“I’M NOT GOING TO START WORLD WAR III FOR YOU”

Russia, now in the person of Chernomyrdin rather than ousted Primakov, was finally able
to induce Milosevic to capitulate in early June. The Russian army, anxious to
demonstrate solidarity with the Serbs, and resentful because of NATO attempts to deny
Russia an occupation zone in Kosovo, on June 12 carried off a coup de main. They
quickly shifted a couple of companies of armored vehicles to the airport in Pristina, a city
in Kosovo not far from the border of Serbia proper. At this point General Wesley Clark
(later Michael Moore’s favorite presidential candidate in 2004) became frantic, and
ordered the NATO ground commander, British General Sir Michael Jackson, to deny the
Russians the use of the airport. There were reports that Russia was about to send a sky
train of paratroopers to back up its demand. General Jackson flatly refused to carry out
Clark’s order, making the now-famous reply:

I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.

General Jackson later told the BBC: ‘‘We were [looking at] a possibility....of
confrontation with the Russian contingent which seemed to me probably not the right
way to start off a relationship with Russians who were going to become part of my
command.” Clark planned to order British tanks and armored cars to block the runways
to prevent any Russian transport planes from landing. Clark said he believed it was “an
appropriate course of action.” But the plan was again vetoed by Britain. Here was a
second serious warning about world war. (BBC, March 9, 2000)

It is evident in retrospect that the Kosovo operation was a proxy war between the United
States and Russia, in which the NATO mauling the Serb civilian population was
supposed to illustrate to Russia the formidable military potential of the US-led alliance.
The Pristina crisis cooled down, but US-Russian relations were dangerously strained.
Milosevic had been indicted for war crimes in May 1999. As NATO troops streamed into
defeated Serbia, they were accompanied by suitcases full of US dollars to be used by the
National Endowment for Democracy to organize the overthrow of Milosevic, which duly
followed in the spring of 2000, when the dictator was toppled by a textbook CIA “people
power” revolution. In mid-2001, a couple of months before 9/11, Milosevic was illegally
kidnapped from Serbia and taken to stand trial at a kangaroo court in The Hague.

Bob your answers seem reasonable enough so i will direct my questions to tuther fella - cwiko:

Do you think it more reasonable to conclude that we have had contact with life from other universes than a part of the intelligence agencies might of had a hand in 9/11?

If so why so?

I've read the first couple of pages of discussion here, and just watched the 911 Revisted video online. I'll likely read the other pages here, but I wanted to first jot down my first impressions. I scribbled down some notes as the video progressed.

I should mention that I lived in NYC at the time, personally saw the second plane hit from about a mile away, and was in lower Manhattan through out the weeks that followed.

To be up front...I'm not impressed. To really debunk this would take some research. For example, I would want to see what some of the studies cited actually say in full context. But here are my on-the-fly comments.

* I am immediately skeptical of any scientist who teaches at BYU. Hell, at Eastern Il Univ. where I attended I had a physics prof. who used class time to explain that evolution was impossible because it violates the second law of thermodynamics. (It doesn't by the way). I wonder if evolution is taught at BYU?

* The other main speaker is from Claremont School of Theology.

* It's not clear to me that the fellow identified as an MIT scientist is exactly that. Perhaps they mean an MIT graduate? At some point he refers to one of his "patients".

* The last speaker is a philosophy prof. I can guarantee you can find a PhD carrying philosopher willing to argue any fool point anyone would ever care to make.

OK enough ad hominem. My apologies...but understanding their "expertise" does matter. Something I'd want to check into if I was seriously researching this.

* Much was made of the fact that both towers were rendered into fine dust. This needs clarification. Certainly the dust that blew around was fine dust. But I don't recall the endless stream of trucks afterward carrying away only fine dust. Second, much of the breakdown of the cement happened due to the collapse itself...i.e. dust need not be evidence of additional explosives.. And third, additional breakdown was likely caused by the fires that burned for weeks thereafter. And finally, the towers were not constructed (relatively speaking) with a lot of cement or masonry anyway. (And by the way...explosives used to take down buildings *do not* result in massive fires like the ones left in the pit of the twin towers. The fires are not evidence of explosives being used)

* Much was made of the convenient 30 ft segments of steel left behind. Well the towers weren't made of lengths of unbroken steel 100 stories long. They were made of segments bolted together. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that rather than steel beams snapping in the middle you would get bolts failing, and structures breaking where they were joined together. Hence the convenient segments. Not much of a mystery there.

* Much was made of the speed at which the site was cleaned up. Well I was there and I can tell you that that was as much as anything else due to thousands of volunteers who needed, deep down, to do *something*...*anything*...about this tragic event. It's like the wife who deals with her husbands death by throwing herself into the details of the funeral arrangements, worrying about everyones travel arrangements and making sure they get fed...etc etc. People wanted to do something...and all there was to do was to clean up the mess left behind. And by the way...at the time nobody felt like it was a crime scene. It was a *war* scene, and nobody was thinking about it any other way. In my opinion, we still shouldn't.

* There were numerous mentions of squibs or sequential exhausts of smoke out to the side as the buildings fell. This is perfectly consistent with the pancaking of the floors as they fell. The building at this point is like a piston, and as the top comes down the enclosed air gets blown out the windows or fractured sides. There is no mystery here.

* The video tries to have it both ways in terms of melting steel. At one point they mention finding pools of molten steel in the debris pile, but at other points they try to convince us that the fire couldn't have melted the steel. Well, by the way, building demolitions do not leave behind pools of molten steel either.

* But they spend more time complaining that the steel structure couldn't have melted. There are a number of fallacies at play. First, the steel didn't have to melt for the building to collapse. It just had to become overly flexible. Second, it's likely that much of the insulation used to keep the steel from overheating was blown away by the initial explosion. Third, the temperature at which jet fuel burns isn't as important as the total amount of energy released. There was more than enough energy released to heat the steel so as to cause it to warp and bend leading to one, and then more, floors collapsing.

* Someone said it was odd that the buildings collapsed from the top down. Well they didn't exactly collapse from the top down. The buildings failed right where the highest concentration of heat was from the fires, and the segment of the building above that failure fell down, and then the building pancaked downward. Just watch the video footage. You can see this for yourself. If the building was taken down by extra explosives, do you suppose they had to tell the pilots to make sure they crashed the planes right where the very first charges were going to start going off? Or did some conspirator have a big panel of switches so he could start the final explosives on whatever floor the plane happened to hit? Or could it simply be that the building simply collapsed right where the heat was the greatest?

* It was claimed that the buildings fell in the wrong order...that the first building to get hit should have collapsed first because it had more time to heat up. Here is what might explain that. The building that fell first was the one where the plane hit lower than the other. The damaged area of the south tower had more weight above it, so even though its metal started fatiguing later, the damaged areas had much more stress from above...and so it came down first.

* The argument that the rate of fall of the building was too fast to be pancaking is entirely bogus. Think about shooting pool. When one ball contacts another there isn't a moment in time where the stationary ball stops the moving ball, and then after a delay they both start moving. The first ball may be slowed, but both immediately move without hesitation. The pancaking floors would similarly just keep moving downward...there would be no catch-and-fall, catch-and-fall, catch-and-fall...there would be exactly what you see on the video...smooth motion downward. Like falling dominoes except straight down.

* It's worth noting that the buildings were designed to absorb the impact of an aircraft. And they *did*. They were *not* designed to resist the energy released by a nearly full load of fuel. And they didn't.

* A number of times it's mentioned that a burning high-rise has never collapsed like the twin towers. That may be true, but it's also true that no high-rise has ever had a jetliner's worth of fuel poured into it and then ignited.

* Finally there is the mystery of building 7's collapse. I'm not sure what is going on there. But I can speculate, and I suspect more research would reveal a reasonable answer involving not the fire so much as structural damage as a result of the collapse of the twin towers *very* nearby. The collapse of those buildings released a *huge* amount of potential energy. *Thats* why there were deep fires burning for days going on weeks.

Frankly, many in NYC thought that a number of buildings nearby would end up being taken down due to vibration damage or concussion waves from the impact of the towers. It's something to look into, but I don't see much in the way of evidence for the twin towers being intentionally blown up, and it seems an unlikely scenario that dark forces would decide to blow up building 7 alone. In other words, once it's clear that there was no conspiracy (other than al Qaeda's use of airplanes of course) to take down the twin towers, speculation about building 7 seems beside the point.

You obviously haven't read bob's performance. Try again when your a little better *informed*

I'm not sure what "Bob's performance" means. I'll read the rest of this thread and see if that makes it clear.

However, I watched an hour long video, and was left very unsatisfied that any kind of case was made. It was *their* job to, as you would say, "inform" me. If that video cannot stand on it's own, and every viewer has to log into the EA website to get the real story, then I think it's safe to say that at a minimum the video fails in its mission.

