by Denis G. Rancourt
I have argued that the 911 Movement is an important and valuable societal movement populated by citizens seeking truth, justice, and democracy:
LINK.
I have also argued that it is wrong to assume that information and majority public opinion on their own produce societal change. I have argued that without an effective activism column the 911 Movement will simply be a curious cultural phenomenon with no political impact.
Activism cannot be only “getting the message out” and making videos and web sites. It must include direct interactions in the public sphere at political venues (hearings, conferences, government propaganda events, etc.), legal activism, classic political organizing, and anti-establishment activism at work and at school.
In this regard, in my opinion, the 911 Movement division between “researchers” and “activists” is counter productive. “Researchers” who focus their interests on tenuous theories of events rather than supporting the activists harm the movement. To operate a division between inquiry and social reform always serves concentrated and undemocratic power.
This is a fundamental divide and conquer strategy that has lead to our modern concept of “academic freedom”, thereby effectively making virtually all university professors into service intellectuals. (
EXAMPLE)
The 911 Movement needs to rout out and isolate this destructive tendency to go off and “research” rather than concentrate one’s energies on effective activist tactics and strategies. Useful research must be part of a praxis of social reform or it is harmful research. There is no lack of historic evidence of research as a neutralizing force.
And the Movement needs to stop spinning its wheels with extreme theories such as: directed energy weapons, all the video is fake and there were no planes, and the two towers necessarily came down in controlled explosives-assisted demolitions with or without the help of tonnes of nanothermite.
None of these theories need to be true or proven for the motives driving an “inside job” to hold. In addition these proposals about the twin tower collapses can easily be contested, displace the debate away from more important issues, and appear to most opponents as ridiculous and therefore non-threatening.
To illustrate how easy it is to contest arguments for the “controlled demolition” of the twin towers, I offer two discussions below; in the hope of drawing the Movement away from severed “research” and towards political activism.
Evidence for nanothermite - Not
As a scientist with relevant expertise, I have reviewed the paper by Harrit et al. reporting to have found synthetic nanothermite in WTC dust samples (
Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2, 2009, 7-31).
My report is posted
HERE.
Harrit et al. did not make conclusions or proposals that followed from their data and made basic errors in data interpretation. Harrit himself admits to never having used the central method of energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDXA) in his research before his 2009 paper (
LINK).
My
REPORT explains a natural origin for the grey-red bi-layer flakes found by Harrit et al.
Explosives were required - Not
There is a widespread narrative among Truthers that the nature of the collapses and the degree of destruction imply that large amounts (tonnes) of explosives must have been used.
I see no evidence for this.
A standing building is a bomb waiting to be ignited (by an earthquake or anything capable of taking out structural elements). The gravitational potential energy that is released when a tall structure collapses is enormous. The higher and more massive the structure, the greater the energy release.
Indeed, this is the basis of controlled demolition in which gravitational energy not explosives does virtually all the destructive work. The explosives are only used to take out key structural elements and gravity does the rest.
The gravitational energy liberated (and used for destruction) in the collapse of one WTC tower is approximately 100 tonnes of TNT equivalent, a massive amount equal to approximately 1% of the Hiroshima atomic explosion.
The US war crime that was the Hiroshima explosion caused total destruction on an area of 12 square kilometres and killed 200,000 people. The US war crime that was the 911 twin tower attack caused destruction that is indeed equivalent to approximately 1% of the Hiroshima blast damage, although more concentrated on the point of the towers.
100 tonnes of TNT equivalent is enough to cause all the destruction seen as the result.
Those who insist that explosives were needed to produce the observed degree of pulverization would have us believe that every piece of office equipment and every human body had been loaded with explosives. That’s not how it works when you liberate 100 tonnes of TNT equivalent in seconds.
The following simple scenario of a twin tower collapse does not violate any physical principle.
I have already reported on the important work of
Jim Malott (
HERE) who exposed the corrupt politics of how the core-structure steel was allowed to be installed virtually unprotected during construction of the towers.
The core-structure is hit from one side, blowing away some of the fire protection material. The steel in the core-structure first fails on the side it was hit causing the top segment of the tower to start rotating. The heated steel in the rest of the core then also fails under the combination of heat and bending strain. The top segment now crushes against the bottom segment as it also continues to rotate but with lessening angular acceleration under a significant counter torque from the asymmetric crushing.
The top segment crushes itself into the bottom segment as it simultaneously (action-reaction) crushes the bottom segment. A cascade follows in which every newly crushed layer adds to the mass being accelerated downwards to continue the destruction.
In other words, I believe that if the conditions were created for key structural elements to fail at the point of impact then the rest would follow from gravity. Of course in such a NON-CONTROLLED demolition it would be messy and pieces would be flung in all directions, as was observed.
Sorry but I don’t see the need for an explosives assisted collapse.
And it matters because…?What is most unfortunate is that many Truthers will now spend much energy refuting my proposal rather than moving on to the important task of activism.
We should be figuring out how to make the bastards accountable rather than posturing on questions of high school physics.
