Scholars for 9/11 Truth

[Makalakumu]

I was poking around the internet, chasing around some rumors and I came across this site. Very interesting stuff here. Peer Review articles. Groups of scientific professionals. Rational, well supported arguments. All of it attacking the official story put forward by the 9/11 commission report. Poke around and report your thoughts...

Scholars for 9/11 Truth

 

[Don Roley]

"Peer Reviewed"?????

Take a careful look and you will see the same three names over and over again. Jones, Griffith and Fetzer.

I took a look at one of the articles trying to say that the WTC was brought down by pre-positioned charges. The author only seemed to have looked at some photos of the rubble and such to reach his conclusion.

Great, proffesional- looking lay out. But three guys with computers is not the standard I would go by. And pictures from the media are not the type of thing I would base an accusation like that off of .

 

[Makalakumu]

"I took a look at one of the articles trying to say that the WTC was brought down by pre-positioned charges. The author only seemed to have looked at some photos of the rubble and such to reach his conclusion.

I just read the first peer reviewed paper. It is far more extensive then that. This is something I would suggest reading very carefully and not skimming. I don't know what to think yet...

 

[tshadowchaser]

I need to read this a lot more a few times befor I say much

 

[Makalakumu]

I need to read this a lot more a few times befor I say much

This is the most extensive, well researched, well thought out site that I've seen on these matters. The first article really made some good points. These guys are pretty well prepared.

 

[Don Roley]

This is the most extensive, well researched, well thought out site that I've seen on these matters.

I don't see it that way. I have seen a lot of things like this in my years of dealing with fake ninja on the internet. If you really do not know the subject matter, it sounds great. But to those that know, the flaws are evident.

In this case, it is hard for those of us that are not experts in the field to even tell what they are saying. I have seen the most silly things said about Japan and ninjutsu that have been accepted. I see no reason to believe that it can't be the case here. So, why hasn't the experts that are obviously not biased chimed in yet?

Who has peer reviewed this and why is it just a few cranks on the internet? I saw that supposably a Professor Griffith backed up what the first article said, but the link it had did not lead to another site, but to the same site as these guys. And I could find no reference to him and his qualifications on the site.

The evidence they give is questionable at best and very meager. They reject the most obvious conclusions and deal with things that seem to make grassy knoll theories sound sane by comparison.

Of course, a lot of the technical stuff does go over my head- which is something I am used to ninjutsu frauds using as well. If you pile it on higher and deeper, a lot of people will take the hook.

Extra ordinary claims require extra ordinary proof. Not only do I not see anything that I myself can take as proof.

And of course, with all theories of a frame up, there is the question of how someone could pull off such a huge undertaking. To arrange for everything to happen in such a way that Al-Queda would be blamed would take thousand of people years of work. And yet there has been nothing to blow them out of the water? Take a look at the Watergate break in. A few guys on a crime that did not really harm too many inocents- only a politacl party. And yet within a few months someone was talking to the press. So, after all the people that would be needed to pull this off and have it on their consciousness for years, no one has had a case of guilt? Nothing fouled up to exposwe them? We are talking about a goverment that loses satelites because someone did not convert to metric correctly and we expect a frame up like this to go off without something being blown?

But the strength of conspiracy theorists is that they can point to the lack of evidence, or contradictory evidence as proof that there are people trying to cover something up.

 

[Makalakumu]

I guess the one thing that stick in my head, Don, (and I have a scientific background) is the fact that steel girders were found that showed signs of vaporization. The kind of temperature needed to vaporize steel cannot be generated in a hydrocarbon fire.

4500 degrees F is the range needed to start this process. Higher if one needs to do it faster. This temperature range, between 5000 and 6000 degrees, is as hot as the surface of the sun and only a few specific chemical reactions can generate it. One of them is a steel cutting explosive used to demolish buildings.

I think that it is good to be skeptical about these things, but to defer an argument because one does not understand the technical jargon isn't skepticism. Ask some more questions. Ask me. I'm a teacher and I can probably help explain some stuff you might not understand.

The bottom line is that the fact that steel was vaporized in the WTC superstructure casts some serious doubt on the hypothesis that the impact of the planes and the fire caused by paper and hydrocarbons caused the buildings to go down.

