The issue of 9/11 Truth is one of intrinsic importance. The questions it asks are quite literally directly germane to the survival of our democratic Republic. It asks whether or not our government is capable of participating–even after being given ample funding and time to do its job–in cover-ups. It asks whether or not as yet unnamed and unidentified co-conspirators on 9/11 got away with literal murder. It asks if there are factions even now operating in America who want some combination of perennial war, omnipresent totalitarian surveillance, and possibly even, eventually, the eradication of our political freedom outright.
At root, the question is simple: was a crime committed which was larger than that 4 planes were hijacked and crashed? Specifically: is the government’s account of the collapses of World Trade Centers 1, 2 and 7 plausible?
And I would like to draw an analogy. If someone stumbles across a dead body with stab wounds in it, do we need to establish what sort of knife was used prior to considering it a murder or suicide? Do we need to know if the perpetrator was left handed or right handed, educated or uneducated? Do we need a motive? Do we need the knife itself? Do we need to know exactly when and how it happened? Of course not.
In the entire history of modern building–let us call it 85 years or so, dating from the opening of the Empire State Building–only three skyscrapers have gone through complete collapses, all of them on 9/11. A particularly annoying person I have been going back and forth with–the word debate would imply a level of sincerity he quite obviously does not possess–cited the McCormick Place fire. This is not relevant, as McCormick Place was not a skyscraper, was filled with highly flammable material and no sprinklers, and did not undergo a complete collapse. The roof collapsed, and the building was rendered unusable, but did not collapse entirely, or instantly, as did all three WTC buildings. It was a progressive fire, whose reach could be and was watched by helpless firefighters.
Further, this collapse happened in 1967, and influenced national building codes. WTC7 was not opened until 1987, 20 years later, and can be safely assumed to have incorporated the lessons learned.
With regard to Sight and Sound Theater, the fireproofing for the steel supports had been removed, and it was by design only reinforced on the sides by metal beams. By design, the middle of the building included no structural supports. There was no forest of beams in the core reinforcing one another as was the case with all three WTC buildings. It is not a comparable case.
Here are comparable cases: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/compare/fires.html
Here is a partial listing of major high-rise fires: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_fire
It is indisputably the case that there have been a number of fires which have burned on more floors, longer, and not even brought on partial collapse. 9/11 is unique. All three collapses of skyscrapers that have ever happened, happened on that day.
And here is is worth doing some detail level analysis. The way steel frame skyscrapers are built is metal I-beam are bolted together, then in most cases welded. There are horizontal connections, and vertical connections. Wherever there is a “joint” fire-proofing is sprayed. No fire can get within 4-6 inches of a welded, bolted joint.
This construction is, quite obviously, DESIGNED to withstand fires. You could build a bonfire around one of these beams, using anything you might find in an office, roast marshmallows, sing campfire songs. and have NO worry that anything would happen to it. The flame cannot reach the beam, or the joint, and it cannot loosen bolts, burn through welds, and cannot come close to melting steel.
Even though their final conclusion is farcical, we can use the work of NIST to rule out certain conjectures about the collapse particularly of Tower 7. We can assume, for example, that they found no evidence that fuel from the backup generators at the electrical substation played a role. If there were any evidence, they would have brought it forward. We can assume that they found no evidence that the falling debris from the collapse of the other two World Trade Centers played a role. What holds a building like this up is the core supports, and the gashes were superficial. If there has been any merit to this claim they would have mentioned it. We also would have seen an asymetrical collapse, like a tree being felled. If this collapse was off vertical, as some claim, it was only by a few degrees and that can easily be explained as imperfectly synchronized beam cutting. Some bending is seen in even acknowledged controlled demolitions.
We can, in fact, conclude, that they could find no explanation other than the one they provided, EXCEPT that of explosives, which on their own account they did not look or test for, and which we can therefore was excluded from consideration at the outset, for unknown reasons.
We can and should conclude that only two hypotheses remain standing: explosives, and what NIST claims caused the collapse.
And what do they claim? That a single supporting beam, in a forest of beams, was loosened by being exposed for eight hours to the combustion of office furnishing, to the extent that it gave way, and that this led, within 6 seconds, to the initiation of a general collapse of the entire 47 story building, a collapse that began in absolute free fall, and slowed little in the ensuing few seconds it took to complete.
I would like to examine this story in some detail. Here is their official report: http://www.nist.gov/el/disasterstudies/wtc/faqs_wtc7.cfm
They say that “Debris from the collapse of WTC 1, which was 370 feet to the south, ignited fires on at least 10 floors in the building at its south and west faces. However, only the fires on some of the lower floors—7 through 9 and 11 through 13—burned out of control.”
Then: “The heat from the uncontrolled fires caused steel floor beams and girders to thermally expand, leading to a chain of events that caused a key structural column to fail. The failure of this structural column then initiated a fire-induced progressive collapse of the entire building.
According to the report’s probable collapse sequence, heat from the uncontrolled fires caused thermal expansion of the steel beams on the lower floors of the east side of WTC 7, damaging the floor framing on multiple floors.
Eventually, a girder on Floor 13 lost its connection to a critical column, Column 79, that provided support for the long floor spans on the east side of the building (see Diagram 1). The displaced girder and other local fire-induced damage caused Floor 13 to collapse, beginning a cascade of floor failures down to the 5th floor. Many of these floors had already been at least partially weakened by the fires in the vicinity of Column 79. This collapse of floors left Column 79 insufficiently supported in the east-west direction over nine stories.
