Debunking Popular Mevhanics

Introduction This article will examine the claims made in the March, 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics purporting to "debunk" 9/11 "conspiracy theories." A fundamental tenet underlying my analysis is my firm belief that the American People have not been afforded a forum - whether in closed hearings by their elected Representatives in Congress, or in public - whereby urgent questions relating to the events of September 11th, 2001 have been addressed cogently and forthrightly. Generally the reasons offered by the Government for this failure are to the effect of: "We're too busy fighting the war on terror;" or "An investigation might hamper efforts to secure the safety and well-being of the American people." This line of argument is only plausible up to a point. Certainly there was a rush to judgment that Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" were "behind" the attacks. Shortly after September 11, 2001, on September 14th, the FBI released a list of 19 suspected "hijackers." The day before, Secretary of State Colin Powell had fingered Osama bin Laden as likely to have been behind the attacks. Presumably then, the FBI's list of suspected hijackers included individuals associated with bin Laden; or part of the bin Laden organization, dubbed by Western intelligence "Al Qaeda," meaning "the base" in Arabic, and often used as a euphemism for the crapper. Note that no one in bin Laden's organization had ever used this term with reference to themselves or to their activities before 911. A reasonable person might ask, on what grounds should we believe that bin Laden and/or "Al Qaeda" was responsible for the September 11th attacks? And, how did the FBI come up with its list of suspects? What was known about bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" beforehand? (The speed with which FBI Director Meuller produced the September 14th list of names implies foreknowledge.) Even then the question, "How did this happen?" still remains. Was somebody asleep at the wheel? The United States spends about 1/3rd of its national budget on defense (if you include allocations for past military expenditures, for example, veterans' pensions and benefits, including the VA, and interest on past war-debt, the figure is actually much higher). What were our military defense forces doing on the morning of September 11th? The stated mission of the 9/11 Commission was to find out what went wrong on

the morning of September 11th, 2001 - and even what might have gone "right," although apart from the heroism displayed by some ordinary Americans and first responders it is difficult to find much in the chronology of events surrounding 9/11 to recommend to history. David Ray Griffin, in a follow-up to an earlier (2004) book, The New Pearl Harbor, has subjected the 9/11 Commission Report to a thorough review. In The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, Griffin shows that the Commission performed a great disservice to the men and women who died on the morning of 9/11, to their families, and to this Nation. The author masterfully marshals complex materials, drawing on the timelines constructed by Paul Thompson (available online at cooperativeresearch.org or in Thompson's new book, The Terror Timeline). Extending Paul Thompson's 2003 article, "The Failure to Defend the Skies on 9/11," Griffin's painstaking analysis of flights 11,175, 77 and 93 is simply unsurpassed in its clarity. Griffin argues persuasively that the 9/11 Commission deliberately set out to shift the entire burden of blame for the deficiencies of the US military's response on the morning of 9/11 onto the FAA. Griffin demonstrates that the Commission's revisionist account of the responses of both NORAD/NEADS and those of the civilian authorities, including the FAA, is simply not credible. Before proceeding, then, with an analytical deconstruction of the Popular Mechanics article, "Debunking 9/11 Lies," it is necessary that readers understand that the PM article relies heavily on the 9/11 Commission Report, but without specifically citing, or even acknowledging the 9/11 Commission, or any of its reports, including the widelypublicized final report. Note that the article also relies heavily on the FEMA/ASCE/NIST Building Performance Reports, and specifically, the Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) Reports, which analyzed the factors that led to the collapse of the World Trade Center (Twin Towers, the WTC Hotel, Buildings 4, 5, 6 and 7, and the Bankers Trust Building). These are available online. Readers are encouraged to consult the original reports. The Joint House and Senate Intelligence Committee (JICI) held hearings in September 2002 to address 'intelligence failures" relating to 9/11. This question - "What did we know about bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" prior to 9/11?" - was taken up again by the 9/11 Commission. Peter Lance, in his book Cover-Up (a follow-up to his earlier book, 1,000 Years for Revenge) argues convincingly that the 9/11 Commission's Report is not to be believed. The subject of "What did we know (beforehand)?" was not addressed by the article in Popular Mechanics , and will not be discussed further here.

1. A thousand words: seeing is NOT believing! The first straw man knocked down by Popular Mechanics was the question of photographic "evidence." Popular Mechanics seems not to have noticed that the writers of the WTC Building Performance Report were forced to rely - heavily - on photographic evidence. This was because forensic evidence that would have allowed for truly definitive analysis of structural failures was removed and disposed-of before House Science Committee investigators could secure the crime scene. In some cases, team members were forced to retrieve pieces of steel from dump trucks or from garbage barges. Almost all of the physical evidence was sold as scrap to China. In several instances, due to "jurisdictional conflicts" and a lack of any clear command authority, investigators were actually prevented from accessing the WTC site. I should note that the writers of the Popular Mechanics article themselves resort to photographic evidence in their disposition of another scuttlebutt, namely the windows - or lack thereof - on Flight 175. Without acknowledging the facts regarding the wanton disposition of crucial physical evidence, the writers of "Debunking 9/11 Lies" instead choose to focus on a question raised by David von Kleist, of the Power Hour radio show. Von Kleist had noticed what appears to be a strange "pod" mounted on the underbelly of Flight 175 in a photograph taken by Rob Howard and published in New York magazine. Popular Mechanics sent a "digital scan" of the photo, taken just seconds before UA 175 smashed into the South Tower, for analysis to Ronald Greeley, Director of the Space Photography Laboratory at Arizona State University. Greeley concluded that the apparent "bulge" - or "pod" - was likely an artifact. Although intriguing, many of the other images reproduced by von Kleist in his video, 9/11 In Plane Site were derived from videographic recordings, and these similarly cannot be resolved decisively. Popular Mechanics' writers at were at pains to emphasize that von Kleist "believes" that the mysterious pod "proves" that the 9/11 attacks were an "inside job." However, von Kleist has always insisted that he does not know what caused the mysterious bulge seen in the Howard photograph. He merely asks us to look at the photograph and then asks, "What is it?" Von Kleist carefully qualifies his remarks, asking:

if what we see in the photograph was not UA 175 - if, for example, what we're looking at is a picture of a tanker jet and not a Boeing 767 - then, what would this imply? An atmosphere of "internet myth and rumor" permeates the whole article. James Meigs, the editor of Popular Mechanics,, in a brief introductory essay, "The lies are out there," makes reference to the "X-Files" and to "Oliver Stone movies." Significantly, Dr. Greeley was asked to analyze a digital scan of the original Howard photograph. This already seriously vitiated any conclusions he may have have been able to draw about the apparent "bulge" which appears underneath the fuselage of the aircraft that crashed into South Tower (which, according to the "consensus reality" was a Boeing 767-200ER).

