While I'm at it

[Possum]

why this thread?

what does this have to do with pickups?

OK, so you know what, now I'm stepping in this shit like the rest of you. The American media killed those kids. They made such a huge deal out of Columbine and made media heroes out of everyone involved in that, that now some kid goes off his meds and the first thing he thinks about is I hate those guys at school who make fun of me, I'll do what those Columbine kids did and I'll die a hero and those guys I kill won't see tomorrow, and they will tell about my horrible life on tv and my picture will be everywhere. Who put that idea in his head, TV did.

You know what I did when I saw the first news on that recent shooting? I tunred my TV OFF, OFF, OFF. I don't know anything about what happened and I don't want to know, I don't want to know about the sponsors of those sick news shows making more money on their ads because viewership went up because of the shootings, I don't want to know about some kids who are now considered heroes because they did this or that, I really fucking don't want to know about the life history of some kid who got a shitty deal in life and chose to mimic what he saw on tv during the last tv shootings. The media in this country is turning this country into what it is, they focus on fear, they make tv stars out of kids who shoot other kids, they glorify gangs, they glorify war. Guns have nothing to do with any of this, and when you watch this crap on tv you contribute to it. I turned mine OFF....

[David Schwab]

Dave, I couldn't agree with you more. At home we never watch the news, unless its the BBC news or something on PBS.

The rest is just sensationalism and focuses on mostly negative news. Even with this recent incident, I hadn't heard about it until someone mentioned it to me, and on looking it up, right away there was people protesting the medias focus on the shooter and not the victims.

OK I'm finished with this subject.

Back to pickups....

[Zhangliqun]

Actually some witnesses said they saw what looked like "a 20 passenger corporate jet, with no markings on the side..."

What about all these witnesses?

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blflight77w.htm

And do you have a link to the corp jet witness?

Here's a quote from Donald Rumsfeld to Parade Magazine on October 12th, 2001:

"Here we're talking about plastic knives, and using an American Airlines flight filled with our citizens, and the missile...

What missile is he referring to?

I don't know -- assuming the quote is even accurate (link please?), maybe at the time of the quote they hadn't seen the security camera photos:

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/03/0...agon.pictures/

Anyway, whatever someone thinks Rumsfeld said, the fact is, it wasn't a missile because there are endless photos of airliner debris both inside and outside the Pentagon, which I have linked. Plus a hole far too big for a cruise missile or any other conventional missile to make, and a fireball (see above photo) that could only be caused by huge amounts of jet fuel.

No footage of the first plane hitting the WTC? Sure there is! I thought everyone saw this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0RdNrZ6CQ8

I saw the second plane hit from about 8 blocks away. It was dark blue and had no markings. Everyone there noticed that. I always thought that was odd.

Unfortunately I can't access YouTube here at work, so someone else will have to verify for me -- if it the plane is dark blue, then it is still the 2nd plane, seen here:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...42.html?page=1

...because the 1st plane was American Airlines Flight 11. The AA paint scheme is mostly bare metal but with some red-white-and-blue trim stripes, as seen on the piece of airplane debris on the Pentagon lawn linked in my previous post. The 2nd plane was United 175. The United Airlines paint scheme is a medium gray and dark blue fuselage (please look at this photo):

http://www.airlineandairportlinks.co...es/n337ua.html

United switched to this paint scheme about 10 or 12 years ago.

Have you ever tried to use a cell phone aboard a commercial jetliner?

You can physically, technically do it. If you couldn't, why do they tell you NOT to use your cell phones on the plane during flight? Who would ask a fish not to walk? (Many planes have "Airphones" built into the back of the seats for that matter.) They don't allow you to use your personal phones because of the potential for interference with radio communications on the flight deck. But the terrorists overruled the flight crew on that one.

Otherwise you have to make the case that all these families who got calls from their loved ones aboard those planes are all lying.

In the film Loose Change, 2nd Edition, he...

"He" who?

...points out that there's a record of one of the flights making an emergency landing in Ohio, where all the passengers were taken off the plane.

There is? Which flight? Any evidence? Every plane still in the air made an emergency landing that day to avoid getting shot down.

I've actually never saw that site before. But I do know how wide the plane is:

And with a 124' span and the wing roots collapsing and folding up against the fuselage, that 75' wide hole is PLENTY big enough.

No modern skyscraper has ever collapsed from a fire until 9/11.

No modern skyscraper ever had burning jet fuel in direct contact with its steel girders. And again, as the expert quoted at PM said, steel doesn't have to melt to lose enough strength to collapse.

The WTC was designed to have a DC-10 hit it.

It was? Where did you hear that?

Even the Empire State building had a B-52 bomber hit it.

It wasn't a B-52. It was a B-25, a much MUCH smaller plane -- in 1945, 7 years before the first B-52 flew:

http://www.evesmag.com/empirestatecrash.htm

A medium bomber by WW2 standards:

http://www.aviation-history.com/north-american/b25.html

Here's a comparison:

Wingspan: B-25 67 feet
B-52 185 feet

Length: B-25 51 feet
B-52 156 feet (models A through F) to 161 feet (models G and H)

Max Take-off weight:

B-25 35,000 lbs.
B-52 450,000 to 488,000 lbs., again depending on model

The fuel on the 757 would burn off fairly quickly, and even in a constant burn, kerosene only burns at 2,048° F (1120° C) after 40 minutes of sustained ignition. Stainless Steel has a melting point of 2800ºF (1,537.8° C). So you can't say the fire from the jet fuel make the twin towers collapse. Titainium, which is one of the metals used in the jet engines on the 757, has a melting point of 3,070.4° F (1,688° C)... yet they are saying in both cases that much of the planes vaporized?

Large planes tend to just about vaporize in just about every crash because they are very large and moving very fast. You rarely see large pieces of airplane at any crash site outside of a controlled crash landing. That said, your question falsely assumes they found no airline debris in the WTC wreckage. They actually found plenty and even put some of it in a display. Here's one photo, which also shows windows typical of an airliner:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...42.html?page=3

Also, just this past weekend a gas truck in Northern CA just took down a freeway overpass from the heat of the burning gasoline weakening the girders:

http://www.redding.com/news/2007/apr...ruck-explodes/

I appeal once again to the experts quoted at the PM link:

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."

Witnesses, including NYC firefighters, and my wife, who was across the street at the time the towers came down (she's one of those people you saw on TV covered with ash), heard multiple explosions.

Of course they/you did. The sound of a skyscraper pancaking one floor at a time would be like multiple explosions. Read the Popular Mechanics link more carefully.

And what made Wold Trade Center 7 collapse? It was 300 feet from the north tower, and wasn't even damaged! And all the buildings around it were untouched.

PM once again:

Many conspiracy theorists point to FEMA's preliminary report, which said there was relatively light damage to WTC 7 prior to its collapse. With the benefit of more time and resources, 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 tells PM. "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." NIST also discovered previously undocumented damage to WTC 7's upper stories and its southwest corner.

NIST investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe structural damage contributed to the collapse, though assigning the exact proportion requires more research. But NIST's analysis suggests the fall of WTC 7 was an example of "progressive collapse," a process in which the failure of parts of a structure ultimately creates strains that cause the entire building to come down. Videos of the fall of WTC 7 show cracks, or "kinks," in the building's facade just before the two penthouses disappeared into the structure, one after the other. The entire building fell in on itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.

According to NIST, there was one primary reason for the building's failure: In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were carrying exceptionally large loads, roughly 2000 sq. ft. of floor area for each floor. "What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors," Sunder notes, "it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down."

There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation: First, trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed to transfer loads from one set of columns to another. With columns on the south face apparently damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing capacities.

Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to 7 hours. "There was no firefighting in WTC 7," Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time."

WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the fire that burned for hours, but those combined factors--along with the building's unusual construction--were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse.

And the idea that the pressure blew out windows is silly. Some of those windows were open. Remember, people were jumping out. Then there's the ventilation ducts. And the stair wells. And the central elevator shafts. The floors were not hermetically sealed after all.

They don't have to be hermetically sealed. That SOME of the air escaped through the shafts and stairwells doesn't mean it was enough to prevent windows from exploding. With the same stairwells and ventilation ducts present, fires routinely blow out skyscraper windows just from the heat of the fire. But even if every single window was open (and modern skyscrapers don't typically have windows you can open due to lawsuits over suicides -- the jumpers either broke the windows or the heat of the fire did it for them), it would be strange if debris and dust DIDN'T fly out of the windows.

Motive? The owner had the buildings insured for billions of dollars shortly before the attack.

Assuming that's even true, are you sure it wasn't just a renewal of an existing policy? Are you saying that for the previous 27 years of its existence, the WTC was uninsured? Are you saying that this owner has the juice to have the entire US gov't at its beck and call to order an arson for profit job? Where did you hear that?

Bomb sniffing dogs were removed shortly before the attack. The explosives would have been needed, because the plane and subsequent fire would not make the building collapse. In the subbasement of the WTC was a large amount of gold, most of which was never recovered.

Where did you hear all that?

And lastly, some felt we needed a "new Pearl Harbor".

Some? Who? And what evidence do you have of these feelings?

These types of plans had been drawn out a while ago...

Again, evidence please.

For instance, supposedly many of the accused terrorists that were supposed to have died on these planes are still alive and had never been in the US. What's that all about?

Nothing. According to the 9/11 commission, they were denied entry into the US and thus couldn't participate. Had they not been denied entry, they would have participated and died, but they never got to the US so they're alive. What is your point?

[David Schwab]

What about all these witnesses?

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blflight77w.htm

And do you have a link to the corp jet witness?

Loose Change 2nd Edition (Google Video)

They show part of some news footage talking to witnesses.

I think there's some issues with some of the info in the movie, but it does raise some very compelling questions.

