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I’m unlikely to post much on this forum having said all I wish to say on the original. WTC7 probably just collapsed, most likely due to appalling design and construction (as documented by the UAF report), though I do wonder if a very brave team rigged demolitions (WTC7 was on fire, distorting, leaning and making alarming creaking noises!) on the afternoon of 9/11 – surviving firefighters had been ordered not to search for their missing comrades in the vicinity of WTC7 due to the risk of it collapsing. The New York Fire Department was on the verge of mutiny, so maybe some kind of deal was done, though the only reason I can think of for keeping such an emergency demolition secret would be to encourage conspiracy theorists. To those who claim this to be impossible in such a short time, military demolition teams do this as their day job, behind enemy lines.

The UAF report makes reference to four other engineering investigations of WTC7’s collapse; the FEMA Building Performance report, the NIST report, the ARUP report and one I can’t remember the name of, so there is plenty of material to investigate for anyone genuinely interested. Two reports were produced for two court cases; WTC7 was built above an electricity transformer substation, which it destroyed when it collapsed. Con Edison, owners of the substation, sued the owners of the WTC claiming that WTC7 collapsed due to faulty design and construction. Con Edison won, but the verdict was overturned on appeal. I mention these matters because demolition theorists generally don’t seem to know, and instead of examining this copious evidence they merely parrot things they find on Truther websites.

g and free-fall are NOT the same thing; see my comments on the original thread. Contrary to Chandler, acceleration at g does not prove free-fall, eg. a vehicle could accelerate horizontally at g but it would not be in free-fall. Try to use your brains! And buildings subject to controlled demolition typically fall slower than g anyway.

For the record, I am not a supporter of the “official story”. I think that the 9/11 attacks were quite possibly a Gladio B operation. Gladio B, exposed by whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, is a “strategy of tension” operation similar to the original Gladio operation in Europe, but using Jihadists in the place of violent right-wing extremists. Gladio B is run by NATO Secret Services, and 9/11 was used as the pretext to make the invasion of Afghanistan (for the Unocal pipeline) a NATO operation. NATO has no government of its own, so NATO Secret Services lacks government oversight.

But there is little suspicious about the collapses of the Twin Towers; they collapsed as any structural engineer would have expected them to under the circumstances; structural failure inducing progressive collapse. The Twin Towers were of the most lightweight construction ever implemented in such tall buildings; occupants complained that they swayed excessively in high winds, spilling coffee out of cups on desks, making the floor assemblies creak, and causing tower computers to fall over. They had been fitted with thousands of viscous dampers (ie. shock absorbers) to prevent occupants from suffering motion sickness.

9/11 was NOT used as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq; that was fake “weapons of mass destruction” and fake informants such as ‘Curveball’. Nor was it used as a pretext for the devastation of Libya (fake massacre in Benghazi), nor the infiltration of Jihadists into Syria (“Assad is a dictator”).

The real scandal of the 9/11 Commission Report is that it was 60% based on confessions extracted under torture. It is well established that torture produces false confessions; it also permanently corrupts the evidence trail. Condoleezza Rice authorised the CIA torture programme; she should be your target rather than the mediocre engineers and desk-jockeys of NIST.

Conspiracy theorists, your pristine thread awaits you; enjoy your boring circle-jerk 😀

Node, these personal accusations are off-topic, as will be my defence against them.

I was referring to the original UAF Report thread. Yes, there is the much earlier 9/11 Post of Craig’s, which became entirely overtaken with arguments about building collapses. There is much more to 9/11 than that; it seems to me that building collapses serve as a very effective distraction from the points I raised in the second comment of this thread.

As a moderator I repeatedly reopened the original 9/11 Post; it was Craig who instructed site admin to close it. I was unaware of the problem in the forum software, so I was incapable of exploiting it. When I discovered it I warned others and tried to get it fixed. As a last resort I opened this forum, but…

It is the height of irony that you accuse me of sabotage, and yet you vow to boycott the thread.

