The controlled demolition theory is perhaps the most easily disproved. Explosions are really really loud, ask anyone who deals with these things, you'd expect to pick up the noise in audio from miles away. There was quite a few audio recordings of each of the collapses and none of them picked up any sort of explosion.

If you can explain to me how they set off enough explosives to bring down an entire skyscraper without making any noise, maybe I'd take the theory seriously.

This funnily enough is the reason NIST gave for not looking for explosives in the debris. Its pretty sound logic, its a shame it got drowned out in shouts of '9/11 was an inside job'.

Hey Truthers, I really want to know (and I got a few scotches in me) seriously.

What do you think of scientists? Do you think we fake data? Do you think NIST rigged their multiphysics simulations to get the result they wanted?

I really want to know. Just saying.

@blastido_factor:

There's an old Jewish proverb that runs something like this:

"A fool can throw a stone into the water that ten wise men cannot recover."

Your stones, fortunately, aren't irrecoverable. I'll offer some counterpoints to a few of your claims, and I'll leave it up to you to fish for the truth about the others.


- The alleged masterminds of 9/11 have never been produced and never put to trial, despite having supposedly been captured in 2001/02

I don't know what you mean by "produced," but here's something I do know: I started a case in small claims court earlier this year (in New York City, nonetheless), and I was told I'd have to wait at least four months to appear before an arbitrator. (It's likely that I'll have to wait longer, if, for example, I opt to appear before a judge.) Simply put, trials take time. Given the complexities of a trial involving the masterminds and perpetrators of 9/11, ten years is hardly cause for conspiracy.


- Total failure of the air defense system. The Pentagon was struck One hour and Twenty minutes after the attacks began, yet there was no response from Andrews Air Force base, which is just 10 MILES away and supposed to be in charge of defending the capitol."

The North Tower was struck at 8:46 AM, the South Tower at 9:03 AM, and the Pentagon at 9:37 AM. By my math, the Pentagon was hit fifty-one minutes after the first plane hit the WTC and thirty-four minutes after the second plane hit. The 9/11 Commission estimated that the hijacking of Flight 11, the first plane to hit the WTC, began at 8:14 AM. It's misleading, in this context, to consider the hijacking of Flight 11 as the beginning of the attack (I assume this is what you meant); it wasn't until the second plane hit the WTC that the nature and the scale of the attacks became evident. Could the communication between the FAA and NORAD have been more prompt, and, thus, more effective? Yes. (Rightly so, this is one of the major criticisms lobbied against the agencies responsible for responding to the attacks.) Is the delay of thirty-four minutes cause for conspiracy, given the lack of precedence in handling such a coordinated attack and the confusion surrounding the events of the attack? No.


- The remains of the twin towers were quickly carried off and buried before any forensic investigations could be done.

Your use of the word forensic is categorically flawed. (The first and third definitions of forensic, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, are as follows: (1) "belonging to, used in, or suitable to courts of judicature or to public discussion and debate, and (3) "relating to or dealing with the application of scientific knowledge to legal problems.") NIST's reports are chock-full of forensic analyses; have a look for yourself: http://www.nist.gov/el/disasterstudies/wtc/index.cfm. Forensic investigations also led to the identification of a significant number of victims. According to Wikipedia: "Within a year, medical examiners had identified the remains of 33 victims who had been on board Flight 11. They identified two other Flight 11 victims, including the lead flight attendant Karen Martin, after body fragments were discovered near Ground Zero in 2006. In April 2007, examiners using newer DNA technology identified another Flight 11 victim. The remains of two hijackers, potentially from Flight 11, were also identified and removed from Memorial Park in Manhattan." The methods used to identify these victims (DNA testing, in many cases) were nothing if not forensic.

You're also neglecting the simple fact that the removal of debris was necessary from a health standpoint. Again, according to Wikipedia: "The thousands of tons of toxic debris resulting from the collapse of the Twin Towers contained more than 2,500 contaminants, including known carcinogens. Subsequent debilitating illnesses among rescue and recovery workers are said to be linked to exposure to these carcinogens."


- Of all the cameras around the pentagon, including the security tapes taken from local gas stations, only one blurry clip was released.

Three videos, not one, were released. According to Wikipedia: "A nearby Citgo service station also had security cameras installed, but a video released on September 15, 2006, did not show the crash because the camera was pointed away from the crash site. The Doubletree Hotel, located nearby in Crystal City, Virginia, also had a security camera video, and on December 4, 2006, the FBI released the video in response to a freedom of information lawsuit filed by Scott Bingham. The footage is 'grainy and the focus is soft, but a rapidly growing tower of smoke is visible in the distance on the upper edge of the frame as the plane crashes into the building.'"


I don't fault you, or others like you, for wanting to "think twice" about the explanations given for certain of the events surrounding 9/11. I do fault you, though, for spending so little time on your second round of thinking, and for so carelessly tossing conspiracy theories to the wind.

FEMA: "WTC 4, 5, and 6 are eight- and nine-story steel-framed office buildings, located on the north and east sides of the WTC Plaza, that were built circa 1970. ... Because of their close proximity to WTC 1 and WTC 2, all three buildings were subjected to severe debris impact damage when the towers collapsed. as well as the fires that developed from the debris. Most of WTC 4 collapsed when impacted by the exterior column debris from WTC 2; the remaining section had a complete burnout. WTC 5 and WTC 6 were impacted by exterior column debris from WTC I that caused large sections of localized collapse and subsequent fires spread throughout most of the buildings. All three buildings also were able to resist progressive collapse, in spite of the extensive local collapses that occurred."

So WTC 4, 5, and 6 behave like every other steel-framed building in history, but somehow WTC 7 collapses like a house of cards?

Observing the collapse of 47-story WTC 7 shows it to have all of the features of an implosion engineered by controlled demolition:

-The collapse of the main structure commences suddenly (several seconds after the penthouse falls).
-The building sinks in a precisely vertical manner into its footprint.
-Puffs of dust emerge from the building's facade early in the event.
-The collapse is total, producing a rubble pile only about three stories high.
-The main structure collapses totally in under 7 seconds, only about a second slower than it would take a brick dropped from the building's roof to reach the ground in a vacuum.

But NIST never tests for any explosive residue. Instead they spend 5+ years perfecting a computer model to blame the collapse on office fires.

And skeptics are the crazy ones? If you don't regurgitate government lies, then you're a conspiracy nut?

Go back to bed America.

And there were many reports of explosions in the basement and lower levels of the buildings.

The NIST never examined any evidence for traces of explosives or thermite, to the best of my knowledge.

http://videosift.com/video/NIST-engineer-denies-the-existence-of-Molten-Steel

There is no point in talking about this stuff any more.

9/11 was an inside job. The NIST consists of a bunch of pussy yes men.

They never set out to find out what happened on that day. Instead, they came up with a narrative, and set about skewing all of the data models to justify that narrative.

When they get away with a job like 9/11, what the fuck? What can you do?

It infuriates me, and millions of others.

You know what it means, at the bottom of it all?

Our country is a fucking joke.

>> ^quantumushroom:

Occam asks: Why would the demolitioninjas collapse the building in an orderly manner that would arouse the suspicions of conspiracy theorists (and 1500 construction experts)? Why didn't they wire the building so it would fall over?

>> ^marinara:
Let's say WT7 had 20 columns holding up 47 floors (that's big). So these big ass columns get pushed around by by the "flooring under heat expansion" and then the other 20 ginormous columns fail instantly, and the whole thing goes down.
If one column can bring down WT7, it wasn't a skyscraper, it was a deathtrap.



You're mis-wielding the Razor. 1) The construction of T1/T2, and I assume 7-- steel-structured buildings in the old WTC site were such that they *would* impolode in the face of structural failure, not fall over. this limits casualties from outside the buildings. 2) The assumption that there are demoninjas necessitates the sub-assumption of the fact that demonninjas do not care what conspirators think, because conspirators will not be able to prove anything, because the ninjas are ninjas. 3) Because, in theory, the demoninjas are making so much money off of this that risking the ire of 1500+ construction experts, demo experts, engineers, and internet users isn't nearly reason enough to stop them taking the risk.

Can I just say... (I lived a few short blocks away in NYC at the time of the collapse. And I am a truther of sorts.) ...I'd like to stop the idea that conspiracy "nuts" are akin to religious zealots, suffer from some kind of mania, think that Illuminati lizards control the world, etc. The government's official story is BOTH a conspiracy (religious nuts in a cave in Afghanistan conspired to crash two planes into two of the largest structures in the financial capital of the west) and a theory (there has been no trial, there is very little hard evidence, there was no comprehensive official investigation, and both the Commission and NIST reports were produced by government institutions or congressionally appointed committee, and neither were conclusive- both were, in the end, speculative.

