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).
“entertaining strip dancers at boozy establishments,”
Evidence?
“entertaining strip dancers at boozy establishments,”
No. Really. Do you have evidence for this?
So, Glenn, is this claim similar in quality to that of the pristine passport?
http://www.911myths.com/html/strip_clubs.html
Can you possibly get anything right?
A three-star “Larry alert” ! That means you’re in _deep_ trouble with this subject.
Just to rub it in, I’ll make it personal:
*
I note – very clearly – that you and nobody else. I repeat that, _nobody else_ , has gone anywhere near challenging my most important point about this.
I’ll concede this whole debate to you, just deal with my post of Jan 28 2010, 11:05, concerning momentum. Do you have much of an understanding about physics, Larry?
*
Thanks for the reply Glenn. I appreciate the compliments. I have never thought it unreasonable to question and I don’t think it good to have unquestioning faith. But that’s not my position.
*************
Anyway,
The Wikipedia page I sent you shows that a plane (Flight 1771) plunged into the ground with 44 passengers after a man shot the pilots. Almost nothing was left of the plane and the first investigators arriving almost found it impossible to believe a plane had crashed there as there was almost no sign of it, only paper debris scattered over a wide area. This is similar to the crash at Shanksville of United 93 in so many respects.
Not only that but 27 of the passengers could never be formally identified just as many of the victims on 9/11 could never be identified. These things happen.
Moreover, investigators were able to piece together what happened on Flight 1771 after finding a sick-bag with a note scrawled on it from the man who was responsible for taking down the plane. It sounds almost incredible that a paper bag could survive with a legible message on it while 27 people were completely incinerated along with most of the fuselage of the plane but it happened. So, I have no problem believing that a passport could have survived one of the impacts into the WTC especially given the fact that various parts of the planes did come out the other side of the buildings. You’ve seen film footage of the engine and the wheel parts and photographic evidence of the bits of fuselage that were blown out from the explosions. As Larry said, some of the hijackers were in the cockpit. Anything in there was fair game to be ejected out of the towers, including body parts and passports. The example of Flight 1771 shows there really is no telling what will and won’t survive a crash.
If you’re willing to make it a dead issue though, let’s move on…
***********
“Gubmint” is what the Alex Joneses of the world think are the root of all evil.
I don’t think they’re the root of all good, but we can both agree Alex Jones’ worldview is a bit cracked. Morally simplistic too.
***********
As for the answers to the questions I asked, you say it isn?t SOP to hand over the cockpit controls to hijackers. This may or may not be true but is irrelevant as the pilots were overpowered. The ATC audio has been released for flight United 93 under an FOIA request in which two bursts of sounds (screams and shouts) are clearly audible over the public channel. This agrees with the reports in the 9/11 Commission in which you can find on page. 11 ?During the first broadcast, the captain or first officer could be heard declaring ?Mayday? amid sounds of a physical struggle in the cockpit. The second radio transmission, 35 seconds later, indicated that the fight was continuing. The captain or first officer could be heard shouting: ?Hey get out of here ?” get out of here.?
I?ve listened to the broadcast and although I couldn?t make out what was being said in the struggle and although you can claim that I am believing in the ?official story? out of blind faith and that the radio transmissions and the testimonies of the ATC personnel are all fabricated WHAT YOU CANNOT SAY, is the ?official story? posits the casual handing over of the controls to the hijackers. This is an utter straw man in which you attempt to ridicule what you call the official story.
Right, also don?t ?paraphrase? my questions in such a way as to render them ridiculous. I did not ask you, ?Do I believe in Magic Arabs?? in order to set you up with an hilarious comeback, ?No. But it appears you do.? I asked you if you believed there were any Arabs on the flights at all (magic or otherwise ?” let?s stick to non-magic shall we?)
Also you ask, of the hijackers, ?But if you are taking that sort ?of thing so seriously, with body hair being shaven for such an event, perhaps you could ?explain how the alleged hijackers would maintain such a high profile, in a most un-Muslim ?like way, entertaining strip dancers at boozy establishments, just before their most important ?mission off their lives that would actually end it? All in the name of Allah (pbuh!)??
I think this is a mishmash of truth and rumour. The fact is that the 19 hijackers were followers of political Islam. Not all of them were extremely pious though some of them undoubtedly were. To say that they couldn?t possibly have gone to strip clubs or got drunk etc? is just silly. Plenty of Muslims do exactly those kinds of things even the ones who like to consider themselves extremely devout. Can you really find it difficult to believe they would be hypocritical?
