9/11 'Truth' Correspondence

The problem with 9/11 conspiracy theories in not just that they are nonsense but that they support deeply flawed world-views that operate at different levels of paranoia and distrust. There is some evidence that these can be corrosive in themselves, but they also lay people open to exploitation by unscrupulous individuals for material gain. Hook someone with 9/11 'Truth' and then you can sell them lots of other ideas, and lots of other stuff as well. Books, DVDs, T-shirts are all grist to the mill of the well-developed conspiracy industry. So, arguing against 9/11 idiocy is not just about the ideas, it is trying to prevent people parting with their cash and chunks of their lives at the behest of charlatans.

In that context, I had an email, and since it was open and sent to many other recipients other that myself, a public response is in order:

This is an open letter.


Dear Mr Horgan,

I read with interest your article snapping at Mr Fisk for questioning the official version of 911.

Criticising, actually.

I suppose you did not study Physics at school, College or University - this is clearly evident from the Physically illiterate article you have written.

Undergraduate level physics, as if it matters.

Can I confirm that I have read the NIST report in full, from cover to cover, and you are WRONG, the actual NIST report (not the fakes) states on 911 both the 110 floor building came to ground in less than 10 seconds. Indeed the NIST report claims one building fell faster than free fall speed in a vacuum at sea level.

The US National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) says that the speed of the debris hitting the ground approximated that which would have been expected from freefall. What am I wrong about?

Indeed we have copious video evidence and seismic data which clearly proves both twin towers came down in less than 10 seconds each.

Well, NIST don't think so:

NIST estimated the elapsed times for the first exterior panels to strike the ground after the collapse initiated in each of the towers to be approximately 11 seconds for WTC 1 and approximately 9 seconds for WTC 2. These elapsed times were based on: (1) precise timing of the initiation of collapse from video evidence, and (2) ground motion (seismic) signals recorded at Palisades, N.Y., that also were precisely time-calibrated for wave transmission times from lower Manhattan (see NCSTAR 1-5A).

and

From video evidence, significant portions of the cores of both buildings (roughly 60 stories of WTC 1 and 40 stories of WTC 2) are known to have stood 15 to 25 seconds after collapse initiation before they, too, began to collapse. Neither the duration of the seismic records nor video evidence (due to obstruction of view caused by debris clouds) are reliable indicators of the total time it took for each building to collapse completely.

Now look here, you can play your silly little political games and lie and cheat and basically make yourselves look like clowns, or you can start to accept Scientific facts and question the ludicrous "conspiracy theory" which is the official narrative.

What political games? My party is in opposition in the UK? There are no scientific facts that support the 9/11 'Truth' industry.

For clear Physics proof of why 911 was a "False Flag" "Inside job" demolition (after jet impacts), I have enclosed a letter recently sent to the BBC , which clearly explains why 911 was a controlled demolition including the simple maths.

This calculated that a very simple model of the twin towers shows a collapse time slightly more that 10 seconds. It does not contradict the observed facts, and it certainly provides no evidence of a controlled demolition.

I openly challenge the whole of Physics, Engineering and Science to prove this physics hypothesis and maths incorrect.

What hypothesis? It is deeply flawed logic to calculate that mathematically the towers behave more or less as they did in real life, announce it must have been a controlled demolition and then demand to be disproved. If you have a theory the onus for evidence is on you, not on everyone else to prove a negative.

The claim is that the US government committed mass murder of its own citizens. I would have thought that if someone were going to believe that then they would have to have a weight of convincing evidence. Clearly, I was wrong.

Laindon Centre in new ownership

After a protracted purchase process, the Laindon Centre has a new owner, with the promise of comprehensive regeneration. If you don't know it, Laindon Town Centre is a decaying sixties disaster that desperately needs bulldozing and replacing with the quality development that the traders there and the people of Laindon deserve. This was the press release:

LAINDON REGENERATION LLP

Press Release

28^th August 2007

LAINDON REGENERATION TAKES A STEP FORWARD

New plans for Laindon town centre have taken a step forward with the news that Laindon Regeneration LLP, a division of Colonnade Group, has completed the purchase of the Laindon Centre from Lakehill Investments. Currently, much of the existing centre is in poor condition.

