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).
Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth
5 hrs ·
JUSTICE IN FOCUS HIGHLIGHTS:
Dr. MacQueen Presents Analysis of Eyewitness Accounts; Lawyers Discuss Admissibility in Courtney Lambert
*Please excuse the microphone interference and other technical difficulties in the first 4 minutes of the video.*
Today, we invite you to watch Dr. Graeme MacQueen testify before the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry at the Justice In Focus symposium last month.
Dr. MacQueen is a retired professor of Religious Studies and Peace Studies who spent 30 years at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He is renowned for his analysis of 9/11 eyewitness accounts as they relate to the occurrence of explosions at the World Trade Center and to insider foreknowledge of WTC 7’s destruction.
In this devastating 45-minute presentation, MacQueen dismantles critics’ suggestions that the explosions witnessed on 9/11 were anything other than the result of explosives destroying the WTC Twin Towers. Following his testimony, the panel of attorneys discuss the admissibility in federal court of the various eyewitness accounts cited by MacQueen.
Watch the entire 16 hours of proceedings in the Justice In Focus video archive by making a donation of any amount, here: http://bit.ly/JIFarchiveDonate
Let’s apply que bono to demolition theories.
Glenn, are you listening?
Suspects according to demolition theories so far:
Public regulatory bodies NIST and FEMA.
University academics; physicists, civil engineers.
FDNY firefighters.
Medical staff at Jennings’ hospital.
Noam Chomsky.
Craig Murray.
Julian Assange.
Edward Snowden.
And counting…
List of benefactors, anyone? Alex Jones seems to have done OK.
Oh just ignore me. I’m obviously an agent for the authoritarian right.
But “we believe the price is worth it”.
You forgot Silverstein, the BBC, Rothschilds…
Silverstein comes out of it rather well; leaseholder and owner of buildings that were indestructible without controlled demolition. I’m sure he’d rather be accused of demolitions that never happened than provably poor safety standards throughout his property empire.
Beneficiaries? The owners. The buildings were insured in such a way that the insurance companies had to pay double the appraised value.
That value was inflated … considerably and much of the buildings was empty.
The buildings were going to have to either be torn down or the interior beams were going to have to undergo asbestos remediation. Previous tenants knew this, and so did prospective tenants. The die was cast on that one … my wife is a former inspector for the Department of Environmental Protection for the City of New York and it was common knowledge that the WTC towers were in deep trouble on that score.
Consider also that a great deal of gold was stored in the basement of the buildings … but was shipped out in the weeks preceding the demolition.
Consider also that the building had been shut down over the weekend several times … supposedly to wire it for faster networking. You don’t need detonation cord if you have CAT 5 going where you need it to.
Nope … not buying it. And the dirtier the current election gets, the less inclined I am to believe that the demolition did not at least have the approval of US Government administrators even if the actual demolition was contracted out to others, such as Mossad, who would have none of the inhibitions Craig references. That dog won’t hunt.
Bill, FYI detonation cord is made of explosive; it blows up. Cat 5 is computer networking cable; it doesn’t blow up.
OK, theoretically, detonators could be triggered via networking cable, but what a nightmare wiring job, and the chances of accidentally detonation would be ridiculously high. Very embarrassing to blow up a Tower or two before the ‘planes turned up. I think you haven’t really thought this through or looked anything up.
Hang on; networking cable can’t handle sufficient current to trigger many detonators. The detonators would therefore need their own batteries. The chances of premature detonation would be even higher than I first thought.
You just made this up, didn’t you?
I thought this was for discussion of 9/11. Seems to be a vanity blog for Clark. You’ve killed it dead, Clark, well done. I hope the fee was respectable, a gentleman needs something to keep the draught from the door.
Vronsky, I nearly met you once, when I was driving Craig about supporting the pro-independence campaign. Sad; that looks like a failed cause now, too. I’d have moved to escape the right-wing foreigner-hating morass that Essex has become.
I remember you once posted something like “Newton will win this argument”, but Chandler’s action-reaction argument is utter bunk; buildings are not homogeneous like blancmange so you can’t draw one big upward vector in the middle to represent resistive force. It’s a real shame about Chandler. He’s done the best independent video measurement and analysis I’ve seen anywhere. He’s provided strong sound evidence disproving demolition, but he dubs his voice over everything, propagandising for explosives.
Ah well, you think I’m an agent. I hope you’re at least sincere because in fact I’m suicidal; I had therapy this afternoon. Do you want me to scan and post my doctor’s letters? I could probably find my therapist’s professional affiliation if that would help. An apology from you wouldn’t go amiss.
No, Vronsky. I care about physics and I hate to see it continually mangled by the lying Truthers. Sorry, but that’s what they do; they lie and propagandise. Shame about you, too; there’s not even any hope in Scotland.
Vronsky, whether I’m an agent or not, explosives can’t do this:
https://www.metabunk.org/the-pre-collapse-inward-bowing-of-wtc2.t4760/
That’s not my vanity. It’s just what happened. I, too, needed to face the truth, and it was difficult; I’d soaked up too much Truther propaganda. But the rather mundane and tawdry fact is that buildings built by the New York Mob aren’t particularly sound.
And yes I’m trying to discuss 9/11. Demolition didn’t happen*, so discussing demolition is NOT discussing 9/11.
* I retain some reservation about Building 7, but not very much.
Oh and I’ll tell you something else; it was me that repeatedly re-opened comments on this thread. The same thing happened again and again – everyone circle-jerked the “certainty” of demolition and the absolute evil of everyone US until they got bored and then comments closed automatically. You need to imagine I’m an agent or there’s no enemy to hate.
Vronsky, what about the Glasgow bin-wagon tragedy? Reckon it was a set-up? How about asking Suhayl; he works at the hospital?
Woh! Never seen that footage before! Well done for finding it.
Now, how are the Truthers going to explain it away?
The term “grasping at straws” comes to mind. Pathetic!
Perhaps that could be because it looks like one of the ‘computer-based’ re-enactions produced by NIST to try to befuddle the masses.
We have all seen the totally smoke and dust enshrouded collapses of the Twin Towers, but no one has seen this crazy sh*t. But what do you expect from Metabunk?
Ah, “it’s a fake”.
Now THAT’S grasping at straws!
The buckling can be seen in Tuther videos, too. I saw it last night on Paul Barbara’s link to a Truther vid called (ironically) “Denying the Obvious”. At one minute:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luGkdBs95kY
The shot itself is also confirmed from another camera angle, but I haven’t found that again yet.
“Grasping at straws” yet no complaint against hologram aircraft, buried nukes, energy beams from orbit, or even supposedly pre-emptive children’s cartoons… You name it; anything goes, except actual evidence.
Here’s another; still not the one I saw earlier:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJPYTVjxug
Not such a good angle, but you can still see buckling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rbfLLp7rBI
See the second link here. It explains why there would be an inward collapse. Explain that away bearing in mind it is put together by engineers and demolition experts – not journalists and inhabitants of a blog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fknMGEVUvyM#t=681.683356
” Nano aluminium is a controlled substance ”
Here’s somewhere sells it by the tonne!
http://www.novacentrix.com/products/nanopowders/nanoaluminum
Irrelevant of course because there was no thermite.
You’re wrong again about the use of nano-thermite.The white smoke and the huge clouds as from the lift-off of a rocket proves it. Initially the smoke was black. But the molten metal immediately before the collapse, in both twin towers, shows the fires had nothing to do with jet fuel.
All credit to you for your perseverence in the face of science. People used to think the world was flat. Then the truthers came along.
John Goss, there is no “second link” in your comment of October 14, 18:54. I’ve found no alternative explanation for the inward bowing, which you were denying occurred at all a couple of days ago.
The video you linked to was not “put together by engineers and demolition experts”. I don’t know who made it but it was posted to YouTube by user PreserveOurFreedoms who’s apparently very keen on some Bible Basher and NWO theorist called David Barton.
Regarding the link you did post, do you have to post that sort of thing? It takes forever to analyse and describe. It’s a New World Order mash-up dubbed with sinister music made from many shots we’ve seen before, including one of the earliest alternative 9/11 videos, The Great Conspiracy by Barrie Zwicker. It featured Mike Ruppert, who wouldn’t touch demolition theories with a bargepole.
The bit you were probably interested in is the heavily and selectively edited interview with ex Controlled Demolition Incorporated employee Tom Sullivan. If you’d bothered to find the original you’d have discovered that Sullivan is talking about Building 7 exclusively, though the vid you linked dishonestly edits images in to suggest that he’s referring to the Twin Towers. Note for the gullible: inward buckling and implosion are not the same thing. “Implosion” is a term used to denote demolition.
John Goss, do you actually approve of deception? You really waste my time with this sort of rubbish. Make some effort yourself and trace the clips back to their original sources. Here’s Sullivan talking live to an audience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns_hjONWZ88
But beware. A&E 9/11 “Truth” were indulging in a bit of deception, as usual, and it involves thermite, as usual:
http://ae911truth.info/wordpress/2010/ae911truth/ae911truth-posts-a-correctiont/
The original correction isn’t on the link provided to A&E but can be found at archive.org.
NOW, having got through that mess, SHOW me evidence for a molten substance issuing from WTC 1, or retract your claim.
WHAT a WASTE of TIME. They just lie, lie, lie.
Clarke, you’re right. There was no second link. I apologise. What happened was I thought I had copied an earlier comment posted lower down the thread which contained the second link but I had not. And the second link was still in my memory bank. I should have informed about that. However the link was the second link as in this comment.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post/comment-page-98/#comment-629713
John Goss, show me evidence for a molten substance issuing from WTC 1, or retract your claim.
An independent investigator found a very plausible explanation for the flow of molten material from WTC 2, and even corrected NIST about it:
http://undicisettembre.blogspot.co.uk/2007/06/ups-on-81st-floor-of-wtc2.html
http://undicisettembre.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/nist-confirms-ups-on-81st-floor-of-wtc2.html
John Goss, October 14, 19:51
– “You’re wrong again about the use of nano-thermite.The white smoke and the huge clouds as from the lift-off of a rocket proves it”
Most rockets produce white clouds. A Saturn 5 first stage burned highly refined kerosene (similar to jet fuel) with liquid oxygen, producing mainly water vapour which condensed rapidly to white steam and colourless carbon dioxide. The Ariane 5 main engine burns liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, so the main engine’s plume is just steam, but it also has two solid rocket boosters (SRBs) fuelled by a mix of ammonium perchlorate, aluminium and polybutadiene. The Shuttle’s SRBs used polybutadiene acrylonitrile copolymer.
I’m pretty sure this proves nothing about nanothermite.
Love this line: “People used to think the world was flat. Then the truthers came along”
https://www.facebook.com/ae911truth/videos/10153834103441269/
Watch this video FFs! Explosions testimony everywhere!
Yes there were loads of explosions; fires make many common objects explode. But the demolition theory is that “all support had to be removed simultaneously to cause such rapid collapse”, so random explosions throughout the day are not evidence for demolition. How many times must this be repeated before you get it? I’m accused of being an accessory to murder because I “comment too much”, but you just wheel out the same old crap over and over again, requiring the same refutation again and again.
Go on, show me ONE controlled demolition initiated by randomly placed explosions randomly timed over the course of between one and seven hours. Put up or shut up.
I wrote “fires makes many common objects explode”. Maybe there were also also planted bombs, but that would still not be evidence for “controlled demolition”.
Do you actually care about truth at all? Or are you going to keep repeating this because you regard it as helpful propaganda? That’s just like bent police framing their chosen suspect.
@ Clark
October 14, 2016 at 13:39
The buckling can be seen in Tuther videos, too. I saw it last night on Paul Barbara’s link to a Truther vid called (ironically) “Denying the Obvious”. At one minute:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luGkdBs95kY
The shot itself is also confirmed from another camera angle, but I haven’t found that again yet.
“Grasping at straws” yet no complaint against hologram aircraft, buried nukes, energy beams from orbit, or even supposedly pre-emptive children’s cartoons… You name it; anything goes, except actual evidence.’
Just like I suspected, it’s a NIST ‘explanatory mock-up’. Do you really think that ‘plane’ in the video is real?????
Madness alone is no longer enough – Kempe and Clark ‘take the cake’ – enjoy!
Watch the following, to see how ‘special effects’ are manufactured:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEA05F393EC843D80
Paul Barbara, no it isn’t a video effect. It’s not the aircraft shot in your link “Denying the Obvious”; it’s the shot after. It’s an excerpt from 16 minutes and 50 seconds into this video by Ben Riesman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2aUkKWg0J0
Why did you even bother disagreeing? The footage is confirmed from other videos.
I just finished reading “The Plot to Kill King”, about the assassination of Martin Luther King, by William Pepper, who was a friend of King’s and the lawyer representing the King family in their 1999 civil suit that resulted in a jury ruling unanimously that King was killed by a conspiracy involving local, state, and federal government agencies. Pepper has held this view for many years, but the new book contains new evidence.
Pepper concludes his new book with an epilogue on disinformation contained in books and media promoting the false official account that King was killed by James Earl Ray. He points out that virtually no one in the mainstream media dares to dispute the official accounts of such sensitive matters as the King assassination and 9/11, as to do so would endanger their careers and livelihoods.
Or even their lives!
Here is a very good (and long!) video of many of the major political assassinations:
Evidence of Revision (The assassination of America): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHb5X3fFhPw
Lysias, here is the section of above video that deals with the King assassination:
Evidence of Revision – Part 6 – The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ipTFmGQcUU
I concluded in my article on Manchurian Candidates in Issue Eight in a 2002 issue of Eye Spy magazine that Ray was one who was being moved around by CIA Executive Action Director William King Harvey, and primed to kill King when he saw him in the sights of the gun he had bought for Harvey aka Harvey Steinmeyer (pp.53-5) which certainly disputes official accounts of the assassination.
Read Pepper’s book, and you will be convinced that Ray, like Oswald, didn’t shoot anybody. Like Oswald, he was just a patsy set up by the government to take the fall for the crime.
@ lysias
Absolutely agree.
I have not only read Pepper’s book, but have a copy of it with my complaints about it in it.
It is largely rubbish which makes no mention of my article about Manchurian Candidates, including not only Ray, but also Sirhan Sirhan, and Arthur Bremer.
Of course, there is no mention that I can find of this, especially William King Harvey’s role in it.
Harvey’s people tried a quick hypnosis on double agent LHO in the hope of making him the communists’ killer of JFK, but it didn’t take because he wouldn’t agree do it, forcing them to make him the patsy of it after they accidentally, it seems, shot Governor Connally who suspected he had been double crossed, forcing them to get Jack Ruby to disposes of him so the whole plot could be covered up/
There isn’t even any mention of Jim Garrison being on the trail of Hsrvey when he effectively stopped it.
I won’t waste anymore time on Pepper’s rubbish who didn’t even use the best help from spook Gerald Posner’s crap which would help explain why and how Harvey’s people got Ray to do theor dirty work.
Regarding ‘Whistleblowers’, this may be of interest to some:
‘ Monday 17th of October 2016 between 9am and 12 noon
This special vigil outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London is very important as this is the day the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will be finally questioned enabling some progress regarding the outstanding Swedish case. Please visit http://www.justice4assange.com website for the latest developments in this case.
Particularly, we remember the last time the Swedish Prosecutor was to proceed with questioning the meeting was cancelled at the last minute we also remember that JA’s legal team welcomed the progress of the investigation and has actively pursued it for years.
It is also the case that the United Nations Working Group of Arbitrary Detention has examined the case from the very start of Julian Assange’s detention in 2010 and through the years’ long procrastination and inactivity by Sweden and have found that both the UK and Sweden are arbitrarily detaining him, that they should release and compensate him.
Since neither countries have complied with their International obligations, both UK and Sweden will be under scrutiny on the subject during their UN Universal Periodic Review for Human Rights. Already UK has been chastised.
Quote “Assange’s case “raises serious concerns regarding the UK’s ability to guarantee equal treatment and the right to a fair trial, protection against inhuman and degrading treatment and arbitrary deprivation of liberty, the right to privacy and family life and the right to health. In addition, Mr Assange’s case is emblematic of the trajectory of human rights protection in the UK, with the UK’s apparent efforts to cut off access to human rights appeal mechanisms, and demonstrates the importance of access to UN complaint mechanisms for UK citizens and residents.” Unquote
If you are unable to attend, but still wish to show your support, please share with us a statement of support special for the occasion which we can read out during the event.
Julian Assange Defence Committee [email protected]
Apologies if this has already been posted.
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/04/04/chechnya-high-rise-burns-for-29-hours-with-no-collapse-wtc7/
And this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fknMGEVUvyM#t=681.683356
What surprises me about those supporting the official view is that before 9/11 there had never been anything like it. Nor afterwards. Yet on one day three buildings, not one, not two, but three, buildings collapsed. Skyscrapers had been hit by planes before. But planes never brought down any steel-structured building.
At the beginning of the second video link there is a quote from Bill Cooper that there was going to be an attack on America and Osama Bin Laden would be blamed but it would not be Osama Bin Laden. The NWO would be responsible. This further confirms what Nathan Rockefeller told Aaron Russo about there goiing to be an event and there would be videos of people searching in the caves of Afghanistan but the event would be orchestrated by US.
People going on believing the official account need to start asking questions about coincidence. Three buildings. One day. At least with Julian Assange’s so-called ‘rapes’ they happened within a week, even though there had been no allegations before or after. Two separate fabricated events, 9/11 and the accusations by Sofia Wilen and Anna Ardin, are too much weighted in coincidence and not the laws of probability. Wake up world.
” before 9/11 there had never been anything like it ”
Exactly. Please provide list of steel framed skyscrapers hit by large aircraft.
I know the one that hit the Empire State Building in 1945 was only a medium-sized bomber but it did not weaken that edifice, although it did a lot of damage, and it still stands today. Perhaps you should make a list of structural-steel buildings which have pancaked in on themselves without having had any structures weakened by detonations.
I applaud your efforts Kempe. It is a bit of an obsession with you. It is as though when anything questioning the official version is posted, Kempe is there, to shoot it down on behalf of the white hats.
Here are seven storeys of a steel-framed building collapsing due to fire. Finding this is called “doing one’s own research”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bizr86N-4nc
The Empire State was an older design, with columns roughly equally spaced throughout the structure. In WTC 1, 2, and 7 the columns had been concentrated into the core and the perimeter, to give wide, open-plan spaces in between, but making the buildings more vulnerable. Add the corruption of organised crime and you get collapses. Sorry if that’s a bit technical for some.
I expect we’ll see more collapses of steel-frames over the next few years, of buildings of poorer quality built between the construction era of the Twin Towers, and the early 2000s when the lessons of 9/11 were learned.
Here are some images of the WTC under construction, showing that the lightweight floor trusses really were lightweight:
http://www.the-office.com/floorframing.jpg
http://www.scientistsfor911truth.org/introduction/wtc_col_spandrel.jpg
Yes, the upright columns really were massive, but there’s no way those floor trusses could support the weight of the entire structure above. “Lose the geometry, lose the building”.
Clarke the seven storey fire destruction was a partial collapse. It confirms what truthers have been alleging all along. If a few stories above fall (the video runs for more than a minute) it does not have a significant impact on the floors below. This video shows what work the demolition team had to do after the fire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwPD0HF3GPM
On the other hand the twin towers collapsed in about 12 seconds (give or take). Work it out for yourself. You don’t even need to be an engineer.
This is even more compelling about the findings of your research Clarke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCHXOVlRga8
It looks like the fire went pretty well through all the building because there is only the skeletal structural-iron surrounds remaining in parts (apart from the room with the red chair – not in this video) other than the part that collapsed.
John Goss. These statistics support your point
WTC 1 : 115 floors in approximately 15 seconds. Total symmetrical collapse.
