Perhaps you’ve heard of the school lab experiment of putting a frog in a pan of cool water, putting the pan over a burner, and slowly raising the water to boiling, killing the frog. The frog doesn’t notice the temperature changing and, rather than jumping out of the pan, falls asleep as the water warms up.

Dear Mr Cockburn,

I would like to agree with you over 9/11, but there are problems.  I also agree that there are more than enough wingnut theories flying around and they should be ignored.  However, having studied the way the twin towers and building 7 came down, I cannot explain them without benefit of thermite.  I am not a structural engineer, but I can understand the basic facts of the construction of the twin towers. 

They snapped back upright after each impact, therefore the central steel structure could not have been that damaged.  Also, if it had been, the upper floors would have started to sag at once, and they didn't.  Kerosene burns at approximately 1000 degrees (I'm sorry, for the moment I cannot remember if that is F or C, but for the purposes of this argument, it doesn't matter) lower than the temperature at which steel starts to weaken.  You only have to look at the video of that day to see that it is thick black smoke coming out of the towers, not white hot flame.  Black smoke is a sign of low level combustion which shows that the fire could not possibly have been at a tenperature to melt the steel core.  

AUSTIN, Texas -- Is it just me, or was that the worst presidential press conference in history? So I went back and read it over. Of course, in print you don't get the testy tone: I heard it on radio and thought the man was about to blow up -- not just because he was being questioned, which Bush appears to consider an offensive action in the first place, but because people continue to refuse to see things the way he does. How can they be so stupid or malign, he appears to wonder.

I ask: How can he be so repetitive, repeatedly using the oldest tactic of a verbal bully -- saying the same thing louder, as though that would make it true?

Last Friday's Rose Garden press conference seemed so awful I thought it worth wading through it again to see what set him off. Maybe if you saw it on television, it seemed better. Perhaps his banter with reporters works better on TV. But I left with the impression that this is a spoiled man whose frustration level when someone disagrees with him is that of a 3-year-old and that he's the last person you want to see operating under a lot of stress because he doesn't handle it well.

It is ridiculous that you're email address contains the word 'truth' as your columnist Andrew Cockburn has recently proved himself to be a liar in his September 8th article 911 Conspiracy Nuts.

For him to claim that there are pictures which exist of the aftermath of the pentagon wreckage which purport to show the outline of 'wings' surrounding the initial impact zone is prepostrous!

Show me these photos, or forever consider yourselves part of the mainstream media, nothing but distraction.

For The Guardian (UK) -- Is the Alaska Pipeline corroded?  You bet it is.  Has been for more than a decade.  Did British Petroleum shut the pipe yesterday to turn a quick buck on its negligence, to profit off the disaster it created?  Just ask the "smart pig."

Years ago, I had the unhappy job of leading an investigation of British Petroleum's management of the Alaska pipeline system.  I was working for the Chugach villages, the Alaskan Natives who own the shoreline slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker grounding.

Even then, courageous government inspectors and pipeline workers were screaming about corrosion all through the pipeline.  I say "courageous" because BP, which owns 46% of the pipe and is supposed to manage the system, had a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems.