September 11th; does anyone else think it was suspicious

[Fanghur]

I'm just curious; am I the only one who finds the World Trade Center bombing more than a little suspicious? Now I'm not some crazy conspiracy nut job, but I've always thought that the whole situation with 9/11 was suspicious to the extreme.

 

First of all, the fact that in this day and age nobody realized what was going on with the planes until it was too late; even though the flight paths of every airplane are supposed to be carefully monitored, seems to be highly unlikely. Second, as I understand it, the planes hit the towers near the top, which means that the fire was "mostly" localized to the upper floors (and let's not forget that the sprinkler system in BOTH building just conveniently malfunctioned). And finally; how is it possible for not just one, but both buildings to collapse in the manner that they did just from having a plane crash into them?

 

I mean the videos clearly showed both buildings collapsing within minutes of each other, they plummeted straight down at terminal velocity, there were supposedly explosions heard immediately before they collapsed, and most suspicious of all (if this is true) is that there were supposedly sections of of liquefied steel beams that were found; there's no way in hell ordinary fire could liquefy steel, maybe weaken it, but not liquefy it. Now admittedly I'm no expert in building fires, but if I'm not mistaken, there have been instances of skyscrapers being completely engulfed in flames from bottom to top, and they didn't collapse.

 

And then of course, some of the so-called terrorists behind the "attack" were supposedly found to be alive and well, being just ordinary citizens, wondering what the hell the US was talking about tagging them as suicide bombers.

 

 

Believe me guys, I'm not a conspiracy theorist; I'm an educated university student. Does no one else even find it remotely suspicious?

[Marat]

There was also another building (was it called building seven?) which just simply collapsed for no assignable reason. Because this happened on the same day as the general mayhem and destruction at ground zero occurred, it was always assumed that some explanation for its collapse would be found in the overall physics of the catastrophe, but to this date its fall has never been explained. But just think what an important mystery it would be if that building had collapsed on its own without the rest of the 9/11 tragedy around it. In essence, it should still be regarded as a mystery of that magnitude, since we cannot yet relate it to the rest of the events that day.

[Mr Skeptic]

As for the physics of the situation, it turns out iron gets soft when it is hot (same reason blacksmiths heat it up). It also turns out that airplanes have a lot of fuel in them, and fuel is flammable. Of course the structural support had some fireproofing to prevent just that problem, but it turns out having a giant airplane crash into the building can cause some damage to that. And while I'm sure buildings are very sturdy, dropping hundreds of tons on a building (ie, its upper half) from even one story high is probably not something they can withstand.

 

On the other hand considering 9/11 was the greatest thing to ever happen for Bush, I think it is healthy to be a bit suspicious, if only so that no one would dare to try that sort of thing. However if he was involved I really doubt it would be any further than simply not preventing it. I just can't believe even a president could plan something like this without someone speaking up, if he wanted it done he'd have to outsource.

[mississippichem]

As for the physics of the situation, it turns out iron gets soft when it is hot (same reason blacksmiths heat it up). It also turns out that airplanes have a lot of fuel in them, and fuel is flammable.

 

For the record iron transitions from the hard [math]\alpha[/math]-phase to the softer [math] \gamma[/math]-phase around 900 C. This would easily allow a 100+ story building to collapse without the aid of demolition explosives.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

First of all, the fact that in this day and age nobody realized what was going on with the planes until it was too late; even though the flight paths of every airplane are supposed to be carefully monitored, seems to be highly unlikely. Second, as I understand it, the planes hit the towers near the top, which means that the fire was "mostly" localized to the upper floors (and let's not forget that the sprinkler system in BOTH building just conveniently malfunctioned). And finally; how is it possible for not just one, but both buildings to collapse in the manner that they did just from having a plane crash into them?

IIRC they turned off the transponders, so they vanished from radar. As for the rest, NIST explains it in some detail (i.e. several thousand pages worth):

 

http://wtc.nist.gov/

 

Short version of how they collapsed so easily:

 

WTC towers had a novel design. The outer walls were load-bearing and there was an inner "core" of columns with the elevators; in between was open floor space. The aircraft likely damaged the inner core severely -- the columns are clustered together, so it's easy to strike many of them at the same time. Once the inner core failed due to fire and impact damage, the floors above collapsed downward into the center. The floor structure pulled the outer columns inward as it fell, destroying the outer columns. The same process repeated for subsequent floors: inner columns destroyed, outer columns pulled inward by floor beams as they fell.

 

This process, and momentum, allowed the collapse to happen very quickly.

 

And then of course, some of the so-called terrorists behind the "attack" were supposedly found to be alive and well, being just ordinary citizens, wondering what the hell the US was talking about tagging them as suicide bombers.

Do you have a source for this?

[Marat]

Also, why were the black boxes from the planes never found? They are designed to be crash resistant, and the entire ground zero area was carefully studied and thoroughly dug up, sifted, and carted off, so where did they go?

 

So it seems that five puzzles remain to be explained:

 

1) The ability of the planes to escape detection as quickly as they should have been detected when they first went off course.

 

2) The collapse of building seven for no apparent reason.

 

3) The fact that none of the black boxes from the planes were ever discovered.

 

4) The ability of partially trained pilots to locate two specific buildings in a city with no guidance from ground radar or air controllers and fly into the buiidings cleanly without hitting any of the many other buildings in the area.

 

5) The simultaneous failure of the sprinkler systems of the two buildings hit.

[ydoaPs]

4) The ability of partially trained pilots to locate two specific buildings in a city with no guidance from ground radar or air controllers and fly into the buiidings cleanly without hitting any of the many other buildings in the area.

A half-blind monkey could find the towers without guidance from ground radar.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

1) The ability of the planes to escape detection as quickly as they should have been detected when they first went off course.

They didn't escape detection. F-15s were sent to intercept American Airlines Flight 11 after controllers realized it was hijacked.

 

http://en.wikipedia....ht_11#Hijacking

 

2) The collapse of building seven for no apparent reason.

See here:

 

http://en.wikipedia..../WTC_7#Collapse

 

Uncontrolled fire with a terrible sprinkler system.

 

3) The fact that none of the black boxes from the planes were ever discovered.

Flight 93's flight data recorder was recovered; the two that hit the towers were not, although given the volume of the debris I'm not surprised.

 

4) The ability of partially trained pilots to locate two specific buildings in a city with no guidance from ground radar or air controllers and fly into the buiidings cleanly without hitting any of the many other buildings in the area.

They're really big and tall buildings.

 

5) The simultaneous failure of the sprinkler systems of the two buildings hit.

NIST report:

 

The fire safety systems (sprinklers, smoke purge, and fire alarms,) were designed to meet or exceed current practice. However, they played no role in the safety of life on September 11 because the water supplies to the sprinklers were fed by a single supply pipe that was damaged by the aircraft impact.

Dumb design.

[John Cuthber]

I had hoped that this nonsense conspiracy theory had died out. Oh well never mind.

To me, this

"3) The fact that none of the black boxes from the planes were ever discovered."

seems like evidence it wasn't a plot.

Faking a couple of severely damaged black boxes (which could seem to say anything you liked) would have been very easy compared to all the other aspects of this "conspiracy".

[swansont]

"Yeah, but X, Y and Z are still unexplained" is "conspiracy of the gaps." Missing evidence for another position is not the same as support for yours. You can't have an honest discussion if you try that approach. It's the same reason that a "god of the gaps" argument fails, and why any engagement with conspiracy proponents fails. If the two sides don't have to follow the same rules, it's inherently dishonest. Besides, it was aliens. Prove me wrong.

[insane_alien]

I'm just curious; am I the only one who finds the World Trade Center bombing more than a little suspicious?

 

There was no bombing on the 11th of september. Two dirty great planes flew into the buildings.

 

And yes, when two planes are flown into buildings within minutes of each other yes it is bloody suspicious. Luckily we found out who did it and are still hounding them to extinction.

 

First of all, the fact that in this day and age nobody realized what was going on with the planes until it was too late; even though the flight paths of every airplane are supposed to be carefully monitored, seems to be highly unlikely.

 

Oh the aircraft controllers would have realised in a jiffy that something was up. The problem here lies in that aircraft do deviate from the perfectly planned course all the time. This can be due to weather, the pilot not getting the guidance exactly right and other fun stuff. This in itself is not suspicious. By the time the planes were far enough off course for it to become suspicious there wasn't much time left. Also, I doubt the terrorists were responding to ATC radio chatter, they could have assumed a communications malfunction.

 

Also, if they scrambled fighter jets, they wouldn't reach the aircraft in time. It wasn't wartime so getting the jets off the ground isn't going to be their quickest possible time. Also, if some fighters did arrive, what are they going to do? Shoot it down? over one of the most crowded cities in the world? Like hell they are, they didn't know what they were going to do at the time.

 

Second, as I understand it, the planes hit the towers near the top, which means that the fire was "mostly" localized to the upper floors (and let's not forget that the sprinkler system in BOTH building just conveniently malfunctioned). And finally; how is it possible for not just one, but both buildings to collapse in the manner that they did just from having a plane crash into them?

 

Massive structural damage from an impact and raging fires tend to have an impact on a buildings ability to stand up. Steel is not indestructable no matter what some people may think. If you heat a 2cm thick steel rod up to the temperatures experience in the fire even a stereotypical computer nerd would have the strength to bend it never mind 10000tonnes of building.

