View From the Bushes

I was hoping for more comments on yesterday's blog, but oh well, I'm guessing the sheer length of the two letters probably put off a lot of people from reading yesterday's entry, to say nothing of commenting on it. Despite this lack of popular support, I've decided to continue the debate in this forum, and offer a rebuttal of my friend's letter.

Ross,

In our conversation yesterday, what I said, and I stand by it, is that there were shenanigans. Here's my thesis:

Shenanigans... hmm... Interesting that you should choose that word. We both did debate in high school so I'm sure I don't need to remind you how often topicality, or the definition of words, becames important in a debate. By using this word you've set yourself a really low standard. Dictionary.com defines it as a deceitful trick or an underhanded act. Wow, a deceitful trick in world politics/terrorism, you truly do have a herculean task ahead of you. Still, all sarcasm aside, you do make some individual points that are worth looking at:

* The government had covert operatives, vast intelligence organizations, procedures and policies, and plenty of fighter jets. The Bush administration nevertheless allowed not one, but TWO identical attacks to be perpetrated by known enemies of US on the same day. The airplane crashing scenario was not widely known by civilians, but Washington had been aware of the possibility of for quite a while. It's their job to detect it, stop it in advance, and intervene once it starts. They failed. It ended in the worst possible scenario, with two gigantic buildings being completely destroyed. Total failure. At best it was unbelievable incompetence and a total lack of leadership.

By any reasonable estimate 8 months is not a lot of time to change all the "covert operations, vast intelligence organizations, procedures and policies." If you accept that and if you've ever dealt with the federal burearacracy I think you'd have to. Then the failure of these "resources" is probably a failure of the governments which came before Bush. So yeah, at best it was "unbelievable incompetence and total lack of leadership." But it is also myopic at best and a complete prevaracation at worst to lay all of the lack of competence and leadership at the feet of Bush. Also, this is a strange position for someone who hates the Patriot Act as much as you do. You blame the government for not stopping 9/11 but then when they want to increase the spying, you go ballistic over that as well. So which is it, are you comfortable with a certain risk, as long as your civil liberties are infringed, or would you rather give up all your liberties if it would prevent another 9/11? It's hard to have it both ways...

* The explanation given by NIST is complicated, hard to believe, and doesn't match the evidence very well. Until I did some background checking myself I believed it simply on the assumption that they wouldn't make it up. But after looking at it myself and looking at some past data, I doubt that their explanation is correct.

I don't think anyone's hubris is such that they profess to know every detail of what happened, but without more specificity about what exactly is "hard to believe" or "doesn't match the evidence," it's difficult for me to offer any better rebuttal than that.

Are our leaders conspiring terrorists, bumblers lying to cover their incompetent performance, or just so stupid that they actually have no idea what happened? I would put the odds on #2, but I hold it against them whichever it is.

So you think they're most likely "bumblers lying to cover their incompetent performance?" We're still talking about what caused the collapse of the tower right? Because while I can certainly imagine incompetant acts that would have led to the attack happening in the first place, I'm having a hard time seeing a connection between Bush's incompetence and the actual collapse. Did Bush own a company which manufactured the infamous angle clip?

**snip**

But it's clear that there are inconsistencies in the government explanation, and that occam's razor was NOT employed by FEMA and NIST in concocting the official government statement on what happened. Occam said: "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything". There is no implication that an explanation is simple because it is a commonly held belief or because it is propounded by a source of authority.

At what point in our discussions have I implied that Occam's Razor had anything to do with popularity or correlated with government support? I'm merely saying that "The simplest answer is usually the correct answer," which is a reasonable translation of Numquam ponenda est pluritas sine necessitate. (Occam did not say "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything," that was later authors) And in this case I think they definitely followed Occam. A plane flies into a building; it collapses. What caused it to collapse? The plane. It's the essence of Occam. Even if we use your version of the Razor, you're multiplying entities. Everyone agrees that a plane hit the building. If you add demolitions on top of that you're multiplying the entities, without any clear reason (that we've covered so far) why couldn't it just be the plane.

