9-11 Evidence Unanswered
Alright folks... here we go. All the evidence that's fit to print supporting indications of a cover-up surrounding the events of 9-11.
I expect anyone commenting on the evidence provided to have listened to, read entirely, or watched all the way through the evidence provided. Not doing so automatically disqualifies you from this debate. Your posts, no matter how loud, indignant, persistent or inflammatory will not be responded to if your intent is to shoot the messenger. Ignorance will not be tolerated or rewarded on this thread. Any refutation MUST be accompanied by links, facts, and verifiable sources. Absent those, if you simply wish to state your gut reaction or intuitive sense of human nature, there are plenty of threads on this topic for you to do so. This is to be a civil discourse with NO PERSONAL ATTACKS. This is an effort to establish a mature informative debate... please treat it as such.
By responding to this thread you are agreeing to play by the rules as stated above.
My purpose here is not to preach to the choir. It is do introduce compelling evidence to those in doubt that they otherwise wouldn't bother to take a look at.
On a personal note... I was in the same place you are now several years ago. There was no way anyone was going to convince me that the government had any direct involvement in these events. Unfortunately, for me... I have a background in physics and engineering (among many other areas), I subscribe to the scientific method... and as such, I was compelled to take an objective look at the evidence. I had much anticipated that I would be able to blow gaping holes in these theories with a peashooter... that has not turned out to be the case. Also on a personal note, I have promised rdnor that I would not use information stemming from Alex Jones or any of his followers... which is actually the easiest part of this. Lots of folks much smarter than I have been involved with this effort and they deserve the respect that their education and position affords them.
Lastly, I am not advocating belief in a government conspiracy, I am advocating that you exercise due diligence and look at all the evidence (and there are hours of evidence to go through) and make an informed judgement, and maybe, just maybe you will have some questions at the end.
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Now then... where do I begin... I guess with rdnor's assertion that the steel in the twin towers was superheated causing structural failure, ala the Discovery Channel and NOVA and supported by the NIST report submitted to the 9-11 Commission.
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Frank Demartini's Statement
Frank A. Demartini, on-site construction manager for the World Trade Center, spoke of the resilience of the towers in an interview recorded on January 25, 2001.
The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it. That was the largest plane at the time. I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door -- this intense grid -- and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.
Demartini, who had an office on the 88th floor of the North Tower, has been missing since the 9/11/01 attack, having remained in the North Tower to assist in the evacuation
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Quote:
The Richard Roth Telegram
On Feburary 13, 1965, real estate baron Lawrence Wien called reporters to his office to charge that the design of the Twin Towers was structurally unsound. Many suspected that his allegation was motivated by a desire to derail the planned World Trade Center skyscrapers to protect the value of his extensive holdings, which included the Empire State Building. In response to the charge, Richard Roth, partner at Emery Roth & Sons, the architectural firm that was designing the Twin Towers, fired back with a three-page telegram containing the following details. 5
THE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS CARRIED OUT BY THE FIRM OF WORTHINGTON, SKILLING, HELLE & JACKSON IS THE MOST COMPLETE AND DETAILED OF ANY EVER MADE FOR ANY BUILDING STRUCTURE. THE PRELIMINARY CALCULATIONS ALONE COVER 1,200 PAGES AND INVOLVE OVER 100 DETAILED DRAWINGS.
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4. BECAUSE OF ITS CONFIGURATION, WHICH IS ESSENTIALLY THAT OF A STEEL BEAM 209' DEEP, THE TOWERS ARE ACTUALLY FAR LESS DARING STRUCTURALLY THAN A CONVENTIONAL BUILDING SUCH AS THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING WERE THE SPINE OR BRACED AREA OF THE BUILDING IS FAR SMALLER IN RELATION TO ITS HEIGHT.
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5. THE BUILDING AS DESIGNED IS SIXTEEN TIMES STIFFER THAN A CONVENTIONAL STRUCTURE. THE DESIGN CONCEPT IS SO SOUND THAT THE STRUCTURAL ENGINEER HAS BEEN ABLE TO BE ULTRA-CONSERVATIVE IN HIS DESIGN WITHOUT ADVERSELY AFFECTING THE ECONOMICS OF THE STRUCTURE. ...
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Quote:
The truss theory, endorsed by FEMA in its World Trade Center Building Performance Study, lets us imagine the floors falling on one another in a chain reaction, gathering momentum. It offered a way around the obvious problem with the column failure theory, another variant of pancake theory: the need for all the columns to be heated to 800ยบ C. It offered instead prerequisite conditions that were far less implausible: that trusses holding up the floor slabs were heated to that temperature, and began to experience some combination of expansion and sagging. Floor trusses are much easier to heat because, unlike the columns, they are not well thermally coupled to the rest of the steel structure. The heavily promoted truss theory is based on the assumption that the floors were only undergirded by trusses, since any beams under the floors could not have been heated enough to fail. The assumptions cannot be verified because of the unavailability of detailed engineering drawings of the buildings. They are questionable for several reasons. The anonymous Guardian author provides calculations to support the following:
FEMA's building description leaves 32,000 tons of steel unaccounted for in each tower, given that the towers were known to each use 96,000 tons of steel.
A truss-only-based floor construction system would leave the floors too weak to transfer loads between the core and perimeter walls.
Since the failure of a few trusses on a floor wouldn't automatically lead to a whole floor falling and starting the pancake syndrome, some fine tuning in the theory was needed. Dr. Thomas Eagar provided us with the zipper theory to explain how the failure of one truss could cause adjacent ones to fail. A horizontal domino effect of unzipping would precede the vertical one of pancaking.
From Sagging Trusses to Leveled Building
The unverified assumptions of the truss theory listed above are the least of its problems. It pretends that a few truss failures would automatically lead to the entire steel building crushing itself. What would be the likely chain of events following a floor failure envisioned by the truss theory?
Let's accept Dr. Eagar's zipper scenario (despite the clear evidence that fires did not cover a whole floor in either tower) and imagine that all the trusses of a floor failed in rapid succession and the whole floor fell. Then what? It would fall down about ten feet, then come to rest on the floor below, which was designed to support at least five times the weight of both floors, the fall cushioned by the folding of the trusses beneath the upper floor. But let's imagine that the lower floor suddenly gave up the ghost, and the two floors fell onto the next, and that failed, and floors kept falling. Then what? The floor diaphragms would have slid down around the core like records on a spindle, leaving both the core and perimeter wall standing.
Truss theory proponents hold that the core and perimeter wall lacked structural integrity without mutual bracing provided by the floor diaphragms. That may have been true in the event of a 140 mph wind, but not on a calm day. Note that the core had abundant cross-bracing, and would have been perfectly capable of standing in a hurricane by itself. And even if one imagines the outer wall buckling without that support, it does not begin to explain how it shattered into thousands of pieces, many of the column sections ripped from the spandrel plates at the welds, and how it shattered so quickly that no part of the wall remained standing above the falling dust cloud.
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S.O.S. ------ United We Stand, Divided We Fall
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