911 evidence - Page 4

LOL.......funniest thing ever. Obviously trying to make fun of the movie Zeitgiest which EVERYONE here needs to see.

Hellooooooooo, this is a 9/11 thread and we're talking about hurricanes? Come on!

Loose Change

Let's put your quote in context.

You're saying the city was "utterly devastated" because Bush didn't take charge and act in a time of crisis, something he claimed to be great at. Since Bush wasn't responsible for the hurricane, your argument falls flat since the city was already devastated. His failing was in mitigating the human suffering because of poor communication between the state and federal government. You could even blame him for cutting funding to the levees (despite the fact several administrations had cut funding, so in that aspect he is not solely responsible not to mention, we've borrowed the money for this entire war, the funding didn't come from the levees, that's just a cute little thing liberals like to add in there) but that wasn't the route you were going or at least you didn't make clear you were going.

Much like the 9/11 truthers, your argument is taking strands of truth and trying to spin gold out of them. There was plenty of blame to go around for what happened after Katrina, a good portion of it can fall squarely on Bush's shoulders but by trying to add a hyperbole argument about how it was all his fault you're taking away from his true failings with that disaster. People will just shun you as a loon and poke holes in your logic and that doesn't help. There are very easy and convincing arguments of what Bush failed to do, because facts make things easy and convincing.

Since I don't want to derail this thread any further, I'll let this be my last word in on Katrina.

For the record, ut·ter·ly (tr-l)
adv.
Completely; absolutely; entirely.

Since all of New Orleans wasn't entirely devastated (only parts of it were flooded), I ignored that part of your sentence as hyperbole.

Wow ... I posted on page one, go back to real life and this thread is already 4 pages?!

Did anybody reply with an answer that addresses the model and explanation of the collapse as described in the paper I linked to? If not, what else is there to discuss. Cite some credible structural engineer (and not a demolitions hobbist) that can even beginning to argue against that work and we can really have a discussion. Everything else is just noise.

And yt, no the professors that wrote that paper did not investigate the site themselves. They did not have to, at all. The foundation of the conspiracy is that this is not possible, and there you have a good document explaining it to you. It is the burden of the conspiracy people to refute those points, which are well accepted in the engineering community.

Your homework made me laugh.

You're right, it wasn't where I was going. Because I was making a very simple point about Bush's failure to live up to his own hype, without the intention of making a detailed argument for exactly how and why he failed every step of the way. But you went ahead and concocted one and assigned it to me, which is irritating enough, but it's also the broadest and most asinine of strawman. No one in their right mind is saying Bush should've stopped a hurricane from forming, or that he personally poked holes in the levees, or that the states and local governments bear absolutely no responsibility for the aftermath. I certainly didn't, so I ask again politely: don't quote my posts if you're going to disregard what they say and argue against a bunch of stuff you made you.

Oh, and...

Main Entry:
dev·as·tate Listen to the pronunciation of devastate
Pronunciation:
\ˈde-və-ˌstāt\
Function:
transitive verb

1 : to bring to ruin or desolation by violent action <a country devastated by war>
2 : to reduce to chaos, disorder, or helplessness : overwhelm <devastated by grief> <her wisecrack devastated the class>
synonyms see ravage

"Devastate" does not mean "destroy".

Sir, this is a thread on 911 conspiracies. Facts are not appreciated here. Please supply some outlandish suppositons based on misunderstandings of basic physics, then we'll talk!

All the people here who call me a nutjob for thinking it was an inside job have still not explained how Building 7 collapsed.

Maybe that's because you're an asshole.

After about two minutes of looking on Wikipedia:

Or, you know, it was brought down on purpose just in case knocking TWO 110-STORY BUILDINGS down wasn't enough.

Another wacky bit of illogic regarding WT-7 is the fact that owner told the press that the Fire Chief had called him and told him that they couldn't save the building, and that he (the owner) had told the Fire Chief "I guess we'd better pull it". According to the conspiracy theorists, "pull it" is a demolition term, so the owner must have wanted the Fire Chief and his men to enter a burning building that they thought would collapse in order to ILLEGALLY blow it up (the firemen were doing this!), and that not only did he illegally conspire with the Fire Chief and the firemen who were trying to save the building, he then went and told the PRESS about his illegal plan to blow the building up!

The fact that they base their "proof" that WT-7 was blown up on a PUBLIC statement by the owner shows how frigging RETARDED the conspiracy theorists are.

