FBI releases 9/11 investigation document that scrutinized Saudis
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The FBI document released Saturday contains significant redactions, but nevertheless shows FBI officials were skeptical of claims by various witnesses that Saudis in the U.S. who met with the two hijackers did so accidentally through chance encounters.
It was “difficult to reconcile” the connection between the hijackers and those who gave them support, the FBI document states, noting that one individual claimed he met the hijackers at a 7-Eleven convenience store in northern Virginia “during a ‘chance meeting’, in a uniquely similar fashion to the way Bayoumi described his ‘chance meeting’ with Hazmi and Midhar in Los Angeles.”
with that said, there's a joke that many jews make when they travel, of playing the game "spot the jew", and I can imagine if I ran into a jew at a random 7-11 I'm more likely to have a friendly chit-chat than with other random people, so I can imagine that the same might hold true for saudis. I could very easily imagine if they were in a location with a reasonably sized saudi ex-pat community that there would be many of these chance encounters with other saudis.
I could imagine "white bread" FBI agents that aren't from a minority, might not be able to comprehend how minorities find each other and make connections in random locations.
with all that said, it be proper for the FBI to chase down all these threads.
But not only that, he was someone I met up with at 2600 meetings every month in Toronto. We chatted, and he was staying in a compound that I had stayed at a number of times before. It was a total chance meeting, as neither of us knew the other had even left Toronto for any particular gig. Prior to that I didn't even know what he did for a living.
So chance meetings certainly can and do happen. In this case it was actually someone I knew. But we initially noticed each other because we similarly stood out in the surrounding population.
Likewise, during prayer times (Saudis pray 5 times a day!) I would stay in whatever restaurant or cafe and they would shut the window blinds so the religious police (Muttawa) wouldn't see us and give us grief for not being at prayer. Every time, the place always had numerous other white people whom I didn't know and didn't meet. But you could be sure several of us bumped into each other repeatedly at these cafes, despite not knowing each other at all. Our only connection was being white and non-Muslim. Exactly the reverse of what's being touted as suspicious coincidences here.
As a former Management Consultant, i've been in dozens of random mosques in random cities (based on where my client happened to be.) In SF alone I've visited in five or six on Fridays in the year before COVID as I flew in for work meetings.
I dont know anyone at any of these, but you try to smile and greet people as you are encouraged to.
Now imagine you create a graph of where you've been and who else has been there. You can find all sorts of co-incidences because the graph doesnt account for the degree of connectedness (near zero)
Another reason others faiths often dont fully understand this is due to the workday challenge in the west. Muslim mandatory congregational prayers are on a workday (usually Friday 12-1 or 1-2), so we dont get to enjoy the community feel of a long congregation with socializing before/after that one could achieve on a Saturday or Sunday. Instead Muslims often find themselves rushing back to work for a 2pm meeting. If you're unlucky and your meeting starts at 2pm sharp, you are brisk walking back and swapping New Balances for wingtips on the elevator up.
The workday challenge also means that the congregational prayer is not in your home community, it is whatever is closest to your office. Sometimes, you have multiple depending on whether you're at the downtown or uptown office, etc.
That can get dangerous very fast!
Secondary source for the $100k money transfer from the ISI head to Atta:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/22/usa.september1...
> Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Why not?
They exchanged 1971 captives for 1965 captives
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Task_Force_74
US administration at the time supported Pakistan in that war.
The genocide isn’t even acknowledged:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/genocide-us-cant-reme...
If I'd have to guess, Mehmood is what is used in Pakistan, reflecting local pronunciation, whereas Mahmoud is the more traditional Arabic translation of the name (which is Arabic).
We have the same with a lot of names in the west as well, Jacob, Jakob, Yakob, Yakov, Jakub, Jakup etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_al-Haznawi
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/24/terrorism.anth...
https://911research.fandom.com/wiki/Omar_al-Bayoumi
> FBI agents involved in the case had received several reports that led them to believe al-Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence officer, living and working secretly in the U.S. His cover story was that he worked for an aviation logistics company owned by the Saudi government, but investigators found he never did any work for the company.
