BBC vs 9/11 Truth: The Smear Continues

BBC vs 9/11 Truth: The Smear Continues

Winter Patriot
Sunday, February 18, 2007

LOOKOUT AGAIN!
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2007/180207smearcontinues.htm

Here comes another load of manure from the BBC!

We wondered what kind of documentary the BBC was making about 9/11, and it's becoming clearer by the day. Guy Smith, producer of the upcoming BBC "Conspiracy Files" episode on 9/11, laid the groundwork in a piece called "We're all conspiracy theorists at heart" which was published by the BBC on Friday. In that piece, Smith claims conspiracy theories persist because people are natural story-tellers who instinctively look for elaborate tales to describe events beyond their control. Your nearly frozen correspondent replied with "BBC vs 9/11 Truth: The Smear Begins". I urge you to read both pieces if you have any doubts about our respective positions, or motivations.

On Saturday the BBC laid the next layer of infrastructure for its coming propaganda barrage, under the curiously misleading headline: Q&A: What really happened

In BBC vs 9/11 Truth: The Smear Begins, I half-jokingly claimed the upcoming documentary would be "nothing more nor less than Popular Mechanics on skates". Imagine my surprise, then, to see the current BBC offering taking the same approach used by PM.

The BBC purports to explain the events of 9/11 by asking and answering 10 questions, and I will deal with each of them, briefly or otherwise, below. But first let's talk about why this approach -- the attempted "debunking" of selected "conspiracy theories" -- is an unsatisfactory approach to the problem.
The Madness In The Method
The common approach taken by both BBC and Popular Mechanics consists of a series of vignettes. In each one, they pick out an anomaly between the official story and the available evidence of what really happened, they detail one possible explanation for that anomaly (which both BBC and Popular Mechanics helpfully refer to as a "conspiracy theory"), and then they allegedly debunk the "conspiracy theory" using one means or another.

It's a three-step process and it's vulnerable to corruption at every step. We'll talk about this more below. But here I want to mention a very important limitation on the method. Even if this approach were carried out with rigorous logic, even if no corruption were allowed at any stage of the process, it would still prove unsatisfactory for the following reasons:

[1] There's a vast difference between proving that a so-called "conspiracy theorist" is wrong on a given point and proving that the official story is right on that point.

Here's a concrete example: I happen to disagree with Alex Jones, Jim Fetzer and Dylan Avery on key points and yet I still do not believe the official story. So nobody -- not Guy Smith, not anybody else -- is going to make me believe the official story by pointing out places where Alex or Jim or Dylan has allegedly gone astray. In other words, even if all these so-called "conspiracy theorists" are "wrong", and even if BBC demolishes all of them, that still doesn't prove that the official story is correct.

And for that matter, even the use of the term "conspiracy theorist" is overloaded with spin, because the official story -- the story that Guy Smith is trying to protect -- talks of at least 20 people -- Osama bin Laden and 19 hijackers. Anyone who believes that those 20 people conspired to pull off this enormous crime is also, by definition, a "conspiracy theorist". And anyone who believes they did it without conspiring -- that they just happened to work together without any prior planning or communication -- is flat-out crazy.

To be blunt about it, anyone who thinks the attacks of 9/11 could have been done without a conspiracy is crazier than anything Alex Jones and Jim Fetzer and Dylan Avery and Guy Smith have ever said all combined.

[2] Even if the BBC's answers to all 10 questions were sound and solid, their sum total would barely begin to explain the differences between the attacks of 9/11 and the official version of same, because the number of unanswered questions about 9/11 runs into the hundreds.

Therefore the selection of 10 key questions in effect amounts to a ruling that all the hundreds of others are beyond the pale, and this is the necessary first step in the ongoing propaganda campaign to get you to believe lies about what really happened.

First they get you thinking it all boils down to 10 easy questions, and then they lie to you about the questions -- and then they lie to you about the answers, and kaboom! ... or should I say "Zzzzz" ... you're sound asleep!
1: Could the US Air Force have prevented the attacks?
This is certainly a good question and answering it in the "politically correct" manner requires serious obfuscation, so it's surprising to see it first. However, if the BBC is going to lie to you through all 10 questions, it doesn't really matter which comes first, so they may as well dive in the deep end.