There must have been something else at work in order to vaporize steel. What?

 

[CanuckMA]

One of the most common fallacy used by the conspiracy nut bars is that the fires were not hot enough to melt steel. True. But the towers were stabilized by massive concrete slabs on the roof. The combination of the impact damage and the WEAKENING of the steel girders by the fire was enough to buckle the steel, causing the collapse. You do not need liquifying temperatures to soften a metal. Ever seen a blacksmith at work? The steel is not melted, just softened a bit. Enough to reshape it.

 

[jdinca]

A steel girder will start to elongate at 1,000 degrees, well within the limits of a hydrocarbon fire. I'm thinking way back to basic fire chemistry but I think they fail between 1500-2000 degrees.

 

[Makalakumu]

One of the most common fallacy used by the conspiracy nut bars...

Don't you think this is a bit perjorative? Could it be possible that some people may have some legitimate questions regarding the events of 9/11?

...is that the fires were not hot enough to melt steel. True. But the towers were stabilized by massive concrete slabs on the roof. The combination of the impact damage and the WEAKENING of the steel girders by the fire was enough to buckle the steel, causing the collapse. You do not need liquifying temperatures to soften a metal. Ever seen a blacksmith at work? The steel is not melted, just softened a bit. Enough to reshape it.

This point is a commonly brought up in defense of the Official Story and it is extensively addressed in the research presented.

Here is an excerpt...

Most defenders of the official theory, in fact, do not make this absurd claim. They say merely that the fire heated the steel up to the point where it lost so much of its strength that it buckled.[/SIZE][11] For example, Thomas Eagar, saying that steel loses 80 percent of its strength when it is heated to 1,300˚F, argues that this is what happened. But for even this claim to plausible, the fires would have still had to be pretty hot.

But they were not. Claims have been made, as we have seen, about the jet fuel. But much of it burned up very quickly in the enormous fireballs produced when the planes hit the buildings, and rest was gone within 10 minutes,[12] after which the flames died down. Photographs of the towers 15 minutes after they were struck show few flames and lots of black smoke, a sign that the fires were oxygen-starved. Thomas Eagar, recognizing this fact, says that the fires were “probably only about 1,200 or 1,300˚F” (Eagar, 2002).

There are reasons to believe, moreover, that the fires were not even that hot. As photographs show, the fires did not break windows or even spread much beyond their points of origin (Hufschmid, 2002, p. 40). This photographic evidence is supported by scientific studies carried out by NIST, which found that of the 16 perimeter columns examined, “only three columns had evidence that the steel reached temperatures above 250˚C [482˚F],” and no evidence that any of the core columns had reached even those temperatures (2005, p. 88).

NIST (2005) says that it “did not generalize these results, since the examined columns represented only 3 percent of the perimeter columns and 1 percent of the core columns from the fire floors”. That only such a tiny percent of the columns was available was due, of course, to the fact that government officials had most of the steel immediately sold and shipped off. In any case, NIST’s findings on the basis of this tiny percent of the columns are not irrelevant: They mean that any speculations that some of the core columns reached much higher temperatures would be just that---pure speculation not backed up by any empirical evidence.

Moreover, even if the fire had reached 1,300˚F, as Eagar supposes, that does not mean that any of the steel would have reached that temperature. Steel is an excellent conductor of heat. Put a fire to one part of a long bar of steel and the heat will quickly diffuse to the other parts and to any other pieces of steel to which that bar is connected.[13]

For fires to have heated up some of the steel columns to anywhere close to their own temperature, they would have needed to be very big, relative to the size of the buildings and the amount of steel in them. The towers, of course, were huge and had an enormous amount of steel. A small, localized fire of 1,300˚F would never have heated any of the steel columns even close to that temperature, because the heat would have been quickly dispersed throughout the building.

