#17
Duke, would you care to give us a quick synopsis as to why you believe the video to be nothing but a farse? The link you provided is rather lengthy...for politics, I like the cliffnotes version for it.
These are replies I made to a similar conspiracy theory website posted by a member of another forum.
Here's the conspriacy site. Below are answers to points raised in the site and to points raised by the poster.
On the subject of the airliners being remote-controlled decoys:
DGP: Yes, let me get that real quick for Wayne from Virginia. These planes were being piloted by remote control, probably an AWACs aircraft taking over that airplane or airplanes or drones, unmanned drones. And flying them at 5 and 8 G-force that no pilot could withstand. So, in short, and if you read books 2 and 3, you will discover how and why this came about.
First off, aerobatic and fighter pilots take 5-8 Gs all the time. Second off, no 737 could take 5-8 Gs - the airframe is not up to it. Third off, the planes came in relatively flat and level; the videos show it - there's absolutle no evidence that the planes were pulling anything like this kind of radical maneuver.
AJ: Yeah, you remote control the original planes out, then your loaded up drones attack. And the biggest and oldest newspaper in Spain just came out, three weeks ago, and they looked at the bottom of one of those jets and there's some type of giant belly attachment. It's clearly a modified aircraft.
First off, I've seen the pictures to which they're referring, in both stills and slo-mo video. It's not a 'belly pack', it's the standard fairing around the belly of the aircraft highlighted by an odd lighting angle. Second off, they're proposing that these were specially-modified drones that were flown by remote control after the real planes were ditched.
Surely, if you're going through all this effort to deceive people and you have
a freakin' empty airliner to work with, the millitary-industrial complex could have found a way to put the control system
inside the actual aircraft?! I mean c'mon, the slightest amount of common sense debunks this stuff without half trying.
John: Colonel, did a cruise missile hit the Pentagon or a Global Hawk or a drone business jet?
DGP: You are talking about what hit the Pentagon, right John? It was a cruise missile. It could have been a Global Hawk. It was not a commercial aircraft.
There were
wheels and engine parts consistent with the proper commercial airliner in the smoking wreckage, folks. There's video of an airliner flying up the parkway almost brushing the light poles, folks. It was an airliner, folks.
Here are some supposed points "proving" why the buildings must have been demolished purposely:
the moonbat
Some facts demonstrating the flaws in the government jet fuel theory include:
-- Photos showing people walking around in the hole in the North Tower where 10,000 gallons of jet fuel supposedly was burning..
--When the South Tower was hit, most of the North Tower's flames had already vanished, burning for only 16 minutes, making it relatively easy to contain and control without a total collapse.
--The fire did not grow over time, probably because it quickly ran out of fuel and was suffocating, indicating without added explosive devices the firs could have been easily controlled.
--FDNY fire fighters still remain under a tight government gag order to not discuss the explosions they heard, felt and saw. FAA personnel are also under a similar 9/11 gag order.
--Even the flawed 9/11 Commission Report acknowledges that "none of the [fire] chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible."
-- Fire had never before caused steel-frame buildings to collapse except for the three buildings on 9/11, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise since 9/11.
-- The fires, especially in the South Tower and WTC-7, were relatively small.
-- WTC-7 was unharmed by an airplane and had only minor fires on the seventh and twelfth floors of this 47-story steel building yet it collapsed in less than 10 seconds.
-- WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams.
-- In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein, the WTC leaseholder, told the fire department commander on 9/11 about WTC-7 that. "may be the smartest thing to do is pull it," slang for demolish it.
-- It's difficult if not impossible for hydrocarbon fires like those fed by jet fuel (kerosene) to raise the temperature of steel close to melting.
And my reply:
Why is someone from the Department of Labor suddenly a structural expert? Also, again, it's a matter of them simply saying "it couldn't have been". Understand:
this never happened before. All bets are off. If you put a coffee can full of kerosene and light it on fire (as one of your articles suggests), you're right, it will never melt the coffee can.
But we're not talking about a coffee can here. We're talking about 5000+ gallons of kerosene, atomized for optimal combustion by the horrific impact of an airplane crash, and concentrated into a wide, flat space less than 20 feet high. It will damn sure melt more than a coffee can.
I'm an architect myself, with 15 years in the field. I work side by side with structural engineers every day. The Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia was a different structural system than the WTC; the interior columns support most of the load and are heavier. The WTC used a more perimeter-loaded system to allow for greater stiffness in a
horizontal direction due to wind loads on the tall building. The interior columns bear a smaller portion of the load and may be smaller despite the greater height of the WTC over Meridian. Also, there's no detail given on how the structures were fire-protected, and there is a wide variety of methods that can be used. Meridian's fire grew slowly from an electrical fault,
not as the sudden result of an explosion and the impact of a 400,000-lb airliner ripping through the building.
If you're relying on drywall to provide fire protection for your steel columns - which is common, and quite legal - that little difference might have some impact on the effectiveness of your fire resistance.
They also state that the flames had "disappeared" in less than 16 minutes. Not in any pictures I saw! I saw huge columns of smoke and flames belching out of both buildings all morning. They state that they saw people standing around the impact hole in the north tower. That's possible. Remember, that hole is the result of a 400,000-lb airliner with 5,000 gallons of fuel in it moving at 200-250 knots hitting the building. Do you not think that
momentum would have carried the wreckage far into the center of the building? The plane did not stop with the tail sticking out of the side... it was a huge mass moving at a high rate of speed. The impact hole of a bullet wound is rarely much to look at. It's the interior path cut by the mushrooming slug, and the
exit wound that do all the real damage.
They talk about fire never causing a structural collapse before. But they never talk about fire
combined with a massive impact form a heavy, fast moving object - because they can't.
This is a big hot fire, and it's at the
perimeter of the building, with one whole side open to fresh room-temperature air, being sucked in by the combustion. Care to place your faith on the conditions at the
center of that building, surrounded on all sides by that kind of heat?
They talk about the suspicious collapse of WTC 7. But they ignore the fact that strucutral damage to surrounding buildings, caused by localized seismic disturbance, is the primary concern in
any building demolition. When they demolish a building next to other buildings, they may reinforce or otherwise protect the remaining structures, and they do a lot of structural monitoring with instruments placed inside, to make sure that the remaining buildings are not overstressed by the demolition.
WTC 7 had just experienced the mother of all demolition projects, under non-controlled circumstances,
right next door. Fires or no, it had
gaping holes knocked in the roof and much of the south face by large aircraft parts passing through the WTC, and by debris from the collapse of the towers themselves. It had certain internal damage from 1) the debris, 2) the resultant fires,
and 3) the immense localized seismic activity caused by the collapse of not one but two of the world's largest buildings
directly next door.
I'd say it's not so suspicious that WTC 7 collapsed; rather, it's more surprising that other buildings in the immediate area
didn't collapse.
Seismic Spikes
CLAIM: Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded the events of 9/11. "The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of the collapses, well before falling debris struck the earth," reports the Web site WhatReallyHappened.com.
A columnist on Prisonplanet.com, a Web site run by radio talk show host Alex Jones, claims the seismic spikes (boxed area on Graph 1) are "indisputable proof that massive explosions brought down" the towers. The Web site says its findings are supported by two seismologists at the observatory, Won-Young Kim and Arthur Lerner-Lam. Each "sharp spike of short duration," says Prisonplanet.com, was consistent with a "demolition-style implosion."
FACT: "There is no scientific basis for the conclusion that explosions brought down the towers," Lerner-Lam tells PM. "That representation of our work is categorically incorrect and not in context."
The report issued by Lamont-Doherty includes various graphs showing the seismic readings produced by the planes crashing into the two towers as well as the later collapse of both buildings. WhatReallyHappened.com chooses to display only one graph (Graph 1), which shows the readings over a 30-minute time span.
On that graph, the 8- and 10-second collapses appear--misleadingly--as a pair of sudden spikes. Lamont-Doherty's 40-second plot of the same data (Graph 2) gives a much more detailed picture: The seismic waves--blue for the South Tower, red for the North Tower--start small and then escalate as the buildings rumble to the ground. Translation: no bombs.
WTC 7 Collapse
CLAIM: Seven hours after the two towers fell, the 47-story WTC 7 collapsed. According to 911review.org: "The video clearly shows that it was not a collapse subsequent to a fire, but rather a controlled demolition: amongst the Internet investigators, the jury is in on this one."
FACT: Many conspiracy theorists point to FEMA's preliminary report, which said there was relatively light damage to WTC 7 prior to its collapse. With the benefit of more time and resources, NIST researchers now support the working hypothesis that WTC 7 was far more compromised by falling debris than the FEMA report indicated. "The most important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7," NIST's Sunder tells PM. "On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom--approximately 10 stories--about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out." NIST also discovered previously undocumented damage to WTC 7's upper stories and its southwest corner.
NIST investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe structural damage contributed to the collapse, though assigning the exact proportion requires more research. But NIST's analysis suggests the fall of WTC 7 was an example of "progressive collapse," a process in which the failure of parts of a structure ultimately creates strains that cause the entire building to come down. Videos of the fall of WTC 7 show cracks, or "kinks," in the building's facade just before the two penthouses disappeared into the structure, one after the other. The entire building fell in on itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.
According to NIST, there was one primary reason for the building's failure: In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were carrying exceptionally large loads, roughly 2000 sq. ft. of floor area for each floor. "What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors," Sunder notes, "it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down."
There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation: First, trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed to transfer loads from one set of columns to another. With columns on the south face apparently damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing capacities.
Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to 7 hours. "There was no firefighting in WTC 7," Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time."
WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the fire that burned for hours, but those combined factors--along with the building's unusual construction--were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse.
[edit] For what it's worth, I came across this article while I was searching for good pictures of WTC7. I hadn't read a word of it before typing my own post above. [/edit]
On the subject of "obvious demolition":
more moonbats
Early on you can follow the lines of explosives ripping down the
levels, they move down sequentially leading the initial stage of collapse
by several floors. At some point when the spire is blown to bits
and accelerating the explosions are masked by the expanding debris cloud.
There are also side views in other films showing the jets of debris spewing out several floor below and leading the rate of collapse.
View the previous film very carefully again. Once you have observe these
explosions moving down the levels in the indymedia stills, you will
recognize them in the previous film but it very fast. I can now see
them in film because I've seen them in still frames of the same film.
My reply about structural collapses:
I'm sorry, it's 100% based on assumptions that may or may not be true. I don't really have time to go into this, but I can't stop myself from rebutting it a little. The quotes below are from your link.
It has been claimed that the explosions of dust that span the east face of the tower, were caused by air being forced from the windows as each of the floors above collapsed. This explanation is obviously incorrect. If it was correct, such lines of dust would have been expelled from the windows of each floor in succession. That is, we would have seen such lines of dust expelled from floors 79, 78, 77, 76 and 75 in succession, but what we observe is an explosion of dust at floor 79, no new clouds of dust for a few floors, then another explosion of dust at floor 75.
100% pure assumption. There's no guarantee at all that the floors would fail in strict linear order. There's absolutely nothing preventing the shock from above being transmitted through the columns of one floor and causing the floor below to fail. Even assuming the floors were identical, it's perfectly possible just by the nature of progressive failure - variations in construction tolerances could be a large enough difference. And that's leaving out the possiblity that the floors
aren't identical in strength, either by initial design of the shell or by later tenant modifications to the structure.
It is worth noting that the second line of (much larger) explosions occur at the center of a section of mechanical floors (the three mechanical floors appear as a slightly darker gray band across the building and are important for the strength they impart to the building). It is possible that the mechanical floors 76 and 75 (and also 74) have no windows, but of course, if this is so, it raises many more questions than it answers. In particular, if the mechanical floors have no windows, then the explosions of dust from floor 75 cannot be caused by air being forced from them as the floors above collapsed.
It is
also worth noting that the mechanical floors are differently structured from the office floors, and likely from each other, depending on the nature of the equipment each floor was designed for. In a building this size it's likely that one floor in the 74-75-76 group housed a lot of big electrical equipment (with one set of load criteria and little need for penetrations in the outside walls), one floor housed chillers for air conditioning (with a second set of load criteria, and a large need for outside air ventiliation, including a set of very large louvers running all the way around the building), and yet a third floor housed boilers for heat (with yet a third set of load criteria, and a moderate need for outside air ventilation, likely resulting in fewer louvers, but not no louvers). These factors would all affect the precise sequence in which the floors collapsed and also the order in which the dust appeared.
The dust due to the visible explosions is a whitish grey. The dust from the demolition of the upper section (which is disintegrating as it falls) is dark grey. One wonders what caused this difference.
One doesn't have to wonder for very long. The floors above had been involved in a large fire for some time, resulting in lots of very dark combustion smoke from burning office furniture, curtains, plastics, paper, etc. The floors below were not on fire and in fact it's concrete and gypsum dust, both very light in color, rather than smoke at all.
A sequence of still photos of the collapse (at quarter second intervals) is included in
http://www.nerdcities.com/guardian/WTC/south-tower.htm.
In these frames, we can see that the top 35 or so floors have snapped off and are toppling eastward. In the above frames we follow the north-east corner of the tower as this 35 floor section collapses. Using the north-east corner as a reference I have outlined in red the progress of this 35 floor top section as it descends.
The first thing to note is that the top section itself must be disintegrating otherwise (as the above frames show) the top section would have extended far into parts of the building that are clearly as yet unaffected by the collapse.
Correct, as far as it goes.
But what could possibly cause the top section to disintegrate? And in fact, what could possibly cause the top section to almost entirely disintegrate, before the lower section begins to collapse?
You have to realize that most of the top section had not been affected by the aircraft strike or fires and was thus still the same immensely strong structure that had supported the building for more than 30 years. If this section was going to fall at all, this section would fall as one piece (like a tree in the forest).
What your author here
doesn't realize is that the top 35 floors were designed to hold themselves up, and had done so for 30 years, but they were never designed to be
dropped 30 feet and then
still remain intact.
Prop a watermelon on its long end. It will stand there indefinitely without structural failure. Now pick it up 2 feet and drop it on its long end. Get it yet?
The other factor he's ignoring is that the top 35 floors were designed to hold themselves up with the force of gravity acting directly through the axis of each column (IE straight down). Tip the building over 15 or 20 degrees and
every structural joint in the entire skeleton will be overstressed. It's no surprise at all that the top part disintegrated, and in fact it held together for a reasonably long time. Remember in
Titanic when the aft half of the ship ripped off of the bow after sticking up out of the water so far? Same effect, except that the WTC suffered a much more sudden impact when the collapse began, and the resulting stresses caused faster failures. This is ignoring the fact that the WTC outweighs the
Titanic by a factor of many thousands of times, and that ship's hulls are a stressed-skin structure that is very resistant to this kind of failure.
Unless, of course, this section had been laced with explosives and was undergoing a controlled demolition of its own, just a few moments before the lower part of the building was demolished.
100% pure, unsubstantiated conjecture, presented as fact. Sorry, not buying.
I've been in buildings slated for explosive demolition. There's a huge amount of prep work involved, usually including gutting all the interior finishes to get to the key structural members they need to destroy. Can you walk up to a column or floor girder in your workplace and touch the actual piece of structural steel? Didn't think so. There's ZERO chance that anyone could rig the building without any of the 5,000 people who went to work that day noticing
something was going on.
And that's assuming that they could complete a job that normally takes a few weeks under the easiest circumstances over a single weekend, with nobody noticing anything.
Also, they don't install the explosives until the last possible moment because of the safety factors. Or do you think that the demolitions people were actually a suicide squad and they went in disguise that morning?
TSXTuner
Yep, everyone just happenes to have their highrises preloaded with demolitions.
See above. You're hanging your hat on the interpretation of a single comment made while under stress on a catastrophic day. That's not much to go on against a mountain of logic and common sense.
On the subject of the "mystery plane that "didn't" hit the Pentagon:
TSXTuner
Ok Duke now your making me pull out the big guns.
Where is the plane? If this one is a lie it is all a lie which was the
original point, it is all a lie. All of it.
http://home.comcast.net/~skydrifter/exp.htm
Yup, everything there on you link is a lie. All of it. Here's the truth:
Note the momentum effect of the damage as the plane crashed from the outside toward the courtyard, having hit the building at just about ground level, from an angle to the face of the building.
Note the flight path and the evidence left by something wide flying right down on the deck, damaging light poles on the parkway it crossed right before impact. A Tomahawk cruise missle is less than 20 feet wide; a 757 is about 125 feet wide. Also note the path of internal damage the Pentagon took. Does the pattern mean anything to you?
Where's the "mystery plane"? Right here, in little chunks, and some not so little. These are all pictures of wreckage recovered from the Pentagon. Here's a piece of turbine; also note the pieces of aluminum skin with the rows of rivet holes:
Here's a wheel strut; probably the nose gear:
Here's a hub from one of the main gear wheels; after that is the OEM item for comparison:
Here's another wheel with a tire that's sort of intact. First, a still from news video showing the piece
in situ in the Pentagon; next, the same piece cataloged after recovery:
Now, let's look at the hole in the building: a big central impact from the fuselage, ground floor damage extending quite a bit to either side from the impact of the wings - note, heavier damage on the starboard side of the face than the port side, because he came in at about a 30 degree angle to the face. But the
internal damage is clearly heavier to the left of the picture, because the plane's approach path came in at an angle from right to left.
Remember, a cruise missile is less than 20 feet wide. And remember the blast pattern of internal damage shown above - it wasn't static explosives either. If those were the 'big guns', the conspiracy theory has nothing behind it.
I know you really desperately want to believe this stuff, for whatever reason, but it's just plain
not the truth.
More on the subject of the Pentagon:
TSXTuner
>>>
Note the momentum effect of the damage as the plane crashed from the outside toward the courtyard, having hit the building at just about ground level, from an angle to the face of the building. <<
What plane hit at ground level ?
http://thewebfairy.com/killtown/pentalawn.html
And my reply to this numbnut:
The plane that left all those chunks of itself scattered inside the Pentagon. Who said the plane actually hit the ground in front of the Pentagon? It flew into the ground
floor of the Pentagon, not the actual
ground.
[edit] I just looked through your satirical little website. The lawn A) shows minor damage in many of the pictures, likely caused by falling debris, and B) shows lots of tires tracks from the fire equipment, and C) has pictures all taken from a long distance, where small amounts of damage can't be seen. One of
their own quotes even states that damage won't be seen in long shots.
Yet these amateur Sherlocks jump to the inescapable conclusion that
there was no plane, rather than simply considering the possibility that the plane's main mass
just didn't quite touch the ground before it hit the building. If only there was a "duncecap" smiley.
They cite a lot of 'reports' saying that the plane hit the ground in front of the building. A) half of those 'reports' are third-hand or worse (some of them come from
other conspiracy blogs), B)
eyewitnesses can't even agree if it was no plane, a Tomahawk missle, a small commuter jet, a 757, or a 747 (which is a little more than twice the size of a 757).
Anyone who's ever been involved with law enforcement or jury trials will tell you that eyewitnesses are the
least reliable form of evidence, no matter what they say on TV. Yet you'd rather believe that
there was no plane rather than consider the possibility that maybe it just dragged a wingtip and hit the building a few feet above the ground.
I suppose then somebody in the conspiracy went out after the fake crash and pushed over all the light poles in the approach path? While other crews were secretly planting large, heavy pieces of evidence like the correct type of aircraft wheel (which probably needs a forklift to move)
in a building that was on fire and collapsing at the time... [edit]
Look, if you want to stubbornly deny real, logical evidence that's backed up by careful analysis, that's your right. I just think it's a... oh, never mind. You'll obviously believe whatever you want in total ignorance of the evidence. I can burn out every brain cell trying to get logic and common sense across, and it will just never work.
I think I gave up after this.
, but technically should it have compromised the lateral strength of the structure LOWER than the impact? Yes, more to some degree, but would that impact higher up effect the lower structure to the point where they would be compromised (knowing that as a net level of force the building can take laterally was 3 times greater)?
