I dont think Bush & Co. are actually smart enough to pull off this kinda job, they havent been able to pull anything else off have they? Saying 9/11 was an insider job is giving those tosspots too much credit.

Soubs,
Please tell me that the reports are to do with your work, pleeease!!

Otherwise there are some serious questions - your analyst must have a field day!

CB, Got that right, in one! Actually, I find it interesting that this is the ONLY way you could use "GWBush" and "smart" in the same sentence without looking totally stupid yourself!

The IPCC reports interest me because I have been peripherally involved with climate change since I was an undergraduate.

I studied at the University of East Anglia and the Climate Research Unit was attached to my School. Later I worked researching Earth surface processes. Climate and climate change are fundamental controls on physical processes like erosion and sedimentation, and the chemical changes that can be described as "weathering". I have written the definitve account of the evolution of the Pilbara landscape over the past 50 million years (he said modestly).

I read (some of) the Fema reports because I followed up a couple of the conspiracy links posted by O11, and thought "this is tosh". Sure enough, when I went back to the original sources, I found most of what was being claimed had no basis in the findings of the reports.

I bother with this stuff out of personal curiousity, and also out of a sense of duty. We live in an enlightened age because professionals are rigourous in their analysis and interpretation of information. This is always under threat from quacks, frauds and delusionals suffering from primitve superstitions. It is important for those of us with some understanding to oppose those with no understanding, and yet claim the cloak of science and reason.

Thank god! I thought, for a moment there, that you were seriously in need of therapy.

BTW how's Mrs soubs? and the tin lids?

The 9/11 Commission Report has since been heavily criticized by err... the 9/11 Commissioners themselves. Basically they said that their hands were tied and that they were fed a lot of misinformation.

Given that it is authors that are criticizing it, I wouldn't pay much attention to that particular document.

I`m not quite sure what you mean by the 9/11 Commission Report.

The reports I have read were produced by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Chapter 2 gives a fairly detailed description of the construction of the twin towers, as well as the various safety measures that were in place. All this is easily verifiable information.

It also includes includes photographs of the buildings with plane shaped holes extending across several floors, considerable internal damage and fires burning on several floors. I find the combination of serious structural damage as well as uncontrolled fires burning in areas where the insulation would have been stripped from the structural steel by impact to be a perfectly plausible reason for the collapse.

I`d be very interested to see any authoritative links where the authors criticise their work.

Meanwhile I`ll refer you back to my earlier post, where Fig 20-19 definitvely demonstrates that Oyuki`s original quote was wrong. I`ve also searched the chapter and "core columns" are mentioned 20 times in the text. That may constitute "...denied the existence of the 47 massive steel columns that in reality constituted the core of each tower..." for some, but not for me.

Its the document described as being full of lies in the original post in this thread. The report of the official enquiry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Commission

Thanks for that Mr W. We are obviously at cross purposes. The reports I have read are from FEMA, not the 9/11 Commission.

I guess if you want to know what's happening it's better to ask an engineer rather than a politician. This is from the Introduction of the FEMA report. Sorry it's a jpg, but the document is locked, and won't let me select text. Read the third paragraph. I don't believe all these professionals can be bought, especially after working for over 20 years with American scientists.

your answer here caught my attention. How and why did they 'pull' it? I am under the impression that to demolish a building safely you need sometime in advance to plant the charges in the right places (so you need detailed info about the building, as well as time and resources. Is that a feasible idea to pull an out-of-the-way building that is mildy on fire?

And why do you agree with the statement in the first place? 'Official' line is that it came down by fire! Read the 9/11 report again. What does it say about Tower 7?



VOLUNTEERS??! The biggest terrorist attack in US history, and it should have been gone over like the crime scene it was! Where was the federal investigation? Why was it removed before one was conducted?




Not at all. I just wanted to add a little excitement to the boards.

Volunteers.

You have to look at it from an engineers perspective, at the time (before the conspiracy theory snowballed). The engineers had little doubt about what caused the collapse, and weren't trying to advance any particular theory.

From the Introduction to Appendix D

"Collection and storage of steel members from the WTC site was not part of the BPS Team efforts sponsored by FEMA and the American Society of Civil Engineers. SEAoNY offered to organise a volunteer team of SEAoNY engineers to collect certain WTC steel pieces for future building performance studies."

(WTC_apndxD.pdf)

Unfortunately this kind of obstruction has to be expected in any investigation of a large organisation. At any given time in any big organisation there will be all sorts of empire building and skullduggery going on that the bosses aren't aware of or have no clue to the scale. As these things start coming to light many people see being sacked (or worse) as a real threat and try to scramble to safety.

I remember the public inquiry held when Air New Zealand managed to fly a full DC10 into Mt Erebus. The judge who handled the affair got so frustrated by Air NZ ducking and diving for cover that he publicly called the Air NZ response "An organised litany of lies".

In the scheme of things Air NZ is a small organisation. Now imagine trying to get answers out of something the size of the Pentagon! An organisation that must feel itself invulnerable to any serious questioning, where telling porkies would be sport and your lunch break considered a national secret! A hideous task.

Conspiracy or incompetence in the face of such a massive event where the answers seemed obvious?

What were you doing at the time of the attack?

I was a sleep until I got called at about 3am by a friend who was on night shift at a TV station. I watched the live feed for the next 4 hours. I saw the towers fall. Shocking.

Did you know anyone in the towers?

I have a friend who had a late start that day - her office was in one of the towers. She lived because of that late start.

That deserves it's own thread JM --- do it!!

(I was watching CNN)

>What were you doing at the time of the attack?

3 of my friends and I had just come back from eating Gyukaku. We got back to my place for a night cap and turned on the telly. First image was the airplane flying into the towers. I thought it was a cm for a new movie and so did everybody else with me. Then all our jaws hit the floor.

Did you know anyone in the towers?

yes, several people. a few made it a few didnt. My uncles were at the pentagon, too. Crazy isnt it...

Good idea. Here it is:

http://www.snowjapanforums.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/273129.html#Post273129

Well, i will concede (and truly want to believe) that the towers came down because of the planes. And perhaps thats what happened.


But why were the planes allowed to hit the towers in the first place?

Apparently, there are systems in place to specifically prevent such an event, ith several stages. All of them failed, without much questioning or explanation from the authorities.

Following loss of radio contact from an airliner, jets are supposedly supposed to be put on warning and scrambled to intercept. The airliners, if i remember correctly, were out of contact for something like 2 HOURS before hitting the first tower.

How did that ever happen? Why were the airliners NOT intercepted and shot down? There were military bases close to both targets, and of scrambled, should have reached the targets in under 10 minutes or so, even without flying at top speed apparently.

From what i read, the fighters were sent up extremely late, and even then, could have reached the targets flying at top speed with time to spare. I haven't heard any reasons why they didn't make it in time.

Not to mention, the dude supposedly piloting the aircraft hitting the pentagon was accprding to his flight instructors, extremely incompetent. But the flight path recorded that took him into his target (a declining loop) was said to be an extremely difficult maneuver, even for an experienced pilot. How did he do it?

And while on the subject of airliners being intercepted, what about the one airliner that supposedly crashed because the passengers overpowered the terrorists?
There is not much wreckage to suggest it crashed. The wreckage was spead over a large area, several kilometers, and was more consistand with something BLOWN UP IN MID-AIR. Wierd, huh?

911 conspiracy theory shares a remarkable parallel with Intelligent Design in that people start with a pre-existing belief and then selectively use information to support that belief. It can be also be described as an example of the Theory of Gaps. Any aspect of the event that isn't adequately explained is taken as evidence supporting the original hypothesis. A wit once pointed out that if some information came to light that neatly dissected a gap in the pre-existing knowledge, effectively creating two gaps when previously there was only one, the proponents of Intelligent Design would claim that evidence Intelligent Design had doubled! I'm not suggesting that those questioning the official 911 explanation are as silly those who subscribe to ID, but the tools used by the supporters of ID to argue their case are very much same tools used by 911 conspiracy theorists. Selective use of information, misinformation, error, lies, irrelevancies, cynical use of popular perceptions, myths and ignorance all play a part in building up a compelling argument.

I also like how different people ascribe a different role to the US government depending on their level of suspicion - some say the gov knew about it and let it happen, others reckon it was only the gov, some reckon there weren't any planes at all etc. It is all a bit like religion - people take what they want as befits their lifestyle. The ability to do this suggests that none of the different views have any more weight than any other and thus undermining the lot.

The world isn't a Tom Clancy novel. The US military and government departments, like every other organisation has it's fair share of incompetents, system failures, ignorance of SOPs, in adequate training, in adequate SOPs, people on holidays, new people on the job, people who don't give a toss about their job etc. To expect that there is going to an unbroken narrative where every minute is accounted for and everyone is going to do their job perfectly, without delay or petty incompetence or inconvenience getting in the way, is unrealistic.

A great example of the questionable techniques used by 911 supporters is this question - Why didn't the pentagon defences shoot down the plane that struck the building? This is a great question because it immediately puts out of the equation any doubts about the existence of a defence system for the pentagon. It plays on an easy assumption that the centre of the US military would be defended. But would it really? With constraints on military spending, do people really expect that such a building is going to be surrounded by AA guns and AA missiles or do people expect that jets and fighter pilots are such a common resource that the US government has them sitting around ready to launch? The Cold War ended years ago and even if it hadn't, continental based planes are not the ones on high levels of readiness. It takes time to get planes ready, to get bombs from bunkers and loaded up, to brief pilots - and that is after you actually know what is going on and have orders to launch aircraft to intercept. Modern jet fighters also have remarkably narrow performance parameters; blast off in a F-16 at top speed and you're in for a very short flight. So please, anyone who thinks the Pentagon's defences could easily have accounted for the plane, please do tell me what exactly is used to provide close in defence for the pentagon. hmm?

There is a lot of misinformation about 911. A lot of the information and questions raised by 911 conspiracy theorists is deliberately misleading. The case above regarding the construction of the Towers is a classic - What the person claimed was simply false. Oyuki, it wasn't anything like 2 hours that the planes were in the air and out of contact or control before they hit the Towers. This is what I'm talking about, information gets put into circulation that is patently false and becomes part of the collective belief -not that I'm saying you are doing it deliberately, but these things take on a life of their own. Like the many, many people who saw a passenger plane crash into the pentagon. Because these eye witnesses are conveniently overlooked by 911 theorists they don't get mentioned when people are talking up questions about what happened there and whether it really was a passenger jet. Why the Towers fell is another great area for miss-information. Allsorts of theories and explanations are based around what people assumed happened when the planes entered the buildings. Whenever I read those I'm reminded of crash test dummies. Why? Because the automotive industry spends a lot of time and money working through different crash scenarios by putting dummies into cars and crashing them . They do this because things happen in those situations that you simply can't predict. If it wasn't so prohibitively expensive, they're do the same with planes. 911 theorists talk about the simple math/physics involved in plane-meets-building scenarios but what they fail to point out is that whilst the math might be simple, its application to the circumstances is actually incredibly difficult.

It really is so very similar to the way ID proponents argue their case: omit data that doesn't match your view, play up gaps (real, perceived or imagined) in knowledge and cloud the issue with irrelevancies.
On this last point, Oyuki mentions the flight path of the pentagon plane and how difficult a manoeuvre it is - my answer is, so what? What does that prove? Nothing, is the answer. The guy got lucky, the guy very nearly missed his target and crashed into the ground. If the manoeuvre is difficult for a pilot on the plane with all of the usual environmental feedback, how much more difficult would it be for a remotely piloted vehicle where the pilot doesn't have all of that? One could just as well say, the manoeuvre was so difficult that it was too difficult for a remote piloted vehicle so therefore there must have been a real plane involved!

Very nicely put Rag-Doll. I can see why you're a lawyer and I'm an unemployed ex-geologist.

Flying a plane in a loop and lining up with a target is very easy. I can do it no problem, and I've only had about an hour at the stick.

It's worth noting the deafening silence of the civil engineering community. They seem to have no problem with impact + fire = collapse.

Here are some other structures which were designed "not to fail", but no-one seems to have a problem with these.

Thanks Soubs. It's the use of ignorance to create suspicion that drives me to get involved in this stuff. I remember during one of the other 911 debates someone tried to suggest there was something sinister in the fact that Empire State Building managed not to fall over when it was struck by a B-17 years ago and that it was "curious" that the accident wasn't mentioned when 911 happened.

So the average punter goes, hmmm, those B-17s were pretty big and the empire state didn't collapse, hey so what's with the WTC? Something's not right....

The thing is a 767 weighs about 85-90,000 kg, has a wing span of nearly 50m and cruises at 850km/ph. A B-17 fully loaded barely tops 24,000kg, had a 30m wing span and couldn't go faster than 300 km/ph, and then of course the buildings themselves are very different. Hardly comparing apples with apples, but it doesn't stop some people trying to suggest something else.

But anyway, I'm just as guilty as the next guy for viewing facts through the prism of my own prejudices. I believe the US gov on 911 and I'm doubtful about anthropological global warming, but I'm cynical about governments generally.