Friday, September 12, 2014

A few thoughts about 9-11

Just a few thoughts about 9-11

For those who don't know yet, I took a bunch of pictures from my windo and rooftop of the Twin Towers burning and collapsing on september 11, 2001. You can see them in my Facebook albums.

First off, it was a terrible, horrible day. More died than at Pearl Harbor, and far fewer people committed the act. Even more people suffered, physically, emotionally, psychologically, and financially.

And every day that the incident gets further away, memories of it fade, and more and more mistakes, misinformation, and crackpot ideas find it capable to gain traction. People who were not there, are too young to have been there, who only see what the Interwebs have to show us, are finding it easy to accept things that fit clever conspiracy theories that support agendas.

Here are a few things I think are true, based on what I saw that day and what I have read and seen from reliable sources. I am dispensing with weblinks and things because I only have so much time in my life to dedicate to this.

Those were commercial airliners that crashed at all four sites. They were hijacked by terrorists, and the people on them all died.

The burning airplane fuel was hot enough to weaken the steel, and the weight of the buildings above the weak points made them break. That's why one building tilted the way it did, and the building that was struck higher up collapsed later.

The front of 7 WTC at ground level was taken out by debris fro the other towers. There were fuel oil tanks to power the generators for the police command bunker in the building (which wound up never being used). Those tanks caught fire, weakening the structure, and it collapsed. The reason the front of the building went down first was that the front of the structure was taken out, as I already said.

There was not the time in any security lapse for anyone to plant as many explosives as would have been needed for a “controlled demolition” of that magnitude.

He “squibs” in the collapse of the towers are the air, furniture, and debris being blown out the windows as the ceilings collapse, one by one, and the top of the building falls on them.

Those little squibs further down? The whole freakin' building is collapsing. You don;t thing that maybe the ceiling in an office somewhere collapses and blows out the window as a result?

The reason steel beams and other debris fell slower than the building is physics. The building was going straight down, and there was nothing strong enough to stop all that mass. The building was collapsing from the overall destruction. As steel beams snapped and other, less massive things bounced off other things, they went flying wherever there was room to fly, which was away from the building. The force projecting them outwards combined with air to slow their trajectory downwards.

The “vibrations” you see in the building in that new video? That is the shadow of the smoke from the fires.

The hole in the side of the Pentagon was where the fuselage went through. The slits where the wings went through are hidden behind the pile of debris. There are pieces of the airplane even in a photo on the cover of a French book claiming that there was no plane.

That was not a bomb on the underside of the second plane's fuselage. That is a bump that is part of the plane's design.

That little bulge that comes out of the other side of the tower in that video shot from the helicopter is debris blowing through the building and out the other side. It is absurd to think that the half-dozen pixels that are roughly the same shape as the nose of a plane could be the nose of a plane slipping past the “masking” line in the video. There are plenty of pictures and video of the plane hitting the tower from other angles that show the explosion out the other side.

And you don't see the plane earlier in that video because it was too damn small.

To say that the grainy, low-res video still shows something other than the plane just before it hits the building it is supposed to be because a row of pixels looks like the sun is hitting it at a different angle is ridiculous. Those few pixels of an object in motion can easily look like something they are not.

The “moving bridge” and other background elements are because the cameraperson is trying to keep focused on the towers as the camera moves, not because it is a composite image.

The slightly out-of-synch timing of the explosions from second plane strikes from the various networks is because the network feed to one network might simply be a second slower than the video feed to another network.

The plane did not disintegrate before it hit the building because 1) the plane had not been going that fast that long, it was accelerating to that speed, and 2) just because industry standards say you should not fly it that fast does not mean that it will not hold together long enough to crash into a building.

Those were people jumping out of the towers. I have friends who were there and saw them.

Those silhouette sculptures were public art.

There are plenty of pictures of plan wreckage at the Twin Towers.

There is someone who says that certain pictures of certain victims used other pictures of those same people and faked the backgrounds, showing side-by-side comparisons. First off, why would anyone do that? Secondly, look closer, there are little differences in the lighting or the angle. Do you think it is impossible for someone to have more than one picture of themselves taken under similar lighting conditions at similar angles?

No, there was no message sent out to all the Jews who worked in the WTC to stay home that day.

No, no one “surfed” down as the building collapsed.

The picture of the man on the roof as the plane is about to hit is a fake. The roof wasn't open, the observation deck was on the other tower, the plan is in much too sharp focus, and the guy is wearing a winter coat and hat on a very warm sunny day.

There are no secret camps holding the passengers, the victims' families were not paid off. Nobody recruited nearly 3,000 families to pretend that they had relatives that died.

There is plenty wrong with this country, the administration of George W. Bush, and everything else that led up to the circumstances that inspired and allowed the events of that day to happen, and plenty wrong with the reactions to it and the events that followed it, and there are far more Afghans and Iraqis dead, military, civilian, and “terrorist,” and American military personnel that have died since, than Americans who died that day, for what it's worth.

Those of us who were there saw the planes, saw the live footage, saw the damage, lost friends and relatives. To claim that there were no planes, that there was a government conspiracy, etc, not only cheapens the tragedy, but gets in the way of finding out why the tragedy really happened, and taking a sober and responsible look at what has happened in response since then.