9/11 (and other) mysteries

[bwv 1080]

Sean, why am I not surprised that you subscribe to this nonsense?

Might I suggest that the former is the reason for the latter?

I actually lived three blocks from WTC and regularly walked through the building. I was there on 9-11. Also, my wife studied architecture. BTW, the WTC has only a small concrete core around the very center of the towers, where the elevators are housed. The rest of the structure is supported by the steel colums that make up the facade. That's it. The rest is just thin floor beams between the inner core and the outer columns. You could see and understand this rather filigree structure only from close up. Walking through the base of the towers you see a large elevator lobby, four stories high, framed exactly by what I described: the elevators in the center and the facade on the outside. I always was in disbelief walking through there, imagining 100 stories sitting on top of this airy open space I was seeing. The impact of the aircraft took out a good 60-75% of the outer supporting beams on the side where each aircraft entered and another 10-30% on the side where it exited (more so in the case of the second aircraft which impacted at higher speed).

This is a common misconception, partly abetted by outragously sloppy reporting in the media. Nobody among the official investigators ever claimed that the steel had "melted". That would be patently stupid, as any 6th grade physics student should know (unfortunately most reporters these days don't even rise to that level). The heat of the fire caused vast amounts of hot air wanting to flow upwards. This buckled (in effect, bent upwards) the floor beams above the fire (steel can be bent without having to melt it completely, you know?). At some point, this bending broke the anchoring of the beams or otherwise caused them to crack (you could hear these cracks, in fact, on 9-11). For good reason, therefore, the south tower that took the stronger impact that took out more of the external supporting structure at a lower level, thus where more weight was sitting on top of the fire, collapsed first, despite having been hit second. The north tower was hit higher up, with less weight sitting on top of the fire, thus it took longer for the steel to buckle and the tower to collapse. It is beyond me why anyone has doubts about this. When I walked out of my apartment that morning and took a look at the south tower on fire, seeing the outline of the aircraft basically stamped out of the facade, my first though was literally: "this thing will collapse - I want to be at least as far away from it as it is tall." That was my first thought, because I knew how flimsy the structure was. Without those external pillars and with the fire raging inside, that building was toast.

You do know about the uncontrolled fire therein, right?

Look, let's get this straightened out: the Bush administration has been defined by spectacular levels of incompetence, heretofore unseen in any modern government of a major democracy. What are the chances that this government could pull off the sort of stunt the conspiracy theorists allege, without any single one of the many people who would need to have been involved leaking even one small bit about the operation? Look how many leaks this administration has produced? Where are the 9-11 leaks? I can hear Occam's razor going snip-snip-snip all over these conspiracy theories.

BTW, read this, brilliantly written by an acquaintance of mine:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11818067/the_low_post_the_hopeless_stupidity_of_911_conspiracies/print

Also, his follow up to all the hate mail he received as a result:

http://www.alternet.org/story/43418/?cID=270425

The thread should be closed now on this excellent post.  Trying to reason with these conspiracy morons is no different than young earth creationists or holocaust deniers

[Sean]

head-case, Mensch, guido

I'm always surprised at the readiness to accept the official view on anything- and a little more surprised to find it even here on a critical arts forum: if there aren't thinkers here we are indeed without hope.

Regarding the sudden collapse of WTC7 being explained by fire, head-case is assuming the support structure has only slightly greater strength than needed, so that a failure in one small area would raise the load on the rest over its capacity. But tall buildings are extremely strong, well over the minimum needed, and just wouldn't fail catastrophically in this way- there are pictures of similar buildings where perhaps half the building's support has gone and it stays up.

WTC7 was packed with explosives designed to detonate in the same moments as the neighbouring main tower came down and covered the area in obscuring clouds of dust, so it would appear one brought down the other, but they failed to go off. By the time the building collapsed the fires were almost out- despite the evidence for operatives trying to keep them going.

