I'm not one to buy into conspiracy theories… ever, but….

Do people not think that an airliner with tens of thousands of KG of jet fuel on board is not explosive enough? The WTC was designed to take a hit from a Boeing 707, and in actual fact the towers withstood more than that as one took a hit from a Boeing 757 and one from a Boeing 767, both substantially heavier than a B707. In the end it was the force of the impact that compromised the fire protection off the steel structure and the heat of the burning jet fuel weakened the steel structure – the strength of steel is significantly compromised at relatively low temperatures – say around 600 degs C and the heat due to the burning jet fuel was far greater than that. I really don’t see what is wrong with this explanation and why people feel the need to look for some other more fantastic and less plausible explanation.

Wrong building wobblibiscuit, WT7 wasn’t hit by a plane.

Ah good point. That’ll teach me to try to multi-task – my computer may be capable of it, clearly i’m not!

Why would anyone jump to the least likely explanation?

There may be things we cannot explain, but there’s no evidence actually in favour of a conspiracy, is there?

molgrips – Member

Why would anyone jump to the least likely explanation?

Because some folks like to feel superior, and one way to do that is to know things other people don’t. Some do this by coming up with genuinely new information, some do it just by being better informed than most… But those are hard. Some do it by withholding information from others, and some do it by making things up/believing made up things. For these people, a fact is better if few people believe it, because that puts you in the elite minority, and the easiest way to find a fact that few people believe is for it to be a made up one.

Ironically it seems like 9/11 conspiracies are too widely believed for it to be a really satisfactory conspiracy theory now.

I think part of the problem is that many Americans want to believe in conspiracy theories because they have been brought up to deeply dislike and distrust the their government.

Had the attack happened in another country it is far less likely that so many people would be have been prepared to believe that it was an “inside job”.

Perhaps it was some elaborate cover to distract everyones attention from the fact that they never went to the moon? Clever buggers eh!

The REAL truth is far worse than any conspiracy theories. Bin Laden warned the USA they would be attacked with aircraft if they didn’t stop meddling in the Middle East. How do we know? Because in a Discovery documentary about the 1996 TWA800 crash, the tape was played of that warning, in reference to the FBI thinking the TWA800 explosion WAS the threat come true. The documentary was shown pre 9/11.

The US continued meddling in the Middle East, the attack came.

Lots of US citizens like to believe that nasty old terrorists attacked innocent old’ USA, but the truth is somewhat different.

IME it is rare that someone believes one conspiracy and think the rest are nonesense and they tend to believe them all.

Some people take the deep suited lack of trust of government, who clearly are a bunch of two face lying bastards, and assume they must be responsible as they are capable of anything.

The fires in the third building went uncontrolled for most of the day. Add to that that it was partially damaged from falling debris, and was probably as poorly fire protected as the other towers it seems reasonable.

The alternative is that you add the same variables as mentioned for explosives use on the other 2 towers to a third tower makes it seem even less likely. The lower floors were open and the building probably had a lower factor of safety against collapse than the other towers.

Is it likely that a third building would be rigged to detonate so long after the other two, especially with no plane hitting it?

I also don’t think it looks like a controlled demolition. Normally explosives rigged on multiple floors on a delay so you collapse one section onto the one below. If explosives were used on it then it appears only charged on one or two floors lower down.

Good chance that the building would have suffered only partial collapse leaving the embarassing situation of explosives still attached to the building. It all seems highly implausible. (I am trying to be kind).

Planes laden with fuel crash in to buildings

Explosion so violent it blasts protective foam from steelworks

Bare Steelwork (that is also damaged from impact) carrying vast weight exposed to intense heat for some considerable time

Steelwork fails and building collapses.

Dammit, you’re right! How could this happen without explosives?! Definitely an inside job

I’m sure the video has a certain surface plausibility, but then so does the website of the flat earth society.. If the OP really does think there is something in this, he needs to be able to see the wood for the trees. Who cares if there are civil engineering arguments to be made, the fact is that two large jets were seen to crash into the two towers and that the organisation responsible admitted they did it. The fact that civil engineers are able to debate about the third tower should not obscure this fact. Occam’s Razor strikes again.

I find it hard to belive that explosives could be rigged to demolish over 500,000 tonnes of one of the most prominent building in one of the Worlds busiest cities and nobody would notice!

the organisation responsible admitted they did it.

Which can only mean that Al-Qaeda/Osama Bin Laden were in on the conspiracy. Or at the very least didn’t in anyway want to undermine the official version.

So an “inside job” backed up by Al-Qaeda/Osama Bin Laden then. The plot thickens.

i am not a conspiracy theorist.. i believe in the ability to muck stuff up iobn

for 20 years my father was site/ contracts director of probably the countries largest demolition company. throughout my late teens early twenties i saw hundreds of explosive demolitions from light houses to cooling towers from coal bunkers to tower blocks.

two things strike me. that third tower looks like i d expect a controlled demolition to look. i saw a large number of failed demolitions/ partial demolitions yet the video is a typical controlled demolition.

the amount of work that has to be done to prepare a building is unbelievable the amount and scale of the drilling alone takes several weeks before laying the charges and the miles of wiring. this is not something that could be done during construction without virtually everyone on site being aware of it equally it would be impossible to do whilst the building was inuse impossible

my conclusion has to be that despite appearances it was not a controlled demolition merely coincidently looked like one..

the organisation responsible admitted they did it.
Which can only mean that Al-Qaeda/Osama Bin Laden were in on the conspiracy. Or at the very least didn’t in anyway want to undermine the official version.

So an “inside job” backed up by Al-Qaeda/Osama Bin Laden then. The plot thickens.

Who said anything about Al-Qaeda? I was talking about the CIA

Not to mention the number of people who’d go to work every day knowing they were about to commit an attrocity against the US and possibly murder thousands of people and keep quiet about it.

Basically, the only sane people left in this world are those who consistently question things i.e. regardless of where the information comes from.

If you simply cannot conceive of the idea of the government lying to the populace then you must be, as Victoria Beckham once mimed on every tv show for a week with Dane Bowers, out of your mind.

Let me make this really easy for you:

WTC 7, Urban Moving Systems Inc and a wealth of other leads suggest there was certainly something a bit fishy going on there…

whilst we’re in this realm, what about this whole Diana SAS thing…

we all know the daily mail is a wealth of top class information:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2407571/Princess-Diana-SAS-murder-claim–mad-think-says-SUE-REID.html

alot of things about 9/11 dont add up including the ‘plane’ that hit the most protected building (apart from the white house), the pentagon, yet no one on the ground dies in the building that day and there’s no video evidence of it ever happening ( apart from 1 security camera which shows jack) . snowball effect does occur but not at freefall speed

Amusing to see Russia Today cited on the topic of security-service organized bombings of public buildings (FSB involvement in apartment bombings blamed on Chechens and used as a pretext for military escalation).

clear this sort of discussion isn’t welcome here. I’ll see if I can find a civil engineering forum to discuss some of the technical aspects/flaws in this video.

They’ll be too busy discussing mountain bikes.

If you’ve ever seen a building being demolished you’ll notice the sheer amount of work involved in weakening the structure, placing the explosives, wrapping the building to contain flying debris from the explosives, in order to ensure the building collapses in on itself within its own footprint. I think the locals would have noticed all of this weeks of activity and planning if someone brought the building down deliberately. More likely the foundations of the building were damaged when the weight of the twin towers was relieved. If you take away the foundations of a building it is only going to fall one way – straight down. Only a guess, but I don’t have the confidence in the US government or any US government institution to pull off a secret conspiracy like this. Too many loud-mouths and people seeking to blab about government secrets for their own personal gain.

In fact I think the original conspiracy goes further – doesn’t it suggest hat the US government actually planned and executed the jets crashing into the twin towers to cover up the demolition of the WT7 building? That is even more difficult to believe, that the US government or men in black are capable of pulling this off.

My employer is building a brand new factory at the moment with a steel framework. We have coated the steelwork with an intumescent paint because the factory will be full of chemicals like terpenes and guess what? terpenes burn like aviation fuel. Intumescent paint will retard the bending of the massive steel beams, so massive they were built in a shipyard in Belfast. When our warehouse burned down 15 years ago all the steelwork collapsed like cooked spaghetti. So that’s why I think anybody who says the twin towers were demolished deliberately is talking twaddle.

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I think the locals would have noticed all of this weeks of activity and planning if someone brought the building down deliberately.

I think the conspiracy theory runs that the explosives etc were laid in the course of a long-running lift replacement job (or something) that involved bogus technicians doing the installation for months. Needless to say, it’s all nonsense.

Who said anything about Al-Qaeda? I was talking about the CIA

I wasn’t aware that the CIA had admitted to the fact that they were responsible for flying two large jets into the twin towers.

That does indeed put a whole new angle on the story.

^ makes you think doesn’t it.

The comprehension that governments lie. Does not automatically mean everything is a lie.

You need to question all sources, not just the ones you are pre loaded to be suspicious of.

Is it time for a PressTV YouTube clip?

I couldn’t be less interested if I’m honest..

What I do find quite interesting though, is the way that folk get almost angry when they dismiss people that see fit to question the official line..

