Unhinged At Last: Further Reflections On The NIST/WTC-7 Scam

It may seem too obvious to mention, but I'm going to mention it anyway. Sometimes when we fail to mention the obvious, we get off on the wrong foot and then everything else we do turns out wrong -- and we don't even know why.

And maybe people are saying this all over the place; I don't know. I don't get out much. If I'm adding one more voice to the choir, so be it. If I'm singing a new song all by myself, that's ok too. It wouldn't be the first time.

If you're doing an investigation -- any kind of investigation -- if you're looking into a murder, or a plane crash, or a structural failure, or a suspicious fire, or -- God forbid -- a complex series of events involving all of these things -- you want to start with the physical evidence.

"Bring me the body," you would say, "and the murder weapon, if you can find it." You'd want to see the remains, the wreckage, and/or the scene of the crime, as soon as possible after the event. Physical evidence is the basis of all physical sciences, and you'd be looking to recreate the event based on the remaining physical evidence.

If that evidence were not available, you'd do two things. First, you'd find out why the evidence was unavailable. And if it turned out that the evidence had been destroyed, you'd find out who did that. This person or group of people would move to the top of your list of suspects.

Second, you'd turn to eyewitness (or camera-witness) accounts of the event. You'd interview everybody you could find who was there at the time; you'd examine all the still or moving images of the scene that you could get your hands on. Here your job would be much tougher than if you were working with physical evidence, because witnesses can lie or make mistakes, and video evidence can be tampered with; so everything you collected would have to be validated before it could be used.

But -- if you were running an honest investigation -- you'd have no choice but to gather up all this possibly conflicting testimony and try to piece together the event that the testimony purports to describe.

By their own account, this is exactly what the NIST investigators looking into the destruction of World Trade Center 7 failed to do. They didn't have access to any of the physical evidence, but they didn't see this as a problem; rather than trying to find out who destroyed the evidence and focusing on them as suspects, the NIST investigation turned to the next problem: the eyewitness accounts.

Predictably, NIST didn't pay any attention to the eyewitnesses either, despite the fact that so many of them were trained to respond to emergency situations. The firemen and paramedics who were heroes on 9/11 and in the weeks thereafter were nowhere to be seen in the NIST account of the event, which was based on nothing more than a computer simulation.

In short words, NIST ran as far away from reality as they could get. And they came back with a ludicrous conclusion, telling us that they'd identified a whole new phenomenon that can destroy a skyscraper -- without a shred of physical or other evidence to back up their conclusion.

It would be laughable, if it were not so much worse than that. But the media lap it up and ladle it out, all while pouring scorn on those of us who dare to point out how laughable it all is, or would be, if it weren't so tragic.

It's no wonder that I've come unhinged.

The remarkable thing is that so many other people have remained hinged!

Have we really fallen so far through the looking glass that we can now take transparent lies from our government and media in stride?

Well, I'm sorry, but I can't do it.

I couldn't do it three years ago, either, when I wrote about 9/11 and hinges in a different way:

America wasn't at war [in the summer of 2001]. "911" was the number you dialed in the event of an emergency: it had no terrorist connotation. Not yet, anyway. [...]

Look at us now, just four years later. We've got unimaginable trouble at home and unspeakable horror abroad. [...] Network television is utterly disconnected from reality, and the American government continues to move in a very unhealthy direction, at record speed. How could this have happened?

If it was all planned in advance, then the hinge was 9/11.

And guess what? 9/11 was the hinge, even if it wasn't all planned in advance.

But ... do you ever wonder how that single hinge could allow everything to swing so far so quickly -- unless it was all planned in advance?

Does it ever seem to you that our present situation -- and the future it entails -- makes much more sense if it was all planned in advance, than if it wasn't?

Some questions just don't go away.

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NIST Report Ends The 9/11 Truth Movement

I never realized how much damage the upcoming NIST report had already done to the 9/11 Truth movement until I read about it in the Rocky Mountain News. As the RMN says: "Truthers, over and out".

Here's the piece in full with a bit of emphasis; comments to follow.

NIST report credibly explains fall of WTC 7

August 26, 2008

"What about World Trade Center 7?"

That question has always been the trump card for the "9/11 Truthers" - conspiracy buffs who have peddled the mind-boggling theory that the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were an inside job, plotted and even executed by the federal government as a way to justify the war on terror.

