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Thursday, April 26, 2007

Rosie and 9/11

I have never been much of a fan of either Roseanne Barr or Rosie O’Donnell, until I heard some quotes they each made recently…

Roseanne Barr: "I am going to support a green party, a third party, and for once vote for what I believe, not what I hate least…get with me on this, America! No more phony right extremes masquerading as middle. Support change!"

Rosie O’Donnell: "I do believe that it defies physics for the World Trade Center Building 7, which collapsed in on itself, it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved - World Trade Center 7. One and two got hit by planes, 7 miraculously the first time in history, steel was melted by fire - it is physically impossible."

I don’t care what Donald Trump says, I think this is why Rosie is leaving "The View" which airs on ABC.

18 Comments:

At Sun Apr 29, 09:17:00 PM CDT, Blogger Ted Wong said...

She obviously knows nothing about failure of steel under heat stress. The biggest cause for concern of steel structures besides seismic failure is exposure to fire. Many steel structure throughout history have collapsed because of fire. In all fairness though, had she witnessed the fire on the overpass in San Francisco today she'd probably retract her statement.

 
At Mon Apr 30, 09:53:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

Ok, assuming no foul play, we may have to admit that fire can melt steel. My understanding is that steel is typically melted in a furnace. It may be more accurate to say that fossil fuels are required to melt steel. Of course, jets and tankers both carry fossil fuels. In the case of the SF overpass, it looks like the tanker gave off enough concentrated heat to destroy the supports between two sections of highway.

Granting then that the supports melted, to me it looks more like what I would have expected to see in Tower 7: A mixture of damaged and undamaged structure, a picture of asymmetry and imperfection. We have the center supports apparently melted by the tanker heat, and the supports for the adjacent sections, unaffected by the heat, snapping with the columns remaining standing. Sections of highway sloppily draped on highway. Even in the collapsed connection, a column remains standing. Notice that the lower highway did not collapse in a "pancake" fashion. It looks messy. To me, Tower 7 looked too perfect.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/chronicle/archive/2007/04/29/BAGVOPHQU46.DTL&o=4
http://www.wtc7.net/videos.html

 
At Mon Apr 30, 10:33:00 PM CDT, Blogger Ted Wong said...

Melting steel and heating it to the point of failure are two different things. Melted steel is steel in it's molten or fluid state. Steel that has been heated to cause failure does not have to be molten but only heated enough to become soft and lose it's temper and structural integrity.
Fossil fuel is not always necessary for this to happen. Steel or steel connections can be heated to failure with wood sources, as well as sources derived from petroleum based products like carpet, fabrics, plastics etc. all items found in buildings. Even an electrical fire can become hot enough to cause structural damage to buildings
The comparison of a burning highrise building collapse and a double decker freeway collapse due to heat exposure is irrelevant. A highrise buiding collapsing has more momentum and potential energy to make it's collapse scenario different than a section of freeway.

 
At Tue May 01, 06:09:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

Ok, here’s what I’d like to see: The next time a building is condemned, let’s ask the demolition crew if they could use jet fuel or tanker fuel instead of the usual explosives. Maybe PBS could pay for it. While I don’t like burning fossil fuels, I would definitely be interested in the results. To give you the benefit of the doubt, I’d be willing to see such an experiment repeated many times over. However, if it requires synchronized explosions and not just fires, then the odds of that happening on 9/11 must also be taken into account.

http://www.wtc7.net/buildingfires.html

 
At Thu May 03, 10:44:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

In their October 16-31, 2006 issue, CounterPunch ran an article by Manuel Garcia, Jr., titled “Dark Fire: the Fall of WTC7.” Since CounterPunch is a trusted source for many Greens and Nader supporters, I felt like I needed to take the article seriously.

The article concludes: “The blast of hot debris from WTC 1 kindled fires in WTC 7 and caused an emergency power system to feed the burning to the point of building collapse. One of the building’s major bridging supports was heated to the point of exhaustion by the burning of an abundant store of hydrocarbon fuel. An oil well fire under a loaded bridge.”

I’m not an engineer, but what struck me was how many ways WTC 7 was not symmetrical. It was built on top of another building. Viewed from above, it was in the shape of a trapezoid (the north face was wider than the south face). Support columns for the new addition did not align with the old, so trusses were designed to transfer the weight. There were three major trusses, two parallel ones on one side of the building, and a perpendicular one on the other side. The trusses had different shapes and patterns. Fuel tanks and pipes were on the west side of the building, while the east side began to collapse first.

The fuel was diesel, which isn’t very combustible compared to other fuels. The CounterPunch article does not claim that an explosion occurred, but rather a long burn. It just seems hard to believe that the fuel would become concentrated in just the right places to melt one of the main trusses that would set off a perfect chain reaction.

The following response to the CounterPunch article bolsters my initial thoughts:

http://www.911review.com/reviews/counterpunch/markup/darkfire11282006.html

We may never know what really happened. I need to remain open to different possibilities. I know that natural gas leaks can cause houses to explode. This has been bothering me. You know the trick where you balance with one foot on an aluminum can and tap it on its sides to crush it into a disk? Well, I even tried that but tapping it on only one side. I was surprised that it still collapsed into a disk, with only slight asymmetry. But I also know that a tree chopped on one side will fall to that side (with the help of a felling cut on the opposite side).

I appreciate that with office buildings, massive weights are involved, so that scale models can’t prove much. But given all the imbalances of symmetry in WTC 7, it just seems all the more reasonable to expect that the collapse would have looked more like the San Francisco overpass, with its asymmetric remaining standing column, intact road sections, and resistance to propagating effects. In other words, messy.

 
At Thu May 03, 10:46:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

Comment from a fellow Green:

Just go through the process I went through in reaching the
conclusion that the fall of the World trade Center Towers had to be
caused by a controlled demolition. I didn't realize it was possible
to clear buildings away by taking a few weeks to carefully
preposition explosives and then cause the building to fell cleanly
into its basement, instead of debris from the building falling all
over the surrounding area, until I read about buildings being removed
to make way for newer buildings in the course of urban renewal in
downtown Minneapolis. The only way I had known to remove buildings
previously was to crash wrecking balls into them and spend several
months tearing them down. I remember being surprised that it was
possible to bring buildings down cleanly by controlled demolition.
When did you first learn that it was possible to cause buildings
to collapse into their basements by spending a few weeks preplanting
explosives? Weren't you surprised? I know I was.
So even if fire can melt steel, a fire would not causse the World
Trade Center Towers to fall cleanly into their basements and that is
the way they did fall. A fire would vary in temperature in different
parts of the building and the steel girders would have been exposed
to the fire for different lengths of time since the fire would reach
the girders at different times. The chances are virtually nill that
a fires would cause each structual element to fail at precisely the
moment necessary for the buildings to collapse into their basements
instead of falling all over their surrounding area. Only a
controlled demolition could have caused WCT 1, 2, and 7 to fall as
they did.
If the planes that struck Towers 1 and 2 were filled with
explosives, that would have caused the towers to fall over everything
around them, not collapse into their basements. And World Trade
Center Tower 7 was not even struck by a plane.
As for fire causing stell framed buildings to collapse, I have
seen pictures of burned buildings with their stell frames intact on
various 911 discussion Groups. I asked an architect about this at a
meeting of a local 911 Meetup Group and he answered that not only
could fire not produce a high enough temperature to cause the steel
girders to become ductile enough to buckle but that, since metal is
such a good conducter of heat, the heat of the fire would be
conducted throughout the entire length of the girder too rapidly for
the fire to have much effect on the girder where the fire was located.
I did google the melting point of steel and its melting point was
around 2800 degrees Fahrenheit and I understand that even the hotest
fires don't get higher than 1100 degrees Fahrenheit.
So your architect told you one thing and my architect told me a
different thing. The only way to settle this is to find an
archtecture textbook that says fire has never caused a steel framed
building to collapse or oone that says it has.

 
At Thu May 03, 10:47:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

Comment from fellow Green Paul Bramscher:

I'm mostly curious about what causes the difference between conspiracy
theory and conspiracy fact. Obviously a conspiracy was involved with
regard to 9/11 (a crime involving more than one person). As someone
trained in history, anthropology, and some of the sciences, I approach
most things as open-ended questions, perpetual candidates for additional
historical research or scientific inquiry. The only areas in which this
is verboten are typically religious orthodoxies a totalitarian states.

I can't speak as a physicist, architect, metallurgist, etc. But I can
speak as a curious person. So the biggest question in my mind remains:
Why weren't explosives tests conducted? And has anyone been able to
obtain a list of the researchers (by name) involved?

 
At Fri May 04, 06:45:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

NOTE: The previous two comments were reprinted with permission from Robert Halfhill (the first comment) and Paul Bramscher (the second comment). Thank you Robert and Paul!

 
At Mon May 07, 09:54:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

The following is reprinted with permission from Robert Halfhill:

First, the ONLY way to cause a building to collapse cleanly into
its basement, withouut the building falling all over its surrounding
area, is by controlled demolition. Even if fire can melt steel, or
at least make the steel ductile so it cannot support the weight of
the building, it is unlikely that fire would cause the support beams
to fail at the precise times and in the precise sequence to bring WCT
1, 2, and 7 down cleanly into their basements.
I remember being surprised that it was possible to cause buildings
to collapse on their footprints without damaging their surroundings
when I read about the controlled demolitions used to remove buildings
during the course of urban renewal in downtown Minneapolis. Unless
there were large gaps in my knowledge that I was unaware of, my
surpise indicates that controlled demolition is the only way to cause
buildings to collapse cleanly on their footprints,
A fire in an enclosed space will be starved for oxygen and will
not burn hotter than a fire in the open. The large amout of black
smoke pouring from the World Trade Centers is a sign of uncombursted
soot, which indicates oxygen starvation. Extra air is blown into
blast furnaces. Do you remember the illustration in books of the
first primative metal workers operating bellows to blow air into
their furnaces.
Tom Cleland has included a link to click on which indicates the
explosives can be programmed to respond to coded radio signals so
that it is unlikely that a stray radio signal can match the code and
accidentally detonate the explosives.
9/11 raises the question of who allowed the hijacked planes to fly
unmolested over the northeastern U.S. and who prepositioned the
explosives to produce the additional shock and awe caused by the
buildings complete destruction. Since 9/11 set off the wave of
hysterical superpatriotism that raised Bush in the polls and enabled
him to clamp down on civil liberties and embark on his wars of
conquest in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is obvious who benefited from
9/11 and therefore was likely the one who brought it about.
Remember, NEWSWEEK quoted Richard Pearl of the Project for a New
American Century as saying the American people needed a new Pearl
Harbor to wake them up.
Robert Halfhill

 
At Mon May 07, 10:01:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

The following link offers some possible answers. I'm not saying I believe it's what happened. I'm not satisfied with any explanation, but I do find this one intriguing:

http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/analysis/scenario404.html

 
At Mon May 07, 10:04:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

The following is reprinted with permission from David Shove:

The reason 9-11 is not an inside government job is that it would make us
feel really really really really really really really really really really
really really bad if it were true.

For the same reason, there is life after death, all virtue is rewarded,
and all evil is punished.

If 9-11 were an inside job, we would have to do something about it, which
would be difficult and dangerous. Therefore it is not
an inside job.

 
At Mon May 07, 10:06:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

The following is reprinted with permission from Paul Bramscher:

It also hinges somewhat on how we define "inside" and "outside." Is
Bush himself inside? Or is he basically an outsider -- to the
democratic process anyway? Even if we accept the Bin Laden explanation,
there remains some lingering insidedness:

* He may have been on the CIA payroll in the Soviet-Afghan wars
(although the US government is now denying it:
http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/24-318760.html). Of
course, that's a DoS source, which ultimately answers to Condoleeza
Rice. You can decide yourself who to trust there...
* He's a son of a powerful family in Saudi Arabia, a country whose
destiny seems inseparable economically and politically from the Bush
dynasty.
* Bin Laden and Bush may have used the same "dirty" bank (BCCI):
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/05/326/.

So basically, even if we accept the Bin Laden conspiracy as fact, it
then becomes a delicate matter of defining what exactly is inside vs.
outside. It's somewhat an arbitrary (and perhaps inaccurate) dualism if
you think about it carefully.

Paul Bramscher

 
At Mon May 07, 10:07:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

The following is reprinted with permission from Paul Bramscher:

The problem with all the theorizing about how structures fail, etc. is
that the evidence is for the most part gone now. We can speculate about
building physics, etc. until the cows come home, but it's not a testable
venue. It doesn't yield any harvest -- short of building a large-scale
model and flying a plane into it. And those results, in the end, are
best handled by civil engineers, architects, physicists, metallurgists,
etc. Basically it leaves us in no stronger position. I think these are
better routes for the ordinary person to pursue:

1) Look for logical contradictions and circular conditions in the
government's statements. For example, they didn't test for evidence of
explosives because there was no evidence of explosives (basically what
the NIST has said).
2) Let's find the names of the 200 researchers. Have they gone on
record as individuals anywhere? What are their credentials? Who wrote
and directed the research plan? Can we see it?
3) What pressure has the Bush administration put on Saudi Arabia and the
Bin Laden family to produce and/or monitor communications with Osama?
Supposedly the mastermind of the worst atrocity on US soil, you'd think
it quite unlikely that he's had no conversations with family the past
few years (if he's still alive).

The pattern here looks alot like the teleological arguments, in which
centuries of theologians tried to prove god existed by sheer logic (all
attempts have basically failed), though that doesn't say anything about
god so much as it illustrates a problem fundamental to the logical
technique. In general, it just doesn't seem that we can prove positive
anything by sheer logic, without readily available evidence on hand.

There's a fundamental asymmetry with logic. While it may not be
possible to prove-positive with logic alone, it may be possible to
prove-negative with logic alone. For instance, if I claimed I had a 4
sided triangle in my desk drawer, you could immediately retort that no
such triangle exists -- by logic alone -- since I've contradicted my own
claim. I think that's the reasonable venue to pursue with 9/11
explanations. At the end of the day, it might produce a laundry list of
statement inconsistencies that should be investigated by a truly
independent 9/11 commission.

 
At Mon May 07, 10:09:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

The following is reprinted with permission from Robert Halfhill. It was in response to another comment (from the Green Party of Minnesota discussion list) which does not appear here:

David, you should Know that arguing that since the Tacoma Narrows
Bridge taught us for the first time that wind can cause a bridge to
collapse, MAYBE there is something else we don't yet know that caused
the World Trade Center buildings to collapse onto their footprints is
a weak argument.
Saying maybe there is something we may not know, without specifying
what it
is, is a weak argument. Is is a generic answer to any argument.
Maybe we don't yet know
that miracles can happen and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are
right in saying God did it!
Furthermore, while the smoke obscurred much of the fall of the
World Trade Centers, most of the fragments from their destruction
ended up resting on the buildings footprints. And in the case of WTC
7,
the building was not obscured by smoke although there were flames
licking from SOME of the windows. If you watch the clip of the BBC
reporter reporting that WTC 7 had collapsed 24 minutes BEFORE it
collapsed, with the still standing WTC 7 visible behind her, it is
not
obscured by smoke. The BBC took the film off their publicly
available archive when this anomaly was reported after their attempt
to "debunk" the 9/11 truth movement. But copies of the film had
already been widely disseminated on 911 truth sites. And if you look
at other publicly available videos of the WCT 7 collapse, the roof
sinks evenly, as does the rest of the building, making the whole
think look like a stage prop attached to a stopper that is being
retracted underground. Have you ever seen buildings collapse or fall
like this?
I should have been a little more precise, however, and said that
the overwhelming majority of the mass of the World Trade Centers were
resting on the buildings' footprints. Videos of the collapse will
show puffs of dust shooting out of the towers and massive girders
being flung out. Some of the girders and other debris even landed on
the roof of the winter garden, three and a half blocks away. But you
see the bulk of the mass of he World Trade Centers piled up where the
buildings stood instead of being strewn all over the surrounding
blocks.
To the extent you can see the World Trade Centers through the
smoke, you can see the puffs of dust jetting out of each floor, just
before that floor joins the collapse. The puffs jetted out of each
floor successively from top to bottom, which is the only way to bring
the building down at free fall speed without the floors blew slowing
down the fall.
Also, if you look at the billowing dust clouds as the World Trade
Centers fall, you can see that they show the same cauliflower shape
as are shown in pyroclastic flows from volcanoes, when a volcanic
eruption ejects a superheated mass of steam and rock dust, which
follows the contours of the ground as it speeds outward. The
superheated air and pulverized rock dust and asbestos in the case of
the World Trade Centers were produced by the thermate explosions,
which were used to cut the steel beams along the same diagonal lines
that show when thermate is used for controlled demolition of
buildings.
Incidentally, subsequent deaths reveal that the federal government
lied when they told the people of New York that the air was safe.)
Unlike the usual procedure of leaving a crime scene intact until
the investigators can complete their investigation, the steel was
immediately trucked to a landfill along with the other debris and the
steel shipped to China to be melted down. However 911 truth
investigators did manage to retrieve some steel fragments and their
analysis showed clear traces of thermate explosives. I guess this
haste to dispose of the evidence explains why tourists were not
allowed to take pictures from the observation platform set up to view
the wreckage. I guess this also explains why little or no attempt
was made to separate out the body fragments for proper burial of the
fireman, policeman and others who perished in the World Trade Centers.
I didn't say the fire was going to burn itself out. I said the
black smoke, which reveals uncombusted soot particles, indicates
oxygen starvation. I will not only maintain that the planes, even
large passenger jets, hitting near the tops of the buildings not only
COULD not have produced large enough holes in buildings a block
square
and over a thousand feet tall to keep the fires from being oxygen
starved, but the presence of black, sooty smoke shows that it DID not.
Neither did I argue that the Bush Administration organized the
hijacking of four planes. Al Qaida did that. The Bush
Administration merely let the planes reach their targets in the same
way the Roosevelt Administration let the Japanese planes reach their
target at Pearl Harbor. The U.S did decipher the coded Japanese
messages about the forthcoming attack. Apologists claim that the
U.S. couldn't warn Pearl Harbor by radio because the Japanese might
decode their message and they couldn't contact the U.S. military base
at Pearl Harbor by cable because the headquarters office was closed
during the weekend so there wouldn't be anyone there to answer the
phones. Does anyone believe that any military worth its salt would
let a forward base be out of contact with central headquarters for
whole weekends? And wouldn't it be worth it to let the Japanese
detect their radio messages if that would have enabled them to warn
the base, forestall the attack and save nearly 3000 lives. Not
unless you had coldly calculated that a forestalled attack would not
have been enough to get the U.S. into World War II.
Whether or not the hijackers had the explosives they bragged
about, they apparently did not go off at the World Trade Centers.
And explosions near the top of the buildings where the planes struck
would not cause the buildings to collapse on their footprints. The
workers hooking up the containers with thermate inside could have
been told they were upgrading the buildings electrical systems or
computer networks. Tenants did report loud sounds from unoccupied
floors of the buildings and construction dust getting into adjoining
floors. The World Trade Centers were in fact owned by a subsidiary
of Cheney's old company, Haliburton. U.S. intelligence did receive
at
least seven warnings about a forthcoming Al Qaida attack. The then
CIA Director had a meeting with Condelezza Rice in her office but was
unable to get through to her about the seriousness of the situation.
The Civil Air Traffic control system can detect immediately when
planes deviate from their assigned flight plans. The protocol calls
for them to inform military air traffic control in five minutes, but
since they were told not to because of the war games scheduled for
September 11, 2001, the military were not informed for twenty
minutes. Even then, the military planes were told to fly out into
the Atlantic and they did not get back to New York until after the
attack. In any event, the military had been told not to attack
without Donald Rumsfeld's approval and, for some reason, that
approval was not forthcoming.
Whether Bush is not intelligent is something I don't know. Bush
seems dumb and he is dyslexic. But dyslexia can exist in highly
intelligent people. I have read in newspapers that Albert Einstein
was dyslexic, but whether or not that is just one of those oft
circulated tales about Einstein, I am unable to say. But in any
event, Rumsfeld and Cheney are intelligent enough to carry it off.
The incompetence of the Bush Administration during Katrina is of
too great a
degree to be explained by just dumbness or incompetence. It seemed
like the federal government was doing everything it could to
consciously sabotage the relief effort. Wal Mart sent a fleet of 500
trucks laden with food and water but the feds turned them away while
thousands were without food and water in the new Orleans Metrodome.
Ships carrying food and water were also turned away. Racist said
that God has done what we were unable to do in "cleaning out" New
Orleans. Well, it wasn't God. It was the Bush Administration. And
when the incompetence extends to the point of turning away trucks and
ships laden with vitally needed food and water, that reveals not
incompetence but a malign hidden agenda.
The Bush Administration needed more than two planes hitting the
World Trade Centers to get the U.S. into war and suppress civil
liberties. They needed the complete destruction of the buildings to
produce the necessary "shock and awe."
False flag operations are a standard method for governments
leading their citizens in the way they want. The Nazis burned down
the Reichstag and blamed it on the Jews. Their was the blowing up of
the Maine in Havana Harbor before the Spanish American War, which led
to the U.S. acquiring its first imperial possessions. The sinking of
the Lusitania got the U.S. into World War I. And after Pearl Harbor
before World War II, there was the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a
pretext for the U.S. escalating its involvement in the Vietnam War.
We can expect another false flag operation before the U.S. invades
Iran.
Robert Halfhill