Some defenders of the official story have claimed that the fires were indeed very big, turning the buildings into “towering infernos.” But all the evidence counts against this claim, especially with regard to the south tower, which collapsed first. This tower was struck between floors 78 and 84, so that region is where the fire would have been the biggest. And yet Brian Clark, a survivor, said that when he got down to the 80th floor: "You could see through the wall and the cracks and see flames . . . just licking up, not a roaring inferno, just quiet flames licking up and smoke sort of eking through the wall."[14] Likewise, one of the fire chiefs who had reached the 78th floor found only “two isolated pockets of fire.”[15]

The north tower, to be sure, did have fires that were big enough and hot enough to cause many people to jump to their deaths. But as anyone with a fireplace grate or a pot-belly stove knows, fire that will not harm steel or even iron will burn human flesh. Also in many cases it may have been more the smoke than the heat that led people to jump.

In any case, the fires, to weaken the steel columns, would have needed to be not only very big and very hot but also very long-lasting.[16] The public was told that the towers had such fires, with CNN saying that “very intense” fires “burned for a long time.”[17] But they did not. The north tower collapsed an hour and 42 minutes after it was struck; the south tower collapsed after only 56 minutes.

To see how ludicrous is the claim that the short-lived fires in the towers could have induced structural collapse, we can compare them with some other fires. In 1988, a fire in the First Interstate Bank Building in Los Angeles raged for 3.5 hours and gutted 5 of this building’s 62 floors, but there was no significant structural damage (FEMA, 1988). In 1991, a huge fire in Philadelphia’s One Meridian Plaza lasted for 18 hours and gutted 8 of the building’s 38 floors, but, said the FEMA report, although “eams and girders sagged and twisted . . . under severe fire exposures. . . , the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage” (FEMA, 1991). In Caracas in 2004, a fire in a 50-story building raged for 17 hours, completely gutting the building’s top 20 floors, and yet it did not collapse (Nieto, 2004). And yet we are supposed to believe that a 56-minute fire caused the south tower to collapse.

Unlike the fires in the towers, moreover, the fires in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Caracas were hot enough to break windows.

Another important comparison is afforded by a series of experiments run in Great Britain in the mid-1990s to see what kind of damage could be done to steel-frame buildings by subjecting them to extremely hot, all-consuming fires that lasted for many hours. FEMA, having reviewed those experiments, said: “Despite the temperature of the steel beams reaching 800-900°C (1,500-1,700°F) in three of the tests. . . , no collapse was observed in any of the six experiments” (1988, Appendix A).

These comparisons bring out the absurdity of NIST’s claim that the towers collapsed because the planes knocked the fireproofing off the steel columns. Fireproofing provides protection for only a few hours, so the steel in the buildings in Philadelphia and Caracas would have been directly exposed to raging fires for 14 or more hours, and yet this steel did not buckle. NIST claims, nevertheless, that the steel in the south tower buckled because it was directly exposed to flames for 56 minutes.[18] ​

I think we can safely throw out the "steel was weakened by fire" hypothesis.[/SIZE]​

 

[Makalakumu]

A steel girder will start to elongate at 1,000 degrees, well within the limits of a hydrocarbon fire. I'm thinking way back to basic fire chemistry but I think they fail between 1500-2000 degrees.

This point is also addressed in there research. Here is an excerpt...

Claims have been made, as we have seen, about the jet fuel. But much of it burned up very quickly in the enormous fireballs produced when the planes hit the buildings, and rest was gone within 10 minutes,[12] after which the flames died down. Photographs of the towers 15 minutes after they were struck show few flames and lots of black smoke, a sign that the fires were oxygen-starved. Thomas Eagar, recognizing this fact, says that the fires were “probably only about 1,200 or 1,300˚F” (Eagar, 2002).

There are reasons to believe, moreover, that the fires were not even that hot. As photographs show, the fires did not break windows or even spread much beyond their points of origin (Hufschmid, 2002, p. 40). This photographic evidence is supported by scientific studies carried out by NIST, which found that of the 16 perimeter columns examined, “only three columns had evidence that the steel reached temperatures above 250˚C [482˚F],” and no evidence that any of the core columns had reached even those temperatures (2005, p. 88).​

I think it is instructive to remember that even if one were to put a fire to piece of steel, the metal takes a long time to absorb the heat. This would explain why columns that were directly affected by the brief fire (the ones with hydrocarbon scoring) were only shown to have reached 482 degrees.

Also, the hydrocarbon fire does nothing to explain the presence of vaporized steel...