I find it a bit unnerving

Off on a complete tangent now.. I was watching the events unfold that morning, with the very first reports coming in and the panic in the newsreaders faces, an astonishing experience for anyone..
My instant assumption, perhaps due to other things that were in the news that summer, and the obvious symbolism of the target, that it was the work of anti-capitalists..

How different would the outcome have been over the following years if this were the case?

the way that folk get almost angry when they dismiss people that see fit to question the official line

I’m not sure it’s anger so much as outraged disbelief that anyone would give the conspiracy theories credence.

A lot of people have a similar ‘you seem like a rational person but you’re prepared to believe *that*?’ reaction to organised religions.

Just to give an engineers view, I did a fair amount of study on this during uni. The fire precautions in the tower was ok the intumescent cladding was a bit shoddy but in 99% of fires it would have been ok. With the damage caused by the planes strike the poorly fitted cladding came away.
Modern Fire protection mainly looks at single source fires, steps to control it and give time for the people above the fire to escape, they are not based about 5 floors starting in a fully engaged fire.
The largest limiting factor in a building fire is the amount of air if can get not the amount of fuel that can burn, the aviation fuel was a great accelerant to get the real fuel load burning the paper and the flame retardant office furniture.
With 5 floors worth of windows blown out there was plenty of air getting in and a fire burning paper and wood at stoichiometric rates you an see temp of over 1000C in the flame, steels structural fail tep is well exceeded so is no shock that the floors involved with the fire would collapse.
The structure of most high buildings is made to cover the static weight of the floors above with a extra margin for safety, around 50% if i remember right (I’m a fire engineer not civ so I could be out on that) but that’s static weight the force of the top dropping though the 5 damage stories would have been like a bomb.

So why did the 3 tower drop? The same as the first 2 massive uncontrolled fire, and plenty of big holes for air to get in.

There is no need for explosives.

Well that settles that then.

What about the moon landings ?

the flag ernie – it’s all in the flag

Wow chilled is a genius!!! he/she just light the touch/flypaper which attracted all the usual smug argumentative know-alls and then retired to a safe distance and let them get on with it,genius.

Off on a complete tangent now.. I was watching the events unfold that morning, with the very first reports coming in and the panic in the newsreaders faces, an astonishing experience for anyone..
My instant assumption, perhaps due to other things that were in the news that summer, and the obvious symbolism of the target, that it was the work of anti-capitalists..

How different would the outcome have been over the following years if this were the case?

Well….

Binners wouldn’t be here on STW to entertain us…. He’d mostly be wearing orange while on an extended holiday in the Caribbean

The problem with this conspiracy theory isn’t the practicalities of it.

Let’s assume for argument that the theories are correct, that it’s an inside job by the US government or the CIA for some reason; to stir up ill feelings against brown people with beards, or whatever.

Let’s also assume that the logistics aren’t an issue. For instance, rigging up a building with explosives is a massive undertaking with a high risk of being discovered; aside from suspicious building staff, if any one of those contractors suddenly had an attack of conscience it’s game over. Can you imagine someone whistle-blowing 9/11, what the repercussions would be for America? But for all we know, the CIA have their own trusted black-ops bomb squad, so lets roll with that for now.

So they plot to slam planes into high profile buildings in order to kill several thousand tax-paying Americans. They stage a hijacking, and fly two large passenger planes laden with aviation fuel into two massive buildings(*).

At what point in the proceedings does it become necessary to also rig the buildings with explosives? What are we gaining here? Do they think that a pair of huge aircraft aren’t going to be sufficient to bring the building down? Do they believe that it’s critical that the buildings fall otherwise no-one will care, that the world won’t take notice? Is there any reason why, if they believed the planes alone would be insufficient, they didn’t pack the planes full of extra explosives which would’ve been a much simpler task (and easier to explain if discovered) than a controlled explosion? Oh, and of course, the elephant of the room is, if you want to do a controlled demolition, why not just blame that on the terrorists as well?

This is where the whole thing falls down (so to speak) for me. All other things aside, there’s absolutely no point to anyone taking the massive risk and effort which would be required to rig the building when you’ve got a pair of bloody great 767s at your disposal.

(* – and incidentally, what about the other two planes, did they fly one into the floor intentionally? What’s that all about?)

This topic was covered in the film “Zeitgeist” has anyone watched it?

Also discusses Christian religion and Christ being about the worship of the sun….

radoggair – Member

snowball effect does occur but not at freefall speed

Neither building fell at freefall speed- it’s a really easy thing to discount, debris clear of the building is visibly outrunning the collapse. Really not sure how this one’s got so accepted tbh.

so WT7 wasn’t hit by a plane, had a few office fires, then completely collapses. Sounds plausible.

I think part of the problem is that many Americans want to believe in conspiracy theories because they have been brought up to deeply dislike and distrust the their government.