9/11

maani wrote: However, now that the shock has worn off, it is incumbent upon us to take a closer look, and see if what we were told is actually what happened.  And contrary to the belief of some members, this is not "conspiracy theory" for conspiracy theory's sake.  It is, in effect, "the people" (including experts in all related fields) doing the investigative work that the government should have done in the first place.  Maybe these alternative theory(ies) are correct, and maybe they are not.  But to simply ignore both the facts and the hard and circumstantial evidence that has been mounting is to put on blinders and bury our heads in the sand. At least one member has accused me of deliberately fomenting "conspiracy-type thinking," with some nefarious intent.  However, I do not pretend to have all the answers, or even some of them.  I am simply providing a forum in which this topic - the movement for which is growing globally at an accelerating pace - can be talked about and debated.

I think the bit you said about looking back is very important. Having blind faith in the government is alot stupider than having "conspiracies for conspiracy theory". I think if all americans were shown conspiracy information before the elections, bush would NOT have been elected president (but in my opinion he cheated again, so...).

Me and a friend of mine looked back about two years ago, because something seemed very wrong with the situation. We're not clever at all, just curios. It took a simple two word search and we had what we were looking for. For me, the "conspiracy theory" makes alot more sense than the official story.

What I found more distrubing than the idea of this conspiracy, is the way Bush pathetically tries to defend himself against movements against him. He passed the "patriot act" which as i see it, goes against everything American democracy ever stood for. Americans simply lost what for so long was thier pride, but no one seems to notice, because of "the great terrorist threat". 

NetsNJFan wrote: ^ but to deny the Arab's opposition to the very idea of Israel is not Anti Semitism is silly.

So Nets.It's the year 2500 and the most powerful country in the world is China.The Native Tribes of America make a plea that their homelands should be restored to them.Along comes China,clears great chunks of real estate and forcably declares the Nation Of United American Tribes on lands formally of residence to Mr & Mrs NetsNJFan.

I reckon you'd be pretty pissed off.....

You see, there you go again. I can hear Israel now: "What do you mean, you don't want us invading your land, displacing your people, occupying the best bits, denying you your own state and killing you if you don't like it? What are you, antisemites, or something??"

Purlease!

To claim that to criticise the state of Israel is tantamount to antisemitism is playing right into Israels hands. It (the state) has been playing the guilt card since its conception, which is why so many nations have felt compelled to turn a blind eye to, or in some cases, (Uncle Sam) actively encourage its totally criminal actions.

And as for their claim, "God promised us this land, so bugger off, its ours!", crap!

maani wrote: Sorry, Tony.  This is not speculation.  And yes, of course I am "taking the word of someone else" since I am not an expert.  However, I am taking the word of quite a number of people who are experts, in fields like construction management, engineering, demolition, vulcanology, metallurgy, and other related fields.  After all, isn't that how we learn anything we don't have personal expertise in?  By reading up on it, finding out what experts say, weighing various experts' credentials and experience, and making an informed determination as to what seems most likely given the evidence? Really.  I know you have better forensic debate skills than simply dismissing something as "speculation." Peace.

Of course it is speculation.If you read my post,I make the observation that:

How many toppling Skyscrapers can anyone have seen? Enough to know how they will behave in any given set of circumstances.How many collapsing Skyscrapers would one need to see in order to become an expert?

Other "experts" disagree with the "experts" you quote, Maani:

 Thomas Eagar is Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Engineering and Engineering Systems at MIT.
The Collapse: An Engineer's Perspective.

Eagar: We had all this extra fuel from the aircraft. Now, there have been fires in skyscrapers before. The Hotel Meridien in Philadelphia had a fire, but it didn't do this kind of damage. The real damage in the World Trade Center resulted from the size of the fire. Each floor was about an acre, and the fire covered the whole floor within a few seconds. Ordinarily, it would take a lot longer. If, say, I have an acre of property, and I start a brushfire in one corner, it might take an hour, even with a good wind, to go from one corner and start burning the other corner.
That's what the designers of the World Trade Center were designing for -- a fire that starts in a wastepaper basket, for instance. By the time it gets to the far corner of the building, it has already burned up all the fuel that was back at the point of origin. So the beams where it started have already started to cool down and regain their strength before you start to weaken the ones on the other side.
On September 11th, the whole floor was damaged all at once, and that's really the cause of the World Trade Center collapse. There was so much fuel spread so quickly that the entire floor got weakened all at once, whereas in a normal fire, people should not think that if there's a fire in a high-rise building that the building will come crashing down. This was a very unusual situation, in which someone dumped 10,000 gallons of jet fuel in an instant.