Honestly, I think all of these are dead issues and if you don?t think of these things as deal-breakers then let?s move on to what you consider the main issue, which is your post from before that I will repost, now:
***********
Glenn writes:
***********
Perhaps the key point to the entire implausibility of the ‘pancake collapse’ theory is considering a very old law – conservation of momentum.
Conservation of momentum comes from Newton’s first law. A body will remain at rest or travel in uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by another force.
Consider the initial collapse of the top sections, which in each case would have the lightest top portion of the building, being the thinnest part of the core. We are expected to believe that as it suddenly (with a flash) lost all its structure and fell onto the floor below, the combined weight of the section above the disintegrated floor lands on the floor below. That causes the floor below to collapse under the strain, and the entire new mass falls onto the next floor. This progression continues neatly all the way down.
That’s fine, apart from one very important detail – how does each new floor suddenly assume the accumulated velocity of the falling floors above? We’re talking about a progressively heavy core structure (it having been built to bear the weight of the entire structure above, at each stage). So why did it not _substantially_ arrest the downward motion?
As Frank Verismo points out, a great deal of the mass was pulverised in any case, so the full weight of the above sections were dispersed each time a new floor was reached by the downward progression.
How did the really heavy mid to lower sections suddenly start moving at the same pace as the falling upper sections, unless they were offering _virtually no resistance at all_ – unless they were already falling themselves immediately before the progression hit them.
The towers did not come down quite at free-fall speed, but it was not far off it. It was way too close to free-fall acceleration to believe even for a moment than a substantial structure of increasing strength was being crushed by the powdered remains of the floors above.
*
If the motion was entirely downwards, with no other force than downward gravity operating after collapse was initiated, why do we see massive steel girders ejected out laterally for hundreds of feet? Why did tiny body parts (sections of finger, etc.) appear on rooftops hundreds of yards away?
In standard building collapses, one would find at least a few things intact. A chair, a monitor, something. How come the biggest items found were fragments of telephone keypads?
Look at the column on the last picture on this page: How did it acquire that precise cut, consistent with a controlled demolition?
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/thermite.htm
*
But back to conservation of momentum. Inertia dictates that a mass will not suddenly assume the velocity of the moving object falling onto it, even if it is so tenuously structured that a feather falling onto it would initiate its collapse. In this case, we are talking about an increasing substantial structure the further down the building we go. Yet it offered little more resistance than fresh air on the day of 9/11.
Posted by: glenn at January 28, 2010 11:05 PM
I?m not going to pretend to know anything about structural engineering, I?ll leave that to the likes of David Ray Griffin, but whenever I have asked about these things I?ve been told that Griffin and Jones may well be correct about their physics but they?ve misapplied it because the model in their heads or wherever else they may be about the collapse of the towers are simply wrong.
We?re not talking about a solid block crushing itself as if it were a massive stone grinding itself into oblivion we?re talking about the support columns on the outside of the building being unable to hold up the fifteen or so stories above the impact points with that part of the building crashing down on to the next story. How much weight can one story hold? Not fifteen stories of weight and certainly not when that weight is accelerating into it. So, the floor gives way. It really seems to be as simple as that, and yet the Truthers try to insist that the collapse happened differently.
?If the motion was entirely downwards, with no other force than downward gravity operating after collapse was initiated, why do we see massive steel girders ejected out laterally for hundreds of feet??
We didn?t. But put it this way.
If you don?t believe it was a gravity-driven collapse you have to come up with some other mechanism for it falling.
Okay, how about explosive demolition? This is impossible as there were no sounds of explosives and with all the glass in the windows we would have seen it being hurled for miles IF it is believed that STEEL GIRDERS were being hurled for hundreds of feet by explosives. Also, there were no cases of people having their eardrums burst or suffering blast wounds.
?Look at the column on the last picture on this page: How did it acquire that precise cut, consistent with a controlled demolition??
The column you have photographed is one that has been cut by clean-up crews. If you look behind the column you?ll see a man with something that can be used to cut through steel. You?ll also find plenty of other pictures of clean-up crews cutting through beams. Some of the remains of the Towers stood up many, many stories into the sky, yet they didn?t get blasted by the explosives or cut with thermite (the latter of which is not used in controlled demolitions anyway as I tire of telling people).
That whole page from What Really Happened (sic) is a sick joke. It looks like the owner of the site has absolutely no concern for anything that has already been comprehensively debunked including the photograph of the firefighters apparently looking into the hot core of the demolition remains. Actually, it is a flashlight causing the glow and someone either with or without Jones? supervision doctored the picture to make it look orangey. In short, Griffin and Jones have no credibility and are telling out and out lies and will continue to do so safe in the knowledge that many people will believe them and believe that believing their utter crap is a badge of radicalism.
OK, I just looked at glenn’s link at whatreallyhappened.com and it’s immensely hilarious.
That photograph, Glenn. Really.
That’s what you based your conspiracy on.
Really.
Glenn, have you ever heard of acetylene torches?
soba:
“Okay, how about explosive demolition? This is impossible as there were no sounds of explosives and with all the glass in the windows we would have seen it being hurled for miles IF it is believed that STEEL GIRDERS were being hurled for hundreds of feet by explosives. Also, there were no cases of people having their eardrums burst or suffering blast wounds.”
—
No sounds of explosives ? No bust ear drums ?? ‘Blast wounds’
absolutely ridiculous stuff!
Hundreds of posts ago you described how heavy debris from the tower damaged building 7 from 350 feet away!
You dont deal with evidence soba, you pick and choose what you like to recall.
Woaw, though you can just go on and on and on… jabbering
Here’s a picture to look at:
http://www.debunking911.com/columnd.jpg
Did you know the Twin Towers were VERY TALL?
On the next post I will show you a picture.
Please look at the picture.
http://www.debunking911.com/wtc1heli.jpg
Now, do you think debris could reach WTC7 from the towers if large sections of the perimeter peeled outwards?
What do you dispute?
That any debris hit WTC7?
Or that debris could only have hit WTC7 with the aid of explosives?
‘peeled outwards’ -now that’s a new one! Never mentioned in any engineering hypothesis oddly enough. Huge chunks of structure large enough to pulverise wtc 2 and wreck wtc7 350 feet away (having to travel at minimum 10 meters per second sideways and practicaly much faster than that) – just “peeled outwards”
keep on jabbering angry
Hello Soba,
Thanks for waiting – been rather busy here lately, so may I just get straight down to the best part of your rebuttal to my post on momentum.
—start AS quote
We’re not talking about a solid block crushing itself as if it were a massive stone grinding itself into oblivion we’re talking about the support columns on the outside of the building being unable to hold up the fifteen or so stories above the impact points with that part of the building crashing down on to the next story. How much weight can one story hold? Not fifteen stories of weight and certainly not when that weight is accelerating into it. So, the floor gives way. It really seems to be as simple as that, and yet the Truthers try to insist that the collapse happened differently.
—end AS quote
I’m afraid I’m going to have to refer you to my post on momentum again, because you just haven’t understood it at all. This “Well, a floor collapses onto another, and it can’t stand the strain. Sounds simple to me!” dismissal is simplistic in the extreme. Never mind about structural engineering, never mind about architecture. Just look at the basic laws concerning conservation of momentum, and you’d realise that this could not happen at the rate and in the manner we are supposed to believe – no how, no way.
I’m going to end up repeating my original post, which would be pointless – I couldn’t have put much more succinctly. Waving all that away with your paragraph above is like waving away serious subjects with a meaningless slogan.
*
Please don’t tell me we didn’t see huge girders weighing many tons ejected out laterally – anyone who watched video of the collapse saw it happen. I suppose you’re going to ask me whether I’m stupid enough to believe my lying eyes instead of your word? And when did tiny body parts ever get scattered over a wide area in a building collapse?
—start AS quote
If you don’t believe it was a gravity-driven collapse you have to come up with some other mechanism for it falling.
—end AS quote
No, actually I don’t – really. I could hypothesise alternative explanations, but I don’t _have_ to in order to observe your officially approved theory is not credible. I’m surprised you have such difficulty understanding this. But you go on to say:
—start AS quote
Okay, how about explosive demolition? This is impossible as there were no sounds of explosives and with all the glass in the windows we would have seen it being hurled for miles IF it is believed that STEEL GIRDERS were being hurled for hundreds of feet by explosives. Also, there were no cases of people having their eardrums burst or suffering blast wounds.
—end AS quote
This is ridiculous. Not only did we get to hear explosions on recordings, plenty of eye witnesses testified to it (such as the firemen). Do steel girders really get blown _miles_ during an explosion? Really? Hmm. Maybe you’re talking about the glass. Does glass thrown outwards at a given rate travel further than steel at the same given rate? What hits the ground sooner faster, Soba, a bullet fired from a powerful gun, or a bullet dropped from a hand at the same height at the same time?
There were reports of people suffering blast wounds, but is that a serious rebuttal, when you complain about a lack of burst eardrums? I daresay anyone in there at the time would have suffered worse than that, but what are you talking about – people outside the buildings?
Are you suggesting that in every controlled demolition, steel girders are ejected “miles” and eardrums are broken over a wide area? If not, what on earth are you talking about?
And uh huh… there was no hot core at the demolition site, just a flashlight catching a reflection on the camera, eh? Everyone lying about that, including satellites long after the event? Amazing.
*
Please try to understand what I was writing about momentum, and what that means in regard to an event like this. Do you actually understand anything about physics? No offence, your skills might well be in another direction altogether, but do I need to give a lesson on basic principles of physics and maths before rather obvious points stop being just waved away?
All the best, and I appreciate the new atmosphere of our discussions.
Quick clarification… the question about the lateral ejections should have asked:
“What hits the ground sooner faster, Soba, a bullet fired horizontally from a powerful gun, or a bullet simultaneously dropped from a hand at the same height?”
And I get (on second reading) that you were talking about glass traveling “miles” if it was a controlled explosion, rather than the steel. So I should have clarified:
“Are you suggesting that in every controlled demolition, steel girders or glass are ejected “miles” and eardrums are broken over a wide area? ”
“What hits the ground sooner faster, Soba, a bullet fired horizontally from a powerful gun, or a bullet simultaneously dropped from a hand at the same height?”
What’s the point of this question? They will hit the ground at the same time, as both are falling under the influence of gravity. The fact that the bullet also has a horizontal component to its motion is irrelevant (unless your gun can fire a bullet at the earth’s orbital velocity).
Earlier I posted links to Cornell University papers on the tower collapses. For WTC7 the writers conclude “that the building was destroyed in a highly controlled fashion.” On the twin towers they conclude “the buildings did not perish because of combined mechanical and heat damage to their primary zones, but because of yet another catastrophic event: a wave of massive destruction (WMD) that destroyed the CCs [core columns], following which the buildings collapsed to the ground.”
It is these authoritative analyses by experts in relevant fields that the debunkers must address, and in appropriate detail with appropriate skills. The very simple piece of calculus produced by David Chandler and also linked above, although not a structural analysis, gives prima facie mathematical support to the intuititive impression that the observed collapses were impossible.
There are many other loose ends in the official account, most notably the alleged cell phone calls from the hijacked aircraft, but the temptation to pull on these should be resisted. The case for controlled demolition of the three buildings is unanswerable, and calls for a fresh enquiry should focus on that alone.
Vronsky: Precisely, about the bullet. The point was about gravity, acceleration, and seeing whether Soba had any insight on the subject (no disrespect to him personally – as mentioned, he clearly has other skills).
The trouble with these “Well, a floor falls onto another, and that collapses – simple!” views are that they can only be held by people without the faintest understanding of even basic physics. I hoped that getting their minds around the bullet question would get them thinking. Free-fall acceleration under gravity only happens when nothing impedes the, well, free fall. Other forces at 90 degrees are irrelevant.
But if you fired the same bullet underwater, you’d expect it to take a lot longer to hit the ground. That’s because there is more resistance to its downward movement, even though gravity, mass, distance and initial velocity etc. is exactly the same.
But we hardly saw _any_ resistance to the buildings’ collapse – and that raises two huge, atom-bomb sized questions:
1) Why didn’t the ripping apart of massive interconnected steel frame structures in the progressive collapse offer any arrest of the downward acceleration, and
2) Why didn’t the inertia of the mass of floors that were apparently stable (until the arrival of the downward progression) decrease the momentum at each point, and – as an integral function – lower the acceleration and greatly increase the time for collapse way, way beyond near free-fall?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GNhEpHfgfI
Thermite!
Gravity!
Downward progression!
Barack Obama and the Jooooss have taken over the demolition industry in France!
With that pathetic nonsense from Larry immediately above, as the best that can be offered to refute my argument about momentum, I conclude that this is probably settled.
I was not offering any wild or esoteric position. All that was asked, was some counter to a very basic observation completely in line with understood physics. I’d proposed a very easily grasped principle, with which no high school student of physics should have any problem.
The offer is made again – if anyone can find any problem with my post of January 28, 2010 11:05 PM, let me know, if you’d be so kind? This is central to the Offical Postion, after all. Upon which policy for the GWOT is based, nothing terribly important.
The deafening silence from any serious supporters of the Offical Story, and the desperate distractions already provided, tell us all we need to know.
Marvellous closing sentence from David Chandler in debate with Frank Greening (an advocate of the official conspiracy theory):
“Your argument is not with me; it is with Isaac Newton.”
Hi Craig,
There are two facts that rather knock at the Inside Job door – no matter how difficult it is to believe.
First is the Laws of Physics. WTC 1, 2 and especially 7 – could not have collapsed naturally without breaking Newton’s Law of the Conservation of Momentum. You cannot get a building to collapse in freefall (ie no resistance whatsoever) without the aid of explosives.
Second is mathematics. The probability of the Put Options on the airlines and businesses in WTC being “chance” is millions to one against. The 9/11 Conclusion stated that because the trades were done by people or firms with no ties to AQ then the trades must be ok. This clearly defies logic and the maths.
Do we find evidence of exlosives: yes. Do we find other evidence of pre-knowledge: yes. Ipso facto, it must have been a false flag attack and some form of Inside Job.
Do you believe in science or politicians?
Wadham College, Oxford: The ‘Wadstock’ Festival. Anyone heard of Jack’s Maggot ceilidh band?
Sorry – light relief.
Are there any structural engineers posting on this thread? If so, what d’you think?
Mark (Golding), if you know something about something to do with this matter, please reveal it now or forever hold your peace (!)
In other words, give us the rundown, man.
Suhayl,
I will not play into the hands of the Neo-Conservatives and provide an
easy target for ‘dollar in the knickers’ OCD candidates such as
Larry (not from St Louis) who obfuscate (for good reason) the underlying
issue of what actually happened before and after 9/11.
Yes I have some evidence of foreknowledge that at
least provides a case for criminal negligence on the part of the previous President and Vice President,
who were repeatedly warned OF AN ATTACK, followed by a cover-up conspiracy
after the 9/11 attacks detailed to me in brief by Robin Cook (PBUH).
It will take some time and some scary fact finding to indict Cheney, Bush and possibly Clinton.
But this is a stated aim, one I have publicly announced and the
reason Lawrence followed me here to disrupt the drip feed of evidence
before the final case can be presented in full.
In the summer 2000 the work done by the Able Danger data mining team
in the Department of Defense that created a profile of Mohamed Atta
and three other 9/11 terrorists was conveyed to the Committee staff
in several forms and ways but unsurprisingly did not show
up in the report.
The FBI report on Zacarias Moussaoui
was known by British intelligence according to an insider.
The mid-1990s Bojinka plot that planned to crash hijacked aircraft into
key buildings, including CIA headquarters was known to
Robin Cook and some details told to me have become the foundation of my work to build a case for prosecution
of those mentioned before an International law court judge.
To move from negligence to fore-knowledge will involve a colossal
amount of work.
A great deal of so called evidence in the public domain is there to
obfucate the truth of cover-up including criminal acts such as the
NORAD positioning of USAF jets and timely exercises.
It is my duty to the children of Iraq who are maimed, disfigured,
traumatized, orphaned and suffering, to bring these tragic moments in our
time-line to a successful public condemnation and prosecution.
I will do this no matter how
long it takes and hope you and
others will give me the support I need.
Thank you, Mark. That was an incredibly powerful and important piece of information. I appreciate you replying to my question so comprehensively and honestly. And all good fortune in your endeavour.
“That was an incredibly powerful and important piece of information.”
No, that wasn’t Suhayl. Damn you’re stupid. You have an incredible lack of ability to sift through meaningful evidence.
Do you practise law in St Louis, Larry?
Is it a pleasant city? What fields do you specialise in?
Are there good bars? What do you like most about the city, and what, least? Are there any good bands or writers who hail from St Louis? What’s your favourite restaurant? Tell me something, please, about your home city, Larry.
What’s the grooviest bookstore? And what kinds of people live in St Louis? I mean, are there specific groups, and if so, where do they live? Are there particular areas with high concentrations of, say, Irish Americans, for example? Or Russian Americans? Give us some feel of the place, man.