It was a beautiful, crisp, sunny New York morning (unfortunately I didn’t have my camera). There were a lot of people walking around the perimeter of the area, and a lot of flowers and pictures had been stuck in the wire fences around it. The area itself is still nothing but a construction site, and looks little different from two years ago, last time I saw it. (Today’s New York Times has an article on the increasingly embarrassing saga of the reconstruction of the site). Loudspeakers were playing the voices of relatives reading the names and short message to those who died on 9/11. The majority of the voices were those of wives and girlfriends, often wavering and choking with emotion.
The first thing I saw as I came out of the subway station was a big banner that said “The USA DID 9/11.” Another banner said “PLEASE HELP US. The government has been hijacked by a group of ruthless criminals. 9/11 was just the beginning. Stop them now.” At the other end of the spectrum was a banner that read: “When the Left Says Peace, They Mean Surrender.”
I had come in part out of professional curiosity with the “9/11 truth” groups–groups that believe that 9/11 was a government conspiracy, carried out to give the administration a free hand to increase its powers and go to war around the world. I was told about 500 people had come to New York. There were certainly a few hundred walking around today, mostly wearing black t-shirts that read “Investigate 9/11.” I witnessed quite a few heated arguments between these people and others. Often the conversations would start out calmly, with people asking the demonstrators what they meant and trying to convince them that they were wrong. But gradually they would generally escalate into arguments. The 9/11 Truth people talked about things like Building 7 (which apparently collapsed on 9/11 without being hit by a plane), the fact that the steel in the WTC couldn’t have melted, the fact that no photos of the plane that hit the Pentagon are supposedly available.
People seemed both curious and troubled by what the demonstrators were saying. But they recoiled at the idea that 9/11 was a massive conspiracy. One man got upset when a 9/11 Truth organizer implied that there were actually no planes that day. “What about the people who died?” he wanted to know. “What about their relatives?” His interlocutor had no good answer, and could only repeat “I don’t know. It’s classified. They should unclassify it.” Finally New York police broke the argument up and told people to keep moving. Other 9/11 Truth people were more confrontational, telling people that questioned them that they were “talking nonsense” and unspooling a whole series of rapid-fire, pretty non-sequitur statements: “Did you know Bob Graham wrote the Patriot Act? Have you heard of the Reichstag fire? Or Operation Northwoods?”
While I was standing next to some very young 9/11 Truth demonstrators, a woman walked by and said: “Nazis! You don’t go to someone’s funeral and do this bullshit! Nazis!” “Please don’t say that,” said a young female demonstrator in a sad little voice.
As I left, a man walked quickly past me on his cellphone and said “It’s worse than a damn three-ring circus here.”
Nice to know the American loony Left is as conspiratorial as ever.
It turns out that ABC/BBC mini-series was actually made by evangelicals – do let us know what you think if you watch it.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1871146,00.html
I watched that Loose Change conspiracy thing on YouTube. At one point the narrator asked something like: “Can you honestly still believe that such a plane and ten thousand gallons of BURNING jet fuel could really take a building like this down? After everything you’ve now learned, can you honestly say this sounds plausible?”
I literally laughed at my computer screen. “Yes!” I said. “That sounds enormously f**king plausible!”
Oh man. I don’t know what it says about people, conspiracy theories. I kept on thinking of that joke — every time a pipe in a private residence in Damascus blows or gets clogged, someone blames the Mossad.
Dear Dan,
What if you knew that a steel framed skyscraper once burned virtually uncontrolled for more than three days and was very nearly totally consummed WITHOUT colapsing? Would that change your mind? One Meridian plaza in Philly burned for over eighteen hours encompassing eight floors – without collapse.
See http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/compare/fires.html
Wake up and THINK. I think we’ve been duped by one of the most dishonest administrations in American history. I don’t know FOR SURE, but I think it’s very likely the WTC was destroyed for political reasons. (Remember the Alamo! Remember the Maine! Remember Pearl Harbor! Remember the WTC!)
Why do you assume I don’t know about it?
If I had to *think* about it, my first thought would be to assume that such events reasonably have an incredible amount of issues specific to them and thus are not so simply comparable.
Just cos two buildings are “steel framed” doesn’t mean much, unless they’re built by the same people, or at least with the same or similar design. (Surely there’s more than one way to construct a steel frame for a skyscraper? Do you know for sure the buildings you compare have similar structures, that their joints and trusses are bolted similarly? Or are they soddered? And how? And more importantly, do you know the differences in these “little” details between the buildings, and how they might make a difference? You think it doesn’t matter? Cos I’m pretty sure these sorts of things are the difference between if a skyscraper goes down in a strong gust of wind, or not.)
And just cos they were both “on fire” doesn’t mean anything either, especially considering the example you site did not get hit by a rather large plane loaded with jet fuel.
So, that’s what I would think, if I woke up.
Do you mean soldered? There is no way you’re going to find a building with SOLDERED joints/connections/reinforcements, etc. Welded yea, but never soldered.
I know, I know, not your point, but you DO say that “just cos they were both “on fire” doesn’t mean anything”. It means everything since the “official” story/reason for the WTC collapse (1, 2, AND 7) was/is FIRE. AND that no steel-framed building EVER collapsed from fire, except for WTC 1, 2, & 7.
plus you have to keep in mind that the melting point for steel is about 3000 degrees and jet fuel burning for hours on end can only get as hot as 2000. check the charts.
From popular mechanics:
Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn’t need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength–and that required exposure to much less heat. “I have never seen melted steel in a building fire,” says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. “But I’ve seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks.”
“Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F,” notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. “And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent.” NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.
But jet fuel wasn’t the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.
“The jet fuel was the ignition source,” Williams tells PM. “It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down.”
The following link is a good debunking of 911 conspiracy theories. They also have a book they are making:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=1&c=y
Dear Dan,
Alright, I will give you the towers collapsing from fire IF. . . you tell me why building 7 collapsed. It was not hit by an airplane, it was relatively undamaged. It only had a couple of low level fires going in widely separated areas of the building. A building, by the way, that was supposedly re-enforced because of the presence of the city’s command bunker and several vital government offices. A building that was much further away from the towers than buildings 1 through 6. A building that was at least partially sheltered from debris by buildings 5 (9 floors) & 6 (8 floors). A building that collapsed inside of ten seconds.
NIST researchers now support the working hypothesis that WTC 7 was far more compromised by falling debris than the FEMA report indicated. “The most important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7,” NIST’s Sunder told Popular Mechanics. “On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom–approximately 10 stories–about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out.”
Are we supposed to believe that the FEMA people were so incompetent that they didn’t notice that a quarter of the base of the building was missing? Is anyone THAT stupid? Granted, it’s FEMA, but still. . .
Since no steel frame high-rise building had ever been leveled by any cause other than controlled demolition or severe earthquakes, the total collapses of Buildings 1, 2, and 7 of the World Trade Center would seem to warrant the most painstaking forensic analysis. Instead the structural steel was removed and recycled with astonishing speed, while volunteer investigators were hampered by red tape and access restrictions. Why was the administration in such a hurry to dispose of the steel from the towers? Why did they resist an investigation for so long?
No, I don’t buy it. Any way you look at it, this whole incident stinks like week old fish.
Are you saying that people who were arguing is disruptive? Sorry pal, that’s what we do; argue. One could say that it was the perfect venue to ask all the questions that didn’t get answers. That’s what America is all about; Justice. It is an irrefutable scientific fact that the main supports of the twin towers were “cut” by thermate. It is visible in the photo’s and the videos that we all have seen, and there are traces of it still, to this day, all around that plaza. Let us put aside our emotions and bring the victims murderers to Justice. And let the guilty be brought to swift punishment. Anything else is just emotional nonsense.