Source: http://www.rense.com/general74/dismiss.htm

Related: 9/11 Archives (PrisonPlanet.com) -
http://www.prisonplanet.com/911.html

Related: http://911blogger.com/


Chomsky Dismisses 911
Conspiracy Theories As 'Dubious'
12-13-6


The following is an exchange between a ZNet Sustainer and Noam Chomsky,
which took place in the Sustainer Web Board where Noam hosts a forum...

ZNet Sustainer: Dear Noam, There is much documentation observed and
uncovered by the 911 families themselves suggesting a criminal
conspiracy within the Bush Administration to cover-up the 9/11 attacks
(see DVD, 9/11: Press for Truth). Additionally, much evidence has been
put forward to question the official version of events. This has come in
part from Paul Thompson, an activist who has creatively established the
9/11 Timeline, a free 9/11 investigative database for activist
researchers, which now, according to The Village Voice's James Ridgeway,
rivals the 9/11 Commission's report in accuracy and lucidity (see,
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0416,mondo1,52830,6.html,
or www.cooperativeresearch.org).

Noam Chomsky: Hard for me to respond to the rest of the letter, because
I am not persuaded by the assumption that much documentation and other
evidence has been uncovered. To determine that, we'd have to investigate
the alleged evidence. Take, say, the physical evidence. There are ways
to assess that: submit it to specialists -- of whom there are thousands
-- who have the requisite background in civil-mechanical engineering,
materials science, building construction, etc., for review and analysis;
and one cannot gain the required knowledge by surfing the internet. In
fact, that's been done, by the professional association of civil
engineers. Or, take the course pursued by anyone who thinks they have
made a genuine discovery: submit it to a serious journal for peer review
and publication. To my knowledge, there isn't a single submission.

ZNet Sustainer: A question that arises for me is that regardless of this
issue, how do I as an activist prevent myself from getting distracted by
such things as conspiracy theories instead of focusing on the bigger
picture of the institutional analysis of private profit over people?

Noam Chomsky: I think this reaches the heart of the matter. One of the
major consequences of the 9/11 movement has been to draw enormous
amounts of energy and effort away from activism directed to real and
ongoing crimes of state, and their institutional background, crimes that
are far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be, if there were any
credibility to that thesis. That is, I suspect, why the 9/11 movement is
treated far more tolerantly by centers of power than is the norm for
serious critical and activist work. How do you personally set
priorities? That's of course up to you. I've explained my priorities
often, in print as well as elsewhere, but we have to make our own
judgments.

ZNet Sustainer: In a sense, profit over people is the real conspiracy,
yes, yet not a conspiracy at all ­ rather institutional reality? At the
same time, if the core of conspiracy theories are accurate, which is
challenging to pin down, though increasingly possible, does it not fit
into the same motivations of furthering institutional aims of public
subsidizes to private tyrannies? I mean, through the 9/11attacks, Bush
Et Al. has been able to justify massive increases in defense spending
for a "war without end," and Israel has been given the green light to do
virtually whatever it wants since now 'the Americans are in the same
fight.' Furthermore, there has been a substantial rollback of civil
rights in our nation, with the most extreme example being strong attempt
to terminate habeas corpus.

Noam Chomsky: Can't answer for the same reasons. I don't see any reason
to accept the presuppositions. As for the consequences, in one of my
first interviews after 9/11 I pointed out the obvious: every power
system in the world was going to exploit it for its own interests: the
Russians in Chechnya, China against the Uighurs, Israel in the occupied
territories,... etc., and states would exploit the opportunity to
control their own populations more fully through "prevention of
terrorism acts" and the like. By the "who gains" argument, every power
system in the world could be assigned responsibility for 9/11.

ZNet Sustianer: This begs the question: if 9/11 was an inside job, then
what's to say that Bush Et Al., if cornered or not, wouldn't resort to
another more heinous attack of grander proportions in the age of nuclear
terrorism ­ which by its very nature would petrify populations the world
over, leading citizens to cower under the Bush umbrella of power.

Noam Chomsky: Wrong question, in my opinion. They were carrying out far
more serious crimes, against Americans as well, before 9/11 -- crimes
that literally threaten human survival. They may well resort to further
crimes if activists here prefer not to deal with them and to focus their
attention on arcane and dubious theories about 9/11.

ZNet Sustainer: Considering that in the US there are stage-managed
elections, public relations propaganda wars, and a
military-industrial-education-prison-etc. complex, does something like
this sound far-fetched?

