The 9/11 Post 11807


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).


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11,807 thoughts on “The 9/11 Post

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  • lysias

    Looks like Saudi Arabia is going to take the charge that it was behind 9/11 lying down.

    Saudi Arabia: Legal Expert Says That U.S. Government Blew Up the Twin Towers on 9/11:

    Saudi Arabia is livid over the recent passage of a bill in the U.S. Senate that would allow 9/11 victims’ families to sue the Middle Eastern nation. The bill was recently passed by a unanimous vote, and while the Washington Times reports that President Obama has vowed to veto it, that hasn’t stopped the Saudi Arabian media from coming out swinging against the U.S. government.

    According to a Breitbart report, a reporter representing Saudi Arabia is now claiming that the U.S. planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon to create the war on terror.

    The article was written by Katib al-Shammari, a Saudi legal expert, and published in Al-Hayat, which is based in London. It calls out the United States for its recent threats to “expose documents” proving that Saudi Arabia funded the 9/11 attacks, as well as detailing the involvement of Saudi Arabia in the worst terrorist attack in history on U.S. soil. According to the piece, these threats fall in line with a United States policy he calls “victory by means of archives.”

    Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/3130396/saudi-arabia-legal-expert-says-that-u-s-government-blew-up-the-twin-towers-on-911/#tSWiH6DMt06DTYPm.99

  • Trowbridge H. Ford aka The Biscuit

    As far as I remember I have not posted on this thread which is quite absurd to start with – i. e, the US government was in no way responsible because it would have required a lot of people who would not have kept their mouths shut after what happened.

    This claim overlooks the fact that many in the plot were killed unexpectedly in the process, both the 15 unarmed agents on the plane, and those in the Agency’s NYC office, so they did not survive the crashes to complain about anything.

    Then those responsible, like DCI George Tenet, Dick Cheney, Michael Hayden, GW, Condi et al., are not about to spill the beans about what happened for fear of what might still happen to them.

    And the whole confusion is made more difficult by all kinds of people mouthing all kinds of claims, most of which are absurd.

    And I think you, Lysias, mean that the Saudis are not taking it lying down claims that they were responsible for the mass murder.

  • Dave

    You have to laugh when the manipulated fail to follow the script by following what they think is the script, but in a way not intended by the manipulator, but in a way its difficult for the manipulator to stop without revealing their manipulation and unstated agenda!

    Manipulated Congress is meant to fund the military to “bomb the Muslims” responsible for 9/11 to further the neo-con agenda, not “prosecute the Muslims” in a court of law, which would of course expose the whole shebang!

    The manipulated think prosecuting Saudi Arabia serves truth and America, and it would by revealing the US government, neo-con cabal, as responsible, because the Saudi’s would spill the beans as part of their defence, but of course the manipulators, the true culprits, don’t want this.

  • Clark

    http://www.inquisitr.com story comes via http://www.breitbart.com who say it was translated here:

    http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/9202.htm

    On April 28, 2016, the London-based Saudi daily Al-Hayat published an exceptionally harsh article on this topic by Saudi legal expert Katib Al-Shammari, who argued that the U.S. itself had planned and carried out 9/11

    “…Proof of this is the sequence of continuous explosions that dramatically ripped through both buildings. … Expert structural engineers demolished them with explosives, while the planes crashing [into them] only gave the green light for the detonation”

    http://www.alhayat.com/ is said to publish some English translations, but I haven’t been able to find an English section on their site.

    So it seems that Al-Hayat chose to publish Katib Al-Shammari’s head-on attack… Does anyone know who Katib Al-Shammari is, how shrill Al-Hayat tends to be or whether translation by http://www.memri.org tends to be slanted, etc?

    This could become interesting.

  • Paul Barbara

    @ Trowbridge H. Ford aka The Biscuit May 26, 2016 at 18:11
    ‘As far as I remember I have not posted on this thread which is quite absurd to start with – i. e, the US government was in no way responsible because it would have required a lot of people who would not have kept their mouths shut after what happened…’
    How many people kept their mouths shut over:
    !. The deliberate goading by FDR of the Japanese, and of not warning Pearl Harbor authorities of the impending attack, (the Japanese Task Force was tracked across the Pacific – the US even knew which Japanese vessels were in the Task Force – yet Pearl was DELIBERATELY left in the dark – see ‘Day of Deceit’ by Robert B. Stinnett):
    2. That the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’ never occurred – (declassified documents now admit) – 58,000 US Servicemen died, 100,000’s thousands injured and MIA – and millions of Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian dead – many Americans STILL don’t know the ‘Gulf of Tonkin ‘|Incident’ was a LIE;
    3. How many people knew of the CIA-sponsored ‘Gladio’ terrorist attacks in Europe in the ’70’s and ’80’s, 7yet let them continue (and yes, the cat is out of the bag because of Italian, Belgian and EU Parliament investigations, but it still remains very little known about.
    4. How many people have been imprisoned or gagged in the US, when they tried to tell what they know about US foreknowledge or deliberate scuppering of attempts at foiling an attack they were sure was coming (and why was ‘[Able Danger’ denied, and trillions of records deliberately destroyed?
    There is something very facile about ridiculing an argument just because you think it couldn’t have happened; a far more sensible method would be to check out the evidence put forward, then to find flaws, if you can.
    The Lusitania was another deliberate ‘Sacrifice’ to make US involvement in WWI much more acceptable to the American public.

  • Clark

    Dave, May 29, 08:28; I very much agree, though I doubt the neocons are worried* – they can maintain “plausible deniability” by sacrificing former “friends” at lower levels if necessary.

    * they may even be too arrogant, complacent and conceited to realise that they should be worried.

  • Dave

    Yes and to illustrate your point the leaseholder of WTC 1 & 2 who purchased the lease and insured them against terrorist attack and then double insured against more than one terrorist attack few months before they were, twice, attacked secured a $billion+ insurance payout, but then tried to secure a further $billion+ payout from the airlines involved, but this halted by a New York Judge, who no doubt recognised the legal pitfalls of over doing it!

    • Canexpat

      Yes.

      Silverstein bought the WTC despite the fact that it was well known in real estate circles that the place was essentially worthless. (The sale was facilitated by his fellow Zionist Lewis Eisenberg who happened to be head of the New York Port Authority.) Many of the offices were empty as the towers lacked the infrastructure required by modern businesses, and more importantly, the towers were riddled with asbestos. To safely remove the asbestos would have cost millions, and it would have been impossible to demolish them for the same reason.

      Silverstein is a savvy real estate mogul who is not only a personal friend of Netanyahu and an enthusiastic supporter of the Zionist project, but who unexpectedly cancelled his breakfast in the restaurant at the top of one of the twin towers at the last minute due to a ‘dermatologist’s appointment’. His sons were also missing from their breakfast meeting. Why would such a smart invester purchase a worthless white elephant? Enquiry minds would like to know.

  • Clark

    Canexpat, all that may be true, but you’d need evidence that directly implicates Silverstein to land him in court.

    I note that the Arabian-language pro-Saudi publicity campaign (as translated by memri.org) has targeted the Bush administration and the US rather than the Zionists. I suspect that the facts of the attacks matter little to either side; they’ll both simply use convenient bodies of public opinion to amplify their own positions. The premises of the argument suggest that it’s unlikely to be more revealing than any other slanging-match.

    • mog

      Regarding Silverstein, perhaps the ‘evidence’ is already out there somewhere.
      Tony Szamboti re-iterated is claim in a recent interview that Silverstein explicitly claimed that WTC7 was demolished in a controlled demolition, in a 2004 TV interview:
      ‘Well, in 2004, I used to watch the History Channel on Sunday mornings. They had a show on called “History Center” that I liked. There was a show on before that called “History’s Business,” from 8:30 to 9:00 AM. They would have past and present captains of industry like Jack Welsh of General Electric, the CEO of Southwest Airlines — people like that. So Larry Silverstein was on this show, “History’s Business.” Larry was the owner of World Trade Centre 7. He had taken over the Twin Tower complex in 2001 from the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey. He leased them for 99 years at a cost of $115 million a year.

      So he was on, and this had to be in early 2004, because they showed the new Freedom Tower. It’s built now. They call it One World Trade Centre. They had a design competition, and the design that won was a 1,776-foot-tall building with the [unintelligible] antenna at the top. They showed that design, they talked about 9/11, and at the end, the host says to Larry very matter-of-factly, “What happened to 7?” I had been perplexed about it. Larry very matter-of-factly said, “Building 7 was a controlled demolition” — using those words. I wasn’t suspicious. It was like a head-slap moment for me. I said, “Oh, that makes sense.” . . . He even talked about [the building being] “so damaged” [that] “for safety reasons” they took it down.’

      http://themindrenewed.com/transcripts/884-int-067t

      NB this is not the PBS Frontline episode seen repeatedly in 911videos where he makes the ‘pull it quote’. I believe Szamboti has tried to get hold of a copy of the ‘History’s Business’ show but uniquely that series is unavailable. It must be somewhere.

    • Ba'al Zevul

      Clark, may I caution you most sincerely against using MEMRI as a source without the use of a disinfected bargepole? It’s a (sensu stricto) Zionist neocon site, set up by Meyrav Wurmser and devoted to Israeli propaganda. Incidentally, I agree with Canexpat up to this point: if you’re following the money, Silverstein had a possible motive, though means and opportunity are debatable. Silverstein only leased the WTC complex (in July 2001), btw.

      • Ba'al Zevul

        I hadn’t looked at MEMRI for years before posting that. Its original function was to highlight articles in the Arab media which tended to show Arabs in a bad light, justifying Israel’s then policy. But it’s evolved, I see. The scope has expanded to all media, with particular reference to Iran (obviously) and Russia (intriguingly); in the latter case the intention is apparently to fragment alliances in the ME and keep the pot boiling nicely. And it’s a lot more tabloid than it was, aiming at a mass demographic. Nasty bastards.

        Wikispooks has further information, but this is probably out-of-date:

        https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Middle_East_Media_Research_Institute

  • Clark

    Ba’al, thanks. I thought I vaguely remembered a red flag by memri.org which was why I kept naming it hoping someone might pick up on it.

    • Ba'al Zevul

      Glad to help, Clark. I don’t often come to this corner, as I am deeply sceptical of the conspiracist versions of what happened. However, I’m seeing very little evidence since 9/11 that any jihadi group has or had the skills and coordination to put it together. And it would certainly have suited the dual-loyalty PNAC grouping of which Wurmser, Kristol, Abrams and the rest were members. Open mind here.

  • Clark

    Mog:

    “Building 7 was a controlled demolition” . . . He even talked about [the building being] “so damaged” [that] “for safety reasons” they took it down.’

    So why cover it up? Just to create a total headfuck? If so, it works. And you’d expect NIST to be REALLY pissed off.

    That said, it seems unlikely that the History Center Silverstein quote could go missing entirely. You’d think someone would have it on VHS or DVD.

