WTC 7: FEMA report and NIST prelim report: What about pre-collapse leaning and the transit???

Over the next week or two I plan to write a series of posts about WTC 7, culminating in the promised detailed explanation of why I think WTC 7’s collapse most likely wasn’t purely “natural,” i.e. why I think it most likely wasn’t caused just by debris damage plus subseequent (non-arson) fires. But first, in this and the next few posts, I’ll look at the official reports plus some other stuff that various defenders of the official story have asked me to read.

I’m now studying both of the following:

• Appendix L – Interim Report on WTC 7 (PDF) in NIST’s June 2004 Progress Report
• Chapter 5 (PDF) of the FEMA report

Richard Gage’s slide show, WTC 7 section: Reply to charlienneb

I’ll now reply to charlienneb’s review of the section on WTC 7 in Richard Gage’s powerpoint presentation.

Proposed debate with Jim Hoffman (reply to ref1 and some folks in the JREF forum)

Today I noticed an incoming link from a thread about Jim Hoffman on the JREF forum, where ref1, a.k.a. ref, relayed my message about a possible debate between Jim Hoffman and a “debunker.”

The 9/11 Truth movement and me: Further reply to Pat Curley

On the Screw Loose Change blog, in the comments on Pat Curley’s recent post about me (to which I replied here), the first three comments were as follows:

They are blatently going to crucify her.
Jon | 11.21.07 – 1:43 pm |

If Diane continues on this path, she will join Mikey Metz in the land of Ex-truthers.
Anonymous | 11.21.07 – 1:59 pm |

Actually I foresee both those things happening, and in that order.
Pat Curley | Homepage | 11.21.07 – 2:13 pm |

WTC 7: Reply to Pat at Screw Loose Change

On the Screw Loose Change blog, Pat seems to like my post Demolition of WTC: Let’s not overstate the case, please in which I object to some flawed arguments for the idea of demolition – although I do indeed believe it’s likely that WTC 1, 2, and 7 were brought down by more than just plane impacts plus subsequent fires. But he then says:

(she apparently does not know about the photos of WTC 7 which clearly show the building collapsed slightly to the south, not symmetrically by any means).

Not only am I already aware of the argument that WTC 7 “collapsed slightly to the south,” I already responded to it a long time ago in my post Straight-down collapse of WTC 7 – what do “debunkers” say?, which I referred to in yesterday’s post.

Demolition of WTC: Let’s not overstate the case, please

On the Truth Action board, we’ve been having an interesting discussion about the evidence for controlled demolition of the WTC buildings, starting on this page.

There is disagreement about how sure we should be about the idea that WTC 1, 2, and 7 were demolished with explosives and/or thermite. Some, including YT, are 100% sure, while others, such as John Doraemi and Nicholas, believe that it’s likely but not 100% proven. I’m in the latter camp, though not to quite the same extent as John and Nicholas. On the next page of the above Truth Action thread, I voiced some of my own opinions about the need for caution in how we present the case for controlled demolition of the WTC buildings. Below, I’ll voice more of my thoughts on this matter.

In my opinion, we shouldn’t be claiming that the WTC buildings definitely were demolished with explosives and/or thermite. Instead, our claim should be that there’s enough evidence for demolition to warrant a serious and truly independent investigation with subpoena power.

Furthermore, we need to be careful about how we argue for the likelihood of demolition. We need to make sure our arguments are sound; otherwise we risk discrediting ourselves.

To me it seems that a lot of people in the 9/11 Truth movement have overstated the case for demolition and have used some faulty arguments (as well as some good arguments) for the likelihood of demolition. Below is my assessment of various arguments that I’ve seen used:

False flag terror (Review of 911proof.com, Part 1)

The website 911proof.com contains a very good, concise introduction to many of the problems with the official story of 9/11. In this and subsequent blog entries I’ll examine the evidence presented there.

Wiesenthal Center slanders 9/11 Truth movement. We must avoid bigoted response.

Very scary: Simon Wiesenthal Center presents 9/11 sites alongside radical Jihadist sites to House Hearing on “Terrorism and the Internet”, as reported on 911blogger, referring to an earlier post CSPAN Hearing coverage conflates 9/11 Truth sites with Jihadist sites.

To accuse us of being associated with “radical Jihadists” is the worst possible slander, given current laws.

As Reprehensor says:

Here at 911blogger we are opposed to any and all terrorist activities, including STATE SPONSORED TERRORISM. Don’t really care who the state is either. It’s all bad.

Truth Action forum discussion about “bankers,” anti-Illuminism, and the religious right wing

On the Truth Action message board, there are now the beginnings of some discussion about the promulgation of right-wing-style anti-“banking system” hysteria and anti-Illuminism within the 9/11 Truth movement.