 
At Mon May 07, 10:10:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

The following is reprinted with permission from Robert Halfhill:

Paul:
The statement that no building has collapsed onto the surface it
was standing on, without falling all over the surrounding area,
except by controlled demolition is an EMPIRICAL statement, not a
statement of logic. It is a statement confirmed by experience since
NO building has ever collapsed cleanly on to its footprint until the
technique of demolition by carefully placed and timed explosions was
peerfected, and no building has fallen this way since except by
controlled demolition.
David Dittmann's argument that there COULD be something we don't
know that could account for the way WTC 1, 2, and 7 fell is a generic
anser to any argument. It would be as if every scientic law or
theory had to be amended with the statement that MAYBE God exists
although we don't know he exists, and that Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson COULD be right in claiming God brought down the World Trade
Centers.
God didn't do it. The Bush Administration did it.
All scientific arguments involve steps in which the tautologies of
mathmatics and logic, once we have established other statements
empirically, are used to lay out explicitly what follows from the
statement we have established empirically. Both logic and empirical
investigation are used as needed in an argument. So please don't
lapse into what is all too common in modern thought -- to make the
assumption that if an argument has some logic in it, then it is
all "just" logic and conclude it is just airy mysticism and
philosophical speculation. At this point, it is customary to
propound platitudes about how we can't know everything, how tentative
and provisional all human knowledge it, etc, etc.
Stop avoiding the issue and face up to the fact of just ow bad our
government is!
Robert Halfhill

 
At Mon May 07, 10:11:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

The following is reprinted with permission from Paul Bramscher:

My own/personal preference with 9/11 inquiries is to look very carefully
at official statements/conclusion, sifting through claims searching for
those which -- themselves -- may be contradictory, circular or otherwise
flawed in relation to each other. Let's cross-examine them. As I
suggested, physical evidence is essential for proof positive, but logic
alone may (in some cases) be sufficient for proving to the negative,
assuming the record is sufficiently large and
weak/self-contradictory/circular, etc. I feel this is indeed the case.

I, for one, would like to see the names of the 200+ researchers, explore
their credentials, read the research plan, and draw my own conclusions
about the efficacy of their research plan. I'm not a physicist,
metallurgist, architect, etc. But I'm sufficiently critically-minded in
that I could judge for myself whether it was a bona fide research effort
or a foregone conclusion. Was it designed to genuinely explore and
rule-out possibilities, or was it designed from the get-go to produce
certain answers? The more we can establish that internal contradictions
and gross weaknesses exist in the research plan, the better argument we
have for re-opening the investigation -- with an independent (and
perhaps international) body this time around.

Paul Bramscher

 
At Wed May 09, 10:33:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

[The following is reprinted with permission from Dave Crawford. It was originally posted prior to Robert Halfhill's second comment above. Dave wrote:

You might add
as a preface that I don't consider it definitive, because there's too much I
don't know, and that it's a perspective based on my present understanding.

