Truth and the Devil

There’s a new 9/11 conspiracy video making the rounds. It’s called 9/11 Justice, and it can be found here. I was curious if it contained any new arguments, but it’s the same old stuff that has been refuted many times in the past. I thought I’d take the opportunity to point out some of these errors, as it can be applied to many of the major points in 9/11 conspiracy theories.

The absurd conspiracy

It’s interesting how none of these conspiracy theory videos rarely ever make mention of Osama Bin Laden and previous acts of terrorism towards the United States. After showing a clip of Bush stating that going after conspiracy theories takes away attention from the real criminals, they say:

“It was the President’s conspiracy theory about 19 amateur hijackers with box-cutters, supposedly directed by some nut in a cave, somehow overcoming the most sophisticated air defense systems in the world that seemed like an outrageous conspiracy theory to us.”

Despite their obvious use of an argument from their own incredulity, I don’t see why it would take anything more than a box-cutter to bring people in line. From what I hear, the first thing they did was to slit the throat of one of the flight attendants to show they meant business. Fear is a powerful weapon, especially when no one had ever heard of an airliner being used a suicide bomb previous to 9/11. As for this “some nut in a cave.” Osama was an experienced veteran who fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets. He is also very well-funded, with support from all over the Muslim world, as well as being a member of the Saudi royal family. He was also responsible for organizing simultaneous attacks against several U.S. embassies and an attack on the U.S.S. Cole. He is a ruthless killer who is very capable at inflicting damage on the U.S.

U.S. defenses should have shot down the aircraft

The next argument they bring up is that U.S. defenses should have taken out the aircraft before they hit the World Trade Center. According to this theory, as soon as an aircraft gets lost on radar, it’s expected to be shot down by F-16s? I certainly hope not. Air controllers have to rule out other possibilities, such as a transponder failing, or a radar glitch. This takes time. Then the FAA has to contact NORAD, NORAD then has to launch fighters, then they have to intercept. And once that happens, the military isn’t in the business of killing it’s own civilians. Every effort would be made to get the plane on the ground before any fire order would be given. Again, before 9/11, no one knew that these planes would be used as suicide bombs. The primary point being that, NORAD has to be notified before any military action is taken at all. It didn’t happen in time on 9/11.

In 9/11 hearings to the U.S. Senate, NORAD commander Ralph Eberhart said:

Sir, FAA is charged with the primary responsibility in terms of hijacking in the United States of America. We are charged with assisting FAA once they ask for our assistance. As you know, the last hijacking of a commercial aircraft in the United States of America was 1991. So although we practice this, day in and day out, the FAA sees on their scopes scores of problems that are a result of mechanical problems, switch errors, pilot errors, et cetera, and that that’s what they think when they see this.

Although we have exercised this, we have practiced it, in most cases it’s a hijacking like most of the hijackings, all of the hijackings I’m aware of, where we have plenty of time to react, we get on the wing, and we follow this airplane to where it lands and then the negotiations start. We were not thinking a missile — an airborne missile that was going to be used as a target — a manned missile if you will.

And in most cases when we practice this, regrettably we practiced it — the origin of this flight was from overseas and we did not have the time-distance problems that we had on that morning. We had plenty of time to react.

Even thought NORAD had training about using planes as weapons, the scenarios they had trained for began overseas, giving them plenty of time to intercept.

This 9/11 Myths webpage has extensive research and commentary as to why the planes weren’t shot down before reaching their targets.

WTC shouldn’t have collapsed due to aircraft impact

Their next main argument is about the WTC design specifications. It was designed to withstand an impact of an airliner wasn’t it? Shouldn’t this have prevented it from falling? Well, not necessarily:

The WTC towers were the first structures outside of the military and the nuclear industries whose design considered the impact of a jet airliner, the Boeing 707. It was assumed in the 1960s design analysis for the WTC towers that an aircraft, lost in fog and seeking to land at a nearby airport, like the B-25 Mitchell bomber that struck the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945, might strike a WTC tower while low on fuel and at landing speeds.

The Boeing 707 that was considered in the design of the towers was estimated to have a gross weight of 263,000 pounds and a flight speed of 180 mph as it approached an airport; the Boeing 767-200ER aircraft that were used to attack the towers had an estimated gross weight of 274,000 pounds and flight speeds of 470 to 590 mph upon impact.

The building wasn’t built to withstand and high-speed, intentional impact. They only had in mind an accidental impact at slow speeds, similar to what happened when a lost B-25 bomber accidentally hit the Empire State Building due to fog in 1945.

Further commentary includes some subjective observations that are contradicted by the evidence. At one point they say that the building fell with “explosive force.” That may be, but the explosive force can be explained by the immense pressure of the top floors of the buildings falling onto the lower ones. They would have compressed the air in the floors below, forcing debris out of the windows, as we see in the videos. No preexisting explosives are required to cause that type of explosion.

