Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Explosive Material

Based on these observations, we conclude that the red layer of the red/gray chips we have discovered in the WTC dust is active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material.[1]




[1] The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009, 2, 7-31 7
Open Access
Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade
Center Catastrophe
http://www.bentham.org/open/tocpj/openaccess2.htm
Scientists:
Niels H. Harrit
1 Jeffrey Farrer
2 Steven E. Jones
3 Kevin R. Ryan4
Frank M. Legge
5 Daniel Farnsworth2
Gregg Roberts
6, James R. Gourley7
and Bradley R. Larsen3

1 Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
2 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA
3 S&J Scientific Co., Provo, UT, 84606, USA
4 9/11 Working Group of Bloomington, Bloomington, IN 47401, USA
5 Logical Systems Consulting, Perth, Western Australia
6 Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Berkeley, CA 94704, USA
7 International Center for 9/11 Studies, Dallas, TX 75231, USA

http://www.bentham.org/open/tocpj/openaccess2.htm

11 comments:

Bruce Webb said...

Brenda I don't know where you are going with this but the general problem with 9/11 conspiracy theories is that they are over-determined.

If your goal was to get enough shock value to get your war on surely a double airplane strike which killed hundreds would be just as effective as a double airplane strike combined with a controlled explosion. There is not enough value added to justify the additional destruction of capital and loss of so many firefighters.

And if you flip that around you would equally get the same effect by blowing up the building without adding the flourish of the hi-jacking. After all we had a proven history of Islamic extremists target the WTC with explosives, it would have been child's play to blame a straight out building bombing on Iraq/al Qaeda and avoid the embarassing complication of having your hi-jackers be mostly Saudi and Yememi..

If we ignore that and back up, any conspiracy requires knowing with some precision that the hijackings would work and that the impacts would occur in a relatively narrow time frame.

Which is why I don't find arguments from the chemistry and the engineering particularly compelling, the underlying plot line is just too over-determined, to elaborate to achieve the actual aims.

And this remains true no matter which culprit you pick to do the actual explosive rigging.

Anonymous said...

I wonder if they look for this stuff elsewhere if they'll find it's produced in any large building fire.

Their footnotes (especially "Making Nanostructured Pyrotechnics in a Beaker" from 2000) aren't nutjob work, at least.

But odd things happen in high temperature fires with multiple materials -- for example the structures called "buckyballs" that were first built in labs, then later discovered to be formed naturally.

Robert D Feinman said...

I'm afraid the "journal" this appeared doesn't seem to have much credibility. They claim that articles are "peer" reviewed, but there are no indications of editorial policies or how the reviewers are chosen.

It is only in its second issue and seems not to be widely cited elsewhere.

Now publishing an incendiary claim (no pun intended) could be a way to get some buzz generated about the journal.

It would be useful to know if this paper had been submitted elsewhere and what the reviewers had to say. Obviously if it had been accepted it wouldn't have been published in this obscure journal.

Junk science in a junk journal.

Myrtle Blackwood said...

Bruce
My instincts are saying that an independent inquiry into the September 11th attacks need to occur. This hasn't happened. An inquiry needs to determine whether any members of the US Congress are implicated.

Anonymous,
I don't know the answer to your question. If it was possible for thermite to occur "in high temperature fires with multiple materials" then perhaps this will come out of further studies?

Some excerpts on 911:


· The 9/11 commission members were appointed by George W. Bush as well as Congress, which led to the valid criticism that it was not a truly independent commission since many suspicions about the 911 attacks lead directly to Congress and the White House.

· The 911 Commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, had a conflict of interest. A new York Times reporter (Philip Shenon) claimed that Zelikow had much closer ties to the White House than he publicly disclosed; that Zelikow stopped panel staffers from submitting embarrassing reports about Rice and Bush and that Zelikow tried to change a 9/11 Commission staff report to include a false claim of the Bush administration regarding supposed contact between ‘al-Qaida’ and Saddam Hussein.

· Richard Clarke testified about his urgent warnings over the Summer of 2001 to Condoleesa Rice about the imminent threat of terrorist attack on US soil.

