This was posted on the afternoon of Sunday, September 9, 2007, and will remain on top until Tuesday, September 11, the sixth anniversary, is over in the United States (PDT).
For other new material, scroll down.
For sources, see the original posts.
From my previous post, You Can't Touch This:
Frank A. Demartini, on-site construction manager for the World Trade Center, spoke of the resilience of the towers in an interview recorded on January 25, 2001.
"The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it. That was the largest plane at the time. I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door -- this intense grid -- and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting."
In the wake of the WTC bombing, the Seattle Times interviews John Skilling who was one of the two structural engineers responsible for designing the Trade Center. Skilling recounts his people having carried out an analysis which found the twin towers could withstand the impact of a Boeing 707. He says, "Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed." But, he says, "The building structure would still be there." [Seattle Times, 2/27/1993] The analysis Skilling is referring to is likely one done in early 1964, during the design phase of the towers. A three-page white paper, dated February 3, 1964, described its findings: "The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707—DC 8) traveling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact."
[snip]
According to the calculations of engineers who worked on the Towers' design, all the columns on one side of a Tower could be cut, as well as the two corners and some of the columns on each adjacent side, and the building would still be strong enough to withstand a 100-mile-per-hour wind.
Skilling - a recognized expert in tall buildings - doesn't think a single 200-pound car bomb would topple or do major structural damage to a Trade Center tower. The supporting columns are closely spaced and even if several were disabled, the others would carry the load.
"However," he added, "I'm not saying that properly applied explosives - shaped explosives - of that magnitude could not do a tremendous amount of damage."
Although Skilling is not an explosives expert, he says there are people who do know enough about building demolition to bring a structure like the Trade Center down.
"I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it."
Battalion Chief Brian Dixon
it actually looked -- the lowest floor of fire in the south tower actually looked like someone had planted explosives around it because the whole bottom I could see -- I could see two sides of it and the other side -- it just looked like that floor blew out.
Firefighter Christopher Fenyo
At that point a debate began to rage because the perception was that the building looked like it had been taken out with charges.
Battalion Chief Dominick DeRubbio
It was weird how it started to come down. It looked like it was a timed explosion
Paramedic Daniel Rivera
At first thought it was -- do you ever see professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear "Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop"? That's exactly what -- because I thought it was that.
Firefighter Edward Cachia
It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit, because we originally had thought there was like an internal detonation explosives because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down.
Chief Frank Cruthers
there was what appeared to be at first an explosion. It appeared at the very top, simultaneously from all four sides, materials shot out horizontally. And then there seemed to be a momentary delay before you could see the beginning of the collapse.
Firefighter James Curran
everything was getting blown out of the floors before it actually collapsed
Captain Karin Deshore
Somewhere around the middle of the World Trade Center, there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that building had started to explode. The popping sound, and with each popping sound it was initially an orange and then a red flash came out of the building and then it would just go all around the building on both sides as far as I could see. These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going both up and down and then all around the building.
Firefighter Kenneth Rogers
One floor under another after another and when it hit about the fifth floor, I figured it was a bomb, because it looked like a synchronized deliberate kind of thing. I was there in '93.
Firefighter Richard Banaciski
It seemed like on television they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.
Assistant Commissioner Stephen Gregory
You know like when they demolish a building, how when they blow up a building, when it falls down? That's what I thought I saw.
Deputy Commissioner Thomas Fitzpatrick
My initial reaction was that this was exactly the way it looks when they show you those implosions on TV.
In October 2001, approximately one month after the September 11 attack, an agent from a [city name omitted] field office, re-sent a certain document to the FBI Washington Field Office, so that it could be re-translated. This special agent, in light of the [September 11] terrorist attacks, rightfully believed that, considering his target of investigation (the suspect under surveillance), and the issues involved, the original translation might have missed certain information that could prove to be valuable in the investigation of terrorist activities. After this document was received by the FBI Washington Field Office and re-translated verbatim, the field agent's hunch appeared to be correct. The new translation revealed certain information regarding blueprints, pictures, and building material for skyscrapers being sent overseas. It also revealed certain illegal activities in obtaining visas from certain embassies in the Middle East, through network contacts and bribery. However, after the re-translation was completed and the new significant information was revealed, the unit supervisor in charge of certain Middle Eastern languages, Mike Feghali, decided not to send the re-translated information to the special agent who had requested it. Instead, this supervisor decided to send this agent a note stating that the translation was reviewed and that the original translation was accurate.