MAY 7, 1999: US BOMBS CHINESE EMBASSY

The Kosovo adventure ruined US relations with China as well. On May 7, a US stealth
bomber destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing a number of Chinese. This
incident may have disrupted a potential agreement that might have ended the bombing a
month earlier than turned out. The Chinese leadership orchestrated a vehement anti-US
campaign, with mass demonstrations everywhere. Albright’s deputy James Pickering
flew to Beijing on June 16 to deliver the official US apology and claim the attack was an
accident, but this was brusquely rejected by the Chinese government. Matters were
complicated by the arrest of US scientist Wen Ho Lee, who had been charged in March
with spying for China. On May 25, 1999, the Cox Committee of the US House of
Representatives delivered an exaggerated and provocative report about Chinese
espionage in the US. US-Chinese relations were now dangerously strained.
This was followed by what some journalists saw as a possible brush with actual
thermonuclear war between the US and Russia. The occasion was the mysterious sinking
of the newest and most powerful Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, in the Barents
Sea during maneuvers on August 12, 2000. Russian officials reported that there had been
a NATO submarine in the area when the Kursk was lost. NATO denied any involvement.

The Kursk had been launched in 1994. During the Cold War and well into the 1990s, the
Barents Sea had been the scene of dangerous underwater cat-and-mouse games between
the US and Russia, with hunter-killer subs trailing ballistic missile subs on each side. US
and Russian subs had last collided in the Arctic Ocean on March 20, 1993, when the USS
Grayling crashed into a Russian Delta III class ballistic missile sub carrying 16 SS-N 18
submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) about 105 miles north of the Soviet fleet
base at Murmansk, during what was alleged by the US to be a routine patrol. At that time
the Russian Defense Ministry had stated that the “high command of the Russian military
fleet expresses its extreme concern over the latest incident of dangerous maneuvering by
foreign submarines in military training zones.”

THE KURSK: “WORLD WAR III COULD HAVE BEGUN SATURDAY”

While American and European media have jumped the gun in attributing the Kursk
sinking to onboard explosions, probably caused by a battery fire or torpedo detonation,
the preponderance of evidence in fact suggests that the Kursk collided with another vessel
– a U.S. or British submarine, or drone vehicle – or, in the extreme case, was possibly hit
by a torpedo. A commission of Russian Navy officers officially endorsed the finding that
the Kursk had been destroyed by a collision with a foreign sub. The Kursk, with a crew of
118 sailors and officers, was found at the bottom of the Sea. The crew members were
instantly killed in what Russian officials asserted was a collision with the second vessel.

On August 21, the Russian news agency Interfax reported that Russian rescue workers
had found a fragment of a submarine, “most likely British,” near the Kursk. This
followed earlier reports that emergency buoys, also identified as British, were seen
floating near the collision site.

On August 22, 2000, Pravda.ru ran a story on the Kursk disaster under the headline:

“World War III Could Have Begun on Saturday.”

According to this piece, “On Saturday,
August 12, an incident occurred in the Barents Sea, where the Russian Federation’s
Northern Fleet was conducting exercises, which nearly led to the outbreak of full-scale
combat--a third world war.... For several days the world hung by a thread, and one false
political move could have led to an exchange of nuclear strikes.” Citing hydroacoustical
evidence of three explosions, “indicating the possibility that the Kursk had suffered a
torpedo attack.” Pravda.ru described the incident as a possible casus belli, but concluded,
“Happily, the incident in the Barents Sea was successfully resolved by political means.
Agreement to ‘end the affair in peace’ was reached during a telephone conversation
between Vladimir Putin and Bill Clinton. The Presidents’ conversation lasted 25 minutes,
and nothing of its content was reported in the mass media.” (New Federalist, August 28,
2000)

On August 22, John Helmer, a Moscow-based journalist who wrote for the Journal of
Commerce and the Moscow Times, commented in the Singapore-based Straits Times that
“the Russian sub drama looked like war at the start.” Dismissing the hysterical Western
media criticism of President Putin, who remained at the “vacation Kremlin” at Sochi,
Helmer wrote, “If you were the ruler of Russia, and you were told late one night that one
of your most powerful and secret submarine weapons had been hit by a mysterious
explosion, and sent to the bottom without word from the crew, would it be prudent for
you to suspect an attack? An attack by a nuclear superpower and old rival? And if it is
your sworn duty to defend your country from attack, would it be reasonable for you to
determine whether there was a cause for war, or an accident?” Also noteworthy was
Putin’s growing convergence with the former Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov, an
advocate of a Eurasian perspective for Russia, who on August 23 delivered a strongly
worded statement warning the West and the Russian oligarchs not to try to exploit the
near-war crisis. (EIR, September 1, 2000)

The US claimed that an anti-submarine rocket fired from the Kursk had gotten jammed in
a firing tube, causing the deadly explosion. But Russian authorities insisted that a foreign
sub of the same general type as the Kursk had been present. As the US media were
concerned, the Kursk crisis calmed down after a surprise visit to Moscow by CIA
Director Tenet, but tensions between the two powers remained extreme. This is the
immediate background to Vladimir Putin’s telephone call to Bush on the morning of
September 11, 2001.

