https://www.kezi.com/content/news/575294492.html or at least that's the summary I get from a statement from "9/11 Families United", connecting dots through these redactions is not a skill I have.
There is only one document in there at present; Order 14040 suggests there should be more showing up in the next six months, with a chunk of stuff required to be up by 60 days after the date of the order (which was the 9th), another, larger chunk by 120 days after, and even more by 180 days after. So if you are interested in seeing how much the FBI is willing to let you see of what they discovered (assuming none of these documents are actually disinformation) then you probably want to make one of your systems check this URL regularly.
"assuming none of these documents are actually disinformation" that is always a possibility, the government does not have a good history of telling the truth.
More saliently, the NORAD timeline of events was dodgy enough that the 9/11 commission referred the matter to the Inspector General of the DoD and DOT.
"Commission staff believes there is sufficient evidence that the false statements made to the commission were deliberately false. The false testimony served a purpose: to obscure mistakes on the part of the F.A.A. and the military, and to overstate the readiness of the military to intercept and, if necessary, shoot down UAL 93."
For splicing together a bunch of different conversations, it sounds pretty methodical to me.
@ 8:14 AM, original ATC (Boston Center) loses contact, attempts to reestablish contact, alerts various parties of no radio flight, makes them aware its flying without transponder, and clears traffic on its presumed heading. There's a lot of work to search on radars to fix the plane's exact position.
@ 8:20, word comes in (from American) that confirms it's a hijacking, and related centers spin up to work that. Note, they're initially calculating endurance, given that hijackers typically want to fly somewhere.
@ 8:34, the local Air National Guard is alerted, with a heads up that an official request will be coming shortly.
@ 8:37, position is confirmed visually by another plane, with the hijacked plane descending.
@ 8:38, NORAD (NEADS) is officially contacted, to report the flight has been hijacked and requesting an intercept.
@ 8:41, military pilots are readying.
@ 8:47, the World Trade Center is on fire.
33 minutes, to react to a situation that hasn't really happened in American airspace for a long, long time (ever?).
The only gap I could fault all involved with would be somehow expecting the unexpected -- that plane hijackers wouldn't be interested in flying the plane to safety, but would instead intentionally fly it into a building.
If that had been in the realm of considered possibilities, I assume fighters would have been scrambled much earlier.
Edit: Casting about for an analogy.
Imagine I called you up one morning, and I told you that you needed to have a VP or higher in your company authorize an action that might have serious legal ramifications, and needed to be coordinated with VP+ counterparts in 2 separate companies you've had some dealing with.
We'll even put aside uncertainty and doubt. You trust me, and want to make it happen.
The NORAD testimony I was noting is in fact contradicted by these NORAD tapes. To quote Vanity Fair's piece again:
"In the chronology presented to the 9/11 commission, Colonel Scott put the time NORAD was first notified about United 93 at 9:16 a.m., from which time, he said, commanders tracked the flight closely. (It crashed at 10:03 a.m.) If it had indeed been necessary to "take lives in the air" with United 93, or any incoming flight to Washington, the two armed fighters from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia would have been the ones called upon to carry out the shootdown. In Colonel Scott's account, those jets were given the order to launch at 9:24, within seconds of NEADS's receiving the F.A.A.'s report of the possible hijacking of American 77, the plane that would ultimately hit the Pentagon. This time line suggests the system was starting to work: the F.A.A. reports a hijacking, and the military reacts instantaneously. Launching after the report of American 77 would, in theory, have put the fighters in the air and in position over Washington in plenty of time to react to United 93."
But it didn't happen that way, and the two fighters that were over Washington that would have taken down United 93 were unarmed after recent training missions. If they had taken down the plane, it would not have been a shootdown, but a kamikaze mission: Marc H. Sasseville would take out the cockpit and Heather Penney would take out the tail, on the premise that just taking out an engine could leave them with a functioning glider.
> The only gap I could fault all involved with would be somehow expecting the unexpected -- that plane hijackers wouldn't be interested in flying the plane to safety, but would instead intentionally fly it into a building.
Sadly it really shouldn't have been unexpected.
> ...between 1994 and 2001 CTC [CIA Counter Terrorism Center] collated no less than twelve specific reports warning that terrorists were scheming to hijack an airliner and fly it into a prestige target. Several of the reports actually named bin Laden and al Qai'da..
