Posted on 12/10/2006 9:34:51 PM PST by doug from upland
NOTE: if you have not read this, it is the best comprehensive debunking of the fools running around this country who live in a fantasty world.
FROM THE MOMENT the first airplane crashed into the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, the world has asked one simple and compelling question: How could it happen?
Three and a half years later, not everyone is convinced we know the truth. Go to Google.com, type in the search phrase "World Trade Center conspiracy" and you'll get links to an estimated 628,000 Web sites. More than 3000 books on 9/11 have been published; many of them reject the official consensus that hijackers associated with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda flew passenger planes into U.S. landmarks.
Healthy skepticism, it seems, has curdled into paranoia. Wild conspiracy tales are peddled daily on the Internet, talk radio and in other media. Blurry photos, quotes taken out of context and sketchy eyewitness accounts have inspired a slew of elaborate theories: The Pentagon was struck by a missile; the World Trade Center was razed by demolition-style bombs; Flight 93 was shot down by a mysterious white jet. As outlandish as these claims may sound, they are increasingly accepted abroad and among extremists here in the United States.
To investigate 16 of the most prevalent claims made by conspiracy theorists, POPULAR MECHANICS assembled a team of nine researchers and reporters who, together with PM editors, consulted more than 70 professionals in fields that form the core content of this magazine, including aviation, engineering and the military.
In the end, we were able to debunk each of these assertions with hard evidence and a healthy dose of common sense. We learned that a few theories are based on something as innocent as a reporting error on that chaotic day. Others are the byproducts of cynical imaginations that aim to inject suspicion and animosity into public debate. Only by confronting such poisonous claims with irrefutable facts can we understand what really happened on a day that is forever seared into world history.--THE EDITORS
On a previous thread, a total whackjob from Canada had recorded several calls in which he was screaming at authorities and demanding answers. I actually called him, and he admitted he was on leave from his job and has to take psychiatric tests.
No, let him live in his world.
"Melted" Steel
CLAIM: "We have been lied to," announces the Web site AttackOnAmerica.net. "The first lie was that the load of fuel from the aircraft was the cause of structural failure. No kerosene fire can burn hot enough to melt steel." The posting is entitled "Proof Of Controlled Demolition At The WTC."
FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength--and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."
"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.
But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.
"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."
We sadly had a good friend who fell for this. He kept asking us if we could handle the truth. I checked up on some of the links that he gave us, and the information he quoted on some of the websites had been retracted. The websites posted a second article saying the original information was not true.
Our friend has a family history of mental illness, and we are very concerned for him. We're thinking he has started with having problems of his own. He is willing to believe anything about President Bush and started calling him "evil."
I read this book, got a copy from the library. I was carrying it with me, wondering if I should talk about it to him. He saw the title and never spoke on the subject to us again.
This book is believable, names sources. I am grateful that it was written.
I didn't believe all the things our friend was saying, but didn't have the information to refute it.
He even believed that President Bush had a satellite weapon that controlled bad weather and hurricanes. The year that Katrina hit, a storm hit South America which had never happened before, and a storm hit Europe. In addition to Katrina and all the others in the gulf that year. It had to be President Bush, and couldn't be another person or government.
I'm starting to think none of this stuff matters, frankly. The kooks appear to be winning, and by the end of the decade, 9/11 will be "a big question mark"--the MSM will ignore facts and push "feelings" about 9/11, because that's what the Public believes (the Public being the morons at DU, which the MSM is only too happy to feed).
Doug, I'm with you but why did it take the time to get the jets in the air all the way from Florida rather than Mass. but only took a fraction of this time to follow Stewart Payne's plane & why were the short sales of AA covered up, etc. Why did bld #5 collapse? Something needs more explaination.
Why don't you know that Popular Mechanics is only a shill for the bush's?
It is one thing to have a healthy distrust about Govt encroachment, it is quite another to believe that:
"Explosives were pre planted in the WTC"
IMO, they are sadder than kooks, they are self delusional.
Looks like a good reference. Still reading, but the more I read, the better it sounds :-) Thanks for posting it, DFU.
Yes, I know it has been posted. Drudge had David Lynch on tonight and brought up the conspiracy again. I thought it was time to bring this back for those who missed it. Let the trolls have their fun. They don't have a life, so having a little fun is fine.
You'll have to ask Alex Jones.
I'm not familiar w/ David Lynch. Is he one of the sane guys or one of the insane?
One thing about 911.....what caused Buildng #7 to collapse?
Any ideas?
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
WTC 7 Collapse
CLAIM: Seven hours after the two towers fell, the 47-story WTC 7 collapsed. According to 911review.org: "The video clearly shows that it was not a collapse subsequent to a fire, but rather a controlled demolition: amongst the Internet investigators, the jury is in on this one."
FACT: Many conspiracy theorists point to FEMA's preliminary report, which said there was relatively light damage to WTC 7 prior to its collapse. With the benefit of more time and resources, NIST researchers now support the working hypothesis that WTC 7 was far more compromised by falling debris than the FEMA report indicated. "The most important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7," NIST's Sunder tells PM. "On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom--approximately 10 stories--about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out." NIST also discovered previously undocumented damage to WTC 7's upper stories and its southwest corner.
NIST investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe structural damage contributed to the collapse, though assigning the exact proportion requires more research. But NIST's analysis suggests the fall of WTC 7 was an example of "progressive collapse," a process in which the failure of parts of a structure ultimately creates strains that cause the entire building to come down. Videos of the fall of WTC 7 show cracks, or "kinks," in the building's facade just before the two penthouses disappeared into the structure, one after the other. The entire building fell in on itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.
According to NIST, there was one primary reason for the building's failure: In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were carrying exceptionally large loads, roughly 2000 sq. ft. of floor area for each floor. "What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors," Sunder notes, "it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down."
There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation: First, trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed to transfer loads from one set of columns to another. With columns on the south face apparently damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing capacities.
Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to 7 hours. "There was no firefighting in WTC 7," Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time."
WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the fire that burned for hours, but those combined factors--along with the building's unusual construction--were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse.
"...Rivero?"
LOL!! Please don't!!!
Yeah and 90 percent of democrats.
I am not suggesting conspiracy, but the questions were troubling. No one I have ever spoken to who has seen this film has ever come away from it with out many questions.
The most troubling images from the film are recordings of controlled demolitions of condemned buildings followed immediately by the tapes of the towers collapsing on themselves.
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