Craig Hill, in a hilarious (as in Hillary Clinton) paid advert on SupportTheTruth.com asks: “George Bush Admits Demolitions?” You have no idea how hard I want to point and laugh, but I will humour him and give a straight answer:

No, he didn’t.

Bush’s speech of 15/9/2006 is quoted in an embedded audio file (why do all the real psychos encode their content in realmedia format?). I’m not sure why they didn’t just quote the actual text available on whitehouse.gov:

The bill I have proposed will ensure that suspected terrorists will receive full and fair trials, without revealing to them our nation’s sensitive intelligence secrets. As soon as Congress acts on this bill, the man our intelligence agencies believe helped orchestrate the 9/11 attacks can face justice.

The bill would also provide clear rules for our personnel involved in detaining and questioning captured terrorists. The information that the Central Intelligence Agency has obtained by questioning men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has provided valuable information and has helped disrupt terrorist plots, including strikes within the United States.

For example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed described the design of planned attacks of buildings inside the U.S. and how operatives were directed to carry them out. That is valuable information for those of us who have the responsibility to protect the American people. He told us the operatives had been instructed to ensure that the explosives went off at a high — a point that was high enough to prevent people trapped above from escaping.

KSM seems to have had his finger in every major terror plot of the last 10 years, but it takes a very selective reading of the above paragraph to conclude that Bush must’ve been talking about “the” explosives on the WTC site, especially given his known propensity to talk about “the” Google and “the” internets.

Bush doesn’t give speeches; he reads speeches. Whenever he’s left to fend for himself, it’s painfully obvious that he’s having to work his brain cell at full throttle. This wasn’t one of those occasions, so is Craig Hill suggesting Bush’s scriptwriters gave away the secret of the century with the slip of a pen? If so, why am I reminded of this?:

MATTHIAS:
    Look. I-- I'd had a lovely supper, and all I said
    to my wife was, 'That piece of halibut was good
    enough for Jehovah.'
CROWD:
    Oooooh!
OFFICIAL:
    Blasphemy!
    He's said it again!
CROWD:
    Yes! Yes, he did! He did!...
OFFICIAL:
    Did you hear him?!
CROWD:
    Yes! Yes, we did! We did!...

The demolition theories hinge on the idea that the observed events of September 11th 2001 would have been impossible without pre-placed explosives doing the critical damage. In fact there is nothing impossible or even implausible about the collapses - the fact that buildings have never been observed to do so under the same circumstances is a testament only to the unique nature of the attack. A disaster is a complex system where almost anything can happen; there are countless historical examples of extraordinary counter-intuitive events occuring in extreme circumstances.

If you’d asked me before 2004 how big a wave had to be to be deadly, I would’ve guessed something like 10m - and indeed there were sections of Indonesia battered by such huge waves in the christmas tsunami. Remarkably though, there are videos of waves no more than 2m above sea level causing shocking amounts of damage.

Who would’ve thought a failed o-ring or a piece of foam could cause a space shuttle to explode?

Who would’ve thought that resonance caused by wind could ever cause a bridge to collapse?

Prima facie-extraordinary events happen all the time, and I guess it’s a form of gambler’s fallacy that impels us to search for alternative explanations. What are the odds of the numbers 2, 18, 31, 38, 39, and 46 coming up in the National Lottery? 13,983,816 to 1. And yet those were the numbers that came up last week.