> Bayoumi got the hijackers an apartment and helped open a bank account, obtain car insurance, get Social Security cards and call flight schools in Florida—and also threw a welcoming party for the hijackers, during which he introduced them to the local Muslim community.
The Al Saud princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haifa_bint_Faisal_Al_Saud?wpro...
Not just him, but there were about 50 employees at this Saudi aviation company that were being paid and not showing up to work.
Clearly this was immigration fraud to bring people to the US, but I’ll bet these “ghost” jobs haven’t been cracked down on by immigration authorities.
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/12/1036389448/biden-declassifies...
So Saudis has connections with 9/11 terrorists, and Washington invaded Iraq instead?
This was a complete anathema to the PNAC psychos' vision of the Middle East [0]. They basically wanted to exact control over the majority share of OPEC producers for power over economic rivals (as they saw them).
The PNAC [1] had been pushing for war in the Middle East from their founding in the 90s. They got a lot of buy-in from all the Nixonites in GWB's administration. Rumsfeld set up the Office of Special Plans [2] that stovepiped unvetted intelligence from a bunch of Iraqi expats and exiles to push PNAC narratives to GWB.
[0] https://archive.org/details/RebuildingAmericasDefenses
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeur...
There's a de facto global tacit agreement to sell oil in US dollars - on pain of unilateral sanctions by the US or military intervention by the US military. All countries who deviate from this agreement are in fact deemed enemies of the US. This includes, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and China, and (formely) Iraq and Libya. When they don't, that means that the US can't simply print dollars as they please and force other countries (who purchases that oil) to purchase US debt as well. Pricing oil in currencies other than the worlds reserve currency (the US dollar) affects the dollar value greatly. The US printed about 10 trillion dollars in two years. The rest of the oil-dependent world pays the price.
That is 100% how the US has managed to maintain as a "stable" global currency.
~"American hegemony is net good for the world, therefor the US should not hesitate to use military power, unilaterally, to reshape the world towards US interests, without apology."
These are people that rejected any concept of a collaborative or consensus based world order among peer powers, consent of those governed but subjects of a weaker state, etc, vs the US becoming a benevolent in their imagination unipolar power. They'd spent most of the 90s writing essays about why the US should just straight up depose Saddam and allow US private interests to take over all Iraqi oil infrastructure.
These people had an extremely hawkish take on US foreign policy and it's undeniable that 9/11 dropped a giant present right in their lap. They did exactly what they'd already told the world they wanted to do as a response just using 9/11 as a new justification. The only real surprise is they failed to convince everyone on taking over Iran too.
As for GWB himself, it's not clear what his personal views were other than he stacked his admin full of these people and clearly trusted them. The argument that he had a personal grudge vs Saddam due to his father makes perfect sense and would be an easy way to persuade him personally.
Regarding 9/11:
I think Cheney was pulling the shots and knowingly and cynically ignored all of those glaring warnings, thinking they'd get maybe a small attack somewhere with a smaller number of US deaths, which would sort of be the cost of doing business in the middle east, and that this could be politically expedient in the context of his larger vision on how to deal with "the Iraq/Saddam problem", and in the larger picture morally "fine".
Btw: Dick Cheney is actually still around. How he and GWB never were indicted is beyond me. Don't get me started on the GWB PR rehabilitation campaign that has been ongoing during the the past ~6 years.
Did he have so much control that he could suppress intelligence about an attack? I know he was pretty powerful for a vice president, but it sounds weird to me that one guy who isn't even in command could do that.
Note I'm not American and don't know that much about that period.
You should watch Vice (2018).
That movie really made a shitload of sense to me after following politics closely since a bit before the Bush/Gore election in 2000.
"Harry Whittington, the Republican lawyer shot by Dick Cheney in a hunting accident in Texas last weekend, emerged from hospital yesterday and apologised to the vice-president for all the trouble the shooting had caused."
https://newsfeed.time.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2010/10...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Whittington
> Whittington told the paper that although many media outlets had described Cheney and him as "good friends", the pair had only met one another three times in 30 years, and had never been hunting before. The Washington Post article also said that Cheney had violated "two basic rules of hunting safety": he failed to ensure that he had a clear shot before firing, and fired without being able to see blue sky beneath his target. The paper also reported that Cheney has still neither publicly nor privately apologized to Whittington for the shooting.
