12/22/05: Not this crap again...

> According to Dutch Wikipedia, Werner von Braun got arrested by the SS because he kept blabbering about 'rockets to the moon' when the German army wanted rockets to bomb London.

And this contradicts my assertion that von Braun is assumed to be far more Nazi friendly that he actually was... how?

> That's it. Never says he was about to get shot by the SS or on the run. He got released and after that he asked his co-workers whether they should surrender to the Russians or the Allies.

The English Wikipedia article I linked to claims that after he buried the plans and hijacked the train, the SS was ordered to kill him. That may be historically inaccurate; I'm not claiming that WP is perfect. But that's what the article says. Do you have a better cite that says otherwise?

> Regarding the WTC, you work in a plastics factory, not? I'd say that if the steel skeletons of both WTC 1 and 2 and WTC 7 were made of plastic instead of steel then I agree the fires could have caused the structure to melt.

The explanation I heard was not that the steel melted, but that it hit its "plastic limit." This is engineer speak for "got soft due to heat." The jet fuel (commercial grade Jet-A; mostly kerosene) can burn at 850C ideally, which is far more than hot enough to allow the beams to twist up like spaghetti. Though, most experts have claimed it only burned at about 500C due to shortage of oxygen in the middle of the fire. These claims about temperature are from this site, which is pro-WTC conspiracy:

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/thermite.htm

The point is, you don't need to *melt* the steel to liquid to make it fail. All you have to do is get it hot enough where it starts to weaken like a stick of butter left out of the fridge too long, and down the building goes.

Here's a cite for the plastic limit of steel. The PL depends on how heavily loaded the steel beam is, as well as how hot it gets:

http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/wtc/analysis/fires/steel_fire_resistance.htm

> But even then they should never have come down as they did, in such a short time. The first tower that went down desintegrated from the top down to the ground.

The architecture of the building was intentionally designed such that the outside skeleton was made strong enough to hold up to the wind, but not the building weight. The load bearing stuff was all in the central columns. When the central columns failed (fire cause lowering of the plastic load limit), the building dragged itself down from the inside, pulling the outer skin down with it.

Cite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center, the third paragraph under the heading "The Twin Towers".

See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_World_Trade_Center

> And of course the same result can be achieved by some random fires on a few floors even though fire has never caused a modern steel structure to collapse, certainly not at that speed.

Unfortunately I don't believe we have ever seen a fire this hot in a building with the same kind of internal load-bearing structure the WTC had. And we definitely haven't seen a fire this hot in a skyscraper as tall as the WTC. The tallest one I could find was a skyscraper in Madrid, which was a mere 62 stories tall, far short of the WTC's 110 stories.

> Nearly all the steel debris, including heavy (very heavy in the case of WTC 7) solid steel beams (more than twice as thick as ordinary T-bars) could be scooped up after the destruction and loaded onto trucks without the need for further cutting. Some neatly organized collapse, eh?

Dude, those support structures FAILED AT THE JOINTS, which are weaker than the steel beams they join. The support structures then collapsed back into the individual beams from which they were made - beams that has been BROUGHT THERE BY TRUCK during the construction of the building. I see very little suspicious about the fact that a house of cards falls apart into card-sized pieces.

> Ask yourself this question: would you *ever* believe that "9/11" was an inside job even if the evidence was found in a vault in the Pentagon? Or do you dismiss that possibility before going over the evidence?

I'd love to have good, solid evidence that Bush either knew about 9/11 and ignored it, or was complicit in it. That'd be just about the surest way to take the fucker down. But it's an extraordinary claim, and such claims require extraordinary evidence. "I hate Bush and want to blame him for 9/11" is not evidence, it's just prejudice. I hate Bush too, and want to see him taken down, but unlike you I do not let my hate for him blind me and make me grasp at straws of inane conspiracy theory.

-Ben

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