The worst of Hearst

This essay is a year or so overdue, but the Hearst book discussed remains displayed prominently on chain book store shelves.

If you spot any errors, please notify the essay writer, Paul Conant, at Znewz1@Yahoo.com.

Jan. 31, 2008. Reader comments caused me to adjust two points, one concerning debris ejection, and another concerning Ground Zero hot spots, and to delete a paragraph about load-bearing columns.

I apologize for running a very tight operation and not providing photos. But relevant photos are available on the internet, though they must be viewed with caution. However, a well-financed book that omits relevant photos will draw reproach.

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How could pilots with very poor training have managed to execute the 9/11 attacks so precisely? Hearst writers have the answer: The hijackers "did not have to perform what flight-training professionals consider to be the three most difficult aspects of flying: taking off, flying through inclement weather, and landing."

So say Popular Mechanics writers in Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts (Hearst Books, 2006). Though several of the alleged hijackers reportedly were certified for instrument flying, the PM writers seem wary that the men could have pulled off such sensational maneuvers in bad weather. But, wonders British journalist Ian Henshall, in 9/11 Revealed: the New Evidence (Carroll and Graf, 2007), how did the hijackers know it wouldn't rain?

Allah is great! It's not raining
The purported hijackers began buying their airline tickets in August, meaning they couldn't even consult a "five-day forecast."

In 2002 FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that Nawaf al-Hazmi and Salem al-Hazmi bought their tickets on Aug. 27, 2001, via the internet agent Travelocity. He said Hamza Alghmedi bought his ticket via the internet on Aug. 29 and Ahmed Alghmedi did likewise the next day.

The purported hijack plot was, the CIA told the 9/11 commission, tightly controlled by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an al Qaeda chieftain now being held at the Guantanamo Bay prison. It would be expected that he knew the date of the attack.

Imagine setting up such a complex operation, where big targets were an important element of the plan, but then crossing your fingers and hoping it doesn't rain.

There are a number of such "oversights" by the team led by Popular Mechanics magazine Executive Editor David Dunbar and contributing editor Brad Reagan, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. The book's format, which counterpoints "myth" versus "fact" ensures that discrepancies and anomalies aren't given balanced treatment, as one would expect in a true investigative report.

Flying skill wasn't critical, assert the writers for Hearst's Popular Mechanics. Most of the flying was done by autopilot, they say, though they admit that for the last eight minutes Hanjour -- who had an abysmal training record -- steered the plane that rammed the Pentagon. They omit any discussion of the extraordinary maneuver Hanjour reportedly pulled off in those last minutes: He went into a power dive from high altitude and pulled the jetliner up so expertly that the plane leveled off a few feet above the ground and then skimmed along at some 500 miles per hour, striking the five-floor Pentagon at the first floor.

The PM writers dryly note, "To date, no other evidence has been made public about whether Hanjour's co-conspirators flew the planes manually or on autopilot." The debunkers don't tell us whether they tried to find out why that highly relevant information hadn't been made public.

Considering that the Hearst report is so one-sided, one wouldn't expect that an alternative be carefully considered: that the planes might have been steered remotely via GPS-guided robotics. The highly maneuverable GPS-guided drone Predator system had recently been developed by the Pentagon, a fact not mentioned by PM.

Sen. John McCain, a former combat pilot and POW, wrote an enthusiastic forward to Debunking in which he scoffs at those who believed President John F. Kennedy was slain in a conspiracy or who warned of Soviet intrigue in Washington.

Fast work at the Pentagon
Within minutes of the Pentagon crash, says PM, "FBI agents arrived on the scene" and began collecting debris, including a small piece of the fuselage with the American Airlines emblem on it. Such quick action doesn't imply cover-up, says PM, quoting one airline accident expert as saying that it is standard procedure, when a crime is suspected and the FBI steps in, for investigators to quickly gather up evidence. Another expert is quoted as claiming that, because of the crush of emergency responders, it was even more urgent to get the evidence off the lawn rapidly.

