Is it possible al qaeda planted bombs in the towers?

[The Witch]

I really want to get my tinfoil hat screwed on straight, so please help me make the leap between "bombs were planted" and "the US did the planting." It seems to me the bombs could have been a backup plot by al qaeda operatives in the towers to make sure they were going down one way or another... and to my addled brain that theory makes more sense than the US planted bombs in the towers. For one thing, the US is no good at backup plans (cf. Iraq!)...

please clarify all you :tinfoilhat: gurus...

[Kevin Fenton]

1. Yes, but

If AQ had planted them in the towers (for example by penetrating the elevator company and attaching them to the core columns accessible from the elevator shafts), then they would not place them all the way up the towers and they would not set them off so that the towers fell straight down. They would put bombs just at the base and make the towers fall sideways, causing maximum collateral damage - at least this was the plan for the 1993 bombing.

IMHO the US must have put them there after the 1993 bombing in case of a repeat, i.e. if one tower was damaged and looked like falling on the other or a big chunk of lower Manhattan, they could blow it up, thus preventing collateral damage.

I go into one aspect of this here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x60799

[Rich Hunt]

2. two problems with that

1) It would be mighty dangerous to leave such devices in the WTC

2) It would require planning within the government that probably wouldn't be possible without some leaks

3) How on earth could this be done without scrutiny?

You have to explain the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY, AND HOW.

And funny, I thought "the US" referred to the American people.

Moreover, I am assuming this is a Democratic board. If so,
this treacherous rigging surely must have been done post-Clinton.
That would give 'the enemy' one year and nine months to
accomplish this, without anyone noticing or suspecting.

If that's not the scenario, then WHICH governmental body
would be responsible under this conspiracy theory? It will
not suffice to say 'the government'. Whose government? The U.S.
government? The government of NYC? The government of New
York State? Which agencies?

If people want to 'market' their theory as plausible,
they have to answer ALL of the above questions.

[theSaiGirl]

3. You guys are making my day ......

I lovvvvvve this thread.
I love it.
(rubbing my hands together gleefully..)

Now we get to study the art of the "limited hangout".
How fallback positions are crafted to accommodate possible leaks or cognitive breakdowns in the overall psy-op.

As you all know, Morgan Reynolds (prof.Emerit of Texas A&M, former chief economist in Bush Jr. Labour Dept., expert in standards of legal evidence) has argued that Marvin Bush's security firm, had obtained the protective contracts on the WTC only a few months earlier, and probably had more than enough opportunities to rig the Towers and the rest of the complex.
We also have the confirmed reports of the power outages and lots of weekend "maintenance and repair" that occurred there just prior to 9/11.

But lets just put all that aside, for a moment, and pretend we donÕt know it.
Instead lets wipe that slate clean, and consider a posting that I think presents a brilliant opportunity for us to educate ourselves about the nature of "black" technology.
And precisely how ignorant the average American might be about the varieties and characters of various explosives used in military, mining, industrial and urban development.

(Just as I feel many Americans have been dumbed-down about the basics of firearms technology, knowledge of which, in earlier pre-industrial times, was considered de rigeur for life on the farm and frontier.)

So just how much do we really have to learn here about modern explosives, construction and demolition, to infer some probabilities and perhaps conclusions ?
And how much of that knowledge is scarce, hard to obtain or outright verboten ?

Kevin Fenton has really turned on the hottest and brightest spotlights, so we can see the entire stage of the play with stark clarity. Other posters over the WEB have echoed similar views, and in a few other scattered media venues.
The general argument is that "modern" buildings are built with a specially coated rebar, or perhaps inert explosive components, distributed throughout the concrete of elsewhere in the structure.
Certainly makes sense, intuitively
Certainly would be a lot cheaper and more efficient to prepare a building for take-down, say.. give it a projected life, but prep it structurally for implosion at some later date, when detonators can be installed and programmed.

So I'm going to try and read up on this and report back on whether there is any evidence of such preparatory destructive design materials and methods; although I suspect that the WTC, having been built in the early 1970s, probably preceded widespread commercial use of such preparations for obvious PR inhibitions.
But certainly, the military has this kind of pre-fab construction that can be built with the elements of its own implosion; so that critical installations, embassy security zones, makeshift bases that can be quickly destroyed so as not fall into the hands of an adversary, etc.
Sounds reasonable.
Wonder how formally classified all this might be ?

Rich Hunt (Holy Icon of Saint Bobby) probably would agree that the public is entitled to know for sure if buildings are going up in cities with "built-in" explosives. Bobby would certainly have wanted us to know, don't you think ?
Bullet-riddled Bobby would never have granted that big government and corporate leviathan had the right to conceal from their obedient denizens and workers, that the latter might be working every day in urban behemoths that are already rigged for some distant future detonation. I do not think that Bobby would have accepted the argument that it is best for us NOT TO KNOW such things, so that we might be ignorant for our own good.
Would it require a FOIA lawsuit to obtain government/military documentation of such capabilities ?
Or is it already available in the public domain ?
Any military demo experts out there who can give us a clue ?
What about private-sector use of such technology ?

I think that if this thread means anything at all, we should now "put up or shut up", when it comes to shutting down argument by using the excuse that so much "black" technology (whether military or private-sector) is classified or privileged, making real confirmation well nigh impossible
No matter how much reporting we get, the official government and corporate sources will either deny or "no comment".
Would they ever openly admit to such a thing ?
It would be "unthinkable" ...

(Although, apparently less unthinkable than the likelihood that they simply spent a few weekends rigging the builidngs

But perhaps we can here and now enlighten ourselves.
And enlighten those true democrats, liberals and progressives who instinctively feel that ordinary people have a "right to know", if such an unthinkable reality were everywhere around us.

We need to examine all possibilities: thermite, C-4, thermo baric ..etc. ..much as Prof.Jones briefly and modestly speculated or posed reasonable conjectures in his paper.
Are there inert forms that maintain their potency over decades, and can be pre-positioned, or painted on rebar, for future use ?

While we are at it, we should also look at the reports (and analysis by scientists with backgrounds in physics or engineering like Prof.Jones) which suggest the possibility that "baby-nukes" of some kind might also have been employed at the WTC.
According to the "9/11-Eyewitness" DVD recently released, the collapse sites continued to emit fantastic amounts of heat, bright light and possibly radiation.
Has anyone heard of any Geiger counter readings of the site in the immediate aftermath ?
No one could near them for quite a while.
Would it still be contaminated now, if baby-nukes had been used ?
Certainly worth exploring, over and above the officially admitted hot pools of melted steel.

Now someone has posed the question of whether "Al Qaeda" could have planted the explosives that brought down the Towers ?
Does this also mean they rigged WTC 7 ?
Not likely, since WTC7 housed civil-defense and emergency preparedness functionalities for both Giuliani and the Feds. Would they have allowed "Al Qaeda" to penetrate and plant explosives to that extent ?
Wow... what a fantastic movie plot !!!!!

Like we could script it so that Larry Silverstein and Marvin Bush hire some Arab patsies to to rig the WTC, and then cash in on the insurance, while hiding other business losses..
Right out of John Grisham, huh ?
Any budding script-writers want to tackle that one ?
Or do you think the plotline lacks believability ?

I think it's important to recall that "Al Qaeda" was originally a CIA off-the-shelf project dating back to the Afghan jihad of the 80s. It was just a rudimentary database invention; a list of names, cellphone numbers, addresses and other potentially mine-able data; a terrorist database for use against the Soviets and their proxies in Afghanistan, and perhaps elsewhere to de-stabilize Islamic areas of the old Soviet Union, the Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan, Kyrgiztan .. Chechnya even ..
These were Ronald ReaganÕs Afghan freedom-fighters, the mujahaddin
"...the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers",
as Reagan called them.
Later, these same jihadist mercenaries were reactivated in the Balkans and elsewhere. The KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) is basically the Balkan branch of "Al Qaeda".
Except that now they have an air force and some tank divisions - itÕs called NATO.