    I wouldn’t call any demolition under 9/11-type circumstances “controlled”. I doubt that any regular demolition crew would rig a burning, damaged building under conditions of civil disaster. It would have to be some sort of military team, and I suppose it could be called an “emergency demolition”.

    • mog

      Why cover it up?
      I don’t know. But I think that NIST have done the covering up.
      I have just read ‘1984’ and the parrallels of Winston Smith’s musings on the Party’s exercise of power through controlling history were bizarrly relevant to my experience of reading about 911 evidence. The concepts of ‘doublethink’ and ‘crimestop’ fit well with my understanding of our society’s inability to understand or really question these events. Getting your population to believe absurdities leaves them more malleable, less able to rationalise in general and more willing to commit atrocities.
      Perhaps it is a greater assertion of power to publicly say that you have committed a crime -all the while remaining ‘untouchable’, than it is to hide in the shaddows? The psychology of crime is bizarre and this was of course an extreme crime. My guess is that Silverstein knows that he will not be questioned about what he said on Frontline, or History’s Business, or his fortune that he made from the attacks.
      This is a good short segment about the money trail (not just Silverstein’s):
      https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-308-911-trillions-follow-the-money/
      I think that you would agree that there is enough evidence to warrant a new investigation. This though will not happen, it cannot happen, the events of 911 were a foundational myth of 21st century America.

  • Clark

    Why on Earth would Silverstein be giving the finger to NIST like that? “You idiots have to cover this up, and I’m just going to blab on telly when I feel like it”. Is Larry all right in the head?

  • Clark

    Paul Sperry, April 17, 2016, New York Post:

    http://nypost.com/2016/04/17/how-us-covered-up-saudi-role-in-911/

    Actually, the kingdom’s involvement was deliberately covered up at the highest levels of our government. And the coverup goes beyond locking up 28 pages of the Saudi report in a vault in the US Capitol basement. Investigations were throttled. Co-conspirators were let off the hook.

    Case agents I’ve interviewed at the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in Washington and San Diego, the forward operating base for some of the Saudi hijackers, as well as detectives at the Fairfax County (Va.) Police Department who also investigated several 9/11 leads, say virtually every road led back to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles.

    Yet time and time again, they were called off from pursuing leads. A common excuse was “diplomatic immunity.”

  • Dave

    The latest “Saudi did it” is compelling evidence, if more were needed, that it was an “inside job”, because its impossible that the entire Worlds intelligence services were unaware of the plot and how the buildings were destroyed.

    And from selfish and public interest reasons the World would have without doubt told the US what the “Saudi’s were planning” and how the buildings were destroyed to enjoy the gratitude of a grateful nation, unless they feared the truth would backfire on them and were told to keep quiet!

    It obvious the US would be aware and involved, so better to go with the flow and try to ameliorate the actions of the US and hope that the fallout will remove the neo-cons from the US government, that potentially could happen under either Trump or Saunders!

  • Chris Jones

    As I’ve not seen any valid evidence as to why 9/11 wasn’t an inside job I would have to conclude that the overwhelming evidence proves beyond all reasonable doubt that 9/11 was indeed an inside job or was done with the complicit knowledge of the relevant authorities. This is by now the mainstream public opinion – the people who try to sell the ‘it wasn’t an inside job’ have ironically become the nutty conspiracy theorists whilst the conspiracy realists (as in it is/was obviously a conspiracy against the people and nation of the USA) have become the people that most people now generally believe. Finally, here are ten points to drive home the message.

    The Top 10 Reasons Why 911 was a U.S. Government Inside Job, a False Flag Attack on the Sovereignty, on the Constitution of the United States

    (Points mostly by Richard P. Sheridan, P.E., Professional Engineer, New York)

    10. The Intelligence failures and the inability to intercept even one of the four planes is unexplainable. U.S. Military officials have BLATANTLY LIED. The hijackers were not in the planes as 9 of the 19 were found alive after 911. The planes were remote controlled decoys. The head of the security company (Securacom and now named Stratesec) over the World Trade Center, Dulles Airport, and United Airlines was GW Bush’s Cousin, and Bushes brother was on the Board of Directors.

    9. The Planes and/or jet fuel/fire did not bring the towers down. Jet fuel, kerosene, burns at about 1000 F lower than it takes steel to melt. A plane hitting a World Trade Center Tower would be like a sparrow flying into a Paul Bunyan, or a telephone pole. A fire has never caused the collapse of a steel high rise. The Towers’ steel was weakened, but still damn strong!

    8. John O’Neill was a former FBI agent and a recognized expert on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. He left the agency because they weren’t listening to him (Presidential directive W199i), and the FBI subsequently tried to smear him in the news. John O’Neill was also very knowledgeable of what was in building 7, the 47 story building that came down very mysteriously 7 hours later, in perfect free fall, just like a building would in a controlled demolition. The SEC had files in Building 7 covering thousands of cases of Wall St. fraud. Among the most notable were Goldman Sachs and Enron. Enron’s CEO Ken Lay was a close friend of the Bushes, and was our Nation’s Biggest Bankruptcy. On the first day as director of security at the World trade center, O’Neill died from a Tower collapse.

    7. Hundreds of former government officials from the military, intelligence community, and elected office all say that 911 was an inside job.

    6. Any expert in controlled demolition will state (if they are honest) that the Towers were brought down by controlled demolition. However, conventional demolition technology was not used. The technology used is among the most advanced weaponry developed by the U.S. Government, “Star Wars” caliber.

    5. Over 350 first responders have died of cancer, and hundreds more are now sick with cancer. This cancer came from the mysterious fumes from the nuclear based advanced weaponry. Many are calling 911 the new Chernobyl. Workers at remote landfills handling the contaminated soil also got the cancer

    4. Governments have lied to the people for hundreds of years to control us. The Pentagon Papers put out by Daniel Ellsberg revealed the truth about the Vietnam War, and lead to the war’s early end. Nixon wound up getting Impeached, and thrown out of office because of his attack on Ellsberg, Watergate, and his deceit to the American People. Both Bill Clinton and McNamara, and many others now say the Vietnam War was wrong and never should have happened. The incident in the Gulf of Tonkin was the False Flag to cause the Vietnam War. 911 was a False Flag to justify attacking Afghanistan and Iraq.

    3. At least 90% of the Towers’ steel, concrete. furniture, computers, and human bodies disappeared. Instead of about 30 stories of a steel haystack remaining with chunks of concrete, there was 2 to 3 stories of material. Where did the Billion pounds of steel and concrete go? It was turned to dust by a “Star Wars” Advanced Nuclear Weapon, like we see in some great movies.

    2. The Pentagon was hit by a missile, not a commercial plane. No plane crashed in Pennsylvania.

    1. The crime scene and the evidence was taken away almost instantly by hundreds of removal lorries and the metal melted down or shipped away. This destruction of a crime scene and the removal of evidence before an investigation has taken place is a crime in itself.

    I rest my case. Judgement: guilty. Call in the defendants for charging.

    • Pyewacket

      I have recently read Dr Judy Wood’s book; ” Where did the Towers Go”, which is quite illuminating on your point 3 Chris, and confirms that everything almost, was turned to dust including several thousand WC pedestals, Urinals and sinks, 35,000 filing cabinets, 65,000 square metres of glass, and a couple of acres of marble. In total the Towers weighed about half a million tons each, and they disappeared at free-fall speed.

    • Kempe

      “10. The Intelligence failures and the inability to intercept even one of the four planes is unexplainable. ”

      Not really, the US air defence system was designed for threats coming from outside the country not from within. If you read Tim Weiner’s book Legacy of Ashes you’ll learn that this isn’t the first major US intelligence failure; quite the reverse.

      ” The hijackers were not in the planes as 9 of the 19 were found alive after 911. ”

      Some people with the same names were found. According to 192.com there are 33 Mohammed Attas living in the UK alone.

      ” The planes were remote controlled decoys. ”

      Evidence?

      ” The head of the security company (Securacom and now named Stratesec) over the World Trade Center, Dulles Airport, and United Airlines was GW Bush’s Cousin, and Bushes brother was on the Board of Directors. ”

      Irrelevant.

      ” 9. The Planes and/or jet fuel/fire did not bring the towers down. Jet fuel, kerosene, burns at about 1000 F lower than it takes steel to melt. A plane hitting a World Trade Center Tower would be like a sparrow flying into a Paul Bunyan, or a telephone pole. A fire has never caused the collapse of a steel high rise. The Towers’ steel was weakened, but still damn strong! ”

      The fires were still hot enough to cause the steel to lose 60-80% of its strength. Enough to initiate a collapse. Steel doesn’t have to melt before it collapses. You seriously think that a plane is going to bounce off a building? Lead is softer than bone so by that logic if I shoot you in the head the bullet should bounce off harmlessly.

      ” 8. John O’Neill was a former FBI agent and a recognized expert on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. He left the agency because they weren’t listening to him (Presidential directive W199i), and the FBI subsequently tried to smear him in the news. John O’Neill was also very knowledgeable of what was in building 7, the 47 story building that came down very mysteriously 7 hours later, in perfect free fall, just like a building would in a controlled demolition. The SEC had files in Building 7 covering thousands of cases of Wall St. fraud. Among the most notable were Goldman Sachs and Enron. Enron’s CEO Ken Lay was a close friend of the Bushes, and was our Nation’s Biggest Bankruptcy. On the first day as director of security at the World trade center, O’Neill died from a Tower collapse. ”

      So? Can’t see you’re point here.

      ” 7. Hundreds of former government officials from the military, intelligence community, and elected office all say that 911 was an inside job. ”

      Names? Thousands disagree.

      ” 6. Any expert in controlled demolition will state (if they are honest) that the Towers were brought down by controlled demolition. However, conventional demolition technology was not used. The technology used is among the most advanced weaponry developed by the U.S. Government, “Star Wars” caliber. ”

      Many more will point to the sheer impossibility of rigging the towers for demolition without the occupants noticing and the large team of experts and months of time that would be required. Any proof of this “Star Wars” technology? Thought not.

      ” 5. Over 350 first responders have died of cancer, and hundreds more are now sick with cancer. This cancer came from the mysterious fumes from the nuclear based advanced weaponry. ”

      Or possibly from the large amounts of asbestos and other toxic material that was left floating about afterwards. Has anybody detected high levels of radiation around Ground Zero?

      ” 4. Governments have lied to the people for hundreds of years to control us. The Pentagon Papers put out by Daniel Ellsberg revealed the truth about the Vietnam War, and lead to the war’s early end. Nixon wound up getting Impeached, and thrown out of office because of his attack on Ellsberg, Watergate, and his deceit to the American People. Both Bill Clinton and McNamara, and many others now say the Vietnam War was wrong and never should have happened. The incident in the Gulf of Tonkin was the False Flag to cause the Vietnam War. 911 was a False Flag to justify attacking Afghanistan and Iraq. ”

      Irrelevant. Even if true it’s not evidence that 9/11 was a “false flag”.