I did look at Scenario 404, and it seems to be a plausible speculation. The
bottom line is that speculation, some of which is extremely plausible, will
have to contest against The Official Story indefinitely, unless objective
evidence is revealed. I'm suspicious about The Official Story, and
suspicious about all of the speculations I've read. And my message is as
speculative as any.

And here's a further speculation: the amount of bandwidth in all forms of
information media that's being expended on the pros and cons of what
happened on 9/11 could be, in itself, counted as a success by the
perpetrators. Ask yourself what might happen if all of the time, effort,
argument, action, and bandwidth taken up by this were channeled into
something else, like working for government that's truly of, by and for the
people, or crafting and implementing a workable plan for achieving peace.

Dave Crawford]

After seeing a documentary (not connected with 9/11) on how controlled
demolition is done, I am convinced that if explosives had been used to
collapse the towers, everyone who worked in the towers, from maintenance
staff who enter places normally off-limits, to executives who never see more
of the building than their elevator and their office, would have known
something fishy (understatement) was going on. All of the structural
columns (all equals "lots and lots") on every floor of the building would
have to be exposed (hence wreaking havoc on any interior decoration that was
in the way, such as office walls), cut partway through (not a subtle
process, tends to leave burned-steel smells and sprays of steel fragments
all over the interior), have explosives secured to them, have blast blankets
wrapped around them to direct the explosive force for the greatest effect,
and have wiring installed to connect every charge on every column on every
floor to one sequencing timer so that the charges went off in the right
order at exactly the right time.

Once the explosives were wired, the users of the building would have to
refrain from operating cell phones (yeah, right) and any other devices which
can emit radio interference, otherwise there would be a considerable risk of
one or more explosive charges going off. (Similarly, if the charges were to
be hooked to radio-controlled detonating circuits, so as not to have
thousands of unexplained wires trailing through the building, premature
detonation due to radio interference is even higher - a risk which would be
completely unacceptable to anyone who needed precise timing in order to fool
the general public along with the experienced rescue personnel who were at
the scene at the time of collapse.)

Assuming that all of the necessary hardware, explosive material, wiring, and
timing apparatus was somehow put in place without any users of the buildings
noticing unusual activity, you then need to explain how crashing a large
airplane into the side of your carefully wired building could avoid severing
any of the wires by direct shock or subsequent heat from flaming jet fuel,
and how it could avoid detonating any of the charges prematurely, again due
to impact shock or heat. Even assuming you could somehow protect the
charges and their wiring, it would be impossible to factor in the effects of
an aircraft collision and subsequent fire on the structural integrity of the
building when designing the arrangement and power of explosive charges.

I'm not a demolition expert. The foregoing is one view of explosive
demolition, based on seeing one documentary, and on seeing the evidence of
radio interference precautions taken at sites where explosives are in use.
Are there any demolition experts out there who know of other ways to
collapse a building into its footprint? Has any >demolition expert< given a
plausible scenario for how the towers could have been collapsed by
explosives under the kind of conditions that occurred on 9/11?

Also, my read of the evidence of the SF overpass having steel structural
elements fail due to heat from burning fuel is 1) yes, steel will fail at
temperatures which can be reached by normal burning of fossil fuel and 2) if
this is possible in an open-air setting where flame and heat are free to
diffuse, how much more intense would the effect of burning fossil fuel be
when focused by a non-open-air scenario where the effect of convection heat
rising would be considerable?

Note that I'm not completely comfortable with the fact that all three towers
collapsed the way they did. I rule out controlled demolition as a cause. I
consider it >plausible< that heat effects alone could have been responsible.
But I withhold judgment on whether other factors might have been involved.
I acknowledge that I don't know enough to be certain of what really
happened. Until our government and/or other entities which have information
that has so far been kept secret are willing to place all the evidence in
public view, I'm not satisfied with >any< explanation of what happened.

Dave Crawford

 
At Wed May 09, 10:41:00 PM CDT, Blogger Tom Cleland said...

We also spend a lot of bandwidth on Virginia Tech, Rutgers, sharks, Gary Congdon, Monica Lewinsky, American idol, Brittany Spears, Michael Jackson, Brad and Angolena, and that woman who married that rich guy, had a baby, and died recently.

 

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