Plans for a major redevelopment of the existing 1960s shopping centre are currently being prepared and will be the subject of public consultation with local residents and businesses on 13^th, 14^th and 15^th September. Laindon Regeneration believes that Laindon is well positioned to take advantage of the Thames Gateway developments as it is on a major road junction, close to both the A13 and A127, with rail access to London in 30 minutes via Laindon Station.

Alastair Watson, Chief Executive of Colonnade Group said,

“We are delighted to have completed the purchase of the Laindon Centre and are committed to delivering a high quality development of new shops and homes. Public consultation is at the heart of our approach and we are looking forward to this in September when local residents and businesses can have their say.”

Councillor Stephen Horgan, Cabinet Member for Regeneration and Development, said:

“We are delighted that Laindon Regeneration has now formally completed the purchase of the Laindon Centre. We have been deeply concerned about its continued deterioration and the damage this has done to the community of Laindon. We are now confident that Laindon Regeneration will be moving things forward with haste and enthusiasm, and we look forward to the public consultation in September.”

Angela Smith MP welcomed the announcement, saying;

"The Laindon Centre urgently needs to be updated and improved to provide a better service for local residents. I would like to encourage as many people as possible to take part in the proposed consultation, to help shape this exciting and innovative new development."

Chris Balch, Chairman of the Basildon Renaissance Partnership, says:

“A key priority for Basildon is the regeneration of our town centres, and we also welcome the news that the regeneration of this major focal point for the local community is in the pipeline. This is another clear indication that the private sector is confident and willing to invest in the Basildon District, and can see the great opportunities that exist in the area. We look forward to supporting all parties in bringing this scheme forward and giving the community of Laindon a town centre fit for the modern age.”

Cameron goes firm on Crime

David Cameron’s approach to the crime crisis has been thoroughly measured, but now it is detailed. Conservative proposals include building prisons, local accountability for the police, and an end to early release for prisoners, but there is also a recognition that society has to change. This means schools, parents, popular culture and most of all time. In contrast the government have popped out a couple of initiatives designed to grab headlines and then tried to spin that there is no real problem. Most interestingly, there has been almost no engagement by Gordon Brown, who is becoming a master of inactivity as far as talking to the public is concerned. While this is somewhat welcome compared to Tony Blair’s constant ham acting, the reticence that goes with being Chancellor is simply not part of a PM’s job description. A leader has to lead, and they cannot do that glowering alone in their office.

The polls show that Conservatives lead Labour by ten points on Law and Order. This is very significant because this is one of the key issues that people actually decides people’s votes. In fact, if you get Health, the Economy and Crime then that is usually the election, unless something very significant happens in the area of foreign affairs. Labour is also trailing on Health and the real economy is looking weak. Maybe there is a reason why Gordon is sulking.

Brown should hold a referendum

You almost have to feel sorry for Gordon Brown, because Tony Blair has stitched him up like a kipper. When the former PM was off negotiating the latest European Treaty the Brown camp was clearly worried, hence the muttered threats at the time that a bad deal might be repudiated when the new man came in. Then Blair came back trumpeting that his Red Lines had been held and that the new agreement was a totally different animal from the previous failed constitution. So, Brown got with the programme and announced that there was no need for a referendum, his team probably sighing with relief at dodging the political bullet. Then things started to unravel, with a series of European leaders stating that the new treaty was in fact the old constitution in a different dust jacket. Suddenly, this suggestion ceased to be the province of the Eurosceptic usual suspects and became the mainstream view. Then the Conservative Party decided to unequivocally campaign for a referendum regardless of David Cameron’s efforts to reposition the Party to be less strident on Europe. Now major trade unions and dozens of Labour MPs have also given their support to the referendum campaign, and the polls have the public at about 80% in support. Brown’s assertion that this is a matter for parliament alone looks increasingly difficult to defend, and this issue will not go away as the whole protracted process of ratifying a European treaty unfolds.

Now some newspapers are suggesting that the best thing to do would be to have an election, that Brown should use his lift in the polls to put the matter to the country along with the fate of his government. Well, I don’t think that this is good advice. Brown’s ‘bounce’ appears to be waning, and the last few weeks have not been good for the government in political terms. More importantly, an election with Europe as the main issue would unite the Right and help the Conservatives get the vote out.

The fact is that Blair’s European chalice was as poisoned as Brown feared. There is, however, one way to avoid having to drink from it: hold a referendum.

Children kill children and the Labour reaction is to lie about it

According to the Labour Party, gun crime is on the wane. They are quoting the British Crime Survey to suggest that on their watch our streets are getting safer and in particular crimes involving guns are down. The British Crime Survey by the way is a glorified opinion poll. Now, you are almost certainly scratching your head at this point because your impression from the media is probably that gun murders are happening with depressing regularity and you are pretty sure that things didn't used to be like this. Guess what, you are right. Buried on page 36 of the latest Home Office figures is the interesting fact that gun deaths and injuries have increased by more than a factor of four since 1998, that is from 864 in 1998 to 3821 in 2006. Police officers shot are up by nearly a factor of four in the same period. The Sunday Times has it here.

So, not only have Labour presided over an appalling spate of murders and woundings, that have seen our streets become so unsafe that children are being hit in the crossfire, they have been lying about it. Then they gabble on about more laws or some way for people to hand guns in, as if gangsters are simply going to go 'oh well' and give up their weapons because people in suits decide that they should. They try to lie the problem away because it is clear that they have no clue what to actually do.

Robert Fisk wants 9/11 'truth'

There is a word that has entered the lexicon called 'fisking', as in I fisk, you fisk, oh would that they had not fisked etc. It is defined thus:

fisking: n.

[blogosphere; very common] A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form. Named after Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent (and deserving) early target of such treatment.

Now, said Robert Fisk has again demonstrated why his name is doomed to be a pub quiz question a century hence. In an article in today's Independent he spouts all of the tired garbage of the 9/11 'Truth' industry, and even parrots their line that all he is doing is asking questions.

So, he writes:

where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon?

All over the impact site as evidenced by many photographs and eye-witnesses.

Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled?

They haven't, but they are a little tired of being badgered by nutcases and their words being taken out of context.

Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field?

It didn't, this was a map reading error where idiots have confused a straight line distance from the road distance, which involves driving around a lake.

If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time?

Because steel loses structural strength as the temperature increases, that is why blacksmiths heat steel before working it. Also, when buildings collapse then they tend to collapse abruptly not in slow motion. The only people who have claimed that the steel beams would have had to have melted are people like, well, Fisk. The engineers who have looked at the problem have determined that the steel supports in the World Trade Centre certainly got hot enough to lose enough strength to fail.

(They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.)

They didn't (NIST estimates 15 to 25 seconds but it is difficult to be precise because of the dust and the fact that many of the cameramen in the best positions to observe were running for their lives).

What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it?

What could possibly have struck WTC 7 to damage it enough so that it eventually collapsed? Well, here is a clue:

Building 7 is tall one that is being showered with debris. Having a quarter-mile high building collapsing nearby can be a bit of an issue, and the FDNY pulled all of their men away before the final collapse of building 7 because it was on fire and so badly damaged that they didn't think that it would survive, and they were right. Many of the other buildings surrounding the two World Trade Centre towers were also effectively destroyed by falling debris, but funnily enough we never hear about them from the 'Truth' industry.

Fisk is a joke, and also the main reason why I stopped reading the Independent. I remember the article that finally finished me off. It was on the eve of the Gulf War of 1991, where he was predicting that the allied offensive would be a fiasco on the basis that a truck convoy that he was riding with had got lost. As everyone now knows the allied offensive was actually so successful and one-sided that it was called off after 48 hours because it was less war and more massacre. Funnily enough he said much the same about the US attack on Baghdad in 2003, which was equally successful. In fact, embracing 9/11 'Truth' represents an entirely consistent standard of journalism for Mr. R. Fisk.

