I recently saw a picture suggesting that the resilience of Belgrade’s Usce Tower should cast doubt on the official story of the September 11 attacks.
Like many internet accounts that lack citations, there are some problems here.
The Usce tower was built in 1964 and housed offices of the ruling party of Yugoslavia. It is 25 stories tall. During the NATO bombing campaign, the building was targeted for airstrikes because Milosevic’s Socialist Party had used it as a headquarters and because the NATO command believed that nationalist propaganda was being broadcast from the tower.
It is odd that an “unskilled” workforce would be able to construct a 25-story building. I guess that depends on what is meant by skilled. A bunch of commies from a country that doesn’t exist anymore might not have built things as well as Americans, but they could make a sturdy 25-story building. Considering the importance of the building as a party office and a symbol of national prestige, its resilience shouldn’t be too surprising. It also wouldn’t be surprising if missile attacks were actually taken into account, considering that Yugoslavia’s national identity was closely linked to the WWII partisan struggle and concerns of attack were probably in the background.
It’s not clear where the figure of 12 Tomahawk missiles comes from, but the building was attacked on multiple occasions by at least four cruise missiles.
The World Trade Center north tower was hit near the 80th floor, with 30 floors above it. The south tower was hit near the 60th floor. The buildings withstood the plane hits, but not the fire fed by jet fuel and wind combined with the massive strain of multiple stories on top of steel losing its rigidity at high temperature. Neither of these factors would have been as bad for the Usce tower.
How much fuel was involved?
History.com says 20,000 gallons were in each plane. Wikipedia says 10,000 gallons. Per Wikipedia, a 767-200ER has a capacity of 24,100 gallons of fuel. 30% of that would be 7,230 gallons. It’s not clear where the image’s 30% figure comes from. By comparison, the maximum fuel capacity for a Boeing 727 listed by Wikipedia is 10,520 gallons. Of course, since there are no citations on the picture, it’s difficult to determine what kind of plane strike the towers were actually built to withstand. It looks possible that a slow-moving 707 was considered, but not the fires that would be produced.
This image does not present credible evidence against the position that the official story is the closest to what actually happened.