THE NEOCONS ANTAGONIZE CHINA

The great neocon project of the late 1990s was that of a US confrontation with China.
Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations crisis cookbook had identified two challengers to
Anglo-American world domination: the Moslems, because of their population growth,
and China, because of its economic growth. Neocon thinking oscillates between these
two as the more immediate threat. After the Taiwan straits confrontation of 1996, the
bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, the Wen Ho Lee case, the
Cox report on alleged Chinese espionage, and the Chinagate accusations of Beijing
funding for Clinton, US-Chinese relations were at a low ebb. As former US Ambassador
to Beijing James Lilley pointed out, “:…there has been a dramatic change that is
pervasive and, at times, ugly. After the Belgrade bombing accident in May of 1999, we
saw the full face of anger, hostility, and even hate on the faces of the Chinese attacking
our embassy.” Lilley went on in a threatening tone: “If China continues to expand its
military parameters, it will encounter our power. China can avoid this confrontation by
buying into economic globalization, and lowering nationalistic tensions. To do otherwise
is to risk tearing down the whole structure.” (Newsweek, April 16, 2001)

The good will expressed towards the US by the Chinese students in Tien An Men Square
in 1989 had completely dissipated, and was replaced by loathing – well before 9/11 and
Iraq. Something similar had happened in Russia and elsewhere – also before 9/11.

Bush’s first months in office were dominated by an incident involving the mid-air
collision between a US EP-3E Aries II spy plane and a Chinese F-8 fighter jet just off the
coast of China near the main base of the Chinese South Sea Fleet in Zhangjiang.. Here
US planes on electronic surveillance missions had long been regularly buzzed and
harassed by Chinese interceptors. During one such encounter the Chinese fighter collided
with the larger and slower US plane; the Chinese jet crashed and the pilot was lost, while
the US plane had to make an emergency landing at a Chinese airport on Hainan Island.

The plane and its crew of 19 were detained for a couple of weeks before being returned to
the US. The Chinese demanded a formal apology, which the pugnacious Bush
administration was reluctant to make. The Chinese press ran pictures of the downed US
spy plane with headlines reading “Proof of Bullying,” and contemptuous attacks on
“Little Bush.” Chinese internet chatrooms buzzed with talk of imminent war; “Are you
ready? This is war,” said one posting. The neocon Weekly Standard headlined its story
about the Hainan incident “A National Humiliation,” and authors William Kristol and
Robert Kagan, both prominent chickenhawk warmongers, accused the newly installed
Bush 43 of “weakness” in handling the affair. The neocons were disturbed by Colin
Powell’s reliance on diplomacy to get back the plane and crew for the US, and especially
by the attitude of the US business community, which was more interested in profitable
deals than in seconding the neocons’ distorted view of national honor. (Newsweek April
16, 2001)

The whole experience was an object lesson to the neocon clique and the
military provocateurs. For eight years they had writhed in bitterness because of Clinton’s
sane reluctance to resort to military force. Now, after the tremendous effort required to
put Bush into the White House, the result was not much more satisfactory. We can safely
assume that neocons and provocateurs drew the obvious lessons: that they must begin
thinking along more grandiose lines, and planning for an outside event several orders of
magnitude greater than any attempted thus far.

Tensions increased elsewhere as well. During the 1990s, Moscow and Beijing were
repeatedly and pointedly reminded of the presence of an aggressive faction inside the US
government and military which was intent on provoking periodic incidents to exacerbate
tensions among the major powers. From Kosovo to Belgrade, from the Barents Sea to the
South China Sea, from Iraq to Somalia, this aggressive faction had provoked clashes,
manufactured pretexts for intervention, and fought a proxy war near the heart of Europe.

The 1990s were anything but idyllic; they were a period of escalating economic and
strategic crisis. The sympathetic interest in US life seen in 1989-1991 in Russia and
China had by mid-2001 been replaced by overwhelming hostility. At the same time, the
aggressive and adventurous network inside the US government was deeply dissatisfied
with their own failure to achieve decisive results. Every passing year brought population
increases throughout the Moslem world, and 10-15% economic growth rates to China,
while the US real economy (apart from Wall Street’s paper swindles) continued to
stagnate. Like the British contemplating German economic growth in 1905-1907, the US
war faction concluded that a long period of world peace could only result in the further
relative decline of the US. To create the political preconditions for what they wanted to
do, the US war party therefore began to feel an overwhelming need to become the party
of synthetic terror.

