My friend, who told me about this theory, easily refuts the NIST report as total bullshit. PD, get your head out of the sand and at least watch a video about 9/11 and then decide what you think happened. Total compliance to the government is unpatriotic. True patriots protect their country, think independently, and march against wrongs. Remember the Boston Tea Party? Does anyone in this country even have the guts anymore that the founders had, or are we turning into compliant followers? Our founders rebelled against their government. If they had not, we’d still be ruled by England. It’s sad that this courage has been dismissed as unpatriotic. Is it so hard to believe that the people who gave us the housing bubble and Iraq war are capable of cover-ups? Greenspan telling people in 2004 to get ARMs? That doesn’t sound like a benevolent government to me. So it’s natural, as I’m peeling back the layers of housing bubbles, to question what else they are up to.
Copied below is his e-mail response
The biggest weakness of the “buckling” theory is why the center column collapsed.
The center column was EXTREMELY strong – it was the main support structure of the buildings. You can read lots about this if you search Google. It was actually a very unique design – these center columns were STRONG.
If it is true that the trusses weakened due to heating, and buckled, OK, so the floor would detach from the center column and collapse down to the floor below it.
But why would the floors about it collapse????? They are still connected to the center support columns.
And even if they did somehow magically collapse AT THE EXACT SAME MOMENT as the floors below – WHY DID THE CENTER COLUMN COLLAPSE? I can see the floors collapsing around the center column, and the center column remaining standing at the end – which it easily could, it was extremely strong, basically all dense steel and concrete, holding up almost the entire weight of the buildings – but if you look at the final pictures, and those videos, there is NOTHING left of the center column at the end. Not even 10 feet sticking up above the ground.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CENTER COLUMN, NIST LIARS???
The NIST report does adequately refute some of the less sanguine “conspiracy theories”, but it doesn’t at all dispell the fundamental argument that it was a controlled demolition which the government – in this case, NIST – is covering up.
Just one example – FAQ 6. Of course the above floors were heavy enough to cause the lower floors to collapse – but they say the lower floors were so weak that they did not even slow down the upper floors (as if they were in free fall).
This ignores two fundamental principles of physics – the law of inertia and the law of energy conservation. When the buildings were collapsing, all of the concrete – of which there were endless tons, you can research if you like – was pulverized and turned into dust. This required a tremendous amount of energy. This energy had to come from the force of the building collapsing. Hence, some (a great deal) of that force was exhausted in crushing the cement and spewing it hundreds of years off to the side. Obviously this is not enough to stop the collapse – but independent investigators have confirmed it *is* enough to *slow* the collapse.
Second is the law of inertia. Each floor below (each of which was quite heavy) was at rest. The combined weight of the floors below, in fact, greatly exceeded the combined weight of the top floors. Each of these lower floors had to be started from a state of non-motion – i.e. the upper floors had to overcome the laws of inertia.
Again, this would not be enough force to stop the top floors from collapsing – but it would definitely *slow them down”.
As the report itself admits, both towers fell at the rate of free fall – if you dropped a bowling ball from the top of the building at the time the collapse started, it would have hit the ground at the exact same time as the top of the building.
Think about it. Would the bowling ball not have been slowed down, if at each step along the way, there was a suspended bowling ball it had to bring down with it (imagine the other balls were *barely* suspended, so that any amount of energy would break them.
Number 7. They say the steel trusses buckled due to insulation being blown off by the impact. This also is total bullshit.
Yes, steel softens when it reaches 1000 degrees. But in their own simulations, the buildings did not collapse under this scenario, until they “fudged” their simulation enough to force the collapse.
Second, there is no evidence the insulation was blown off, apart from their assertion, that I can find.
Third, it is true that hydrocarbons can burn at 1000 degrees but that is under optimal simulations – when there is enough oxygen (e.g., a blue flame on a stove, or a blast furnace, called blast b/c air is blasted onto the fire to keep the oxygen supply high). When there is a lot of smoke, it is obvious that the fire is oxygen starved and not burning nearly as hot.
In the WTCs, the fuel would have burned away in a few minutes. The second building impacted (which collapsed first) is the best example – almost all the fuel was burned off outside the building right after impact. Aside from that Kerosene evaporates quickly at room temperature. You can do your own experiment – spill a gallon of kerosene on the ground, light it, and see how long it burns. Maybe a few minutes, that’s it.
But the buildings collapsed over an hour after impact. If the steel beams somehow (impossibly) did get really hot from the kerosene, they would have cooled by then.
If you look at pictures of the buildings, there was hardly any fires – small, isolated ones. Compare these fire pictures of the WTC w/ the Spanish Windsor building fire that burned several years later, but did not collapse:
Look at these pictures and tell me, which fire was high and hot enough, to heat steel to 1000 degrees.
Finally, steel has a remarkable ability to transfer heat. E.g., if you heat one part of steel, the heat travels down the steel quickly. That is why when people forge (unhardened) steel, they use tongs to grab the steel. The WTCs had countless tons of steel, all connected. Any heat being applied to the steel beams, would have been transferred through the building quickly.
In terms of all those scientists – keep in mind the problem of “group think”. They are all told this is how the building collapsed, now substantiate it. Everyone knows that to question it, is to accuse their government of complicity in the crime. Who will do that? How do we know they didn’t try, and were threatened one way or another? How were these scientists selected – b/c they tend to “go with the flow” or for their renowned critical analysis and whistleblowing? Did they have to sign confidentiality papers? Why have none of these scientists publish independent reports?
Why did the lead demolition expert in the US, when he saw the buildings collapse, exclaim it was a controlled demolition, only to retract his story days later after the CIA visited him? Was he told this is a question of national security?
BTW – here is a thesis of how the gov’t managed to shut these scientists up. (And this is the backup story if the demolition theory is finally validated in the public arena, which it eventually will be.) They will claim: they were afraid the building would collapse. If it did, it would not collapse straight down, and knock nearby buildings over. These buildings were still filled with people. Therefor, they had to bring the WTCs down to save the neighboring buildings. They cannot say this publicly b/c people would not understand, people are emotional – but we are the gov’t, we were acting to protect people. That is the backup lie.
BTW, one of these links has a nice picture of the Windsor building burning (it burned for almost 2 days) in Spain in 2005 or so – the building did not collapse despite the obviously much greater fire (in contrast the WTC fires were minor, you can see people standing in the hole where the airplane entered, firefighters were saying there were only “isolated pockets” of fire, and there was only thick black smoke coming from the building, up until it collapsed):
[img_assist|nid=2262|title=Windsor building, Spain, Building did not collapse|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=345|height=500]
This building has a similar design to the WTC, but despite the much greater fire, did not collapse.
So there are so many unanswered questions, that I am really unsure what happened.
4plexowner really nailed it: why were the remains of the building not studied, and so quickly hustled off to recyclers? Why was Osama bin Laden immediately named as a suspect, without any investigation? Those 2 questions make me suspect of the official government version. Why no whistleblowers? Well, why didn’t the cigarette companies or Enron have whistleblowers? For decades, we were told cigarettes are safe, even though hundreds or thousands of insiders knew otherwise.
