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US Releasing 9/11 Flight 77 Pentagon Crash Tape
Robotron23 writes "The BBC is reporting that the US government has decided to release the videotape depicting the crash of Flight 77 into the Pentagon building, nearly five years after the 9/11 attacks. The government had previously withheld the tape due to 'ongoing investigations' into al-Qaeda's Zacarias Moussaoui. A government representative commented that they 'hope that this video will put to rest the conspiracy theories.'"
If the U.S. gov't tried to do something like this, thousands of people would of have to known about it.
The plot has been on the table for over forty years. You're not one of those that believe that our government would never do such a thing, are you?
What?
Love that place, and love the Freedom of Information Act that allows it to exist -- one of the true strengths of our Democracy.
If you haven't read it, and if you are at all prone to dismissing "conspiracy theories" on the basis that our government wouldn't do that kind of thing, you have to read it. If you've ever wondered: Did the CIA really know and approve of the Contras funding their war by selling drugs in the States? Did the U.S. really know that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds at the same time Donald Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam's hand and providing cover stories for him? Read it.
Nothing that I know of that is relevent to the current situation, but it is still a fantastic archive and a great resource for putting to pasture any remaining naivete you may have about the nature of governments.
The enemies of Democracy are
What procedures were ignored?
The FEMA report was preliminary. Further investigation, not to mention some pictures and some interviews with firefighters on the scene, indicate that WTC7 also suffered severe structural damage, not just fire.
This is just plain wrong. http://911myths.com/html/recycled_steel.html
Well, if a building couldn't collapse due to fire alone, then what's the point of fireproofing the steel columns?
It didn't. Indian Lake is not 6 miles from the impact site, as some people would like you to believe. Popular Mechanics has some bits about Flight 93 (continues on next page, too) in their "9/11: Debunking The Myths" article.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
The wings on most aircraft today are made to shear off (eg; snap off of the fuselage) upon impact, in order to reduce the risk of ruptured fuel tanks discharging their burning payload directly into the cabin.
The only reason that the outlines of the planes' wings remained on both of the impacted WTC towers was due to the building materials. Short of the box girders, those sites were covered with a thin stainless steel facade. The underlying girders themselves were in fact a ruddy brown color, which would be invisible to the naked eye under fire conditions, adding to the illusion that those planes somehow punched a huge hole through, when at best it was approximately the size of the fuselage as well. Evidence of this is consistent with the debris left at the Pentagon.
Similarly, you have building materials VS. aircraft design in the Pentagon attack. The Pentagon was initially designed to withstand aerial bombardment during WWII, and retrofitted for nuclear attack in the decades to follow. That translates to LOTS of reinforced concrete and stone which, if anyone else here watched impact testing and missile tests against solid concrete bunkers, et al, showed very similar, if not exactly, the same results when compared to the Pentagon attack. The impacts would not only have sheared off the wings, but the general refusal of reinforced concrete to either snap or bend out of the way would have resulted in a misleadingly small impact site.
As for nonexistant skid marks at the Pentagon, it may just be possible that the plane was either in level flight, or on the rebound (as evidenced by light posts that were snapped off at the base, exactly as they're designed to) before impacting.
Additionally, to all the nutters who claimed the WTC was hit by a missile, those so called pods are in fact the rear landing gear bays, the flash they claim to be a launch is more than likely a high voltage discharge from the radome in the aircraft's nose (visible just as the fiberglas dome comes into contact with the outside of the towers). Just bright enough to arc and trigger theories everywhere from people who have no idea how planes are made, sadly enough.
But nowhere enough to give people the real story about 9/11, just more noise to keep people with real credentials from being heard.
Anyway, the long and short: There's a lot more involved in aerospace than most would imagine, and even fewer bother to verify or study, like much junk science or conspiracy theories. If the idea of aircraft "disappearing" in the process of crashing sounds like a conspiracy, then the Valujet crash in the Everglades a decade or so ago must have come from little green men indeed.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
That's why he didn't say it. You introduced the word "never", and yes, your straw man is nonsense.
He was referring to the claims that Iraq had WMD circa 2001-2003, which were used as justification for the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. Those claims were lies.
Yes, we know Iraq had WMD in the past. Of course we know that, we sold them the WMD. But Iraq had used or destroyed all its WMD prior to the illegal invasion.
Oh, do pay attention. He was saying that the claim that oil prices would be controlled was false. The current high prices are demonstration that he's right.
And as for bringing up Bill Clinton: Did anybody claim that the problems started in 2000? No, I don't think so, so once again you're erecting a straw man.
In fact, if you look at the people who complain about the lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq, you'll find that almost all of them were also deeply critical of the Clinton era sanctions that resulted in the lingering death of tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and their children.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It is, in fact, very easy to fly a plane close to the ground without crashing. There is a wonderful thing known as "ground effect" that causes this to happen. Normally when a plane is flying, the air pushing down off the wings forms a circular vortex. However, as the plane approaches the ground (to within 2/3 the width of the wing) this vortex becomes compressed and oval. In that case, the amount of lift on the wing increases because now it requires the extra force to "squash" the vortex. This is why the "Spruce Goose" (Howard Hughe's Hercules airplane) can't actually fly, but went airborne during testing. It was entirely flown within the realm of ground effect. In fact, it cannot generate enough lift to actually achieve free flight.
In this case, a "rookie pilot" with dozens of hours in a simulator, could ease the plane towards the ground and actually find it like "dropping into a pillow" as he got close to ground level and being able to run the plane straight into the Pentagon.
On the other hand, landing a plane involves a ballet of speed, flaps, landing gear, drag, nose angle, angle of attack and half a dozen other variables. Doing everything perfectly in a landing is the *hardest* part of flying.
Ask a pilot about ground effect, and they'll tell you all about it.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
That is completely untrue.
Al-Qaeda is Arabic for "the Base" or "the Foundation" - but it's actually a shortened form of the Arabic term "qaedat bayanat" - or database. Al-Qaeda started in the mid 1990s based on Osama bin Laden's personal database of Arab mujihadeen who had fought with him in Afghanistan against the Soviets. His number 2 man, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri was recruited in order to merge al-Qaeda with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
As a side note, the CIA did not fund bin Laden, although they knew of him and knew that some fighters they did fund were also working with him. The CIA's main group in Afghanistan throughout the 1990s was led by a man named Ahmad Shah Masood. Masood was assassinated by bin Laden on September 9, 2001 as a symbol of al-Qaeda's commitment to protecting the Taliban. The group that Masood founded was the Northern Alliance - the same fighters who fought with the CIA in 2001 against the Taliban.
Al-Qaeda has existed as a terrorist organization since at least 1998, and probably earlier. It was 1998 when al-Qaeda launched the attacks against the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and bin Laden declared his fatwa against the presence of American troops on the Arabian peninsula.
So, no, you are not correct. Al-Qaeda has root well before 9/11, and to insinuate that it was invented afterwards is simply not correct.
The short answer is we didn't.
Bin Laden wasn't funded by the CIA. He wouldn't have taken American money anyway, and didn't need it besides. We did fund some groups that were associated with his Arab mujihadeen, but not his group directly.
The person you're thinking of was Ahmad Shah Masood, who was one of the more successful Afghan fighters during the war. Masood was an enemy of the Taliban, and was assassinated by al-Qaeda shortly before 9/11 to help reassure the Taliban that al-Qaeda would protect them from American reprisals. (Bloody lot of good that did!)
Ahmad Shah Masood was the founder of the anti-Taliban resistance called The Northern Alliance - and that's one of the reasons that the CIA had such good luck in Afghanistan - we were working with the same fighters we had a decade before in fighting the Russians.
I agree with most of your post, but let me state once and for all: the fire did not have to melt steel. It only had to weaken it. Steel gradually loses its tensile strength with temperature. It is a known fact and a pretty well researched one, since it is very important in warehouses containing flammable materials—they can easily collapse during a fire. As you could guess, the steel of an extreme building as the WTC is strained to the limit. Since the second tower to be hit was hit at a lower level (more strain because of the weight), it collapsed first (Ok, sorta simplistic).
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Clever signature text goes here.
First of all, WT7 DID NOT have a plane crash into it, and yet still fell (symetrically and into its own footprint), next:
the empire state building had a plane crash into it: At 9:49 a.m. on Saturday July 28, 1945, a B-25 Mitchell bomber accidentally crashed into the north side between the 79th and 80th floors, where the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Council were located. The fire was extinguished in 40 minutes. 14 people were killed in the accident[3].(wikipedia)
Regardless of this, the building was designed to withstand impacts by aircraft of this size, so it shouldn't (and indeed thats not the official explanation) have been the impact that caused the problem. if you think it was the fire, then compare this picture of the WTC fire towers where you can see a small area on one tower and a larger but still relatively small section on the other smoking (black indicating low oxygen therefore cooler fires) with a few visible flames, with this and thisimage of the windsor building in madrid, that was totally engulfed in flames from about halfway up the building to the top, and burned for 10 hours, yet didn't collapse, with only parts not including the inner support section collapsing after burning for hours, as you might expect. Note that the tower, while smaller, had a similar construction to the wtc, being a central support column and perimeter supports, and that the tower was "built using normal strength concrete and before modern fire proofing standards, without any sprinkler system. It was undergoing a complete refurbishment, including the installation of various active fire prevention and resistance measures, when the fire began at around 11pm on 14 February 2005." (see here and here for more pictures and (you may say biased) info and here for a case study of the construction and result of the huge fire. Many other buildings have burned for similar or longer, and not collapsed. If you still think it's reasonable to accept three world first events on the same day at face value, in your words "then you are, frankly, a fucking moron.""(in a less offensive way, if it was conspiracy theorists saying that al queda did it with planes, and the government saying that they demolished it to make room for new towers or something, then would you still think it was rediculous?)
also if you think it was "not an ordinary fire" and that the addition of the jet fuel caused the extra heat that differentiated them from every other fire in history, then, from the debunking 911 myths on popular mechanics:
"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsiblefor the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."
therefore apart from a hot start and some mild damage to the outer structure (which was not intended for holding up the bulk of the weight of the building but rather to resist torsional forces from wind etc, and therfore if that had failed would be much more likely to have caused an assymetrical toppling, rather than a symetrical fall), it was no different to any other fire in the history of steel/concrete buildings. So I ask again, why did three buildings fall on the same day from fire, and never before or since in history?
straw man. The steel didn't melt. It was hot enough to significantly weaken it (ask a blacksmith), but not to melt it.
"Peter Tully, presid
watch "the money masters" on google video