Since any rebuttal to my analysis of the video so far seems to be best summarized by "Nuh-uh!", I take it that I'm doing a good job and am pressing on.
In my last installment, I didn't include the foreword to this grim piece of disinformation. I call it disinformation based solely on my analysis of the first chapter, in which basic facts about WTC 7 are misrepresented (the number of fires, the working hypotheses for collapse) and misinterpreted (Silverstein's comment), which result in such strange arguments as "the collapse should have looked like this controlled demolition instead of that one." Anyway, here's that quote:
"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction."
-James Baldwin
That's so true, Mr. Baldwin. I'm going to make that my new signature.
So onward and downward. As always, the misspellings and grammatical mistakes in the transcript are verbatim.
Chapter 2: Melting Towers
Let me save myself a lot of time. We're going to hear a lot about the "melting point of steel" in this chapter. This is, again, a straw man. Steel doesn't have to get close to the melting point to become dangerous in a steel structure. Steel is usually quite elastic (meaning it will regain its initial shape after a deforming stress is removed), but enough heat will move it into a "plastic" stage, where stress will deform the steel structure permanently. The steel from the WTC towers shows all signs of having been in this plastic stage, the temperatures for which do not begin to approach the melting point of steel. Whenever you hear someone bring up the melting point of steel to show that the collapse of the WTC towers was deliberate, this person is confusing the issue.
(shot: ABC coverage of the collapse of the south tower in slo-motion)
(shot: footage of the North Tower collapsing, also in slo-motion - the footage breaks up into blocks and slides off screen)
Melting point of steel: 1535ΓΒ° C
Max temperature of non-pressurized hydrocarbon fire: ~825ΓΒ° C
Difference: ~710ΓΒ° C
The surface temperature of the Sun is
6000Β° C, a difference of 5175Β° C. It has just as much relevance to the plastic deformation of load-bearing steel as the melting point of steel.
No other modern steel structure skyscraper has collapsed from fire
PDF:
Historical Survey of Multi-Story Building Collapses Due to Fire(picture: 1 New York Plaza fire) Not the 1 New York Plaza Fire Which suffered a severe fire and explosion on August 5, 1970
Nor the First Interstate Bank Fire of May 4, 1988 which burned for 3 1/2 hours
Not even the One Meridian Plaza Fire of February 23, 1991 which burned for over 18 hours!
None of these buildings had their structures severely compromised by airplanes being crashed into them or other buildings falling into them.
None of these buildings had the revolutionary design of the WTC towers.
And all of these other buildings were normal office fires - the fires in the two towers were started simultaneously over a large area of the building.
Why the Towers Fell: NOVA:
Now, there have been fires in skyscrapers before. The Hotel Meridien in Philadelphia had a fire, but it didn't do this kind of damage. The real damage in the World Trade Center resulted from the size of the fire. Each floor was about an acre, and the fire covered the whole floor within a few seconds. Ordinarily, it would take a lot longer. If, say, I have an acre of property, and I start a brushfire in one corner, it might take an hour, even with a good wind, to go from one corner and start burning the other corner.
That's what the designers of the World Trade Center were designing for -- a fire that starts in a wastepaper basket, for instance. By the time it gets to the far corner of the building, it has already burned up all the fuel that was back at the point of origin. So the beams where it started have already started to cool down and regain their strength before you start to weaken the ones on the other side.
On September 11th, the whole floor was damaged all at once, and that's really the cause of the World Trade Center collapse. There was so much fuel spread so quickly that the entire floor got weakened all at once, whereas in a normal fire, people should not think that if there's a fire in a high-rise building that the building will come crashing down. This was a very unusual situation, in which someone dumped 10,000 gallons of jet fuel in an instant.What was the nature of the fires in the Twin Towers?
"First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?"
Sorry. I digress.
(sound: emergency channel)...Ladder 15, we've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines. Radio that, 78th floor...
Two isolated pockets of fire...
It's good to actually hear those words while reading them. The words on the page don't begin to convey the urgency and stress in that firefighter's voice.
And while I'm here, to represent this single statement as the sum total of the fires in the towers...it just boggles the mind. That firefighter was on one floor. He couldn't have seen even all of that floor! He's reporting on one small section of the WTC towers.
But, hey! Since we've got that "two small fires" meme going, let's work it for all it's worth, right? :eyes:
(picture: WTC tower under construction) ...causes all 287 columns to weakened to the point of collapse at the same instance to cause the telescoping collapse of the towers.
There is absolutely no evidence that all 287 columns weakened to the point of collapse simultaneously. None, nary. The simultaneous collapse of all 287 is not a necessary part of what we saw that day. The CTs want to believe that it is so, because that is a basic premise of their argument. But there is no evidence presented to establish that premise. No premise, no argument.