WTC 2 : 115 floors in approximately 15 seconds. Total symmetrical collapse.
WTC 7 : 47 floors in under 7 seconds. Total symmetrical collapse.
Delft Architecture Faculty : 7 floors in approximately 10 seconds. Asymmetric collapse of part of one wing.
Node, not symmetrical. Don’t bullshit. Somewhat symmetrical. The asymmetry of the WTC 2 collapse, that the top section tipped as it started to fall, is used in Truther arguments; you can’t have it both ways. You can see the asymmetry in the debris plume that this tipping resulted in. The rubble piles were not symmetrical. The ejections from the corners can be seen to progress at different rates. The remnants of the cores were not symmetrical. And the collapse times are roughly consistent with Bažant and Zhou.
Stop propagating false memes. Deception cannot counter deception.
John Goss. These statistics support your point
WTC 1 : 115 floors in approximately 15 seconds. Total symmetrical collapse.
WTC 2 : 115 floors in approximately 15 seconds. Almost total symmetrical collapse.
WTC 7 : 47 floors in under 7 seconds. Total symmetrical collapse.
Delft Architecture Faculty : 7 floors in approximately 10 seconds. Asymmetric collapse of part of one wing.
And Node, Building 7 took over fifteen seconds to collapse. Stop stretching facts in your favour. Give me some hope; stop bullshitting.
… etc ….
It is true that we could build a big see-saw with an intricate and fully functional clock on one side, and over-balance it with a greater weight of random parts from assorted clocks on the other, but doing so would tell us almost nothing about how clocks function.
John Goss and Paul Barbara, I apologise. You’re not lying, are you? You actually have to care about truth and falsity to be able to lie. You’re actually just bullshitting. You couldn’t care less about about accuracy or facts. So long as a statement points in the direction you wish to lead your audience, you just seize upon it and transmit it on. Equally, if you find a statement that contradicts your preferred direction, you either ignore it or call it disinformation or propaganda.
I actually do care about facts, so while you two indulge in your hobby, I get frustrated. Look, if there were actually any evidence indicating pre-rigged demolition of the Twin Towers, I’d be taking it very, very seriously, as I do Building 7’s 2.25 seconds of acceleration at approximately g. But there just isn’t any. I follow your links and watch a load of your videos (always videos – you don’t like documents or scientific papers, do you?), but there’s just nothing, zilch, nada. You just can’t understand what I’m on about, can you? You think these videos you post actually mean something. Internal consistency, correct references to sources, full instead of edited quotes – the value of these is lost on you, because all you care about is which way it points.
All of which suggests that I’m wasting my time. I may as well cast pearls before swine.
While you’re feeling low Clarke I don’t really want to enter into a debate with you. I trust the engineers. They don’t even agree with one another about the method. Steven Jones, Judy Wood and Morgan Reynolds present different theories. But what they all know, like me, is that 9/11 needs investigating to find out the truth of what really happened. The science is in their videos which are of course presented in a lay fashion so that people like me and you can understand them.
Hope you are soon feeling better.
John, thanks for your kind words, but it’s not going to improve. I don’t like human nature, and I don’t see any hope. I should have stuck with physics. There would be some hope for me if I were in the scientific community but I’m too late for that.
I’m now convinced that advanced communication developed in humans primarily as a means of manipulation. The whole structure of human society argues for that. I cannot see any hope for a species in which success of individuals and groups is determined primarily by how well they can deceive and dominate.
While I agree with you largely although everybody is not out to deceive. Robots and artificial intelligence will be the new slaves of the rich and super-rich unless there is a change in thinking. Fortunately most of the rich are lazy and not capable of maintaining artificial intelligence let alone creating it. Their interest is in making money and the playthings money can buy. They are shallow.
We all have our own ideas. We support them, sometimes even with facile arguments, and perhaps sometimes too we are too rigid in our support. What I do know, which nobody can argue about, is that Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen were much more stabe countries before 9/11 than they are today. 9/11 gave the nasty Bush administration a raison d’être to start its unholy wars. I believe it was specifically planned and people like Aaron Russo and Wesley Clark show that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw
Don’t know why I put as an afterthought ‘although’ in the first sentence above. 🙂
John, I’d like to agree; God knows I could do with some hope, but it’s not “us versus them”, not even “rich versus poor”:
– “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Yes, the countries you name have all been destabilised. Libya and Syria were both destabilised partly by Western exploitation of Saudi-inspired religious extremists, who now run amok in Iraq and Libya. Yemen is being attacked because it threatens Saudi power, so the so-called West is supporting Saudi Arabia with massive supplies of weapons.
This decades-old competition between the USA and Russia, formerly the USSR. Through US and British influence upon the monarchies of the Middle East, the extremists have been sent again and again against those countries that aligned with the USSR and modelled their political systems upon the one-party state.
But on 9/11, the policy backfired. Chomsky is spot on. In no way did the US hawks and neocons want the embarrassment of 9/11. There is no way they’d have laid a false trail to implicate their most exploited “allies”. If the policy were widely understood by the electorate, the backlash would stop the policy within two elections.
So the pro-war powers had to thwart understanding. Their tool is propaganda, but to be successful they needed more then one strategy. For the masses, amplification of islamophobia sufficed; Anon1 falls into this category. But how could they handle those who suspect propaganda and manipulation? They turned to the trusty technique of divide and conquer. Multiple contradictory theories were amplified through right-wing US talk radio and the like, the same outlets that promote anti-UN depopulation theories, anti-science theories to undermine climate science, anti-environmental theories, and the weakening of democratic controls over corporate power.
And it has worked and continues to work; this thread proves it. I can write all of the above, but around half here suspect that I’m some sort of pro-war agent. Look at Chomsky, smeared on this very thread. Look at Craig Murray, blacklisted. Look at Nafeez Ahmed, sacked from The Guardian for seeing too well and describing too clearly:
http://www.nafeezahmed.com/2015/08/911-conspiracy-theory-and-bullshit.html
The real battle isn’t between “us and them”. It’s between truth and falsity.
Subjugating oneself to reality requires humility. It requires acceptance of being mistaken. I used to accept demolition but I was mistaken. I had to accept the facts and admit that I had been wrong, and I had to do so in the knowledge that others would treat me the way I once treated Angrysoba and Larry from St Louis.
I think Clark we should agree to disagree.
John, sorry, but your position isn’t coherent enough to be either agreed or disagreed with.
Dickhead!
I tried to reach out an olive branch because I know you are unwell but there is no need to be insulting.
Your trouble is Clark you believe you are right to the exclusion of all others. I have tolerated this nonsense and tried to make allowances. You need to go back through the comments and see how you have taken over this thread and how opinions of those who do not share your (and Kempe’s) ludicrous views is not worth consideration.
I’m sorry, it reminds me of how much of a stickler you were over the combined harvesters, totally inflexible. Your last insult was the last straw.
I said I was sorry, but there you are. Should I be “flexible” over whether light travels in straight lines? It’s your own problem, John. When facts get in the way of the narrative you wish to promote, you get “flexible” with the facts. You chop and change, demonstrating no integrity, so that one day you’ll insist that bowing didn’t occur, then the next you’ll say that bowing did occur but it’s consistent with demolition. You’ll raise the matter of a court case which you says proves deception by the BBC, then claim that it’s a red herring and that those challenging you are diverting the thread. You’ll claim molten matter falling from WTC 1, but just quietly ignore the lack of evidence when challenged.
How am I supposed to decide which of your contradictory assertions to agree or disagree with? It can’t be done; sorry, not my fault.
Further, your offer of an “olive branch” and “mak[ing] allowances” suggests that you think these matters can be determined by how aggressively arguments can be expressed, rather than by accuracy of facts and consistency of logic. I remind you that we are debating demolition, a matter of physical reality, not opposing political opinions.
It is true that sufficient aggression may drive me or others from the thread, but that will not change the facts of what occurred. To think otherwise is to invoke magic – that reality, even events in the past, can be altered by spells, because spells are merely sequences of words.
I am sorry that you found my remark insulting.
There is no accuracy in your ‘facts’. They start from the premise that the twin-towers could fall as fast as they did when there was resistance below. You start off with a basic denial of science (Newton’s laws) and expect people to take you seriously in your support for the lying American war-mongering machine.
I’m out of here.
(sigh) I do not deny Newton’s laws; Chandler misapplied them, “proving” that even the collapse of a house of cards can’t accelerate.
I OPPOSE ALL WARMONGERING, US or otherwise. Please apologise for this slur.
NB. America is a continent; the US is a relatively minor part of it. I deny US exceptionalism even in my use of language.
Glenn, sorry for my rat-tat-tat; obviously I should permit myself to be denigrated.
John, really; I wouldn’t lie. Chandler’s downward acceleration / action-reaction argument is wrong. It’s like saying that you can’t fall out of a tree because you can’t accelerate downwards through the trunk – well, the second bit is true so far as it goes, but it doesn’t stop you falling out of a tree.
The thing that really saps my energy is constantly challenging little false claims, but I’ve seen how it works. Any little distortion that seems to support demolition becomes part of the mythology. It’s like the New Agers and their cancer “cures”. One person on a grape juice diet undergoes spontaneous remission, and suddenly it’s proof that the whole of oncology is a conspiracy to kill people with radiotherapy and mustard gas. All the ones who die were obviously killed by the conspiracy.
You’ll never find real objections to the various mainstream narratives while you’re constantly finding false ones to amplify, and even if you do they’ll be unrecognisable under your self-generated mountain of bullshit.
– Deception, Justice, Peace.
No, that can’t work.
– Counter-narrative, Justice, Peace.
Hmmm, could work, if we’re really lucky with the counter-narrative.
– Truth, Justice, Peace.
Truth?!? No way; that would involve admitting our own faults! It would mean admitting imperfection, weakness! Let’s go back to Plan B; we’re feeling lucky, aren’t we? We don’t want any misery-guts who don’t feel lucky.
Clark, you seem to be in a very dark place at the moment; I say that not to disparage anything you’ve said here, because you’ve made some very excellent points that seriously need to be considered in the 9/11 debate (mostly about balance).
Whatever us fucked-up humans do, the sun will always rise in the morning.
For me it’s always the best time of day, because it is the affirmation of life.
Life is not a given, it’s a gift.
RobG, I posted at 10:02 below ‘blind’, without reading the thread. Thank you for that kindness.
“Life is not a spectacle or a feast. It’s a predicament”.
I can’t remember who wrote that, but for some reason I wrote it up on my living-room wall.
Last night I watched videos of Danny Jowenko (and before Paul Barbara starts up, no it seems most unlikely that Jowenko was elaborately murdered). I really relate to his final remark about Building 7; he makes a quizzical face and says, “I can’t explain it”.
I think I know why Trutherism angers me so. It’s very similar to a religious cult.
And I think I know why it obsesses me so. In various ways, it’s particularly like Jehovah’s Witnessism, which ruined, and continues to ruin my life.
And I think that’s why Glenn upsets me the most of all here. He attacks me for something that already has an outpost in my soul, that I can’t be rid of because it was indoctrinated into me from before the emergence of my consciousness.
Glenn, I need your help. If rationality does not prevail I will go under.
I have had to stop discussing politics with two of my close relations, relatives A and B. They get angry and make abusive personal comments about me which they would never make under other circumstances.
Relative A has been like that ever since we became adults. He believes the world is largely as it is portrayed in the TV news, and if I challenge that view he interprets it as a sign of my lying twisted nature that I see such traits in politicians he trusts. He would never say that (or believe it) outside the context of a political argument. However every discussion about ‘the way of the world’ ends up with him making bitter remarks about me. The more I offer supporting evidence for my views, the angrier he gets.
Relative B was, until a few years ago, much more relaxed during such discussions, in fact he sought out my views on matters which puzzled him. I had long made plain my belief that 9/11 was an inside job to which he maintained an open mind. Then one day he emailed me saying he had been watching an Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth video and he was now convinced that 9/11 WAS an inside job. A family meeting was scheduled for about a month later when all three of us would be together and I looked forward to seeing how relative A would react to finding out that his was now the minority view regarding 9/11.
I was to be disappointed! In the intervening period, Relative B had watched the BBC programme “9/11 Ten Years On” and decided he’d been hoodwinked by AE911Truth. He’d lost his open mind and was vehemently opposed to any sceptical views. Now, not only does he get angry when I challenge 9/11 orthodoxy, he gets angry when I challenge any political orthodoxy. He too now dismisses my views on the grounds of deep and unpleasant faults in my character. I can date this sradical personality change to the exact day! ….. The day he watched the BBC’s “9/11 Ten Years On.”
How do I interpret this? I believe that in the few days when relative B believed that 9/11 was an inside job, he couldn’t avoid the huge and horrible implications that come with it – wholesale media complicity, deception and corruption all the way to the top – in short that the world was not the cosy place it had seemed. When the BBC programme offered him an escape from this dystopian nightmare he grasped for it like a drowning man. He could believe that everything is all right again ….. at the price of locking away and never examining again anything which contradicts the comforting illusion.
A mental trick must be adopted to accommodate the dilemma posed by those inconvenient 9/11 theories : they must be the product of deliberate deception by those who champion them ….. but it is disturbingly difficult to dismiss them on rational grounds …. so they must be such despicable ideas that they are abhorrent to a decent person … therefore it is OK to dismiss them in anger without examining them …. it is logical to direct my anger at these Truthers because they have warped minds and are trying to deceive me.
I enjoy debate but not bitter argument. They cannot see that if my views are extreme to them, then their views must be equally extreme to me. They get angry, I don’t. They are intolerant of my views whereas I understand theirs. Why my views are provocative to them but their views are not provocative to me is not a question they ask themselves. And so now when they make what seems to them everyday observations about the news, I bite my tongue and thus continue to enjoy the company of two otherwise fine people.
Node, one of my favourite sites is Media Lens – not the message board; the main site by the Two Davids. Their articles are not quite as good as they used to be; they’re getting more angry, but the results of their meditative practice are still evident in their adherence to clear, contextualised quotes and facts, and avoidance of exaggeration.
My suggestion is that you examine the source material. Ask relative B what matters A&E deceived him about, but refrain from arguing and/or “correcting” him. Note them down. Find those sections on the A&E site – be thorough; the arguments probably appear on multiple pages, some more exaggerated than others. Then watch the BBC’s Ten Years On, noting the arguments presented that contradict the points in your notes. Then return to the A&E site, find the contradictory material, and identify those passages that, in this context, could be taken as exaggerations, distortions or deceptions.
There is more I could write but it is more personal. The one point I will make is that, from your comments, you seem no longer to regard demolition as a theory but as a proven fact. On that matter, you seem to have left behind the stage of consideration, and have since taken to advocating demolition, of presenting only those facts that tend to support it and neglecting those facts that contradict it. This will make it difficult for you to recognise “those passages that, in this context, could be taken as exaggerations, distortions or deceptions”.
Humans suffer a troublesome tendency to polarise; our little brains have trouble considering both of two contradictory hypotheses at once, let alone more, let alone shades of grey and uncertainty. When someone contradicts our beliefs, we have a tendency to escalate, to present a harder-hitting argument. Meanwhile, the other party is suffering exactly the same tendency but in the opposite direction. Those whose views are supported by a smaller proportion of the involved population tend to compensate by resorting to more extreme arguments and fighting harder, in the unconscious hope that when peace is restored the border will have shifted favourably. But this process has no connection to the validity of facts; it’s merely a legacy, a side effect of being descended of the (on average) more triumphant in the evolutionary process.
You have missed the point of my post. It was : Why do they get angry when I express my honestly-held opinion that the world as portrayed by the media is a fiction?
An example: If I said I was going to vote SNP because I believe Scotland would be better as an independent nation, they might argue for UK unity but they wouldn’t get angry with me. But if I said I was going to vote SNP because I believe Westminster is controlled by shadowy bankers, they WOULD get angry with me. Never mind whether I’m right or not, why are they prepared to tolerate one of those opinions and not the other?
And not just these two relatives, I have friends who would react in just the same way. I am an opinionated kind of guy and so I have many opportunities to study this phenomenon!
Node, hang on a minute; you wrote:
– “Relative B was, until a few years ago, much more relaxed during such discussions…”
Something changed. Since it changed for Relative B, it might have changed earlier for Relative A, in circumstances you’re unaware of, or maybe A is just not like B.
I think you’ve attributed B’s change to the BBC, but you wrote that Relative B used to be relaxed when you expressed your views, then became more convinced after reading the A&E site, and then started getting angry with you after the BBC programme. I’d say the change was probably to do with both sources; B had been exposed to the BBC all his life. Little ape brains, not adapted to coping with contradiction, ambiguity and the undiscoverable.
What I find difficult is that it’s lonely being between the polarities, where I tend to get shot by both sides. Things got quite bad for me when Exexpat likened me to “Cameron with blood on his hands”. Hell, I wrote a very strong letter to my MP before the Syria airstrikes vote. I’ve been hair-trigger since that remark and I’m not likely to calm down with Glenn and Vronsky needling me. I think the sources of anger may be quite diverse, and most things are more complex than we tend to think.
And also, people don’t like being deceived. One source raises no suspicion of deception. Two contradictory sources may imply deception, and responsibility then falls on the reader to work out where. Most likely there is error, and probably deception from both sources. This annoys me all the time. I point out something wrong in a claim, and various then accuse me of “supporting the official story”, as if it’s a binary choice.
Corporate media distortion is the most comfortable sort because it works mainly by omission. Those who make strong claims are more likely to be perceived as deceptive.
” A mental trick must be adopted to accommodate the dilemma posed by those inconvenient 9/11 theories : they must be the product of deliberate deception by those who champion them ….. but it is disturbingly difficult to dismiss them on rational grounds ”
Well no it isn’t and no mental trickery or pseudo-psychology is needed because there is no dilemma once you realise how absurd the inconvenient theories are. Clearly the BBC documentary opened Relative B’s eyes to this.
But why do they get angry? If my opinions about 9/11 are so ridiculous, why not pity me, or laugh at me, or just agree to disagree?
If we’re watching a football match and disagree about whether a player was offside, they don’t accuse me of deliberate deception or impugn my character. Yet they will do just that if I question whether the media portray the world honestly. I’ve suggested an explanation (the mental trick you quoted). If you don’t accept my explanation, what’s yours?
I’m asking you to accept that I’m describing a real situation without exaggeration. I’m sure many other ‘truthers’ have experienced similar behaviour.
Compare the sources. Relative B gets angry with you. A&E do use deceptive techniques at times, as do the BBC. If the BBC programme has exposed bias or deception in A&E’s argument, relative B may be angry with you for not noticing that and warning him.
This is certainly what gets me mad at times. All media has an agenda, so when we discuss personally it is up to each of us to screen our sources and pre-warn those we’re conversing with. It’s about respect. I feel disrespected when John Goss presents impossible arguments about hologram aircraft, or buried nukes as promoted by the best friend of an arms dealer. He should have checked. Neglecting to do so is like offering a gift of rotten fruit, or a pen that leaks ink on your fingers.
P.S. I’ll tell you the more personal bits if you ask.
The point I am making is not about me, you, my relatives or any particular belief or opinion. I gave examples to illustrate my point (not very well, apparently) but the general question is:
Why do some people get irrationally angry when their worldview* is challenged?
* worldview : noun; the overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world. (The Free Dictionary)
… and I’ll convert my suggested explanation into the general case too.
Because when confronted with evidence that their worldview is unrealistic these people are unable to cope with the flood of ramifications. They cope by denying the evidence using emotion rather than logic.
Node, I can’t answer you because (1) there are assumptions inherent in the questions you’re asking and (2) I’d have to point out some personal matters.
You could compare and contrast my own predicament, of repeatedly being accused of being a shill working for the assumed 9/11 conspiracy.
David Cameron at the UN “9/11 was a jewish plot and 7/7 was a staged event” and Cameron was serious about dealing with the people that promoted these things. No ridicule pity or laughing involved with his comments either! Why would the UK Inc have their top puppet mouth off about these ridiculous laughable theories?
Maxter, here’s Cameron’s speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g-HqRP-ANk
It’s long-winded waffle – convoluted rationalisation – by a hamstrung politician. He’s trying to appear opposed to “terrorism”, but he’s committed to US/neocon policies including the overthrow of Syria’s existing government, so he’s also trying to justify US/UK etc. arming, training and assistance to “selected” religious extremists. He’s also promoting justifications for increased government control and surveillance over media, communications and public speaking.
The problem is always the same whether we look at individuals, companies and corporations, media, or governments. Everyone recognises that there are severe problems, but illusory superiority blinds them (us) to their (our) own contribution to them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
Cognitive dissonance at work. And the powers that be count on it.
Yes and yes.
And the more subtle point I am leading towards is that in my personal experience*, it is the defenders of the official narrative who get angry and abusive, not the ‘truthers.’ I get angry at the people behind these murderous schemes, and the enabling media, but never at ordinary people who don’t happen to share my beliefs. I understand that for whatever reason – lack of interest, too busy, personality type, etc – they see the world differently. There but for the grace of the flying spaghetti monster go I.
I therefore consider the behaviour I have been describing as a significant clue regards where the truth lies. If cognitive dissonance is “the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioural decisions and attitude change” then it is instructive to note in which individuals the symptoms are manifest.
*When I say “personal experience” I am referring to the real world outside the internet.
Node wrote:
– “it is the defenders of the official narrative who get angry and abusive, not the ‘truthers”
(cough) so it isn’t abusive to dismiss those who challenge 9/11 “Truth” as conspirators in mass murder? That happens all the time – eg. Vronsky to me at the top of this page. I find it remarkably offensive.
Note – false dichotomy – I do not defend some official narrative.
1) Test your assertion with reductio ad absurdum. You can prove any absurd proposition that gains some minority foothold to be true with this reasoning.
2) Note that cognitive dissonance proves nothing about truth and falsity. Cognitive dissonance would occur just as much to someone with accurate beliefs who became overwhelmed by false opinion.
Example for (1) above – I used to go knocking on doors, preaching with my mum as a Jehovah’s Witless. We were always very polite, but some people got angry. We knew we had The Truth. The cognitive dissonance displayed proves that Jehovah’s Witlessism is True!
so it isn’t abusive to dismiss those who challenge 9/11 “Truth” as conspirators …
I specifically excluded internet debate from my statement.
Clark, it is impossible to disentangle your response to my question from all the personal comment you make, and I don’t want to get side-tracked.
Node, I just remembered. Away from this thread in private e-mails (if I remember correctly) I’ve had a demolition theorist get very angry at me because I argued for the possibility of collapse of the Twin Towers due to fire and damage. Cognitive dissonance can cut in various directions.
Here are a couple of interesting videos taken on 9/11 regarding Building 7. I’ll be looking at these more closely later.
Oops:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLqGRv7CQlc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtkWNHSG3MY
I’m posting these for their video record, not for the message at the beginning of the second one.
For the second of my two YouTube links above, “WTC 7 Before Collapse”, think the eye logo on the reporter’s mic denotes CBS, so presumably channel CBS 2. Can anyone verify this please? The camera timestamp at the beginning reads 16:34.
I’ll just leave this here.
http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/psychologists-explain-why-coming-to-grips-with-911-truth-is-so-difficult/
And how should Truthers come to terms with 9/11 misinformation? Has Chandler withdrawn or corrected his paper Downward Acceleration of WTC 1? People are still using that argument. John Goss used it just up this page, and accused me of supporting US warmongering because I reject it.
It’s rich depicting denial of provably false claims as some sort of psychological problem.
There is NO evidence for explosive demolition of the Twin Towers. None. I have studied the evidence thoroughly and I say that with confidence. There is massive evidence that the Twin Towers collapsed due to severe damage and fire. I have not avoided the evidence; I have examined it thoroughly, coming at it from both yea and nay approaches. Here’s the clincher; inward bowing initiating collapse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJPYTVjxug
There is some evidence that may indicate explosive demolition of Building 7, but there is far more indicating otherwise.
*** HELP REQUESTED ***
I’m looking for help with this video:
“Inside 7 World Trade Center Moments Before Collapse”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLqGRv7CQlc
I’d like to find its source, and work out what time it was taken from visual and/or audio clues rather than relying on the title. It’s a six minute excerpt from something; I think it might be interesting to find more of it.
Any comments appreciated.
Apparently it was CBS, taken between the collapses of the Twin Towers; see comments at the link below. It was removed from YouTube by CBS on copyright grounds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp2SC_aduTA&google_comment_id=z13oepmwxnv0ijufi22ygrwghq2adnjdq
That makes sense of the timing and people still being in Building 7 because Barry Jennings would have been in Building 7 at that time.
Here it is; incredible video. Respect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2EZddwTuR0
I enjoy your posts Mr Murray,
but on 9/11 I would offer two points that need an answer,
First the evidence of molten metal. Cannot be caused by burning jet fuel.
Second and even more telling I believe, what would be a reasonable explanation of the fall of tower 7 being announced by the BBC 30mins BEFORE it happened.
Regarding molten metal: I found a video of Leslie Robertson speaking at a lecture. He described “little rivulets of molten steel” – I think that’s what he said, but do check. Maybe he said molten iron. I wanted to hear his opinion because I’d expect him to know molten steel from other metals. He didn’t say there were large quantities. There is that clip of the firefighters, one saying “like a foundry”, but he doesn’t actually say how big the pools of metal were, and I certainly couldn’t blame him if he was being a bit dramatic.
Various other commonly used metals melt at lower temperatures. Of course there was lots of aluminium cladding on the outside of the Towers, and aluminium aircraft structure within. The buildings had much copper wiring, and large transformers and motors with copper windings. There were also UPS rooms – Uninterruptible Power Supplies for server computers, with racks and racks of batteries – lead-acid accumulators very similar to car batteries. Office fires could certainly melt lead, and lead-acid batteries can melt themselves if shorted out. Here’s an investigation which also corrected NIST and some official documents:
http://undicisettembre.blogspot.co.uk/2007/06/ups-on-81st-floor-of-wtc2.html
http://undicisettembre.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/nist-confirms-ups-on-81st-floor-of-wtc2.html
Molten copper and/or aluminium are other possibilities. I’m not sure if office fires would melt these, but short-circuits of the mains supply certainly could, as could short-circuits in the battery circuitry of UPS installations, even if the mains electricity had failed. Both mains and batteries could also melt steel.
As to the BBC’s early announcement, I still find it spooky and I retain some suspicion that Building 7 was deliberately brought down. But it must be noted that the collapses of all three buildings were anticipated. Deformation of each Tower was noticed before collapse. Fire chiefs tried to order firefighters to evacuate, but inadequacy of their radios and failure of the Twin Towers public address systems prevented the orders reaching personnel. Building 7 was evacuated and an exclusion zone implemented hours before collapse. Deformation of Building 7 was being measured and monitored. These points can be confirmed from surviving firefighters’ testimony.
I once accidentally shorted a 38Ah motorcycle battery with a spanner. It had been on charge for a while and the spark musk have ignited the hydrogen-oxygen mix. I didn’t immediately know what had happened. My thought process went something like this:
Why is my face wet? Why are my ears ringing? Why is the right-hand side of the battery a jagged mess with the plates showing? Why is it raining plastic fragments? “What?” Why didn’t I hear myself speak just then?… Oh, the battery must have exploded and that must be acid on my face… Quick, wash!
The spanner had a quarter-inch notch in it; just missing. It was about half an hour before I could hear normally again.
I’ve just caught myself at it. I didn’t “accidentally” short the battery. I must have rationalised my own memory…
I’d been abusing the battery by using the bike while the alternator was dead by charging the battery each evening. This had worn the battery out and it was no longer holding much charge. I thought that a high forward current might help restore it, so I deliberately shorted it with a 19mm spanner.
The clue that I’d rationalised my own memory record came from my image of the notched spanner. It was the 17mm/19mm open-ended from the bike’s own tool kit, but the battery terminals were only 10mm; why would I have been using such a big spanner? Well, because it was long enough to reach across the terminals. Now I remember rightly I’d expected a largish current which is why I used a spanner. I remember making a firm contact onto the left terminal, then swiftly and firmly closing the gap onto the right terminal. Then followed the surreal experience above…
I lived to be older and wiser. Washing quickly saved my face from the acid. I was lucky no shrapnel hit my eyes. And now, thirty years later, I’ve admitted foolishness to myself, amended my memory, and confirmed the process of rationalisation.
Aluminium melts at around 660C so the cladding could’ve been melted by the normal fires. I know Truthers react by claiming molten aluminium isn’t orange in colour and whilst that might be true at temperatures just above it’s melting point as it get’s hotter the colour changes. At 1,000C it is orange.
The BBC announced the collpase of WTC 7 in error shortly after they were told it had been abandoned. That’s a reasonable explanation. What isn’t reasonable is the idea that the BBC were in on the conspiracy and that whoever planned it provided them with a script in advance. That’s not really very credible is it? That a foreign broadcaster would be trusted with advance knowledge of the most secret project since ULTRA.
Cognitve dissonance is just a pseudo-scientific and patronising escape route for Truthers. If faced with a non-Truther who won’t be taken in by a conspiracy obviously they’re just a “sheeple” suffering from “cognitive dissonance” rather than someone able to distinguish facts from fantasy.
Kempe, check my links above at 20:43; it’s a good investigation. The molten metal was probably lead.
Cognitive dissonance is very real; I suffered years of it escaping Jehovah’s Witlessism. But cognitive dissonance says nothing about which world view is more accurate. Truther’s misapply it, same as Chandler mangles Newton’s laws.
High levels of lead were detected in the dust from the collapse so that’s a very good possibility. Either way the stream of whatever isn’t proof it was molten steel or the presence of thermite.
My apologies over the cognative dissonance thing. If you’re presented with two credible sets of data it’s possibility but not when one is totally lacking in reason or evidence.
Oh I was indoctrinated from the age of four, I think; it was too early in life to remember clearly. Two hours on Sundays and Thursdays, an hour on Tuesdays, plus an hour of bible study and Watchtower study with Mum on a Friday, plus some hours “out on the doors” with Mum every non-school week. Dad wasn’t “in The Truth” so I was convinced he’d be killed at Armageddon around 1975 plus or minus a decade or so (they refused to pin down the date) when I’d have been twelve. Then at school: no participation in religious education, not allowed into the religious bits of assembly, no carol singing, no participation in Christmas or Easter, no birthday celebrations (mine or others), not even cards; it’s very isolating. I didn’t want to take biology but it would have been frowned upon because I’d have been taught evolution. All under threat of death at Armageddon if I’d “left The Truth”.
It isn’t devoid of evidence; they just pick supportive facts such as the intricacy of eyes and cells, and bits of the Bible that seem to be backed up by recent findings such as David’s “you (God) protected me in the womb” as a reference to the placental barrier and rabbits “chewing the cud” as a reference to cecotrophy, and either never mention contradictory evidence, or find some way of explaining it away, and they repeat these over and over again. It’s a lot like 9/11 demolition theories in these respects – the speed and symmetry of the collapses, “no building ever before”, the 2.25 seconds of free-fall, the same YouTube clips over and over. Anyone contradicting the doctrine is influenced by or working for The Devil, just like you and me must be agents of the conspiracy, and anything unexplained is attributed to God’s omnipotence, just as the 9/11 conspiracy calls on “secret military technology” like mini-nukes that don’t produce I131 or hologram planes that make great holes in buildings.
I didn’t leave because I stopped believing – I was too scared for that. What happened is that I found that non-Witlesses weren’t evil, so I rebelled against “God” and decided that the more moral choice was to die with the non-believers at Armageddon.
But it did help set me up to cope with cognitive dissonance. Node. Lysias. Sorry I get cross sometimes 🙂
Kempe, no apology necessary. It’s the ones accusing me of being feeble-minded who should apologise.
Once I was “out of The Truth” I realised I’d been in a bubble of confirmation. Then, of course, the question occurred to me if I wasn’t just in a bigger bubble. No, I don’t believe any “official story”. I’m not going to start believing things just because they get repeated a lot, in either mainstream or alternative media.
And this is why I respect Osama bin Laden and the Saudi-indoctrinated extremists. I’d have fought to resist a blood transfusion, and they are quite capable of flying themselves to their own deaths into buildings. The ages are about right, too – it dogged me right through my twenties. Thankfully I was never forced to witness live beheading, flogging or hand amputations. Life can be made cheap by applying effective techniques.
See my Gravatar? I wrote the program that plotted that. Don’t tell me my science is no good, and don’t tell me it’s all my vanity. Science, reason and adherence to fact are the only salvation I have left.
Clark, I read your posts above on Jehovah Witnesses and the power of repetition. Thanks for explaining that background. Maybe in a way the Witnesses did you a favour. We all perceive reality on the basis of repetition. Many never get to realise this. If one belongs to a group whose repeated message is at odds with that of wider society it may be that there is a greater chance of beginning to question how we have arrived at many of our fundamental premises, and start to try and apply reason and some level of watchfulness over our responses. Anyway I don’t always agree with you, but thanks for explaining this about your background.
Fwl, thank you. Yes, I think my upbringing eventually led to my taking little on trust and maintaining a questioning attitude. But I think the cost to me was high as well. People take comfort in their beliefs and in the agreement they find among the groups they form or join, but I’m ever an outsider and consequently lonely.
Lysias, I’m sorry that I was rude and aggressive to you (October 7, 00:06 and 00:27; previous page of comments) and I apologise.
@ Clark October 18, 2016 at 03:15
‘*** HELP REQUESTED ***
I’m looking for help with this video:
“Inside 7 World Trade Center Moments Before Collapse”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLqGRv7CQlc
I’d like to find its source, and work out what time it was taken from visual and/or audio clues rather than relying on the title. It’s a six minute excerpt from something; I think it might be interesting to find more of it.
Any comments appreciated.’
Very interesting. I was reading down the comments, and thought I’d check it out. Sure enough, I had never seen it. I got the name of the Secret Service guy, Bennette, and the department he said he was in, OST (Office of Safe Transportation – of nuclear material, that is!!! – but some further digging came up with an article where he had been charged with stealing 5 Security Service cars, so while it is true he worked with the Security Service, he may have been telling a porky with the OST business):
Came up with some interesting stuff, but not as good as your later find of the 29-minute clip (which I didn’t get to till after I’d found this:
‘9/11 WTC ‘Nuclear Demolition Man’ from Nuclear OST Dep-T with Construction Helmet in WTC-7 Lobby!’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptMLxF06LJs (gives an exact time frame in the ‘notes’ below video);
‘Prosecutors Say Rescuer Stole Cars Recovered At Ground Zero’:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/14/nyregion/prosecutors-say-rescuer-stole-cars-recovered-at-ground-zero.html?_r=0
But that siren certainly does sound strange – I seem to have a recollection of a similar sound from a Chemical/Biological siren from some Gulf War video clips.
I wonder what the two guys were ‘rescuing’ on the gurney?
OST was (is?) a post in the US Secret Service; “Operations Support Technician”:
https://web.archive.org/web/20131512594100/http://www.secretservice.gov/opportunities_technical.shtml
Office of Secure Transportation is a (completely different) department, not a post, which is what the cameraman asked him. Therefore there’s no reason to think that Bennette had any connection to nuclear materials.
Thanks for that clarification. When I looked up OST all I could find was ‘Office of Secure Transportation’.
‘Operations Support Technician’ makes much more sense, as in the article (not video) he is said to be ‘head of the agency’s motor pool at 7 World Trade Center’.
Anyone watching that video of WTC7 should also be aware the EPA knoowingly lied and said ‘the air is safe to breathe’:
‘World Trade Center Rescue Workers Believed EPA, Ended Up Sick’:
http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/center-science-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/ground-zero-air-pollution.html#.WAcsuY8rKM8
And the head of the EPA finally, 15 years late, apologises for being wrong, but still doesn’t admit she lied at the behest of the Bush Administration: ‘Former EPA head admits she was wrong to tell New Yorkers post-9/11 air was safe’:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/epa-head-wrong-911-air-safe-new-york-christine-todd-whitman
Many clean-up workers were told NOT to wear protective masks, so as to reassure New Yorkers the air was fine.
Further to my above comment: ‘Thousands Have Cancer, Hundreds Dead from Massive Chemical Attack’:
http://www.shiftfrequency.com/911-first-responders-die-lack-of-medical-care/
‘….This isn’t just some far-flung theory. As Scientific American wrote on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, as also noted by Rudowski in his video, the then administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Christie Whitman told the public on September 13, 2001, “EPA is greatly relieved to have learned that there appears to be no significant levels of asbestos dust in the air in New York City.” Adding, “We will continue to monitor closely.”
Five days later, she perpetuated the lie by reiterating firmly, “I am glad to assure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that the air is safe to breath [sic].”
But it wasn’t.
Asbestos that had been used in the construction of the North Tower of the World Trade Center ballooned out in a putrid, toxic cloud containing untold quantities of other toxins and particulates — and has since caused illness, respiratory ailments, and fatalities in an unknown number of people present that day.
In fact, the Inspector General of Whitman’s own agency concluded two years after she’d assured people’s safety, that the EPA “did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement.” Of the myriad samples the EPA did collect in the weeks following the attack, 25 percent contained levels above the 1 percent “safe” threshold indicative of “significant risk.”
“Competing considerations, such as national security concerns and the desire to reopen Wall Street, also played a role in the EPA’s air quality statements,” the Inspector General noted in the report in 2003.
That deception in the interest of, essentially, the banking interests and the government quite possibly directly influenced the decisions of volunteers — firefighters, police, health workers, local residents, concerned civilians, and members of the military — to work at or near Ground Zero in the days and weeks following. Worse, as Rudowski explained, volunteers were told protective masks and gear were unnecessary — and should be removed…….’
Paul Barbara, absolutely, and it’s despicable At every turn, the people and workers have been lied to by the organisations that are supposed to serve and protect them. The EPA said the air was safe. Legislators forced NIST to say the buildings were safe. Intelligence said there was no way they could have known and the military said there was no way it could have been prevented. The government endorsed and enabled all of the above and the news media duly transmitted and amplified it. An information environment entirely dominated by deception and manipulation, all to keep the money flowing, and we haven’t even mentioned foreign policy.
No wonder conspiracy theories abound. This is what Kempe needs to acknowledge.
@ Clark
‘…Legislators forced NIST to say the buildings were safe….’
Pity you felt you had to slip that in, or we could have agreed. There is absolutely no evidence the buildings weren’t safe, never mind of Legislators forcing NIST to say they were.
Read NCSTAR 1. The change in law is referred to – May 2002, before the NIST investigation started. That was quick, wasn’t it? Just like the Patriot Act. The disclaimers on the first pages refer to the terms applied to the investigations, and the non-disclosure agreements NIST had to submit to before they could get plans, records and data about the buildings – ie. they were prevented from publishing the deficiencies. Kempe tried to link a report in professional journal Fire Engineering about the fire resistant materials (“fire-proofing”) that were flaking off, but it’s behind a paywall so he summarised a few comments later:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post/comment-page-97/#comment-627963
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post/comment-page-97/#comment-628117
NCSTAR 1 records substandard thickness of fireproofing on samples from the wreckage, such as was salvaged before the authorities whisked it away. The NIST Building 7 report doesn’t mention the components that were meant to stop girders being forced off their seats by expansion. It doesn’t say they were omitted, but it sure doesn’t say they were present, either. But the new law gagged NIST from making any accusations, as recorded in NCSTAR 1. Funny, that, eh?
The families of emergency responders who were killed in the collapses were offered out-of-court compensation settlements but had to submit to gagging orders to receive payment; that looks like a cover-up to me. And read a few pages from this search term:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=corruption+new+york+construction
OK, reports I’ve looked at don’t mention substandard building components or construction, but every other type of corruption is there – what are those publications meant to do? Tear some buildings apart to prove it?
There’s loads of evidence that the buildings were unsafe, and even more that it was covered up as much as possible. I bet NIST are well pissed off.
I bet NIST were well pissed off, even before a load of Truther’s turned up accusing them of being party to mass-murder by demolition. Under the terms of the new 2002 law, they couldn’t even defend themselves from the Truthers’ accusations by pointing out the buildings’ deficiencies.
Yet NCSTAR 1 records as many of the deficiencies as NIST could publish. The language is carefully neutral but the information is there. Meanwhile, the demolition theorists are free to use the most inflammatory language they can think of. It must be as frustrating as hell.
Paul, to be fair to you I would guess there are some well-connected big-wigs in (or above) NIST who were keeping the researching engineers in line, too. Or maybe they were threatened via funding, lack of promotion, loss of jobs or pensions etc. Banks handle the pensions, don’t they? Variable rates, by any chance? I haven’t looked into it so I’m only guessing, but we know how The System generally works. I’ll bet most of the suppression happened at the wording and publication stages, ie. bosses rather than researchers.
Civil servants in agencies of the U.S. federal government like NIST who were hired before 1987 receive their pensions under the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS). Those hired in and after 1987 receive their pensions under the less generous Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS). Both systems are managed by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which is staffed by career federal civil servants. Banks have nothing to do with the systems.
Lysias, thank you; I always appreciate factual, well-sourced information. Any ideas about pressure brought to bear upon members of NIST by threats to their pensions?
And Lysias, I hope you saw my apology to you earlier on this page:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post/comment-page-98/#comment-630683
Here is a nice article, where you can display errors on the part of the Truthers, if you can find them.
They, for their part, have demonstrated the errors by Bazant, NIST etc.
I’m sure you have seen this stuff before, so you should be able to home in on the Truth Brigade’s ‘errors’, if you can find them, quite quickly.
For simplicity’s sake, keep your arguments to the information of both sides as presented in this article:
On the physics of high-rise building collapses:
https://off-guardian.org/2016/09/07/on-the-physics-of-high-rise-building-collapses/
There is no need to rush; there is plenty of material there to keep you out of mischief for aquite some time.
I was working through the original Bažant and Zhou. The tipping equation (kinetic energy equals potential energy) seemed to correctly represent the physical system. Some of the relationships are more engineering than physics; I’ll need to look those up. I’ll go through the various papers – originals and replies – in order.
What I can say immediately is that some relationships will involve the strengths of structural components. This is a similar situation to the components that should have prevented girders from being pushed off their seats by expansion in Building 7. NIST didn’t mention those components and A&E Truth criticised NIST for that, but corruption could well have led to those parts never being installed in the first place. If NIST were leant on or legally gagged to prevent them from blaming anyone, leaving those components out of their model could be the clearest message they could get away with sending. Someone needs to read through the 2002 act, and the one it replaced.
The authorities had the site cleared without checking whether critical components were missing. OK, the quick clearance could have been to cover up evidence of explosives, but I think more likely to cover up missing or substandard parts. Consequently, some structural details are now beyond being discovered. Someone should be prosecuted for interference with the crime scene, but I bet there’s some sort of exception or amnesty from on high. That’s another legal paper trail.
I’ll report on Bažant and Zhou etc as I progress.
PS. I’ll work through the original paper and post what I make of it before going through the objections. That way, if I come up with objections they’ll be my own, and can be compared with the ones already published.
If there’s anyone else here who can check my work (when I post it), I’d be grateful. I often guestimate about physical systems, but this is more in-depth than anything I’ve done for decades. I’ve more of an electronics background, but ultimately it’s all the same stuff; I should get there eventually!
Ooops – I should cite what it is that I’m looking at:
http://www.civil.northwestern.edu/people/bazant/PDFs/Papers/405.pdf
Paul Barbara, thank you for that. But I am sorry to say that Clark finds a way to ignore basic physics. We have all posted similar credible articles by a variety of engineers and physicists. The encapsulating sentence from the link you posted is this:
“Researchers have since provided calculations showing that a natural collapse over one storey would not only decelerate, but would actually arrest after one or two stories of fall (see Fig. 4) [2, 10].”
Although that is Newtonian physics (and a law that has never been challenged) Clark is immovable. Even if you hit him with an irresistible force he would not budge. Instead he proposes you are quoting from someone disreputable because the establishment loons like those in the Qwilliam Foundation, much criticised by Craig, say so. Or he presents you with a NIST-enhanced graphic of how flimsy the floors are.
For me I take on the mantle of ‘Truther’ in the same way the Society of Friends took on the mantle of “Quaker” because although others meant it as a source of ridicule Friends would wear the epithet with pride because of what they believed to be the truth.
There is a very, very, very, almost non-existent possibility that fires could have brought down three buildings of structural steel for the first and only time known in history. As well as fire burning upwards it would need to be burning in all the floors (the ground floors too) for what happened to have any possibility of happening.
Anyway I, you, and the ever-growing number of scientists and engineers are all wrong. Clark will find a way of proving it, at least to his own satisfaction.
John Goss, I DO NOT IGNORE PHYSICS. Regarding the Twin Towers, the arguments I have seen presented are wrong.
Chandler’s “downward acceleration” argument misrepresents the physical system, treating the floor assemblies as vertically strong as the upright columns. That isn’t even true of a single girder. Consider. Place a girder horizontally, supported at each end. How much downward force applied in the middle would it take to make it bend? Stand an identical girder upright. How much force can it withstand applied straight down? You could even try this yourself with, say, a metre of copper pipe.
The “missing jolt” argument is also wrong. We see a jolt in vérinage demolition because the top part of the building remains parallel to the lower part as it falls; the two floors that impact each other do so almost simultaneously across their entire areas. The top sections of the Twin Towers started to tip as they began to fall; a parallel impact could not occur, so no jolt would be expected.
You insist that the Twin Towers were built to an incredibly high standard. You also insist that NIST and the vast majority of structural engineers are lying about the collapses. But both the construction and the analysis were performed by structural engineers. Before the collapses you see paragons of virtue; after the collapses you see apologists for murder. I suspect it is you displaying double standards rather than them.
Paul Barbara, the article you linked (October 20, 01:41) is the one in Europhysics news, republished in OffGuardian. I’d already read it. It’s probably the best demolition theory article to date, and if it gets more researchers looking at the matter that’s no bad thing. It has a few misrepresentations in it, but seeing as its not a research paper but rather to stimulate scrutiny from the scientific community, the authors can be forgiven for those.
It says that most high-rises have sprinklers, but omits that there was a general lack of water after one of the Twin Towers collapsed and broke a water main. Likewise, it mentions “fireproofing” (strictly, fire resistant coatings) but doesn’t mention, for instance, the Fire Engineering article or the NIST findings that much of it was substandard or had flaked off entirely.
On Building 7, it mentions the 0.5 seconds before acceleration set in, but doesn’t mention that the roof-line underwent uniform velocity during this period, which is uncharacteristic of explosive demolition. It misrepresents the collapse time as under seven seconds – they really should have pointed out that the fall of the east mechanical penthouse occurred some seconds earlier because that was a major piece of structure and all sorts was probably happening inside, out of view, between that and the final collapse.
In the Twin Towers section, the adjustment of acceleration and floor masses probably doesn’t make much difference – I’ll be able to say more definitively when I’ve got through the various papers, but the margin was around a factor of ten, so even with masses least favourable to collapse it would probably still be on the collapse side, or marginal. Additionally, Bažant and Zhou only considered a drop of one floor and we know from photographic evidence that the damage zone was more than that – swings and roundabouts… They said that NIST didn’t explain the degree of pulverisation of concrete, but didn’t mention that Bažant and Zhou’s second paper covered that, as well as the progressive collapse following initiation.. Pulverisation wasn’t in NIST’s remit, which was concerned with safety.
I’ll know more definitively when I’ve worked through all the papers, but it looks as though total collapse was certain even with all the numbers tweaked away from that possibility. Even if not, it looks impossible that there’s a smoking gun, a proof that the Towers couldn’t have collapsed without explosive assistance, because if the initial drop were a bit more or if any of the structure were substandard the numbers will fall back into the “collapse inevitable” zone again. The real problem is that the wreckage was disposed of when it should have been kept. Without it, it is impossible to prove that it had suffered explosions, or to know how close or far the Towers were from their specification.
I looked briefly into the 2002 National Construction Safety Team Act (H.R. 4687). Guess what?
– [NIST’s] investigations may not consider findings of fault, responsibility, or negligence and “No part of any report resulting from such investigation, or from an investigation under the National Construction Safety Team Act, shall be admitted as evidence or used in any suit or action for damages arising out of any matter mentioned in such report.”
Apologies for butting in at such late stage. It seems to me that video evidence presented by Clark on 17/10 at 22.56 as the “clincher” for gravity collapse actually shows the opposite. The video is of WTC2 looking at the north and east façades; the north façade being to the right. Before the initiation of collapse no damage or fires can be seen on either of the facades below the impact line.
This still picture is taken from a similar direction but from a much lower view point. It shows the upper section of the building rotated by about 15% but the structure underneath still standing but with ejecting gases along both facades some 20 or 30 m below the rotation point. The video showed no damage or fires in this area prior to the start of the collapse.
http://www.mediatica.ro/hirek/kulfold/15-eve-doltek-le-az-ikertornyok
So what is causing the powerful ejection of the gases? It can’t be air as some have suggested because the building below the rotation line has not started collapsing yet.
Whether the upper section rotation started spontaneously or not is not that important – what is important that the rotation was not completed because the supporting structure underneath disappeared. Gravity had to have a helping hand.
The Bazant paper from 2010 I believe has a section on the velocity of the ejecting gases – completely flawed because it did not take compressibility of air into account
I swear that if I see another post on how the buildings allegedly collapsed rather why they did, and what happened to all their occupants and the passengers on the planes, I shall scream so loud that you can possibly hear me no matter where you are.
I know you contribute to this Trowbridge and it is another credible (one of the most credible I have read) pieces on 9/11. Because it comes from at least one insider who has survived it gives more credibility. I have always believed the twin towers were brought down from the bottom up this makes me rethink some of it. Of course there needed to be nuclear detonations at the base.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/10/05/911-filling-in-the-map-tracing-the-nukes/
Anyway Veterans Today has done sterling work on why nobody in their right mind would want to join the military, so I was half-way there before. Unless contradicted this recent article may be key to two major events. The first is why Dr. David Kelly was assassinated. The second is what happened to the nuclear weapons when South Africa was freed from apartheid. David Cameron knows the answer to the latter. The truth will out.
By the way I always suspected the nuclear weapons went to Israel. Where else?
Give Clark due respect; he’s coming round!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdJH7Y56c7Y
I truly hope he is. He has an enquiring mind.
Thanks for the link John! Excellent information in addition to the stuff I am already aware of. The world is indeed run by absolute psychpathic scum.
You’re welcome Maxter. It could be interesting if families who lost relatives sue Saudi Arabia because this type of evidence would have to be scrutinised by lawyers for the families.
The Veterans Today article claims:
– “The following information is from the US Department of Energy Preliminary Report on the Events of September 11, 2001”
Please link this document. Without it, the article has no credible foundation.
That’s like saying Craig is not credible because the parliamentary select committee won’t let him keep even the documents he wrote himself.
Jeff Smith, who provided the information is under a gagging order. The article says so. It says this too. “We also know that a grand jury seated in Houston actively silences all involved in Able Danger, that being the very few who survived the series of “accidents” and other mishaps. All are under threat of imprisonment for violating the Patriot Act if information revealing US government complicity in 9/11 is revealed.” Smith released photographs of the surveillance of the Israelis, the crater created by the nuclear event and lots of documents (many redacted). Here is an earlier document by him.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/12/31/jeff-smith-on-the-upcoming-able-danger-leak/
One telling fact that it was nuclear is how ground zero continued burning at high temperatures and melting steel, rock, glass, everything for more than three months after the event. Another is the lack of bodies, office furniture, cabinets, everything was obliterated. Another is the pulverisation of concrete into tiny particles of dust. There is so much compelling evidence I find it difficult to reason why an intelligent man like you Clark cannot see it.
However Clark if you are going to continually rubbish everything that does not concur with the official view it is not worth people posting, and you are no different from NIST, which was given a conclusion that the twin towers were brought down by fire and it must make the facts fit that conclusion. Everything else was ignored
John, any nuclear explosion would have been detected. They cannot be concealed even deep underground. They can be immediately detected seismically, infrasonically, hydroacoustically, and by satellite detection. Later, they can be detected by radionuclide signature. The UN runs the International Monitoring System; Russia and China presumably participate but could also publish detection results independently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparatory_Commission_for_the_Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_Treaty_Organization#International_Monitoring_System_.28IMS.29
Able Danger was a real data mining operation. It detected the 9/11 hijackers, but that it did so seems to have been suppressed:
– “According to statements by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and those of four others, Able Danger had identified 2 of 3 Al Qaeda cells active in the 9/11 attacks; the ‘Brooklyn cell’ linked to “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman, including September 11 attacks leader Mohamed Atta, and three of the 9/11 plot’s other 19 hijackers.
In December 2006, a sixteen-month investigation by the US Senate Intelligence Committee concluded “Able Danger did not identify Mohamed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker at any time prior to September 11, 2001”, and dismissed other assertions that have fueled 9/11 conspiracy theories. The Senate Judiciary Committee first attempted to investigate the matter for the Senate in September, 2005. The Pentagon “ordered five key witnesses not to testify“, according to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter. “That looks to me as if it may be obstruction of the committee’s activities“, Specter, R-Pennsylvania, said at the start of his committee’s hearing into the unit”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Shaffer_(intelligence_officer)
Nikko, sorry, how do you explain the buckling?
I strongly suspect that you’re being dishonest, trying to mislead people, though it’s possible that you have merely been misled. I’ll expound if needs be.
Nikko, in case you are genuinely confused or have yourself been misled…
The photograph you linked was taken some short time after the top began to fall. Falling debris was already displacing large volumes of air from beneath it. Yes, air is compressible, but as soon as the outer perimeter was breached the air will have started rushing out.
The reason I suspected dishonesty is that you linked to a still image rather than a video. Many videos clearly show that all ejections, of both fire (initially) and dust/debris, began after the collapses initiated. The ejections were clearly effects of collapse.
There is no evidence that the collapses were initiated by explosives. However, there is powerful evidence against. There is the buckling. There is the absence of explosive sounds or shock waves (as would be seen in the smoke) at the onset of movement. There is the extreme improbability of pre-placed explosive charges surviving the aircraft impacts and subsequent fires.
Your video shows molten metal pouring away from exactly the point where the supporting column separated and thereafter the whole upper section of the building started to rotate. However, what happened next – actually what did not happen next – is far more revealing because the rotation did not get a chance to continue about its fulcrum because the supporting structure underneath disappeared.
You say that the ejections were clearly the effects of the collapse. There is no “clearly” about it.
Your mind seems to be made up but you did say you were going to do some physics. Given that you think it was air that was gushing out, do not forget to take it into consideration. The polytropic expansion coefficient of air is 1.3.
The ejections were clearly effect rather than (evidence of) cause because they came after collapse initiation rather than before.
It’s not a matter of my mind being made up; please don’t insult me. Show me convincing evidence and I will change my mind. That is called sanity. And of course if you keep me running around I won’t have time to work on the tipping equations, and you will falsely proclaim your “victory” to the gallery, as all your ilk repeatedly do.
Buckling? Buckling, buckling, BUCKLING??? Sorry, WHOSE mind is made up?
I did not mean to insult you but saying that your mind seemed to be made up is hardly an insult after you suspecting that I was dishonest by posting a still rather than a video.
If your mind is open to consider also the possibility that the ejections were the cause of the collapse of the supporting structure have a look at this video of known demolitions, which shows similar ejections occurring shortly after the start of the collapse at intervals of 4 or 5 floors below the initial fault line.
Look at the building on the left at 0.22 (initial explosion/start of collapse) followed by a second explosion at 0.31 five stories down. Or from the other side at 1.28 and 1.33 respectively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbff_Ol-izY&feature=youtu.be
Do you see a similarity?
I know you were not asking me but yes. I can see a similarity. Anyone who can’t has the telescope to their blind eye.
First building (0:00 to 0:11) – massive ejections well before any part of the building starts to fall.
Second building (0:11 to 0:47 – fuzzy sections ignored) – small ejections seen on nearest face well before any part of the building starts to fall.
Third building (0:47 to 1:16) – explosion at back left before any fall; ejections on right apparently simultaneous with right side of building starting to fall, but the origin of these ejections appears to be some way further back, so ejections had probably proceeded for some time before extending into view.
Fourth building (1:16 to 1:38) – small ejections seen well before building starts to fall; larger, air-driven ejections follow later. Window frames blown outwards.
Fifth building (1:38 to 2:05) – top wave of bright flashes of explosives have already been and gone by the time the top of building starts to fall.
2:05 to 2:30 – apparently a repeat of fifth building footage.
Sixth building (2:30 to end) – dust from explosions already visible when video sequence starts; some time before any of building starts to fall.
Well done. You have provided strong evidence that in explosive demolitions, ejections from explosives are seen before any of the building begins to fall. By contrast, in the case of each of the Twin Towers, ejections are not seen before some part of the building is seen to fall.
Additionally, the collapses of the Twin Towers initiated with inward buckling, most clearly seen, and videoed, in the case of WTC 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJPYTVjxug
The evidence indicates that the collapses of the Twin Towers initiated due to failure under load, without explosives.
John Goss, thank you for yet another insult; you could reflect upon your feelings that motivate such remarks. I think I’ve demonstrated that I watched the videos more closely, and with a more open mind, than you did – you saw only what you were directed to see. But you can change that at any time 😉
Watch Danny Jowenko, Dutch demolition expert, talking about the Twin Towers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3wwdI0XawI
I don’t agree with him about “bolts springing out”. My guess is that very dense, hard objects like lift winches, transformers or UPS racks smashed down inside, breaking relatively small holes through the floors, falling more rapidly than the general building debris, setting off cascades of rubble which followed them and eventually led to ejections ahead of the main collapse front, maybe when abruptly arrested by the heavier mechanical floors. Or maybe falling lift carriages or counterweights, in the cores. But whatever, those ejections that get ahead don’t initiate new collapse fronts further down.
Here he is being shown Building 7’s collapse, apparently for the first time, and giving it some serious thought. Some Truthers think he was eventually assassinated for this, but I very much doubt it; he died years after giving the interviews. When he’s shown a plan of the building he says that the design would make rigging it somewhat quicker. The plans don’t show the truss assembly between floors 5 and 7 and the even smaller number of columns which supported it, which would have made demolition set-up quicker still. But when he learns that Building 7 was on fire, he shrugs and says that he can’t explain it. Neither can I:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZyCCpXNPbw
John, I get the impression that even if you became convinced that the Twin Towers did collapse through damage and fire, you’d continue to insist on demolition because you think there’s some value in propagating that belief, whether it be true or false. But you can’t overcome deception with more deception. Remember; this is a chain of dependencies:
Truth, Justice, Peace.
Clark, even if I were to accept Danny Jowenko’s theory, which I don’t, it hardly matters. Most important is the Newtonian physics and my own observation of the thickness and design of structural steel girders, and what could or could not have happened to them. After posting what you called your research – the TU building
It is insulting of you, not a structural engineer, to imply the designers of the twin towers took shortcuts. Nevertheless the basic physics work in the TU Delft University fire, ironically a post of your ‘research’ which shows exactly the opposite of your argument that fire can bring down buildings with a framework of structural steel. They cannot. What was probably seen in the video you posted was the collapse of the concrete. The next morning the strutural steel was still there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDuoVDeFFhA
You cannot vanish structural steel in the way it vanished in the collapse of the twin towers. Something very powerful and greedy consumed those girders.
John, I posted evidence for the deficiencies of the Twin Towers, here:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post/comment-page-98/#comment-631042
All the physics shows is that the towers were weaker than everyone was led to believe, but you know that capitalist systems always make exaggerated claims. Newton’s laws are not broken by the collapses.
And it is far less insulting of me to say that the New York Mob, organised crime, cut corners, than for you to say that all of NIST and the entire structural engineering and physics academic communities (apart from the tiny minority of A&E Truth), including those in Russia, are complicit in covering up mass murder by demolition.
You posted evidence which you claim supports your theory that fire brought down the twin towers. You called it doing your own research sort of implying that others are not clever enough to do research.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post/comment-page-98/#comment-629808
I showed you a video of the difficulty the demolition team had in removing the girders that remained after the fire. You ignored it because rather than your research proving your point it disproves it. So I posted another video to show you how much of the structural steel remained at TU Delft the morning after the fire. That was almost all of it. Even though your own evidence proved your theory to be wrong you did not comment on the morning afterwards video (as you did not comment on the demolition video). What does not suit your case you ignore. But it does not change your theories and your unsubstantiated claim that the 2000 plus Truth engineers are a tiny minority. No sane engineer would claim that fire would burn through structural beams uniformly especially in three buildings.
Steel girders are very resistant to fire. Have you ever tried cutting through steel? It is possible with an oxyacetylene torch (but that is thin steel and can only generally be done a bit at a time). With highly concentrated white heat a structural steel beam can be cut through and shaped. The bit that is cut through drops off (it does not disappear).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ18rn84neY
Having worked with steel for 19 years (everything from EN24 through to nimonic) I know something about its properties. You can melt carbon steel at around 1500 degrees centigrade. You melt it in a furnace.
Your video shows what happens to a building when fire cracks and disintegrates the concrete. Please look at the video of the morning after and give me your comments instead of posting your ‘evidence’ of why the twin towers were allegedly weak structures. I will have a look at it but judging by your ‘evidence’ of TU Delft proving that the twin towers fell I don’t have much faith. But I would welcome your comments on why the girders were there. Thanks.
Clark I looked at your further evidence which, as you say yourself, does not point to any structural problems but just that there were areas where the fireproofing had flaked off due to rust. Presumably if the inspector put in a report these areas were attended to. I don’t know that but neither do I know anything to the contrary. However what we are talking about is burning through steel girders. Steel girders are much more likely to warp than fracture under heat. Ask a blacksmith.
Bonfire night is coming. When we were kids we used to build a den under the bonfire (probably a dangerous thing to do). This was the area where paper and tinder was put when the fire was lit. We lit it at the bottom, not near the top. As you saw in the TU Delft video you posted the fire was burning upwards. The lower floors of the twin towers were not on fire and fire could not have caused their collapse. Newtonian physics, the third law, states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Bottom floors would have arrested the fire-damaged floors which anyway could not have cut through the girders.
A wing of the Delft building collapsed on one side:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cC4wXI3Gegw/TesGi5Vl2JI/AAAAAAAAASs/Pb5VeL-oI8E/s1600/facultybuilding.jpg
The video you linked is titled ‘The MoUrning After’ – as in ‘sense of loss’, not ‘before midday’. It seems to have been taken some days later, as the smouldering has stopped. It looks like much had already been cleared away by then. The other video you linked showed demolition of part of the building that didn’t collapse.
Yes, A&E Truth are a TINY minority. For instance, the American Society of Civil Engineers has over 150,000 members. Then there are other professional bodies, plus academia, and similar institutions all over the world.
– “Steel girders are much more likely to warp than fracture under heat”
Yes, that’s right, and that’s exactly what the mainstream, academically and professionally accepted explanation claims. With many columns severed and many others stripped of their fireproofing by shrapnel, the heat from the fires softened the remaining columns until they buckled under load. The Veterans Today article you linked to above had a photograph of a column that had suffered exactly that fate:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/bent-girder_1477855i.jpg
Yes, fire from the impact zones mainly spread upwards, not downwards, but it wasn’t fire that destroyed the lower parts of the towers. Each tower failed at the impact zone and then the top part crashed down through the floor assemblies beneath, stripping them out – the leading edge of this was the advancing collapse front, violently ejecting air, dust and debris. But the floor trusses other function was to hold the perimeter columns upright. With the floor trusses gone and all that debris within bearing outwards upon the perimeter, the column sections were forced to peel outward. Most of this process is clearly visible on the videos, which is why I believe what I do – I can see it happening before my eyes!
No I don’t think people aren’t clever enough. I think that they’re lazy, impulsive, and self-righteous, and they want to demolish the “opposition” by forceful language. They’ve been convinced by the argument that the collapses of the Twin Towers due to damage and fire “contradicts the laws of physics”, which is false, but they’re so convinced that they see no point in checking facts.
Also, I think Trutherism has become a clique. Truthers never question each other’s arguments; they just deride any challenge as “supporting the official story” and deride the challenger as either a paid shill, closed-minded, brainwashed by propaganda or incapable of thinking for themselves. It’s a lazy approach and one I’ve rejected, choosing to look more deeply instead, which is why my objections to the government and corporate media accounts are very different from those of most Truthers.
John, incidentally, I have worked metal a bit. I did metalwork at school, heating metal in the forge and working it on an anvil. I’ve brazed but never welded. I’ve turned, cut threads; that sort of thing. I solder quite a lot; electronics with an iron, or plumbing with a gas torch. I keep a box of scrap in case I need to make a stainless hinge for a washing machine door or whatever. If I need to heat steel to bend it I do it in the wood stove, but for most applications I just choose a softer metal like copper, brass or aluminium.
John, 15:13; you wrote:
– “Newtonian physics, the third law, states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Bottom floors would have arrested the fire-damaged floors…”
This is essentially Chandler’s argument, and it is wrong. He started by drawing his diagram wrong. He just drew the building as a (divided) block, with one big arrow representing the upward, supporting force and another representing the weight, acting downwards. A lump of foam would be like that, but building’s aren’t; buildings have internal structure. I’ve drawn a better representation. It’s very rough and ready, it isn’t a proper vector diagram and it isn’t remotely to scale, but it’ll give you the idea:
http://www.killick1.plus.com/odds/diag.png
So on the left is Chandler’s starting point. My correction is in the middle. The verticals are the upright columns. I’ve shown the floor slabs as just horizontal lines, but that’s not unfair; if we made a 1/100th scale model of the Towers, it’d be over 4 metre high but the concrete of the floor slabs would be just 1mm thick. If anything, my pencil lines are too heavy. I’ve made no distinction between core uprights and perimeter uprights; imagine that one side or the other is the core and that the other side isn’t shown if you like, but it doesn’t affect the principle involved.
The columns could support more than the weight above, so I’ve drawn the upwards arrows, representing support, bigger than the downward arrows representing the weight above bearing down. But the floor slabs have only tiny arrows. That’s as much support as they can provide.
Now imagine that the top section got displaced to the right by some sort of magic, or a Star Trek transporter beam. I know this isn’t anything like what happened, but we’re only showing that reaction forces don’t prevent acceleration. The top section starts to fall. The uppermost floor of the lower section encounters the force bearing down; its little upward arrow opposes the big downward arrow. Yes, there’s an equal and opposite reaction from the floor, which effectively subtracts from the big downward arrow, but the reaction can’t be any greater than the floor slab’s little arrow. It has no help from the floor beneath because that hasn’t been reached yet, so the top floor breaks.
Now there’s about a 4 metre gap for acceleration to occur before the process repeats. So long as 4 metre’s worth of acceleration exceeds the velocity loss at the next floor down, the collapse will accelerate. This is what Bazant and Zhou 2001 shows; that the increase exceeds the decrease by a large factor, so the collapse accelerates rapidly.
The way I’ve drawn this there could be noticeable jolts and decelerations, but the physical system was both tilted and far more chaotic, smoothing out the motion. Also, my diagram shows the right columns of the top section falling outside the right columns of the bottom section. In fact, most falling material fell within the lower perimeter, but how that occurred is a bit more complicated.
– – – – – – –
It was this “impossibility of acceleration” argument of Chandler’s that started the whole furore. It was just wrong, but it encouraged Truthers to take the rather extreme position of becoming demolition theorists. Hardly anyone cites that paper any more, but most Truthers have failed to reassess and instead have proposed theory after theory to try to defend their position. They should just give it up; it’s a non-starter, the engineering and academic communities aren’t totally corrupt, and there are plenty of legitimate ways to criticise the government and media reports.
John, I (tentatively) accepted demolition theory for a while:
http://www.killick1.plus.com/odds/golgi.png
I don’t any more for the Twin Towers; the evidence is overwhelmingly against demolition and for damage, fire and gravity.
I’m still wondering about Building 7. The appearance of its collapse is just like known controlled demolitions whereas the Twin Tower collapses look like top-down collapses. A rush-job demolition on the afternoon of 9/11, that hurt no one and was purportedly to make the site safer would be much easier to hush up than two far more elaborate, pre-rigged demolitions that killed thousands. FEMA’s initial report was inconclusive, and NIST didn’t start their investigation until the trail had gone very cold. Building 7’s design seems conducive to a rush-job demolition, though that makes a fast, neat collapse due to fire less improbable, too.
TU DELFT
The part of the TU Delft north section which partially collapsed was not made of structural steel but reinforced concrete. Also the south section where the fire started was identical and did not collapse. I located some academic research which is still ongoing because I believed I knew what could and could not happen to a structural steel building and it was not what happened in your before and after photographs. The research says:
“Collapse of a major reinforced concrete structure in fire, as occurred with this building, is a rare event.”
http://www.dr.dk/NR/rdonlyres/FECDDBA8-7428-460D-846F-0C3D424D3A81/2748348/Delft_brandrapport.pdf
So it is nothing like the twin towers. However, despite the weakness of the building, it still obeyed the laws of Newtonian physics. The fire started on the sixth floor of this thirteen storey building. That means that with the partial collapse more than half the building was above the fire (again nothing like the twin towers). There were rare books and manuscripts in the basement. All these survived because they were below the fire and as we know resistance from below is going to deter and finally stop the collapsing debris from the upper floors, action/reaction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Delft_University_of_Technology
The basic flaw in your melting steel argument is that the floors where the initial crashes took place could not have reached 1400 degrees centigrade. Even if they did the floors below could not and they would have stopped a total collapse. I wished you had done your university physics course because if you had we would not be having this debate.
Afterthought.
I have tried to support this blog as much as I can. This morning I had two comments removed on the Blanket Corporate Media Corruption thread – the latest thread at the time of writing. It fitted neatly with the title and argument. I remarked that whistleblower Jeff Smith should get the next Sam Adams award for revealing this. Craig or his moderator(s) removed it.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/10/05/911-filling-in-the-map-tracing-the-nukes/
[ Mod: The comments were removed for infringement of the ‘9/11’ guideline: “(Now I have given full opportunity to discuss 9/11 here, any further references on other threads will be instantly deleted).” ]
In my opinion it is the nearest article to the truth, as far as my limited expertise I have come across regarding 9/11 lets me analyse. What saddens me more than the removal of the comments is the fact that:
“Not one official with any standing at all, has challenged VT’s 9-11 reporting. That includes mass media, which, to date, has not put in one call “to learn more”, and perhaps revisit their own coverage, or should I say coverup.”
That quote is from the beginning of the Veterans Today article. I am so surprised that Craig (and/or moderators) would not let a comment stand that showed blanket corporate media corruption at its worst. Yes, the article may not be right. Though somebody would need to demonstrate why before I would be convinced. In excluding it from the current thread it just shows that on certain issues Craig Murray’s blog is no different from the corporate media in excluding articles that do not fit its editorial policy. Shame. I like so much of what Craig writes.
Goodbye.
The Veterans Today site has lots of anti-Semitic material including Holocaust denial. Most of the rest seems to be fabricated conspiracy nonsense. Its article about thorium is a joke. The article you linked to blames Israel for 9/11 on the basis of no credible evidence whatsoever.
I do hope you’re leaving permanently, John. You’re polite and friendly, but you don’t seem to take notice of anything anyone says to you, and you don’t seem to care about factuality at all. I believe you mean well, but you’re a liability. Sorry. I really am sorry. Goodbye.
John Goss, I’m writing this in a text editor; I’m going to post it ‘blind’ because I really don’t want to read any of this thread today.
I feel sorry for telling you that I hope you leave Craig’s site permanently, and I apologise. However, I do not retract my remark about you being a liability to the comments section. What I hope is that you’ll reflect upon why I think this, maybe for some weeks, and then return to the site with changed feelings.
I think you’re fighting for peace, without appreciating the inevitable contradiction in doing so. To be effective, our external endeavours for peace have to be accompanied by internal reflection upon contradictions. Ultimately, all conflict arises within the psyche, and all people are made of the same stuff. We all have internal conflicts. Most people come to conclusions by deciding to accept one side of a contradiction and to reject the other. But as in external conflicts, all sides have some validity, though in varying proportions. When we reject one side we ‘drive it underground’ ie. into our subconscious, where it continues to express itself in our behaviours.
The harder but better course is to maintain a dynamic tension within, giving due respect to the validity of the multiple facets of each contradiction. This requires time and effort; regular reflection, concentration and re-evaluation.
In your fight for peace I think you have become accustomed to searching out sources that confirm the side of a contradiction that you have chosen to support, and sources that contradict the side you have rejected. Driven by earnestness, you have posted links to such sources in haste, thereby neglecting bias, inaccuracy and lack of verifiability.
Consider the links that you posted that led to your comments being deleted. You posted a link about 9/11 on the front thread, in contradiction to the long standing and well known moderation rule against that. But worse, in your haste and with a feeling of burning justification, you neglected to examine your source. The Veterans Today site is well known for anti-Semitism and blatant nonsense. Had you explored the site even briefly you would have quickly found articles about Holocaust denial, and other wild assertions that are clearly untenable. This would have stimulated your sense of caution, scepticism, and critical reflection, all much needed on the great wild Internet, where you can find confirmation for virtually any theory no matter how outlandish.
– – – – – – –
Yes, I’d seen that the Delft building was constructed from reinforced concrete. I was going to comment about that, but I was busy making and uploading that diagram for you, and when I checked the thread you’d already mentioned it yourself. It is in any case of limited relevance; as you can no doubt appreciate, all buildings balance weight against strength, which converge to limit the maximum height to which it is possible to build while maintaining a margin for safety. The Twin Towers, of course, pushed that limit to the maximum for their era of construction. Weight of construction was minimised in order to maximise height. The remaining margin proved adequate for decades, until the extreme conditions imposed on 9/11.
Best wishes John. I hope you will practice consideration of arguments which do not align with your own, weighing them for their validity, since your approach until now has, I feel, been to find ways to contradict them as quickly as possible, using whatever sources come to hand. Remember; fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity – inevitably self-defeating.
Again, I apologise for my former rashness.
Thank you mods for reinstating the deleted comments. It’s half-term here in Birmingham and I’m taking a break from commenting for a while. I will continue to read Craig’s blogs which are always entertaining and informative.
[ Mod: Your comments were deleted for a clear infringement of the rules for comment moderation, in particular the 9/11 rule cited above. They were reinstated temporarily by way of illustration. Comments which fail to abide by the rules are eligible for deletion, as are false complaints of arbitrary moderation. ]
Clark, please try and apply the advice you give to others to yourself. I realise how much proving the official NIST version means to you even though in my opinion it is scientifically unsound. If I could offer a little advice it would be to do the same as me, especially over the 9/11 thread and take a break. As others have pointed out you seem to have set yourself up as gatekeeper to this thread in case what you think is an errant comment gets through. This I think has driven almost everybody away until it appeared to be only you and me commenting to any extent, particularly you. So I am going to leave you to it with no hard feelings on my part.
John, I’m not trying to “prove the official NIST version”. Think what you’re saying. If a US government department says that water boils at 100 centigrade at STP are you going to contradict them for the sake of it? When the US government say they have nuclear submarines are you going to say that they haven’t so that you’re not “supporting the official story”?
In case you hadn’t noticed, the structural engineers of Russia aren’t accusing NIST of ignoring Newton’s laws. Why’s that, eh? The Saker is quite happy for you to make a fool of yourself but he doesn’t quote any Russian physicists, does he? I’m trying to do you a favour. I’m trying to prevent the peace party from discrediting itself. Among the first to say that the Towers were so strong that explosives must have been used was DONALD TRUMP for Christ’s sake! These are US right wing conspiracy theories. You’re going to be supporting Corbyn alongside me, and I don’t want to have to keep saying “oh sorry about this idiot”.
I bet you haven’t even bothered to look at the diagram I went to the trouble of drawing for you.
John, sorry, I shouldn’t have written “idiot”; I should have written “fool”. I’m having trouble with my emotions. It’s so hard not to fight, when I seem to be surrounded by people fighting. They even seem not to recognise that they are fighting; nor that the people they agree with (ie. “on their side”) are fighting, too. Each “side” seem to think that their fight isn’t a fight. I’ve never felt so isolated, alone and scared.
Trowbridge H. Ford, October 20, 21:24: please post your story, with supporting links wherever possible.
Most here are obsessed by the notion of demolition of the Twin Towers, for which I have found no credible evidence, and extensive, highly credible evidence to the contrary. It is the nature of obsession to be impervious to rationality, so the prevailing “consensus” on this thread, though characterised by unquestioning acceptance of each others’ contradictions, is unlikely to change. I may post a little physics eventually, but spurious objections can be raised ad infinitum. Probably the only recourse is to ignore the perpetual clamour and proceed as if wasn’t happening.
That’s it. That’s what ostriches do I’m told. 🙂
As far as I can see there is only one ‘obsessed’ on here. You have a clear view as to what happened and never detract from it, apart from the occasional questioning of Building 7. But then you conclude that it is not really credible to question it.
Others of us know the official version is wrong. That is why so many different hypotheses are posited. Not just because we have no clear united view but because we question the official story and would like to see an investigation. That is what all research is about: questioning what came before, going back to basics, re-examining, testing new theories, looking at other people’s research, discarding anything questionable, reading the latest papers, drawing conclusions. It does not make any item of research necessarily right. If we thought we were exclusively right to the exclusion of all others we would be dogmatists.
John, the aircraft impacts and collapse sequences of the Twin Towers are about the only parts of the events which were openly visible, seen by thousands, and videoed and photographed by hundreds. It is perfectly clear what happened; there is no need to speculate. The Twin Towers were substantially severed, and further degraded by fire at those same regions. Unsurprisingly, that is where they failed, causing the upper sections to come crashing down onto the structure beneath.
You call this “the official story” but it is much more than that. It was the directly witnessed by countless ordinary people.