 

I mean the videos clearly showed both buildings collapsing within minutes of each other, they plummeted straight down at terminal velocity,

 

No, they did not have time to reach terminal velocity. What most people say about this is that they fell at an acceleration of g. Although, if you calculate it out (and it is possible, i did it on another thread) they fell at an acceleration of 8.something m/s^2. This is far from g. This is what you'd expect when something is offering resistance like, oh they rest of a building.

 

Buildings do not cope with shock damage well. they are not designed to have massive weights dropped on them.

 

there were supposedly explosions heard immediately before they collapsed,

 

Steel beams breaking and falling stuff can sound like explosions when they are big, this isn't a new phenomenon. I think you'll agree with me when i say the towers were big.

 

and most suspicious of all (if this is true) is that there were supposedly sections of of liquefied steel beams that were found; there's no way in hell ordinary fire could liquefy steel, maybe weaken it, but not liquefy it.

 

Oh yes they could. you don't need to get THAT hot to melt steel. only 1500*C. Do you know how hot a candle flame is? 1000*C and that is largely because it is small. Also, there's plenty of other burnables in an office. and plenty that can cause some interestingly hot fires.

 

Now admittedly I'm no expert in building fires, but if I'm not mistaken, there have been instances of skyscrapers being completely engulfed in flames from bottom to top, and they didn't collapse.

 

yes, that is true. but they weren't hit by planes first. Steel buildings come with fire proofing around the steel supports. This is because it is known if the steel gets hot, the building is coming down. Having a plane slam into the building (destroying plenty of main suport colomns completely on itw own) tends to rip and knock off a lot of this fire proofing while setting the beams on fire by dousing them in jet fuel.

 

Can you spot the difference between an ordinary building fire?

 

And then of course, some of the so-called terrorists behind the "attack" were supposedly found to be alive and well, being just ordinary citizens, wondering what the hell the US was talking about tagging them as suicide bombers.

 

the people who planned the attack were not the ones flying the aircraft. I assure you that the ones flyingthe aircraft were not found alive and well.

 

And you can understand why the taliban didn't want to lose the planners, anyone who can pull of a plan like that is a skilled planner and could be of great future use.

 

Believe me guys, I'm not a conspiracy theorist;

 

But it was a conspiracy. It was a conspiracy by the taliban to kill people.

 

I'm an educated university student. Does no one else even find it remotely suspicious?

 

Yes, people did find it suspicious, thats why lots of people went to war with the people who did it. How could you fail to notice how many people wwere treating it suspiciously?

[michel123456]

Agreeing with Insane_alien on almost everything. adding that the airplanes were coming from nearby airport and full of fuel. The enormous amount of flammable mass made the buildings collapse, not the shock. It is noticeable that the towers litteraly swallowed the airplanes without breaking. One must know that buildings are not usually designed to resist horizontal force other than wind and earthquake. Buildings are designed to resist vertical force of gravity.

 

Here is where I disagree:

(...) thats why lots of people went to war with the people who did it. (...)

Do you believe Irakees did it?

[insane_alien]

Do you believe Irakees did it?

 

If you recall, the 'war on terror' did not start in Iraq. The place everybody started attacking was Afghanistan as this is where the Taliban (Osama and all his lot) were currently based.

 

The war with Iraq started because the USA thought they were hiding WMD's.

 

PS. Please don't put words in my mouth, its not a good tactic and not once did i mention Iraq or the Iraqi people

Edited January 16, 2011 by insane_alien

[Sisyphus]

But it was a conspiracy. It was a conspiracy by the taliban to kill people.

 

Small correction. It was Al Qaeda, not the Taliban. The Taliban just allowed them to base operations from territory they controlled. It's very doubtful that anyone in the Taliban even knew about 9/11 beforehand.

[John Cuthber]

"Luckily we found out who did it and are still hounding them to extinction."

Actually, they are already extinct.

We are hunting down some people who were probably involved.

 

 

"they plummeted straight down"

Which direction does gravity normally make things fall?

"(and let's not forget that the sprinkler system in BOTH building just conveniently malfunctioned)."

OK, lets not forget it, lets look at it.

The fire sprinkler systems will have been designed to barely scrape past the minimum required standards in order to save money.

No designer will have thought " what happens if some moron flies a freshly fuelled plane into this?"

Nor will the people who wrote the building standards regulations.

Of course, BOTH buildings will have been built to the same standards.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

"they plummeted straight down"

Which direction does gravity normally make things fall?

"(and let's not forget that the sprinkler system in BOTH building just conveniently malfunctioned)."

OK, lets not forget it, lets look at it.

The fire sprinkler systems will have been designed to barely scrape past the minimum required standards in order to save money.

No designer will have thought " what happens if some moron flies a freshly fuelled plane into this?"

Nor will the people who wrote the building standards regulations.

Of course, BOTH buildings will have been built to the same standards.

 

The fire sprinkler systems were retrofitted into the buildings; they did not originally have sprinkler systems.

[John Cuthber]

I must have missed the war against Saudi Arabia where the hijackers actually came from.

 

There was one against Iraq because they wanted one and wrote a report to justify it. This report was subsequently referred to as "the dodgy dossier".

I'm not sure about the war in Afghan.

[insane_alien]

Small correction. It was Al Qaeda, not the Taliban. The Taliban just allowed them to base operations from territory they controlled.

 

Apologies, been a while since I've actually paid attention to this. Thanks for the correction.

[tomgwyther]

leaving aside, the other buildings (WTC 1, WTC 2, Pentagon) and leaving aside who and for what reasons and with what consequences. Certainly leaving aside conspiracy theories of varying scope and magnitude. I feel compelled to ask a question about Building 7...

 

If anyone can show me one example in the history of the world, of a steel framed building suffering a gravitational collapse under it's own weight due to a fire, moreover a localised fire which would cause all points of the building to fall simultaneously, so it falls into it's own foot-print, and could demonstrate with historical, logical, experimental physical evidence to support such a hypothesis...

I'll give you my piano... one of my legs... and my wife.

 

 

p.s there are also over a thousand professional architects and structural engineers who would like to know.

[rigney]

I'm an educated university student. Does no one else even find it remotely suspicious? I'm just curious; am I the only one who finds the World Trade Center bombing more than a little suspicious? Now I'm not some crazy conspiracy nut job, but I've always thought that the whole situation with 9/11 was suspicious to the extreme.

 

 

I'll try being as gentle as I can guy and with no disrespect, (wink) (wink). But if you exemplify what our universities are turning out today as being educated, I suggest your parents save the rest of their money, spend it on top shelf booze, excellent cuisine and vacations.

"HELL"! Even the assination plot of President Kennedy made more sense than this. At least it was believable.

Edited January 16, 2011 by swansont
fix quote tag

[ydoaPs]

The war with Iraq started because the USA thought they were hiding WMD's.

I'm not so sure about that. Sure it was the excuse, but.......oil and desire to please daddy probably had more to do with it.

[John Cuthber]

"I'm an educated university student. Does no one else even find it remotely suspicious? "

Yes, very.

 

 

"If anyone can show me one example in the history of the world, of a steel framed building suffering a gravitational collapse under it's own weight due to a fire, moreover a localised fire which would cause all points of the building to fall simultaneously, so it falls into it's own foot-print, and could demonstrate with historical, logical, experimental physical evidence to support such a hypothesis..."

I gather that there's some evidence that two buildings did that on 9/11.

There's a report that supports it.

[md65536]

Yes, of course it was suspicious, and it was by definition a conspiracy (it wasn't individuals acting alone).

 

However:

1. The explanations given for what happened that day (the tower "pancaking" collapses, the vanishing of the "plane" that hit the pentagon, etc) are extremely dubious.

2. The US government stifled objective investigation of 9/11. They destroyed evidence and kept findings classified. So yes, there was also a government coverup.

 

This doesn't prove there was government involvement of the planning of the attacks, or if the coverup was done to protect their interests (or even the interests of the people), or to hide negligence, or whatever... It just proves that the US government can cover up a major attack on one of its cities because the people (or majority) won't demand a full explanation.

[ydoaPs]

1. The explanations given for what happened that day (the tower "pancaking" collapses

How is that 'dubious'?

 

the vanishing of the "plane" that hit the pentagon, etc) are extremely dubious.

How is debris with clearly visible airplane parts 'extremely dubious'?

 

2. The US government stifled objective investigation of 9/11. They destroyed evidence and kept findings classified. So yes, there was also a government coverup.

[citation needed]

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

leaving aside, the other buildings (WTC 1, WTC 2, Pentagon) and leaving aside who and for what reasons and with what consequences. Certainly leaving aside conspiracy theories of varying scope and magnitude. I feel compelled to ask a question about Building 7...

 

If anyone can show me one example in the history of the world, of a steel framed building suffering a gravitational collapse under it's own weight due to a fire, moreover a localised fire which would cause all points of the building to fall simultaneously, so it falls into it's own foot-print, and could demonstrate with historical, logical, experimental physical evidence to support such a hypothesis...

I'll give you my piano... one of my legs... and my wife.

 

 

p.s there are also over a thousand professional architects and structural engineers who would like to know.

WTC 7 didn't fall into its own footprint; it caused significant damage to neighboring buildings, some of which had to be demolished and rebuilt. There are no other historical examples, but WTC 7 had an interesting design and NIST has covered the collapse fairly exhaustively in their reports.

 

Also, I think Tim Minchin would not approve.