Well, let's go with them:

To sceptics of the official account of 9/11, the idea of 19 fundamentalists hijacking commercial airliners and outsmarting the world's most advanced air defence system seems simply incredible.

Some 9/11 conspiracy theories argue that the US Air Force should have succeeded in intercepting at least some of the hijacked planes, and that someone, therefore, must have prevented them from doing so.

The official version - 9-11 Commission Report - holds that on the morning of 11 September, 2001 a major defence training exercise was taking place.

What an understatement! What was taking place was the most heavily concentrated set of training exercises ever scheduled!

The BBC can roll out any number of explanations as to why these exercises were sufficient to derail the air defense in the Northeastern US that day, but they don't dare approach the next logical question: Who scheduled those wargames?

Did Osama bin Laden send key components of the US Air Force to places like Alaska and Greenland that day? And if not, who did?

BBC quotes Popular Mechanics reporter David Coburn pushing the "incompetence" theory, which simply doesn't wash in the face of so much deliberately sown confusion, and then deals with an issue that's been hanging over the "official investigation" for quite some time:

Following the publication of the 9/11 Commission Report it emerged that the Commissioners were concerned they might have been deliberately misled by the military about the timeline of their response to events on the day.

Suspicions of a cover up by the military were recently addressed by a report from the Pentagon Inspector General.

The report found that there had been no deliberate attempt to mislead the 9/11 Commission, and that the discrepancies in their testimony to the Commission were the result of "a lack of capabilities and thoroughness" within the military.

The next logical question should be: Why is the Pentagon investigating whether the US military colluded in the coverup of 9/11?

But instead the BBC allows the suspects the final word on this issue. It's a ploy we'll see again and again.

Did anybody at the BBC notice that their link to the 9/11 Commission report is broken? (I've fixed it in the quoted passage.)
2: Were the Twin Towers deliberately demolished by explosives?
Of course they were. Anybody watching on TV knew that right away. But the official story doesn't account for Osama bin Laden getting access to the WTC in order to plant explosives there, so now we have to have all these transparent lies.

Was it a "pancake collapse" or a "progressive collapse" or in fact what kind of collapse was it? The official story has changed, but not the official wording.

All the talk about "why the towers collapsed" is absurd because the clear and visible fact -- perhaps the most notable fact of the day -- is that the towers didn't collapse at all; they disintegrated!

BBC prefers to obfuscate these very inconvenient facts in the following manner:

After 9/11, investigations by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) determined that the collapse of the Twin Towers was due to the impact of the planes and the large quantities of exploding jet fuel released into the buildings.

Those questioning this account point to the lateral puffs of smoke that emerged from the towers just ahead of their collapse. Could these be explosive devices planted as part of a conspiracy?

They also argue that jet fuel, which has a far lower burning temperature than the melting point of steel, is unlikely to have weakened the steel supporting framework sufficient to prompt the collapse of the Twin Towers.

Jet fuel burns at 800 degrees Celsius whereas temperatures must reach 1,500 degrees Celsius for steel to melt.

Those questioning this account raise a lot of other questions as well, such as why so many firemen and emergency workers testified to hearing bombs going off all around them just before the towers fell, or why the steel beams appear to have been cut rather than having buckled, and why there was molten steel in the basements of the towers so long after the "collapse". But the BBC is not prepared to admit these questions, much less deal with them. Instead, we get a rehash of the official line (which still makes no sense!)

The explanation for the puffs of smoke offered by the authors of the Popular Mechanics study is that as the floors crashed down of top of one another, a pressure wave forced dust and smoke out of the windows.

As for the fuel temperature - the official explanation holds that whilst steel does indeed melt at 1,500 degrees Celsius, it loses half its strength at a much lower temperature of 650 degrees Celsius.

The fuel might not have melted the steel columns, but it weakened the structure, and especially the trusses that supported each floor, to the point that they could no longer support the weight on the building.

So BBC supports the "truss failure" theory. The supports couldn't hold up the floors.

The main problems for this "explanation" is that it is hugely at variance with the evidence.

If trusses had failed the floors may have come tumbling down but the steel exterior walls and the central steel columns would have been left standing, or at worst would have fallen over, or bucked and fallen partway over, or at any rate the result would have been very different than what we saw that day. The NIST report says the steel buckled but doesn't provide any photos of buckled steel. In some photos of WTC damage the steel appears to be cut. And then there's the issue of molten steel in the basements, or the reports of "rescue workers" working at Ground Zero having to change their boots all the time, because the soles were melting. How could a truss collapse generate that much heat? And why do we have eyewitness reports of underground explosions in the towers before the planes hit?

The BBC doesn't go near any of these questions either. They just pick one detail they like (the puffs of smoke coming from the buildings) and they work that detail into the official story in one way or another (i.e. the puffs of smoke were compressed dust and smoke being squeezed out of the buildings by the collapse) and they move on to the next narrowly framed question, as if the entire issue were settled.

It's a ploy we'll see again and again. But in the meantime ...

Here's a good way for you to evaluate the "steel weakened and buckled" theory at your own convenience: Go out and start your car. Watch what happens when burning fuel heats the steel around it -- in this case the steel is your engine block. Let it run for a while and you'll find that your engine block actually buckles -- because the heat from the burning fuel is so intense that, even though it's not hot enough to melt the steel, it's hot enough to weaken the steel, and this combined with the intense pressures in your engine, make the steel of the engine block lose its strength and buckle. And that's why you can't drive your car for long distances, because the heat from the burning fuel weakens the steel and your engine sags and the next thing you know it loses its compression.

You see this happening to other people all the time, don't you? Cars and trucks broken down by the side of the highway, no longer able to move because their engine blocks are so deformed from the heat of the burning fuel... You see them every day, do you not?

No? Well ... Maybe I'd better go back and check my facts, then!
3: Was WTC7 deliberately demolished by explosives?
Well, yes, it appears it was. In the last week we've had an emergency worker speak out and say yes, bombs were going off, yes, we had a twenty-minute warning to evacuate, and yes, it was what it looked like -- a controlled demolition.

He was using an alias and saying he'd lost his job because he spoke the truth and within a few days other emergency workers started talking and saying "yes, he's right, that's what happened" ... So what does the BBC have?

In the afternoon of 11 September 2001, World Trade Centre Building 7, a 47 storey office block close by the Twin Towers collapsed without even being hit by the planes.

The building had been evacuated and there were no casualties and with so much else happening that day, its collapse was barely reported.

That's another understatement. And it's something skeptics find a bit sinister!

WTC 7 was home to local offices of the CIA, Department of Defense, the United States Secret Service and the city's Office of Emergency Management, among others.

Sceptics of the official account, including those at Scholars for 9/11 Truth argue that the building was deliberately destroyed in a controlled demolition, perhaps in order to conceal important information about a pre-9/11 plot by the authorities.

Some even argue that the plane which crashed in Pennsylvania was intended to crash into Building 7.

The collapse of WTC has been investigated by FEMA. Their interim report found that when the North Tower collapsed, debris crashed into Building 7.

This was the likely cause of fires which quickly took hold. The sprinkler system did not work effectively because the water main in Vesey Street had been knocked out when the Twin Towers came down.

With the intense fires burning unabated, the steel structure supporting the building was fatally weakened. But the FEMA investigators conceded that this hypothesis had a low probability of occurring.

Say again?? "This hypothesis had a low probability" and yet it's being offered as an official explanation? Or is it?

In their final report, due to be published later in 2007, FEMA is expected to back its original hypothesis substantially - the collapse of WTC7 was accidental, not deliberate.

This is supposed to explain anything? This is supposed to make those questions go away?

The two propaganda techniques we see at play here are [1] pretending that the questions which have drawn replies have been answered, and [2] pretending that the questions that haven't been answered don't exist. Sneaky debating tricks. Underhanded but not evil.

This is a pattern which you may see change very soon.

Note the links in this passage. The BBC link to the FEMA interim report leads to "page not found". How convenient. Or how sloppy. Either way, BBC looks ... well, I'm sorry but I can't bring myself to say it. But I have fixed the link in the quoted passage.
4: Were Jews forewarned about the attacks?
The headline alone gives me hives. We'll talk about that in a minute. But first, here's the BBC's take on this aspect of the story:

Shortly after the attacks a rumour started in the Middle East and spread around the world which claimed that 4,000 Jewish employees at the World Trade Centre had not turned up for work on 11 September. Were they warned to stay away?

One conspiracy theory suggests that 9/11 was an Israeli plot to discredit the Arab world; another that the Israeli intelligence ag