9/11 conspiracy theories

Many of whom do not exist, and many of whom are, in fact, engineers who have requested (to no avail) to have their names removed, as they never assented to having their names put up in the first place.

But even if all 15k were on board, all any one of them has to do is publish a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed, academic journal, in which they break open the entire conspiracy, using actual facts and data, that falsifies the NIST report. That’s it–do that and you stand to make millions, be the one that finally nails old Dubya to the fence.

But not one of them can.

So what we’re left with, as I understand it, are a bunch of logical fallacies all strung together. Let’s review:

Straw man (“An office fire can’t melt steel!”)
Post hoc (“There are sounds like explosions before the buildings fall! Therefore, the sounds are the cause of the buildings falling!”)
Appeal to authority (“But…but…this guy’s an engineer!”)
False dichotomy ("See! These other tall buildings didn’t fall when a fire broke out!)
Affirming the consequent (“Tall buildings destroyed by controlled demolition fall straight down; the Twin Towers fell straight down. Therefore, they fell because of controlled demolition.”)
Ambiguous Assertion (“Yeah! That liquid stuff flowing there is STEEL!”)
Failure to State (“Oh, I have no unified, falsifiable theory; I merely have some inconsistencies I’d like to point out.”)
Appeal to common sense (“None of us have ever seen a skyscraper fall down like that before! Didn’t it look like a controlled demolition?”)
Bandwagon (“15,000 other people believe it!”)
Argument by half truth (“Thermite can melt steel!”)
Argument by selective reading (“Nevermind the mathematical calculations in the NIST report; there’s no way the buildings had enough stored energy to destroy themselves.”)
Red herring (“See! This lady is standing where the plane hit!”)

Et. cetera.

15,000? I call bull. The biggest ‘engineering’ group in 911 truth only has 1000 members and they did so with a host of fake names and very weak definitions of ‘engineer’ (l wonder how ‘software engineers’ are at designing hi-rise buildings.).

Doubtful skeptic is doubtful.

As far as I know, thermite has never been used in building demolitions. It can be used to weld, or to disable an enemy’s armaments by, for example, igniting it inside a cannon barrel.

Are you talking about the core columns that were cut down low at like a 45-degree angle? Those cuts were made during cleanup - there are even videos out there showing cleanup workers making these cuts!

False. If it cools enough to look red, orange, or yellow, it has solidified. If it’s steel.

The “millatary” has thermite that’s been finely ground to give the particles more surface area, so that the reaction propagates faster and could be considered an explosive. However, you have to go back and look at why thermite was hypothesized in the first place.

The Truthers claimed that the towers were taken down with explosives, but there was a big problem: explosives make a LOT of noise, and no one reported hearing these kind of explosions when the towers started falling.

Now comes Stephen Jones from BYU, who brings up the idea of thermite, which burns really hot but doesn’t explode.

But then knowledgeable people pointed out that you couldn’t get thermite to cut a vertical beam, Jones says that there is a special kind of thermite that could be considered an explosive.

But that just takes us back to where we started! Explosives make LOTS of noise. If an explosive were used, everyone in Manhattan would have clearly heard it. The “explosive” thermite idea doesn’t support the idea that the towers were taken down like a controlled demolition!
By the way, thermite can be mixed with paint and made to burn. This isn’t explosive, and the test showing that it can burn does not heat up the beam enough to damage it. See http://nmskeptic.blogspot.com/2010/03/video-jesse-ventura-doesnt-want-world.html

Then why do you keep talking about thermite? Explain your logic to me. I’ve talked to dozens CTists and every single one of them goes on and on about thermite but they aren’t sure why. It’s not an explosive. It is not used to demolish buildings. It cannot cut steel support beams laterally. Presence of thermite, even by the truckload, in or around WTC on 9/10 wouldn’t have indicated a plot to demolish the buildings. Proving that thermite was burned in the buildings on 9/11 wouldn’t make half a shit of a difference to this or any other theory. It makes about as much sense as rabidly searching for clues that would indicate the presence of quail eggs in the remains of the towers. One thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other.

So please, please explain to me just what thermite has to do with WTC or 9/11 or the government or building demolition. No CTer has ever been able to do this for me.

Yep, steel was cut in the rubble of the WTC towers. How else were they going to haul away the remains of the building? If you’d participated in one of the other 128,511,424 threads we’ve had on this subject, you’d have watched a video of the workers actually cutting away the remains of the columns after the collapse in order to dispose of them.

No, let’s not waste our time proving something that ultimately does not matter.

Which link? And why do I have to do your donkey work for you? I asked you for a cite with some names…please provide them. Don’t tell me to clink on a link and dig them up myself…it’s not MY claim, it’s YOUR claim. You can also now provide a link showing that there are 15000(!!) additional qualified experts who agree as well.

