Re: OT: Attention 9/11 conspiracy enthusiasts

Boise <onlnpkr@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:mv92d3xu8b.ln2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Feb 23 2006 7:18 PM, William Coleman wrote:

Tonight on Coast to Coast AM, Art Bell's former show, the topic will be
9/11
conspiracy theories.
Here is the website of one of the guests --

http://www.st911.org/

You can find a radio station in your area at --

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/info/wheretolisten.html

I am going to try to clear my mind of previous judgements and listen to
the
evidence and arguments
again, since Chris Robin, whose intelligence and analytical ability I
otherwise respect, seems to
think there is really something to these conspiracy theories.


William Coleman (ramashiva)

It is compelling.
The Destruction of the World Trade Center:
Why the Official Account Cannot Be True
David Ray Griffin
Authorized Version (with references & notes)

The problem with this is that you're assuming the buildings were built to
code and specifications.

I remember a story about someone punching their way out of an open elevator,
through a wall, into a bathroom. The elevators were inside the core of the
building.

Wouldn't be the first building in the history of, even, New York that was
shoddly built.

In The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush
Administration and 9/11 (2004), I summarized dozens of facts and reports
that cast doubt on the official story about 9/11. Then in The 9/11
Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005a), I discussed the way
these various facts and reports were treated by the 9/11 Commission,
namely, by distorting or simply omitting them. I have also taken this
big-picture approach, with its cumulative argument, in my previous essays
and lectures on 9/11 (Griffin, 2005b and 2005d).[1] This approach, which
shows every aspect of the official story to be problematic, provides the
most effective challenge to the official story.

But this way of presenting the evidence has one great limitation,
especially when used in lectures and essays: It means that the treatment
of every particular issue must be quite brief, hence superficial. People
can thereby be led to suspect that a more thorough treatment of any
particular issue might show the official story to be plausible after all.

In the present essay, I focus on one question: why the Twin Towers
and building 7 of the World Trade Center collapsed. One advantage of this
focus, besides the fact that it allows us to go into considerable detail,
is that the destruction of the World Trade Center provides one of the best
windows into the truth about 9/11. Another advantage of this focus is that
it will allow us to look at revelations contained in the 9/11 oral
histories, which were recorded by the New York Fire Department shortly
after 9/11 but released to the public only in August of 2005.

I will begin with the question of why the Twin Towers collapsed, then
raise the same question about building 7.





1. The Collapse of the Twin Towers



Shortly after 9/11, President Bush advised people not to tolerate
"outrageous conspiracy theories about the attacks of 11 September" (Bush,
2001).[2] Philip Zelikow, who directed the work of the 9/11 Commission,
has likewise warned against "outrageous conspiracy theories" (Hansen,
2005). What do these men mean by this expression? They cannot mean that we
should reject all conspiracy theories about 9/11, because the government's
own account is a conspiracy theory, with the conspirators all being
members of al-Qaeda. They mean only that we should reject outrageous
theories.

But what distinguishes an outrageous theory from a non-outrageous one?
This is one of the central questions in the philosophy of science. When
confronted by rival theories---let's say Neo-Darwinian Evolution and
Intelligent Design---scientists and philosophers of science ask which
theory is better and why. The mark of a good theory is that it can
explain, in a coherent way, all or at least most of the relevant facts and
is not contradicted by any of them. A bad theory is one that is
contradicted by some of the relevant facts. An outrageous theory would be
one that is contradicted by virtually all the relevant facts.

With this definition in mind, let us look at the official theory
about the Twin Towers, which says that they collapsed because of the
combined effect of the impact of the airplanes and the resulting fires.
The report put out by FEMA said: "The structural damage sustained by each
tower from the impact, combined with the ensuing fires, resulted in the
total collapse of each building" (FEMA, 2002).[3] This theory clearly
belongs in the category of outrageous theories, because is it is
contradicted by virtually all the relevant facts. Although this statement
may seem extreme, I will explain why it is not.



No Prior Collapse Induced by Fire

The official theory is rendered implausible by two major problems. The
first is the simple fact that fire has never---prior to or after
9/11---caused steel-frame high-rise buildings to collapse. Defenders of
the official story seldom if ever mention this simple fact. Indeed, the
supposedly definitive report put out by NIST---the National Institute for
Standards and Technology (2005)---even implies that fire-induced collapses
of large steel-frame buildings are normal events (Hoffman, 2005).[4] Far
from being normal, however, such collapses have never occurred, except for
the alleged cases of 9/11.

Defenders of the official theory, of course, say that the collapses
were caused not simply by the fire but the fire combined with the damage
caused by the airliners. The towers, however, were designed to withstand
the impact of airliners about the same size as Boeing 767s.[5] Hyman
Brown, the construction manager of the Twin Towers, said: "They were
over-designed to withstand almost anything, including hurricanes, . . .
bombings and an airplane hitting [them]" (Bollyn, 2001). And even Thomas
Eagar, an MIT professor of materials engineering who supports the official
theory, says that the impact of the airplanes would not have been
significant, because "the number of columns lost on the initial impact was
not large and the loads were shifted to remaining columns in this highly
redundant structure" (Eagar and Musso, 2001, pp. 8-11). Likewise, the NIST
Report, in discussing how the impact of the planes contributed to the
collapse, focuses primarily on the claim that the planes dislodged a lot
of the fire-proofing from the steel.[6]

The official theory of the collapse, therefore, is essentially a fire
theory, so it cannot be emphasized too much that fire has never caused
large steel-frame buildings to collapse---never, whether before 9/11, or
after 9/11, or anywhere in the world on 9/11 except allegedly New York
City---never.

One might say, of course, that there is a first time for everything, and
that a truly extraordinary fire might induce a collapse. Let us examine
this idea. What would count as an extraordinary fire? Given the properties
of steel, a fire would need to be very hot, very big, and very
long-lasting. But the fires in the towers did not have even one of these
characteristics, let alone all three.

There have been claims, to be sure, that the fires were very hot.
Some television specials claimed that the towers collapsed because the
fire was hot enough to melt the steel. For example, an early BBC News
special quoted Hyman Brown as saying: "steel melts, and 24,000 gallons of
aviation fluid melted the steel." Another man, presented as a structural
engineer, said: "It was the fire that killed the buildings. There's
nothing on earth that could survive those temperatures with that amount of
fuel burning. . . . The columns would have melted" (Barter, 2001).[7]

These claims, however, are absurd. Steel does not even begin to melt
until it reaches almost 2800° Fahrenheit.[8] And yet open fires fueled by
hydrocarbons, such as kerosene---which is what jet fuel is---can at most
rise to 1700°F, which is almost 1100 degrees below the melting point of
steel.[9] We can, accordingly, dismiss the claim that the towers collapsed
because their steel columns melted.[10]

Most defenders of the official theory, in fact, do not make this
absurd claim. They say merely that the fire heated the steel up to the
point where it lost so much of its strength that it buckled.[11] For
example, Thomas Eagar, saying that steel loses 80 percent of its strength
when it is heated to 1,300&#730;F, argues that this is what happened. But
for even this claim to plausible, the fires would have still had to be
pretty hot.

But they were not. Claims have been made, as we have seen, about the
jet fuel. But much of it burned up very quickly in the enormous fireballs
produced when the planes hit the buildings, and rest was gone within 10
minutes,[12] after which the flames died down. Photographs of the towers
15 minutes after they were struck show few flames and lots of black smoke,
a sign that the fires were oxygen-starved. Thomas Eagar, recognizing this
fact, says that the fires were "probably only about 1,200 or 1,300&#730;F"
(Eagar, 2002).

There are reasons to believe, moreover, that the fires were not even
that hot. As photographs show, the fires did not break windows or even
spread much beyond their points of origin (Hufschmid, 2002, p. 40). This
photographic evidence is supported by scientific studies carried out by
NIST, which found that of the 16 perimeter columns examined, "only three
columns had evidence that the steel reached temperatures above 250&#730;C
[482&#730;F]," and no evidence that any of the core columns had reached
even those temperatures (2005, p. 88).

NIST (2005) says that it "did not generalize these results, since the
examined columns represented only 3 percent of the perimeter columns and 1
percent of the core columns from the fire floors". That only such a tiny
percent of the columns was available was due, of course, to the fact that
government officials had most of the steel immediately sold and shipped
off. In any case, NIST's findings on the basis of this tiny percent of the
columns are not irrelevant: They mean that any speculations that some of
the core columns reached much higher temperatures would be just
that---pure speculation not backed up by any empirical evidence.

Moreover, even if the fire had reached 1,300&#730;F, as Eagar
supposes, that does not mean that any of the steel would have reached that
temperature. Steel is an excellent conductor of heat. Put a fire to one
part of a long bar of steel and the heat will quickly diffuse to the other
parts and to any other pieces of steel to which that bar is connected.[13]

For fires to have heated up some of the steel columns to anywhere close to
their own temperature, they would have needed to be very big, relative to
the size of the buildings and the amount of steel in them. The towers, of
course, were huge and had an enormous amount of steel. A small, localized
fire of 1,300&#730;F would never have heated any of the steel columns even
close to that temperature, because the heat would have been quickly
dispersed throughout the building.

Some defenders of the official story have claimed that the fires were
indeed very big, turning the buildings into "towering infernos." But all
the evidence counts against this claim, especially with regard to the
south tower, which collapsed first. This tower was struck between floors
78 and 84, so that region is where the fire would have been the biggest.
And yet Brian Clark, a survivor, said that when he got down to the 80th
floor: "You could see through the wall and the cracks and see flames . . .
just licking up, not a roaring inferno, just quiet flames licking up and
smoke sort of eking through the wall."[14] Likewise, one of the fire
chiefs who had reached the 78th floor found only "two isolated pockets of
fire."[15]

The north tower, to be sure, did have fires that were big enough and hot
enough to cause many people to jump to their deaths. But as anyone with a
fireplace grate or a pot-belly stove knows, fire that will not harm steel
or even iron will burn human flesh. Also in many cases it may have been
more the smoke than the heat that led people to jump.

In any case, the fires, to weaken the steel columns, would have needed to
be not only very big and very hot but also very long-lasting.[16] The
public was told that the towers had such fires, with CNN saying that "very
intense" fires "burned for a long time."[17] But they did not. The north
tower collapsed an hour and 42 minutes after it was struck; the south
tower collapsed after only 56 minutes.

To see how ludicrous is the claim that the short-lived fires in the
towers could have induced structural collapse, we can compare them with
some other fires. In 1988, a fire in the First Interstate Bank Building in
Los Angeles raged for 3.5 hours and gutted 5 of this building's 62 floors,
but there was no significant structural damage (FEMA, 1988). In 1991, a
huge fire in Philadelphia's One Meridian Plaza lasted for 18 hours and
gutted 8 of the building's 38 floors, but, said the FEMA report, although
"[b]eams and girders sagged and twisted . . . under severe fire exposures.
. , the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage"
(FEMA, 1991). In Caracas in 2004, a fire in a 50-story building raged for
17 hours, completely gutting the building's top 20 floors, and yet it did
not collapse (Nieto, 2004). And yet we are supposed to believe that a
56-minute fire caused the south tower to collapse.

Unlike the fires in the towers, moreover, the fires in Los Angeles,
Philadelphia, and Caracas were hot enough to break windows.

Another important comparison is afforded by a series of experiments
run in Great Britain in the mid-1990s to see what kind of damage could be
done to steel-frame buildings by subjecting them to extremely hot,
all-consuming fires that lasted for many hours. FEMA, having reviewed
those experiments, said: "Despite the temperature of the steel beams
reaching 800-900°C (1,500-1,700°F) in three of the tests. . . , no
collapse was observed in any of the six experiments" (1988, Appendix A).