Noam Chomsky: I think that's the wrong way to look at it. Everything you
mention goes back far before 9/11, and hasn't changed that much since.
More evidence that the 9/11 movement is diverting energy and attention
away from far more serious crimes -- and in this case crimes that are
quite real and easily demonstrated.

ZNet Sustainer:Considering the long history of false flag operations to
wrongly justify wars, our most recent precedent being WMD in Iraq, The
Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam, going back much further to Pearl Harbor (FDR
knowingly allowing the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor ­ which is
different from false flag operations), to the 1898 Spanish-American War,
to the 1846 Mexican-American War, to Andrew Jackson's seizing of
Seminole land in 1812 (aka Florida).

Noam Chomsky: The concept of "false flag operation" is not a very
serious one, in my opinion. None of the examples you describe, or any
other in history, has even a remote resemblance to the alleged 9/11
conspiracy. I'd suggest that you look at each of them carefully.

ZNet Sustainer: Lastly, as the world's leading terror state, would it
not surprise anyone if the US was capable of such an action? Would it
surprise you? Do you think that so-called conspiracy theorists have
anything worthy to present?

Noam Chomsky: I think the Bush administration would have had to be
utterly insane to try anything like what is alleged, for their own
narrow interests, and do not think that serious evidence has been
provided to support claims about actions that would not only be
outlandish, for their own interests, but that have no remote historical
parallel. The effects, however, are all too clear, namely, what I just
mentioned: diverting activism and commitment away from the very serious
ongoing crimes of state.

http://blog.zmag.org/node/2779

Building on Ground Zero

Web site launch date: August 24, 2006
Original PBS Broadcast Date: September 5, 2006

In a follow-up to the Emmy Award-winning documentary "Why The Towers
Fell," NOVA looks back at the events of 9/11 and reviews the major
investigations into the collapse of the World Trade Center. What did the
Twin Towers' catastrophic fall teach us about how to improve the
construction and security of our most important structures, both present
and future? What challenges face architects, engineers, and builders?
What obstacles prevent them from adopting new building codes? The film
features incisive interviews with key investigators and engineers,
including Leslie Robertson, who engineered the World Trade Center towers
and takes viewers to the construction site of his current project in
Shanghai, touted as the world's tallest structure.
Here's what you'll find on the companion Web site:
From Impact to Collapse
Narrated by Dr. Shyam Sunder, lead investigator of the federal building
and fire safety investigation into the disaster, this audio slide show
details the series of structural, fire-related, and other events that
occurred within the towers as they progressed toward sudden,
catastrophic collapse.
Above the Impact: A Survivor's Story Brian Clark was one of only a
handful of individuals to escape either tower from above the floors
where the planes struck. Here, Clark tells his riveting, vividly
personal tale.
Towers of Innovation They're gone now, but New York's Twin Towers
featured many elements that were groundbreaking at the time: a basement
like a bathtub, a building like a tube, and an elevator system like a
subway system, among others. In this article, review the buildings'
engineering marvels.
Outfitting Firefighters The firefighters that raced up the stairwells of
the doomed towers carried several dozen pounds of equipment, everything
from axes and turnout gear to thermal imaging cameras and self-contained
breathing apparatuses. In this feature, prepare firefighters for a
high-rise response.
The Structure of Metal Explore metal at the atomic level and discover
how it's structured, why it bends, and what happens when it heats up.
The Structure of Metal
by Rick Groleau

From carrying current on a computer's circuit boards to holding up
skyscrapers, metal has countless uses, thanks to its special
characteristics. It's hard and strong, yet it's bendable. It can be
welded to other pieces of metal and rolled flat or hammered into shape.
It conducts heat and electricity. It has a lustrous surface.

At the atomic heart of metal is a crystalline structure -- tightly
packed atoms arranged in orderly rows. This feature explores this heart
and reveals what it is that gives metal its special characteristics and
how metal behaves under the stress of heat and outside forces.
Flash is a plug-in that allows for increased interactivity. If you can
see the animated boxes at left, the plugin is already installed. If you
do not see the boxes, you can install the Flash plugin or select this
feature's non-Flash version.

Rick Groleau is managing editor of NOVA Online.

The Collapse: An Engineer's Perspective

It wasn't until Dr. Thomas Eagar saw Building 7 of the World Trade
Center implode late on the afternoon of September 11th that he
understood what had transpired structurally earlier that day as the Twin
Towers disintegrated. A professor of materials engineering and
engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
couldn't find a structural engineer? Eagar went on to write an
influential paper in the journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials
Society entitled "Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science,
Engineering, and Speculation" (JOM, December 2001). In this interview,
Eagar explains the structural failure, with complete confidence and no
evidence whatsoever, what can be done within existing skyscrapers to
improve safety, and what he believes the most likely terrorist targets
of the future may be.