Thus far you have provided a whole lot of nothing to backup anything you are claiming.

-XT

Well, good, but I’m still trying to follow the slow chain of accepted premises, so I repeat my earlier post, in part:

As for the accuracy of cameras, are the camera used by demolition companies designed for tenth-of-a-second accuracy? Even if they are, what does the apparently anomalous fall speed (assuming it exists - without a baseline comparison, how would we know?) actually prove? The presence of structural compromise much lower than the impact sites?

Hooboy.

A couple of things.

Anyone ever watch a blacksmith make a horseshoe? Notice that they heat the steel to red hot, but the steel isn’t melted? It isn’t melted, but it’s softened. You can bend red-hot steel much more easily than you can bend cold steel. If steel is red hot, it’s not molten. If steel is molten, it isn’t red hot. Molten steel is white-hot. If you see red-hot bits being thrown out, those are bits that have cooled enough to be red-hot, and therefore aren’t molten any more.

Next, take a look at the collapse videos. They look like a controlled demolition. Or do they? Every video of the WTC collapses show the top floors falling first, into the lower floors. Except that’s not how controlled demolitions look. In a controlled demolition they blow the lower floors first, and the building starts collapsing from the bottom. It looks almost intact as it falls. That isn’t what happened in the WTC collapses, they collapsed starting at the point where the planes collided.

Next, the WTC towers didn’t collapse in a free fall, because you can see debris and particles falling faster than the towers. The debris falls faster because the debris is in a free fall, while the towers are slower because each floor has to be crushed by the weight of the falling material above it.

Next, the WTC collapsed mostly into their own footprints. Just like a controlled demoltion! Except, what demolishes a building in a controlled demolition isn’t the explosives, it’s gravity. Gravity is what destroys the building, the explosives just weaken it. And what direction does gravity pull? Straight down. The buildings can’t tip over like a toy skyscraper.

People have the wrong idea about the strength of materials. The strength of a material is proportial to its cross-sectional area. The weight of a material is proportial to its volume. This means that if you take a 10 foot steel beam and make an exact duplicate that’s 100 feet long, the 100 foot beam has 100 times (10 times the width and 10 times the depth) the strength, but 1000 times the weight (10 times the width, 10 times the depth, 10 times the length). This means that proportionally the 100 foot beam has 1/10th the strength of the 10 foot beam.

And this is why scale models are misleading. You can make a model of a suspension bridge with toothpicks and elmer’s glue. But if you tried to make a real bridge out of telephone poles and glue, it would collapse. That’s because the strength of the glue doesn’t increase.

So every skyscraper in the entire world is being pulled straight down by gravity. Every skyscraper is much weaker proportionally than a small building, because every time you increase the size of the support members you increase the weight of the support members, which means the support members have to be supported. What happens when you remove some support members and weaken others (like, say, by heating them the same way a blacksmith heats a horseshoe)? The things above the weakened spot fall.

And that’s what happened in the WTC collapses.

And further on, the alternative theories about the attacks just don’t make any sense.

Suppose you’re an unidentified conspirator who wants to carry out the 9-11 attacks. Since you’re an Illuminatus, all you have to do is pick up the phone, and minions at the highest levels of government, religion, media, and business will leap to do your bidding.

And so…what makes sense? You want to destroy the towers, you want it photogenic, you want to use the resulting media images to movtivate the sheep-like American people in certain ways. What would make sense?

You could wire the buildings with explosives. You could order airplanes hijacked and crashed into the buildings. Either would work. But…not both at the same time! And if you order the hijacking of the planes, why would you inform your other minions at the FAA or the military? There’s no need. All you need to carry out the plot are 19 religious fanatics. You don’t need to call the military and tell them not to intercept your hijacked planes. Why would you? Why would you need to order the investigators to ignore evidence?

The simplest easiest most foolproof plot is the official story. Hire some doofuses to hijack planes and crash them into the WTC, the Pentagon, and the White House. There’s no need to cover up anything if the official story is the actual story. The only mystery is the identity of the mysterious Illuminatus who ordered the attack on America. Osama bin Ladin was the guy who got together the money and assembled the teams that carried out the hijackings. I suppose there could be an Illuminatus even higher up who pulls Osama’s strings.

But the problem with any conspiracy theory is that the consensus theory makes too much sense. Any hypothetical conspirators would have to be idiots to have carried out the plot in other ways. Law of Conservation of Illumination. If you want Kennedy killed, simplest way to do that is convince Oswald to head up to the book depository with a rifle. There’s no need for anything else. No need for a cover-up of the official story is the real story.

ironbender, what do you think happened on 9/11.

