Posted 2006-August-19, 06:07
I can't believe I've actually hit the pageback button twice on this damn keyboard. Lost the response twice 2/3 of the way through.
Quickly, then.
1. How was it hot weeks after the event? Certainly not from thermite, which would have burned out long before the buildings collapsed. It's designed to burn fast- that's one of the reasons they use it. A more likely cause is that the plane itself landed in a pile of burning iron. Burning iron becomes rust, rust and aluminum with a flash source (more burning iron) becomes thermite. And that plane would have taken a long time to burn.
How did molten iron appear on the outside of the building? Again, not from thermite. The columns were burned through, not the exterior. How would the thermite on the interior make molten iron on the exterior? On the other hand, the window frames were aluminum and lead, the glass silicon dioxide, the supports holding in the windows steel (and likely not directly attached to the big supports holding up the building). That's probably what was seen.
2. How did the steel get so hot? From the chimney effect, air being sucked upward through ventilation ducts. It's not hard to get the metal hot enough to burn from that. Anything that got hot enough to melt was from minor secondary fires, such as the aluminimum window frames burning.
Where did the sulfur come from? A ton of thermate at 2% sulfur has 40 pounds of sulfur. On the other hand, 10,000 gallons of JetA fuel, which is .3% sulfur, would have 210 pounds of sulfur. Any sulfur from the thermite would have ben dwarfed by the sulfur in the jet fuel (and other sources- the floor panels may have been gypsum, for example). He later points out that Building #7 had lots of diesel fuel in it, which explains the sulfur in there.
3. Who cares? It was a CIA building. Even if you found that #7 had been blown up, all that would show was that they had the building rigged to blow incase the enemy (Congress) came sniffing around. #7 collapsed because the impact of the taller buildings shook it apart. Why one building would collapse but not another isn't a question you can really answer, any more than why in an earthquake some buildings will collapse while other identical ones remain up.
4. No previous skyscraper collapses due to fires. Apparently, he believes in Xeno's Paradox- since no other skyscapers had fallen, therefore no skyscrapers can ever fall. Only one had had a jetliner crash into it prior to this, and it's a much more solidly constructed building. He later points out that explosives weren't enough to take down the building. Um, yeah. Don't you think that's an argument AGAINST explosives being used to take down the building?
Partly evaporated steel structures aren't explained by fire...but they are explained by friction, as somebody noted earlier. That only the ends of the girders were 'evaporated' while the center was pretty much untouched supports this idea.
5. 'Squib timing'. I wish this guy could make up his mind. Squib-timing implies that the building was blown up from the bottom up. Earlier, he claimed it was blown up in the middle, and then later he says it blew up from the top down. The very fact that he has to use mutually exclusive explanations for this stuff shows that his idea is faulty. Doesn't mean that all ideas are faulty, just his. Anyhow, this is the vaccuum cleaner bag thing I mentioned earlier.
6. Early drop of the antenna. Again, thermite doesn't explain this. If the columns had to all burn through simultaneously for this to happen, and they burned through at the middle or the bottom, the antenna wouldn't have fallen first. If it happened at the top, all of the columns burning through simultaneously, it would have sloughed off in some direction and fallen like a giant bottlecap.
So how about this? The antenna wasn't help up by all the columns, just the center one. The center one burned through first, both because it was at the center of the fire and it had more weight on it than the others. When it went down, the antenna fell. It also fits with a lot of the later things he mentions.
7. What you think of as the sound of explosions are just the rapid expansion of air after compression. You think there was any compression going on when the interior collapsed? As for the flashes, that was no doubt dust burning, either from friction or from coming in contact with electricity. Yes, Professor, "electrical explosions" wouldn't take down the building. These were at the lower floors, and dust explosions are more of a special effect than anything dangerous. Who ever said they were otherwise?
8. That same rapid expansion would blow dust and even girders out the windows, much faster than gravity would have any effect on the way down (the vaccuum cleaner bag trick). This is the same effect that you see in demolitions. It is *not* what you would see from explosives placed on every floor!