Not sure about suppressing intelligence - but he sure was powerful enough to generate fake intelligence about "Sadam having weapons of mass destruction" - overriding the skepticism of multiple established intelligence services in the process[1]. Cheney basically set up a parallel intelligence service out of his office to push the "weapons of mass destruction" angle with no factual/ground-intelligence basis.
1. https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/special-reports/iraq-intell...
W/r/t control beyond the whitehouse, he was publicly part of multiple groups with other key players (e.g., PNAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...) as well as part of non-public "groups" -- Neoconservative. He was clearly effective because his cohorts (Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Bremer) were also part of the same circles, well placed in the DC foreign policy / defense apparatus, also shared the same singular focus of hawkish Foreign Policy.
It also helped that half the media landscape unashamedly supported the Cheney stance. Parts of other media (NY Times) reduced their critical thinking for several years until the disaster of the Bush administration became clear.
This is also why Comedy Central and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Show took off during that time -- because they (along with PBS News Hour and NPR) were one of the few consistently thoughtful sources of news during that time. Consider how much easier it is for Cheney to execute policy when the media check-and-balance has disappeared.
Same reason nothing will ever happen to Trump for January 6th (and many other things). Same reason Nixon was pardoned. Same reason Clinton got away with lying to Congress, nothing happened to Reagan or Bush Sr. over Iran Contra, and so on...
Once you reach a certain level, laws no longer apply.
This is a more likely explanation than more complex conspiracy theories for Saudi and Pakistani ISI involvement with the 9/11 hijackers. These people were never brought to justice because they are powerful, rich, or "valuable" in some other way. They're not subject to the law.
Finally some government blame that isn't brain-dead "Bush did it".
911 hijackers were Saudis and Osama Bin Laden was Saudi but it was decided to not look at KSA at all.
This was known to the Bush adminsitration who censored any mention of KSA from the 911 reports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_28_pages
The GOP has always been a supporter of foreign and domestic terrorism. Them posing as antiterrorists is the biggest con of the 21st century.
Bin laden was an outcast. He left Saudi Arabia and went around to various places and at one point ended up in Northern Africa where he was engaged in evicting the Americans from Somalia. He said that the Americans he fought in Somalia were so weak and retreated so readily that it opened his mind to the possibility of inflicting real damage to the United States. But around this time he became more high profile and was evicted from his host country and wasn’t welcome anywhere, including Saudi Arabia. That should be a big hint about the Saudi theory. He made an appeal to the UK for political asylum, which based on his rhetoric at the time was like hitler asking for asylum in Israel. If the UK had granted him asylum 9/11 wouldn’t have happened. But they didn’t.
From there he ultimately moved on to Afghanistan and the tribal regions of the Pakistan border where there is no presence of government.
Bin laden was a religious fanatic who outwardly pursued The universal adoption of islam and protested foreign occupation of the pan-Arab community, even the willful presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia after the invasion of Kuwait. He killed 3,000 people because the saudis willingly hosted American troops. Mind-bending. But this leads to the next point which is that despite his outward behavior, inwardly he probably had political ambitions and all indications point to yet another repetition of history in that region — a small group of people justify violence in the name of Islam and then promptly transform into a conventional state, built upon violations of Islam, as soon as they have captured the material means to do so. Bin laden, who probably thought 9/11 would cause the United States to remove itself from the Middle East, only made it to step one.
And this has interesting consequences for the future landscape of terror. We probably won’t see another attack from the Middle East. Attacks from these groups are almost always pragmatic, even if they are done in the name of “Islam,” and almost always the pragmatic target is some other player in that region.
Saudi royal family are one thing, and Saudi nation is another.
Saudi royal family is effectively an occupational regime, largely propped by American handouts, and backing, on top of gigatons of $$$ coming from ArAmCo
If you topple the Saud dynasty then another regime would take their place. They aren’t suppressing some kind of egalitarian wellspring. If you disagree then I have 2000 years of history to show you.
I'd like you to tell that to tens of thousands Saudi citizens who tried to say a word, or two about the system, and had to flee the kingdom.
The only reason Saudi kingdom stands is the extraordinary amount of US support.
> If you disagree then I have 2000 years of history to show you.
This is an extremely racist innuendo
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/trump-us-troop-stole-...
I think this is related to the very long DoD audit process, and there's a difference between being unable to track those dollars and them being missing or stolen or inappropriately used.
Notably, it took until about 2017 for annual audits to actually start at DoD, and AFAIK, they have yet to have a 'clean' audit where all/substantially all assets and spending is accounted for, although it seems like progress is being made. This isn't necessarily unexpected as the organization wasn't built with auditing as a requirement and it takes some time to retrofit that into a large organization. Congressional oversight is powerful, but persistant focus is hard to come by and is really needed on something like this.
Think about it, there is not a single off the shelf enterprise accounting system designed to accommodate even a fraction of this maniacal minutia.
Note that the cited list didn’t account for JIEDO appropriation type (which also had a FY component) which was prevalent over the past 20 years, but is now defunct.
A major part of the problem (save the super fragmented parsing of the funding) is that each service has their own accounting & execution systems. There is NOT a singular DoD system.
https://acqnotes.com/acqnote/acquisitions/appropriation-cate...
https://ndiatvc.org/images/downloads/DAU_Training/dau_color_...
And I'm no accountant but I suspect there could be a reasonable middle ground between accounting for every single dollar spent, and accounting for 2.3 trillion dollars.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pldkd4/what_...
Firstly, why would the government plant explosives/thermite/whatever in the buildings? Flying planes into buildings would be enough pretext to start a war on terror, if that was the intention. You don't need to ensure they collapse with additional explosives.
Secondly, why would they use a missile rather than a plane when targeting the pentagon? If you're planning to make the public think a plane hit the pentagon, why not just use a plane?
I thought this video was interesting since it doesn't really seem to claim anything. It's asking difficult questions though:
The Debate: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=829
Part 1 - Air Defence: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=878
Part 2 - The Hijackers: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=3378
Part 3 - The Airplanes: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=5802
Part 4 - The Pentagon: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=7011
Part 5 - Flight 93: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=8272
Part 6 - The Twin Towers: - https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=9681
Part 7 - Building 7: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=16141
Beware of false equivalences though. Some facts are black and white even if parties are trying to muddy the water, retain secrets, or whatever. Eg, flat Earth: there is no middle and by humoring the story tellers elevates them to credence they haven't earned.
The use of a missile rather than a plane has never made any sense to me - one unexpected photo, or even a plausible witness account, gives you a problem, despite there being an obvious way to avoid it. It also invites questions if the result is inconsistent with a plane crash in any way.
https://www.rferl.org/a/saudi-russia-arms-weapons-/31425164....
So seems like they are making moves on the other side. Which US probably doesn't like. So something's going on with the timing of these news.
Reason is simple: it possesses large deposits of fossil fuel but spends "too much" (from American point of view in the world with rapidly declining energy resources) for internal consumption.
By bombing Saudi Arabia, killing millions and destroying infrastructure (e.g. oil-fired power plants), USA will reduce consumption of fossil fuels by Saudi Arabia and leave more for export to the US.
References: 1. https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/20-years-later-nis... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiwpj7aa9c8
We all know what happened when the Rebel Alliance got the plans to the Death Star.
I always felt there are two parts of the “truthers”: the same crowd that is now denying covid and the ones representing this point of view.
The insanity is overshadowing the reasonable people in the truther movement, but in isolation this video (and ones like it) really makes me wonder.
Plus the ever present rampant hucksterism that will say anything to sell stuff.
Still to this day, I'm extremely skeptical of some of the official stories. I don't get the point of classified documents in this case. And there are still many open questions like e.g. why WTC 5 collapsed without an airplane impact.
Dunno, I guess eventually with more years passing we'll start to learn more diverging stories and potentially the truth?
