[Sosfbay-discuss] FW: Rebuttal to Enrico Manieri

Wed Nov 18 01:36:33 PST 2009

For 9/11 scholars

From: snug.bug at hotmail.com
To: terrykoch1 at yahoo.com
CC: sf911truth at googlegroups.com
Subject: Rebuttal to Enrico Manieri
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:56:07 -0800

Hi Terry,  

   Thanks for forwarding that inquiry about the Manieri articles.  They're typical lame 
debunker fare--quibbling about details, a blizzard of irrelevancies, straw men--but
since they're quite effective at convincing people who don't want to bother with 9/11
that they needn't bother with 9/11 I guess we'll keep on seeing them.  Cosmos at
truthaction recently referred colorfully to some posts at BoingBoing as "craptastically 
run-of-the-mill hitpieces on 9/11 truth".

  Here's what I wrote to the guy in NYC:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

- "Whistleblower" WTC blueprints corroborate NIST, debunk CT
claims 

- Real-world tests cut through steel, shatter thermite
"evidence" 

- Technical details on thermal cutting of steel

       Thank you for
the chance to comment on Mr. Manieri's articles, though they're red
herrings. Nitpicking of conspiracy theories only distracts from the
fact of the inconsistencies, dishonesty, implausibilities,
impossibilities, and omissions of the official reports.  I don't take
truthers' theories very seriously, not even my own.  They are only
launching pads for further investigation. In seeking new
investigations, I prefer to focus on facts such as these:

       1.  91% of the
9/11 widows' 300 questions were not answered by the 9/11 Commission
Report

       2.  NORAD's
9/11 tales were so unbelievable that the 9/11 Commission report
"corrected" them, and   the Commission gave thought to
referring NORAD's shifting stories to the DoJ for a criminal inquiry.

       3.  The 9/11
Commission's claims about al Qaeda's involvement in 9/11 come largely
from CIA transcripts of testimony extracted under torture, which
would not be admissible in a court of law

      4.  The NIST
report on the twin towers stops at the point of collapse initiation
and thus skips the most baffling aspects of the towers' structural
failure:

       a) complete
pulverization of the concrete floors and associated steel floor pans
       b) symmetry of
collapse--how did asymmetrical insults from aircraft impact and
nomadic fires yield a completely symmetrical collapse?
       c) totality of
collapse--neither NIST nor FEMA explained what felled the robust
structural steel cores with their forests of 47 16" X 36"
steel box columns.  Dr. Bazant's "piledriver" theory is
implicitly invoked--the core can't dismember itself and only attack
by the mass of the upper section's acre-sized concrete floors can
explain the cores' destruction--but north tower videos clearly show
that Bazant's alleged "piledriver" came apart before the
impact zone began to collapse.
       d) speed of
collapse--"essentially in free fall", says NIST.  Since
kinetic energy was consumed in pulverizing concrete, breaking the
structure, twisting and mashing steel components and creating the
enormous hot dust clouds, this feat is mystifying
       e) arrested
rotation of WTC2's top.  Tilting 22 degrees, the top should have by
the law of conservation of angular momentum continued rotating until
it fell off the building.  Instead its concrete floors seem to have
turned into dust 800 feet in the air.

       Those aren't
theories.  Now to three of Mr. Manieri's articles:

"Technical details on the
thermal cutting of steel"

       Exhaustively informative on
oxygen-assisted cutting, Mr. Manieri's article makes no effort to
show it was used at Ground Zero.  Why didn't he phone the cleanup
contractor Controlled Demolition and ask?  He doesn't quantify the
molten material produced, nor quote any witness accounts of molten
streams.  If cleanup cutting produced the molten iron, why don't the
officials say so?  Instead they deny that the molten iron exists.   

       Here is a page of witness accounts
of molten steel, including reports of steel members pulled from the
rubble with molten steel dripping: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/moltensteel.html

        Dr. Astaneh-Asl, a UC Berkeley
structural engineer who studied the Ground Zero wreckage, told PBS "I
saw melting of girders at the World Trade Center."  Dr. Ahmed
Ghoneim of MIT wrote "Evidence of some steel melting was
suggested by the photographs."  Were they talking about
steel-cutting operations?   Some of this testimony appears at 1:55 in
this video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVO5jNZ34I0

        Self-styled "debunkers"
often seek to explain apparent anomalies in the 9/11 event with
speculative theories that the officials do not advance.  If Manieri
is right, he's only proving my point--the official reports are
incomplete and incompetent and we thus need further investigations.

"Real-world tests cut through
steel, shatter thermite 'evidence'". 

       The famous photo of the angle-cut
core column went into my "too good to be true" file the
moment I saw it, I am proud to say.  Debunking one mistaken piece of
evidence by no means demolishes the other evidence for the thermite
hypothesis.

"'Whistleblower'" WTC
blueprints corroborate NIST, debunk CT claims" 

       Suppressed evidence invites
speculation, the 9/11 Truth movement is not monolithic as NIST is,
and Mr. Manieri's complaint that various conspiracy theories
contradict each other is unreasonable.  Truth researchers bring
varied educational and social experience, various ideologies, and
varying degrees of research competence and tolerance for
science-fictiony speculation to bear, (and not a few are just plain
nuts!).  The theories are contradictory.  So what?

      Mariani rightly criticizes Steve
Watson's untrue claim that the NIST and FEMA don't report core column
dimensions (they do), but this error hardly indicts the movement. 
People publish stupid stuff about 9/11 every day, I never heard of
Steve Watson, and I don't read Infowars.  Officials did in fact
misrepresent the strength of the cores: the
9/11 Commission characterized the core as "a hollow steel shaft"
and FEMA's drawings made 16" X 36" core columns look like
toothpicks and sometimes eliminated them altogether. 

       Manieri
warns that basing structural calculations on architectural drawings
would be a mistake.  Well duh!  Engineers know that architectural
drawings aren't construction drawings and that they severely
under-represent the building's strength.  Condemning as "a
harebrained approach, worthy of those who posit the involvement of
nukes or space rays in the collapse of the WTC" an action that
nobody even proposes is a transparent straw man argument.

       Manieri's
implication that the steel components' stamped steel ID numbers
somehow validate NIST's findings is amusing.  The ID numbers
specified each component's location in the structure and would have
aided a truly scientific investigation that identified all the pieces
and mapped their locations on the debris pile* and reassembled for
study the pieces from the impact zone and from any anomalous failure
zones.  Not only was no scientific inventory done, the steel was
shipped off to China and India before experts could study it. Dr.
Astaneh-Asl complained to the House Science Committee that the
aggressive recycling program interfered with his studies of the steel
wreckage.

       NIST
lacked the intellectual honesty to express regret for the steel's
destruction, and the head of its investigation even lied to NOVA in
claiming that the steel was unavailable for study because rescue
operations scattered it.  Rescue operations lasted one week.  Fire
Engineering Magazine was still screaming bloody murder about ongoing
destruction of physical evidence three months later.  The "scoop
and dump" cleanup was so hasty that the complete body of a man
in a business suit turned up in the landfill; the steel was recycled
so swiftly that NIST apparently can not show evidence that any of
their core steel samples show heating above 482 degrees F.  That's
not hot enough to seriously weaken the steel.

       Don't
be fooled by the spectacularly deformed steel column C-88a in
Manieri's Figure 6-31 and Figure 4-3 (from NIST's report NCSTAR
1-3C).  Neither Manieri nor NIST make the claim that the hairpin bend
was caused by high temperatures.  The stresses imposed are thus just
as consistent with the controlled demolition hypothesis as the
fire-weakened steel hypothesis.

       Manieri's
conclusion claims that he's shown "how gratuitous and groundless
the CT's allegations of manipulation are."  Since he's achieved
only a trivial correction to Mr. Watson's mistaken declaration about
manipulations that in fact occurred, Manieri's grandiose conclusion
is neither justified or factual. 

*
 How a Scientific Deconstruction of the Pile Coulda, Shoulda Been
Done:  

    Station
photographers in tall buildings next to Ground Zero.  Before each
piece of steel is removed,   spray paint a color code (like an
electronic resistor color code) on it, photograph it in place from
the tall building. Photograph again from the ground as it's logged
and placed on the truck.  Ideally the stamped numbers would be
recorded as the steel was put on the truck.  

     Deconstructing
the pile scientifically would have helped answer many questions about
the collapse:

     1.
 Did the core outlast the trussed floors?  If so, toppled core
components should be laid out linearly over the top of the other
rubble.

     2.
 Did the entire top part of the building remain intact through the
collapse, as the Bazant piledriver theory claims?  Then top
components (particularly the hat truss) should have all been found
close together atop the debris heap, and the components of the robust
structural core should have been under them, centered in the heap. 
If the "piledriver" came apart before the collapse began,
as videos of the north tower collapse seem to show, then the top
components would be scattered widely in the debris, and core elements
might reflect toppling, rather than crushing, failure.  The hat truss
elements in particular would have been informative in determining how
a collapse on one side of the building managed to propagate across
the robust core to bring the other side of the building down.

    3.
 What was the nature of the so-called "squibs" which appear
to be pulverized building materials ejecting explosively from windows
centered in the exterior wall?  Stamped ID numbers would have
facilitated examination of the steel framing from those specific
windows.
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