Why not just assume that nobody could turn over bin Laden; that he lived in an essentially lawless part of the world beyond the reach of anything we’d consider to be effective law-enforcement?
As far as I know, this changes nothing about the events of September 11, 2001.
[QUOTE=Try2B Comprehensive]
Sure I did. I found your points unsatisfactory, but that’s ok.
[/QUOTE]
It has nothing to do with whether the answer was satisfactory or not. Had it not been satisfactory to you, you could have listed the parts that were unsatisfactory to you and we could have discussed it. Putting in ‘Cite!’ however clearly showed you DIDN’T read it (or, less likely, you didn’t understand it), since I rather clearly said that it was moot and there could be no cite, since obviously the Taliban did not choose to turn over Bin Laden or any high ranking AQ members.
I did manage to turn this up. From CNN:
And, having shown given you the data that Bush DID demand the Taliban turn over Bin Laden, and the Taliban DID refuse, while holding your fingers in your ears and hand waving the data away as being inconclusive sort of puts into perspective who is claiming the earth is 6000 years old and who believes the whole 4.5 billion years old ‘theory’, ehe?
Here is the thing…I and others have provided you with at least SOME data on this (and really, it’s not like this stuff is unknown or controversial in any way). You on the other hand have asserted that you don’t believe any of it, while giving diddly to back up your own theories. I realized long ago that you are essentially unconvincable on this subject…it will always be something, a theory of the gaps, so to speak. Find an anomaly and bam!, you are off…hell, find what YOU THINK is an anomaly and you are off to the races. Show you that your view point or data is wrong and you will either dismiss it, ignore it (to come back to it again when hopefully no one is looking) or simply shift the discussion somewhere else.
Yes, you have, but here is another, earlier request to deal with the Bin Laden problem. I’m sure there will be yet another ‘gap’ though, ehe?
This stuff isn’t really even in dispute. It’s like you are asking me to cite water is wet or something. AFAIK, NO ONE seriously questions that the US demanded the Taliban turn over Bin Laden, or that the Taliban rejected the US’s demands. Well, no one but you. Hell, I don’t even know of any CTer’s who are making this particular (odd) claim.
And you know, had you not been shown links demonstrating that you are simply wrong, and if you didn’t have access to Google, you maybe would have a point. As it is, I wonder who you think you are fooling here. It’s certainly not me…though, perhaps you are winning over some who aren’t following along closely in the peanut gallery.
And it leaves aside the aspect that the Taliban COULD turn over Bin Laden but chose not too, for reasons of their own. Excluded middle, I suppose.
Convincing to who, exactly? It’s like debating with a moon landings CTer…what is pretty obvious and convincing to me is not going to convince them, and vice versa.
I gave you two. If you want more, I suggest you work on your Google-Fu…it’s really quite easy to find a LOT of names of high ranking AQ members, both dead and alive (mostly dead at this point after years of being hunted and attacked).
It’s too bad you couldn’t have an open mind and actually absorb what people (many with a lot more patience than I have) have been trying to tell you. It’s too bad you couldn’t realize that this aspect of the CT you have been working is REALLY not in dispute by nearly anyone…not that much of the rest of the CT actually is either, mind.
Um…sure chief, whatever you say. If you want to give yourself props and points, it’s no skin off my nose. 
-XT
ROFLMAO
What happened to the towers was GRADE SCHOOL physics.
Engineering is physics. It is just applied physics that is usually so well known that physicists don’t pay much attention to it anymore. Structural engineering is thousands of years old. It merely got more scientific and mathematically precise in the last couple of hundred years.
The towers were designed to sway 3 feet in a 150mph wind. With a 208 foot width that is 1 1/2 %. The NIST says the south tower moved 12 inches at the 70th floor on impact and that was 130 feet below the impact point. So an extrapolation would indicate that the 81st floor moved 14" on impact.
So that is only a 0.6% deflection so it doesn’t look like the building was stressed anywhere near its maximum.
But of course the difference is the airliner impact was concentrated, thereby doing local structural damage. But since the kinetic energy of the plane had two different effects, building deflection and structural damage, then the amount of energy that did one of them must be computed to determine how much was left to do the other. The energy that went into building deflection cannot be determined without knowing the distribution of mass. So why don’t we have it after SEVEN YEARS? The NIST admits its importance in two places. Once in relation to wind and the other in relation to the impact analysis.
psik
It doesn’t change anything about the events of September 11-assuming you aren’t blaming the Taliban directly for it. But it could affect our entry into the Afghanistan theater of war.
