"Was 9/11 an 'Inside Job'?"

[Guest James H. Fetzer]

As the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, http://911scholars.org, and the manager of its forum, http://911scholars.ning.com, I would like to take the occasion of Evan Burton's announcement of the creation of a more organized 9/11 research section to present some of the findings of members of Scholars, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, and other 9/11 research organizations, to identify some of the most controversial aspects of 9/11 research and offer some resources for consideration.

The most controversial aspects of 9/11 research concern how the Twin Towers were destroyed, the possibility of video fakery on 9/11 (especially in relation to the hit on the South Tower), whether a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon, and who was responsible for bringing this about, where indications of Israeli involvement are especially controversial. The resources provided here are intended to provide an introduction to these issues. They are not "the last word".

But they are intended to provide the basis for understanding why the "official account" of 9/11 cannot be sustained and enough information to appreciate why these issues are controersial within the 9/11 community, without resolving them. Those who are unaware of the breadth and depth of support for the 9/11 movement, moreover, should visit http://patriotsquestion911.com, where they will find bio sketches and statements from no less than

400+ Medical Professionals

400+ Professors Question 9/11

1,200+ Engineers and Architects

250+ Pilots and Aviation Professionals

300+ 9/11 Survivors and Family Members

200+ Artists, Entertainers, and Media Professionals

220+ Senior Military, Intelligence Service, Law Enforcement, and Government Officials

OFFICIAL ACCOUNT:

Nineteen Islamic fundamentalists hijacked four commercial carriers, outfoxed the most sophisticated air-defense system in the world, and perpetrated these atrocities under the control of a guy in a cave in Afghanistan. For an overview of how we know that this story is fabricated, view "Was 9/11 an 'Inside Job'?", http://twilightpines.com/JF-BuenosAires/Buenos-Aires.html, and check out some of the (more than a dozen) videos recommended there.

9/11 RESEARCH FINDINGS:

1. The impact of planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the buildings down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank DeMartini, the project manager, has observed), the planes alleged to have hit were similar to those they were designed to withstand, and the buildings continued to stand after those impacts with negligible effects.

2. Most of the jet fuel, principally kerosene, burned up in those fireballs in the first fifteen seconds or so. Below the 96th floor in the North Tower and the 80th in the South, those buildings were stone cold steel, unaffected by any fires at all other than some very modest office fires that burned around 500 degrees F, which functioned as a massive heat sink dissipating the heat from the steel.

3. The melting point of steel at 2,800 degrees F is about 1,000 degrees higher than the maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed 1,800 degrees under optimal conditions; but the NIST examined 236 samples of steel and found that 233 had not been exposed to temperatures above 500 degrees F and the others not above 1200.

4. Underwriters Laboratory certified the steel in the buildings up to 2,000 degrees F for three or four hours without any significant effects, where these fires burned neither long enough or hot enough—at an average temperature of about 500 degrees for about one hour in the South Tower and one and a half in the North—to weaken, much less melt.

5. If the steel had melted or weakened, then the affected floors would have displayed completely different behavior, with some degree of asymmetrical sagging and tilting, which would have been gradual and slow, not the complete, abrupt and total demolition that was observed. Which means the NIST cannot even explain the initiation of any “collapse” sequence.

6. The top 30 floors of the South Tower pivoted and fell to the side, turning to dust before it reached the horizontal. So it did not even exist to exert any downward pressure on the lower 80 floors. A high-school physics teacher, Charles Boldwyn, moreover, has calculated that, if you take the top 16 floors of the North Tower as one unit of downward force, there were 199 units of upward force to counteract it.

7. William Rodriguez, who was the senior custodian in the North Tower and the last man to leave the building, has reported massive explosions in the sub-basements that effected extensive destruction, including the demolition of a fifty-ton hydraulic press and the ripping of the skin off a fellow worker, where they filled with water that drained the sprinkler system.

8. Rodriguez observed that the explosion occurred prior to reverberations from upper floors, a claim that has now been substantiated in a new study by Craig Furlong and Gordon Ross, “Seismic Proof: 9/11 Was an Inside Job,” demonstrating that these explosions actually took place as much as 14 and 17 seconds before the presumptive airplane impacts.

9. Heavy-steel-construction buildings like the Twin Towers are not generally capable of “pancake collapse,” which normally occurs only with concrete structures of “lift slab” construction and could not occur in redundant welded-steel buildings, such as the towers, unless every supporting column were removed at the same time, floor by floor, as Charles Pegelow, a structural engineer, has observed.

