Yes, people only ever find things they are looking for. And this is dumb for many reasons. Here's an older post of mine demonstrating this:
Seeing as how they were probably smashed to smithereens there almost certainly wasn't enough of them to find to be sure you had found any one piece of them. Which means they probably lay in the Fresh Kills landfill to this very day.
As Travis here has quite well pointed out, conspiracy peddlers often mischaracterize elements of 9/11 - in this case, the search through and recovery of the Twin Towers debris, and anything that might have been in it - in order to show their proposals in a more favorable light. Yes, indeed, it is possible for people to miss what they're not looking for. But who says that's the case here? It takes more than insinuation. And the fact of the matter is, the debris was examined very closely.
And although this is a fire scene, it is also a crime scene, which means a large unit of crime scene investigators is present, working from a tent at the corner of West St. and Liberty.
NYPD Detective first grade Hal Sherman: "At Ground Zero the CSU is responsible for photographing the site, recovering physical evidence, documenting body parts and any other physical evidence like weapons or a wallet, manning the temporary morgue at the site (as well as the city morgue up on 28th Street), inspecting debris that leaves the site, and inspecting debris as it gets sifted out at Staten Island. ...All evidence is documented– airplane parts were essential to the beginning investigation, but now they look for hair, fibers, glass particles, semen, ballistics. ...We ID every part. Pillars and beams are swiped for hair, tissue and blood, evaporated body evidence. We have two police officers with mortuary degrees, and they are either in the medical examiner's office or the police lab, because you must be a sworn police officer to take evidence. "
There are two dump sites. One is in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, and the other is in Great Kills, Staten Island. At each location police Investigations Unit detectives and FBI agents are spotting and sifting through every truckload, searching for the flight recorders of the planes and for any remains of the victims.
From
Report From Ground Zero. Smith, Dennis. New York: Penguin, 2002, page 194, 326-327, and 201 respectively.
"Law enforcement authorities survey the material for evidence. Only then is it released to a scrap processor under an existing long-term contract with the NYC Department of Sanitation to purchase and then recycle scrap metal."
http://www.americanrecycler.com/11wtc.html
That's an awful close examination of the debris. And there were a lot of eyes on it:
24 local, state, and federal agencies participated, with as many as 1,000 workers a day • 17,000 tons of material were processed daily. • 55 FBI Evidence Response Teams worked the site -- over 1,000 agents -- plus FBI medics, safety officers, and other specialists. • New York Evidence Response Team members worked over 8,000 hours at the site, at the morgue, and at Ground Zero.
(
http://www2.fbi.gov/page2/nov03/nyhs112703.htm)
Guiliani had promised that 100 percent of the victims would be identified, and the way he chose to do that was to haul everything to the Staten Island Landfill, lay it out and let the agents (NYPD, FBI, Secret Service, CIA, and K-9 units) go through the debris looking for evidence.
The first thing the P&J team did when they took over the site was to make life easier for the agents. The debris was being laid out on the ground, and the agents (about 2,000 of them working 24/7) would have to rake through the debris looking for body parts, personal effects, and evidence at their feet. We brought in Picking Stations, which placed the debris at waist level on conveyor belts. This immediately cut down on the fatigue level and increased productivity.
• 14,968 workers had been through the PPE process
• 43,600 people (39,795 NYPD, 6,212 non-NYPD) had been through the Site Specific Indoctrination
• Over 1.7 million man hours had been worked
• Over 55,000 discrete pieces of evidence had been recovered
• 4,257 body parts had been recovered
Anatomy: World Trade Center/Staten Island Landfill Recovery Operation
That says a lot about how carefully and closely the went through everything.
So, is it possible for them to have missed some things? Of course. But think about this: It's
not only residue that would be a sign of either explosives or incendiaries use. It would be gross signs of their effects: Spalled steel for explosives; grossly molten steel for incendiaries. It would also be leftover remains of the entire system that would've been used (i.e. detonation cord for explosives, and God-knows-what for incendiaries). Could everyone involved in the recovery chain have missed individual signs of any of that? Sure. But as a whole, could
everyone have missed
every sign? I need to be convinced of that. Given that we already know there were survivors in close proximity to a column in a stairwell, and given that the steel was also examined by NIST, and the collapse initiation mechanism known, that puts the possibility of that even further down. And given that we're missing broad characteristic remains/effects of either explosives (many instances of severe barotrauma, shattered glass in every building within several blocks) or incendiaries (hardened pools of previously molten steel), that possibility really starts approaching zero. So sure, it
is possible for investigators and cleanup personnel to have missed things. But in light of everything that's known, as well as the fact that the use of such materials would
not have been subtle, I'd have to say that the silence from all those people is because there was nothing to find in the first place. It's up to the truthers to explain how all those people examining the debris as closely as they were would've missed the signs. And to date, they have not.
The possibility that they missed things is of course present. But it's unlikely. Look at the entirety of the narrative; that'll tell you why.
