Seven Questions about 9/11

[James H. Fetzer]

Seven Questions about 9/11

Jim Fetzer

As a former Marine Corps officer (1962-66), who spent his 35-year career offering courses in logic, critical thinking, and scientific reasoning to college students, it troubles me when my government appears to be lying to the American people. On this 4th of July, therefore, I want to share with you some of the questions that have arisen in my mind about the events of 9/11, which have been used to justify wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at enormous cost in lives lost and resources expended. I don't claim to have all of the answers, but here are some of my questionsseven for the 4th of July!

(1) The early explosions

In their study, "Seismic Proof: 9/11 was an inside job", Gordon Ross and Craig Furlong (one an engineer, one a numerical analyst) present evidence that there were enormous explosions in the subbasements of both of the Twin Towers prior to the impacts of any planes on those buildings. They used extremely reliable data from a geological laboratory run by Columbia University and radar and FAA data to come to the conclusion that those explosions occurred 14 and 17 seconds before those planes hit the towers:



My first question, therefore, is how were those 19 Islamic terrorists able to arrange these explosions, which drained the water from sprinkler systems that would have otherwise extinguished the rather modest office fires that remained after the jet fuel was consumed in those spectacular fireballs? I have given this a lot of thought and I can't figure out how they did that.

(2) The impossible entry

We have all seen the footage of Flight 175 hitting the South Tower, which is the only reasonably distinct video coverage we have of any of the four plane crashes. There are plenty of copies of the Michael Hezarkhani video, which was taken more or less from the side, and still others of the Evan Fairbanks video, which was taken looking straight up the side of the South Tower. I have been puzzled, when I have taken a closer look, the plane actually enters the buildings without crumpling, without losing its wings or tail, and with no bodies, seats, or luggage falling to the ground. Here's what I mean:



The problem I have is that, as a student of physics in high school and college, I learned that the impact of a moving plane impacting with a stationary building should create the same effects as those of a moving building impacting with a stationary plane. We would not expect a car crashing into an enormous tree to disappear into the tree. My question is, absent the suspension of the laws of physics on 9/11, how could this occur?

(3) The sizing problem

Perhaps because of my military background, I have found the Pentagon attack of special interest. The Department of Defense originally released five frames instead of any of the more than eighty (80) videos that would have captured exactly what happened. Although three of those videos have subsequently been released, none of them shows more about the crash than those original five, four of which show the spectacular fireball, the other the somewhat obscure image just above the gate mechanism that is conveniently labeled "plane". It looked too small to me. So I asked a friend of minewho is better at these things than am Iif he could size the image of a Boeing 757 to the tail shown in the frame that the Pentagon had released:



Imagine my surprise when it turned out that Flight 77 should have been more than twice the size of the plane in the Pentagon's own frame. So my third question is, why isn't the plane in the image the size of a Boeing 757?

(4) The lack of debris

Although many Americans are unaware, the hit point on the Pentagon is on the ground floor. There is a hole about 10' high and 16-17' wide, which is surrounded by a chain-link fence, two enormous spools of cable and a pair of cars, where there are unbroken windows beside and above the opening. What we do not see is an enormous pile of aluminum debris, broken wings or the tail, bodies, seats or luggage. Remarkably, not even the engines were recovered from the crash sitealthough a part of a compressor, which was too small to have come from a 757 and too large for a cruise missilewas later reported to have been found. Even more striking to me, however, is this photo of the civilian lime-green fire-trucks as they extinguish the fires:



Since these fire trucks arrived after the crash and spent fifteen minutes or so putting it out, I have been struck by the clear, green, unblemished Pentagon lawn. It looks so smooth, I expect Tiger to appear with his caddy to practice his game. My question, therefore, is, why is there no debris on the lawn?

(5) The planted fuselage

Later, of course, debris would start showing up. Since there was none even as the fire trucks were extinguishing the fires, it has to have come from somewhere. It would have been difficult to have had officers and enlisted men carry pieces of debris out onto the lawn without being observed, so it has occurred to me that perhaps it was dropped from a C-130, which was circling the Pentagon that morning. That's my best guess. I am open to other possibilities, but I haven't been able to think of real alternatives. One piece of debris has been used to cement the case for the crash of Flight 77:



One of the oddities about this debris is that it shows no signs of having been exposed to those fireballs and includes a piece of vine. Another student of the Pentagon, James Hanson, a newspaper reporter who earned his law degree from the University of Michigan College of Law, has traced that debris to an American Airlines 757 that crashed in a rain forest above Cali, Columbia in 1995. "It was the kind of slow-speed crash that would have torn off paneling in this fashion, with no fires, leaving them largely intact." My question is, how did this piece of fuselage wind up on the Pentagon lawn?

