I envision a similar 9/11 scheme, but one where the passengers boarded under their true names. Indeed, the seat occupancies on all four aircraft allegedly hijacked on 9/11 were very much lower that industry average (averaging 26% of capacity vis-à-vis 71% for all domestic flights in July 2001). So, here I extend my “all passengers survived” postulate to all four 9/11 “hijacked” flights on the notion that this small number of passengers might have been considered by conspirators as the minimum number for public credulity, while at the same time not exceeding the maximum number of “true believers in the cause” willing to accept long separations from their loved ones (sweetened by handsome Swiss bank accounts).

Griscom shows a predilection toward loopy theories, as his revelatory blog post links to Jim Hoffman’s ceiling tile theory as a “very plausible scenario” of how the *therm*te could have gotten into the building.

It’s Stephen Jones’ reaction that is the most illuminating to me.

As one of the authors of this paper, I can say that Prof. Griscom’s twelve pages of review were very well thought-out and required us to do considerable further work on the paper, which improved the final version significantly.  This was one tough review, more challenging than any other review I have received, excepting perhaps peer-reviews of papers in Scientific American (1987) and Nature (1989) on which I was co-author.  I should also add that I have never met Prof. Griscom personally and that I just learned of his blog disclosing himself as a peer-reviewer today (thanks to Dirk Gerhardt).

And yet Griscom says that he couldn’t find anything to criticize about the ATM paper! 12 notes of suggestions he has that makes Harrit, et al. sweat and strain to meet (according to Jones), but none of these are criticisms? Just like the 9/11 Truth employs the famous Hush-a-Boom *therm*te whenever they wish to argue for explosive sounds or against them, we now have peer review that’s both rigorous and non-critical at the same time.

The bias of this “referee” of the ATM paper is palpable. Jones says that he has never “met” Griscom, nor knew explicitly that Griscom was a reviewer of the piece, but the Bentley Open review process allows, indeed requests, that authors suggest reviewers for the piece. Jones has not categorically denied that Griscom was not one of the suggested reviewers by the authors of the paper, and I’m afraid such a categorical denial is required in this case. If it turns out that Jones and Griscom have communicated over the Internet, or if Griscom is well-known by other authors of the paper (like Harrit) and was suggested by them, this will be another blow to the objectivity of the review process beyond what has already been revealed.

And here’s an idea! Why not have Griscom release his 12 pages of suggestions so that we can examine this rigorous non-critical review? It certainly would be interesting to read over.

(Please note: the term *therm*te is my own to keep from having to type out every iteration of thermite 9/11 Truth advocates employ in what I interprest as their shell game. We’ve seen nanothermite, super nanothermite, regular thermite, thermate, etc. It gets old qualifying every single statement about the thermite arguments.)

One of AE911Truth’s key talking points is a suggestion that the official story was inserted into the media with the use of people like this person. He’s called the Harley Guy because of his T-shirt, and his very vivid and precise way of describing the attack is seen as suspicious. However, only a short clip of this interview has ever been displayed by AE911Truth or other 9/11 Truth advocates.

Now the full interview is available, and Harley Guy is identified as Matt Walsh, a “freelancer for Fox.” So this is a person who has thought very carefully about how to describe the event he just witnessed because he works in the video news business and knows what is expected. His interview sounds like a sound bite because he works with sound bites all the time. There is nothing remotely suspicious about this, and suggestions that Mr. Walsh is a government plant dishing out the official story to fool the world are ludicrous.

ETA: A quick note – Mr. Walsh is used in the AE911Truth presentation. He’s part of the first 911Mysteries clip. As I recall, he’s also been used in other AE911Truth short videos, and that recently, like at the National Press Club vanity mock debate. I’ll check into it.

The total revenue for 2009 – $344,570. Salaries for Gage and others topped out at $107,417. That means salaries constitute 31% of AE911Truth’s expenses.

In other words, Richard Gage’s salary is 21% of all revenue received by AE911Truth in 2009.

I’ll post a more detailed analysis of this (and the 2008 Form 990-EZ) later.

ETA: My detailed look at the 2007 Form 990-EZ for AE911Truth is available at the link.

Thanks to Orphia Nay at JREF!

Building What is Up! – and it looks like a lie on every page.

