Demolition Access To The WTC Towers - Kevin Ryan

[Peter Presland]

Peter,
My position of fires and impact is and always was:

No single factor is responsible for the destruction we saw. it was a cascading series of runaway progressive (factors/failures/causes) which in the aggregate facilitated the collapse... among those factors was a key one - the designs themselves. Plane strike mechanical damage alone wouldn't do it, fires alone would take lots of time to do it (as in 7), loss of fire protection would not do it, burning fuel alone would not do it, loss of sprinklers alone would not do it. All of them together could and did do it. Could the kick off be accomplished by some devices in lieu of heat weakening? Why not if they technology exists to engineer and *detonate* them. But there is no evidence in support of such devices. Ryan and others offers the idea that it was possible and who may have made it possible. Food for thought... speculation but not evidence.

Then I did misunderstand your position.

For a whole raft of evidence-based reasons, I cannot accept that ".... all of them together can and did do it". My own working hypothesis is that, at the very least, an external event additional to all those factors would have been required to initiate a possible progressive collapse, but that additional 'insurance charges' were probably also placed at strategic positions well below the impact zones. I accept that the evidence for this is open to different interpretations, but it is evidence nonetheless. Unless and until I come across something new that renders my 'working hypothesis' untenable, I really am not interested in exploring the existing public domain minutiae of the collapses any further, if only because I find the Kevin Ryan approach more challenging and potentially productive.

I have not listened to the Ryan interviews you mentioned. I do however accept that he is in the 'conspiracy' camp. He may well have been making the case you describe, but his book certainly does not set out to make that case. It simply marshals masses of factual information about people and their positions, responsibilities, actions etc, prior to and during the 9/11 events - and pretty startling stuff it is too.

I do believe that Ryan does not accept the fact that the collapses could manifest as they did IF there was sufficient heat present in the critical weak locations in the structure to kick off a progressive cascading series of failures leading to global collapse. In the recently closed thread it became clear that this critical data can not be derived by debate and accordingly more date (accurate) would be required to rule in or rule out heat as the energy which tipped the structures toward global collapse.

And that 'IF' is the crucial condition. I accept that your ROOSD is a well-grounded theoretical possibility were the above impact-zone sections to suddenly free-fall 10-15 stories onto the relatively undamaged floors below but, well-grounded or not, it has no bearing on the evidence Ryan has set out in his book. He says nothing about his belief (if he has one) about the post initiation collapse process.

I don't know that Ryan addresses whether he believes there is a basis to accept the notion that radical Islamists could pull of the 9/11 attacks.

He doesn't put it quite like that. Like myself, I think he would agree that a bunch of hard-drinking, whoring, disaffected 'Islamist' misfits were deeply involved in the events of 9/11. The questions he seeks to illuminate are 'who exactly protected, steered, facilitated, financed and controlled them?' and if they were indeed killed in those aeroplanes, 'did they know that was to be their fate?'. Also who traded foreknowledge of the events?' and who authorised the destruction of the remaining records that would have identified them?

Collectively, the people Ryan identifies certainly did have motive means and opportunity. The Islamic misfits, as I would prefer to describe them, may well have been angry and disaffected enough to WANT to hurt 'The Great Satan', but they could not have pulled it off without either the sustained gross dereliction of duty of the entire US Military, Security, Intelligence apparatus, or the deliberate and determined facilitation of their dreams by elements of that same apparatus. My money remains on the latter.