Re: [OPE] The Dog Days of August?

hyl0morph@yahoo.co.uk

On Sun, 2008-08-17 at 01:24 +0200, Dave Zachariah wrote:
> on 2008-08-17 00:33 Philip Dunn wrote:
> > I've read it. Pancake collapse? Overall it is an exercise in deception.
> >   
> 
> It doesn't take an engineer to understand the mechanism of such a 
> collapse, but it takes a good portion of speculative imagination to come 
> up with a theory of "controlled demolitions". One has to be able to 
> assess the likelihood of the available theories.
> 

Are you saying it was a pancake collapse? Even NIST rejected that. A
pancake collapse takes time, 60 seconds or more in the case of the
Towers, and when it has finished the floors resemble a stack of
pancakes. It is simple untrue that "it takes a good portion of
speculative imagination to come up with a theory of "controlled
demolitions". Architects or engineers take one look at the collapse of
WT7 and say "controlled demolition". NIST has not provided an
explanation of how the structural strength of a whole building can
vanish in a few seconds. CD has high likelihood.

> Your reply reminds me of something Alexander Cockburn wrote in a very 
> good piece:
> 
>     "What is the goal of the 9/11 conspiracists? They ask questions,
>     yes, but they never answer them. They never put forward an overall
>     scenario of the alleged conspiracy. They say that's not up to them.
>     So who is it up to? Who do they expect to answer their questions?
>     When answers are put forward, they are dismissed as fabrications or
>     they simply rebound with another question."
> 

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot criticise sceptics both for 
refusing to speculate in the absence of evidence and also for wildly
speculating. In fact, a number of overall scenarios do exist. What is
missing is the evidence needed to eliminate the wrong ones. 

> I think his political response is on point:
> 
>     "These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political
>     economy from Marx via the small, mostly Trotskyist groupuscules.
>     Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a diffuse,
>     peripatic conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate ruling
>     class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, or the
>     falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale
>     (the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos) or supposedly
>     "rogue" agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The
>     9/11 "conspiracy", or "inside job", is the Summa of all this
>     foolishness."
> 
>     http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11282006.html (Also with link to
>     a more detailed technical analysis by Manuel Garcia, physicist at
>     the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.)
> 
> Unfortunately, I have first-hand account of the results of this 
> theoretical void; healthy skepticism being abandoned for paranoia and 
> rational basis for explanations abandoned for irrefutable beliefs.
> 

Cockburn left Operation Gladio off the list. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladio_in_Italy

"In addition to preparing for a Soviet invasion, the stay-behind also
was to act in case of a communist government being elected in Italy.
Since Italy was the country most likely to vote into power a communist
government (with the communist party receiving up to 36% of the popular
vote, being at times the strongest party in parliament), the Italian
branch of Gladio also became the largest NATO "stay-behind"
organization."

The Italian left was destroyed by explosives.

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