I think xtisme is reading me wrong. A demand is one thing. An impossible demand is another. Proof of the demand doesn’t show that the demand was possible. With a guy like Bin Laden, doubt about his capturability isn’t so unreasonable, since he is still in fact on the lam today. I described Bin Laden up thread as ‘Rambo on crack’ in terms of his ability to hide in the mountains, and no one disputed that.
Gig0buster’s link doesn’t just show evidence of a demand or a refusal. It also shows that (unless it is bad intel or something, but that isn’t what I’m saying) the Taliban actually could lay their hands on him, and therefore it was possible that US demands could have been met and war averted. Xtisme’s link also suggests that this is the case.
However, the reports xtisme quotes almost suggest that the US were impatient with their demands. It suggests the contrary of what I was just recently starting to believe, that is, that there was a still push for war and the chiefs didn’t much care anymore what the Taliban did.
Still, even that is less suspicious in light of the evidence that the Taliban had some idea where OBL was and how to get him.
Sorry to everyone who complains that I didn’t answer every post. I honestly don’t have the time for 100% coverage.
Well, yes, in the sense that they fell down. However, GRADE SCHOOL physics (as I assume we will call it from now on) relies on simple idealized formulas. It isn’t until high school physics courses that students learn about additional fudge factors like friction and wind resistance, and not until college engineering courses do they learn about caulculus-heavy ideas like material tensile strength and shear stress. Someone whose expertise and understanding is limited to GRADE SCHOOL physics is sorely underqualified to describe what happened to the towers.
So what exactly are your engineering qualifications? If you’ve described them already, please meantion the post number as I must have missed it.
Because no-one of any credibility has any argument other than the towers were destroyed by crashing planes, thus nobody of any serious expertise has bothered to microanalyze every trivial aspect of the collapse?
Since I never took a single course in architecture or structural engineering the qualifications are irrelevant.
I was debating between mechanical engineering and electrical engineering in high school. I won a National Merit Scholarship and applied to MIT. I got an interview but did not get accepted. I attended another engineering school. My pledge father was an architect and we could see the Sears Tower being constructed from campus so there was lots of talk about skyscrapers in the frat. It was a standard joke among the engineering students that architects took “funny physics and funny math”.
I emailed Richard Gage in 2007 about what was wrong with Frank Greening’s paper. Gage acknowledged that I was correct but I notice his AE911Truth does not talk about the distribution of steel and concrete in the towers. That is one thing about EXPERTS, they really want to make their area of expertise look mysterious and complicated. I encountered Greening on the JREF forum.
http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=3667265&postcount=316
psik
People claiming to have credibility need to keep people bamboozled.
The NIST says this:
Since deflecting the south tower by 14 inches at the level of impact meant moving all of the exterior wall panels on those levels to not specify the weights and numbers of the 12 different types of panels and yet claim to have taken the conservation of momentum into account is complete crap.
All they are saying is, “Trust us We are the EXPERTS!” They don’t have to actually explain jack shit. Everybody is just supposed to roll over and play dead because a LIAR waves a degree in their faces and claims the subject is too difficult for them to understand.
psik
Whether or not this is true, it doesn’t prove that anyone has been bamboozled.
Whether this is true or not, why is better to take the work of an admitted (and indeed, proud of it) non-expert?
No. Recognizing that the buildings returned to equilibrium following the impact and maintained that equilibrium until fires destroyed the supporting structure indicates that their analysis is completely accurate. Unless you have evidence of the towers oscillating continuously between the times of impact and the times of collapse, you are simply grabbing at a single rather irrelevant thread and pretending that it has SERIOUS IMPORT simply because no one bothered to waste time making unnecessary calculations.
Either the towers returned to equilibrium following the impacts and later collapsed due to fires ignited by fuel in conjunction with damage caused by the impact or else the towers continued to oscillate after the impacts so that the oscillations contributed to the collapse in conjunction with the impacts and fires. In either case, the proximate cause of the collapses are the impacts of large bodies filled with flammable material. Making a big deal about whether the building continued to shake and figuring out how much they weighed is pointless.
Oh sure, we are supposed to believe that a hydrocarbon fire could destroy the structure in 56 minutes even though they won’t tell us the quantity of steel in the impact zone. The NIST admits that there were 100,000 tons of steel in each tower. That comes to an average of 862 tons of steel per level. But of course there was more steel toward the bottom.
Here is a temperature computation. Of course the quantity of steel would affect the result.
So that is my point. Claiming to have analyzed these events without knowing the distribution of STEEL and concrete through the towers is absurd.
The people who can BELIEVE this are capable of turning off there brains when AUTHORITY speaks. AUTHORITY doesn’t have to come up with the relevant information.
psik
I wonder how we can trust the numbers in the link when they somehow also use estimates of the steel and concrete. 
As the math in the link is suspect, I have to say that no serious researchers trust what that 9/11 “research” site mentions in your link.
http://www.debunking911.com/moltensteel.htm
I’m not sure why you are making an issue of a “hydrocarbon fire,” but I will note that the site to which you linked accepts (actually quotes) a statement from FEMA (page 22) indicating how fast the jet fuel burned off, then completely ignores the computations on the very same pages (pp 22-23) regarding office materials that were present on multiple floors that provided fuel for fires to continue much longer and hotter than the jet fuel.
That is a classic straw man argument and indicates something rather different than a search for “truth.”
You will also notice the calculations are based on the assumption that no heat escapes by conduction or convection. Both of which are physical impossibilities.
What I pointed out was that the quantity of steel had to matter. He just assumed a linear distribution with twice as much at the bottom. I presume there was actually less steel then he is assuming. So my point was simply that we need to know the quantity of steel. He also assumes a 100% efficient burn which is not going to happen in an open air fire.
psik
Your conclusion violates conservation of energy.
In your experiment, adding masses (washers) adds potential energy to the system. During the experiment, the potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, and the kinetic energy is used to break molecular bonds in the toothpicks.
When you started with more potential energy, you broke fewer toothpicks. Where, then, did the additional energy go to?
I suggest there’s some portion of your experiment you haven’t adequately controlled.
No, the calculations are bogus because they focus entirely on the kerosene fire, ignoring all the other material that continued to burn well through the collapse. Saying that the kerosene calculations were “too high” because they unrealistically ignored heat escape is a matter of bait and switch tactics when the kerosene burn is not the primary source of the heat.
The initial fuel-air mixture and explosive fire from the crashes provided a way to ignite massive amounts of furniture, walls, documents, carpeting, etc. It was not necessarily the primary fuel for the ongoing conflagration. By focusing on the “low” heat from the jet fuel fire, your author is pretending that jet fuel is the only possible source for the heat. In fact, he makes a big deal about how the jet fuel fire alone was not enough to raise the ambient temperature above a certain level and deliberately ignores all the other sources of flames.
Then there is the additional bait-and-switch that you appear to be employing regarding the structual steel. If I shove a car into a furnace, there is a pretty good chance that the engine block is going to survive a longer period at higher temperatures than the engine mounts, the frame welds, tie-rods, axle mounts, etc. Long before the engine block has suffered any significant damage, the car would begin to come apart. Knowing the total mass of the car, (or the steel in each floor of the WTC), tells us nothing regarding how long a particular joint or girder will survive the stress of a fire. Even if the mass of the core steel was sufficient to act as a damper for internal fires, (a point I do not grant except as a hypothetical), fires attacking the floor supports would not have to be nearly as intense.
I must say we get a better class of twoofer than, say, the IMDb. There’s a current discussion at the World Trade Center board over there in which a twoofer accuses a debunker of trying to change the subject when the twoofer is the one who brought up that particular subject in the first place!
Any reports of explosions prior to the collapses have been dismissed, claiming any that were heard could have been many things besides a bomb.
How big an explosion would we expect to have heard, had a detonation of some device taken place at the core of the towers, bearing in mind all the other noise and chaos that morning?
Invalid question, given that demolition charges are required on all columns and not just those at the core.
But just for shits & giggles, here’s a demolition of a much smaller building. The buzzing noise is from the helicopter the camera is in. Here’s another angle of the same demolition.
The collapse started from the section the planes crashed into, before one can even bother to look for other reasons of the collapse we need better evidence.
Your question still has no supporting evidence, and when one checks the audio of the french reporter that was in the lower floors of the WTC the idea is even more preposterous.
Have you ever been to an explosive demolition of a building, live? I have and even though they use the smallest charges necessary they are really LOUD, and that’s hundreds of yards away in the open air. It takes a lot of energy to cut steel. There’s an incredible BANG BANG BANG as the charges detonate.
I work in a modern steel-framed office building and loud sounds (like a door slamming, box dropping, furniture being moved, etc) are quite obvious even through a concrete slab floor. Compared to an actual explosion those are nothing.
psikeyhackr, what do you think brought down WTC1 & 2? What is your strongest, most irrefutable evidence?