Rumsfeld-Cheney Cabal? Not Guilty.

They had absolutely nothing to do with the Columbine High School massacre.

And, after much digging, reading, viewing, listening, debating and thinking, I also believe that the balance of probabilities is against them being guilty of causing the freefall collapse of the twin towers. Specifically I am now 99.9% certain that there were no controlled demolitions in WTC 1 or 2.

I was prompted to this confession by one of my readers drawing attention to this posting I'd made back in July (it was about Fox News' handling of an interview with one of the "911-Scholars" - Dr Jim Fetzer). He wanted permission to repost it and whereas I don't normally think twice about granting such, (just attribute and backlink and it's all yours folks) on this occasion I had to pause to consider whether that post still represented my views on the issue. Fortunately it did.

The questions it raises remain legitimate and the only way to deal with them satisfactorily is to set up an investigation headed by trusted scientists, engineers and forensic specialists, with unlimited powers to peer into all the dark corners the State (and others) would prefer not to expose to the light of day.

What I now suspect, however, is that such an investigation would honestly conclude that there genuinely is no evidence to support the Controlled Demolition (CD) hypothesis. Nor, indeed, is there any need for such an explanation in respect of the most glaring oddity in respect of the attack, viz the near freefall collapse of the twin towers. I am, in other words, (almost) convinced that there is likely to be an "innocent" explanation.

For me, one of the most persuasive factors in reaching this conclusion has been this interview snippet with Leslie Robertson, the "man who built the world trade centre". I first saw it in 2002 and it has stuck with me ever since. As I've said (in the description) when I uploaded that snippet to youtube:

If anyone can be said to understand the structure of the World Trade Centre, this man is at the top of the list.

If anyone has a vested interest in finding an alternative explanation (other than his design "flaws") for the rapid and catastrophic collapse of the Towers, this man is at the top of the list.

If he thought, for one moment, that it was impossible for the towers to collapse as they did, without the aid of a controlled demolition, then surely he'd have been shouting it from the rooftops. If he thought the CD hypothesis was a remotely plausible alternative he would surely have given some indication of sympathy towards it. His failure to jump on the CD bandwagon - or indeed to look for anything which might reduce his own burden of responsibility for the deaths he failed to prevent - is, in my view, particularly compelling. (Incidentally - in case it's not obvious - I don't agree with his own apparent self assessment. No architect or builder should blame themselves because their structure failed to survive a literally (previously) "unthinkable" attack. He, more than most, is "not guilty")

Be that as it may, there are other major flaws with the CD hypothesis, not least the clear absence of typical CD explosions. Check out any of the CD samples around the web (this one of the Landmark Tower demolition is a typical example) and you will not find ANY (with reasonable soundtracks) where you do not hear very distinct "transients" - sharp sounds typical of and consistent with the string of explosions which are required to conduct a CD. Yet despite dozens of video and audio recordings of the collapse of the towers, and despite the fact that we can clearly hear other loud noises created by the collapse itself, there is literally not a single transient peak consistent with a demolition charge.

This description of the collapse (mp3 - 1.5mb) from the inside, by the Ladder 6 crew - who miraculously survived the collapse because it bypassed their corner of Stairwell B in the North Tower - is particularly relevant. Their graphic account very clearly talks about the "boom boom boom" of the floors hitting one another and mentions no explosive noises at all. It is frankly inconceivable that experienced firefighters would have failed to hear or mention the explosions consistent with the CD hypothesis.

The counter to that argument is to postulate the use of thermate which isn't an explosive but is, instead, a fast burner which doesn't make noises we could reasonably expect to have heard. This explanation is also held to account for the streams of molten metal seen dripping from the tower and for the molten metal still being found in the ruins some weeks later. However, although thermate provides a plausible answer for molten metal, it is not a plausible answer for a tightly co-ordinated CD which results in a free-fall collapse. In short you won't find a single engineer to support the idea that you could trigger a cascade necessary to explain what we saw using thermate. Its burn rate is nothing like as predictable as explosives and to achieve the collapses with explosives would have required millisecond accuracy well beyond the "performance envelope" of thermate.

Yet the towers obviously did collapse in near freefall. So I'm guessing that we're going to find, whenever the real investigation is allowed to begin, that there is a flaw in the Chinese researchers' model (the one that suggests the "Progressive Pancake" hypothesis is viable but that the collapses should have taken 10 times longer than they actually did) and I'm even prepared to hazard a guess as to what that flaw may be.

I think we'll find that their calculations are based on the resistance offered by the floors at both connecting points - i.e. to the core and to the external walls. I suspect, however, that the manner of the collapse should be thought of more like peeling a banana, with the walls being pushed away from the floors not by the collapse reaching the floor, but by the collapse reaching the previous floor. The debris preceding the main collapse being enough to push the walls
out and away, breaking the links with the floors before the main mass hit them.

The result of which was that the external walls (through their connection with the floors) offered literally zero resistance to the major descending mass and the "only" thing the collapsing tower had to do as it came down was to slice off the connections to the core. Whilst this may have offered significant resistance at the top of the building, the increasing mass during the descent would have rendered it less and less significant. Whether that would be enough
to account for the near freefall collapse I don't know, but my gut says that something like that is going to be the answer.

As a result of these considerations and others I won't bore you with, I am now pretty well convinced that there was no CD. This line of reasoning does not, however, deal with the anomaly of WTC 7 which collapsed symmetrically, despite asymmetric damage and without the aid of an aircraft impact. I have been unable to find - or even invent - any half decent explanation for that collapse but, given my current thinking in regard to the absence of a CD in respect of towers 1 and 2, I am forced to conclude that it is extremely unlikely that building 7 was brought down by a CD either.

Indeed, that logic works the other way. If we ever prove that WTC 7 was brought down by a CD, then that makes foul play in the other two towers much more likely - which is what drew me in to considering the CD Conspiracy Theory in the first place. (I was never particularly convinced about 1 & 2, but I've always been much more convinced by 7 and it remains a genuine unexplained mystery)

Nor does any of this mean that I now consider the Rumsfeld-Cheney cabal innocent of all charges in relation to 9-11.

It is still possible and plausible that they knew, ahead of time, that the attacks were going to take place; that they deliberately failed to raise any alarm; that they conspired to provide optimum conditions for the attack (standing down the defences with dummy exercises etc); and even (possibly if not quite plausibly) that they authorised the placement of automatic guidance hardware and or software on the planes in order to ensure that they hit their targets with a level of accuracy which is otherwise difficult to explain (particularly in the case of the Pentagon - where, for me, the real question remains: "why did the attackers, who had a completely unobstructed approach towards the vip section of the Pentagon, in which Rumsfeld and dozens of other legitimate military and political targets were present at the time, choose instead to fly over that juicy target and perform a very difficult and precise diving turn finishing on a cluttered approach to the most heavily fortified and least populated section of the building?" A strangely "considerate" choice of target wouldn't you say?)

My guess, however, is that, on this occasion at least, we will not find conclusive evidence that they conspired to assist the mass murder of the thousands of their fellow citizens.

Their real exploitation of the events of 9-11 is likely to be "limited" to the imposition of the Police State of America, the illegal invasion of Iraq and to taking the opportunity afforded by a miraculously convenient "New Pearl Harbour" to begin the implementation of their Project For The New American Century; all of which activities contain more than enough war crimes to justify the death penalty if and when they are ever brought to justice.

We don't need Controlled Demolition to bring the bastards down.