It experienced fire and partial collapse due to being hit with part of the fuselage of UA 175 and other debris from the North Tower. (“Without an airplane impact” is, of course, a false description.)
The complexity of the problem is such that it is extremely difficult to not make a cognitive error during contemplation, even leaving aside the famous unreliability of the multiple systems this cognition sits on top of.
Think of how hard it can sometimes be to debug a system for which you have the literal source code for, which sits on a highly trustworthy base. Now consider reality, for which you have no source code, but you do know (at least during certain mental states, but not necessarily all) that it is chock full of bugs, indeterminate behaviors, etc.
So something something grand conspiracy...
Also symmetric free falling, from a fire? Has fire become opinionated and decided to consume a steel scraper equally at all floors on all sides of a building all at once?
Yes, by way of having a hollow center (aka, the elevators) and dumping large quantities of jet fuel down it, essentially becoming massive chimneys.
There are some awful survivor stories you can find about hearing people stuck in the elevators and getting cooked alive.
Gravity is symmetric.
Once fire weakens multiple individual structural members, collapse is both inevitable and rapid as the loads transfer within the materials to the remaining supports at the speed of sound.
For reference please google Grenfell Tower Fire. Or in China, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Fire.
For gravity to be symmetric such that free fall speed is achieved by the whole building at once at the same time (start of collapse), all the columns would have to suffer the exact same fire made damage at the same exact time. I don't know about you, but i have yet to see nature produce exact results at the same exact time anywhere. Gradual, slow and chaotic describes nature better. Fast, precise and calculated usually is the realm of human beings.
WTC 7's collapse, viewed from the exterior (most videos were taken from the north), did appear to fall almost uniformly as a single unit. This occurred because the interior failures that took place did not cause the exterior framing to fail until the final stages of the building collapse. The interior floor framing and columns collapsed downward and pulled away from the exterior frame. There were clues that internal damage was taking place, prior to the downward movement of the exterior frame, such as when the east penthouse fell downward into the building and windows broke out on the north face at the ends of the building core. The symmetric appearance of the downward fall of the WTC 7 was primarily due to the greater stiffness and strength of its exterior frame relative to the interior framing.
https://www.nist.gov/pao/questions-and-answers-about-nist-wt...
WTC 7 collapse was neither symmetric nor free falling.
Reporter: "what about the new that there will be a controlled demolition of WTC 7 because of fear of collapse?"
Fire Chief: "What? What are you talking about?"
Reporter: "There's a rumor that building 7 needs to be brought down due to damage..."
Fire Chief: "Listen miss, I don't know what you've heard, but there is no damage to building 7 and there's no reason to bring it down. If you suggest such a thing to someone else, I'll have you arrested for inciting a panic. We have a high amount of coordination and there is limited information available to the public."
There was more to it, but that was memorable because, as a kid, I realized something. In a real disaster situation, people would be getting conflicting information. During 9/11, it was a real disaster. Nobody seemed to know wtf was really going on or going to happen and the reporters were, notably, just in the way of the real work. Later, when building 7 fell, I thought...well...that's quite a coincidence. I don't feel it was a coincidence anymore.
Yet, in trying to find more information about it, I have found absolutely no mention about such a car bomb. It's not on any "false rumors that got started during the day" lists; it's not picked up even by the most insane of conspiracy theorists as suppressed information. I'm actually kind of curious where the idea got into my sister's head--the closest I can figure is that the original attack on the Pentagon was reported as a blast in an unknown area to the southwest of the caller, and the National Mall was suggested as a possible site by the reporter.
This goes to show two things. One, it's very easy to specifically remember facts (including reporting of facts) that never actually happened. Two, in a day of hectic reporting, it's very easy for wrong information to spread very quickly.
FWIW, you can find archives of television news coverage of 9/11 here: https://archive.org/details/911/day/20010911.
https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-08/fema430.pdf
https://www.nrt.org/sites/2/files/WTC_PENTAGON.pdf
Also, the BBC specifically says it was notified beforehand about the plans to take WTC7 down. I feel like small confirmation about some of the details.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/02/part_of_the_c...