Apparently the only evidence given here is stated thusly: The only way for the towers to telescope together is for all 287 columns to fail simultaneously. That's not true. It's a gross overstatement of what had to happen. Check out the actual working hypothesis from NIST above to see what we're actually talking about.
(footage of firefighters talking: 1:"We made it about a block?", 2: "We made it at least two blocks, and we started running...floor by floor started popping out" 2 indicates a pancaking effect with hands, 1: "It was as if, it was almost like they had denonated", 2: "Yeah, denonated..." 1: "denonated, planned to take down a building, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom")
(footage: WTC 2 collapsing - regular speed)
(footage: back to firefighters - 1:" boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom" 2:"...all the way down.")
(footage: rewind the firefighters - 1: "It was as if, it was almost like they had denonated", 2: "Yeah, denonated..." 1: "denonated, planned to take down a building, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom" 2:"...all the way down. I was watching it and running. And then you just saw this cloud of shit chasing you down...", 3: "Where did you go?" 1: "You couldn't outrun it" 2:"You couldn't outrun it." 3:"What did you do?" 2: "I jumped under a battalion(?) car, just hid under the car, it was way too dark.")
(footage: Alex Jones "Also we have the still images from Fox News, of video showing the puffs of smoke down the sides of 7, down 1 and 2, of the classic demolition charges going off, boom, boom, boom" hand mimics the squibs puffing out "boom boom boom, before the building collapsed. Boom boom boom boom boom? Ssssssssssss!" hand pushes the building down)
Doo whacka doo whacka boom boom boom.
It's just so clear that the firefighters and Alex are talking about two different things. Yet the way Alex appropriates the "boom" sounds, he's purposefully misdirecting the meaning of what the firefighters are conveying. The firefighters aren't talking about Alex's precious little squibs. They're talking about the actual collapse.
Remember Alex specifically says that the "boom boom boom" happens before the buildings collapse. The firefighters' "boom boom boom" are their description of the floors falling into each other, as their hand gestures make clear. And they're also very clear that it was "as if" it was a demolition. They aren't saying it was - they said it was "almost like" a controlled demolition.
From the editing, it's also obvious that the makers of this video either intended to mislead the viewer so blatently, or have no ability to distinguish between what Alex is saying and the firefighters are saying. Either way, their credibility lies in tatters.
Now from this point, the analysis might be confusing, because the video is doing two different things. It's playing a recording of NBC reporter Pat Dawson talking about some information he'd received from Albert Turi, chief of safety for the NYFD. It also continues to put up pictures and statements. They're not always relevant to each other, so your mind has to follow both the audio and the images. Note: this makes the critical thinking this documentary expresses the desire to inspire almost completely impossible. It's a tactic more worthy of Jim Jones and L. Ron Hubbard than Edward Morrow. So I apologize if it becomes difficult to follow the thread of the film. I'm going to debunk when necessary.
Evidence of secondary explosions
Sound recording of NBC newscast... (footage of WTC 2 beginning to collapse looped - freeze frame in mid collapse)
What would cause the side of the building pop out like this?
From the NIST interim report (p. 14):
Finding 1a.19: NISTβs preliminary analyses of a single floor truss assembly if it were subjected to a severe fire suggest the following sequence of events:
β’ The floor truss first experiences increasing vertical deflections at mid-span as it pushes (expands) outward and exerts a compressive lateral load on the exterior column. The exterior column begins to displace outward at the floor connection.
β’ Web diagonals begin to buckle at 340Β°C, the mid-span deflection continues to increase, but the horizontal displacement of the exterior column begins to decrease. The maximum horizontal displacement of the exterior column is approximately 0.7 in. when the diagonals begin to buckle. (The interior column is assumed to have no lateral displacements at the floor level, as it is braced by the core framing.)
β’ The shear connectors (steel-knuckle-to-concrete slab connections referred to as knuckles) at each end of the truss begin to fail as the steel and bottom surface of the slab reach 400Β°C, with such failures moving progressively inward from the truss ends. The failure of web diagonals and knuckles at the ends of the truss reduce the bending rigidity of the floor truss at the ends, further increasing the floor sag and decreasing the lateral outward force exerted on the columns.
β’ The truss bearing angle slips until the bolt is bearing against the edge of the slotted hole. The bolt shears off at the interior seat connection at approximately 500Β°C. The floor truss sag increases to 20 in. when the bolt fails.
β’ The interior end of the reinforced slab continues to carry vertical loads as the truss bearing angle continues to slip. At 560Β°C, the exterior column begins to be displaced inward as the floor truss continues to sag and exert vertical and horizontal tensile loads.
β’ At 650Β°C, the truss slides off the interior seat, followed by the gusset plate fracture at the exterior connection at 660Β°C.All temperatures well within the range of the "maximum temperature of non-pressurized hydrocarbon fire". The horizontal ejections are these trusses failing right down the line. When one went, it increased the stress on its neighbor which was also suffering the same stress. It was like a zipper across the side of the building.
(footage: WTC 1 beginning to collapse, looped - freezeframe)
What would cause these lateral jets of debris to explode out of the building.
Popular Mechanics:
Like all office buildings, the WTC towers contained a huge volume of air. As they pancaked, all that air--along with the concrete and other debris pulverized by the force of the collapse--was ejected with enormous energy. "When you have a significant portion of a floor collapsing, it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window," NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder tells PM. Those clouds of dust may create the impression of a controlled demolition, Sunder adds, "but it is the floor pancaking that leads to that perception."Yes, that venting is below the edge of the exterior cloud of destruction, but the facade of the building below that destruction "line" is still doing its job, which was to provide lateral support for the building. The outer tube is funneling the destruction down into the structure, but at times the internal cloud is venting out.
(loop the WTC 1 footage again)
Each floor is 39" thick; the top 4" is a poured concrete slab, with interlocking vertical steel trusses underneath.
(NBC sound recording gets to the money quote: Chief of Safety Albert Turi recieved news of the possibility of a secondary device, another bomb going off)
Here's
something else Turi said: "The next thing I heard was Pete say what the . . . is this? And as my eyes traveled up the building, and I was looking at the south tower, somewhere about halfway up, my initial reaction was there was a secondary explosion, and the entire floor area, a ring right around the building blew out. I later realized that the building had started to collapse already and this was the air being compressed and that is the floor that let go."
Explosions do not mean bombs. Reports of possibilities of bombs do not mean bombs. Bombs mean bombs. Anybody got any other evidence of a bomb besides rumors about a bomb that have been repudiated by the guy we got the rumor from in the first place?
Might as well get this over with too: the link above says something about how somebody got to Albert Turi and other firefighters and told them to shut up if they knew what was good for them. Alex Jones is the sole reporter credited with that information. I'd have to say I'm not too inclined to believe him at this point.
Oh, by the way. Here's
something else Albert Turi said: "I knew right from the start that there was no way this Fire Department could extinguish six or eight floors of fire, fully involved, in a high-rise building,'' said Albert Turi, the deputy assistant chief of fire safety, according to an interview transcript obtained by The New York Times and reported in Wednesday's editions.
Two isolated pockets of fire were the only fires burning? Riiiiiight.
How is reinforced concrete turned into dust and ejected laterally from the building?
This comment again demonstrates the sheer inability of conspiracy theorists to comprehend the incredible amounts of energy that were unleashed when the towers finally fell.
Let's keep it simple. The top sections of both towers were like the rock. The earth was like the hard place. What got caught in between was ground to dust.
Now keep this in mind: Turi's already repudiated what follows. It was based on his initial impression of the collapse and other speculations that followed from that wrong impression. This report was invalidated one month after the 9/11 attacks. Yet here the makers of this video are, still hawking it.
(Dawson: "about a hour after the first crash there was another explosion")
Another explosion?
(the letters explode as Dawson continues "in one of the towers here. He thinks there were actually devices planted in the building....)
Planted in the building!
("he thinks one of the devices was on the plane that crashed into the towers... the second device, Turry thinks, he speculates, was planted in the building...)
Well, then. I think we're due for an outright misquote, which has already been retracted by the newpaper that printed it when the attributed author demanded they do so, don't you?
"My opinion is, based on the videotapes, that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse."
Van Romero, an explosives expert and former director of the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center and New Mexico Tech, Sept. 11, 2001
Popular Mechanics:
Demolition expert Romero regrets that his comments to the Albuquerque Journal became fodder for conspiracy theorists. "I was misquoted in saying that I thought it was explosives that brought down the building," he tells PM. "I only said that that's what it looked like."
Romero, who agrees with the scientific conclusion that fire triggered the collapses, demanded a retraction from the Journal. It was printed Sept. 22, 2001.How would the terrorists gain access to WTC 1, 2 and 7 to plant the expolsives?
Would they have the expertise?
Who would?
This is like a little lead-in to the next chapter, so I'll let it rest with this: no explosives were planted, so all three statements are completely irrelevant to what happened on 9/11.
The video's case isn't just not proven - it's completely implausible, and is based on wild speculation, misinterpretation, and shoddy reasoning all frosted over with a extra helping of propaganda.
So far. Maybe the next chapter will redeem the whole project...you think???