· Jamie Gorelick, member of the 911 Commission, had major conflicts of interest. Gorelick developed the policy that prevented communication between various government law enforcement and intelligence agencies, specifically the FBI and CIA. (the "wall memo").[5] She also is on the board of United Technologies. Gorelick's firm has agreed to represent Prince Mohammed al Faisal in the suit by the 9/11 families. The families contend that al Faisal has legal responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.

· Bush was personally briefed on August 6, 2001 about the possibility of the September 11 attacks

· in the months and weeks leading up to 9/11 there were warnings and signs that some members of the Administration and its national security apparatus were anticipating something horrendous.

· The money trail links Bush’s oil background, his family’s connections to Saudi investments, the politics of pipelines in Central Asia, and the military-industrial complex.

· the FBI contends at least 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks were Saudis.

· There are Bush and Baker connections to the ruling elite of Saudi Arabia. Those connections helped to generate large investments in Carlyle from the Saudi elite including the bin Laden family, a family made wealthy by an extensive construction business.

· Five Degrees of Osama. President George Bush named Thomas Kean chairman of an ‘independent’ commission examining the September 11th attacks. But Kean is a director of petroleum giant Amerada Hess which, in 1998 joined with a company backed by Khalid bin Mahfouz called Delta Oil to develop oil fields in Azerbaijan. Mahfouz is married to one of Osama bin Laden’s sisters and he is suspected of funding charities linked to al Qaeda. Mahfouz has also shown up in dealings with (among others) ultra-secretive investment firm Carlyle Group and BCCI, the lender toppled by fraud in 1992.

· John Connally and individuals with close links to the Saudi Royal family as well as George HW Bush were all coinvestors in Houston’s Main Bank.

· Deputy Director of the FBI. O’Neill had repeatedly been denied access to questioning the bin Laden family, including a January 2001 directive from the White House to desist from investigating two of Osama’s brothers who were residing in Falls Church, Virginia at the time. In the face of such continuing obstruction, O’Neill resigned in protest from the FBI claiming that the “main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it.”

joel hanes said...

"thermite" sounds all techy and how-could-this-happen-except-on-purpose

Iron rust plus pulverized metallic aluminum (the most common thermite composition) does not seem to me to be an especially unlikely product when a steel-skeleton iron-piped aluminum-cladding-faced skyscraper collapses in a jet-fuel fire.

Robert D Feinman said...

Actually there were several studies done by noted civil and structural engineers.

This had nothing to do with the political commissions.

Their detailed analysis including computer models of what failed and how were all published in real journals and reports.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that they demand that you prove a negative. "Prove to me that there wasn't a secret cabal".

Every piece of evidence presented then gets flipped around to show that the cabal is even more secret than was previously expected. A fool's errand.

Stick to economics.

By the way I used to visit Ground Zero each year on 9/11 to take photos of the (lack of) progress and to see how the crowds were interacting.

If you are interested you can view the collection on my web site, start here:
A Multi-year Stroll Around Lower Manhattan

I skipped last year since things have generally remained static in the past few years. Perhaps I'll try again this year, there has been some progress in building the below ground memorial, although the freedom tower seems to be on indefinite hold.

TheTrucker said...

If the towers were purposefully destroyed that does not mean there was a planned destruction of the towers for clandestine and wrongful reasons.

Let me simplify by asking you what you would do the following circumstance:

You can see the jet liner is going to hit the tower. You know that the people in the tower and the people in the plane are going to die as well as people on the ground. You can blow the jet liner out of the sky and kill all aboard and thus decrease the loss of life. What do you do?

Now let us understand that there had been attacks on the twin towers in the past and the objective was to topple one into the other and then have them fall over killing all inside and all in the city where they (the towers) would fall. The towers are tall so the death will be very much spread out and you will get 50% more death or thereabouts. I wonder if you would have the brains and the guts to put ultra safe explosives in the towers such that they could be brought down as they were brought down in order to save the lives of the people NOT IN THE TOWERS.

What would you do?

Bruce Webb said...

Brenda there is a plausible case that 'Bush Knew' that an al-Qaeda attack using airplanes was in store. There is no plausible reason to extend that to additional pre-planned measures to amplify the damage by wiring the building.

That is what I meant by 'over-determined'.

There were elaborate theories that the Pentagon was not in effect hit by an aircraft. All of which ignored the reality that a plane took off and never landed, that people on that plane were public persons who have not shown up since, and that we have eye-witness reports of a plane flying low on a path that would intersect the Pentagon. As opposed to that we have a few seconds of blurred videotape that people claim are more consistent with a cruise missile strike.

The problem is that known people on a known flight never showed up anywhere any time after.

Occam's Razor often slices a little thin, which doesn't mean we have to grant every credit to the outliers.

TheTrucker said...

I think that Bruce Web offers a very concise and credible point of view concerning the use of "there were explosives" as an attempt to boost credibility to the "they knew" claim.

I, for one, am very much convinced that "they knew" and that "they wanted it". All of the conspiracy stuff about the explosives actually detracts from the obvious footprints left by the people who either knew what was likely happening or should have been able to deduce what was happening and should have acted and didn't.

And no, people. That doesn't include Bill Clinton or George BUsh. Clinton was long gone and Bush was a Rovian sock puppet. Cheney, OTOH, was in charge of the interceptors at the time and there is every possibility that the schedule of training exercises was "leaked".

Myrtle Blackwood said...

Robert: "I'm afraid the "journal" this appeared doesn't seem to have much credibility. They claim that articles are "peer" reviewed, but there are no indications of editorial policies or how the reviewers are chosen.

Fair enough. But perhaps the most important question would be: who is brave enough to be the editor in chief of this journal?

The editor in chief of the journal where recently the paper: "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe" was published, resigned, claiming she wasn't informed of the publication. She proceeds to provide not a single solid scientific rebuttal, only administrative bickering and personal political bias against, well.. inconvenient science....

http://www.nowpublic.com/health/editor-chief-quits-over-active-thermitic-material
____________


Robert: "The problem with conspiracy theories is that they demand that you prove a negative."

Who presented a conspiracy theory here?

Joel: "Iron rust plus pulverized metallic aluminum does not seem to me to be an especially unlikely product when a steel-skeleton iron-piped aluminum-cladding-faced skyscraper collapses in a jet-fuel fire."

what about the nanotechnology found in the compound at the WTC?

Trucker: "I wonder if you would have the brains and the guts to put ultra safe explosives in the towers such that they could be brought down as they were brought down in order to save the lives of the people NOT IN THE TOWERS."

And how many days in advance does it take to set up explosives in these very tall buildings so that they fall in a controlled demolition manner?

Bruce: "Brenda there is a plausible case that 'Bush Knew' that an al-Qaeda attack using airplanes was in store. There is no plausible reason to extend that to additional pre-planned measures to amplify the damage by wiring the building."

The only reasons I can think that someone would plant explosives in the buildings in such a context as you describe would be:
(i) To amplify the shocking spectacle to ensure the American public would support yet another American invasion of a very long line of invaded countries;
(ii) To get rid of buildings that were not wanted. I purchased a rather aged book (dated 1970s, I think) that mentions that the twin towers were extremely expensive when it came to energy use.

Only last year a plane flew into a highrise building in New York and the building didn't collapse.

Why did building 7 of the WTC complex collapse in exactly the same manner as the twin towers even though no plane flew into it??

By the way, I found this tonight:

"According to the Navy's Small Business Innovation Research, super-thermite "is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services."

"This finding really goes beyond anything that has previously been shown," said Jones in a media advisory. "We had to use sophisticated tools to analyze the dust because this isn't just a typical explosive, RDX or CD4 or something -- this is a highly engineered material not readily available to just anyone."

"The cost and production rate of super-thermite composites has limited the use of these materials in DoD applications," claims the Navy's SBIR.


Study claims 'highly engineered explosive' found in WTC rubble
Stephen C. Webster
Published: Saturday April 4, 2009
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Scientists_find_active_superthermite_in_WTC_0404.html

TheTrucker said...

Brenda asks:

And how many days in advance does it take to set up explosives in these very tall buildings so that they fall in a controlled demolition manner?


I don't get it? The first attempt on the towers was in 1993 and the objective was to topple on into the other. That gives the spooks about 8 years to do the job of setting the stuff in there in such a way as to make sure that those towers would not fall over but instead fall straight down on command.

I do not claim that this is what happened. I ask if there are people who would put this stuff in the buildings just for such a situation to stop the things from falling over and killing even more people. And did they think the towers were going to topple or did the fire actually set off the explosives without their "command"? And in any case would you think they would admit to any of it?