9/11 – A Cheap Magic Trick

RussiaToday
Mar 24, 2012

Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, talk to independent journalist, Lars Schall, about his recently published investigation into insider trading around the 9-11 terrorist attack as well as his pursuit of Germany’s elusive gold reserves.

“I’ve never seen so much real-world stuff happen during an exercise.”

- Major James Fox, Northeast Air Defense Sector, September 11, 2001

Key military personnel who were responsible for protecting the U.S. against the 9/11 attacks may have been seriously hindered in their ability to respond because of a large-scale air defense exercise they were participating in when the attacks occurred. Evidence indicates that the personnel, whose responsibilities included ordering fighter jets into the air to intercept the hijacked planes, were unclear about what was “real-world” and what was “exercise.” They may have been led to believe that the terrorist attacks were just simulated scenarios.

These individuals worked at the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) in Rome, New York. Audio recordings of the operations floor at NEADS reveal staffers suggesting that the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001 could have been part of the exercise. They sometimes even made jokes and laughed about what was taking place, further indicating that they were mistaking actual events for exercise simulations. Even senior commanding officers have admitted wondering if the terrorist attacks were part of the exercise.

And while staffers sometimes apparently made clear that an event was unconnected to the exercise by referring to it as being “real-world,” there is evidence that the term “real-world” may in fact be a way to describe live events played out within an exercise, perhaps involving real aircraft getting airborne, rather than just hypothetical scenarios.

Furthermore, NEADS personnel previously participated in exercises that included scenarios resembling the 9/11 attacks, such as plane hijackings and aircraft being crashed into skyscrapers in New York, and this could have increased the likelihood that they would mistake the events of September 11 for exercise simulations.

Although much remains speculative, the available evidence raises serious questions about whether the exercise at NEADS on September 11 was a deliberate tactic used to hinder skilled and dedicated professionals, thereby preventing them from stopping the terrorist attacks.

NORAD’S ‘SIMULATED AIR WAR’ ON SEPTEMBER 11
A key agency responsible for protecting the U.S. from an airborne attack, like what happened on September 11, is NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. NORAD is the military organization responsible for monitoring and defending the airspace over the United States and Canada. Within the U.S., it is divided into three sectors. The 9/11 attacks took place in the airspace monitored by its Northeast Air Defense Sector, NEADS. It was therefore personnel at NEADS who were responsible for trying to coordinate the U.S. military’s response to the hijackings. These individuals, however, were in the middle of a major training exercise when the attacks began.

“Vigilant Guardian” was an annual exercise conducted by NORAD that was several days underway on September 11. All of NORAD took part in it. [1] Vigilant Guardian has been described as a “simulated air war” and as “an air defense exercise simulating an attack on the United States.” [2] Remarkably, it was scheduled to include a simulated hijacking at around 9:40 a.m. on September 11. The exercise “was designed to run a range of scenarios” that day, according to Vanity Fair, “including a ‘traditional’ simulated hijack in which politically motivated perpetrators commandeer an aircraft, land on a Cuba-like island, and seek asylum.” [3]

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Written by Nory King
Thursday, 15 March 2012 14:15

As part of the vital mission of AE911Truth, Richard Gage, AIA, is traveling to our great northern neighbor, Canada, on an eleven-stop speaking tour immediately following his tour of Arizona. Gage will be presenting the explosive 9/11 evidence to concerned citizens across Canada in March and April in conjunction with a campaign to submit a petition demanding an official review of the World Trade Center catastrophe to the Canadian Parliament.

This will be our third trip to Canada, and we have always been met with a good response. During our most recent trip, we joined David Ray Griffin and other esteemed 9/11 researchers at the Toronto Hearings.

AE911Truth Congressional Outreach Team leader Wayne Coste is one of the main organizers of the Canada tour. “There is a lot of enthusiasm surrounding this tour,” Coste said. “There is a groundswell of support for the 9/11 Truth movement that is sweeping across Canada.” Gage will begin the tour on Saturday, March 24, at the Denman Place Cinema in Vancouver, British Columbia. Denman Place opened in 1969 and is a must-see landmark in Vancouver.

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Richard Gage joins The Bob Tuskin Radio Show for a discussion on the state of 9/11 truth. Richard also reveals that AE911 Truth will soon be releasing a BRAND NEW documentary.

Written by Adam Taylor
Architects & Engineers for 911 Truth
March 1, 2012

Plane Impacts, Fire Damage & Melted Steel

Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of an extensive report by researcher Adam Taylor that exposes the fallacies and flaws in the arguments made by Popular Mechanics (PM) in the latest edition of Debunking 9/11 Myths. We encourage you to submit your own reviews of the book at Amazon.com and other places where it is sold.

(Quotes from Popular Mechanics’ book are shown in red and with page numbers.)

Plane Impacts and Fire Damage

PM next turns to the issue of the plane impacts and fire damage and their roles in the WTC event. Though PM acknowledges that the fires in the buildings could not have become hot enough to melt steel, they nonetheless rehash the constantly heard argument from other defenders of the official story that the steel did not need to melt to cause collapse. According to PM, it only had to be weakened by the fires enough to cause collapse.

PM argues that “When the planes hit the buildings and plowed into their centers, a large section of the exterior load-bearing columns as well as some crucial core columns were severed.” (pg. 37-38) Though this may be true, the collapse of the Towers appears to have actually started at floors that had minimal structural damage.1 PM also discusses the theory from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that “the impact stripped fireproofing insulation from the trusses that supported 80,000 square feet of floor space.” (pg. 38) This assertion, however, is greatly flawed, as noted by UL whistleblower Kevin Ryan:

[NIST’s] test for fireproofing loss, never inserted in the draft reports, involved shooting a total of fifteen rounds from a shotgun at non-representative [structural steel] samples… it’s not hard to see that these tests actually disproved their findings. One reason is that there is no evidence that a Boeing 767 could transform into any number of shotgun blasts. Nearly 100,000 blasts would be needed based on NIST’s own damage estimates, and these would have to be directed in a very symmetrical fashion to strip the columns and floors from all sides. However, it is much more likely that the aircraft debris was a distribution of sizes from very large chunks to a few smaller ones, and that it was directed asymmetrically.2
Photo from Ground Zero shows a portion of the airplane fuselage, which contradicts the framework of NIST’s “shotgun test” for fireproofing loss in the Twin Towers

Photo from Ground Zero shows a portion of the airplane fuselage, which contradicts the framework of NIST’s “shotgun test” for fireproofing loss in the Twin Towers

Ryan’s assertion that “…aircraft debris was a distribution of sizes from very large chunks to a few smaller ones” is well grounded, as photographs show that large portions of the planes exited the Towers, and eyewitnesses who escaped from the Towers reported seeing intact portions of the plane in the building.3

PM next goes on to discuss NIST’s assertions that the fires in the buildings were sufficient to weaken the steel to the failure point. However, NIST’s own tests show no evidence of this. While PM asserts in their book that “[steel] loses roughly 50 percent of its strength at approximately 600 degrees Celsius (1,100 Fahrenheit)” (pg. 38), NIST cites no evidence that the steel in the Towers sustained temperatures anywhere near this range. The highest temperatures NIST estimated for the steel samples was only 250 °C (482 °F), according to the metallographic paint tests they performed on WTC core column specimens.4

PM attempts to make a case that the combination of the aircraft impacts and the ensuing fires were sufficient to cause both of the structures to collapse.

Conspiracy theorists point to other high-rise fires, such as the one in 1991 at the 38-story Meridian Plaza hotel in Philadelphia, as proof that fire alone cannot bring down a skyscraper. And, in a sense, they are right: Fire alone did not bring down the towers. (pg. 40)

It is important to note that the term “conspiracy theorists” is a derogatory term used here to discredit the forensic evidence of controlled demolition brought forward by technical professionals. The experts at AE911Truth do not speculate on possible theories regarding who brought down the WTC skyscrapers.

In the case of Building 7, the NIST report tells us that structural damage played no role in initiating the collapse of the building, and that its collapse was due to “normal office fires”.5

One then has to wonder why PM does not consider the 9/11 Truth movement “in a sense right” about Building 7. But that aside, it is important to quantify how the structural damage played a role in the collapse of the Towers. We previously noted that the collapse of the Towers started on floors with less damage than other floors. In the case of the North Tower, the collapse started at the 98th floor6, which had the least amount of structural damage out of all the damaged floors.7 Not only that, but the upper section of the North Tower started to collapse on the side of the building opposite to where the plane impacted.

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People from around the world came together at Ryerson University in Toronto, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, to present evidence challenging the official accounts of that day. A DVD of the proceeding of the “Toronto Hearings” is nearly complete. Here is a preview.