2. Even if not a stand-down, then surely a let down As I have already indicated, Popular Mechanics' defense of the US military's response - and more specifically, the response of NORAD/NEADS - on the morning of September 11, 2001 is at best percursory and relies, uncritically, on the 9/11 Commission Report. - without, however, anywhere referring to either the 9/11 Commission or to any of its reports. As stated in my introduction, the 9/11 Commission had a hidden agendum. First, the Commission labored to absolve the US military of any possible blame for its evident failure on the morning of 9/11. To do so, of course, it had to deny the obvious - pretend either that the attacks on World Trade Center and the Pentagon had never occurred, or, if they had, that this, somehow, did not constitute any dereliction of duty - without, however, admitting at any point that the response of the US military that morning was ever anything less than exemplary. That is, there really was, no, not any, failure to defend the skies after all! (Meanwhile, for months after the attacks, the smoke continued to pour out of Ground Zero...) It would have been easier if the Commission had not been saddled with an additional burden. It had also to be sure to remove any suspicion that Flight 93 might have been shot down by US fighter jets - even though, given everything that had happened that morning there was every justification for "executive action." It was arguably better to have brought down the plane over rural Pennsylvania than some densely populated area. But curiously, the US military had frantically denied responsibility for this - the one effective action taken that morning to try and stop the attacks! Popular Mechanics, following the lead of the 9/11 Commission in a locked-step fashion, claims that the FAA (specifically, "Boston Center, one of 22 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regional ATC facilities") called NEADS (Northeast Air Defense Sector) three times. In fact, according to the writers of the Popular Mechanics article (and the 9/11 Commission), the FAA greatly added to the confusion. The Commission claimed that someone at Boston Center called NEADS and asked whether American Flight 11 was still in the air and headed towards Washington, DC, at almost the same moment that Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

This call was recorded by NEADS and was cited by the Commission as "NEADS audiofile, Identification Technician position, channel 7, 9:21:10" (reference #148, chapter 1). [A truncated segment of this audiofile recording - or perhaps a dramatization of it - was replayed in the National Geographic special Inside 91/1.] It is striking that the Commission does not cite any other logs or transcripts of taped conversations - of the Logan controllers, or air-traffic controllers at any of the other FAA centers; or of their military counterparts at NEADS - in support of their assertion that this one brief exchange "explained" the apparent inability of highly-trained military personnel at NEADS - or anyone else in the North American Aerospace Defense Command - to anywise comprehend "what was happening" that morning until after the attacks. In its final report the 9/11 Commission admitted that their researchers had not been able to determine the provenance of this audio file. That is, they had been "unable" to ascertain the identity of who it was at "Boston Center" that had, presumptively on the morning of 9/11, put in a call to NEADS, and, in the course of terse conversation, made the confusing remarks about AA Flight 11. Nor were 9/11 Commission staffers able to identify of the woman at NEADS ("Technician position, channel 7") who took the call. They do not explain why they were unable to identify either the Boston Logan controller or the NEADS "channel 7" technician. This is simply unacceptable as "evidence." For all we know, "NEADS audiofile, Identification Technician position, channel 7, 9:21:10" could have been recorded at a later date. "Officially," that is, according to the 9/11 Commission, this call was made at 9.21 a.m. (pp. 26, 27) Taken out of context, it is very misleading. It is extraordinarily revealing that the Commission focused - obsessively - on this one brief snippet of recorded conversation. The Commission introduced "NEADS audiofile, Identification Technician position, channel 7, 9:21:10" as if it were a kind of "smoking gun." This brief exchange of remarks - made by persons unknown - supposedly "proved" that no one at NEADS could have possibly known that American commercial airliners had been hijacked and that the country was under attack. And in fact, according to the Commission, the only reason NEADS knew that American Flight 11 had gone missing was because, at the suggestion of the military liaison at Boston Center, NEADS "contacted the FAA's Washington Center," to be "informed" that they were "looking" - that they'd "lost American 77."

At the same time, the Commission excluded a large volume of evidence that indicated that senior officials at the White House, the Pentagon, at FAA headquarters and at NEADS were well aware by 9:21 a.m. that America was under attack. Most of the "world" knew that "a plane" had hit the World Trade Center by 9:03 a.m. EST. And millions of Americans were glued to their television sets when Flight 175 crashed - "live" - into the South Tower! Robert Marr, NEADS Commander stated on the National Geographic special, Inside 9/11 that a technician had been watching a television set in the computer room, and had come to him to report that a plane had crashed into the Twin Tower of the Trade Center in New York. Colonel Marr said that he then decided that they needed to "get a TV station into the battle cab to help with... decision-making." This was a little after 8:54 a.m. AA Flight 11 had crashed into the North Tower (at 8:46 a.m.). So, obviously, NEADS, along with several news commentators, and millions of Americans watching the Today Show, CNN, etc., knew that America was under attack by the time UA 175 hit the South Tower. Knew that this was not an "accident" or a series of accidents. Knew that the second jet had been crashed - deliberately - into the WTC. So what's going on here? The casual reader might have missed the significance of this call, were it not for the way it is highlighted by Popular Mechanics. The 9/11 Commission stakes the main weight of their whole case on this one undocumented, unverifiable piece of so-called "evidence?" So what "case" are t h e y trying to make? As pointed out in the introduction, the US spends a large part of its annual budget on defense. So what went wrong on 9/11? As mentioned above, David Ray Griffin, in his book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions persuasively argues that a fundamental objective of the 9/11 Commission was to shift the entire burden of blame for the terrible events of 9/11 - blame for what can only be described as a truly abysmal performance by the US military - onto the FAA. To understand this, the reader will need to go back to the days that immediately followed the attacks. At a prescheduled confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services

Committee, General Richard Myers, who had been acting JCS Chairman on September 11th, testified that, "to the best of [his] knowledge," the order to scramble fighters had been given "after the Pentagon [had been] struck" (emphasis added). This was on September 13th. As evident from the tone of Senator Levin's question to General Myers, were we really to believe that "the armed forces of the United States simply sat passively during the attacks?" Then, NORAD spokesman, Mike Snyder made it worse! He confirmed what General Myers had said in his Senate testimony to Boston Globe reporter, Glen Johnson. According to Snyder, "fighters were not scrambled for more than an hour after the first hijacking was reported" (emphasis added). Presumably this means, "reported" to NORAD. Snyder had added that NORAD had not immediately scrambled any fighters "even though it was alerted to a hijacking 10 minutes before the first plane... slammed into the first World Trade Center Tower" (emphasis added). But even before the Globe story had been published, on September 15th, CBS Evening News, the day before, had offered another account, saying that "contrary to early reports, US Air Force jets did get into the air on Tuesday while the attacks were underway" (emphasis added). The damage control was already underway. But, if so, then how was it that no military jets were anywhere near the WTC or the Pentagon; if only to a t t e m p t to intercept; let alone to prevent the attacks? Note that Mike Snyder, when talking to Globe reporter Glen Johnson, on September 15th, had refused to "comment" on the earlier (September 14th) CBS Evening News report. On September 18th, NORAD issued a press release, which filled in the "gaps" in General Myers' memory. But, as David Ray Griffin notes, in The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, this second, "official" version did little to allay suspicion that a standdown order had been given. A careful examination of the times published by NORAD in their press release of September 18th, when compared with accounts of the events leading up to the hijackings and the attacks, reveals, first, and most prominently, an apparent failure by the FAA to follow their own procedures.

