I’m sure I’ve seen big chunks of that on Snopes, too…
The whole thing with all the elevens sounds like the sort of thing they would have. It’s the sort of silly thing people would be forwarding all over the place in e-mails.
I didn’t even read past the first part of that page when they posted it because it’s such gunk that’s all been brought up before.
But I’m glad I read Acci’s analysis to see what they were saying about MK Ultra. Based on their interpretations of the MK Ultra experiments, I’m thinking these guys may have been fed LSD by the government in some sort of experiment…. Not sure what that experiment would have been called though *cough* *cough*.
I didn’t even read past the first part of that page when they posted it because it’s such gunk that’s all been brought up before.
But I’m glad I read Acci’s analysis to see what they were saying about MK Ultra. Based on their interpretations of the MK Ultra experiments, I’m thinking these guys may have been fed LSD by the government in some sort of experiment…. Not sure what that experiment would have been called though *cough* *cough*.
I’m thinking the people that came up with that crap have been living on acid for a long time since they seem to be residing in some hallucinational world.
Well, after having had my attention drawn to this web forum by the person above, I decided to take a look at what they had to say. And what did they have to say? In the words of the website administrator himself:
That is the hard FACTS, and there is no need to argue about it when you can all KNOW the TRUTH about these things insted of just “believing” in something !!!
If you really want to be able to help us make a REAL change in society, you have to look at the FACTS and KNOW what you are talking about !!!!
THESE ARE THE FACTS !!!! People NEED to know this, because knowledge like this WILL SET YOU FREE !!!!
Come on man… You know people are lazy, wont believe in these kind of things anyway… At least you should post the answer, because that would / should make even the most lazy ones go “that cant be true? I dont believe that?“ and then they WILL go check it out, just to prove you wrong… Well: You are NOT wrong NOT AT ALL !!!!
PEOPLE DONT KNOW, THEY DONT WANT TO KNOW, THE DONT WANT TO SPEAK OUT
What about YOU waking up to the FACTS !?
. . . this NWO forum is NOT about what you personally are capable of handle, but what has been proven as the FACTS !!!!
If you had just been reading a LITTLE bit before posting in here, you would know that I do NOT wan´t people to believe or think about this, I wan´t well informed people who are able to do there OWN study and come to there OWN conclusion because then they will KNOW that what I post at this forum it is all TRUE !!!
Bottom line: Study the facts and KNOW what you are talking about !!!!
Do not believe in these kind of things, check out the information for your self and confirm that it is the FACTS we are talking about in here, and then go warn others.
Clearly, the idea that they claim to follow is that people should question what they’re told, do research, find out information with facts to back them up, and then spread the truth. And so I decided to take them up on this, and to look at the information they provided, do research to see how factual it is, and then to inform them of my results. Thus I took one section of information that they provided and looked through it carefully.
The first bit of information I questioned and researched was the forwarded e-mail that the site administrator, PaCmAn, had posted. It concerned the “amazing coincidence” of all the instances where the number eleven appears in relation to the 1993 WTC bombing, the various attacks on September 11th, the Madrid bombings, the invasion of Afghanistan, and whatever else. After careful research, I posted the following comment where I pointed out the many errors in the e-mail:
I am afraid that you appear to have been the victim of some false information.
3) Ramsin Yuseb (The terrorist who threatened to destroy the Twin Towers in 1993) has 11 letters.
Actually, his name doesn’t. It would have. . .about seven letters, I suppose, in its proper Arabic alphabet. When transliterated into letters as used in English, it can have all sorts of different numbers: Ramzi Yuseb (10 letters), Ramsin Youseff (13 letters), and so on.
4) Flight 77 which also hit Twin Towers, was carrying 65 passengers. 6+5=11
No, it was 64. 6+4=10. Also, Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, not the Twin Towers.
There’s a leap-day in there, which makes the difference.
The following verse is taken from the Quran, the Islamic holy book:
‘'For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome eagle. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allahand lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced: for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the lands of Allah and there was peace.“
That verse is number 9.11 of the Quran.
Sura 9, section 11 of the Quran says, “But even so, if they repent, establish regular prayers, and practice regular charity, they are your brethren in Faith: thus do We explain the Signs in detail, for those who understand.“ And nowhere in any sura does it have that passage mentioned above. It is completely made up.
This is one of those rare instances with all the 9/11 stuff where you don’t even have to trust second-hand information and reports. To find out that there is no such passage in the Quran, just pick up a copy of the book and look for yourself.