(6) The dumpster fires

As though that were not disturbing enough, I was also puzzled why, later in the day, when rumors were circulating that the Capitol might be next and the members of Congress rushed out onto the steps of the building, when they looked across the Potomac, they witnesses billowing black clouds of smoke. That struck me as rather odd, since the lime green fire trucks had put out the modest fires long ago. When I took a closer look, I discovered that these black clouds of smoke were not coming from the Pentagon itself but from a series of enormous dumpsters in front of the building. See what I mean:





When I was still living in Duluth before my retirement in June of 2006, another student of the Pentagon came by and showed me forty-four (44) more frames of the same thing, where you could actually see light between the dumpsters and the building. So my question is, why was it necessary to fake fires coming from the Pentagon if a plane had actually crashed there?

(7) The absence of interest

Since I have been unable to discover the answers to questions like thesewhere I actually have many moreit has dumbfounded me that nearly ten years after the fact, the mass media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN has shown no interest at all in addressing them. Here are three examples of why it seems to me these questions should be burning issues in every major media outlet in this country, where we are confronted only by silence:

(a) Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the Co-Chairs of the 9/11 Commission, have long since published WITHOUT PRECEDENT: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION (2006), in which they explain their frustration at the lack of cooperation from the administration, citing especially the fact that the Pentagon provided three different accounts of the events of 9/11, not a very reassuring indication that they got everything right. And this report is not from a "conspiracy theorist" but from the co-chairs of the 9/11 inquiry.

(b) A former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in three administrations, Dr. Steve Pieczenik, has revealed not only that Osama bin Laden actually died on or about 15 December 2001 (as David Ray Griffin, OSAMA BIN LADEN: DEAD OR ALIVE (2009) explained), but that he had been told by a high-ranking general that 9/11 was a "false flag" attack, which was done by the government in order to arouse the American people to support wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq. And this guy earned his Ph.D. at MIT.

© And Alan Sabrosky, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan and is a graduate of the US Army War College, has explained that 9/11 was conceived by neo-cons in and out of the Department of Defense who wanted to advance the proposals of Project for the New American Century by taking advantage of the demise of the Soviet Union to expand the power of the sole remaining superpower by creating an empire around the world, but worried that Americans would not support those wars absent "a new Pearl Harbor".

Now I cannot claim to know for certain that what we are being told by Lee Hamilton, Thomas Kean, Steve Pieczenik, and Alan Sabrosky is true. I can tell you that it is consistent with my own research and that of others with whom I have been in collaboration since founding Scholars for 9/11 Truth. In case you may think that I am one of those "conspiracy theorists" myself where I have done a lot of research on JFK as well as on 9/11 just ask yourself whether my six questions deserve answers and why the American media has been ignoring them in the land of the free and home of the brave!

Jim Fetzer is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth and maintains a blog about issues of public interest at http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com.

[Ed Jewett]

"In America, telling the truth is a treasonous act. The inverse of that is that selling misinformation in a republic and an open society is behavior that brings rewards from the centers of control. Without appropriate social agreement or understanding, we are simply telling lies to one another. That's the way it works in dysfunctional relationships. We then have what amounts to a Potemkin village, a maskirovka, in which purposeful deception is allowed and fraud and corruption are actively promoted as the way of transaction."


That was written by me and serves as my signature line at CommonGroundCommonSense.org

[Kyle Burnett]

We would not expect a car crashing into an enormous tree to disappear into the tree.

Sure, were that enormous tree carved out into a bunch of open office space with windows all over the face like the towers were:



A car going fast enough would shred right through that, or a enormous tree carved into something like it.

So I asked a friend of minewho is better at these things than am Iif he could size the image of a Boeing 757 to the tail shown in the frame that the Pentagon had released:

You would do well to have your friend try again with this image of a 757:



The angle of the plane relative to the camera in that picture is far more comparable to the one the pentagon released than the image your friend used.

Another student of the Pentagon, James Hanson, a newspaper reporter who earned his law degree from the University of Michigan College of Law, has traced that debris to an American Airlines 757 that crashed in a rain forest above

Do you not realize that your second link there is pointing out the fact that the James Hanson's supposed rain forest vine looks a lot more like airplane insulation?:



As for the rest of your arguments about the Pentagon, 911review.com does well addressing them in their Errors section.

[James H. Fetzer]

Kyle,

Your replies are superficial and not well-founded. As an example, I took a look at the windows on the Twin Towers, which were 18" across in frames that were three meters wide. Since there were no windows between floors, that means that less than 50% of the fascade of the towers was glass. Suppose that parts had passed through those openings: more than 50% would have crumpled outside the buildings, with wings and tail breaking off and bodies, seats, and luggage falling to the ground. None of that actually happened, where the plane simply passed effortlessly into the buildings.