Well-established routines dictated that as soon as a plane deviates from its flight-plan, airtraffic controllers must establish contact with the plane to ascertain the reason for the diversion. Obviously this is all the more critical in the air-space immediately surrounding major inter-national airports, but it is generally true over the entire Eastern seaboard, with perhaps the densest air-traffic in the world. If the aircraft does not respond, the civilian authority is supposed to immediately "inform" NORAD. In the event of a suspected hijacking, or even a passive crisis, as in the case of the private jet of pro golfer Payne Stewart, which lost cabin pressure at high-altitude, immediately killing everyone on board due to anoxia, NORAD is supposed to scramble fighters to intercept the plane and make an assessment. The NORAD response time is 15 minutes. (This means, the fighter jets are required to make a visual inspection of the cockpit of the suspected plane). As noted by the 9/11 Commission in its final report, "before 9/11, it was not unheardof for a commercial airliner to deviate slightly from course, or for an FAA controller to lose radio contact with a pilot for a short period of time. A controller could also briefly lose a commercial aircraft's transponder signal, although this happened much less frequently. However the simultaneous loss of radio and transponder signal would be a rare and alarming occurrence, and would normally indicate a catastrophic system failure or an airplane crash" (p. 16). The Commission argues that in such a case, "the job of the controller was to reach out to the aircraft, the parent company of the aircraft, and other planes in the vicinity in an attempt to re-establish communications and set the aircraft back on course. Alarm bells would not start ringing until these efforts - which could take five minutes or more - were tried and had failed" (ibid). The September 18 NORAD timeline reveals that the "FAA" contacted NEADS regarding AA Flight 11 at 0840 a.m. EST. According to the Commission, the FAA did not make contact with the military until well after they knew there was a hijacking. The Commission attributes this failure to follow established protocols as being due to a weakened or inappropriate command structure, stating that "as they existed on 9/11, the protocols for the FAA to obtain military assistance required multiple levels of notification and approval at the highest levels of government" (p.17). Then, according to the 9/11 Commission, Boston Center called NEADS at 8:37:52 a.m. (which only slightly differs from the NORAD September 18th timeline). As Griffin points out, "here we... see that the regional FAA managers could [and did] call the military themselves; without going through FAA headquarters. We also see that they did not need to go through the NMCC in the Pentagon but could call their local NORAD sector - in this case NEADS - directly.

"It is not clear how the Commission can [then] say that [FAA] headquarters" began to follow the hijack protocol - but failed to contact NMCC, since "the essential role played by FAA Headquarters in this protocol is to contact the NMCC" (Omissions and Distortions, p.158; emphasis added). The import of this apparent discrepancy in the Commission's presentation may be lost on the casual reader. On the one hand, the Commission wants to suggest that a relatively "loose" (over-long and weakly linked) or disorganized command structure on the civilian side contributed to the delay in the military response. What is not clear is that the ATC -> regional -> Command Center -> Headquarters sequence has to do more to do with getting final shootdown authority than with initial response. In the event of a serious emergency, as in the case of the Payne Stewart plane, or a possible hijacking, before June 2001, the FAA and NMCC were free to initiate immediate responses without waiting for specific approval from the Secretary of Defense. The June 2001 change was the only major change of procedures in place for over 15 years. Certain "immediate responses" were allowed under the new orders, but were more restrictive. Apart from shootdown authority, scramble authority also had be sought from acting NORAD US Continental Commander, Major General Larry Arnold, at Tyndall Air Force Base, in Florida. NEADS Battle Commander Colonel Robert Marr, after being contacted by Logan ATC, ordered fighters to "battle stations," and then called General Arnold to seek authorization. "Not one to waste time, General Arnold said (he later recalled), 'go ahead and scramble them, and we'll get authorities [sic] later'" (Griffin, quoting the Commission Report, p. 20). Early critics of the US military response looked at the "Fighter Scramble Order" times published by NORAD on September 18, 2001, and, when they did the math - calculated the "Airborne" times and the times of the WTC and Pentagon crashes - they discovered that 1) The Otis fighter jets scrambled at 8:43 (UA 175) and airborne by 8:52 ("estimated") were 71 miles away when United 175 crashed into the South Tower; F-15s going at top speed (or, in the words of Lt. Colonel Timothy Duffy, one of the pilots, "full-blower") should have been over Manhattan well before 9:02 a.m. As it turned out, at 9:02 they were "vectored towards militarily-controlled airspace off the Long Island coast," according to the Commission (p.20). We shall see how the Commission explains this away below. 2) Jets scrambled from Langley presented an even thornier problem for apologists for the US military response on 9/11; we shall see how the Commission attempts to throw up

dust about this below; for now, we'll note that according to NORAD's September 18 timeline, NEADS was "notified" by the FAA at 9:24 (AA Flight 77); the F-16's were fully airborne by 9:30. What is extraordinarily interesting is that the September 18 NORAD timeline calculates that the fighters were 105 miles when the western wall of the Pentagon was hit at 9:38. a.m. Langley AFB is about 129 miles away from the Pentagon. Top speed (just under "full-burner," which is prodigal with fuel) is about 1,200 mph... Were, perhaps, the jets headed in the wrong direction? According to the 9/11 Commission that is exactly what happened! In summary: the Commission had to correct some residual "defects" in the timeline offered early on by NORAD - which had endeavored to undo the damage caused by General Myers, at his confirmation hearing, and by Mike Snyder. To do this, the Commission will not only have to rely on the flimsiest of "evidence," taken out of context, as mentioned above, and discussed further below, but will literally have to manufacture "new" evidence out of thin air! Without going into details here (see below for further discussion), I will only point out that the overriding rationale behind the "phantom aircraft," introduced by the Commission as a new revelation (it had never been reported anywhere before, by anyone; neither at the FAA nor at the Defense Department) was to provide an "explanation" for the fighters scrambled from Langley; since, according to the revised (9/11 Commission) timeline, the military had never been notified about Flight 77 (see below for discussion). To call the Commission's revisionist timeline "Procrustean" would be too high-minded. The Commission introduced slender reeds intended to be used as a plaster to "explain" the launch of the Langley fighters - while at the same time maintaining that the FAA had, in "fact," and contrary to the September 18, 2001 NORAD timeline, never notified NORAD/NEADS about Flight 175; or about Flight 77; or even about Flight 93 until after the latter had gone down near Shanksville, PA.

