A plausible 9/11 Conspiracy Theory

Yes, I know that tagline alone will get me labeled a nut. Please follow me for a bit, and draw your own conclusions.

Building 7 was a 47 story building that spontaneously collapsed 7 hours after the collapse of the World Trade Center. It was not hit by a plane, and was only slightly damaged by the collapse of one of the other WTC buildings. Several floors seemed to be on fire for many hours, though, which is what the semi-official, post-conspiracy theory, investigation concluded. Here is the official explanation offered by Popular Mechanics:

WTC 7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings. It did not collapse from explosives or from diesel fuel fires.

Evidence in favor of the consensual reality is that the building was plainly damaged by the collapse of the World Trade Center, and that there was plainly fire coming out of the windows for many hours, as both filmed and seen by many firemen on site.

Here is some video of that. If you go to about three minutes, you see fire coming out almost as if it were being projected. It is inconceivable to me that much fire could come from the combustion of office furniture and the sorts of papers people keep on their desks, but that is what we are told was the cause.

According to a “truther” debunking site

“WTC 7 contained 10 transformers at street level, 12 transformers on the 5th floor, and 2 dry transformers on the 7th floor.” – FEMA report

Transformers are filled with oil and can blow up. Did those large transformers blow up taking out the floors below? Remember that the building was on fire for hours.

This sounds plausible on the face of it, but the final report indicated that diesel fuels were not involved.

Here is what the NIST report, issued in 2008 after that many years of research, said:

After 7 hours of uncontrolled fires, a steel girder on Floor 13 lost its connection to one of the 81 columns supporting the building. Floor 13 collapsed, beginning a cascade of floor failures to Floor 5. Column 79, no longer supported by a girder, buckled, triggering a rapid succession of structural failures that moved from east to west. All 23 central columns, followed by the exterior columns, failed in what’s known as a “progressive collapse”–that is, local damage that spreads from one structural element to another, eventually resulting in the collapse of the entire structure.

Keep that in mind as you watch this video of the collapse.

Here is the other side of the story, where he focuses on the Twin Towers, but it would apply equally–actually more–to Building 7.

Further, the report claims

the smallest charge capable of initiating column failure “would have resulted in a sound level of 130 dB [decibels] to 140 dB at a distance of at least half a mile.” Witnesses did not report hearing such a loud noise, nor is one audible on recordings of the collapse.

This is not accurate. There were in fact apparently reports of hearing an explosion.

Here is some testimony from a man claimed by the website to have been an NYC cop on site

.”I walked around it (Building 7). I saw a hole. I didn’t see a hole bad enough to knock a building down, though. Yeah there was definitely fire in the building, but I didn’t hear any… I didn’t hear any creaking, or… I didn’t hear any indication that it was going to come down. And all of a sudden the radios exploded and everyone started screaming ‘get away, get away, get away from it!’… It was at that moment… I looked up, and it was nothing I would ever imagine seeing in my life. The thing started pealing in on itself… Somebody grabbed my shoulder and I started running, and the shit’s hitting the ground behind me, and the whole time you’re hearing “boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” I think I know an explosion when I hear it… Yeah it had some damage to it, but nothing like what they’re saying… Nothing to account for what we saw… I am shocked at the story we’ve heard about it to be quite honest.”

Yes, it’s Prison Planet, but one can safely assume they believe what they believe because they think they have the evidence to back it up. This guy could be reinterviewed by other people, as could others who offered similar reports.

Edit 2: I have left out testimony by two senior New York City officials since I was unable to contextualize it within a plausible narrative. Barry Jennings and Michael Hess were relatively senior members of Guiliani’s administration, particularly Hess. They went to the Emergency Command Center in WTC7 after the first plane hit, since they were a part of the Disaster Response Team. When they got there, they said everyone had left, and when they started to leave, an explosion blocked the stairwell they had intended to use, stranding them.

The evidence is inconclusive, since NIST claims the “explosion” was really the collapse of the South Tower. Theorist one presents timeline 1 that supports their view, theorist 2 does the same.

However, I would like to offer an interesting, to me, hypothesis: what if the actual target of United 93 was WTC7, which contained, among other things, the command center for emergency response, which is why Jennings and Hess were there in the first place? That plane took off from Newark. If the hijack went down something like it was portrayed in the movie, they missed their window of opportunity due to indeciveness, but would that not have been quite spectacular, hitting three adjacent buildings, one after the other?

To my mind, this scenario makes sense. Assuming explosives were used, no good mind would have failed to realize that buildings don’t just collapse on their own.

Given the foregoing, therefore, here is my preliminary assessment (I say preliminary, since I only make final assessments when I need to make a decision; in this case, I don’t need to make a final decision): I am no engineer, but it makes NO sense to me to claim that office furniture burning brought a 47 story skyscraper straight down–particularly when all skyscrapers have building codes, complete with fire walls, and the use of relatively incombustible materials. I can imagine jetfuel burning hot enough to cut through steel. I cannot imagine office furnishings doing so. This makes no sense.

Edit: I would like to expand on this a bit. Imagine in your mind a typical office building floor. I’ve worked in many of them. In a contracting capacity I’ve watched them go up many times, from demo to occupancy. On the floor you have a thin carpet, which is flame rated. On the carpet you have furniture workstations, plastic or metal garbage cans, and chairs. Both the chairs and workstations likely would have been flame rated, and depending on the age of the furniture, if they had the most popular brand, Steelcase, the panels would have been made of steel. If they weren’t, they would have come with a Class A fire rating.

On the workstations you have computers, overhead compartments with a variety of thick binders and books. Pinned to the walls you have a variety of personal pictures, sarcastic or sweet pictures, and maybe a few ideosyncratic curios to identify yourself as an individual in a cubicle forest.

In the offices, you might have wooden desks and woodern cabinets. In file rooms, you might have rows of metal file cabinets, or possibly libraries filled with books.

In the bathrooms you would have toilets, sinks, paper towels. In the break areas you would have a refigerator, paper towels, cabinets, food, a coffee pot, maybe some styrofoam cups, some seats and tables, some magazines and maybe a TV.

Above this would be a drop ceiling. Typical ceiling tiles are Class A fire rated, as here. What this means is not that they don’t burn, but that they don’t burn easily or well, or hot.

The supporting steel beams would in all likelihood have been sprayed with a fire retardant, which normally contained asbestos when WTC7 was likely built. I am in ceilings in office towers all the time, and they always spray the joints where beams come together.

Above the ceiling also would have been data and phone cabling, ductwork, air handlers, and plumbing.

What we are to believe is that from the above mixture of components, a fire was created which caused a collapse of a 47 story steel skyscraper at the same rate which would have been expected if it had been intentionally taken down the normal way, with explosives attached to key points.

Let us dilate on that for a moment. We have all seen the pictures of the guys sitting on the steel beams, eating their lunches, or pretending to play golf. Skyscrapers are built–to point out the painfully obvious–to not fall down. To withstand high winds, and to withstand fires. The method used is simple: weight distribution. Vertical and horizonal steel I-beams are connected one to another such that any single point of failure–even at the base–will not bring down the structure, and in every construction I have personally seen, those points are specifically targeted for added protection from fire.

Let us think of this as a Tinker Toys structure, in which the wooden pieces are glued into the slots, and every level contains 20 or so supporting beams in both directions, which are connected one to the other as a web in the middle. Let us suppose the whole thing is built such that we have cardboard cutouts workout to anchor everything together, which in the real world would be the concrete which was used to build the floors, which would likely have been concrete in pan, where corrugated metal is put down, then concrete poured on top of it.

Cut 10 sticks at random places, in your mind, one at a time. Does the whole thing collapse? I don’t think so, but let’s suppose you disagree. If you think it collapses, does it not tilt over, one way or the other? Does it not slowly fall over, like the Titanic sinking? Do we not hear creaking as overwhelming pressure builds, tearing lose connections, such that it gradually falls over, clumsily, crookedly and probably incompletely?

