Thursday, November 02, 2006

9-11 Conspiracy Theories Refuted

I have seen numerous persons buying into the Conspiracy theory that states that the 9-11 attacks were the result of a massive conspiracy set into motion by the Bush administration. As such I am going to take some of the most prevalent questions and endeavor to answer them using logic and A LOT of research. The questions will be listed in RED. There are two main lines of thought regarding 9-11 conspiracies. The first I will address is the idea that 9-11 occurred by permission or government allowance. The second ideology being that the US government actively participated in an attack on US interests culminating in the resulting chaos at the WTC, Pentagon, and Shanksville, PA.



1. 9/11 could have been prevented but the leaders of America decided to let it happen.

There is no question that 9/11 could have been prevented. That doesn’t mean that it was allowed to happen. If your car were to be stolen while you are sitting at your PC reading this, should your insurance company assume that you intended to allow it to be stolen? You could have prevented it by sitting guard at your car 24 hours a day. The problem with this plan is that while you are standing guard over your car your house is now not protected. There is more to this huge country then just 4 planes, and 3 buildings. We could set up all kinds of protection for one building but that leaves the rest of the nation open for attack. The government failed to protect it citizens in the WTC, but that doesn’t mean that a choice was made to allow such an attack to occur. Something to bear in mind between the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA; the US government receives THOUSANDS of tips regarding terrorist activity and threats per day! The fact is just before 9-11 every major terrorist organization was asked to flood the agencies I listed with even more false threats. Why? To put it simply, it would increase the volume and there by reduce the amount of time available to investigate each threat.


2. Air traffic control had to know that these planes were going the wrong way, yet no military planes intercepted them.

Part of my training to become a firefighter included learning about how to address ARFF fires. ARFF (Aircraft Rescue Fire Fighting) is a science all on its own. Part of that training included going into an airport tower. There are so many planes being tracked it is hard to believe it is even possible. (To give you an idea of how close these planes land and take-off see the picture below, courtesy of Google Earth) Anyhow due to the volume of air traffic it would be difficult to recognize a change in direction on one plane for some time. Secondly, the hijackers intentionally waited till they were clear of any major airports. This was so that their altered flight plan would not be immediately recognize. As far as military planes escorting these guys it takes time to scramble these military aircraft and then it takes time to get them to the area. Finally, hind sight is 20/20; if we knew then what we know now we would have planes sitting on the tarmac 24 hours a day 365 days a year. But we didn’t know then what we know now. Additionally, the terrorists had deactivated the transponders on the planes. This caused them to literally disappear from the screens of the air traffic controllers.

Note the small amount of space between these two landing planes.


3. 9/11 was allowed to happen to instill fear in the American population, resulting in them being easily controlled.

This statement is lacking something quite important, benefit. The benefit of being able to control a nation is not gained in such a manner. If you were to control a nation and get the populous to agree to relinquish more of their income to taxes, then maybe. That hasn’t happened, nor has it been attempted; at least not by the Bush administration. It is the Democrats who have pushed the most for increased taxation.


4. 9/11 was allowed to happen so the US government could justify war in the Middle East.

The war in the Middle East has been a massive burden on the US economy and has not proved to be of any fiscal benefit. The non-fiscal benefits include the reduced number of Iraqi civilian deaths, the fact that there has not been another successful attack on US soil, and the reality is that numerous nations who once sponsored terrorism, i.e. Libya, openly denounced terrorism and ceased all support of these cowardly organizations. To those who point to oil as the reason we went to war you should look at the following. America went to war in Iraq, for failure to abide by UN Resolution 1441. UN Resolution 1441 includes the following resolutions which were not adhered to by Iraq.

UN Resolution 660 (1990) of 2 August 1990,
UN Resolution 661 (1990) of 6 August 1990,
UN Resolution 678 (1990) of 29 November 1990,
UN Resolution 686 (1991) of 2 March 1991,
UN Resolution 687 (1991) of 3 April 1991,
UN Resolution 688 (1991) of 5 April 1991,
UN Resolution 707 (1991) of 15 August 1991,
UN Resolution 715 (1991) of 11 October 1991,
UN Resolution 986 (1995) of 14 April 1995,
UN Resolution 1284 (1999) of 17 December 1999,
and UN Resolution 1441 (2002) of 8 November 2002

Other UN Resolutions that Iraq failed to adhere to include
UN Resolution 1373 (2001) of 28 September 2001,
UN Resolution 1382 (2001) of 29 November 2001,
Three others were also not adhered to by Iraq; I was however, unable to find their reference numbers prior to releasing this article.

