9/11 – INSIDE JOB? – OPEN THREAD

Brad:
Did you know that Reagan National is less than 1 mile from the Pentagon and has a runway pointed right at its NE corner? Andrews AFB is DCANG and other units, not NORAD, and the only NORAD armed and fueled standby fighters close to the Pentagon were the 2 F-16s at Langley. AA 77’s transponder was off and it was flying low, so it was lost by ATC for ~1/2 hour, and the 2 Langley fighters went east around the DC traffic and then north to get to NYC where the first 2 attacks had already occurred.

As for your “highly engineered, multilayered, nanothermite-composite materials” BS, some nutjobs found sulfur, rust, silicon, and aluminum in some WTC dust samples, and concluded that it all “reminded” them of nano-thermite, although they provided no exemplars of anything for comparison.

I have studiously ignored this thread so far. I suspect the last few comments are representative of the whole. Admin wins, truther nutjobs lose. Surprise surprise.

The impact of planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the buildings down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank DeMartini, the project manager, has observed), the planes alleged to have hit were similar to those they were designed to withstand, and the buildings continued to stand after those impacts with negligible effects.
Most of the jet fuel, principally kerosene, burned up in those fireballs in the first fifteen seconds or so. Below the 96th floor in the North Tower and the 80th in the South, those buildings were stone cold steel, unaffected by any fires at all other than some very modest office fires that burned around 500 degrees F, which functioned as a massive heat sink dissipating the heat from building up on the steel.

The melting point of steel at 2,800 degrees F is about 1,000 degrees higher than the maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed 1,800 degrees under optimal conditions; but the NIST examined 236 samples of steel and found that 233 had not been exposed to temperatures above 500 degrees F and the others not above 1200.

Underwriters Laboratory certified the steel in the buildings up to 2,000 degrees F for three or four hours without any significant effects, where these fires burned neither long enough or hot enough—at an average temperature of about 500 degrees for about one hour in the South Tower and one and a half in the North—to weaken, much less melt.

If the steel had melted or weakened, then the affected floors would have displayed completely different behavior, with some degree of asymmetrical sagging and tilting, which would have been gradual and slow, not the complete, abrupt and total demolition that was observed. Which means the NIST cannot even explain the initiation of any “collapse” sequence.
The top 30 floors of the South Tower pivoted and began to fall to the side, when the floors beneath gave way. So it was not even in the position to exert downward pressure on the lower 80 floors. A high-school physics teacher, Charles Boldwyn, moreover, has calculated that, if you take the top 16 floors of the North Tower as one unit of downward force, there were 199 units of upward force to counteract it.

William Rodriguez, who was the senior custodian in the North Tower and the last man to leave the building, has reported massive explosions in the sub-basements that effected extensive destruction, including the demolition of a fifty-ton hydraulic press and the ripping of the skin off a fellow worker, where they filled with water that drained the sprinkler system.

Rodriguez observed that the explosion occurred prior to reverberations from upper floors, a claim that has now been substantiated in a new study by Craig Furlong and Gordon Ross, “Seismic Proof: 9/11 Was an Inside Job,” demonstrating that these explosions actually took place as much as 14 and 17 seconds before the presumptive airplane impacts.

Heavy-steel-construction buildings like the Twin Towers are not generally capable of “pancake collapse,” which normally occurs only with concrete structures of “lift slab” construction and could not occur in redundant welded-steel buildings, such as the towers, unless every supporting column were removed at the same time, floor by floor, as Charles Pegelow, a structural engineer, has observed.

The demolition of the two towers in about 10 seconds apiece is very close to the speed of free fall with only air resistance, which Judy Wood, Ph.D., formerly a professor of mechanical engineering, has observed is an astounding result that would be impossible without extremely powerful sources of energy. If they were collapsing, they would have had to fall through their points of greatest resistance.

Indeed, the towers are exploding from the top, not collapsing to the ground, where their floors do not move, a phenomenon Wood has likened to two gigantic trees turning to sawdust from the top down, which, like the pulverization of the buildings, the government’s account cannot possibly explain. There were no pancakes.

WTC-7 came down in a classic controlled demolition. A complete, abrupt and total collapse into its own footprint, where the floors are all falling at the same time, yielding a stack of pancakes about 5 floors high. Had the Twin Towers collapsed like WTC-7, there would have been two stacks of “pancakes” equal to about 12% the height of the buildings or around 15 floors high. But they were actually reduced to below ground level. Since there were no “pancakes”, there cannot have been any “pancake collapse” of either building, where the buildings were destroyed by different modes of demolition.

The Pentagon’s own videotapes do not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building, at 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 77-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present and easily visible; it was not, which means that the video evidence also contradicts the official account.

The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectory physically impossible which means that the official account is not even aerodynamically possible.

If Flight 93 crashed into an abandoned mine shaft, as the government maintains, then they should have brought out the heavy equipment and the bright lights and dug and dug, 24/7, in the hope that, by some miracle, someone might possibly have survived. But nothing like that was done. Even the singed trees and shrubs were trimmed, apparently to make it impossible to subject them to chemical analysis.

There is more, especially about the alleged hijackers, including that they were not competent to fly these planes and their names are not on any original, authenticated passenger manifest. Several have turned up alive and well and living in the Middle East. The government has not even produced their tickets as evidence that they were even aboard the aircraft they are alleged to have hijacked.

President Bush recently acknowledged that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The Senate Intelligence Committee has reported that Saddam was not in cahoots with Al Qaeda. And the FBI has acknowledged that it has “no hard evidence” to tie Osama to 9/11.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv7BImVvEyk

Why thousands of Co-conspirators? The Arabs did it with 19 untrained professionals that lived in a sand huts.

ONE, TWO, THREE? The world may never know?

Thirty minutes after the second tower was hit and the airspace above the Pentagon was NOT impenetrable – way to go military!

Meanwhile Stuckey and Admin prove nothing, but their arrogance. 9/11 is the day of a million miracles, and your acceptable answers for the unanswered questions are just as ridiculous.

Do you people ever think?
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What do people that “think” come to understand when they realize that 30 minutes after the second tower was hit the airspace above the Pentagon was still wide open?

The Only argument I can provide with certainty is that the attacks should have been prevented. The rest is just speculation on my part.