I don't know -- assuming the quote is even accurate (link please?), maybe at the time of the quote they hadn't seen the security camera photos:

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/03/0...agon.pictures/

Have you seen the actual movie footage? You don't see a plane. Just the explosion, so it doesn't prove anything. I've attached the frame by frame of the video. And why did they just release five frames of video?

Unfortunately I can't access YouTube here at work, so someone else will have to verify for me -- if it the plane is dark blue, then it is still the 2nd plane, seen here:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...42.html?page=1

No, it's the first plane. Someone was filming something with some firefighters, and they heard the plane fly very low over head. You can see that there is no fire at all at the towers. It's the first plane, and it's dark blue like the second plane. This is not new.. they showed this to death on TV at the time.

...because the 1st plane was American Airlines Flight 11. The AA paint scheme is mostly bare metal but with some red-white-and-blue trim stripes, as seen on the piece of airplane debris on the Pentagon lawn linked in my previous post. The 2nd plane was United 175. The United Airlines paint scheme is a medium gray and dark blue fuselage (please look at this photo):

Yes, and I now agree that was an AA plane that hit the Pentagon. Now what about the twin towers? Wrong color scheme. You know, my brother was friends with a flight attendant on that flight. I met her several times many years ago. We also lost a close friend who was a NYC fire fighter. Another friend of mine worked in tower #2, but she had just went downstairs to get some coffee. She worked for Lehman Brothers.. that would have been the end of her. And my wife worked across the street. So I wasn't just sitting here watching this on TV. I was much more involved.

http://www.airlineandairportlinks.co...es/n337ua.html

United switched to this paint scheme about 10 or 12 years ago.

Well that does look like the planes...

You can physically, technically do it. If you couldn't, why do they tell you NOT to use your cell phones on the plane during flight? Who would ask a fish not to walk? (Many planes have "Airphones" built into the back of the seats for that matter.) They don't allow you to use your personal phones because of the potential for interference with radio communications on the flight deck. But the terrorists overruled the flight crew on that one.

They also ask you to not use personal electronic devices that have nothing to do with radio communication. The problem with using a cell phone is that you are higher than the cells and you are switching cells too fast. You move past a cell before the connection can be established. If you look it up on the 'net a lot of cell phone experts feel you cannot reliably make a cell phone call from a moving airliner.

FCC Considers Cell Phone Use On Airplanes

The FCC bans in-flight use because cell phones can communicate with more than one cell tower when in the air. This could lead to disruption of service for cell phones on the ground, which use only one tower at a time.

A cell phone aboard an airplane, fantasies and the facts

First alarm was set when cell phones became widely spread and equipment errors became more often but still there were no direct evidences. Till 2000 some of the countries didn't joint to the ban against cell phones but an air crash of the flight number LX 498 Crossair (Saab 340) considerably changed the situation. It was not far from Zurich on the 10. of January 2000. Ten passengers and a whole crew perished in that air crash. For a long time the results of flight recorders decoding were not announced but at last it was a sensation. One of the reasons of the crash was an SMS message, which was received by one of the passengers, and a next cell phone conversation. Navigation monitoring devices showed wrong data at that moment, what led to a crash.

"He" who?

You broke up my sentence, The author of the film I was making reference to. I provided a link to the film above.

There is? Which flight? Any evidence? Every plane still in the air made an emergency landing that day to avoid getting shot down.

View the film in the link. Actually there is news footage of a couple of planes flying over the Pentagon at the time. One was the cargo plane that was told to follow flight 77.

And with a 124' span and the wing roots collapsing and folding up against the fuselage, that 75' wide hole is PLENTY big enough.

75' Try about 19 feet! The hole is not 75 feet wide. You have to look at pictures before the top floors collapsed.

Why didn't the wings come off when they hit the lamp posts crossing the highway? That's what normally happens in an accident like that. It happened to a plane that George Bush the elder was supposed to get on once. it hit a pole, which tore the wing right off.

And why whould the wings wrap against the fuselage? When has that ever happened in a crash? Why didn't that happen with the twin towers?

No modern skyscraper ever had burning jet fuel in direct contact with its steel girders. And again, as the expert quoted at PM said, steel doesn't have to melt to lose enough strength to collapse.

Jet fuel is just kerosene. I already showed that it doesn't burn that hot. There have been other fires that have burned a lot longer... 24 hours.. even causing the collapse of the top ten floors, and the building didn't fall.

And have you forgotten the other incidents at the Twin Towers?

On February 26, 1993 at 12:17 PM, a Ryder truck filled with 1,500 pounds (680 kg) of explosives was planted by Ramzi Yousef and detonated in the underground garage of the North Tower, opening a 100 foot (30 m) hole through 5 sublevels of concrete leaving 50,000 workers and visitors gasping for air in the shafts of the 110 story towers.

It was? Where did you hear that?

I'm sorry... didn't you say you researched this stuff?!?!? I heard it from the architects that designed the Twin Towers. There was a show on the Discovery Channel about the building falling. They explained how they were designed with a central shaft supporting the structure. You are aware that the Empire State Building once had a B-25 bomber sticking out the side? That building is still there.. I just saw it on my lunch break!

WTC Construction Certifiers Say Towers Should Have Easily Withstood Jet Fuel Temperatures

WTC Construction Manager: Towers Were Designed to Take Numerous Plane Crashes

Frank A. DeMartini, Manager, WTC Construction and Project Management, discusses the fact that the WTC towers were designed to take multiple hits from airliners and not collapse, comparing it to poking a pencil through fly netting, DeMartini was adament that the towers would not collapse.

Twin Towers Engineered To Withstand Jet Collision

Article from 1993 after first WTC bombing. "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," he said. "The building structure would still be there."

It wasn't a B-52. It was a B-25, a much MUCH smaller plane -- in 1945, 7 years before the first B-52 flew:

http://www.evesmag.com/empirestatecrash.htm

A medium bomber by WW2 standards:

http://www.aviation-history.com/north-american/b25.html

52... 25.. I obviously inverted the numbers. You are quite blasé about a plane hitting a sky scraper. It might be a medium size bomber, but it's still a big plane. And the Empire State Building is not as large as the Twin Towers and much older.

The B-25 that Crashed Into the Empire State Building

[snip]

Where did you hear all that?



Some? Who? And what evidence do you have of these feelings?



Again, evidence please.

Loose Change 2nd Edition (Google Video)

Nothing. According to the 9/11 commission, they were denied entry into the US and thus couldn't participate. Had they not been denied entry, they would have participated and died, but they never got to the US so they're alive. What is your point?

No, I'm talking about the ones that are shown to have been on the planes.

Loose Change 2nd Edition (Google Video)

Just do some homework... I'm finished with this topic.

[Sweetfinger]

David Schwab said " Some felt we needed a 'new Pearl Harbor'"

Some? Who? And what evidence do you have of these feelings?

Just go right to the source, folks:
An overview of the whack-jobs who have hijacked the Republican party to further their own paranoid imperialistic notions of divine right-
http://www.newamericancentury.org/

Their own site-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project...erican_Century


Page 51 on this plan for Amerika's future is the oft cited Pearl Harbor reference (Adobe) -
http://www.newamericancentury.org/Re...century.org%22

Eisenhower WARNED this nation about the danger of a growing and influential 'Military Industrial Complex' but we didn't listen, and didn't care. We get the government we deserve.

[dai h.]

the Loose Change stuff is interesting. Anyone recall the Israeli intelligence agents apprenhended then subsequently released after some people in the same building they were in saw them cheering when the towers went down (purportedly). I remember a caller asked some congressman or senator on some NPR program, and the response was essentially that they couldn't talk about it because it was classified. Footage of this report about the agents on Fox News used to be on the web. Wonder what that was all about.

[Zhangliqun]

They show part of some news footage talking to witnesses.

What about all these witnesses?

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blflight77w.htm

I think there's some issues with some of the info in the movie, but it does raise some very compelling questions.

Doesn't that then put ALL the info in the movie under suspicion?

Have you seen the actual movie footage? You don't see a plane. Just the explosion, so it doesn't prove anything. I've attached the frame by frame of the video. And why did they just release five frames of video?

I have seen it. It does show a huge fireball that only massive amounts of some kind of liquid fuel could cause.

No, it's the first plane. Someone was filming something with some firefighters, and they heard the plane fly very low over head. You can see that there is no fire at all at the towers. It's the first plane, and it's dark blue like the second plane. This is not new.. they showed this to death on TV at the time.

I have to apologize to you for one aspect – you are right, I remember they did show that video frequently and it does appear to be the first plane. I remember seeing it. But also from memory and from the still photos of the video I have been able to find since last post, it sure looks like a silver plane to me.

Yes, and I now agree that was an AA plane that hit the Pentagon.

It takes a big man…

Now what about the twin towers? Wrong color scheme. You know, my brother was friends with a flight attendant on that flight. I met her several times many years ago. We also lost a close friend who was a NYC fire fighter. Another friend of mine worked in tower #2, but she had just went downstairs to get some coffee. She worked for Lehman Brothers.. that would have been the end of her. And my wife worked across the street. So I wasn't just sitting here watching this on TV. I was much more involved.

I’m sorry for your brother’s loss and that you had to deal with the attack up close and personal compared to the rest of the country. But that doesn’t prove the plane was dark blue.

They also ask you to not use personal electronic devices that have nothing to do with radio communication. The problem with using a cell phone is that you are higher than the cells and you are switching cells too fast. You move past a cell before the connection can be established. If you look it up on the 'net a lot of cell phone experts feel you cannot reliably make a cell phone call from a moving airliner.