I am so pleased Clark has condemned ‘Naked’ links on here – I’m a bit of a prude myself.
Still, I know Clark is a bit sensitive on ‘Lucky Larry’, so here is a very short video, which I will just write the title to (simply search video + title):
‘EXPLAIN THIS – Plans to Rebuild WTC-7 Over 1 Year Before It’s Destruction’.
I’ve spent years on 9/11, and this is a new one on me. ‘All roads lead to Rome’, or in this case, an ‘Inside Job’.

The video Paul Barbara refers to is here.

Silverstein took the lease of the WTC complex only six weeks before the attacks, but he says that the plans for the replacement WTC7 were drawn up eighteen months before, in April 2000. So whoever had the plans drawn up, it presumably wasn’t Silverstein Properties. So the alleged conspiracy has to be extended, as they always seem to. This theory also needs yet more conspirators to arrange the attack on the Pentagon. One of my tests for a “conspiracy theory” is whether the alleged conspiracy has to be expanded without limit.

Paul, rather than just linking to that uninformative and rather anti-Semitic* video, I think you should do some research and find out who did have WTC7’s replacement designed. And as the video alleges that the attacks were essentially an insurance fraud, you should also find out and post how much it eventually cost Silverstein Properties to redevelop the WTC complex; without that information, the video’s claim that the insurance payout was excessive is merely malicious gossip.

* Anti-Semitic tropes from 04:00 onward – slowing Silverstein’s voice to make him sound sinister, and then repeating, with reverb, “but at least I got the money” over and over, because everyone knows that money is all Jews care about. Videos like this are an appeal to unpleasant emotions; you should link to documentary evidence instead.

The reason the WTC buildings were so poor was that the Port Authority has an exemption from state building “codes”, ie. regulations. Building codes have been improved in response to the collapses on 9/11.

@ Clark February 18, 2020 at 14:33
My understanding is that Larry Silverstein designed and owned WTC 7 from the outset, and six weeks prior to 9/11 signed the deal to lease the rest of the WTC buildings.
So it was ‘Lucky Larry’ who designed the new WTC 7 in 2000.
‘BOMBSHELL! Larry Silverstein designed NEW WTC-7 in April of 2000’.
‘…And as the video alleges that the attacks were essentially an insurance fraud, you should also find out and post how much it eventually cost Silverstein Properties to redevelop the WTC complex; without that information, the video’s claim that the insurance payout was excessive is merely malicious gossip…’
I don’t believe 9/11 was designed as an insurance fraud (nor do I believe that is implied in the video, or believed by anyone I know) or that Larry Silverstein had any part in planning 9/11, but certainly he took full advantage of the planning, of which he had to be aware, to make a financial (and literal) ‘killing’. The implication is that Larry Silverstein was fully aware of the plans for 9/11, and used it to maximum effect.
What you don’t seem to understand, is Silverstein paid only some $15 million dollars as his share of the first installment, and that was it! That was all it cost him, as he only paid that one initial installment (the other $100 million was apparently paid by his backers, who were presumably adequately reimbursed). That was a tiny fraction of the prohibitive price it would have cost to have the asbestos removed, or to have the Twin Towers manually dismantled.
And of course the Twin Towers had never been a popular place to work, never been fully occupied, and never made money. So the iconic landmark Towers were in reality a massive White Elephant, a financial drain, and condemned because of asbestos (though people were still using it, I don’t know how that worked).
And he had enshrined in the insurance, right to rebuild on the extremely valuable site.
An absolute dream come true. He had miraculously turned a huge albatross around his neck, into a golden opportunity.
All are agreed that WTC 7 was a very peculiar building, but he had just spent millions on it before making the plans for the new building in 2000. One presumes he had not been made aware of the plans for 9/11 before he spent the millions refurbishing WTC 7, but only learnt later, probably when he started making the plans for the new WTC 7. Again, another albatross miraculously transformed into a golden opportunity.

Having said all that, yes, I’d forgotten that Silverstein Properties had WTC7 before leasing the rest of the WTC complex, but you’re right about that and I remembered when you mentioned it. I think it makes no difference; property maintenance is routine, and the prices probably don’t look big if the context is examined.

