(Bolding mine.) Why not? I can.
This is wrong. We've tried to explain this to you elsewhere, but even though by your own admission you lack the technical ability to make this judgment, you cling to your assessment.
As a scientist, one who has studied structural mechanics, fluid dynamics, and is up to his elbows in commercial aircraft, the NIST report is darn near bulletproof to a certain granularity. The gross order behavior of what happened on Sept. 11th is absolutely air-tight. Not a single credible alternative has ever appeared, and I've spent nearly a year trying to seek out those alternatives, finding them all to fail at first inspection.
The criminological question, blaming Al-Qaeda and the specific 19 terrorists, as outlined in the 9/11 Commission Report and later in the Moussaoui trial, has a few flaws but is basically satisfying. We've explained over and over again why the 19 suspects are who they are (reports from planes, airport cameras and witnesses, DNA evidence, evidence left behind, and confession videos played after the fact), and I'm 100% comfortable with that. There are errors, particularly in the Moussaoui trial, but they are procedural. Even where the Justice Department screwed up, it doesn't cast any doubt on the 9/11 Commission conclusions.
I ask again: Why can't you believe in incompetence? I am perfectly comfortable with the Official Theory, while maintaining that the justification for the war in Iraq, Camp X-Ray, the gutting of Habeus corpus, and some provisions of the Patriot Act amount to a colossal blunder. There is absolutely no reason to conflate politics with the Sept. 11th investigations. Don't make that mistake.
Follow-ups on the last paragraph to Politics subforum. Keep the topics separate, please, as they belong.
I just can't. Call for argument out of incredulity, but I can't believe a President can stay on the same erroneous war for years, one against a country that we know was no threat to us, nor did it seem like it was, out of plain ignorance. There is always many more interests you can count for starting a war in the middle east, than the ones fed to us by their mind boggling speeches. It wasn't about WMD's, or Iraqis' freedom, or the war on terror. I cannot believe they pushed these reasons down our throats out of plain incompetence. And they're still on it. And they'll go for Iran. You know it's a unjustified war. Both Reps and Democrats are pushing it. Ehm. I lost my
point already. What was it again? Well, whatever.
So, you seem to respect the NIST as a thorough investigation which explains how the towers fell.A straightfoward question then: Am I being mentally dishonest if I feel like they didn't explain it enough, considering that they did not account for the collapse sequence? Or should I be ashamed of myself for not being able to plug the dots together in visualising that "collapse initiation -> 11 seconds
global collapse"?
Yurebiz:
If someone in your neighbourhood is murdered, you'd expect the police might ask you a few questions, but do you think they would interogate you, arrest you, bring you to court, and try to convict you. How about your neighbour, would you expect the police to do this to him...or his neighbour.
My point is simple. You cannot take a shotgun approach and deeply investigate every single possibility...it isnt feasable and doesnt make sense. Is it possible, in the realm of all things "possible" that some sort of energy beam weapon brought down the WTCs...yes, in the same vein that it is possible that the aliens we met in the 1940s in New Mexico brought down the WTCs for the evil Cabal whom they have a relationship with...possible...EXTREMELY UNLIKELY...to the point of virtually nil chance.
Maybe Leprachauns brought them down. Should we send in a team of investigators to rule this possibility out?
The FBI, NIST, etc...took the evidence at hand, and investigatd what was plausible, what was likely, based on it...EOS.
TAM
The NIST hasn't.. wait, I should say.. congress hasn't investigated the collapse sequence.
NIST has proven that it is possible for a plane to knock down to buildings
They did not prove the Boeings made it collapse under the conditions
witnessed.
That isn't a criminal investigation at all. It wasn't one to begin with, I reckon. Should we use it to prove what we saw happening at all? I'm beginning to doubt it even more since you guys explained me what little has the NIST accomplished, in regards to the 9/11 investigations...
I can't take a scientific investigation, which proves only half a phenomena, as adequate. I'm sorry.
But since you brought up probabilities to the question, I'd be glad to discuss some of it, because I just love exploiting chances out of my bodily orifices. Ahem. I my opinion, the chance of 'CD' in a global collapse of a skyscraper at slightly more than 80% of vacuum free-fall acceleration is about... 80%, just to go along with the made up acceleration ratio I just got out of nowhere.
Hi Yurebiz, I'm going to address three of your points.
The full investigation showed that terrorist acts caused 9/11. Whatever you think, politically, about the war on terror is not going to be affected by the engineering reasons why the towers collapsed, is it? Suppose the towers had not collapsed and the fires were put out with minimum loss of life (the plane passengers, and a few hundred people in the towers who perished horribly in the impact or fires constituting most of the casualties), but the governments' response were basically the same. Would that make the war on terror or the
Patriot Act any less justified?
Thats a great question, I never thought of that.
Reasonably speaking, no of course it wouldn't. however thats not what happened. Because the towers fell, more people died. That requires an investigation to who made the towers fall at all. It is not self evident that it was the plane and the fires. It might be for us who are already informed by NIST's work, but it sure wasn't back then, and it sure isn't easy proving such thing as you know. Whatever the scenario would be, there has to be an investigation for whatever caused damage to the citizens. Even more so if it's was done by foreign matters in an act of war.
Let me attempt an analogy. Suppose, some day, terrorists succeed at detonating a bomb that breaks a dam that inundates a river valley, destroying hundreds of homes and buildings in several medium-sized river towns in a rushing wall of water, with numerous casualties.
I would expect the government to investigate how the terrorists had been able to plant and detonate the bomb, why the bomb was so effective at breaking the dam, whether the dam should have been built differently to be less vulnerable to bomb damage, whether warning systems for the population in the event of dam breakage had functioned as they were designed to (and if not, why not), and what additional measures might be taken to protect other dams, and the people downstream from them, in the future.
I would not expect them to investigate why, once the dam broke, the water flowed downstream, or why the rushing wall of water was able to destroy buildings in its path, or how buildings should be built differently to withstand sudden torrential floods. Because we already know why water flows downhill, and we already know why massive water flows knock over buildings, and we already know that it would not be practical to require that buildings be designed to resist torrential floodwaters.
Would you disagree? Would you regard the government as having failed in its duty to explain to you why the flood destroyed buildings downstream?
We also already know that once the upper floors of a building collapse, the collapse will not self-arrest and cannot be arrested. We know that as surely as we know that water runs downhill. For those who didn't know it, the government reports attempted to explain it. If they failed to convince segments of the public, perhaps it's because the public educational system has failed to teach their students enough to understand the explanation.
Would you join with other members of the James Randi Educational Foundation to lobby for better science education in the public school system? That would appear to be a rational corrective response. If the public knew science, then the government (as well as the truthers) would be rendered unable to lie to the public using bad science.
Thats an excellent analogy I think. Except that it isn't necessary to prove the overwhelming energy by the flood is enough to smash houses and whatever weak structures stood in its way. You know why. That is self evident. No one doubts that houses can get smashed by high speed, big masses of
water.
What was, and still is in doubt, is how could the tower's global collapses take place under such short interval between plane crashes, and how could they collapse so fast. It is an unusual event, since no such high rise structure had collapsed before. IT requires investigation, full investigation, not to rule out every minor possibility such space beams or atomic bombs, but to at least make sure that the planes+fires made such collapses happen the way we saw them.
You have a new strange phenomena. You propose a hypothesis. Test it out multiple times, and if correct, you got a sound theory. That's frigging elementary science basics.
But not this time. Here we have the NIST saying fires could do it. They prove fires could do it. But they don't address how could the massive upper floors could smash all the way down under 11 seconds. That is irrelevant to their investigation, as mentioned before. Is that a sound theory to prove it happened due to fire+crash? It might be for you who is able to connect the dots yourself, but I can't, I have to be spoon-fed all the way. I'm that pathetic. Is it dishonest to think that the government failed to provide the american public with a conjunctive and complete report about what happened, or is everyone obligated to read into each every little separate report to be able to understand what really happened?
