The significance of the February 2003 timing

On Thursday, January 30, 2003, Tony Blair traveled to the US, stopping over in Madrid for talks with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. On January 31, Blair and George W. Bush held a summit on Iraq at Camp David and at the White House. Details of the two-hour White House meeting emerged three years later in a memo seen by Phillipe Sands, a QC and professor of international law. The memo, known as the "Manning memo", revealed that Bush made clear the US intended to invade Iraq even if there was no further UN resolution, and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of an Iraqi illegal weapons program. Bush told Blair that the US was considering a way around the failure to find evidence of banned weapons. This would involve "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours", in the hope that Saddam could be provoked into firing on the aircraft. The warmongers would then be able to cite Iraq's "breach of UN resolutions" as another pretext for the invasion. Blair is quoted as saying he was "solidly with the president and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam".

(The "Downing Street memo", which is more of a "smoking gun" referred to a secret July 23, 2002 meeting of senior British government, defence and intelligence figures discussing the build-up to the war. But at the end of November 2009, a new memo from 2002 surfaced at the Iraq War Inquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcot. This showed that on July 29, 2002, six days after the "Downing Street memo" meeting, the then attorney-general Lord Goldsmith wrote to Tony Blair advising him that "regime change" was not a legal basis for war, and that Britain could not justify an invasion on grounds of self-defense because Iraq was not a threat to the UK. Lord Goldsmith, who is Jewish, was eventually "persuaded" to change his mind by Blair's cronies and enforcers. Goldsmith lost three stone in that period, and behaved relatively honorably in contrast to the treacherous Blair, who denied that Goldsmith ever told him the war would be illegal.)

On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell addressed the UN General Assembly. His claims included: "We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories. [...] There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons. [...] Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. [...] We also have sources who tell us that, since the 1980s, Saddam's regime has been experimenting on human beings to perfect its biological or chemical weapons. [...] there is no doubt in my mind, these elicit (sic) procurement efforts show that Saddam Hussein is very much focused on putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear weapons program, the ability to produce fissile material."

Powell and the warmongers hoped that their lies about "weapons" would bring about a new UN resolution. On Thursday February 6, Bush declared that "the game is over" for Saddam Hussein. On February 7, Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Italy to begin a series of meetings with European officials. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said Russia did not see any grounds for passing a new resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq. By February 10, the warmongers' plans to sway opinion were not faring well, with France, Germany and Belgium blocking proposals to increase Turkey's defenses in case of a war.

On Saturday February 8, 20,000 anti-war protesters demonstrated peacefully in snowy Munich, as 3,500 police were needed to protect a security conference attended by Donald Rumsfeld and others. Demonstrators carried signs such as "Rummy go home". Around this time, more than 700 women posed nude on a hillside in Australia, forming the words "NO WAR", and about 30 women stripped off in the snow in New York to spell the words "NO BUSH". There were plenty of protests over the next days, including a "die-in" at the University of South Florida. By February 12, the ground swell of public anti-war opinion had surprised many campaigners in Britain, and it was already expected that a million protestors could arrive in London on the following Saturday morning. More than 450 organisations and groups including Greenpeace, Americans Against the War and Britons versus Bush - a group of Bedford cabdrivers - joined 11 political parties including the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens, and affiliated themselves to the Stop The War Coalition.

By February 13, city and county officials had headed for Washington, DC, for anti-war protests. On February 14, United for Peace and Justice, a US-based campaign group, estimated that 603 anti-war protests had been organized across the globe. The crescendo of opposition culminated with an estimated six to thirty million people demonstrating worldwide on Saturday, February 15. The BBC's lower estimate of "six million" is likely to be too low, since the estimate for Rome is a record three million, verified by the Guinness Book Of Records in its 2004 edition and in a special ten-year edition. Up to 375,000 protested in New York, with the demonstration featuring a giant puppet depicting President Bush holding buckets of blood and oil. The low turnout in Israel, a mere 1,500 to 3,000, confirms that Israeli Jews were strong supporters of a US military attack on Iraq.

Wikipedia's page on the preparation for war has this summary for the period from February 5 to Saturday February 15, which encompasses both high-rise office fires of February 7 and 14:

In February 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations General Assembly, continuing US efforts to gain UN authorization for an invasion. Powell presented evidence alleging that Iraq was actively producing chemical and biological weapons and had ties to al-Qaeda. As a follow-up to Powell’s presentation, the United States, United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Australia, Denmark, Japan, and Spain proposed a resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, but NATO members like Canada, France, and Germany, together with Russia, strongly urged continued diplomacy. Facing a losing vote as well as a likely veto from France and Russia, the US, UK, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Italy, Japan, and Australia eventually withdrew their resolution.^[51][52]

With the failure of its resolution, the US and their supporters abandoned the Security Council procedures and decided to pursue the invasion without UN authorization, a decision of questionable legality in international law.^[53] This decision was widely unpopular worldwide, and opposition to the invasion coalesced on February 15 in a worldwide anti-war protest that attracted between six and ten million people in more than 800 cities, the largest such protest in human history according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

In the second week of February the anti-war protests were organised to peak on the Saturday, February 15, 2003. So the ideal time to stage a false-flag incident that could sway public opinion and deter people from turning up at the protests would have been Friday, February 14, with February 7 being a little less ideal but still potentially useful for gaining support for a new UN resolution.

Other incidents

On October 17, 2003, six people were killed in a fire at the Cook County Administration Building. This 460 feet and 36 stories above grade level high-rise is located at 69 West Washington Street, Chicago. The fire started on the 12th floor in a 6 ft by 18.3 ft by 8.7 ft high storage room in Suite 1240, in the office of the Secretary of State's Business Services Division. The fire safety director left the building at 4pm on the day of the fire, an hour before it started, and there were no sprinklers above the lobby. Officially, it was ruled that the evidence was inconsistent with arson, although the cause was classed as "undetermined". But there was evidence indicating arson, since debris was found that tested positive for gasoline, although a dog did not detect gasoline.

The Fire Department ruled that a person had set off the fire with gasoline, but the testimony of an "independent expert" with a Jewish name - Jeff Eaton - contradicted this and said there was "no evidence" of arson. However, the police said they were "unable to determine the actual cause of the fire". Those that died were trapped in the smoke-filled southeast stairwell because doors were locked.

The NIST report on the Cook Country Administration Building fire was authored by Daniel Madrzykowski and William D. Walton. However, the scope of this study only started after there was a small, flaming fire in a storage room, and ended 16½ minutes later as the Chicago Fire Department started to fight the fire. NIST ignored the question of how the fire started. Daniel Madrzykowski was also lead NIST investigator for the Rhode Island Station Nightclub fire of February 2003.

The first fire alarm signal was at 17:00:16. At 5pm, an occupant of Suite 1240 smelled smoke, alerted other occupants, and started to evacuate. Another occupant went to investigate, and found a small fire on the top of a set of wall shelves in a storage room, under a ceiling-mounted light fixture. Various office stationery items - principally paper, forms, brochures and boxes of envelopes - were stored on the shelves.

A slightly different account is given on page 363 of the 1183-page full report, prepared by James Lee Witt Associates of Washington, DC. According to this timeline, one of the female occupants smelled smoke, mentioned it to her colleagues, looked at her watch and noticed it was 4:57pm. She went to investigate and saw a yellow-orange flame on the top shelf of a bookcase inside a storage room that always had its door open.

The writer conducted an experiment in which a single A4 sheet of paper was held directly beneath a 100 watt incandescent bulb, at a distance of half an inch or less. After more than a minute, the paper was still in pristine condition, feeling merely very slightly warm to the touch.

The ignition temperature of paper is popularly known to be around 451 °F. Taking the low end of Wikipedia's range of autoignition temperatures for paper, we have 424 °F which is 218 °C. A4 size paper is 210 x 297 mm = 0.0624 square meters. Assuming the full 100 watts was directed at the paper - which it wasn't, since the light radiates in almost all directions (almost 4π steradians) - the heat absorbed could be up to 1,602 watts per square meter, assuming none was reflected away.

