P4man wrote:
The sad truth is that it has been debunked, and to some extent the debunking has been debunked, and so you end up were you started: clueless.
Its a damn shame the official 9/11 report didn't do a better job of setteling these, and all other controversies surrounding 911 once and for all (collapse of building 7, pentagon, following the money trail, etc). I don't quite understand why that is, as many of these conspiracy theories should be (and actually are) easy to debunk. Take the attack on the pentagon for instance. Its kinda hard to imagine anything other than an airplane would have hit it. I mean, why on earth would anyone take the risk of using a cruise missile and have someone see of film it? Yet at the same time, they are not releasing the footage of all the security cams in the area which ought to show the impact, except for one which doesn't show a plane.
That's why that in the end one has to look to the big picture instead of only the small individual pieces and come to his/her own conclusions regarding the "truth", that hopefully won't depend on too many coincidences or require doublethinking.
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Anyway, about the thermite, have a look here:
Those links predate the publication of the article and thus don't tackle the microscopy at all and tackle the calorimetry indirectly. The article actually addresses some of the points of those links (gypsum, IIRC) and perform the analysis of the interior of the chips, that supposedly was protected from external contamination.
My issues with the article are that they should also have analyzed other magnetic and non-magnetic debris in the dust to show if their "thermitic" samples were clearly distinct in composition, calorimetry and microscopy from all other stuff contained in the dust, and they should have also analyzed other possibilities. Also, their preliminary investigations show that the chips represent about 0.1% by weight of their small samples of dust, which translates to roughly 1000 tons of explosives in the towers, a lot of explosives. But of course, the "debunkers" also have problems in their version.
Interestingly, one of the most qualified people in the world to review the paper was supposedly the chief editor of the open chemical physics journal, who was specialist in nanotechnology, explosives and consultant for the french army, but that abruptly resigned after learning about the paper while claiming that she had never read it and that it wasn't her field of expertise.
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The "nano thermite" claim seems particularly unbelieveable to me, since that stuff hasn't been used anywhere outside laboratoriums afaik, and has yet to prove it useable for anything remotely like that. Why use such experimental explosive when ordinary thermite would do the job just as well? Not too mention the simple question how you could plant thermite (or other explosive) charges and not have them go off when the planes hit.
Indeed. A more basic question would be about a realistic way by which three distinct buildings can fall symmetrically in near free fall speed through the path of most resistance.
