The Truth Behind 9-11

S.W. Hain

• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781098071165
• eBook ISBN: 9781098071172
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

There are many conspiracy theories that attribute the planning and execution of the September 11 attacks against the United States to parties other than or, in addition to, al-Qaeda, including that there was advance knowledge of the attacks among high-level government officials.

Government investigations and independent reviews have rejected these theories. Proponents of these theories assert that there are inconsistencies in the commonly accepted version, or evidence that was either ignored or overlooked.

2

The Claims

As with any well-developed pseudoscience, literally thousands of individual arguments can be advanced in support of the proposition that the United States secretly carried out the September 11 attacks. This report will examine the most enduring and oft cited of these claims: free fall of the towers, reports of thermite and molten steel, and 7 WTC’s curious collapse. Some of the factions that have developed (such as the no-planers) will also be described briefly.

• Claim 1—The twin towers collapsed at free-fall accelerations through the path of greatest resistance.
  Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of September 11 was the rapid destruction of both 110-story twin towers. After the collapses began due to cascading structural failures at the airplane impact locations, each tower fell completely in just fifteen to twenty seconds. Mainstream scientific analyses, including years of work by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), generally looked at the cause of each collapse. The intense fires (started by jet fuel and fed by office contents and high winds) eventually caused floor trusses to sag, pulling the perimeter walls inward until they finally snapped. At this instant, the entire upper section of each tower fell the height of one floor, initiating an inevitable, progressive, and utterly catastrophic collapse of each of the structures.
  While the mainstream explanation (dismissed as the official story by 9/11 truthers) usually ends with the initiation of these unstoppable collapses, the 9/11 Truth movement’s attacks begin there. Gage of AE 911 Truth says on that group’s website, “Destruction [of the twin towers] proceeds through the path of greatest resistance at nearly free-fall acceleration” (Gage 2011; emphasis added). Many 9/11 truther pundits drop the nearly and say simply that the collapses were at free fall. Truthers then insist that free fall acceleration indicates a complete lack of resistance, proving that the structures were demolished with explosives. We are also told that the sheer mass of the towers—80,000 tons of structural steel—would simply resist collapse.
  How could the buildings fall so quickly? It’s been explained very well in the technical literature by Northwestern’s Zdeněk Bažant PhD and others. (See, for example, Bazant 2008.) I’ve developed a simpler physics model of the progressive collapses that agrees quite well with the main points of Bazant’s more rigorous results (Thomas 2010b). Here are some of my findings:
  • Each floor of the towers contained over 2 million kilograms of mass. The gravitational potential energy of a standing tower with twelve-foot floors extending upward 110 stories can be calculated straightforwardly; it comes to over 420 billion joules of energy or the equivalent of 100 tons of TNT per tower. This energy, which was released completely during the collapses, is more than the energy of some of the smaller nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, such as the W48 (72 tons TNT) (Sublette 2006). This is where the energy required to break columns, pulverize concrete, and expel debris through windows came from. (Truthers often compare such expulsions of air and debris, visible several floors below the collapse fronts to squibs, explosive devices often used in demolitions. However, they are readily explained by pressure changes as the towers acting like a gigantic bicycle pump being compressed, collapsed.)
  • The twin towers used a “tube within a tube” architectural design, which provided considerable open office space in the interiors of the towers. Much of the structural support was provided by a dense grouping of thick central core columns in the interior and the perimeter walls on the outside. When the towers began to collapse, large parts of the inner cores (called the spires in 9/11 Truth circles) were actually left standing briefly before they, too, toppled over. The perimeter walls were largely forced to peel outward in large sections, producing the iconic images of ground zero with which we’re all familiar. Between the outer perimeter and the inner core, the weight of the upper sections plowed through one floor after another, breaking the floor connection brackets and support columns, pulverizing concrete decks, and gaining momentum and mass with each additional floor failure. Had the buildings been constructed differently (the port authority was allowed to circumvent some existing New York buildings requirements for the towers)? The collapses might not have even happened (Young 2007).
  • Even the 9/11 Truth movement’s most eminent physicists are confused about the basic principle of the difference between static and dynamic forces. A piece of paper taped across a jar’s opening will support a heavy coin such as a quarter indefinitely (static load). However, if the coin is dropped from just a few inches up, it will tear right through the paper (dynamic load). Given the information at hand—for example, the mass of the upper section of the north tower (58 million kilograms), the distance it fell (3.8 meters, about 12 feet), and the stiffness/rigidity of the lower structure itself—the dynamic force imparted on the lower section can be estimated as some thirty times the upper portion’s weight. This is many times the lower structure’s safety margin, which explains why it was quickly overwhelmed.
    Once progressive collapse began, there were decreasing time intervals of free fall (between floors), punctuated by very brief incredibly violent collisions (decelerations) of the upper mass for each floor in turn. There was resistance at every step of the collapse as the upper section collided with and incorporated each floor below. Conservation of momentum shows that the reductions in falling speed were slight as each floor was impacted, going as the ratio of floors before to floors after (e.g., 14/15 or about 94 percent for the first impact). Accordingly, the upper section fell from rest to about 19 mph was slowed down to 18 mph by the first impact, continued to fall until a speed of 26 mph was reached, was then slowed down to 24 mph by another impact, and so on. While the first plunge lasted about nine-tenths of a second, the upper section took only four-tenths of a second to fall through the next floor, three-tenths of a second for the next one, and so on until the bottom floors, which were crushed at a rate of just seven-hundredths of a second each at speeds of over 100 mph.
    Yes, there was resistance at every step as many tons of structural steel was demolished, yet the entire process like an avalanche lasted only fifteen to twenty seconds about 50 to 100 percent longer th...

Table of contents

• The Players
• The Claims