The groundwork for the aggressive and terror-based consensus at the end of the 1990s
had been laid starting in March 1992, when Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the Pentagon's
Under Secretary for Policy submitted his long-term Defense Planning Guidance to then
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. As the press wrote at that time, the Pentagon policy
paper asserted “that America's political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will
be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the
territory of the former Soviet Union.” The role of the UN would dwindle to
insignificance, the paper indicated, and US unilateral action would dominate the world.

Wolfowitz’s plan also stressed “using military force, if necessary, to prevent the
proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in such countries
as North Korea, Iraq, some of the successor republics to the Soviet Union and in Europe.”

Direct nuclear blackmail of Russia was also prominent; the Wolfowitz document
underlined that American strategic nuclear weapons would continue to target vital aspects
of the former Soviet military establishment. The rationale for this targeting policy was
that the United States “must continue to hold at risk those assets and capabilities that
current – and future – Russian leaders or other nuclear adversaries value most” because
Russia would remain “the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the
United States.” The essence of US policy was seen in intimidation, “convincing potential
competitions that they need not aspire to a greater role,” thus guaranteeing that no rival
superpower would be allowed to emerge. (The New York Times, March 8, 1992)

Richard Perle later elaborated an aggressive strategy for Israeli politician Beniamin
Netanyahu known as the “Clean Break” policy, which was based on rejecting a
negotiated peace with Arabs and Palestinians in favor of endless war. Brzezinski’s 1997
Grand Chessboard touted the benefits of US meddling central Asia for geopolitical
reasons; this study was similar in spirit to the Karl Haushofer’s 1934 Weltpolitik von
heute, the manual of Nazi geopolitics. But how to manipulate the American people into
accepting the burdens and human losses associated with such meddling? Brzezinski, a
petty Polish aristocrat, replied: “The attitude of the American public toward the external
projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported
America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” (Brzezinski 24-25)

An even more explicit call for US world domination came from the Project for a New
American Century, a neocon movement that provided most of the top officials for the
Bush 43 administration. After discussing their imperialist plans, the PNAC authors, led
by chickenhawk William Kristol, focused on the way of duping the American people into
supporting the raft of new foreign adventures: “…the process of transformation is likely
to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl
Harbor.” (PNAC, September 2000)

It is in this restless mood, desirous of a new global
conflict to pre-empt the emergence of challengers to a new Anglo-American world order,
viewing the democratic system as unresponsive to their elitist warmongering, and eager
for the assistance that a spectacular external attack would bring, that the roots of 9/11 are
to be sought.

galanter wrote:* Much was made of the speed at which the site was cleaned up. Well I was there and I can tell you that that was as much as anything else due to thousands of volunteers who needed, deep down, to do *something*...*anything*...about this tragic event. It's like the wife who deals with her husbands death by throwing herself into the details of the funeral arrangements, worrying about everyones travel arrangements and making sure they get fed...etc etc. People wanted to do something...and all there was to do was to clean up the mess left behind. And by the way...at the time nobody felt like it was a crime scene. It was a *war* scene, and nobody was thinking about it any other way. In my opinion, we still shouldn't.

I agree with many of the points you've made and made a couple of them myself somewhere around here but this one really doesn't add up.
War scene or not the event was still a crime - the murder of almost three thousand people.
If it's a war scene then figuring out exactly who was commiting this 'war crime' might have been sensible. Instead, the evidence in this crime was cleaned and shipped elsewhere before proper examination and various evidential holes remain because of what certainly seems to be deliberate obstruction to any investigation from very high up.

This should concern the American people - a lot.

I fail to see how the release of withheld evidence or an earlier more thorough investigation could have revealed greater incompetence than is already evident if the offical explanation is to be believed.

I'm sure many people heard things that sounded like explosions. I heard those kinds of reports from day one, and I don't find them surprising or worrying in the least. People also describe tornados sounding like freight trains, but that doesn't make them so. Some of the quoted people are clearly speaking metaphorically. I'd wager most of the people who actually thought they heard explosions at the time it happened no longer think that's what they heard.

The pop-pop-pop could have easily been the sound of sequential floors being pancaked. So called explosions in the basement could easily be the result of force being transmitted down the structure terminating in the foundation along with trapped air being forced downward through the tower as the falling top acts as a closing piston.

It seems absurd to expect that everyday people could tell the difference between (1) the sound of a 100 story tower's floors sequentially collapsing after heat has caused a catastrophic failure and (2) the sound of a 100 story tower sequentially collapsing as thermite explosives cause individual floors to fail.