I can't join this scientific community. I'm purposely too ignorant of scientific principles and common sense. I'll stick around though. Rather, lurk around.
I don't mind explaining this again. First of all, there is no evidence for "pools of molten metal" let alone "pools of molten iron/steel." Some eyewitness reports spoke of molten metal, which was probably aluminum and not steel. Other eyewitness reports spoke of molten beams, which were probably steel members softened by intense heat. (Most people would describe the glass being shaped by a glassblower as "molten," but it does not flow into puddles.) As far as I know, everyone who referred to "pools of molten metal" were describing them second-hand or at further remove. It's not surprising that people hearing from eyewitnesses about "molten metal" would
assume that large amounts of metal was liquified and would therefore naturally form pools. But no one saw a pool first-hand.
What happened under the debris piles is that the fires already burning when the towers collapsed continued burning inside the debris piles. Most laymen would assume that such fires would be smothered, but a fire does not truly go out until its heat can be dissipated. A fire in a confined space, with a limited air supply, will burn slowly, but the heat it generates also escapes slowly. The result of the trapped heat can be that the fire gets hotter. The trapping of heat is why a wood fire in a wood stove, with a controlled limited air influx, gets hotter than an open campfire the same size, even though the fuel in the wood stove lasts many times longer because of the limited oxygen supply. Other well-known phenomena, such as underground coal fires that burn for decades, long-burning all-but-unextinguishable freight fires in uncontainerized cargo ships, and closed-room fires that seem dormant from outside and then "explode" when the room is vented, are explained by the same principles.
Leading into the depths of the WTC debris piles were open subway tunnels and sewers, which provided limited but sufficient airflow to some spots (which became the hot spots). The smoke rising from the ground is evidence of that air flow. Until some of the layers of debris were removed, because of the random stratification of the debris, the water the firefighters were pouring on the ground couldn't penetrate many of the places where combustion was going on and accumulating trapped heat.
Good, I didn't know that. There has to be a way to express the temperatures through scientific quotations though. There has to be a way to at least roughly measure the amount of heat energy present in those points.. then somehow calculate the ammount of metal debris located there... and finally calculate how high was the initial temperature at the spots on 9/11. This aint quite accurate since there's no way to tell the kind or ammount of metal present in the spots but still it might give us an idea. If it was anywhere over 1000 degrees Celsius, be it alluminum, steel, iron or whatever, then we know something is definitely wrong, eh. Fires can't elevate it that high.
I hope someone within the movement does that sometime because I have no idea how to even start. And because the NIST surely isn't going to do it, since it's not their job. Plus they didn't even reckon it's existance at all.
Sorry for being an ass, and thanks.
Funny you've answered all the posts in this thread except mine...
Is it because you don't like the answers to your questions?
Pardalis I said they have been debunked already. I didn't question anything, so how can you be answering them? I'm only asking for your opinions on the government's response about those topics, in the official report. I know you guys love debunking, but there's nothing to do in that respect here...
Well, just to answer ya then: Yes, I don't like the answers. It makes me think we have thousands of islamofascist terrorists infiltrated in the US today waiting for a chance to kill us. So I grab my security blanket, AKA conspiracy theories, and hold it tight while I call my mommy AKA Alex Jones.
The US Government does not have the burden to explain things that people SHOULD have learned in school or through common experience, nor to explain things that are common knowledge among more specifically educated groups. The US Government knows that there are others out there that can explain specific points about those days based on their education and experience. Molten metal at Ground Zero? The Government doesn't have to explain this, any more than they have to explain the effects of turbulence on the flight path of an airplane over a major city. Explosives BUILT into the Towers? Time to wire explosives and cover up the evidence? The Gov't doesn't have to explain this either - plenty of us out here have first-hand experience and knowledge with demolitions and explosives, and have explained time and again that these theories are exceptionally improbable and/or impossible.
