Having complained of people posting off topic, it seems a reasonable solution to give an opportunity for people to discuss the topics I am banning from other threads – of which 9/11 seems the most popular.
I do not believe that the US government, or any of its agencies, were responsible for 9/11. It would just need too many people to be involved. Someone would have objected. There are some strange and dangerous people in America, but not in sufficient concentration for this one. They couldn’t even keep Watergate quiet, and that was a small group. Any group I can think of – even Blackwater – would contain operatives with scruples about blowing up New York. They may be sadly ready to kill people in poor countries, but Americans en masse? Somebody would say it wasn’t a good idea.
I asked a friend in the construction industry what it would take to demolish the twin towers. He replied nine months, 80 men, and 12 miles of cabling. The notion that a small team at night could plant sufficient explosives embedded at key points, is laughable.
The forces of the aircraft impacts must have been amazingly high. I have no difficulty imagining they would bring down the building. As for WTC 7, again the kinetic energy of the collapse of the twin towers must be immense.
I admit to a private speculation about WTC7. Unfortunately in construction it is extremely common for contractors not to fix or install properly all the expensive girders, ties and rebar that are supposed to be enclosed in the concrete. Supervising contractors and municipal inspectors can be corrupt. I recall vividly that in London some years ago a tragedy occurred when a simple gas oven explosion brought down the whole side of a tower block.
The inquiry found that the building contractor had simply omitted the ties that bound the girders at the corners, all encased in concrete. If a gas oven had not blown up, nobody would have found out. Buildings I strongly suspect are very often not as strong as they are supposed to be, with contractors skimping on apparently redundant protection. The sort of sordid thing you might not want too deeply investigated in the event of a national tragedy.
Precisely what happened at the Pentagon I am less sure. There is not the conclusive film and photographic evidence that there is for New York. I am particularly puzzled by the much more skilled feat of flying that would be required to hit a building virtually at ground level, in an urban area, after a lamppost clipping route – very hard to see how a non-professional pilot did that. But I can think of a number of possible scenarios where the official explanation is not quite the whole truth on the Pentagon, but which do not necessitate a belief that the US government or Dick Cheney was behind the attack.
In my view the real scandal of 9/11 was that it was blowback – the product of a malignant terrorist agency whose origins lay in CIA funding and provision. Also blowback in a more general sense that it was spawned in the nasty theocratic dictatorship of Saudi Arabia which is so close to the US and to the Bush dynasty in particular. As with almost all terrorist activity, I do not rule out any point on the whole spectrum of surveillance, penetration and agent provocateur activity by any number of possible actors.
But was 9/11 false flag and controlled demolition? No, I think not.
(Now I have given full opportunity to discuss 9/11 here, any further references on other threads will be instantly deleted).
Here’s a coincidence:
On Wednesday, I was in a book shop with a friend of mine and picked up Catcher in the Rye. “Did you know J.D Salinger is still alive?” I asked. I said this because I had thought, for years, that he had died years ago.
Anyway, he died later that day at the age of 91.
Did I have anything to do with Salinger’s death? I don’t think so. But coincidences and strange things happen all the time. It doesn’t mean they are all planned or they’re all purposeful.
“No, I’m not the one making the connection. Apparently you are.”
Cause-and-effect doesn’t work, for you ? It’s bedtime.
“That’s the last time I use litotes on this site!
Posted by: frank verismo at January 29, 2010 4:18 AM”
Good! And stay off the magic mushrooms while you’re at it.
“It’s bedtime.”
Remember, The New World Order never sleeps!
The sun never sets on the government within the government!
This is the strength of truther evidence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhKiAUkw7SY
“Good! And stay off the magic mushrooms while you’re at it.”
You really are a killjoy, aren’t you?
“You really are a killjoy, aren’t you?”
Alright, you can keep on the magic mushrooms as long as you remember what they do to people’s minds.
Hey look! I made a new post:
http://angrysoba.blogspot.com/2010/01/j-d-salinger-dies-i-didnt-do-it.html
Glen, you rock man! And your advice to Soba is spot on. I gave him a similar finger-waving lecture last year, but to no avail. The boy is going downhill and getting into seriously Bad Company, and I don’t mean the guys who sung “running with the pack”.
Soba, “Interestingly, those with the best credentials on this thread don’t believe in the inside job.” And intriguingly, there’s not a single structural engineer among them. There isn’t even a theologist. And amazingly, I find that you haven’t responded to any of my very reasonable questions about collapsing buildings. Well, you can lead a horse to water, they say.
Larry, you’re so full of excrement that if you gave yourself an enema, what was left of you would float off into the air like ripe dandelion seeds on a breezy spring evening. You take care now and enjoy yourself with your fellow Randi boyscouts. And don’t overdo the rootbeer.
“I find that you haven’t responded to any of my very reasonable questions about collapsing buildings.”
I haven’t seen any. Would you mind pointing them out or restating them?
I did just have a root beer lollipop. (Just quit smoking).
What a coincidence. But I don’t think Randi would be impressed.
Angrysoba,
Tim Groves relies on the argument from incredulity and resurrects the existence of squibs. Do you remember squibs? They got a lot of attention from the conspiraloons in 2004. You might have seen them in the movie The Usual Suspects – when, at the end, Keyzer Soze shoots the Kevin Pollack character and for some reason the film directors thought it would be cool to keep the special effect in the movie (or perhaps they didn’t catch it in the editing). In any event, if you’re a movie director and you want to fake gun shots or small explosions, you use squibs.
Truthers, for whatever reason, believe that small explosions were placed by the windows of the Towers. I’ll never understand why they argued that – it would seem that they would want to admit that it was air that was escaping, but maintain the argument that really big explosives or whatever were placed on the columns. By and large, they’ve dropped the squibs concept.
But then there’s Tim Groves. Tim, you failed to address the following:
Tim Groves: “Conversely, if we assume a modest squib placed close to a window, there is no problem visualizing why only one window popped.”
BWWWAAAHHHAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!
Why the fuck would your Men in Black place “modest squibs” right by the window?
BWWWAAAHHHAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!
The term “squibs” has been amusing me for years. They might be useful in the movie industry to fake bullet penetrations, and have some other small-scale explosive uses, but it would be quite silly for a demolition team (whether ninja or not) to employ squibs to demolish a building. My guess is that the truthers saw the air exiting each floor (as can be predicted and is testable!) and decided that it looked like squibs used in buildings and there you have it.
Btw, there are even larger “explosions” coming out of the windows where there are atrium levels.
Well, I have posted videos which also shows “squibs”. In one, it is a burning steel framed building in which smoke is ejected out of the windows during its collapse.
In another, there were many explosiveless demolitions using the verinage technique in which “squibs” were visible.
They both demonstrate that the Truthers are wrong to assert that the “squibs” on the Twin Towers could only be explained by explosives. In fact, they don’t behave like explosives because they billow out continuously, increasing in volume as the collapse front descends the building towards those “squibs” coming out of the building. Explosives would surely seem to emit their “ejecta” in one large burst. The opposite behaviour to the “squibs” which continue increasing for several seconds.
Anyway, that’s enough for me for one day. I’m off to the my local standing bar where the vast majority of customers neither know nor care about 9/11 Truth.
Another coincidence!
I was watching something for entirely different reasons, and I found Tim Groves’ squibs!
Start at 2:30
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrCJX7c8gvo&NR=1
Soba, since it’s Friday evening, and I don’t want to spoil your weekend, I’ll just restate one point for now.
I posted links to three controlled demolitions that went wrong. In two cases, despite an intial drop of one or more floors triggered by the “pulling” of the load-bearing members, the bulk of the buildings above the blast zone came to a halt and did not disintegrate further.
Since you are aware that in the case of WTC 1 and 2, the “block” above the impact/initial structural failure zone was ground down to powder, I wanted your opinion of why the same thing didn’t happen in these other cases in which the structures involved were much less robust than those of the WTC towers.
Remember, NIST argued that once collapse was initiated then total collapse was inevitable. And I believe this is your view too.
As Clive mentioned in the post, a domestic gas appliance explosion caused the entire corner of an East London tower block (Ronan Point) to collapse. Let me refer you to a video of a similar roughly 30-story East London tower block that resisted global collapse despite being well and truly initiated and the “block” decending nine floors or over 20 metres at a good fraction of free-fall speed. This piece of shoddy old-Labour sixties reinforced concrete and breezeblock Stalinist slum-clearance construction was not nearly as robust as the state-of-the-art massive-central-cored steel-framed WTC “blocks”, so why didn’t it disintegrate? Call it a Saganite test of your hypothesis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsePUn5-88c&feature=related
I’ll make it easy for you, as I’m really not a vindictive man, nor an angry one. The building was Northaird Point in Hackney.
Some details were covered in this book:
http://books.google.co.jp/books?id=4eerqvOPhnoC&pg=PA277&lpg=PA277&dq=%22Hackney%22+%22demolition%22+%22tower+block%22+%22Northaird+Point&source=bl&ots=WMjXRHvnMB&sig=MIAJZiS7mGcwuG5Z5d31gTFwUHQ&hl=en&ei=zpRiS4G7FMqOkQWikojpBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22Hackney%22%20%22demolition%22%20%22tower%20block%22%20%22Northaird%20Point&f=false
LMFAO. What a thread! I think the good guys (the brills) have clearly notched up a 2-1 half time lead over the shills. Roll on the second half lads. Lamby, I am sending you off for swearing. No insolence now. You can watch from the sidelines and moronically shout ‘U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A. whilst rhythmically girating your flab. Woooohoooooooo!’
I’d like to inroduce angrysoba to an unexpected (and I’m sure unintentional) ally of the 9/11 Truth movement: Cass Sunstein. Read his paper at tinyurl.com/3jv4wo.
It’s one of those unfortunate pieces of writing that Ernest Gowers (or was it Orwell?) deplored, that inadvertently establishes the opposite of what it intends. From a US government point of view it also reveals a little too much.
Says Sunstein:
“In a closed society, secrets are not difficult to keep, and distrust of official accounts makes a great deal of sense. In such societies, conspiracy theories are both more likely to be true and harder to show to be false in light of available information. But when the press is free, and when checks and balances are in force, government cannot easily keep its conspiracies hidden for long.”
Few would characterise the US as an open society, with a free press and ‘checks and balances’. It seems that on Sunstein’s advice we should have a presumption in favour of the conspiracy theories.
Then taking this:
“An especially useful account suggests that what makes (unjustified) conspiracy theories unjustified is that those who accept them must also accept a kind of spreading distrust of all knowledge-producing institutions, in a way that makes it difficult to believe anything at all. […] How many other things must not be believed, if we are not to believe something accepted by so many diverse actors?”
…together with this…
“For most Americans, a claim that the United States government attacked its own citizens, for some ancillary purpose, would make it impossible to hold onto a wide range of other judgments.”
…one can begin to see the source of Sunstein’s anxiety. If US complicity in the attacks of 9/11 is established as fact, surely it’s the end of the line for the neo-cons, and all dependent mythologies? Myself, I wouldn’t be so sanguine – America is a funny place.
It’s clear from reading the paper in its entirety that Sunstein is not really concerned about, or even interested in, conspiracy theories in general. It’s just that big, bad, nasty one – 9/11. He even discusses the ‘synergistic’ merit in attacking all conspiracy theories in order to cloak this interest in just one of them.
If it was the remit of angrylarry to supress discussion of 9/11 and heap abuse and ridicule on anyone who attempted it, then I think they will fare badly in their next performance review. The posts here reveal the ‘foaming, swivel-eyed, conspiraloons’ as the people with evidence and reason (not to mention the laws of physics) on their side, and the debunkers as merely repetitive and unimaginatively abusive bores.
As a result of the activity of the debunkers we’ve all discovered that we’re not crazy – that there are perfectly sane, literate and educated people who believe that 9/11 was a false-flag attack. We also get to pass around links to information that might never have turned up otherwise – the conspiracy of conspiracists turns out to be a wide one. Here for your collection are some more foaming, swivel-eyed conspiraloons:
Michael Meacher (perhaps the only man of principle left in the Labour Party): tinyurl.com/2tojtw
Professor David Proe & Ian Thomas (University of Melbourne comment on NIST report on WTC7): tinyurl.com/yg69ec7
Robert Fisk (journalist, The Independent): tinyurl.com/3lwadm
It only remains for me to thank angrylarry for his work here.
‘the whole 9/11 project is intrinsically linked . . . . .
You are entitled to believe that. others believe that the Protocols of Zion, Bilderberg, Templars, Freemasons and various other permutations are intrinsically linked to everything’.
I am disappointed at the conflation by Craig of skepticism about 9/11 with belief in the Protocols.
As a Jew – though not a Zionist – who does believe there is something fishy about the collapse of these buildings, I am quite insulted.
Are we here to discuss 911 or respond to AngryLarry?
Are we here to exchange ideas about 911 or are we here to respond to AngryLarry?
From what I have seen AngryLarry have managed to take control of the entire forume. They decide what we talk about, not us.
I think we should read each other’s posts more than we read theirs. And I think we should respond to each other more than we respond to them.
I am going to cut and past what I wrote at the top, read it, think about it and respond. And I will think about what you say about what I say.
This is what I wrote:
I have a present for the truthers here that you will not find in any truther site.
Because this is from my own knowledge and research, which unlike is being carried out in a University’s Engineering Labs and not at 5th grade. I work with composite Structures.
Composite structures fail in two phases, because two different Materials(or more) are used, each with its own maximum stress and strain levels.
What this means to you peasants is if you have something made out of one material, like a stone bridge, and you put a great big thing on it, heavier than what it can take, it will break at once. And the something goes for a bridge made of steel.
But if you take a bridge or building made from a composite of two materials, like lets say a building made from steel and concrete, and place a stress which causes a strain greater then what it can take, the brittle phase will fail first followed by the ductile phase.
What that means is the fire and impact, if it did cause it would have caused the concrete to start breaking off first, and then the steel.
To require a composite structure to fail as a single phase, a weak point will have to be created. Sort of like the fuse in an electrical circuit, If a the building had a couple of floors weakened, beams cut etc. The weakening effects of the impact and the fire could cause it to fail at that location. Materials Engineers use this, when we test materials we cut a little notch to cause failure at a set location.
I am not a truther though. I think I am undecided on the issue, because I have read both sides and I am still unconvinced. I think, like most things, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle of a poler debate.
People probably did attempt to do what happened, and the people who are paid to stop it happening found out about it and decided to facilitate it happening. I am not stating this as fact. Just as a thought. But what I wrote about how two phase structures fail is fact. It is up to you lot to debate whether it is a relevant fact or an irrelevant fact.
Posted by: Arsalan at January 28, 2010 11:02 PM
Soba: your ‘analogy’ is no such thing. Bowling balls and pieces of paper? Which – in your analogy – would be the bowling balls, and which would be the pieces of paper? Are you seriously expecting anyone to believe that the twin towers were of such feeble construction that they in any way resembled a teetering 110 story construction of bowling balls suspended on pieces of paper?
Far more accurate an analogy would be if you had a tower of 110 bowling balls with several iron rods running up the middle of them, holding them in place. And then if one whipped a couple of bowls out of (say) positions 88-90, you (personally, you) would expect to see the bowls 90-110 crash down onto bowl 88, and they’d all crush each other down to the bottom at near free-fall speed.
As should be obvious, no such thing could possibly happen.
Anyway, we’re not talking about bowling balls or pieces of paper. We’re talking about an increasingly strong structure being progressively destroyed by the pulverised remains of the tower above and _offering no resistance at all_ to that collapse. That massive plume is the powdered remains of floors as they disintegrated. That fine dust which coated lower Manhattan used to be the building. Gravity induced collapses simply would not do that.
Gravity induced collapses would not cause large steel girders to leap out horizontally for hundreds of feet, nor would it turn people into tiny little pieces, so that minute body-parts would land on rooftops far distant. Gravity acts straight downwards after all.
*
Other points – the Magic Arabs did carry out their tasks perfectly as I said: death or destruction of the target. Those in Pennsylvania achieved the former.
*
You ask “We talked about the Pentagon ones before. Here’s a question. You do believe that Pentagon staffers were killed there don’t you? Have you seen picutres of their dead bodies? No, neither have I and I don’t want to. I won’t demand that I see the bodies of the passengers either.”
With all due respect to your sensibilities, of course Pentagon staffers might have been killed by virtue of the damage done to their building. But you’re boot-strapping in assuming there were passenger bodies because you’ve assumed a passenger plane hit the Pentagon. Bodies do not vapourise, so where were they?
*
Passengers were supposedly telephoning people to say goodbye, because Magic Arabs were going to destroy the flight. Would they have remained seated, belt fastened, seat in upright position and the tray properly folded away in such circumstances? I sure as hell wouldn’t have!
*
They didn’t flight “straight into buildings” by any means – have you even looked at the routes they took? Nothing straight about that at all. A few hours in a simulator does not prepare one for such a feat, you need to stop claiming you’ve explained that point.
And I know you’re exasperated, but you haven’t explained how they became such good pilots, nor how mobile cell ‘phones all worked so well, nor why procedures were not followed that day in intercepting the planes.
It is _not_ standard procedure for pilots to give up the controls to hijackers, where did you get that one from? Why did you claim pilots were just following standard procedure?
Please – enough of the strained patience act. You haven’t gone near an explanation of my points on inertia. Bowling balls and pieces of paper indeed!
Oh sorry, I should have put in the missing words.
After “own knowledge and research, which unlike” read the words “Larry’s Fission research”
Arsalan says: “Are we here to discuss 911 or respond to AngryLarry? Are we here to exchange ideas about 911 or are we here to respond to AngryLarry?”
(May I please suggest hitting return after 60-odd characters, because a long line is burdensome to read, with the page width set way wider than our browsers.)
I’ve been responding to the Official Liners – at least, to Soba – because he’s at least attempting to explain away the impossibility of what we all saw that day. I don’t bother with “Larry” – he’s a busted flush but without ever having shown any potential.
But you’re right, it’s time to move on from repetitions from people who are just expressing their disbelief, and wriggling around to avoid the obvious. You are right about different components failing at different times, and we would not expect to see an entire couple of floors fail as a unit (with a mighty bang and flash!) neatly onto the section below, so that it cleanly and progressively falls down. That is just not going to happen.
Tim,
Thanks for that. I believe that what happened was that you posted a comment which contained too many links putting it into moderation. This is why I hadn’t noticed it before.
The videos you present show demolitions that fail but don’t seem to rule out the fact that a gravitational collapse CAN happen. All they seem to show is that they SOMETIMES DO fail.
My opinion, which is by no means expert, is that they failed because the forces bearing down on the lower part of the building were too weak to break it. However, in the case of WTC1 and WTC2 the load was much greater than that in the building you showed and, more importantly, SHIFTED from its supporting columns to the FLOOR, ie it had come loose from the perimeter walls which were supposed to hold up the structure.
As I showed with the verinage demolitions, sometimes all that is needed is gravity and a large weight to crush down the floors below. We have to agree that that IS possible otherwise they wouldn’t attempt it with such a success rate.
In fact, if your videos are supposed to prove anything they only prove that controlled demolitions with explosives don’t always work which actually detracts from your hypothesis.
Now, here is a video of a steel-framed building collapsing with “squibs” being emitted from the windows.
Do you agree that this building crushed the lower floors down to the ground and that “squibs” needn’t be actual explosives?
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ff1_1210707903
Glen.
Up until 9/11 no one had conceived of the possibility that hijackers would deliberately crash an aeroplane so it was normal for passengers and crew to obey the high jackers. Certainly pilots would not expect to turn control of the aircraft over to the hijackers but they would expect to allow them into the cockpit and ask to be flown to some specified place. Probably the hijackers killed both pilots as soon as they entered the cockpit. Box cutters are enough for slitting a carotid artery. Only on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania did passengers and remaining crew become aware of the hijackers plans and they were no longer intimidated by a few men with box cutters.
Glenn, you keep making silly remarks about “Magic Arabs”. You are yet to explain what makes the hijackers “magic” and are expecting me to defend a silly hypothesis of your own making.
Many of your points are way too nebulous for me to respond to and require me to do too much work. I’m not interested in writing out a full summary of what I understand to happen on that day as you will only ask me to explain more and more about highly technical things that neither of us know about.
You think you can JAQ off about such technical matters and the fact that someone can’t answer them means it was an inside job, but you were convinced about an inside job because of things that have since been debunked.
Could I also ask what would count as evidence that will falsify your hypothesis that it was an inside job? If you can’t provide me with what will convince you that you are wrong then you can’t claim to be approaching this rationally or scientifically.
Glenn, you have no idea how you would react in a frightening situation like the passengers aboard those flights.
Stop pretending you would be some all-conquering hero because despite what you believe to have been the case there have been many hijackings prior to the 9/11 hijackings and many of those passengers probably would have believed themselves as brave as you say you are.
Carlyle Moulton writes: “Up until 9/11 no one had conceived of the possibility that hijackers would deliberately crash an aeroplane”
Indeed? From thinkprogress.org :
CLAIM: ?I don?t think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.?
– National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 5/16/02
FACT: On August 6, 2001, the President personally ?received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane.?
In July 2001, the Administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles.
– [Source: NBC, 9/10/02; LA Times, 9/27/01]
This is largely why Bush slept on an aircraft carrier at the G-8 meeting a couple of month earlier. There was also talk about terrorists crashing planes into the conference.
In any case, the crew would not give up the controls to hijackers – that is not standard procedure.
Glen.
You are allowing the emotional reaction to seeing the towers come down in what looks like a perfectly arranged controlled demolition to override your rational thought processes. The logic you are following is that since it looked like a controlled demolition therefore it must be a controlled demolition.
If I follow that logic for a moment and postulate that there must have been demolition charges placed in the building and coincidentally placed at different floor levels in the two towers and coincidentally at that level in each tower into which on the same day they were to be detonated some people flew 200 tonne jet airliners. The charges went off some time after the serendipitously arriving planes.
Do you realize how absurd the coincidence would be? The people who placed the charges in each tower knew at what floor the hijacked airliners flown by amateur pilots would arrive and when they would arive so that they could time their explosives to go off less than two hours afterwards. Also the fire started by the aeroplanes did not prematurely incinerate the explosives. High explosives will only detonate if set off by a detonator and sometimes a train of intermediate explosives, but if ignited they will burn without exploding. (Vietnam era soldiers used to use blocks of C4 for their cooking fires). Explosives placed at the level in the towers of the plane impacts would have burned to nothing before their supposed detonation time.
One of the principles of science is too choose the simpler of competing explanatory hypotheses, this is known as “Occam’s razor”. The simpler explanation is that the aircraft impact and fire damaged the WTC and the damage and weakening of the structures was sufficiently uniform that the building collapsed in a way reminiscent of a controlled demolition.
Incidentally the fuel capacity of a Boeing 767-200 is some 90,000 litres. The WTC planes may not have had full tanks but they would have had some tens of thousands of litres of fuel, enough to start a very big fire very quickly. The WTC air crash fires were very big and very intense, much more so than the kind of fire expected in a building which starts at one location and only has the combustibles normally in the building as fuel.
The WTC towers may have been designed to resist the impact of a 707 but the maximum takeoff weight of a 707 is only about 100,000 Kg as against 200,000 Kg for a 767. Incidentally all these aircraft statistics can be found in 30 seconds using Google.
The fact that the twin towers began collapsing at the impact points seems to mean nothing to Truthers.
Hey, Glenn, would you explain to me how the buildings were rigged to fall apart from those very impact points and how the planes’ impacts were unable to detonate whatever explosives or thermite charges were pre-planted in the buildings when they struck?