GRAVY on the attack

[GRAVY]

Fire is what brought the towers down. An engineer friend explained 
that after a fire burns for awhile, the steel holding up the 
structure softens. When it fails, the part above falls with impact on 
the part below, which causes progressive collapse of the building, or 
pancaking, as one floor crunches onto the next onto the next. Once 
one floor goes there is no stopping it.

The World Trade Center was likely designed to last 1-2 hours in a 
major fire, long enough for most people to evacuate. The tower that 
fell first lasted 57 minutes, in a fire driven by 100,000 pounds of 
jet fuel. No one anticipated that part when the building was 
designed, and there is no way to build a building to withstand such 
an event. The TV newscasters who keep asking what could have been 
done to make the buildings more resistant should go home.

An astonishing thing is the way the towers collapsed straight down. 
As horrifying as that was, imagine how much more damage and loss of 
life there would have been would have been if they had tipped over 
like falling trees, landing on surrounding buildings for a quarter 
mile.

A building demolition expert interviewed on NPR said that what made 
the disciplined collapse possible was the external skeleton, the 
girders that lined the edges of the towers. These girders contained 
the collapse. The expert considered this an extraordinary achievement 
by the architect.

The World Trade Center was designed by the late Minoru Yamasaki, at 
the firm of Skilling, Ward, Magnusson and Barkshire, in Seattle. You 
have to think it's good he didn't live to see this. The rest of his 
firm is said to be shock, as are the employees of Boeing, whose 
engineers are acutely aware of the destructive energy contained in a 
767 going three hundred miles an hour and full of fuel.


A few random notes:

This attack seems different from Pearl Harbor in the same way that 
the Vietnam War seemed different to fight than previous wars, which 
is that the enemy did not stand up and "fight like a man," but rather 
was hidden, hard to find, and devious, as well as surprising. The 
British felt the same way about the American "irregulars" in the 
revolutionary war. They felt we weren't fighting fairly or properly. 
In all three cases, one side deliberately ignored the "code of war" 
of the time to powerful effect.

In this way the definition of war changes. It just changed again, 
whether we like it or not. Whatever we do to retaliate risks an 
escalation of terrorist-style attacks on American citizens. We will 
not get to watch our distant military on newsreels and TV like the 
old days.

One of the things that makes this scary is that we have found a bomb, 
and it is everywhere. Every plane is a terrific bomb for a pilot who 
is willing to die.

This attack has been called cowardly. That's silly. It was no more 
cowardly than flying a stealth fighter loaded with smart bombs into 
Iraq, when by the same definition the uncowardly thing would have 
been to ride in on a camel with a broadsword.

The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was headed for Washington but 
the plan was foiled by the passengers who had heard what the planes 
did in New York. Bravo. Instead of banning knives, perhaps we should 
issue one to every passenger on all commercial flights.

This attack was a huge failure of American military intelligence.

This attack points up the value of an unworkable and insanely 
expensive missile defense system. For those of you who are sleepy, 
that value would be zero.

Bush said that we were attacked because we believe in freedom. This 
is not why we were attacked. There is much about the execution of our 
foreign policy that rarely makes it into US news reports. If you have 
lived abroad for more than a few months, you have seen this. If not, 
it is educational to talk to someone who has. At the same time, 
nearly all Arabs and other Muslims abhor terrorism. The 
Arab-Americans I know are as dismayed and horrified as we are.

Our airport security has always been a joke. My dad's crutches were 
consistently handed around the inspection points by the nice people 
working there. All I could think was how much explosive or how many 
knives and zip guns I could have packed into each crutch, while they 
were busy making business travelers go through their briefcases.

It is hard to fight people who believe they will achieve martyrdom 
and go to heaven following a suicide attack for their cause. It is an 
impossible stretch for us to understand how our enemy thinks when it 
is that different from how we think. It is difficult to protect 
yourself from someone who does not value his life on this earth.

Of course fight them we shall. No one gets to do what they did. We 
need to start by repealing some laws, like the one that says we can't 
use intelligence agents to infiltrate groups with human rights 
violations (which wizard thought up that one?), and the one that says 
we can't assassinate heads of state. We must not try to bring anyone 
to trial. We must be as surgical as possible, to minimize the loss of 
innocent life that would would be both a new tragedy and a fuel for 
escalation. I support Bush's plan to treat harboring states and 
helpers as indistinguishable from the terrorists themselves.

Above all, we must not rush. There is no advantage or need to hurry. 
We must take our time, learn everything we need to learn, make no 
mistake. And then it will be time to execute.

I regret that that will not be the end of it.

jb
-- 


It ain't so much the things you don't know that get you
in trouble. It's the things you know that just ain't so.
-- Artimus Ward, 1834-1867

Put another way: You can always spot a well informed man -
his views are the same as yours. -- Ilka Chase


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