"Highly engineered explosive" found in WTC rubble...

[cosmicalstorm]

I just had this thrown in my face by a 9/11 truther.
It's supposed to be printed in a peer reviewed magazine but im still a bit skeptic.
What do you guys think?

Stephen C. Webster
Published: Saturday April 4, 2009

A team of scientists claim to have unearthed startling data from dust and debris gathered in the days and weeks after the World Trade Center towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001.

In a study published by the Open Chemical Physics Journal -- a peer-reviewed, scientific publication -- Steven E. Jones and Niels Harrit level a stark allegation: that within the dust and rubble of the World Trade Center towers lays evidence of "a highly engineered explosive," contrary to all federal studies of the collapses.

"We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center," reads the paper's abstract. "One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC)."

The study, however, shows that the dust was collected from four different sites, three of which were not in the immediate area surrounding the fallen towers. Most of the samples are collections of dust taken from blocks away.

They claim their analysis has uncovered "active thermitic material": a combination of elemental aluminum and iron oxide in a form of thermite known as "nanostructured super-thermite."

Thermite, used in steel welding, fireworks shows, hand grenades and demolition, can produce a chemical reaction known for extremely high temperatures focused in a very small area for a short period of time.

According to the Navy's Small Business Innovation Research, super-thermite "is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services."

"This finding really goes beyond anything that has previously been shown," said Jones in a media advisory. "We had to use sophisticated tools to analyze the dust because this isn't just a typical explosive, RDX or CD4 or something -- this is a highly engineered material not readily available to just anyone."

"The cost and production rate of super-thermite composites has limited the use of these materials in DoD applications," claims the Navy's SBIR.

Dr. Steven E. Jones, a former physicist at Brigham Young University and a founding member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, presented a paper in 2005 discussing alternatives to the government's theory that massive structural damage combined with burning jet fuel to weaken the towers' support infrastructure, causing a rapid "pancake" collapse.

In September 2006, under heavy criticism in the media and by several colleagues, the university placed Jones on paid administrative leave and his paper was removed from the BYU database.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which investigated the WTC tower collapses, maintains there was no recovered evidence of explosive materials. An electronic FAQ to the government's theory is available online.

"We get a lot of calls from people who have heard these theories," NIST spokesman Michael Newman told Newsday. "But we conducted what was probably the most complex investigation of a building collapse in history."

"We based our conclusion on the talents of the world's best engineers and scientists, state of the art computer models and 236 pieces of steel recovered from the site," reads the NIST FAQ.

"The collapse of the WTC towers was not caused either by a conventional building fire or even solely by the concurrent multi-floor fires that day," NIST says. "Instead, NIST concluded that the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and (2) the subsequent unusually large, jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires weakened the now susceptible structural steel."

"No building in the United States has ever been subjected to the massive structural damage and concurrent multi-floor fires that the towers experienced on Sept. 11, 2001," the agency claims.

This latest report, Jones told Visibility 9/11, "explodes the official story that 'no evidence' exists for explosive/pyrotechnic materials in the WTC buildings. The red/gray chips are the 'loaded gun' of 9-11."

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Scientist ... _0404.html

[Kanastrous]

What are the odds that flying airplanes made mostly of aluminum into buildings made largely of steel and then baking the results at high temperatures could produce traces of an aluminum+iron oxide compound?

And, I think the expression is smoking gun.

[General Zod]

5 minutes of Googling on the author of this paper is enough to cast its claims into serious doubt; especially considering he's a founder of one of the original 'truther' movements.

[Isolder74]

WHAT peer review publication?

I want a name.

If it is a 9/11 Truther one than it simply have no validity.

[FSTargetDrone]

Let's say someone wanted to engineer the surprise collapse of the towers. Is it even possible that this could be done in secret? No one would notice the explosives being carried into the building and installed on various key points?

Madness.

[erik_t]

WHAT peer review publication?

I want a name.

If it is a 9/11 Truther one than it simply have no validity.

"Open Chemical Physics Journal"

My fucking god, did you read the OP? That's the name. Whether the claim of publishing is true or not, I dunno. Whether it's legit or not, I dunno. Go look it up. But you have a name.

[Isolder74]

The Open Chemical Physics Journal is an Open Access online journal which publishes research articles, reviews and letters in all areas of chemical physics.

Does not fill me with much confidence.

I've looked through the articles and did not find it but I might later.

Edit: No new articles listed before April 2. I will look harder later I m busy now.

[RedImperator]

There's also the fact that even if they did find traces of thermite, it still doesn't prove some kind of massive, implausible government conspiracy that has somehow kept totally silent all these years (even though much smaller conspiracies, like Watergate, unraveled and collapsed in much shorter time frames). Nor are traces of thermite (again, if they actually exist) proof that the buildings were actually demolished by thermite--they still have to deal with the analyses that determined that the structural failure happened on the upper floors, where the planes hit, not down in the basement or wherever else truthers claim the buildings' support columns were blown.

Not that I actually believe they found thermite. Open Chemical Physics Journal is a vanity publisher--authors pay to submit articles. I read the conclusion to the article, and if it's actually true, it's pretty staggering: they're claiming hard evidence for high explosives in the WTC debris, and implying it proves a controlled demolition. Why would you submit it to a brand new (less than two years old) online journal where you have to pay to publish, when any reputable established chemistry journal in the world would leap on findings like this?

[FSTargetDrone]

Why would you submit it to a brand new (less than two years old) online journal where you have to pay to publish, when any reputable established chemistry journal in the world would leap on findings like this?

That seems pretty damming.

[Edi]

Bullshit article As pointed out by Kanastrous, aluminum + iron oxide compounds being found in the wreckage due to plane impact is no surprise. Furthermore, what the fuck does everyone think they welded the building's structure together when it was built, given the stress factors it needed to withstand? Bubble gum?

Hell, the article itself makes mention of that superthermite being used for welding applications, so there would logically be a fuckload of it among the debris.

This is on the same order of the Truther claims that the steel structural beams were vaporized due to a Swiss cheese kind of holing found in some beams that had lain under the wreckage and that had been subjected to a corrosive substance in splashes according to their own fucking "research".

It's bullshit through and through, mark my words. Before it's published in something more rigorous than some open access whatever that looks like it was cobbled together ten years ago and run on advertising revenue, I'm not accepting a word of this shit as legitimate conclusions. It's cherrypicked evidence for their favorite conclusion, nothing more.

[Darth Wong]

Here's the link for the Open Chemical Physics Journal, Volume 2:

http://www.bentham.org/open/tocpj/openaccess2.htm

This journal's first publication was in 2008. They've published a grand total of twelve articles in their entire history, and they tout the rapidity and low cost of their peer review process. How do we know what quality of peer review these articles have undergone?

What kind of peer review would overlook the rather obvious fact that nobody uses thermite in building demolitions? None of the peer reviewers thought to ask why someone trying to demolish a building would use some kind of "exotic super-thermite" rather than, say, C-4. I love the part where they say that under certain conditions, thermite burns "very rapidly, even explosively", as if that justifies this absurd hypothesis. We have a word for incendiaries that burn "very rapidly, even explosively"; they're called low explosives, like gunpowder. And you can't use them as if they're high explosives. And what the fuck kind of scientific paper uses so many subjective qualitative terms anyway?

They go into great scientific detail about how they establish that these chips contain iron and aluminum dust rather than paint chips; fine, mission accomplished. It's not particularly surprising, given the fact that the building's structure contained thousands of tons of iron, and the plane is made mostly of aluminum. They also go into great detail to show that this iron and aluminum can react in thermitic fashion. Well no kidding, that's what thermite is: iron mixed with aluminum. But the hypothesis is completely absurd, and contains no real engineering input. They treat it as a pure chemistry exercise, and they figure that they've won once they establish that the 9/11 dust contained iron and aluminum and that this iron and aluminum can react "thermitically".

At no point do they even attempt to explain why this thermite would be scattered so far and wide in such great quantity if it was in fact used as low explosive demolition charges, and none of the "peer review" group seemed to think to ask.

[erik_t]

The Open Chemical Physics Journal is an Open Access online journal which publishes research articles, reviews and letters in all areas of chemical physics.

Does not fill me with much confidence.

I've looked through the articles and did not find it but I might later.

Edit: No new articles listed before April 2. I will look harder later I m busy now.

Sorry, a pile of segfaults is making me cranky. I was excessively bitchy.

[bilateralrope]

They claim their analysis has uncovered "active thermitic material": a combination of elemental aluminum and iron oxide in a form of thermite known as "[/i]nanostructured super-thermite.[/i]"

Do the items in italics exist ?

Also, when did thermite become explosive ?

I've seen Mythbuster episodes where they used thermite, and while it burned hot it did not explode. In fact, excluding truther claims, everything I've seen about thermite says that it burns hot but does not explode.

"This finding really goes beyond anything that has previously been shown," said Jones in a media advisory. "We had to use sophisticated tools to analyze the dust because this isn't just a typical explosive, RDX or CD4 or something -- this is a highly engineered material not readily available to just anyone."

This is the first time I've seen them claim that a rare explosive was used. So the conspiracy gets bigger

[Darth Wong]

Heh heh ... they declare that they've proven it to be "super-thermite" because of "the small size of the iron oxide particles". Yes, that's right: if they find fine particles of rust, it must be super-thermite!

It's like something a high-school kid would write, except that it has the veneer of professionalism about it.

[Darth Wong]

Also, when did thermite become explosive?

It's explosive in the same sense that wheat is explosive. If you mix it up just the right way in fine enough particles, you can get a very rapid burn that constitutes a low explosive reaction. But it's nowhere near qualifying as a high explosive, which is what you need for demolitions work. Most explosives are characterized by specific molecular compounds in specific formulas. However, thermite can be produced by literally just mixing powders together, so you don't need to establish any kind of microstructure to make a claim of identity.

This study is based entirely on finding the right elemental constituents for thermite. It would be like finding a piece of dogshit and saying that it's proof of the presence of TNT, because dogshit contains carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen: all of the elements found in TNT. And then you dress up this bullshit conclusion by showing in great detail how you used high-tech equipment to establish the presence of the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen.

[Edi]

Fucking A, if I could pick out the flaws in that bullshit even without analyzing the peer review angle, given that I'm a failed computer engineering student who had difficulty with some of the rather basic physics required of all the students at EVTEK, what the fuck does that say about these "peer reviewers"?

[Solauren]

High Engineered eh?

I can make thermite with stuff I can get at the hardware store (can't ignite it however, have to go somewhere else for that), and they are calling it highly engineered.

This article fails, just on that.

[Darth Wong]

Of course, the real reason he focuses on thermite is because the ingredients of thermite are absurdly common, and therefore easy to find: rust and aluminum. It's an absolutely horrible material for demolitions work, but it's a great material for finding false positives, because its constituents are so common that you can find "evidence" of them everywhere, pretty much at will.

And the authors know that most people have no idea that there is a distinction between low explosives like gunpowder and high explosives like RDX.

[Darth Wong]

If you want a laugh, look at the full list of authors and contributors to the paper. Half of them are groups with the word "9/11" in their names. And I'll bet money that the reputable contributors were only tapped for the mundane part of the paper, where they establish that there is iron and aluminum in the samples.

[Darth Wong]

Just for shits and giggles, here is their list of conclusions:

CONCLUSIONS

We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in significant numbers in dust associated with the World Trade Center destruction. We have applied SEM/XEDS and other methods to characterize the small-scale structure and chemical signature of these chips, especially of their red component. The red material is most interesting and has the following characteristics:

1. It is composed of aluminum, iron, oxygen, silicon and carbon. Lesser amounts of other potentially reactive elements are sometimes present, such as potassium, sulfur, lead, barium and copper.

2. The primary elements (Al, Fe, O, Si, C) are typically all present in particles at the scale of tens to hundreds of nanometers, and detailed XEDS mapping shows intimate mixing.

3. On treatment with methyl ethyl ketone solvent, some segregation of components occurred. Elemental aluminum became sufficiently concentrated to be clearly identified in the pre-ignition material.

4. Iron oxide appears in faceted grains roughly 100 nm across whereas the aluminum appears in thin platelike structures. The small size of the iron oxide particles qualifies the material to be characterized as nanothermite or super-thermite.

5. Analysis shows that iron and oxygen are present in a ratio consistent with Fe2O3. The red material in all four WTC dust samples was similar in this way. Iron oxide was found in the pre-ignition material whereas elemental iron was not.

6. From the presence of elemental aluminum and iron oxide in the red material, we conclude that it contains the ingredients of thermite.

7. As measured using DSC, the material ignites and reacts vigorously at a temperature of approximately 430 °C, with a rather narrow exotherm, matching fairly closely an independent observation on a known super-thermite sample. The low temperature of ignition and the presence of iron oxide grains less than 120 nm show that the material is not conventional thermite (which ignites at temperatures above 900 °C) but very likely a form of super-thermite.

8. After igniting several red/gray chips in a DSC run to 700 °C, we found numerous iron-rich spheres and spheroids in the residue, indicating that a very hightemperature reaction had occurred, since the iron-rich product clearly must have been molten to form these shapes. In several spheres, elemental iron was verified since the iron content significantly exceeded the oxygen content. We conclude that a high-temperature reduction-oxidation reaction has occurred in the heated chips, namely, the thermite reaction.

9. The spheroids produced by the DSC tests and by the flame test have an XEDS signature (Al, Fe, O, Si, C) which is depleted in carbon and aluminum relative to the original red material. This chemical signature strikingly matches the chemical signature of the spheroids produced by igniting commercial thermite, and also matches the signatures of many of the microspheres found in the WTC dust [5].

10. The carbon content of the red material indicates that an organic substance is present. This would be expected for super-thermite formulations in order to produce high gas pressures upon ignition and thus make them explosive. The nature of the organic material in these chips merits further exploration. We note that it is likely also an energetic material, in that the total energy release sometimes observed in DSC tests exceeds the theoretical maximum energy of the classic thermite reaction.

Based on these observations, we conclude that the red layer of the red/gray chips we have discovered in the WTC dust is active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material.

These conclusions are about as thorough as the actual paper, except for the part where they identify the chemical constituents of the particles where they get into great detail in an attempt to create an impression of credibility and distract you from the fact that all of the really important conclusions are really just supported by wordplay.

Conclusion #5 is downright hilarious: "Iron oxide was found in the pre-ignition material whereas elemental iron was not". Ooooh, what a shocking discovery! This proves it must have been thermite, because there's certainly no natural process which would turn fine particles of iron into iron oxide, is there?

Conclusion #8 is hilarious too: they conclude that the iron shows evidence of having been exposed to high temperatures. Gee, I wonder how that could have happened

And then there's conclusion #9, where they point out that if you take this aluminum and iron oxide and ignite it, it acts just like thermite. Well no kidding, because that's all thermite is! What kind of an idiot is taken in by a "study" like this? Even the way it's worded is clearly meant for laypeople to read. The constant references to "super-thermite" and "nanotechnology" make me laugh. Remember, kids: if you make a powdered product with smaller particle sizes, it's not just higher quality: oh no, it gains super powers! From NANOTECHNOLOGY!

[Superman]

Man, these nutjobs still refuse to let this shit go. You'd think by now we'd start seeing less of this crap.

[Pulp Hero]

Haha. Oh wow, I'm going to have to print this out.

I'm not going to re-interate long reasons why this is false, you guys covered most of it.

I can say that thermite can detonate under the right conditions, but its strength and brisance is going to be crap.

[Rogue 9]

Of course, the real reason he focuses on thermite is because the ingredients of thermite are absurdly common, and therefore easy to find: rust and aluminum. It's an absolutely horrible material for demolitions work, but it's a great material for finding false positives, because its constituents are so common that you can find "evidence" of them everywhere, pretty much at will.

But don't you see, Mike? Bushitler used thermite for just that reason; it creates deniability!

What a bunch of whackaloons.

[Darth Wong]

One other thing I forgot to mention: the author goes into some detail explaining that thermite has a higher energy content than many explosives. But this is classic misdirection: the critical parameter is velocity, not energy content. And when the author describes speed of reaction, he provides no numbers: instead, he uses purely qualitative descriptions.

Ordinary gasoline kicks the shit out of TNT for energy content per kilogram too, but you'd be hopeless if you tried to use gasoline for building demolition.

[CaptainChewbacca]

If they'd used thermite to blow up the world trade center, they'd have had to use so much we would have been able to SEE the flash from outside.