...more than four months prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, in April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset who had been providing the bureau with information since 1990, provided two FBI agents and a translator with specific information regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama bin Laden. This asset/informant was previously a high-level intelligence officer in Iran in charge of intelligence from Afghanistan. Through his contacts in Afghanistan he received information that: 1) Osama Bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting four to five major cities, 2) the attack was going to involve airplanes, 3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States, 4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months. The agents who received this information reported it to their superior, Special Agent in Charge of Counter-terrorism Thomas Frields, at the FBI Washington Field Office, by filing "302" forms, and the translator translated and documented this information. No action was taken by the special agent in charge, and after [September 11] the agents and the translators were told to "keep quiet" regarding this issue.
From my previous post, 9/11 at WTC: Somebody Made a Killing:
In the days following the terror attacks, suspicious and unusual stock trading activity indicated that people used inside information to make huge profits. The money made from the trades done with apparent inside information has been estimated at up to $15 billion worldwide.
One data recovery expert, Richard Wagner, has estimated that more than $100 million in illegal transactions appeared to have rushed through the WTC computers before and during the disaster.
8 comments:
Are we to believe that terrorist detonated explosives around the perimeters of the buildings? Based on fact or a theory...but then again, what is fact these..I don't know what to believe in the mass media.
The reports of the explosives being detonated come from emergency workers on the scene on 9/11.
In the weeks following the attack, NYFD conducted interviews with those who responded. Finally, the NY Times won a legal battle and got transcripts of the interviews and published them online.
You can read my work about this at Something Heavy Going Down Part II.
The explosives were not just at the perimeter of the buildings.
Cutter charges had to cut the vertical supports in order to get the buildings to actually fall.
Other explosives had to remove the concrete, etc., by pulverizing it in order to get the buildings to fall at free-fall speed. Otherwise, there would have been momentary delays as stuff on top crashed into stuff below, and this was not observed.
This pulverization of the concrete is what resulted in a giant cloud of debris even as the building was just beginning to fall.
In the wake of the 1993 bombing, which in hindsight looked very amateurish, a newspaper did an interview with the head structural engineer on the project. Basically, he said a bombing like the 1993 bombing could not bring the buildings down. Significantly, he also said a fully-loaded airliner crashing into it couldn't do it either, yet that is what we are supposed to believe did the trick.
He pointed out it would take demolition professionals to do it, and the reports from the firefighters and emergency personnel on the scene -- many of whom were very senior in rank and highly experienced -- indicate that explosives were present, and that the collapse did not start near where the aircraft had crashed into the buildings. They said it looked like controlled demolition.
The crashes were a terrorist act, but also a diversion. While everyone's attention was on the fire, stock trades were being run through the WTC's unattended computers; in my opinion they were laundering drug money. When the transactions were over, the buildings were pulled to bury the evidence; also, WTC 7 came down, even though no airliner had crashed into it. Among other things, WTC 7 housed the offices of agencies that investigate dirty stock deals and white collar crime.
Here's one theory: Bin Laden had long wanted to strike the US in a spectacular way, and the Twin Towers were a particular target. But, after the 1993 bombing attempt, he found out what it would really take. Since he finances his Holy Terror with illegal income, he needed to launder his money, and wanted to turn a few bucks into the bargain, so he leveraged his knowledge into stock trades planned around his attack, and laundered his drug money, while making billions in profit.
Ground Zero was a crime scene -- it was the scene of the crime of the century. Who headed up the investigation? Why was the rubble removed so quickly, instead of going through it for evidence?
