This evening I went to a movie, “Improbable Collapse”, promoting the controlled demolition hypothesis for the collapse of the WTC buildings on 9/11. I saw the way the WTC buildings collapsed from more angles than I’d ever seen, and the collapse of WTC7 in particular seemed very strange. But as a scientist I trust the analysis more than my seemings and hunches so I’ve not yet come to a conclusion on the nature of the collapses.
I came upon this FAQ and it seems plausible, but still not conclusive. Accordingly there is a long and detailed critique of the report here: 911research’s critique of the NIST FAQ.
I think there is a lot of hard science that needs to be done before these suspicions about controlled demolition get turned into conclusions for or against it. Hopefully the science has been done and someone can point me to it, or it’s being done and will come out soon. All this amateur speculation doesn’t lead anywhere unless someone does all the modelling and calculations and checks all their bases. Unfortunately NIST does seem to be evading certain questions (in particular the time of collapse, probably the single most compelling argument for controlled demolition) so it’s up to someone else to do the analysis right.
For me, the most compelling evidence for controlled demolition are the bone fragments found in nearby buildings. What kind of pancake collapse makes people explode?
The NIST FAQ explicitly rejects the pancake collapse theory:
Furthermore, if it is true that the collapse had sufficient power to shred and toss steel into the air and pulverize concrete, why would you pick human bone fragments as the key evidence? To a collapsing tower bone would hardly be stronger than the pulverized drywall and concrete that was shot out the sides of the tower as it collapsed.
It does seem strange to me that the collapse did shred the steel and pulverize the concrete, but I don’t think my feelings are sufficient to establish the facts of the matter. A 100-story steel tower collapsing is far far outside of our ordinary experience. Our physical intuitions can provide very little certain conclusions in the matter. Only the hard scientific analysis checking all the details can do that.
NIST notes that the capacity to do a rigorous engineering analysis of a plane impact and subsequent fires was limited in the 60’s. I think this is a pretty reasonable claim. Computers then were primitive, and the calculations necessary to take everything relevant into account may well have been outside the capabilities of 60s engineers. The 9/11 skeptics are right to point out that steel framed buildings have not collapsed by fire in the past; but what about impact + fire? I can’t think of many other skyscrapers that endured a plane crash.
In evaluating any conspiracy theory, it’s important to do what I call “becoming the conspirators.” That is, put yourself in their place, assume that you have the means to do what it is alleged that the conspirators did, give yourself their probable (or asserted) motives, and ask yourself whether this is a good idea.
In that way, I reject such conspiratorial assertions as the idea that Roosevelt knew about the Pearl Harbor attack beforehand and let it happen in order to galvanize the U.S. to enter the war. Roosevelt was underhanded enough to pull something like this, but an American victory at Pearl would have served the purpose as well as a defeat, without damaging national morale or sinking ships and killing sailors vital to prosecuting the war effort. (We won the subsequent Battle of Midway through sheer luck.) If FDR had known about the Pearl Harbor attack ahead of time, he would have used that knowledge to countersurprise the Japanese fleet and clobber it. The sneak attack would still have taken place, and the nation would still have entered the war, but in a stronger military and morale position than we actually did. So – Roosevelt did NOT know about the attack ahead of time.
Same logic can apply here. The Bush administration has certainly used 9/11 to provide an umbrella justification allowing it to go to war with anyone it wants whenever it wants, and to curtail American liberties and bolster the power of the executive branch, in quite dastardly fashion. But if it had deliberately orchestrated something to give it that authority, a much less drastic attack, or even a foiled attack, would have done as well. And since it was obviously Bush’s intention from the beginning to go into Iraq, he would have made it so that Saddam Hussein was implicated in the alleged attack, rather than one of Saddam’s enemies. Ergo: whatever went on at the WTC, Bush did not orchestrate it or plan it. He merely took advantage of it.