In order for the US government to have allowed this to happen in an effort to justify war in the Middle East, this plan would have had to have been implemented back in 1990. The US was already in Iraq in 1990 after Hussein invaded Kuwait. Why set this plan in motion when you are already there. Additionally a lot of faces moved through the White House throughout this time, do you believe that this conspiracy spanned all of this time and it never leaked out? Of course not, that would be absurd.

The UN Security Council approved the use of force in Iraq on eleven separate occasions culminating in sixteen different UN Resolutions. If you draft and ratify a resolution that is to be viewed as the stance of the UN Security Council and all fifteen members have stated that they support action, you can hardly refer to any action explicitly defined in said resolution as “unilateral”. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the branch of the United Nations charged with maintaining peace and security among nations. While other branches of the United Nations only make recommendations to member governments, the Security Council has the power to make decisions which member governments MUST carry out under the United Nations Charter. The UNSC is pretty much a useless entity if it passes laws that are not intended to be enforced. For the record the UNSC is made up of fifteen countries, consisting of five permanent seats and ten temporary seats. The permanent five are France, Russia, China, the United States and the United Kingdom. These five permanent members hold veto power. The ten temporary seats are held for two-year terms. This means that on at least eleven occasions all five of the permanent members of the UNSC, even France, elected to ratify rather then veto resolutions that supported forcibly addressing the failure of Saddam Hussein to comply. This includes UN Resolution 1441, the final resolution agreed upon before the US went to war with Iraq which stated that this was “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.”

Finally the general public is misinformed as to what a WMD is, and the presence of terrorists in America. First, regarding WMDs, the general populous thinks WMDs are anthrax, and nukes. While it is true that these do constitute WMDs, so do salmonella* and influenza**. WMDs have been found in weaponized form in Iraq since the beginning of the war. Just not the big three everyone was expecting, Nuclear, Anthrax or Smallpox, and VX gas. As a side note, in June of 2006, the national Ground Intelligence Center, released a report detailing the weapons of mass destruction that had been found in Iraq, including pre-1991 sarin*** gas and mustard agent****. The report stated that, "While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal.


*Salmonella typhimurium (Used by the terrorist organization "Rajneeshee" in Oregon in 1984, resulting 751 casualties)

**Influenza (claimed 21 million lives, over 20% of the world’s population, from 1918 to 1919)

***Sarin (Used by the terrorist organization "Aum Shinrikyo" in Japan in 1995, resulting 7deaths and over 200 casualties)

****Mustard Agent (Used in multiple wars by and against multiple nations. This classification of chemical agent is in the highest risk class set forth by the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. The effects can be seen in the photo below, courtesy of Wikipedia)


Mustard agent burns on a soldier during World War I.



The remaining questions are posed by those who believe that the US government actively participated in the 9-11 attacks on the WTC, Pentagon, and Shanksville, PA.



5. The twin towers and other neighboring buildings were detonated and did not fall due to the impact of the "flying objects".

Those persons who make this “Conspiracy theory” statement are not considering, physics, engineering, and especially the effects of fire on a structure’s integrity. I am a firefighter; I study the effects of fire and heat on structural members in order to stay alive at my job. I take this subject quite seriously. I watched 343 of my brothers die in that building and I know that I would have done same. I also know that a building struck by an airplane weighing 833,000 lbs is being shock loaded with a massive amount of weight. This shock loading will invariably destroy a great number of the structural members that are load bearing and required in order for the structure to have a chance to remain standing. I also work as a pyro-technician and can tell you from the videos of the buildings collapsing that they begin to collapse in what is called a “pancake” collapse at the fire floors. First, the fire floors are where it would be logical for a damaged building to collapse. It would have been impossible for any person to have been able to plant explosives at these locations prior to the planes striking the towers without the explosives being destroyed in the impact, and it would have been equally impossible to plant explosives afterwards. The people jumping out of the building were jumping for a reason; do you think someone could have gone into those areas? No, they couldn’t. Even with full fire gear, a person would not be able to survive planting explosives with synchronized timing devices or wiring back to a remote location because of the extreme temperatures.

