It's The Pattern Of The Last Fifty Years
It's The Pattern Of The Last Fifty Years
http://www.comicbookresources.com/co...mn=10#section3
It's the pattern of the last fifty years, at least: every time the government "officially" puts some issue to sleep - say, who killed Jack Kennedy and why, or what our reasons for invading Iraq were - someone comes along to upend it. Now the official version of what happened to the World Trade Towers on 9-11 has gotten some pretty serious criticism from a very unlikely source: Brigham Young University physicist (and lifelong Republican) Steven Jones.
He studied the collapse of the towers and realized the physics were all wrong. The heat from exploding jet fuel wouldn't have been enough to melt steel girders in the buildings, though melted girders were found. Hit the way they were, the towers wouldn't have collapsed the way they did. The time of collapse doesn't meet physical models (it was too fast). Then there was the third collapsed building, untouched by any plane, that fell exactly the same way as the others, despite other buildings near it being virtually untouched. And he can demonstrate, via a video of that building collapsing, that it was a demolition job. He can show where the squibs explode in sequence up the building before it collapses, he can show where steel girders eject out of the walls before any dust and rubble. The implication, since the rate and pattern of collapse is identical to those in the main towers, is that they were also demolition jobs. (You may recall that at the time both NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani and the Twin Tower's architects believed the buildings were structurally sound enough to withstand being hit by aircraft, and were flummoxed when they weren't.)
Jones doesn't make a lot of claims as to why anyone would demolish the Towers and blame it on terrorist-occupied aircraft. But if he's right, some implications can't be ignored. If the demolitions were timed to coincide with the crashes, then someone had to have coordinated them, which means someone knew specific details of what the terrorists were planning, and well in advance. The odds on terrorists, working in sync with those on the planes, precisely mining the Towers are pretty slender, since NY branches of the CIA, FBI and DoD were housed there and one assumes (though maybe that's an outlandish assumption, given the sloppy ways all three agencies seem to handle security and intelligence) security would have been tight enough to spot the pretty large amount of explosives needed to pull off the job. So if Jones is right, either the government was extremely lax, or the government was involved.
At which point we seriously crawl into "conspiracy theory." At which point, someone always dismisses it with "with all the people it would have taken to carry it out, someone would have talked." Which also dismisses - understandable when you're a citizen in what's arguably the most open society in history, but we should never forget that's only a comparative, not a superlative - the number of subcultures in our culture that revolve around codes of silence, from frat houses to police forces to the CIA. The idea of a group of people pulling off something and keeping their mouths shut about it is actually quite conceivable, and if it went on as a matter of course every day, how would we know about it?
The real question would be why, and that's usually a much trickier question. The usual way to begin sorting that out is to ask who benefits. (Seems to me I wrote a column about that, oh, around Sept. 18 2001. Check the archives.)
And Jones isn't alone. A steady stream of other researchers, including physicists and engineers, are demolishing other elements of the official version, which refused to even consider at least 115 facts. Don't expect to read about it in your daily paper for awhile, though. There's a war on!
Which may be why so many Congressional Republicans are upset over the administration's sponsorship of a Saudi Arabian firm taking over management of six of the United States' biggest domestic ports. You may remember Saudi Arabia; it's where much of the world's oil and most of the funding (not to mention personnel) for al-Qaeda comes from. Homeland Security honcho and longtime Hand Puppet circle insider Michael Chertoff said there are "assurances in place, in general" that American security wouldn't be compromised, and that's good enough for him. Which suggests maybe he's not the right guy for his job. I'm not a fan of "punishing" entire populations for acts committed by some of their number, but even to me putting, essentially, Saudi Arabia in charge of the security of American ports seems too risky for comfort. It's almost like the Administration is now trying to encourage another terrorist attack on American soil. (Congress is only likely to grant another extension to the Patriot Act at the moment, while the Administration wants it permanentized; another attack might do it, since 9-11 did not only make the Patriot Act possible but made swift and unthinking passage virtually mandatory in Congress.) One thing's for sure: somebody will make a lot of money off this deal going through, and it'd be nice if we knew who ahead of time.
In fact, the Administration seems dead set on facilitating some sort of disaster. After months of the DoE getting clobbered right and left on the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository, with exposures of lies, rigged data, safety violations etc., not to mention total lack of a coherent plan for transporting nuclear waste to Nevada from various power plants around the country, threatening the bring the thing to a complete halt, the Hand Puppet declared as "sound science" a new plan to bypass many of the holdups and get the depository going regardless. Scientists are already lining up to decry the new "sound science," but the Administration needs Yucca Mountain if they're going to push forward their new nuclear power agenda. The Hand Puppet has already started handing out invitations to other countries to dump their waste at Yucca Mountain as well, making it necessary to bring it through many of those same ports the Saudis will be in charge of.
Either someone's up to some really canny thinking in the Administration these days, or someone's not thinking at all.
