I don't know what to believe but I'm not prepared to write anything off at this point.

As far as conspiracies go, remember the Manhattan Project, that was huge (thousands of people involved and happening in friggin' Manhattan) and the VP didn't even know about it until he became president.

This?

Gug says: "Huge buildings fall down, not over."

The pictures above suggest that buildings can sometimes fall over. I think they sometimes also fall down, but I think over is more common which is one of the reasons that demolition experts are paid a good fee for the skill they employ to make a building fall down instead of over.

I have read over and over that no fire has ever caused the collapse of a steel frame building. If that is true, then the collapse of the steel frame buildings at WTC on September 11th were pretty unusual. And it is not that steel frame buildings have not been engulfed in massive fires. Here are the pics of that sort of thing:

In May 1988 a fire at the Interstate Bank Building in Los Angeles destroyed four floors and damaged a fifth floor of the modern 62-story building. The fire burned for four hours. The building did not collapse. See http://www.iklimnet.com/hotelfires/interstatebank.html

Here is a building, steel frame that is burning pretty good:

February 2005 the 32-story Windsor Building in Madrid, Spain, caught fire and burned for two days. The building was completely engulfed in flames at one point. Several top floors collapsed onto lower ones, yet the building remained standing. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4263667.stm

Here it is when the fires burned out:

I try to have an open mind about the destruction of the three buildings at WTC on September 11th. I don't know why the three buildings fell down, but I believe the collapse of those three buildings almost into their own footprint was a very unusual event. No steel frame building has ever collapsed due to fire, except for September 11th, when three buildings, that did not appear to be subject to anything like the kind of fire that other steel frame buildings have withstood, all collapsed.

Gug, is your mind open to the unusual nature of these building collapses? When you look at these other pictures of building fires and collapses does it make you wonder how this happened?

Here is a pretty good webpage for the argument that the airplanes and subsequent fires should not have caused the buildings to collapse.

For me, I don't know why they fell down, it doesn't look right and the engineering and history of steel frame buildings surviving fires makes me wonder about the official story. That's as far as I will go on it.

Because you don't disturb a crime scene until the investigators have completed their work. 

"the cause of the collapse seemed quite clear at the time"

It's a hard thing to test because flying large airplanes into big buildings is a very expensive event.  So many folks watched the videos and looked at the pictures and drew the obvious conclusion.  If you fly airplanes into building, the buildings will collapse to rubble.  Seems quite clear.  May or may not be true, insufficient data available for me to draw conclusions.

The NYT ran a story in Dec 2001 saying the investigation into the fall of the two buildings (of course, three buildings actually fell down, but who's counting?) was inadequate.  

Fire Engineering - a trade magazine for firefighters ran an article asking for a meaningful study of the materials to determine how the buildings collapsed. 

from that article:

For more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut up and sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that could answer many questions about high-rise building design practices and performance under fire conditions is on the slow boat to China, perhaps never to be seen again in America until you buy your next car.

Such destruction of evidence shows the astounding ignorance of government officials to the value of a thorough, scientific investigation of the largest fire-induced collapse in world history. I have combed through our national standard for fire investigation, NFPA 921, but nowhere in it does one find an exemption allowing the destruction of evidence for buildings over 10 stories tall.

Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the "official investigation" blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure. Except for the marginal benefit obtained from a three-day, visual walk-through of evidence sites conducted by ASCE investigation committee members-described by one close source as a "tourist trip"-no one's checking the evidence for anything.

The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately.

The federal government must scrap the current setup and commission a fully resourced blue ribbon panel to conduct a clean and thorough investigation of the fire and collapse, leaving no stones unturned.

Firefighters, this is your call to action.

 

With regard to your questions:

Is it not sufficient that investigators sorted through 1.6 billion pounds of debris that now rests at Fresh Kills Landfill?

I don't think it was sufficient.  There were many contemporaneous calls by knowledgable experts (didn't count, may have been 400?) for an NTSB style investigation. 

and another question you asked: 

Is there a reason one could not exhume that evidence for further testing?

My answer, yes, there is a reason the evidence, the steel framing of the building cannot be exhumed for further testing.  As noted above by Fire Engineering, the evidence has been cut up and sent to China to be recycled.   

Is your mind really open on this subject, Gug?  You seem to be moving away from hard data, and reasonable analysis to rhetoric with the Rumsfeld analogy.   

I don't think it is helpful or possible to try to understand the Tower story in a big picture way, to deconstruct it, you have to painstakingly follow each item and run it down.  

I am not interested in doing that because there are certainly folks who are spending all their spare time working on that, but I may post on just one thread - the put options as a new thread.