By the way the explosives around the small missile impact area around the Pentagon also failed to go off at first, the charges only blackening the facade, another major blunder for the conspirators, making it all the more obvious there was no plane (being too difficult a target to hit), along with the total lack of wreckage.

[Sean]

head-case, the WTC7 steel frame was a dense grid, without even the marginal vunerability of the main towers. There are huge problems in accounting for its failure by fire, and several sets of investigators have pulled out of the project, accounting for its endless delays in publication.

[bwv 1080]

I'm always surprised at the readiness to accept the official view on anything- and a little more surprised to find it even here on a critical arts forum: if there aren't thinkers here we are indeed without hope.

Regarding the sudden collapse of WTC7 being explained by fire, head-case is assuming the support structure has only slightly greater strength than needed, so that a failure in one small area would raise the load on the rest over its capacity. But tall buildings are extremely strong, well over the minimum needed, and just wouldn't fail catastrophically in this way- there are pictures of similar buildings where perhaps half the building's support has gone and it stays up.

WTC7 was packed with explosives designed to detonate in the same moments as the neighbouring main tower came down and covered the area in obscuring clouds of dust, so it would appear one brought down the other, but they failed to go off. By the time the building collapsed the fires were almost out- despite the evidence for operatives trying to keep them going.

By the way the explosives around the small missile impact area around the Pentagon also failed to go off at first, the charges only blackening the facade, another major blunder for the conspirators, making it all the more obvious there was no plane (being too difficult a target to hit), along with the total lack of wreckage.

Sean, think about the absurdity of the logistics of a massive conspiracy to plant explosives in a public building then recruit willing Arabs to hijack planes to crash into the building, perfectly timing the explosives to go off at the same time as the plane impact.  What would possibly be the motive of planting explosives in the building?  Planes were already set to crash into them and I assume nobody believes explosives were planted in the Pentagon (why not though? it would be alot easier for the CIA, the Jews or the Freemasons to do this than plant them in the WTC).   If the only motivaton for the conspiracy was to engineer a terrorist attack to justify war in the middle east, that could have been done just as well without the explosives - so why would the conspirators take the extra risk?

There is no evidence of any explosives simply the unfounded contention, coming from unqualified people, that it is "physically impossible".  Are you an engineer?  Can you really judge what is and what is not within the realm of physics in this situation, when countless qualified scientists support the "official version "?  

[bwv 1080]

This is a particularly good quote from the piece O Mensch linked to:

To me, the 9/11 Truth movement is, itself, a classic example of the pathology of George Bush's America. Bush has presided over a country that has become hopelessly divided into insoluble, paranoid tribes, one of which happens to be Bush's own government. All of these tribes have things in common; they're insular movements that construct their own reality by cherry-picking the evidence they like from the vast information marketplace, violently disbelieve in the humanity of those outside their ranks, and lavishly praise their own movement mediocrities as great thinkers and achievers. There are as many Thomas Paines in the 9/11 Truth movement as there are Isaac Newtons among the Intelligent Design crowd.

[Sean]

O Mensch

I actually lived three blocks from WTC and regularly walked through the building. I was there on 9-11.

Well I once walked through the ground level of the tower where you could do tours, in 1997.

Also, my wife studied architecture. BTW, the WTC has only a small concrete core around the very center of the towers, where the elevators are housed. The rest of the structure is supported by the steel colums that make up the facade. That's it.

Nonesense, there was a massive central steel support column that took a majority of the building's weight: have a look at a cross section. The central colums were totally destroyed, indeed to the extent that the cloud of debris resembled a pyroclastic flow. What the hell happened to thousands and thousands of tonnes of toughened steel, held vertically together for 400m?

The impact of the aircraft took out a good 60-75% of the outer supporting beams on the side where each aircraft entered and another 10-30% on the side where it exited (more so in the case of the second aircraft which impacted at higher speed).

