Symmetrical Collapse?

The unexplained collapse of the three World Trade Center buildings on 9/11 remains the most obvious smoking gun in whole 9/11 mystery. This article is the best thing I've seen on the issue. Here are some excerpts:

In 2006, San Francisco Bay Area architect Richard Gage, AIA, began raising technical questions among his professional colleagues about the destruction of the Twin Towers and 47-story WTC Building 7. Those who take time to look at the facts overwhelmingly agree that vital questions remain unanswered, Gage has found. Today more than 29 structural engineers, experts in what can and cannot bring down buildings, have joined almost 700 other Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth in signing the petition demanding a new investigation.

The symmetry of collapse struck Paul Mason, a structural engineer in Melbourne, Australia, and Dennis Kollar, P.E. (licensed Professional Engineer in Wisconsin). Kollar was troubled by the collapses’ “totality and uniformity” and the fact that the mass of debris remained centered on the building core all the way down. The towers should have fallen “with increasing eccentricity as the collapse progressed,” writes Howard Pasternack, P.E. These systematic collapses required that many structural connections not only fail “nearly simultaneously,” but also “in sequential order,” wrote Frank Cullinan, P.E., who designs bridges in Northern California. That’s
“impossible from asymmetrical impact loading and ... small, short-duration fires.”

The engineers find it difficult to believe the government’s claim scattered fires brought about such an orderly collapse. Failure of heatweakened steel would show “large deflection, asymmetric and local failure, and slow progress,” David Scott told colleagues at the Institution of Structural Engineers in the UK. It’s “a gradual process,” agrees Anders Björkman, and “cannot be simultaneous everywhere.” A Swedish naval architect working in France, Björkman maintains that failures “will always be local and topple the mass above in the direction of the local collapse.”

William Rice, P.E., a Vermont structural engineer, expects fire-induced failures to be “tilting, erratic and twisting.” while Ronald Brookman, S.E., a licensed structural engineer from Novato, California, figures on “a partial collapse to the side.” Symmetrical collapse requires simultaneous failure of all supporting columns, notes Charles Pegelow. “How could all 47 core columns fail at the same instant?” Pegelow has performed design work on offshore oil rigs and tall buildings. His opinion: “Fires could not do that.”

Baffling as the Towers’ “collapses” were, even more perplexing was the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7. “Unprecedented,” says Rice. “Unexplainable,” says Huebner. “No plane hit this building,” points out Graham Inman, a chartered engineer in London.

Few Americans have given any thought to the third World Trade Center high-rise destroyed on September 11th, since it was not repeatedly televised. Kamal Obeid, S.E., ponders it. “A localized failure in a steel-framed building like WTC 7 cannot cause a catastrophic collapse like a house of cards without a simultaneous and patterned loss of several of its columns at key locations within the building.”

Videos show “simultaneous failure of all columns,” wrote Inman, “rather than [the expected] phased approach,” in which undamaged columns would show resistance sequentially.

Though the building housed “offices of the CIA, the Secret Service, and the Department of Defense, among others,” Rice notes, the 9/11 Commission left WTC 7’s collapse out of its report. FEMA’s 2002 inquiry blamed WTC 7’s collapse on fires, though it admits that its “best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence.” Rice notes that the media have “basically kept the collapse of WTC Building #7 hidden from public view.”

Here's the thing. If these "collapses" could not have been "collapses", then the other obvious answer is controlled implosion. And that undercuts the entire theory of Al Quada acting alone, because no one thinks they could have or would have rigged these three buildings for controlled implosion by themselves.

Cui bono? Who benefited from these 'collapses'? Certainly not Al-Quada, who poked a sleeping bear into a ferocious rage and 'brought the building down on themselves.'