FCC Considers Cell Phone Use On Airplanes

The very articles you linked above appear to directly contradict you:

WASHINGTON POST “Cell phone use is banned on airplanes by two federal agencies for separate reasons. The Federal Aviation Administration fears the wireless signals could interfere with an airplane's avionics and communications equipment.

The FCC bans in-flight use because cell phones can communicate with more than one cell tower when in the air. This could lead to disruption of service for cell phones on the ground, which use only one tower at a time.

But the commission thinks cell phone technology has advanced far enough in recent years to minimize such disruption of ground service. Yesterday, the FCC voted to consider lifting its ban, and it will begin taking comments from businesses and travelers over the next few months.”

MOBILE REVIEW “Those, who often use airplanes, get used to warnings, that it is banned to use electrical devices, such as players, notebooks and mobile phones in particularly during take-offs and landings. The latter are banned to use during all the flight and none of the airlines allows passengers to do it. …… This ban, which was appeared as an extra insurance, is of vitally importance today. We've already known instances in which equipment and navigation equipment, in particular, was affected by a cell phone. At least one air crash was occurred because of a working mobile phone and it is a forcible argument to ban all wireless phones aboard the plane.

75' Try about 19 feet! The hole is not 75 feet wide. You have to look at pictures before the top floors collapsed.

First, does this mean you're changing your mind about the Pentagon?

Second, you’re looking at the wrong photo. That’s the C-ring (3rd ring). Also I must correct myself, the post-collapse photos show a 75-foot hole. The pre-collapse photos below show a hole about 20 feet high and twice as wide, and one shows damage from the left wing impact. (These photos are from a site that though the author believes it was definitely an airliner, it was still a government conspiracy.)

http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon...os/orange.html

http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon...os/morris.html

Most of the 757’s 44-foot height is the tail and the landing gear. The hole is plenty big enough for the fuselage.

Why didn't the wings come off when they hit the lamp posts crossing the highway?

Because a lamp post isn’t as strong as a building designed to withstand naval and aerial bombardment and Oklahoma City-style car bombs.

That's what normally happens in an accident like that. It happened to a plane that George Bush the elder was supposed to get on once. It hit a pole, which tore the wing right off.

Please give me a link to the story with something about the type or size of the plane. After the cell phone article links you gave me above and the confusion of a B-25 with a B-52, I’m sorry, but I need more than just your say-so. (As you should need more than just mine with the errors I have made.)

And why whould the wings wrap against the fuselage? When has that ever happened in a crash?

We don’t have a history of airliners crashing into buildings fortified to withstand naval and aerial bombardment and Oklahoma City-style car bombs to compare it with.

Why didn't that happen with the twin towers?

Because the twin towers weren’t fortified to withstand naval and aerial bombardment and Oklahoma City-style car bombs.

Jet fuel is just kerosene. I already showed that it doesn't burn that hot.

PM even gave a much lower temperature than you did for burning jet fuel. You said 2,048 F, he said 800 to 1,500 F. But that’s irrelevant because, and I repeat, steel doesn’t have to get anywhere its melting point to warp or collapse. It loses 50% of its strength at 1,100 F and nearly 90% at 1,800 F.

There have been other fires that have burned a lot longer... 24 hours.. even causing the collapse of the top ten floors, and the building didn't fall.

None of these fires had an airliner crash into it that would:

a) weaken part of its structure by shearing or weakening some of the frame, and:

b) knock the fireproofing off other beams and then spray burning jet fuel directly on them.

And have you forgotten the other incidents at the Twin Towers? On February 26, 1993 at 12:17 PM, a Ryder truck filled with 1,500 pounds (680 kg) of explosives was planted by Ramzi Yousef and detonated in the underground garage of the North Tower, opening a 100 foot (30 m) hole through 5 sublevels of concrete leaving 50,000 workers and visitors gasping for air in the shafts of the 110 story towers.

I remember it well. 1,500 lbs. is nowhere near enough to knock down such a massive tower, and it didn’t, not even close. Visitors gasping for air is dramatic but proves nothing other than that either the ventilation system was still working sucking smoke up to every floor or, more likely, the blast opened a hole in one or more stairwells and the smoke got to the higher floors through the stairwell(s).

I'm sorry... didn't you say you researched this stuff?!?!?

Let’s stay away from sarcasm. I’ve done my best to be respectful toward you. If I have failed to do so at any point, I apologize.

I heard it from the architects that designed the Twin Towers. There was a show on the Discovery Channel about the building falling. They explained how they were designed with a central shaft supporting the structure.

It appears they were right about the impact part and wrong about the heat. The towers did in fact survive the impact just fine. But maybe they, like you, based their calculations on the melting point of steel rather than how much strength it loses at temperatures well below the melting point. It’s not as if engineers have never been wrong before.

You are aware that the Empire State Building once had a B-25 bomber sticking out the side? That building is still there.. I just saw it on my lunch break!

Hold on a second – it was me who pointed out in my last post that it was a B-25 and not a B-52 as you first said it was, and admitted here:

52... 25.. I obviously inverted the numbers.