Try this and see how you feel afterwards, it made my hair stand on end:
Open Microsoft Word and do the following:
1. Type in capitals Q33 NY. This is the flight number of the first plane to hit one of the Twin Towers.
2. Highlight the Q33 NY.
3. Change the font size to 48.
4. Change the actual font to WINGDINGS
That’s based on the idea of an airplane with the flight number of Q33 NY hitting the World Trade Center. Well, the flight numbers of the two airplanes that hit in New York were AA11 and UA175, as all the world knows. The aircraft numbers are much more obscure, but were N334AA and N612UA. There is no Q33 NY; that designation doesn’t even fit any of the numbering systems (tail numbers, for example, start with “N”, not with “Q”). “Q33 NY” is something that somebody made up.
Although if you type “N334AA” in wingdings, it comes up with an interesting result: a skull and crossbones, a sheet of paper, a sheet of paper, a bunch of sheets of paper, a victory sign, and a victory sign. I personally interpret this to mean, “if we kill all this extra paperwork, we shall be very victorious!“.
Anyway, you should certainly be extra-careful when evaluating “facts” sent to you by the sources from which you received all the above information.
When PaCmAn replied to my initial comment, he praised me for actually doing research and looking into things for myself, rather than simply accepting what was said to me. And so I did some further questioning and researching and fact-finding.
My next post concerned PaCmAn’s original post on that thread, where he displayed all sorts of pictures of cut steel beams. It went as follows:
Concerning those pictures that you have in your original post here: you simply present the pictures, without providing any context of your own. So I’m not certain exactly what point you’re trying to get across regarding them.
I did a bit of research to find out just what people are saying about those pictures elsewhere. As is the case with just about every other subject in the whole 9/11 debate, there are people quite loudly and forcefully arguing one point or another about the pictures and what they mean. There seem to be several main questions, though:
-Can a man with a cutting torch make such a cut?
-Are the slag and the occasional yellow residue the sign of thermite reactions?
-Do traces of sulphur point to the use of incendiary devices?
-Could the beams have been cut by explosives or thermite?
-Are the beams cut at an angle so as to make the building fall a certain way?
So I looked around for myself to see if I can find any answers to these questions, or to at least narrow down what possible answers there are. Though there are a number of such photos that are debated, the first one that you posted seems to be one of the most commonly referred to, so for the sake of simplicity I’ll use that one as the main one I compare to. I’ll call it the “fireman picture”.
Regarding the idea of workmen with cutting torches not cutting steel beams in such a way, that’s quite obviously untrue. There are plenty of pictures of workmen doing just that, such as picture 5102 on this website. If you look closely at that picture, you can see that the worker has cut a good portion of the way through the column. And the angle of cut is pretty much the same as the angle of the cut column in the fireman picture, and the way that the steel has melted and run looks very similar as well. It’s obvious that not only can workmen with cutting torches cut a column in that way, but also that they did so.
For more on cutting steel with torches, you can look at this website. And for an example of the power of cutting torches, you can look here, and for an idea of the speed with which it can be done see here.
You can also see in the picture of the workman cutting that there is a big cloud of yellow smoke, which would go some way to explaining the yellow residue.
As has already been mentioned, the way the slag has run is very similar in both pictures as well. A close look at the angle-cut beam in the fireman picture shows us even more.
If you look down towards the base of the column, you’ll see where a bit of molten steel dripped down from it onto the pile of debris below. Now, the only way I can see for molten steel to drip from the column onto the top of that pile of debris is if the pile of debris was already there when the steel melted. Which means that the steel was melted after the building came apart. And that makes it very unlikely that the cutting of the column was the cause of the building falling down.
The obvious diagonal cutting marks across the cut surface of the beam further make it unlikely that the column was cut before or during the building’s collapse. Those sorts of marks are made by somebody going along with some sort of a tool and cutting gradually thought the column. As they cut, they hold the saw or cutting torch or whatever a bit longer in one place than another, or at a slightly different angle, or at a different speed or temperature. That’s how the surface gets the sort of parallel grooved look. Something like an explosive or a thermite charge wouldn’t be able to make such regular marks cutting through.
As for sulphur traces: it has been reported that traces of sulphur were found on the ends of some cut beams, and that this is a sign that thermite or thermate was used on them.