Animation of a floor truss in the World Trade Center giving way. If
they animated it, it must be true! Note that cross trusses, which ran
perpenducular to the trusses shown, are omitted. The Collapse: An
Engineer's Perspective

It wasn't until Dr. Thomas Eagar saw Building 7 of the World Trade
Center implode late on the afternoon of September 11th that he
understood what had transpired structurally earlier that day as the Twin
Towers disintegrated. A professor of materials engineering and
engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
couldn't find a structural engineer? Eagar went on to write an
influential paper in the journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials
Society entitled "Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science,
Engineering, and Speculation" <../eagar_jom/eagar_0112.html> (JOM,
December 2001). In this interview, Eagar explains the structural
failure, with complete confidence and no evidence whatsoever, what can
be done within existing skyscrapers to improve safety, and what he
believes the most likely terrorist targets of the future may be.



NOVA: After the planes struck and you saw those raging fires, did you
think the towers would collapse?

Eagar: No. In fact, I was surprised. So were most structural engineers.
The only people I know who weren't surprised were a few people who've
designed high-rise buildings; people who will remain unnamed so this
assertion can't be verified .

NOVA: But you weren't surprised that they withstood the initial impacts,
is that correct?

Eagar: That's right. All buildings and most bridges have what we call
redundant design. If one component breaks, the whole thing will not come
crashing down. I once worked on a high-rise in New York, for example,
that had a nine-foot-high beam that had a crack all the way through one
of the main beams in the basement. This was along the approach to the
George Washington Bridge. They shored it up and kept traffic from using
that area.

Some people were concerned the building would fall down. The structural
engineers knew it wouldn't, because the whole thing had an
egg-crate-like construction. Or you can think of it as a net. If you
lose one string on a net, yes, the net is weakened but the rest of the
net still works.

That's essentially how the World Trade Center absorbed an airplane
coming into it. It was somewhat like the way a net absorbs a baseball
being thrown against it. If you lose a couple of the columns, that's not
the end of the world. It will still stand up.

NOVA: The World Trade Center was also designed to take a major wind load
hitting from the side.

Eagar: Yes. A skyscraper is a long, thin, vertical structure, but if you
turned it sideways, it would be like a diving board, and you could bend
it on the end. The wind load is trying to bend it like a diving board.
It sways back and forth. If you've been on the top of the Sears Tower in
Chicago or the Empire State Building on a windy day, you can actually
feel it. When I was a student, I visited the observation deck of the
Sears Tower, and I went into the restroom there, and I could see the
water sloshing in the toilet bowl, because the wind load was causing the
whole building to wave in the breeze.

NOVA: Are skyscrapers designed that way, to be a little flexible?

Eagar: Absolutely. Now, there are different ways to design things. For
example, Boeing designs their aircraft wings to flap in the breeze,
while McDonnell Douglas used to design a very rigid wing that would not
flex as much. You can design it both ways. There are trade-offs, and
there are advantages to both ways.

Most buildings are designed to sway in the breeze. In fact, one of the
big concerns in the early design of the World Trade Center, since it was
going to be the tallest building in the world at the time, was that it
not sway too much and make people sick. You can get seasick in one of
these tall buildings from the wind loads. So they had to do some things
to make them stiff enough that people wouldn't get sick, but not so
rigid that it could snap if it got too big a load. If something's
flexible, it can give; think of a willow tree. If you have a strong
wind, you want the building, like the tree, to bend rather than break.

NOVA: Brian Clark ,one of only four people to get out from above where
United 175 hit the South Tower (The New York Times (3/2/6) has
identified 18 people) , says that when the plane struck, the building
swayed for a full seven to 10 seconds in one direction before settling
back, and he thought it was going over.

Eagar: That estimate of seven to ten seconds is probably correct,
because often big buildings are designed to be stiff enough that the
period to go one way and back the other way is 15 or 20 seconds, or even
30 seconds. That keeps people from getting sick.
NOVA: The Twin Towers collapsed essentially straight down. Was there any
chance they could have tipped over?