To fully understand all this is to go beyond the scope of this article. Readers are urged to consult David ray Griffin's book (along with the Thompson/cooperativereserach.org timeline). However, a few remarks are in order. It is especially outrageous that the Commission "corrected" its own witness, NORAD Commander, General Arnold, browbeating him into admitting that in his earlier, May 23rd, 2003 testimony before the Commission, that he had been "incorrect." General Arnold had stated in his previous testimony that at 9:16 a.m., the FAA had reported that United Flight 93 "might have been hijacked." After relentless badgering by Commissioner Ben-Veniste, during the June 17, 2004 hearing, Arnold rather grudgingly conceded that in his earlier, May 23, 2003 testimony before the Commission he must have been confused. General Arnold adds that "a lot of the information" that Ben-Veniste and the Committee Research Staff "have found out in... [their] study of this 9/11, the things that happened on that day, helped us [the US military?] reconstruct what was going on." This admission is made all the more trenchant when Ben-Veniste bears down: "General, is it not a fact that the failure.. [of] the [NEADS] miscommunication [about American Flight 11] and the notion of a phantom Flight 11 [which NO ONE neither the Press; nor NORAD/military spokespersons, nor the FAA - had hitherto thought worthy of mention] continuing from New York City south in fact skewed the whole reporting of 9/11, it skewed the official Air Force report, which is contained in a book called the Air War Over America, which does not contain any information about the fact that... [NEADS and/or the Langley fighters] were following, or thinking of a continuation of Flight 11... that you had not received notification that Flight 11 had been hijacked?" As to the audiofile recording unearthed by the Commission, General Arnold lets slip that "[NEADS} ...apparently had a tape that we were unaware of at that time [i.e., in his earlier testimony]. And your - to the best of my knowledge, what I've been told by your staff is that they were unable to make that tape run. But they were later able to - your staff was able, through a contractor, to get that tape to run." OK. Let's review: First, we had NORAD's claim, in its September 18th, 2001 timeline, that Air Traffic Control had failed to ever "notify" NEADS about Flight 93. (This claim is disputed by news reports that the FAA had notified NORAD about Flight 93 at 9:16.)

[After "FAA Notification," the NORAD timeline had indicated "N/A" for "Not Applicable." But as we have seen, General Arnold testified on May 23, 2003 that at 9:16 a.m. the FAA had reported to NEADS that United Flight 93 "might have been hijacked."] To "correct" the Sept 18 NORAD timeline, the Commission needed make sure its witnesses got their stories "straight." Recall that the Commission claims that the second time "the FAA" (Boston Center) contacted NEADS, (at 9:21 a.m.) the caller only added to what Col. Robert Marr, in his interview in the National Geographic special, Inside 9/11, the "fog of war." I have already noted the problems of provenance with the audifile. But to fully understand just what the 9/11 Commission (and thus the writers of Popular Mechanics) have done by thrusting this "evidence" into the foreground, one needs to more closely examine the Commission's published transcript of the call with the segment reproduced in the National Geographic special, Inside 9/11. National Geographic is careful to label the 9:21 a.m. caller as "FAA." Was this "Boston Center," as suggested by the Commission? Or was it perhaps someone at Boston's Logan Air Traffic Control? Was this someone at the FAA regional center, or could have been someone at the FAA Command Center is in Herndon, VA? Or at FAA Headquarters in Washington (perhaps the "hijack coordinator")? The published transcript is as follows: FAA:

Military, Boston Center. I just had a report that American 11 is still in the air, and it's on its way towards - heading towards Washington.

NEADS:

Okay. American 11 is still in the air?

FAA:

Yes.

NEADS:

On its way toward Washington?

FAA:

That was another - it was evidently another aircraft that hit the tower. That's the latest report we have.

In the segment reproduced by National Geographic, the "FAA" person never identifies himself. The meaning of "Military, Boston Center" is unclear. Did the Commission simply assume that the caller was from "Boston Center" and insert this into the transcript? In which case, to what does "Military" refer?

It would be easy to put this all down as mere effluvium, if it weren't critical to the 9/11 Commission's case. The Commission seems to maintain that prior to 9/11 the proper role of the military in the event of an attack on the United States was to sit passively - awaiting information and some kind of official "notification" from their civilian counterparts. They imply that such was the case on 9/11. In any event, after 9:03 a.m. it was clear to NEADS personnel that the US was under attack. According to the 9/11 Commission, the established p r o t o c o l was for the "hijack coordinator" at the FAA's Headquarters in Washington was to call the NMCC (the National Military Command Center), located in the Joint Chiefs of Staff area of the Pentagon. The NMCC, in turn, would seek approval from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to provide military assistance. The 9/11 Commission enlarges on what is already - at best - a somewhat dubious proposition ("confusion" about Flight 11) by attempting to create a thoroughly false impression that the FAA had somehow "lost track" of the hijacked flights, something not borne out by any historical account! Note that the sole basis for Popular Mechanics' claims regarding Flight 77 could only have come from the 9/11 Commission "reconstruction" of the flight's chronology. Indianapolis Air Traffic Control, which had taken over for Dulles, knew that Flight 77 was off course by 8:54. Radar contact had been lost at 8:50 and there was a loss of the transponder signal for a little over 8 minutes. Starting at 8:56, and until 9:05, according to the 9/11 Commission, Flight 77 simply "disappeared" from Indianapolis "primary radar" - for reasons that were "technical" in nature said the Commission. The main problem with this account, apart from news reports that Flight 77 had gone seriously off course at 8:46 (somebody knew; just not the FAA nor NORAD, according to the Commission!) is that when a transponder signal is lost, information about the plane's altitude is no longer available, a very dangerous situation in busy air-space. The plane is then displayed as a twodimensional blip, and in any plane under ATC control, the blip for that aircraft is inserted automatically into the screens of every ATC in the region. The crucial question then is, "Did West Virginia also lose primary radar?" The 9/11 Commission never asked. And neither did Popular Mechanics.

The Commission is content to comment only that "neither [the FAA Command Center in Herndon, VA] ... nor FAA headquarters issued an all points bulletin to surrounding centers to search for primary radar targets." Adding that "American 77 traveled undetected for 36 minutes on a course heading due east for Wasinhgton, DC." (p. 25). To claim, as Popular Mechanics does that "ATC [couldn't} find hijacked flights when the hijackers turned off the planes' transponders, which broadcast identifying signals [because] ATC [then] had to search 4500 identical radar blips crisscrossing some of the country's busiest air corridors" (p. 73; emphasis added) is ludicrous. A blip without identifying information sticks out like a sore thumb to a trained eye! In answer to critics who had pointed out that that the military's sophisticated PAVE-PAWS radar can track objects three-dimensionally, including their altitude, even without a transponder signal, Popular Mechanics suggests that if the US military didn't know anything about what was happening (insinuating that this was the case - i.e., they hadn't known - 'cause if they had, of course, they would have at least tried to intercept at least one of the errant flights especially after Flight 11 had crashed into the North Tower - wouldn't they?), well, this was because they weren't looking. Or rather that they were "looking outwards for threats, not inward," says Popular Mechanics. Here again we find Popular Mechanics following the lead of the Commission, but wandering off even further into the land of Oz. The article quotes Maj. Douglas Martin, a NORAD Public Affairs spokesperson: "It was like a doughnut... there was no coverage of the middle." The careful reader will notice that Maj. Martin doesn't explicitly deny that NORAD was perfectly capable of tracking anything in the air over North America... Popular Mechanics then further insinuates that pre-9/11 "NORAD wasn't prepared" to "track flights" o r i g i n a t i n g in the United States (again without explicitly saying that they couldn't!). This is doubly misleading. The casual reader might assume from this that NORAD's radar was all "pointed outwards." That is, might think that the North American Air Defense Command was blind vis-à-vis the continental United States! And, in fact, this was the original line that the US military command tried to peddle to Congress and the public. They fairly quickly modified this to "mean" an external defense "posture."

