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:
[QUOTE=NIST Report On WTC7]
When did WTC 7 collapse?
On Sept. 11, 2001, WTC 7 endured fires for almost seven hours, from the time of the collapse of the north WTC tower (WTC 1) at 10:28:22 a.m. until 5:20:52 p.m., when WTC 7 collapsed.
What caused the fires in WTC 7?
Debris from the collapse of WTC 1, which was 370 feet to the south, ignited fires on at least 10 floors in the building at its south and west faces. However, only the fires on some of the lower floors-7 through 9 and 11 through 13-burned out of control. These lower-floor fires-which spread and grew because the water supply to the automatic sprinkler system for these floors had failed-were similar to building fires experienced in other tall buildings. The primary and backup water supply to the sprinkler systems for the lower floors relied on the city’s water supply, whose lines were damaged by the collapse of WTC 1 and WTC 2. These uncontrolled lower-floor fires eventually spread to the northeast part of WTC 7, where the building’s collapse began.
How did the fires cause WTC 7 to collapse?
The heat from the uncontrolled fires caused steel floor beams and girders to thermally expand, leading to a chain of events that caused a key structural column to fail. The failure of this structural column then initiated a fire-induced progressive collapse of the entire building.
According to the report’s probable collapse sequence, heat from the uncontrolled fires caused thermal expansion of the steel beams on the lower floors of the east side of WTC 7, damaging the floor framing on multiple floors.
Eventually, a girder on Floor 13 lost its connection to a critical column, Column 79, that provided support for the long floor spans on the east side of the building (see Diagram 1). The displaced girder and other local fire-induced damage caused Floor 13 to collapse, beginning a cascade of floor failures down to the 5th floor. Many of these floors had already been at least partially weakened by the fires in the vicinity of Column 79. This collapse of floors left Column 79 insufficiently supported in the east-west direction over nine stories.
The unsupported Column 79 then buckled and triggered an upward progression of floor system failures that reached the building’s east penthouse. What followed in rapid succession was a series of structural failures. Failure first occurred all the way to the roof line-involving all three interior columns on the easternmost side of the building (79, 80, 81). Then, progressing from east to west across WTC 7, all of the columns failed in the core of the building (58 through 78). Finally, the entire façade collapsed.
What is progressive collapse?
Progressive collapse is defined as the spread of local damage from a single initiating event, from structural element to element, eventually resulting in the collapse of an entire structure or a disproportionately large part of it. The failure of WTC 7 was an example of a fire-induced progressive collapse.
Progressive collapse did NOT occur in the WTC towers, for two reasons. First, the collapse of each tower was not triggered by a local damage or a single initiating event. Second, the structures were able to redistribute loads from the impact and fire-damaged structural components and subsystems to undamaged components and to keep the building standing until a sudden, global collapse occurred. Had a hat truss that connected the core columns to the exterior frame not been installed to support a TV antenna atop each WTC tower after the structure had been fully designed, it is likely that the core of the WTC towers would have collapsed sooner, triggering a global collapse. Such a collapse would have some features similar to that of a progressive collapse.
How did the collapse of WTC 7 differ from the collapses of WTC 1 and WTC 2?
WTC 7 was unlike the WTC towers in many respects. WTC 7 was a more typical tall building in the design of its structural system. It was not struck by an aircraft. The collapse of WTC 7 was caused by a single initiating event-the failure of a northeast building column brought on by fire-induced damage to the adjacent flooring system and connections-which stands in contrast to the WTC 1 and WTC 2 failures, which were brought on by multiple factors, including structural damage caused by the aircraft impact, extensive dislodgement of the sprayed fire-resistive materials or fireproofing in the impacted region, and a weakening of the steel structures created by the fires.
The fires in WTC 7 were quite different from the fires in the WTC towers. Since WTC 7 was not doused with thousands of gallons of jet fuel, large areas of any floor were not ignited simultaneously as they were in the WTC towers. Instead, separate fires in WTC 7 broke out on different floors, most notably on Floors 7 to 9 and 11 to 13. The WTC 7 fires were similar to building contents fires that have occurred in several tall buildings where the automatic sprinklers did not function or were not present.
[/QUOTE]
There’s a lot more in that little summary, including specifically:
[QUOTE=NIST Report On WTC7]
Some people have said that a failure at one column should not have produced a symmetrical fall like this one. What’s your answer to those assertions?
WTC 7’s collapse, viewed from the exterior (most videos were taken from the north), did appear to fall almost uniformly as a single unit. This occurred because the interior failures that took place did not cause the exterior framing to fail until the final stages of the building collapse. The interior floor framing and columns collapsed downward and pulled away from the exterior frame. There were clues that internal damage was taking place, prior to the downward movement of the exterior frame, such as when the east penthouse fell downward into the building and windows broke out on the north face at the ends of the building core. The symmetric appearance of the downward fall of the WTC 7 was primarily due to the greater stiffness and strength of its exterior frame relative to the interior framing.
[/QUOTE]
and
[QUOTE=NIST Report On WTC7]
In a video, it appears that WTC 7 is descending in free fall, something that would not occur in the structural collapse that you describe. How can you ignore basic laws of physics?
In the draft WTC 7 report (released Aug. 21, 2008; available at World Trade Center Investigation | NIST), NIST stated that the north face of the building descended 18 stories (the portion of the collapse visible in the video) in 5.4 seconds, based on video analysis of the building collapse. This time period is 40 percent longer than the 3.9 seconds this process would have taken if the north face of the building had descended solely under free fall conditions. During the public comment period on the draft report, NIST was asked to confirm this time difference and define the reasons for it in greater detail.
To further clarify the descent of the north face, NIST recorded the downward displacement of a point near the center of the roofline from first movement until the north face was no longer visible in the video. Numerical analyses were conducted to calculate the velocity and acceleration of the roofline point from the time-dependent displacement data. The instant at which vertical motion of the roofline first occurred was determined by tracking the numerical value of the brightness of a pixel (a single element in the video image) at the roofline. This pixel became brighter as the roofline began to descend because the color of the pixel started to change from that of the building façade to the lighter color of the sky.
The approach taken by NIST is summarized in Section 3.6 of the final summary report, NCSTAR 1A (released Nov. 20, 2008; available at World Trade Center Investigation | NIST) and detailed in Section 12.5.3 of NIST NCSTAR 1-9 (available at World Trade Center Investigation | NIST).
The analyses of the video (both the estimation of the instant the roofline began to descend and the calculated velocity and acceleration of a point on the roofline) revealed three distinct stages characterizing the 5.4 seconds of collapse:
Stage 1 (0 to 1.75 seconds): acceleration less than that of gravity (i.e., slower than free fall).
Stage 2 (1.75 to 4.0 seconds): gravitational acceleration (free fall)
Stage 3 (4.0 to 5.4 seconds): decreased acceleration, again less than that of gravity
This analysis showed that the 40 percent longer descent time—compared to the 3.9 second free fall time—was due primarily to Stage 1, which corresponded to the buckling of the exterior columns in the lower stories of the north face. During Stage 2, the north face descended essentially in free fall, indicating negligible support from the structure below. This is consistent with the structural analysis model which showed the exterior columns buckling and losing their capacity to support the loads from the structure above. In Stage 3, the acceleration decreased as the upper portion of the north face encountered increased resistance from the collapsed structure and the debris pile below.
[/QUOTE]
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:
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/factsheet/wtc_qa_082108.cfm
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.