So, by all means, lets never rule out the possibility that "Al Qaeda" planted explosives in the Towers (and/or WTC7) ... or maybe they somehow penetrated the innards of our national security and discovered that the buildings were already pre-rigged for easier deconstruction.
Now that would be a plotline with plenty of potential for hot action scenes....
LetÕs script it and run it by the studios.... Maybe we could get it produced on CNN or FX ...

[The Witch]

4. All right, settle down.

I asked a question and tried to make it clear my question was out of ignorance not out of challenging anybody's theory. Can you answer my question without implying that I'm a stupid idiot, please? I'll be yer best friend... :hug:

[spooked911]

6. I didn't see her imply you were a stupid idiot-- Saigirl just is

interested in the topic, I think.

[theSaiGirl]

14. re: US is "no good at backups"....

Very naive assumption.
All operations have fallbacks.
And 9/11 (like the Iraq War) is full of them.

One of the themes currently emerging to replace the "Al Qaeda did it" plotline of 9/11, is the subtle suggestion that the Israelis, the Mossad or their controlled agents at the Pentagon, carried out 9/11.
Of course that is not officially sanctioned.
Officially, that is regarded as anti-Israel bias or even "anti-semitic" bigotry.
Recall how quickly FOX yanked Carl Cameron's coverage of the "Israeli art student" story; or the propagation of the "dancing Israelis in New Jersey on 9/11" story, which circulated and then disappeared.
The stories were set loose, then disappeared.
Classic manipulation by media psy-op.
One could see how various intelligence agencies might be delegated to throw out those periodic red-herring, to muddy the waters around 9/11, especially by assoicating the rumors with names (and often dual-citizenships) like Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Chertoff, Zakheim and so many of the high-profile "neo-cons" and PNAC names held out in public as delegated goats for both 9/11 and the Iraq quagmire.

It really is a deceitful and maniplative kind of psy-op (right out of Rumsfeld's P2-OG black bag) to taint questions about 9/11, in advance, with the stain of bigotry and anti-semitism.
It shows that the media were already being used, in the immediate days after 9/11, to mold and manipulate and discredit any reasonable challenges to the officially sanctioned myth of 19 crazed Arab Muslims with boxcutters, and their brilliant mastermind back in Afghanistan.
But it works effectively to arbitrarily and pre-emptively shut down the flood of questions about the absurdities, inconsistencies and sheer impossibilities of the official psy-op legend of 9/11.

[Kevin Fenton]

9. Attempts at answers

"1) It would be mighty dangerous to leave such devices in the WTC."
Why? It only proved dangerous when somebody flew planes into the buildings. Modern explosives don't just go off like that.

"2) It would require planning within the government that probably wouldn't be possible without some leaks."
There are lots of things the government does that it shouldn't that don't get leaked. People only leak stuff when they have an interest in doing so.

"3) How on earth could this be done without scrutiny?"
Scrutiny by whom? Scrutiny of US intelligence agencies is hardly rigorous.

"You have to explain the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY, AND HOW."
To provide a full and totalling convincing answer I do. I am not yet in a position to do so, but I'll give it a go.
WHO - This needs three answers: (1) who made the decision? (2) Which agency actually did it? (3) What was their cover?
(1) I don't know, but it's a pretty major decision, so I guess it would go back to the president. And, yes, he was a Democrat at that time.
(2) I don't know, but I guess the CIA would be top of the list of usual suspects.
(3) ACE Elevator.
WHAT - Explosives. How could I know exactly what type?
WHERE - In the elevator shafts, because that's where the core columns were. It the logical place to put them - perhaps the only place to put them. Also, the damage to the elevator shafts appears to be inconsistent with the impact damage and some eyewitnesses said they heard sounds like bombs coming from them.
WHEN - In the mid 90s.
WHY - Because the 1993 bombers planned to topple one tower onto the other, which would then fall itself. This would have caused over 100,000 fatalities, massive real estate losses and massive losses of information (which wasn't backed up off-site in 1993). The explosives would be used to stop a tower that was attacked falling and hitting anything else.
HOW - Using explosives placed in the elevator shafts.

