Path to Persia

format_quote Originally Posted by MustafaMc

The Project for a New America Century's document 'Rebuilding of America's Defenses' (Sept 2000)

I’m taking this to be one of the key sources for this conspirary theory, perhaps even the most important. So I’ve spent some time on it. Once something like this gets on the internet it continues to circulate and multiply until no one questions the source any more. So let’s take a closer look at what the PNAC document actually says.

It isn’t what you think.

First, the main phrase: "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor".

This quote usually appears in isolation. What they are actually talking about? A ‘transformation’ of what? If you read the whole document it’s clear that this refers to the need to modernize American military capabilities, especially with reference to information technologies. It's one of the principal themes throughout the document and is referred to again and again. This comes from earlier in the same chapter:

"To preserve American military preeminence in the coming decades, the Department of Defense must move more aggressively to experiment with new technologies and operational concepts, and seek to exploit the emerging revolution in military affairs. Information technologies, in particular, are becoming more prevalent and significant components of modern military systems. These information technologies are having the same kind of transforming effects on military affairs as they are having in the larger world. The effects of this military transformation will have profound implications for how wars are fought, what kinds of weapons will dominate the battlefield and, inevitably, which nations enjoy military preeminence".

So "transformation" refers to the process of updating the military with better use of information technologies.

How does 9/11 help this agenda? It does not. In fact, the attacks provided powerful evidence that one of the PNAC's own pet schemes - a global missile shield - was a waste of time. And this is exactly how some politicians reacted at the time: “Sen. Carl Levin told Rumsfeld at a June 2001 hearing that we were lavishing money on missile defense and not "putting enough emphasis on countering the most likely threats to our national security ... like terrorist attacks." http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article...NGQ58FN831.DTL

Back to the PNAC and the key "Pearl Harbor" phrase. What exactly does this mean? More clarity comes from the one other place where it’s used in the document:

"Absent a rigorous program of experimentation to investigate the nature of the revolution in military affairs as it applies to war at sea, the Navy might face a future Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war at the dawn of the carrier age".

The reference to ‘Pearl Harbour’ here is as a warning from history. All they're saying here is that ‘the process of updating the US military will take a long time, unless the problems are made apparent by an attack that reveals our technical failings ie a disaster or shock to the system like Pearl Harbour was’. It's pretty obvious why the phrase came to mind - they're talking about the navy.

It most certainly does not suggest that they are proposing to create their own, new Pearl Harbour event as a catalyst for change. In fact it is making the exact opposite point – that if no action is taken, the US will be vulnerable to just such an attack. What has been read into this phrase is simply not there and there is nothing in the document to support this kind of interpretation. In fact the document as a whole is quite boring and unremarkable.

Summary

There is nothing in the document that you wouldn’t expect to find. The authors come from the perspective that the US had become by that time the strongest military force in the world. Their job was to maintain that strength.

Yes, they were looking for increased defence spending – have you ever known a defence review that didn’t? (Or any other government department for that matter). It was their job to look for more money all the time.

It talks about all aspects of the military, and all global theatres, as you would expect. The Middle East does not show up as being of particular interest. It does not predict anything in Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt or Syria but is concerned with the obvious issues of the day – the Gulf region and especially the pressure of maintaining the no-fly zone in Iraq. They are most concerned with the rising threat of China (quite presciently as it turns out).

As far as homeland security is concerned it pushes for its pet project, a missile shield and says this: “The current American peace will be short-lived if the United States becomes vulnerable to rogue powers with small, inexpensive arsenals of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass destruction.” 9/11 made a mockery of spending a fortune on a missle shield, a fact that is still repeated even today.

The PNAC document does not provide any supporting evidence for a 9/11 conspiracy. It’s explicit strategic goal is preserving world stability and peace. What it does not propose is a strategy for smashing world order to pieces. The notion that in the middle of this rather boring review they suddenly propose an attack on their own country is wholly incredible.