      ” 3. At least 90% of the Towers’ steel, concrete. furniture, computers, and human bodies disappeared. Instead of about 30 stories of a steel haystack remaining with chunks of concrete, there was 2 to 3 stories of material. Where did the Billion pounds of steel and concrete go? It was turned to dust by a “Star Wars” Advanced Nuclear Weapon, like we see in some great movies. ‘

      Hate to have to tell you but the movies aren’t real. The WTC had several levels of basements and a lot of the debris collapsed into those.

      ” 2. The Pentagon was hit by a missile, not a commercial plane. No plane crashed in Pennsylvania. ‘

      So what about the witnesses who saw the plane hit the Pentagon? How was it that the flight recorders and other wreckage was found at the Pentagon and that all the occupants were identified from DNA? What happened to the plane that was supposed to have crashed in Pennsylvania and its occupants?

      ” 1. The crime scene and the evidence was taken away almost instantly by hundreds of removal lorries and the metal melted down or shipped away. ”

      Hang on you said earlier that 90% of the buildings were disintegrated, vaporised so why were hundreds of removal lorries needed and what was left to be melted down?

      So you’re saying it was a controlled demolition; but it wasn’t. The towers were brought down by some “Star Wars” nuclear technology the precise nature of which you’re unsure about and for which there is no evidence?

      • Chris Jones

        Kempe, I’m afraid you’ve failed to provide any evidence to disprove the charges of a 911 inside job which would allow for the reopening of this case.The verdict is guilty as charged beyond all reasonable doubt. This case has now been closed. Please feel free to carry on your conspiracy theories on fruitcake conspiracy websites

        • Kempe

          Ah so we’re back to the Truther mainstay; “You cannot disprove it so therefore it must be true!”

          No actually the emphasis is on you to provide evidence, real evidence, that 9/11 was an inside job. Even after 15 years of a small army of Truthers “doing their own research” the Truth movement has failed. Instead it’s produced a series of ever more bizarre hypotheses and taken to in-fighting.

          Still, it provides the sane majority with some amusement.

  • Paul Barbara

    @ fwl May 24, 2016 at 21:17
    ‘…He also appeared in the BBC Gladio documentary. At that time the USSR had fallen, special ops were being reviewed and it would have been understandable for Italians to either assume deep state control was unnecessary and over or unnecessary, but continuing and to agitate for a change.’

    Gladio is in no way curtailed, but as or more active than ever. Turkey is a major ‘Gladio’ player, destabilising the ex-Soviet ‘Stans’ and China.
    Paul Williams’ book ‘Operation Gladio’ is a goldmine of information. The Vatican Bank and Opus Dei helped fund Gladio in Latin America, and backed the murderous Right-Wing Juntas there

  • Voice of Treason

    Thanks for posting your opinion on 9/11, Craig. I note that it was in 2010, so maybe your position has shifted? Mine certainly has, in response to evidence that has emerged mainly since 2009. In this case, I disagree that 9/11 can be characterised merely as ‘blowback’, mainly because hard evidence now shows that active high level military and / or covert security service assistance was required to accomplish the attacks.

    Before I comment on the hard evidence, I shall make a more general point about criminal conspiracies and the oft-quoted difficulty of keeping things secret. In short, it’s true that secrets often tend to leak out, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to any widespread acknowledgement of the truth. Acceptance of the truth requires a realignment of the views of the majority, especially those in the media entrusted with forming opinions. That realignment is a social phenomenon quite separate from the existence of facts in the public domain. For example, those who are interested in the matter can find out everything they want to know about the assassination of JFK (or MLK for that matter). We know the identities and positions of all the shooters in Dealey Plaza that day, because most of them blabbed to investigative journalists, who wrote books based on their testimony, but none of this matters a jot. It’s always possible to dismiss whistle blowers as fantasists or opportunists, if you so choose – and they are always subjected to official smears, as you well know. There is also very strong disincentive for the core insiders to blow the whistle, anyway. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose, including their lives.

    More recently, we have witnessed how easy it is for secrets to be kept for decades, even among cohorts of hundreds. The Hillsborough cover-up, the Jimmy Savile case, Cyril Smith and other VIP paedophiles are all good examples where many people knew the truth but were afraid or simply felt unable to declare it. Those who did declare it were simply dismissed as ‘conspiracy theorists’ or gobshites. That is the very simple way in which secrets can be kept, even after they leak out. Even when a large minority of people harbour well-founded doubts about some official story (e.g. Savile, 9/11, the Gulf of Tonkin etc.), there is always a collective doublethink in which the official version of events remains the accepted truth, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. The more dystopian the truth becomes, the more overwhelming the evidence needs to be before it becomes generally accepted. This is a tragic aspect of the human condition, in which comforting lies are perpetuated in the face of deeply disquieting truths.

    In the case of 9/11, there are literally dozens of whistle blowers, peripherally connected to the event, who were aware of overwhelming evidence for official US (and Saudi) involvement in the plot and who have declared their awareness (Sibel Edmonds being one of best known but far from unique example). But again it makes no difference. Whistle blowers are seldom believed, except in cases where people are prepared to confront the depth of the dystopia they reveal. But by all means google ‘9/11 whistle blowers’: there is a vast amount of testimony in the public domain but it will always be possible to dismiss it all as lies or misinterpretation of facts, if one so chooses. Enough of the ‘soft’ evidence, though. It’s much more difficult to dismiss the hard evidence, without a more determined act of doublethink:

    We know for certain (or as near to certain as anyone can ever be about anything) that the twin towers and WTC 7 were demolished using unconventional explosives / incendiaries, namely energetic nano-composites, aka nano-thermite or super-thermite. We know this because a thoroughly professional forensic examination of dust samples was carried out by a team of academics and engineers, led by Prof Niels Harrit (formerly Professor of Chemistry at Copenhagen University). Their study was written up in a peer-reviewed journal, accessible to the public for free. The study identifies the thermitic material and characterises its exothermic and chemical properties whilst carefully eliminating all other interpretations of the data. It is here, for those who want to read it:

    http://benthamopen.com/ABSTRACT/TOCPJ-2-7

    The study also found an extraordinary abundance of elemental iron spheres – corroborated by an earlier study by RJ Lee laboratories for insurance purposes – which can only be products of a thermitic reaction. In 2001, nano-thermite was only available from a handful of secure military research laboratories in Western countries, rather like the military anthrax that was used in the anthrax letter attacks shortly after 9/11. The anthrax attacks, by the way, are quite inseparable from 9/11 and may be seen as an adjunct to it. These attacks have since been traced to a US military lab and are now generally known to have been a false flag event. That fact is indisputable, since the letters were made to look as if they came from Islamic extremists and the whole episode was a crucial part of the official case for war against Iraq, as it was supposed to prove a connection between Saddam Hussein, his (non-existent) WMD and al-Qaeda. yet we know know that the anthrax attacks had literally nothing to do with Iraq or al-Qaeda and has since been blamed on a ‘lone nut’ military scientist, who then conveniently killed himself. In my view, it requires a great effort of self-deception to believe such utter nonsense, but facts are endlessly malleable for those who wish to cling to a belief. The anthrax attacks themselves appear to have been virtually erased from public consciousness today, no doubt because they are a huge embarrassment for the whole official narrative surrounding 9/11.

    But back to the hard evidence. One may always dismiss a single scientific study: perhaps it was fraudulent or incompetent in some way, even though no subsequent peer-reviewed study has contradicted its results or offered a better interpretation of them. On the contrary, we have another peer-reviewed study which further corroborates the findings of the first:

    http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-008-9182-4

    We also have hard evidence in the form of simple observation of the collapse of the buildings, especially WTC 7, as caught on video. It is now officially accepted that WTC 7 collapsed at free fall acceleration for over 2 seconds, straight down through the path of greatest resistance. This is despite the fact that it was a fully steel-framed structure, with 82 steel columns supporting its weight (24 in the core, 58 around the perimeter). In fact, no defects in the construction of the building have been established – only speculation and lies in that regard. But even if the building had been constructed along the lines of a jenga tower, it is still physically impossible for that tower to collapse symmetrically in free fall through the path of greatest resistance, as if its 82 columns simply didn’t exist – or rather as if they had been simultaneously severed by explosives. Spontaneous connection failures can only occur at isolated spots, leading to partial asymmetric collapses, at much less than free fall. It is simply impossible for such a building to have simultaneous spontaneous failures affecting all 82 columns at the same time, bringing the whole structure down in exactly the manner of a controlled demolition.

    If you are looking for a complete account of the collapse of the WTCs in the official reports produced by NIST, then you will be sorely disappointed. NIST does not even pretend to offer a full account of any of these collapses, because they can’t. Instead, they offer only unevidenced speculation about the events leading to the onset of collapse and hope that that will suffice, seeing as they know that the vast majority of engineers are too busy to bother reading their reports. They refuse to publish the full details of their finite element simulations, citing ‘public safety concerns’. Personally, I have read their report on WTC 7 and I know it to be fraudulent nonsense. Having a PhD in applied mathematics (engineering) and a degree in physics, I am reasonably well qualified to make that judgement, as I believe would almost any engineering professional who took the time to read their investigations. There are now over 2500 such people (growing daily) who have signed the petition of the campaign group, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (I’m not even one of them because my PhD is not specifically in structural engineering): http://www.ae911truth.org/

    Enough of engineering and science, though. Is there any other hard evidence, easier for the layman to judge? Yes, there is. The 9/11 Commission report concluded that there was no evidence of insider trading on airline stocks in the days prior to 9/11. However, 3 peer-reviewed academic studies have looked into this question and all of them conclude the exact opposite. The volume of put options traded in airline stocks just prior to 9/11 was so unusually huge that it leaves no reasonable doubt that there was prior knowledge of the attacks among certain people very well connected to Wall Street, especially to Deutsche Bank, its subsidiary Alex Brown & Sons and its CEO, a certain individual named ‘Buzzy’ Krongard, coincidentally also a CIA executive director. The academic papers and supporting story are all documented by financial journalist Lars Schall here and elsewhere:

    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NC21Dj05.html

    So, we also have overwhelming evidence of foreknowledge, most likely by people connected to the US establishment, unless you choose to believe that Osama bin Laden had a stockbroker who just happened to be in the CIA. Again, facts are always as malleable as you want them to be, but I would suggest that the truth is sadly staring us in the face. It isn’t simple at all, but it is clear enough.

    All I have done here is to present a few brief snippets of evidence drawn from an enormous mountain of facts, all of which points to direct complicity in the 9/11 attacks by official agencies of the US and other governments, rather than simply ‘blowback’. There isn’t space to touch on other very strong strands of evidence (e.g. the Sibel Edmonds testimony and that of numerous other whistle blowers or the 28 redacted pages of the Congressional Report which remain classified) but together these various strands do tell a very compelling and coherent story which, at the very least, utterly refutes the official narrative composed entirely of lies, stitched together with nothing.