These comparisons bring out the absurdity of NIST's claim that the
towers collapsed because the planes knocked the fireproofing off the steel
columns. Fireproofing provides protection for only a few hours, so the
steel in the buildings in Philadelphia and Caracas would have been
directly exposed to raging fires for 14 or more hours, and yet this steel
did not buckle. NIST claims, nevertheless, that the steel in the south
tower buckled because it was directly exposed to flames for 56
minutes.[18]

A claim made by some defenders of the official theory is to speculate
that there was something about the Twin Towers that made them uniquely
vulnerable to fire. But these speculations are not backed up by any
evidence. And, as Norman Glover, has pointed out: "[A]lmost all large
buildings will be the location for a major fire in their useful life. No
major high-rise building has ever collapsed from fire. The WTC was the
location for such a fire in 1975; however, the building survived with
minor damage and was repaired and returned to service" (Glover, 2002).



Multiple Evidence of Controlled Demolition

There is a reverse truth to the fact that, aside from the alleged cases of
9/11, fire has never caused large steel-frame buildings to collapse. This
reverse truth is that every previous total collapse has been caused by the
procedure known as "controlled demolition," in which explosives capable of
cutting steel have been placed in crucial places throughout the building
and then set off in a particular order. Just from knowing that the towers
collapsed, therefore, the natural assumption would be that they were
brought down by explosives.

This a priori assumption is, moreover, supported by an empirical
examination of the particular nature of the collapses. Here we come to the
second major problem with the official theory, namely, that the collapses
had at least eleven features that would be expected if, and only if,
explosives were used. I will briefly describe these eleven features.



Sudden Onset: In controlled demolition, the onset of the collapse is
sudden. One moment, the building is perfectly motionless; the next moment,
it suddenly begins to collapse. But steel, when heated, does not suddenly
buckle or break. So in fire-induced collapses---if we had any examples of
such---the onset would be gradual. Horizontal beams and trusses would
begin to sag; vertical columns, if subjected to strong forces, would begin
to bend. But as videos of the towers show,[19] there were no signs of
bending or sagging, even on the floors just above the damage caused by the
impact of the planes. The buildings were perfectly motionless up to the
moment they began their collapse.



Straight Down: The most important thing in a controlled demolition of a
tall building close to other buildings is that it come straight down,
into, or at least close to, its own footprint, so that it does not harm
the other buildings. The whole art or science of controlled demolition is
oriented primarily around this goal. As Mark Loizeaux, the president of
Controlled Demolition, Inc., has explained, "to bring [a building] down as
we want, so . . . no other structure is harmed," the demolition must be
"completely planned," using "the right explosive [and] the right pattern
of laying the charges" (Else, 2004).[20] If the 110-story Twin Towers had
fallen over, they would have caused an enormous amount of damage to
buildings covering many city blocks. But the towers came straight down.
Accordingly, the official theory, by implying that fire produced collapses
that perfectly mimicked the collapses that have otherwise been produced
only by precisely placed explosives, requires a miracle.[21]



Almost Free-Fall Speed: Buildings brought down by controlled demolition
collapse at almost free-fall speed. This can occur because the supports
for the lower floors are destroyed, so that when the upper floors come
down, they encounter no resistance. The fact that the collapses of the
towers mimicked this feature of controlled demolition was mentioned
indirectly by The 9/11 Commission Report, which said that the "South Tower
collapsed in 10 seconds" (Kean and Hamilton, 2004, p. 305).[22] The
authors of the report evidently thought that the rapidity of this collapse
did not conflict with the official theory, known as the "pancake" theory.
According to this theory, the floors above the floors that were weakened
by the impact of the airliner fell on the floor below, which started a
chain reaction, so that the floors "pancaked" all the way down.

