Sunday, August 06, 2006

Evidence Mining

We have discussed "quote mining" several times, which is when truthers take a quote and grab part of it in order to support their assertions, ignoring any part which would contradict their beliefs. This is a variation on the same theme, which could be called "evidence mining", where you take one part of the evidence which could be made to support you, ignoring other parts of the same evidence which contradict it.

Well here is a good example of that. Steven Jones has been claiming that the World Trade Centers could have been rigged for demolition by 10 men, making 4 trips each. I have often wondered what the basis for this is. At the recent LA Conference, shown on CSPAN, he gets into his logic, if you can call it that.

Steven Jones: The point is, planting these explosives and incendiaries requires a group of people, it requires preplanning. This implies an inside job, it doesn’t have to be a large group of people. In fact I suspect it was a small group of people, perhaps about 19 who were in the know. (laughter) You see what I am saying? And there were others below them who basically… you put this material, we put it in the elevators shafts and so on. They gave them instructions…

Alex Jones: In fact you have done a calculation, on how many men it would take, how many trips to load the buildings.

Steven Jones: Yeah, let’s see, it was in one of my papers. You see I interviewed a demolitions expert on this, “How much explosives does it take to bring down a tower like this?” And he said “Well…” He’s done hundreds, “Southwork Tower took 2 or 3
hundred pounds of explosives” Well that means if you scale that to the towers, you are talking about 1000 pounds roughly. In the towers case it does look like they put more, for redundancy. For instance, you don’t know where the plane is going to go in, but you want to start the explosions from where the planes went in so you have the extra explosives at different levels. Are you following me here? Different levels, so then with a radio control… and computerized, after about an hour, we’re ready now. The computer controls the start, near where the planes went in. And it will just knock the material out of the way so this will be a complete straight down collapse.

Now his calculations for the pounds of explosives seem a bit optimistic, but they may be correct. I don't know, I didn't talk to this alleged expert, but first of all he is talking about explosives, not his super magic thermate. It is much harder for him to come up with a number for how much thermite/thermate would be used, for the simple fact that thermite is not used in building demolitions.

But more importantly, he is intentionally avoiding a huge part of the process. He is trying to imply that a small amount of explosives would be needed to bring down the building, because that would make it quicker and easier for someone to smuggle it into the Trade Centers. 10 men (or 19) making 4 trips makes it sound like this is something that you could do over a weekend by simply turning off a few security cameras.

But they don't just have to drop off the explosives like some kind of devious UPS delivery men, the reason controlled demolitions can work with smaller amounts of explosives, is because the buildings undergo extensive preparations, and the demolitions are painstakenly placed in strategic positions.

Walls are ripped apart and knocked down, beams are cut, holes are bored, wires are run to detonators. Here is a description of the work needed to take down a much smaller, 33 story building. Keep in mind, this is just the amount of time needed to emplace the explosives, not to prepare the building in the first place:

In 24 days, CDI's 12 person loading crew placed 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations on 9 levels of the structure. Over 36,000 ft. of detonating cord and 4,512 non-electric delay devices were installed in CDI's implosion initiation system. As the implosion required the detonation of a total of 2,728 lb. of explosives, CDI implemented 36 “primary delays" and an additional 216 “micro-delays" in the implosion initiation sequence in an attempt to keep detonation overpressure to a minimum.


Yeah, 10 men making 4 trips should be enough to wire a two 110 story office buildings. I could do that over my lunch break.

7 Comments:

At 07 August, 2006 02:05, Blogger Billythekid said...

Still no proof for thermate, according to Jones himself: "The samples are predominantly iron, so we can rule out the 'molten aluminum' hypothesis with a high degree of confidence. There is very little chromium, so that the 'molten structural steel' hypothesis is highly suspect. Yes, there is sulfur -- but proving the use of 'thermate' positively will certainly require further analyses and comparisons with samples of known origin (such as thermate-products)."

 
At 07 August, 2006 08:07, Blogger AbrashTX said...

And of course, the WTC complex was abandoned and security disabled on all four of these trips, so no one noticed the 10 men dropping off tidy packages of explosives. And then, no one noticed the explosives sitting there because they were made invisible. By science.

 
At 07 August, 2006 08:13, Blogger Avery Dylan said...

Like hey man, I bet they did it on a weekend when the World Trade Center was closed - like the last guy out on Friday night turned off the lights, and the demo guys went in.

 
At 07 August, 2006 11:25, Blogger Sword of Truth said...

Do Jones and Fetzer ever speak to each other?

Isn't Fetzer going around saying "Steve Jones has proven blah blah blah blah..."?

 
At 07 August, 2006 13:18, Blogger Manny said...

ironically the conspiracy itself doesnt require a huge number of people, its the subsequent coverup that requires thousands of people to keep quiet

Precisely. If one were to make a comparison between the proposed conspirators and the actual ones, one would posit that in the latter case all the flight school instructors, landlords, FBI agents who searched the hijackers' personal effects, airport security camera operators, money transfer operators and similarly situated people failed to come forward because of some mixture of fear, embarrassment, being bought off or being in on it.

In other news, looks like they're making some big changes to the Loosers' forum. Among other things, I can't get to the skeptics forum any more.

 
At 07 August, 2006 13:19, Blogger Manny said...

Oops. Now it's back. They are having a big purge of skeptical contributors, though.

 
At 07 August, 2006 13:59, Blogger Unknown said...

A demo charge has to be placed on the girder to be effective and they must be exposed. Were the charges on the outer load bearing or the core girders? Were these exposed? If so would not someone who worked in the towers have asked questions by now?

 

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