As if US military air-bases don't need their own Air Traffic Control! Prior to 9/11 there was every indication that the military's air-traffic control system was well-integrated with civilian ATC. Fact: Between September 2000 and June 2001, US military fighters were launched 67 times to chase after wayward or suspicious aircraft. (Note: There was an Air Defense Intercept Zone for the entire Atlantic seaboard.) But, here again, Popular Mechanics strays dangerously close to outright disinformation. In a section headlined "Intercepts Not Routine" Popular Mechanics tells us that "[I]n the decade before 9/11, NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane," referring the Payne Stewart incident (also mentioned by the Commission). Here one is reminded of Bill Clinton's hedging about the meaning of "is." Military fighters escorted the stricken jet, which had lost cabin pressure, killing everyone on board due to lack of oxygen, until it crashed in a field in South Dakota. The question is then, What were the other 67 'incidents'? (Intercepts? Escorts?) Popular Mechanics attempted to cover its journalistic tracks by adding the following qualifier (to "Intercept Not Routine"): "over North America." Noting a little later that "Prior to 9/11, all other NORAD interceptions were limited to offshore Air Defense Identification Zones." To rectify their headline into some semblance of the truth, one would have to write: "Intercepts over continental North America [were] not routine." This would be at least consonant with their earlier claim that "pre-9/11, flights originating in the States were not looked at or seen" by NORAD (emphasis added). (Because, you'll recall, NORAD, was postured "looking outward.") Popular Mechanics states that it took "1 hour and 22 minutes" for a pair of F16's dispatched from Air National Guard at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., to reach the Payne Stewart plane. This is an egregious error! Newspaper accounts reported that within about "20 minutes after ground

controllers lost contact" the jet was escorted in relay-fashion by a series of fighters (Dallas Morning News, 10/26/99) until it crashed. The NTSB gave this "interception" time as about 9:52 CDT (in the vicinity of Eufaula, Alabama the plane crossed from the EDT zone to the CDT zone): and about 10:00 CDT "the [fighter] test pilot began a visual inspection of N47BA [the Payne Stewart plane]" - within about 22 minutes. Perhaps Popular Mechanics wants us to think that the NTSB (and/or the Air National Guard) can't keep track of time-zones changes! But even if NORAD doesn't ordinarily closely "monitor" commercial jet traffic, at least 3, possibly 4, war games (or even more) were in progress during the attacks on the morning of September 11th. Despite the patent absurdity of the assertion that these wargames facilitated the military's response on 911 (an ignoratio elenchi repeated by William B. Scott, in Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 3, 2002: "Exercise Jump-Starts Response to Attacks"), the revelation that there were air defense drills underway effectively torpedoes the claim that NORAD's pre 9/11 "defense posture" somehow explained what was otherwise inexplicable or rather, might be used to excuse the inexcusable. 9/11 Commissioner Roemer questioned General Ralph Eberhart, asking if "you were postured for an exercise... [d]id that help or hurt? Did that help in terms of were more people prepared? Did you have more people ready? Were more fighters fueled...? "Or did that hurt in terms of people thinking 'No, there's no possibility that this is real world; we're engaged in an exercise' ....delay[ing] things?" Eberhart replied "my belief is it helped because of the manning, because of the focus," and said that it had taken "about 30 seconds to make the adjustment to the real-world situation." As if the air defense command's performance that morning were anything less than disgraceful! Nonetheless, diligent research about the nature of the exercises underway (details were classified) revealed that NORAD was in the 11th day of an exercise called Vigilant Guardian. And Gen. Myers told Richard Clarke that NORAD was in "the middle" of Vigilant Warrior. These exercises included live-fly "hijacking" drills and the insertion of false radar blips into the screens of both military and civilian air traffic controllers.

Scenarios had been scripted in which airplanes were supposed to have crashed into buildings like the Pentagon and the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office). (The NRO drill scheduled for that morning was called off after the first attack.) Now all of this indicates that NORAD was a) alert and b) likely to be especially attentive to "unusual" activity occurring in domestic air-space. That is, NORAD/NEADS personnel were definitely not just gazing "outward" over the Atlantic Ocean or somewhere past the DEW line! Not when their job-performance ratings depended on the scores for games and exercises which included live-fly simulations of domestic hijackings and scenarios in which planes used as missiles crashed into buildings designated as possible terrorist targets. [Any "doughnuts" they may have been contemplating were from Kispy Cream!] Perhaps the most valuable aspect of David Ray Griffin's analysis is his comparison of three "versions" of the timeline/events of that terrible morning in September, 2001. Griffin helps the reader to sort through these accounts by making plain the many dilemmas confronting the Kean-Zelikow Commission. Note that it is my contention here that the writers at Popular Mechanics bought into the same agenda; namely, to absolve the US military of any possible blame for an evident failure to defend the skies on the morning of 9/11, and to shift the entire burden of blame for that failure onto the FAA. I have attempted to demonstrate that the only possible source of at least two of the "plasters" applied by Popular Mechanics (used to "paper over" the disgraceful performance of US military forces on September 11th) was the 9/11 Commission's Final Report. The task confronting the Commission, and the writers at Popular Mechanics, was to absolve the US military of any possible culpability - for dereliction of duty on 9/11 - if for nothing else. The Commission had to explain (or, more accurately, explain-away): First, the Otis jets circling 71 miles away over Long Island when UA175 crashed into the South Tower.

Second, the Langley F_16's; which were: either 105 miles away, headed north from Langley, towards Baltimore;

or 150 miles away, heading directly east over the Atlantic, (remember, Langley is about 129 miles south-east from the Pentagon). [Reports about the Langley fighters vary widely.] In any case, as Paul Thompson points out in The Terror Timeline, "even traveling at 1,300 mph [top speed of an F_16 is about 1,500 mph] the Langley jets could have reached Washington in six minutes" - well before the Pentagon was hit). Third, and finally, the Commissioned labored to remove any possible suspicion that Flight 93 might have been shot down by US military fighters. To do this, Popular Mechanics' writers claim, again following the 9/11 Commission without anywhere explicitly saying so, that the FAA Boston Center only contacted anyone in the military three times. The second call was the brief conversation entered into evidence as "NEADS audiofile, Identification Technician position, channel 7, 9:21:10" by the Commission. While this claim - about Boston Center - largely seems to be true (apart from uncertainties about the second call) based on television, radio, internet and newspaper accounts, it ignores a main point established by David Ray Griffin in his review (Omissions and Distortions) of the Final Report of the 9/11 Commission. Griffin shows that the Commission obfuscated the significance of a substantial body of evidence which indicates that communications between the civilian and military authorities on 9/11; i.e., between officials at the FAA and the White House and the US military were more than adequate. If the civilian authority had: a) informed the military about "possible" hijackings (even if they had failed to follow long-established protocols, and inexplicably delayed serving official "notice"); and b) then kept their White House and NORAD counterparts informed of the progression from possible to "probable" in continuous real-time, utilizing at least three teleconferences, as suggested by Griffin then it would be all but impossible for the Commission to explain-away any of the major points above; viz., the Otis jets, the Langley jets, and Flight 93.