    It may not be enough to convince you, but I hope it offers plenty of food for thought.

    • lysias

      Once one becomes aware of how many false flags there have been in recent history, shouldn’t the predisposition be to suspect another instance of a false flag, rather than to believe an official account? Certainly that is now my predisposition.

      • mog

        I think that is a fair point Lysias; Machiavellian politics has become (or perhaps has always been) the norm.

        The complete lack of genuine consideration and public reflection on the totality of 911 evidence by the alt media is, to me, one of the most telling things. If it were not all such a strictly taboo subject then these evidential points would have been properly thrashed out by the political commenters, academics and historians of the past fifteen years.
        Where is the repository of supposed debunking, or answers, or real consideration (i.e. without a priori assumptions) by the Left, the Liberals, by the likes of Craig Murray? There is not one; only innuendo, silence, misrepresentation and quarantined zones of ‘911 discussion’ like this one where such taboo subjects can safely be set aside and effectively ignored- as if they don’t potentially contextualise just about everything that the Craig Murray’s of this world (for example) write about.

        I regard it ultimately as the failure of the Western Enlightenment tradition: important events must be publicly understood and accounted for through an adversarial process of evidence evaluation – except in events like those of Sept 911 2001. The exception is telling.

    • Clark

      This is a very good comment which I hope to reply to when I have the time – which may not be for a while. Sorry.

  • Dave

    There are practical reasons why most terrorist attacks are false flag, because an angry individual may be inclined to do something terrible, but unless they are mentally ill and susceptible to manipulation, they will rationally know there is little they can do to make a difference and resist the urge to become a martyr.

    And if they are part of a big group, which is only possible if backed by a hostile State, they or their sponsor will have been infiltrated and/or crushed by the State. The remarkable thing about the US/neo-con inflicted suffering worldwide is the lack of blowback in US and Europe, presumably because rationally or fatalistically the victim states know this would only encourage their oppressor.

    Hence the only way a ‘war on terror’ can be maintained is if the State perpetuates false flag attacks, because without them there almost wouldn’t be any.

    • Clark

      I think that US/UK/neocon-driven foreign policy has provoked and enabled much so-called terrorism.

      The devastation of Iraq – has provoked massive resentment, created a power vacuum which has enabled the development of ISIS, Al Nusra, and many other such loose groupings; gave these violent groups an income stream from oil, and left hundreds of tonnes of Western-supplied weaponry ready to be used by them.

      The US-Saudi treaty signed at Bitter Lake – that the US would do nothing to hinder the spread of Saudi Wahhabism, and gave tacit approval (and covert support) while the Saudi monarchy turned outwards the violent, brutalised young Wahhabists to counter the spread of communist influence across the Middle East. This proxy war continues today, the neocon target now being called “Russia” rather than “the USSR”.

      The US/UK/French devastation of Libya – which has created another zone of utter lawlessness, prejudice and widespread violence, the ideal culture-medium for the growth of “terrorism”.

      The US/NATO “intervention” in Afghanistan – handing power to tribal drug-lords, the creation of one of the most corrupt governmental powers in the world (another being that of Iraq), thereby fostering thousands of resentments and jealousies.

      Macrocosm dominates microcosm. Large scale arbitrary violence provokes and enables thousands of examples of small scale arbitrary violence – “terrorism”.

  • Dave

    And I suspect the quid pro quo for Britain de facto supporting 9/11 was the end of US support for the IRA.

  • mog

    ‘We don’t discuss 9/11. There are plenty of places on the web where you can do that. It tends to take over threads.’

    What if, for example, the nascent prosecutions against members of the Saudi state ended up bringing convictions, would we be allowed to discuss that?

    What if someone like Bandhar bin Sultan were implicated, would we be allowed to point out any connections to other events or other agents of other states? And so on….Are we even allowed to mention the events of 911?

    To ban a subject wholesale from discussion is not my idea of a ‘free speech zone’.

    [posted on ‘Rules for Moderation’ thread -for moderation]

    • Clark

      mog, I think that in theory it would be OK to discuss such matters on other threads where it would be related to the topic, but in practice I think it would attract too many comments consisting of “voodoo physics”.

  • Ian Fantom

    “The forces of the aircraft impacts must have been amazingly high”. Have you looked at the physics of this? It was trivial, and if it hadn’t been, the towers would have fallen sideways. See Professor Steven Jones’s physics paper “Why indeed did the towers of the WTC fall?”.

    I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the towers could have been set up for controlled demolition overnight. Of course they couldn’t. So Building 7 couldn’t have been pulled without pre-planning. Nor could the other towers have fallen straight down.

    Yes, it would have been difficult for the US Administration to keep such a thing secret, but it would have been much more difficult for Osama bin Laden to keep it secret, especially when he’d been under surveillance by the CIA for years. If Osama bin Laden had done it, then all his accomplices would have been in on it, whereas if the CIA had been involved, most of them would have thought they were in a security exercise.

    Where is the evidence that Osama bin Laden was responsible? Even the FBI didn’t have the evidence to mention that as a crime that he was wanted for on their website. We’d expect the papers to be full of it.

    So what are the options?

    • Clark

      Sorry, this is silly. Just watch the Towers fall; most of the destruction was caused by the falling debris, ie. by the Towers’ own weight.

  • minh

    Please do simple math for a scaled model 1:225 of the 9/11 event.

    Take the specification of the building(500,000 ton total, 100,000 ton of construction steel) and the Boeing 767 (90 ton when empty, with 31 ton of fuel at impact) and make a model 1:225 of the 9/11 event. (the original measures : WTC1 208x208x1368, WTC2 208x208x1362, WTC7 330x140x610 feet, Boeing length 159 ft).
    Can an AK-47 projectile weights 8 gram and 1/5 of a tablespoon (2.75 gram) of gasoline destroy to dust an object of the height of a man (6 feet) with a square base of 11 inch x 11 inch, weight 97 pounds, with 19 pounds of steel core ?
    The speed of the plane is 1/2 to 1/3 of the speed of the bullet when it leaves the gun. And 8 gram is half the weight of a typical aluminium beer-can.
    The AK-47 projectile 7.62 x 39 mm is made with lead covered with copper, while in our model the Boeing is made of aluminium and empty inside, 8.5 inches (wingspan and length) the kinetic energies of them are the same if they fly at the same speed. The muzzle velocity of the bullet is 715 m/s (2,350 ft/s) and the plane speed is 470 to 590 mph upon impact which is 210 to 264 m/s (690 to 865 ft/s).

    One third of speed at impact leads to one ninth of kinetic energy. Now, how do you explain the destruction of the towers 1 and 2, let alone WTC7.

    • Clark

      You can’t scale like this. If you reduce the size by 1:225, you have to increase the gravitational constant accordingly. Things accelerate due to gravity. If they have less distance to fall through then they don’t get to accelerate so much, so they’re not carrying so much momentum and kinetic energy when they hit whatever is below them.

    • Clark

      Try it the other way around. Ants can carry leaves many times their own size. Scale up to the size of an elephant – can it carry a similarly scaled-up leaf? Sorry, this doesn’t work.

    • Clark

      minh, sorry, I jumped to a conclusion and overestimated the subtlety of your comment. The question isn’t whether such a projectile could destroy such objects because that’s not what we saw. There is no point in scaling if you’re then going to pretend that the (scaled analogy of the) aircraft blew the (scaled analogy of the) Towers to pieces.

      Such a projectile certainly could damage the scaled-down building and set fire to it. If the top tenth of the building then lost support and fell on the rest, it could certainly destroy it so long as the gravitational constant was scaled up sufficiently.

  • Silvio

    Mechanical Engineer Sends Open Letter to Main Defender of the 9/11 Official Account, Zdeněk Bažant

    On June 19, 2016, Tony Szamboti, a mechanical engineer who has studied the World Trade Center collapses intensively for the past ten years, sent an open letter to Northwestern civil engineering Professor Zdeněk Bažant. Dr. Bažant is the author of four articles in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics that purport to explain why the lower sections of the WTC Twin Towers provided no discernible resistance to the falling upper sections.

    The Open Letter
    Dear Professor Bazant,

    This open letter is being sent to you to request that you correct your four papers on the collapse of the WTC Towers, which were published by the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.

    In these papers, the values used for the below three items:

    The velocity of the descending upper section of the building
    The mass of the descending upper section of the building
    The column strength of the underlying story at the impact floor

    have been shown in the intervening years to be significantly unrepresentative of the actual situation concerning the North Tower (WTC 1) at the time of its collapse.

    SNIP

    The NIST stopped their analysis at a point where the report says the building was “poised to collapse” when the south exterior wall purportedly buckled. There is no analysis or explanation provided in the report for the horizontal propagation across the building. The NIST report simply moves from a single buckled exterior wall to your analysis for substantiation of vertical propagation. I am not sure if you are aware, but the actual horizontal propagation occurs from the southwest to northeast corners (a distance of nearly 300 ft.) across the 98th floor of the North Tower in less than a second. The measurement of the vertical descent/propagation does not show any deceleration, at any time. Focused ejections can be observed emanating from the corners and the sides of the building during the collapse. None of these three observations can be explained easily as being due to naturally caused occurrences, but can easily be explained by the use of charges.

    Unfortunately, the possibility that there were charges in the buildings has not been investigated up to this point and it would appear that your papers, with these errors still intact, have provided some level of umbrage for those who presently insist it is not necessary. It is hard to believe you would approve of that knowing there are errors. It is sincerely hoped that you will correct these errors now that they have been brought to your attention. Once they are corrected your analyses can no longer be used as an argument against a new investigation to look into those things which were missed in the first attempt to investigate these collapses.

    Sincerely,
    Anthony Szamboti

    http://www.ae911truth.org/news/265-news-media-events-mechanical-engineer-sends-open-letter.html

    • Clark

      “the actual horizontal propagation occurs from the southwest to northeast corners (a distance of nearly 300 ft.) across the 98th floor of the North Tower in less than a second”

      – seems OK to me; there was a LOT of weight on top.

      “The measurement of the vertical descent/propagation does not show any deceleration, at any time.”

      – so long as the descending debris was gaining velocity / momentum from gravity faster than it was expending it through impact etc. then it would accelerate. A mechanical engineer should know that.

      “Focused ejections can be observed emanating from the corners and the sides of the building during the collapse”

      – yep the air in the offices had to go somewhere. Do a quick calculation of how much volume of space (air) was filled how quickly by debris. No really. And it seems intuitively right to me that the most powerful ejections would be from the corners. I can’t think of a good example right now; the closest I can think of is the manner in which a toy balloon empties if instead of tying it off you let it go to fart its way around a room – it has a sudden spurt at the end, doesn’t it, as the last bit of air is expelled. I’ll post a better example when it comes to me.

