The Day Before 9-11

[chequita guevara]

Everybody knew a big attack on the US by al Qaeda was coming, except, apparently, the morons in charge of our government, even though nearly every country on the planet was warning them. I mean, even Cuba was telling the U.S. they had heard something.

But controlled demolition? Only a moron would believe that.

[RoboCon]

I think he had an overflow error in his random text generator.

Thanks for the flame, loinburger. If the time to steal. "Look at me, I hear a different opinion on a typically liberal message board so often stop and look!" If you pass a poster or poster a message that they do not want to try to create. Only destroy. Like you.

Often there are different sizes. Sometimes people back to normal, but ended without any changes. Such is the way with liberals. Build your strawman is all vandalizes can not refuse. Then when your logic betrays you and I spam, and even ridiculously way to find interesting is important for the urgent problems and serious. He and a small choir and his democraticunderground befriends bitter experience. 9-11 online indeed.

I am aware of all internet traditions!

[Guynemer]

He forgot to say 9-11 changed everything. Call tech support.

[Solomwi]

Unbelievable!

[Ben Kenobi]

Gaymarriagegaymarriagegaymarriage!

You rang?

Funny how Robocon is discussing my non-existant point.

Why would I argue with KH about truthers? I think they are nuts.

I don't mind arguing with Half Lotus if he'll put his thesis out as to precisely why and how the US government committed a conspiracy on 9-11.

The 'controlled' demolition aspect had to do with the fact that once the supports finally gave, the whole tower collapsed. Just as elok tried to explain, the tower is designed to hold the static weight of all the floors above it. Once the tower collapses where the planes hit, the falling floors stack up on each other and crush the floors below.

TBH, they are very fortunate the towers held up as long as they did, and they were able to evacuate almost everyone below the first tower hit, and almost all in the second tower.

[Berzerker]

I don't mind arguing with Half Lotus if he'll put his thesis out as to precisely why and how the US government committed a conspiracy on 9-11.

The 'controlled' demolition aspect had to do with the fact that once the supports finally gave, the whole tower collapsed. Just as elok tried to explain, the tower is designed to hold the static weight of all the floors above it. Once the tower collapses where the planes hit, the falling floors stack up on each other and crush the floors below.

I remember watching it in slow motion on Nova and you could see the top just give way leading to the pancake effect. Demolitions bring buildings down in "unison", those buildings fell top down.

[SlowwHand]

Could you cite a reference that discusses in advance a situation where an airplane is parked, very near the top?
If the floor drops where the plane is parked, what is the theory on what the floors above do? Might they drop?

[Darius871]

Your definition of conversation is as loose as Rah's of debate - first 5 pages are entirely trolls.

If there's anything worth a **** on pages 6-15 let me know.

It gets better around page 8 onward.

[Elok]

I remember watching it in slow motion on Nova and you could see the top just give way leading to the pancake effect. Demolitions bring buildings down in "unison", those buildings fell top down.

And that's the nail in the coffin, HL. Your conspiracy theory is so utterly loony that even Berz doesn't believe it.

[HalfLotus]

The problem with the 'pancake' theory is it doesn't explain the free-fall collapse. i.e. total structural failure of nearly the entire structural support system. How does that happen when the fires were limited to a handful floors? It doesn't.

Even if you accept the extremely unlikely notion that fires caused total failures on the floor they affected, it doesn't even remotely explain the free-fall collapse of over a hundred floors. As floors 'pancake' down, the floors below (unaffected by fire) provide substantial resistance, and slow the collapse.

I've seen the Nova animations. My professional expertise is in Structural Computer Modeling (going on 20+ years now), and I know that it is very easy to 'fake' structural impossibilities in a digital model which fool clients and even architects.

And it is extremely easy to fool people who find it almost impossible to believe that their government might not give a **** about their lives.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Why would I argue with KH about truthers? I think they are nuts.

No, silly, HL. No one was hoping you'd argue with KH about truther delusions.

[Ming]

And it is extremely easy to fool people who find it almost impossible to believe that their government might not give a **** about their lives.

Spoken by the person that believes the crazy conspiracy theory

But assume you are right about the government being behind the attack, just for the sake of argument.
Ask youself... why the government would attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon? Why risk destroying the American Financial Community (which did crippled American Business and it's Economy) and the military, when there were far more similar targets they could hit that would have the same effect, kill enough people, and accomplish what they wanted? If the government was SOOOOO smart to pull something like this off for their complex reasons, why not hit something that would do less damage to the United States. Why not Chicago... Why not kill those liberals in California, Boston, or any other major city.

The whole conspiracy theory falls apart when you it view it like this. But then again, I guess it is extremely easy to fool people who are looking for crazy consipiracy theories

[Elok]

The problem with the 'pancake' theory is it doesn't explain the free-fall collapse. i.e. total structural failure of nearly the entire structural support system. How does that happen when the fires were limited to a handful floors? It doesn't.

Even if you accept the extremely unlikely notion that fires caused total failures on the floor they affected, it doesn't even remotely explain the free-fall collapse of over a hundred floors. As floors 'pancake' down, the floors below (unaffected by fire) provide substantial resistance, and slow the collapse.

I've seen the Nova animations. My professional expertise is in Structural Computer Modeling (going on 20+ years now), and I know that it is very easy to 'fake' structural impossibilities in a digital model which fool clients and even architects.

And it is extremely easy to fool people who find it almost impossible to believe that their government might not give a **** about their lives.

Well, I don't know a lot about the support system used by the towers, but if you assume that the supports failed at the highest possible point on each tower (I believe it was the 95th floor on one of them), you're still talking about fifteen floors or so suddenly falling down onto one. I don't think the video footage ever manages to do justice to what an incredibly heavy hunk of crud that must have been. Probably a few hundred tons at the least, depending on what all they were made of. Steel beams and concrete, no? HEAVY! And as floor after floor gave way, the mass involved just grew and grew. First fifteen floors fall, then sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen...I can easily picture the momentum imparted by the increased weight overcoming the (in any case pretty negligible, given the weight we're talking here) resistance of each individual floor. The floors might as well have been held up by toothpicks once that chain reaction started.

Of course, I'm not an engineer or anything. My main reason for disbelieving your pet theory is that it relies on the Bush administration, the most spectacular ****ups to disgrace the WH in my lifetime, if not my parents', somehow managing to keep the largest and most outrageous act of treason in American history a total secret. There's also the bit about buildings wired with high explosives taking half an hour to collapse after a direct hit by a jumbo jet.

[HalfLotus]

Fair enough, but the load bearing capacities of the middle and lower floors of WTC 1 & 2 are extremely high; buildings are always "over-engineered" in case of partial structural failure. They do not simply 'give way' when upper floors collapse - they do provide resistance - and are designed to carry those loads.

A free-fall collapse would require total failure of nearly the entire building.

And as you can see in some videos, the collapse of the upper floors was not symmetrical. You see them totter to the side (likely due to the airplane impact taking out structural columns on some floors), yet the failure of everything below was symmetrical. Another unexplained anomaly.

It's interesting that this all has to be theorized, because of course we all know that fire has never caused even partial collapse of a steel structure.

Look at this video of the TVCC building in Beijing on fire.

The entire ****ing think burns like hell on hearth, and not even a partial structural collapse. There are several other such videos on the web, I encourage you to watch them

Now contrast with that partial building fires in WTC causing total structural failure. And consider WTC 7 which had sporadic fires on a few floors, no airplane impact, and experienced total symmetrical failure throughout the building. It is a textbook demolition.

As for the Bush administration, I think they had very little to do with the planning and execution. You call them failures, which they were, but government failure is selective. They suck at delivering mail, for instance, but they managed to take over an entire country, Iraq, in two weeks. Not a small feat. (Guerrilla resistance is another story)

The execution of the 9/11 conspiracy can mostly likely be attributed to intelligence agencies which are very competent organizations in terms of mission execution and keeping secrets.

I think you'd be giving us peons far too much credit if you think they aren't keeping a very large amount of big secrets from us.

[drake]

As to the op, more believable than any complex conspiracy theory, is that the government simply ignored the intelligence and warnings and allowed the attack to happen, rather than participated directly. There is a lot more plausibility and evidence to support that type of theory.