Yet, as Henshall points out, don't criminal investigators usually tag and photograph the evidence before removing it? Was it impossible to make a compromise so that emergency workers could get access while the wreckage area was roped off?

And what happened to the plane's tail, which was four stories high in comparison to the one story height of the fuselage? One photo was disseminated which contains a small, mangled bit of metal with the American Airlines insignia visible. Since the jet slid under the second floor slab, it seems odd that a major portion of the tail wasn't clipped off and hurled backward in accordance with Newton's third law of motion. This puzzle doesn't interest the PM writers.

At any rate, the writers quote approvingly from the Pentagon Building Performance Report, which was composed by a group of volunteer civil engineers who had no formal access to Pentagon studies of the event. The lack of basic forensic data, such as a Pentagon analysis of the jetliner's purported maneuver, doesn't raise Hearst eyebrows.

In their discussion panning the idea that anything other than a 757 struck the Pentagon, PM points to a security video that purportedly has a frame with a plane at less than a second from impact. The PM book omits that photo from its portfolio. The plane looks suspiciously out of proportion with respect to the building, but PM ignores that criticism and quotes an expert to say that it was "unrealistic" to think that a low quality security video would give a good view of the plane.

Tom Fitton, head of the conservative activist group Judicial Watch, had hoped to debunk conspiracy theorists by pressing for release of the video, PM says, but "was disappointed the footage was not more conclusive."

Shooting the sitting ducks
Of course, some "myths" are easier to puncture than others. The writers found that a "pod" seen on one attack aircraft during photo enhancement is an optical illusion caused in part by computer imaging technology and quotes experts that back that point. The Hearst team may be right. But, they have not proved a "fact" which debunks a "myth" but have only offered what may be a plausible explanation of a disputed point. However, the explanation would have been more convincing had PM published more of the relevant photos in that controversy, rather than just one (plus a comparison photo).

Other easily dismissed points include amateurish misunderstandings of seismic data concerning the collapses and what trade center owner Larry Silverstein meant when he said the fire department had decided to "pull it" before tower 7 collapsed.

Tacked onto the plane-bulge analysis is this paragraph:

"Finally, as part of a three-year investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a nonregulatory agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, ran computer simulations of the crashes and concluded the damages were consistent with the impacts of airplanes -- not missiles or bombs."

This is a false claim. The NIST did not say the damage was inconsistent with explosives or bombs. The agency did not investigate that possibility (except for a "small bomb" scenario that is essentially irrelevant). After the period of public comment, the NIST inserted a disclaimer in its final report saying "no evidence" had been found for explosives. However, the NIST simulation did not test for an explosives scenario and the NIST offers no indication at all that this possibility was scientifically examined.

In fact, when the NIST contracted out a computer simulation for the collapse of the 47-story tower 7, it did not include the explosives possibility in the contract, but later -- perhaps under pressure from the contractor -- amended the contract to test for that possibility. (The oft-delayed WTC7 report is now scheduled to be wrapped up in August 2008.)

By the way, what is the relevance of the non-regulatory status? That the NIST had no conflict of interest that might have contributed to cover-up?

Cheap shots
An example of the Hearst technique:

A.K. Dewdney, a retired Canadian computer science professor, believed that three of the hijacked planes landed safely and were replaced by military drones. Not satisfied with having found what they say is an arithmetical error in Dewdney's account of the switch-off, they portray Dewdney's scenario as an "advancement" of a hypothesis that first appeared on a site which "promotes revisionist histories of the Holocaust." Dewdney is tarred as being associated with Holocaust deniers, though there is no evidence that he holds such views.

The writers ignore the fact that Dewdney is recognized for his math books and at one time was a frequent contributor to Scientific American.

The PM team also takes Dewdney to task for focusing on the cell phone conversation problem. The experts the Hearst writers consulted actually confirmed Dewdney's essential point that cell phone conversation was very iffy while airborne. Eventually, according to Henshall, the prosecutors in the Moussaoui trial asserted that only two calls on Flight 93 were by cell phone, with the rest by Airfone. The story keeps changing...