      • mog

        Are you not falling prey to confirmation bias Clark? You seem to focus on the enormity of the mass of the top section whilst downplaying the enormity of the structural resistance of the lower section.

        There was a LOT of weight on top, but there was a LOT of vertical steel superstructure holding that weight up – basically ALL of which had to have failed simultaneously within a fraction of a second if the collapse was to proceed symmetrically.

        The top section would accelerate so long as it was gaining velocity due to gravity faster than impacts with the lower section were slowing it down. In a building with considerable reserve capacity, surely those impacts and deformations would have slowed the top block considerably – that is the point made repeatedly by the physicists who allege controlled demolition. If I built a tower of playing cards held together only by small frictional forces, the tower would not support the weight of a bowling ball. Dropping that ball onto the tower, we would be hard pressed to see any deviation from gravitational acceleration as the energy required to destroy the card tower would be so minimal.
        If we build the same tower (and use the same ball) but glue the cards together, then repeat the experiment, again the tower will not support the ball, and the dropped ball would still exhibit an overall acceleration hardly distinguishable from 1g. If we build a tower out of balsa wood, and lets say (for the sake of making the point) that placing the ball atop puts the tower on the very verge of collapse. Dropping the ball onto a tower of this robustness, we would expect to be able to measure a clear difference between it’s descent acceleration and 1g, would we not?
        And so on, until we build say a tower strong enough to support three times the weight of the bowling ball. Now we raise the ball and drop it, and ….what? Is it untrue to say that ANY structure that can support a mass with considerable reserve capacity, would, in the case of a gravity driven collapse, offer considerable resistance to that same mass dropped onto it? The energy required to destroy and dislodge the supporting components in such a tower would be significant, and would have to be matched by a reduction in the kinetic energy of the falling mass.
        You seem to me to deny this, or fudge it in your comments.
        Its all very well just insulting the many scientists, engineers and architects who disagree with you as ‘cranks’ but where is the proof to support your argument? The NIST reports are not peer reviewed science, and although not written by spooks they uphold the old Upton Sinclair adage that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” The 911 Commission report is disowned by all except Zelikow….need more be said? And as far as the debunking literature goes there is only the book of any note and that is endorsed by known propagandist , John McCain.
        As Blair today evokes 911 as some lame attempt to justify his war crimes, I still regard this as a live topic.
        Some academics:
        https://911inacademia.com/

        • Clark

          To continue, now I have a bit more time… I don’t regard those with serious questions about collapse mechanisms of the Towers as cranks. However, there has been an awful lot of crankery. There was an early argument of impossibility of collapse based on momentum. Just a simple, first approximation of momentum blows it away but it is, still seen occasionally staggering on, now like an emaciated zombie. There’s that silly model, actually built from a wooden frame supporting a number of rectangles of plasterboard (or something) spaced much closer together than the floors of the Towers were, with no attempt to correct for the fact that you can’t scale the gravitational constant to match. There are the arguments based on falsities, such that nothing was left but dust, or that the collapse front of the Towers accelerated at 1g. There’s the silly angular momentum argument about the tipping of the top section. These are all daft; none have the slightest validity. Why should serious engineers and scientists be continually criticised on the basis of such nonsense?

          I could continue further, but I have already outlined a plausible collapse scenario, though gawd knows how many pages back in the comments. It is now up to others to show that to be wrong, so I don’t want to continue until you’ve clarified exactly what you mean by “structural resistance”.

          But let’s just glance at the bigger picture. There is an argument that the Towers couldn’t have collapsed as seen due to damage and fire. This argument is used to support the assertion that some sort of explosives must have been pre-rigged into the buildings. This is then further used to assert that the US government, or Israeli agents must have done this. To further support this, it is asserted that NIST must have covered up what they found. To further support this, the majority of the mechanical engineering community, including ambitious young post-grads the world over, are turning a blind eye to glaring physical nonsense in the NIST reports, apparently to save their salaries or future salaries. By this point, there are literally millions going along with nonsense, including the swathes of graduates who are stacking shelves, flipping burgers and doing other low paid tedious jobs because of the graduate employment crisis. And yet I haven’t seen a single coherent explanation of how a floor structure that’s rated for four times its own weight is supposed to significantly slow down ten times as much material as it consists of itself, dropping from heights of between about three and thirty metre.

          There is tentative evidence for explosives from after the collapses, but no one has shown that there were explosives pre-rigged into the Towers. No evidence of explosives being rigged has been found – just finding some time when they could have been put there is merely circumstantial, as is the presence of a few art students with cardboard boxes, even if one of them was called Urban! But even if these hurdles are surmounted, there is nothing to tie this conclusively to the alleged yet personally unknown perpetrators.

          Remember the charges – conspiracy to mass murder, and accessory to mass murder. Remember the term “beyond reasonable doubt”? Or do we relax that massively because of who you’re placing in the dock? How about the term “equal in the eyes of the law”, or doesn’t that one matter either? Don’t just reverse it and moan about beleaguered Saudis because logically, the NIST/mainstream collapse scenario doesn’t need Saudis, it just needs aircraft collisions and fire.

          I really think it’s time you considered that you may be barking up the wrong tree.

          • lysias

            Beyond a reasonable doubt is a standard of proof in criminal cases. It’s far stronger than is generally required for historical probability or high probability. To use the legal standards, something like preponderance of the evidence suffices to establish historical probability, and clear and convincing evidence is more or less what is required for historical high probability.

            When we’re discussing history, no one is facing criminal punishment. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt comes close to absolute certainty. No reason to require that when one is discussing historical matters. If it were required, there would be very few conclusions in history.

          • Clark

            lysias, fine; history is your thing, physics and mechanics are mine. I see essentially NO evidence specifically indicating explosive demolition of the Twin Towers, and very good reasons why they should have collapsed in the manner recorded on video. I’m giving you my semi-expert opinion that the arguments I’ve seen for impossibility of gravity-driven collapse are utter bunk, a waste of your valuable time – it doesn’t need to be a fully expert opinion because the physics behind those arguments is spectacularly weak.

            Building 7 is another matter. I note that the distance of free-fall is roughly equivalent to the almost hollow cavity beneath the core. The eventual NIST report implicates a critical failure at a single point – therefore, by NIST’s own reckoning, anyone with access to the plans of the building could have targeted that critical point with explosives. However, the building burnt for several hours – over twice its rated safety interval – before collapse occurred. So my conclusion on Building 7 is inconclusive.

            The building collapses also have to be considered in the context of the “building regulation black hole” of the Port Authority, the complaints of fire safety professionals, and the refusal of that authority to make construction records and building debris public – ie. NIST cut a deal with the Port Authority to get the records by agreeing to a cover-up. I therefore suspect that all three buildings were probably sub-standard.

          • Clark

            So my balance of probability is that NIST indeed perpetrated cover-ups, in that they saved the arses of corrupt officials in the Port Authority in exchange for records. I think NIST probably felt somewhat sorry for them – the buildings would probably never have collapsed but for the attacks – but also NIST wanted to understand the collapses for the safety of the rest of the country. A cover-up for these sorts of reasons seems far more likely to be something that a bunch of professionals could stomach, than covering up murder by deliberate pre-rigged demolition.

        • Clark

          While I’m on the subject, there are the arguments from emotive soundbites, such as the “path of least/greatest resistance” arguments, which never produce a diagram colour-coded for degrees of resistance throughout the structures. There are the “lateral ejection” arguments which fail to address that hardly any debris is seen ejected into an ascending arc, as charges would be expected to do. Oh OK, they were shaped charges… it just gets more and more baroque.

          This is all voodoo physics. And remember that sceptics become fair game for accusations of accessory to mass murder just for pointing out that such arguments are bunk.

          Then arguments from psychology are dragged in. Thinking that damaged tall buildings might collapse under their own weight provokes accusations of “cognitive dissonance”. Ignoring the insult, if we’re looking to the unconscious, we must consider ALL of it, not just the bits convenient to theories of ipre-rigged demolition. Go on, show me that you can criticise your OWN theories for a change, or I’ll do it for you; that’s a promise.

      • Clark

        Mog, I’m short of time so I’ll just briefly consider one point… The “weight of the top section” is a bulk property, just a simple quantity. However, I’d like YOU to define what you mean by “the structural resistance of the lower section”. Is it a bulk property? Was it the same throughout the various components of the lower section? In each component (or set thereof) was it the same in all directions?

        • mog

          Have not the time and patience to reply to all your points Clark.

          Referring to ‘structural resistance’ I am trying to draw attention to what I perceive as a bias in your comments- i.e that you focus on the huge mass but less so on the structural system that kept that mass suspended up in the sky for so many years.
          The simplest way I can think of arriving at a point where we can clearly see our point of divergence is to consider the conservation of energy in the towers demise.
          At the point of collapse we know that there was a building on fire that had suffered localised damage. Just fourteen seconds later that building was a domed shaped, extremely hot pile of fragmented steel components, and a plume of fine dust that spread over a considerable area. Such a conversion required an enormous amount of energy, so we might ask where did that energy come from? The Pile Driver Hypothesis that forms the explanation from official sources has it that the mobile top section of the building had sufficient potential energy to perform this work. Yet we know that only about 30% of that potential energy was available to do the work as the remaining 70% was converted into kinetic energy of a rapidly accelerating descent. I assert, just on the grounds of common sense that this was insufficient energy to do the above mentioned work.
          The structural resistance of the many dozens of vertical columns in the lower section must have been compromised to an extent that allowed the top section to fall so rapidly. If the destruction of the lower section was a result of impact from the top section, then that impact would have significantly reduced the kinetic energy of the upper section, and we would have seen it slow or jolt. This is something I witness every day as physical bodies collide and interact.
          You might write that electricity was an other source of energy that could be factored in, but it is just a distracting hand waving excersize unless you can propose a way that electrical energy could be put to work to destroy the building. You wrote that huge steel components ‘fell away’ as the collapse continued, but the evidence is in plain sight that they were laterally accelerating at considerable velocities. You might say that the building’s volume was composed mainly of air, which it was, but the explosive ejections thirty or forty metres below the destruction zone need some further explanation (was there a piston pressurizing air in vertical shafts? What was it made of? How did it work? etc.).
          The resolution of these questions will not take place on a web forum, there needs to be a new investigation, one that conforms to the adversarial process that is the norm in our society.

        • Clark

          Mog, I’m sorry that my adversarial comments are fraying your patience. I recommend five minutes of concentration upon your breathing; it works quite well for me. I shall now indicate the bias in your own comments. Sorry about that, too.

          “Just fourteen seconds later that building was a domed shaped, extremely hot pile of fragmented steel components, and a plume of fine dust “

          Actually there was also a great deal of concrete and other stuff in the debris pile.

          I wouldn’t call the overall temperature extreme, but we’d expect it to be hotter than before the collapse anyway. I know this is a “gas law” but some variant will apply, at least in approximation – P1.V1.T1=P2.V2.T2 – taking Pressure as constant, Volume was reduced so Temperature increased. Add in frictional heating and all sorts of other stuff and the temperature presumably rose considerably.

