End of Moussaoui trial may destroy Bush administration

[Straybow]

Originally posted by NeOmega
0.33 x 0.25 = .0825

25% = .25, x .0825 = 0.020625 = about 2% of the building was damaged, but surprise, surprise, the NIST report tried to convey it as about 25%, and only the most discriminating of readers would notice this.

Your math is faulty. When 25% of the depth is "scooped out" of "one face" you don't divide by 4 for the number of faces and then by four again for the depth. The depth scooped out already accounts for the cross section. The part about "one face" just means it didn't wrap around a corner of the building.

The destruction of the lower floors was therefore .33 x .25 = .0833.

However, this is not 1/12 of the structure carefully excized, like an ice-cream scoop taking a chunk out of the side of a chocolate cake. It is a concrete and steel mass, like a sledge hammer, dropping from hundreds of feet above, crashing into the building, tearing out 1/12 of its structure. Structural members that weren't "scooped out" would be damaged in ways only revealed by close inspection.

Furthermore, in the section where 25% of the depth was scooped out, 25% of the structural integrity was gone. If there are load mechanisms to magically transfer load from the end of the building where the damage weakened it to the less damaged opposite end then you would have a point.

Once the damaged end starts to collapse it is all over. The weight of the structure will pull down the rest, more or less into the center of the footprint.

We have seen catasrophic damage to large buildings before,

catastrophic as in Alfred P Murrah, as in the embassies in Kenya, as in buildings in Iraq. They had much greater shocks to their foundations, and yet, they still at least partially stood

Yet this steel framed, American engineered skyscraper, built to withstand 100mph winds and earthquakes, gets some rubble at the southwest corner, and a couple of small fires, and in 7 short hours suddenly collpases in on itself?

Unbelievable!

Once again, the WTC structures were built far more lightly than even contemporary and comparable projects, using advanced load-sharing techniques, etc.

The fires were not "small" just because they didn't engulf the entire structure. One only needs to sufficiently weaken a small area to bring the whole down, if that small area encompasses a significant fraction of the part that wasn't "scooped out."

Murrah building was reinforced concrete, and therefore no comparison can be made. Likewise the Embassy buildings in Kenya, and most of the buildings in Iraq.

[Darius871]

LIES!

[Slaughtermeyer]

Originally posted by Darius871
LIES!

You can't say that about the NIST report about WTC 7 because instead of lying, the NIST simply did not release a report about WTC 7.

http://newyorkmetro.com/news/features/16464/index6.html

And I wouldn't go so far as to call Rumsfeld a liar when he went on the record to say that the Pentagon was hit by a missile and that Flight 93 was shot down:

http://www.democrats.com/node/5056

[Arrian]

"Missile damage" to the Pentagon... sure, in that the plane was used as a missle.

The second quote is even funnier. Here's what he said:

"And I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten -- indeed the word "terrorized" is just that."

When he talks about people shooting down flight 93, he means the hijackers/terrorists. Read the quote in context. He should have used "crashed" instead of shot down, but I think it's clear nonetheless. There is no way a reasonable person should interpret that quote as meaning that the government shot down the plane.

-Arrian

[Imran Siddiqui]

You are not dealing with reasonable people here, Arrian.

[Slaughtermeyer]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
You are not dealing with reasonable people here

You're absolutely right about that, there are people here like Arrian and yourself who ignore evidence as plain as the nose on Osama's face.

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/osamatape.html

[Arrian]

"E" is the one that doesn't seem to match up (crappy image quality, though). The rest all look the same to me.

...

Having checked the link, that's their point: E is the odd man out.

Let us assume for a moment that you are correct and the "Osama confesses" tape was faked (quite possible, I'll grant). This somehow proves that the US government or perfidious Israel was actually behind 9/11?

Um, no. It does not such thing.

-Arrian

[Straybow]

Yeah, Rummy doesn't say, "and a missile..." he says, "as a missile to attack the pentagon..."

[Slaughtermeyer]

Originally posted by Arrian

"E" is the one that doesn't seem to match up (crappy image quality, though). The rest all look the same to me.

The crappy image quality is further evidence that the videotape was faked. I've never seen a videocamera sold that did not have an autofocus feature. Yes, autofocus can be turned off but the only reason to do that is if the scene being filmed has both near and far elements, not the room in which the taping took place in which everything filmed was relatively close to the camera.

Originally posted by Arrian

Let us assume for a moment that you are correct and the "Osama confesses" tape was faked (quite possible, I'll grant). This somehow proves that the US government or perfidious Israel was actually behind 9/11?

It was especially important to have Osama "confess" to 9/11 because people were starting to connect the dots to the real masterminds behind the 9/11 plot. In the words of Chaim Kupferberg:

Perhaps the answer lies in an October 9 bombshell, courtesy of the Times of India:

"While the Pakistani Inter Services Public Relations claimed that former ISI [Pakistani intelligence] director-general Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmad sought retirement after being superseded on Monday, the truth is more shocking. Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Center. The U.S. authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by [Omar Saeed] at the instance of General Mahmud [Ahmad]."

In short, the Times of India revealed that Omar Saeed was acting under the direct orders of the head of Pakistani intelligence and not Osama bin Laden. That in itself could perhaps have been explained away, as it was widely acknowledged that Islamic elements in the ISI were sympathetic to the Taliban and their al-Qaida guests. Yet tracing the "smoking gun" money trail to General Ahmad created an entirely new smoking gun that led straight back to Washington, D.C. - for General Ahmad had already been reported as having breakfast in the nation's capital with Senator Bob Graham and Representative Porter Goss on the morning of September 11 (Both Graham and Goss would go on to co-chair the joint Senate-House 9/11 inquiry). In fact, as early as September 9 - two days before 9/11, for those who didn't notice - Karachi News had weighed in with the following observation:

"ISI Chief Lt-Gen [Mahmud Ahmad's] week-long presence in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council... What added interest to his visit is the history of such visits. Last time Ziauddin Butt, [General Ahmad's] predecessor, was here during Nawaz Sharif's government, the domestic politics turned topsy-turvy within days. That this is not the first visit by [General Ahmad] in the last three months shows the urgency of the ongoing parleys."

If ever there was a paper trail leading to the 9/11 conspirators, these articles provided the print-smeared paving. Taken together, they would conjure up the following plausible scenario: Omar Saeed, acting under the direction of General Ahmad and the ISI, had provided money and "training" (as reported in the Telegraph) to the hijackers while "false-flagging" himself to the hijackers as an operative of al-Qaida. The General, on the other hand, may have represented himself to Omar Saeed as acting exclusively under ISI authority, when in fact he was acting under the direction of his American-Anglo handlers. With Omar Saeed seeding the "legend" of a bona fide money trail leading back to bin Laden, the stage would then be set for Omar Saeed to take the fall as the main patsy providing the smoking gun of al-Qaida complicity for 9/11. Yet at some point, this carefully enacted "legend" began to unravel once Indian intelligence was able to establish (or just mischievously leaked) Saeed's link with General Ahmad, forcing a reluctant FBI - or, alternatively, a cooperative element in the FBI outside of the hermetically compartmentalized loop - to go along and confirm the findings.

Naturally, in the light of the Times of India's Oct. 9 bombshell, somebody would have to organize a prophylactic strategy of damage control.

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP310A.html

[Imran Siddiqui]

Oh Jesus... what possible reason would Washington have to create 9/11 (and wow... an INDIAN newspaper tries to like the PAKISTAN intelligence director to 9/11.. because there is no bad blood between those countries)?

You've been watching too much '24', son, and it's warped your brain.

[Slaughtermeyer]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Oh Jesus... what possible reason would Washington have to create 9/11

I'll let a former Israeli MK describe why Washington was very glad that 9/11 happened, in an article written around the time of "Mission Accomplished Day" in 2003:

http://gush-shalom.org/archives/article242.html

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Slaughtermeyer


I'll let a former Israeli MK describe why Washington was very glad that 9/11 happened, in an article written around the time of "Mission Accomplished Day" in 2003:

http://gush-shalom.org/archives/article242.html

oh please that link has all the impartial credibility of Rush Limbaugh

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Straybow

Originally posted by Ted Striker
You're making a really bad relative comparison

The point here is that technology to withstand plane collisions has been around since before Empire State was built

Each building considering handling airplane collisions of planes larger than their time

How the two compare to each other is irrelevent

Probably a waste of time to reason with conspiracy kooks, but this information should be disseminated anyway.

Wrong. The "technology to withstand plane collisions" was not around when the Empire State Bldg was designed and constructed. I doubt a single thought was given to aircraft collision in its design.

Buildings of that period were seriously "overbuilt" in that they used much heavier steel sections than structurally necessary. This was the result of no computational power to analyze the whole structure. A modern design replicating the ESB would use maybe 2/3 as much steel.

Add to that the practice of using heavy facing which would prevent some (or most, in the case of the B-25) of the debris and fuel from entering the building, thus little fire damage, already mentioned elsewhere.

The theory advanced by the WTC designer was that a collision would only take out a section of the curtain wall. He never considered a full load of fuel spreading out on several floors and down elevator shafts. He never considered the impact knocking fire insulation off the trusses.

There was no dynamic modelling of an impact, transfer of impact load to center columns, reduction of floor truss integrity due to impact distortion, etc. He considered only the structural integrity of the building after a certain number of consecutive curtain wall columns were taken out.

In addition, the 9/11 planes were going nearly twice as fast as anticipated. Heavies in approach zones are restricted to 250 knots, whereas the attackers flew the planes at ~450 knots. That is 3 times the energy. The planes took out far more supports, on both sides of the towers, than anticipated by the designer.

Twin Towers' Designers Anticipated Jet Impacts Like September 11th's

According to Hyman Brown, a University of Colorado civil engineering professor and the World Trade Center's construction manager, 1 and 2 World Trade Center were designed to survive an impact and resulting fires from a collision by the largest commercial aircraft at the time, a Boeing 707-340. 1 Contrary to widely promoted misconceptions, the 767-200s used on 9-11 were only slightly larger than 707s.

Given the differences in cruise speeds, a 707 in normal flight would actually have more kinetic energy than a 767, despite the slightly smaller size. Note the similar fuel capacities of both aircraft. The 767s used on September 11th were estimated to be carrying about 10,000 gallons of fuel each at the time of impact, only about 40% of the capacity of a 707.

Like All Skyscrapers, the Twin Towers Were Over-Engineered

One aspect of engineering that is not widely understood is that structures are over-engineered as a matter of standard practice. Steel structures like bridges and buildings are typically designed to withstand five times anticipated static loads and 3 times anticipated dynamic loads. The anticipated loads are the largest ones expected during the life of the structure, like the worst hurricane or earthquake occurring while the floors are packed with standing-room-only crowds. Given that September 11th was not a windy day, and that there were not throngs of people in the upper floors, the critical load ratio was probably well over 10, meaning that more than nine-tenths of the columns at the same level would have to fail before the weight of the top could have overcome the support capacity of the remaining columns.

There is evidence that the Twin Towers were designed with an even greater measure of reserve strength than typical large buildings. According to the calculations of engineers who worked on the Towers' design, all the columns on one side of a Tower could be cut, as well as the two corners and some of the columns on each adjacent side, and the building would still be strong enough to withstand a 100-mile-per-hour wind. 3

http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/design.html

[Straybow]

9/11 commission already covered all that. I will try to break it down for you. I do have a degree in Civil Engineering and postgrad work (all but thesis) in structural engineering. If I were talking to an engineer about the WTC collapse there are many things I would bring up that I won't waste my time trying to explain to non-engineers.

The "over-engineering" (actually called "factor of safety") mentioned in your cut 'n' paste is not the same as the overbuilding of the ESB I was talking about. If the ESB design were recalculated using techniques and standards contemporary to WTC the beam and column sections employed would be lighter by a significant factor. But that is more of a footnote for comparing the ESB B-25 incident to the WTC attack.

Now take off your tin foil hat and pay attention: it isn't the failure of the columns that initiates collapse, but the failure of flooring truss/connections that initiates collapse.

The first factor in WTC collapse is the open floorplan. Without intermediate loadbearing the entire floor slab can fall once enough floor-to-column connections or truss members near connections fail.

It is a matter of progressive failure. The strength of the floor truss depends on being connected to the columns. The strength of the columns depends on being connected to the floor truss. The strength of the core depends on being connected to the rest of the structure.

With a number of curtain columns knocked out the floor truss is partially unsupported, overstressing the connections near the impact damage. As fire weakens the steel those connections fail. Now the next set of connections are overstressed even more, and failure is more likely. It is like a slow motion unzipping of the floor from the supporting columns.

The second important factor in WTC collapse: Original design did not account for fireproofing being knocked off by the impact, negating their analysis of fire resistance. The degradation of fireproof cladding meant the burning floors collapsed more easily than expected.

Do either of these factors guarantee collapse? No, but that is the critical path of collapse. Column strength had no effect on WTC collapse.

If enough floors collapse the columns fail elastically by buckling. They are designed to be braced by the floors to prevent buckling. Once that critical unbraced length is passed the columns buckle, placing great stresses on floor-column connections of floors below, essentially guaranteeing that floors not weakened by fire will collapse under the weight of the floors falling from above.

[chequita guevara]

What Strawbow said.