Again, it is beyond the scope of this article to examine the way the Commission puts negative spin on the White House, FAA and NMCC teleconferences. Readers are referred to The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. I have mentioned two incidents that especially served as "plasters" for the Kean-Zelikow account, and were applied without critical reflection by the writers of Popular Mechanics. The first was the suspicious audiofile, which, although it had no real evidentiary weight, effectively contributed to the "cover." Second was the "phantom aircraft" introduced by the Commission. To understand the significance of the audiofile, it's necessary to review the revised timeline offered by the Commission - keeping in mind that since NORAD had first published its timeline of events on September 18th, 2001, many commentators had noticed: that the Otis jets dispatched after Flight 11 were eight minutes (71 miles) away - circling over Long Island - when Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower; and that if the revised times given by NORAD on September 18th were true, namely that one minute after the Otis fighters were airborne, at 9:24 a.m., NEADS was informed by the "FAA" (the reason for the quotes will be clearer later) of a possible hijacking of AA Flight 77 (this was widely reported in various news accounts - Washington Post, CNN, Guardian - as well as by NORAD), this represented the greatest threat to the Commission's revisionism Because NORAD had said that immediately - at 9:24 a.m. - a scramble order was issued at Langley AFB. Assuming that the Langley F16 Fighting Falcons were airborne by 9:30, they should have had plenty of time to reach the Capital. Why the Capital, you may ask? Because according to a BBC report ("Clear the skies," BBC 9/1/2002), even as "last-minute pre-launch checks... [were] being made" by Captain Craig Bergstrom, codenamed "Honey, and Major Dean Eckmann, the other Langley F16 pilot, "air-traffic controllers at Dulles had reported that a plane was heading at high-speed towards Washington. . The pilots were told to fly to Washington to protect the Capital and they received a signal over their transponders indicating "an emergency wartime situation." (The question of why the order was issued to Langley - over 300 km away from the Capital - has never been completely satisfactorily resolved by any account.) As mentioned above, the Langley jets could have covered the 129 miles in seven minutes.

Instead, at 9:40 when Flight 77 flew into the Pentagon, they were hundreds of miles away, headed out over the Atlantic (according to NORAD, Sept 18, 2001, approximately 12 minutes or 105 miles away from "Airline impact location;" i.e., the Pentagon). We have seen how the Commission attempts to explain-away reports like that of the Arlington County After-Action Report (Annex C, Law Enforcement, Part III, Federal Bureau of Investigation). According to this HRSA (Health Resources and Services Administration) report, "at about 9:20 a.m. the WFO [FBI Washington Field Office] Command Center... [was] notified that American Airlines Flight 77 had been hijacked shortly after takeoff from Washington Dulles International Airport." The Commission claims that earlier reports, by NORAD (September 18, 2001) and the FAA were in error. Regarding the latter, in a May 21, 2003 'clarification' [a for the record] memorandum, the FAA stated that although the FAA had only made "formal notification" to NEADS that Flight 77 might have been hijacked at 9:24 a.m., "information about the flight was conveyed continuously during... phone bridges" established earlier between FAA field facilities, FAA Command Center, FAA HQ, the DOD, the Secret Service and other government agencies. "The US Air Force liaison to the FAA immediately [that is, "within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World Trade Center] joined the FAA headquarters phone bridge and established contact with NORAD on a separate line." The New York Times reported that "During the hour or so that American Airlines Flight 77... [was] under the control of hijackers, up to the moment it struck the Pentagon, military officials in a command center on the east side of the building [the NMCC] were urgently talking to law enforcement and air traffic control officials about what to do" (NYT, Sept 15, 2001, "Pentagon Tracked Deadly Jet But Found No Way To Stop It"). In the Commission's reconstruction: By 8:50 a.m., when radio contact is lost, Indianapolis flight control center was handling Flight 77. The plane began to veer off course at 8:54. By 8:56 a.m. Flight 77's transponder signal is lost. According to the Commission, the Indianapolis flight controller watched the flight go off course, headed south, when it "disappeared" from primary radar. (See above discussion.) Supposedly, this controller is blissfully ignorant about any hijacked planes that morning. According to the Commission, he presumably notifies AA headquarters in Fort Worth ("While trying to confirm whether the aircraft that had hit he World Trade Center was Flight 11, we learned from air traffic control officials that another of our flights, Flight 77, was not responding to radio calls and not emitting a transponder signal, and that air traffic control could not determine its location." January 27, 2004 testimony of Mr. Gerarad J. Arpey, President and CEO of AMR Corporation. and AA before the National Commission On Terrorist Attacks on the United States).

However, according to the Commission, NORAD is not notified. [Recall: N O R A D had claimed, Sept 18, 2001, that NEADS was notified at 9:24.] The 9/11 Commission denies that NORAD was ever notified about Flight 77. That is, the Report states, flatly, on page 34, that: "NEADS never received notice that American 77 was hijacked." In fact, according to the Commission, not only was the published September 18th, 2001 NORAD timeline in error, but so was General Larry Arnold, when he testified on May, 2003, in front of the Commission. Furthermore, when other NORAD officials had told reporters that the Langley fighters had been scrambled in response to the 9:24 a.m. "notification" about AA Flight 77, their statements, too, were "incorrect." As David Griffin points out, the Commission never explains how it was - or why General Arnold and other NORAD officials had made all these false statements. "The main point.. [of] the Commission's revisionist account of Flight 77... is its twofold denial that NORAD was notified about the hijacking of Flight 77 and that Langley F-16s were scrambled to intercept it" (p. 193). Ah, "but if the military had not been notified about Flight 77 at 9:24, why were fighters from Langley airborne by 9:30?" (ibid) The key to understanding the Commission's treatment of Flight 77 is to be found in its earlier treatment of Flight 175. In answer to the question, why were fighters from Langley airborne by 9:30? "the Commission faced a problem similar to that of explaining why the F-15s were scrambled from Otis at 8:53 even though Flight 11 had already crashed and [according to the Commission's revisionist account] NORAD did not know that Flight 175 had been hijacked" (readers are strongly encouraged to study Chapter 13 of Omissions and Distortions). It is at this crucial juncture that the full significance of the audiofile can be seen, together with the baroque tap dance around Indianapolis ATC's "primary radar" described above. According to the Commission, the Langley F-16's were chasing a "phantom aircraft," American Flight 11. If so, why weren't they headed towards New York City? And this is where the Commission becomes really "creative." [Either that or completely disingenuous.] As Griffin notes, "Elsewhere the Commission told us that Colonel Robert Marr, head of NEADS, had to call General Arnold to get permission to scramble fighters to after the