INTERVIEWER: How high did the temperatures get, and what did that do to the steel columns?

Eagar: The maximum temperature would have been 1,600°F or 1,700°F. It's impossible to generate temperatures much above that in most cases with just normal fuel, in pure air. In fact, I think the World Trade Center fire was probably only 1200°F or 1300°F.
Investigations of fires in other buildings with steel have shown that fires don't usually even melt the aluminum, which melts around 1,200°F. Most fires don't get above 900°F to 1,100°F. The World Trade Center fire did melt some of the aluminum in the aircraft and hence it probably got to 1,300°F or 1,400°F. But that's all it would have taken to trigger the collapse, according to my analysis

INTERVIEWER: You've pointed out that structural steel loses about half its strength at 1,200°F, yet even a 50 percent loss of strength is insufficient, by itself, to explain the collapse.

Eagar: Well, normally the biggest load on this building was the wind load, trying to push it sideways and make it vibrate like a flag in the breeze. The World Trade Center building was designed to withstand a hurricane of about 140 miles an hour, but September 11th wasn't a windy day, so the major loads it was designed for were not on it at the time.....

.......as a result, the World Trade Center, at the time each airplane hit it, was only loaded to about 20 percent of its capacity. That means it had to lose five times its capacity either due to temperature or buckling -- the temperature weakening the steel, the buckling changing the strength of a member because it's bent rather than straight. You can't explain the collapse just in terms of temperature, and you can't explain it just in terms of buckling. It was a combination.

INTERVIEWER: So can you give a sequence of events that likely took place in the structural failure?

Eagar: Well, first you had the impact of the plane, of course, and then this spreading of the fireball all the way across within seconds. Then you had a hot fire, but it wasn't an absolutely uniform fire everywhere. You had a wind blowing, so the smoke was going one way more than another way, which means the heat was going one way more than another way. That caused some of the beams to distort, even at fairly low temperatures. You can permanently distort the beams with a temperature difference of only about 300°F.

INTERVIEWER: You mean one part of a beam is 300°F hotter than another part of the same beam?

Eagar: Exactly. If there was one part of the building in which a beam had a temperature difference of 300°F, then that beam would have become permanently distorted at relatively low temperatures. So instead of being nice and straight, it had a gentle curve. If you press down on a soda straw, you know that if it's perfectly straight, it will support a lot more load than if you start to put a little sideways bend in it. That's what happened in terms of the beams. They were weakened because they were bent by the fire.

But the steel still had plenty of strength, until it reached temperatures of 1,100°F to 1,300°F. In this range, the steel started losing a lot of strength, and the bending became greater. Eventually the steel lost 80 percent of its strength, because of this fire that consumed the whole floor.

If it had only occurred in one little corner, such as a trashcan caught on fire, you might have had to repair that corner, but the whole building wouldn't have come crashing down. The problem was, it was such a widely distributed fire, and then you got this domino effect. Once you started to get angle clips to fail in one area, it put extra load on other angle clips, and then it unzipped around the building on that floor in a matter of seconds.

INTERVIEWER: Many other engineers also feel the weak link was these angle clips, which held the floor trusses between the inner core of columns and the exterior columns. Is that simply because they were much smaller pieces of steel?

Eagar: Exactly. That's the easiest way to look at it. If you look at the whole structure, they are the smallest piece of steel. As everything begins to distort, the smallest piece is going to become the weak link in the chain. They were plenty strong for holding up one truss, but when you lost several trusses, the trusses adjacent to those had to hold two or three times what they were expected to hold.

Those angle clips probably had two or three or four times the strength that they originally needed. They didn't have the same factor-of-five safety as the columns did, but they still had plenty of safety factor to have people and equipment on those floors. It was not that the angle clips were inadequately designed; it was just that there were so many of them that the engineers were able to design them with less safety factor. In a very unusual loading situation like this, they became the weak link.

INTERVIEWER: I've read that the collapse was a near free-fall.

Eagar:

Yes. That's because the forces, it's been estimated, were anywhere from 10 to 100 times greater than an individual floor could support. First of all, you had 10 or 20 floors above that came crashing down. That's about 10 or 20 times the weight you'd ever expect on one angle clip. There's also the impact force, that is, if something hits very hard, there's a bigger force than if you lower it down very gently.

So,different experts have different "opinions"-SPECULATION in my book,if no one can agree.

The point being that no one expert has enough experience of a Skyscraper of this magnitude collapsing.

maani wrote: Barbs: First, this thread is not "going" anywhere.  Nor am I making any "prediction" about the Antichrist, the "end times" or the "second coming."  I'm not even sure where you are getting that from. Second, I never stated that George Bush was a "dumba**."  And even if I believe he is, don't forget that he has surrounded himself with "daddy's" people, who are far from being dumba**es: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, even Rice.  I'm not saying Bush is necessarily a "puppet," though others have said so.  But he, personally, doesn't need to be "smart enough" to "pull off" 9/11: he need only have a vested interest in doing it, and have people around him with an equally vested interest and the ability to pull it off.  There is no question that that is the case here.  Say what you will about Cheney, he is among the greatest strategists of this or any administration.  Rumsfeld is no slouch either. Finally, the Orson Welles broadcast was a "one-off" event that was not only stated (four times during the program) as being a radio play, but within 24-48 hours anyone who wasn't sure at the time found out it was just a radio show.  No one - not Welles, not the radio station, etc. - made an attempt to claim it was anything else. 9/11 was also a "one-off" event (of sorts).  However, in this case, the government came up with their "official story" in less than 48 hours.  And they stuck to that story, dismissing any other scenario at all, despite the fact that not all the evidence was in yet.  That is a very different thing than what Orson Welles did.

OK, I would be the first to admit that Bush's Neo Con appointments could have 'hairraising' consequences, and yes, admittedly they do have the power, the connections, the financial backing to do basically whatever they want, but then really what you are saying is that this is most likely the most powerful government ever assembled in the US or in fact the world.

And, you must admit, anyone who is capable of orchestrating such an abominable act on its own people (A Stalinesque mentality of the ends justifying the means) has all the hallmarks of a very evil personality.

Please, dont forget this either.

(in Australia recently, 3 chinese embassy staff escaped and place themselves in the hands of the Australian govt - and I fear they may hand them back to the Chinese - and one has gone very public in saying that there are appx 2000 chinese spies in Australia alone.)

Spy technology, satellites etc are available to all independent states and who so ever has the capacity and power and desire to use it and the US do have alot of enemies (and difficult borders to protect) so if this were true, surely a foreign government would have picked up something substantial enough to broadcast it across the known universe.
 
Some of the US enemies would like to see nothing better than to bring them down from their superpower status. This includes France, possibly Germany, China etc, probably even Russia and particularly Islamic run states such as Syria, Iran and Lybia who in turn have their own connections and power sources.

Truly to pull off a conspiracy such as this would be, quite possibly, the cleverest evil plan in the history of the world because when we consider how 'big brother' is watching you from every corner of the earth, even if they could think it up and plan it, I can't see how the others could be so incompetent that they wouldn't have picked it up.

Finally, in regard to the Orson Welles thread, it does appear that you hold something of a leftwing view as opposed to the ultra conservatives at least, so it could be deduced that because you do not hold your current leader nor his govt executive in very high regard at all, you may not hold back to much in doing whatever you can to destroy whatever vestige of positive opinion anyone reading these posts might have of him.

Certainly, like paedophilia and such like, once the die is cast, the mud often sticks and this is such a gross accusation that if there is complicity by the US exec govt in this it would have to go down as one of the most abhorrent acts in the history of the western world.

I apologise for judging your motives for posting this thread but it is such a stupendously incredible suggestion that tears at the fabric of so much of what is supposed to be held true about honest and responsible government, by the people for the people, however, if it has any basis in truth, it is almost to FREAKIN SCARY to even think about.

Tony R wrote: gdub411 wrote: Dumb like a fox I say. Ah...the way he disarmed you two with his I'm too stupid to formulate a sentence look....such a clever, clever man he is. You liked the ploy so much-you adopted it as your own....................

damn skippy.

Tony R wrote: NetsNJFan wrote: ^ thanks for the perspective Tony R I really don't think Bush planned these.  Even that arrogant bastard looked pretty shaken after the attacks, not something I think he could fake, hes kind of dumb in my opinion. That crossed my mind too Nets.He looked kind of dumb,but would have rehearsed a more "Presidential" reaction if it was all pre-planned.....

Dumb like a fox I say. Ah...the way he disarmed you two with his I'm too stupid to formulate a sentence look....such a clever, clever man he is.