You ask me to ignore the evidence of my own eyes in favour of “physics” I can see to be rubbish. You ask me to abandon my sanity. And if I do not comply you accuse me of supporting Quilliam! You showed me the car crash in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiwpj7aa9c8
Well I put it to you that those cars were supremely strong, made almost entirely of steel, and mere impact could never have smashed them in like that. It must have been rigged in advance, with many hugely powerful springs stretched between the front and numerous anchorage points throughout the cars, held from contracting by glass rods which were shattered using remotely detonated explosives just before the moment of impact, to make it look like the crash did the damage. Where else could the energy have come from? We all know that cars are made of steel and much stronger than that. The damage is too symmetrical. One car rotated much more than the other, and BOTH front ends went down, violating Newton’s third law and the law of conservation of momentum – there must have been stronger springs hidden in one wing than the other. No other cars have sustained exactly those patterns of damage ever before, and it’s a HUGE coincidence that both cars’ bonnets went UP, and NEITHER of them burst into flames!!! And if you disagree, then it can only be because you support fascists, and want perpetual war with Russia! Go on, prove otherwise!
It was Israel! Israel! Only Israel can hide springs like that. Only Israel has the power to smash such strong American cars! Where else?
i worked at the WTC and loved it. sad to say my survival is because my mom got terminal cancer and i quit to be with her.
i am pretty sure the kamikaze run of those two planes happened mostly as we’ve been told. we tried to starve terrorism financially, and doubtless they hit our financial hub for the same reason.
may i say i loved going to work there every morning w thousands of well dressed people, and i miss the buildings, too. the buzz from all the wiring was palpable, the floors and walls hummed w excitement.
where i differ is w the plane that crashed afterward in the PA. i suspect our military shot it down.
EdTuo, welcome; sorry about your mum, but glad you escaped.
I suspect the hijackers were within the US system, under the secret 1945 Quincey agreement with Saudi Arabia. FDR made an agreement with Ibn Saud that for a secure supply of oil, the US would protect the oil fields, build an airbase in Saudi Arabia, and provide military assistance and training to Saudi Arabia. They also agreed that the US would never oppose Wahhabism, the Saudi version of Islam which includes flogging, stoning, amputations, beheading, and religious police walking the streets. It’s this brutal, supposedly religious system that raises extremists who are indoctrinated enough to perform suicide missions.
Since then, the US/Saudi compact has sent such extremists against governments seen as socialist in the Middle East, just as the CIA trained, armed and funded the Mujahideen to fight the USSR out of Afghanistan. But it’s a religious motivation, and those that “rebel” and slip the control of the Saudi power structure are the ones that get labelled “terrorists”.
I suspect that Saudi fighters were receiving their military training in the US (look up Springman’s revelations) and these were at least some of the hijackers, the so-called “terrorists”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Springmann
– “J. Michael Springmann was the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the Reagan and former Bush administrations, from September 1987 through March 1989.[1] While stationed in Saudi Arabia, Springmann was “ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants”. Springmann states that these applicants were terrorist recruits of Osama Bin Laden, who were being sent to the United States in order to obtain training from the C.I.A”
http://europe.newsweek.com/alleged-hijackers-may-have-trained-us-bases-152495
It’s these same Saudi-indoctrinated extremists that your government and mine are currently sending against Syria, because Syria is more aligned to Russia than to the West, with a Russian naval base and no US or UK airbases. They now also run amok across Libya.
As to the crash in PA, Susan Lindauer was imprisoned on a US military base after 9/11 because she knew and said too much. She says that the pilot who shot down that flight was imprisoned there too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G43zl4fzDQg
The man she said was her handler certainly does seem to be CIA, though of course he “neither confirms nor denies” that. She also talks about demolition, but that wasn’t in her personal experience. She says a State Department official told her that – I suspect that the State Department are deliberately muddying the water, because it was the State Department ordering that visas be given to the Saudis that turned against the US.
Saudi Arabia fund mosques and place their extremist imams in them all over the world. It’s a projection of Saudi power; they’re trying to take control of all Islam, and the US is committed never to oppose that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro-Islam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy_Agreement#The_Quincy_Agreement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRbq63r7rys
A lot of ostensible U.S. Foreign Service officers (diplomats) are in fact CIA officers. Diplomat is their cover.
Any idea of Springman’s career since he was sacked?
My impression is that all the real 9/11 whistleblowers, the ones who were inside the system, were ejected and have been outside it since. I haven’t looked deeply, though.
And of course you could make a very similar accusation against Craig. Just as I could accuse you of haunting these threads as an agent of “controlled opposition” to weaken the credibility of whistleblowers.
But I do not so accuse. I argue that we have to work with the information available. It can always be argued that all the really revealing information has been successfully hidden, in which case none of us can know anything of value and we might as well give up – but who would that serve?
Richard Feynman on cherry-picking:
– “The idea is to try and give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one direction or another”.
EdTuo, are you still reading? I was hoping for a chat.
Has anyone here read The Spire by William Golding?
So that’s it, is it? No comments for days. The only thing anyone wants to discuss about 9/11 is “demolition”, specifically of the Twin Towers. Any and every whacky theory is sufficiently juicy, so long as it superficially supports that impression. Discredit that, and everyone loses interest. So much for your claims to be interested in foreign policy.
Tunnel vision, or so it seems.
No; I sympathise – somewhat. A few obsessive souls claimed that the collapses of the Twin Towers were physically impossible without explosives or such, and you seized upon it thinking you had an invincible case. Now it’s looking less hopeful (and you’ve failed to shoot the messenger), you see a load of donkey-work ahead. Welcome to that tired, uphill feeling.
I guess things were quiet here waiting for you to come up with some “physics” to support your claim that the towers came down through gravity. You do not see a similarity between ejecting gases tearing the buildings apart 4 or 5 floors below the collapsing front of known demolitions and the Twin Towers and you speculate that it was air.
If you are correct, then the slabs of the 4 or 5 floors above the gas ejections must have been falling through the (at this point still intact) outside shell of the building as a piston in a pump until the pressure was high enough to uniformly break out across the facades.
The force acting on the “floor piston” can only come from the mass of the floor slabs above it, so no more than 4 or 5. What pressure do you think was needed to cause the damage seen?. Where did the mass to create this pressure come from?. Were the slabs falling as a perfect piston or were there some inefficiencies due to the slabs breaking up or not falling straight? What about air leakage into the lift shafts and stairwells?
The physics to model the “pump action” of the slabs is very simple. If you believe that that is what happened, then you need to back it up with some credible numbers. When you have shown that sufficient force could have been developed, it will be necessary to also consider the effect of the pressure build-up in relation to the rate of fall but that is more involved.
Nikko, I don’t “speculate that it was air”. The volume of the buildings was 95% air, and it had to go somewhere – “law of conservation of mass”, seeing as you want some physics. Likewise, it doesn’t matter whether the floor slabs fell as complete chunks or as smashed rubble – though under the circumstances, smashed rubble is overwhelmingly more likely – but in either form, they still displace air.
“leakage”? Consider the rate of displacement of air. Even in a new engine some of the combustion gasses get past the piston rings (which is what makes engine oil turn black, whereas gearbox oil remains clear even after 100,000 miles), and if you crank an engine slowly enough by hand you’ll notice this lack of compression. This degree of leakage does not matter at normal engine speeds because it saps compression much too slowly. Likewise in the collapsing towers. Do the maths. Calculate the volume between each floor, from the videos estimate the number of floors inundated per second, and from that calculate the air displacement rate. Yes, the windows burst out; are you really surprised? In stressed and warping frames with a chaotic and highly energetic maelstrom of rubble and compressing air behind them, they burst like soap bubbles.
“…so no more than 4 or 5” Eh? Where do you think the rest of the material went? Law of conservation of mass again. Even in the case of least material, the top-most impacted floor of WTC 1, eleven floors-worth of material was making its descent, and it only increased from that point on. It doesn’t matter if it was smashed up; it was still there and still falling. A small proportion was lost as dust, but observation of the videos shows that by far the greatest emission of dust occurred in the terminal stage of each collapse.
– “When you have shown that sufficient force could have been developed, it will be necessary to also consider the effect of the pressure build-up in relation to the rate of fall” – Think this through. What you’re actually saying is that the windows (made of just glass, in warping and twisting frames) were strong enough to maintain an air cushion which would have made the collapses significantly slower. Maybe structural engineers are wasting their time with all this steel and concrete; maybe all that’s really needed is glass and a big fan!
No Nikko, it’s not up to me to “come up with some “physics” to support [the] claim that the towers came down through gravity”. That buildings can collapse, and that the Twin Towers did collapse, is the null hypothesis; the hypothesis naturally consistent with gravity, Newton’s laws, increase of entropy and observation of the actual events. It’s extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence, not obvious ones. That two immense and continuously occupied buildings could be secretly pre-rigged at multiple points on every floor with fireproofed explosives which then somehow escaped the severe damage to the buildings such that they could be detonated with precision timing by an overall control system to simulate a progressive collapse – this is an utterly extraordinary claim, and after fifteen years, proponents of this theory have come up with precisely zero evidence that even one single person worked on this project.
Clark, pressure is the important issue and not conservation of mass and it makes all the difference whether the floors fall as complete slabs or as rubble, because if they fall as rubble,they displace air as you say, but they do not compress it. And for gases to have been seen ejecting across all facades there had to be quite a lot of compression to produce the pressure to not only fracture glass but also to fracture and then eject massive chunks of steel horizontally out of the building. You must have noticed this sideways ejection of debris.
If, as you believe, air pressure was the mechanism, the floor had to be falling as a slab with a near perfect seal to develop the pressure. But how can you achieve a seal if the slab is punctured with massive holes for the lift shafts and stairwell or particularly, as you consider likely, if the floor is falling as rubble.
And what about the colour of the ejecting gases? Air is invisible. If you are right and the windows burst out due to increasing pressure then that would have occurred before the falling slab hit the floor and dust was created. Don’t forget that the ejection of gases occurs every 4 or 5 floors with the building above the ejections perfectly intact for at least 4 or 5 floors.
The first sideways ejection could absolutely not have involved more than 4 or 5 floors as those further above were not damaged. In theory the lower ejections could have involved more floors but what you will need to explain is why the regularity of 4 or 5 floors. Why not every floor – what makes the 3 or 4 floors in between resist the developing pressure?
To develop pressure requires energy. I am indeed saying that to develop the kind of pressures that can break glass, tear the structure apart and eject debris sideways is incompatible with the collapse speeds that were observed. The law of conservation of energy and all that.
Clark, it is not up to you to prove a gravity led collapse – NIST should do that – but you did raise expectations by saying you were going to provide some “physics”. To consider that the buildings fell through controlled demolitions is far less an extraordinary claim than to consider the facts and pretend it was gravity led.
And as you did mention increasing entropy – what about three instances of asymmetric damage resulting in symmetrical collapses?
– “…because if they fall as rubble,they displace air as you say, but they do not compress it”
You’ve made the classic mistake of treating a dynamics problem as a statics problem. Air has viscosity. Yes, a stone can fall through air, but it drags some air with it creating something of a downdraught. A handful of falling stones creates a greater downdraught. All the falling material of a 63 metre square 40 metre high piece of building, whether contiguous or in pieces, substantially accelerates the air to nearly its own velocity, compressing air ahead of it (air has mass, too, so needs a force to accelerate it out of the path. That force can only be pressure). Confine the falling material within the perimeter walls and it will compress the air ahead even more.
I don’t suppose it was just air that smashed the windows out. More like a pyroclastic flow of air and rubble; highly kinetically energetic but not as hot. Air within a level’s cavity won’t compress much until the floor above is smashed through; given the velocity of descent of the collapse front, that air will be mixed with rubble and dust within milliseconds. Chaotically dynamic rubble will have impacted the glass almost instantly, like Brownian motion on a large scale.
I haven’t seen “massive chunks of steel [ejected] horizontally out of the building”. If I had, I would suspect explosives, but I haven’t seen such on the videos. I see massive sections of perimeter above the advancing front of ejections, sort of peeling outwards, the top arcing out and then down, the sections sort of hinging out, initially relatively stationary at the bottom.
I’m not sure what you mean by the following:
– “Don’t forget that the ejection of gases occurs every 4 or 5 floors with the building above the ejections perfectly intact for at least 4 or 5 floors.
The first sideways ejection could absolutely not have involved more than 4 or 5 floors as those further above were not damaged. In theory the lower ejections could have involved more floors but what you will need to explain is why the regularity of 4 or 5 floors. Why not every floor – what makes the 3 or 4 floors in between resist the developing pressure?”
I don’t see the ejections happening in blocks of four or five floors, if that’s what you mean.
I think you’ll find that there was plenty of energy. Chandler showed that the collapse fronts proceeded at about 2/3 of g. I’ll try to get around to using that to calculate the energy available for destruction, but not right now. It was the top sections that initially fell; the sections with the most gravitational potential energy. Lower structure entrained into the collapse then added to that.
As for symmetry, various things suggest to me that Building 7 should probably be considered separately. For instance, consider the case of Building 7 having been demolished but that the Twin Towers weren’t – then, the remarkably symmetrical fall of Building 7 could suggest nothing at all about the Twin Towers’ collapses. The Twin Towers were almost identical to each other and suffered similar damage so it maybe they were likely to collapse similarly. Building 7 was different, its damage was different and its collapse was very different. Considering these as two classes, with one class containing two members and the other one, it doesn’t seem such a big coincidence.
But the Twin Towers’ collapses weren’t more symmetrical than might be expected. The centre of mass of the sections that fell started from the centre lines of the buildings. They departed from that as they tipped and began falling, considerably in the case of WTC2, but neither got outside the constraining perimeter by the time that their movement was predominantly downward. The advancing wave of ejections on some walls was remarkably even, but on others you can see that the ejections got well ahead. I’ve seen one video that shows this particularly clearly, but I haven’t been able to find it again tonight. The one linked below is not as good, but the ejections proceeding down the far right corner get well in advance. It also shows the “hinging out” of perimeter sections I mentioned above, and how the majority of the dust wells up as the collapse hits the ground, consistent with crushing rather than floor-by-floor explosives:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKYW89xEYg0
Actually, it wasn’t up to NIST to prove gravity collapse since Bazant and Zhou 2001 claims to do so. So far I’m not too impressed with Bazant and Zhou 2001 though maybe I just haven’t quite “got it” yet, but there’s nothing there to imply impossibility of collapse under gravity.
If you don’t get my bit about pyroclastic flow, watch one of the more zoomed-in collapse videos a few times. Then try to imagine being inside, on one of the floors as the collapse front arrives. Consider how fast your large empty office ceases to be an air-space – literally; blink, and you’d miss it. Stuff wasn’t, couldn’t have been, simply falling. Particles of all sizes from dust upwards were in constant, repeated collision. Larger lumps will have been imparting greater velocity to smaller pieces on impact – consider m1.v1=m2.v2 when m1 greatly exceeds m2. There’s no way a significant proportion of the air is going to make its way upward through that lot with a multitude of high velocity particles, bits and chunks cutting through its path every millisecond. The air and rubble and bits right down to dust has to be considered as a chaotically dynamic mixture, almost a fluid, in its own right.
Note: my 04:38 comment above requires amendment.
Clark, your description of boundary layers around falling rubble creating a pressure wave to collapse the towers is just beyond science phantasy. It was you who said in an earlier comment that the towers were 95% air, so the notion that a relatively small mass of rubble from the floor slabs would have the energy to dismantle the steel structure is fanciful.
I am with you about the pyroclastic flow but not what caused it. You say you have not seen chunks of steel ejected sideways – look at the video you posted above of Tower 1.
I am all for questioning all narratives, but the science has to be sound.
Nikko, do you accept that the buckling captured on video initiated the collapse of WTC 2?
Do you assert that the lightweight floor trusses with four inches of concrete could have arrested the descent of the material impinging from above?
You call the falling material “a relatively small mass of rubble”, but you have neglected the uprights above the damaged zone, the hat truss, the heavier upper mechanical floor with its large water tanks, motors and winches for elevators and other heavy equipment, and the buildings’ contents which also included heavy equipment such as UPS battery racks etc.
Please do not over-complicate descriptions by arguing against claims I had not made, such as boundary layers, and destruction by pressure waves that I mentioned only in a different context. Please keep descriptions sufficiently simple and explicit that others can follow them. Please do not misrepresent my arguments. Please do not move the goal posts – yes, large steel perimeter members can be seen falling outwards from the trailing edge of the destruction, but you specifically claimed ejection of “massive chunks of steel horizontally out of the building” at the leading edge of the collapse front, and these are NOT seen. Please acknowledge errors so that they can be put to rest and we can move on, as is correct in scientific discussions.
“Nikko, do you accept that the buckling captured on video initiated the collapse of WTC 2?”
No. It does not necessarily follow that the collapse of the lower section was caused by the upper.
“Do you assert that the lightweight floor trusses with four inches of concrete could have arrested the descent of the material impinging from above? “
I would guess that the slabs were a bit more than 4” and made of reinforced concrete. It is possible that a really heavy object could have punched its way through a slab or two but for that to cause the complete collapse no way.
“You call the falling material “a relatively small mass of rubble”, but you have neglected the uprights above the damaged zone, the hat truss, the heavier upper mechanical floor with its large water tanks, motors and winches for elevators and other heavy equipment, and the buildings’ contents which also included heavy equipment such as UPS battery racks etc.”
Even if it could be imagined that a massive force punched its way through all the slabs, the steel framework should have remained standing
“Please do not over-complicate descriptions by arguing against claims I had not made, such as boundary layers, and destruction by pressure waves that I mentioned only in a different context. Please keep descriptions sufficiently simple and explicit that others can follow them. Please do not misrepresent my arguments. “
What you were saying was not making any sense.
“Please do not move the goal posts – yes, large steel perimeter members can be seen falling outwards from the trailing edge of the destruction, but you specifically claimed ejection of “massive chunks of steel horizontally out of the building” at the leading edge of the collapse front, and these are NOT seen. Please acknowledge errors so that they can be put to rest and we can move on, as is correct in scientific discussions.”
I checked and found no mention of “leading edge of collapse” with reference to the sideways ejections. Nothing to correct.
The floor slabs were not reinforced concrete. They were lightweight steel trusses supporting a light metal deck, with concrete, said to be four inches deep, spread on top after installation. Raised “knuckles” in the steel protruded up into the concrete, but the concrete did not have steel reinforcement running through it. I have found two films made at the time of construction, plus a photo-montage and an instructional animation from A&E Truth:
World Trade Center Construction 1968-1972
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vgB8pckjUQ
01:11 – A floor truss being lifted.
01:25 – “Large open areas, free of columns…”
Building the World Trade Center Towers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwc49cZKunQ
07:55 – “Three elements…” – horizontal steel cross-members are not mentioned, though some were installed on the three “mechanical floors” of each tower.
09:12 – A floor truss being lifted.
09:26 – Floor trusses being lifted from trailer.
09:48 – 10:10 – Floor concrete being poured, spread and smoothed. At 09:55, the concrete being spread comes up to about the workers’ ankles.
10:10 – A floor truss being lifted.
10:49 – Another floor truss being lifted.
11:38 – Another floor truss being lifted.
World trade center history in pictures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyYj9g2_ASM
03:35 – Some quantities of material used.
04:42, 05:16 06:21 – Open plan interior.
07:26 – Contents list to give an idea of the load on the buildings.
09:55 – The wreckage pile…
10:18 – …with people for scale.
9/11 in 5 minutes – Construction World Trade Center – A&E Truth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3TmHYaXvEo
04:03 – You can see how lightweight the floor trusses were in comparison with the perimeter columns, but note that the concrete had not been added at this point.
You wrote – “It is possible that a really heavy object could have punched its way through a slab or two but for that to cause the complete collapse no way”
But there was a 3.7 metre drop beneath each floor in which acceleration would have again added to the falling mass’s residual velocity. And there was a LOT of falling mass. I have read that the floor assemblies could support about four times their own weight as a static load, and that their anchorage points on the uprights could support about ten times each floor assembly’s weight. The falling mass of the top sections exceeded that and was applied dynamically indeed, very suddenly, impacting; I really don’t see how the floor assemblies could have arrested the descent of material.
Note also that the corner sections of the floor assemblies had support from uprights only on the outer two edges. The inner two edges were supported only by the adjacent floor assemblies. On the videos of the collapses, we see some parts of the collapse front (where the ejections are) getting ahead, and those parts are at the corners of the buildings.
– “Even if it could be imagined that a massive force punched its way through all the slabs, the steel framework should have remained standing”
Apart from the two mechanical floors, the floor assemblies had no heavy steel cross-beams. This omission is what made the Twin Towers vulnerable to overall progressive collapse, and building regulations were improved after 9/11. In videos of the collapses we can see the outer perimeter being forced outwards (presumably by the mass of debris within), and then breaking away and falling. Both cores, though severely damaged, indeed remained standing after the main collapse and were caught on video before toppling a few seconds later.
– “What you were saying was not making any sense”
Then rather than complicating matters, please ask questions and I will attempt to clarify.
You wrote – “I checked and found no mention of “leading edge of collapse” with reference to the sideways ejections. Nothing to correct.”
But on November 1 at 19:39 you wrote:
– “And for gases to have been seen ejecting across all facades there had to be quite a lot of compression to produce the pressure to not only fracture glass but also to fracture and then eject massive chunks of steel horizontally out of the building”
The ejections happened at the leading edge of the collapse front. Do you yet retract the claim that the ejections (at the leading edge) ejected “massive chunks of steel horizontally”? Actually, I see no horizontal ejections of massive pieces of steel anywhere; the perimeter sections quite clearly swing outwards from their tops before falling away. The perimeter seems to “unzip”, rather like a banana unpeeling from the top down, as would be expected with a mass of debris forcing its way down within.
Here’s a photo of some floor trusses before concrete was poured onto them. You can see the knuckles:
http://heiwaco.tripod.com/WTC1floorconnection.jpg
Clark, thanks for posting the construction videos – most interesting. The floor trusses may be “light weight” but that does not mean they are not strong. Using a steel decking covered with concrete is a common way to do floors but you will notice that the concrete has been “reinforced” by means of the decking being channeled or otherwise corrugated. The concrete is supported in its entirety by the steel and the channeling embedded in the concrete gives strength and rigidity to the whole structure.
The videos confirm how solidly the towers were constructed – 40 odd internal columns with outside walls of load bearing box sections. All internally braced by 100 odd floors. There is absolutely no way that those buildings could have destroyed themselves falling vertically downwards.
Now that we know exactly how the floor slabs were constructed there is no way they could have fallen as rubble because of the continuous steel support. But as I said before, even if all the floors somehow fell through to the bottom, the inner core supports and the outside walls should have remained standing. If you do not think so then what natural force could have possibly acted to destroy the column and wall joints?
Clark, look at the video you posted at 08.32
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyYj9g2_ASM
I see 4 or 5m long chunks of debris , which to me are massive, ejected horizontally away from the facades. If you can’t see them then we’ll just have to agree to disagree. And for the record again, there is no way that any air compression through falling floors or rubble could have done that.
I remember from fluid mechanics that fluid flowing near an object is subject to boundary layer behaviour which is what you seemed to be describing. Your description of the pressure producing effect was so off the mark that I do not see any point in discussing/clarifying it. Particularly as we now know that the floors could not have been falling as rubble.
Yes the floor assemblies were strong, but they could not be strong enough to withstand what fell on them. It is difficult to know what happened beyond that they had to fail. The figures I’ve seen are that the floor slabs could support four or five times their own weight, and that their connections to the uprights could take about ten times their weight. That would suggest that the floors would break rather than separate from the uprights. Considering the more optimistic case of WTC1, the metal decking would have added little extra argument against the eleven floors-worth of material (minus losses) impinging from above. In the longer construction video you can see that temporary wooden decking was placed over the metal decking to spread the load of the concrete tipper.
Having said that, consider what we saw of WTC1’s collapse. The antenna began falling before the roof line, indicating that the core failed first, which doesn’t seem unreasonable since the aircraft hit very directly. In the top section, the core would have pulled its end of each floor section downwards; all floors would have been sloping down towards the core. Thus the floor assemblies would have been pulling downwards and inwards upon the perimeter, tending to make it narrower. Whether this could have been sufficient to slip the entire top section of perimeter into the section beneath seems difficult to judge, but also seems worth considering in light of the “banana peeling” effect observed. If so, the spandrels of the top section of perimeter could have started descending like blades within the lower section, separating floor assemblies from the lower perimeter as the upper perimeter fell. At the core, the inverse would have been happening; the columns of the upper section of core being pulled outwards, again by the tension of the floors.
This is just a visualisation. I’ll have to attempt some measurements, but not tonight.
The perimeter would only have remained standing if no lateral force had been applied. I think it unreasonable to assume that everything would have just fallen downward. The floors certainly presented some resistance. Some rubble was bound to have been liberated from the structure, but there were also building contents to consider. All such material would have effectively formed a pile, even as the floor was in the process of giving way, and piles spread outwards. Without the lateral support from the floor assemblies, the perimeter was vulnerable to being pushed outward. This, too, is consistent with the “banana peeling” effect observed.
Sections of the cores did remain standing after the collapses, though not for long.
Yes I can see huge chunks of perimeter heading outward, but they’re at the top of the wave of destruction ie. at the trailing edge. The gaseous ejections are at the bottom, or leading edge, of the wave of destruction. That’s my point – the ejections don’t eject massive chunks. The wave of very rapid ejections passes downwards, and a little later the huge chunks of perimeter sort of fall outwards and arc downwards, some then overtaking the wave of destruction.
Nikko, I think you copied the wrong link. The one I linked before isn’t the best for seeing the ejections. Bear in mind that the perimeter columns had aluminium cladding, which the ejections could have blasted off. We may have been discussing at crossed purposes. But I’m up too late. I’ll find some more videos at another time.
Clark, you mentioned WTC 1 where the antenna started “falling down” first. For that to happen the core columns supporting it must have all sheared and moved sideways in order to be able to start to descend.
You talk of the central core as a single unit when in fact it was made up of of over 40 individual columns spaced some distance apart from each other. A lot of the energy of the impacting plane would have been absorbed by the perimeter box section wall and it is completely inconceivable that all of the internal columns would have been damaged to the point that the upper and lower sections separated. This would be a necessary condition for all the columns supporting the antenna to result in a vertical descent. What I am saying is that it is impossible to achieve such symmetry with a plane impacting from one side.
Besides, a plane is hardly in a position to cause much damage to the towers. Correct me if I am wrong but I think it said in one of the videos that each tower comprised 200,000 tonnes of steel, which makes it about 2,000 t per floor. A plane’ mass is a few tens of tonnes, so hardly in a position to cause much internal damage by penetrating deep into the core.
In WTC1 the symmetrical failure in the core columns was followed by the symmetrical failure of the box section outer wall, which was assembled tent pole fashion by sliding the upper sections into the lower ones. Which makes the joint stronger than the rest of the piece.
In effect, the outer walls formed a rectangular tube and tubes just do not disintegrate like you see. Contemplating the internal forces from falling floors and rubble, as you are doing, can never develop the lateral forces needed to tear the outer walls apart. You are wasting time. (Just consider the force necessary for the outer box sections to fail in shear which is the only mode possible to explain individual sections peeling away as you call it.)
I would suggest that WTC 2 actually collapsed in the same manner as WTC 1, i.e. the core went first (unseen by us) but in this case the upper section started to rotate probably due to more severe damage to the periphery of the building. And a second or so after the core started collapsing, the perimeter started collapsing in a symmetrical fashion just like WTC 1.
And you still think gravity alone can do all this? As regards the debris ejecting laterally from the facades, it is immaterial whether at the leading or trailing edge – the important point is the existence of the lateral force which caused it. I believe you have commented yourself that debris was spread some distance from the towers.
Have you visualised the towers at a smaller scale to help conceptualise it? I can’t speak for you, but I find it difficult to think about buildings nearly half a kilometre tall; all the parts seem massive. I have somewhat arbitrarily chosen a scale reduction of 1/100 to get the structures into my mind. This gives a “mind model” two or three times my height, the perimeter columns 3.6mm square, made from steel that is still just about thick enough to visualise. Even at this scale, with the concrete of the floor trusses about a millimetre thick, the steel of the floor trusses gets too thin to think about.
The figure of 200,000 tons of steel refers to the entire WTC complex. There is the steel in the other buildings and the foundations to subtract, then a division by two because there were two towers, and then a division of more than 110 because the sub-levels must be accounted for. The floors hit by aircraft were both relatively high where less steel was used, and they were just normal floors, not the more heavily constructed mechanical floors. Then consider that the perimeter only carried 30% of the gravity load, and that the aircraft’s passage to the core was obstructed by well under a quarter of the core columns.
Considering WTC1, the perimeter having been breached, almost the entire aircraft fuselage including the strongest members attaching it to the main spars in the wings, was then aligned with and drove directly into the core – all that length of fuselage, piling and piling in, even as its leading (but eroding) edge severed columns. The laden mass of the aircraft would have exceeded 100 tons – remember that a ton is substantially less than a tonne. With a substantial proportion of uprights severed, loads within the building shifted. This asymmetry henceforth imparted lateral forces, so at the time of core failure, lateral displacement of core columns at the damaged zone (involving either severing or buckling), seems reasonable.
Nikko, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but your figure of 2000 tons of steel per floor, and your requirement that all core columns be both severed and displaced at the time of impact, seem remarkably unreasonable. I think you should consider that you may have rejected collapse under gravity due simply to your personal incredulity, and have since been rationalising to make explosives indispensable to the collapse process. Please spend a while visualising the towers at a reduced scale. When considered in isolation the steel components do seem almost invincibly robust, but when seen in context they were merely adequate for their normal function, as would be expected.
Your 2000 t(onnes) of steel versus a few tens of tonnes of aircraft is particularly exaggerated, by maybe two orders of magnitude. The entire mass of the aircraft carried kinetic energy. Since the aircraft hit full on, that entire destructive potential was inflicted. However, it was inflicted upon a very small proportion of each building, localising and concentrating its destructive effect.
Please explain how you came to be so far out.
You are right Clark, my 200,000 t for 1 tower was wrong as I was quoting from memory. I did say that might be the case. The mass advantage for the towers is nowhere near so great, but you need to take into account also the mass of concrete and the rest. However, at the end of the day the extent to which the aircraft penetrated does not explain the lateral disintegration of the entire structure below the impact if only gravity was involved.
Until you come up with a convincing mechanism where the massive lateral forces that tore the building apart came from, your theories of falling rubble and compressed air are more wishful thinking than science.
Nikko, no, the aircraft did not directly cause the overall collapses. It was caused by the top sections falling onto the sections beneath. The energy source was the gravitational potential energy of the buildings themselves, which was immense.
Watch the North Tower fall again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAeUgMDHeR8
As the collapse begins, near the top, dust is not dispersed far. Indeed, as the top section falls, dust and smoke is drawn back as air refills the vacated space. It is lower in the collapse that we see lateral dispersion of material. Sections of perimeter swing away, some of them huge, their top ends falling outwards first. Their bottom ends separate shortly after, and as they fall they trail clouds of dust.
Note that once the Tower has gone, most of the plume of dust is barely wider than the Tower was.
The buildings do not appear to be “torn apart”. Rather, they seem to be “gutted”, the floors stripped within the perimeter. Unsupported laterally and pushed by the debris within, the perimeter sections then swing outwards and then downwards.
Clark, we are going round in circles. What I see is massive lateral force tearing the building apart. Your belief that it was falling debris and compressed air which caused it is not founded in any science and your repeating it without any proof does not make it true. Believe what you like but unless you can quantify your argument it is not worth pursuing this further.
Quantities. Eleven storeys of WTC1 began to fall. According to what I’ve read, each floor assembly beneath the falling section could support about four times a floor assembly’s weight, and each floor assembly’s connection to the uprights (core and perimeter) could support about ten times a floor assembly’s weight. Looking at the construction images and thinking about the design, those figures seem reasonable.
Reasoning. Since the weight of about eleven floor assemblies, plus contents, plus the uprights supporting eleven floors, plus the hat truss, plus ancillary equipment such as water tanks and lift winches, fell upon the topmost intact floor assembly, that floor assembly had to fail. Therefore, the weight of material already listed, plus the newly failed floor assembly and the contents it was supporting, fell upon the next floor assembly down. Therefore, that too had to fail, and by the same reasoning, all the other floor assemblies at least as far as the next highest mechanical floor. This holds without even considering that the dynamic load inflicted will have greatly exceeded the falling material’s static weight.
I have not said that compressed air destroyed the structure. I do say that the falling material will have compressed the air ahead of it, and that this caused the ejections at the leading edge of the collapse, which are interpreted by many as demolition charges. Please stop misrepresenting this matter. You seem to be trying to make my description of the collapses seem ludicrous. I suspect that you are playing to the gallery on this, attempting to convince other readers of demolition rather than being even handed.
At the trailing edge of the collapse, large pieces of perimeter structure are seen moving outward and then falling. They do not accelerate suddenly as they would if driven by explosions. At the trailing edge, the perimeter had already lost its lateral support which had been provided by the floor assemblies. This loss of lateral support follows logically, since the floor assemblies could not have withstood the material falling within the perimeter.
Material falling within the perimeter will have exerted most of its force downwards, but inevitably it will have exerted some force outwards as well, pushing the perimeter sections out.
The above description is qualitatively and quantitatively consistent and accounts for all observations including sudden, fast ejections of dust at the leading edge of destruction where the floor assemblies were being destroyed, relatively gentle toppling of perimeter sections at the trailing edge of destruction where lateral support had been removed, complete collapse from the damaged zones downwards, and greatest emission of dust towards the end of the collapses.
“You seem to be trying to make my description of the collapses seem ludicrous”
It is ludicrous, so no need to try.
You seem to be oblivious to how metal behaves under stress. There is absolutely no way that falling debris on the inside can rip the outer structure apart into pieces smaller than the prefabricated sections. If you want to be taken seriously study strength of materials and how metals behave. Putting it politely your collapse theory has zero chance of being true.
The falling debris did not “rip the outer structure apart into pieces smaller than the prefabricated sections”. I have made that clear. Why do you repeatedly misrepresent? Do you not have an honest argument to offer?
Yet again, the debris within the perimeter destroyed the floor assemblies, depriving the perimeter of lateral support. The same debris also exerted lesser forces outwards, initiating the outward toppling of the perimeter. The perimeter box columns were very strong in compression along their length, but they were far less resistant to being bent and fractured. They were also very heavy. You can see what happened on the videos. As the perimeter sections toppled outward their own weight broke them away from the sections beneath, those lower sections still having lateral support.
The pieces thus formed were by no means all “smaller than the prefabricated sections”; why do you argue from falsity, unless to deceive? In the collapse videos, large sections obviously consisting of many prefabricated sections can clearly be seen falling, and large sections are clearly visible in photographs of the aftermath. Workers had to cut many large sections to make them small enough to remove by truck, whereas the prefabricated sections were, by design, small enough delivered by truck when the Towers were constructed.
You seem to need to misrepresent in order to support demolition theory, which begs the question of whether you actually believe it yourself.
“The falling debris did not “rip the outer structure apart into pieces smaller than the prefabricated sections”. I have made that clear. Why do you repeatedly misrepresent? Do you not have an honest argument to offer? “
Your explanation does not make any sense within the framework of physics and engineering as it was taught a few years ago, so forgive me for over simplifying. If I now understand correctly, you are not saying that the falling debris ripped the towers apart but that it led to events which caused the towers to rip themselves apart. If you look at the collapse videos (particularly tower 1) you see the towers break up into pieces – a few large ones but many smaller than the prefab sections and being hurled 60m or more sideways. Even though I asked you before you have not accounted for the forces that would do this, i.e. fracture the metal in shear and then hurl it sideways.
“The perimeter box columns were very strong in compression along their length, but they were far less resistant to being bent and fractured.”
Rubbish. The outer wall box sections would have been extremely resistant to shear and bending. The flying pieces smaller than the prefab sections would have need to fracture through shear at least at one end and so would the larger sections. Not much evidence of bending was seen. Besides, steel is a ductile metal so considerable bending would be achieved before failure. Bending (as does shear) absorbs energy – have you considered the impact of this on the time of collapse? I guess not.
“They were also very heavy. You can see what happened on the videos. As the perimeter sections toppled outward their own weight broke them away from the sections beneath, those lower sections still having lateral support.”
The towers were akin to a rectangular cylinder, with the perimeter sections bolted together. Cylinders are inherently very strong and can easily carry more than their own weight, even without internal bracing.
“The pieces thus formed were by no means all “smaller than the prefabricated sections”; why do you argue from falsity, unless to deceive?”
If you check what I wrote you will see that I have not used the word “all”. Why do you accuse others of what you are guilty of yourself?
“In the collapse videos, large sections obviously consisting of many prefabricated sections can clearly be seen falling, and large sections are clearly visible in photographs of the aftermath. Workers had to cut many large sections to make them small enough to remove by truck, whereas the prefabricated sections were, by design, small enough delivered by truck when the Towers were constructed.
You seem to need to misrepresent in order to support demolition theory, which begs the question of whether you actually believe it yourself.”
That some of the debris had to be cut up to fit on a truck is hardly a proof one way or the other. You forgot to mention, or was it a deliberate misrepresentation on your part, that a very much larger number of much smaller debris is also clearly in evidence in the collapse videos, which did not need to be cut up to fit on a truck. What force produced this debris? What force hurled it sideways?
Clark, I get the impression that you are getting paranoid with your accusations. If you want to be taken seriously I suggest again that you need to quantify your arguments with some numbers, particularly for the forces involved and compare to the available gravitational forces. As we are going around in circles, I will leave our discussion here, unless you come up with something new. Cheers
At the trailing edge of the destruction, nothing is being “hurled sideways”. The perimeter sections are clearly toppling outward, and of course that results in some lateral dispersion. 60m dispersion is “hurled”? From 200m to 300m or more up? No.
Yes, there were larger and smaller pieces. “Not much evidence of bending was seen” – oh. Was much evidence of explosive cutting seen?
“Bending (as does shear) absorbs energy – have you considered the impact of this on the time of collapse?”
But this was all happening at the trailing edge of the destruction, which indeed proceeded slower than the leading edge (where the ejections were), upon which it could have had no effect.
You seem to have changed your argument a number of times. I will summarise later.
I presume that just about everyone in this thread knows how the World Trade Center towers were constructed.
I believe it was a first at the time: instead of a central core which the floors radiated out from, the World Trade Center towers were built with the exterior walls as the structural force. This is why the WTCs had such small windows; because massive I-beams ran from the bottom to the top of the exterior of the building. It was like a massive steel cage.
There’s a huge amount of video (don’t ask me to find it now) of the plane hitting the second tower, and then coming out of the other side of the building with its nose cone intact.
This is physically impossible.
Rob,
I recently saw a youtube video made on the day 9/11 of Donald Trump discussing the fact of the exoskeleton construction and the impossibility of the planes being the cause of their collapse. Trump of course has built many high rises and would know what he is talking about. I’m an architect, and I’ve recently come to the conclusion that 9/11 is an inside job, planned by the Bush/CIA clan to give us a reason to start meddling in the ME. Mossad accomplished the planning, and the Saudis funded it and provided the pilots. I believe W7 was a controlled demolition of some type.
Here it is. Apologies if this has already been posted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSSwXvsEX_c
To clarify, Trump believed it was a combination of bombs and the planes. I cannot speak to the videos because I think some of them were faked or doctored but I have no way to verify which ones. If this was an inside job, like the JFK assassination it would have had the appropriate agencies doctoring the dox. I’m not an engineer but I’ve worked on several hi rises as an architect, and from my physical sense of their structure, it does not seem right to me that the planes’ impact alone would bring them down. I don’t really buy that there were no planes, I think the videos were doctored. At this point I agree with Trump, the planes plus an explosive either in the planes or in the buildings.
I’m perhaps not so interested in the technical discussion of how they were brought down, but the conspiracy behind them. I recently came to the conclusion that the New World Order Bush spoke about in 1990 was aiming for a one world government, and to do that, America had to be weakened. We see how the EU is accomplishing the collapse of the European countries into a single grey mass, and I believe the first big steps toward that in the Americas was 9/11, the NAU, and starting to collapse the ME. Wesley Clark is on YT also talking about the Pentagon’s plan under Rumsfield to collapse 7 ME countries in 5 years. The plans got delayed but Obama continued them and next up was supposed to be either Jeb Bush or Hillary (Clintons and Bushes are partners in the enterprise, both have very strong ties to the Saudis). Trump is interrupting the whole plan, that is why there is so much opposition to him from the establishment in the US. Most of us are rebelling against the globalist plans of the elites as we do not want to be their serfs.
Actually, the US has been “meddling in the Middle East” for seventy years since the Quincey Agreement; haven’t you heard of the previous Gulf War, “babies taken from incubators”, Operation Ajax etc? All pre-9/11.
How long have you been an architect and which building designs have you contributed to?
I worked on hi rise buildings in Houston, Minneapolis, and Atlanta in the 80s, by Pelli and Philip Johnson. I worked on De Rotterdam and Shenzhen Stock Exchange when I worked in Europe in 2006 – 8. I am now teaching architecture as a professor, and recently taught a studio on hi rise exoskeleton design.
I recently realised just what a terrorist organisation the CIA has been since Dulles, and I see it not as an American institution but as the enforcer arm of the globalist cabal that is out of our control. The CIA like the Fed is not under the direct control or even supervision of the President, but even our presidents/presidency have been hijacked since Bush/LBJ assassinated JFK. I was never a conspiracy theorist, but too many things were not adding up and I got ‘redpilled’ as they say. The last 6 months have been a real ‘trip’ for me, as I try to piece this puzzle together.
Well beware of “Truther” sites – they warp the facts to support their arguments. Always check Truther claims against the counter-arguments from sites like 9/11 Myths, Metabunk, WTC7 Lies, and try to follow assertions to their source – the Truther scene is an echo-chamber.
Trump was a New York property developer; I think he was just reacting against suggestions that the buildings weren’t particularly strong. He was up to his neck in corruption in the building trade:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/trump-swam-in-mob-infested-waters-in-early-years-as-an-nyc-developer/2015/10/16/3c75b918-60a3-11e5-b38e-06883aacba64_story.html
Building 7’s collapse was dead weird, but remember that it had been evacuated and the area around it cleared hours before it came down.
Yes, much US foreign policy is covert, projected by the CIA, and continues regardless no matter who’s President.
Zazou, you may find the following pages useful:
http://inplaceoffear.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/they-didnt-even-try-to-keep-americans.html
http://inplaceoffear.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/9-11-warnings-ignored-timeline-summer.html
http://europe.newsweek.com/alleged-hijackers-may-have-trained-us-bases-152495
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Springmann
The aircraft didn’t directly cause the collapses. The aircraft severed a lot of the columns and started widespread fires, but after the top sections began to fall, the ensuing destruction was caused by the buildings’ own gravitational potential energy.
But in a sense, 9/11 was an “inside job”. The hijackers were probably inside the US military system, issued visas by the CIA under State Department directions – see Michael Springman. This long-standing arrangement began with the Quincey Agreement in 1945.
Certain Middle Eastern countries don’t get attacked by the US, notably Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. These countries indoctrinate, fund, arm and train the sort of extremists who had to be “protected” in Benghazi and who are currently attacking Syria. These are the same sort of extremists as the hijackers on 9/11, yet the US continues to make use of them.
You seem to know alot of details. I might be weak on the history side, but I’m very involved in uncovering the recent details of Hillary’s involvement in Benghazi and Syria. My information may or may not align with yours.
Most Americans are unaware of what has been going on since at least Dulles, but many of us are waking up. Like I said, I believe this is not really an American conspiracy or policy but a globalist one. It’s as if Americans were taught all these values of democracy and freedom and equality, and still believe in the American dream, and somehow we were taken over by the giant vampire squid of the bankers, the CIA, the multinational corporations. It’s a nightmare to realise we are losing our country. The UN is somehow the face of all this. I had no idea there was a plan to collapse our hemisphere into a single entity like the EU until just recently. The recent presidential campaign had brought it all into focus, and Trump has exposed just how staged and rigged everything has been. I believe I am still in some stage of shock and grief.
This next week will be very interesting as we see what Wikileaks gives us, what is on Huma’s computer, and the details are emerging of Benghazi as well as all the corruption of the Clinton Foundation. It will certainly be a pivotal week in history, and the election on the 8th will determine whether we survive as a nation or not, and hopefully change direction. If Clinton gets in, we are through, and there will be WW3 within a few years. There will be no hope of recovery, the only question will be how slow or fast our decline and dissolution will be.
Globalisation is a corporate agenda – acquisition of both markets, natural resources, and workforces unprotected by unionisation or government regulation.
The UN is heavily influenced by the US, but beware the anti-UN theories such as the depopulation theory, anti-environmentalism and global warming denial, which I expect are seeded to advance the corporatist-financial agenda; the corporations would rather there were no laws or institutions restricting their activities. Of course the UN is heavily influenced by the corporations, too, but its members also include all the poorer countries, and it is the major forum for international and humanitarian law. The UN attempts a lot of good work, but it often does it badly because of corporate influence.
My own feeling is that corporate-financial dominance is the major threat. Clinton and Trump are both tools of global corporatism, just with somewhat different portfolios of corporate sponsors. That’s why such effort was made against Bernie Sanders, despite his being the better candidate to oppose Trump.
Watch out for convergence of interests. For instance, US, Saudi, Qatari, Israeli and corporate objectives all converge against Syria, but all for different reasons. Israel is occupying Syria’s Golan Heights and wishes to extract oil there. The US opposes Assad’s government because it is allied to Russia, has a Russian naval base and won’t host any US military bases. Saudi Arabia and Qatar oppose Syria because Arab Nationalism or Ba’athism is a threat to the Saudi and Qatari monarchies. Corporations want pipelines across Syria, and make money wherever there’s war. These are simplifications, but my point is that the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel aren’t “all in it together”; Saudi Arabia and Israel are enemies, but their interests converge as regards Syria, and as regarded Iraq and Libya.
Sorry it’s so complicated. You might find that the following helps:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/j_a_hobson_impe/
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/the_consequence/
I guess you still subscribe to the terrorist narrative? I’m afraid I do not. The Bushes are behind it, but Mossad carried out the planning, which is why there are not alot of Americans around to blow the whistle. The ‘hijackers’ were trained in Florida near Miami while Jeb Bush was governor. They definitely knew it was going to happen, and Condi Rice and several others called friends and family in Manhattan the day before 9/11 and warned them to get away. The exoskeleton is very strong, the tubular structure of the columns and their spacing is extremely strong, I think the planes would not have been able to collapse them without explosives. Then the cleanup was accomplished in record time, I remember being offended that they tore down the last remnants of the structure while people were still mourning the loss of their loved ones, everything was carted out of the city in record time, as if to erase the evidence. There is also some detail about Giuliani getting warning to get out of a building just before it was blown up. Too many things that do not add up to simple terrorist. And once you know just how dirty and evil the Bush family has been since Nazi era, the cognitive dissonance is just too great. It could not, in my opinion, have been a surprise terrorist attack. The terrorists were really the Bush/globalist cabal. It will be pure joy to see the look on their faces if Trump gets in, which looks likely unless he is assassinated.
Zazou, no, not “terrorists”; the US’s own proxy forces – Wahhabist indoctrinated extremists. Remember how close the Bush family is to the bin Laden family. “Terrorists”, “moderate rebels” or “freedom fighters”? The choice of moniker depends entirely upon context.
“Zazou”, you’re not playing the ingénue very convincingly; you use too many Truther phrases 😉 Nothing’s changed about the WTC architecture in the last six months. Look at my 02:09 comment below. I calculated the scale of the box columns just tonight; cooking foil is actually an over-estimation. An architect would have known that for years.
Of course they cleared it all away pronto. It was built by the New York Mob, so any evidence of skimping had to be disposed of before NIST could impound it.
” Condi Rice and several others called friends and family in Manhattan the day before 9/11 and warned them to get away. ”
Evidence? Rice herself remained at her desk in the White House. You’d have thought she’d have made herself and appointment elsewhere.
If there was an urgency to clear the wreckage it may have been an attempt to erase the memory of terrible events not to mention getting hundreds of tons of toxic material out of the city centre.
I’m not sure why but I don’t have a button to reply to your posts Clark.
I don’t agree about your technical estimation of the overall structural integrity of the towers. Any one column might seem thin to you, but overall the structure is very very strong. You don’t need mass, that is the very principle behind an I beam or a box beam and the thinness of modern construction. You eliminate mass but the organization of the members and the material gives it maximal strength. You are also using an assumption that it was not built as engineered or up to code. There are plenty of holes in your argument.
You might be right about alot of the details, but I think you don’t have a comprehensive picture of what is going on in the world. Corporatism alone does not explain it. I’ve also looked at Hollywood and the music industry, and have come to realise through a few in depth studies of particular works and artists that you really cannot get ahead in those industries without going along with this illuminati or globalist agenda. There may be a few exceptions, like Dave Chapelle, but they are very rare. Alot of the artists are even very open about it. Take a very very close look at Prince and Michael Jackson for instance. The symbolism they used, their images, their agendas are all consistent with the illuminati theory. Jackson even became openly paranoid they were out to get him, while Prince accepted their ‘religious’ beliefs almost entirely. (By the way, his death was a suicide, and was a suicide pact with Vanity who he carried on and off with throughout his entire life. I wish I had time to put together the evidence into a neat package, but I don’t). I used to dismiss the illuminati chatter as ridiculous paranoia, but after alot of personal research I came to my conclusion that there is no other logical explanation. I believe they both underwent MKUltra programming.
I have looked at some of the accepted dogmas of today in some depth, such as climate change, and I find some huge missing gaps and some credible lawyers and Nobel prize winners who dispute it, and make good cases. It is by no means an established fact. Rather it is a belief and an ideology. If it exists, there is plenty of reason to believe it is a natural occurring event.
While I don’t approve of what the CIA has been doing in other countries. I am less concerned about international law than I am about the disappearing freedoms in my own country at the moment. If the world loses the American Constitution and Bill of Rights as victims of the UN, it will be a nightmare scenario for the world. The rapidly increasing capability of the cyber surveillance state will turn this world into a totalitarian state with no other option.
That’s all I have to say for the time being. Stay tuned to news about Benghazi and Syria, there are rumors of impending revelations which I hope will come to pass. Thiel is involved, Petraus, Rossi, according to what I have heard. We’ll see what develops.
Zazou, as an architect, please explain to me why buildings aren’t built higher. Is there any limit to how high a building can be, and if so, what determines that limit?
Zazou, many thanks for the YouTube link. It perfectly encapsulates what I was trying to say.
I’m never afraid of being called a ‘conspiracy theorist’ or a ‘conspiraloon’ or whatever. I’m capable of critical thinking and if something does not add-up to my mind I will say so, even if I’m labelled as the only lunatic in the room.
History shows that us ‘lunatics’ are usually right.
However, since you say that your eyes have only been opened recently, I would add that you need to keep that critical thinking. The further you go down the rabbit hole the easier it is to believe that everything is a conspiracy.
Much of it is cock-up rather than conspiracy.
We’re dealing with human nature here.
Which is why it didn’t happen.
Look at the footage and two burning objects can be seen to pass right through the tower. These are the engines or at least part of them; solid bits of engineering which as they provide all the thrust will want to keep going after the rest of the aircraft has been destroyed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFiEgwLQVJk
The understandably crushed and broken remains of both engines were recovered and are now on display in the WTC museum.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/momentsnotice/11155905684
Bet I know what’s coming next…
Hundreds or maybe thousands of people witnessed the second aircraft strike, and many thousands must have seen the holes the aircraft made in the buildings. The damaged perimeter columns were bent inwards.
Yeah, I bothered to download the “Nosed Out” video and checked it frame by frame. It comes down to matching about sixty pixels, if I remember correctly, and the match isn’t even particularly close. You’ve got ten frames or so to pick from as the aircraft approaches, and the nose makes a slightly different shape in each one. Then you’ve got a few frames of the ejecta on the opposite side of the building, again, each being different. That gives you dozens of before/after comparisons, and the maker of the video found the closest match out of all available. The video maker even boasts of (ie. admits to) using a video “enhancement” technique.
I saw Father Christmas’s face in a cloud once, and I didn’t even need video enhancement. I covered this back in January:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post/comment-page-66/#comment-572903
I-beams are always “massive” in Truther speak, aren’t they? In fact they’re that shape to minimise their mass. The Twin Towers’ “framed tube” shape used only 60% as much steel as older designs. The Twin Towers’ columns were not I-beams, but box columns of 36cm square cross-section, four plates welded together, but towards the top of the buildings (where there was less weight to carry) those plates were only 1/4 inch (about 6mm) thick. A 1/100th scale model of the Twin Towers would be over 4 metre tall and 0.63 metre square. Each face would indeed have 59 columns, but each would be just 3.6mm square and mostly hollow, the steel itself having thickness comparable to cooking foil.
Do check, but I expect that leading edges and surfaces of aircraft are hardened – I bloody well hope they are in case they fly through a hailstorm at hundreds of miles per hour.
” I expect that leading edges and surfaces of aircraft are hardened ”
As is the case with a car body an aircraft gets a lot of it’s strength from it’s shape but they are not simply thin aluminium tubes as conspiracy websites would have you believe. Fuselages have numerous ribs and stringers to provide strength to what it essentially a box girder required to withstand enormous dynamic loads. Then of course there are the floors which have to take the weight of the payload, whether it be passengers or freight. This is a cross section of a B747 being scraped.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/88/5f/22/885f229a8e3ec040d068e7fa6833a0bd.jpg
Same is true of the wings and they’re built around what are called main spars. These are hefty box girders which support the weight and thrust of the engines and transfer the lift of the wings to the fuselage. The main landing gear is also attached to the main spars so they have to withstand the impact of landing. Another picture of an aircraft being broken up for scrap to illustrate.
http://www.clearcirclemetals.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/aircraft-recycling.jpg
So, another intelligent, thoughtful commentator gets chased off this thread by a combination of voodoo science and obscurations.
God, is there any hope for the human race.
– “God, is there any hope for the human race”
With so many keen to deny global warming and promote assorted anti-science, and trash any institution protecting human rights and international law, probably not much.
And as it all goes down the drain, you, Rob, can be proud that you did your bit to promote right-wing conspiracy theories, public distrust of academia and the agenda of unbridled profit.
That’s total bollocks, and you know it.
Feck knows what they pay you for this, and I’ve always pondered the psychology of people who will take a buck to screw their fellow humans down the drain.
It’s an age old question.
And it’s why the world is a complete mess.
In the meantime, this is Clark’s thread, and I’m sure he’ll enjoy talking to himself.
RobG, I don’t ask to be paid to seek truth, apply reason, and speak sense. I regard it as a duty.
Truth, Justice, Peace.
Do you deny global warming Rob? Most of the money is in denying it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_family#Climate_change
– According to the environmentalist group Greenpeace, the Koch brothers have played an active role in opposing climate change legislation. Climate change skeptic Willie Soon received $230,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Organizations that the Koch brothers help fund, such as Americans for Prosperity, The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Manhattan Institute, have been active in questioning global warming. Americans for Prosperity and the Koch brothers influenced more than 400 members of Congress to sign a pledge to vote against climate change legislation that does not include offsetting tax cuts.
The Kochs have also funded efforts to stop the growth of solar power.
Fossil fuel interests are also generally supportive of the Saudis, obviously.
I reckon you don’t reveal half of what you think. Much that you write is innuendo. You attribute effects of global warming to contamination from the Fukushima disaster. You accuse Craig of collusion with the secret services. It’s not impossible that you’re being paid, but I suspect it’s simply anger, ill-directed due to ego problems.
I find it somewhat sickening:
– “Yes, yes! Let’s all ignore Wahhabism and the projection of the power of the House of Saud! Let them turn Islam into a doctrine of death! Let them subvert all of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims! The atrocities attributed to them in Western lands are purely fabrications of the media! Oh, we loudly proclaim that they run amok in what’s left of Libya, and that our secret services collude with them to overthrow Syria, but here? NO! That ideology NEVER provokes violence over here!!!”
There’s something racist about such thinking, that an ideology will only provoke the killing and maiming of brown people, but somehow never has, and never will provoke violence upon white people.
Why defend this evil thing? Inspired as it is by public beheadings, public flogging, public amputations, and the public stoning to death of women. Why pretend that it only ever strikes them, and that it never strikes us?
I guess that people can’t think beyond the propaganda.
Look, it was the propaganda that said that (a) because nineteen “Muslims” hijacked and crashed aircraft on 9/11, that (b) programmes of torture and military devastation were necessary.
But you apparently can’t think beyond “This OR That”.
Therefore, to reject (b), your limited thinking insists that you must reject (a).
But your brain is too small; (b) never did follow from (a), and (a) was distorted rather than an outright lie, but you’re missing both of these tricks. The propaganda machine is cleverer than you. It has tricked you into discrediting yourself; denying science, academia and common sense! And most of all, most of all, it has tricked you into defending the neocons’ primary weapon in the Middle East; Wahhabism!
The true path of peace is to refuse to retaliate despite the provocation; not to deny that the provocation ever occurred in contradiction of all evidence. You need to lead by example rather than trying to propagate delusion. You’re taking the public for idiots when you promote demolition and hologram aircraft, so of course they won’t listen.
Oh I forgot; you’re all of Christian background. You have form. When your Christ (“saviour”) was executed for exposing and challenging the authorities’ hypocrisy and corruption, someone sneaked off with his body enabling your predecessors to pretend he hadn’t actually died at all, and two thousand years later you still won’t tell it like it was. You abandon your cultural background rather than face the obvious fact; whoever Jesus was, he was executed for political reasons.
OffGuardian allows free and open discussion of 9/11…
https://off-guardian.org/category/911-fifteen-years-on/
As do the usual suspects like Global Research, et al.
Otherwise you’ll just have to put up with Clark on this board.
Philip Giraldi at OffGuardian demeans Jill Stein by associating her with Loose Change. What she has actually said:
– “On the eve of the 15-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Stein called for “a comprehensive and independent inquiry into the attacks,” saying that the 9/11 Commission report contained many “omissions and distortions.” The next day, she said: “I think I would not have assassinated Osama bin Laden but would have captured him and brought him to trial.”
“Attacks”. “Osama bin Laden”. Nothing about demolition or holograms.
OffGuardian just did a hit-piece against Chomsky. Funny how the 9/11 demolition/hologram theories seem always to hit the good guys. Even when you hear it straight from Trump’s own mouth, you still don’t recognise it for what it is.
Or are you a Trump supporter?
– “OffGuardian allows free and open discussion of 9/11… As do the usual suspects like Global Research, et al. Otherwise you’ll just have to put up with Clark on this board”
Free and open discussion of 9/11 is allowed here, so what this comment really means is “if you want to speculate with no challenge, there are circle-jerks at x and y”.
Unbridled speculation, Justice, Peace?