real Flight 11. But now we are being asked to believe that planes were scrambled for phantom Flight 11 without Arnold's ever having heard anything about such a flight." The Commission concedes that: "this... phantom aircraft was not accounted in a single public timeline or statement issued by the FAA or Department of Defense." However, these [perforce] "inaccurate accounts created the impression that the Langley scramble was a logical response to an actual hijacked aircraft" (p. 34). But their back-and-fill explanation strains credulity, even amongst stalwarts of the official consensus. Even assuming that we can accept that the "taped conversations at NEADS" along with "taped conversations at FAA centers" support the Commission's theory of the "phantom" - together with "contemporaneous logs compiled at NEADS, Continental Region headquarters, and NORAD;" and "other records" (p. 34) - the Commission fails to offer any actual supporting evidence - original recordings or copies; transcripts; etc. We simply have to take their word for it. Contemporary accounts, published just days after 9/11 indicate that at no time did Boston Logan controllers lose sight of Flight 11. In some accounts, Boston has to update NEADS by telephone until a few minutes before the plane crashes into the North Tower. Astonishingly, the Commission claims that NEADS personnel were "still trying to locate the flight... [when] word reached them that a plane had hit the World Trade Center" (p. 20). The reasons for this should be obvious by now. It was necessary to imply that NEADS needed 'better radar' if the Commission was to sustain the myth of the "phantom plane." Finally, even if we were able to swallow this treacle, it still leaves at least one major detail unaccounted-for: why were the Langley pilots headed out to sea, over the Atlantic when the Pentagon was struck? The various accounts of the pilots' actions that morning are garbled (see discussion above). I leave it the reader to read the Commission's "clarification" (p.27 - "The Langley pilots were heading east..."). My point is that, by hanging their entire theory about what happened that morning on one, flimsy, piece of so-called "evidence" the Commission and Popular Mechanics leave themselves subject, under the most generous interpretation, to a charge

of revisionism. It seems fair to ask at this juncture - why - and how - was the defense of NORAD a proper subject for Popular Mechanics? A close check of their "experts" on air defense experts (listed at the end of the article) indicates that Popular Mechanics "consulted" public information spokespersons for the article. Only PA spokespersons. That is, Popular Mechanics did not interview anyone at, say, the Center for Strategic and Security Studies. Or at the War College. Or anyone at RAND. By their own account, the "experts" they claim to have consulted about Air Defense were all press agents. Their area of e x p e r t i s e was public relations, not security or strategic studies. Popular Mechanics' attempted defense the US military is, then, at best "science by press release." [Translation: pure spin.] In this case, the fact is that our military let us down. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

2. Wagging the WTC In general, Popular Mechanics' bullet-style presentation effectively precluded in-depth analysis or any serious discussion of the facts. And even then, their handling of bare facts is occasionally quite misleading. This "massaging" appears deliberate. Behind Popular Mechanics' presentation, then, one can clearly perceive an attempt at "spin." In plain English, the article appears to be an exercise in propaganda. One of the internet sites asking questions about 911 suggests, tongue in cheek, that perhaps Muslims had suspended the laws of physics. It is difficult to figure out where to begin, even, when addressing the many issues about the WTC collapse. The article in Popular Mechanics is good a place as any. Actually, I'm a little baffled by Popular Mechanics' discussion about the damage reported in the lobbies of both towers after jet planes had crashed into the buildings but before they collapsed. Popular Mechanics shows an un-credited photograph of shattered windows in the North Tower lobby captioned "Before the fall." Why would this surprise anyone? Apparently Popular Mechanics introduced this picture to refute reports by survivors, some of them firefighters or other first responders, some of workers - and by on-the-scene news crews about "explosions." It's too bad Popular Mechanics didn't bother to more closely examine these reports. They are not, of course, always coherent accounts of what happened. They are first hand reports of people either escaping from or responding to a desperate scene. For example, Tom Elliot, at work at Aon, a brokerage firm located in the South Tower, reported "a tornado of hot air and smoke and ceiling tiles and bits of drywall came flying up the stairwell" [this was probably the B stairwell] just after Flight 175 crashed into the building. It is likely that

this, and the shattered windows observed by firefighters on the Concourse level, were both a result of "overpressure" in the stairwells as well as in the elevator shafts, as was suggested by the authors of the Building Performance Study (Chapter 2, p. 21). However "overpressure" cannot explain the incident televised by CNN, which showed smoke billowing up from the Customs House, WTC 6 from street level at 9:04 a.m. - only one minute after 175 crashed into the adjacent South Tower. Nor the large crater which was observed in the ruins of WTC 6. What could have caused this crater? William Rodriguez, a maintenance man assigned to the three stairwells, A, B, and C in the North Tower, was in the maintenance office, located on the first sublevel, at about 8:30 a.m. on September 11th. As he described it to Deanna Spingola (renewamerica.us) "There was a very loud massive explosion which seemed to emanate from between subbasement B2 and B3... At first he thought it was a generator that had exploded. But the cement walls in the office cracked from the explosion. .... seconds later, there was another explosion way above" which made the building sway momentarily, according to other observers. Stephan Evans, a BBC's North American business correspondent, on the ground floor of the South Tower when Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower, reported: "There was a huge bang and the building [So Tower, presumably] physically shook... Seconds later there were two or three similar huge explosions and the building literally shook again." There were other eyewitnesses who heard what they described as "explosions." In many cases these sounds did not seem to be connected to the crashing jets nor were they associated with either collapse of the towers. One might be tempted to write all of this off as secondary impact damage bursting water mains, or exploding "generators" or maybe gas-lines, except that some of the witnesses who thought they heard bombs going off were professional fire-fighters. But this raises an important question: if there were bombs planted in the building(s) does this help explain the WTC collapse? Here we will adopt a convention: by WTC collapse we mean the structural failures of WTC 1&2, Building 7; and Buildings 4, 5 and 6. In none of these cases can failure be explained as a result of impact damage alone (in the case of the Twin Towers). We do not include WTC 3, the hotel complex, which was severely damaged by falling debris from WTC1&2.

It is highly significant that prior to 9/11, no steel-framed building had ever collapsed solely due to fire. But the explosions mentioned by eyewitnesses generally fail to correlate well with the idea that the Towers were brought down by explosives. A controlled demolition - one that would produce the almost symmetric pattern of damage seen at the WTC (in a non-symmetric collapse a tower would have fallen over, crashing onto other buildings) requires a very precisely timed sequencing of explosive charges. In one case, a man who witnessed the collapse of the towers from his 22nd floor office window, a few blocks away, reported that he'd seen what looked like small explosions on each floor as the buildings went down. Popular Mechanics has an answer at the ready, which passes off these "puffs of dust" as perfectly consonant with the "pancake theory," which will be discussed below. In attempting to explain-away the clouds of dust that were ejected with incredible force as the buildings came down, - over 500 feet into the air in some cases - they also hastened to offer Van Romero's redaction of his statement to the Albuquerque Journal that "the collapse of the [towers] ... resembled... controlled implosions used to demolish old structures." Romero, Vice President for Research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology had speculated on September 14th, 2001 that "there were explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse" According to Popular Mechanics Romero now believes that fire "triggered the collapses" and "regrets" that his comments had become "fodder for conspiracy theorists." Van Romero was not the only observer who thought that the collapses had every appearance of being controlled demolitions... Before discussing what Popular Mechanics dubs a "scientific conclusion" (namely, that fire triggered the collapses), I'd like to dispose of the question of seismic evidence. The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is located in Palisades, N.Y. about 21 miles from the WTC. Routine seismographic recordings taken on the morning of 9/11 showed a 2.1 magnitude earthquake during the 10-second collapse of the South Tower at 9:59:04 and a 2.3 quake during the 8-second collapse of the North Tower at 10:28:31. However - and this is the part that needs explaining - the middle spikes of the graph of the collapses are approximately 20 times larger in amplitude than those appearing at the end of the 10 and 8 -second graphs... Which is odd,