Should they investigate the collapse sequence of the towers though?
Besides, not everyone is an expert. Don't you think they could have done a better job at explaining all that complicated stuff to our fellow citizens? Myself included.
90% of what Twoofers prattle on about is a result of willful ignorance on their part. That being said, the 10% is very interesting, yes - foreknowledge of the attacks, possible connections between key Gov't officials and bin Laden, etc. But most of them refuse to focus on the interesting questions, and instead want to focus on all the things they should have already learned about from other people. Education is strongly lacking among the Twoofer crowd, and willful ignorance is rampant.
I think they ought to turn their focus on their failed educational upbringing - their insufficient schools, pathetic parents, and outright malicious churches, which together conspired to make them ignorant and gullible. That would at least be a JUSTIFIED conspiracy theory.
Awesome. You think they did a bad job explaining foreknowledge then? Please say yes, you'll be the first addressing a specific topic I had listed! Of course that doesn't lead the least to MIHOP and maybe not even LIHOP. But to even admit the lowest probability of LIHOI is an awesome and daring move of your part, considering only a handful here in this whole forum have done so. Expect to be
chastised by your skeptic friends once you agree with me, if you ever do! And thanks.
In other words: the government is not obligated to send everyone to get a Masters Degree in Engineering, so they can understand the findings of the various experts (public and private).
Are they obligated to put all findings together in one open report, though?
More talk of CT and lots of political stuff, over and over.
If it was really the hijackers? CT talk.
You just want to keep saying WMD, AFGAN, etc, BUSH, etc,. You do not understand 9/11; it is not the government's fault. It is you fault.
Do you have a:
list of errors in NIST?
list of errors in the 9/11 report?
list of errors in well know papers on 9/11 WTC collapse?
It is a fact you have no facts to support any CT ideas on 9/11; and it is not the government's burden to make you understand. You must learn to use logic and knowledge to understand 9/11.
So it's my fault the government fails me in assembling a single report which explains relevant phenomena about 9/11, like the collapse sequence and WTC7?
This thread is not about discussing errors but to provide your opinion on how the government has handled the available evidence.
I don't want to give you a list of errors to further derail this thread as it is already. No one is giving a proper response except for a few honest straightforward people.
But the US govt has provided its proof and it has satisfied the majority of people.
The CTers are either exceptional in their ability to find fault in the official account which no one else can see, or exceptional in their ability to see a conspiracy where none exists.
Let's face it, the 'truth' movement deserves our derision. They have been told time and time again....
- that multistorey steel structures are vulnerable to fire
- that aircraft moving at high speed can cause immense damage to the object they hit
- that wreckage was found at the pentagon and the flight data shows the plane travelling the same path as the physical damage
- that NORAD didn't 'stand down'
- that the hijackers are not alive
- that Silverstein did not have the means or motive to bring down wtc7.
And still they refuse to believe.
Who are the deluded ones?
And I'm sure they put all that in the Commission report. Is that right? But thats cool, it's your opinion if you feel they did answer all that and I appreciate your input. I do horribly feel otherwise but who cares what a twoofer thinks - I'm mentally impaired for certain.
Another point is that the government isn't some almighty omniscient God-figure with either the ability to answer or the means to find out about every last piddling detail. The government only does anything at all with the consent of the public, and with funds provided by the public. Yurebiz and elements of the Truth movement (and others) consider that some questions about 9/11 have not been answered to everybody's expectations or desires. But my (British) government has done a great deal that is not to my expectation or desire - and I'm a supporter! In other words, the matter of "the government should answer these questions" is just a political question, just like any other thing that the government does or does not do. People who want these questions answered will have to stand for office with the promise "I will spend up to $1bn to ensure that every last unanswered question regarding 9/11 is answered", and see how well they do.
Well said. Although I got one question: Do you think it's unnecessary to explain the collapse sequence of the Twin towers as seen, along with collapse initiation, in one unified model?