The archives you linked are almost all Washington DC area archives, showing none of the majority independent (and minor station) journalists that west coast channels had to leverage for coverage. I did comb through them for quite awhile. Thanks.
> section of the fuselage from United Airlines Flight 175 landed on the roof
The only fishiness radar I have is around the subsequent power grab and civil liberties rollback by the espionage organizations within the USA. Certainly I wouldn’t have given more power to the organizations that so clearly failed, let alone who have had a track record in directly creating enemies for the USA.
No matter what is the reality, one thing is for sure - you should never, ever trust in any meaningful way a single word from anybody from those agencies. Whether they are incompetent beyond belief or just good liers is not so important.
Rather large showing of bias to try to attribute that saying to Republicans.
Sure, there are bugs in our history books (and lots of propaganda). But if you discard facts reported in the media, then how do you know water is wet? :)
On topic: it's hard to know if classification makes sense. But I'll admit I don't really feel competent to have an opinion on the subject.
e.g. governments definitely keep secrets, so how many people can be in on a given conspiracy-like government secret without major leaks that cannot be squashed through media, suppression, etc.?
I feel like precursors to the Manhattan project (since the project itself was clearly widely known) would hold the answer, but wouldn't account for modern technology / communication methods.
An interesting / fun thought :)
Yeah, it's an interesting question. How would you model it? What is the probability that an arbitrary person leaks a secret?
Also I would assume that the more devious the secret the harder it is to keep.
I'm not on the conspiracy train either, but when I think about it now, the world was very naive before the modern era of ease of discussion and information sharing. The story "some guys stole some planes" sold fine in 2001, but in my mind something this big requires a lot more moving parts than that. I don't claim to know what those moving parts are, but there's definitely a lot more to the story than what we know. I doubt we will ever learn the full truth of what happened, or anything resembling it.
If I were to throw out probable pieces I'd say there had to be some state involvement from at least one state intelligence apparatus and some financing through the traditional, "white market" finance sector, that's about all I'd be willing to bet on.
Saudi embassy/consulate staff involved meeting these people? This looks so dodgy, the Kashoggi case has shown that Saudi diplomat staff doesn't respect territorial laws when being hosted. Mediterranean restaurant is some sort of key word or red herring, not just because of the rather offensive "beneath their status" statement, but clearly if it's more than just Mediterranean than in name, their last priority would be to cater for halal food and I am pretty sure that the Mediterranean dressing style would be viewed as "beneath their status" (but certainly not style, if I mad add this). So they didn't go there for the food, but to meet with other lackeys, to not been seen in the usual, not under status locations.
Edit: must be a DNS issue, the website resolves to cloudflare-dns.com so I guess it must be part of the website's operator's childish fight with Cloudflare's DNS resolver for not forwarding the resolving IP subnet to their DNS servers.
I just wonder how WTC7 collapsed in 5 seconds despite not being hit by any aircraft.
The video just has always baffled me, and no explanation, including NIST's, has come close to passing the pub test.
FYI: Shyam Sunder, the author of the article, was the lead investigator of this collapse.
- Debris from wtc1 ignites fire on at least 10 floors. Sounds believable to me.
- floor 7-13 fires got out of control, primary sprinkler system failed, the redundancy or backup system didn't not work due to damage from the tower 1 and 2, the water supply for the backup relied on the cities water system which was mia on that day. This caused the fire to spread diagonally across the building. Sounds ok to me, I don't think anyone could make this up and it would be allowed into such a report without review.
There's much more but assuming usual explosives, this has to be considered: The smallest charge capable of initiating column failure would have resulted in a sound level of 130 to 140 dB at a distance of at least half a mile. This would be quite a couple seconds or max a minute before the full collapse, but no footage had such sounds, nor did witnesses report such sounds, and any nearby seismology equipment would detect irregularities. Just for reference 130-140 decibels are much louder than I would have thought, 130 is peak stadium crowd noise, 135 is an air raid siren, 140 is a jet engine take off.
True, but it is possible to apply the same strict epistemology to the consensus narrative as well, like how is it that "many things happened" resulting in an orderly freefall that appeared magically homogeneous across the entire structure, resulting in a descent that is (afaik) largely indistinguishable from a controlled demolition.
