Define your terms.
Vastly increasing the number of credulous loons available to pool their ignorance does not equal evidence.
I welcome evidence that CT’er reliability has improved in the age of the Internet.
The problem with this of course is that even if the ‘official’ theory is wrong, every conspiracy theorist can’t be right, because there are so many contradicting conspiracy theorists. There are some who believe that the airplanes were remote-controlled, and other who believe there were no planes and it was all done with some combination of holograms, brainwashing, and/or video editing. There are some who believe the buildings were blown up with explosives, some who believe thermite, some who say nukes in the basement, and others who say it was disintegration beams from space. (I am not making any of those up.) So even if it turns out some sort of government conspiracy after all, you’re still going to have a large number of conspiracy theories that turn out to be completely insane.
I thought I did.
Everyone who believes the account given by the govt, is right to do so, anyone who doesn’t believe it couldn’t be more wrong.
It seems to me that the biggest argument against the likelihood of an “enemy within”, is that of incredulity, for some unfathomable reason.
The way I see it, even if these accusations, insinuations, whatever you deem them to be, are completely wrong, a strong and honest government can withstand such probing.
Aye, and there’s the rub. Just like with the ufo phenomenon - another fave target of ridicule - it only takes one of them to be the real deal, and we are looking at a completely different picture.
What do you mean Official Conspiracy Theorists? And are you just talking about 9/11, or every other conspiracy?
And what kind of “probing” would you deem satisfactory?
There’ll be more and less efficient ones, like there are in every field.
I’m pretty sure that’s the exact opposite of what AndrewL just said.
Neither did the moon landings nor the JFK assassination, though the spread of both hoax/conspiracy theories was greatly enhanced by the internet. Nuts found that there were more idiots than they thought buying into their b.s.
I can’t prove it, but I often think the originators are start these things as pranks or ego boosts.
In fairness, I should link to the video of this lecture, given by the well-respected physicist Dr. Stephen Jones. In it, he outlines some of his most compelling theories and alternate hypotheses about the events of 9/11/01. He also clearly and concisely presents all of his supporting evidence here. I’ve got to admit, he does raise some very interesting points.
Sure, but we’re here to fight ignorance, the government can take care of itself. Conspiracy theories of this nature are willful ignorance, and should be treated as such.
Incredible inanity does provoke incredulity (among other things), and there’s nothing unfathomable about it.
It never ceases to amaze me that the people who go on at greatest length about how every institution in society is up to no good and cannot be trusted, are themselves the most likely of anyone to fall for hoaxes and scams (another superb example of this phenomenon is alternative medicine devotees - you can sell them virtually anything if they can be led to think that they are outsmarting the Man).
Hi, I’d recommend for starters that you take a look at a thread I started regarding the NIST report on WTC7 a while back. tomndeb kindly provided a link, here you go:
You may find that some or all of your questions have been asked and answered.
All that being said, every time this topic comes up and someone claims that it’s impossible for a building to collapse in some manner or they begin addressing questions about structural engineering or demolitions or related topics I feel the need to ask the following, just so I know what kind of knowledge/background the person is coming from:
Do you have any particular education or work experience in the topic(s) under discussion? For example do you have some kind of degree in civil engineering, architecture, mechanical engineering, materials science or demolitions, or do you have some relevant work experience in those fields? If so what is it? For my part, I have a BS and MS in civil engineering (structural and risk analysis). I’ve also had the opportunity to be up close and personal a few times with thermite (one of my fellow CE grads did his PhD work on using it to repair train tracks in place) for what that’s worth. This doesn’t make me an absolute expert by any means, but I do think that I’m qualified to discuss the basics of structural engineering including failure.
I ask this for a couple of reasons, and not to belittle anybody. If someone doesn’t understand how structural systems are designed and how they behave, it’s hard to make knowledgeable statements about what is actually going on under certain circumstances. It is also very easy to make the mistake of taking behavior that you see in your day to day life and trying to scale that up to complex systems that are so many orders of magnitude larger that they just don’t act the same way as you might think.
A perfect example would be making a one foot tall model of a skyscraper, knocking it over and then assuming that that’s exactly how a 1000 foot skyscraper would behave, when in fact they are totally different things.
I’d like to address these points:
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Structural steel does not have to be heated to 1800F to fail. At 1000F it has lost approximately 50% of it’s strength. That’s a temperature easily achievable in building fires where you’ve got all kinds of normal flammable stuff around (office supplies, furniture, partitions, drapes, carpeting, etc). A big ball of burning jet fuel can start a huge fire which will burn quite well even though all the jet fuel itself is gone shortly afterwards. Where did NIST say 1800F is required for any collapse mechanism of any of the WTC buildings? Was this supposed to be for WTC1/2 or WTC7?
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The failure mechanism for WTC7 was unusual - to quote NIST, it was “…thermal expansion of long-span floor systems…” - when steel gets hot it expands, changing the geometry of the structural system, which resulted in collapse. As NIST noted this was “…the first known instance of fire causing the total collapse of a tall building…”
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The point about “neither explosives nor fuel” causing the collapse was in there because NIST specifically looked into whether WTC7 was actually blown up (i.e. by someone planting explosives) or whether the large fuel oil tanks in the building caught fire causing the structure to fail. A more complete quote is:
They most definitely did not say anything to the effect of “Gosh, it was a total coincidence that WTC7 collapsed, we don’t know what could possibly have happened.” WTC7 was struck by debris from WTC1 and it caught on fire. The fire burned long enough and hot enough to alter the shape of various structural members which then failed resulting in collapse of the building.
WTC7 did not fail in the exact same way as WTC1/2 except insofar as it suffered structural damage and caught on fire. The precise collapse mechanisms of those buildings were different. If I can use a simple example, the Titanic and the Lusitania both sank because their hulls were ripped open but that doesn’t mean they failed in the same way.
No one has mentioned the conspiracy theory that everything went down as it appeared, but that the gov’t knew about it and didn’t try to stop it.
I think that is a lot of bullshit because there are a great number of people who work for the gov’t (GWB included) who care about their fellow citizens enough that they wouldn’t stand for that and would blow the lid off of it before you could say “Alex Jones”.
BTW, someone mentioned upthread that many would consider it implausible that several planes could be hijacked at once. Why? What’s so hard about that?
Rob
So if one believes that the US government was actively complicit in the events of 9/11…
Does this mean Obama is in on it too?
Obama has access to every secret the government has. And if he can pin any part of 9/11 on a conspiracy of conservatives he can wipe out their electoral chances for a generation or two.
Why did Obama let the health care debate drag on for an entire year when all he had to do was say “Vote for this bill as is including a public option and free abortions and mandatory gay marriage… or else I’ll tell the American public what you were really up to on 9/11.”
Seriously, what reason would he have not to beat the Republicans over the head with it until his arm got sore? We’re not talking about breaking into a hotel room here. We’re talking about the cold-blooded murder of 3000 American citizens as a pretense for starting two very expensive wars that are still going on today. This has lead to another 4000 Americans losing their lives. So Obama can pin the deaths of 7000 Americans on his political opponents any time he pleases. So why wouldn’t he?
I don’t understand why so many people latch onto this one detail. Atta’s passport was found in the wreckage, so what? How many other ID cards, documents, certifcates, plane tickets, and credit cards do you think were also found that weren’t important enough to be reported on? And it being found isn’t all that ridiculous, either. Obviously rescue workers are going to be looking for things like ID cards and other kinds of identification so as to compare with bodies they find and passports have a distinctive eye-catching look to them.
Probably time for this thread to join its many brethren in GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Don’t be silly. Everyone knows that secrets held by shadowy government cabals need not be passed onto the next president. Heck, there must be truthers out there who think that even Bush wasn’t in on it.
But if push came to shove, most truthers would probably be fine with the idea that Obama knows about it now.
Yes. When my wife started reading the wrong things and wondering about this, we could drive by two buildings that had separate fires in them. In both cases, the ordinary building fires - the materials and contents of the small stores, a one storey and 2-storey - were sufficient to warp the metal roof beam, which had to be a 10-inch tall I-beam; and the only weight on it was the flat roof in both cases. The 1800-degree thing is crap, as you point out.
The floor-plans for WTC7 were available on some site when the controversy was at it’s height. Because of the huge open lobby (facing the towers) there was an inordinate amount of weight on one or two pillars, oddly enough about where the building starts to collapse. The pillar can take the weight under normal circumstances, but any impacts can weaken the structure. There is a serious gouge from the fallen north tower visible in some photos.
A computer magazine in an article on problems with disaster recovery scenarios mentioned that there was a large diesel generator and large fuel tanks high up the WTC7 building; diesel is normally pretty safe, but it will burn with the right inducement- which it obvious was given with flaming hot debris falling and creating a building fire all around.
Not sure what the conspiracy nuts are suggesting with the main towers. They obviously failed from the point of impact. You can’t do that with explosions at ground level. Show me an explosive expert willing to carry full charges up a building to plant then at the level of the giant flames…
As with most conspiracy theories, nothing makes sense the more you look at it.