9. Does this guy even know what thermite is? It isn't an explosive. It doesn't create "shock and awe". And it sure as heck doesn't disintegrate concrete. In fact, no explosive explains what happened to the concrete. For that matter, this was over an hour after the initial fires...must have been the longest burning thermite in history. And what did they do, paint it on the walls? No we have thermite on the interior columns, the exterior steel, AND the concrete walls. Maybe they built the building out of thermite.
But how about this? The heat cause the concrete to break apart, becoming very fragile. When the columns snapped, they took the exterior steel supports with them around where they snapped. Without the support, the pressure caused the concrete to disintegrate. No explosives involved.
What happened to the angular momentum? No amount of explosives explains that one either- what, now they had explosives on the outside of the building to propel it in the right direction? How about, instead, the top of the building was still attached to most of the broken support columns, When it fell, if it angled too much the columns would bounce off the inside part of the exterior wall, thereby righting it. What other explanation can there be?
10. Gee, now we're to explosives in the basement. So now it was caused by a collapse from explosives at the floor where the plane it, a few floors below, at the top, on the first two floor, and the basement. All of which happened first.
Now he points out that only the greatest demolition experts would attempt to do an implosiion like this. Great, and yet his theory is that all of these demolition experts were somehow able to set up all of these explosives without anybody noticing or blabbing and able to factor in a crashing plane into account, and somehow all of these critical points weren't visible to the thousands of people inside. Again, his argument against the plane being the cause is actually a greater argument against explosives. So, no steel frame skyscraper has ever been hit by a plane, let alone collapsed from fire. So who's to say they wouldn't all act like this? We know doing it with explosives is almost impossible, you've shown that. We don't know if it's impossible or easy to do with fire. And this is supposed to convince me they used explosives?
11. This is just a repeat of the earlier stuff. "Of the more than 170 areas examined on 16 perimeter column panels, only three columns had evidence that the steel reached temperatures above 250ºC… Only two core column specimens had sufficient paint remaining to make such an analysis, and their temperatures did not reach 250 ºC. ... Using metallographic analysis, NIST determined that there was no evidence that any of the samples had reached temperatures above 600 ºC. (NIST, 2005, pp. 176-177; emphasis added."
So...the thermite melted the steel on the outside of the building, but never got above 600 degrees on the inside?
12. NIST contracted with Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. to conduct tests to obtain information on the fire endurance of trusses like those in the WTC towers… All four test specimens sustained the maximum design load for approximately 2 hours without collapsing.” (NIST, 2005, p. 140, emphasis added.)
Apparently, he thinks that that they lasted for 56 minutes and 1 hour and change instead of lasting for 'about two hours' means that there must have been explosives planted all over etc. Instead of it being, say, that substandard materials were used in the manufacture (God knows that would never happen in New England) or that in the years that it's been up that the structure had weakened. He's spent the first 10 points saying that it wouldn't have collapsed, now he says it collapsed quicker than it should have. So which is it?
The only conspiracy I see here is that the building probably wasn't built to spec. It was likely built with poorly made high-carbon steel that caught fire easily and was brittle and snapped faster than it should have. Probably didn't have the level of fireproofing it was supposed to either. The NIST could very well be hiding the information (point 13) to prevent huge lawsuits against the construction firms, who have good reason to keep the data hidden.
Now, that's the sort of conspiracy I find easy to believe. Doesn't take many people, no pre-planning required, nothing complex, no hard-to-find materials like thermite, don't need to be experts, and even ordinary people could be convinced to keep quiet on it without horse's heads showing up in their beds.
Claiming the WTC collapses were a CIA conspiracy is like saying global warming is a CIA conspiracy. It's just too big and complicated for a government that's inherently slow, lazy, and leaks like a sieve.
Help
but yes it was a police riot but not totally unprovoked at times.