise needed to resolve the issues, we should encourage
those challengers of the official story who do have at least some
relevant expertise, but we should not endorse their views without
question either. We should be willing to wait and see.
(P.S., 2/28/2008: In
this and subsequent comments,
westprog99 argues that structural engineering is, in fact, a “mature
discipline.” See the ensuing discussion. It might have been more
accurate for me to say, as I do in
this comment,
that the field of structural engineering is probably “mature” on the
question of what is needed to ensure the safety of buildings under
normal
conditions, but perhaps not quite so “mature” on the question of how
buildings of various different kinds perform under various extreme
conditions.)
The most likely main motive for complicity, by high officials, in the 9/11 attacks
In my long-ago post
Reply to some folks at Screw Loose Change, one objection I did not respond to very well was this one:
4. If your whole plan is to attack Iraq, why not blame
the attacks on Saddam? Wouldn’t that actually help to further your
goals, instead of the nonsensical “frame Osama to attack a country that
has nothing to do with our target” scheme?
I still stand by most of what I said in reply to that objection:
Perhaps because Al Qaeda already existed, and perhaps
because making use of Al Qaeda was both easier and less
suspicious-looking than cooking up a totally new CIA-front Iraqi
“terrorist group” from scratch. Also, the point of the 9/11 attacks,
from the point of view of the American perpetrators, probably wasn’t
just to justify a short-term war against Iraq or Afghanistan, but to
justify a century of “war on terror,” with a variety of targets. That
would explain why the attacks had to be so exceedingly massive and
dramatic, as well as explaining why the exact nationality of the
terrorist group wasn’t too important, as long as they were Islamist and
thus could be tied, in the American popular imagination, to just about
any Muslim country that the administration might choose to go to war
with for whatever reason.
But I would now add the following:
The most likely
main motive probably had to do with
Afghanistan, the country which was invaded almost immediately after
9/11. Before 9/11/2001, there were actual military preparations, not
just a plan, to invade Afghanistan. However, if 9/11 had not happened,
it would have been extremely difficult to sell the American public on
the idea of invading Afghanistan, given what a meat grinder Afghanistan
had been for the Soviet Union back in the 1980’s. (For documentation on
the preparations for an invasion of Afghanistan, see the section on
The war in Afghanistan in my post
My main reasons for being suspicious about 9/11.)
This, the need to justify an invasion of Afghanistan is a likely motive for complicity in the 9/11 attacks,
regardless of the reasons why the Bush administration wanted to invade Afghanistan in the first place. Most likely there were several different motives for the invasion. The relative importance of these motives can be debated.
One topic that has been debated quite a bit is the role of oil (and
other energy sources such as natural gas) in U.S. foreign policy. Some
interesting information on this topic can be found on the website of the
Council on Foreign Relations. (See especially
this collection of pages on “energy security.”)
The Bush administration got lots of mileage out of 9/11, on more
matters than just Afghanistan. It provided an excuse for the Iraq war
too, and for torture, and for various curtailments of civil liberties.
These other things could perhaps be seen as secondary motives, but the
most likely primary motive was to provide an excuse for invading
Afghanistan.
But why destroy WTC 7?
Various “debunkers” have asked what the motive could have been for destroying WTC 7 in particular.
Some people in the 9/11 Truth movement have speculated that the
motive might have been the destruction of records. WTC 7 had a lot of
interesting tenants, including the CIA, the FBI, the EEOC, and the SEC,
any one of which might have had something that the perpetrators wanted
destroyed.
To this, “debunkers” have had two responses: (1) If the point is to
destroy papers, why not just use a shredder? (2) All but the most
recent records were likely backed up somewhere anyway, so could not be
destroyed.
My reply is that there’s a difference between (a) actually destroying records and (b) having a good
excuse
to lose records that one isn’t supposed to lose. The destruction of
WTC 7 might have been good for the latter purpose, if not the former.
Furthermore, in the event that the CIA was involved, they might have had
something other than just records that they wanted destroyed.
Anyhow, there’s also another possible motive for the destruction of
WTC 7. My guess is that, from the point of view of those who planned
the destruction of the WTC buildings, there might have been a lot of
unknowns, and that these unknowns were dealt with via redundancy.
The planners might not have known, for sure, whether the hijackers
would succeed in hijacking the planes, and, if so, whether they would
succeed in crashing into the buildings, and, if so, whether the
resulting damage and fires (plus whatever devices might have been
planted in the Towers, if any) would succeed in bringing the Towers
down. In case the above did not fully succeed, then perhaps the collapse
of a third skyscraper might provide the desired melodrama.
Given how WTC 7 was hit by flying debris, the planners may have
decided, on the fly, to use that as an excuse for an allegedly “natural”
collapse, and to time their remote-controlled devices accordingly, e.g.
by first setting off incendiary devices on floors 7 and above to start
the fires, and then waiting 7 hours to destroy the building by setting
off incendiaries or explosives further down, say, on floor 5. But, in
the event that WTC 7 had not been hit by flying debris, I’m assuming
here that the planners would have had some sort of backup excuse for the
collapse of WTC 7 – perhaps even bombs (or incendiaries) planted by a
“terrorist.” But the collapse of WTC 1 and 2 provided a much better
excuse, so they went with that one.
In addition, if the planners also wanted to destroy one or more
specific offices in WTC 7, for whatever reason, they would have done so
by two redundant means: First, by just setting the specific office(s)
on fire. But the planners could not have known in advance whether fire
fighters would succeed in putting out the fires in WTC 7. To deal with
that uncertainty, demolishing the entire building might have been a
backup means of destroying whatever offices the planners wanted to
destroy.
Disclaimer: This entire discussion about WTC 7 is hypothetical, since
I don’t claim to know what happened to the WTC buildings, let alone
what the motives were.