Moreover, Flight 11 hit the North Tower at an angle and thereby intersected with seven (7) floors, while Flight 175 intersected with eight (8). Each of those floors consisted of steel trusses connected to the core columns at one end and the external support columns at the other. They were filled with 4-8" of concrete, where, at 208' a side, they represented an acre of concrete apiece. Imagine what would happen if a plane were to collide with just one of those (seven or eight) floors suspended in space!

As for the angle, the plume of white smoke exiting from the plane appears to be perpendicular to the building, which falsifies your argument based upon perspective. Jack White did the study, where I have found his research extremely valuable, just as it was in this case. I love it when you cites some other source instead of offering your own arguments, which suggests you don't know what you are talking about. That seems to me to fit you to a "t". Your arguments are not serious. I am not impressed.

Jim

We would not expect a car crashing into an enormous tree to disappear into the tree.

Sure, were that enormous tree carved out into a bunch of open office space with windows all over the face like the towers were:



A car going fast enough would shred right through that, or a enormous tree carved into something like it.

So I asked a friend of minewho is better at these things than am Iif he could size the image of a Boeing 757 to the tail shown in the frame that the Pentagon had released:

You would do well to have your friend try again with this image of a 757:



The angle of the plane relative to the camera in that picture is far more comparable to the one the pentagon released than the image your friend used.

Another student of the Pentagon, James Hanson, a newspaper reporter who earned his law degree from the University of Michigan College of Law, has traced that debris to an American Airlines 757 that crashed in a rain forest above

Do you not realize that your second link there is pointing out the fact that the James Hanson's supposed rain forest vine looks a lot more like airplane insulation?:



As for the rest of your arguments about the Pentagon, 911review.com does well addressing them in their Errors section.

[Kyle Burnett]

As an example, I took a look at the windows on the Twin Towers, which were 18" across in frames that were three meters wide.

Where are you getting these flagrantly wrong figures from?

Imagine what would happen if a plane were to collide with just one of those (seven or eight) floors suspended in space!

There's no need to imagine, Purdue did a simulation demonstrating when a plane hits multiple floors suspended by a steel columned facade and core:



Granted, the fuged to angle of the plane down to cause more damage to the building in support of the notion that the impact damage and resulting fires caused the buildings to come down, but in general their approximation of the physics of such a plane impacting such a building is reasonably accurate, while yours is apparently derived from watching too much Loony Toons.

As for the angle, the plume of white smoke exiting from the plane appears to be perpendicular to the building

The angle I refer to is the one on which the light posts were downed, and it isn't even close to perpendicular, as depicted here:



As for the smoke, it dissipates with time, hence the portion of smoke trail further from the engine and further from the camera has expanded more than that which is near to the engine and the camera, leaving them appearing comparable in size due to the perspective.

I love it when you cites some other source instead of offering your own arguments, which suggests you don't know what you are talking about. That seems to me to fit you to a "t". Your arguments are not serious. I am not impressed.

Says the guy who cited a source poking fun at the argument he was making. Have you still not come to terms with the fact that you did that?

[James H. Fetzer]

Well, the 18" width of the windows came from here, but I can't recall at the moment where the three meter intervals was derived. If the sides were 63 m, then if there were 21 separations including windows, at 3 m apiece, that would yield the result.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center:

Yamasaki's design for the World Trade Center, unveiled to the public on January 18, 1964, called for a square plan approximately 208 feet (63 m) in dimension on each side.[17][23] The buildings were designed with narrow office windows 18 inches (46 cm) wide, which reflected Yamasaki's fear of heights as well as his desire to make building occupants feel secure.[24] Yamasaki's design included building facades sheathed in aluminum-alloy.[25] The World Trade Center was one of the most striking American implementations of the architectural ethic of Le Corbusier and it was the seminal expression of Yamasaki's gothic modernist tendencies.[26]

I don't quite understand your research methodology. If you really want to dispute the figures I have given, then cite another source with different ones. The Purdue study was a sham and I know of no serious student of 9/11 who thinks otherwise. (Clearly, you are not a serious student of 9/11.) If any more proof were required, you have taken a diagram of the official approach to the Pentagon to refute my observation of the approach approximately perpendicular to the building, but I was based in that on the sizing photo study, where you can even see the shadow cast is perpendicular. So was talking about a frame released by the Pentagon, while you were talking about a diagram. The photo may be faked, but we know the diagram cannot possibly be right. And your reliance upon animations speaks volumes about your research capabilities.

As an example, I took a look at the windows on the Twin Towers, which were 18" across in frames that were three meters wide.

Where are you getting these flagrantly wrong figures from?

Imagine what would happen if a plane were to collide with just one of those (seven or eight) floors suspended in space!

There's no need to imagine, Purdue did a simulation demonstrating when a plane hits multiple floors suspended by a steel columned facade and core:



Granted, the fuged to angle of the plane down to cause more damage to the building in support of the notion that the impact damage and resulting fires caused the buildings to come down, but in general their approximation of the physics of such a plane impacting such a building is reasonably accurate, while yours is apparently derived from watching too much Loony Toons.

