Hay naku.... ENOUGH WITH THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES.

Here's my view on the "controlled collapse" scenario.

1. inertia: How many thousands of tons would you say each tower was? For either WTC tower to fall sideways, an enormous amount of lateral stress would have to be put on either tower. Once you start a few thousand tons moving straight down, it would take an awfully unbalanced load stress on it, or possibly one side of the building being ten or twenty times stronger than the other to make it collapse to the side.

Regarding the local collapses, one was due to an earthquake, which was stress failure from lateral strain, and another was from poor ground conditions, which caused the building to lean to one side.

2. The WTC was not a monument. It was a living, breathing office building. Over ten thousand people worked there. To install demolition charges, one would have to strip the fire insulation and non-structural walls away from the beams. To wire the entire building up with explosives would take months. If it were necessary to carry out the operation without anyone noticing, it would take years. And at that point, the condition of the explosives that were originally wired would be in question. In all that time, people would have to be transporting tons of explosives past security personnel, office workers and maintenance people.

3. The pancaking effect doesn't have to be sequential in the sense that the building falls one floor at a time. Structural members on skyscrapers are not built on a per-floor basis, as they are in smaller structures. The larger structural supports span tens of floors. The shockwave of collapse from the initial structural failure can travel at supersonic speeds through the steel itself. Consider, if all the floors were under the same stress, wouldn't it be logical for all of them to collapse?

None of us can say what the WTC should or should not have been able to withstand. No one, and I mean absolutely no one has had any experience with the collapse of a structure this tall and large.

4. Regarding fires. The planes sliced through the towers, spreading aviation fuel across the floors where the initial impact occured and down elevator and ventilator shafts. Some witnesses described the elevators as falling down the shafts, and flames shooting out of the doors into the lobby, incinerating many people there. After the initial amount of aviation fuel was used up, the fires that were started continued on for a long, long time.

Now, fire retardant material is merely that. Fire retardant... not fire-proof. Not even metal is fire-proof. Once non-structural materials start burning, structural steel weakens. It may take 1800 degrees to melt steel, but it'll lose much of its strength at lower temperatures. NIST reports now confirm that pockets of fire actually did surpass 1800 degrees.

And with fires in the elevator shaft, some of those pockets were near structural hardpoints on a large number of floors, all the way down to ground level.

5. Regarding the lack of larger pieces of airplane at the Pentagon site. If you're a fan of accident investigations, you'll note that in many plane crashes, investigators have to reconstruct the plane from hundreds of thousands of tiny scraps of metal. What more if the metal had slammed into reinforced concrete?

6. Logistics: And finally: If you wanted to simulate an "Attack on America", how would you do it? Simple, hire a terrorist cell to do exactly what they did. Unnecessarily complicated plans lead to an unnecessarily large number of people involved in carrying them out. That's what conspiracy theorists always fail to take into account.

To wire up two hundred story towers for a controlled collapse would have involved dozens, if not hundreds of demolition experts, many of them civilian. To fake the disappearance of even one plane would require the complicity of dozens of civilian air traffic controllers and/or a few dozen air force personnel. Plus the dozens of technicians who wired up and controlled the drone or aerial bomb that hit the Pentagon and the life-sized "fake" airliners that hit the Twin Towers.

Plus they would have to have the people who made the cellphone calls on their side, or they would have to be able to force them to comply with the deception. That would have taken days. And take note: Nobody made any calls saying "The Army has taken over our plane!" And the pilots would have to be in on it, too.

And take note: Those who say cellphones can't be used in airplanes... ever watch Die Hard 2? :lol: ...and these planes were flying low, trying to avoid radar... within easy reach of ground-based cell sites.

So, so far, I count at least a thousand or so people involved in the conspiracy, with at least a fourth of them civilian. With America's fondness of conspiracies, secret revelations and media attention, isn't it strange that no one has come forward saying: "Hey, I was in on it!"... of course, the CIA could have had them all killed... but then, where are the missing people reports? Also, knowing killing American civilians is something I don't think American soldiers are willing to stomach. I know the CIA could do it, but come on.

Like I said: Want to fake an attack on the WTC? Just have someone do it... for real.