Mon 27 Aug 2007
Submitted from YOUR NEW REALITY
Six Years Later, And Important Questions About 9/11 Remain Unanswered
Former NIST Science Chief Encourages Fire Investigators To Become 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists, “But In A Proper Way”
Unlike most other journalists, Robert Fisk manages to get beyond the ‘ravers’, as he calls them in an interesting piece on 9/11 ‘truth’ published today. He also quickly dismisses the standard argument blunter about a 9/11 conspiracy – BushCo. can’t run a war, how could they have pulled off 9/11? – so as to get to the real red meat of the debate.
That meat being questions relating to the core mysteries of the collapse of three New York City skyscrapers on 9/11 that so very few journalists are even interested in daring to raise.
Why is that?
What are they afraid of? The reaction from NeoCons? From their own governments? From the public? From their colleagues? From the ranting ranks of propaganda-spouting right-wing blogs that believe everything President Bush tells them?
As one of the rescue workers told me in New York City, a few weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks, “this (will be) one of the biggest stories of the century, and the media won’t even bother reporting it.”
The rescue worker was referring to numerous eyewitness reports, some from his friends and colleagues, about explosions coming from inside the Twin Towers before they fell, and a number cars and trucks around the base of the towers that some claimed had ‘blown up’ before the buildings came down.
He was right. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Sydney Morning Herald, the International Herald Tribune, CNN, the London Times, the BBC, have all refused point blank to launch even the most basic of investigations into the eyewitness reports of unexplained explosions and vehicle detonations, let alone the raft of other unanswered questions about what happened on 9/11.
Curiously, many of these media outlets reported the mysterious explosions around the base of WTC 1 and 2 on September 11 & 12, and then never mentioned them again, not even to correct earlier reports.
Journalists are supposed to question what governments propose to be the truth. It is their job to challenge the propaganda and myth-making of spin doctors and government-approved investigations. They are supposed to hold our governments and authorities to account.
Six years on, and many of the questions Robert Fisk raises in his column remain mostly unanswered. At least, the answers provided by a handful of investigations, some less credible than others, have not achieved a scientific consensus, or even broad peer reviewed agreement.
Why aren’t more journalists prepared to investigate these questions, and the gaping inconsistencies of the 9/11 Commission Report, and the endlessly cited, allegedly thorough debunking of 9/11 conspiracies by Popular Mechanics?
As Fisk notes in this story, six years on and there is still no peer-reviewed scientific explanation for why the WTC 7 building collapsed on the afternoon of 9/11.
You don’t have to believe that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were controlling the planes of 9/11 via remote control, or some other such absurd conspiracy theory, to have doubts about the official story of what happened that morning, when 2300 Americans and international workers lost their lives in the worst non-state terrorist attack in history.
Here’s Fisk writing in the UK Independent :
I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7.
…what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose “Islamic” advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the “Fajr” prayer to be included in Atta’s letter.
…like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious “war on terror” which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush’s happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that “we’re an empire now – we create our own reality”. True?
The questions about Atta’s prayer are new, at least we haven’t seen them raised before. You may remember that the 9/11 hijackers left their parked cars stuffed full of Korans and prayer sheets and other paraphernalia that could leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that those who hijacked the planes that morning were Al Qaeda-inspired, suicide-minded Islamists.
That full “our own reality” quote Fisk mentions, supposedly muttered by Karl Rove to journalist Ron Suskind follows (Suskind is doing the quoting) :
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“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ …”That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.”
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We liked the reality-warping of that mindset so much, we used it to come up with a name for this blog.
Nothing sums up the Bush administration, their version of the Iraq War, or the so-called ‘official story’ of what happened on 9/11 more than that line : “we create our own reality.”
On the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) investigation mentioned by Fisk, and referred to heavily in the supposedly credible Popular Mechanics investigation into 9/11 conspiracies, the former Chief of the Fire Science Division of NIST, Dr James Quintiere is unhappy with conclusions reached in the NIST investigations about what caused the collapsed of three skyscrapers on 9/11, and now wants the NIST reports to be peer reviewed.
Dr Quintiere voiced his concerns during a speech at the 2007 World Fire Safety Conference.
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“I would really like to see someone else take a look at what they’ve done; both structurally and from a fire point of view.”
“I think the official conclusion that NIST arrived at is questionable,” explained Dr. Quintiere. “Let’s look at real alternatives that might have been the cause of the collapse of the World Trade Towers and how that relates to the official cause and what’s the significance of one cause versus another.”
Dr Quintiere said he had trouble getting clear answers to his own questions from the NIST panel of investigators, and remains unhappy with the conclusions reached, and the six year delay in their finalisation of a report on what caused the collapse of WTC 7.
Debunkers of even the most basic questions, or supposed conspiracy theories, of 9/11 love to claim that only nutters, ravers and people with no scientific credibility believe anything but the ‘official story.
But now even the former chief of the Fire Science Division of the NIST is raising serious questions about the numerous, very valid points of contention regarding the scientific causes of the WTC collapses that remain mostly unanswered. Six years later.
There is about as much of an international consensus amongst scientists and experts on why three of the WTC towers collapsed from fire damage on 9/11 as there is a scientific consensus on the causes of global warming and climate change.