But if that is what happened, the lower floors, with all their steel and
concrete, would have provided resistance. The upper floors could not have
fallen through them at the same speed as they would fall through air.
However, the videos of the collapses show that the rubble falling inside
the building's profile falls at the same speed as the rubble outside[23]
(Jones, 2006). As Dave Heller, a builder with degrees in physics and
architecture, explains:

the floors could not have been pancaking. The buildings fell too quickly.
The floors must all have been falling simultaneously to reach the ground
in such a short amount of time. But how?. . . In [the method known as
controlled demolition], each floor of a building is destroyed at just the
moment the floor above is about to strike it. Thus, the floors fall
simultaneously, and in virtual freefall. (Garlic and Glass 6)



Total Collapse: The official theory is even more decisively ruled out by
the fact that the collapses were total: These 110-story buildings
collapsed into piles of rubble only a few stories high. How was that
possible? The core of each tower contained 47 massive steel box
columns.[24] According to the pancake theory, the horizontal steel
supports broke free from the vertical columns. But if that is what had
happened, the 47 core columns would have still been standing. The 9/11
Commission came up with a bold solution to this problem. It simply denied
the existence of the 47 core columns, saying: "The interior core of the
buildings was a hollow steel shaft, in which elevators and stairwells were
grouped" (Kean and Hamilton, 2004, 541 note 1). Voila! With no 47 core
columns, the main problem is removed.

The NIST Report handled this most difficult problem by claiming that
when the floors collapsed, they pulled on the columns, causing the
perimeter columns to become unstable. This instability then increased the
gravity load on the core columns, which had been weakened by tremendously
hot fires in the core, which, NIST claims, reached 1832°F, and this
combination of factors somehow produced "global collapse" (NIST, 2005, pp.
28, 143).

This theory faces two problems. First, NIST's claim about tremendously hot
fires in the core is completely unsupported by evidence. As we saw
earlier, its own studies found no evidence that any of the core columns
had reached temperatures of even 482°F (250&#730;C), so its theory
involves a purely speculative addition of over 1350°F.[25] Second, even if
this sequence of events had occurred, NIST provides no explanation as to
why it would have produced global--that is, total--collapse. The NIST
Report asserts that "column failure" occurred in the core as well as the
perimeter columns. But this remains a bare assertion. There is no
plausible explanation of why the columns would have broken or even
buckled, so as to produce global collapse at virtually free-fall speed,
even if they had reached such temperatures.[26]



Sliced Steel: In controlled demolitions of steel-frame buildings,
explosives are used to slice the steel columns and beams into pieces. A
representative from Controlled Demolition, Inc., has said of RDX, one of
the commonly used high explosives, that it slices steel like a "razor
blade through a tomato." The steel is, moreover, not merely sliced; it is
sliced into manageable lengths. As Controlled Demolition, Inc., says in
its publicity: "Our DREXSTM systems . . . segment steel components into
pieces matching the lifting capacity of the available equipment."[27]

The collapses of the Twin Towers, it seems, somehow managed to mimic
this feature of controlled demolitions as well. Jim Hoffman (2004), after
studying various photos of the collapse site, said that much of the steel
seemed to be "chopped up into . . . sections that could be easily loaded
onto the equipment that was cleaning up Ground Zero."[28]



Pulverization of Concrete and Other Materials: Another feature of
controlled demolition is the production of a lot of dust, because
explosives powerful enough to slice steel will pulverize concrete and most
other non-metallic substances into tiny particles. And, Hoffman (2003)
reports, "nearly all of the non-metallic constituents of the towers were
pulverized into fine power."[29] That observation was also made by Colonel
John O'Dowd of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "At the World Trade
Center sites," he told the History Channel, "it seemed like everything was
pulverized" (History Channel, 2002).

This fact creates a problem for the official theory, according to which
the only energy available was the gravitational energy. This energy would
have been sufficient to break most of the concrete into fairly small
pieces. But it would not have been anywhere close to the amount of energy
needed to turn the concrete and virtually all the non-metallic contents of
the buildings into tiny particles of dust.