The answer to the Truthers' question - how that 47-story building could collapse into a fiery heap when it wasn't hit by a plane - was provided definitively in a report issued last week by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The NIST report is so exhaustive that it should put to rest wild notions, including one suggesting that bombs were planted in the structure and detonated to erase key evidence about the plot.

That said, we're not about to believe for a New York minute that the loopier 9/11 Truthers will accept those findings.

The more level-headed among us have little trouble accepting the uncomplicated (and hence credible) explanation that the 9/11 attacks were devised by Osama bin Laden and fellow jihadists to demonstrate the vulnerability of the "decadent" West to terror attacks.

Not so fast, the Truthers have insisted. What about WTC 7? Why would that structure collapse seven hours after the Twin Towers fell unless it was brought down by a controlled detonation?

The explanation, quite simply: uncontrolled fires, which burned to an intensity hot enough and long enough to compromise the steel girders holding up the structure.

The 66-page report, available at wtc.nist.gov, resulting from a three-year technical investigation, including simulations of the event, noted that the debris from World Trade Center Building 1 ignited fires on at least 10 lower floors of WTC 7. Fires on floors 7 through 9 and 11 through 13 burned for at least seven hours.

They raged unabated because the building's primary and secondary water source for sprinklers on the bottom 20 floors originated from city water mains - and those water lines were damaged by the impact of the Twin Towers collapse.

Without any way to feed water to sprinklers, fires from office furniture and paper rose to temperatures that caused the steel girders to expand. Temperatures weren't hot enough to melt the girders, but without any relief, over time the expansion compromised their integrity. A girder on the 13th floor lost contact with one of the 81 columns supporting the building. That floor collapsed, taking the eight floors below it.

Then one interior column buckled. When it failed, the 23 other central columns supporting the building soon followed, and the structure could no longer support itself.

"This is the first time that we are aware of that a building taller than about 15 stories has collapsed primarily due to fires," said NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder at a Thursday press conference.

This unprecedented event has highlighted structural vulnerabilities in other skyscrapers. And the report offered 13 recommendations for ways to make those buildings safer - some as minor as redesigning work spaces to prevent fires from spreading from one cubicle to another.

The NIST report might not placate the more unhinged Truthers. But it should prod building owners to take small steps that prevent future tragedies.

Normally I would object to being called "unhinged" and "loopy", and I would point out that no writer with a credible case would use so many heavily weighted words to slant the piece in his favor. I would strive to point out that if the case were there on its own merits, it would be much better to use the space (and the fleeting moment for which you have the reader's attention) to lay out solid facts rather than disparaging those who clearly don't have those facts. Normally I would mention that such transparent ad hominem attacks carry exactly the same weight as the throwing of shoes.

But there's nothing normal about this situation, and the RMN editorial staff is right!

I am unhinged!

This is one of the things that have unhinged me:

A building 47 stories tall disintegrating in a grand total of seven seconds! You'd come unhinged too, if you ever opened your mind and considered the ramifications of that event.

Or maybe it was this that unhinged me.

The thing is: You have to be unhinged to entertain mind-boggling theories. And this is a mind-boggling theory indeed -- it's the most mind-boggling theory ever!

And that's not because I'm unhinged: it's because something truly mind-boggling happened that day.

How can your mind not be boggled by the undeniable fact that the news of the collapse of building 7 was broadcast while the building was still standing?

Something mind-boggling is definitely going on here, surely.

The clip above shows Danny Jowenko, a Dutch demolition expert, seeing video of the collapse of WTC 7 for the first time. He doesn't know it was part of the World Trade Center complex; he doesn't know when the building went down. He just sees the video and describes what he's seen. And he's quite clear: It was a controlled demolition, a professional job; they worked hard.

NIST worked hard too -- and that's the problem with a lie like the one they're required to defend: the more ridiculous the lie, the harder it is to prop it up.

It's encouraging to see the Rocky Mountain News helping its readers along the path to truth by suggesting that uncomplicated explanations are credible -- because such is indeed the case here.

There is a very uncomplicated and very credible explanation for all these contradictions -- the very puzzling contradictions between what we know about the day and what the government keeps telling us. And the explanation is this: They're lying to us! They're covering up an enormous crime!

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