7 Facts about Building 7 – and how cherrypicking gets you the answer you want every time.

Of course these family members deserve answers to their questions. However, they don’t deserve the answers that they prefer. We owe it to all the victims of the 9/11 attacks to deal with the truth, and the presentations of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and this front group simply are not dealing with the truth. Deception and craft followed by a way to donate money to promoting more deception and craft doesn’t honor anyone’s memory.

Meanwhile, NIST updated their FAQ about the WTC 7 investigation. Here’s one of the additions:

In June 2009, NIST began releasing documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the International Center for 9/11 Studies for “all of the photographs and videos collected, reviewed, cited or in any other way used by NIST during its investigation of the World Trade Center building collapses.”  One of the items released, a video obtained from NBC News , shows World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) in the moments before it collapsed, then cuts to the collapse already in progress, with the building’s east penthouse “disappearing” from the scene (as it had already fallen in the intervening time).  Other videos of the WTC 7 collapse show the penthouse falling first, followed by the rest of the building. Did NIST edit the NBC News video to remove the collapse of the penthouse?

The video footage released under the FOIA request was copied from the original video exactly as it was received from NBC News, with video documentation of the WTC 7 east penthouse collapse missing.  The footage was not edited in any way by NIST.

This was something that I’d referred to before. Allegations from the 9/11 Truth movement that NIST is trying to hide the east penthouse are ludicrous. It has been everything debunkers could do to get 9/11 Truth advocates to even acknowledge that the east penthouse is a part of the actual collapse. Now suddenly that some in the movement think they can prove NIST shenanigans, this video is being used as evidence that the east penthouse is being covered up. Please, let’s discuss the east penthouse and the role it played in figuring out what happened to Building 7, Truth Movement!

Consider these two statements:

A – Fire can bring down steel structures buildings like Twin Towers.

B – The Twin Towers collapse was a controlled demolition.

It is quite possible to believe that both statements are true. If you believe that “B” is true you don’t need to believe “A”is false.

In other words, if you believe there is sufficient evidence that explosives were used in the towers, it does not mean that you have to believe that the collapse due to fire would be impossible.

So what are the arguments that support the claim that fire can not bring down buildings?

Before answering, let me remind you some facts:

1 – Steel does lose strength at high temperatures.

2 – The fire protection were removed from the truss on the floors where the impact occurred.

3 – It is not necessary to remove all fire protection to make the structure susceptible to fire.

4 – The failure of a structural element can cause the failure of others.

5 – Progressive collapse does exist.

This… is not about evidence of controlled demolition nor NIST findings. It’s about arguments that support the claim the towers (WTC 1 and 2) couldn’t have collapsed due to fire.

There is, of course, no reason to have to believe a simple collapse of a steel-framed building is not possible. This is what AE911Truth and Richard Gage have stated, though. It’s amazing to me that they consider it such.

But for the reasons Carlos puts forward, there’s no reason not to consider unassisted collapse a viable option. It is possible for buildings to collapse due to fire alone. That one has not before 9/11 or after is not evidence for the opposite, but evidence for the power of the social safety net that exists throughout cities that build such large buildings. Between design codes and firefighting operations, humanity has only let three buildings slip past the many safeguards meant to keep them up.

Indeed, the unassisted collapse of these buildings has already led to better design and resulted in at least one building being saved during a catastrophic fire –the Mandarin Oriental. The designers of that building had conducted an extensive internal study of the WTC collapses, and then designed the Beijing building from the lessons learned. However, AE911Truth uses this victory, a genuine instance of humanity learning from tragic mistake, to say the tragic mistake could not have been a mistake.

They could not be more wrong.

When a column develops plastic hinges and buckles it absorbs a very large amount of energy. It absorbs orders of magnitudes more than a simple shear connection failing, or a truss web, or a connection from the perimeter column to the diaphragm. If there is not enough available energy absorption in the columns then there is no possible way that the building could resist the collapse. Bazant and Zhou shows this very clearly.

What Bazant Zhou showed through simple mathematics is that there was enough energy present in the upper sections to buckle the columns all the way down. In fact, there was enough energy by an order of magnitude necessary to buckle the columns all the way down the Towers.

But this is not what happened! And to be clear, Bazant Zhou does not claim that this is how the towers fell. But it’s important to recognize that the falling upper section could cause many other failures in the building’s structure below. Newton’s Bit lists three of those. Since the upper section had enough energy to buckle the columns all the way down, failures taking far less energy to accomplish had no chance at all of stopping the fall of the upper section.

