Murrah Redux

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In 9/11 lore we are often told that the fact that people could be seen standing in the craters caused by the planes proved that the fires could not have been hot enough to compromise the steel structure. In Oklahoma City, conspiracists claimed that the fact that the YMCA building across the street from the Murrah building was unaffected proved that the truck bomb could not have caused the damage. "Window washers weren't even knocked off their scaffolding!" screamed one site.

Conspiracy theories are always full of this kind of "It's just common sense" rhetoric, i.e. you can't throw an ice cube through the side door of a Buick so clearly the Titanic was not sunk by an iceberg. . . . Similar appeals can be found throughout 9/11 literature. One of my favorites comes from David Ray Griffin, who in his book The New Pearl Harbor posited that if the falling top-section of the second tower had paused just a half-second each time it collapsed a floor beneath it, it would have taken forty to forty-seven seconds to fall, and not the "near-freefall" eleven seconds or so that it actually took.

Which is true. It's also true that if the top-section had paused for three seconds on each floor, it would have taken not eleven seconds, but three minutes to fall! And if it had paused five minutes on each floor, you could have watched the whole first half of Ghost Dad on the fifteenth floor before you died! And so on. Griffin never explains why he thinks the building should have paused a half-second on each floor, but that's why he teaches theology, not engineering.

Murrah conspiracists also used the inevitable scientific mumbo-jumbo genus of argument. Here's a typical entry by J. Orlin Grabbe, a ubiquitous conspiracy barnacle who can be found sticking to the cyber-hull of almost every right-wing conspiracy theory from the last two decades, from Vince Foster to Whitewater:

The concrete in the columns had a compressible yield strength of at least (and probably higher than) 3500 pounds per square inch. Since this value is almost ten times the strength of the blast wave hitting the columns from the truck bomb, the blast wave is insufficient to produce a wave of deformation in the concrete (and thus to turn it back into its sand, gravel, and clay components).

In these accounts structures like the Murrah building and the World Trade Center suddenly become architectural Bismarcks, unsinkable engineering wonders seemingly impervious to damage. Just as writers like Griffin went out of their way to quote engineers who said "nowadays, they just don't build them as tough as the World Trade Center," Oklahoma conspiracists focused intently on the remarkably tough core of the federal building. Here's an excerpt from a post-Murrah report by William F. Jasper, who not surprisingly would surface years later as a leading voice of the relatively small right-wing contingent of 9/11 conspiracy theorists:

"Critics have argued compellingly that the blast wave from the ANFO truck bomb was totally inadequate to cause the collapse of the massive, steel-reinforced concrete columns of the federal building in Oklahoma City . . . "

One need hardly mention that "steel-reinforced" would a few years later become one of the most-widely circulated phrases on the Internet (third place, after "rock hard penis" and "buy vicodin online"), in connection with both the Pentagon and the WTC, which were variously supposed to be impenetrable or unshakeable. "For that hole to have been caused by Flight 77," barks Loose Change about the Pentagon crash, "the Boeing would have had to smash through nine feet of steel-reinforced concrete." Says wanttoknow.info of WTC: "First Steel-Reinforced Skyscraper To Ever Collapse in Fire!"

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