We know the government's story -- that fires caused by the airliners crashing into the buildings caused them to collapse -- is impossible, because the buildings were specifically designed to withstand such an eventuality, which the designers knew someday would occur; in fact, the buildings were overengineered to withstand that.
Yankee, that's really interesting. I've heard snatches of this kind of thing but more along the lines of the Bush Government creating 9/11 as a pretext to go to war in Iraq for the oil, which never really seemed plausible to me.
But you realize that all this you've just posted will label you as a fruitcake on most of the Conservative blogosphere. I believe in keeping an open mind and taking in all the info. I know one thing, and that is, no matter who is a bad apple in the GOP, nobody is as evil as the Clintons.
You know, Aurora, the other posts I have will label me as an Islamophobe in the liberal blogosphere, too.
But, when all the name-calling is done, I want to hear what people have to say about the facts.
Facts are pesky things; they don't just go away with a little name-calling.
The post contains facts, and, like I've said before, it's a post that you just can't touch.
have a somber Sept 11 my friend and God bless ya!
I had no idea that you were a "truther". Take me off your blogroll immediately, because by the time you read this, you will be off mine.
Yankee, don't misunderstand me. My reaction isn't as extreme as Russet Shadows. I just know what people out there say. Actually, I am not closed to any information. I take it in and digest it and wait to see other stuff on it. I don't think we can afford to be as dogmatic as RS about this kind of thing. I don't want something to hit me in the butt while I've got my head stuck in the sand either! There's always the possibility that we could be wrong or unaware of something. That's my take.
On the other hand, I respect and understand the patriotism of those who don't want to hear a bad word about those in charge, especially since it's the only Conservative government we have.
First of all, Aurora, I would like to comment on how prophetic your previous remarks had been! :)
And, Aurora, your most recent comment is also very profound.
Like most of my readers, you disagree with some things that I write, but you differentiate between a disagreement and personal animosity. Pela, Anticant and Rider of Rohan, similarly, are examples of readers who have disagreed with things that I write, but who remain personally pleasant and friendly (Hint: What else do you four have in common?); and that short list of such readers is certainly not comprehensive.
Your views seem very much to be grounded in reality, which is why you are open to new information, the accuracy of which you evaluate for yourself. I contrast that sharply to dysfunctional ideologies such as those of the terrorists, which are so out of touch with reality that they can be destroyed even by erroneous and fallacious arguments; hence the need for thought control.
"On the other hand, I respect and understand the patriotism of those who don't want to hear a bad word about those in charge, especially since it's the only Conservative government we have."
I believe I understand your thoughts here, but I couldn't disagree more with your choice of words.
First of all, not wanting to hear a bad word about those in charge is not patriotism, any more than Nazism is patriotism; not wanting to hear a bad word about those in charge is, like Nazism, blind obedience, and it is exactly what this blog battles, because the Islamic conquest we face is blind obedience coming from one direction, but such blind obedience threatens us from other directions, as well, and that includes from the District of Columbia.
And this brings me to "the only Conservative government we have" -- it is not.
Osama bin Laden is a mafioso, a drug-trafficker and a terrorist, who has wrapped himself in the banner of Islam.
Similarly, the Bush Administration is corrupt (even more so than the previous record holder, the Clinton Administration) and has wrapped itself in the shroud of Conservatism. Bush has in fact done very little that I would consider "conservative".
Quite the contrary, from growing the federal bureaucracy and federal debt to imperiously violating our Constitutional rights, from a paranoid insistence on secrecy to an arrogantly unlawful obstruction of justice, from smear compaigns against his critics to his treasonous way of giving carte blanche to our nation's enemies because of personal and business relations, Bush has outdone Clinton in most ways that matter.
The conservatives that I am familiar with think for themselves; those who follow the "either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists" lead of the current administration are totalitarianists, pure and simple.
One thing I am now convinced of is the wisdom of the remark made by Admiral Farragut at the Battle of Mobile Bay: "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!"
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