 

[jdinca]

I've been in a burn room where we generated 800 degrees at the ceiling from hay bales, just by letting the fire burn for 10 minutes. I also would go by the windows blowing out to determine the amount of heat generated. Those windows are impact resistant safety glass that's probably at least 1/2" thick. They'll hold the heat in quite a while before they fail. The building itself is Type I construction, basically a cement oven.

Does the report talk about the massive amount of energy disipation from a very large aircraft impacting the building at several hundred miles and hour? That alone would generate a great deal of heat and could account for vaporization at the moment of impact.

As for the color of the smoke, what was burning after the jet fuel was gone was not the building itself, it was the contents of the building and of the planes. There is now a tremendous amount of plastics(petroleum products) in interior furnishings these days. That was the source of the black smoke. Remember the burning jet fuel produced black smoke too. Had the fires been oxygen starved and in a smoldering phase, the smoke would have developed a yellowish gray or gray appearance, not thick and black.

These buildings are designed to prevent the spread of fire. Poke throughs are sealed, stairwells are isolated. Lapping up from the floor below through broken windows or the radiant heat from the fire below are the main ways a fire is going to spread in these types of buildings. I'm not surprised there wasn't a greater spread.

As for the use of explosives, they would have had to been placed at the level the planes impacted, since that's where the initial collapse took place. In addition, there would have been secondary explosions just before the buildings collapses. The amount of explosives required would have created a blast that would have been seen outside the buildings.

I'm going to keep my aluminum foil in the drawer on this one.

 

[Blotan Hunka]

Somehow "top secret" NSA spy programs get leaked but a huge operation with synchronized multiple airplane crashes along with pre-positioned explosives -not to mention the ammount of time and prep it takes to set something like that up-does not. Im not buying it. The X-files was canceled years ago.

 

[Makalakumu]

I'm going to keep my aluminum foil in the drawer on this one.

I think alot of people will no matter how much research contaverts the official story. The alternative is just too terrible.

You make some valid points, however, it is good to remember that these buildings (and this is mentioned in the research) were over engineered to face fires that were much worse then then what occured. They were also engineered to withstand aircraft impacts, hurricanes, earthquakes, and strikes from conventional weapons in times of war...

They were built to last as long as they could...forever in an idealistic sense.

Some things you might want to think about are the fact that only a small percentage of the beams were actually burned with the jet fuel fire. These beams were tested and were shown to have risen to a temp of 481 degrees. This is well below any threshold that would cause them to buckle. It was also well below the threshold that would actually melt the beams.

However, both melted steel and vaporized steel were observed in the wreckage of the WTC. Further, it was shown that the gravitational energy of the falling building and the friction that would have been generated would not be sufficiant to melt steel or vaporize it.

Another thing to think about is the fact that WTC 7 fell from a low grade fire alone. There was hardly any jet fuel and no airplane impact in that case. No steel building has ever collapsed from fire alone in recorded history.

 

[Makalakumu]

Somehow "top secret" NSA spy programs get leaked but a huge operation with synchronized multiple airplane crashes along with pre-positioned explosives -not to mention the ammount of time and prep it takes to set something like that up-does not. Im not buying it. The X-files was canceled years ago.

I have no real idea what happened. However, this research does poke huge holes in the official version of this story. Anyone can see this...

 

[Blotan Hunka]

Why didnt the government cover up the clean-up to cover their tracks if they are so efficient? Tin hat stuff I agree.

 

[Blotan Hunka]

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=1

Read it.

 

[Makalakumu]

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=1

Read it.

I did and so did the researchers on this site. This article has been specifically refuted.

 

[Makalakumu]

Why didnt the government cover up the clean-up to cover their tracks if they are so efficient? Tin hat stuff I agree.

If you read the "removal of steel" section, it certainly looks like someone trying to cover tracks. The rest of the stuff is also very interesting...

Removal of the Steel: For one thing, the steel from the buildings was quickly removed before it could be properly examined,[48] with virtually all of it being sold to scrap dealers, who put most of it on ships to Asia.[49] Generally, removing any evidence from the scene of a crime is a federal offense. But in this case, federal officials facilitated the removal.[50]

This removal evoked protest. On Christmas day, 2001, the New York Times said: “The decision to rapidly recycle the steel columns, beams and trusses from the WTC in the days immediately after 9/11 means definitive answers may never be known.”[51] The next week, Fire Engineering magazinesaid: “We are literally treating the steel removed from the site like garbage, not like crucial fire scene evidence (Brannigan, Corbett, and Dunn, 2002). . . . The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately” (Manning, 2002).

However, Mayor Bloomberg, defending the decision to dispose of the steel, said: "If you want to take a look at the construction methods and the design, that's in this day and age what computers do.[52] Just looking at a piece of metal generally doesn't tell you anything."[53] But that is not true. An examination of the steel could have revealed whether it had been cut by explosives.

This removal of an unprecedented amount of material from a crime scene suggests that an unprecedented crime was being covered up.[54]​

​

Evidence that this cover-up was continued by NIST is provided by its treatment of a provocative finding reported by FEMA, which was that some of the specimens of steel were “rapidly corroded by sulfidation” (FEMA 2002, Appendix C). This report is significant, because sulfidation is an effect of explosives. FEMA appropriately called for further investigation of this finding, which the New York Times called “perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation” (Killough-Miller, 2002). A closely related problem, expressed shortly after 9/11 by Dr. Jonathan Barnett, Professor of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is that “[f]ire and the structural damage . . . would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated” (Glanz, 2001). But the NIST report, in its section headed “Learning from the Recovered Steel,” fails even to mention either evaporation or sulfidation.[55] Why would the NIST scientists apparently share Mayor Bloomberg’s disdain for empirical studies of recovered steel? ​

​

North Tower Antenna Drop: Another problem noted by FEMA is that videos show that, in the words of the FEMA Report, “the transmission tower on top of the [north tower] began to move downward and laterally slightly before movement was evident at the exterior wall. This suggests that collapse began with one or more failures in the central core area of the building” (FEMA 2002, ch. 2).[56] This drop was also mentioned in a New York Times story by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, which said: “Videos of the north tower's collapse appear to show that its television antenna began to drop a fraction of a second before the rest of the building. The observations suggest that the building's steel core somehow gave way first” (Glanz and Lipton, 2002). In the supposedly definitive NIST Report, however, we find no mention of this fact. This is another convenient omission, since the most plausible, and perhaps only possible, explanation would be that the core columns were cut by explosives---an explanation that would fit with the testimony of several witnesses. ​

​

South Tower Tipping and Disintegration: If the north tower’s antenna drop was anomalous (from the perspective of the official theory), the south tower’s collapse contained an even stranger anomaly. The uppermost floors---above the level struck by the airplane---began tipping toward the corner most damaged by the impact. According to conservation-of-momentum laws, this block of approximately 34 floors should have fallen to the ground far outside the building’s footprint. “However,” observe Paul and Hoffman, “as the top then began to fall, the rotation decelerated. Then it reversed direction [even though the] law of conservation of angular momentum states that a solid object in rotation will continue to rotate at the same speed unless acted on by a torque” (Paul and Hoffman, 2004, p. 34). ​

​

And then, in the words of Steven Jones, a physics professor at BYU, “this block turned mostly to powder in mid-air!” This disintegration stopped the tipping and allowed the uppermost floors to fall straight down into, or at least close to, the building’s footprint. As Jones notes, this extremely strange behavior was one of many things that NIST was able to ignore by virtue of the fact that its analysis, in its own words, “does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached” (NIST 2005, p. 80, n. 12). This is convenient because it means that NIST did not have to answer Jones’s question: “How can we understand this strange behavior, without explosives?” (Jones, 2006). ​

​

This behavior is, however, not strange to experts in controlled demolition. Mark Loizeaux, the head of Controlled Demolition, Inc., has said: ​

​

y differentially controlling the velocity of failure in different parts of the structure, you can make it walk, you can make it spin, you can make it dance . . . . We'll have structures start facing north and end up going to the north-west. (Else, 2004) ​

​

Once again, something that is inexplicable in terms of the official theory becomes a matter of course if the theory of controlled demolition is adopted. ​