Thermate can indeed contain sulphur, and so would leave a sulphur trace behind. But it would also leave behind huge traces of aluminum, as well as larger traces of barium than sulphur (the proportions of sulphur to barium nitrate to aluminum/iron oxide in thermate is about 1:15:30). Aluminum would have been common enough in the buildings so as to possibly leave traces on the beams, but barium isn’t so common. So the presence of barium traces on the cuttings would be an argument in favour of the use of thermate, while the lack of barium (and even more the lack of aluminum) would be a strong argument against it. What results I’ve seen, including these ones used by Prof. Steven Jones, show lots of iron along with traces of sulphur, oxygen, copper and manganese. But no barium, and not even any aluminum.
Could the sulphur traces have been the result of something other than thermate, though? Was there another source of sulphur? Actually, there was a huge amount of sulphur all around the steel columns: gypsum sheetrock. Gypsum is used because, for small fires or larger low-temperature fires, it actually works somewhat as a fire retardant by releasing its stored water molecules (see Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry, 3rd Edition by Rayner-Canham and Overton for more on that, on pages 248-250). Gypsum is CaSO4*H2O, and has a Mohs hardness of only 2. Which means that it would easily fall apart and disintegrate if subjected to stress. In the presence of a catalyst such as carbon monoxide, it will release sulphur in a relatively low-temperature fire (less than 800°C; see Wheelock’s “Reductive Decomposition of Gypsum by Carbon Monoxide” from 1960’s Industrial and Engineering Chemisty, 52(3), 215, or Kuusik’s “Thermal Decomposition of Calcium Sulfate in Carbon Monoxide” from 1985’s Journal of Thermal Analysis 30, 187). Carbon monoxide is, of course, one of the main byproducts of a fire and would build up quickly in an enclosed space (Pitts’ “Algorithm for Estimating Carbon Monoxide Formation in Enclosed Fires”, Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Fire Safety Science). Also, any impurities in the gypsum can reduce the temperature needed another 100°C. So all we need is an enclosed fire with temperatures around 700°C to release sulphur oxides from gypsum. (This isn’t all some cutting-edge theoretical chemistry, either; it’s from the start of the last century, when a good source for sulphuric acid was being sought; see Hull’s “Sulfuric Acid from Anhydrite” in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, 49(8), 1204 from 1954). And sulphur oxides are the same products that you’d get from using sulphur in thermite. (See Chemistry of Pyrotechnics by Conkling for much more on sulphur and thermite, and Lyngfelt’s “Model of Sulfur Capture in Fluidised-Bed Boilers Under Conditions Changing Between Oxidizing and Reducing” in Chemical Engineering Science for more on the properties of sulphur). So the presence of the sulphur traces alone doesn’t tell us anything either in favour of or against the use of thermate. But the lack of traces of other thermate residues argues against the use of thermate. Unless there are shown to be traces of aluminum and barium, then the more likely source of the sulphur is from the gypsum that was encasing the steel columns.
And what of the idea that explosive or thermite could have been used to cut through the support columns? Well, first remember that there’s a difference between thermite and an explosive. Thermite works by suddenly increasing in temperature and melting or burning its way through things. And explosives use a physical shockwave to simply smash things apart. So the two things work in completely different ways and have different effects. In fact, trying to use the two at the same time wouldn’t work, as the explosive would disperse the thermite before the thermite got a chance to do anything.
Let’s consider an explosive, then. Keep in mind that there’s no such thing as a “one-way” explosive. Any explosive material will explode with roughly equal force in all directions if left unhindered. A block of TNT floating free would, upon exploding, send a spherical shock-wave expanding out in all directions from it. In that situation, a steel beam would only be hit by a small fraction of the explosive force as the rest of the force went off in other directions. This would be a problem for anybody wanting to cut a beam; since only something like 5% of the explosive’s force is hitting the beam in the right place, you need to use twenty times the amount of explosive that you’d require if you could direct all of the force properly. Also, the other 95% of the explosion would blast the heck out of the rest of the area, and in the case of the World Trade Center would have simply disintegrated the building rather than knock out its supports so it fell.
Obviously that didn’t happen. So if explosives were used, then they must have had their force directed. This means that less explosive is needed, and also that less blast damage is done to the rest of the surroundings. So some sort of a shaped charge would be needed. Looking again at the pictures of the cut beams, we can see that they’re fairly clean cuts. The edges are a bit ragged, yes, but they’re not all warped and mangled. For an explosive to do that, it would have to be a line-shaped explosion. This would mean a linear shaped charge was used. Such things do exist.
