End of Moussaoui trial may destroy Bush administration

[Geronimo]

Also for those convinced that the collapse looked too perfect take a look again at this picture:




To me that sure looks damn precarious for an engineered collapse. Also keep in mind that no engineered collapse of a building begins near the top as this does. Rather they are designed to make the building implode as much as possible. furthermore it would have been asking quite a lot to get the engineers who wired the building for demolition and the pilots of the planes to manage to coordinate their efforts in just such a way that the engineered collapse would initiate precisely at the floors where the planes had hit. It seems impossible to have planned.


Of course none of this addresses wtc7 but the important thing to establish is that the planes did in fact bring down wtc 1 and wtc 2

[Arrian]

But they MADE it that way, so it wouldn't look too suspicious! Only the really smart people could figure it out!



-Arrian

[chequita guevara]

It wasn't the fuel from the planes that brought the buildings down. That burned out relatively quickly. It was the sustained fire from all of the office equipment.

[OzzyKP]

Well the conspiracy theorists may be on to something. I heard that there was a design flaw in the WTC that caused it to collapse like it did. Other buildings aparently could have withstood the impact and fire from the planes. So clearly the builders were in on it and had this plotted out for decades.

You're all just afraid of the truth.

[Ted Striker]

The collapse of 7 however is so good it's textbook, it fell down into it's own tidy footprint:

http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/wtc/rubblepile.html

[Ted Striker]

Bleh my hotlink got pwn3d

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Ted Striker
The collapse of 7 however is so good it's textbook, it fell down into it's own tidy footprint:

http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/wtc/rubblepile.html

Well, I read through that very long presentation you linked. did you even look at the picture i posted? It sure as hell doesn't look anything like a controlled engineered explosion when it initiates. Can you honestly say that the collapse looked even remotely under control in that picture? The point at which the collapse initiates and when an engineered collapse tends to be most tightly under control?

Neither you nor the author seem to examine the issue of how the engineers who demolished wtc 1 and wtc 2 managed to coordinate their demolition with the pilots of the planes to ensure the collapse would initiate in both cases where the planes impacted.

The author nearly lost me early on when he wastes time talking about the melting points of steel. Nobody said the trusses melted and that caused them to fail. jeezus. It has always been noted that the fire *softened* the steel. Even a blacksmith can do that.


Also the author pretends that wtc 1 and wtc 2 relied on their cores as a major weight bearing structure when in fact from the moment the ink dried on the plans for these buildings it has been public knowledge that they made use of a (then novel) tubular design in which the loads would be borne by the exterior columns of the building. In no way was the core built to take that load off of the exterior columns.

And the building falls mostly into the foot print because as has been stated many times in this thread it is *very* difficult to get the bulk of a collpasing skyscraper to go anywhere else. The collapse was about as messy and destructive and chaotic as any a building of its size and design can produce.

Pages 39-42 of your link were interesting:

Evidence Surviving the Cleanup Operation

Although the physical evidence was destroyed, photographic, video, and eyewitness evidence survives.

This evidence shows:

* Dust and fragments were ejected from the towers at high velocities.
* The tops of the towers exploded into descending mushrooming clouds of dust.
* The mushrooming dust clouds remained centered as they devoured the towers.
* The dust clouds grew to volumes several times the buildings' volumes, and covered Lower Manhattan with dust.
* The non-metallic components of the towers and their contents were pulverized to sub-100-micron dust.
* The steel superstructures were shredded.
* Intense heat in the basements melted the foundations of the core columns.
Explosive Ejections of Dust and Pieces

* Thick dust clouds spewed from towers in all directions, at around 50 feet/second.
* Solid objects were thrown ahead of the dust -- a feature of explosive demolition.
* The steel was thoroughly cleansed of its spray-on insulation.
* Some pieces of the perimeter wall were thrown laterally 500 feet.
* Aluminum cladding was blown 500 feet in all directions.
* Blast waves broke hundreds of windows in buildings over 400 feet away.
Demolition Squibs

* Energetic ejections of dust (squibs) occurred below the rapidly descending demolition wave in each tower.
* Squibs appear at regular intervals about 10 floors below demolition waves.
* Squib velocities exceed 200 feet/second.

