[THS] Cockburn and his physicist friend abuse physics and credulity

[Peter Webster]

[My critique of the physicist's arguments follows 
- about all they can do honestly here is sling ad hominems - Peter Webster]

CounterPunch Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
VOL. 13, NO. 15 September 1-15, 2006

Alexander Cockburn writes,

As those CounterPunchers who read our website may 
have seen, we ran a piece of mine the weekend of 
September 9/10 attacking the conspiracy crowd 
claiming the 9/11/2001 attacks were an inside job, ordered by Bush and Cheney.

We don’t believe this, and have always declined 
to make our newsletter or website a platform for 
those who do. As CounterPuncher Michael Neumann 
remarked in a note to me after he’d read my piece:

“I think the problem of conspiracy nuttery has 
got worse, and is part of a general trend. There 
really were serious questions about the Kennedy 
assassination, an unusual number of them, and it 
wasn’t too crazy to come to the wrong conclusion. 
There wasn’t a single serious question about 
9-11. But this is the age of angels, creationism, 
corpses all over Kosovo, Arabs suspiciously 
speaking Arabic, Satanic child abuse, nucular 
Eyraquees, and channeling. The main engine of the 
9-11 conspiracy cult is nothing political; it’s 
the death of any conception of evidence.

“This probably comes from the decline of Western 
power. Deep down, almost everyone, across the 
political spectrum, is locked in a bigotry which 
can only attribute that decline to some 
irrational or supernatural power. The result is 
the ascendency of magic over common sense, let alone reason.”

I’ll quickly resume my basic points, before 
moving to a very interesting piece by a physicist 
(and Counter- Puncher) – Manuel Garcia Jr – who 
offers a theory for the fall of the Towers, which 
conspiracy advocates attribute to prepositioned explosives.

One characteristic of the nuts is that they have 
a devout, albeit preposterous belief in American 
efficiency, thus many of them start with the 
racist premise that “Arabs in caves” weren’t 
capable of the mission. They believe that 
military systems work the way Pentagon flacks say they should work.

They appear to have read no military history, 
which is too bad because if they did they’d know 
that minutely planned operations -- let alone 
responses to an unprecedented emergency -- screw 
up with monotonous regularity, by reason of 
stupidity, cowardice, venality, weather, and all the other whims of providence.

[ummmm. so WE screw up, cant get or planes in the 
air, can't figure out what's going on, can't see 
the planes on radar, ... yet BL and alQ bring off 
their demonic plan with a perfect score -pw]

The 9/11 nuts proffer what they demurely call 
“disturbing questions”, though they disdain all 
answers but their own. They seize on coincidences 
and force them into sequences they deem to be 
logical and significant. Apparent anomalies that 
seem to nourish their theories are brandished 
excitedly; testimony that undermines their 
theories – like witnesses of a large plane 
hitting the Pentagon – is contemptuously brushed aside.

Of course it’s very probable that the FBI or U.S. 
military intelligence, even the CIA, had 
penetrated the Al Qaeda team planning the 9/11 
attacks; that intelligence reports – some are 
already known – piled up in various Washington 
bureaucracies pointing to the impending onslaught 
and even the manner in which it might be carried out.

The history of intelligence operations is profuse 
with examples of successful intelligence 
collection, but also of fatal slowness to act on 
that intelligence, along with eagerness not to 
compromise the security and future usefulness of 
the informant, who has to buttress credentials by 
even pressing for prompt action by the plotters. 
Sometime an undercover agent will actually 
propose an action, either to deflect efforts away 
from some graver threat, or to put the plotters 
in a position where they can be caught 
red-handed. In their penetrations of 
environmental groups the FBI certainly did this.

One notorious “deductive” leap involves flight 
77, which on 9/11 ended up crashing into the 
Pentagon. There are photos of the impact of the 
“object” – i.e., the Boeing 757, flight 77 – that 
seem to show the sort of hole a missile might 
make. Ergo, the nuts assert, it WAS a missile and 
a 757 didn’t hit the Pentagon. As regards the 
hole, my brother Andrew – writing a book about 
Rumsfeld and the DOD during his tenure – has seen 
photos taken within 30 minutes of Pentagon impact 
clearly showing outline of entire plane including 
wings. This was visible momentarily when the smoke blew away.

[and then presto! all traces were gone with the wind]

And if it was a missile, what happened to the 
757? Did the conspirators shoot it down somewhere 
else, or force it down and then kill the 
passengers? Why plan to demolish the towers with 
pre-placed explosives if your conspiracy includes 
control of the two planes that hit them? Why 
bother with the planes at all? Why blame Osama if 
your fall guy is Saddam Hussein?

The nuts ignore obvious crimes and blunders. They 
scorn the notion that the WTC towers crashed down 
because they were badly built as a consequence of 
corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by 
the Port Authority, and because they were struck 
by huge planes loaded with jet fuel. No, they 
fell because Dick Cheney’s agents methodically 
planted demolition charges in the preceding days.

It was a conspiracy of thousands, all of whom –- 
party to mass murder –- have held their tongues ever since.

The towers did not suddenly collapse, as if 
triggered by a demolition fuse. As discussed in 
Wayne Barrett and Dan Collin’s excellent book, 
Grand Illusion, about Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, 
helicopter pilots radioed warnings nine minutes 
before the final collapse that the South Tower 
might well go down and, repeatedly, as much as 25 
minutes before the North Tower’s fall. A 
structural engineer in the North Towers similarly 
advised police he thought the structure might 
well be fatally compromised and would soon drop.

What Barrett and Collins brilliantly show are the 
actual corrupt conspiracies on Giuliani’s watch: 
the favoritism to Motorola which saddled the 
firemen with radios that didn’t work; the ability 
of the Port Authority to skimp on fire 
protection, the mayor’s catastrophic failure in 
the years before 9/11/2001 to organize an 
effective unified emergency command that would 
have meant that cops and firemen could have 
communicated; that many firemen wouldn’t have 
unnecessarily entered the Towers; that people in 
the Towers wouldn’t have been told by 911 
emergency operators to stay in place; and that 
firemen could have heard the helicopter warnings 
and the final Mayday messages that prompted most 
of the NYPD men to flee the Towers.

That’s the real political world, in which 
Giuliani and others have never been held 
accountable. The nuts disdain the real world 
because, like much of the left and liberal 
sectors, they have promoted Bush, Cheney and the 
neocons to an elevated status as the Arch Demons 
of American history, instead of being just one 
more team running the American empire, a team of 
more than usual stupidity and incompetence 
(characteristics I personally favor in imperial 
leaders). The conspiracy nuts have combined to produce a huge distraction.

Now for Manuel Garcia, Jr. Manuel wrote an 
interesting piece for our site last year on the 
collapse of the levees in New Orleans after 
hurricane Katrina. He’s a native New Yorker who 
works as a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore 
National Laboratory in California with a PhD in 
Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, from 
Princeton. His technical interests are generally 
in fluid flow and energy, specifi- cally in gas 
dynamics and plasma physics; and his working 
experience includes measurements on nuclear bomb 
tests, devising mathematical models of energetic 
physical effects, and trying to enlarge a union 
of weapons scientists. Today, he believes an 
immediate shift to green energy technologies 
should be the highest political and technical 
priority, to both quench the global class war and 
to quickly achieve the UN’s Millennium 
Development Goals. Like his father, also Manuel 
is an amateur poet. Here’s his take, as outlined in his letter to me:

Garcia’s Theory of Why the WTC Buildings Fell

“Your piece, The 9-11 Conspiracy Nuts, was right 
on target, to my way of thinking. It is so easy 
to spin conspiracies when you ignore Occam’s 
Razor and pile on assumptions to preserve an 
underlying bias, despite facts and historical 
experience. As you note, anyone who has read any 
military history will know how easily it is for 
plans to be scrambled by human failings, the 
unexpected forces of nature and what can only be 
called the caprices of fate. Robust plans are 
really very simple and they rely on individuals 
who are well trained to be able to apply that 
training, and the resources at their disposal, as 
the opportunities of the moment allow, in order 
to advance a tactical objective.

“One item I have thought about is the contention 
that the WTC buildings collapsed at terminal 
velocity (free fall), and that this must indicate 
the use of preplaced explosives, as in building demolitions.

The assumption in this claim is that the collapse 
‘should have’ been slower if the frame below the 
descending collapse front was intact and thus 
‘resisting’. I have not done any engineering 
calculations on this, however, I can see how the 
buildings could collapse as observed, without 
invoking a conspiracy of sabotage, even for WTC 
7, the shorter building that did not suffer an airplane strike.

“I think it possible for shock waves to have run 
up and down the buildings, bouncing between the 
collapse front and the foundation, and these 
shock wave could have weakened, possibly at 
points broken, the bolts and rivets holding the joints of the framework.

“This is not an esoteric idea, it would occur in 
auto crashes (tests and accidents), and can 
probably be observed in computer simulations. 
Modern autos are designed to have crushable ends, 
to absorb the energy of impact preferentially, 
thus sparing the passenger compartment. It is 
unlikely that any such consideration went into 
the design of the metalwork of the World Trade 
Center buildings. Their frames were probably of a 
uniform rigidity, and a sharp impact anywhere 
would necessarily send out stress or shock waves, 
as the transient response of the structure 
seeking to equilibrate to the force of a new loading.