Eagar: It's really not possible in this case. In our normal experience,
we deal with small things, say, a glass of water, that might tip over,
and we don't realize how far something has to tip proportional to its
base. The base of the World Trade Center was 208 feet on a side, and
that means it would have had to have tipped at least 100 feet to one
side in order to move its center of gravity from the center of the
building out beyond its base. That would have been a tremendous amount
of bending. Actually the top would only have had to tip 50 feet before
its center of gravity cleared the building's core -- the gravity
load-bearing component. The top of the South Tower had already tipped
that much and, given the law of preservation of angular momentum, would
have continued to tip more had it not disintegrated in mid-air. In a
building that is mostly air, as the World Trade Center was, there would
have been buckling columns, and it would have come straight down before
it ever tipped over. The WTC's "air to steel" ratio was no higher than
for any other modern skyscraper. Eagar's "mostly air" comment is
nonsense; it's just more rhetoric intended to make the "collapses" seem
to make sense, without using any real logic. All matter is "mostly empty
space," but there are "solid" reasons why we can count on most objects
to remain intact most of the time.

Have you ever seen the demolition of buildings? They blow them up, and
they implode. Well, I once asked demolition experts, "How do you get it
to implode and not fall outward?" They said, "Oh, it's really how you
time and place the explosives." I always accepted that answer, until the
World Trade Center, when I thought about it myself. And that's not the
correct answer. The correct answer is, there's no other way for them to
go but down. This is a great discovery, Eagar. Demolition companies no
longer will need to carefully place and time explosives to get a
building to fall into its footprint. They will just need to start a
fire. 47-story WTC 7, underwent a complete and systematic collapse even
though it sustained no impacts with aircraft or large debris. It just
had a few small fires that were barely visible. They're too big. With
anything that massive -- each of the World Trade Center towers weighed
half a million tons -- there's nothing that can exert a big enough force
to push it sideways. This whole argument of the physics working
differently because of the scale is nonsense. The strength of the
structural elements is scaled up in proportion to the weight. Eagar
wants it both ways -- the tower was at once very massive, and mostly
air. In fact the towers had a high strength-to-weight ratio (in contrast
to masonry buildings). Given the dense grid of long vertical columns in
the tower's core, the collapse proposed would have caused the tower's
top to topple from the crash zone, like a falling tree. But even if the
core were completely severed at the crash zone, the intact portion of
the core below would deflect the falling portion of the building away
from the center.

NOVA: I think some people were surprised when they saw this massive
110-story building collapse into a rubble pile only a few stories tall.


Eagar: Well, like most buildings, the World Trade Center was mostly air.
It looked like a huge building if you walked inside, but it was just
like this room we're in. The walls are a very small fraction of the
total room. The World Trade Center collapse proved that with a 110-story
building, if 95 percent of it's air, as was the case here, you're only
going to have about five stories of rubble at the bottom after it falls.

NOVA: You've said that the fire is the most misunderstood part of the
World Trade Center collapse. Why?

Eagar: The problem is that most people, even some engineers, talk about
temperature and heat as if they're identical. In fact, scientifically,
they're only related to each other. Temperature tells me the intensity
of the heat -- is it 100 degrees, 200 degrees, 300 degrees? The heat
tells me how big the thing is that gets hot. I mean, I could boil a cup
of water to make a cup of tea, or I could boil ten gallons of water to
cook a bunch of lobsters. So it takes a lot more energy to cook the
lobsters -- heat is related to energy. That's the difference: We call
the intensity of heat the temperature, and the amount of heat the
energy.

Continue: The heat was much greater than might have been expected in a
typical fire?
NOVA: Many other engineers also feel the weak link was these angle
clips, which held the floor trusses between the inner core of columns
and the exterior columns. Is that simply because they were much smaller
pieces of steel? Those angle clips! Well, I guess we'll have to take
Eagar's word that the designers stupidly underengineered them, because
the blueprints remain sealed and unavailable for inspection by the
public. Actually they weren't "clips", they were brackets welded to the
columns.

Eagar: Exactly. That's the easiest way to look at it. If you look at the
whole structure, they are the smallest piece of steel. As everything
begins to distort, the smallest piece is going to become the weak link
in the chain. dominoes, chain, ... how about house of cards. They were
plenty strong for holding up one truss, but when you lost several
trusses, the trusses adjacent to those had to hold two or three times
what they were expected to hold.

9-11 was an inside job. Parts of it were first planned in the 1960
timeframe as a pretext for invading Cuba. Kennedy opposed it, but they
got rid of him. Search "Operation Northwoods" on your favorite search
engine. This mass murder was perpetrated by the same people who then
demanded that we surrender our freedom so that they could protect us
from terrorism.
.
The U.S. was poised to invade Afghanistan before 9-11 took place. What
comes first, the cause or the effect?