Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: William_Rusher
Your explanation while plausible requires the assumption that in order for the terrorism to be successful that the buildings needed to fall. My opinion is that just making impact with one of the jets into one of the towers is a major success for the terrorists. The buildings falling is gravy to these folks.

*Very* astute.

I had come to the same conclusion myself.

People are assuming that the terrorists "knew exactly" how to bring down the buildings. They're forgetting these scenarios:

1. The terrorists naively and wrongly assumed that the plane impacts alone would topple the towers, but they didn't. But they got lucky and the flames finished the job, much to their surprise.

2. The terrorists figured the best they could do was to cause twin "towering inferno" out of control fires (which is why they made sure they used fully fueled planes, and hit high enough that water from the ground couldn't be sprayed on the fire), which would be more than enough to cause enormous death tolls and major financial/business disruption. They simply succeeded better than they dreamed when the fires caused the buildings to fail structurally.

Other factors which point to less than masterful planning was the relatively small amount of damage to the Pentagon (and into the *least* occupied wing of the building), and the botched fourth hijacking.

I don't see this as necessarily being the work of criminal masterminds. Balls and sheer luck could have been all that was needed.

Finally, it wouldn't surprise me if all the structural advice necessary to do even a planned demolition was contained in the pages of Time and Newsweek in the weeks after the original WTC bombings -- remember how all the news magazines fell all overthemselves interviewing building engineers and posting breathless stories about how, "it could have been worse, things could have been really catostrophic had the terrorists instead done something more like..."

129 posted on 09/11/2001 7:35:07 PM PDT by Dan Day
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 85 | View Replies ]


To: Dan Day
I agree with you on everything except that the small amount of damage to the Pentagon. That building is designed to handle terrorism, the twin towers are not. I bet you could learn enough from FR's archives on OKC to learn how to take out any building even without specific professional engineering advice. However, I think the gravy scenario I descibed before and supported by you and others is the correct assumption here.
138 posted on 09/11/2001 7:52:48 PM PDT by William_Rusher
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 129 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson