911 Truth Movement

[Rosy]

The owner of WTC7 Larry Siverstein admitted in an interview that he wanted firefighters to 'pull it', a phrase which refers to a controlled demolition. This indicates that firstly, they had the capabilities, and secondly, they were considering explosives as an option. So if there was some commercial imperitive to take the building down, why is it so far fetched that a controlled demolition took place?

You seem to be making a few assumptions there bullus. There are professionals who claimed that "pull it" is not a term used in the demolition industry. It's been suggested it could have meant pull the firefighters away and let the building go cos they couldn't save it. It's also suggested that pull it could mean pul it over. The fire department person in charge denied he'd spoken to Silverstein about the situation and that the fire department were in control of the building and wouldn't run decisions by the owner or take an owners requests into account. It wasn't his call to make.

 

[Disco08]

What is this based on? Would it mean that? Is it not evident? My memory of the footage is that the collapse accelerated as you'd expect, (or I'd expect it to), based on the laws of physics. "falling at free fall speed with constant acceleration' is exactly how this naive amatuer building enthusiast would expect. Again, where you see weirdness I see unremarkableness.

What of the undamaged structure beneath the impact/fire zones? What of the undamaged massive steel support columns? Why would you expect those things to offer no resistance whatsoever? This is a crucial point of many expert's disagreement with NST's reports.

Again with the extreme language. 'Blatant lie' We have just spent 90-odd pages producing proof and debating, its obviously had zero effect, which to be honest I find surprising. I see no evidence to prove its a 'blatant lie', yet you keep tossing it around as if its an accepted truth.

You see no evidence. Seriously? There's any number of eyewitnesses who report seeing and hearing evidence of an exposion inside WTC7. Many of them public officials. To turn around and say absolutely no evidence exists is most certainly a blatant lie.

Let me also spell something out to you. You're the one(s) insisting your version of events is the truth or near enough to it. You're the ones insisting truthers' opinions are ludicrous. Most truthers (me included) are happy to accept the possibility that 9/11 was purely the doing of 19 Al Qaeda terrorists despite our reservations towards accepting the official narrative. For you to accuse me of being inflexible in my thinking is actually quite incongruous. For example:

Very good point, and very simply put. But to then make the jump to a conspiracy is, IMO, ludicrous.

Not only do you completely rule out any possibility of conspiracy, you label the thinking of all who don't agree wth you "ludicrous."

I didn't say the process was satisfactory. I actually said the opposite. But there is no evidence of a conspiracy, and the prospect of one just doesn't wash.

Here's the thing, The USA is the most powerful regime in the world ever. Power in large part relies on perception. The planes hit, the head honchos crapped themselves (which I can understand), and also the fact that the event occurred punctured the veneer of US invincibility. To me, it is perfectly rational and understandable that the Inquiry would have been leant on, and would have attempted to anyway, to minimise any appearance of weakness. Any regime anywhere in the world and through history would have done the same.

Spin and war footing, not conspiracy.

And that's supposed to explain the removal and destruction of all the twin towers rubble (for example)? These buildings were supposed to be able to withstand plane crashes yet they collapsed. Surely that evidence needed to be preserved so as to figure out why the engineering failed so that the next generation of steel framed high rises can be made safer.

I could understand if you limited that reasoning to Bush and Cheney's refusal to cooperate with the 9/11 commission. Although I wouldn't necessarily agree but I could see the logic. However saying that this explains an utter and systematic removal of vital evidence and a complete departure from standard procedures just doesn't make any sense to me. Surely the US would have known that such measures would bring about the exact suspicion that's eventuated and that this is projecting anything but strength to the rest of the world.

There is lots of evidence that none of the buildings fell at "freefall". From the video it can be hard to tell but the calculations have been done. A thought experiment for you. When the buildings were severed by the planes you can virtually consider the levels above to be suspended by a crane and then dropped in their entirety onto those below. Their collapse under that doesn't seem hard to explain to me. Here is someone else:

The pancake theory is not necessarily incorrect, but how it is presented is. The NIST said that heat from the fires sagged the trusses, which bowed the columns inward, causing the building to collapse. After it began to collapse the inevitable pancaking ensued due to the tremendous force from above. The force from above and the pancaking itself took the rest of the building down with it[51]. Regardless, pancake style collapses are not as rare as the conspiracy theorists would have you believe, a prime example is the L'Ambiance Plaza, which collapsed in 1987, before it was even completed[52]. Two other incidents happened, also during construction, in 1985 and 1973, where pancaking floors collapsed both buildings[53]. There is also the Lian Yak building in March 1986[54]. Civic Center of Pavia in 1989, Cathedral in Goch, Germany; Campanile in Venice, Italy in 1902[55]. Ronan Point flats, where a gas explosion on the 18th floor blew out the perimeter structural panels, resulting in the floors collapsing on top of one another[56].As you can see, pancaking is hardly a rare occurrence only happening in terrorist attacks.

Now while I have tried to stay away from the 911fortruth and debunking websites this is one but the citations are well referenced and seem to check out.

http://www.ae911truth.org/en/evidence/35-key-facts/275-nist-admits-freefall.html

There's more debate about the twin towers. Different sources put the collapse times between 10 and 15 seconds. Either way there's contention among experts as to the physics of these events. Here's a couple of examples of expert opinion which as a complete novice I can't critcise at all.

http://physics911.net/closerlook/

http://www.debunking911.com/freefall.htm

 

[bullus_hit]

You seem to be making a few assumptions there bullus. There are professionals who claimed that "pull it" is not a term used in the demolition industry. It's been suggested it could have meant pull the firefighters away and let the building go cos they couldn't save it. It's also suggested that pull it could mean pul it over. The fire department person in charge denied he'd spoken to Silverstein about the situation and that the fire department were in control of the building and wouldn't run decisions by the owner or take an owners requests into account. It wasn't his call to make.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq-0JIR38V0

Judge for yourself what he meant, from my perspective it's pretty clear cut.

 

[Rosy]

Judge for yourself what he meant, from my perspective it's pretty clear cut.

I have no interest in judging from my ill-informed position. I wouldn't have a clue.

The following clip shows it's nowhere near as clear cut as you reckon.

[youtube=560,315]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0bQJ2VU1zU[/youtube]

 

[Harry]

IMO this is a debate no-one can win as both sides are relying on second hand evidence, assumptions and theories. every theory can be debunked. the only way to prove anything is to fly identical planes into identical towers and have an identical 47 story building near them. then assess the results. it's virtually impossible to re-investigate as there is no physical evidence to investigate. All you can investigate are witnesses and personal accounts, and these can be easily debunked, even if true. If it was an inside job, there is no way the Govt will allow another investigation, and even if there was one the insiders will never admit. Can't see how an inside job, if one, can ever be uncovered.

 

[Disco08]

Wrong - it had a central core and then a distributed tubular column structure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center#Structural_design

Of course this messes with the theory that somehow a team could prewire these two huge structures for demolition without any of the thousands of workers and visitors there noticing (and I include maintenance workers and others who had access to elevators, crawl spaces and other "off-limits" areas).

If you have any evidence of crews (video footage, eye witness accounts, anything Bueller) performing the installation of this demolition system, please share it. If you don't, I must dismiss your theory of controlled demolition as not supported.

http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/docs/nist_fig_3_3.png

As someone said earlier even the head designer thinks it was doable. The evidence for controlled demolition quoted by various experts is the rate of collapse, pulverisation of materials, presence of molten metal long after the collapses, eyewitness reports and audio recordings of explosions during collapse, the rapid onset of destruction and the evidence of thermite in the rubble. These may well have reasonable explanations but they were not addressed by NIST. Not sure why you'd dismiss all that without even investigating it even if no one had reported seeing demolition crews beforehand.

Yes I do. And scepticism is fine.

I look at it this way. None of us were there (as far as I know). All the information we received is second hand - tv reports, video footage, eye witness accounts. You say how can we disregard the number <x> of witness who saw a plane with no windows or whatever - and yet there are <x> times 1000 who were there and do not dispute the generally accepted version of events. Terrorists hijacked planes, flew them into buildings, they were damaged and caught fire, and eventually collapsed.

So it's incredibly easy for us to ignore the <x> times one thousand witnesses and find one witness (or some video footage or something) that supports a theory like the ones you support. And of course, I haven't been there, I wasn't there, so I'm getting all my info secondhand just like you ... but just like I've never actually seen Barack Obama in the flesh, there is enough circumstantial evidence there for me to believe that he really does exist. Of course, it could be a massive conspiracy, he could be a computer generated hologram, and I'm the victim of a reverse Truman Show scenario, but meh, good enough, I'm convinced.

In the 9/11 case what is being suggested is a conspiracy so massive in scale, so audacious in conception, so complete in its secrecy, that it is many orders of magnitude less likely to be able to pull off than the actual terrorist attack that I believe occurred... And all this without one - even one - person who was in on the conspiracy coming forward and saying "we did it, I feel a bit bad about it, so I'm coming clean and Bush and Cheney are going down with me".

I mean, sorry Disco, get real man.

The fallacy of that argument occurs with your selection of the plane with no windows as an example. Replace that with "WTC7's apparent controlled demolition" or "the removal and destruction of multiple forms of vital evidence" and disregarding the evidence, eyewitness or otherwise, is far more problematic.

So again all your argument boils down to is an appeal to incredulity that exonnerates a departure from the scientific method. Not only that but you're left with the burden of proving not only the conspiracy you're insisting must be implied but also that it was demonstratably impossible. Not an easy job.

 

[Disco08]

IMO this is a debate no-one can win as both sides are relying on second hand evidence, assumptions and theories. every theory can be debunked. the only way to prove anything is to fly identical planes into identical towers and have an identical 47 story building near them. then assess the results. it's virtually impossible to re-investigate as there is no physical evidence to investigate. All you can investigate are witnesses and personal accounts, and these can be easily debunked, even if true. If it was an inside job, there is no way the Govt will allow another investigation, and even if there was one the insiders will never admit. Can't see how an inside job, if one, can ever be uncovered.

Lets have a listen to the CVR's for a start. Then line up all of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice - and their staff - and interview them on the record and under oath. Then interview the ATC's whose interviews were destroyed on 9/11. Perhaps investigate the mountain of insider trading evidence and follow a few of those leads. Maybe follow up reports that some of the hijackers have been seen alive.

 

[bullus_hit]

I have no interest in judging from my ill-informed position. I wouldn't have a clue.

The following clip shows it's nowhere near as clear cut as you reckon.

[youtube=560,315]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0bQJ2VU1zU[/youtube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OE3Adu4l0g

There's a few problems with that explanation, firstly there were no firefighters in the building at the time, the sprinklers were out and everyone had been evacuated. Secondly, why make up a story that you spoke to the head firefighter when this was patently untrue? Thirdly, is it just pure coincidence that Silverstein took out an insurance premium against terrorist induced damage just 2 weeks before 9/11 and fortuitously happened to book in for pedicure on the day of 9/11, not to mention that his other family members were also absent from the site. Fourth, is it just coincidence that he was due for a billion dollar spring clean to remove all the asbestos from the buildings and that he was grappling with higher than usual vacancy rates. And I'll finish by saying that he's well versed in the art of explosives and the phrase 'pull it' has in fact been used to refer to controlled demolitions.

So here we have the luckiest guy on the planet who's not only presided over a freakish building collapse, has pocketed billions of dollars in the process, and has managed to avoid getting so much as a scratch when thousands of others lost their lives in his little kingdom.

All I can say is I've never witnessed such amazingly good fortune bestowed upon one man.

 

[tigersnake]

http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/docs/nist_fig_3_3.png

As someone said earlier even the head designer thinks it was doable. The evidence for controlled demolition quoted by various experts is the rate of collapse, pulverisation of materials, presence of molten metal long after the collapses, eyewitness reports and audio recordings of explosions during collapse, the rapid onset of destruction and the evidence of thermite in the rubble. These may well have reasonable explanations but they were not addressed by NIST. Not sure why you'd dismiss all that without even investigating it even if no one had reported seeing demolition crews beforehand.

The fallacy of that argument occurs with your selection of the plane with no windows as an example. Replace that with "WTC7's apparent controlled demolition" or "the removal and destruction of multiple forms of vital evidence" and disregarding the evidence, eyewitness or otherwise, is far more problematic.

So again all your argument boils down to is an appeal to incredulity that exonnerates a departure from the scientific method. Not only that but you're left with the burden of proving not only the conspiracy you're insisting must be implied but also that it was demonstratably impossible. Not an easy job.

But it always gets back to motive and logistics. Why do it? Even if a motive could be plausibly found, would a secret organisation actually attempt it? And the killer: Would it be able to be kept quiet?

The answer to these questions for me is no. And I believe Noam Chomski's analysis, and the Pop Mechanics, encapsulates why there appears to be anomolies and coincidences. None of them are compelling when viewed within that context.

 

[Disco08]

Nope, disagree entirely. The scientific method is simple and effective. I'd much prefer to follow it than ignore the evidence because you presuppose a bunch of stuff that is conjecture at best.

 

[tigersnake]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OE3Adu4l0g

There's a few problems with that explanation, firstly there were no firefighters in the building at the time, the sprinklers were out and everyone had been evacuated. Secondly, why make up a story that you spoke to the head firefighter when this was patently untrue? Thirdly, is it just pure coincidence that Silverstein took out an insurance premium against terrorist induced damage just 2 weeks before 9/11 and fortuitously happened to book in for pedicure on the day of 9/11, not to mention that his other family members were also absent from the site. Fourth, is it just coincidence that he was due for a billion dollar spring clean to remove all the asbestos from the buildings and that he was grappling with higher than usual vacancy rates. And I'll finish by saying that he's well versed in the art of explosives and the phrase 'pull it' has in fact been used to refer to controlled demolitions.

So here we have the luckiest guy on the planet who's not only presided over a freakish building collapse, has pocketed billions of dollars in the process, and has managed to avoid getting so much as a scratch when thousands of others lost their lives in his little kingdom.

All I can say is I've never witnessed such amazingly good fortune bestowed upon one man.

There is nothing really compelling in any of that. Lucky, I suppose so. People insure stuff all the time, and people collect on insurance policies all the time. we discussed this. I would have been more surprised if he wasn't insured. Would it be a coincidence if it was a month before rather than a fortnight? At what point does the time of insuring the building become suspicious or not suspicious? How often was he in the building? How often was he out of the building? How often were his family there? If ever? If we had perfect info on all these supposed coincidences, which might sound a bit iffy when lined up like that with spooky music played over the top, I'd bet they really aren't remarkable at all.

 

[Disco08]

http://www.personalgrowthcourses.net/video/9-11_truth_documentary

Mostly concerning the 9/11 commission.

 

[tigersnake]

Nope, disagree entirely. The scientific method is simple and effective. I'd much prefer to follow it than ignore the evidence because you presuppose a bunch of stuff that is conjecture at best.

As a scientist, I find your understanding and application of the scientific method perplexing.

 

[Disco08]

Care to tell me why?

 

[tigersnake]

Not only do you completely rule out any possibility of conspiracy, you label the thinking of all who don't agree wth you "ludicrous."

Thats not what I said Disco. I said that to make the leap from [The US government is concealing details surrounding 9/11] to [it must be a conspiracy], is ludicrous. It is. Logically, it is ludicrous, way beyond drawing a long bow.

 

[tigertim]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OE3Adu4l0g

There's a few problems with that explanation, firstly there were no firefighters in the building at the time, the sprinklers were out and everyone had been evacuated. Secondly, why make up a story that you spoke to the head firefighter when this was patently untrue? Thirdly, is it just pure coincidence that Silverstein took out an insurance premium against terrorist induced damage just 2 weeks before 9/11 and fortuitously happened to book in for pedicure on the day of 9/11, not to mention that his other family members were also absent from the site. Fourth, is it just coincidence that he was due for a billion dollar spring clean to remove all the asbestos from the buildings and that he was grappling with higher than usual vacancy rates. And I'll finish by saying that he's well versed in the art of explosives and the phrase 'pull it' has in fact been used to refer to controlled demolitions.

So here we have the luckiest guy on the planet who's not only presided over a freakish building collapse, has pocketed billions of dollars in the process, and has managed to avoid getting so much as a scratch when thousands of others lost their lives in his little kingdom.

All I can say is I've never witnessed such amazingly good fortune bestowed upon one man.

what were the vacancy rates at the time? Where's the proof "pull it" has been used to refer to controlled demolitions?

All I can is he must be one dumb mother to go on national tv "admitting" he organised the controlled demolition of the building so that e can claim it on insurance!

So you're saying Silverstein was "in on it"?

 

[tigersnake]

what were the vacancy rates at the time? Where's the proof "pull it" has been used to refer to controlled demolitions?

All I can is he must be one dumb mother to go on national tv "admitting" he organised the controlled demolition of the building so that e can claim it on insurance!

So you're saying Silverstein was "in on it"?

'Pull it' is very apt here.

 

[tigersnake]

Care to tell me why?

I've been trying to for quite a while now.

You don't accept evidence that challenges your hypothesis. You cherry pick evidence that fits your argument. You don't attempt to triangulate evidence. You reject the testimony of a bona-fide hyper-expert 8- like Noam Chomsky, who is in my book the most qualified person to provide a political analysis, and in particular his explanation of the nuts and bolts of why various 'facts' and coincidences might appear strange.

Seriously, if I have rusty pipes I call a plumber, if I want an unbiased analysis of a complex international political matter, Noam C is the man. Why stuff around with blogs and 'Truth' websites? Why take a Datsun 120Y when there's a Ferrari sitting there in the offing?

 

[bullus_hit]

what were the vacancy rates at the time? Where's the proof "pull it" has been used to refer to controlled demolitions?

All I can is he must be one dumb mother to go on national tv "admitting" he organised the controlled demolition of the building so that e can claim it on insurance!

So you're saying Silverstein was "in on it"?

Silverstein's one lucky dude, wouldn't you admit? Insurance policy two weeks prior with a tailored terrorism clause, didn't show up for work that day, his daughter didn't show up either, he calls 'pull it' 20 minutres prior to the building collapsing and low and behold, it resembles a controlled demolition. Amazing really, has there ever been a luckier guy?

As for 'pull it', yes it is used when a structure is pulled away from it's surroundings, whether that be through explosives or otherwise.

here's an explanation from Demolitionforum.com

"pulling" is a fairly generic term. You might hear a blaster say that he is going to design the blast to pull a particular wall away from an adjacent structure, so pulling is used throughout an imploded structure to get it to fall where the blaster wants it.

 

[jb03]

When exactly did he decide to "pull it"?