Please read it yourself and see. You can download it from here: http://www.newamericancentury.org/pu...onsreports.htm

Part 1 of reply - What was the motive for an attack on WTC 7

The video proposes that WTC 7 was a pre-planned target along with the Twin Towers. Why then were planes crashed into the Towers, but not WTC 7? Why did the Towers get a cover story (the planes) but not WTC 7?

In effect, by putting WTC 7 on the hit list, the attackers would be guaranteeing that difficult questions would be asked afterwards.

Even more problematic, they couldn’t possibly be sure that rubble from the Towers would hit WTC 7 at all. (It is a little distance away with other buildings in between.) If it had missed, then when the explosives went off, WTC 7 would have collapsed abruptly in a pristine condition. Total giveaway!

Which begs the question, why risk the WTC 7 attack at all? It didn’t add anything to the shock value of the overall operation (no casualties even). It didn’t buy one extra soldier for the military. All it does is raise difficult questions.

The video you have posted doesn’t offer any motives for the attack. However, it make a point of listing some of the tenants of WTC7 (CIA, SEC etc) which implies a few motives. I answer these below:

1. Was it done to prevent an on-going prosecution?

The is the easiest to debunk because many years have elapsed, and it’s plain that no prosecutions were ever prevented (although some may have been delayed a little). Nor was it ever likely to prevent prosecution, as is made clear by a number of relevant staff:

Wayne Carlin, the SEC’s Northeast regional director, told the Washington Post:

"It will slow us down, and we will need some amount of time to recover….We lost a lot of stuff, though some of it is reconstructible," he said. "Anybody who is under our investigation would be making a mistake if they thought they were in the clear."

An SEC statement said that "we are confident that we will not lose any significant investigation or case as a result of the loss of our building in New York. No one whom we have sued or whose conduct we have been investigating should doubt our resolve to continue our pursuit of justice in every such matters." ("SEC & EEOC: Attack Delays Investigations” by Margaret Cronin Fisk, National Law Journal, September 17, 2001)

"Within two days of the attack, we had retrieved all documents stored electronically and had commenced a review of every single investigation and case currently underway in the office with the twin aims of ensuring that we do not miss any imminent deadlines and of developing a plan for completing our investigations and cases in timely fashion. While our review has not been completed, we are optimistic that we will not lose any significant investigation or case as a result of the loss of our building." (Harvey L. Pitt, Chairman SEC)

Even the Truthers don’t seem to make a big deal out of this one any more. Consider it BUSTED!

2. Was it done to cover up evidence because this was the centre of the CIA WTC attack operation?

This proposes that WTC7 was the nerve centre of the CIA demolition operation, both for planning and actually directing the planes onto their targets. Therefore the building needed to be destroyed to eliminate evidence.

This idea has some serious drawbacks. First, the not-inconsiderable risk that the CIA would risk killing themselves accidentally. Second, far from eliminating the possibility of discovery, blowing the building up seriously raises the risk. Papers and disc drives were in fact recovered from the scene.

Why bother if you have total security in your own office (which is of course a prerequisite of the whole conspiracy theory from beginning to end) and no reason to expect anyone would investigate this building?

3. The Silverstein theory.

This theory is not referred to in the video and has been thoroughly debunked so I won’t dwell on it (unless you want me to). Silverstein was the owner of WTC 7 and it has been alleged that he sought to profit from an insurance policy taken out a few months beforehand. However, as he only insured it for less than the rebuilding cost, it’s not at all clear that he ever made any money. Certainly he could have done better in a few hours playing the hedge fund market at no personal risk to himself.

Fundamentally, in an epic conspiracy about creating long term war between the West and Islam, it seems vanishingly unlikely that they would allow one guy to tack on his own minor private enterprise and risk the whole operation.

In conclusion

I don’t see any credible motive for making WTC 7 a specific target. If it wasn’t a target, than it becomes an accident (‘collateral damage’).

Obviously, the lack of a motive doesn't in itself prove that it wasn't pre-planned so I'll move on to the next part tomorrow.

format_quote Originally Posted by Independent

WTC 7 is the anomaly that causes the most trouble for all sides

Do you have a more cohesive explanation for WTC 7 besides the above? It is hardly satisfactory even to school kids!

What is the 'anything' else we're meant to consider just to cut through the crap!

format_quote Originally Posted by Independent

I just watch the video of that building falling down and I either 'deny the obvious' or agree with you? No one can make that kind of assessment from the video alone. Not even an expert.

Yes, of course they can. It was very obvious even to high school physics teacher David Chandler as he analyzed the video per the laws of physics. The FACT that the building fell at free-fall acceleration for 2.5 seconds means there was absolutely ZERO resistance to the collapse and it fell for 2.5 seconds at exactly the same rate as a bowling ball would have fallen if dropped from the top of WTC at the same instant the collapse initiated. The ONLY way for this to have happened is for ALL of the supporting steel columns to be removed at EXACTLY the same instance. It is obvious to me that you are either incapable of scientific thinking or a dishonest person and that you most likely are paid to discredit any attempt to question the official story for the collapse of WTC1,2 & 7. Your jumping on PNAC's document to counter the 'Pearl Harbor' statement and your refusal to acknowledge the obvious implosive collapse of WTC7 per the comment by the reporter (Dan Rather I think) at the end of the video with completely irrelevant motive and emotive (no pun intended) mumbo-jumbo just proves that meaningful discussion with you is pointless. I rest my case with this video.

I’m going to ignore all the personal stuff.

So you watch this video and you have no questions? You just swallow the whole thing, you don’t think maybe you ought to check some of the claims out? And you call that being scientific? Why do you trust Chandler so easily? Do you know him or something?

Is controlled demolition the only possible explanation for what was observed of building WTC7? No it isn’t. The NIST account of the collapse is accepted by the vast majority of industry professionals. You, as a non-professional, can of course choose to believe Chandler rather than them. I don’t see how you have the technical knowledge to make that choice - no more do I.

The more you study Chandler’s claims, the less they stack up. Across the board he has presented evidence selectively, taken quotes out of context, or just simply failed to offer any reasonable explanation. The more I read about this, the more I am convinced that the Truthers – ironic name – cannot be trusted.

When Chandler says the building was falling at freefall speeds, he is lying. He tells you he’s lying within the video itself if you listen carefully enough. More of that in a moment. If this video is still available, then he is also deceiving us by showing and referring to the pre-circulated draft NIST report, not the final published version.

Controlled demolition is not the only explanation, which means there is no irreducible ‘fact’ at the core of his argument. I’m going to give some quotes from JREF, a forum like this one set up in 1996 to examine unlikely claims from a scientific point of view. It’s not a political forum. Members include a wide range of specialists across many fields. Their level of expertise is obvious when you read their posts. Robust views are exchanged, as you might expect. The thread I quote from is massive and goes on for many years – please read the rest of it, it’s very interesting. (It starts here: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=128194).

Just to add a bit of spice to it David Chandler himself joined the forum under his own name in order to put his case (not very satisfactorily but there you go). Several blatant ‘Truther’ trolls also intervene at times.

And if you think they’re all liars too, why don’t you join their forum and explain to them why? See how you get on?

Freefall – Chandler’s view

The official account is contained in the NIST report (National Institute of Standards and Technology 2008). Chandler says that NIST makes ‘dishonest claims’ about the rate of acceleration of the fall. In fact NIST was neither wrong nor dishonest, but it doesn’t give enough detail about the variation in the rate. The draft report only gave an averaged rate of acceleration for the whole period of the fall. However, for the first 2.5 seconds it is much faster (close to but not at freefall). Chandler sent them this information at the draft stage. NIST agreed with this and incorporated it into the published version of the document. This added a no more than couple of pages to a 1000 page report, the rest of which Chandler does not dispute. In its final form, there is no significant disagreement between Chandler’s figures and NIST’s on this issue.

However, Chandler is rather less than scrupulous with his own analysis. In the video you post he describes how he calculates the acceleration of the fall, which he says is close to the rate of freefall. This is correct as far as it goes. Because of the poor video quality there is a margin for error of 1 second, as both he and NIST observe. But now Chandler plays some language games: ‘The most accurate way to characterize the result is to say, the acceleration of the building is indistinguishable from freefall.”

No, it is not the most accurate description. He’s just changed the meaning very significantly to allow people like you to say ‘there was absolutely ZERO resistance to the collapse.’

Later in the video he drops the qualifier altogether: “For a significant two and half seconds the building was in literal freefall.” NO IT WASN’T. Both his result and NIST’s give figures somewhat less than freefall rates. His own analysis, because of the margin for error, tells him it’s actually impossible for him to know this one way or the other. In other words, the collapse did meet some resistance from the start, which increased significantly after 2.5 seconds.

He also fails to take account of the prior internal collapse, as discussed below.

Chandler compared with NIST

Essentially, there is surprisingly little difference between the NIST account of the building collapse and Chandler’s. Where they disagree is in the interpretation. As one of the JREF professionals comments:

‘What you have found is an effect. NIST agrees with that effect. What you are now claiming instead is a cause, but you have not demonstrated that your cause is the one and only explanation. Until you do so, our argument remains with you.’

Note also the last quote I give below, where they point out the differences (and fundamental limitations) of trying to apply abstract, classroom physics to real-world, messy engineering problems. There is a reason why physics teachers teach physics and not structural engineering.

As I say the thread is massive but I’ve picked out a few interesting quotes:

1.
What you see on the video is the outside of the building, but that’s only part of the story. The building was already collapsing inside, as confirmed by the seismic record and the prior collapse of the penthouse. The internal collapse began about 10 seconds before the external wall comes down:

“THIS is the core of my (& NIST's) argument, that there was very little of the structural support of the external walls still intact when their collapse began.

The fact that the vast majority of the internal structure of the building had long since (~ 10 seconds) failed is indisputable from the collapse of the penthouses. Sequencing video evidence of reporters on the street hearing the collapse begin with lateral motions of the roofline of the building, you can reliably push the start of the collapse of the internal structure back 18 seconds before the external walls began to fall.”

2.
The term ‘freefall’ is inaccurate. No part of the building fell at pure freefall –however, one part fell at near freefall for 2.4 secs:

“Chandler says that the exterior North Wall falls "at G". He hasn't said a whole bunch that I've seen about the internal collapse process.

Chandler is wrong.

NIST says ONLY that the external walls fall at accelerations that are less than G, but rise for short periods to values that are "approximately equal to G". NIST says that the building as a whole does NOT collapse "from top down", but rather "from inside (column 79 - 81) spreading towards the external walls".

NIST is right. Mostly. They have made a couple of small errors.

NOBODY but you says "the intact top part of WTC7 free falls". This silliness is, no doubt, a bad habit left over from your WTC towers nonsense….….My best estimates of the numbers are:

1. the average acceleration between 1.75 seconds & 4.00 seconds is .94G.
2. the peak acceleration between those two times is .99 G.
3. the time after the start of the collapse of the exterior wall that it took to accelerate from zero G's to .98 G is about 2.6 seconds.”


3. The building does not fall as a single unit, as it might appear to the unqualified observer looking at the video. The collapse starts in one place and progresses:

“The whole top structure does NOT fall as a unit. It fails first near the core columns (79 - 81), and the failure wave moves horizontally outward towards the walls. It takes almost 7 seconds for this wave to reach the outer walls. CLEARLY proving that upper floors of the structure did NOT fall as an intact unit…….The internal structure does NOT fall in free fall. The pieces & parts collide with elements below, and are thereby slowed far below "free fall" acceleration.”


