Creative Speculation

... notably in Dr. Bazant's analysis, which compared the gravitational potential energy to the energy that the structure could absorb, and in the FEMA report, both of which NIST referenced in its report. As it says in the Q&A response I quoted, NIST was concerned with explaining the "why and how" of the collapse initiation because that was the mystery and that was what was needed to accomplish NIST's other objectives. Once the collapse got started, propagation was not a mystery to knowledgeable experts; it was "readily explainable" by structural mechanics, as demonstrated by the many technical papers before and after the NIST report. Your inability to comprehend that does not entitle you to accuse NIST of lying.

That includes the collapse of the core after the floors were stripped away, because it simply wasn't designed to be free-standing, your laughable rejection of the meaning of "cross-bracing" notwithstanding. One doesn't need to be a structural engineer to understand that a free-standing structure needs to be braced to hold its shape in all three axes, and the core floors clearly did not serve that purpose. You can't successfully dismiss such common sense just because it's offered to you by anonymous internet posters. If you want to insist that the core should have remained standing, you need to explain what should have prevented laterally movement that would lead to column buckling, and you can't because there wasn't anything.

But you, yourself, demonstrate that "truthers" do not want any non-conspiratorial solutions to their "mysteries" because they disingenuously want to use them to rationalize dismissing the entire NIST report, which they have manifestly failed to do on valid technical grounds. Disingenuous, because the purpose of their "just asking questions" game is not to seek answers but to imply that they already know the only acceptable answers. As you demonstrate, that true purpose becomes clear when they refuse rational answers.

Instead, you parrot the classic quote-mining of the NIST response to a "request for correction" letter from "truthers." That quote comes from a paragraph answering to the criticism that the entire collapse should have been modeled by computer simulation: