PBS' Frontline: "Bush's War"

[Hugh Nunn]

You can add to the above:

4. Where are the tail section and engines of the 757 that hit the Pentagon?

From the FAQ section of the link I posted above:

FACT: Blast expert Allyn E. Kilsheimer was the first structural engineer to arrive at the Pentagon after the crash and helped coordinate the emergency response. "It was absolutely a plane, and I'll tell you why," says Kilsheimer, CEO of KCE Structural Engineers PC, Washington, D.C. "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box." Kilsheimer's eyewitness account is backed up by photos of plane wreckage inside and outside the building. Kilsheimer adds: "I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts. Okay?"

Ok, maybe he's not CNN, but my Father was playing golf t Army-Navy CC when the plane that hit the Pentagon flew over very low and getting lower. His group all remarked on how it would never make Reagan National Airport. Then they heard/saw the explosion. Do the math...you can't hide a plane. Not like that.

[StrykerFSU]

Guys, it belittles us all to respond to that nonsense.

[KnoxVegas]

I never said that a plane did or did not hit the Pentagon. I just asked what happened to the tail section and the engines.

(I grew up playing Army-Navy as my family has been members there since the 1970's.)

[Jana]

I don't know where it is currently stored, but that does not mean there is a conspiracy afoot. I don't know where the tail pieces to Flight 800 are either (or any other plane crash for that matter). There was a crash on New Year's Day 2008 over Indonesia, plane hit the ocean at full force and burst into smithereens, there was nearly nothing to recover. That doesn't mean it didn't happen or it was a military plane.

Anyway, all these conspiracy theorists claiming different types of planes caused the damage - so what happened to all those civilian people who are on the commercial flights (which apparently didn't hit the Pentagon, instead apparently missiles or military jets hit)? Are they being held at Gitmo? Extraordinary rendition?

[Dan Warren]

Read the Popular Mechanics article.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technol ... tml?page=4

Footnotes are required before we take the facts listed in your questions at face value. Also, considering how terribly our country tests in science and mathematics, can 98% of americans even comprehend the physics that were involved in the WTC collapse?

Define free fall speed? cite credible sources stating which floors had fires in WTC 7? Define the history of hte put-options on AA and UA stock that week and what the major changes were? Were there other factors (such as the weakening economy or increases in fuel costs, impending strikes, etc)?

As for the Pentagon crash, I guess you could say build a conspiracy about any airplane crash because the layman doesn't know where all the pieces are stored afterwards. Seriously, where are the pieces of Flight 700 stored? I have no idea. CONSPIRACY AFOOT!

read "Debunking 9-11 Debunking", and you will find all the footnotes you need. David Ray Griffen tears apart "Popular Mechanics" so called debunking with facts. He does the same with NIST, and the 9-11 Commission report.

I am not going to point the finger at anyone specific here, but from everything that I have read, I think we deserve to have another investigation, with an impartial committee. Not one hand-picked by Bush.

[Dan Warren]

here is brief amazon review of chapter 4 in "Debunking 9-11 Debunking"

In a blockbuster of a last chapter, Griffin in Chapter 4 destroys Popular Mechanics' Debunking 9/11 Myths, a short book expanding a 2005 article in that magazine. He starts out with a thorough deconstruction of Senator John McCain's propagandistic Foreword, and then reviews the history of the involvement of Benjamin Chertoff, cousin of Michael Chertoff, Director of Homeland Security, in the book's production, and the fact that the editors of the book deny this relationship. Griffin then explicates the logic underlying the task facing Popular Mechanics. Specifically, it "must show that every one of the key claims made by the leading critics of the official story is false. Why? Because each of these claims challenges one of the essential claims of the official story. If even one of those essential claims is disproved, then the official story as such is thrown into doubt. Critics do not need to show the falsity of every essential element in the official account; they need to show only the falsity of one such element." Griffin then proceeds to demonstrate, in great detail, that the book utterly fails to accomplish its purpose with respect to even one essential claim of the leading critics of the official story, let alone all of them. He follows the order of the book and shows that the arguments presented to debunk critics of the official account of the planes and the alleged hijackers' flying skills, the stand-down, the destruction of the World Trade Center, the events at the Pentagon, and Flight 93 all fail, quite miserably and even comically. Along the way he exposes the many rhetorical tricks and deceptions used by the editors to fool gullible readers.

The book's Conclusion returns to the role played by the press, showing that its uncritical acceptance of the official conspiracy theory of 9/11, due to its reliance upon the authority of the government and its unfounded assumption that official and semi-official publications have been genuinely scientific, objectively neutral reports, has perpetuated an irrational and unscientific theory and suppressed far more rational and scientific alternatives. Griffin provides examples of this misplaced trust in the government in writings by left-leaning journalists, including Alex Cockburn and Matt Rothschild. He believes the left press may be able to see the errors they have made, and make a turn toward the truth, but holds out little hope for the mainstream press, which largely has vested interests in the government agenda of "the war on terror." Griffin concludes with suggestions for how US citizens and people in other countries could organize and mobilize to demand a genuine investigation into 9/11, leading to judicial proceedings.

Debunking 9/11 Debunking is a tremendous book, which should be read by everyone. By utterly destroying each of the well-funded, best efforts of the government to defend its case in the court of public opinion, the book effectively finishes off the official conspiracy theory. With this book in its arsenal, the 9/11 truth movement is set to take the offensive. It is time to launch this Debunker Buster at the hardened fortresses of the mass murderers within. Do what the perpetrators fear most. Read this book!

[KnoxVegas]

I don't know where it is currently stored, but that does not mean there is a conspiracy afoot.

Maybe it's here?:

I don't know where the tail pieces to Flight 800 are either (or any other plane crash for that matter).

Flight 800 was reconstructed by the NTSB in Calverton, NY.



And I never mentioned anything about conspiracy theories.

[Jana]

Aha! No tail shown in the picture. The US Navy STOLE IT!

If you'll all recall (some may be too young) flight 800 had a conspiracy theory that a Navy missile brought it down over L.I. My father was a retired master chief, who has served on more air craft carriers than I can recall, witnessed his fair share of missiles fired from nearby gunships. As he explained it to me, on a fair september evening, a missile lights up the evening sky, it's pretty hard to miss, and pretty hard to misidentify.

And...keeping a conspiracy quiet on a gunship of that size would be impossible. Too many guys would talk if they knew they had fired on Flight 800. Fortunately that conspiracy has died out.

Hopefully the new conspiracies about 9/11 will meet a similar fate. I wonder at the qualifications of the reviewer for Amazon. Physics training? Architecture? Buildings come down all the time in fires. Why not the WTC? Why are conspiracy theorists so certain that it was not possible for jet fuel and combustable material to bring it down?

[Jac Coyne]

He follows the order of the book and shows that the arguments presented to debunk critics of the official account of the planes and the alleged hijackers' flying skills, the stand-down, the destruction of the World Trade Center, the events at the Pentagon, and Flight 93 all fail, quite miserably and even comically.

[Dan Warren]

Jac Coyne...I didn't write that. I just posted a review of the book. I agree that excerpt was tough to read.

Hopefully the new conspiracies about 9/11 will meet a similar fate. I wonder at the qualifications of the reviewer for Amazon. Physics training? Architecture? Buildings come down all the time in fires. Why not the WTC? Why are conspiracy theorists so certain that it was not possible for jet fuel and combustable material to bring it down?

Jana

First, remember both "theories" on what happened that day are conspiracy theories. I am not sure what qualifications that reviewer has, I just posted it for another perspective.

Buildings come down all the time in fires, TRUE. But do they come down right down on their own footprint? No. They topple sideways, or whatever way the damage allows. For three buildings to come down right on top of their own footprint, exactly like a controlled demolition, is impossible.

Buildings come down all the time in fires.

Actually, prior to 9-11, no steel frame stucture building had EVER collapsed due to fire. On that day 3 did?

Why not the WTC? Why are conspiracy theorists so certain that it was not possible for jet fuel and combustable material to bring it down?

Because Jet Fuel doesn't burn at a temperature hot enough to melt steel. Steel does not begin to melt until 2800 F. NIST itself says no steel columns were heated up more than 482 F. What combustible material inside the building is going to heat up to that temperature and then spread to all the columns in the building to weaken them enough to melt them, and have them all collapse at just the right time to have the building fall down on top of itself?

There needs to be a new investigation. One without any involvement of the Bush Administration [/quote]

[Dan Warren]

Guys, it belittles us all to respond to that nonsense.

actually, it belittles us all to just blindly take our governments word. They lie to us all time, why would they not lie about this? They work for US, and should answer to us.

[Zeuslax]

Another investigation of the reasons for the collapse will be difficult, but not out of the question. The material(s) from the site were carted away quickly and recycled.

[StrykerFSU]

Somebody get Rosie on the phone!!! I need some expert opinion on the melting point of steel!

Just one question, in this control group of 150 story tall sky scrapers that have burned but not collapsed that prove that it is impossible for a building to come down in its footprint, how many of them experienced the force and damage done by a high speed collision with a fully loaded and fueled passenger airliner?

Yes, it is true that steel melts at around 2000 degrees C (that's Celsius for all you non-geeks out there) and jet fuel burns at around 800 degrees. But, and this is the important part, we don't need to melt the steel for the buildings to come down. All you need to do is further weaken the already damaged steel support structure and gravity will do the rest. The strength of steel degrades with increasing temperature, dropping to about 50% at the temperature at which jet fuel burns.

You also have to think of heat not as solely temperature but also as energy. As the fire puts energy into the steel beams, the temperature of the beams rises but energy is also being transmitted throughout the steel structure by conduction. If the heat is coming in faster than it is being removed, the temperature of the steel in the area of the heat source will rise higher than the burning point of the jet fuel. That energy has to go somewhere! So if you input heat faster than it can be removed, the steel's temperature will rise, and it will soften until it becomes plastic.

It hardly takes a stretch of the imagination to see that the combined stress of the airplane smashing in the building and the weakening of the structure from huge fires burning for upwards of an hour might be able to weaken the buildings skeleton enough to bring a few floors down and thus spark a chain reaction that would drop the buildings.

But I guess there is always the possibility that W orchestrated an international plot involving the military, the city government of New York, al Quaeda, multiple airport security details, and numerous others to kill thousands of American citizens so that he would have the pretense to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. All without anyone anywhere getting a hint of his dastardly plot. Yeah, I guess that makes sense too.

[Sonny]

But I guess there is always the possibility that W orchestrated an international plot involving the military, the city government of New York, al Quaeda, multiple airport security details, and numerous others to kill thousands of American citizens so that he would have the pretense to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. All without anyone anywhere getting a hint of his dastardly plot. Yeah, I guess that makes sense too.

W is far too stupid to pull that plot off.

[StrykerFSU]

Since I don't want anyone to take my non-expert word for it, feel free to check out any of the numerous studies on the subject published in reputable peer-reviewed journals. Here are some examples to get you going:

Structural Responses of World Trade Center under Aircraft Attacks
Yukihiro Omika1; Eiji Fukuzawa2; Norihide Koshika3; Hiroshi Morikawa4; and Ryusuke Fukuda5
JOURNAL OF STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING © ASCE / JANUARY 2005

Conclusion
By evaluating analytically the overall responses, damage situations, and stress states at the aircraft impact for WTC1 and WTC2, the following items were found. The overall responses of the WTC towers impact evaluated by the lumped mass model show that the maximum acceleration responses were a little less than 2g for WTC1 and about 3g for WTC2, and the maximum displacements were about 50 cm at the tops of both towers. Moreover, although the story shear forces and the overturning moments in part exceeded those by design wind load on the upper stories, they were restored below to the horizontal load-carrying capacity in WTC1 and WTC2. As a result, the buildings did not collapse
immediately at impact.

Based on the results of the analysis using a detailed finite element model, the damage situation of each structural component around impacted stories and the destroyed components were
evaluated. As a result, the damage situation of the outer wall of WTC1 and WTC2 and the velocity reduction curve of the aircraft for WTC2 showed good agreement with the actual phenomena. Moreover, the number of destroyed core columns, which cannot be seen from a video image, photographs, and so on, were 32 for WTC1 and 9 for WTC2. Under this condition, it turns out that the stress was smoothly redistributed by the outrigger truss and the whole building maintained its supporting capability against the gravity load. Immediately after impact, the upper story part above the impacted center story leaned at a displacement angle of about
1/1,650 for WTC1 and about 1/460 for WTC2, respectively.

Where there is no outrigger truss system, as the axial forces carried by the damaged columns were not transmitted to the surrounding columns, there is a great possibility that a large area of the floor slabs fell down simultaneously over multiple stories, resulting in progressive collapse.

For WTC1, the floor locations of destroyed columns were almost symmetrical and the stresses in the intact columns after stress redistribution were also mostly distributed over an almost symmetrical form in the floor plan, while for WTC2, the columns destroyed by impact and the yielded columns were located eccentrically near side C. Thus, it is considered that WTC2 collapsed sooner than WTC1 because of the difference in the stress state of the components after impact between WTC1 and WTC2.

How did the WTC towers collapse: a new theory

A. S. Usmani Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, Y. C. Chung and J. L. Torero
School of Engineering and Electronics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JN, UK
Received 10 March 2003; revised 6 June 2003; accepted 10 June 2003. ; Available online 26 July 2003.

6. Conclusions

The chief conclusions are:

1. The analysis presented points to a compelling fire induced collapse mechanism rather unique to the type of structure that the WTC Twin-Towers represented.
2. This analysis also shows that the collapse is initiated principally by a stability mechanism as a result of geometry changes in the structure caused by thermal expansion effects.
3. Furthermore it is quite possible that the geometric changes required to precipitate collapse could result from very low temperatures not high enough to induce significant reduction in the material properties.
4. It can therefore be provisionally concluded that these buildings could have collapsed as a result of a major fire event. This is of course assuming that any of the active fire suppression systems would either fail or be unable to control the development of the fire. This is a normal assumption when designing fire protection for buildings.

Author(s): Irfanoglu A (Irfanoglu, Ayhan), Hoffmann CM (Hoffmann, Christoph M.)
Source: JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE OF CONSTRUCTED FACILITIES Volume: 22 Issue: 1 Pages: 62-67 Published: JAN-FEB 2008
Times Cited: 0 References: 13
Abstract: The writers report on a simulation study of the performance of the North Tower (WTC-I) of the World Trade Center complex during the impact of American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. We discuss impact damage that the structural core might have sustained and its possible behavior under structural and thermal loading. Our simulations indicate that the worst damage to the core structure was in stories 95 through 97 of the tower. We estimate that a core collapse mechanism could be initiated if the tower core column temperatures were elevated to about 700 degrees C.

Author(s): Flint G (Flint, Graeme), Usmani A (Usmani, Asif), Lamont S (Lamont, Susan), Lane B (Lane, Barbara), Torero J (Torero, Jose)
Source: JOURNAL OF STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING-ASCE Volume: 133 Issue: 12 Pages: 1719-1732 Published: DEC 2007
Times Cited: 0 References: 20
Abstract: This paper reports on an investigation of the effects of fire on long span truss floor systems in a tall building environment. The effects of fire spread over multiple floors of a building are the focus of this research, especially where this may lead to progressive collapse. The results from an investigation of a two-dimensional model of a multistory office building analysis are presented. The model is representative of the type of construction used in the World Trade Center Towers 1 and 2. The local and global response of the model is described over the course of a concurrent fire on three floors reaching a peak compartment temperature of 800 degrees C. The results of the analysis show that large displacements may occur in long span structural floor systems without failure, however, the interaction of the highly deflected floors with the exterior or perimeter columns can lead to structural collapse. Additional structural members, such as hat trusses, that allow redistribution of loads away from the exterior columns to the core columns have a significant beneficial impact on the robustness of the structure.