Deep State Fragments

This item appeared elsewhere on April 12, 2007 The attacks of 9/11 fit in very well with the already planned war to topple Saddam, says a former speechwriter for the first President Bush in a scathing denunciation of the current Bush presidency. In his book "Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy Rollers and Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP" [Sourcebooks, 2007], Victor Gold says the neo-conservatives around the current President Bush were highly motivated to arrange a pretext for war. Gold writes, "Had it not been for 9/11, the Bush White House, determined to go to war, would no doubt have seized on some synthetic provocation, on the order of the one LBJ used to push through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965," adding that a number of elder neocons were at the time Johnson Democrats. The expansion of the war to include North Vietnam and to justify major troop deployments was based on a murky incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in which North Vietnamese coast g

Says Bush was untruthful about reason for Iraq war This is a copy of a page that appeared Oct. 23, 2009. I posted an item on this matter when Greenspan's memoir The Age of Turbulence was published in 2007. He didn't alter his words for the updated version that discussed the first phase of last year's financial crises. In the days following Sept. 11, 2001, said former Fed chief Alan Greenspan, "There was no bigger question in Washington than, Why no second attack?" (Page 227) He wrote: "If al Qaeda's intent was to disrupt the U.S. economy, as bin Laden had declared, the attacks had to continue. Our society was open, our borders porous, and our ability to detect weapons and bombs was weak. I asked this question of a lot of people at the highest levels of government, and no one seemed to have a convincing response." (Emphasis added.) In other words, Greenspan thought there was something fishy about the attacks and the war on terror. Green

Where is the timeline? expert asks By PAUL CONANT Znewz1, Dec. 27, 2007 Problems of professionalism dog the official account of the collapses of the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, according to a fire scientist who once served as a division chief for the investigating agency. James G. Quintiere, a fire science professor at the University of Maryland, charges that the National Institute of Standards and Technology failed to use subpoena power in order to obtain all evidence, issued a murky report that "defies reading and analysis," failed to do relevant experiments, and failed to give a "clear account of the logic they used in explaining collapse mechanisms." Quintiere, in a published paper provided to this writer, said each NIST investigator wrote a separate analysis, which was then cobbled into the main report and "there was not a full integration of the work as each passed their work on to the other." Quintiere charged that the NIST had failed to

This article, which first appeared somewhere around 2002 or 2003, preceded efforts by President George Bush and various humanitarian groups to promote the spread of cheap anti-HIV drugs globally. That effort seems to have mitigated the probability of imminent global disaster. Paul Conant is an internet journalist Conant is not an epidemiologist If you see an error, please email him at krypto at gmail dot com. By PAUL CONANT A global population cataclysm should occur no later than 2028 if the Third World pandemic is left unchecked, according to my simple but I think not simplistic calculation. An activist scientist, Andrew M. Sessler, agrees with me on the scope of the problem, though he is wary of the precise numbers (as am I, actually). Another scientist, James B. Watson of 'double helix' fame, argues in his 2003 book DNA: the secret of life that current methods are unlikely to stave off a global AIDS catastrophe, despite effective controls in developed countries.

By PAUL CONANT Time: 12:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Sept. 12, 2001. Place: In the Manhattan buffer zone uptown from the twin towers catastrophe. When I first arrived in the buffer zone between 14th and Houston streets, surrealistic scenes greeted me. Police cars in motion covered with ash and dust; a convoy of giant earth movers filled with skyscraper rubble; emergency rescue vehicles on unspecified missions. No one was afoot except for me and a few drunks, addicts and homeless persons. At the key intersection of Houston and 6th Av. (also known as the Avenue of the Americas) I shared a bench with a homeless woman, watching as emergency vehicles came and went, convoys of dump trucks were deployed and city buses ferried police, firefighters, volunteers and construction workers in and out of the death zone. I wandered up and down East Houston, noting the trucks laden with scaffolding parked and ready to roll. I stood on a footbridge over FDR Drive watching streams of emergency vehicle

By Paul Conant A ZNEWZ1 special report Copyright 2007 Permission is granted to reproduce this article in full or in part, free of charge. Scientists, some with Ivy League credentials, are battling over whether official accounts of the 9/11 attacks are trustworthy. In particular, the collapses of the twin World Trade Center towers are the focus of spirited debate. The controversy, which has raged outside the realm of scholarly journals, is largely an internet phenomenon, though it has spilled over into hard-copy magazines. In the fall of 2006, a leftist magazine published three articles by Manuel Garcia Jr., a government weapons lab physicist, whose aim was to debunk 9/11 "myths." One of his concerns was that critics were saying that collapse times were too short to have occurred unaided by explosives. Garcia, who holds a doctorate in aeronautical and mechanical engineering from Princeton University, published a calculation in Alexander Cockburn's "Counterpunch"

This piece first appeared Jan. 16, 2007. Draft 3  includes some editorial changes, but no physical or mathematical changes. For Draft 2, included were data on elastic collisions and not only on perfectly inelastic collisions, as in Draft 1. The reader may wonder whether my simplifications suffice, but I have attempted to ensure that real-world events could only have taken longer. In some extremely spare models, the collapse times are close enough to [purportedly] recorded times to make the reader wonder whether there is a case against the government story here. I suggest that these spare scenarios are too favorable to the government. But, then, there's a faint chance that they are not. So what is needed is further investigation of this matter. The NIST said it could find no evidence of the use of planted explosives and yet ducked a scientific analysis of, or even informed opinion about, fall times. Obviously such an analysis is potential evidence, meaning the government

This piece first appeared April 17, 2007. Just a note to amplify a previous post which takes a look at the energy deficit problem for the twin towers. Correction (April 26, 2007): A mass estimate has been revised to 7 x 108kilograms per building. This is quite a trivial matter, since the numerical mass is irrelevant. It is the energy ratio that is important. We may regard the energy associated with the buoyant force as the binding energy of the lower structure of the 417-floor WTC2. Most of this energy went into the construction such that the structure could bear the load above. We could think of this energy as internal energy. That is, if the entire structure collapses, how much energy should be released? We feel safe to say that the energy must be at least as much as is required to raise a block to a specified height. That is, it must be at least mgy for a specific block and height. Though there may be some justification for a discrete summation, which I used in a previous ver

First published March 2, 2007. Are roof-to-ground collapses plausible? WTC1 Height: 420 meters Mean distance per floor: 3.82m Collapse began at: floor 94 Mass of top block: 0.145M or less, where M is the mass of the entire building (we have neglected the mass of the airliner) Energy required to keep top block in place: mgy = 0.145M(9.8)(359.08)meters = (510.25M)Joules Energy inherent in fail-safe design to keep top block in place: 2mgy or more = (1020.5M)J or more Energy converted to entanglement or damage energy after the top block falls one story onto the bottom block: Less than 1/2mv 2 = 0.5(0.145M)(8.65)2 = (5.43M)J This represents less than 1 percent of the normal force energy of (510.25M)J. Remaining potential energy in top block at time of collision: mgy - 1/2mv 2 = (504.82M)J. Considering that such a small amount of energy was available to inflict structural damage, it seems problematic that the damage energy was not dissipated rapidly near the top of the u

This piece was first published as Draft 2 on April 4, 2007. It corrects and updates previous draft. How long did it take the World Trade Center's two tallest towers to fall? The answer is crucial to the government's "modified pancake theory" of collapse. But, government information on fall times is difficult to locate. The National Institute of Standards and Technology web search engine revealed nothing for "NCSTAR, seconds." NCSTAR is the codeword for the main (2005) and backup reports on the collapses of the twin towers. Unfortunately, I don't have access to my hard copy of those reports to see whether fall times are given (which might be dicey, given that there is no real index). I do know that the NIST's computer models halt at the point "global collapse" begins. The 9/11 commission report, its appendices and transcripts of public hearings have been taken offline by the Bush administration. Various attempts at searching Google Sc

This post appeared elsewhere on June 2, 2007 Here's a thumbnail of the scenario used by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to justify its computer modeling: When the plane collided with a tower, a spray of debris "sandblasted" the core columns, stripping them of fireproofing. Some fireproofing may have come off because of the vibrations on impact. Some jet fuel immediately burst into flame, in a fireball seen from the street, with some of the fiery fuel dropping down the core elevator shaft and spilling out onto random floors, setting a few afire. Jet fuel, whether fueling an explosion or an ordinary fire, cannot produce enough energy to critically weaken naked core columns in the time alloted, the NIST found. Hence, the NIST presumed that fires were accelerated by the jet fuel but got hot enough from office materials and furnishings, which the NIST variously put at five pounds per square foot or four pounds per square foot on average. Though t

This article appeared in PrisonPlanet December 6, 2008 Paul Conant Znewz1 Saturday, Dec 06, 2008 Federal scientists ruled out controlled demolitions of three World Trade Center towers but declined to perform routine tests on soil and debris for traces of explosives or incendiaries, a review of National Institute of Standards and Technology publications shows. The agency, which spent $16 million on its inquiry into the Sept. 11, 2001, collapses, said such tests weren’t needed because computer simulations and other considerations had shown that controlled demolitions were improbable. In an August 2006 fact sheet, the agency frankly admits that it did not test trade center steel for the residue of explosives or the incendiaries thermite and thermate. The agency’s decision to omit routine tests contrasts with its assertion that “some 200 technical experts — including about 85 career NIST experts and 125 leading experts from the private sector and academia — reviewed tens of thousan

This piece was originally published Jan. 18, 2008. This essay is a year or so overdue, but the Hearst book discussed remains displayed prominently on chain book store shelves. Jan. 31, 2008: Reader comments caused me to adjust two points, one concerning debris ejection, and another concerning Ground Zero hot spots, and to delete a paragraph about load-bearing columns. I apologize for running a very tight operation and not providing photos. But relevant photos are available on the internet, though they must be viewed with caution. However, a well-financed book that omits relevant photos will draw reproach. How could pilots with very poor training have managed to execute the 9/11 attacks so precisely? Hearst writers have the answer: The hijackers "did not have to perform what flight-training professionals consider to be the three most difficult aspects of flying: taking off, flying through inclement weather, and landing." So say Popular Mechanics writers in Debunking