          “the explanation from official sources has it that the mobile top section of the building had sufficient potential energy to perform this work”

          Wrong. You’ve discarded much of the available energy. Please work out how for yourself, as you consider me biased.

          “Yet we know that only about 30% of that potential energy was available to do the work as the remaining 70% was converted into kinetic energy”

          May we see your working on that please? You could be right, but I think that most of the energy has been discarded again.

          “just on the grounds of common sense that this was insufficient energy to do the above mentioned work”

          Figures please? But first please reclaim all the energy you discarded.

          “The structural resistance of the many dozens of vertical columns in the lower section must have been compromised to an extent that allowed the top section to fall so rapidly”

          Why the “vertical columns”? Did these constitute the major area of material opposing the descent? I think not. This indicates that I have “focused on […] the structural system…” considerably more than you have.

          “and we would have seen it slow or jolt. “

          What, you’d have seen that at a scale reduction of about 1000:1 on the screen you watched the videos on, would you? I certainly wouldn’t expect to.

          “You might write that electricity was an other source of energy that could be factored in, but it is just a distracting hand waving excersize unless you can propose a way that electrical energy could be put to work to destroy the building.”

          Thanks for the insult; please read my comments more carefully. Electrical and other energy sources would have contributed to temperatures in the debris pile, and may account for much of the molten metal discovered. I do not think they contributed much to the destruction of the buildings.

          “evidence is in plain sight that they were laterally accelerating at considerable velocities”

          Please refer to video evidence. Please show ejection inclining above the horizontal as would be expected from explosives. Please do not conflate ejection of dust etc with the motion of large structural elements.

          “but the explosive ejections…”

          Weasel word. Explosives are what you’re trying to prove; please don’t presuppose like this.

          “was there a piston pressurizing air in vertical shafts? What was it made of? How did it work? etc..”

          I’ll do you the favour of explaining this one. The Towers were a “tube within a tube” construction, as we have read repeatedly. The outer tube constituted the “cylinder”. The descending rubble constituted the piston. Displaced air propelled dust and rubble out as it escaped through gaps in the outer tube.

          • Clark

            Actually scrub my “P1.V1.T1=P2.V2.T2” – air is included in the original volume, but there was less of it in the rubble pile. But solid materials didn’t compress to that extent.

            I think there would still have been increases in temperature related to a process like this. The above would have applied to air as it compressed, and that air would have heated solids before it was expelled. But I’m not going to try to put a figure on it.

            But please note that I do self-correct – I submit my own theories to critical scrutiny, something I rarely, if ever, see from most proponents of pre-rigged demolition.

          • Clark

            “Yet we know that only about 30% of that potential energy was available to do the work as the remaining 70% was converted into kinetic energy”

            Actually all of the kinetic energy was also soon converted to other forms. What form do you expect most of it ended up as? Hint – what form does all energy relentlessly and annoyingly turn into?

        • Clark

          Oh, I’ve just realised that there was more potential energy in the buildings than the gravitational potential energy alone. As the building was constructed, each addition of weight would have slightly compressed the structure beneath, storing energy in it like in a compressed spring. My “mechanical intuition” suggests that this would have formed only a minor proportion of the total potential energy, most of it being gravitational, but would any of you great judges of other people’s physics care to make an approximation of it?

          • Ba'al Zevul

            Arguably, the stored energy would act in the opposite direction to the collapsing building as the lower stories were progressively partially unloaded, slowing the collapse. Considering a simple block, rather than getting into integrals over the height of the building, the load above can only generate a stress proportional to the amount it ‘fell’ during construction, as compression occurred – millimetres maybe – while the gravitational energy would be a function of the (mean, avoiding integrals) height of the structure – hundreds of metres. However, the WTC structure wasn’t that simple, and you’d probably need a geek to make you a computer model. Wouldn’t go there, myself. A three-pipe problem.

          • Clark

            Ba’al, good to see you checking in on my Elementary Guestimation in Physics class. Do please pull me up if I blunder seriously; it’s always reassuring to have more eyes on the work (Linus’ Law). I do read the Blair Miles thread occasionally; interesting to see the letter from Saddam Hussein’s lawyer, which reminded me of the Taliban’s offer to deliver Osama bin Laden into US custody.

            If concrete was poured around frame members after their assembly the slight expansion during unloading could have contributed to pulverisation. I expect that the compression during construction was more than millimetres but the stored energy still insignificant compared to gravitational potential energy. Intuitively, I expect that any released energy would have assisted in the destruction even though expansion due to unloading would have been proceeding upwards. I did see a flying pig once but I assume it was an escaped balloon.

  • Clark

    I have nothing against the theory that the 9/11 attacks were false flag, though myself I speculate that they could have been permitted to occur – so a sort-of semi-false flag. “Inside job” can fit, not that the US government did it, but that insiders helped to enable it. This is the traditional meaning of “inside job” where, for instance, a bank employee or a group of bank employees perform critical actions that enable another external team to empty the vault – it doesn’t mean that the manager ordered the entire bank staff to conspire in committing the crime. “Inside job” with regards to 9/11 seems often to be taken to mean that whole government departments cooperated to hoodwink the rest of the world, and I don’t accept that. I do not accept that all the various bodies involved in the various NIST reports would cover up controlled demolition, for instance. Those people were engineers and scientists, not spooks.

    There are also other ways that 9/11 could have been enabled from within, and that is by breaches of computer and systems security. Orders and information that seemed to pass (or fail to pass) from one civil or military department to another may have been injected (or blocked) by external agents. In this scenario, “inside assistance” could include the leaking of passwords, installation of malware or opening of normally secure telephone circuits. And if so, the authorities might have covered that up, essentially to avoid embarrassment and blame, though they could claim that their motive was to prevent further security breaches, of course.

    But voodoo physics is voodoo physics, and I do wish people would desist. I believe that voodoo physics is one of the main reasons that we haven’t secured a proper investigation. I only have to glance at most of the stuff masquerading as physics on this thread to see that is either utter bunk, or in the rare cases that it is remotely plausible it fails to prove anything.

    Voodoo physics serves as chaff – the huge heaps of little aluminium foil strips thrown out of aircraft to confound radar in wartime. People look at the 9/11 Truth movement and what they see is a load of cranks who think they can judge about physics but haven’t a clue. If outside observers question any of this bunk, many Truthers will loudly accuse them of covering up for the conspiracy, and that seals the matter because they know that they are not.

    Having said all that, Voice of Treason’s comment of June 17, 15:06 is of much higher quality and deserves a proper reply. I have some issues with it but I’ll read those references before I address the issues. I’m very busy at present so I may be some time.

    • lysias

      I think you underestimate the cowardice and risk-averseness of most government employees. If they know that not towing the party line could lose them their jobs, and will almost certainly block any promotions, they’re not likely to dissent.

      Semi-false flag could involve not just permitting the terrorists to do their thing, but also inspiring their leaders to mount operations that people in the U.S. government want. Sibel Edmonds claims to have been exposed to evidence, in her career as an FBI intercept translator, that bin Laden was in U.S. pay all the way up to 9/11.

      • Clark

        Lysias, I don’t underestimate that at all. I think it characterises the various investigations.

        Yes I agree, the neocons have been working with, arming and enabling Saudi Wahhabists for fucking decades, giving them visas, training them in the US to be pilots among other things.

        I just think the Twin Towers were cheap office blocks that collapsed faster than they should have, no explosives necessary. And I think that because of physics and my “mechanical intuition”, both abilities developed over decades.

        • Clark

          …MILITARY pilots at that, who might just be able to pitch an airliner into a 270 degree turn just above ground level, if they didn’t really care too much about exceeding the design limits such that the aircraft would be certified unsafe for flight thereafter…

          • Clark

            Could this have been a pilot who was already experienced in fighter jets over the Middle East, shamming about to look inexperienced, and it was only an airliner he wasn’t interested in learning the landing procedure for? Bit rushed for time, maybe?

      • Clark

        Lysias, I’ll tell you what else I suspect. The US has a “special relationship” with the UK, which is a monarchy. Every year a UK prince goes to the Middle East and sells weapons contracts. They do the Sword Dance, the WEAPON dance for the Saudi king. And the neocon allies are the Gulf MONARCHIES. This relationship based upon weapons and power goes back even further, hundreds of years, to the British Empire.

        Despite the extreme efforts made, the jury in the Diana and Dodi inquest returned a verdict of Unlawful Killing. The mass media saw to it that 90% of the public think the verdict was accidental death.

        • Clark

          Of course it was incorrect of me to write that the UK is a monarchy. But it was a monarchy, and it still has that monarchy which, by acting as liaison with other monarchies, is clearly still involved in international power relationships.

          When Tony Blair quashed the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into arms contracts with Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi king made a rare visit to the UK, it was the UK monarch that he came to “thank”, though his statements about terrorism seemed to imply intimidation to me – surely the UK shouldn’t have to bribe its safety from the Saudis? Exactly what levers does he hold that he was threatening not to pull?

          I was surprised that people who consider themselves patriotic didn’t protest about that, but I suppose the implications went over their heads.

        • Clark

          Al-Yamamah arms deal – events in 2006:

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Yamamah_arms_deal#Threats_by_the_Saudi_government

          Robert Wardle, head of the SFO, also stated (in a later High Court challenge, see below) that he had received a direct threat of a cessation of counterterrorist co-operation from the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the UK, in the first of three meetings held to assess the seriousness of the threat: “as he put it to me, British lives on British streets were at risk“.

          Article 5 of the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery prohibits the decision to drop investigations into corruption from being influenced by considerations of the national economic interest or the potential effect upon relations with another state. This does not however explicitly exclude grounds of national security.

        • Clark

          From the lead of the same Wikipedia article:

          Al Yamamah (Arabic: اليمامة The Dove‎‎) is the name of a series of a record arms sales by the United Kingdom to Saudi Arabia, which have been paid for by the delivery of up to 600,000 barrels (95,000 m3) of crude oil per day to the UK government.[1] The prime contractor has been BAE Systems and its predecessor British Aerospace

          Oil. It always comes back to oil, the liquid fuel upon which the modern way of life depends, without which the burgeoning human population would begin to starve and governments could not win wars.

          It’s not simply about energy, it is specifically about liquid fuel, its high energy density being irreplaceable for small and medium scale mobile power – aircraft, agricultural machinery, transport, and the military. Hydrocarbons provide the highest energy density in chemical form, higher joules per kilo available only from nuclear reactors, which are too large, heavy, dangerous and require nation-state levels of security. If we didn’t have crude oil to refine we would have to synthesize liquid fuel in similar quantities. I therefore predict that the strife in the Middle East will continue either until suitable infrastructure is built, or the oil becomes too expensive to extract. I see little sign of such infrastructure being built.

    • Ba\'al Zevul

      I’d consider false-flag, too. And that could have been achieved by ignoring areas of intelligence-gathering, and diverting attention elsewhere, conducted by the dual-nationality neocons in the State Department, with some encouragement, perhaps, via Saudi Arabia. 9/11 most conveniently fitted the Clean Break scenario:

      http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/a-short-history-the-neocon-clean-break-grand-design-and-the-regime-change-disasters-it-has-fostered/

      and was arguably previewed in PNAC’s ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ (Sept, 2000)

      The passage suggested that the transformation of American armed forces through “new technologies and operational concepts” was likely to be a long one, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

      [Wikipedia]

      This isn’t a new idea, but in the light of Chilcot’s acknowledgement that intelligence was selected and massaged to make a case for war, by the US and UK, and of the neocon dominance of the State Department – and control of its intelligence sources – it remains plausible. It may even be that the State-Pentagon disconnect allowed the Pentagon plane through as State put its telescope to its blind eye. I’m not syaing it’s probable, but if ’twere done, Kagan, Kristol, Perle and the rest were the lads to do it.

  • Clark

    Voodoo physics is voodoo physics whether it’s in connection with 9/11 or not (flat earth, “scalar weapons”, Tesla mythology, etc. etc. etc.) It’s just that 9/11 seems to attract far more than its fair share. And I DO wonder whether that’s a coincidence or not, since it’s very convenient for those who wish to thwart understanding of 9/11. I’m not accusing anyone here, far from it, but it costs very little to seed a hundred lame theories onto the ‘net.

  • mog

    Craig Murray has mentioned two things recently that are relevant to this thread.

    On the 3rd of July he wrote a piece about Theresa May’s citing of and handling of the Abu Qatar case as an argument that she is Islamophobic. The absence of evidence and court prosecution, together with his long imprisonment reminded me of Khalil Sheikh Mohammad – the alleged mastermind of 911. KSM was captured and imprisoned in 2003, tortured and confessed his involvement in the crimes of 911. He has not been brought to trial in 13 years. So the US cannot convict the alleged mastermind of the most heinous terrorist crime in history. Why not?
    Yesterday on the 7th July Craig mentioned that Blair evoked the horror of 911 as some desperate defence of his war crimes in Iraq. He also mentioned that 911 was completely unrelated to Saddam’s regime but that it WAS connected to the Saudis. Surely this begs the question of : What links were there between Saudi intelligence, Saudi financiers, the alleged hijackers, and the political establishment of the US and the UK?
    I would say that it is still taboo for someone of Murray’s standing to delve into these questions in any depth. There is an unmentioned assumption that the official narrative (written into the 911 Commission Report) is essentially true, despite the fact that the commission heads have essentially disowned it, and the commission’s legal counsel have severely criticised it, and that the whole thing was run by a White House insider in contravention of the principles on which it was established.
    So why assume it is correct as writers from the establishment press and the liberal left all seem to ? ‘Facts’ are established through an adversarial process of evaluating evidence, either in a legal setting or through academic peer review and debate. This has clearly not happened.
    The default position should reasonably be that we do not reliably know what happened, and we need to know , especially if it is still being used as a fear device by the political elites.

    • Clark

      Seconded, thoroughly and in full, apart from this minor point:

      “I would say that it is still taboo for someone of Murray’s standing to delve into these questions in any depth”

      Craig stays away from 9/11 because of dogged promotion pre-rigged demolition which tends to swamp all other discussion on the matter. I’m sure he discounts the confessions extracted under torture, and he is highly critical of repeated and ongoing US/UK/neocon collaboration with and exploitation of Saudi elements.

      • mog

        Clark, I’ll endeavour to respond to some of your points when I have more time.

        • Clark

          Mog, that’s fine; I stay away from this thread myself for weeks at a time because when I’m here I try to be clear and thorough, and I try to check sources, answer and follow-up, and it can be quite time consuming. I still have Voice of Treason’s sources to read and comment to answer.

    • Clark

      US torture has compromised all the “testimony” from all the abused detainees, not just at the time but forever. Even if eventually tried their testimony in court would be hopelessly corrupted by the abuse they suffered. That entire avenue of investigation is ruined forever.

      • lysias

        Which bothers U.S. authorities not at all, since the last thing they want is for the truth about 9/11 to come out at a trial.

      • Clark

        lysias, exactly – well, almost exactly. There are good people within the US authorities, though is seems that little can be revealed from within – Craig’s own case illustrates, albeit regarding the UK authorities.

        lysias, I hope you’re following the leads I’ve been filling in further up the thread.

    • Clark

      Craig mentioned that … 911 … WAS connected to the Saudis. …
      .
      There is an unmentioned assumption that the official narrative (written into the 911 Commission Report) is essentially true…
      .
      So why assume it is correct as writers from the establishment press and the liberal left all seem to ?

      It’s not just an assumption; there are all those investigative journalists, intelligence agents and gagged public employees who say that warnings were ignored or investigations were blocked from above, but I suppose you’ll dismiss all those as an elaborate double-bluff because they don’t allege voodoo “controlled demolition”:

      http://inplaceoffear.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/9-11-warnings-ignored-timeline-summer.html

      http://inplaceoffear.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/they-didnt-even-try-to-keep-americans.html

  • mog

    @Clark,
    Firstly, I think that it is worth re-stating the importance of knowing the cause of the collapse of the WTC buildings, for a number of reasons. Defenders of the wider official narrative about 911 as well as some of researchers and activists who have sought clarification about anomalies within the events fifteen years ago, have regarded it as a blind alley (“barking up the wrong tree”), a distraction or just plain lunacy. To question the notion that the effects of the plane impacts were solely responsible is generally to put oneself beyond the pale.
    I think that it is worth starting from a consideration that the destruction of the buildings was the main cause of loss of life on 911 (far more than the combined fatalities of the four plane crashes); and that this must be regarded in conjunction with the fact that the design claims of the people who created the twin towers clearly stated that they had taken possible passenger aircraft impacts into account. If the design was so utterly compromised or the process of safety evaluation was at fault then that is a very grave conclusion for tall buildings the world over. The wider implications of the cause of the WTC building collapses is of course huge, as they traumatised millions of people watching live on TV, and have been part of a political narrative that has changed the way the world is understood. These points (indeed the scale of the fatalities alone) should lead us to demand that the public bodies charged with explaining the events at the WTC must be upheld to the very highest standards of scientific rigor, accountability and transparency. I think that I am right to say that from your previous comments, you agree that this is far from the case. If we do not have a reliable version of what happened to those buildings then we do not really know the true story of 911 with all that that implies. So rather than trade speculation, we should prioritise trying to assess whether the official report is trustworthy and rooted in sound science.
    The definitive NIST reports on the WTC events have been rightly rebuked for withholding large amounts of evidence; for being secretive, opaque and unresponsive to criticisms; for gross failure in the very basics of scientific method and evaluation; and for failing to account for many of the anomalous pieces of evidence that have been brought forward by members of the engineering, architecture and academic communities. In short the NIST reports are a frickin’ travesty and 911 debates should be about them rather than our pet theories of what happened.
    (There are many examples but to quote one or two: If the collapse initiation model is wholly dependent on the assertion that fire proofing was dislodged from steel members in the fire zone – as NIST clearly states- then a school level understanding of science tells us that any furnace tests need to be run with floor assemblies stripped of that protection. NIST didn’t. Related to that, NIST have to demonstrate that aluminium shrapnel can effectively remove most or all of the fireproofing, however, shooting a shotgun at a small square of coated metal does not suffice when your whole theory hangs on this supposition. With the disputes around the collapse dynamics, they simply neglect the whole issue and refer us to Bazant’s work. Criticisms of the work they have covered are dismissed or regarded as the ramblings of ‘conspiracy theorists’. This is not science, and if the reports had been independently peer reviewed -as science demands, then these and many other disgraceful examples would have been just the kind of error that such a process is designed to pick up on. See Kevin Ryan’s critiques).
    So I think it is fair to say that NIST have failed at the science, and unlike you, I am not surprised that scientists are compromised on such a scale in such a politically charged investigation. There are many examples throughout history of scientific forgery for political and commercial gain. (It is worth noting that the scientific community as a whole is going through something of a crisis at the moment due to the unearthing of prevalent fraud perpetrated for career advancement).
    If I imagine that I am a layperson sitting on a jury to decide whether a new investigation should take place into the WTC events (-one independent of connection to the executive branch of the US government), I would hope that this kind of criticism of NIST was the primary consideration. The compromised nature of NIST reports does not in and of itself PROVE the controlled demolition hypothesis, but arguably shows that it has not been disproved. We must consider whether the general procedures and protocols that usually accompany such investigations have been followed. They clearly have not. Most of the evidence at the scene was quickly cleared away without forensic examination, which is arguably criminal and certainly very suspicious. Even if there is little expectation by authorities of much obvious to learn from such forensics, examinations are carried out as a matter of course because you never know what you might find by looking. The same can be said for testing for incendiaries and explosives in the dust. It is standard practice and just basic science that you can rule out the speculative by process of elimination- but only if you follow protocols and do the tests. That this was not done is damning.

    So your accusations of ‘voodoo science’ are best leveled at the authorities that were given the job of investigating the WTC events I would say. Such comments can be unhelpful, as unhelpful as those who speculate about mini nukes, space rays or that the buildings were shoddily built- as C Murray seems to weakly intimate.
    These online discussions about the scientific in’s an out’s of 911 have been going on for well over a decade and basically lead nowhere. I am not that interested in your model of how the towers could have collapsed; I am though interested in the official reports that comprise part of an establishment narrative about 911. We could argue until the end of time with no consequence. You might have your own speculative theory as to how random debris could fall down a lift shaft or service duct and somehow compress the air to such an extent that it blows a hole in a wall with a pressure wave powerful and concentrated enough to cross a large open space and puncture a window thereby shooting debris out into the surroundings at high velocity. Good on you, if that makes sense in your head then, great! It is certainly no less speculative than the theory that –considering that it looked just like a demolition squib, it likely was one. The real issue at hand is that NIST ignored these ejections completely in their supposedly ‘full and accurate account’ of the demise of WTC. And the same is true for the molten steel; if you can envisage some mechanism whereby a kind of random arc furnace was created out of the chaos of the fallen buildings then, well, all I ask is, ‘Is that more or less likely than the cause being the reaction of thermitic material –remnants of which were found in the dust?’ I don’t know, but NIST, the US government and the media establishment do not seem interested in molten metal at all –that is the point. In fact they deny any relevance whatsoever. As for the collapse dynamics arguments I think that David Chandler has produced videos that explain the case that makes most sense and is comprehensible to me. They are easily found if you are interested. I have looked for a counter example but not found one.