4. David Chandler is a high school physicist, not a practicing structural engineer. This is how one professional views him:

“You are frankly incompetent in the field of structural engineering, structural mechanics and failure mechanics of large buildings. The ULTIMATE analysis ain't physics. It's engineering. It's messy. Things in the real world don't fall in a vacuum, they don't have zero friction, they don't behave like rigid bodies or perfect gasses.

You have been dealing in physics-type absolutes. You slide casually & carelessly from "fell at almost G", to "fell, for all intents, at G", to "fell at G". You then opine that "for something to fall at G, there has to be zero resistance". The correct phraseology is "for it to have fallen at approximately G, there has to be approximately zero resistance."

And, as I have drummed into about 20 baby engineers that I've helped mold in my career, "unless you know the cold, hard numbers as well as the nerdy error bands, you don't know Jack." Without an error analysis, you do NOT know how "approximately close to G" you can claim. Without a solid background in structural dynamics, you do not know "how approximately close to zero" can be the resisting force generated by a structure in the process of buckling.

You thought that your results proved something that was impossible in a gravity driven collapse of a building. And, in the pristine physics terms that you've phrased it ("it fell at gravitational acceleration'), it might be impossible. But once you throw in the real world's messiness, then your "impossible event" turns into "not surprising at all".


“I would be willing to bet my and my wife's entire pensions up against yours that no short of 100,000 engineers WORLDWIDE have looked at this. If there was a problem, don't you think that the majority of them would be screaming for anyone and everyone to pay attention?? Engineers (IMHO) like to analize things. Right??”

“….9 years and counting and not a single paper in an accepted academic peer reviewed journal in a relevant field. Not one.”

To summarise:

There is surprisingly little difference between the two accounts of the collapse. However, Chandler attributes the cause to explosives despite the fact that far less remarkable causes are perfectly possible. Unlike the vast majority of all the experts, witnesses and participants, who together number hundreds if not thousands, Chandler is overtly political in motivation whereas they are not.

It is manifestly untrue for him, or you, to say that controlled demolition is the only possible explanation for WTC 7. And once there is doubt about the core of his argument, the rest of his extraordinary explanations about how the explosives got there fall to pieces.

Therefore by Occam’s Razor –the official collateral damage explanation is the one we should follow unless significant new evidence emerges.

format_quote Originally Posted by Independent

I’m going to ignore all the personal stuff.

Yet you're free to dispense it? including adhoms against the scientists by finding another character to insult him? funny stuff!
before you edited your post you wrote that Br. Mc isn't a professional.. well in fact he's a scientist- you on the other hand aren't per your own admission, you prefer to imbue whatever is dished out to you. Well the rest can use their minds and you're most welcome to shut off yours.
The above is still not a refutation.. I notice the tighter the noose around your neck the more padding you add to your words. Why don't you follow the advise in your closing statement and follow Occam's razor. i.e cut the crap and offer the simplest and most logical explanation, not search the web for adhoms on the character rather than the fact?

you're aware that at some point Hitler hired a group of 'scientists' to debunk Einstein? Now they just hire net shills and they still come up so comically empty!

best,

format_quote Originally Posted by Independent

I'm just hazarding a guess here, but maybe people don't like being called mass murderers when they're just going about their daily job.

What does this mean?

format_quote Originally Posted by Independent

Scientist, yes. Professional structural engineer, no. There is a difference and it's kind of important.

One puts the same neurons to work and make connections that's how one acquires a PhD or a doctorate in the first place, by being able to think in an abstract fashion and come up with theories and put them to practice rather than be fed them and accept them at face value.

format_quote Originally Posted by Independent

That's it? That's the extent of your counter argument? You actually have nothing?

outside of adhoms and appeals to 'professionalism' you've not offered much for me to counter. I am of the original opinion and until you can come up with something practical and not empirical to refute it. You'll spin a web of sophistry and still be none the wiser and with the desire to dupe as many fools along with you..

best,