It might be a medium size bomber, but it's still a big plane.

The B-25 Mitchell is a plane with half the cruising speed and less than 8 percent of the mass of a B-52 Stratofortress, which carries three times the weight of a fully loaded B-25 in jet fuel alone. That is a MASSIVE difference that can't be ignored.

And the Empire State Building is not as large as the Twin Towers and much older.

The B-25 crash took place in 1945. The Empire State Building was completed in 1931. The WTC towers were built 1972-1974 making them at least 27 years old on 9/11 -- meaning they were twice as old as the ESB at the time of their respective incidents.

No, I'm talking about the ones that are shown to have been on the planes.

Loose Change 2nd Edition (Google Video)

I apologize that I’m unable to access the Loose Change videos, so at least for the moment until I do some further research, I’ll admit I don’t have an answer for that one.

Just do some homework... I'm finished with this topic.

I intend to, but please do the same. If you do come back, I request that you answer the following questions:

1) How did they get such an intricate network of all those explosives in 250 floors of buildings without anyone finding out?

2) Why did none of the floors ABOVE the crash sites explode? Were there no explosives there and if not, wouldn’t this require that they knew exactly what floors the planes would hit? Wouldn’t this be risky in assuming there would be no turbulence at all in the area to knock the pilots off the exact target?

3) What expert pilots who could fly a huge plane with such precision did they hire who were willing to give up their own lives?

4) Where did all the passengers go?

5) Did all the coroners in NY, DC, and PA who identified the remains of passengers found at all 3 sites falsify their reports?

6) In light of the articles you linked that directly contradict you about cell phone usage on airplanes, did the government also hire hundreds of voice-alikes to call the families of the passengers?

7) The complexity of such a plan is so extremely risky that wouldn’t it have been far easier just to fly the planes into the towers and the Pentagon and the White House if possible and just be done with it? Why bother with WTC7? Why bother with explosives that would leave telltale residue and debris? Why involve thousands of people outside the government in a conspiracy (never mind the hundreds or thousands within the gov’t) if it could be limited to a few dozen?

[Ruel]

Even if that kid didn't have a gun, he would have found other ways to kill people at Virginia Tech. There was no way he could have been stopped. He was ready to kill and die so he could have used a car bomb or explosives starpped to his chest instead of a gun. But Possum is right. What does it have to do with pickup winding?

[black_labb]

Even if that kid didn't have a gun, he would have found other ways to kill people at Virginia Tech. There was no way he could have been stopped. He was ready to kill and die so he could have used a car bomb or explosives starpped to his chest instead of a gun. But Possum is right. What does it have to do with pickup winding?

my point was making bombs and such would give him time to think about things and maybe calm down and think rationally. wether that would have happened i dont know but guns make it so easy, where as most other methods require much more thought.

[Ruel]

my point was making bombs and such would give him time to think about things and maybe calm down and think rationally. wether that would have happened i dont know but guns make it so easy, where as most other methods require much more thought.

I could be wrong but I don't there was anything that would have calmed the guy. He was anything but rational. There was clearly something wrong with him. His own grandfather said that the kid was bad news from the day he was born. True, it would have been a little harder for him to have carried out his plans without a gun. In the end though, it would have just slowed him down.

[black_labb]

I could be wrong but I don't there was anything that would have calmed the guy. He was anything but rational. There was clearly something wrong with him. His own grandfather said that the kid was bad news from the day he was born. True, it would have been a little harder for him to have carried out his plans without a gun. In the end though, it would have just slowed him down.

i agree, but i believe it would have helped in some circumstances

[David Schwab]

Doesn't that then put ALL the info in the movie under suspicion?

Nope. A few wrong facts doesn't make it all wrong. One example from the film... several people on the scene after the incident saw they smelled "cordite or gun smoke", and mentioned that it doesn't smell like jet fuel. Cordite is an explosive. The problem is no one makes cordite anymore... it was used a lot in WWII.

Obviously they smelled something that they associated with explosives... but I doubt it was cordite.

It does show a huge fireball that only massive amounts of some kind of liquid fuel could cause.

Right, so all we know for sure was there was an explosion. What was the source of the explosion? What kind of fuel was it? Does kerosene burn like that? People mentioned they saw a "bright silvery flash"... that sure isn't jet fuel. In the film they have some good footage of big jets being crashed and filmed in slow motion.

But really, why don't we see the jet heading across our field of view? I can accept that it was a slow frame rate, and the jet was moving fast, but it's a big jet and there should have been some of the explosion happening while the jet was still going into the wall... don't you think?

Very off to say the least. There was other video caught that day, one was by the highway department. That would have showed the jet crossing the highway and knocking the poles down. Why haven't we seen that?

I have to apologize to you for one aspect – you are right, I remember they did show that video frequently and it does appear to be the first plane.

Hey, nothing to apologize for.. we are having a discussion, and we are learning things. It's not about who's right and wrong... we might all be wrong.

But that doesn’t prove the plane was dark blue.

It looks dark blue in the videos, and the photo you linked to with the other color scheme is dark blue. They sure weren't silver!

The very articles you linked above appear to directly contradict you:

WASHINGTON POST “Cell phone use is banned on airplanes...

That's just one article I found on line. There are others. They also mention that the time it takes for the handshake might be longer than the time you would be at that cell. The second article also suggests that cell phone use might cause the plane to crash... well it's a bit late for that!

First, does this mean you're changing your mind about the Pentagon?

I haven't made up my mind, so there's nothing to change. As soon as think we know the answer to something, we stop looking for it. No one knows exactly what happened except the people on that flight. The rest is speculation. I never thought about any of this stuff until my son came home from school and told me about the film they watched (Loose Change).

Second, you’re looking at the wrong photo. That’s the C-ring (3rd ring). Also I must correct myself, the post-collapse photos show a 75-foot hole.

75-foot hole? Not in the photos I've seen. I yes know that was the punchout in the C-ring in the one photo. And why wasn't the punchout hole 75 feet wide?

And how do we know it's 75 feet? The Pentagon is 77 ft 3.5 in (24m) tall. The damage, even with the upper floors collapsed isn't as wide as the building is tall. I attached a photo that has a pretty clear view of the area after the upper floors collapsed.

http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon...os/orange.html

I'd like to know why those wire spools didn't even fall over? Shouldn't the wings have hit them?

http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon...os/morris.html

Now you can clearly see in that photo that the hole is no where near 75 feet across, or high.

Because a lamp post isn’t as strong as a building designed to withstand naval and aerial bombardment and Oklahoma City-style car bombs.

You didn't read my post. Other plans have hit lamp posts. When they do, they rupture the wing. The wing is where they store all the fuel. When the wing ruptures the fuel ignites. The you have a big fireball. There was no fireball before it hit the building.

I've attached photos of test crashes showing what happens when the wing ruptures.

Please give me a link to the story with something about the type or size of the plane. After the cell phone article links you gave me above and the confusion of a B-25 with a B-52, I’m sorry, but I need more than just your say-so. (As you should need more than just mine with the errors I have made.)

I gave you a link to the film. Just watch that when you get a chance. He has more stuff in there than I can link to.

We don’t have a history of airliners crashing into buildings fortified to withstand naval and aerial bombardment and Oklahoma City-style car bombs to compare it with.

But we do have a history of planes crashing into mountains. The mountain didn't budge! We also never had a history of "Oklahoma City-style car bombs".

It would seem to me that the fortification didn't do all that well. The plane didn't have anywhere near the explosive power of an "Oklahoma City-style car bombs" and it went through all the rings?

Because the twin towers weren’t fortified to withstand naval and aerial bombardment and Oklahoma City-style car bombs.

No, but they were designed to withstand several planes crashing into them, and burning jet fuel, and not fall down. With a pair of building that at the time were the tallest in the world, they had to take into account the possibility that a plane might hit them.

PM even gave a much lower temperature than you did for burning jet fuel. You said 2,048 F, he said 800 to 1,500 F. But that’s irrelevant because, and I repeat, steel doesn’t have to get anywhere its melting point to warp or collapse. It loses 50% of its strength at 1,100 F and nearly 90% at 1,800 F.

And I repeat, the twin towers were designed for such an incident.

None of these fires had an airliner crash into it that would:

a) weaken part of its structure by shearing or weakening some of the frame, and:

You don't give up, do you? The twin towers was designed to have a plane crash into them. The planes didn't weaken the structure, because the central column is what held them up, and the 4 corners. The planes didn't hit either.

b) knock the fireproofing off other beams and then spray burning jet fuel directly on them.

What beams and what fireproofing? Now you are just making up scenarios.

Try this.. go buy a container of kerosene and take it out to your barbecue grill, throw some paper and wood and stuff in the grill, cover it with kerosene and light it on fire. Now keep it burning as long as the twin towers burned. Did the grill melt or warp? Jet fuel is kerosene.

Also most of the fuel burned off rather quickly. The FDNY were quite sure they would be able to get the fire under control. They didn't think it was that serious.

It appears they were right about the impact part and wrong about the heat. The towers did in fact survive the impact just fine. But maybe they, like you, based their calculations on the melting point of steel rather than how much strength it loses at temperatures well below the melting point. It’s not as if engineers have never been wrong before.

Did you watch the interview with one of the designers of the twin towers? He didn't agree with you. He also died in the attack that day. A lot of engineers have come forth and said the building shouldn't have collapsed. I wouldn't put any credence in Popular Mechanics.

Hold on a second – it was me who pointed out in my last post that it was a B-25 and not a B-52 as you first said it was, and admitted here:

And I said I made a typo. You don't like sarcasm but you aren't reading what I write either.

I apologize that I’m unable to access the Loose Change videos, so at least for the moment until I do some further research, I’ll admit I don’t have an answer for that one.