From the Stefan-Boltzmann Law for a gray body radiator, radiative heat transfer is given by:

P / A = e σ (T⁴ - T_c⁴)

...where:

• e is the emissivity
• σ (sigma) is Stefan's constant of 5.67 x 10^-8 W/m².K⁴
• T and T_c are the absolute temperatures in Kelvin of the hot radiator and cooler ambient surroundings respectively
• P / A is the power density of radiated heat

...it may be seen that assuming an emissivity of 1, a radiator temperature of 218 °C and ambient temperature of 100 °C, we obtain:

P / A = 0.0000000567 (491⁴ - 373⁴) ~ 2,198 W/m²

...as the heat emitted by the paper, which is greater than the 1,602 W/m² maximum absorbed as obtained above. The light bulb does not heat the surrounding air to as high as 100°C, so that underestimates the heat emitted by the paper. Since the paper is not a black body radiator, it will not radiate as much as if its emissivity were 1, but similarly, it will not absorb the full 100 W energy consumed by the light, and not all of that energy would be incident on the paper in any case. Thus, it may be seen that the paper will reach an equilibrium temperature that is considerably below its autoignition temperature.

The Cook County Administration Building fire occurred the day after the release (in Germany and Austria) of the film Baltic Storm, with Helje Kaskel and the Bollyn children Christopher Jr. and Catherine amongst the cast. It was also just as a State Department study was released showing that many of the problems with the occupation of Iraq had been predicted, but were ignored by the Pentagon.

Fazlur Khan, employed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and regarded as the "father of tubular design for high-rises", designed a concrete tube structure for the Cook County Administration Building, later going on to use a modified version of the concept for the Sears (now the Willis) Tower, and the framed tube structure was used for the World Trade Center. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill were the architects for 321 North Clark Street, River North as well as the Cook Country Administration Building at 69 West Washington and the Willis Tower.

Within an hour of the River North high-rise fire on February 7, 2003, there was an explosion at a chemical plant in Cranston, Rhode Island. One worker was critically injured and lost some of his vision when a plastic vent blew up in his face after he tapped it with a small hammer. According to the report on the incident at Technic, Inc., the production of silver cyanide salts had been temporarily suspended on the day of the explosion due to employee absence. As a result, management had instructed remaining employees to clean up their work areas. The worker who was severely injured told investigators that he was cleaning on mezzanine 2 when he heard a whistling sound coming from the exhaust duct connected to tank 8. He said it sounded as though the duct was blocked. After tapping on the duct with a small hammer, he thought he heard some loosened material fall into the tank. However, because the duct still sounded blocked, he tapped on it again. An instant later, at approximately 9:30am, the duct exploded, knocking him to the floor. There was a secondary explosion and fire, and businesses and residents were evacuated over a half-mile radius.

As of the day after the explosion, investigators had "found no easy answers" as to why a plastic exhaust duct would have burst and caught fire. The US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) investigation was headed by lead investigator Randy McClure, and included Dr. Isadore (Irv) Rosenthal who was nominated by Bill Clinton in November 1998. Rosenthal was one of the ten members of the James A. Baker III-led investigation into the March 23, 2005, British Petroleum Texas City refinery accident. Baker is a member of the Pilgrims Society and Bohemian Grove.

A hypothetical conspiracy in which the Technic explosion was staged as an attempted false-flag might start by proposing that absent worker(s) were part of the plot. The absentee(s) would have been aware that employee absence could result in suspension of production of a particular product, with the remaining workers having to clean up their areas. An absent infiltrator might have planted highly shock-sensitive material into an exhaust vent to block it in the hope that the next day, a worker involved in cleaning and maintenance would discover the blockage and try to clear it, with violent results.

This type of false-flag would have the advantage of little risk of exposure. Given a wise choice of explosive mixture, the investigators could conclude, as in the official report for the Technic incident, that "through years of accumulation of solids [...] and mixing, many materials could have resulted in violent reactions such as the one that caused this incident". After the investigators allowed for the fact that "tapping of the hammer would produce significantly less energy than a lighted cigarette, electrical spark, or open flame", they would narrow the list of suspects to unstable compounds that could have been formed from silver nitrate and ammonia such as silver azide and silver amide, or silver nitrate reacting with ammonium citrate or sodium hydrosulfite. The disadvantage is that there would be no guarantee of success, so the perpetrators would have to conduct several such acts of infiltration and sabotage on the principle that one or two of them would probably work.

Technic is the exclusive North American distributor for the Japanese-patented Mazerustar planetary mixers / deaerators. Even back in 1992, one application of these planetary mixers would be mixing of "highly exothermic mixtures" such as iron oxide and aluminum. Technic's Engineered Powders Division's products include atomized silver powders and alloys, atomized gold powders and alloys, and atomized silver-palladium powders. The photo of their atomized silver powder 625 shows that particle diameters are mostly in the 1 to 10 micron range. However, assuming there was no foul play and the incident was due to a natural build-up of materials over several years, the February 7 incident shows how even these materials are capable of reacting with explosive force.

A very interesting woman happened to be on hand at Rhode Island to provide any required "aid" after the explosion: Jimmie Carol Oxley, PhD chemistry and Professor of chemistry at the University of Rhode Island, with sixteen years' experience in "energetic materials". She is an explosives expert, having published several papers such as "Non-Traditional Explosives: Potential Detection Problems", published in Terrorism and Political Violence, 1993. She organized an explosives course attended by NAVSEA (Indian Head), WES (Army), Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc, and collaborates with people from the Weizmann Institute, Hebrew University, and the Israeli police. She also advises on Aviation Security, and is an advisor to Homeland Security. In this file, she has listed the explosives allegedly used at major terror incidents from Beirut (1983) to Mumbai (2006). An explosives expert who was rather naive about Zionist terrorism need not be part of the conspiracy, but could have been exploited after being briefed with the type of explosives that "Muslim terrorists" were "known to use".

Although the idea of a number of conspirators infiltrating chemical plants and conducting acts of sabotage in the hope that they would get lucky is highly infeasible, it is not quite so ridiculous as the idea of a conspiracy involving the ADL, Homeland Security, the entire Hoffman Estates Police Department, Jewish prosecutors, the American Free Press, Republic Broadcasting Network - and possibly the CIA for good measure - to arrest and Tase an "anti-Zionist journalist" who calls the police to his home and then tells them he is going to get reinforcements. When the police turn up at your home ten minutes after you dialled 911 and told them to call, and when you get Tasered and arrested after yelling that you are going inside to get reinforcements, the explanation for the events is already patently obvious - no conspiracy theory required. And when the conspiracy theory requires that the plotters be capable of mind control in order to induce the subject into calling them out, and secondly to induce the subject to become belligerent, in order to provide the pretexts both for arriving at the home and using the Taser, the conspiracy theory may be dismissed as the product of a nut - or an intelligence operative and disinformation agent.

Since any honest investigation must take account of the laws of logic and causality, it must be concluded that there is no compelling reason to prefer a conspiracy over the official version of events for the Technic plant explosion. And dust explosions kill or injure every year, with minor blasts even more frequent. In fact, it has been estimated that about 35 major dust explosions occur each year in the US, with about 40 fatalities. If the Technic incident is the type that recurs about every ten days, then the probability of an incident on the same day as either the River North or IBM fires is as high as 1 in 5, and the probability of occurrence within an hour - either way - is 1 in 60.

Back on December 14, 1785, there was a flour dust explosion in Turin, Italy.

On February 7, 2008, 14 were killed and 36 injured in a sugar dust explosion at the Imperial Sugar refinery at Port Wentworth, Georgia. Three-inch thick concrete floors in the south packing building heaved and buckled from the force of the explosion, and violent fireballs erupted for more than 15 minutes. Small fires continued burning for many days. The granulated sugar had a mean particle size of 286 microns, with the powdered sugar at 23 microns, and cornstarch at 10 microns. On the dust deflagration index K_st, even the cornstarch samples had a value of only 189 bar m/s, which just about places them in the ST 1 "weak explosion" hazard class. An overheating bearing is believed to have caused a spark which triggered a primary explosion of sugar dust, with this being followed by “a powerful cascade of secondary dust explosions”. The incident was described as "the deadliest industrial dust explosion in the United States in decades". Sugar dust accumulated to an explosive concentration after a conveyor system had been enclosed with steel panels, creating a confined, unventilated space.