“This is like striking a bell. It ‘rings’at a 
frequency characteristic of its rigidity and 
shape, and it eventually spreads the stress of 
the new load throughout itself, as an additional 
stress if it is a constant load (like a new 
weight), or an added amount of heat -- what the 
bouncing vibrations devolve to -- if the load was 
a transient blow. So, it might be that the WTC 
buildings ‘shattered’, perhaps not perfectly like 
a bullet through a glass pane (imagine seeing one 
of Egerton’s high speed film clips) but more like 
the shattering of the safety glass of an 
automobile windshield (with plastic sheeting bonded between layers of glass).

“The collapse of the heat-weakened frame (blast 
and heat from airplane fuel tank explosions and 
fires, fed by plastic furnishings in the offices) 
at the impact zone would be the onset of an 
impulsive load on the lower structure, as the 
descending mass of the top floors collapsed the 
impact zone. The sudden imposition of the 
momentum of the top floors -- our hammer -- onto 
the structure below the impact zone was too 
sudden for the structure to resist by a uniform 
increase in the stress throughout the body of the 
metal framework, impact zone-to-bottom. So, the 
entire force of resistance would be carried by a 
short length of structure (perhaps only a few 
floors, even one) immediately below the impact 
zone, and this might have fatally ruptured local 
joints -- our shattering effect. This local 
stress concentration would race along the 
structure, moving the high stress condition to fresh material.

“Thus, each section of the lower structure would 
experience a brief time of extremely high stress 
as the wave passed through it. On reaching the 
foundation, it would shake the ground, basically 
an earthquake, and part of the energy would also 
reflect back up the structure. In this way, the 
shrinking length of the lower structure would be 
experiencing a likely increase in both the 
average level of stress, as well as more frequent 
passage of shock waves across any given floor. 
The final impact of the collapsed mass into the 
foundation would send the energy radially outward 
through the ground as an earthquake (the 
deflection of the ground in resistance to the momentum of the fall).

“I think WTC7 could have collapsed as a result of 
weakening by fires, caused by falling burning 
debris, and the earthquakes from the collapse of the tall towers.

[suddenly, in free fall exactly like films of 
other controlled demolitions, and several hours later - right]

“I am sure these effects can be calculated, 
probably by engineers and scientists who study 
the mechanics and dynamics of complex structures 
under earthquake loading. To offer this 
hypothesis as a “proof” would require such 
calculations, which could be verified by others. 
I am not able to produce that level of 
verification, so I leave this as a suggestion, 
within the spirit of Occam’s Razor, of seeking 
explanations for the WTC building collapses that 
require the fewest number of ad hoc assumptions (e.g., no conspiracies).

“The essential point here is that buildings, 
bridges and other extended structures can be seen 
as antennas that pick up and transmit mechanical 
vibrations. A famous example is the collapse of 
the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1937, by the action 
of wind vortexes shed at the resonance frequency 
of the bridge (you can find the film clip on the 
internet). Like any bell, each structure has its 
natural frequency, and if a force strikes it in 
harmony with that frequency (synchronously, or at 
the resonance frequency) then the transmission of 
energy from the load to the structure is very 
efficient (mathematically, it is perfect at resonance).

“During the sequence of forcings that occurred 
during the collapse of the three WTC buildings, 
there may have been some nearly resonant 
transfers of mechanical energy, and these may 
have created ‘explosive’ levels of stress at 
enough joints to shatter the framework 
sufficiently that the collapses we observed were of already broken buildings.

“Your larger point is most important. Conspiracy 
ravings and other distractions into irrationality 
and fantasy sap energy and focus that could be 
used to better effect, both personal and social. 
There really are some conspiracies out there, but 
the worst ones are all too easily seen -- power does not depend on subtlety.”

[The parallel with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge 
collapse is horsedoody, and makes me wonder 
whether this "physicist" has forgotten his 
first-year physics lessons. The Tacoma example is 
taught in first year to demonstrate forced 
oscillations and resonance (see Resnick and 
Halliday, *Physics* vol 1, pp310-313), in which 
it is necessary to inject an ADDITIONAL 
incrememnt of energy in almost perfect timing 
with the oscillating energy wave, to overcome the 
natural damping by frictional forces that all 
such systems have. Left alone, the system will 
return to stability - Tacoma wouldn't have 
collapsed were it not for continuing injections 
of energy to the oscillation by continued wind. 
An easy to understand analogue of the situation 
is a child on a swing. If he does not pump with 
his legs, the swing loses energy, slows its 
movement and eventually comes to a stop. If he 
pumps his legs out of synchronisation with the 
swing, it comes to rest even faster. Thus an 
injection of energy at a precisely timed interval 
is necessary to maintain or increase the oscillation.

For WTC to have collapsed due to resonance and 
forced oscillation, additional airplanes or their 
equivalent would have had to crash into the 
building IN RESONANCE WITH the oscsillation - if 
they hit the building out-of-phase they would 
actually have damped the oscillation. And without 
further injections of energy (by timed explosions 
for instance?) the oscillation would have died 
out by itself, assuming that it existed in the first place.]