10. The demolition of the two towers in about 10 seconds apiece is very close to the speed of free fall with only air resistance, which Judy Wood, Ph.D., formerly a professor of mechanical engineering, has observed is an astounding result that would be impossible without extremely powerful sources of energy. If they were collapsing, they would have had to fall through their points of greatest resistance.

11. Indeed, the towers are exploding from the top, not collapsing to the ground, where their floors do not move, a phenomenon Wood has likened to two gigantic trees turning to sawdust from the top down, which, like the pulverization of the buildings, the government’s account cannot possibly explain. There were no pancakes.

12. WTC-7 came down in a classic controlled demolition at 5:20 PM after Larry Silverstein suggested the best thing to do might be to “pull it,” displaying all the characteristics of classic controlled demolitions: a complete, abrupt and total collapse into its own footprint, where the floors are all falling at the same time, yielding a stack of pancakes about 5 floors high.

13. Had the Twin Towers done the same thing, there would have been two stacks of "pancakes equal to about 12% the height of the buildings or around 15 floors high. But they were actually reduced to below ground level. Since there were no "pancakes", there cannot have been any "pancake collapse" of either building.

14. The hit point at the Pentagon was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125-foot wingspan and a tail that stands 44-feet above the ground; the debris was wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail! Not even the engines were recovered, which means that the official account is not true.

15. The Pentagon’s own videotapes do not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building, as even Bill O’Reilly admitted when one was shown on “The O’Reilly Factor”; at 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 77-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present and easily visible; it was not, which means that the video evidence also contradicts the official account.

16. The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectory—flying at high speed barely above ground level—physically impossible, because a Boeing 757 flying over 500 mph could not have come closer than about 60 feet of the ground, which means that the official account is not even aerodynamically possible.

17. Data from a flight recorder provided to Pilots for 9/11 Truth by the National Transportation Safety Board corresponds to a plane with a different approach and altitude, which would have precluded its hitting lampposts or even the building itself, which means that, if this data corresponds to a Boeing 757, it would have flown over the Pentagon rather than hit it.

18. If Flight 93 crashed into an abandoned mine shaft, as the government maintains, then they should have brought out the heavy equipment and the bright lights and dug and dug, 24/7, in the hope that, by some miracle, someone might possibly have survived. But nothing like that was done. Even the singed trees and shrubs were trimmed, apparently to make it impossible to subject them to chemical analysis.

19. There is more, especially about the alleged hijackers, including that they were not competent to fly these planes and their names are not on any original, authenticated passenger manifest. Several have turned up alive and well and living in the Middle East. The government has not even produced their tickets as evidence that they were even aboard the aircraft they are alleged to have hijacked. Did Osama call from a cave in Afghanistan and charge them to his MasterCard?

20. President Bush recently acknowledged that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The Senate Intelligence Committee has reported that Saddam was not in cahoots with Al Qaeda. And the FBI has acknowledged that it has “no hard evidence” to tie Osama to 9/11. If Saddam did not do it and Osama did not do it, then who is responsible for the death of 3,000 citizens that day?

We believe that it is the highest form of respect to those who died on 9/11 and their survivors to establish how and why they died, which our own government manifestly has not done. With the American media under the thumb of a corrupt administration, we cannot count on the press to perform its investigative function. But we can do our best to expose falsehoods and reveal truths about 9/11.

FURTHER RESOURCES:

Elias Davidsson, "There is no evidence that Muslims committed the Crime of 9/11", http://www.opednews.com/articles/There-is-no-evidence-that-by-Elias-Davidsson-100811-366.html:

David Ray Griffin, "Phone Calls from the 9/11 Airliners [were Faked]", http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16924

James H. Fetzer, "New Proof of Video Fakery on 9/11", http://www.opednews.com/articles/New-Proof-of-Video-Fakery--by-Jim-Fetzer-080729-132.html

John Lear, Affidavit in the Judy Wood Lawsuit (on planes/no planes hitting the Twin Towers), http://911scholars.ning.com/main/search/search?q=John+Lear

James H. Fetzer, "An Analysis of [How] the WTC [was Destroyed] on 9/11", http://911scholars.ning.com/profiles/blogs/an-analysis-of-the-wtc-on-911

James H. Fetzer, "What Didn't Happen at the Pentagon", http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-didnt-happen-at-pentagon.html

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS AND VIDEOS:

There are links to a dozen or more videos about 9/11 on the home page of Scholars, http://911scholars.org. Here are a few recent additions:

Jack White, "A Photographic Portfolio of Death and Devastation", http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2010/01/911-photographic-portfolio-of-death-and.html

James H. Fetzer, "Unanswered Questions: Was 9/11 an 'Inside Job'?", http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-presentation-in-seattle.html

James H. Fetzer, "Thinking Critically about Conspiracy Theories", http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2009/12/httpdotsub.html

James H. Fetzer, "New 9/11 Photos Released", http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-911-photos-released.html

WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE?