6. Why is it that Madrid's Burning Building Stands and yet the World Trade Center Falls?
Reference the following site for more information regarding this theory.


http://freepress2005.blogspot.com/2005/02/madrids-burning-building-stands-world.html

First, the Madrid building was not struck by a 747. That alone says enough, but I will continue. The Madrid fire was a simple fire that gutted the entire building. A fire that was fueled by normal office things that are designed to be fire resistant and thus do not evolve into complete combustion. The less complete the combustion is, the less heat is released. Liquid fuels combust better. Why, because solids do not burn. Believe it or not wood does not burn. Wood and all other solids go through a process called pyrolosis. Pyrolosis is the decomposition of a solid material when heat is applied to that material. That decomposition gives off gasses that are flammable. Liquids go through a similar process called vaporization. Less energy is required to cause vaporization then is required for pyrolosis. As such, more energy is expended to pyrolize a solid. This expended energy would have been turned into heat had it been a liquid fuel rather then the typical office materials that burned in Madrid. Jet fuels are not just liquid fuels but they are fuels that are chemically engineered to burn completely and cleanly evolving into more heat then other fuels. The more completely something burns the less smoke it produces. As a result the less smoke there is, the more oxygen is available to feed the fire, and thus combustion reaches even hotter temperatures. The web site above does not give the whole story about the Madrid fire. That building was only 32 stories tall. The weight of 32 stories, sitting on supports that had not been impacted by an 833,000 lb jet, and had not been exposed to a primarily liquid fuel source, is very different from the weight of 110 stories that HAD been impacted by an 833,000 lb jet, after which it was exposed to liquid fuel sources!

For the record the WTC was designed to withstand the impact of a 707. Many people think of this and surmise that the 747 is only a little bigger then a 707. This is absolutely wrong. A 707 weighs 673,000 lbs less. Meaning one 747 impact is equivalent to more than FOUR 707 impacts simultaneously.

**************************NOTE**************************
I made a mistake and I want to ensure that all information given is as accurate as possible. The WTC buildings were not hit by a 747, they were struck by a Boeing 767, whose weight is 450,000 lbs. This makes the 767 only about 3 times as big as a 707's 160,000 lbs. This is still well beyond the design specifications for the WTC towers.
**************************NOTE**************************

7. The first tower was not hit by a hijacked commercial jet but some sort of missile.

There is no evidence of this whatsoever. The fact is there are hundreds of witnesses who have always stated that they witnessed a plane and not a missile of any kind strike the WTC. Additionally, video footage of the first plane striking the first tower refutes this idea. There is also the matter of a plane and it’s occupants who had to disappear from the face of the earth, and all of the radio traffic and cellular calls that emanated from the first plane to strike the WTC.

8. The second tower was not hit by a hijacked commercial jet but a jet resembling one.

There is no evidence of this whatsoever. Again, there are hundreds of witnesses who have always stated that they witnessed a plane and not a missile of any kind strike the WTC. Additionally there are a host of videos who show this to be an inaccurate statement. There is still the matter of a plane and it’s occupants who had to disappear from the face of the earth, and all of the radio traffic and cellular calls that emanated from the second plane to strike the WTC.

9. The Pentagon was not hit by a hijacked commercial jet but a bomb or was detonated internally.

Again eye witness reports and video footage show this statement to be made in error, and to be not just flawed but undeniably inaccurate. There is still the matter of a plane and its occupants.

10. The people who are said to have perished on those planes aren’t real people and were never on any planes.

The following is a link to a site that lists all of the victims of 9-11. It includes names, pictures, home cities, employers, ages, and can be listed in order by each of these categories. If you select to list by location you can pull up information on each person on each of the planes.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/memorial/lists/by-name/index.html

11. The destruction of the World Trade Center and surrounding buildings was planned internally within the US government.

The answer to this is laid out in my responses to numbers 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Also the number of people who would have had to be involved in this kind of an operation and the ensuing cover-up would have been so vast and massive that it would have been impossible to even consider this plausible. Consider the baggage handlers who recall loading the planes. Now open this up onto a grand scale. How many people would have had to be in on this? How could the government find people willing to participate without anyone saying they wouldn’t? The number of sadistic people it would take to carry out something of this nature would preclude it from being possible to cover up.