Kevin Barrett On the NIST Report

Kevin Barrett is giving Uncle Fetzer a run for his money to be the battiest member of the "Scholars". Well, OK, that may not be the case now that Judy Wood is back, but perhaps he is going for #2. In any case his radio show Saturday was filled with so many idiotic bits, that I may not ever get around to addressing all of them. Here is another part.

A caller asks (apparently the same caller who called in to Jason Bermas) about reviewing the NIST report. Here is Barrett's answer:

We are talking with Clinton in Wisconsin saying we need to deal with the massive… the massively inadequate NIST report. And I was telling Clinton, that report, as I understand, I haven’t read the whole thing I doubt if anyone ever has or will. But basically what it does is it shows, or claims to show what it thinks might have happened as structural steel uh... was supposedly weakens, and begins to bow or bend or buckle inward after it lost its fireproofing from the plane, so they had these diagrams of this alleged inward buckling, and they just say global collapse ensues. But they don’t describe how it ensues.

Alleged inward buckling? If Barrett had actually read the report and paid attention, he would have noticed not just diagrams, but photographs of this buckling.




















































It is amazing what you learn when you read.

Not content with merely screwing this part of Barrett continues lying about the report, claiming it does not explain the collapse.

This whole report, according to people that I trust like Kevin Ryan, the Underwriters Lab guy who was fired, for blowing the whistle on the cover up that was going on with Underwriters. It sounds like what they did was churn out this gigantic pile that nobody can possibly read. That doesn’t even pretend to explain what actually happened. It pretends to explain how there could have been a structural steel failure on one floor. And that hypothesis, according to Kevin Ryan and others is extremely improbable. That is extremely improbable that there could have been this failure on even one floor. Much less the actual event. These towers coming down at roughly free fall speed in an explosive manner, with structural members being blasted upwards and outwards for hundreds of feet in all directions. And pyroclastic flows, which are characteristic only of nuclear explosions and volcanic eruptions blasting outwards as most of the contents of the towers did not come down it was turned into dust in this extremely high energy process. So this NIST report apparently really doesn’t deal with what happened. It deals with kind of an imaginary version of what conceivably could have happened in some alternate reality, on a couple of floors (laughter).

This is a misrepresentation of what the NIST report says though. The report did explain how the collapse began, they just did not go into details on what happened after the collapse began. Once it started the forces were so great it was going to continue. There was no scientific reason to analyze it in detail. This would be like an aircraft crash investigation, they are worried about why a plane crashed, not what exactly happened to the plane after it hit the ground.

In the second hour Barrett even continues with this, asking why NIST didn't study the collapse and propose changes in building codes. The answer to this of course is, they did.

World Trade Center Study Spurs Improvement of Codes
When the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released the final report in October 2005 from its technical investigation of the fires and collapses of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers on Sept. 11, 2001, included were 30 recommendations for improving building and occupant safety derived from the findings. On March 24, 2006, the first 19 proposed changes to model building codes (used as templates for codes legislated, implemented and enforced by state and local jurisdictions) based upon and consistent with the NIST WTC recommendations were submitted to the International Code Council (ICC).

I guess they don't teach research and critical reading skills at the University of Wisconsin.