In the period around early February 2003, another notable dust explosion in the US was at West Pharmaceutical Services in Kinston, North Carolina, on January 29, 2003. Six were killed and 36 injured. Windows were broken at a distance of 1,000 feet, debris was propelled for up to two miles, and the blast could be heard 25 miles away. Rubber strips were conveyed through a tank containing very fine polyethylene powder mixed with water, to reduce the stickiness of the rubber. The coated rubber strips were blown dry with fans, with the result that polyethylene dust became airborne. Dust that settled on visible areas was continuously cleaned off, but a quarter-inch to a half-inch of the dust built up above the ceiling, on ceiling tiles, beams, light fixtures and conduits. Investigators said that as much as a ton of combustible powder could have settled above the ceiling, a few feet over the heads of unsuspecting workers.

West Pharmaceutical was one of three fatal dust explosions in 2003. Another occurred on February 20 when phenolic resin powder exploded at the CTA Acoustics plant in Corbin, Kentucky. Seven workers were killed and 37 injured. Investigators found that a cloud of phenolic resin dust, generated during the cleaning of a production line, was ignited by a fire in a malfunctioning oven. The initial explosion stirred up more dust and caused secondary explosions. And on October 29, aluminum dust exploded at the Hayes Lemmerz aluminum wheel plant in Huntingdon, Indiana. Two workers were severely burned in the ensuing fire, and one of these died the following day.

On January 25, 2003, a massive explosion destroyed the Bestcare pet food factory and injured two in Gunnedah, New South Wales. Fortunately, the factory had closed for the Australia Day long weekend. Investigators believed a spark set off a series of dust explosions along with the resulting fire. In a more recent report, a propane leak triggered a small primary explosion, which was followed by a secondary, much more massive dust explosion. Twenty giant roller doors were blown out on a building nearly a hundred yards away, at least thirty homes and ten factories were damaged, windows were broken in homes two miles away, the blast was heard twelve miles away and a firefighter more than forty miles away claimed to have seen the explosion which looked like "the mushroom of a little nuclear blast". The scene was described as like a war zone. Bestcare moved to a new facility in Dubbo, which was acquired the next year by Bush's International. Receivers were appointed for the company in June 2009.

On the night of Wednesday February 12, 2003, two University of Illinois at Chicago students were arrested in the College of Medicine building on robbery charges. The suspects, Omar Sheikh, 22, and Santosh Soparawala (occasionally shown as Soparawalla), 21, allegedly were in the process of stealing computer equipment when the police arrived. The suspects later informed police that a locker in the College of Pharmacy contained a flammable liquid. At about 8am on the following Thursday morning, the Chicago Police Department Bomb and Arson Unit and the Chicago Fire Department's hazardous materials team inspected the building. It was evacuated, and the substance was removed 90 minutes later. It was found to be non-hazardous n-n-dimethylformamide, which is similar to rubbing alcohol. UIC Police Lt. Michael Cherry said there was no reason to believe a link to terrorism.

Omar Sheikh, of Calumet City, subsequently had his pharmacy technician license revoked due to his arrest and being charged with three counts of burglary. Santosh Soparawala, of Evergreen Park, had his pharmacy technician license placed on two year definite probation for being arrested and charged with three counts of burglary. In 2005, Soparawala was involved in a study into products containing rhenium - a metal so rare that its price has exceeded $12,000 per kg - at the Governors State University, IL, along with Jan Wazio, Sam John, and Professor of Inorganic Chemistry Gregory A. Moehring.

On February 20, 2003, 100 people were killed and some 230 injured in a fire at The Station nightclub, West Warwick, Rhode Island. This was the fourth deadliest nightclub fire in American history, and was set off when the tour manager of the evening's headlining band, Great White, set off pyrotechnic sparks that ignited flammable sound insulation foam. The club was almost instantly engulfed, and one of those killed was the band's guitarist Ty Longley. Daniel Biechele, the tour manager, was sentenced to 15 years including 11 years suspended for setting off the fire. This incident is easily ruled out as a failed false-flag.