This point is almost silly: "Not one of the leading conspiracy theorists has a background in engineering, construction or related fields." Physics is not considered a related field apparently. And what of computer science? After all, the government explanation of the fall of the twin towers relies on a computer simulation.

Another cheap shot:

The discussion of the controlled demolition controversy opens by highlighting the opinion of a Danish online essayist that bombs felled the towers and pointing out that the writer also claims the Apollo moon landings were a hoax, as if he is representative of critics of the government theory.

In fact, PM knocks the "handful of skeptics" who "cite academic credentials to lend credence to their views." On the other hand, those who support PM's claims are supposedly respected academics who are just giving the facts.

But it is PM that is suspect in the credentials area.

The book asserts that in the five years since 9/11, the tower collapses had been "the subject of lengthy investigations and engineering school symposiums, together involving hundreds of experts from academia and private industry, as well as the government" and that the consensus favors the NIST theory. This is known to scientists as a "hand-waving" argument. PM fails to document this alleged fact.

The authors say that the PM team consulted hundreds of experts, with the implication that they all tend to back up the government. However, the book provides no endnotes or footnotes, and no method of easily checking on what the people listed actually said. Similarly, Hearst Books decided to omit an index, making checking difficult. It is also noteworthy that the 9/11 commission and the NIST trade center report lacked indexes. (Henshall's book also lacks an index, but he did not have the financial resources of Hearst behind him.)

One of the experts PM lists as among the seemingly pro-government experts is Fire Science Professor Glen Corbett. We are not told that he blew the whistle on the rush to get rid of the steel evidence from the towers, nor of his estimate of the NIST report on the twin towers as troubling and inadequate.

Similarly, Fire Science Professor James Quintere, who was once an NIST division chief, has denied the book's claim that he had been an NIST adviser during the World Trade Center investigation. Quintere also blew the whistle on the rush to get rid of trade center steel, a fact PM omits when it quotes him on a point -- flames from an elevator shaft -- that bolsters its version of events. In 2007, Quintere denounced the NIST report as so unsound technically that it promotes conspiracy theories.

Physics 101 escapes PM
PM rebuts the point that an airplane that struck the Empire State Building did not cause a collapse by citing an expert who asserts that the Empire State Building had a far higher density per cubic foot than the trade towers, which used a hat truss design.

The towers in fact had less density than balsa wood, a PM expert said. The implication is that, by comparison with the Empire State Building, the towers were flimsy. However, what PM -- which says its technical expertise makes it "ideally equipped" to research the 9/11 controversy -- fails to understand is that density is virtually irrelevant. In general, the less mass there is higher up, the less mass is required lower down to hold up the structure. This means that if the upper block falls into the lower one, the energy ratios for a trade tower versus the Empire State Building would be equivalent -- because the densities cancel out! (Just as it takes more force to raise an object weighing 1000 pounds than it takes to raise an object weighing 500 pounds, the energy necessary to knock down from above a less dense building is generally less than for a more dense building.)

But, somehow PM gets the physics partly right when its case is helped, noting that the bomber that struck the Empire State Building was traveling at 200 mph versus 440 to 540 mph for the jetliners. Though PM didn't say so, the bomber's total mass would have been far less than the jetliner's so that the kinetic energy of the bomber crash was far less than that of the jetliner crashes. But the trade towers were designed to withstand the crash-induced sway and to transfer load from damaged columns to others, which they did well, as even PM's experts concede.

Leslie Robertson is described by PM as the "chief colleague" of the late John Skilling, the WTC design engineer. Robertson is quoted as saying in November 2001 that though the Skilling firm studied the possibility of a jetliner impact, Robertson couldn't recall studying what would happen to the jet fuel.

According to Henshall, Robertson was not Skilling's chief colleague, but rather a minor employee.

To further buttress its case, PM quotes Jon Magnusson, CEO of Magnusson Klemencic Associates, Skilling's firm, as asserting that "ninety-nine percent of [modern] high-rises, if hit with a large-scale commercial aircraft, would collapse immediately, not just collapse but collapse immediately."

No substantiation is given for this claim, no other experts are polled, and no clear definition of high-rise is given.

PM quotes Mark Loizeaux, an executive with a "world-renowned" controlled demolition firm, as saying that, in order to bring down the buildings, "thousands of pounds" of explosives would be necessary, as if it is obvious that such an eventuality is impossible. There are several points the PM team doesn't consider:

* Government plotters, perhaps operating from the CIA's New York station based in World Trade Center building 7, would have seen to it that the trade center security force was compromised.

* News reports had said that the 1993 trade center blast failed to topple the tower because the vehicle, containing 1000 pounds of explosive, couldn't park close enough to the core.

* Small charges could have been placed on floor trusses linked to core columns along with one or two big charges in the core area.

There have been conflicting claims as to whether there was molten metal in the smoldering debris. PM says molten hot spots aren't surprising, because piles of hot, burning debris acted as long-term ovens at Ground Zero. There have been reports -- not however cited by PM -- that hot spots of 2400 degrees Fahrenheit were detected, which is close to the 2500 degrees Fahrenheit that is typical of the melting point of steel. However, PM has not established a fact, but presented an apparently plausible explanation of a disputed point. (The 100 degree difference might be due to measurement error or the carbon content of the steel.)

Unlucky Seven
When it comes to tower 7, which collapsed at 5:20 p.m., the Hearst team isn't exactly even-handed. It cites chief WTC prober Shyam Sunder's "working hypothesis" that a pressurized fuel line spilled fuel onto the fifth floor for "a long period of time" without mentioning the fact that the FEMA report said that its best-case scenario had only a "low probability" of occurrence. Supposedly those odds were changed because the FEMA probers were unaware of the severity of the structural damage to tower 7 caused by the collapses of the twin towers.

Here is the problem: in order to get enough heat to buckle a key steel element, the fire needed to burn long and hot, and the only possible source was a basement fuel tank. But why did the fuel line keep gushing? Normally, there is an automatic shutoff lever that tilts when a moat fills up. Also, the Fire Department would have shut off the electricity to the building hours earlier, meaning that the fuel was being elevated by a pump running on power from an emergency generator, which, for some reason, was supposedly working, though the FEMA writers were puzzled as to why.

PM explains that, because WTC7 housed the mayor's emergency management office, the emergency generator was designed to keep running. Yet, PM cites no source for this assertion. PM fails to ask why firemen didn't shut it off. Where was it? On a fire floor? The PM team fails to report that the FEMA probers were exasperated by the lack of blueprints, copies of which should have been in New York City records, for the building's electrical system.

In 2006, PM was eager to "prove" its no-conspiracy conclusion about WTC7's fall, even though the NIST investigation was far from complete -- perhaps indicating that the NIST already had an answer before the scientific work had been done. The final report is scheduled for August 2008, seven years after the event, four years after the 9/11 commission report and three years after the twin towers report.

Sunder has said that though the twin towers investigation was "challenging," the WTC7 investigation is even "more challenging."

A preliminary NIST report is "definitive" that "NIST has seen no evidence that the collapse of WTC7 was caused by bombs, missiles or controlled demolition," asserts PM. As Quintere has pointed out, the NIST did not use its subpoena power, and the agency omits reference to standard forensic evidence gathered by federal crime scene investigators. Also, the NIST inserted the "no evidence" disclaimer into an amended contract it issued that permitted computer simulation of the possibility of controlled demolition.

Sly omission
The PM team pooh-poohs the idea that the Air Force had been under orders to "stand down" and steer clear of hijacked aircraft but never discusses the point that an interagency air hijacking exercise was in progress when the "real hijackings" occurred, a fact that easily could have befuddled air controllers and military personnel.

In an aside, PM notes that the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which investigated the tower crashes, "granted all witnesses anonymity in exchange for their cooperation." This doesn't seem to bother the Hearst journalists. Certainly some witnesses might prefer to remain anonymous but surely not the majority. This writer's experience as a reporter is that Americans are in general very cooperative in describing their experiences and happy to give their names, workplaces and home towns.

The fact that it is impossible to check witness statements doesn't seem to furrow a PM eyebrow.

At another point, PM cites hundreds of rush-hour commuters who, PM says, saw a 757 crash into the Pentagon building. But, the debunkers give no names nor means of checking this rather odd claim. Do you suppose that a typical driver would be able to accurately identify an object traveling at some 500 mph at a hundred yards or so away? Drivers would have had less than two seconds to observe the object as it supposedly skimmed across the lawn.

'An in-depth investigation'?
"As for those who believe bombs may have been planted in the buildings," says PM, "one of the primary sources they cite is New York City Firefighter Louie Cacchioli," who, pulled from the rubble of Tower 2, apparently told a reporter that "on the last trip up a bomb went off" and that "we think there was bombs set in the building."

The Hearst writers report that Cacchioli later told PM that he had meant only that "it sounded like a bomb" -- not that it was a bomb.

PM went on to assert: "Cacchioli, like every other firefighter contacted by Popular Mechanics, accepts that the combination of jet impacts and fire brought down the WTC buildings." However, no other firefighter's name is given and so the claim is unsupported.

More importantly, a careful check of the Port Authority police radio transcripts shows that a number of officers believed bombs were going off, though the transcripts appear to have been fudged in order to "explain" that belief. This writer's story "9/11 blasts still echo in tangled files" can be found at http://911science.blogspot.com (search: echo).

Slick evasion
The NIST's report on the collapses of the twin towers glossed over the point that its computer simulation required that the fireproofing be stripped by fast-flying jet debris from floor joists and trusses in WTC2 but not from the underside of the adjacent floor slab. Similarly, for WTC1, the fireproofing had to have been stripped from core columns but not from the underside of the floor slab.

The evasiveness of the NIST is spotlighted in How did the twin towers fall: questions remain found at http://www.angelfire.com/ult/znewz1/wtc.html.

PM manages to match the NIST in evasiveness with this bland statement: "In addition, the remaining fireproofing can trap heat that reaches the steel in exposed areas, magnifying the effect of the heat."

This is a clever way of saying that the computer simulation fails if the fireproofing isn't left on the floor slab underside but stripped off the floor supports a few inches or less away. The PM team doesn't point out that otherwise the fire heat would have conducted up through the slab and into the air, leaving insufficient heat to buckle floor supports or columns.

The PM team fails to concede that the NIST admitted that it had no hard evidence that there had been sufficient heat -- particularly so in WTC2 -- to have caused critical steel damage, that it was forced to rely on guesswork.

Consider this caption: "Conspiracy theorists claim that fuel from the hijacked jets didn't burn hot enough or long enough to cause structural failure. Vertical lines on this photo of WTC 2's east face indicate the original line of vertical columns, while the small perpendicular bars show an inward bowing of about 10 inches just 18 minutes after the impact of Flight 175. WTC 1's south face was bowed inward some 55 inches six minutes before collapse."

In fact, the NIST reported that burning jet fuel couldn't have buckled steel and the agency came up with an elaborate scenario to account for that fact. The photo shows a wall section bent inward, and so either the jet impact caused the damage or some other source, such as an unaccounted for high-energy explosion, did so.

Nobody did the math?
PM associates the NIST and the Federal Emergency Management Agency with the "pancake theory" of collapse: "Unable to absorb the massive energy, that floor failed, transmitting the forces down to the floor below, allowing the collapse to progress downward through the building in a chain reaction."

Yet neither the FEMA report nor the NIST report gives any physics calculations to support this claim. In fact, the NIST only examined conditions leading up to initiation of "global collapse," not the actual collapse.