David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage, and others focus on how it was done and refuting the official account, but without addressing the "who" and the "why".

James H. Fetzer, "9/11 and the Neo-Con Agenda", http://tinyurl.com/45ltba

James H. Fetzer, "Is 9/11 research 'anti-Semitic'?", http://www.opednews.com/articles/Is-9-11-Research-Anti-Sem-by-Jim-Fetzer-090615-95.html

ON INDICATIONS OF ISRAELI COMPLICITY, SEE:

Albert Pastore, Ph.D., STRANGER THAN FICTION (2003)

Jeff Gates, GUILT BY ASSOCIATION (2008)

Christopher Bollyn, http://www.bollyn.com/index.php

"Missing Links", http://www.911missinglinks.com/

ON THE ATTACK ON THE USS LIBERTY, SEE:

Phillip F. Tourney (with Mark Glenn), WHAT I SAW THAT DAY (2010)

Interviews on "The Real Deal" with Elias Davidsson, David Ray Griffin, John Lear, Albert Pastore, Jeff Gates, Mark Glenn, and many others are archived at http://radiofetzer.blogspot.com.

Edited August 31, 2010 by James H. Fetzer

[Guest James H. Fetzer]

Here's a nice article that explains what's really going on in the world of the "war on terror", which is a fabricated offensive intended to justify looting and pillaging Iraq and Afghanistan and, if the Neo-Cons and their Israeli associates have their way, the destruction of Iran as well, which seems to have been thwar...ted by Iran's possession of sophisticated anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems they have acquired from the Russians. (I interviewed Gordon Duff on "The Real Deal" on 6 August, by the way, which is also archived at http://radiofetzer.blogspot.com.)

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/08/07/gordon-duff-new-al-qaeda-leader-may-be-israeli/

GORDON DUFF: NEW “AL QAEDA” LEADER MAY BE ISRAELI

August 7, 2010 posted by Gordon Duff · 56 Comments

Costumes and makeup by Bin Laden Studios, Tel Aviv

PHONY TERRORIST LEADER BEING “BRANDED” BY ASSOCIATED PRESS, THE “VOICE OF ISRAEL”

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Adnan Shukrijumah, 35 formerly of Brooklyn, New York and Miami Beach is more likely to carry the real name Levine or Goldstein. The “legend,” intelligence jargon for a false background constructed for an imaginary person, created for Shukrijumah is paper thin. An FBI Agent named Brian LeBlanc in an “exclusive interview” with the Associated Press warned the world of this new “bin Laden” clone.

Another term is “branding.” This is what was done with Osama bin Laden, a former CIA operative and minor player in Afghanistan during the 1980s. He was branded as a terrorist mastermind, blamed for 9/11 though there isn’t a single shred of proof of his involvement and has been chased around the world for the last nine years though he has been dead that long. Bin Laden died December 14, 2001. Adnan Shukrijumah, or whoever he really is, may well be the next “patsy” blamed for a “much too convenient” terror attack meant to send the United States to war with Iran, another war fought for Israeli business.

Now we are told that Adnan Shukrijumah of Miami Beach, probably enraged at the closing of Wolfie’s “Rascal House,” a really excellent deli, is the greatest threat America faces. An FBI agent has crowned him “king of Al Qaeda.”

One other problem is that Al Qaeda doesn’t exist, never has.

We simply made it up. There has never been such an organization, there has never been an organized world terrorist conspiracy of any kind. There have never been terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Has anyone ever seen a photo of one? Of course not. In our nearly ten years scouring every square foot of Afghanistan, we have never found any of those “monkey bar” things we seeing the the films put on the internet. Journalists joke about these films along with the phony bin Laden videos. We call the Israeli group that puts them out “Bin Laden Studios.”

Arabs with box cutters had nothing to do with 9/11. This is a cover story. It was all made up. There is no proof of their involvement and, quite to the contrary, six of the supposed dead terrorists are alive and well and screaming for press interviews. 9/11 had nothing to do with terrorism, nothing to do with Arabs and everything to do with money. Follow the money.

Why is this game being played, attacks in London and Madrid, New York and Detroit now, why the games? The answer is simple. The Caspian basin has trillions of dollars in gas and oil, controlled by new and highly corrupt countries whose governments turned to Israel years ago for technical support. With Russia, the Gulf States and Nigeria controlling most of the world’s oil supply and money supplies almost exhausted, every loose cent that can be stolen already stashed away, looted by the banksters with the help of the Rothschilds and the Federal Reserve, this is the last great prize.

Chasing trillions of dollars of hydrocarbons, the last great source of collateral in the world, has brought about more than just the creation of phony terrorist organizations, false flag terror attacks and two phony wars.

Yes, we mean up to twelve trillion dollars in gas and oil is sitting there to be stolen from weak and corrupt governments. For this kind of money, we can easily expect another 9/11 or perhaps something worse, something “nuclear.” The people making these decisions care nothing for human life, nothing for America and certainly, one thing I can assure you, not a single one of them is a Muslim.

The process of funding the corruption of these governments has taken billions of dollars. That money has come from the narcotics trade re-instituted by the Bush administration after the invasion of Afghanistan. What was no opium production at all is now, not just opium but heroin, with refining now done in Afghanistan and new poppy fields being planted every day with American guarding, not only the harvest but helping with the export as well. This is why America has used “contractors” to such an extent.

It isn’t only Afghanistan, we are planting poppies in Iraq as well. In case, ok, let’s face it, when America loses the war in Afghanistan, it is likely the Taliban will destroy opium production again. The only thing keeping Afghanistan afloat is drug money, American payoffs to the Taliban to let our supplies into the country, estimated at nearly $800,000,000 a year paid to the enemy by America’s military, keeps them awash in cash. Taliban leaders have to travel to Pakistan. It is the only way they can fly to Dubai to bank their American cash. They share hotels there with the druglords tied to our “friends,” all involved in the same sick game.

In the end, gas and oil will be piped through Afghanistan from the narco-republics of the Caspian. These negotiations have been going on since the 1990s. Our invasion of Afghanistan was only part of it, part of the negotiations. The Taliban was looking for too big a cut of the profits. We thought we could brush them aside and take over. 9/11 and the carefully planned and staged disinformation campaign attempting to tie it to Afghanistan was nothing personal, it was business. People die in business every day. Ask any banker.

This is the reason an FBI agent’s uncontrolled blithering to an AP reporter is now in hundreds of newspapers as the branding of a new leader of a non-existent terrorist organization. It is also the reason we are likely to see a new terrorist attack in the United States after Labor Day. Attacks are time for news cycles. Check on that. We can expect one in September and another one around Christmas with one more on the run up to Easter.

What could we find out about Shukrijumah? Air Force pilots who have flown him and his family, yes, you have it right, United States Air Force, claim the photos and likenesses are totally phony. These pictures are someone else entirely. This isn’t the first time this has happened as the strange transformations of Osama bin Laden showed us. My how much bin Laden changed after his death.

It took minutes to get multiple confirmations on this. Everything about our “terrorist” and his family is being misrepresented. These aren’t even the same people. This is too easy.

If a several questions didn’t just come to mind after reading this, you aren’t getting enough sleep.

There are no people hiding in Afghanistan planning these attacks. There are no terrorist leaders. No, Mullah Omar, the imaginary leader of the Taliban is not planning a major offensive against American troops or attacks on anyone. Even if he does have one of those encrypted Israeli satellite phones that the rest of the insurgents are using to defeat American signals intelligence operations, he is unlikely to be doing anything other than waiting.

America, along with the “Karzai Incorpated” drug cartel has created a monstrous situation in Afghanistan. General Petraeus inherited a nightmare, 9 years of wrong direction, wrong country, wrong everything. Yes, there is corruption, evil. Yes, America is being victimized by violent men, planning the downfall of the United States.

We call them “congress.”

When something blows up, be it a dirty bomb in Cleveland, not too close to Shaker Heights, or a school in Little Rock, a “branded” terrorist leader, one with a storybook background, Saudi born, evil extremist Muslim dad, will be dragged out. As with most of our phony terrorists, he will be a ghost, a Mossad agent like the dozens, maybe hundreds of violent Muslim terrorists they dress up and parade out when needed.

Simply put, there is no Islamic terrorist movement of any kind other than the groups promoting a just and peaceful settlement in Gaza, groups that strike back against Israeli violence, really Israeli terrorism. They have no reason to attack the United States. Millions in the United States support them.

The cover for 9/11, the idea that Americans were “defiling” the religious shrines of Saudi Arabia is equally insane. Nobody in their right mind believes that. Extremists exist. They ran the United States. If you want to ask someone about 9/11, someone who could tell you why, tell you how, go to Dallas. Ask George “W” Bush about 9/11. He knows.

[Dave Greer]

OFFICIAL ACCOUNT:

Nineteen Islamic fundamentalists hijacked four commercial carriers, outfoxed the most sophisticated air-defense system in the world, and perpetrated these atrocities under the control of a guy in a cave in Afghanistan. For an overview of how we know that this story is fabricated, view "Was 9/11 an 'Inside Job'?", http://twilightpines.com/JF-BuenosAires/Buenos-Aires.html, and check out some of the (more than a dozen) videos recommended there.

9/11 RESEARCH FINDINGS:

Jim, if you want to prove that the offical version of events is wrong, then do you not agree that you should at least accurately represent what the offical position is? Your list of points (below) is riddled with inaccuracies.

1. The impact of planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the buildings down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank DeMartini, the project manager, has observed), the planes alleged to have hit were similar to those they were designed to withstand, and the buildings continued to stand after those impacts with negligible effects.

Firstly, this is circular reasoning. One might as well argue that Titanic never sank, since it was designed to be unsinkable. Regardless, that isn't even the "official version". According to the NIST investigation:

NIST concluded that the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and (2) the subsequent unusually large jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires (which reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius) significantly weakened the floors and columns with dislodged fireproofing to the point where floors sagged and pulled inward on the perimeter columns. This led to the inward bowing of the perimeter columns and failure of the south face of WTC 1 and the east face of WTC 2, initiating the collapse of each of the towers. Both photographic and video evidence—as well as accounts from the New York Police Department aviation unit during a half-hour period prior to collapse—support this sequence for each tower.

Source (section 2)

2. Most of the jet fuel, principally kerosene, burned up in those fireballs in the first fifteen seconds or so. Below the 96th floor in the North Tower and the 80th in the South, those buildings were stone cold steel, unaffected by any fires at all other than some very modest office fires that burned around 500 degrees F, which functioned as a massive heat sink dissipating the heat from the steel.

Most of the jet fuel may indeed have burned off relatively quickly, but the resultant fires occurred where there was sufficient combustibles, oxygen and an ignition source. Some heat may have been conducted away from the fire zones by the steel frame. Are there any published papers that demonstrate how much heat was conducted away, and how it affected the temperature of steel beams in the affected floors?

3. The melting point of steel at 2,800 degrees F is about 1,000 degrees higher than the maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed 1,800 degrees under optimal conditions; but the NIST examined 236 samples of steel and found that 233 had not been exposed to temperatures above 500 degrees F and the others not above 1200.

The official position is not that any steel reached its melting point.

In no instance did NIST report that steel in the WTC towers melted due to the fires. The melting point of steel is about 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,800 degrees Fahrenheit). Normal building fires and hydrocarbon (e.g., jet fuel) fires generate temperatures up to about 1,100 degrees Celsius (2,000 degrees Fahrenheit). NIST reported maximum upper layer air temperatures of about 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit) in the WTC towers (for example, see NCSTAR 1, Figure 6-36).

Source (section 7)

9. Heavy-steel-construction buildings like the Twin Towers are not generally capable of “pancake collapse,” which normally occurs only with concrete structures of “lift slab” construction and could not occur in redundant welded-steel buildings, such as the towers, unless every supporting column were removed at the same time, floor by floor, as Charles Pegelow, a structural engineer, has observed.

According to NIST there was no "pancake collapse".

NIST’s findings do not support the “pancake theory” of collapse, which is premised on a progressive failure of the floor systems in the WTC towers (the composite floor system—that connected the core columns and the perimeter columns—consisted of a grid of steel “trusses” integrated with a concrete slab; see diagram below). Instead, the NIST investigation showed conclusively that the failure of the inwardly bowed perimeter columns initiated collapse and that the occurrence of this inward bowing required the sagging floors to remain connected to the columns and pull the columns inwards. Thus, the floors did not fail progressively to cause a pancaking phenomenon.

Source (Section 2)

10. The demolition of the two towers in about 10 seconds apiece is very close to the speed of free fall with only air resistance, which Judy Wood, Ph.D., formerly a professor of mechanical engineering, has observed is an astounding result that would be impossible without extremely powerful sources of energy. If they were collapsing, they would have had to fall through their points of greatest resistance.

That's not an accurate appraisal of the "official" position.

NIST estimated the elapsed times for the first exterior panels to strike the ground after the collapse initiated in each of the towers to be approximately 11 seconds for WTC 1 and approximately 9 seconds for WTC 2. These elapsed times were based on: (1) precise timing of the initiation of collapse from video evidence, and (2) ground motion (seismic) signals recorded at Palisades, N.Y., that also were precisely time-calibrated for wave transmission times from lower Manhattan (see NCSTAR 1-5A).