> but no footage had such sounds, nor did witnesses report such sounds, and any nearby seismology equipment would detect irregularities
A strict epistemological examination wouldn't let such premises be deployed without scrutiny.
I mentioned in my other comment the Surfside condo collapse, and that accidentally illustrates a key point about the WTC7 collapse. In the video of the Surfside condo collapse, we get a decent view of the origin of the collapse, so we can see how the collapse progresses. But with WTC7, the video we have is of the roof of the back side (with respect to the collapse origin). So we don't have visual of the collapse progress until it reaches the fairly homogeneous progressive collapse phase.
> resulting in a descent that is (afaik) largely indistinguishable from a controlled demolition.
All progressive collapses are going to look superficially similar. The most notable facet of a controlled demolition is the sheer sound of the charges going off to initiate the collapse. I've had the pleasure of being able to view a controlled demolition live, and I can tell you that the sound is loud enough and distinctive enough that all of the rescuers working on the debris pile that was the twin towers would have been reporting the explosions.
Which in itself seems a bit odd, not unlike the lack of footage of the Pentagon (publicly released footage, at least).
> So we don't have visual of the collapse progress until it reaches the fairly homogeneous progressive collapse phase.
Suggesting there is some uncertainty involved.
> The most notable facet of a controlled demolition is the sheer sound of the charges going off to initiate the collapse.
If one uses the traditional loud approach, agreed.
> I've had the pleasure of being able to view a controlled demolition live, and I can tell you that the sound is loud enough and distinctive enough that all of the rescuers working on the debris pile that was the twin towers would have been reporting the explosions.
Certainly seems plausible.
Even if the office fires burned hot enough to compromise the columns, wouldn't they have advanced gradually over the diagonal span, trigger slow sequential collapses that might have resulted in the building listing or distorting, rather than falling flat to the ground in 5 seconds?
Would thermite be deployed explosively at 140db, or might it work over a longer period of minutes at lower volume to heat the steel columns to 700 degrees, the temperature at which it would lose structural integrity?
It sounds to me like Silverstein and the NYFD were talking about pulling firefighters out of WTC7. Once the fire department realized saving the building was a lost cause, there was no reason for firefighters to remain inside and risk their lives further. I don't hear anything in the video about "pulling" the building down.
As in, they decided to pull and then the building collapsed. This means one of two things:
1) They pulled as in the context of some kind of an act of a pre determined demolition of the building
2) Something closer to what you're referring to, but with the foresight that the building WILL collapse and actually did as they have expected it to by their decision to pull the men (and women) and equipment. To which of course the first question is, why then? why at 5pm and not any of the hours before Larry made that decision. It only took about 40 or so minutes for the big buildings to fail.
Option (2) is equally problematic as option (1) in the context of 9/11. Given that the claim is that all 3 buildings (all the WTC complex really) has suffered an equal progressive fate made by 2 projectiles hitting WTC 1&2.
Did you see the video of, say, the Surfside condo collapse? When a skyscraper starts to collapse--and it doesn't really matter all that much how it starts to collapse--it invariably collapses quite quickly and in much the same way.
WTC7 didn't collapse in "5 seconds". The actual observed portion of the collapse took about 9 seconds, and this is a view that only shows about the first ⅓ of the collapse. One of the things that greatly hampers analysis of the WTC7 collapse is there just aren't good views of much of WTC7, and so the full extent of the damage it received from its front-row seat of a collapsing building isn't entirely known.
>The final design for 7 World Trade Center was for a much larger building than originally planned when the substation was built.[16]:xxxviii The structural design of 7 World Trade Center therefore included a system of gravity column transfer trusses and girders, located between floors 5 and 7, to transfer loads to the smaller foundation.[0]
Despite simulating a number of hypothetical scenarios, we were unable to identify any progressive sequence of failures that could have taken place on September 11, 2001, and caused a total collapse of the building, let alone the observed straight-down collapse with approximately 2.5 seconds of free fall and minimal differential movement of the exterior.
[1] https://vault.fbi.gov/9-11-attacks-investigation-and-related...