Yet PM was in a position to have experts run the numbers, but did not do so. However, elementary physics calculations show that the "massive energy" of the top block falling one floor was miniscule in comparison with the potential energy of the remaining block, which is why skyscraper pancake collapses were unheard of before 9/11. (See "The case of the missing energy" at http://kryptograff.blogspot.com and search: missing.)

As to the puffs of smoke observed belching from tower windows, PM quotes Sunder, the NIST's lead investigator, thus: "When you have a significant portion of a floor collapsing, it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window." To untrained eyes, these clouds of dust from pancaking floors might create the impression of controlled demolition, says PM.

PM doesn't acknowledge that NIST experts wrote a supporting document to the main report in which they suggest the dust-from-debris possibility but are unwilling to back up the idea. Significantly, the NIST did not publish a table giving the exact time and window location of each puff, nor did the agency publish all photos of the puffs. In Sunder's scenario, law of gravity means that a debris-type puff cannot appear faster than a floor can fall. Hence had the times confirmed the debris theory, wouldn't the NIST have been glad to publish them?

Nevertheless, as James Conant, a mathematics professor, pointed out to this writer, there is a possibility that puffs could be ejected faster than free fall, either because a column of air was trapped and squeezed or because of a high-speed vibration wave traveling down through the structure. Even so, NIST offered nothing to bolster such possibilities.

In fact, the NIST, which boasts of publishing a huge mass of documents concerning the tower collapses, keeps all sorts of basic data away from public eyes, including a comprehensive timetable of events? What kind of investigation is that? asks Quintere (see "Fire scientist questions 9/11 probe's professionalism" at http://911science1.blogspot.com and search: Quintere). The NIST has also refused to permit outside experts to see details of the computer algorithm for simulating the jet impacts, as Michael Ravnitzky, a freedom of information act lawyer, discovered.

Yellow journalism survives
It is unfortunately true that a number of 9/11 critics, either though lack of training or for propaganda reasons, indulge in unprofessional practices, such as the inflation or blurring of credentials when convenient, or the selective use of quotations that tend to bolster one's case without at least noting the source's position, when one is apparent, concerning 9/11 controversies.

Yet such practices by a team of professional journalists, with a major news corporation behind them, can only be seen as indicative of a deception operation.

The Hearst team did not behave like a group of professional investigative reporters. They seem to have interviewed very few skeptics and critics, while interviewing a number of people who they would use to bolster the "accepted" version of events. This reporter's take is that there is too much reliance on "credentials" and very little real gumshoe work. Also, this science-minded writer sees the popular technology journalists as untutored in basic physics.

Though admittedly some skeptic web sites show signs of amateurish documentation blunders, in general the Hearst effort falls far short of the work of many skeptics in the area of documentation of facts and quotations.

(This writer concedes not at present being in a position to make the phone calls that should be made.)

Quoted as praising PM's investigative acumen are Richard A. Clarke, Bush's counter-terror chief at the time of the 9/11 attacks; Michael Shermer, a science historian and Scientific American columnist; Eduardo Kausel, an MIT civil engineering professor; Christopher J. Earls, a Cornell civil engineering professor; and Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor. No physicist, mathematician, fire scientist or computer scientist is named as vouching for the book.

No responses have yet been received to an email inviting these professors and Shermer to comment on their positions with respect to Debunking or this article. Clarke's email address was not available.

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Feb. 29, 2008. I happened to look at comments posted on this piece on the Amazing Randi site, which runs overwhelmingly antagonistic comments against 9/11 skeptics. One writer got a chuckle out of the lead. But, accusing me of bad physics, he invited fellow posters to find errors in my article. None did, and most comments lacked substance. In fact, it was people in the 9/11 truth community who actually caught some errors, which I fixed. One Randi poster seemed to think my parenthetical remark about the NIST's small bomb scenario was somehow dubious; but by targeting a minor point, he avoided the substance of the article. No poster was able to effectively counterpoint my criticism of the Hearst book.