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).
Glad you want a new investigation, Its essential to get the truth.
There is far too much circumstantial evidence for me not to say it was an inside job, I look at what my eyes tell me and I see 3 imploded buildings, molten steel, thermite residue dust samples, explosions, and an aircraft hyjacking exercise going on at the same time.
Cui Bono…. I’m thinking Israel!
Comrades – good to see this thread’s still going.
Taking a quick scan, I see our new friend Maxter is interested in explosions, and the testimony to those events. I’m very interested in that too, because the number of witnesses, and recordings of same, is quite obvious to anyone looking for them – even while the buildings were not collapsing.
Clark, I’m a bit concerned you’re giving an overly sceptical view and not taking on your overall sense of what’s going on. A confirmation bias is a tough thing to throw off. No offence, your keeping this discussion honest is a true asset, however – we’re never going to be dealing with something proved under scientific conditions, tested as if that setup was the original intention, and so on.
Personally, I’m inclined towards Maxter’s proposal that a lot of people witnessed the sound and vibration of some significant structurally compromising explosions that morning. It wasn’t a 5-minute job, seriously, and I don’t
think they left room for error.
Exexpat’s suspicion that we’re government spooks or stooges of some kind. Please, Exexpat, try not to take offence at this, because I’m being objective here too. It’s tough to take anyone’s word seriously when they’re proposing that I – a beset upon miserable subject of the state – am in fact pulling the strings on the Establishment’s behalf.
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Exexpat, I don’t know why you got all bent out of shape at being lightly referenced as a “conspiracy theorist” – or why you took such umbrage at Clark and myself sharing a mild numerology jest a few days ago. Are you new to these parts of the “Internets”? No offence, seriously? If your normal hangouts has hitherto been the “facebooks”, I understand that this can be a little rough.
A few old regulars having a laugh among themselves shouldn’t ordinarily be taken that seriously, please understand no offence was intended to you personally. Plenty of opportunity around here for that sort of thing, don’t get me wrong! But Clark never goes for that, I don’t do so very often myself.
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The bigger picture is one pointed out earlier about the JFK assassination, many pages back. They did it right in front of us, and hardly even bothered putting out a good story to cover it. The Official Narrative will do, and it will allow the Administration to do as it will.
The earlier poster suggested that you will be kept very, very, busy, as you try to exactly answer the how, when, who, which, what and where… but the real question is why.
The “why” is that they did it right in front of us, to demonstrate their power, to be that totally blatant about what could happen when they wanted it to, and of course to provide an excuse to then go on to do what they’d planned all along. I suppose it was also a demonstration of what could happen to the rest of us too, if we didn’t fall in line. Hideous biological warfare unless you have the antidote, anyone?
The lesson I’m taking from this is that if you’re not stupid enough to accept the Official Story, you’d better hope you get ignored – at best. If large segments of the population start believing you, we might have a serious public health problem.
A message from Richard gage who knows a thing or two!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvuKUmK9eB0
I have started to watch this film as I saw that it includes views by Peter Dale Scott. Clarke – it also has a broadcast of a fire department lieutenant David (?) re knowing all day that WTC7 was unstable and was coming down or would be taken down (at 26:15), though I am not sure where that clip comes from, but it appears to be an interview broadcast on the day just after WTC has come down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqqelDq4P48
The first half hour also looks at: long lasting fires in sky scrapers over several floors, which don’t come down on their own; symmetrical and asymmetrical falls; free fall and how you can’t fall in free fall time if there is resistance. In respect of this last point it says that the building was constructed to take a 3 to 5 * load (yes I note that Craig and Clarke say that maybe it was not constructed to its design spec) and that NIST dealt with free fall by suggesting that it fell slower than free fall although the film suggests that NIST did this by adding time on at start and finish and that if you look at the NIST graph it shows free fall. I don’t know about the graph or time measurements, but it looks like free fall and even a fool can understand that free fall would appear questionable.
The film also notes that apparently NIST ruled out exploring the possibility of explosions because there was no evidence that any explosions would have been loud enough? I have not read NIST, but is that right i.e. did they reach that conclusion about sound and then use that finding to excuse themselves from looking further?
Also, it suggests that fire is organic and moves from one part of a building to another in such a way that when a building collapses because of fire (i.e. a wooden building because there are no steel collapses to compare with) it does so asymmetrically i.e. following the line of least resistance, and that it takes skill and expertise to direct a building to fall against resistance.
Peter Dale Scott appears much later in the film at 1:29 and talks about what he calls structural deep events.
This from Fwl at 1:01 am is significant:
Precisely.
This whole issue of “free fall” is a major red herring. Free fall would have happened to the MegaDodo Publications building had it been released by the tractor beams being used to abduct Zaphod Beeblebrox. The whole building would have fallen as a single object – free-fall.
Collapsing buildings and buildings undergoing demolition do not fall in free-fall. Even buildings undergoing demolition by explosives have some degree of structure. HARDLY ANY of the larger pieces are “free” because they continue to contact other pieces, and on average the larger the pieces the less free they are.
But the advocates of deliberate demolition mention “free-fall” over and over again, though it is simply inappropriate. This silly confusion has wasted so much of so many people’s time that I suspect it may be deliberate conflation, an idea seeded into the public realm to draw attention; a psi-op component in other words. Conjurers make much use of this method but the name for it temporarily escapes me; anyone?
Can anyone see what I’m getting at here? Can anyone pick this up and run with it?
Clark, you need to watch the Richard gage video that I posted. Its only 3 minutes long. Building 7 was measured to fall at free fall acceleration for at least 2.5 seconds reluctantly admitted by NIST!
Fwl, 1:01 am:
The video you need was posted five pages back (!) by Node:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCDpL4Ax7I
The outside of Building 7 accelerates downwards at a rate indistinguishable in practice from the rate of free-fall acceleration for about 2.5 seconds. NIST didn’t cover this at first. Whether by accident or design, they averaged the descent over a longer time thus getting a lower figure. Chandler did his own analysis as shown in the video and challenged NIST, who then included it in a subsequent report.
But the outside of a collapsing building isn’t falling in free-fall anyway, whether explosives initiated the collapse or not.
Sorry I’m such a pedant, but this IS physical law we’re discussing; you can’t just busk it.
Maxter, I’ll watch the video but you’re missing my point. There will be no free-fall in such circumstances. The bits won’t be free.
Macter, you’re referring to “Building 7” (everyone does) but there was no “building” by that point, just loads of pieces debris, each part being acted upon by unfathomable forces from the other bits of debris around it.
It wasn’t a building any more by then, and could no longer be considered as a single object.
We’ve been misled by our assumptions because we think partly in words.
Maxter, there’s an important piece of evidence in the Incontrovertable video you linked to that nearly everyone ignores. When we see the fall of the outside of what has already ceased to be Building 7, the collapse had been in progress for over six seconds. I’m busy now but I’ll get you the time reference within the video later.
C’mon, folks! The outside of the falling remains of Building 7 accelerated downwards on average at a rate indistinguishable from free-fall acceleration in vacuum, and it was nothing like a vacuum. Since that’s an average and some of the descent was slower than free-fall, some of the descent had to be faster than free-fall.
Even the Neocons couldn’t do this no matter how much nanothermite they used. Therefore, something else happened.
What?
Just digressing onto the psi-op possibilities, what’s the name of that old US military bloke who wrote Men Who Stare at Goats or something?
What exactly did he say about the collapses, and when is the first record of him saying it?
Glenn_uk, 8:28 pm:
Anthrax through the mail immediately after 9/11. Now that was indisputably False Flag. Letters written as if from islamist extremists; US military lab origin.
Interestingly enough, Clark, those anthrax attacks were sent to two Democratic senators – Tom Daschel and Patrick Leahy – respectively, the Senate Majority leader and head of the Senate Judiciary. This is in addition to the anthrax sent to various media institutions. The effect was to close down debate on the USA-PATRIOT Act which was rammed through congress, and Daschel would have been one of the few persons able to stop it (or significantly delay it), while Leahy would have had the power to give it significant oversight (including examining the more questionable Constitutional aspects).
With the media in actual fear for their lives, the Bush regime was given a totally free pass to do whatever they liked from then on. Criticism of the Administration (particularly of the President) was understood to be anti-American, unpatriotic, and possibly seditious or siding with the terrorists.
Very convenient that all this happened so quickly, when the preparation of such a terrorist act might be expected to take longer than just the week for the first anthrax letters to arrive.
Glenn, yes, very well targeted, the anthrax attacks. And clearly an inside job.
A great shame that people don’t pin the “false flag” and “inside job” labels onto the anthrax attacks where they belong, instead putting them on the dubious building collapses and thereby getting ridiculed out of the media. Meanwhile the anthrax letters barely remain in the public consciousness.
Coincidence, or effective psi-op?
Maxter, I just watched the Richard Gage video. Sorry, there’s conflation here, and no quantitative argument. Gage makes the fist conflation, which is that the tops of the Twin Towers fell at free-fall speeds; they didn’t.
The second conflation is yours, sorry to say. You’ve presented Gage’s argument about the Twin Towers which didn’t actually fall at free-fall, and supported it with the ~2.5 seconds of correspondence with free-fall rate observed in the destruction of Building 7, even though 7 collapsed in a completely different manner to the Twin Towers.
Sorry. Remember we’re on a mass-murder enquiry here. You can’t just say that your suspect is guilty because he had a knife that looked rather like the actual murder weapon which was found with the victim’s blood on it, or any other such rough correspondence. You need a complete provable chain of events.
Anyone that watches this footage with the intention of denying controlled demolition, are either a special kind of stupid or are trolling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKYW89xEYg0
Note, people, the sheep are sorted from the goats BEFORE they even watch the video above! Please also note the proper definitions of:
Trolls are horrible to others on-line, call them names, swear, bully or threaten etc.
Shills argue on behalf of vested interests. Large numbers paid to do this, often in their own names, are called astroturf (in contrast to a “grass roots movement”).
A troll may also be a shill and vice versa, obviously.
I shall now watch the vid, bearing in mind that if I’m not convinced, I’m, I’m what? Rude and unpleasant, or commenting dishonestly? Ah well…
Well I guess I’m a bad guy because I don’t see proof of controlled demolition.
As the top of the building starts to collapse there’s a gout of orange combustion along a horizontal line near the division between the section of building that starts to fall and the rest of it below. But the building was on fire, and you can see flame at the right-hand end of that line at 3 seconds into the video, 20 seconds before the top starts to collapse. In fact, the top starts moving nearly a second before the orange gout.
So I think not explosives. The orange gout is far more likely to be flame and/or fuel (which would include volatiles from hot plastics etc.) ejected from those office volumes as the floor above collapsed, filling that space and ejecting air and fire.
Also note that the line along which the flames gout out was the area of most aircraft damage and the starting point of fires. If the building had been pre-rigged with either explosives or cutting incendiaries, this would have been the place that they were most likely to have been knocked away by the aircraft impact or pre-detonated by fire.
As the collapse-front progresses down the building, nine or so grey jets can be seen bursting out of the building in fairly random places ahead of (ie. below) the collapse-front. Obviously a huge quantity of debris was falling within the building’s outer façade and could have been compressing air which burst out when the windows gave out.
Or they could be caused by explosives. However, those jets don’t really amount to much on the scale of that building (compare them with the massive avalanche of debris above them), and if they’re indicative of the demolition charges that brought the building down, well, it didn’t take much, did it?
It’s a great view of the collapse. Note that you can still see the core standing as the camera zooms out, just falling as the camera zooms back in again at about 50 seconds into the video. This answers people who say “how did the massive core come down as fast as the far more fragile office-space structure around it?” – it didn’t. The whole outside of the building had disintegrated, stripped away from the core and fallen before the comparatively slender core came down.
What should I do now? Turn myself in the the CIA and ask for back-pay?
If you watch the right hand side of the building you can see it being ripped apart many floors below that of the front of the building. That is the evidence that there is no panicking collapse but explosions heading downwards!
Well Glenn complained that the collapses were too symmetrical not to be demolitions. What about the other tower? Did part of the collapse front get ahead on WTC2?
Do you think the advanced bit looks more like explosions than the rest of it?
The corner towards us looks most like explosions to me, there’s loads of stuff puffing out as the camera follows the collapse front downwards, but the debris falls faster and starts to obscure it, and then the camera follows the debris and out-paces the collapse front, losing it out of the top of the shot.
Meanwhile, the at the furthest corner of the building, the one on our right, the collapse front has descended faster and remains in shot, though dust from falling debris obscures that before it reaches ground, too.
OK, I can’t say for sure from how it looks that there were no explosions blasting that stuff out from the remaining building, but I can also certainly see how the maelstrom of falling concrete, steel and contents impacting onto floors, trapped behind the façade and accumulating very rapidly – these words are inadequate to describe such overwhelming destructive chaos – I lack adjectives. I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine a large office becoming solid matter in under a fifth of a second due to a hail of masonry from above; it’s inconceivable, yet it must have happened, explosives or not. But yes when that happens stuff blasts out through the windows first and then it takes the walls out, too. I can’t see that explosives are necessary. They might not even amount to much compared with the hail of steel and concrete.
Glenn! Glennnnn!
Has anyone had a demolition assessment drawn up for the Twin Towers, like a company would do to demolish them? ‘Cos that’d tell you how much explosive they’d use, from which you could calculate the energy the explosives would release. Then you could make a comparison with the potential energy of the building itself.
Next time there is an isolated high rise which needs to be demolished and has no risk of damaging neighbouring buildings why not just set it on fire at a few random places, but without controlled explosions and wait for it to fall swiftly and symmetrically within its own footprint leaving a pile of dust.
Odds on or against?
Maxter, I think you might have taken “pancaking” a bit too literally. The floors would have broken under too much fast-falling debris, but there’s no saying they’d have broken everywhere simultaneously such that each whole floor fell as a piece, roughly level. Those floors were big but thin; broad unsupported areas, over 18m by 60m but only 10cm of concrete thick; not really an argument against what fell on them. Wherever most rubble hit soonest would have gone first, I assume.
I know my momentum argument worked like horizontally stacked pancakes, but that was only to crunch numbers with. In a very rough theoretical model like that it doesn’t matter, because the total momentum to be exchanged works out the same even if each floor doesn’t go at once. The oversimplified model is used for obtaining an estimate because the alternative involves writing computer simulations of the collapse.
But no obviously the towers didn’t exactly pancake.
Fwl, odds against, obviously. But would you mind re-writing the comment with all the straw men fixed up? Please, I don’t have to do it, do I?
Has anyone but me actually tried to visualise the collapses as a physical system? Has anyone tried to imagine a four inch floors enduring a hail of building rubble so intense it’d fill four tennis courts to the depth of five stories in under a second?
The counter-arguments I’m being presented with seem designed more to persuade than to convince. Sorry, but they do.
I’m not a shill. I want something more convincing. My ‘opposition’ may be persuaded by the arguments they’re presenting, but they all seem very weak to me. I suppose I’d best try arguing for explosives just to calibrate…
Clarke, I’m rather hoping you will persuade me that we aren’t living in a Robert Ludlum novel.
I have no idea what an exploding airliner might do to a building, but I can accept it would be serious. Whether or not both WTC1 & 2 would though go all the way down so neatly without toppling or stalling makes me raise an eyebrow. You see buildings rigged to collapse and they even they simetimes stall or slip. Anyway, I accept an airliner full of fuel is unusual and difficult to configure. So if I’m sitting on the jury and there’s no 7 in evidence so maybe I go with the airlines being the cause on the balance of probabilities, but not beyond reasonable doubt.
If I include WTC7 in my deliberations its a whole different game. Maybe the judge would say when considering 1 & 2 we exclude all considerations of 7 from our deliberations because it would be prejudicial.
Your getting very scientific about free fall, but the point is simple. If no other steel building on fire every collapsed then even if we make exception for 1 & 2 how can we begin to think that fire would be so effective and tidy if there is no massive other event like an exploding airliner. Even if fires caused part to collapse without systematic symmetrical explosions or symmetrical heat wouldn’t the collapsing part fall where it is easiest ie to the side.
What did you make of the fire officer’s interview?