As documented in Section 6.14.4 of NIST NCSTAR 1, these collapse times show that:

“… the structure below the level of collapse initiation offered minimal resistance to the falling building mass at and above the impact zone. The potential energy released by the downward movement of the large building mass far exceeded the capacity of the intact structure below to absorb that energy through energy of deformation.

Since the stories below the level of collapse initiation provided little resistance to the tremendous energy released by the falling building mass, the building section above came down essentially in free fall, as seen in videos. As the stories below sequentially failed, the falling mass increased, further increasing the demand on the floors below, which were unable to arrest the moving mass.”

In other words, the momentum (which equals mass times velocity) of the 12 to 28 stories (WTC 1 and WTC 2, respectively) falling on the supporting structure below (which was designed to support only the static weight of the floors above and not any dynamic effects due to the downward momentum) so greatly exceeded the strength capacity of the structure below that it (the structure below) was unable to stop or even to slow the falling mass. The downward momentum felt by each successive lower floor was even larger due to the increasing mass.

From video evidence, significant portions of the cores of both buildings (roughly 60 stories of WTC 1 and 40 stories of WTC 2) are known to have stood 15 to 25 seconds after collapse initiation before they, too, began to collapse. Neither the duration of the seismic records nor video evidence (due to obstruction of view caused by debris clouds) are reliable indicators of the total time it took for each building to collapse completely.

Source (Section 6)

13. Had the Twin Towers done the same thing, there would have been two stacks of "pancakes equal to about 12% the height of the buildings or around 15 floors high. But they were actually reduced to below ground level. Since there were no "pancakes", there cannot have been any "pancake collapse" of either building.

See above (also, didn't much of the WTC1&2 debris collapse into the basement levels?)

15. The Pentagon’s own videotapes do not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building, as even Bill O’Reilly admitted when one was shown on “The O’Reilly Factor”; at 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 77-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present and easily visible; it was not, which means that the video evidence also contradicts the official account.

There is something visible which looks compatible with a large, passenger jet. Impossible to be sure exactly due to poor resolution of the image. This animated GIF shows the frames prior to when the plane comes into view, followed by the one with the plane in it, annotated to show main features as I see them.

17. If Flight 93 crashed into an abandoned mine shaft, as the government maintains, then they should have brought out the heavy equipment and the bright lights and dug and dug, 24/7, in the hope that, by some miracle, someone might possibly have survived. But nothing like that was done.

The "official position" is not that Flight 93 crashed into an abandoned mine shaft. The official position is that it crashed into an empty field near Shankville, PA (Source). More accurately, it crashed into the edge of a reclaimed strip-mine, at high-speed, nose-down. There was absolutely no chance of any survivors.

I haven't addressed all your points. I just want to highlight where I think you've misrepresented (by accident or oversight, I'm sure) the "official position".

Thanks.

[Jack White]

It is absurd to reply to Jim's points by quoting the NIST report as gospel.

It is that report which Jim is REFUTING!

Jack

[Matthew Lewis]

A truther site that shows the towers took considerably LONGER than 10 seconds each to collapse

http://911review.com/errors/wtc/times.html

[Dave Greer]

It is absurd to reply to Jim's points by quoting the NIST report as gospel.

It is that report which Jim is REFUTING!

Jack

You've misunderstood what I've said.

Jim has made a series of claims. For example, he says the twin towers were not capable of a "pancake collapse". But the NIST report states quite clearly there was no "pancake collapse". So why has this issue been raised by Jim? If NIST says "No pancake", and Jim says "No pancake", where is the discrepancy? How does he refute the official NIST position (no pancake collapse), by saying there should not have been a pancake collapse?

[Jack White]

It is absurd to reply to Jim's points by quoting the NIST report as gospel.

It is that report which Jim is REFUTING!

Jack

You've misunderstood what I've said.

Jim has made a series of claims. For example, he says the twin towers were not capable of a "pancake collapse". But the NIST report states quite clearly there was no "pancake collapse". So why has this issue been raised by Jim? If NIST says "No pancake", and Jim says "No pancake", where is the discrepancy? How does he refute the official NIST position (no pancake collapse), by saying there should not have been a pancake collapse?

Because steel framed buildings by definition do not perform pancake collapses. IF there had been a pancake collapse

(each floor hitting the floor below causing it to fall), the time of the collapse, at say 1 second per floor, would have

been 110 seconds, NOT TEN SECONDS. So the NIST admits to a problem they fail to answer...IF THE 110 FLOORS DID

NOT PANCAKE, WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM? Well if you watch the videos, you see that each floor TURNS TO DUST

(concrete, steel, people, furniture) at the rate of ten floors per second, from the top down. Now what could have caused that?

