Close. There had been several warnings that something was up but not exactly when, where, nor how; such warnings aren’t all that unusual, anyway.
“Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.”
Who was it who came up with that one, and why does it hold such weight?
A police investigation aims to charge a suspect with the most serious crime possible, and then has room to plea bargain downwards. In a case of this magnitude, incompetence doesn’t cut it and it shouldn’t be waved away in such a blase manner.
You may not be alone, but look at the company you’re keeping! You consider the name of your co-believers to be itself an insult!
At first, there were some questions - justifiable in the face of such horrifying chaos, and such a horrifying demonstration that our government was helpless to prevent such an attack. Much better if they were competent and chose not too - then we could at least be safe if they decided to protect us! But then the answers started coming in, theories were examined and refined, and the ranks of your co-believers started shrinking as the evidence mounted. You are now left on a small island of isolated and marginalized True Believers, which aside from you seems to be entirely populated with cranks. It may be time to consider the merits of facing the evidence and jumping ship.
You know, if this were all you were arguing, then people might not dismiss you so handily. Why do you feel compelled to bring in stupid crap like magical silent explosives that leave no marks and sideways-falling thermite?
That’s why every speeder is initially arrested for murder.
Well, they don’t focus on the fact he’s also got a broken tail-light, do they? That might be included, but it’ll be lower on the scale of severity for punishment.
ivan, I fully realize that I’m wasting my breath here, because I know I’ve told you this before, and I know you’ve seen other people say it, and I’ve known dozens of other people who’ve acknowledged the same, but just for the record:
By 2003/2004, when I started hearing the first stirrings of the “truth” movement, I hated the Bush administration so bad that I wanted it to be true. I wanted BADLY for it to be true. I would lie in bed and imagine those fuckers riding lightning, and the whole country learning a lesson to never let this happen again, and a new era of peace emerging from this whole nightmare.
The teensy little wrench in my gears was that I bothered to take 2 seconds to critically examine the evidence. There’s just nothing to it.
And I’ll even grant you this: There MAY HAVE BEEN inside knowledge. It MAY HAVE BEEN a US plot. But, in the very remote circumstance that this is true, the “truth” movement is nowhere near uncovering it. They’re hunting penguins at the North Pole. Everything they’ve posited is demonstrably wrong, and damn near all of it is demonstrably a bald-faced lie.
That enough to take the jam out of your “you guys just don’t want it to be true” donut?
Because when you find great amounts of informational pollution spewing into the waters of intellectual discourse, the proper thing to do is to try to cap it off before the waters are completely polluted beyond repair. The cap might not stem off all of the crap, and it might need replacing every once in a while when new cracks appear, but it would be irresponsible to just it go.
To pharaphrase sparky!: the various branches of intelligence do not discuss amongst themselves due to childish chest thumping and what not.
Reports of a terrorst training camp that specialized in hijacking planes with boxcutters finally came to light a few years back, after being lost (sat on?) in the custodial agency’s bureaucracy.
Why do you think that the US Government has recently been trying to establish a central depository through which all intelligence reports are funneled?
Speaking of which, Mohammad Atta was actually caught speeding in Florida in August of 2001. The officer reportedly did not bother to check exactly what he had caught.
The key element is that it can be explained by incompetence. If there are elements to the story that point to malice, then a malicious explanation is justified.
In this particular case, of course malice was behind it - the malice of 19 hijackers and their various leaders, trainers and supporters. Got evidence pointing elsewhere? By all means, share.
Exactly.
There are a variety of different levels of possible conspiracy:
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The towers were brought down by planes crashing into them. The government tried to cover up its incompetence in not anticipating and preventing the attacks.
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The towers were brought down by planes crashing into them. The government knew in advance this was going to happen, but for nefarious reasons didn’t stop the attacks.
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The towers were brought down by planes crashing into them. The government was involved in planning and executing the crashes.
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The towers were brought down by some other mechanism.
Now:
#1 is entirely plausible and probably happened to some degree.
#2 & #3 are pretty unlikely, but still plausible. There’s no evidence for either, but it’s certainly *possible *that things could have happened that way. It would be an extremely evil and stupid thing for the Bush administration to have done, but it wouldn’t have been totally impossible.
#4 is completely ridiculous. It makes no sense based on evidence, physics, logistics, or human nature.
If you want to argue about the degree of culpability of the Bush administration in allowing (or engineering) the plane crashes on 9-11, that’s at least a position that can reasonably be defended. But once you start arguing that the buildings weren’t brought down by the plane crashes … that’s complete fantasy. That’s like arguing that JFK was secretly poisoned at the hospital instead of dying from a head shot.
It was a stairwell and the pressure inside it was not separated by doors on the individual floors. Dropping the building built up pressure at both ends and forced out the windows in the middle.