I think calling the official story 'inarguably false' is kind of misleading when the documentary linked inspires more questions than answers as to the theory of a controlled demolition. Nevertheless, I watched all three parts for the sake of argument. Plus, I haven’t examined the exact reasoning behind the fall of the towers and I felt somewhat compelled to examine all sides of the argument.

Since people are arguing for proof - well, okay, Darth Sidious is - I'll just provide some links.

Some of my thoughts -

Fire, Fire: The documentary shows examples of other buildings that have sustained fires for X amount of hours and compares that to the damage sustained on 9/11 in the towers to suggest that the towers couldn't have fallen 'straight down' unless they were blown up. Fine; but it doesn't take into account the other factors that contributed to the collapse of the WTC. The Windsor Tower in Madrid, Spain may have been burning for 20 hours and still standing, but that doesn't take into account the fact that it wasn't hit by a commercial airliner at top speed. Furthermore, the construction of the WTC is also fundamentally different from that of the Windsor Tower (hell, even the documentary provides evidence of that in the section that describes how it was built): tube-in-tube. To save space, support columns were moved to the outer wall. Support trusses connected the outer wall to the inner core, and those trusses in turn were coated with a ‘sprayed-on’ fire coating rather than being encased in concrete.

As the source that El Capitan America provided points out, some of the columns were severed by the plane’s impact, and the stress was redistributed to other columns. Pile on the fire, the construction of the building itself, the stripped fire-proofing, and the sagging trusses and you have a collapse.

Explosions: This was frustrating for me to hear over and over again. The documentary uses eyewitness testimony of hearing explosions that sound, rather ominously, ‘like a bomb.’ But just because it sounds ‘like a bomb’ doesn’t mean it is a bomb.

Case-in-point: the documentary likes to note how there were ground-level explosions before the building collapse. They point to photographic and video evidence of smoke below the towers just before they collapsed, and the ‘sounds’ of several explosions.

I think one thing to fundamentally keep in mind is that controlled demolitions are loud. They make noise that can be heard from miles away. You also have to take into account that when a building is rigged to blow, it takes weeks and months to prepare. It isn’t something – unlike what the documentary suggests – that can be done on a quick time frame, especially when you’re dealing with the Twin Towers. There’s some spotty eyewitness testimony that I’ll get to in a second. A written example of a typical controlled demolition .

Compare this with the WTC collapse. The documentary shows a video taken from far away that times sounds coming from the WTC at the time of its pre-collapse – except you can barely hear anything, unless the rumbling as the towers fell is evidence of an ‘explosion.’

Granted, it’s hard to tell from these videoclips, but I think the documentary’s method of proving explosions is dubious at best because they use the exact same method of ‘let’s look at videos!’ without the actual legwork that the NIST did.

Then there’s an elusive squibs, except they’re not that elusive. The documentary likes to think that the puffs of air ejecting from the windows as the building collapses is evidence of a controlled demolition. The NIST Report (you can view it here) has already pointed out the cause of the collapse. The puffs of smoke, according to them:

EDIT: I cleared up some of my sentences.

Sourcing: I think there’s a point in the video where they cite a demolition expert and call him, rather succinctly, ‘demolition expert.’

Instead of arguing about lazy citations, I guess I’ll talk about the people that are constantly championed in the 9/11 Truth movement.

- Steven E. Jones: Jones wrote a paper about how a controlled demolition brought down the towers. Jones was a professor of physics at BYU. His paper was peer-reviewed, but not by a civil engineering journal. You can see a list of responses to Jones’ paper here.

This is mentioned in the documentary, and they present Jones as a beacon for the truth, but as seen in the link, some of the people who specialize in this field disagree with the paper.

- William Rodriguez: I wrote about the documentary’s argument that because people heard an explosion, it automatically means that bombs went off in the WTC. They use janitor William Rodriguez’s claims repeatedly. Rodriguez was in the building that day, but his story keeps on changing. For instance, CNN quoted him as saying: "’We heard a loud rumble, then all of a sudden we heard another rumble like someone moving a whole lot of furniture,’ Rodriguez said. ‘And then the elevator opened and a man came into our office and all of his skin was off.’” No claim of explosives there; but then again, Rodriguez just survived a horrific ordeal. Rodriguez typically argues that his account is ignored by those investigating the case.

Yet, in his 2004 testimony to the NIST, Rodriguez says:
No mention of his claim that there were explosives in the basement. Here’s a fairly exhaustive run-through of Rodriguez’s claims.

- Kevin Ryan: The ex-employee of UL Certified Steel is also mentioned in this documentary. Ryan likes to make issue that the buildings should have easily withstood the stress caused by the burning jet fire, and that UL certified the steel components of the WTC.