The report says no pancake...SO HOW DID THE TOWERS FALL?

Jack

[Guest James H. Fetzer]

THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT cites a pancake collapse in 10 seconds as a result of the

plane's hitting the buildings and the resulting fires. But that is ridiculous. UL had certified the

steel to 2,000 degrees F for as long as four hours without weakening or melting, while NIST

examined 236 pieces of steel from the towers and found that 233 had not been exposed to heat

higher than 500 degrees F and the other three no higher than 1200 degrees F. Fires could have

burned forever at those temperatures and not affected the steel. Plus the fires in the South

Tower only burned around an hour and in the North about an hour and a half. The buildings were

enormous heat sinks, of course, so there was never any chance the steel could have weakened or

melted. In fact, there was an intense fire in the North Tower in 1975 that burned around 2,000

degrees F for four hours, but the steel did not weaken and the floor did not collapse, although

it was on the 11th floor and had the force of 99 floors pressing down, vastly more than in the

case of the North Tower (with 16 floors pressing down), much less the South (none pressing down).

I hope you have better arguments than this. In the meanwhile, since the buildings were destroyed

below ground level, where did all those pancakes go? If not whole floors, then massive debris?

Perhaps you will understand me better if you would view http://twilightpines.com/JF-BuenosAires/Buenos-Aires.html

It is absurd to reply to Jim's points by quoting the NIST report as gospel.

It is that report which Jim is REFUTING!

Jack

You've misunderstood what I've said.

Jim has made a series of claims. For example, he says the twin towers were not capable of a "pancake collapse". But the NIST report states quite clearly there was no "pancake collapse". So why has this issue been raised by Jim? If NIST says "No pancake", and Jim says "No pancake", where is the discrepancy? How does he refute the official NIST position (no pancake collapse), by saying there should not have been a pancake collapse?

[Dave Greer]

Because steel framed buildings by definition do not perform pancake collapses. IF there had been a pancake collapse

(each floor hitting the floor below causing it to fall), the time of the collapse, at say 1 second per floor, would have

been 110 seconds, NOT TEN SECONDS. So the NIST admits to a problem they fail to answer...IF THE 110 FLOORS DID

NOT PANCAKE, WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM? Well if you watch the videos, you see that each floor TURNS TO DUST

(concrete, steel, people, furniture) at the rate of ten floors per second, from the top down. Now what could have caused that?

The report says no pancake...SO HOW DID THE TOWERS FALL?

Jack

If that's Jim's position, then maybe needs to re-frame his argument more precisely. As it stands, there are several areas where he seems to be questioning the "official position", but what he states to be the "official position" just isn't the case. Flight 93 crashing into a mine-shaft for example. Or the point about temperatures not going above the melting point of steel (NIST specifically states that the temperature doesn't go that high).

I don't think it's unreasonable to point these issues out and ask for clarification.

[Guest James H. Fetzer]

No, there is a lot of misinformation out there. Notice I said the towers were destroyed in about

10 seconds, while he corrects me to say one fell in 9 and the other in 11 (9 + 11 + 20/2 = 10)!

Talk about splitting hairs! And I explicitly discuss the frames from the Pentagon cameras in my

Powerpoint presentation at http://twilightpines.com/JF-BuenosAires/Buenos-Aires.html It's hard to show what you are

talking about in written words when so much of the evidence is photographic, as I also explain.

A truther site that shows the towers took considerably LONGER than 10 seconds each to collapse

http://911review.com/errors/wtc/times.html

[Matthew Lewis]

THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT cites a pancake collapse in 10 seconds as a result of the

plane's hitting the buildings and the resulting fires. But that is ridiculous.

Where does it say that? What I've seen is the quote that Dave Greer posted

NIST estimated the elapsed times for the first exterior panels to strike the ground after the collapse initiated in each of the towers to be approximately 11 seconds for WTC 1 and approximately 9 seconds for WTC 2.

but that DOES NOT say the collapses too 11 and 9 seconds. It says the first panels struck the ground in that time. Is there another part where they claim the collapses took only 10 seconds?

Even IF the official report did claim that, why do you take that as truth when you dismiss the rest of the official story? Especially when it is clearly and easily proven WRONG. ANYONE can look at any of the collapse videos and see debris falling outside the footprint of the towers which is falling in freefall far outpacing the rest of the collapse which means the collapse was NOT at freefall. There is also this site

http://911review.com/errors/wtc/times.html

Which does a good job showing that both collapse took longer than 10 seconds. So why persist in claiming the collapses took only 10 seconds?

