Is Fox News acceptable?
Read Eric Hufschmids book ‘Painful Questions’ which clearly shows a photograph of the South Tower not collapsing in a pancake fashion but the top portion overhanging the remainder of the tower. That being so why did the remainder of the building collapse?
…and you should read the transcripts made by the frantic victims and 911 operators in the NY Daily News, the Post,, and the Times,, all of which have the operators reacting to the fact that the people who are about to die unspeakable deaths are telling them about the planes that just hit the buildings.
Guess they’re all in on it too, including the victims.
The towers were designed like a house of cards–destabilize the roof and down it goes.
Oh, you know, the usual kind of crap: Taken to Area 51 and given to aliens, stashed on some desert island with promises to be returned to America and their families someday, killed and buried some place where no one will ever find them, or the people never really existed and their “families” are all gov’t agents in on the whole thing.
Today, however, I came up with a conspiracy theory that I think most people can believe: All the conspiracy theories being promoted are totally bogus, but their spread is being encouraged by the Administration because it distracts people from the glaring intellegence failures which allowed 9/11 to happen.
How were you expecting the building to collapse? Please show your math.
I heard they were over in Afghanistan working on the oil pipeline 
Don’t be ridiculous! **Tuckerfan ** is on the mark! All the passengers are interned in some desert islands and like the Truman Show, they are unwilling actors in a TV show called Lost.
I still say they are at area 57…
-XT
Useless Git makes a good point; this particular question was answered in 1962, in the Operation Northwoods memo.
So the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says to the Defense Secretary “Hey! You know what might spice up this Cuba shit? A plane full of students, shot down over the Bay of Pigs.”
Reading from the report: An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and the passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases.
People plan shit like this all the time. Remember the Maine!
lol … is Barbara Olson, the past conservative commentator for CNN, helping host it! 
For sake of brevity, I will refer to conspiracy theorists as CTs from now on.
I am overall disappointed with my fellow dopers in this thread; the discussion has focused too much on bizarre theories of robot planes and missiles which are easiest to debunk IMO. As a result, the thread has steered into jokes about “area 57” and reality TV.
As I stated earlier in this thread my former boss (well…quasi-former boss since I still help out on projects occasionally) is a CT. FTR, He does not believe robot planes or missiles hit the Pentagon or any WTC buildings. I introduced a couple of his ideas (i.e. US wants to transport oil across Afghanistan and WTC collapse was assisted by explosives) in order to spark some debating that might help me argue against some of the CT’s points.
I have argued with him in the past about the collapse of the WTC buildings #1 and #2. He doens’t even think it was possible for the planes’ impacts and ensuing fires to cause the collapse the way it happened. He contends that because steel melts at 2700°C and that the steel was certified to withstand 2000°C for 6 hours that the buildings had to be assisted by explosives since the fuel under ideal conditions would only have reached about 1800°C. My argument to this is that the collapse was possble w/o explosives because the sporatic burning fuel would not have created uniformly distributed temperatures within the impact zone. Likewise, the resulting temperature gradient from one side of a row of steel columns to another would have caused bending in the steel, which would then yield much sooner than 6 hours especially under the extra load from the floors above. I am no expert, but I am about to complete my bachelor’s in materials science and engineering so I felt as if I could argue with him at least on that particular idea.
The CT (my former boss, that is) invited me by email to one of his public presentation about 9/11. I declined but I did ask him to address a couple questions.
His response dodges the question about structural engineers but he does speak of the oil pipeline a little bit and then babbles (as he has in the past) about secret patents and Nikola Tesla creating free energy out of thin air or something like that. He reaffirms what he has always told me about the alleged conspiracies and attached a file with several links.
Please, can you Dopers help me out with better arguments to counter his ideas? He is a bit nutty, but very educated and always reasonable. For what it’s worth, here are the links from a file he attached to the email (I have not read them yet):
Morgan Reynolds: No More Games
Why did the WTC towers drop so easily?
Rumsfeld Sept 10, 2001: The Pentagon cannot account for $2.3 TRILLION
Scientific Evidence that Official 9/11 Story is a Lie
The New York Magazine: Ground Zero Grassy Knoll
I never claimed to have any credentials especially not those of a professional structural engineer. The fucking point is that I am familiar with failure analysis.
The CT believes Romero was pressured into making that statement. YMMV.
Romero’s initial statement and witness accounts of bombs going off in the basement of the towers and that Bush’s relative was in charge of security and bombs were wired under his watch or something like that encourage the CTs to think that the towers’ collapse was bomb assisted.
The insurance policy for terrorism on the WTC purchased a few months prior to attacks also does not help to quiet the CTs.