Tragedy in Liverpool and a measured Conservative Response

Everyone I have spoken to is quietly appalled at the murder of an 11 year-old boy in Liverpool, apparently by another child. This is a tragedy for the family, and who could not have been moved by the grief and incomprehension of the parents at the loss of their beloved son, but it is also a stark illustration of the country's situation. 'Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' is exposed as nothing more than a clever soundbite from a politician and a party that have systematically made policy that have demonstrably made things worse. Whether it be undermining the police with paperwork and targets that have nothing to do with the prevention and detection of crime, or signing away our right to deport foreign criminals, or undermining the family with an approach to welfare where it pays for children to be fatherless, Labour speak the language of the law-abiding citizen without believing a word of it. Their reaction is always to make more things illegal, well, shooting a child in the back of the head has pretty much always been illegal. We have 3000 more criminal offences since 1997 and where has it got us?

What is required is certainly more effective policing, but also real action on the causes of crime, be it a skewed welfare system, or the failures on children in care, or any of the multiplicity of government policy that has rendered communities powerless. It is not just about government though, and David Cameron made this point very clear in his recent speech, it is about all of us who have influence in society. That means families promoting respect to their children, local authorities promoting their own communities and the media stopping treating violence as a subject for casual entertainment. This is a measured, adult approach, not the glib spiel of a professional politician where success in measured in opinion poll points, instead of children's lives. Labour is stuck in the centralising top-down world where a piece of paper telling people how to behave means that they will behave in that way. Meanwhile back in the real world there is a demand for small coffins.

Basildon Sporting Villiage Coverage

Some good local coverage for the Sporting Village project yesterday, with even more tonight. As ever, there are differing views and some people are concerned about leisure prices or the potential closure of Markham's Chase Sports Centre. Well, the prices will be affordable and that is that. Markham's Chase would only go when the new centre was operating and the two are close enough for the patrons of one to go to the other. This can be something special and we are determined to succeed.

Conservatives pledge to scrap Human Rights Act

The line appears to be that if we didn’t have the Human Rights Act then things wouldn’t change because the UK is a signatory to the UN Convention on Human Rights. This suggests that cases currently litigated in Britain would end up in being decided abroad and taking longer to resolve, so, on balance the Human Rights Act makes no real difference, no harm done, move on. This might be persuasive if you forget the legal practises that sprang into being when the HRA was enacted and dismissed the number of times that it has been quoted since, for example when a con wants hardcore porn in their cell or a police force cannot publish the pictures of dangerous criminals on the run. If lawyers are making money from new stream of lucrative cases and criminals’ rights now count for more than yours or mine then something has changed, and not for the better. Even Jack Straw, the man who brought this pernicious piece of legislation on to the statute book, is claiming that he was misled when he discovered that the government could not deport a foreign murderer because it violated his right to family life, never mind the rights of the family without a father thanks to him.

Now David Cameron has committed the Conservatives to ditching the HRA. It will mean consideration of replacement legislation, and our position with regard to the EU and the Convention, but we do know that whatever the right answer the Human Rights Act isn’t it.

Thumbs up for Basildon Sporting Village

Basildon's Conservative administration is faced with a crumbling sporting infrastructure that was designed for the assumptions of the 80s municipal socialism, which more or less held that competitive sport was a bad thing. So, we have small sports centres that are intentionally inadequate for the development of sporting skills to a high level, one swimming pool was actually designed to be just short of 25m to prevent competitive use. Labour Council administrations also failed to spend to maintain the fabric of Basildon's sports centres, pretty much limiting funding to what was required to keep the rain out. Our answer to all of this is to fold a number of small sports centres into one large, world-class facility characterised as a Sporting Village. Let us be clear, the idea is to provide a facility for everything from leisure use all the way up to elite sports and at a price ordinary people can afford. The trouble is that our local Labour party have suggested that we are going to aim it at the David Lloyd crowd and they are really exercised at the option of a third-party running it under contract. So, having created the problem in administration, they vote against the solution in opposition. The good news is that the Labour government doesn't agree with them and they have pledged £5 million to the project, which brings the total available funding up to £25m. So, the Sporting Village will move forward and we will be out to tender shortly, hopefully now with local cross-party support. Basildon is geographically close enough to the site of the London Olympic Stadium for our Sporting Village to be a supporting facility for the games. The challenge now is now to be ready for the run up to 2012.