At the risk of having the site renamed Yankculture, I’m going to take the ball from the last post and run with it. As one of the two countries that was roped into the second war in Iraq on false pretences, increasing the risk of terrorist attacks on our own soil, what happened in New York on the 11th of September 2001 is of great significance to us.
Conspiracy theorists have a nasty habit of undermining conspiracies. There’s often a total lack of objectivity, and a desire to ‘believe’. Four Corners’ screening of the BBC doco was significant because the ABC series is a current affairs heavyweight, and the screening seemed to strongly imply there was a case to answer.
The veracity of the footage of Tower Seven collapsing neatly in 6.5 seconds is not in question. And it seems blatantly obvious that no steel-reinforced tower block could fall in this way due to fire (let alone one that utilised fire-protected steel girders), and, indeed, none ever had.
It appears to be a controlled detonation, one so carefully prepared that the roofline remained perfectly level as WTC 7 went down. And the only time such an event could be expected not to raise suspicion would be in the aftermath of a much bigger incident – in other words, if Government agents were responsible for it being wired that demonstrates they had prior knowledge of the attacks on the Twin Towers.
The perfectly vertical collapse of the 110-storey Twin Towers (WTC 1 & 2) seemed odd even at the time. Given that the planes impacted, and the resulting fires happened in, the upper third of each tower, how could the massive steel supporting structure completely fail – simultaneously – over the entire height of the buildings? You would expect to see at least the lower two-thirds of the central supports still partially standing.
A hundred and ten storeys is incredibly tall. Such a building requires great strength, and in the case of the Twin Towers most of this strength was in the central columns. Even an intense fire in the upper storeys wouldn’t negate the strength of the central columns lower down.
Again, what we saw looked like a controlled demolition. And carefully timed detonations on the central columns, upper to lower floors in succession, would explain the collapse, which neatly raised the buildings to the ground in seconds.
I’m mindful of the human cost of that day. It’s not an event that should be exploited for trivial conjecture. But the ramifications should claims of Federal wrongdoing be accurate really make Watergate seem like a parking violation. And the Bush Administration is still in office...
Compare the collapse of WTC building 7 as shown in the video
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/wtc_videos/wtc_videos.html
with the collapse as modeled by NIST in their document
http://wtc.nist.gov/media/NIST_NCSTAR_1-9A_for_public_comment.pdf
page 108, figure 4-62.
In the video the exterior vertical walls, except for a single vertical crease, remain connected to and supported by the large number of perimeter columns and retain their rectangular shape until late in the collapse. In NIST's theoretical model the exterior columns almost immediately buckle inwards over the building. Why?
Yeah, I noticed a simplified version of that information on Wikipedia. (That article also states that the National Construction Safety Team advised that fires in any one part of the building would typically have burnt out in 20 minutes. Yet the structural steel was fire protected with ratings of 2 hours plus.)
It’s really a matter of common sense: a fire-damaged building would, if at all, collapse in stages, not the level-roofed 6.5 second freefall shown in the news footage. And this applies especially to WTC 7, given its structural vulnerability on the east side.