THE BIN LADENS

An Arabian Family in the American Century.
By Steve Coll.
Illustrated. 671 pp. The Penguin Press. $35.

Is Osama bin Laden a rebel against the Saudi Arabian ruling class or a model member of it? That question lurks behind “The Bin Ladens,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer Steve Coll. The world’s most famous terrorist owes his fortune and his standing to a family business that Coll calls “the kingdom’s Halliburton.” Like Halliburton, the Saudi Binladin Group specializes in gigantic infrastructure projects. Government connections are the key to the family’s wealth. So you would assume they would react with unmixed horror to a radical son, like the duchess in the Noël Coward song:

You could have pierced her with swords
When she discovered
Her youngest liked Lenin
And sold the Daily Worker near the House of Lords.

But Saudi Arabia, Coll shows, is a place where the interests of rulers and revolutionaries are less easy to distinguish.
Muhammad bin Laden, Osama’s father, emigrated from the canyons of the Hadhramawt, in present-day Yemen, in the 1920s. He arrived in Jidda, one-eyed and semiliterate, at a time when Saudi Arabia had hardly any paved roads and the king kept his treasury in a tin trunk. Muhammad was charismatic. His workers, with whom he prayed and sang at job sites, revered him. He was scrupulously honest, as Arabian lore holds Hadhramis to be, and his company keeps this reputation still. Most important, Muhammad would serve the greedy and capricious Saudi princes in ways that Bechtel and other foreign contractors balked at — doing humiliating jobs from digging gardens to fixing air conditioners. The grateful royals made him their main palace- and highway-builder in the boom years after the war. By the time Muhammad died in a plane crash in September 1967, his company was worth an estimated $150 million, and he had fathered 54 children by about 22 wives.
Those children, Osama included, grew up in the shadow of a court society. Royal favor was all. Since the Saud family sent its sons to Princeton and Georgetown, Muhammad educated many of his own sons in the West, too, starting with Salem, his impious and ribald successor. Coll’s account of Salem is doting. When the austere King Faisal was assassinated in 1975, the sybaritic King Fahd took power. Hedonism and consumerism became for Salem what piety had been for his father: common ground with the royal family. Knowledgeable about private planes, luxury cars and new gadgetry, Salem became, as Coll puts it, a “royal concierge.”
Salem was purposeful. Those royals he shopped for were the same ones who decided on lucrative construction contracts. Salem assigned each of his brothers a prince to cultivate, while he worked on accumulating powerful cronies in the United States. A wheeler-dealer, Jim Bath, who had served in the Texas Air National Guard with George W. Bush, was his route into the upper reaches of Texas politics — the Bushes, the Bentsens and particularly James Baker, later secretary of state, whom the bin Ladens’ lawyer called the family’s “favorite politician.” Since Salem’s own death in a plane crash in 1988, the family’s present patriarch, Bakr, has nurtured his American ties, both as an investor in the powerful Carlyle Group and as a donor to Jimmy Carter’s causes. The bin Ladens, Coll writes, came to own “an impressive share of the America upon which Osama declared war.”

Osama was timid. Coll suggests that he was haunted by the low status of his Syrian mother. An afternoon Islamic study group he joined during junior high school filled him with purpose, and eventually with anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and an abhorrence of photography. These stances got little attention. They were just a more ardent version of what Saudi kids were taught anyway.
Politicized piety did not make Osama a black sheep. It made him an asset. In the mid-1980s, Fahd granted the bin Ladens a contract to redevelop — critics would say Americanize — the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. These projects replaced highway-building as the mainstay of the family income. They depended on the good graces of Saudi clerics and powerful princes like Prince Nayef, who later claimed the 9/11 attacks were a Zionist plot. Osama’s commitment to Muslim holy war impressed such people more than Salem’s bathroom humor. Far from hating the Saud family, Osama would fly into a fury if he heard someone question Fahd’s legitimacy. Even in 1990, Coll writes, he saw himself as “an international Islamic guerrilla leader who worked in service of his king.”
Coll shows that Osama’s efforts supporting the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan could never have been done on his own nickel. He inherited just 2.27 percent of his father’s fortune. What he had, though, was a court network — conservative princes, the company’s associates and the charitable funds of various elite families, including his own. He also had equipment. The bin Laden group was the largest owner of Caterpillar earthmovers in the world. Osama used them to fortify the caves that would shelter Arab and Afghan mujahedeen and, after 9/11, himself. Salem arranged shipments of anti-aircraft missiles. Khalid, a brother who worked in the company’s Cairo office, obtained Afghan visas for Egyptian radicals. The jihad was a family affair.
The question is whether it remained a family affair after Osama turned his sights on the United States. Coll did not crack the family’s inner circle, so his conclusions on the matter are provisional. But through government papers and interviews with various bin Laden associates, he gives us a judicious, painstaking and vivid picture of an exotic family pulled in two directions by world events. Occasionally, the picture is too vivid — there is more detail than most readers will need about Khaled bin Laden’s stud farm in Egypt, Khalil bin Laden’s Brazilian wife’s sister’s drug addiction and Yeslam bin Laden’s unsuccessful stock transactions.
Osama’s siblings repudiated his acts as early as 1994, but they left a door open to reconciliation. After 9/11, they seemed more interested in retaining legal counsel than in sharing information. Coll found allegations in a California custody case that there were scenes of celebration at the bin Laden compound in Saudi Arabia after the attacks. Coll does not believe any of the bin Ladens permitted to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after 9/11 had connections to radical Islam. He notes, though, that one who had possible connections — Omar Awadh — may not have been interrogated by the F.B.I.

Sept. 11 changed the family in two big ways: it made one of the sons into the hero of the Arab world, and it drove up the price of oil, igniting a construction boom. With oil topping $100 a barrel, the bin Laden group is thriving. It has 35,000 employees and expects to double in size in the coming decade. It is building airports in Egypt and elsewhere. In Mecca and Medina, it oversees vast real estate projects. “To please American audiences, the bin Ladens would have to seek forgiveness and denounce Osama,” Coll writes. “To please audiences in the Arab world, where the family’s financial interests predominantly lay, such a posture would be seen as craven.”
Seven years’ distance reveals a brutal reality. For both his family and his country Osama bin Laden’s attacks turned a profit.
Christopher Caldwell’s book on immigration, Islam and Europe will be published next spring.

