Yesterday, for the first time in 2 years, open questions concerning 9/11 were seriously discussed in a German TV show.
Station: Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), 09/10/03
Studio guests were Hans Leyendecker, senior political editor of newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, who often voiced polemic opinions against “conspiracy theorists” but claims he is an investigative journalist, and Gerhard Wisnewski, 9/11 skeptic and author of the Book “Operation 9/11”. A lot of mostly academic experts were interviewed.
I present the most important topics here. I want to stress that the text below does not express my own opinion, I only inserted a question at the end of point 3. I neither claim that a Boeing hit the Pentagon nor that it did not hit the Pentagon.
They discussed 5 topics:
1) Could the hijackers have managed the flight maneuvers observed on 9/11 with their kind of training?
2) Why did no visible debris exist from flight 93?
3) Why was the impact hole in the Pentagon smaller than as would be expected, according to the wing-span of the Boeing?
4) Are some of the hijackers still alive?
5) Was the WTC blown up by bombs?
1) It is not easy to hit the WTC, but possible for someone with a commercial pilot’s license. But it is very complicated to hit the Pentagon where it was hit, the experts agree. And buildings cannot be programmed into the plane’s navigation systems, so the exact goal cannot be aimed at automatically. It could be possible for a trained pilot. However, it is not sure if the Pentagon was hit exactly there where it was intended to have been hit. The plane’s speed could not have been 850 km/h, that is impossible so proximate to ground because of the high air density. It was perhaps 600 km/h, according to a professor. The experts claimed several times that the maneuvers were possible for someone with a commercial pilot’s license, and one of them claimed that the hijackers had perhaps training that we are unaware of, in Arabian countries. They did not discuss the fact that several flight schools really doubted the abilities of their pupils.
2) The earth in the area were flight 93 allegedly crashed was very soft (resp. it could be compressed) because this region was a former surface mining area which was refilled with sand. So the plane disintegrated and disappeared nearly completely inside the hole, the experts claimed.
3) The impact hole was smaller than expected, according to a professor from the Purdue University , because the fuel mass was concentrated near the fuselage, so that the tips of the wings were weaker than the Pentagon wall. He did not explain were the wings tips are (if they smashed, are there visible remants?).
A computer simulation of the plane’s behavior inside the Pentagon was shown, the columns within the building destroyed the plane (cf.
http://news.uns.purdue.edu/hp/Sozen.Pentagon.html). A German professor said the software used were a common commercial software and the result plausible.
However, I don’t understand what should have caused the “exit holes” in the C-ring wall if the plane was destroyed within the Pentagon (search for exit hole pentagon in google for pictures).
4) They proved that in one case the BBC only reproduced an information of The Telegraph, which took the information from Al Jazeera, which only summarized Arabic newspapers. The original information was an error, due to a mix-up of similar resp. common names. I am not sure if that disproves the information about 5 other possibly living hijackers. The families were visited, and they claimed that their relatives had disappeared since autumn 2001.
5) The core did not consist of ferroconcrete, according to an expert.
The white dust emerging from the building could stem from plaster walls inside the building. As the fuel burned off quickly, a normal office fire brought down the buildings. However, office fires reach temperatures of 1000 degrees Celsius, said one expert, that would weaken the steel.
Molten steel in subterranean areas and seismic diagrams were not discussed, neither the collapse of WTC 7.
One of the main arguments of Wisnewski is that the hijackers were never identified positively (which should have been possible e.g. with hairs etc. from their hotel rooms and so on), that there are no pictures that show that they boarded the planes, no airline personnel that said it witnessed how they were boarding.
This 60 minutes show was the most objective and extensive discussion I ever saw in the media since 9/11 on this topic. The moderator was not polemic (a very rare phenomenon), and he concluded with the remark that they showed that most of the technical points of the official version were proven as plausible (!). Why did it take 2 years for such a show to be shown, and why was it shown only am 10pm on a really small channel?
However, these questions represent only a small sample of inconsistencies connected with 9/11.