Furthermore, there has been plenty of expert investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center. I’ve not heard of one demolitions expert that says it looks like a controlled demolition. With a controlled demolition, we would see distinct detonations throughout the building before the tower begins to collapse. Then the whole building should should come fairly evenly on top of itself. Instead, what we see is debris flying out of windows at random intervals as the building is already collapsing. The building begins with the top half (above where the planes impacted) falling onto the lower half. Just what you would expect if the collapse was due to structural damage.

Besides, to plant the amount of explosives necessary to take down the World Trade Center would be inconceivable. The buildings would have to be stripped in order to place the explosives directly on the structural elements of the building. As well as the fact that setting up buildings that large for demolition would have taken months to prepare. Someone would have noticed.

When they focus on squibs going off as the building is coming down, I feel compelled to point out one important fact: squibs go off before a building collapses, not during. This is simple cause-and-effect. The structure must be weakened before it can fall.

I highly recommend checking out the 9/11 Myths site. A lot of research has been put forward to explain many of these claims, and it would be a shame to let some of these claims go by without first checking out the refuting information.

Building 7

Next, building 7 is brought up. They wonder how it could have just fallen by itself if it had only sustained minor damage like the photos show? Well, most of the photos are only of the north side of the building. The south side was heavily damaged from debris from the collapse of buildings one and two. There aren’t many pictures of it because it was filled with so much smoke. You can see some of them here, however.

Here’s an image showing it being bombarded by debris from one of the tower’s collapsing:

They also bring up this mistaken idea that Larry Silverstein, the owner of Building 7 explicitly said that he wanted the building detonated by using the term ‘pull it’, which is said by the conspiracy theorists as a term used by demolition experts to describe destroying a building through the use of explosives. Most research I’ve seen has not been able to find a single demolitions expert who uses the term ‘pull’ in this way. It seems that what Silverstein was referring to was pulling out the firefighting detachment which was attempting to put out the fires at the time.

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

I can admit that it’s not worded very well well, but his spokesperson later clarified:

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

This is supported by other eyewitness accounts. This is what Richard Banaciski had to say:

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

There’s also another interesting aspect to this particular argument. It seems that ‘pull’ can be used in regards to demolition, but not in the way the conspiracy theorists would have you believe.

After 9/11, some of the other buildings were so badly damaged that they decided to demolish them anyway and start anew. This link includes a video showing workers using the term ‘pull’ to describe attaching cables to the building and pulling it down. The term ‘pull’ here is used in the most literal sense.

They also claim that Silverstein collecting insurance money is evidence of his complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Why? Why wouldn’t he want to collect insurance money? Collecting insurance money after such a disaster seems to make logical sense to me. Are they expecting him to just take the loss?

Personal responsibility

The video’s criticism of Richard Myers seems odd. They say that he was in charge of U.S. defense, and therefore should have been shot because of his incompetence instead of promoted to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the time of the attacks he was Vice Chairman, not directly in command of U.S. air defense. Perhaps the commander of NORAD might be a better target for their anger? And even if he was partly responsible for the failures of 9/11 Bush gives these bone-headed promotions all the time. Michael Brown was given praise after handling Katrina, does that mean Michael Brown was responsible for the hurricane? It’s a spurious argument.

They play a clip of the President saying he had seen the first plane hit the tower before going to the classroom in Florida which we’ve all seen over and over again. I would imagine this is simply a mis-recollection on Bush’s part, rather than a “secret government source” having confidential footage of the attack. Human memories are very poor, and of course, we all know the President is an idiot anyway, so I don’t put too much stock in that one clip.

The evidence that the President and Condolezza Rice, then National Security Advisor, had seen an intelligence memo titled, ‘Bin Laden determined to attack within US’, is not evidence of conspiracy. Criminal incompetence, yes; negligence, yes; but not conspiracy.

There’s a bit more conspiracy mongering throughout, but I’ve addresses the main points that have specific evidence for and against.

The thing about conspiracy theories is that they don’t die. The people promoting conspiracy theories are usually not open to the idea that they might be wrong. Therefore, you can keep providing explanations for the ‘what ifs’ that are brought up, but they’re not going to believe you. Also, if you go looking for a conspiracy theory, you’ll be able to find one. If you have a specific conclusion in mind when you begin your research, you’ll be able to find facts to support your conclusion. It doesn’t matter what field you’re working in. This is how bias can get in the way of truth. If you’re really searching for answers, make sure that you’re willing to change your mind. Often, when I speak to those promoting conspiracy theories, if you provide an explanation for one question, they’ll simply jump to another. If that keeps occurring, it’s obvious you’re not talking to someone who’s interested in what really happened. Instead, it’s someone who believes they already have the truth and will fight to keep it. If you don’t want to get caught up in conspiracy theory logic, ask them to give you a testable hypothesis. See if there’s anything that they’ll be willing to accept as proof, or at least evidence that they might be wrong. If they’re unwilling or unable to do so, it’s the sign of a closed mind, who I doubt will respond to rational arguments at all.

If you’re interested in more 9/11 Conspiracy stuff, or have more questions about it that I haven’t answered here, here are some links to help you in your search.

• Debunking 9/11
• 9/11 Myths
• Screw Loose Change