I can’t watch the video here at work but let’s get a few concepts in order.
First of all, barring things like wind and seismic conditions, the vast majority of the load on a building is vertical - plain old “dead load”, the weight of the structure plus contents. It all wants to go straight down and there’s a lot of it.
Second of all, the vast majority of that building is empty space. Air. It’s not a monolithic block of material, it’s a web of small components connected together to resist the applied loads (plus some safety factors) and still give as much usable interior volume as possible.
Buildings don’t tend to hold up the applied loads very well when critical parts of the structural system are removed (such as by being weakened or pushed out of place, as happened in this case).
When structural integrity is lost, the resistance drops below the applied loads and the loads win; they go where they naturally want to, in this case straight down.
The best simple analogy to this is to take an empty soda can and stand on it. It’s mostly empty space and there’s very little material at all, but that thin cylinder of aluminum will hold a 200 pound person up pretty easily since it’s quite strong in the vertical direction (it’s a short column with no irregularities so it’s got a very high buckling load).
Now have someone come up and tap the side of the can with their toe - it doesn’t have to be much, you could have them tap it sharply with a pencil and the same thing will happen. Irregularity is introduced; the previously flawless cylinder wall now has a little dent in it which leads to local buckling of the metal in that area and suddenly your body drops a couple of inches as the soda can is crushed into a little disk. This all happens extremely rapidly.
Similar thing with that building. Heat from the fires caused expansion in various steel members, resulting in failure of an important part of the structure. The loads transferred from the failed members to other parts of the building (some of which were also weakened already due to the fires) which in turn failed and the “death spiral” had begun. It does not necessarily take a long time for this to happen (once stuff starts to break things can go to “utter collapse” in seconds, as we saw) and the weight of the building drops straight down.
Remember this is not the same as, say, chopping down a tree where the object gradually leans over and falls, intact, on its side. Big office buildings are simply not constructed that way. They are not able to hold their own weight horizontally in that manner. Again, the vast majority of a building is empty space and it’s mostly built to hold vertical loads.
Here is the very high-level summary of the NIST report. Note that this is, yet again, the exact same thing that was posted previously. Perhaps someone honestly looking to have their questions answered will read it and get something out of it:
There’s a lot more in that little summary, including specifically:
and
So let’s please stop this nonsense about the appearance of symmetric collapse indicating something fishy was going on, or that the building collapsed “at freefall speeds! OMG!” or that anyone is “ignoring the laws of physics”.
Sorry, here’s the link to the summary:
Except for the parts of the building that fell away from the main structure and landed way across the street! Make your minds up; it either falls straight down or it can sometimes fall at an angle…which one is it? When you’ve cleared this up, I’ll read the rest.
Find a three foot tall fencepost and suspend a glass bottle six feet above it, and then drop it. You will find that when the moving upper floors hit the stationary lower floors, a bit of debris is thrown sideways due to the vagaires of uncontrolled impact. Once they acquired a bit of sideways momentum that was preserved on the way down, resulting in a wide spread by the time it reached the ground.
Well, that or whole slabs of building were blown sideways off the side of the building by explosions, like how in movies the action heroes are ‘blown clear’ by the explosion happening dramatically behind them. The silent, flashless explosion with enough force to fling whole chunks of building sideways.
Which do you think happened?
In an uncontrolled collapse, some parts of the building will fail before others. However as each part fails, that increases the stresses on the remaining parts, causing them to fail in turn. As a result, what you’ll see is that initially the building will twist or topple toward the primary point of failure, but that lateral movement will rapidly be overcome by a dominant downward movement as the out-of-control stresses destroy the rest of the structure. The building doesn’t fall over like a tree, but neither does it slide cleanly down into its original footprint. If you want that sort of clean collapse, you have to carefully place explosive charges so that all the structural members fail at the same time, instead of as part of a cascade.
Or what he said.
(I’m still betting on the hollywood explosions, myself. How powerful a bomb does it take to fling buildings sideways? I bet a nuke would do it…)
This board needs an exploding irony meter thingy.
You mean to go with the rubbery irony and steely stuff that failed so spectacularly on 9/11?
I presume you’re trying to be clever, but it sounds like you’re disavowing belief in the notion that steel gets softer when subjected to heat.
Do you ever actually read what you post? If something (metaphorically) “wants to go straight down,” that does no mean that nothingelse can happen to it. You even note it in your own response, saying “parts of the building fell away.” A 47 story building engulphed in flames. A portion of an external side, already weakened by debris falling from the taller towers, suffers a failure at an upper connecting point to the main structure. That part, still “hinged” at the base, is liable to topple sideways even as the basic building falls vertically.
You are attempting to claim that the NIST report fails to describe the situation even as you, yourself, note that their evaluation makes sense.