The buildings were specifically designed to withstand exactly such an airliner impact, and as such they did before their bizarre total collapse less than an hour later in each case, even though the character of the impacts were quite different.

...For good reason, therefore, the south tower that took the stronger impact that took out more of the external supporting structure at a lower level, thus where more weight was sitting on top of the fire, collapsed first, despite having been hit second. The north tower was hit higher up, with less weight sitting on top of the fire, thus it took longer for the steel to buckle and the tower to collapse. It is beyond me why anyone has doubts about this.

Well there's very detailed arguments, including from VTB architects, why this 'truss theory' is inadequate- I must refer you to the site and its wealth of content and links.

Look, let's get this straightened out: the Bush administration has been defined by spectacular levels of incompetence, heretofore unseen in any modern government of a major democracy. What are the chances that this government could pull off the sort of stunt the conspiracy theorists allege, without any single one of the many people who would need to have been involved leaking even one small bit about the operation? Look how many leaks this administration has produced? Where are the 9-11 leaks? I can hear Occam's razor going snip-snip-snip all over these conspiracy theories.

Now hang on, Bush (who's actually a lot more intelligent than his public profile dumbed-down acting job would indicate) and his henchmen aren't the real brains behind this- few politicians are bright enough for that, and there are instead always hidden elite groups who wield real power.

I'll have a look at your links in a minute.

But I leave you with this: if we live to see the oil really running out, and the destruction of Western civilization and starvation in the billions that will follow, it will be nothing like any human calamity in history and 9/11 will be seen very clearly as a very small piece of the story in the final decades of the manoeuvring and desperate grabbing for the remaining oil in the Earth's rocks.

Face it, we're still living in the Industrial Revolution: we didn't earn the energy source that is petroleum, we just dug it up, found that if you put a match to it it burns, and off we went for 300 years. Our entire material world is based on a rapidly dwindling, purely God given resource for which there is literally no replacement: millions of cars, planes, factories, plastics etc etc etc are all coming to an end- our entire existenc depends on this nasty black sludge stuff.

[bwv 1080]

The only plausible theory is that a SINISTER CABAL OF MUSICAL MODERNISTS were behind the attack!  Witness the comments of their leader, Karlheinz Stockhausen post 9-11.  Also the fact THAT NO ATONALISTS WERE PRESENT IN THE WTC ON 9-11!!!!! they were all warned away!!  The supposed hijackers were just innocent travellers, the plane crashes were caused by SECRETLY ENCODED 12-TONE MUSIC that was piped into the cabin audio system, that through MIND CONTROL was able to get the pilots to crash into the towers.  The tower was further weakened by SINISTER SONIC VIBRATIONS caused by large Audio sytems hidden in the basement of the WTC that played Webern's Opus 21 directly onto the steel support beams

[Sean]

bwv, hi there

Permit me a little brevity and to refer you to the detailed site on the first post.

Sean, think about the absurdity of the logistics of a massive conspiracy to plant explosives in a public building then recruit willing Arabs to hijack planes to crash into the building, perfectly timing the explosives to go off at the same time as the plane impact.

There weren't any Arab hijackers. The planes were under remote control, and may not even have been the original airliners that took off from the airports.

What would possibly be the motive of planting explosives in the building?

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, getting the American army on either side of Iran, with the world's largest oil reserves: both these countries are kept unstable (completely ridiculous to believe), and the troops will never be coming back. See the video on the oil concerns- it loads and plays automaticaly.

If the only motivaton for the conspiracy was to engineer a terrorist attack to justify war in the middle east, that could have been done just as well without the explosives - so why would the conspirators take the extra risk?

No way: the whole point about 9/11 was the massive psychological impact of those events. I knew how colossal those towers were and how many people could be in them and I had to go and lie down when I found out, no joke. Only such an event could get the US into central Asia and the Middle East as it has.

