by _sabotage_ on Tue Feb 03, 2015 8:35 pm
NIST was collecting evidence for an investigation. The investigation would be important on several fronts:
1. For a criminal case.
2. For insurance claims.
3. For future engineering guidelines.
For all of these purposes, evidence of what happened is crucial. The guidelines provide a format for establishing evidence. If explosives were used, it would not be a surprise, it would be expected. It would be expected because fire had never brought down a tall building (NIST's words). It would be the same as if a doctor came out and said I found a new reason for heart attacks. If the patient he had discovered this is in hadn't been tested for the normal ways of causing a heart attack, this would be inconclusive, to say the least.
It's more so because other regulations weren't followed. The site wasn't secured and protected from contamination, in fact it was hurriedly disposed of. NIST didn't have a lot of physical evidence. They themselves state this. But that's not entirely true, they stated at one point that they had 220-240 pieces of steel from WTC 7 and state at another point that none was examined. They had some video evidence and state no evidence of explosives were found. But the video evidence strongly suggests that some explosions occurred.
Wouldn't they be interested in what caused them? Was it the generators, air cons, etc. what role did they play in the collapse and what regulations should be written to ensure that the manufacturers can comply so that it doesn't lead to a other collapses?
What if it was more than met the eye? What if there were active agents of Al Qaeda who had placed bombs there? Knowing that they had would cause us to seek them out and stop them, and punish them.
It's not merely a question of why waste the time, we know why we waste the time for these things.
Who cares about their claim?
If the Osama confession tapes had been validated, we would still care. If a plane was videotaped hitting the Pentagon, we would still care. If any of the alleged terrorists were filmed getting on any of the planes we would still care. If we recovered the black boxes, we would still care. If the "White Paper" proved 9/11 was caused by Al Qaeda, we would still care. If the funding was traced, if several of the alleged hijackers weren't still alive, if the back stories of the hijackers weren't so out of touch with the ideas spread about them, if we hadn't had multiple warnings of an attack using planes, if... The list is very long of the lack of evidence of who actually did the attack. And as such we care even more.
Proving guilt is much more than about punishing the bad guys, it's about providing justice, proving stability, showing that you better not try this cuz we'll get you.
But we can't even prove the alleged hijackers were on any of the planes.
So NIST's claim isn't just about WTC 7, it's the only form of investigation we've had. The 9/11 commission report doesn't even mention WTC 7. It was grossly underfunded, people were accused of stealing documents, only four commissioners were allowed to look through thousands of documents. They weren't allowed to remove them, record them.
But NIST was going to be scientific. At least we would know for sure that the planes brought down those buildings. This would be something lacking everything else.
But they didn't examine the evidence, they invented an arbitrary test for explosives (must be between 130-140 dbs) they didn't do standard tests.
They might as well not have bothered.
They added nothing to engineering understanding. They altered the thermal expansion properties of steel with no evidence. They acted like the stiffeners and shear studs weren't present. They raised the fires to unreadable temperatures and assumed all the energy went straight to the steel.
In other words, they can now report to engineers around the world:
Make sure the building has stiffeners.
Make sure the girders have shear studs.
Double check the thermal expansion rates of a36 steel.
Make sure the steel isn't directly exposed to fire.
And engineers can utterly ignore them, because this is already standard.
It doesn't help with a criminal case. It would actually hurt one.
As for insurance. Bush's brother moved from the security of WTC to the insurer settling the claim for it. Silverstein who had just leased and insured the building got his entire claim doubled.
For people who care, it isn't important, especially the victims families.
Metsfanmax
Killing a human should not be worse than killing a pig.
It never ceases to amaze me just how far people will go to defend their core beliefs.