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).
Hmmm. I can use a monospace font but multiple spaces get stripped down to just one. So if you’re interested in my thinking above I could probably bodge up some sort of diagram…
Hi Clark – I can see what you’re saying, but just don’t agree. Even granted that it might collapse (just saying, for the sake of discussion), it’s exceedingly hard to see why it should happen so fast, symmetrically, at approaching free-fall speed. Particularly when nothing of the kind has even been observed before, and most particularly not in a steel-framed building.
(I’m not saying it was -at- free-fall speed. Never did, btw. Anything remotely approaching it, however, puts the scenario as improbable to the 10th degree.)
Your scepticism is partly based on the lack of people “coming forward”, so to speak, about the crime. Never mind that you and I would never have heard about such people long before they were made quiet, in ways only a state knows how. Never mind that many of the operatives might have been unfortunate in their choice of occupation, which severely curtailed their life-spam, or they kept good and quiet if they knew what was good for them.
Do you believe the JFK assassination was straight-up, just as the Official Story had it, even though a follow-up to the Warren commission stated outright that a conspiracy had to be part of any genuine conclusion? Do you buy into the “magic bullet” theory, any more than you buy into the “Magic Arab” theory?
If you don’t believe all that, why should the lack of a properly documented, entirely credible (and alive) whistle-blower make you belief as a default position the Official Story?
Glenn, we had a gas explosion in the UK in my childhood. A whole side of a block of flats collapsed in a matter of seconds. Doesn’t happen often…
I think the towers probably collapsed regularly because they were constructed regularly. That’s why I mentioned the domino effect, like when they set up those long rows of dominoes to knock each other over sequentially – the angle of impact on the first domino only really determines whether it hits the second domino, and if that goes they’ll all go, completely regularly.
Glenn, think about those floors, over 2700 square metres to collect many floors worth of rapidly descending debris, unsupported from beneath, over eighteen metres in span, consisting of just four inches of concrete on a truss.
If I take an 18m washing line, pull it taut horizontally, and hang a weight in the middle, it’s going to pull in on the ends, right? And a fair sag only pulls the ends in a tiny bit so there’s a big multiplication of force, yes? Either of us could do the geometry.
Well one end of that 18m floor span is attached to the building’s core which is pretty sturdy but at the other end is the outer uprights, a relatively slender structure whose only horizontal bracing comes from…. the floors.
Put aside the thought that it can’t possibly collapse for a moment and consider how it would if it could, what would be first to give. How would it be most likely to go if enough rubble fell onto one of those broad, thin floors with those long, long spans – nine metres to the nearest support? It’ll sag and pull in, yeah? But what it’s pulling in on is all that’s holding its outer edge up. So that falls inwards and the next floor down gets exactly the same treatment, only worse… And so on.
So now think of it dynamically. Instead of just the weight of the top sections of buildings, factor in the extra force due to impact, the momentum of all that falling rubble. Yeah it can happen fast. My momentum guestimate above showed that each floor slows the falling debris less than the one before, so it seems likely that the collapse will accelerate. And the falling top sections established considerable initial velocity before impacting the first in-tact floor.
Now watch the videos again and tell me the collapses don’t look consistent with that.
No, I don’t believe the magic bullet theory. Yes, I believe that hijackers certainly could have and probably did fly the aircraft into the buildings.
I can’t believe the official story because there’s nothing to believe, because the official story officially goes:
Glenn, furthermore, I asked myself this: if the towers really were strong enough to halt the fall of the top sections, how could I use explosives to produce collapses looking like those videoed? And I can’t think of a way…
Blowing the floor-to-upright connections just as the collapse wave arrives might speed the collapses a bit by preventing some transference of momentum via the uprights into the planet, but only near the uprights. Everywhere else, sharing of momentum seems likely to be the dominant factor affecting the collapse rate, and that remains the same with or without explosives.
To seriously speed things up the floor-to-upright connections would have to be blown well ahead of the collapse front. The more in advance the faster the collapse would go. But if so, on the videos we’d see floors starting to fall before the collapse-front reached them, and that’s not what we see at all.
So I thought again. If the towers really were strong enough to halt the fall of the top sections, how could we engineer the collapses to look like what we see on the videos? And I decided that the best method was to increase the weight at the top of the buildings, ie. hit the lower sections with a bigger hammer.
And that’s when I thought, “might there have been more weight up there than we supposed?”
And Glenn, no, my scepticism is hopefully a standard feature of my thinking. It was my scepticism for official narratives that led me to spend time applying that same scepticism to the alternatives.
No, my problem with demolition theories is their lack of utility. You’ve said it yourself in another form – if the explosives technicians have all been killed, how could we pursue the perpetrators up the chain of command?
I hope you’ll at least acknowledge that I’ve given this some real thought. I haven’t simply accepted and repeated anyone’s pre-baked theory, official or otherwise.
Glenn, would the perpetrators have had back-up plans in case some or all of the detonation systems should fail to trigger? What forms could these have taken?
What contingency plans could have covered one or both of the towers failing to be hit by an aircraft?
Damn, Clark… give a man a chance to draw breath before replying!
“I hope you’ll at least acknowledge that I’ve given this some real thought. I haven’t simply accepted and repeated anyone’s pre-baked theory, official or otherwise.”
I’d never think otherwise. Didn’t cross my mind for a moment, and if you took a word I had to say about this on faith, you just wouldn’t be _you_. That’s the sort of admirable consistency that makes it worth the conversation.
“Glenn, we had a gas explosion in the UK in my childhood. A whole side of a block of flats collapsed in a matter of seconds. Doesn’t happen often…”
Was it a steel structured building? Note that only the side of it collapsed. Not a straight footprint perfect collapse, the way demolition crews do it, I take it? I don’t know of any steel-framed building that has collapsed totally, nor so perfectly, in history – despite all sorts of wars, fires, various violations of building codes, terrorism and so on… can you? Yet it happened three times that day. Never before or since, but there we have a three for three.
Bit odd, don’t you think? Particularly since Building-7 (WTC-7) wasn’t even hit by a plane, and it was entirely different damage?
Your questions about contingency plans and so on – who knows? We can speculate that if the planes had missed, why, the buildings had been rigged to blow anyway by some lorry-bomb driven by
Saudi/Iraqi/Muslim/Afghan or whatever, or the devious fiends might actually have been wiring the building for months.Nobody asked about WTC-7, after all. Any narrative will do, as long as it becomes Official, remember.
Most of the questions you’ve put here can be answered by yourself – you have the imagination and intelligence. Just consider how ludicrous these would be, and then consider the actual things we know that administration has done. How it has benefited, the plans that were already in place, the very strange coincidences – a failure to follow aircraft intercept procedure, the curious drills for exactly the same scenario on that day, the shredding of the NORAD tapes, on and on. To dismiss it all would be naive. As would to accept any given narrative.
Consider WTC-7, at the least. Maybe a plane should have hit the building but didn’t. But it fell down anyway.
Clark : Regarding physical evidence, I require conclusive proof that the collapses couldn’t have happened from damage and fire.
In the case of building 7, I regard this as conclusive proof.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCDpL4Ax7I
You might find this interesting particularly the section about how steel loses its strength when hot.
http://www.fireengineering.com/articles/print/volume-159/issue-6/features/the-dangers-of-lightweight-steel-construction.html
Lightweight steel construction about sums up the WTC and if steel structures are unaffected by fire why does every building code throughout the world require fireproofing?
Worth reading up on the Crystal Palace too, it was iron rather than steel but the same principles apply.
Warning, mixed thoughts ahead…
Regarding the gas explosion I mentioned; they were “high rise flats”, so steel framed I believe, but the parts that collapsed either lacked steel, or the steel members were not supported by more steel at the outside. Building regulations were changed as a result. It would be worth looking up whether any US building regulations have been changed since 9/11; that could supply clues as to what NIST may have been covering up. But mostly I mentioned this as an example of fast progressive collapse – it does happen, just not very often. Thankfully.
It doesn’t surprise me too much that the Twin Towers collapsed so similarly because the buildings were almost identical.
Sorry, especially to Node. Interrupted. Kempe, good to see you here. I’ll be back.
Iron is a lot different to steel, Kempe – it’s nothing like as flexible even though it has the same melting point (around 1500 centigrade). It’s been argued that steel gets all soft and noodle-y long before that, but 800 degrees is the maximum you’d get from jet fuel under the most ideal conditions. Those at the Twin Towers were far from ideal, as can be seen by all the soot from the dirty flames.
Clark: The buildings might have been more or less the same, and the collapses certainly very similar indeed, even though the damage very clearly was not. WTC-7 collapsed in a very similar way too, as rather spookily forecast by the BBC reporter.
Steel is an alloy of iron and, mainly, carbon. The similarity is that both melt at temperatures way higher than they experienced in the fires yet still failed. This gentleman demonstrates why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA
Glenn_uk, please make two notes to yourself.
1) You haven’t complained of goal-posts being moved, from the Twin Towers to Building 7, yet you have complained of that in similar arguments, for instance, vaccination.
2) You’ve just introduced a red herring. The collapse of Building 7 was nothing like the collapses of WTC1 and WTC2. The towers collapsed from the buckle point down. Building 7 seemed to fall all together; with ground level hidden by foreground buildings, it looked as if a sink hole suddenly opened under it.
I’ll return to Building 7 later.
When comparing the behaviour of the Twin Towers to other steel-framed buildings that have caught fire but haven’t collapsed, we should remember that at the time of construction, WTC1 and WTC2 were the tallest buildings ever built, and as such, they were at the limit of what could be achieved at that time. They also had an open-plan design, with very wide floors unsupported except at less than two edges (on average, if you see what I mean). Those two buildings were of ambitious design.
To make fair comparisons, you have to compare like with like. I’m not saying that this hasn’t been done. I am saying that if it has, then that hasn’t been made clear by those who use such comparisons to support demolition.
Guesswork – I expect the properties of iron and steel converge with rising temperature.
Sorry, gotta go again…
Kempe, have you any thoughts on Building 7 before I move on to that?
Glenn, here’s another red herring from you:
The collapse of Building 7 seems remarkably neat, but the Twin Towers were not in the slightest; they left a hell of a mess:
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/photos/docs/ground_zero_arial2_ort.jpg
Glenn_uk, 19 Jan 2:41 am:
I agree entirely. However, none of those matters has any bearing whatsoever on what is probably the single most debated matter of 9/11, namely, “were the Twin Towers brought down by explosives”? Consideration of that SINGLE question has wasted SO much time, distracted SO many people from looking into the matters you mention here, caused SO many people to dismiss the whole campaign for a new investigation as nonsense…
I see no indication at all that explosives were either needed or used to bring down the Twin Towers; indeed, I’ve tried to imagine how explosives could have been used to create the collapses as seen and can’t think of any reasonable way. I regard this matter as a waste of time at best, and possibly a deliberate distraction, seeded into the public consciousness to muddy the water.
Node, 19 Jan, 2016 – 2:42 am; thanks for the link to David Chandler’s analysis of the collapse of building 7. It certainly looks like a good piece of work establishing that most of the collapse seen from that viewpoint is indistinguishable from free-fall.
I haven’t checked his work so I’m just assuming that it’s sound. I do have one immediate concern; I believe that there is another view which shows part of the “mechanical penthouse” sort of falling in through the top of the building some appreciable time before the rest of the collapse begins; this would imply that Chandler’s t=0 moment is actually rather late. But this does not change the fact that we see some free-fall.
What do you take the analysis to be conclusive proof of?
Glenn, some further points about the twin towers:
You say that body parts were found on the roofs of adjacent buildings. Has the feasibility of this happening without explosives been properly considered? Do we know whose body parts, and where those people were – specifically, how high up? Could an aircraft impact have propelled those body-parts? The assertion seems very suggestive of explosives, but the Twin Towers were considerably higher than most of the surrounding buildings; the necessary parabola really might not be particularly extreme.
We tend to think of the collapses as being rather neat, but I think this is an illusion caused by watching videos. The Twin Towers were massive; those falling debris clouds must have been the size of a football pitch. Even if we watch the videos on a big widescreen TV, we’re watching through a massive reduction in scale. We see debris looking like matchsticks, but these were girder sections longer than buses. We see what look like clouds of falling dust, but these were more like boulder-slides. TV and similar small-screen media easily produce misleading impressions. The people who make sets for TV shows know this and make use of it; what looks slick and spic and span on telly looks very rough and poorly finished in the flesh, and indeed such sets are thrown together very quickly, slap-dash. Locations for proper cinema movie quality require far more care.
Another reason for relative neatness of the collapses (compared to what could have happened) is the progressive collapse mechanism I described here:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post/comment-page-20/#comment-573445
The floors were effectively acting like nets strung between the core and the perimeter uprights. They’d have fallen most, soonest, furthest from the support of both the core and the perimeter, making a rectangular donut-shaped funnel if you see what I mean. They would also have been pulling inwards on the perimeter uprights, tending to make them fall inwards (though a fair amount also fell outwards) and gather them into the “funnel” beneath. Do you see what I’m getting at here?
Clark.
David Chandler’s calculations in the video I posted …..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCDpL4Ax7I
….. were presented to NIST at a Q&A session after NIST released a draft of their “Final Report on the Collapse of WTC Building 7”. NIST were evasive and non-scientific in defence of their conclusions, and under pressure, agreed to “clarify” the time-line they had based their calculations on. The final report was published with a graph accepting Chandler’s calculation that there was 2.5 seconds of free fall. The rest of the report, including the explanation of a progressive ‘pancake collapse’ is unchanged, even though such a collapse is impossible at free fall acceleration. So the NIST report is illogical, but importantly, it accepts that Building 7 DID free fall for 2.5 seconds.
Here’s a video of that Q&A session and it’s outcome :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii49BaRDp_A
So for 2.5 seconds, Building 7 fell at free fall speed, which is only possible if there was no resistance to the collapse, which is only possible if the steel frame was severed in advance of the falling mass, which can only be credibly explained by pre-placed demolition charges. Add to this ……
…… and I say there is enough evidence to conclude that building 7 was a planned demolition. Then consider :
The explosive charges would have taken days if not weeks to position about the building. Unless we assume some incredibly coincidental scenario (for example, a complex insurance scam was being set up when, with fortuitous timing, the planes struck the twin Towers and Silverstein decided to take advantage of this totally unplanned circumstance) then we must accept that the preplanned demolition of Building 7 was part of an overall plan which included the Twin Towers, Pentagon, etc. It’s unimaginable that that plan was for Building 7 to collapse, seemingly from a peripheral fire, while the Twin Towers remained standing despite been forcibly injected with aviation fuel. Therefore, and given the extremely improbable circumstances surrounding the fates of the Twin Towers, it is reasonable to suppose that they too were brought down by pre-planted demolition charges.
Node, disclaimer: I’m not going to present a balanced argument about Building 7 just yet. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so for now I’m deliberately going to try to demolish the demolition theories.
This hinges upon what you mean by “Building 7”. Certainly we saw the outside of what had just ceased to be Building 7 collapse at free-fall rate for about 2.5 seconds. But that may be telling us little about the behaviour of the interior material. If the middle began falling first it may even have been able to drag the outside down at an acceleration exceeding that of gravity.
There is some evidence that may support this. I mentioned the early disappearance of part of the mechanical penthouse in my 12:53 am comment. That piece presumably dropped first because that which was supporting it also dropped first.
Further, I have seen a claim (which I have not verified) that Building 7 was of unusual construction, in that it was built around and above a pre-existing transformer substation, ie. the building itself had a large cavity at its centre at the bottom. Failure of the horizontal load-bearing beams above this cavity could account for the sudden descent of the central parts of the structure above.
Further assertions for collapse without demolition include the following. There was severe damage to the building from debris that fell from the Twin Towers, including a major gash across several floors on the side facing the WTC site. The fires were considerable, not minor, and continued for several hours. The deformation of the building was being monitored by an instrument called a transit, introduced into a gap in the structure created by damage from falling debris. When the gap began widening at an accelerating rate, a major collapse was anticipated.
Node, have you encountered any of these arguments before?
It could be informative to watch a compilation of films of as many collapsing buildings as can be found just to get an overall view of patterns. Is there such a film ie an unbiased compilation not a selection?
Try this to begin with:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwFHEoiUZ7o
Impossible according to Troofer Fizzics.
Kempe 19 Jan, 2016 – 5:06 pm : Steel is an alloy of iron and, mainly, carbon. The similarity is that both melt at temperatures way higher than they experienced in the fires yet still failed. This gentleman demonstrates why.
This gentleman demonstrates a straw man argument.
http://www.ae911truth.org/news/248-news-media-events-debunker-debunked-blacksmith.html
Kempe 21 Jan, 2016 – 6:50 am : Try this to begin with [….] Impossible according to Troofer Fizzics.
Now it’s you making the straw man argument.
‘Troofers’ don’t claim that a progressive (pancake) collapse is impossible under the right conditions. ‘Troofers’ claim that WTC7 provably wasn’t a progressive (pancake) collapse because for 2.5 seconds the mass of rubble fell at 9.8 m/sec/sec. In your vérinage examples, as every floor hits the one below, there is resistance which must be overcome, resulting in a collapse slower than free fall.
Your video flags up another point. You are trying to prove that WTC7 wasn’t a controlled demolition by showing examples of controlled demolition. Those vérinage demolitions have been carefully prepared. At a calculated height, every support is simultaneously pushed sideways. If all the supports don’t give way at the same moment, the collapse is asymmetric and (1) the collapse may not continue progressively (2) the building may fall to the side, or collapse on one side only. For you to be correct, we would have to believe that a random fire exactly re-created the precise conditions of a controlled demolition three times on the same day!
Furthermore, as far as I can establish, all those buildings are built from blocks or re-enforced concrete – not steel-framed. The walls are load-bearing and thus the structural strength of the buildings is shared amongst tens of thousands of relatively weak individual units, ie bricks, rather than a framework of very strong components. Can you show me an example of a steel-framed building being demolished with the vérinage technique?
And finally, a bonus. Many people have claimed that there is clear evidence of demolition charges (squibs) visible through the windows below the advancing collapse. The official explanation is that these are jets of compressed air created in a bellows action by the compacting volume above. Why then do we not see these squibs in any of your examples (where no explosives have been used)?
MODS
Sorry, I didn’t close the emphasis properly after the word “simultaneously”. I’d be grateful if you would do so to aid clarity, then delete this comment. Thanks.