>> ^marinara:

Let's say WT7 had 20 columns holding up 47 floors (that's big). So these big ass columns get pushed around by by the "flooring under heat expansion" and then the other 20 ginormous columns fail instantly, and the whole thing goes down.
If one column can bring down WT7, it wasn't a skyscraper, it was a deathtrap.


One column?

Do you really believe that the professionals at NIST are suggesting that in WTC7 one column was compromised to the point of failure by the fire, but the other 19 were in pristine normal condition?

Right, anything to hang on to your internal belief system.

The body of professionals across the globe are convinced that the devastation of the lower floors of WTC7 and resulting fires were easily enough to cause the collapse. This was so evident that emergency workers were ordered to abandon the burning building in advance, and news crews were reporting about it's probable collapse before it went down.

Your 'theories' are stupid.

Please, keep parroting things like how house fires can't reach 1000 degrees, it helps people see how stupid your ideas are more quickly. Early steel makers regularly made do with wood fires for their forges, and somehow managed to get the steel to melt. A google scholar search will also quickly show that temperatures exceeding 1000 degrees can be reached by house fires within minutes.

I think the thing that bothers me the most about this crap is the NIST is one the United States most prestigious scientific research institutions.

Ask any physicist; I am not the only one who holds NIST and the scientists there in such high regard. No one tells these people what their findings are, especially not some manager.

The fact of the matter is that NIST did complete and thorough mutliphysics simulations of the entire building, almost completely simulating the entire events from 9/11. They completely recreated the collapse from first principles. I just don't know what more you can want.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go back into my Faraday cage.

Great slow motion clip of building 7 collapsing:
http://videosift.com/video/Office-Fires-How-do-they-work

Newly released video (Jan 2011) by NIST following FOIA lawsuit by International Center for 9/11 Studies.

>> ^ant:

I am sure there are many medias we have not seen and heard. It's almost ten years!


No doubt. There is medias we will never hear or see. Even with the few NIST has been forced to recently release, some have been obviously edited and redacted.

There's probably hundreds of videos of the Pentagon attack that will never see the light of day. They were quickly rounded up "for public safety". They later released one video with 6 frames of the plane hitting.

"A great example of rampant, over-reaching, ignorant, and ill-conceived political foolishness.

Just imagine if security mismanagement such as that encountered at the DHS or the TSA was to impact the NSTIC; one serious data breach would provide a field day for the bad guys. And should that happen, imagine the chaos while the problem was addressed … clients of any of the government's social services would find themselves locked out, services like the Department of Motor Vehicles would grind to a halt (OK, make that more of a halt), and companies that deal with the government could see their businesses hit a brick wall.

And all of this would be because the wonks at NIST think they can do what enterprises with far more experience in hardcore IT have learned the hard way; that unified security is incredibly difficult to implement even for a few thousand people. For tens of millions of citizen, it would be effectively impossible!" - http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2011/011411-backspin.html

If anything this shows that it takes a lot of engineering and setup to make thermite usable for this purpose. To me this implies setup time and research would present a problem and a high probability for failure.

I should say I am a physicist. And when I deposit aluminum in the clean room it glows, granted it is under a vacuum. Therefore, it could be possible that moving molten aluminum also looks "red hot".

Steven Jones is famous for faking his data about cold fusion. That is all I am going to say about that.

I find it laughable that you think the people at NIST are capable of conspiracy... Don't get me wrong; they are great scientists. But I doubt they take kindly to people telling them the results of their experiments.

What really blows my mind here is what an idiot @blankfist is...

>> ^bcglorf:

They didn't specifically test for pre-planted terrorist agents with arc welders cutting the buildings support beams either, but why should they?


Because if this video isn't omitting fundamental parts of the NIST report, the theory of structural failure fails to explain significant evidence, including the molten steel girders, the yellow molten substance (which seems unlikely to have been aluminum with burning furniture), the white flashes and the iron microspheres.

By selectively discarding evidence, an otherwise weak theory can be promoted as the most plausible explanation. For example, if we discard nonrelativistic phenomena, Newtonian physics fit observation quite well.

But as I said, I'm terribly unqualified to take a position on this issue. I have an easy job being a skeptic because whenever I see the media being horribly incompetent when decrying "truthers", I have the tendency of taking the opposing side. I should at the very least read the NIST report.