The E2 nightclub stampede, in which 21 people were killed and more than 50 injured, occurred in Chicago on February 17, 2003. Pepper spray was used to break up a fight, and panic ensued given the still relatively recent anthrax and 9/11 attacks. The timing and location are quite close to the February 7 and 14 Illinois high-rise fires, yet the outcome was unpredictable and would have been very hard to blame on Saddam Hussein. But as an attempted false-flag, although quite improbable, it's not quite so easily ruled out as the Station nightclub fire. Some people are reported to have shouted "poison gas!", "terror attack!", and someone said, "I'll bet it's bin Laden".

On February 21, 2003, there was an explosion at a refinery in Staten Island. The explosion, which could be heard several miles away, was reported shortly after 10am. The FBI said there were no indications of terrorism, although a refinery would be a likely terrorist target.

On Tuesday January 21, 2003, the Rev. Al Sharpton formally entered the Democratic presidential race, as the sixth person to open a presidential exploratory committee. The next day, his National Action Network's headquarters in Harlem was gutted by an electrical fire that started in an overloaded extension cord near boxes of leaflets. The Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, which regards American Blacks as "descendants of the Twelve Tribes of Israel", occupied the third floor. An unidentified member was there at the time of the fire, and was treated for smoke inhalation. The timing of the fire was seen as suspicious, particularly since on April 10, 1997, a fire had destroyed Sharpton's mayoral campaign headquarters in Harlem. The earlier fire was also believed to be suspicious, since an accelerant such as gasoline was believed to have been used, but this fire was started on the floor below the campaign office to throw investigators off the scent. As a conspiracy, the January 22 fire is quite feasible, but it's not a false-flag. The New York Times reported on these suspicions, but described them as a "conspiracy theory".

Here are a couple of relatively recent fires that broke out in cooling towers located around Chicago, with no known reason to suspect them of being failed false-flag operations. On July 9, 2009, there was a small fire that started at a cooling tower at the Argonne National Laboratory in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago. The laboratory's Advanced Photon Source provides X-ray beams to scientists around the world. And on November 3, 2009, a fire broke out in a cooling tower on the roof of a 48-story residential building at 233 E. Wacker Drive, Chicago. An eyewitness said there was a "very dense cloud of smoke".

Possible frame-up

Bret Darren Lee, an American-born Muslim whose Muslim name is Umar ben-Livan, was arrested in St. Louis, Missouri, early Sunday, February 9, 2003. He was questioned about his "anti-war activities", and asked whether he planned any attacks against the US government. St. Louis is about 300 miles from Chicago. Lee, who calls himself Umar Lee for simplicity and now writes a blog under that name, converted to Islam around 1992. He was awakened by loud knocking on his door about 5am on Sunday, and several police officers barged in with weapons drawn. He was handcuffed and taken to a squad car. Police spent 45 minutes searching his apartment and removed documents which were later returned. About noon Sunday, FBI agents returned to Lee's apartment and questioned his wife for 30 minutes, asking whether Lee was a "terrorist", what he thought about the Taliban, etc. FBI agents and a police "investigator" asked Lee similar questions for a half-hour, and also asked him about his friend Tim Kaminski, who is also an American-born Muslim. Lee was released late Sunday on $4,500 bail after being arrested on a fugitive warrant, supposedly for a probation violation but which was evidently a pretext for the arrest and interrogation.

In 2007, for example, Umar Lee visited Illinois to attend the annual Muslim American Society - Islamic Circle of North America (MAS-ICNA) convention at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Rosemont.

An alleged connection between Missouri and the so-called "al Qaeda" is that Ziyad Sadaqa, who briefly lived in St. Louis and also worked for a charity in Columbia, MO, supposedly bought a satellite phone that Osama bin Laden was said to have used to plot the bombings of two US embassies in 1998. But Sadaqa was alleged to have purchased the satellite phone under an alias, Ziyad Khaleel, in 1996. There is also a claim that a St. Louis bank account was connected to bin Laden's "deputy", Ayman Al-Zawahiri. A terrorist organization that calls itself "the base" or "the toilet" can spend $7,500 on a phone, bin Laden can get dialysis treatment and dye his beard whilst encircled by Nato forces in an 8-year-long manhunt, yet they cannot even buy a decent video recorder, or hide the paper trail when they buy a phone. A Jewish fiction writer and lawyer has even compiled a novel about Zawahiri having "infiltrated" US biodefenses, which is one possible source where the scriptwriters obtain ideas for their "modern-day Emmanuel Goldstein" horse manure.

Probability of building fires

As to the central question of whether these building fires were, as Occam's Razor suggests, spontaneous fires due to normal wear and tear of heating equipment, or part of a failed plot to incriminate the Iraqi regime, it will be worthwhile to consider the ignition frequency of structure fires for the particular class of building. "Ignition" in this case would exclude very small fires that, e.g. were extinguished by the occupants, and did not necessitate calling the fire department.

According to the John R. Hall, Jr. report High-Rise Building Fires of June 2009, reported structure fires in high-rises, defined as seven or more floors, averaged 13,400 annually from 2003-2006 in the United States. For offices only over that period, the annual average is 400 for high-rises, compared with 3,550 for offices of 1 to 6 stories. Across all the major classes of usage, the number of fires in high-rises was relatively low when taking into account exposure, i.e., the total area of floor space.

For office buildings, the high-rise share of exposure is estimated at 25-46% with a middle estimate of 38%.

The Energy Information Administration (EIA), in its Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey from 2003, counted a total of 4,859,000 commercial buildings of more than 1,000 square feet in the US. Where the principal building activity is classed as "office", the total is 824,000.

If we assume the average high-rise of seven or more stories has four times the floor space of the average low-rise, then high-rises would only need to account for 9.5% of the 824,000 total - that is, 78,280 - in order to comprise the 38% middle estimate above for their share of exposure or total floor space. 400 fires per year in 78,280 office high-rises indicates a probability of 400 / 78,280 or around 1 in 196 for a fire to occur in a particular office high-rise per year. Over a period of, say, three months in the run-up to the Iraq war, the probability of a fire would be 1 in 783. And if there are ten days - e.g. before some significant event such as a massive anti-war protest - that we specify that a particular building is to catch fire, the probability is only 1 in 196 x (365.25 / 10) = 1 in 7,159.

Fire protection engineer Pierre Palmberg said: "For example the danger in measuring the probability of fire occurrence as once in 1000 years, when the actual probability is once in 100-200 years, is clear."

That is consistent with the above calculations. However, to be fair to the spontaneous fire hypothesis, these estimates do not allow for the fact that the 11-story former IBM building has a total floor space of some 330,000 square feet (31,000 square meters), or 30,000 ft^2 per floor. In the case of small buildings the probability of ignition increases with the exposure (area). But it was found, e.g. by Dr. Ganapathy Ramachandran, that the probability did not continue to increase with the area when the buildings were large. Ramachandran used the equation:

F(A) = kA to the power of alpha

or

F(A) = kA^α

...where A is the total floor area of the building and k and alpha are constants for a particular type of building. The index alpha required a value of less than unity, and it would be lowered if the building had sprinklers. F(A), the probability of fire for a particular building usage and total area, is usually expressed on an annual basis.

This was developed, e.g. Tillander, 2004, into a model that used a sum of two power laws to determine the ignition frequency of buildings with a total floor area in the range 100 to 20,000 square meters. For buildings of greater size, e.g. the IBM Global Network Services building at 31,000 square meters, data is sparse.

According to Tillander, a building classed as "office" usage and 30,000 m^2 would have an ignition frequency of 2.5x10^-6 expressed in 1/m^2a, which is the probability of ignition per floor area and time unit (annum a) (see Figure 10 at this link).

0.0000025 times 31,000 m^2 would indicate an ignition frequency of 0.0775 per annum for the IBM building, which would be once every 12.9 years. But see Table 6 for the probability of ignition per building (1/a), in which Holborn et al (2002) found a value for office buildings in London (1996-99) of only 0.0017, indicating that an average office building would only be expected to catch fire once in 588 years.

Suppose the 2.5x10^-6 in 1/m^2a ignition frequency applied in the case of buildings as large as the WTC's Twin Towers. Each tower had a footprint around 4,020 m^2, and multiplying this by 110 stories and seven basement levels obtains 470,340 m^2 of floor space. When this is multiplied by 0.0000025, the value 1.176 would indicate fires every 10.2 months in each tower. And these are not just false alarms in which the fire department is called. They would be actual fires that produced a smoke plume, although damage could be relatively minor. The North Tower did have a serious fire in February 1975 that burned for three hours, in which flames could be seen pouring out of 11th floor windows on the east side of the building, in contrast to the 9/11 fires. And six people were killed in the February 1993 bombing at the WTC.

But a fire every 10.2 months in each Tower (plus regular fires in WTC7) would appear much too high a frequency, suggesting that the 2.5x10^-6 value becomes increasingly too high for large buildings, and the one fire every 13 years and a 1 in 475 chance of a fire starting on one of ten significant days is too high a probability.

Of course, fire-induced total collapse of any building is an extremely rare event, and any conspirators would have been really pushing their luck had they decided to demolish the IBM or other buildings and blame it on fires started by Iraqi saboteurs. A project conducted for NIST listed twenty-two cases of "collapse" in "multi-story" buildings, and seven cases of "no collapse", four of the latter being steel-framed buildings. Their definition of "multi-story" included all buildings of 4 stories and up. Except for WTC 1, 2 and 7, the only other total collapses occurred in buildings of wood-frame (and also still under construction), concrete, reinforced concrete and "unknown" construction. Most of the so-called "collapses" were only partial collapses. Apart from the WTC, the other steel-framed buildings either did not collapse at all, or the "collapse" was very minor.

Conclusion

International Zionism's successful false-flag of 9/11 left smoking gun evidence (molten metal including molten steel, iron spherules) and loaded gun (active thermitic material). There is no similar smoking gun evidence at the scene of the February 2003 incidents. However, the improbability of two similar high-rise fires exactly a week apart with the final incident occurring one day before unprecedented worldwide anti-war protests and at a building closely associated with a known intelligence asset and disinformation agent makes it unlikely that foul play was not involved in any of these incidents.

This does not mean that Bollyn was necessarily briefed on what was going to happen, just that the perpetrators selected the building of his old employer so that they could exploit him to damage attempts to expose the truth, by feeding him with false data such as "Ehud Barak did it". He has similarly been used to damage the efforts of 9/11 truth by deliberately discrediting himself and posting disinformation.

The irony for supporters of Christopher Bollyn is that if we were to adopt his cavalier disregard for the laws of logic and causality, we could dismiss any difficulty with the concept of perpetrators installing a highly shock-sensitive powder in a plastic vent and then predicting that a worker might tap the vent with a small hammer because the perpetrators' agent(s) who had infiltrated the company and placed the powder knew that their absence on the designated day might lead to a temporary suspension of production and a cleaning of work areas by remaining employees. In this case, the Technic plant blast becomes a likely false-flag, along with both of the high-rise fires, and many of the other events.

If, as should be the case, we do not dismiss the laws of logic and causality, then the chemical plant explosion looks a very unlikely false-flag. The lower the number of hypothetical failed false-flags, the higher the probability that none would have succeeded. The first high-rise fire at River North has Jews who handled a leasing deal in the months before the event, who knew the top floors of the building were not occupied, and whose managing director said that the World Trade Center deal was the deal of a lifetime for Larry Silverstein. Of all the events detailed above, the IBM Global Network Services building would be the most likely failed false-flag, with the River North building a second choice, following on from the AHR Expo 2003 event that convened at Chicago's McCormick Place, January 27-29, 2003, and the January 31 Bush-Blair Iraq summit at Camp David and at the White House.

Apart from the February 7 and 14 fires, there is no compelling reason to suspect any of the other events. Some of them can be ruled out, but they are detailed here for research purposes. Whether or not the February 7 River North fire was an attempted false-flag, the Iraq warmongers would surely have been aware of the chemical plant explosion that followed at 9:30am that day, and of the immense political benefit of what could be passed as a "synchronized terror attack on a high-rise and a chemical plant involving cyanide" perpetrated by "Muslims linked to Saddam Hussein". This would have spurred them on to have a go, or another go, at a false-flag attack at a high-rise office linked to a known intelligence asset, to be carried out one day in advance of unprecedented anti-war protests.

Note: Contrary to any disinformation you may have seen elsewhere, this article was not written by Michael Collins Piper.