[Matthew Lewis]

No, there is a lot of misinformation out there. Notice I said the towers were destroyed in about

10 seconds, while he corrects me to say one fell in 9 and the other in 11 (9 + 11 + 20/2 = 10)!

Talk about splitting hairs! And I explicitly discuss the frames from the Pentagon cameras in my

Powerpoint presentation at http://twilightpines.com/JF-BuenosAires/Buenos-Aires.html It's hard to show what you are

talking about in written words when so much of the evidence is photographic, as I also explain.

A truther site that shows the towers took considerably LONGER than 10 seconds each to collapse

http://911review.com/errors/wtc/times.html

How is that site misinformation?

[Guest James H. Fetzer]

Come on, Dave! The claim is that Flight 93 "disappeared" because it crashed into an abandoned mine shaft (or, if you

prefer, a close facsimile)! I don't mind your asking, if you are serious in your intent. Have you noticed reporters

and photographers were kept 1,000 yards from the site, that the reporters first on the scene reported that the strange

feature of the crash site was that there was no evidence a plane had crashed there? I discuss this in greater detail

in various of my presentations, such as in Seattle on 13 December 2009, http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-presentation-in-seattle.html I am

forming the impression that you are faulting me for making key points in succinct fashion, where the rest of the story

would involved considerable additional elaboration. Did you notice, however, that the crash investigators did not break

out the big lights and the heavy equipment and dig 24/7 in an heroic effort to save anyone who, by some miracle, might

have surived? In fact, they not only did not do that but they did not even bother to recover the bodies--almost as though

the knew there was no point, because there were no bodies there! How else would you explain this stunning malfeasance?

Because steel framed buildings by definition do not perform pancake collapses. IF there had been a pancake collapse

(each floor hitting the floor below causing it to fall), the time of the collapse, at say 1 second per floor, would have

been 110 seconds, NOT TEN SECONDS. So the NIST admits to a problem they fail to answer...IF THE 110 FLOORS DID

NOT PANCAKE, WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM? Well if you watch the videos, you see that each floor TURNS TO DUST

(concrete, steel, people, furniture) at the rate of ten floors per second, from the top down. Now what could have caused that?

The report says no pancake...SO HOW DID THE TOWERS FALL?

Jack

If that's Jim's position, then maybe needs to re-frame his argument more precisely. As it stands, there are several areas where he seems to be questioning the "official position", but what he states to be the "official position" just isn't the case. Flight 93 crashing into a mine-shaft for example. Or the point about temperatures not going above the melting point of steel (NIST specifically states that the temperature doesn't go that high).

I don't think it's unreasonable to point these issues out and ask for clarification.

[Matthew Lewis]

Just want to clarify something here

does this

The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectoryflying at high speed barely above ground levelphysically impossible, because a Boeing 757 flying over 500 mph could not have come closer than about 60 feet of the ground, which means that the official account is not even aerodynamically possible.

refer to ground effect? If so, it was pointed out in another thread that ground effect decreases with speed. It also decreases as the angle of attack decreases (or vice versa) and the impact would have been at a negative angle of attack. Both of these mean that ground effect would have been negligible. What do you think about those facts?

Edited August 24, 2010 by Matthew Lewis

[Guest James H. Fetzer]

So your site claims that the collapse of the Twin Towers took 13-14 seconds? And it also admits,

Despite the availability of video evidence establishing lower bounds of total collapse times of

over 13 seconds for each of the towers, assertions that they collapsed in under ten seconds are

widespread. Collapse times of eight to ten seconds are common not only in literature of the skeptics,

but also in publications promoting the official explanation. A Scientific American article about a

2001 public meeting of engineers on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA gives a figure of nine seconds.

And as David Greer has explained, even NIST set the figures at 9 and 11 seconds, for an average of

10. But far more important than this attempt to read events beneath a cloud of dust is that neither

of the buildings "collapsed", from which it follows that none of those times represent the time that

it took for them to collapse. They were converted into millions of cubic yards of very fine dust,

as "New 9/11 Photos Released", http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-911-photos-released.html, so dramatically displays.

No, there is a lot of misinformation out there. Notice I said the towers were destroyed in about

10 seconds, while he corrects me to say one fell in 9 and the other in 11 (9 + 11 + 20/2 = 10)!

Talk about splitting hairs! And I explicitly discuss the frames from the Pentagon cameras in my

Powerpoint presentation at http://twilightpines.com/JF-BuenosAires/Buenos-Aires.html It's hard to show what you are

talking about in written words when so much of the evidence is photographic, as I also explain.

A truther site that shows the towers took considerably LONGER than 10 seconds each to collapse

http://911review.com/errors/wtc/times.html

How is that site misinformation?