Smooth Waves of Destruction Consumed The Towers

Each tower exploded in a smooth wave -- not discrete explosions.
A continuous wave of explosive destruction moved down each tower, starting around the crash zone.

* It took 15 seconds for the demolition wave to reach the ground, in each tower.
* It sounded like a crashing ocean wave.

Everything the author describes including the "demolition squibs" is far more consistent with accidental collapses than engineered collapse. A "smooth wave of destruction" is all you're going to be able to get with the offical explanation but if we want to assume the building was wired for demolition after having airplanes crash into it a smooth wave of destruction is not what you'd expect to get.

Some Proofs of Demolition

1. The towers' concrete was pulverized in the air.
2. The steel superstructures of the towers provided no more resistance to the falling rubble than air.
3. The expansion rate of the dust clouds produced by the collapses indicates heat energy far in excess of gravitational energy.
4. The South Tower's top shattered before falling into intact structure.

Proofs 1 and 2 require only common sense. Proof 3 uses basic thermodynamics, and Proof 4 uses basic mechanics.

1. A collapse is certainly capalbe of pulverizing concrete. good god this even happens in far less energetic collapses of smaller structures.

2. This will happen with anything. stomp on a beer can. it will collapse as fast as air. All you need to provide no more resistance than air is an instaneous load that the structure cannot bear. The only way you get signs of 'resistance' would be if continual deformation was the mode of failure rather than simple immediate displacement.

3. PV = nRT is is totally inappropriate to apply to the dust and debris cloud. More and more this link begins to remind me of moon hoax bs. It makes a lot of weird bald faced assertions like this.

4. Actually again this is what would be predicted by the official explanation. Look at the picture I posted and see if you can understand why the top would soon disintigrate.

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Geronimo

Well, I read through that very long presentation you linked. did you even look at the picture i posted?
It sure as hell doesn't look anything like a controlled engineered explosion when it initiates. Can you honestly say that the collapse looked even remotely under control in that picture? The point at which the collapse initiates and when an engineered collapse tends to be most tightly under control?

Neither you nor the author seem to examine the issue of how the engineers who demolished wtc 1 and wtc 2 managed to coordinate their demolition with the pilots of the planes to ensure the collapse would initiate in both cases where the planes impacted.

Hold on there Turbo. Here's another example of the blank endorsement crap. I linked his page to show a PICTURE of Tower 7. I didn't say I agreed with everything he is saying. I posted an image link and it wouldn't show up so I posted the URL instead.

Your question is valid. On the other hand remember that the towers were hit a long time before they came down. It wasn't as if the planes hit and then they came down instantly.

The author nearly lost me early on when he wastes time talking about the melting points of steel. Nobody said the trusses melted and that caused them to fail. jeezus. It has always been noted that the fire *softened* the steel. Even a blacksmith can do that.

The point he was making is the OPPOSITE of what you are suggesting. He's suggesting the fire was NOT hot enough to melt steel, and the only thing that could have burned steel were demolition charges.

But back to tower 7, the NIST report is pretty much clueless as to how it came down. I linked the exact notes of it directly from a .gov website.

[DinoDoc]

Why do people even bother? When you try to pin him down on the specifics of what he quite clearly believes otherwise he wouldn't keep linking to sites that espouse it or keep agreeing with Slaughtermeyer he retreats into a cacoon of "What? I don't believe that. It'd be crazy!" Rational thought just rolls off him like water off a duck.

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Geronimo
Straybow, under what conditions might we expect a modern skyscraper to fall in a manner other than more or less straight down? I've been told (not in this forum) that buildings can at least hypothetically "fall over" rather than falling more or less straight down but I've also seen it claimed that skyscrapers can't really be made to do anything of the sort.

Take out about half the structure near the bottom and the weight will cause it to topple to the side. In general, gravity makes things fall down, not over. Structural integrity holds it together and forces it to pivot like an inverse pendulum.

But tall structures don't fall like trees. It will accelerate as though pulled by its weight acting through the center of mass. The tower will bend and exceed the tensile strength of connections and break apart. The fracture mode tends to cancel the angular momentum of the top portion. The top portion retains some sideways velocity, but no lateral or angular acceleration.

I've searched unsuccessfully for footage of smokestack collapses that shows how masonry structures tend to fracture about 1/3rd of the way up. A steel structure might break at a different location due to greater tensile strength.

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
They would have to be hit with something really massive to knock them over. If you look at the demolition of the Sands, IIRC, it fell over, but not really very far. When the structural integrity goes out of the bottom, everything else just seems to collapse, rather than holding together and falling over as one large piece.

That's what controlled demolition does: the point is to break it up into small pieces so it is easier to remove the debris. If only the bottom edge were blown out it would more closely resemble a topple.

But to "knock them [WTC Towers] over" is virtually impossible. As the impact force rises the individual members fail locally. It will shear off the top before it knocks the whole structure over.

[Lorizael]

What prevents me from believing any of the conspiracy theories about 9/11 (other than the absolute dearth of evidence supporting them) is that no one on the inside has come out to reveal the truth.

In order to orchestrate such a devious plan effectively, it would involves hundreds, if not thousands of little people that are simply working for the administration, and are not the administration itself.

What are the odds that no one would have come forward to say... I received orders to do this or... I have evidence that an associate of mine did this or... something. Why is there absolutely no evidence of the people involved in this conspiracy, as opposed to the administration?

Unless, of course, the conspiracy theorists think that Dubbaya and Dick personally visited the towers to plant the bombs.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Ted Striker
the NIST report is pretty much clueless as to how it came down.

Huh?







Disagree with their assessment or think up some "unanswered questions" if you like, but they're hardly clueless.

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Ted Striker

You prefer to believe that somebody somehow placed thousands of demolition charges ahead of time and selectively detonated the ones that would make it look like the aircraft impact were the cause. Or maybe somebody went to the burning floors (that most of the people couldn't escape) and planted hundreds of demolition charges to finish the job started by the aircraft...

This is another example of what I call writing a blank endorsement check for something I have never even discussed. Also known as a strawman. Care to quote where I ever mentioned demolition charges?

Well, if you would care to elucidate how the building collapsed without demolition charges if the plane impact damage was insufficient, then we'd know what you believe. As it is, you keep pointing to kook websites and then saying, "That's not what I believe, but they've got a point." No, they don't. You kinda hafta take the whole or write them off.

However, the big difference in opinion between the "official" story and the "conspiracy" one is whether or not the supporting floor trusses on the upper levels weakening was enough to bring the core (which was unbelievable strong) down.

There is a case to be made that core would have remained intact, even after the plane slammed into it.

Here again, we are at the point of where you keep saying you understand the conclusions of the 9/11 Committee report, but then you show you don't.

The core did remain intact after the impact. Failure of the core was not the failure mode.

As I said before, the strength of the core depends on being connected to the outer columns by the floor trusses. Remove a few floors and the core can collapse under the weight of the intact structure above.

Any columnar structure has a length ratio l/r, where r is "radius of gyration." In the simplest case of a circular tube with negligible wall thickness r is the radius tube. The critical l/r depends on material strength and a few minor factors. A very tall column must be braced laterally at intervals less than l/r.

Once the unbraced length of the core exceeds that l/r it buckles under very little load. The material doesn't fail, the structure fails. The difference between material failure and structural failure is often lost on engineering students, and we generally don't expect non-engr types to grasp it quickly.

It seems people who are not educated about material and structural behavior are quick to point to conspiracy theories to fill in the gaps, instead of seeking to understand the engineering fundamentals to fill in the gaps.

The building was designed for multiple 707 impacts. Multiple. Nobody has provided an answer for that. Oh but the fireproofing got knocked off they probably forgot about that when designing it.

No, once again the building was designed to withstand the estimated forces of initial impact and the assumed structural damage. To model the behavior of the structure under those forces was quite beyond the best computers of the day.

They limited the temperature of the fires to the temperature of an open jetfuel flame. They didn't account for the amount of flammable material and the higher temperatures of those flames. They didn't account for the failure of sprinklers to control fires, the fanning of the flames by winds, the "forge effect" where partitions and debris create hotspots that substantially exceed open flame temperatures.

Why? Because building codes and engineers assumed that paper products, wood furniture, wool carpets, etc with lower flame temperatures would be the primary fuel once the jet fuel burned out. Building codes and engineers do not design under the assumption that fire protection fails. They could, and double the cost of the building.

If they believed fireproofing on the floor trusses might not remain intact they would have changed that specification. But that doesn't mean they were correct in every assumption about impact forces and the integrity of the fireproofing material over time.

The overall picture is that the WTC Towers might have survived if fire protection and fire fighting had been successful in the first hour or two. It didn't work so easily in real life.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Lorizael
What prevents me from believing any of the conspiracy theories about 9/11 (other than the absolute dearth of evidence supporting them) is that no one on the inside has come out to reveal the truth.

In order to orchestrate such a devious plan effectively, it would involves hundreds, if not thousands of little people that are simply working for the administration, and are not the administration itself.

What are the odds that no one would have come forward to say... I received orders to do this or... I have evidence that an associate of mine did this or... something. Why is there absolutely no evidence of the people involved in this conspiracy, as opposed to the administration?

All you'd need to do to prevent this is:

A) Be careful enough to recruit people sincerely committed to your cause
B) Adequately brainwash them so they wouldn't be capable of leaking
C) Threaten them with months of the most gruesome torture imaginable if they talk, and implant neurotoxin capsules in them that can be activated at the push of a button just in case they can't be apprehended in time
D) Just in case they end up being unafraid of torture & death, also threaten their families & friends with the same
E) Force them to engage in humiliating sexual acts on tape so you have blackmail leverage against them to prevent a leak and/or can damage their credibility after the fact
F) Surveil participants thoroughly enough to pick up any warning signs that they might blow the whistle and off them first
G) Give such pawns simple tasks with only need-to-know information, so that if they do indeed defect only a miniscule branch of your operation is compromised
H) Adequately brainwash the population through corporate media conglomerates so they naturally write off such supposed whistleblowers as crazed conspiracy theorists
I) Use a "muddy the water" technique where conspirators deliberately disseminate particularly ridiculous theories in the online conspiracy theorist community, which when debunked tend to discredit said theorists as an entire group and make average people even more averse to whistleblowers

That's just a few ideas off the top of my head. For all we know, "they" have acquired mind control devices of extraterrestrial origin that make whistleblowers quite literally impossible.

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by Darius871


All you'd need to do to prevent this is:

A) Be careful enough to recruit people sincerely committed to your cause
B) Adequately brainwash them so they wouldn't be capable of leaking
C) Threaten them with months of the most gruesome torture imaginable if they talk, and implant neurotoxin capsules in them that can be activated at the push of a button just in case they can't be apprehended in time
D) Just in case they end up being unafraid of torture & death, also threaten their families & friends with the same
E) Force them to engage in humiliating sexual acts on tape so you have blackmail leverage against them to prevent a leak and/or can damage their credibility after the fact
F) Surveil participants thoroughly enough to pick up any warning signs that they might blow the whistle and off them first

That's just a few ideas off the top of my head. For all we know, "they" have acquired mind control devices of extraterrestrial origin that make whistleblowers quite literally impossible.

Silly me. How could I have overlooked that.