“LIHOP” vs. “MIHOP”?

Well, I learned something new today. I thought I knew what “LIHOP” and “MIHOP” meant. Apparently, not quite.

As I understood it, LIHOP (“Let It Happen On Purpose”) is the view that the events of 9/11 were primarily Al Qaeda’s doing, but that high officials in the U.S. government were aware of the plot and deliberately let it happen for political convenience, whereas MIHOP (“Made It Happen On Purpose”) is the view that that the 9/11 attacks were primarily the work of a cabal within the U.S. government, and that any foreign terrorists involved were at most patsies.

However, judging by a discussion I got into in the thread NIST Report Release Date for WTC 7: Second anniversary! on the TruthAction board, it turns out that some folks use “LIHOP” to refer to any hypothesis that involves real live human hijackers at all, even if, say, the CIA was ultimately behind their activities. Some folks also reserve the term “MIHOP” for those hypotheses that don’t involve any foreign terrorists at all, even as patsies.

More about the FAA, NORAD, and intercepts

A couple of nights ago, I posted the thread FAA regs, in effect 9/11/2001, found on Internet Archive in the TruthAction forum, asking if anyone knows of any pre-9/11 examples of intercepts of passenger jets approaching major cities. Detailed knowledge of such cases would be helpful in establishing whether the performance of the FAA and/or NORAD on 9/11/2001 was, in fact, drastically below par for its era.

So far, no such specific cases have been brought to my attention. But some other very interesting information has been posted to the above thread, including the following excerpt from the Appendix on Air Defense on 9/11 in the 2004 Complaint & Petition to the NY Attorney General (Spitzer at the time) for a new criminal investigation into 9/11:

Taking responsibility for counteracting bigotry in our midst

Many people in the 9/11 Truth movement are appalled by the blatant Jew-hating of once-respected 9/11 Truth activists such as Eric Hufschmid and Christopher Bollyn. But how should we counter such bigotry?

Some 9/11 Truth activists think the thing to do is simply to refuse to associate with the Jew-haters. But that, in my opinion, is a band-aid solution. We need to address the deeper problem of how some bigoted ideologies, primarily though not exclusively anti-Jewish, are being promulgated these days within various political movements including the 9/11 Truth movement.

Jew-hating ideologies are most commonly promulgated in disguised form. The two favorite disguises seem to be:

“Stand down” evidence on the “Emperor’s Clothes” site, including FAA web pages

The website Emperor’s Clothes contains a fairly good, though outdated and incomplete, presentation of evidence for a NORAD stand down on 9/11 (or at least a de facto stand down, even if there wasn’t an explicit stand down order). It’s outdated because it does not take into account the 9/11 Commission Report, which put all the blame on the FAA for not contacting NORAD soon enough about all four planes. It’s also lacking some other pieces of information I still haven’t seen anywhere, but which would be needed in order to prove that either the FAA or NORAD was indeed responding slower than normal on 9/11.

But the “Emperor’s Clothes” website does contain quite a few relevant links to the FAA site, useful in analyzing whether the newest version of the official story is credible, and also very useful (though not sufficient) on the more general issue of whether Flight 77 could have been intercepted (and then either forced down or shot down) before it hit the Pentagon. These links are all broken, but I was able to find all the referenced pages on the Internet Archive site. Links to the archived FAA pages, and some other relevant archived pages, will be provided further down on this page. These pages are a vital piece of evidence, filling one of the gaps I complained about in War games, etc.: A preliminary overview of some of Mark Robinowitz’s evidence about 9/11.

Fractional reserve banking: A response to some of the hullabaloo

The banking system is certainly not above criticism. However, as I pointed out in a comment after my post on Chip Berlet and “conspiracism”, there are at least three reasons to be wary of some of the allegations about the Federal Reserve System that have been circulated widely in the 9/11 Truth movement:

1. Many of the more inflammatory allegations originated in anti-Jewish propaganda. Although the people who repeat these allegations are not necessarily Jew-haters themselves, and although the anti-Jewish origin of a claim does not, in itself, prove the claim to be false, it is a good reason to be suspicious. At the very least, it’s a good reason to double-check the accuracy of the claim rather than repeat it uncritically. An example is the claim that the Federal Reserve System makes huge profits that go into the pockets of the owners of member banks, a claim I questioned in my post about Some of the rhetoric against the Federal Reserve System. I subsequently learned that one of the main sources for the more extreme claims about the Federal Reserve System is Eustace Mullins, a notorious Jew-hater.

For more information, see: