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).
“You’re probably familiar with Mark Roberts – he talks about confronting people at Ground Zero with actual evidence, and they turn their heads away. They just don’t want to see the evidence; it’s like they’re afraid.”
Yes, I have seen him. He’s very good. His demolition of Alex Jones who was blaring out his usual rubbish was a joy to watch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Alex Jones so completely flustered and unable to counter.
Clark, I forgot which one you are. Now I remember – you’re the guy who claims superiority because of your ripe age of 47. Nice try at condescension, as you cozy up with crazy people (whether Islamic believers or otherwise)
I’m not interested in arguing over 911 and no one found the video clip I was looking for. I’m heading off to bed now, to get enough sleep before I go off and express my disgust at another lawer that can’t tell right from wrong.
Goodnight.
9/11 Airliners…
http://tinyurl.com/yc24883
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Alex Jones so completely flustered and unable to counter.”
It’s just so easy to destroy these people, isn’t it? They’re used to hanging out with their own kind, or spewing their crap to people who don’t know much about 911 (or who don’t have minimal critical thinking skills).
I think if you or I ever confronted Alex Jones, it would also take only a few short minutes for him to yell out “STRAW MAN! STRAW MAN!”
MJ, you haven’t answered my questions about Andrews airforce base. Do you have any evidence for saying that Andrews airforce base had fighters on standby?
I ask this because the 9/11 Commission report explicitly says that Otis and Langley were the only alert sites with a pair of fighters each. Aircraft were later scrambled from Andrews but presumably weren’t on standby before that.
You have read the 9/11 Commission report so I would expect you to know this. David Ray Griffin wrote a BOOK on this report. Did he read it?
“and express my disgust at another lawer that can’t tell right from wrong.”
yeah, and you cozy up to crazy people and EXPLICIT racists. FUCK YOU! (Now is that not nice? Please tell me.)
Frank Verismo: “The top segment simply disintegrates as it descends and in no way falls as an intact unit. As such, the ‘enormous vertical dynamic load’ simply doesn’t exist. Drop a closed sack of sand on someone from 10 floors up and you’ll probably kill them. Drop only the sand and the dynamic load is so dispersed as to be virtually harmless.”
Really? If you dropped a load of unbounded water on someone’s head do you think it would wash straight off?
Look what happens when you put your theory into practice:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI7BHSOVtMs&feature=related
What do you think would happen with falling steel beams and concrete?
Larry,
I saw your 1:40 post, and then went to bed. I then got up and restarted my computer to give you this message.
I’d like you to consider the possibility that I continue to converse with you because I think there may be some point, whereas I don’t answer or argue with the racists because I expect that there is none.
Bed now, and that’s final!
Glenn: “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.”
As far as I am aware, the “pnacake theory” is the initial hypothesis of the FEMA report and the one that NIST intitially used. After putting it to the test did they not reject it and formulate a new hypothesis?
As far as I know this is the scientific method in operation. You find some initial facts. Develop a hypothesis and then test it. The hypothesis must be capable of being falsified. If not it is impossible to test because testing can only confirm the hypothesis making it meaningless.
NIST only gave the explanation for collapse initiation, which was all it was tasked to do.
It seems clear that the top stories were no longer connected to the perimeter columns meaning that it was now falling through the floor which, as Leslie Robertson said, couldn’t possibly hold the weight of so many stories.
Once the first floor gave way it fell to the next story, which was unsurprisingly no more able to support the weight of the descending upper stories and so on, down to the ground.
Larry, please don’t be mean to Clark.
Clark, with this thread the ambassador is really spoiling us. He’s allowed us to talk about 9/11 so please don’t come on to the thread and announce that you have no interest in the topic.
I’ll try and look out for the video of Palestinians. It sounds vaguely familiar but I don’t know.
Just speculating here, but maybe what you were watching was a replay of the events that day put up on a big screen maybe by Hamas.
I have heard that the attacks were celebrated in Baghdad. Conversely, in Iran I seem to recall that prayers were said for the victims instead of the usual “Marg Bar Amerikkka!” chants at its Friday sermons.
Incidentally, North Korea also condemned the terrorist attacks.
As far as I know, Tehran and Pyongyang haven’t jumped on the Truther bandwagon.
(Then again, I could be wrong about Tehran. I have heard there is an “inside job” exhibit in the old US embassy).
“The cameraman, who appears to be using a hand-held camera, keeps the camera focused on the towers, even when there is the roar overhead of the second plane coming in, and a voice is heard, saying what sounds to me like “Ah, oui”.
Wouldn’t he duck or run, or at least look up, when he is looking at a building that had just had a plane crash into it and he hears another plane roaring in? And is that voice saying “Ah, oui”?”
What the cameraman is looking at and what the camera is pointing at may be two different things.
But it doesn’t really matter. All you are saying is you can’t believe a person would behave like that. It hardly counts as evidence for an Inside Job.
“A Larry-type might actually serve a useful purpose here in flagging decent posts”
He could. The idea that there are people out there who will bite you if you say something silly is a very useful tool, and a constructive role to play, done nicely.
Sadly, he seems to be too self-indulgent to be any good at it. “You all believe stupidity so you’re all stupid” doesn’t contain enough detail or thought to be any use, he lets himself get carried away all the time.
But he must be concerned, or he wouldn’t be here, even if he doesn’t like to actually come out and say so ?
angrysoba: You said “As far as I am aware, the “pnacake theory” is the initial hypothesis of the FEMA report and the one that NIST intitially used. After putting it to the test did they not reject it and formulate a new hypothesis?”
(Was that a sly reference to the PNAC, btw?)
You then went on to argue against this point, as if I posited my entire case upon “NIST says this and…” whereas surely you know I didn’t.
I don’t care what NIST says for this line of reasoning, and I never brought it up. If someone also said something along the same lines then changed their mind, what the heck difference does it make? This is the sort of trick one might mistake another for taking as being “slippery”, please pardon the expression because I know you are well above that sort of thing.
Instead, how about tackling the point I raised in Jan 28, 2010 11:05 PM, and discussing that, instead of arguing about something someone else might have said along those lines but then retracted, together with a distorted simplification?
I don’t consider you a simple minded person, and your final sentence/paragraph does not justify your intelligence, if you considered that as a fair summary of my post on inertia.
“But he must be concerned, or he wouldn’t be here, even if he doesn’t like to actually come out and say so ?
Posted by: Richard Robinson at January 29, 2010 2:37 AM”
Mr Robinson,
What is wrong with being concerned about people spouting 9/11 Truth? Are you saying 9/11 Truth is merely a harmless little hobby or parlour game?
I don’t care about people saying that the Moon landings were faked or that Nessie exists. But 9/11 Truth is presumably not like that. Many Truthers make all kinds of sordid allegations against the families of passengers who died on the planes, the firefighters, Larry Silverstein or Jews. Their evidence is incredibly flimsy but they have this infuriating supercilious attitude that they know better because they are “awake” and don’t trust the mainstream media and they know the laws of physics etc…etc… and they are keen to dismiss anyone who actually has got credentials, or refer to those who don’t agree with them as morons or shills.
The same goes for David Kelly. These people never even met the guy and they believe they can know more about him than Dr Kelly’s wife and daughters. I wonder on whose behalf they are campaiging.
Angrysoba said: “Larry and I are New World Order agents and we know they never did an inside job. No sireee!”
Very droll and all, but do you really want to align yourself that much with the most thoroughly contemptible poster on this blog? Seriously? Because it’s remarkable how much you align, and that is not a compliment. I would suggest your public cuddling hurts your own credibility, because what – to your discredit – is seen as your counterpart has none whatsoever.
“(Was that a sly reference to the PNAC, btw?)”
Whoops! Cat’s out of the bag now!
Glenn, my point was that the collapse sequence you are talking about didn’t happen:
“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?”
I’m not sure how much clearer I can make this, but the core and the perimeter were supposed to hold up the building. Each floor, as in the bit that people walk on, was NOT strong enough to hold up the stories above it. Leslie Robertson explicitly said this in his debate with Steven Jones.
So, what happened? You must have seen the photographs of the top of the towers tilting (with the south tower this was far more pronounced). It shows definitively that it was not a symmetrical top-down PNACake collapse. The top of the building had come loose at its moorings, so to speak, so it is unreasonable to assume it would have slid down a few stories and arrested. Instead you have to picture the floors internally giving way and the perimeter columns being peeled outwards almost like a banana. In fact, plenty of video shows the permimeter columns falling outwards and later photographs show the columns splayed out over a large area on the ground (indeed the WTC7 was hit by the debris as we know) proving that it didn’t collapse neatly into its own footprints.
That is what I mean by a hypothesis that was rejected.
“Very droll and all, but do you really want to align yourself that much with the most thoroughly contemptible poster on this blog?”
Oh that is simply not fair, Glenn!
Larry gets a lot of abuse simply for being American. I find it embarrassing as an Englishman to read my campatriots writing such nonsense as, “You Yanks are so fick! You obviously don’t know nuffink cos everyone nose Yanks don’t no nuffink!” (I am of course employing hyperbole so please don’t ask me to find the direct quote).
On top of that there are some exceedingly contemptible posters expressing explicit Jew hatred here. Bizarrely Larry and I have been blamed for their presence.
Angrysoba said:
“Whoops! Cat’s out of the bag now!”
Heh – now we have your credentials on the table! 🙂
But you’re not getting it, Soba, deliberately or not I cannot tell. Laws concerning inertia dictate that a mass does not magically assume the velocity of the object that lands upon it. Please re-read my “January 28, 2010 11:05 PM” post, I would far rather respond to criticism of that that reiterate the entire point.
Would it help if I declared myself to be a professor in physics, and said I was “Glenn from Edinburgh” or something?
*
Aside:
How come only nit-picking has occurred in so many recent posts, most of which are initiated or continued by the 9/11 truth deniers? And where is even one decent picture of the Pennsylvania OR the Pentagon crash, OR any the aftermath thereof? How come no True Believer has managed to explain how all of these Magic Arabs carried out their missions – death or destruction of the target – perfectly?
How come none of the Magic Arabs were tackled successfully, on any flight, even though people knew what was going on, and – most improbably! – used their mobile telephones to say what was going on? Why did tough-nut ex-forces pilots give it all up to a few crazed terrorists? How did the Magic Arabs prove to be such immensely good pilots? How did it all go so incredibly well – air force stands obligingly down, passengers and crew so obliging, all the terrorist teams hit their targets and things go even better to plan than was imagined, etc. etc. – for one day like that? Perhaps Americans want to put their hands up and say, “Yup. We are an amazingly stupid and incompetent people, and we like giving our planes over to nutty box-cutter wielding foreigners.”
But I don’t buy that about Americans, sorry – they’re just not that weak, lazy and stupid.
Angrysoba:
“Look what happens when you put your theory into practice:”
Hmmmm. Several tons of water versus a flimsy aluminium car. Hardly ‘my theory’. If you insist on using it though, consider what that same volume of water would have done if contained: the car would’ve been crushed flat. To really stretch the analogy, what we’ve got with Bazant & Zhou is your ‘unbounded water’ but resulting in the car being crushed to a height of two inches.
And we both know that ain’t gonna happen.
“Larry gets a lot of abuse simply for being American”
Perhaps I should start by saying “many of my friends are black” ?
“Larry” is not viewed with near universal contempt for being American, Larry is held in contempt because of his expressed opinions! Come on now.
angrysoba:
“and they are keen to dismiss anyone who actually has got credentials, or refer to those who don’t agree with them as morons or shills.”
Yes – repellent, isn’t it? I’ve only spotted one person accusing another of being a ‘moron’ on this thread. Have a look through and see if you can find who it is. Let me know how you get on.
Glenn:
“”Larry” is not viewed with near universal contempt for being American, Larry is held in contempt because of his expressed opinions! Come on now.”
Larry’s American?
Glenn –
Look at this picture of the ValuJet crash and tell me where the plane is:
http://www.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/us/valujet/valujet.html
“Your movement has failed, after all.”
Have *some* decency, man. Our bowel problems are none of your business.
Glenn, I think we are talking at cross puposes here.
Now, just to be very, very simplistic, if you put a bowling ball on a piece of paper, the paper can’t hold the bowling ball and will break. The bowling ball will fall through.
Now, imagine 110 pieces of paper all the way down to the floor. Which piece of paper will arrest the bowling ball’s fall?
None of them, and the bowling ball will probably fall practically at free-fall.
I haven’t tried the experiment, so I don’t know if it will work. I realize there are plenty of problems with my analogy, of course, but I am using it to demonstrate approximately what I think happened.
We may be talking at cross-purposes here though.
Your next lot of many questions:
“And where is even one decent picture of the Pennsylvania OR the Pentagon crash, OR any the aftermath thereof?”
At many crash sites almost all the plane can burn up leaving little left. I don’t have a problem believing a plane crashed in Shanksville. They found the FDR there, after all.
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.
“How come no True Believer has managed to explain how all of these Magic Arabs carried out their missions – death or destruction of the target – perfectly?”
They weren’t magic and they didn’t carry out their mission perfectly. One plane crashed in Shanksville, remember.
“How come none of the Magic Arabs were tackled successfully, on any flight, even though people knew what was going on, and – most improbably! – used their mobile telephones to say what was going on?”
They were on United 93 otherwise people reacted as people have reacted on many, many other hijacked aircraft. The crew and passengers mostly complied with them.
Cell phones? Well, as we know many of them used airphones. Do we really need to go through that again?
“How did the Magic Arabs prove to be such immensely good pilots?”
They weren’t magic. They had pilots licenses and had done simulator training. Why do you keep asking these questions which I’ve answered so many times already? They weren’t immensely good pilots. They only had to fly straight into buildings.
“How did it all go so incredibly well – air force stands obligingly down, passengers and crew so obliging, all the terrorist teams hit their targets and things go even better to plan than was imagined, etc. etc. – for one day like that?”
There was NO stand-down. I told you that planes were scrambled from Otis and Langley. Why do you persist in asking questions which I have answered already and then bring them up again while claiming that we are ignoring them?
Besides, how do you know things went better than imagined?
“Perhaps Americans want to put their hands up and say, “Yup. We are an amazingly stupid and incompetent people, and we like giving our planes over to nutty box-cutter wielding foreigners.””
Again, with the canards and the strawmen. According to phone calls, the hijackers claimed to have bombs. Only Barbara Olson mentioned box-cutters, the other callers mentioned knives and mace. The hijackers were clearly very dedicated and highly trained, not magic. The passengers were clearly very scared and the pilots probably behaved according to regular procedure which was to comply with hijackers’ demands. What makes you think they would have behaved differently?
“Larry’s American?”
Yes, Larry from St. Louis, is I believe American.
“Larry gets a lot of abuse simply for being American”
Larry hasn’t received nearly as much abuse as he’s been handing out. I hope you’re not suggesting that acting the aggressive arsehole is purely a function of coming from the USA ?
“Larry hasn’t received nearly as much abuse as he’s been handing out. I hope you’re not suggesting that acting the aggressive arsehole is purely a function of coming from the USA ?”
No, I’m not the one making the connection. Apparently you are.
“Yes, Larry from St. Louis, is I believe American. ”
That’s the last time I use litotes on this site!