There is no evidence of any explosives simply the unfounded contention, coming from unqualified people, that it is "physically impossible".  Are you an engineer?  Can you really judge what is and what is not within the realm of physics in this situation, when countless qualified scientists support the "official version "?

See the site...

[Sean]

The only plausible theory is that a SINISTER CABAL OF MUSICAL MODERNISTS were behind the attack!  Witness the comments of their leader, Karlheinz Stockhausen post 9-11.  Also the fact THAT NO ATONALISTS WERE PRESENT IN THE WTC ON 9-11!!!!! they were all warned away!!  The supposed hijackers were just innocent travellers, the plane crashes were caused by SECRETLY ENCODED 12-TONE MUSIC that was piped into the cabin audio system, that through MIND CONTROL was able to get the pilots to crash into the towers.  The tower was further weakened by SINISTER SONIC VIBRATIONS caused by large Audio sytems hidden in the basement of the WTC that played Webern's Opus 21 directly onto the steel support beams

Any pilot might opt for the crash option to put an end to serialism forced on them, I must agree.

[MishaK]

I'm always surprised at the readiness to accept the official view on anything- and a little more surprised to find it even here on a critical arts forum: if there aren't thinkers here we are indeed without hope.

Sean, it's not the official story, it's my story. I was there, you weren't. In the meantime, please apply your highly-touted critical thinking skills to the conspiracy theories you endorse. In particular, please address Matt Taibbi's main criticism in the articles I linked: give one coherent narrative of the crime and show how such a vastly (and completely unnecessarily) complex operation was pulled off. Then we'll address your stupendously flawed science (did you graduate middle school? have you asked for a tuition/tax refund yet for the failures of your teachers?).

[bwv 1080]

bwv, hi there

Permit me a little brevity and to refer you to the detailed site on the first post.


There weren't any Arab hijackers. The planes were under remote control, and may not even have been the original airliners that took off from the airports.

Evidence? 

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, getting the American army on either side of Iran, with the world's largest oil reserves: both these countries are kept unstable (completely ridiculous to believe), and the troops will never be coming back. See the video on the oil concerns- it loads and plays automaticaly.

So where is all this oil we got?  If so inclined the US Government and Big Oil could simply have bribed Saddam to get more Iraqi reserves (and Iran certainly does not have the world's largest oil reserves, Saudi does with Iraq second and Russia third)

No way: the whole point about 9/11 was the massive psychological impact of those events. I knew how colossal those towers were and how many people could be in them and I had to go and lie down when I found out, no joke. Only such an event could get the US into central Asia and the Middle East as it has.

This is you speculating again.  Clinton had no problem with political support for attacking Afghanistan after the Khobar Towers or other incidents.  Afghanistan has no oil, so why concoct an elaborate conspiracy to attack it?  If the Administation wanted support to invade Iraq, which does have oil, why not frame Iraq for the attack instead of Al Queda?  The link between Iraq and Al Queda was always weak, as subsequent events demonstrated. 

[head-case]

O Mench, BWV 1080,

It should be apparent by now that "Sean" is a deeply disturbed individual and that a proclivity for conspiracy theories is his most harmless manifestation of pathology.  No amount reasoning will convince him, the only purpose of posting on a thread such as this is to insure that  others who stumble across it will recognize the gibberish he posts for what it is.

[Sean]

head-case, keeping reading 9/11 stuff- from doubt comes faith.

[MishaK]

head-case, keeping reading 9/11 stuff- from doubt comes faith.

Actually, from doubt comes the knowledge that faith is the accomodation of those too weak to live with doubt.

[MishaK]

Well I once walked through the ground level of the tower where you could do tours, in 1997.

Your blindness has been well documented. Thanks.

Nonesense, there was a massive central steel support column that took a majority of the building's weight: have a look at a cross section.

Massive as compared to what? You do realize that massive is the opposite of hollow and that elevator shafts need to be hollow for elevators to go through them, right? I'm looking outside my office window here in Chicago right now where a new skyscraper is going up across the river from me. When completed, it will be only about a third of the height and two thirds of the width of one of the WTC towers, yet the concrete elevator shaft core is twice as wide as that of the WTC.

The central colums were totally destroyed, indeed to the extent that the cloud of debris resembled a pyroclastic flow. What the hell happened to thousands and thousands of tonnes of toughened steel, held vertically together for 400m?

You seem to think steel is indestructible, especially "toughened" steel. Is that a scientific term? Pyroclastic flow refers to volcanic eruptions. What did you mean to say? Are you saying it wasn't the planes, it was a volcano below ground zero? Oh, wait. You just wanted to sound knoweldgeable by using "big" words, when in fact you haven't got a clue. I get it.

The buildings were specifically designed to withstand exactly such an airliner impact, and as such they did before their bizarre total collapse less than an hour later in each case, even though the character of the impacts were quite different.

No, they weren't. They were designed to withstand the impact of a 707, a plane less than half the size and weight of a 767-200ER. But it's not the impact alone that destroyed the building. They were not designed to withstand the fire resulting from over a hundred thousand pounds of jet fuel burning. But go ahead and conveniently conflate the two.

Well there's very detailed arguments, including from VTB architects, why this 'truss theory' is inadequate- I must refer you to the site and its wealth of content and links.

No. That's not enough for the critical thinker. As a critical thinker you are not allowed to simply refer me to the supposedly critical thinking of others, you must show through your own critical thinking why what you call the 'truss theory' is inadequate. Do your homework. I ain't doin' it for you.

Now hang on, Bush (who's actually a lot more intelligent than his public profile dumbed-down acting job would indicate) and his henchmen aren't the real brains behind this- few politicians are bright enough for that, and there are instead always hidden elite groups who wield real power.

Who? Names please. Also provide evidence of intent and agency. That's what you allege.

But I leave you with this: if we live to see the oil really running out, and the destruction of Western civilization and starvation in the billions that will follow, it will be nothing like any human calamity in history and 9/11 will be seen very clearly as a very small piece of the story in the final decades of the manoeuvring and desperate grabbing for the remaining oil in the Earth's rocks.

More deep wisdom? You seem to have missed the fact that the economy has changed vastly in the last thirty years. Note that despite all the upheaval in Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Nigeria, Indonesia and other oil producing countries, we have not had anything resembling the oil crises of the 70s.

There weren't any Arab hijackers. The planes were under remote control, and may not even have been the original airliners that took off from the airports.

Since you dont't work in the aviation industry and I do (note the avatar), let me help you out a little here. The four aircraft involved in 9-11 were in fact not owned by the airlines. They were owned by banks and different financing vehicles and subject to a number of securitization structures, i.e. a lot of different people had a lot of money tied up in these planes and AA and UA were merely making loan or rent payments. If you are concocting such a harebrained plot to remotely fly planes into several landmarks, just to then blame it on a bunch of people neither of which originates from the countries you would like to invade, why use leased, financed or securitized planes that will cause a big mess for a lot of wealthy people who contribute a lot of money to your political party? Why not use some that are 100% airline owned? Why airliners? If different aircraft were used, as you suggest, please account for the missing four airliners. You will find complete production lists of Boeing aircraft here: www.airlinerlist.com

Secondly, if you are remote-controlling them, then why such erratic flightpaths (that look like the plane is being flown by a total amateur), which could endanger the success of the operation? Some of these guys were at the verge of loss of control at several points during the flightpath. The UA 767 that went into the south tower was going so fast it was close to disintegrating in midair. Why fly like that if you know what you're doing?

No way: the whole point about 9/11 was the massive psychological impact of those events. I knew how colossal those towers were and how many people could be in them and I had to go and lie down when I found out, no joke. Only such an event could get the US into central Asia and the Middle East as it has.