How the Government Is Passing Secret Laws, part I

source control

Once upon a time, a team of federal attorneys went before the Supreme Court only to discover that their entire case was based on a revoked executive order and therefore moot.
True story. Look it up. Panama Refining Company v. Ryan. The revoked presidential order was understandably missed by the attorneys. The revocation had never been made public -- an example of what legal scholars refer to as "secret law."
Cases like that caused Congress, in the '30s and '40s, to pen legislation aimed at bringing order to the dissemination of vital government information, amid the chaotic complexity of state administrative laws and downright shoddy record-keeping. Congress also established statutes to keep a growing body of secret law in check.
That's how we got the Federal Register Act of 1935, the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 and the golden key to open government (and investigative reporting) -- the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Those legislative acts exemplify one of the defining features of American government -- the publicizing of laws and regulations. The political philosophy isn't hard to understand. Secret laws are the antithesis of a free and open society, which explains why the first U.S. Congress mandated that every "law, order, resolution, and vote (shall) be published in at least three of the public newspapers printing within the United States."
But, never mind -- for the moment -- the decline of newspapers, and the harmful implications it has for democratic governance. Even more alarming is the underreported increase of unpublicized "secret laws," clandestinely cultivated in recent years.
We're talking everything from secret interpretations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to secret Presidential directives and transportation security orders.
And don't let the word "opinion" throw you off. If, for example, they're "opinions" issued by the OLC -- like the now infamous Yoo torture memos -- those kind of "opinions" are binding on the executive branch.
So, while the Washington press heavy-hitters were analyzing flag pins and pastors, a Judiciary subcommittee hearing was held on "Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government".
Among the half-dozen or so witnesses to testify was the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, Steven Aftergood -- one of the nation's preeminent authorities on secret law. What should have been a top-story across the country was rendered invisible by a tsunami of triviality.
Here's some testimony you probably missed:
"There has been a discernible increase in secret law and regulation in recent years" to the point where "legislative intervention" is required to "reverse the growth."
Unsurprisingly, secret law really became entwined with the government during the Cold War. But today, "secrecy not only persists, it is growing. Worse, it is implicated in fundamental political controversies over domestic surveillance, torture, and many other issues directly affecting the lives and interests of Americans."
The law that governs espionage activity has been re-interpreted by the FISA Court, the specific nature of which has not been disclosed to the public?
In August 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union petitioned the court on First Amendment grounds to make public those legal rulings, after redacting classified information. The court denied the ACLU petition, claiming it didn't have the expertise to decide what information should be redacted.
The denial was issued despite it being evident "that there is a body of common law derived from the decisions of the (FISA court) that potentially implicates the privacy interests of all Americans. Yet knowledge of that law is deliberately withheld from the public. In this way, secret law has been normalized to a previously unknown extent and to the detriment, I believe, of American democracy," Aftergood testified.
Other areas of concern: "there appears to be a precipitous decline in publication of OLC opinions in recent years ... In 1995, there were 30 published opinions, but in 2005 there were 13. In 1996, there were 48 published opinions, but in 2006 only 1. And in 1997 there were 29 published opinions, but only 9 in 2007."
"One secret OLC opinion of particular significance, identified last year by Sen. Whitehouse, holds that executive orders, which are binding on executive branch agencies and are published in the Federal Register, can be unilaterally abrogated by the President without public notice."
Such orders mean "Congress is left with no opportunity to respond to the change and to exercise its own authority as it sees fit. Worse, the OLC policy... implies a right to actively mislead Congress and the public."
Here's something else that's been […] underreported. As of January 2008, the Bush administration has issued 56 National Security Presidential Directives on a range of national security issues. Most of those directives have not been disclosed. "Texts of the directives or descriptive fact sheets have been obtained for about a third of them (19)," Aftergood testified. Only the titles have been obtained on 8 of the directives and absolutely no information is available for 10.
Congress has also gotten in on the action, having "participated in the propagation of secret law through the adoption of classified annexes to intelligence authorization of bills, for example."
Aftergood concluded his testimony, rightly observing that "it should be possible to identify a consensual middle ground that preserves the security of genuinely sensitive national security information while reversing the growth of secret laws."
That's why he's pushing for the passage of the State Secrets Protection Act -- S. 2533 -- which aims to balance conflicting interests of secrecy and public disclosure.
"The rule of law, after all, is one of the fundamental principles that unites us all, and one of the things we are committed to protect. Secret law is inconsistent with that commitment."
Of course, whenever someone points out how civil liberties have taken a back-seat in the name of "national security" under Bush, what's the typical response of true believers?
They call talk radio, blog and write letters-to-the-editor about how "liberals" and "leftists" aid and abet terrorists with a naive insistence that America's political leaders adhere to quaint luxuries like long-established Constitutional freedoms.
The old saw -- "loose lips sinks ships" -- has been replaced by another now familiar brain-dead mantra: "if you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about." But the metastasizing growth of secret law pulls the rug out from underneath that flimsy argument. And for obvious reason: you can't know what you don't know.

Pointer will give you his comments on this stuff in a following article withe the same title.

George Bush as a Real McCainiac

How the president has almost become the man he trounced in the primaries.
March 28th 2002
From The Economist print edition

IF THE battle in 2000 to choose the Republican Party's presidential candidate now seems a world away, it is not just because September 11th changed the world. It is also because George Bush trounced John McCain so thoroughly that he seemed to bury everything the Arizona senator stood for.
Back then, the two men appeared to have nothing in common. While Mr Bush campaigned as the choice of the Republican establishment, Mr McCain rampaged against “special interests” and made campaign-finance reform the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. In economic policy, Mr Bush argued for big tax cuts regardless of circumstances; Mr McCain said tax cuts should be proportionate to the size of the budget surplus. Mr McCain wanted an ambitious national-service program; Mr Bush proposed small-scale “compassionate conservatism”.

If you didn’t note the date, this is 6 years ago.
It was a shocking article. “Despite his defeat McCain laid much of the groundwork for Mr. Bush’ post-9/11 presidency… Mr Bush has proved a better spokesman for McCainiac ideas than Mr McCain could ever had been.”

IF THE battle in 2000 to choose the Republican Party's presidential candidate now seems a world away, it is not just because September 11th changed the world. It is also because George Bush trounced John McCain so thoroughly that he seemed to bury everything the Arizona senator stood for.
Back then, the two men appeared to have nothing in common...
But the biggest differences were in foreign policy. The Arizona senator campaigned for a policy of “rogue-state rollback”— by which he meant preventing disruptive small-country dictators getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction, if necessary by arming the local opposition. Mr McCain was the only candidate on either side to promote this theme, and hardly anyone took him seriously. Mr Bush, in contrast, talked about managing great-power relationships and repairing the damage done to America's ties with China, Russia and Europe after, as he saw it, eight years of Clintonian inconsistency. Mr McCain spoke stirringly or scarily, according to how you see these things, about “national greatness”. Mr Bush called soothingly for greater humility in projecting American power abroad...
Yet, if you look at the ideas that currently animate Mr Bush's presidency, they are about as McCainiac as you can get without having spent five years as a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war... In his state-of-the-union speech in January, Mr Bush... delivered his famous warning on the “axis of evil”, rhetorically reformulating Mr McCain's “rogue-state rollback”.
Suddenly, “national greatness conservatism”—Mr McCain's amour fou—has become the passion of the White House too. Confronting threats from small dictatorships, not managing relations with big powers, has become the focus of the presidency. Mr Bush has defined his presidency in terms of success in the war against rogue states and terrorists. To make the comparison complete, Mr Bush has been telling anyone who will listen that he has been reading Edmund Morris's new book on Teddy Roosevelt, one of Mr McCain's often-quoted heroes.
It is almost as if the Arizona senator had won the election. How on earth did this happen? But he still does not see the broader horizon the way that Mr McCain sees it... Abroad, it meant changing corrupt regimes which threaten the West, and encouraging the spread of democracy.
...Whether by prescience or luck, he [MCCAIN] was the first to reach out for the policies that fit the new world wrought by September 11th. Despite his defeat, he laid much of the groundwork for Mr Bush's post-September presidency. But the credit to Mr Bush is probably greater. He has proved quicker to adapt his views than anyone expected, switching seamlessly from great-power maintenance to rooting out terrorists and showing his independence from the Republican establishment by pinching ideas from his rival.
This transformation contains an irony and a question. The irony is that, because the president dominates his party in a way the maverick Mr McCain could never have done, Mr Bush has proved a better spokesman for McCainiac ideas than Mr McCain could ever have been...

