I read somewhere that a 737 crash was calculated for the WTC with promising results
The scenario was a 707, lost in the fog at the end of a flight, looking for the nearby airport.
Not only was it a lighter aircraft, but the mass of the fuel wasn’t taken into consideration. And the 767s were travelling at (above, actually) full speed, more than double the speed that was planned for.
ignoring Saudi Arabia’s involvement (or at least citizenship of the hijackers).
Keep in mind that Bin Laden’s goal was to overthrow the House of Saud so that the “right” people could run the holy land. The problem was that he couldn’t do this while the House of Saud is propped up by America. An so using Saudis was a move to drive a wedge between America and Saudi Arabia.
Also Bin Laden is Saudi. His contacts would be dominated by other Saudis. And there are cultural differences that made Saudis more likely to be suicide bombers than say, Jordanians or Egyptians.
I don’t really want to play whack-a-mole with you, but I have a few minutes before an appointment.
Steel- There is a bunch of the steel in hangers being stored. All of the debris was sorted and examined. Some was landfilled. I am annoyed that much was shipped overseas. I understand that they did not want to treat it like normal recyclable steel, but more should have been made available for artistic and memorial use.
Debris- People were killed by plane debris, and people have been finding it for years. Sometimes light objects survive explosions and crashes. Some undamaged items were found after the Columbia disaster. After every tornado, there is some object miraculously untouched.
There are images of the hijackers going through security at the airports. If the event happened today, there would be more footage, both because of the attacks and because of the proliferation of cameras.
In any large event, unexpected and surprising things happen. It is possible to hyper focus on those little oddities and construct an alternate narrative, especially if it makes one feel like they are part of an enlightened group, living in an exciting world where random and senseless things never happen. My field of study is Industrial Archaeology. some of that has been devoted to the study of the physical mechanism of the Holocaust in Western Europe during WW2. There are odd details and questions about the process there. I could almost certainly put those details into a narrative that would convince you that there was no Holocaust. But there was. It happened. A few oddly out of place details do not derail our understanding of the real horrors perpetrated there.
You believe this and likely other conspiracy theories because you want to believe them. That belief comforts you in certain ways, and makes the world seem less random. When confronted with evidence that your argument is invalid, rather than change your views, you just construct elaborate reasons why your original premise is still valid. When this happens, it stops being any sort of scientific inquiry and becomes a sort of religion.
Well. . . I’m not about to get into it with a “truther”, I will say I thought the “Loose Change” documentary was well done and even compelling, but that the documentary and the whole “truther” movement reminds me of writing a term paper-- you come up with a hypothesis, you compile everything that supports the hypothesis, you present it as valid. Except if you are looking for actual answers you don’t ignore stuff that doesn’t support your hypothesis; this isn’t a term paper, it’s more like a court case. For example: four eyewitnesses say the Pentagon plane went north of the Citgo station. OK. Are they the only eyewitnesses? How many others say it went south? How many say it was a plane, and how many a missile? With a very quick google search I found news reports from 9/12 that have eyewitnesses vividly describing a plane knocking over light poles before it hit the Pentagon, so why this idea that the CIA cut down the poles later? It sounds like someone starting from a conspiracy and working backwards.
Setting aside the massive structural damage to all three buildings even before the fires…
The truthers have had to move the goal posts that claim to “steel-frame buildings”, and then to “steel-frame high-rise buildings.”
Even then, the claim isn’t true. My favorite example is the Delft University Faculty of Architecture building. (The Faculty of Architecture building, got that?) A steel-frame high-rise building collapsed from fire alone, after a coffee machine short-circuited on the sixth floor.
That documentary was incredibly dishonest on a number of levels. Not just the picking-and-choosing of witnesses and evidence, but also intentionally, maliciously editing witness statements to make it appear some people were effectively arguing the opposite of what they actually believed.
Cracked (of all places) did a pretty good summary of just how horrible that filmmaker was. Here’s just one example:
So he does the whole video like that. He cuts sound bites in half, saving the part where a flight instructor says something like, “I met the hijacker and he was a bad pilot,” and deleting the part where the same guy says, “but you don’t exactly have to be fucking Chuck Yeager to crash a plane into a building.” Without that second part, it sounds like the guy is saying the hijacker couldn’t have done the flying. He has literally edited the words to make the guy say the opposite of what he said.
And even if it WAS true, everything is unprecedented until the first time it happens. No steel high-rise buildings were ever subjected to quite the same forces that the WTC was, so it’s silly to use a lack of precedent to show that such a thing is impossible.
Not to take any opinion, but WTC#1&2 were not “traditional buildings” The solution, developed by the structural engineers John Skilling and Leslie Robertson in the mid-1960s, was to re-conceive the basic structure of tall buildings. At the World Trade Center, a super-strong lattice of exterior steel columns, placed less than two feet apart and locked tightly together at every floor, would transform each tower into a giant “tube.”
(src pbs.org)
Their construction was distinct and rather unique, both in size and scale - considering the engineering that went into their construction, we all would have been surprised if they fell to the side and hadn’t “pancaked” strait down.
