A piisant troll by the handle of "TRUTH" wrote:

I have given enough information and links over the past week for those
intererested to look into it deeper.

One really doesn't have to look all that "deeply" to determine just how
much of a kook Jones is.

For example: Claim 1 - "Molten Metal, Flowing and in Pools"

Jone's effective claim was that this could have only happened with a
mass of Thermite being smuggled in, since the cutter charges wouldn't
have produced the amount of observed heated steel, and the dark smoke
from the conventional fire allegedly could not have produced
temperatures in excess of 650C.

Assume Jone's claim is correct that it was indeed a conspiracy and try
to actually impliment his claimed mechanism: what do we learn by doing
so?

First, I've previously detailed out the amount of Thermite required; I
won't repeat it. At the aforementioned parametric minimum, a total of
2,500 cubic feet of thermite was required *per floor*. The parametric
upper limit is 4x greater...10,000 ft^3 per floor, per building.

That's in cubic feet. How much does it weigh?

Thermite weighs around 4g/cc, which is 4x the density of water, which
would mean that a cubic foot would be 4x 62.4 lbs = ~250lbs.

This means that the conspirators needed to smuggle in over 300 TONS per
floor.
(at the estimated upper limit, it is roughly 1,200 TONS required *per
floor*)

Okay, so how could they have transported in this much material?

Since there was no obvious major heavy construction from 1993-2001,
smuggling in of large quantities would have been highly difficult: the
above mass works out to 40 pallets worth of materials...again per
floor, per building...and each pallet would weigh 8 tons...can't move
that by hand, so we're really probably looking at ~650 pallets at
1000lbs each. Plus, we would then have to break down and covertly
dispurse each pallet within each floor - - - since at the cube factor
of a pallet, you're talking about occupying the floor space equivalent
of over 10,000 office cubicles between the two buildings, you can't
just try hide it in the photocopier room.

650 pallets per floor, times 110 floors = 71,500 deliveries per
building.

If you choose to reduce the risk of getting caught breaking down a
pallet-sized delivery to the floor, the alternative is to make it the
sum accumulation of many hand-carried packages, and the first thing to
consider is the upper practical limit to hand carry in on a frequent
(daily) basis. A "backpack" sized package which would have to weigh in
round numbers no more than 20lbs (a "briefcase" size would have to be
half of this). This means that at the parametric minimum 300tons/floor
of thermite, at least 30,000 trips *per floor* to smuggle in the
material would be required.

Assuming one trip per courier per day (as in a normal worker coming to
work, to provide a plausible cover story) and a generic weekday job (5
days/week), this would result in roughly 200 work days per year, and
thus, 200 transports per year. This means that it would take one
volunteer 30,000 trips / 200 trips/year = 150 *years* to covertly
transport the materials in ...again, **per floor**.

Since taking 150 years to do the job is an impossibility, we would have
to try to compress the timeline by using more couriers. The minimized
staffing comes with a maximum available timeline: assume that they
started on creating such a plan immediately after the first bombing
(Feb '93) and had it fully implemented by 18 months later (Fall
'94): this gives a "nice round number" of seven (7) years available
to transport materials, which - - straight math - - would nevertheless
still require at least 20 couriers (and 80 couriers at the upper
estimated quantity of required thermite) ... until we remember that
this manpower requirement is still on a "per floor" basis:

We now multiply by 110 floors and 2 buildings, so we're talking about
needing an absolute minimum of 18,500 conspirators (and 18,500 at the
upper limit) who combined will have to conduct 6.4 million (to 26
million) successful covert material smugglings without any of them ever
getting caught to tip off the authorities that anything's going on.

Even if there was only a random "1 in a million" chance of pure dumb
luck of any individual transport from getting however randomly caught,
the vast number of required sorties means that odds of at least one of
them being detected are over 85%.

In other words, this plan would have had at least an 85% probability of
failure, simply because of its required scale.

And if we go back to the far more detectable 1000lb pallet delivery,
71,500 of these in 7 years workd out to just over 40 deliveries per
day...assuming a 12 hour day and 5 business days per week, that's one
shipment passing in front of security every 18 minutes that's subject
to inspection. Start reviewing security tapes, and YMMV as to how
many Port Authority guards had to be "in" on this conspiracy just to
make this part have a chance of working.

Material Cost: Aluminum (not Aluminum Oxide) powder is slightly over
$10 per pound. While the Iron Oxide is generally less expensive,
thermite is hard to ignite, so several hundred #8 blasting caps are
necessary; assume a simple cost offset. At the minimum required mass
(300T/floor), times 110 floors, times 2 buildings, the basic materials
cost is $1.32 **billion** dollars, plus whatever premium comes about
from trying to buy such a vast quantity covertly.

UN Security Council Resolution 1373 obligated nations to freeze the
assets of terrorists and to prohibit anyone in the country from
providing financial or other material assistance to terrorists or their
supporters. 166 countries have only found $121 million to freeze.

Conclusion: It was pragmatically impossible to have successfully
performed the required smuggling tasks while remaining 100% covert
across a likely 10 million 'sorties', and also pragmatically
impossible to have financed since the cost of just this one item is 10x
the total demonstrated financial resources.

In plain english, the Thermite Premise is too hard and too expensive.


-hh