Beware confirmation bias; any mundane event can look suspicious if you’ve already decided upon the verdict. We must never start from the verdict and work backwards; that’s how the witch trials executed thousands of innocent women, and what landed Lucia de Berk in prison for years. This is why I keep banging on about Chandler’s stuff; it’s seductively simple but totally wrong and misleading. It wrongly makes people so sure that explosives are required to satisfy Newton’s laws that they turn the rest of their thinking back to front.

A bit like these then?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwFHEoiUZ7o

This is Kempe’s link:

Vérinage Compilation – Explosiveless Demolition

Here is an interview with Danny Jowenko, a Dutch demolition designer, who died in a car crash in 2011:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHqHSMArJyU

Jowenko maintained that the Twin Towers collapsed under their own weight due to damage and fire (which agrees with my own consideration), but that WTC7 was brought down by controlled demolition. Truthers insist that rigging such a demolition takes weeks or months, but Jowenko says that with a well coordinated, hard-working team of thirty to forty, it could have been done on the afternoon of 9/11. In fact he claims that there are various options to achieve this, and some of them are quite quick and easy, but he is very surprised that it would have been done in a building that was on fire, as WTC7 was.

Jowenko points out that, under normal circumstances, all asbestos must be removed from a building before a demolition licence will be granted, that an inspection is required to gain a certificate that all asbestos has gone, and this process requires much of the time. He speculates that the Mayor may have permitted the rapid demolition of WTC7, and it was kept secret because the asbestos had not been removed. He talks about insurance, and criticises the US political system for being overly dominated by big money.

I had seen this part of the interview before but I had not heard it because it was part of a Truther video; the relevant part of the discussion was played at about double speed and the original audio had been silenced and dubbed over with narration. I am surprised to discover just how much Jowenko’s opinion converges with my own.

Danny Jowenko’s remarks have caused me to revise my balance of probabilities again; I think he could well have been right. An emergency demolition with thermite could explain the “partially evaporated steel” documented in the FEMA Building Performance Report. Keeping this purported demolition secret could explain why Con Edison’s court victory was overturned on Silverstein Properties’ appeal, and why part of that appeal was settled out of court with the technical response to the ARUP report withheld from the public – I think these legal details are right, I’m working from memory here, but check the UAF Report which is where I discovered them.

It could also explain why NIST kept much of their WTC7 report secret, and why their collapse scenario is such a bodge. And NIST’s purported “public safety” excuse for withholding some of their data?…

Well the firefighters must have known about any sudden, unlicensed demolition, and indeed, famously, there is video of firefighters warning people away from WTC7 saying it’s about to “blow up”. I have always thought it impossible that the New York firefighters would help cover up any demolition of the Twin Towers, because hundreds of the Brothers were killed in the collapse of WTC2…

But in the aftermath of 9/11 firefighters were dying from asbestos-induced illnesses. But admission of a sudden unlicensed demolition would have made accomplices of any firefighter who knew; firefighters themselves could have been held partly culpable for the asbestos contamination. Could NIST’s “public safety” issue be to do with compensation and health-care costs for retired firefighters injured by asbestos? If NIST had revealed this potential secret demolition, would compensation and health-care payments have been interrupted while the matter went back to court? And would that have provoked a strike by the firefighters? I’d call that a “public safety issue”.

Yep, I’m definitely tending more towards this fast-and-dirty demolition theory. What were the authorities’ choices? WTC7 was burning, distorting and creaking (all this can be found in testimony). They couldn’t extinguish the fire because of cracked water mains, and massive demand for firefighting all over the WTC complex. If they were to leave it to burn it might partially collapse, in all probability asymmetrically. But it’s surrounded by other buildings on three sides so it would very likely damage at least one of them, and they’d have another damaged, burning building. The problem of unstable, burning buildings would just proliferate. The most sensible thing would be to bring it down as vertically as possible and as soon as possible.

But by bringing it down they’d be deliberately adding asbestos and other toxins to the already contaminated air; the authorities would have to pay compensation for the illnesses caused. Worse, when those who got asbestosis or other illnesses died, anyone party to the demolition could be prosecuted for manslaughter or even murder. So they did it in a way that gave plausible deniability to everyone involved.

So yes; it was, and remains, a conspiracy. A conspiracy of silence.