I intend to, but please do the same. If you do come back, I request that you answer the following questions:

1) How did they get such an intricate network of all those explosives in 250 floors of buildings without anyone finding out?

They explore some scenarios in the movie, including testimony from one of the maintenance men, who rescued a lot of people.

From what I remember, there were several times when parts of the building were evacuated for "security reasons" and other times when work was being done. Most of the offices were closed in the evening.

The maintenance guy seems to think some odd things went on. You really have to watch the film.

2) Why did none of the floors ABOVE the crash sites explode? Were there no explosives there and if not, wouldn’t this require that they knew exactly what floors the planes would hit? Wouldn’t this be risky in assuming there would be no turbulence at all in the area to knock the pilots off the exact target?

Why wouldn't they have placed explosives there? If the plane crash was an excuse for razing the building, than it didn't matter where the plane hit.

There was no exact target. And that brings up another point.. these supposed terrorist pilots hardly knew how to fly these big jets. From testimony of flight instructors that trained them, they weren't very good pilots. The pilots of flight 77 went to one of these local flying schools to rent a plane. The instructor who took a test flight with him said he was such a poor pilot that they refused to rent him a plane.

One of the ATC said this:

"The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought.. all of us experienced air-traffic controllers, that is was a military plane."

Danielle O'Brien, ATC at Dulles International Airport
ABC News (9/14/01)

3) What expert pilots who could fly a huge plane with such precision did they hire who were willing to give up their own lives?

They didn't. And if such expert pilots were needed, who flew the planes? The terrorists were not expert pilots. They had very little experience needed for piloting such a large plane, and at the speed needed to make such turns, etc.

The movie proposes that the planes were remote controlled and goes on to show some footage of a large commercial airliner under remote control by NASA.

4) Where did all the passengers go?

That's a good question. In the film there is a reference to one of the flights, either 77 or the one that went down in the field, making an emergency landing in Ohio, were all the passengers were taken off the plane. Some plane did make that landing. They show records of it, and the flight number is the same. They also show that two of the planes are still listed as in service. More odd stuff.

5) Did all the coroners in NY, DC, and PA who identified the remains of passengers found at all 3 sites falsify their reports?

In the case of the plane that went down in PA.. the coroner reported that there were no bodies for him to examine so he left. They never ID'd all the bodies because they never found all the remains.

6) In light of the articles you linked that directly contradict you about cell phone usage on airplanes, did the government also hire hundreds of voice-alikes to call the families of the passengers?

The government publicly demonstrated a device that can mimic voices in real time. The details are in the film. And there wasn't hundreds of calls.

Some of the calls were very strange. Why did the one guy ask for his mother and then state his first and last name to her, and kept saying "you believe me mom, don't you?" Odd.

7) The complexity of such a plan is so extremely risky that wouldn’t it have been far easier just to fly the planes into the towers and the Pentagon and the White House if possible and just be done with it? Why bother with WTC7? Why bother with explosives that would leave telltale residue and debris? Why involve thousands of people outside the government in a conspiracy (never mind the hundreds or thousands within the gov’t) if it could be limited to a few dozen?

Well I can't answer that, but some people feel they felt they needed a "new pearl harbor" and this was it. The bigger the better to get people away from feeling safe. Also having a new enemy that we can't really point at (besides Bin Laden, who is friends with the Bush family) just gives them justification to invade oil producing countries with no valid reason.

[gilligan]

My one cents worth

Can only afford one cents worth, need more bullets! Criminals will always get, and have guns! The only way to stop them is with more guns, and bigger prisons. We have all kinds of weapons pouring across our bourders unchecked everyday, and nobdy is stopping them. When these thugs come for me, or my family, I will not go quietly into the night. And if I go, some of them will go with me. America is under attack from within. You had better be prepared to defend your home. I want all the gun haters to hang a sign on their door " No Guns Allowed Here ". Depending on where you live, it may be a day, or maybe a week before you find a stranger in you house to enjoy your hospitality. You will never get rid of guns, deal with it. I was a Boy Scout in my youth and I did learn well " Be Prepared ". ( Of course now The Boy Scouts are the bad guys to the gun haters)
My guns have never harmed anyone, and I hope they never will, but if
( when ) the time comes, I will be prepared! Don't listen to the whimps on T.V., and the politians, they have bodyguards with guns. IT IS A FACT, ONE GUN IN THE RIGHT HAND COULD END MOST MASS SHOOTINGS IN SCHOOLS, POST OFFICES, MACDONALD'S ETC... As John Lennon ( killed by a freak that should have been in a mental home ) once sang "The dream is over". WAKE UP!!!
My last words on the subject. Your either on one side or the other. I think you know where I firmly stand, and always will. This dosen't make me a bad man, I'm a easy going, pickup winding musician, who served from 1970 -1972 in the Army. But I deal in reality, not fantasy. When the scat hits the rotary oscillator, I will be ready to answer the call. Nuff said.
Ron