The NIST-sponsored fire-proofing tests at UL

The only problem with Ryan’s testimony is that it’s a – how do you say – modification of the truth. First, UL doesn’t certify steel components (steel column or trusses) like Ryan says, but assemblies. UL also didn’t replicate the impact levels – they replicated a floor system with fire proofing as it would’ve been before the impact and tested it with various fireproofing thickness. The test trusses were physically undamaged and had intact fireproofing. Keep in mind, though, that the fire conditions in the towers were much worse. Case in point. Also keep in mind that the official response was never that jet-fuel was the primary cause of the collapse but one of the factors.

- Scott Forbes: I’m perplexed by this testimony because there doesn’t appear to be any info from other people that reported the mysterious power-down. In this interview, for instance, Forbes argues that many people have talked to him and that he was contacted by a journalist. Who are they? Where are they? Forbes later admits that he has no knowledge of the conditions above and below his floor about the mysterious power down. Forbes also says that the power down condition was from 12 noon on Saturday, September 8, 2001 to approximately 2 PM on Sunday 9/9. That wouldn’t be enough time for setting up for a controlled demolition.

WTC 7: There’s a weird argument that WTC 7 didn’t sustain enough significant damage in order to fall. Therefore: CONTROLLED DEMOLITION! Since I’m lazy: Article.

To argue that the contents of WTC 7 or that Silverstein had nefarious intentions is 'fine' (and even that’s a subject for debate), but they’re negligible in the study of how WTC 7 fell. They don’t automatically prove ‘demolition’.

This is another good one. And, what the hell, read the NIST findings.

I think what annoys me about the documentary (and for that matter Loose Change, Zeitgeist, etc.) is that it argues that the NIST report is faulty science and then proceeds to present faulty science of its own; and in our culture, where science is maligned and/or misunderstood, that's dangerous.

I agree with Seabass: the controlled demolition theory relies on facts that contradict one another. It relies on the same eyewitnesses that make up the 9/11 Truth movement. It connects loose threads and tries to pass it off as definite evidence.

Eyewitnesses said it sounded like a bomb? Why would I take a New York resident's word for what a bomb sounds like. Ever hear or watch an entire oil refinery explode at once? I have. Did it sound like it a bomb? I guess so. What would it have sounded like had it been sabotage rather than negligence? I have no idea. And neither do these eyewitnesses.

Also, what else could the sound be compared to? Could be metaphorical..."It sounded like a bomb". Duh.

Has anyone asked the consipracy theorists WHY someone would go the trouble of arranging super-secret controlled demolitions of the Twin Towers?

Say the U.S government or Israel or KONTROL wanted to foment conflict between the U.S. and the Middle East or build support for domestic/foreign intelligence and military operations or ruin The Coup's album cover.

While planning to do this by crashing four planes into four buildings, why would "they" feel like taking on the added trouble of engineering the super-secret, controlled demolition of two of the tallest buildings in the world?

Consider consider how much more effort would have been involved in carrying out the controlled demolitions, and particularly in keeping it secret. And think about the body count, property damage and emotional impact they would already be achieving with four planes into four buildings before any collapse. It just doesn't make sense, does it?

First, they arent the tallest. Second, there are MANY reasons for this. Third, Im not going into it. You'll find out one day.

Well, if that didn't convince him, I don't know what would.

The line you quoted was "two of the tallest", you fucking retard, which was accurate. Read more carefully and stop picking apart meaningless tidbits while ignoring the big picture like every other inane conspiracy theorist.

BrianM, if you head home tonight and see a car plastered with Ron Paul stickers parked on your street, run. Don't slow down, don't think, just run.

I see. So it's on us to provide proof for everything we say, but you don't have to provide shit. That's fair.

I'm going to take a shot in the dark here, and assume that yt would like you to stay off her side. You make even conspiracy theorists look bad.

There's a huge difference between "can't explain the collapse" and "We are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse". One implies they have no idea what happened. The other implies that they don't know evey last detail.

This part is misleading:

http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm

And from the Popular Mechanics article on the collapse of the towers:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...l?page=4#steel

Jones and co. like to argue that fires did not melt the steel, so therefore the towers couldn't have fell, except they fail to take into account the other factors. It didn't need to melt. It just had to lose some of its structural strength.

What Dickson said as well.

I hope this doesn't come off as too snarky, but is there an answer that would satisfy you that isn't a conspiracy? You keep sort of framing this around the idea of "keeping an open mind" but can you conceive of a scientific explanation that would remove all doubt from your mind? Do all these "questions" about 9/11 coalesce into a complete alternate theory? And if they don't, doesn't it make you wonder whether they're just the result of most of us having little more than a high school education in physics?

You're lightly berating us for accepting the "official theory" from the advantage of not having one yourself. Saying things "don't add up" isn't a compelling argument unless they add up to something else.

I don't think you mean to, but some of that comes off sounding of a piece with the intelligent design and creationism advocates who encourage a continued "open debate" on the subject of evolution because we can't completely PROVE that men evolved from apes, and because there are still questions related to evolution that science hasn't 100% solved.

There's nothing wrong with keeping an open mind but at some point a rational mind accepts the weight of scientific evidence in the absence of substantial data to the contrary.

yt, how about my question at post #168 above?

A link to this picture was posted on page 3, yt.




Unless you're asking why the towers didn't lean, tilt or break off from the base of the structure. But why would it do that?

Come on, yt.

The first paragraph is ridiculous, and I refuse to believe you don't recognize that. You're smarter than suggesting that anyone could have a complete picture of what happened that day.

As to the second part, what basis would someone have for the civil lawsuits? If you've done your homework (and much of it is done for you in this very thread) you can see that the building did perform to spec on that day.

Why did they wait to blow the buildings? Could've gotten a lot more fatalities and a lot less questions if they had set the bombs off to blow right after the planes hit.

Then of course, there's also the question why no one in any of the offices ever questioned what these strange bomb packs on the walls were that mysteriously appeared over the weekend.

My apologies in advance for cheapening the discussion.

The Aliens couldn't even knock them fully down either! It must have been Bush! Where's Uncle Cthulhu when you need him?

You can, however, discredit the people that present the evidence and question their motives. And in doing so the reliability of said evidence also comes into question.

You talking about one man's unsubstantiated claims? I'd hardly call that physical evidence... they've never found any thermite at ground zero.

No, but you can certainly question both of those things for the person interpreting the physical evidence. Just because someone can take pictures of pieces of metal and apply CSI-level logic to explain why THIS COULD NOT HAVE BEEN TRUE IF IT WAS TERRORISTS, doesn't mean it's going to blow my mind. These thing are all anecdotal, overly specific, and not even remotely inclusive or contextual enough to actually provide a sound theory. You can't give me one picture of a bent rod, out of hundreds of thousands of tons of rubble, and expect this to shatter my belief in the qualified explanations that have been given and make sense even to a laymen if you put them in context.

Either way. Someone already figured it out for us.

This is so, so unbelievably ridiculous, and one of many reasons why you should read 102 Minutes* like people have been telling you to. Yes, there was probably somebody responsible -- in 1973, and after the fire in '75, and the bombing in '93 -- whose job it was to troubleshoot all possible scenarios. Which still doesn't compensate for a 21st CENTURY 747 FULL OF FUEL CRASHING INTO THE BUILDING AT HIGH SPEED AND ALTITUDE.

I have to be honest, a lot of people are discussing this with you because they like and respect you, but your "an opinion is an opinion!" attitude ain't helping matters.

*Just one fun fact from that book. Because the Towers were developed by the Port Authority, a bistate agency, they were not subject to New York state building codes. Hrum.

Coming from someone who actually saw what the destruction looked like the day after (and trust me, none of you have any idea what the scene was like unless you've seen it in person) and was basically obsessed with it for a while (as I'm sure most people in the city were) I definitely wanted to know what happened and why. I read up everything I could about the case, watched every doc.

I think everyone posting in this thread is curious, it's just that we've all had years and years to do our own research and realize how fucking ridiculous it is to believe a few non-experts, college kids and crackpots when there's so much overwhelming evidence and testimony out there that shows that things really did happen as it appeared. You have to know the conspiracy theorist's side is in the wrong when their bible is Loose fucking Change, a movie originally made as fiction and riddled with inaccuracies and misquotes.

It's funny how you basically imply that people are accepting the official word and blindly following like sheep, when the opposite is true as well. I know people who've seen Loose Change or a Youtube video and just immediately buy into it without looking into the case for themselves.

Trust us and grab 102 Minutes, and read some other sites besides the ones you've been linking to. Do look into this, you'll see why we're being forceful about this.

Not to step on anyone's toes (as I feel weird even talking about 9/11, having not been there but having several close friends who were, and not being able to really fathom what it must have been like...what Alex said about having no idea, basically), but the other side that nobody barely talks about when it comes to these conspiracy theories is that it's incredibly insulting to the people who died. That one about the pilot taking the military exercises and then a year later, his plane crashes into the Pentagon? Give me a fucking break.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta go wash this sand out of my vagina.