Catch-9/11: Chapter 3: I Saw The News Today Oh Boy or Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud

Chapter 3: I Saw The News Today Oh Boy or Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud

It was a very ordinary thing to happen.

The World Trade Center

Only two of the seven buildings that made up the World Trade Center complex were hit by airplanes, but all seven suffered heavily. Early media attention focused on the collapses of Buildings 1 and 2. And later we learned that Building 7 had also collapsed. But until recently, only a few dedicated researchers were aware that Buildings 3, 4, 5, and 6 were also destroyed on the same day.

Nowadays, thanks to the exceedingly free flow of information that we currently enjoy, most people know all about this.

The towers collapsed upward in a very ordinary manner.

A Very Inconvenient Truth

Therefore, we must accept a very inconvenient truth: Rogue airliners can do infinitely more damage than was previously imagined. To be honest, we ought to be grateful that the impacts of those two airplanes hitting those two buildings didn't destroy most of Manhattan, half of New York State, or a big chunk of the Eastern Seaboard.

We're lucky that none of these things happened. If they had, we would be in much worse shape than we are now. But that's not all.

The top third of the South Tower broke away
but fortunately it didn't fall to the street.
It just turned to dust and blew away on the wind.

The Molecular Level

No one would deny that the collapses of the Twin Towers were extremely unusual, at least not until later. Normally when a building collapses, from an earthquake for example, the debris includes large and easily identifiable sections of the former building. If the towers had collapsed in this manner, huge chunks of steel and concrete would have damaged the streets and buildings in their vicinity.

The steel melted,
but only in certain places.

But things turned out much better than that because these particular collapses took place at the molecular level, and luckily, a large proportion of the debris collapsed upward.

A bit of benign dust
hung in the air for an hour or two.

Some Benign Dust

In other words, the towers didn't break up into huge and dangerous sections; they simply disintegrated, leaving relatively little behind except some benign dust that covered the city for a short time and caused a few minor inconveniences, and some lighter particles that lingered in the air for a few days.

in my thoughts I have seen
rings of smoke through the trees

Fortunately, the cloud that hung over the city
was non-toxic and barely noticeable.

No Adverse Effects

At the time, it was thought that these particles might have made the air in the city somewhat toxic, but

George W. Bush and Christine Todd-Whitman
both love you.

Christine Todd-Whitman, who was running the Environmental Protection Agency at the time, bravely assured the citizens of NYC that they would be perfectly safe, even if they happened to inhale quite a bit of it.

Building 5 looked as if it had been attacked
by a drill press on a sky-hook.

Hearing this good news, the gallant and patriotic souls who volunteered to help with the cleanup did inhale quite a bit of it. So it was extremely fortunate that none of them suffered any adverse health effects whatsoever. Of course we were also fortunate that the thousands who did get sick were ignored by the major media. We certainly didn't need any more bad news at a time like that.

Building 6 was horribly damaged before
either of the towers collapsed. We know
this because the air is clear in this photo.

"Inconsistencies" at the Crash Scenes

Even after all these years, immature little twerps still complain sometimes about what they call "inconsistencies" in the crash sites at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. They don't realize how lucky we were.

The debris on the Pentagon lawn was clearly visible,
but not to you.

Shanksville

If the plane that crashed in Shanksville had left any wreckage above-ground, or any sign of wreckage below-ground, the scene might have presented grave difficulties to the investigators, who might have had some physical evidence that they might have been required to fit into their explanation of the event.

The firefighters at the Pentagon were hampered
by debris that nobody else could see.

Fortunately, they were only required to explain how a jumbo jet had disappeared, leaving nary a trace save for a hijacker's bandana, and this, for them, was a much easier problem.

The Pentagon collapsed in an ordinary manner.

The Pentagon

Similarly, if the plane that hit the Pentagon had left wreckage on the lawn outside the building, the investigators might have been required to associate that wreckage with a particular airplane, and then they might have felt the need to explain why that airplane had made a hole in the wall which was much smaller than itself and no bigger than a cruise missile, not to mention similar holes in similar walls which suggested the building had been hit by a bunker-buster rather than a passenger plane.

Jane Standley told BBC viewers that Building 7 had collapsed
about 20 minutes before it did so, and with the still-upright
47-floor tower in the background (over her left shoulder).

Building 7

Crucially, if the collapse of a skyscraper (Building 7, for instance) had been reported by a major news provider (such as the BBC) 20 minutes before it fell, people might have begun to suspect that the entire sequence of events, including all the news broadcasts, had been a scripted presentation, and that somehow a stage manager had called a cue ahead of schedule.

These cars were not damaged ...

It's difficult to imagine how people could believe the attacks were a surprise (or anything else they saw on the news) if this had happened. So we hit the jackpot when no event of this type occurred.

... in any way that could be explained ...

Uncomfortable Questions

Because none of this ever happened, no uncomfortable questions were ever raised, so the news media didn't feel compelled to ignore them. It's almost impossible to guess how much worse off we would be now if any of those things had actually happened, and especially if uncomfortable questions had been given fair and equal treatment by the major networks (and maybe also Fox and CNN).

... therefore they never made the news.

Fortunately, nobody ever had to answer the questions that were never raised, and if we get just a little bit luckier, we'll never hear them raised again. That would just be too uncomfortable, and surely Americans have suffered more than enough.