OK, let’s make the cardboard lead sheeting. Let’s triple the weight on the structure. Now does it collapse? I still don’t think so. If you go back to the Popular Mechanics link above, they have both the layout of the beams in a static picture, and a computer rendering of the collapse that still have multiple beams failing at the same time, and which terminates before we see anything like what was seen in the actual video.

Further, if one determined in advance that fires must have been responsible, then one could simply create a model of the building, and reconstruct the implosion of the building. Key beams would disappear when needed due to the fire, so “reconstructions” are scarcely evidence.

And to the point–in order to grant that ANY beams failed, we have to grant that the materials I listed created sufficient heat to sever an I-Beam. Remember, the official investigators, the people responsible for quieting the rumors of a conspiracy and coverup, said in their final report, after presumably exhaustive analysis, that diesel fuels did not contribute, and that the whole thing in their view could only be due to the combustion of office materials, which I have inventoried.

Presumably they said this since they knew where the diesel fuels were stored, and had a pretty good idea from videos in which order the beams gave way, and were unable to connect the dots. By logical extension, and leaving aside the explosives hypothesis, this left only one option: the one they pronounced as the definitive cause of the collapse.

I would like you to put yourself in the shoes of these investigators, as well. If they had said that the fires and known structural damage could not have accounted for the collapse of WTC7, what does that imply?

First it implies that WTC 1 and 2 were likely brought down by explosives too. The setup would have been simple: fly the planes into the Towers, get 1,000 cameras on them, then demo them in full view of everyone.

Second, that the conspiracy was much larger than the men who hijacked the planes and those who trained and directed them. The logistics of getting explosives into the places where they could do their work would be enormous. It would require a huge amount of planning and funding.

Third, that had the buildings not collapsed, it is quite possible that we might not have waged war on Afghanistan, although it was still likely, just as war with Iraq was also likely, for different reasons. Certainly, the sheer extent of the damage was burned into all of our collective minds, and if explosives were the principle cause of the collapses, then casualties ought properly to have been in the hundreds, not thousands.

Fourth, it would have opened up the Pandora’s Box of conspiratorial confusion, and given critics of Bush more ammunition to continue to paint him as a would-be dictator.

Fifth, it would have taken much more moral courage than the investigators appear to have possessed to draw the obvious conclusion that if this skyscraper was brought down by the combustion of office materials, it would be the first one in history and it would have done so in direct contradiction of the design of the buildings, whose structure and the materials within which were explicitly intended not to burn.

Let’s try this another way. Do this experiment in your mind. If you’ve been in an office building, imagine walking into there with a flame-thrower, and torching the place for a minute or so. This is not what is claimed to have happened, to be clear. We have the image of the jetfuel burned in our heads, but no jet fuel hit WTC7, and NIST does not believe on-site diesel fuels to have played a role, so somehow fires were started simply by falling debris. That doesn’t sound very plausible, but let’s run with it. In the real world our flame thrower was a thousand chairs on fire, set on fire by the jetfuel.

You torch the place. The plastic melts and catches fire on the workstations and computers. The ceiling catches fire briefly then goes out. You burn the carpet but it doesn’t catch fire. The only fires to be seen minutes after your “attack” are from still simmering fuel from the gas/oil mixture in your weapon, and smoldering plastic things scattered around. You don’t get a 7 hour burn from this. You don’t get heat that melts steel I-beams. In WTC 1 and 2 we had 24,000 gallons of aviation fuel.

I can accept the idea that that much fuel would melt steel, and that the pancake effect could bring down a building. There are those who deny it. Frankly, I’m not qualified to comment.

But in WTC7 we had neither a jet airliner crashing through, nor a fuel fire. With only slight exaggeration we had burning chairs and paper towels.

This is the story we are expected to believe. But I don’t believe it.

If, then, I accept in principle that one building was brought down by explosives, which seems the only plausible alternative for Building 7, then I must accept that–potentially at least, and this is not a necessary conclusion, but a necessarily possible one–they were ALL brought down that way.

Now, here is where I am going to differ from the Truthers. I see no reason to doubt that the planes were in fact hijacked and were in fact flown into both World Trade Center buildings, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. We have much evidence of all of this. I see no reason not to believe that Osama Bin Laden played a role in it. I see no reason to believe that George Bush or Dick Chency DID play a role in it.

Given these caveats, what is a plausible scenario? What was going on in 2001? We had balanced the budget, ended the Cold War, and were in a relatively steady state situation, even if we were in a recession. Who would benefit from tipping us in the direction we went?

As I see it, not George Bush. This has always been a sticking point for me, since I think he was and is a fundamentally a decent person. In general, I am a good judge of character, and that is my assessment. Yes, he did want to put an end to the games Saddam Hussein had been playing with the UN and America for the better part of a decade, but it is simply inconceivable to me that he would or could have chosen those means to facilitate that end.

In the end, who benefited? First of all, the Saudis. They would have known that sooner or later we would deal with Saddam Hussein, and more generally the Al Quedists that were and are plagueing them as well. They also benefit from loaning us the money we use to fund the deficit.

Second of all, and likely the more important suspects, would be Wall Street and global financial interests, who want us to be in debt forever. Who earns the $400 billion in interest we pay every year on our national debt,much of it accumulated in the Bush years as a direct or indirect result of 9/11? We really don’t know, but much of it goes to large banks, and much of the funding for the debt is created ex nihilo by those same banks, as I understand the issue. They create money from nothing, then earn interest on it. This is not a bad place to be, sort of like winning the lottery every day of your life.

So often fringe ideas that are utterly unacceptable can become acceptable with minor alterations. Do we need to believe that all Presidents have to kowtow to a shadow elite to get elected? No. Does that mean a shadow elite does not exist? No. Plainly, there are a lot of billionaires out there, with ample funds to affect national and international politics, and they don’t get to be billionaires by being stupid. To assume they play no role in politics is silly. Bill Gates, as one example, is quite active. He is relatively open about it, but not everyone need be.

In particular, do we need to believe in a fabled global Jewish financial elite? That’s where right-wingers usually wind up. That’s John Birch territory. Answer: of course not. Some of them are likely Jewish, most of them are likely not. If you look at any professional field, say academics, physics, law or medicine, Jews are represented disproportionately. This is because their culture is one which values achievement through hard work. As a group, they are one of the most diverse imaginable, ranging across the political spectrum, but generally passionate wherever they wind up. In aggregate, they have been an enormous blessing to humankind, having earned an inordinately disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes over the years, and being very frequently involved in very sincere philanthropic work. To the point, it would make sense that they would be overrepresented in the financial world as well for no reason other than demographics.

In the end, all causes are led by individuals, who have their own history, their own beliefs, and their own goals. It is impossible and undesirable–except when absolutely necessary, and I can’t imagine how that would come about–to reach final conclusions about any heterogeneous group in aggregate.

Net: if one admits that the combustion of office furnishings seems inadequate to account for the precipitous and vertical collapse of a 47 story steel skyscraper, one must admit that many parties were involved that day.

Most plausible to me would be a covert alliance between Bin Laden and some men in suits with chauffeurs. How far beyond that it went, it’s hard to say. Even if one is unwilling to accept Bush’s complicity–and I’m not willing to accept it–then one must still assume that not each and every member of our Defense establishment is beyond accepting the gifts which the nearly infinitely rich would be able to offer.

Sherlock Holmes would say that you have to accept the necessary conclusions from the evidence available, wherever it leads. I agree with this. I have long postponed posting my views, but today it seemed appropriate for some reason.

I won’t lose any sleep over this, but I do feel it’s important to tell the whole truth, and all the truths which come to you. Nothing good comes from avoiding unattractive ideas and facts simply because seeing them would cause you emotional or intellectual discomfort.