By now there’s a lot of critical remarks upcoming from McCain and his
campaign and most important those regarding the size of the troops, initial too small in his eyes to any kind of success.
But in 2002 he said:
“I think we could go in with much smaller numbers than we had to do in the past... I don't believe it's going to be nearly the size and scope that it was in 1991.” [Face the Nation, 9/15/02]
“And I believe that the success will be fairly easy” and “There's no doubt in my mind that... we will be welcomed as liberators.” [CNN, Larry King Live, 9/24/02]
“There's not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias. So I think they can probably get along.” [MSNBC Hardball, 4/23/03]
McCain was asked, “at what point will America be able to say the war was won?” He responded, “...it’s clear that the end is, is, is very much in sight.” [ABC, “Good Morning America,” 4/9/03]
Exactly one year before violence in Iraq peaked: “Overall, I think a year from now, we will have made a fair amount of progress if we stay the course.” [The Hill, 12/8/05]
Now John McCain is outlining his vision for America.
John McCain, looking through a crystal ball to 2013 and the end of a prospective first term, sees "spasmodic" but reduced violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden dead or captured and government spending curbed by his ready veto pen.
In particular, he sees a world in which:
- "The Iraq war has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced."
- The Taliban threat in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced.
- "The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants," McCain said. "There still has not been a major terrorist attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001."
- A "League of Democracies" has supplanted a failed United Nations to apply sanctions to the Sudanese government and halt genocide in Darfur.
- The United States has had "several years of robust growth," appropriations bills free of lawmakers' pet projects known as "earmarks," public education improved by charter schools, health care improved by expansion of the private market and an energy crisis stemmed through the start of construction on 20 new nuclear reactors.
- Democrats are asked to serve in his administration, he holds weekly news conferences and, like the British prime minister, answers questions publicly from lawmakers.

Also this is a jolly good one: "Campaigns and the media collaborated as architects of the modern presidential campaign, and we deserve equal blame for the regret we feel from time to time over its less-than-inspirational features," he said.
Well, as boring and inconspicuous as Barack Obama acts will McCain not perform yet, isn’t it? “We belong to different parties, not different countries," McCain says in remarks prepared for delivery in the capital city of Ohio, a general election battleground. "There is a time to campaign, and a time to govern. If I'm elected president,..” God forbid that should be, because it seems to be McCain is an alien and certainly he belongs to the undereducated creatures from another planet.

Too Late

You don't believe it, but after Tuesday's split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton "yes we can" and hence eventually "yes we will", creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat's Last Theorem, or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to a recording of the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" played backward, or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only contending name on the ballot (her chief rivals, quaintly obeying their party's rules, boycotted the state, which had violated the party's rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama's delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium's Zip code.
Or perhaps she wins if Obama's popular vote total is, well, adjusted by counting each African American vote as only three-fifths of a vote. There is precedent, of sorts, for that arithmetic (see the Constitution, Article I, Section 2, before the 14th Amendment).
Geoff Garin, a Clinton strategist who possesses the audacity of hopelessness required in that role says: "We don't think this is just going to be about some numerical metric."
Mere numbers? Heaven forfend. That is how people speak when numerical metrics -- numbers of popular votes and delegates -- are inconvenient.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur said that every military defeat can be explained by two words: "too late." Too late in anticipating danger, too late in preparing for it, too late in taking action. Clinton's political defeat can be similarly explained -- too late in recognizing that the electorate does not acknowledge her entitlement to the presidency, too late in understanding that she had a serious challenger, too late in anticipating that she would not dispatch Barack Obama by Super Tuesday (Feb. 5), too late in planning for the special challenges of caucus states, too late in channeling her inner shot-and-a-beer hard hat.

Most of all, she was too late in understanding how much the Democratic Party's mania for "fairness," as mandated by liberals like her, has, by forbidding winner-take-all primaries, made it nearly impossible for her to overcome Obama's early lead in delegates. If Democrats, who genuflect at the altar of "diversity," allowed more of it in their delegate selection process, things might look very different. If even, say, Texas, California and Ohio were permitted to have winner-take-all primaries (as 48 states have winner-take-all allocation of their electoral votes), Clinton would have been more than 400 delegates ahead of Obama before Tuesday and today would be at her ancestral home in New York planning to return some of its furniture to the White House next January.

Tuesday night must have been almost as much fun for John McCain as for Obama. The Republican brand has been badly smudged by recent foreign and domestic policies, which are the only kinds there are, so McCain's hopes rest on the still-unattached cohort called "Reagan Democrats," who still seem somewhat resistant to Obama.

McCain's problem might turn out to be the fact that Obama is the Democrats' Reagan. Obama's rhetorical cotton candy lacks Reagan's ideological nourishment, but he is Reaganesque in two important senses: People like listening to him, and his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness -- the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.

Exit Polls: Limbaugh Effect Seems To Rear Its Head

Photo: Lost in North Carolina and defeated with doubble diggits the Billarygang is celebrating their 2% victory over Barack Obama, but they don't look very happy.
Did Rush Limbaugh actually impact the Democratic primary?
The loud-mouthed radio talk show host has been encouraging Republicans to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton to continue the "chaos" in the Democratic race. And a sampling of some key exit poll information suggests he may, to a certain extent, be having an effect.
Thirty-six percent of primary voters said that Clinton does not share their values. And yet, among that total, one out of every five (20 percent) nevertheless voted for her in the Indiana election. Moreover, of the 10 percent of Hoosiers who said "neither candidate" shared their values, 75 percent cast their ballots for Clinton.
These are not small numbers. By comparison, of the 33 percent of voters who said Sen. Barack Obama does not share their values, only seven percent cast their ballots in his favor. Basically, more people who don't relate to Clinton are, for one reason or another, still voting for her. These are not likely to be loyal supporters.
On a broader level, among the 17 percent of primary goers who said they would choose Sen. John McCain over Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical general election match-up, 41 percent of that group came from Clinton's own camp. In essence, roughly seven percent of Clinton support in Indiana (40 percent of 17 percent) said they would defect to the Republican should she end up the nominee. That would be a difficult punch to stomach in November. In 2004, nearly 1 million Indianans voted for John Kerry. A seven percent defection rate would have meant 70,000 less votes.
By contrast, if the general election is between Obama and McCain, 19 percent of the Indiana Democratic primary goers said they would support the Republican. But only 12 percent of that group (2.28 percent) would come from Obama's camp.
The numbers suggest one of three things: A) Clinton's support in Indiana, while clearly there, is not entirely solid; B) a large swath of Indiana primary goers simply didn't like the nominees and thought of Clinton as the lesser of two evils; or C) Limbaugh's hatchet plan could be having political ripples.
Perhaps it's a mix of all three.

Proofs of Demolition

Demolition of the Twin Towers is Provable Through Simple Analysis
Despite the destruction of the most significant evidence of the Twin Tower collapses -- the structural steel -- it is relatively easy to prove the towers were demolished. Determining how they were demolished without the benefit of the steel may be difficult or impossible, but proving that a gravity-driven collapse is insufficient to explain the characteristics of the collapses documented by photographic and seismic evidence is not.
There are numerous pieces of evidence that strongly indicate demolition, including the fact that authorities destroyed and suppressed evidence, the more than 100 years of engineering experience with steel-frame buildings, the misleading representation of the towers' design by truss theory proponents and the implausible sequence of events proposed by that theory, and the many collapse features that seem irreconcilable with gravity-driven collapses.
Proving demolition requires more than enumerating evidence. It requires making logical inferences about events using the evidence. Three fairly strong proofs are as follows. These are presented as qualitative arguments only. Each suggests an approach for developing a rigorous quantitative proof.

* The towers fell faster than they could have if they were crushing themselves.
* The volume of dust was too great to have been the product of a gravity-driven collapse.
* The South Tower's top shattered before falling, and so its breakup was not a result of gravity-driven crushing.

Speed of Fall
Twin Towers' Rates of Fall Proves Demolition
The towers collapsed completely in intervals of time similar to that taken for a block of wood dropped from a tower's roof to reach the ground. A block of wood has about the same average density as the main components of the towers near their tops.
In a vacuum, a block of wood (or lead) would take 9.2 seconds to fall from the tower's roof. In the air a block of wood, say ten inches on a side, might take 50 percent longer than in a vacuum. Fifteen seconds, a good estimate for the total time of collapse of the North Tower, is about the time it would take our block to fall from the roof. The rubble from the Tower probably had similar average density to our block of wood, since the floor slabs consisted of corrugated sheet metal and lightweight concrete, and the perimeter steel columns were hollow with walls only 1/4th inch thick at the Towers' tops. Air resistance alone could account for the slowing of the falls to the point where each Tower took about 15 seconds to completely come down.
The official story requires that more than air resistance was slowing the descents. The falling rubble would be having to crush every story below the crash zone -- ripping apart the steel grids of the outer walls and obliterating the steel lattice of the core structure. The resistance of the intact building itself would be thousands of times greater than air resistance.
If air resistance is able to increase total collapse times by even 20 percent, then shouldn't the addition of the resistance of the buildings themselves increase the time several thousand percent, to at least tens of minutes?
Of course the idea of a collapse lasting minutes is absurd. So is the idea of a steel frame building crushing itself.