(from the book Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-Ups by John Hughes-Wilson)
The amount of intelligence collected really shouldn't have been missed. There was tons of it, from all sorts of sources, including suspected terrorists on lists that were taking flying courses and asking about flying big airliners, who didn't have any interest in landing or taking-off It was an epic failure on the scale of the US intelligence epic failure of Pearl Harbor.
That's making the mistake of assuming these reports were unique in some way, as opposed to being part of a stream of thousands of other reports, some including even more threatening implications.
In low signal, high noise scenarios, the hindsight bias is not saying "We should have known this meant something," but rather saying "We should have given this particular thing more attention."
In our world, it happens with logs. Post- or during an incident, reading back through a log to find the culprit is trivial.
But how easy is it to have a log continually dump to your terminal, all day, for weeks, months, years, and identify the root cause line as it happens and before other monitoring tripwires go off?
I’ve always heard this line of reasoning/evidence, but never seen a break down of how improbable all of these events were, or how publicly known any of these could have been. For example, was the one large training exercise the impetus for many of the smaller exercises to be done simultaneously, and also somewhat knowable to an interested outsider? If so, it could be that the attack was planned at that time to take advantage of it. Or, is it the case that all of these exercises were super secret, rare, and independently planned, which would be much stranger and/or more suspicious. Seems like this is still somewhat knowable and relevant analysis that some enterprising journalist could undertake.
Al-Qaeda hit upon a weakness of US response (partially through luck and partially through their own strategizing): the US intelligence community was still thinking about threats in the Cold War model and hijackings were a blind spot. They generally weren't anticipating hijackings to weaponize the plane, and they weren't anticipating an organized multi-hijacking scenario. Partially because both scenarios are militarily ineffective... Intelligence community thinking hadn't come around to the idea of warfare directed at civilian targets purely to demonstrate that the government was an ineffective defender (as opposed to warfare directed at military targets to damage and diminish military capacity).
Most people don't understand watergate at all. Nixon is far less culpable than people like John Dean for example and I doubt it was ever about "spying" on DNC internal ops rather than some personal project of Dean's not even related to politics. Anyway as the saying goes the victor writes the history.
Basically, what the FBI told us about their fault: "We did not have enough agent speaking arabic" and "if the CIA shared those files, we would have had the ability to prevent this".
What i've heard from someone who worked with the DGSE at that time: the US gov was actually told by at least three agencies to be careful, and that the MI6 actually had details about trained pilots.
Honest question, what value would it have provided the Saudis to support the 9/11 bombings?
The US has had a long, largely positive relationship with the Kingdom to include extensive economic investment as well as military support since at least the '50s (to sometimes an unconscionable degree considering some of the Saudi excesses in the war with Yemen.) It seems like maintaining this relationship with the US is in the best interests of both the Kingdom and its ruling class. The US seemingly continues to support Saudi Arabia at least in part as a check on the influence of Iran in the region.
There are some tensions and differences in ideology between the very religious rural areas and wealthy urban elites, so even the participation of individual Saudis doesn't seem to say much about the position of the Saudi government and the ideology of the state.
Oil money has made the leaders of Saudi Arabia less extreme. (Aside from the odd journalistic kidnapping, torture, and dismemberment...)
And why should it not? They have money, respect, and as posh of a lifestyle as can be bought.
But below the leaders, there's a lot of royal middle management with access to enough money to easily fund terrorism in the amounts we're talking about. And those people absolutely don't have the geopolitical pragmatism of their higher-ups.
What? You think Dick Cheney was the only shareholder of the major military manufacturers and suppliers who would (literally) make a killing after 9/11?
"In addition to the university and its personnel, we would like thank Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth) for providing the funding to conduct this research. We also want to thank John Thiel for approaching Dr. Hulsey to conduct this research. We also want to thank independent, external reviewers and the public who provided comments during a two- month review period."
Not the OP but I’m not reading 109 pages of analysis from 9-11 truthers in order to work out whether their conclusions are correct. That’s not the genetic fallacy either, I’d love someone else who I trust to do it and get back to me with what they find.
I studied structural engineering. The 2008 NIST report changed my view. Beforehand I thought the 9/11 A&E for Truth movement may have had some valid points. I suspected it was due to poor construction inspection or possibly corruption but I didn't rule out conspiracy completely. But when I read the report and it explained the mechanisms for failure I was completely convinced. Heat expanded the beams which pushed the exterior columns out of plane which, in conjunction with the heat, caused their failure. I don't know a single engineer that has read the report that disagrees with its findings.