The investigation into the collapse of the towers was, necessarily, technically demanding. It isn't a matter of "feelings" or what "looks conclusive". It's about what people who understand these things work out.
To me, it seems obvious that when millions of tons of steel and concrete start moving, they will keep going until they hit the ground, and that massive damage will be done in the vicinity. It would be quite unlikely that WTC 1 and 2 could come down without destroying other buildings.
This is just intuition, though. If a Peruvian engineer who really understood this stuff were to say - "Actually, the impact of the falling floors should have been transmitted through the steel core and absorbed by the ground" I'd have to reconsider. When a theologian or philosopher says something like that, I feel no need to even examine his conclusions. He has nothing to contribute that's any more valid than what I think.
The main evidence that the buildings fell due to impact from the planes and the fire is that not a single qualified person has disputed the idea. There are engineers in Iran who would have a vested interest in disputing the Bush official theory. They haven't done so because they know it's the truth.
Would you believe it even if they didn't model it out? Only because they're experts you'd take their word for it, even though they didn't analyze it thoroughly?
A word for all.
I would seriously not know what to say if I was in your position.
If there's anything I can be certain of, is that the government has not been honest in providing the public with the least trivial answers to what happened that day. There are hundreds of critiques over the web, and that's not limited to CTers as you know. Left-winger liberals are starting to question the gov't in direction of LIHOP (or at least deep LIHOI). If thats anything at all, it goes to say that they haven't been honest, and they have been smoking the evidence around, no matter which side it supports.
You know that, to be able to understand the events of 9/11, one has to go deep into long documents like the NIST, and government official's testimonies, like the firefighters at WTC7 or the FAA communication tapes, to understand what did happen.
But is that how it's supposed to be?
Is the american public supposed to connect the dots themselves, or should the government fulfill their burden of proof with a thorough, complete report pluging it all together for us?
I'lll give you what I think so you have something to dissect and bash me with once more.
What we have is...
The 9/11 Commission report is in my humble opinion a whitewash. It does not account for many events. This is arguable as you know and I do not wish to discuss it since I'm not quite able to point specifics. I merely parrot what I read from CTer and non-CTer jerks alike who doubt the official report. I don't care if you agree or not, since it's a political issue like Larry says. It's completely arguable whether they should have addressed the Mineta testimony or not; address WTC7 or not; address the wargames or not; address the money trail or not; etc.
The NIST report is anything but a criminal investigation, and does not account for the tower's collapse sequence. Have we seriously thought about to what extent can we use it as proof of how the towers fell? Is this arguable at all, I wonder.
I would not know what to say if I were to explain why the USG chose to not answer some questions. No matter if there's an answer to them through scattered reports.
Basically, if it's so self-evident, if it's all true, why haven't they packed all the stuff together and put foward a proper 9/11 Commission report?
Why do I have to go HERE, in the JREF forums to look for trivial answers such as the ISI connection, the collapse sequence of the towers, the NORAD wargames, instead of their own publicized report? Which does not satisfy them?
Which does not, therefore, satisfy their burden of proof, in my own opinion?
Bottom line below.
This is a frigging OPINION thread. I Don't CARE if the issues have been debunked or not, please QUIT IT.
Say whether you think the government has fulfilled their burden of proof on topics such as I first listed, and any others you'd want to include. I reckon some topics may be irrelevant to the sequence of events which led to the damage and deaths suffered on 9/11, but certainly not all of them are irrelevant. And certainly not the collapse sequence, be honest now, geez. And there's many other issues left out, too. Please don't give me a "they don't have to" in every subject. I'll take it as you think they covered it all up and you worship Moloch. That's fair enough.
The government is responsible for providing a single report. They have been pushed for doing so, and they did, that's cool. Do you feel it was satisfactory? I want your opinion and that's it. I just want to know what you guys THINK, not what this and that document has to say. I'll be glad to shut up and go lurk around, once again.
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