Breakup of WTC 2's Top
Shattering of South Tower's Top Proves Demolition
There are several pieces of evidence that show the structure of the 30 stories of the South Tower above the impact zone was shattered before it started its precipitous plunge. How could the steel frame of many stories above the impact zone have broken up even before it started to fall? The proponents of gravity-driven collapse maintain that the tops of the towers crushed the floors below the impact zones as they fell. The tops functioned as pistons, according to Bazant and Zhou, crushing the stories one by one. What one actually sees in the case of the South Tower is that their piston disintegrated even before it started to fall. A gravity-driven collapse cannot account for that disintegration, nor for how a cloud of rubble could crush the intact structure below the impact zone.


These frames from a South Tower collapse video are separated by equal time intervals. Examining the middle edge of the falling portion of the tower shows that its angle of tilt from vertical remains about the same between the second and third frames, and therefore the top has stopped rotating. But unless the top had already been shattered, it should have continued to rotate in accordance with the law of conservation of angular momentum.

The Mysterious Leveling of Building WTC-7

large high resolution photograph

FEMA on Building 7
Despite the inescapable logic, the official theory for the collapse, as published in Chapter 5 of the FEMA report goes as follows:

* At 9:59 AM (after the South Tower collapse), electrical power to the substations in WTC 7 was shut off.
* Due to a design flaw, generators in WTC 7 started up by themselves.
* Debris from the collapsing North Tower breached a fuel oil pipe in a room in the north side of the building. (This means the debris had to travel across WTC 6 and Vesey Street -- a distance of at least 355 feet -- penetrate the outer wall of WTC 6, and smash through about 50 feet of the building, including a concrete masonry wall.)
* This, and other debris (that also made the journey across Building 6 and Vesey Street), managed to start numerous fires in the building. (Unfortunately, this event did not prompt anyone to turn off the generators.)
* The backup mechanism (that should have shut off the fuel oil pumps when a breach occurred) failed to work, and the fuel oil (diesel) was pumped from the tanks on the ground floor to the fifth floor where it ignited. The pumps emptied the tanks of all 12,000 gallons of fuel.
* The extant fires raised the temperature of the spilled fuel oil to the 140 degrees F required for it to ignite.
* The sprinkler system malfunctioned and failed to extinguish the fire.
* The burning diesel fuel heated trusses to the point where they lost most of their strength, precipitating a total collapse of Building 7.

The last point is the greatest stretch, since it asks us to believe that an event that would be expected only to cause the sagging of a floor instead led not only to total collapse, but to such a tidy collapse that directly adjacent buildings were scarcely even damaged. This is surprising behavior for a steel frame skyscraper designed to survive fires, hurricanes, and earthquakes.
After laying out this highly improbable scenario, the FEMA report authors conclude:
The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue.
Unfortunately for investigators hoping to resolve this issue, nearly all of the evidence had already been destroyed by the time the FEMA report was published.

But... we have some near better; Analysis of Energy Requirements for the Expansion of the Dust Cloud Following the Collapse of 1 World Trade Center (the North Tower)


Documents Destroyed
At the time of its destruction, Building 7 housed documents relating to numerous SEC investigations. The files for approximately three to four thousand cases were destroyed, according to the Los Angeles Times. Among the destroyed documents were ones that may have demonstrated the relationship between Citigroup and the WorldCom bankruptcy.