And of course it is inconceivable that a fundamentalist terrorist would want to attack such targets for the same psychological reasons... no, that would be way too simple....

[MishaK]

Regarding the sudden collapse of WTC7 being explained by fire, head-case is assuming the support structure has only slightly greater strength than needed, so that a failure in one small area would raise the load on the rest over its capacity. But tall buildings are extremely strong, well over the minimum needed, and just wouldn't fail catastrophically in this way- there are pictures of similar buildings where perhaps half the building's support has gone and it stays up.

How naive! And you call yourself a critical thinker? "Tall buildings are extremely strong." Have you read about Citicorp Center on 53rd and Lex, which had to be reinforced well after it had been completed because it was discovered that it would not withstand a storm? Similar buildings with thousands of gallons of diesel fuel and jet fuel on fire? I doubt it.

WTC7 was packed with explosives designed to detonate in the same moments as the neighbouring main tower came down and covered the area in obscuring clouds of dust, so it would appear one brought down the other, but they failed to go off. By the time the building collapsed the fires were almost out- despite the evidence for operatives trying to keep them going.

Evidence? How come it collapsed much later in the day than the twin towers if it was designed to go off at the same time? Was Rudy Giuliani in on this plot? Why did he have his emergency headquarters there?

By the way the explosives around the small missile impact area around the Pentagon also failed to go off at first, the charges only blackening the facade, another major blunder for the conspirators, making it all the more obvious there was no plane (being too difficult a target to hit), along with the total lack of wreckage.

Oh, the missile again and the claim of total absence of wreckage again. Need I explain again what I have explained before in this forum about the difference between high speed aircraft crashes and low speed aircraft crashes (as would occur during approach and takeoff) and what that does to wreckage? Need I mention Turkish Airlines DC-10, Paris again?

[orbital]

I was right outside Winter Garden, saw the second plane come and hit WTC right in front of my eyes (we were actually waiting for them to put out the fire atop WTC1 so we could go back to work), and it was a passenger plane. This thing about plane with no windows, etc is bull.

Then we went (ran) to a colleague's apartment on 42nd floor in Tribeca 10 blocks north of Ground Zero, looking right at the buildings on fire, and none of us had any doubt that the buildings would fall very shortly, you could just see it by the way the part above the fire-line started to give in.

[head-case]

I was right outside Winter Garden, saw the second plane come and hit WTC right in front of my eyes (we were actually waiting for them to put out the fire atop WTC1 so we could go back to work), and it was a passenger plane. This thing about plane with no windows, etc is bull.

Then we went (ran) to a colleague's apartment on 42nd floor in Tribeca 10 blocks north of Ground Zero, looking right at the buildings on fire, and none of us had any doubt that the buildings would fall very shortly, you could just see it by the way the part above the fire-line started to give in.

Orbital, didn't you ever see "Total Recall" featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger?  Obviously those memories were planted in your brain by the government, and you are just a stodge of the conspiracy.  Did you ever notice a man in a black suit pointing what looked like a giant ray gun at your head?  I thought so.

[Sean]

Well I might get back to you conspiracists tomorrow with your media brainwashing, and it's nice you find the time, but if you don't mind me saying I can see you're rattled enough as it is.

It is a big thing this. It's one thing to casually bitch and rant about the world but quite another to take seriously the notion that it and our whole way of life might be corrupt and based on a pack of absolute lies.

[head-case]

Well I might get back to you conspiracists tomorrow with your media brainwashing, and it's nice you find the time, but if you don't mind me saying I can see you're rattled enough as it is.

We did not hear about "media brainwashing" in the previous, we heard eyewitness accounts with directly contradict the rantings of your beloved conspiracy theorists.

It is a big thing this. It's one thing to casually bitch and rant about the world but quite another to take seriously the notion that it and our whole way of life might be corrupt and based on a pack of absolute lies.

I think this statement may help us nail down the exact nature of your psychopathology.