[QUOTE=ivan astikov]
Plenty of witnesses recollect ‘explosive sounds’, although the experts are convinced these were all perfectly natural on the day.
[/QUOTE]
Two quick points (for the peanut gallery, not you necessarily): First, eye witness accounts and recollections are notoriously bad, uninformed and in many cases contradictory and simply wrong. People are really bad at remembering and understanding what they are seeing, especially in highly stressful situations. It’s silly to base an kind of meaningful theory using supposed witness data as a basis.
Secondly…why would you NOT expect to hear explosive type sounds in such a situation?? Two jets full of fuel flew into two massive buildings. There were any number of things that could and probably did explode. Under rapid, intense heat a water cooler would go off like a bomb. A case of printer ink or a closet full of cleaning supplies would explode violently. This doesn’t even get into things like the storage bunkers for the backup generators and things like that. And when the buildings started coming down, there would be a tremendous roaring like explosion as the floors pancaked…and a tremendous explosive release of air and debris. As I said earlier in this silly thread, as an experiment, simply get some talcum powder on your hands and slap them together really hard. What is the effect? A loud noise and a spraying out of talcum? Now…look around your office and consider if the ceiling met the floor rapidly. See the point?
You mean those sounds that no one there reported actually hearing, but happen to be on his video recording, and which sound exactly like wind noise blowing over a small camera-mounted microphone on a camcorder? Those explosions?
Err… I’m given to understand that the WTC was constructed in such way that basically the core supported everything, that is to say the core supported the entire (or at least, most of the) weight of the building. Which, to me, means that if something had caused it to shake, the vibrations would have transfered directly into the foundations, i.e. the ground.
Unless you’re talking about an explosion so slight as to not even register on a seismic sensor, yet powerful enough to sever a massive, reinforced load-bearing structure. But quite frankly, that’s veering into “A Wizard Did It” territory.
Another example of the deceptive quoting by truthers.
Here’s a list of quotes from firefights, for example:
“Sounded like bombs” –Keith Murphy
“A huge explosion” –Gerard Gorman
“Sound of popping and exploding” –Alwish Monchery
“Explosions” –William Burns
“Kept hearing these large boom, boom” –Rosario Terranova
“Sounded like explosions.” –Anthony Fitzgerald
“Like a shotgun going off” –Mark Meier
“Sounded like explosions” –Wilfred Barriere
“Sounded like bombs, like blockbusters” –John Murray
“You could hear explosions” –Richard Smiouskas
“Sounded like an M-80, that’s how loud they were” –Tim Pearson
“Sounds like a shotgun” –Eric Ronningen
“Sounded like an explosion” –John Morabito
“There were lots of explosions” –Jeff Birnbaum
“Under the assumption that the sounds were secondary bombs.” –Andrew Rodriguez
“Sounded like bombs. Like a bomb going off. I mean, it was huge.” –FDNY Deputy Chief Peter Hayden"
Sure sounds like bombs, right?
But they aren’t.
All of these firefighters are describing the sounds of bodies hitting the ground. The bodies of people who jumped out of the tower to avoid being burned to death.
Truthers have used these quotes, and many more to try to establish that there were bombs going off in the towers.
Yup, that’s a pretty good description of troother methods. Some scientist or other described it as (para.), “the reverse scientific method. They come up with their conclusion first, then throw out everything that doesn’t match it and make up stuff that does.”
If you see the documentary that those French guys did you can hear it quite clearly. It is easy to see how it could be described as above. It is very upsetting to hear.
Bush actually saw the 1st plane hit the towers, on 9/11, live on a tv. He said he was waiting outside the classroom, and saw the plane hit the first tower - before he went into the classroom (we all remember that he was told out the 2nd plane while in the classroom). Only problem is… there was no footage found or aired on 9/11 of the 1st plane. It wasn’t found until later. You might say this is an idiot-Bush misspeak, but he seems to be very clear about his memory. Hear about it here.
A nutty conspiracy theorist just might come to the conclusion that they had a surveillance camera trained on the towers, just waiting for the crash they knew was going to happen. Somebody must have left on CIA channel 322 in the hallway. Woops. Why it was on in the hallway of a school, I have no idea, but that’s what out President says happened, so who can contradict him? Certainly nobody on these boards.
You’d think in the interests of full disclosure and being on the safe side, when NIST were doing the computer simulations of what occured prior to collapse, they’d have factored in the effects of explosives on the core columns, just to see how differently the buildings would have collapsed*. Does this seem too strange a demand to have made of the people charged with investigating the biggest terrorist atrocity ever?
Does anyone want to take a stab at what it would have looked like had the core columns been sabotaged?
“I saw [that] a plane [had] hit the towers.” It’s how southerners talk. Absolutely pathetic “evidence” of foreknowledge.
Yes it does seem a strange demand once you understand that bomb hypotheses were demonstrably fabricated by laymen with zero credibility. You might as well ask why they didn’t factor in king kong, just in case. They had legitimate work to do.
Apparently, you’re new here. If you took a poll of Straight Dope regulars on their opinions about President Bush, it would come out as approximately:
30% “worst president ever”
50% “well, he’s not as bad as, say, Buchanan or Harding, but he’s in the bottom 10”
10% mediocre to below average
5% average
5% posters who inexplicably think he was actually a good (or in some extreme cases, great) president
The reason most Dopers aren’t buying into the 9/11 conspiracy theories isn’t because of their deep-seated lurve for George W. Bush. It mostly boils down to two factors:
(1) There’s no evidence for the conspiracy theories.
(2) Most of the conspiracy theories are hopelessly illogical.
(FWIW, I’m in the 50%)
Basically, he is doing what most witnesses do…several different events are being mixed in his own mind. I.E. he is mis-remembering the course of events and conflating several separate events into one. Here is a cite showing some pictures at the bottom…and it’s clear that Bush is watching the TV events related to the second air plane hitting, not the first.
For anyone interested, here is the timeline for events on 9/11 with an emphasis on what ole GW was doing. BTW, from the link:
So…it actually WAS recorded, simply not broadcast. No special, sooper sekrit video surveillance needed.
Also from the link:
So…Bush wasn’t even at the school when the first plane hit. While we DO have a picture of him watching the second plane hit on TV…
What in the world would be the point of speculating about things that clearly did not happen in order to provide imaginary alternative scenarios?
Up thread some place, someone provided a link to this video or one taken from a nearby location, in which we saw the North Tower falling. In that sequence* the floors are clearly collapsing ahead of the cores. Since the floors collapsed before the cores, (by several seconds), we can discount any odd claim that the cores were destroyed or severed to bring down the buildings.
(Check the 19 second mark, the 53 second mark, and the shots from 1:00 minute through 1:08 as the video is replayed.)
The guy you’re talking about is the guy who had his camera set up on a tripod in Hoboken, NJ, right? That’s across the Hudson, well over a mile away. If his camera reported explosion sounds there, that would have been unbelievably loud to the folks actually on Manhattan. And the noises he recorded sounded exactly like wind in a small mic.
It’d certainly have nipped in the bud all the accusations that a full investigation hadn’t taken place. And, if you’ve done all the hard work putting the parameters in place to do your simulation, how hard would it have been just to include some extra variables? If I’d have been on the job, I’d have done it out of pure curiosity.
All that video indicates to me is that if the core was sabotaged, it would have had to be higher up. I see the tower crumbling, but I don’t know for sure that the cores hadn’t been weakened somewhere below the impact points. And in the case of the tower with the antennae, it even looks as if it is falling before the rest of the building.
So, anyone who questions the official line on anything now, is a “CT’er”, or is it just where 9/11 is concerned?
Why did you feel the need to include me in that negatively implicated category, if my thoughts were already ridiculous enough? Did it make you feel better to associate my suspicions with the likes of people who think there were no planes, or that the towers were blasted from space?
If WTC 7 had not collapsed in the same way that WTC 1 & 2 did you could accept the notion that it was the results of the planes. There’s serious skepticism around this for a reason, buildings don’t collapse like this that are on fire and we’ve countless examples of buildings engulfed in flames for hours that do not collapse in the manner. Either the buildings were faulty to begin with or something else is going on here.
This is from the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth site: