January 2, 2014.
Happy New Year, we hope.

Here is a comment I recently wrote  re Judy Wood and the DEW theory. (see http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/judge_on_nsa_case_cites_9_11_report_but_it_doesnt_actually_support_his_ruli  for the full discussion)
===================
The comment:

I never did accept the DEW theory. I can see why it would be proposed, because of the extreme nature of the destruction of steel and reinforced concrete. Normal demolitions do not powder the buildings to such an extent.

I can also see why people suspect nuclear. But wouldn't that have left radiation? Plenty of civilians are in positions where they could detect radiation with one detecting device or another or those badges.

It seems to me, although I know zilch about nuclear, that radiation in lower New York City would be impossible to cover up, and there would have already been an outcry because people would be suffering radiation sickness by the hundreds, if not thousands.

The extreme pulverization of the WTC towers' floors, as well as the six thousand or so bar trusses and the 220 acres of corrugated steel pan holding up the mesh- and bar- reinforced concrete floors, are very unusual in terms of typical controlled demolitions.

There seems to have been no sign (or very little) of the floors or floor pans on the ground when the collapse was over.

Also there are a lot of missing core columns, or rather, at least in macro size. There is quite a lot but it must have been cut pretty thoroughly.

I haven't studied any analyses of the amount of steel in the core columns vs. the amount of steel on the ground after collapse.

There are some figure available about the tonnage of steel in the buildings vs. the total tonnage hauled away but the second amount, of haul-off tonnage, can not be relied upon in my opinion, because it could have been distorted accidentally or purposely since the area was under intense security in the days and weeks after the event.

So anyway, the extreme destruction does make one suspect exotic explosives or energy devices, i.e. either nuke or DEW. But there is just not any hard evidence for either.

But there is plenty of evidence for conventional high explosives, and apparently there is also plenty of evidence for some type of aluminothermic substance, whether thermite, thermate, or nanothermite or superthermite.

It must be remembered that the public is not necessarily privy to a list of all available such substances.

In the past two decades several new processes and substances have been patented by Lawrence Livermore and by Los Alamos, and the patents can be found on line.

These have to do with what are called sol-gel substances, in which an explosive substance with some appropriate oxidizer is mixed exactly as it should be to produce the desired effects.

The advantage of sol-gel technology for super-explosives is basically easily understood if you think about the difference between a pile of burning bread or macaroni compared to a grain elevator explosion. Same material in both cases, but one will smolder and the other will violently explode.

A similar example can be made using coal, which burns with a flame in macro form but will explode in dust form floating in air. Fuel + oxygen. With sol-gel explosives, the fuel and oxygen are incorporated in the sol-gel matrix, sort of like a froth or soapsuds, and when the gel dries out, what is left is a precise physical arrangement of the molecules which need to be next to each other; the particles are in nano-scale.

By custom arrangement of the sol-gel matrix, and specific choices regarding the explosive substance and the oxidizer used, the speed and power of the reaction can be precisely controlled.

The available literature- from the labs that make it and the patents about it- indicate that such sol-gel explosives could be up to one thousand times more powerful than conventional high explosives such as TNT, RDX, PETN, Cyclonite, and others of that type.

These conventional high explosives have extremely fast detonating velocities; the initial shock wave can travel up to about five miles per second.

So exotics in the form of superthermite or nanothermite, or super-explosives of some sol-gel design, could have been used. The ceiling tiles could also have been made of explosive.

The carpet or floor coverings could have been explosive. Look up detasheet.

Even the fireproofing on the trusses could have actually been explosives of the sol-gel nano-scale type, for all we know. That would certainly explain why the six thousand trusses and 220 acres of floor pans vanished into thin air- or rather, extremely thick air.

All in all, I am not sure whether exotic substances were used, and if they were used, how important they were to the total event, what parts of the building they were directed at, or what type they were.

But that is something that a real investigation could find out. In the meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence of conventional explosvies and a semi-conventional controlled demolition of the Twin Towers.

As for WTC 7, it is so obviously a controlled demolition that I won't discuss it much in this comment.

But too many truthers have accepted that WTC 7 was a conventional demolition, yet think the towers were something different.

My theory is that the height of the towers demanded a top-down demolition, with extreme pulverization.

A bottom-up demolition would have probably caused the towers to topple. Watch CDI, Inc. videos and other demolition videos for examples of buildings, or large pieces of them, toppling. This couldn't be allowed in lower Manhattan. So even a legal demolition of the towers might have used the top-down method for safety reasons.

The extreme pulverization that resulted would have also kept most extremely large chunks from falling to the street or on other buildings in huge quantities. As it was, the explosives did hurl a lot of large pieces which did damage to the neighborhood, but not nearly as much as a conventional demolition would have done.

The pulverization had the great advantage of destroying all the buildings'contents.

Also, the cruel advantage, to the perpetrators, of pulverizing any human beings left in the towers. They were all pulverized and vaporized and incinerated in a couple of seconds.

At least it would have been very fast for most of them. Pieces of the people were still being found, in the form of tiny bone chips, on nearby rooftops years later in areas that had never been thoroughly cleaned of the falling dust and debris.

Another advantage, to the perpetrators, of the top-down method was the resultant curtain or cloud which surrounded the towers like a great waterfall of powdered concrete and everything else.

This falling barrier produced a tremendous amount of noise and also acted as an effective sonic barrier so that the many explosions still happening, floor by floor (a number of these can be seen in the videos of the collapses, they are called squibs) were impossible to hear.

A person cannot hear much through a fog or a snowfall at any distance. I doubt anything could have been heard through the curtains of falling debris surrounding the collapsing Twin Tower.

So, in such a way, even many very loud explosions can be muffled. And they were. Even so, many explosions were reported by witnesses, first responders, and building survivors.

What has long troubled me the most was those floors and their supporting trusses and floor pans. How could conventional explosives have destroyed them so completely, and destroyed everything on them, i.e. in all the office spaces?

Usually a demolition would leave much large pieces of whatever was in the building, if anything, and of its construction materials.

So I can see why the exotic weapon theorists have their theories. The WTC destruction was quite different from the demolitions that we have become familiar with.

But would it really be necessary to use nukes or DEW to create that extreme pulverization? No. But more conventional high explosives would be needed to do it. Bigger, and more.

Imagine if most of the explosives were in the core, having been placed there probably during the supposed elevator renovation.

Suppose there were charges to cut the columns. Standard V-shaped linear shaped charges are made to do this. Looks like angle iron with stuff in it. Kapow, and it will cut through inches of steel in less than a hundredth of a heartbeat.

So cutting the columns is nothing exotic. Suppose, also, that charges were laid along the inner edges of each floor, in the core, i.e. the inner rectangular doughnut ring line.

When explosives go off the force goes outward equally in all directions as an expanding sphere, if it can.

If it is blocked in any direction, by another explosion or by physical resistance of some hard substance, it will reflect off what it can't go through, and some energy will reflect off even if it does go through and destroy the resistance.

Imagine this whole hypothetical ring of charges at columns and perimeter ring, going off for three floors, in very rapid sequence.

The center of the three, with a floor above and one below, will be hit with crushing force, as if smashed between two sledgehammers; it will be pulverized, and have nowhere to go but out, away from the center of the explosion.

In the form of mostly fine powder, it will be forced laterally, out the exterior perimeter walls line, and then cascade downward under the force of gravity while still moving laterally under the remaining force of the explosive push.

And this is essentially what we see in the collapse videos.

So I maintain that conventional explosives, with probably some aid from a thermitic incendiary or super- incendiary which is so super that it is no longer just incendiary but highly explosive, were used.

But these typical demolition explosives were used in much greater amounts than would have been necessary to simply topple the buildings or to bring them down effectively, but without the extreme pulverization that in fact did occur.

And all these explosives were some sixty feet inside the outer walls, and the outer walls, once the collapses began, were shrouded in a dense and and roaring curtain of sand and gravel and other finely divided substances from the buildings.

The heat under the debris pile, which lasted so long, is hard to explain. "Molten iron"... "It looked like a foundry"... "molten steel"..."red-hot".

The heat was real and is documented.

The molten steel,unfortunately not documented so well, but I believe it was there.

The firefighters who reported it had no incentive, that I can imagine, to lie about something like that. and they weren't the only ones.

But it is possible that the masses involved were so great, and the heat of all those explosions and thermitics so great, that, insulated by the debris pile above, and starved of oxygen below, it could have smoldered at great temperatures for a long time simply as a result of conventional fires plus the heat of the explosives and thermitics.

And of course if there were thermitics or exotic compounds, they may have continued to react; for a while anyway, although conventional thermite itself will not go on reacting for months; the reaction is over quite fast.

But if there had been nukes in the basement all those cleanup people would have been dead the first year, I would think, and thousand of other New Yorkers too, from inhaling radioactive dust, aka fallout.

No, I don't think it was nukes or DEW. Just a hell of a lot of conventional demolitions and almost certainly either thermite or some super-thermite or other super-explosive, maybe a sol-gel we haven't even heard about because it is top secret.

People on the Web like to talk about Occam's Razor. To me, that principle does not indicate the apparent simplest solution, i.e. that the planes and fire made the towers come down, which is impossible anyway. Instead- the way I see it anyway- Occam's Razor tells me that that for the most part, normal everyday controlled demolition techniques and substances were utilized.

Mostly.

As for the outside or perimeter walls, the bolts holding the "chex" sections together every three stories along those outside walls were almost all gone in the debris pile. I believe they were mostly removed, with a wrench, in the months prior to the day of disaster.

Removing most of those bolts would have not noticeably weakened the buildings one bit- that is, until the floor systems were destroyed, at which point, the outside walls would come down like pickup sticks, in 36-foot lengths, suitable for trucking.

And most of them seemed to have ended up that way. The vast majority of photos showing the ends of those exterior wall three-column prefabbed pieces show empty holes, and no sign of distortion, explosion, or flame, where those bolts, which were an inch or more in diameter, were.

Thousands of them just seem to be missing. They were easily accessible through the hand holes in the inside face of the columns above and below all the bolt locations. Removing them would not have been difficult. Zip zip with a portable 18-volt powered impact wrench. Or with hand wrenches.

Thank you for reading.

That is, assuming TD will let this rant get by the truth censors.

Disclaimer: all this is theory, and I don't claim it is all correct, but is offered as food for thought, in hopes that some day we will get to the bottom of the mystery of exactly how those Twin Towers were turned into Twin Powders.