    I cannot PROVE the demolition hypothesis, for the reasons that (a) I am not qualified or experienced to; (b) that I do not have access to the necessary evidence to establish proof; and (c) that PROOF in the sense that it has any meaning in this instance can only be provided by a respected and scrutinised public authority. I do though think that the demolition hypothesis provides a reasonable theory that would account for a long list of anomalous evidence; evidence that is established and that is basically ignored by the NIST story. So I of course think this theory is one that deserves serious consideration and testing.
    I have (literally) no more time for this commentary. I have previously linked (and link again) to what I consider authoritative accounts by genuine and expert witnesses, that you have not responded to. Are there any scientific or academic minds outside NIST who are willing to defend NIST (not saying there aren’t, only that I might have missed one)?
    The Toronto Hearings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpiVv8tQdmY
    The Toronto report : https://www.amazon.co.uk/9-11-Toronto-Report/dp/1478369205
    The 911 Consensus Panel : http://www.consensus911.org/
    The Journal of 911 Studies : http://www.journalof911studies.com/

    • Clark

      Mog, you seem to have a very odd idea of how the collapses proceeded. Starting with the design of the Towers, each was a “tube within a tube”, the inner tube being the core, the outer tube being the perimeter wall, these two structures supplying ALL the vertical support; they supported the floor structures by the floors’ edges. These vertical supports were stronger towards the bottom of the towers. They were less strong higher up to save weight.

      The floor structures spanned across between the inner and outer “tubes” and were otherwise unsupported. The weight of the building above did not bear upon these floors. This design saved weight because each floor only needed to support itself and thus didn’t need to be massively strong. The lower floor structures were the same strength as the higher floor structures because the vertical supports (ie. the perimeter wall and the core) supported all the floors.

      Each floor was designed to support between just three and FOUR times its own weight, NOT the weight of the building above.

      Watching the videos we see that after the impacts the buildings stood with fires burning on the floors where the impacts occurred. The same thing then happened in the case of each building; failure occurred at the level of the impacted floor, and the entire top section began to fall and break up.

      At this point, total collapse was inevitable.

      Why inevitable? Well let’s consider the less serious case, the one with the higher impact zone. Over TEN floors-worth of material (plus office contents, vertical structure, lift winches, water tanks, and hat truss) began to fall. Across most of the cross-section of the building, the next intact structure in the way of its fall was a floor rated to support only FOUR times its own weight.

      Considerably more than TEN, versus FOUR.

      Mog, do you agree that TEN is over twice as much as FOUR? Please explain to me how the floor was supposed to arrest the descent of the debris impinging upon it. If you agree that it was impossible for the floor to HOLD, do you further agree that the only other possibility is that it would BREAK?

      So now how much debris was falling? TEN floor’s worth plus ONE equals ELEVEN. So the next floor down had even MORE debris impinging upon it so it too would break.

      Repeat until ALL the floors were destroyed. Deprived of lateral bracing the vertical supports fell over shortly after the collapse front passed.

      You’ve been banging on about “massive structural resistance” but giving no thought to the structure. You’ve misinterpreted what I wrote and misrepresented it thus:

      “You might have your own speculative theory as to how random debris could fall down a lift shaft or service duct and somehow compress the air to such an extent that it blows a hole in a wall with a pressure wave powerful and concentrated enough to cross a large open space and puncture a window thereby shooting debris out into the surroundings at high velocity”

      What “random debris” in what “lift shaft”? What “large open space”??? Each floor that was smashed down by rubble was the ceiling of the level below (d’uh). That which had been office space was filling with rubble at a rate you haven’t even attempted to visualise, the ceiling smashed through and the space beneath filled with debris in literally the blink of an eye (go on, do some maths for a change), and yes, all that air had to go somewhere, fast; where do YOU think it went, Mog? It blasted out the windows as the videos show, carrying dust and debris with it.

      But you reckon that those ejections were thousands of sequenced demolition squibs. Why would the supposed perpetrators even bother, since total collapse was inevitable anyway? And how come we don’t hear the explosives? And don’t try to fob us off with the reports of the sporadic explosions before the collapses, or the bragging of one fire-fighter saying “bang, bang, bang” while his mate sagely nodded his head. Where was the sound of hundreds of tightly sequenced explosions on the videos? Each Tower fell with a great roaring rumble; there was no sound like an immense accelerating machine-gun.

      Oh you can try to swap quieter thermite for percussive squibs, but thermite burns too slowly to sequence like that, and those ejections were dull grey, not incandescent plumes of white and yellow sparks as seen on the thermite demonstrations. Where was the near-180 degree spray of concrete from each “squib”? The ejections were lateral. Oh, the squibs were set in holes drilled into the concrete were they? Well if the holes were drilled from inside the buildings then the ejections would have blown inward, and if the holes were drilled from outside I think someone just might have spotted the work crews drilling them. Or maybe the entire population of Manhattan have been intimidated into silence, as have the entire scientific and engineering communities, in fact everyone except the heroic, circle-jerking Truthers. Damn; you got me at it. I just dismissed the entire 9/11Truth movement, and I’m one of them! I meant the heroic, circle-jerking demolition theorists, with as little credibility, as innumerate and as keen on misrepresentation and moving the goal posts as the No Airliners theorists. Oh look, here comes someone to kill you now, you should have known when to shut up…

      “Impervious to reason”. And the rest. Assuming that the molten metal seen in the sub-levels was steel, despite the photos of extracted steel glowing but still solid; you canNOT pick up molten steel with a mechanical grab! Assuming that all the fuses burnt out properly and there were no shorts of the electrical mains. Discounting all the lead-acid batteries for the server racks, which also may have exceeded the buildings’ weight limits.

      “…the people who created the twin towers clearly stated that they had taken possible passenger aircraft impacts into account. If the design was so utterly compromised or the process of safety evaluation was at fault then that is a very grave conclusion for tall buildings the world over”

      Well precisely; that’s almost certainly why NIST concealed figures! That’s quite probably why the crime scene was cleared so quickly. Everyone, including you, likes to think the high buildings they visit and live or work in are far stronger than they really are, and if their faith were to fail and they refused to enter such buildings the world economy would collapse.

      Yes, anthrax and thermite; both technologies are most readily available to the military. But there’s a BIG difference. What is the minimum team that could steal anthrax and post it to Senators? ONE PERSON. What’s the minimum team for your demolition conspiracy and cover-up? Well, the NIST team, obviously, but also the FEMA Building Performance Investigation team that preceded it, plus those seconded to the various investigations from the Structural Engineers Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Institute of Steel Construction, the American Concrete Institute, the National Fire Protection Association, the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Inc., the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, and the Structural Engineers Association of New York – an assortment of murderous bastards and lazy self-serving fuckers, to a man or woman, I’m sure. That’s before we even consider the team that drilled all the squibs into the walls, and all the WTC security staff that turned a blind eye… And all to place explosives into buildings that WERE BOUND TO COLLAPSE ANYWAY as soon as the top sections started to fall!

      Good luck Mog. Your next exercise is to find your arse with both hands.

    • Clark

      There is simply no evidence to suggest that explosives were involved in the destruction of the Twin Towers. There was no sound of explosives, nothing that looked like explosions, and the Towers collapsed as if under gravity. The only source of suspicion are the words of some Truthers who keep changing their story.

      Expecting NIST to investigate demolition of the Towers is like asking NASA to include green cheese analysers on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

  • mog

    The Lord Ahmed white powder story reminds me to mention Prof. MacQueen’s work on the anthrax attacks. As a way into the subject of 911 generally, it is interesting, as the original official story was clearly that the two attacks were intimately related, but that later that the anthrax attacks emerged from the US military establishment.
    It is worth a listen IMO, the connections between the two events are notable, especially as the lead investigator is now attempting to sue the FBI for mishandling the Irvins case:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/us/ex-fbi-agent-claims-retaliation-for-dissent-in-anthrax-inquiry.html?_r=0

    MacQueen (1 hour): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE15RSSHHFE

    • Clark

      Whoever did the anthrax attacks made a big mistake, didn’t they? They apparently didn’t know that strains of anthrax were individually traceable.

      You can say that the US authorities did it, but the US authorities also traced it. So it’s obviously a conspiracy by the US authorities to make the US authorities look stupid.

      QED.

      • Clark

        lysias, it is not at all clear that the anthrax attacks were performed by a US authority.

        NIST, FEMA, USAF, NORAD, CIA etc. etc are all different US authorities but the 9/11 conspiracy theory lumps them all together as “The US government”. How come the FBI escape when considering the anthrax? When Building 7 collapsed, conspiracy theorists have told me that the CIA had the FBI guard the debris. So the FBI are either in or out, depending upon what the conspiracy theorists wish to assert.

        The essence of conspiracy theory is the assumption of some nebulous, undefined “Them” who all work together to some unified end. Life is much, much more messy. I’m with Craig:

        “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”

        • lysias

          We know the anthrax came from a U.S. lab source. We know the letters accompanying the anthrax, coming mere days after 9/11, reinforced the anti-Muslim propaganda.

          • Clark

            Well that points to the neocons again, pretty strongly I’d say.

            Not doubting you, but please post a link to Cheney’s staff starting cipro. If the reference is a good source I’ll be wanting to post it myself in the future.

          • Clark

            I suppose I should explain for the unwary that the neocons are not a US authority. Rather, they are a group promoting aggressive foreign policy and competition against Russia for Middle Eastern hydrocarbons with a presence within powerful governmental, corporate and media groups across many Western countries… ie. just about ideal for conducting a real conspiracy.

          • lysias

            I’m on a tablet now that doesn’t allow me to cut and paste URLs. But you can do a Google search yourself on, for example, “cheney cipro 9/11”.

      • Clark

        And I think Ba’al made a good point about “neocon dominance of the State Department”:

        https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post/comment-page-91/#comment-611197

        “It may even be that the State-Pentagon disconnect allowed the Pentagon plane through as State put its telescope to its blind eye. I’m not syaing it’s probable, but if ’twere done, Kagan, Kristol, Perle and the rest were the lads to do it”

        What an effective way of galvanising the military for the coming “War on Terror”, eh? The military tend to be less keen on actually going and fighting the wars than the politicians and desk-jockeys are on sending them. I have little doubt that 9/11 was a neocon job. It has all the right elements.

  • Clark

    I think that Chandler did good work in measuring the collapse rate of Building 7, documenting the period of acceleration approximating free-fall and thereby forcing NIST to redo their work. Unfortunately for Chandler, he also wrote this:

    http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2010/ChandlerDownwardAccelerationOfWTC1.pdf

    OK, you can model a building breaking into millions of pieces of building rubble as “two blocks” if you really want to, and you can even measure “accelerations of” and thus calculate “forces upon” those “blocks”, but it really doesn’t tell you anything because you’ve hopelessly over-simplified the system. The above paper “proves” the necessity of explosives for ANY building collapses – shurely shome mishtake.

    NIST’s studies of the collapses on 9/11 have led to building regulations being tightened, and I think that’s a good thing. Of course if the Twin Towers had adhered to US national building regulations in the first place, many more people may have escaped.

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