​

​

WTC Security: The suggestion that explosives might have been used raises the question of how anyone wanting to place explosives in the towers could have gotten through the security checks. This question brings us to a possibly relevant fact about a company---now called Stratesec but then called Securacom---that was in charge of security for the World Trade Center. From 1993 to 2000, during which Securacom installed a new security system, Marvin Bush, the president’s brother, was one of the company’s directors. And from 1999 until January of 2002, their cousin Wirt Walker III was the CEO (Burns, 2003).[57] One would think these facts should have made the evening news---or at least The 9/11 Commission Report. ​

​

These facts, in any case, may be relevant to some reports given by people who had worked in the World Trade Center. Some of them reportedly said that although in the weeks before 9/11 there had been a security alert that mandated the use of bomb-sniffing dogs, that alert was lifted five days before 9/11 (Taylor and Gardiner, 2001). ​

Also, a man named Scott Forbes, who worked for Fiduciary Trust---the company for which Kristen Breitweiser’s husband worked---has written:

On the weekend of [September 8-9, 2001], there was a “power down” condition in . . . the south tower. This power down condition meant there was no electrical supply for approximately 36 hours from floor 50 up. . . . The reason given by the WTC for the power down was that cabling in the tower was being upgraded . . . . Of course without power there were no security cameras, no security locks on doors [while] many, many “engineers” [were] coming in and out of the tower.[58]

Also, a man named Ben Fountain, who was a financial analyst with Fireman’s Fund in the south tower, was quoted in People Magazine as saying that during the weeks before 9/11, the towers were evacuated “a number of times” (People Magazine, 2001).

​

Foreknowledge of the Collapse: One more possibly relevant fact is that then Mayor Rudy Giuliani, talking on ABC News about his temporary emergency command center at 75 Barkley Street, said: ​

​

We were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse, and it did collapse before we could get out of the building.[59]​

​

This is an amazing statement. Prior to 9/11, fire had never brought down a steel-frame high-rise. The firemen who reached the 78th floor of the south tower certainly did not believe it was going to collapse. Even the 9/11 Commission reported that to its knowledge, “none of the [fire] chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible” (Kean and Hamilton, 2004, p. 302). So why would anyone have told Giuliani that at least one of the towers was about to collapse? ​

​

The most reasonable answer, especially in light of the new evidence, is that someone knew that explosives had been set in the south tower and were about to be discharged. It is even possible that the explosives were going to be discharged earlier than originally planned because the fires in the south tower were dying down more quickly than expected, because so much of the plane’s jet fuel had burned up in the fireball outside the building.[60] This could explain why although the south tower was struck second, suffered less structural damage, and had smaller fires, it collapsed first---after only 56 minutes. That is, if the official story was going to be that the fire caused the collapse, the building had to be brought down before the fire went completely out.[61]​

​

We now learn from the oral histories, moreover, that Giuliani is not the only one who was told that a collapse was coming. At least four of the testimonies indicate that shortly before the collapse of the south tower, the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) had predicted the collapse of at least one tower.[62] The director of OEM reported directly to Giuliani.[63] So although Giuliani said that he and others “were told” that the towers were going to collapse, it was his own people who were doing the telling. ​

​

As New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer has pointed out, the 9/11 Commission had access to the oral histories.[64] It should have discussed these facts, but it did not. ​

The neglect of most of the relevant facts about the collapses, manifested by The 9/11 Commission Report, was continued by the NIST Report, which said, amazingly: ​

​

The focus of the Investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower. For brevity in this report, this sequence is referred to as the "probable collapse sequence," although it does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached. . . . [Our simulation treats only] the structural deterioration of each tower from the time of aircraft impact to the time at which the building . . . was poised for collapse (80n, 140). ​

​

Steven Jones comments, appropriately: ​

​

What about the subsequent complete, rapid and symmetrical collapse of the buildings? . . . What about the antenna dropping first in the North Tower? What about the molten metal observed in the basement areas . . . ? Never mind all that: NIST did not discuss at all any data after the buildings were “poised for collapse.” Well, some of us want to look at all the data, without computer simulations that are “adjusted” to make them fit the desired outcome. (Jones, 2006​

 

[Flatlander]

Snoop around in here. This is an interesting series of photos.