Stories about a proposed pipeline did not simply “peeter out” after 2004 as you suggested and I proved it to you. Just admit that you were wrong and try to produce a better argument against the idea that world leaders for many years now have been discussing plans to build a pipeline linking oil under the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean (some discussions involved Afghanistan). One can debate whether or not this motivated the Bush administration to cause another Pearl Harbor type incident in order to have the nation’s backing on a war in Afghanistan. I never said that the pipe had been built. We are at least a few decades away from international oil crisis so what would be the hurry to build one?
I do happen to know a couple structural engineers (a PE and a PhD) who are skeptical of the WTC collapse (especially building #7) but they do not wish to be identified publicly. However, they both agree that the scenerio written by this SE is a reasonable guess regarding buildings #1 and #2.
Well, I have to admit I found the Area 57 thing funny…made more so that I was caught so fast. 
However:
Its late so I didn’t have time to look up that cite from the actual building designer, describing exactly why the building collapsed. However, here is another cite I used in the past, and it deals with the temperature thing you are talking about here:
Its a pretty good account of why the temperature thing is a boondoggle by CT types. Read through the whole cite…some fairly good stuff there about the collapse and such. If I have time tomorrow I’ll see if I can dig up that cite from the guy who actually helped design the building as he did a great job of modeling exactly what happened to the building…and why there is zero mystery as to why it collapsed from the aircraft impacts.
-XT
ArchitectChore, it’s pretty simple, really: If they’re willing to kill ~3K people for a pipeline (or to start a war or whatever), then they’d be more than willing to whack anyone who got within a stone’s throw of the truth. And forget the whole “Going public is what keeps me alive!” argument. The PTB could simply stage a horrific event, like say a hurricane that wipes out most of the Gulf Coast, and enact various FEMA statutes which enable them to suspend the Constitution and thus rule the country by fiat and have the annoying little “truth teller” meet an unsavory end, either in the disaster or in front of a firing squad.
These temperatures should have units in °F and not °C. :smack:
I doubt the CT will buy this, but I’ll let him know what you said.
I still have yet to see a good explanation for the collapse of WTC #7.
See what he thinks of my cite above. Its a pretty good explaination about why you don’t have to get the temperature all the way up to melting point in order to have a collapse. As the cite says at 450C structural steel begins to soften and at 650C it has lost 50% of its strength. The fire was estimated in the 800C range. Couple that with the fact the plane itself took out several load bearing members, and the way that the fire was uneven with a high temperature variance between one side of the remaining support beams and the other and its pretty obvious what happened. If your friend knows anything about structures and load he’ll know that you need to maintain a balance on the load, especially when we are talking about the kinds of weights we are talking about in a modern building (as an experiment simply try and build a brick wall out of true and see what happens about the 6th course :)). Once enough of the remaining load bearing supports warped out of true the weight above would have doomed the building to collapse.
Anyway, their explaination is better. See what he thinks. Just know that its been my experience that many of these CT type people are immune to facts…so don’t be disappointed if it falls on deaf ears.
-XT
The assertion wasn’t, as you recast it, whether or not a pipeline was planning on being built (and you have STILL yet to prove that the thing is in any phase of construction other than in “talks”), but that 9/11 was committed as to get the pipeline project moving. That’s what you have to prove, since it was you who brought it up in the debate.
Just because “world leaders” are talking about it doesn’t mean squat. “World leaders” talk about many things.
Couple that with the fact that the weakening beams were supporting 96,000,000 pounds of WTC and it’s no wonder that one doesn’t need the steel to “melt” in order to suffer a catastrophic failure.
Can it reasonably be said that, in fact, gravity pulling straight down holds the building up, as long as the components are properly aligned, but that once the alignment is damaged or destroyed, everything just falls straight down? It actually is intuitive that the buildings would head straight for the ground – the shortest distance between two points being a straight line. And the buildings wouldn’t fall over, because they were weakened two-thirds or three-fourths of the way up. The illusion that the whole building sank at once is caused by the fact that the only part of the building people saw fall was the part ABOVE the damage. Of course, it would descend straight down as a whole, once the structure below it was weakened enough. The rest of the collapse was masked by dust and smoke. We saw the lower floors for a few seconds before they, too, collapsed, but the actual collapsing was unseeable.
If we just remember what those old science teachers taught us, well, the whole conspiracy thing collapses under its own weight.
Oops! In editing, I edited out a whole paragraph! Insert between my two paragraphs this thought:
Lemur866 and ArchitectChore go to great lengths to cite sophisticated structural engineering, and the reason their posts make sense to me is that I stayed awake in sixth grade science class. I watched our science teacher bend a steel rod heated with a simple bunsen burner, not because the steel melted, but because the heat changed the dynamics of the steel (or however structural engineers would say it.)