So papers like Tony Szamboti’s Missing Jolt which demonstrate Bazant Zhou’s mathematical model did not take place in reality have missed the plot. It was unnecessary to do this, because Bazant Zhou has always been an idealized case, taking the strongest assumptions in favor of the towers surviving to demonstrate that they could have. If the buildings could not survive the best possible case, then they could not have survived whatever actually occured.

And other papers of Bazant’s go on to demonstrate that not even the heart-stopping sight of mass shedding we see in the actual collapses, not even the dreadful pulverization and comminutation of concrete and wallboard and floor contents could not diminish the amount of energy in the upper sections enough to save the lower structure, floor by floor by floor. Once started, the upper sections could not be denied by the structure beneath. There was no pivot point available to deflect the complete upper section off to the side. Fragments and shards, yes, but the complete mass, no. There was nothing but down for the bulk of the mass, and down it went.

Wow, what a big, loud explosion is on that video tape. Too bad it’s not original to the video.

First things first. It’s worth mentioning that the video was recorded just after the collapse of the North Tower. The location appears to be on the north side of Murray just to the west of West Broadway. The sun is shining down the street in a way it only could have that day around 10:45 a.m. Therefore, if this explosion is meant to be associated with Building 7, it is occurring 6 hours and 35 minutes before 7 actually collapses. What it has to do with knocking 7 down, I can’t understand. No one in AE911Truth will ever try to explain it in a cohesive way, because that would mean committing to a hypothesis, something AE911Truth will ever do.

However, the explosion we hear has been added to the original audio of this video. As explained by the poster gumboot at the James Randi Educational Foundation forums:

The sound is fake. It has been added. The fireman in question says “I know that, but you gotta get back, the city’s exploded.”

The people present talk over the explosion, as if it had never happened. In addition, the explosion is heard most clearly in the low frequency range and upper range. The volume levels for the explosion are well below all other sound in the area – the voices of the people peak frequently and yet the only peaking on the explosion is below 60 Hz.

The lower end could be explained by a distant explosion, however the high-volume upper end indicates close proximity to the explosion. Consumer handycams have very poor performance at the lower end of the audio range, and professional cameras are equipped with shotgun microphones designed specifically to pick up human voices.

There is no echo on the explosion – and yet it supposedly occured in a crowded city – which produces multiple echos.

I disagree slightly with gumboot’s transcript. Instead of “the city’s exploded,” I believe it’s “the city’s explodin”. However, it doesn’t change the actual intent of what the man is saying (and it certainly isn’t “Seven’s exploding” as many seem to hear).

The flinch of the person on the phone to the “explosion” is also odd. It seems to be about a second behind what you’d expect, although the rest of the audio is in sync. It’s as if there were actually some loud, but distant sound on the original audio, a sound not impressive enough for whoever added this explosion to the tape. So this more vivid explosion is added just a bit before the actual noise so as to eradicate the actual sound and any edit.

Regardless, no one on the video is acting the way you’d expect if the explosion was actually that loud, especially having just gone through the collapse of the North Tower 15 minutes earlier. Some kind of bang, I’ll grant, but not the one we currently hear on the tape.

And gumboot’s point about no echoes becomes very pertinent due to the location. The person on the phone looks down West Broadway, the direction the camera follows a second later. Looking at a map, it’s clear that this is a direction that the sound would have been heard coming from Building 7.

However, it’s also clear that for the people to look the direction they are looking, the sound would be echoing up the street. They look southeast. WTC 7 is southwest. The sound reaches them by echoing, and thus would have more echoes as the sound bounced off other surfaces to reach them. At the very least, as loud as this explosion purports to be, an echo should have been heard a split second later from Greenwich Street as the sound traveled up it and then down Murray. However, the explosive sound currently featured on the audio has no echoing in it.

This is not the first altered audio that AE911Truth relies upon in its argument. That dubious honor goes to the Oslo demolition video used by the group that edits out the clear explosions heard in other videos of the demolition. And to be fair to the group, it’s not clear exactly who added this explosive sound. It could very well have been done for artistic reasons in the documentary this video clip came from (a phenomenon that has happened before in the 9/11 debate). After all, you can hear the last note of a soundtrack right at the beginning of this clip.

But for a group that regularly derides the authoritarian nature of people who accept the Official Conspiracy Theory, blindly accepting and using a video that seems to confirmtheir own conclusions is a rather interesting choice. They really should stop using it.