So far, so good. But what would it take to set up linear shaped charges to cut through 5-inch-thick hardened steel columns? First, let’s take a look at the charges we’d have to use. Here is a webpage of a company that makes such things. Notice several things from the chart: the size of the charges, the optimum standoff distance, the amount that it penetrates, and what is being cut. Taking the last thing first, we see that the numbers are based on cutting mild steel. The support columns in the buildings were certainly not made of mild steel. So the cutting performance of these explosives will be a lot less than the numbers given here.
Now, look at the most powerful charge that they make: it cuts through, under perfect conditions, 40 mm of mild steel. The support columns were about 127 mm of hardened steel. The most powerful linear charge these people make wouldn’t even cut a quarter of the way through those columns. And from the relatively clean cut on the columns, we can see that they were cut all the way through.
Then let’s consider the standoff distance. Standoff distance is a space that you have between the explosive and the surface that you’re wanting to cut through. Due to the physics of the situation, linear shaped charges cut better if there is a certain standoff, rather than being pressed directly against the surface. And the more powerful the explosive, the greater the standoff distance. We see that the most powerful charge on that chart has an optimum standoff of 19 mm. Combined with the thickness of the charge itself (26.4 mm), that give us 45.4 mm. And we’ve already seen that that charge is far underpowered; for a linear charge that would cut through all five inches of those columns, we’d be looking at a very bulky combination of charge and standoff. This wouldn’t be some little thing. Which would make transporting, placing, and hiding the charges a whole lot more difficult. It’s still possible, yes, but tricky.
Again, though, let’s look at the cut end of the beam. Putting aside the matter of what appear to be burn marks from a cutting torch, we have lots of molten steel dripping down. But remember, explosives don’t work by melting the substance, and actually work against anything that would melt the steel. Added to that is the melted steel being dripped down the outside of the column. A shaped charge could only do that if it were placed along the inside of the column. While I suppose that it would be technically possible for somebody to have sent little remote-controlled robots down into the columns to set the charges, that’s getting to be a bit ridiculous. And it still wouldn’t explain why there’s melted steel.
So, it wasn’t any type of explosives that did the cutting. What about thermite, then? Thermite acts by heat and melting, so it would result in the blobs of molten steel that are the main proof against explosives. But what is thermite? Well, thermite is basically a mixture of a metal oxide and a metal fuel. These react together to form high heat concentration molten products, letting the thermite melt its way through things. A binder isn’t used to hold the thermite composition together, as the binding agent would need to turn into a gas upon ignition so as to not interfere with the thermite reaction, and this would take away energy from the liquid products. And the liquid products are what we want, since they’re what do the actual work. (Conkling, John. Chemistry of Pyrotechnics, pp. 134-136)
What this all means, the lack of a binder and the use of liquids, is that thermite reactions are strongly influenced by gravity. There is no immense force behind a thermite reaction, as there is in an explosion, so the liquid isn’t propelled strongly in any particular direction by the ignition of the charge. So gravity pulls it downwards. This isn’t much of a problem if you have the steel beam situated horizontally, since the liquid can simply drip down onto it and do its job. If the thermite charge is on the side of a vertical beam, though, then you’d have the liquid run all down the side of the beam rather than just cutting its way into the metal (which would require the liquid to flow at right angles to the pull of gravity).
You can limit this problem by encasing the thermite in a heat-resistant shell with the only opening being pressed against the vertical surface of the column, but that will only keep the thermite liquid from being pulled by gravity down the outside of the column. There’s still the five inches of steel it has to work its way through on the inside as well. Once the liquid works its way into the soft steel and no longer has the heat-resistant casing of the thermite charge to restrain it, it will begin to be pulled downwards by gravity again. As the molten thermite material eats its way into the steel, it will flow downwards as well. So we wouldn’t end up with the nice cuts that are level all the way through the thickness of the metal of the column; we’d end up with messy melted holes that flowed outwards from the thermite charges. Whatever cut through the column wasn’t flowing like a liquid. So it wasn’t thermite.
Keep in mind, too, that the volume of iron that thermite melts is less than 20% the volume of thermite used. So to melt one cubic inch of iron, you need well over five cubic inches of thermite. And steel is even harder to melt than is iron, and you’d need enough thermite to cut through five inches of it. And added to that is the heat-resistant thermite casing. Once more, then, we’re talking about huge and bulky charges needed to cut through the columns.
It wasn’t cut by an explosive, and it wasn’t cut by thermite. It also shows signs of being cut by hand, and after the building fell.