As for the angle, the plume of white smoke exiting from the plane appears to be perpendicular to the building

The angle I refer to is the one on which the light posts were downed, and it isn't even close to perpendicular, as depicted here:



As for the smoke, it dissipates with time, hence the portion of smoke trail further from the engine and further from the camera has expanded more than that which is near to the engine and the camera, leaving them appearing comparable in size due to the perspective.

I love it when you cites some other source instead of offering your own arguments, which suggests you don't know what you are talking about. That seems to me to fit you to a "t". Your arguments are not serious. I am not impressed.

Says the guy who cited a source poking fun at the argument he was making. Have you still not come to terms with the fact that you did that?

[Jeffrey Orling]

Fetzer, you understanding of what the collision of a jet plane with the steel box columns and spandrels would look like is rather bizarre. Are you trying to assert that the columns would not deform or break and most of the plane would bounce off in "intact" sections?... That only the "weaker" glass of the facade would yield to the plane's fuselage?

Suppose you had a balloon of 10,000 gallon and it was moving at 400 mph and it slammed into the towers... no aluminum skin or hardened engines or landing gear... just a huge rubber bladder filled with water or fuel . What would happen? Would the 400 mph volume of liquid damage the facade columns? Would it break them or bounce off and disperse into a mist. Or perhaps a both? Would the shape of the balloon matter?

Perhaps you can explain what your understanding of such a collision would look like.

[James H. Fetzer]

The building had an intricate lattice structure. The floors were steel trusses, attached at one end to the core columns and at the other to the external support columns. They were filled with 4-8" of concrete, which--at 208' x 208'--represented an acre of concrete apiece. Flight 11 intersected with seven (7) floors, Flight 175 with eight (8). They posed massive horizontal resistance. The velocity of the plane would have gone to zero, where most of the fuselage crumpled, the wings and tail broke off, and bodies, seats, and luggage fell to the ground. None of that happened. If you understand the damage that a tiny bird (weighing only a few ounces) can do to a commercial carrier, imagine what would happen if such a plane collided with one of the floors suspended in space. I am sure you can't get your mind around that. But then, what's new?

Fetzer, you understanding of what the collision of a jet plane with the steel box columns and spandrels would look like is rather bizarre. Are you trying to assert that the columns would not deform or break and most of the plane would bounce off in "intact" sections?... That only the "weaker" glass of the facade would yield to the plane's fuselage?

Suppose you had a balloon of 10,000 gallon and it was moving at 400 mph and it slammed into the towers... no aluminum skin or hardened engines or landing gear... just a huge rubber bladder filled with water or fuel . What would happen? Would the 400 mph volume of liquid damage the facade columns? Would it break them or bounce off and disperse into a mist. Or perhaps a both? Would the shape of the balloon matter?

Perhaps you can explain what your understanding of such a collision would look like.

[Jeffrey Orling]

The design of the towers from the PANYNJ was driven by economic concerns. They wanted enormous flexible rental area on a relatively small site. The only way to achieve this was to build up. NYC was asked to give all sorts of special zoning and building code waivers to accommodate the towers.

Building them tall with conventional materials and methods would be too heavy, too slow and way too expensive. Every additional floor added to the height meant that all the columns below it had to be carry that weight. So the design load for the floors was reduced from 100 psf to 58 psf lowering the weight of the floor system by over 40%.

The next problem was getting the people up into the towers since the normal use for elevators would consume most of the rentable floor space. This meant the innovative express and local elevator system which was essentially 3 - 32 floor towers stacked one atop the other with 3 lobbies. The ground floor served the other two lobbies at 44 and 78 plus all the local floors up to 41 and the public spaces at floors 106 and 107 - restaurant and observation decks in the two towers.

The whole tower was built like an erector set and the floor assemblies were only of 3 types long span, long span with a corner and short span. They assembles were so light weight that the metal floor pans were on .03" thick and the "concrete" had no stone aggregate and used light weight fly ash and entrained air to lighten them as much as possible. Each floor weighed about 1000 tons and was designed to support about 900 tons of superimposed dead and live loads. Floor 93 was identical in design as floor 33! The only "different" floors were the 8 mechanical floors which carried heavy HVAC equipment, huge tanks of water, and electrical substations. They were separating the 3 stacked towers with one set of mechanical floors above the lobby and another below the roof.

No buildings have been built like that before or since.

[Jeffrey Orling]

A bird hitting a jet liner doesn't survive... it is crushed and not much will remain. But it's mass will punch through the thin metal skin of a jet liner.

Fetzer you need to study some basic physics and stop with looking at the world with a hollywood-like conception of the world designed for young children.

Watch some crash tests.