because one would expect the majority of the energy to have been transmitted to the ground towards the end of the collapse - rather than towards the middle. In any case, to write, as does Popular Mechanics, that the "seismic waves escalate" as the buildings make impact with the earth (ummm, this would be at the end of their fall... right?) is simply incorrect (emphasis added). In fact, the graphs for both events clearly indicate a diminution of energy - smaller waves - just as the buildings hit the earth! So what's going on here? Popular Mechanics is undoubtedly correct in its assertion that the 30-minute graphs, which appeared to show two "spikes" is misleading. However, the energy of the waves recorded during the collapses is significantly greater than that seen when the planes hit the buildings (which caused minimal earth shaking). And Lerner-Lam specifically stated that "Only a small fraction of the energy from the collapsing towers was converted into ground motion." And that any "ground-shaking that resulted from the collapse of the towers was extremely small." They explained that "during the collapse, most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers [on the way down] and the neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage - but not causing significant ground-shaking." [One of the problems with attempting a revisionist account is that the timesequences of the collapses was quite precisely known...] Now this might have supported Popular Mechanics' earlier explanation for the "puffs of dust." That is, even though "these clouds of dust may create the impression of a controlled demolition," they were, according to Popular Mechanics the result "floor pancaking" which ejected air, along with "the concrete and other debris pulverized by the force of the collapse." But Popular Mechanics must have its [pan]cake and eat it too! And "Pulverized." Just the word I was looking for! The one anomaly of the WTC collapse that initially caught my attention was the dust. Those clouds of white dust - what Paul Lioy et al describe as "aerosol plumes" - left a blanket inches deep (10-15 cm) spread over several city blocks (in a radius of approximately .7 km). Microscopic analysis revealed that the dust was composed primarily of pulverized concrete, gypsum and glass particles, approximately 60

microns in size. It takes a specific amount of energy to reduce concrete to such a fine powder. Generally, only explosive charges can pulverize concrete into dust. Now it is likely that there was more than enough energy to pulverize concrete as potential energy was transformed into kinetic energy but this would depend on the accelerated mass involved. That is, by the time the great mass of the WTC had collapsed into ruble, there would have been more than sufficient energy to pulverize concrete. [But nowhere near enough to reduce high-quality steel to puddles of molten metal. See below.] Here's the difficulty: the "aerosol plumes" described by Lioy et al may be clearly seen being "elected" from the upper floors of the Towers. Where did energy to pulverize concrete come from - at the 80th - or 100th! - floor? According to Popular Mechanics, this energy came entirely from the force of the weight of the floor above crashing onto the floor(s) below. But this is nonsense! Remember - in order for this theory to work, only the total mass of the floors above the collapsed zone can be used to calculate the available energy. Even if this mass were assumed to fall freely without impediment - onto the floor below, the distance involved is not enough to allow potential energy (PE) to be converted to kinetic energy (KE) - sufficient to pulverize concrete! Now we'll turn our attention to the to "melted steel."

Leaving aside for the moment questions about the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, it seems fair to ask - why - and how - was the defense of NORAD a proper subject for Popular Mechanics? When we examine the problems with the "official consensus" about what really happened at the World Trade Center, we will discover that in fact, there is no such consensus. In fact, the "official" report about the WTC - the FEMA/ NIST/BPAT/House Science Committee "building performance" report - states, unequivocally, that the cause of the collapse of either of the Twin Towers, or of Building 7 (or of Building 4) is not known. To claim, then, as Popular Mechanics does that studies have "shown" that these buildings

collapsed as a result "the severe damage inflicted by the planes" or as a result of "intense fire" is simply untrue. In the engineering conference convened at MIT in the October following 9/11, experts attempted to explain how a steel-framed building like the WTC could have succumbed to fire. Or how an incredibly redundant structure like the WTC could have sustained enough damage from an airliner collision to have collapsed the way it did ("nowadays, they just don't build them as tough as the World Trade Center," said Robert McNamara, President of engineering firm McNamara and Salvia; quoted in the October, 2001 issue of Scientific American). The engineers speculated that structural damage (from the plane collisions) coupled with weakening - due to fire - of the remaining intact steel somehow led to a cascade of failure(s); what was described as a "pancaking" of overlying floors onto floors below. We will discuss this later (see section 2: Wagging the WTC). For now, I wish to return to my question above: What makes Popular Mechanics in any way "expert" on questions regarding America's air defense? A close analysis of their Air Defense experts indicates that they consulted public information spokespersons. That is, Popular Mechanics' defense the US military is at best "science by press release" (translation: pure spin). Let's pause for a moment and consider the implications of this observation. On the one hand, I do not mean to criticize Popular Mechanics for probing the many complexities of the events that occurred on 911. Even if the readers of Popular Mechanics are not themselves structural engineers, or specialists in materials science or fire and/or medical forensics, they are, in a sense, a "jury" - one presumably made up of reasonably intelligent individuals who seek to educate themselves about their world. Just the sort of folks who sit on medical malpractice cases and court cases deciding the legal facts of complex issues about corporate and government liability (the latter being at the discretion of the government; the sovereign grants citizens the privilege of bringing suit on an individual basis; there is no general "right" to sue the Government). Many of these cases involve quite complex technological and/or legal issues. Which brings us immediately to a hot topic: there is a movement to remove ordinary citizens from complex cases. But, as Judge Brazelton, of the US Court of Appeals, District of Columbia once pointed out (in an article for the Atlantic, I believe), there are no issues so complex that they cannot be presented for review before reasonably intelligent people. The job of litigants is to lay out the facts in such a manner that they are made objectively clear to impartial observers. Else he said, no cases could ever be decided.

Judges are not generally also nuclear scientists, or structural engineers, and so forth. They are, presumably, knowledgeable - "experts" - about the law. They can, and do advise juries about fine points of the law. Other "experts" may be brought in to explain other advanced topics in language the Judge - and Juries - can understand. This common-sense approach is being challenged by a "new school" that seeks to insulate corporations from any possible liability for harm that may result from their products or services. The first line of attack is to place caps on "pain and suffering." But the so-called "tort reform" legislation sought by the Bush Administration goes much further, and effectively cuts off the legs of complainants seeking "punitive damages." The second line of attack is an assault on the jury system. I applaud Popular Mechanics for assuming that as readers we are intelligent enough to educate ourselves about the temperature at which high-quality steel begins to weaken, and the point at which it cannot hold - its point of structural failure. Aabout hydrocarbon chemistry. &tc. We will, no doubt, need to consult experts: about statics, load-bearing, and structural failure. About cockpit design on a modern jetliner. About the technical feasibility of placing telephone calls in flight. And about a host of other questions. But this is just what an investigative body, like a grand jury is called together to do. Juries in both criminal and civil cases review explanatory arguments made in representation of the fact or facts of a given issue, and attempt to render a decision. I suppose, in the end, this is a decision about plausibility. It is plausible that 2+2=4. It is less plausible, under the rules of simple arithmetic that two added to itself could yield some other number - say five. Even in Oceania.