It’s important to avoid what I call demonizing the enemy. By “demonizing” I don’t mean simply painting them as morally bankrupt (I’m well aware the Bush administration is that), I mean treating them as if they were possessed by demons and no longer human. And by “human” I mean motivated as ordinary human beings, thinking in human fashion, and faced with human limitations. During the Cold War, “Communism” was often demonized, and the nationalistic forces that eventually tore apart the Soviet Union were thought of as eradicated simply by the adoption of that political-economic system. It was exactly as if the people of those countries were believed to be demon-possessed and no longer human.
We must avoid that fallacy when considering domestic enemies as well.
I’ve found that to avoid the difficulties created by taking the approach you have just detailed some conspiracy proponents simply create entirely alternative realities.
But for those that haven’t been completely enveloped by the conspiratorial dimension, your approach is a great starting point in the search for the “Truth”.
Excellent. I always thought there was something vaguely absurd about this claim, but your method lays it open as obviously false.
No one claims that Bush orchestrated the terrorist attacks. But he could have helped them along by arranging to have our defenses lowered to allow the attack to be successful. Using your analysis controlled demolition doesn’t seem plausible though. Why demolish the buildings, when the loss of hundreds on the planes would probably be enough to rally the people behind the President? The only reason I can think they would demolish them is to really scare people as insurance. People sometimes don’t take terrorist attacks seriously. By contrast to your above example, I’m sure that they would have taken Pearl Harbor seriously even if the US had won there.
So I tentatively agree with your analysis here, though it seems a little weaker than in the Pearl Harbor case.
He did know, it was part of the Japanese military’s final examination and was a well-known fact.
LOL, why were all the aircraft carriers out of Pearl at the time?
He did not know when, but he, and others knew it was a target.
No he did not. This has been discussed at length on ILP. He did take advantage of it, but did not plan it. However, he probably knew an attack was coming after 1993 with the unsuccessful hit on the WTC.
Have you read the recent news regarding grenades and such in the Northeast. Have you heard the tapes. Geez.
I don’t know. But before you go laughing prematurely, answer MY question, please: why didn’t Roosevelt countersurprise the Japanese fleet and sink it, if he knew the attack was on its way?
There might be good reasons why the carriers were out of harbor at the time. On maneuvers, in training, whatever. There was NO good reason at all why Roosevelt, if he knew the attack was coming, would have just let it happen.
Besides which, only a few visionaries in the Navy actually saw that aircraft carriers were the new capital ships. It was World War II that proved that. Most Navy people, I’m sure including Roosevelt who was anything but a visionary, still thought battleships were the mainstay of any navy. So if he really wanted to let the attack happen while minimizing the damage, he’d have pulled the battleships out of Pearl and left the carriers, not vice-versa.
Yet he apparently knew when to ensure that the American carriers wouldn’t be targets?
Of course how the Towers (all three of them) turned to dust was the only question mark around 9.11.
The rest… well that was obviously accounted for. It’s interesting, the documentary which was the true catalyst for my ‘crossing over’ so to speak was concerning the stock market and all of the money trails prior to 9.11. The buildings and stuff… that sort of came later.
Sure there are menial questions like ‘Well… how could the gov’t come up with a plan to sneak explosives into a building?’ and 'well how could some noob working in the air control center facilitate a bunch of fake excersizes (17 or 18 ‘scenarios’ all somehow exactly the same as the scenario which was actually playing out) without knowing every intimate detail of this ‘conspiracy’.
But I mean… come on, it’s time to wake up and be intellectuals here.
My mistake, I was confusing the NIST FAQ with the Popular Mechanics FAQ, which advocates the pancake collapse explanation.
One statement in the NIST FAQ baffles me completely, and perhaps you or someone else could explain it to me:
This last bit talks of explosions in the towers while they were still standing - what explosions? It also suggests that fires in the piles of rubble and debris could somehow melt steel, even though as far as I know none of the combustible materials could reach temperatures sufficient to do this.
Well, my reasoning is threefold. Firstly, it’s a dramatic image. Secondly, I only found out about this recently. Thirdly, and most importantly, because the human body does not behave like a massive steel and concrete structure. If a huge column is torn out from it’s position by massive structural failure then it is conceivable that this huge motion would pulverise concrete. But a human body, not a static lump of concrete, will not pulverise due to being hit by a gigantic steel column, or by a large lump of concrete. Or so I understand it.
And I did say ‘the most compelling evidence’, and I meant by that that the evidence of tiny bone fragments is very dramatic, though from a scientific perspective not as significant as the immense outer column sections that were ejected from the buildings and into other buildings, or the massive pyroclastic surge of concrete and other shite that covered that whole area and billowed out across the water.
Well, in explaining why they didn’t consider a controlled demolition explanation, NIST state:
Now, the first bit ignores this video youtube.com/watch?v=i24y511VAMM
that shows that the first movement in the tower is the huge antenna sticking out of the top, which clearly moves before any collapse is seen at the impact point.
The second part ignores, possibly for good reason, the oral histories of the events that are available here.
So, what should happen is that any and every remaining piece of rubble from the WTC (some of it is buried in landfills, as I understand it) should be checked for evidence of explosives, thermite, thermate and so on. Of course, any serious scientific investigation would have done that before publishing an extensive report, as NIST did. So forgive me for holding back on praise for scientific analysis given the job that some institutions have done so far.
Well, according to an interview in 9/11 Mysteries, the claims about the building being able to sustain multiple airliner impacts is tenuous at best, because they never factored in the explosive power of the jet fuel or the damage caused by resultant fires. To me, this looks like a gross oversight, though it might not even be true.
This is an interesting argument, but I don’t find it as convincing as yopele and aporia. Morale is, if you’ll excuse the accusation, being used one-dimensionally here, as though support for entering the war were simply a matter of whether people were happy for it to take place. I think there’s also the issue of fear, in that the public have to believe that they the threat is imminent. While foreknowledge of the attack could have been used for a massive military advantage, it may have had the unwelcome result of the US public thinking ‘well, they tried to attack us and we kicked their asses, we’re safe’ as opposed to ‘they attacked us and killed us, we gotta fight back’.
No?
And one could apply the same logic as I did above. However, there’s a more pragmatic issue at stake than psychological warfare, the issue of the need for a cover-up. If Bush, or Cheney, or whichever insider or group of insiders planned and orchestrated the attacks then they’d probably be smart enough to realise that it would require a cover-up on a scale much larger than the event itself. As such, the evidence would need to be destroyed. If the planes that hit the WTC were not passenger planes, as some have contended, then this would have become apparent had the fires been successfully combated and if the buildings were still standing, albeit with big holes in them. As I understand it, none of the four planes apparently used on 9/11 have been investigated officially as in a normal crash situation. This is particularly bizarre in the case of United 93.
Of course, all mischaracterisations of the enemy are dangerous. But in this case I think that your logic is somewhat fallacious. See what you think.
Actually, you misunderstood what I meant by “morale.” I didn’t mean anything that would lead people to accept going to war. I meant something that would lead people to be believe they were going to win it. In other words, I meant it in a military sense, not a poliltical one. The battle of Pearl Harbor was a Japanese victory, an American defeat. It made people angry that the Japanese had attacked us, yes, and turned a solid majority against getting into the war into an overwhelming majority for getting into it overnight. But it also hurt our chances of winning it, by giving us an impression of American military incompetence that later events proved not entirely justified.
A victory would have gotten us into the war just as well, and with better chances of winning it.
No, I don’t think so. It’s hard for someone who wasn’t alive then to enter the mindset of people at that time (I wasn’t alive then, either, just to be up front), but consider this. The whole world, practically, was insane. In December 1941, the Germans had invaded Russia, were pulling off amazing victories, and were advancing on Moscow. Singapore had fallen, India was threatened, and the mighty British Empire was tottering. The U-boat campaign was threatening to starve England. The Japanese were bogged down in China, but had already conquered a lot of the country. There was a lot of pressure for the U.S. to enter the war. The British wanted it, the Russians wanted it, and FDR wanted it. A majority of Americans were for staying out, but it was an insecure majority, as the instant switch Pearl Harbor created shows. Everyone knew that the Germans and Japanese were ruled by aggressive, warmongering conquerors, and that if they weren’t stopped by someone else we’d likely have to fight them sooner or later, and it didn’t look likely at that time that they’d be stopped by anyone else. So most people knew, in the backs of their minds, that we had to get into the war. But people still didn’t want to.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl, the emotional response that got us in with both feet wasn’t fear, it was ANGER. Fear was what had been keeping us out. But when we were attacked, a lot of people got mad enough to bolster the “we’ve got to get in” side of their minds, and overcome the “I don’t want to go to war” side. Anger with less fear would have been even better.
What followed this statement was a lot of reasoning which apparently started with the assumption that there was anything to cover up. What if there wasn’t? If there wasn’t, the entire construction collapses like the WTC itself.
“Some have contended” that the planes weren’t passenger planes, so the buildings had to be brought down to cover up the evidence . . . But what if the planes WERE passenger planes? Then there’s no need for a cover up, and we don’t need all that reasoning. You have to start with a fact that requires explanation, not start with the explanation and insert the facts to support it.
In any case, whether one is talking about the towers collapsing and thousands of people being killed as a direct act of government pseudo-terrorism, or as part of a cover-up, we still run into the problem of motivation. Why do that, when something much less drastic – and attributed to the enemy Bush actually wanted to go after, rather than the enemy of that enemy – would have done better?
Bush did not do this, because he had no REASON to do this. He is an amoral, unscrupulous politician with far too much love for corporate America and far too little respect for the Constitution and civil liberties, but he is still a human being, and his evil is human evil, not that of a demon-possessed entity that does evil for its own sake.
Can you document this?
Why? Do you think that Bush League do not behave as human beings? I see no evidence of this.
No, absolutely not. When a country attacks you deliberately with malice aforethought, it has effectively declared war on you. When a country declares war on you, you fight back, whether you’re winning or losing. Assuming we ‘won’ Pearl Harbor, no one would have thought “oh, I guess we can beat off any attack they throw at us, so there’s no need to actively fight back.” Everyone would have thought more attacks were imminent and prepared just as feverishly as if we had lost.
Somehow I think that this is one of the bullshit nuggets that invariably circulates the conspiracy theory community, but let’s not dispute it for the moment. You’re suggesting that the planes involved in 9/11 were not commercial airliners. To cover this up, you’d have to get the airline companies in on it so they could lie about their destroyed airliners which they in fact never lost. Then you’d have to get hundreds of supposed victims of the airline crashes to pretend that they had lost family members they did not on those flights. And let’s not forget the photographic evidence of large commercial airliners hitting the buildings from many angles. I don’t think that even the 9/11 conspiracy research center website “911research” supports this notion.
If you’re prepared to believe this, you’re well beyond any argument I can make to stop you.
Ever see the movie Tora Tora Torah? This movie is a US Japanese collaborative effort regarding this attack and is quite accurate. We knew the Japanese fleet was mobilizing, but we did not know where they had gone.
Yes, you are correct regarding the military thought regarding aircraft carriers and battleships during this period.
FDR not a visionary? He really pissed off the Republicans with all his social programs, programs they called communist.
True, I mispoke. However, it was a well know fact that the Japanese military final exam for several years was how to best attack Pearl Harbor. I still maintain that FDR knew that the Japanese were planning to attack, but did not know exactly when. Geez, I have lost the research paper I did regarding this. Not the first time.
There was a famous dig by Claire Booth Luce, no fan of FDR’s, that arose when she was asked what hand signal best characterized Roosevelt as the straight-arm salute did Hitler, the raised fist Mussolini, or the V-for-victory Churchill. She responded by wetting a forefinger in her mouth and raising it to the air, as if testing the wind.
FDR was a progressive, but not a visionary in that none of the stuff he implemented was his own idea. His genius was politics, as Luce said in a very unkind way. He almost always had his finger on the public pulse and knew just how far he could go. Republicans may have called the New Deal communist, but an actual socialist (Norman Thomas) published an article pointing out how stupid that was, and how far short of socialism FDR’s programs fell. There was no consistent theme to the New Deal. Roosevelt himself admitted that he was tinkering, trying one thing and if that didn’t work, trying something else.
Okay, assuming that the only Presidential intention regarding World War 2 was to enter it and win it, I can agree with that.
As I said, assuming that the only aim was to get the US public to accept entering the war, this argument makes a lot of sense.
You yourself said that we should put ourselves in the minds of the alleged conspirators. I do that, so you criticise me for assuming that there’s a conspiracy for the sake of argument.
Bizarre, quite frankly.
Perhaps they were piloted by remote, as in the bizarrely prescient pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, that aired the summer just prior to the attacks.
Again, assuming that there was something to cover up (not just planes, but also the alleged insider trading that took place inside the towers on that very morning uncovered by Convar and whatever was happening on the 34th floor that William Rodriguez had talked about, and so on) is part of your very instructions in how we should approach this.
You assume that this is simply about Bush’s thirst for invading Iraq. There’s literally no evidence that this is the case, given all the other multifarious policies that have used 9/11 as their main justification.
So take Bush out of the equation, and make him part of the stunned and confused public. Make the conspirators someone other than Bush, and this whole argument of yours collapses unlike most buildings do when they’re on fire.
Well, the only way I can prove that something didn’t take place is by waving my hands at its absence. I can only assume that the laws in the UK are the same as in the UK, where all crashes must be followed by an investigation and a reconstruction of the planes.
So, if you want me to give you references to the official accounts that I’ve read that don’t contain such an investigation, I can. But I imagine that you’ve already read them, so what, exactly, would I be proving?
Well, they are humans. Their actions are by definition human. This is tautologous.
This is identical to Dawkins argument about a world with no religion. Curious…
Not true, if you can successfully pilot the planes via remote (which I’m led by military people to believe is entirely possible and has been for some time). The airline companies could be part of the deceived, rather than the deception.
Which is entirely possible, though it would be easier to just kill the people on the flights after the remote controlled commercial planes had been landed somewhere. Thus, in a very real sense the relatives and friends would have lost loved ones. If you’re willing to blow up two massive towers and not only killed over 2,000 people inside them but simultaneously poison thousands of others then killing a few hundred passengers on planes (remember that the planes used were relatively empty compared with other similar flights) is neither here nor there.
Your point being? All this proves is that the conspiracy theorists are far from uniform in their views.
No video evidence exists of Flight 93 crashing, and no video evidence exists that clearly shows Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon.
Well, if you can explain why I should believe that Flight 77 and Flight 93 crashed where I’m officially told that they crashed, despite an almost total lack of evidence for this, then maybe we can find some common ground. However, if you’re completely convinced that those two aircraft hit the Pentagon and crashed in Shanksville then there’s not much I can do to persuade you otherwise. Nevermind.
Is there something to be discussed here, or is this just an evasive harumph? I stand by my analysis of the psychology of Pearl Harbor.
Uhm, okay… imagine you’re the head of keeping track of airplanes for United. You hear on the news that one of your planes has crashed into a tower. But all your airplanes are accounted for, since the planes that crashed were actually military planes. Wouldn’t you feel there’s something wrong here to speak up about? Or are you yet another of the people the government hushed up in this massively imaginative and unnecessarily convoluted conspiracy?
okay, so there’s remote controlled civilian planes AND military planes. Military planes hit the targets while civilian planes are landed somewhere and everyone aboard is gassed, and the airplanes disposed of. Is this correct? Please tell me I’ve completely misinterpreted you… because if you believe anything resembling this there’s no reasoning with you whatsoever. If you’ve got remote controlled civilian planes, why not fly the fucking planes into the buildings? Why waste two sets of aircraft?