I admit that it's not the greatest argument I've ever seen, but at the moment it makes more sense to me than the the towers falling from the impact damage and fires and the false flag hypothesis. I like it because I think:
(1) The towers were destroyed with explosives;
(2) The false flag scenario just does not do it for me - Osama doesn't work for the CIA;
(3) The story of the elevator company;
(4) A whole lot of deduction (or, if you want, guesswork), for example there must have been some discussion after the 1993 bombing about what do to if they tried again - especially because the bombers threatened to do just that.

[hack89]

5. It would be unlikely

It would require tons of explosives - it is hard to imagine them being able to wire up the buildings and not being noticed by security. Its hard to imagine an Al Qaeda inside job.

[janedoe]

7. Hey, here's an idea!

"Is it possible al qaeda planted bombs in the towers?"

Let's have a *REAL* investigation so that we can find out!

[mirandapriestly]

8. that would be an EXCELLENT approach for some public figure

who wanted an investigation without getting labeled as a "kook". How could they turn THAT one down? heh heh.

[hack89]

10. Who would do the investigation?

The list of people and organization implicated in CT theories is pretty long.

[dailykoff]

11. Intriguing question.

Hi everyone, interesting discussion! I'm no expert on al Qaeda, but this is one hypothesis I'd be inclined to reject, simply because their previous and subsequent bombings have been so much more modest, to put it mildly. Demolishing the WTC complex was a big job requiring lots of professional planning.

I also don't think the explosives could have been placed much earlier than a few weeks prior to the job, mainly because of the danger of tenant construction accidentally setting them off. Tenants constantly make structural modifications, with and without approval, like drilling holes in walls and slabs, cutting stairwells between floors, etc.

Just my two bits!

[Kevin Fenton]

12. Tenant alterations

Tenants always have to have approval from the building owner before making alterations. AFAIK the only stairwells the tenants cut during alterations were the ones outside the core, where there wouldn't be any point in putting explosives anyway. Half the gravity load was borne by the core columns, which were in technical areas (i.e. by the elevator shafts) - I can't see tenants coming anywhere near the shafts when they made their alterations.

[rman]

13. Why does that make more sense then US planted bombs?

The argument against the latter is that "people would have noticed".

Why would that argument not apply if Al Qaeda did it?



I'd say it's a matter of access to the buildings, and more particularly access to parts of the building that were
1. suitable locations to place demolition charges
2. locations that were 'out of the way', ie service ducts/shafts.

I argue it'd be easier for, for instance the WTC security firm headed by a Bush family member (i'm not making that up) to arrange such access, then it would be for Middle Eastern terrorists.

[theSaiGirl]

15. Advance rigging of the WTC for demolition on 9/11 - Ockham again...

As "rman" put it so succinctly, re: "Al Qaeda rigging exlosives in the WTC":

"Why does that make more sense then US planted bombs?
The argument against the latter is that "people would have noticed".
Why would that argument not apply if Al Qaeda did it?
I'd say it's a matter of access to the buildings, and more particularly access to parts of the building that were
1. suitable locations to place demolition charges
2. locations that were 'out of the way', ie service ducts/shafts.
I argue it'd be easier for, for instance the WTC security firm headed by a Bush family member (i'm not making that up) to arrange such access, then it would be for Middle Eastern terrorists."
====
Well put.
That is very much the case argued by legal scholar Morgan Reynolds in several articles of his posted at lewrockwell.com.
And it certainly conforms to the Ockham's Razor constraint, I would say.
In criminal investigations, one ordinarily assembles evidence of motive, means and opportunity.
The security firm run by the President's brother certainly qualifies in all three categories, as any prosecutor would argue to a typical jury looking at this as a standard RICO, fraud, murder case.
(We'll get to the treason component later.)

Of course, if one has studied the origins of the whole "Al Qaeda" and associated "bin Laden" legends, its organizational, financial and historical roots in the CIA's not-so covert Afghan jihad against the Soviets during the Cold War period; the story of "Tim Osman" and the CIA-run base at Peshawar; the role of the CIA's junior partner, the Pakistani ISI in creating the Taliban; the Bush-binLaden family-syndicate (Carlyle Group) financial and personal ties going all the way back to the 70s at least; the employment of bin Laden and his assets in the Balkan Wars of the 90s; and David Shayler's revelations of MI-6 hiring, financing and offering protection to bin Laden assets for their abortive attempt to kill and overthrow Col Qadafi in Libya ..
after all that long sordid history, it really becomes a transparent argument.
It makes perfect sense for those pulling the strings on 9/11, to call into service their long-time assets, as either patsies, scapegoats or designated fall-guys.
A quick study of the FBI's role in the earlier 1993 WTC bombing (the centrality of their deep-cover CI, Salem) as well as BATF/FBI foreknowledge of the OKC Murrah Bldg. bombing (informants Andreas Strassmeir and Carol Howe at Elohim City), etc.;...
tends to place the 9/11 psy-op in sharper historical perspective as simply one more event in a continuum of staged events leading to the manifest long-term PNAC agenda:
Globalization of terror and war, slow-moving martial law and normalization of domestic police state conditions; a scenario driving
the burgeoning homeland security-industrial complex, which greets the prospect of total surveillance and control over Americans with near apocalyptic anticipation and joy.

Which is why, in some venues today, "Al Qaeda" is half-jokingly half-seriously referred to as "Al CIA-duh".

[rumpel]

16. SaiGirl, here is something that might interest you

NOAA directly supported search and recovery efforts at both the WTC and the Pentagon disaster sites with its mapping and remote sensing capabilities at the request of the Army's Joint Precision Strike Demonstration. NOAA coordinated a highly detailed mapping mission at both disaster sites using high resolution aerial photography and Light Detection and Ranging technology. LIDAR is an active remote sensing system used to profile or scan terrain elevations. NOAA's National Ocean Service, the NOAA Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, Optech, Inc., and the University of Florida teamed up to fly the LIDAR in NOAA's Cessna Citation. NOAA produced an elevation model with accuracy up to fifteen centimeters using LIDAR data, traditional aerial photography, and accurate Global Positioning System measurements connected to the National Spatial Reference System. The data and images produced were critical for search and recovery efforts in that they established an accurate spatial reference frame from which rescuers could perform effective recovery; provided an accurate bird's-eye view of the scene,which is critical for locating structures such as elevator shafts; and established a LIDAR calibration network. This calibration network was critical to private sector entities, such as Earthdata, who were able to collect and distribute critical data every 12 hours using new technologies.

http://www.magazine.noaa.gov/stories/mag2.htm

the best part is this:

Army's Joint Precision Strike Demonstration

https://peoiewswebinfo.monmouth.army.mil/JPSD/wtc.htm

On September 14, 2001, XVIII Airborne Corps G2 and the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense – Advanced Concepts and Systems (DUSD-ASC) requested the Army Joint Precision Strike Demonstration Program Office (JPSD PO), Program Executive Office - Intelligence, Electronics, Warfare & Surveillance (PEO IEW&S), deploy the Rapid Terrain Visualization (RTV) high-resolution terrain mapping capabilities to support the World Trade Center and Pentagon recovery efforts.

At the time, the RTV aircraft was deployed outside the continental United States fulfilling a previous mission requirement and unable to return quickly. As a result, JPSD initiated a series of actions aiding recovery and cleanup activities in New York and Washington.

:)

make sure you visit their home page and look at the "Loitering EW Killer". LEWK

[theSaiGirl]

17. Elevated readings at the WTC site ?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x62208

[rumpel]

18. Yes, strange... I am going to check some more. Exit signs, watches guns

is that really all adding up as the source?