All of this to say, there are plenty of engineers that may have signed on to the original pledge that may have read the report and changed their minds. I never signed it, but I don't recommend buying into their claims. We have reasonable answers now.
I expect I'll get thoroughly thrashed and branded an idiot for daring to ask, but since you studied structural engineering, I really want to take the opportunity.
Is your comment exclusively for the two main towers, or tower 7? I have spoken with engineers who have reluctantly expressed confusion over tower 7. I'd appreciate a reply if you can bear it.
To others: I know to even touch the subject will have many sharpening their axes. Please save them for something other than honest curiosity, if you can.
Confusion is likely as far as we're ever going to get with tower 7. Not because there was a grand conspiracy in play, but because we lack information about what happened in tower 7, period. That's generally what people who disbelieve the official consensus misunderstand... Absence of evidence is not evidence of conspiracy.
The Alaska conclusions are correct as per their model. But their model is making assumptions about the spread of the fire and the damage that we lack concrete information to confirm or deny. It's easy to forget that on the day WTC 7 fell, we don't know how much of that building was on fire. A significant percentage of New York first responders had just died... There wasn't enough fire management on scene at WTC 7 to gather reasonable amounts of information, much less fight the fire.
It might have fallen due to thermal expansion of the main structural elements. It might have fallen due to controlled demolition. It might have fallen due to a sudden upsurge of the mole people from Hollow Earth. Too few people had eyes on for us to ever really know.
(Personal opinion: I don't know that we have any good models of what happens to a building close to but under 50 stories when two of the tallest buildings on the planet collapse immediately next to it. What earthquake-magnitude-equivalent force did the foundation of WTC 7 experience, and what effect would that have? The mole people model might be more accurate than I want it to be. ;) ).
Yes, my comment is only in regards to the two main towers. I didn't study tower 7 in detail, but from what I understand it was a building that had an interior backup generator with enough fuel for a week or two and that is what caused the large fire. But when the 9/11 truth movement was in its prime, most of the focus was on towers 1 & 2 and once I was satisfied with the explanations for those I didn't bother looking into the secondary claims about tower 7. Mostly because once you have the first two towers collapse all the heat and debris from the pyroclastic cloud it makes doing the math much harder. The heat calculations for the two planes were relatively straightforward, other than the degree of fireproofing displacement during impact.
> I don't know a single engineer that has read the report that disagrees with its findings.
Just want to point out that the document that OP linked claims in the conclusion that the NIST report is invalid, but I have no ability to judge that claim. I have no structural engineering knowledge and have never heard of either of these reports until now.
This was published March 2020 though, and I'd be curious if the analysis was cogent enough to warrant NIST's response in a few years
I thought the “jet fuel can’t melt steel beans” guys were way off base from day 1. You don’t have to get steel fully melted to weaken it. Anybody who has messed around with a blowtorch and a section of rebar knows this. Plus the building had just been hit by a fully loaded jumbo jet and several of the supports were damaged in the impact.
The idea that someone snuck in hundreds of explosives and attached them to the building without any of the thousands of people who work in it noticing as a backup to an already elaborate air hijacking plan makes no sense.
What does make sense is that in an attention economy it is pretty easy to grab people’s attention by taking a significant event and trying to convince people that the common narrative is false is very profitable. You get a lot of attention and if you do a good job the idea grows all on its own and becomes something you can capitalize on the attention for a long long time.
What I don't understand is what value do people get out of promoting this type of conspiracy theory? Who profits? Is it just attention seeking or is there some profit motive? If so what?
I'm all for exposing corruption and I think there is enough to keep any anti government person occupied, but why do we get people inventing conspiracies in the most improbable of places? 9/11, Covid19 etc.
Thinking you've found a hidden truth is unreasonably fun. And then you can form a community and have some fun with your fellow nutbars too.
People also want the world to make more sense than it actually does. There being a secret group running things is at least _an_ explanation for the weird shit that happens, even if it doesn't really hold together.
There's a bunch of profit motives and politics involved as well usually.
If your goal is to erode trust in institutions then pushing any and all conspiracy theories is worth your time. Anywhere you see people trying to undermine the local government you see conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories are great because they're so efficient. Once started they are self reinforcing.
> What I don't understand is what value do people get out of promoting this type of conspiracy theory? Who profits? Is it just attention seeking or is there some profit motive? If so what?
They must really believe that what they're saying is true.