The unsupported Column 79 then buckled and triggered an upward progression of floor system failures that reached the building’s east penthouse. What followed in rapid succession was a series of structural failures. Failure first occurred all the way to the roof line—involving all three interior columns on the easternmost side of the building (79, 80, and 81). Then, progressing from east to west across WTC 7, all of the columns failed in the core of the building (58 through 78). Finally, the entire façade collapsed.”
I will note that the report includes a diagram of the supporting columns on the 13th floor. I count 43.
You can locate Column 79. It is alleged that the girder between it and Column 44 lost its connection at Column 79.
You have seen pictures of skyscrapers during construction. They build a skeleton of sorts, upon which they mount floors and walls. Column 79 would have rested on another column on the 12th floor, to which it was bolted and welded, and then there would have been a horizontal girder, also bolted and welded, upon rested the floor which would have consisted in several inches of concrete, poured into a metal pan. The joint would have been sprayed with fire-proofing.
Locate yourself next to Column 79. You have a kerosene lighter, 8 hours, and whatever you can find in the office that will burn. Here is your task: start a fire which will sever the beam underneath the floor. No one alleges that anyone built a bonfire, but I am going to allow you to. You can use paper of course to start it, but paper doesn’t burn for long. You might find some wooden desks, and maybe you can even somehow set metal desks on fire.
Can you get a fire to burn for 8 hours? Only by continually adding fuel. This means that no one area could POSSIBLY have remained hot for a full 8 hours, and whenever the fire got to Column 79, it cannot have burned for more than a couple hours.
The idea that the “combustion of office furnishings”, which is the NIST phrase from another report, could sever a fire-treated beam connection under a concrete floor is ridiculous. It has never been seen anywhere else, and the reason is simple: it is impossible. It is a violation of physics.
But let’s take it to the next step. You have a light saber, which will cut through anything. Sever the beam. Sever it 3-4 times, just to be thorough. What happens? What do you think? I’m thinking you hear some groaning up above, and the floor sags a bit. And that’s it. Everything is connected by the floor, and supported by welded and bolted steel beams. You are in the middle of a tightly interlocking structure that BY DESIGN distributes the weight load. There is no Achilles Heel. There is no single point which, if severed, would bring the whole thing down, in any amount of time.
Bring to mind 1) a forest of interlocking, mutually reinforcing steel beam, treated with fire-proofing, and subjected only to the combustion of plastic computers and maybe wooden desks; 2) the failure of a single column; and 3) that video.
Even as a non-professional, does that make a shred of sense?
Now, it was known in advance that Tower 7 was in trouble. Explosions had been heard all day, there was some outer damage, and flames had been seen coming out of the windows for some time. It was creaking and groaning, and the fire fighters had been told to “pull” it, which means to pull everybody out. I don’t dispute this, or see any reason to dispute it.
Now watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbbZE7c3a8Q
My thesis is simple: all three buildings were wired to blow after being hit by passenger jetliners, and United 93 was supposed to hit Tower 7. It took off right across the river in exactly the right time-frame. But it never showed up. So I think the people who planted the explosives (and I am not qualified to speculate what combination of thermite and other types of explosives might have been used, but the details are irrelevant) knew they could not leave that building intact, but had to make its collapse superficially plausible. They set off a few explosives to get things rolling, started a bunch of fires that would be clearly visible, then at a certain time, did the planned controlled demolition.
So, again, there is no reason to doubt it was in trouble, and that fire-fighters had already decided to abandon it, but that in no respect makes the ludicrous NIST scenario even superficially plausible.
I will deal with two other points made by the silly person I am interacting with.
We agreed that molten metal was seen by many people. He claims it was Aluminum. I do not want to research this at the moment, but asked a simple question: where did the heat come from? He claimed it came from the reaction of iron and steam. I asked where the steam came from, and he had no good answer. More importantly, I asked why this particular reaction has never been seen in any controlled demolition anywhere in the world, or in any other skyscraper fire–and would add, actually, the question as to how fire-proofing experts somehow overlooked this–and he had no answer.
The ground around that area was so hot for several weeks that it was melting peoples boots. And empirically, we have “melted” steel beams. We have a block of concrete which melted and fused with a metal beam. Absent TREMENDOUS heat, that is quite impossible. We have exhibits, in other words, clearly showing heat of the sort only thermite can generate.
So where is the thermite? Some people claim thermite was found, some people claim it was not. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. What is the role of thermite? To burn up, completely. What thermite could be found? Only unreacted thermite. Is it unreasonable to suppose that all the evidence quite literally burnt up because that is what it was designed to do?
The heat, alone, betrays the presence of highly exogenic substances which are not found in ANY skyscraper naturally.
There is only one conclusion consistent with the evidence: that Tower 7, at least, was brought down by a controlled demolition using an unknown package of tools–which included thermite at least–which were planted by people who have not been identified, and who self evidently had to have had access to all the relevant areas. This fact, in turn, means that in principle at least some research could be done. What group or groups COULD have done this, in highly access-controlled buildings, which had already been subjected to a terrorist attack?
This, quite obviously, is the obvious question for sane people to ask. We do not live in a sane world, regrettably. But we can always hope, and can always work to make it more sane.