You should do a couple mouseclicks’ worth of research before you assume such an air of authority on a matter.
No, it’s a specific comment - you’re relying on your own speculation about a situation for which there’s no empirical evidence (just as Dawkins does) to justify your desired conclusion (just as Dawkins does). And you assume that winning the war was the only aim on the war agenda. Remind me again, how long after the war was it before the CIA were created?
Assuming this is what happened then I myself would speak up. On the other hand, if it just so happened to be a day of massive confusion in the FAA then I might keep my mouth shut until I knew for sure what had happened, just in case I was mistaken.
Hang on, wasn’t 9/11 also, by a strange coincidence, a day of mass confusion in the FAA? Perhaps you’d like to research that one and see if you think it might make a difference to people
a) knowing what actually happened
b) feeling confident enough to speak out about what they believed to be lies
Something along those lines, yes.
I never said that I believed this, I merely put it to you as an explanation that might account for what we’ve seen.
So, to recap:
-Navigator says that we should try to put ourselves in the mind of the conspirators
-aporia agrees with this approach
-siatd attempts to do this
-aporia twice declares that there’s no reasoning with siatd
However, as I’m sure you are aware, just such a plan (without the killing of the innocents on the commercial planes) is described in the Northwoods documents that precede 9/11 by almost four decades.
Firstly, this is the US military we’re hypothesising about, for whom waste is practically a founding value. Same with western intelligence services.
But, that jab aside, you wouldn’t be wasting two sets of aircraft, because the poached commercial jets would be under military ownership.
You seem to assume that I take 911research as the defining arbiter on all issues 9/11. I actually think that the 9/11 conspiracy theorists suffer from a lack of imagination, but there you go…
I think there’s a fair amount of empirical evidence for the “speculation” that a nation will counterattack and seek to destroy military capability when a massive and highly aggressive attack is mounted against it. Moreover it’s just common sense. If a man attacks another man aggressively with intent to kill, he will have to fight back unless he’s so massively strong that the attacks are ineffective. But this was not the case in US vs Japan. Therefore the US would have fought back regardless of the outcome.
I think the burden is on you to give an example of a situation where a nation aggressively attacked another nation with massive force only to be repelled, and then the attacked nation felt no need to counterattack and destroy the attacking nation’s military capacity.
Feel free to enlighten me about your CIA speculations. I see no reason why World War II was necessary for America to create an espionage and intelligence organization, when probably all major industrial nations have one.
Okay, that’s fine. We should speculate; all options should be on the table, just so long as we know the difference between what we know and what we are still investigating.
I don’t for a moment think that our government is above creating phony pretext for war by destroying its own people and property. There are way too many historical examples, from the Spanish-American War down to Vietnam. But this plan you’ve proposed makes no sense to me. Why would such a brilliantly executed psy-op contain such an idiotic side-plot?
If you have remote control of commercial aircraft, it would be the easiest thing in the world to fly them into the targets. There would be no suspicions over the planes actually being military aircraft. There would be no need to hide the deaths of hundreds of additional people.
If you propose inefficiency and incompetence as the reason for such a ridiculous execution, let’s just note that this idea requires much MORE creativity and much MORE effort than simply flying the commercial planes into the buildings. Anyone smart enough to come up with the psy-op in the first place would never concoct such an absurdly baroque ornamentation to the simple straightforward plan.
No, I don’t think anyone should take them as an absolute authority. But their presentation of the evidence appears sound to me. I also think that they are open to correction, so if you find a problem you should tell them and us.
Imagination is important, but I’m looking for a strong theory supported by multiple lines of evidence. To get that you also need to apply some critical faculty, otherwise you’ll waste your time on theories like this that, as far as I can tell, never even get off the ground.