And “I don’t know” is not an acceptable answer. We’re having a debate, not a Q&A.

Exactly. Richard Dawkins mentions this often when debunking the beliefs of creationists–he refers to it as the “argument from personal incredulity,” a varient of the argument from ignorance.

“I don’t know” is the most you’re going to get out of him, because he has zero interest in debate, or critical analysis, or anything that could challenge his foregone conclusion about the event. He’s just JAQing Off.

On the other hand, if someone had a valid reason to think that the standard story of what happened that day (it’s not an “official” story) is significantly wrong, I don’t think it’s incumbent on him to show what DID happen. If someone could show why it’s not possible that the towers collapsed because of the crashes and fires, or whatever, then provide a good, strong argument for just THAT. I’d be OK with that.

But we never get any good arguments, it’s always misunderstandings and untruths.

Probably because, aside from a few anomalies that are going to crop up in ANY complex event, the ‘official story’ is completely plausible, while the truther story stems more from ignorance coupled with paranoia. It’s the moon landings hoax CT argument all over again, only repackaged for 9/11.

-XT

Technically true, but I think a strong model showing why it couldn’t have happened the way we think it did would immediately or very rapidly yield an alternative theory for what DID happen. Either way, no one has come remotely close to either one. This is the prevailing problem in the Trieuxth Movement. If they just said “we have a gut feeling that there’s more to this than meets the eyes, but we have zero proof to support that feeling yet; standby while we investigate,” then I would have some sympathy for them. Instead, they’ve constructed a whole reality for themselves based on one blatant lie after another.

Further, I don’t think it’s even possible to take any of their objections to the “official story” and craft a coherent alternate version that doesn’t conflict with reality in major ways.

It’s not just that they have no idea what this alternate story could be; it’s not possible to put together ANY alternate story that doesn’t contradict itself or things we KNOW for absolute sure and everyone agrees upon.

No, it won’t. The inner core needed the outer columns for support.

[deleted]

Continuing to post and raise points will give ironbender and ivan askitov plausible deniability (in their own minds) for not addressing the very valid points and questions that have been brought up since they last posted.

Not to mention the larger implications that apparently the US either directly or indirectly would have had to plan and recruit Islamic terrorists to hijack four planes (which we have extensive proof of through cockpit recordings and cell phone calls from hijacked passengers), but also in a Stars Wars prequel way - we’re fighting a follow-on war in Afghanistan where we are controlling both sides (Coalition and Al Queda through Bin Ladin). All in a place that doesn’t have any oil or any easily exploitable natural resources.

From Wiki:

My emphasis. Basically, both the inner core and the outer skin were integral parts of the load bearing structure. When the plane cut through the buildings, it would have damaged many of the perimeter columns, exposing others (thus making them more vulnerable to heat), and eventually destabilizing the building. Once a single floor collapsed it would have started a chain reaction that would have brought the entire building down…which is pretty much what we see in the various videos. The collapse started at the impact site and propagated from there…completely unlike what happens in a controlled demolition, which usually starts the collapse from the bottom up. If there HAD been explosives (and magic pony ‘nano-thermite’) on the columns, it would have been set off during the initial crash, and, if indeed the magic pixie dust could bring the building down it would have, well, brought that fucker down almost as soon as the crash happened…int 50+ minutes later.

I don’t know why this is so hard for CTers to grasp. The buildings were doomed when the planes cut through so much of their supporting structure coupled with an out of control fire so high up, started instantly and violently with so much jet fuel and so much combustible material found in any office building. The evidence is clear that the collapse started at the impact site and propagated from there. So, using Occam’s Razor, we have a completely plausible and internally consistent theory of why the towers collapsed (i.e. they were hit by big ass air planes that cut through many load bearing structures and stripped off the covers of others, then jet fuel was dumped over the whole thing and ignited, burned for nearly/over an hour unchecked due to the fire suppression system being totally hosed up because of said big ass air craft, the supports lost structural integrity when the load bearing steel softened, and this lead to a catastrophic failure) vs a complex and internally inconsistent theory of a building wired with explosives, having a plane crash into it, then burn for nearly/over an hour, and then set off explosives which just happened to start the collapse right where the plane hit, taking a cast of thousands (10’s of thousands) to bring off, and yet not one of which has come forward to fess up, and that left no evidence behind of any such explosives, which is good enough to fool the real experts (but not the eagle eyed truthers), and entailed further cover ups and the buying off of said experts, etc etc etc.

I’m sorry, but I know where my own Occam’s Razor slices this one. Frankly, I find the moon hoax more plausible…

-XT

I’m kind of stunned by the magnitude of this error.

True, but that’s a subset of the problem I described.