One interesting point some "truthers" make is that the welded steel lattice frame of the buildings should have been an efficient heat sink transfering heat away from hotter areas to colder areas. So warpage is unlikely to have been significant. On the other hand thermal expansion of relatively straight beams is likely what brought the towers down.
WTC 7 was on fire for about 5 hours, with about 7 or 8 floors on fire as a result of WTC 1/2 debris crashing into the building and starting fires. It wasn't helped by the water mains failing due to the collapse of WTC 1/2, which meant the sprinklers failed in the lower portion of the building.
I actually did skim the report. I'm not a structural engineer, so I'm not entirely clear on all of the terminology and how reasonable some of the decisions are, but here's the highlights of what I recall.
* The NIST report made some assumptions that are not justified by actual evidence. The critical complaints are about the modelling of the exterior wall as a unit (?) that made it unreasonably stiff, and insufficient modelling of the actual joints between structural members. [I can't speak as to this accuracy, this is well beyond my understanding.]
* They did their own model of how the structure would behave due to heat and cannot confirm the NIST results.
* They also modelled the collapse on their own. I'm not 100% certain how the model works, but it looks like they basically deleted key structural members and observed how the structure would collapse when they did so.
* In order to match the recorded evidence, they had to delete key structural members very high up (higher than any floors known to have been on fire) to mirror the observed "penthouse kink", and they had to delete all the columns on an entire floor to mirror the fall. (And of course, no plausible mechanisms for either to occur other than controlled demolition).
If I'm following the report correctly--which is a big if--then they have two separate models which aren't used in conjunction with one another, and the first one "overturns" the analysis on how the fire could have caused a key structural member to fail, and the other one "concludes" that the key structural member failing couldn't have caused the collapse. In the latter model, as I understand it, there's no attempt to account for the deteriorated state of the building prior to the final collapse, for example the large gash in the building known to have occurred as a result of falling debris, or any putative (but not confirmed) damage that might have been caused by the long-running fire.
Overall, I didn't come away feeling impressed by their analysis.
I'd love that, too. The trick is figuring out whether the "trusted" person is really unbiased, or whether they have a bias in either direction. Making it harder, whichever side that the expert disagrees with will claim bias, whether or not there was any...
> The trick is figuring out whether the "trusted" person is really unbiased
It’s impossible to avoid bias, however whether the bias is bad or not depends on the bias and the situation. My go tos are people whose biases I think are either actively helpful (e.g. experts in a field who I’ve previously vetted), irrelevant to the topic (e.g. an NYT journalist talking about cheesecake in pre-war Cambodia), or who have a history of self-deprecating humility to the naked truth regardless of where it leads them but also not incredulous but humble to their intellectual limitations (very rare but occasionally stumbled upon).
Because these groups are often painted as or perceived as having an agenda other than truth; unlike say when the WWF says a species is endangered or when people who have issues with "urban sprawl" happen to be large urban landholders.
In other words its a "these people can't be heard because of who they've been accused of being" argument.
No, it's because they are fucking wackjobs. That's a fact. It's not an accusation. And it's not because of any bullshit about "who they are accused of being"; it's because of their wackjob argument.
They are promoting a conspiracy theory that the WTC was destroyed by a controlled demolition.
The collapse of building 7 is the subject of wackjob conspiracy theories as well, even though its collapse has been conclusively explained by studies done by real engineers.
Yeah I think we should believe the unbiased explanation and give a $7-billion no-bid contract to the Vice President's private military contracting firm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7444083.stm
The outcome of 9/11 in terms of the gov't seizing the opportunity was going to happen either way - you need a better argument than "look what happened after".
This kind of feverish laziness and total disregard for intellectual rigor is, of course, precisely what allows the wackiest conspiracy theories to spread.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/09/2021-19... - the text of Executive Order 14040
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fbi-releases-first-911-docu... - mostly it sounds like this first piece is about connections to Saudi Arabia? And that it essentially says "this was not an official Saudi action"?
https://www.kezi.com/content/news/575294492.html or at least that's the summary I get from a statement from "9/11 Families United", connecting dots through these redactions is not a skill I have.
There is only one document in there at present; Order 14040 suggests there should be more showing up in the next six months, with a chunk of stuff required to be up by 60 days after the date of the order (which was the 9th), another, larger chunk by 120 days after, and even more by 180 days after. So if you are interested in seeing how much the FBI is willing to let you see of what they discovered (assuming none of these documents are actually disinformation) then you probably want to make one of your systems check this URL regularly.