**snip**

(1) Skyscrapers have been hit by airplanes before--never with similar results. For example, a b-25 bomber full of fuel crashed into the empire state building and exploded. It was not destroyed, nor was the steel in the building melted.

http://history1900s.about.com/library/misc/blempirecrash.htm

***EDIT 2/3/2006 ***
Sometimes you're writing and thinking as fast as you can, and stuffs just pouring out, you start to lose key facts like the units after numbers, so at some point 10 tons and 10,000 gallons just became 10 and 10,000. As a result I made a major error. This is the original:

This is a really bad example. According to your own link the B-25 weighed only 10 tons. The planes that struck the WTC were carrying 1,000 times that much weight just in fuel. Let's be honest here, there's really no comparison.

Here's the new argument:

The B-25 wasn't going nearly as fast, it wasn't being driven with the intent to do as much damage as possible, but rather probably the least. While I was smoking crack with the 1,000 times, the 767 does weigh 20 times as much as the B-25, and look (since you are so found of visual evidence) at the picturethe picture is there really any comparison between the hole you see there and what you saw the morning of September 11th?

***END EDIT***

And if you read the Wikipedia Article on 9/11, they make the claim that the Empire State building is a lot tougher and might have survived the same strike that brought down the WTC ("...some engineers strongly believe skyscrapers of more traditional design (such as New York City's Empire State Building and Malaysia's Petronas Towers) would have fared much better under the circumstances, perhaps standing indefinitely.")

(2) Lots of steel-framed concrete buildings have caught on fire before, but a building like the trade-towers has not collapsed from a fire before, that I can find a history of using google. For example, venesuela's tallest building burned out of control for 17 hours without collapsing. You can find more stories this if you look for them. Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia caught on fire and burned for 24 hours, but still didn't collapse.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1389

According to your own link it did not burn out of control for 17 hours: military helicopters dropped water on it, which the article itself points out helped to reduce structural damage. Also, based on the article they did not know what caused it, but there certainly wasn't 10,000 gallons of fuel present, nor the complicating factor of losing all the structure bearing elements on one of the four sides because of a plane. Also, if you read the article I linked to yesterday he talked about how in conventional fires the "heat" (not the temperature) is much less and even though something might last 17 hours, parts of the building have a chance to cool when the fire moves on.

(3) 85 minutes my ass. Burning jet fuel would have to be really concentrated, and in massive quantity to melt steel, or even weaken it. And it would need to burn for a long time. The melting point of steel is about 2750 Degrees Farenheight, and there was a lot of steel supporting those buildings. Steel doesn't even start to soften until 1100 degrees or so. Those buildings were built specifically to withstand an airplane impact and subsequent fire caused by burning fuel.

There is a pretty famous letter from an executive at the UL laboritories. That's who certified the steel used in the twin towers. Essentially the exec says "there is no way the steel softened or melted from jet fuel or office fires."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/RYA411A.html
http://www.voicesofsept11.org/archive/911ic/082703.php

You can google and find many reprints of that letter online. He is not saying the steel didn't melt--he is saying it wasn't from the planes or the fuel or from a structural defect in the steel.

No one with any sense is saying that the steel melted, and I agree this letter is powerful evidence that we don't know everything, and even goes to show that there may have been some shenanigans, but moving from this to secondary explosives is still a leap you can't rationally make. It only takes the failure of a single key component like the angle clips mentioned in the Nova article, for the whole thing to come down. You don't have to change the entire building into liquid.

(4) The very same Osama Bin Laden we allege is behind 9-11 snuck a big tank of cyanide and a huge truck full of explosives into that very same building and tried to blow it up back in 1993. So clearly it is possible to get explosives into the towers or at least parts of them without being detected. If you had an inside man, it seems it would be plausible to get explosives into the building lots of different ways.

Driving in a truck full of fertilizer is orders of magnitude less difficult than wiring explosives to bring a building down in a controlled demolition, and why did they wait the two hours; why not just bring it down when it would kill the most people? Why have the planes at all? This avenue is the portal to Moonbat land, turn around!! Save yourself!!

The official explanation is neither simple nor consistent with other evidence, which is what occam's razor is all about. According to NIST, two well-designed buildings collapsed within hours of each other due to the exact same "fluke." It would be the first time that a fire OR an airplane impact or both ever caused a steel-framed skyscraper to collapse uniformly and suddenly. And according to the official story, it happened TWICE, on one day, two times within literally a few minutes, and both towers were completely obliterated.

While I'm happy you no longer dismiss Occam's Razor out of hand, I still think you haven't quite caught the spirit of it. As far as the buildings being well designed, most of what I've read indicates that while it wasn't poorly designed, it wasn't without its weaknesses (the quote above about the differences in design between it and other skyscrapers are examples of this point). As far as the first time argument, well it's because it's the first time it's ever happened. All of the other examples are so different that direct comparisons are impossible to draw.

If you watch the videos in slow motion, you will see two buildings collapsing in what looks like a demolition. And so occam's razor would suggest that it was, in fact, a demolition. If you see something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and makes duck noises, then occam's razor suggests that it is probably a duck. And NIST asserts a far more complicated scenario that has NEVER happened before to any other skyscraper (and that the designers of the building took great cause to prevent.) While I don't believe that occam's razor proves anything (it's just an approach to looking for evidence) I certainly don't think that in this case it supports the official government statement on the matter.

It "looks?" Seriously, "looks?" Your concluding piece of evidence is that it "looks" a certain way? Could you be less scientific? Saying a platypus looks like nothing from this world does not make it an alien. And of course it looks like a demolition, because that's basically what it was, an accidental demolition. I guess what you really mean to say is that it looks like a controlled demolition. In the very next breath you say a similar accidental demolition has "NEVER happened," so how on Earth are you so confident that you can tell the difference between an accidental demolition and a controlled demolition, just by looking at it?

If you read carefully in the letter from the UL Exec above, you will note that he refers to an August 2003 reversal of position by the the inspectors who formulated the official government statement on the collapse of the towers.

Granted. The letter is far and away your best piece of evidence. You probably should have just stuck with that.

I think YOU want to use occam's razor to say: "Well, a government conspiracy or cover-up is much more complicated than an exceptionally unlikely double-disaster," but in fact I think we have plenty of evidence that incompetence could have (and has in fact in the past) allowed people to get explosives into the towers and that the government has covered up lots of incompetence.

You seem to be indicating here that the fact that both towers fell multiplies the improbablity of the event. On the contrary: if two identically designed buildings both get hit by an airplane and one falls and the other doesn't, that would be the head-scratcher, and I'm sure that you would using it as more evidence of conspiracy ("Why did one building fall and the other didn't?")

It's a pretty far-out suggestion that some faction of the government was responsible for the terrorist attacks. I don't have to believe something that sinister in order to think the government explanation is BS--and to hold them responsible for their failure to prevent or intervene. And that is the second reason why I am furious with the bush administration. Shenanigans.

You seem to be really back-pedaling here at the very end, and I'm not sure what to make of it. Yeah, we probably don't know every last detail of why the towers fell (particularly WTC7, which I'm surprised you haven't mentioned). Yeah, given that the government is engaged in shenanigans all the time it's fairly likely that there are some shenanigans involved with respect to 9/11. But to go from this to proving that something other than being hit by a 767 is what caused the towers to collapse is a whole different, and much more tenuous, conclusion.

The True Disciple of Occam
Ross

P.S. If you made it this far you probably deserve an award. I'm not sure how much longer this will continue, but unless I hear a lot of complaints I think I'll keep mining it for material. I should mention that after several months of effort I finally finished "The Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Wow! Anyway, that's all for today.

Posted by direkobold at February 2, 2006 03:37 PM