Dust Clouds: Yet another common feature of controlled demolitions is the
production of dust clouds, which result when explosions eject the dust
from the building with great energy. And, as one can see by comparing
videos on the Web, the collapses of the towers produced clouds that are
very similar to those produced by controlled demolitions of other
structures, such as Seattle's Kingdome. The only difference is that the
clouds produced during the collapses of the towers were proportionally
much bigger.[30]

The question of the source of the needed energy again arises. Hoffman
(2003), focusing on the expansion of the North Tower's dust cloud,
calculates that the energy required simply for this expansion---ignoring
the energy needed to slice the steel and pulverize the concrete and other
materials---exceeded by at least 10 times the gravitational energy
available.

The official account, therefore, involves a huge violation of the laws of
physics---a violation that becomes even more enormous once we factor in
the energy required to pulverize the concrete (let alone the energy
required to break the steel).

Besides the sheer quantity of energy needed, another problem with the
official theory is that gravitational energy is wholly unsuited to explain
the production of these dust clouds. This is most obviously the case in
the first few seconds. In Hoffman's words: "You can see thick clouds of
pulverized concrete being ejected within the first two seconds. That's
when the relative motion of the top of the tower to the intact portion was
only a few feet per second."[31] Jeff King (2003), in the same vein, says:
"[A great amount of] very fine concrete dust is ejected from the top of
the building very early in the collapse. . . [when] concrete slabs [would
have been] bumping into each other at [only] 20 or 30 mph."

The importance of King's point can be appreciated by juxtaposing it with
the claim by Shyam Sunder, NIST's lead investigator, that although the
clouds of dust created during the collapses of the Twin Towers may create
the impression of a controlled demolition, "it is the floor pancaking that
leads to that perception" (Popular Mechanics, 2005). The pancaking,
according to the official theory being defended by Sunder, began at the
floor beneath the holes created by the impact of the airliners. As King
points out, this theory cannot handle the fact, as revealed by the
photographs and videos, that dust clouds were created far above the impact
zones.



Horizontal Ejections: Another common feature of controlled demolition is
the horizontal ejection of other materials, besides dust, from those areas
of the building in which explosives are set off. In the case of the Twin
Towers, photos and videos reveal that "[h]eavy pieces of steel were
ejected in all directions for distances up to 500 feet, while aluminum
cladding was blown up to 700 feet away from the towers" (Paul and Hoffman,
2004, p. 7). But gravitational energy is, of course, vertical, so it
cannot even begin to explain these horizontal ejections.



Demolition Rings: Still another common feature of collapses induced by
explosions are demolition rings, in which series of small explosions run
rapidly around a building. This feature was also manifested by the
collapses of the towers.[32]



Sounds Produced by Explosions: The use of explosives to induce collapses
produces, of course, sounds caused by the explosions. Like all the
previous features except the slicing of the steel columns inside the
building, this one could be observed by witnesses. And, as we will see
below, there is abundant testimony to the existence of such sounds before
and during the collapses of the towers.



Molten Steel: An eleventh feature that would be expected only if
explosives were used to slice the steel columns would be molten steel, and
its existence at the WTC site was indeed reported by several witnesses,
including the two main figures involved in the clean up, Peter Tully,
president of Tully Construction, and Mark Loizeaux, president of
Controlled Demolition, Incorporated. Tully said that he saw pools of
"literally molten steel" at the site. Loizeaux said that several weeks
after 9/11, when the rubble was being removed, "hot spots of molten steel"
were found "at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down
seven [basement] levels" (both statements quoted in Bollyn, 2004).[33]

Leslie Robertson, a member of the engineering firm that designed the Twin
Towers, said: "As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still
burning and molten steel was still running" (Williams, 2001).
Knight-Ridder journalist Jennifer Lin, discussing Joe "Toolie" O'Toole, a
Bronx firefighter who worked for many months on the rescue and clean-up
efforts, wrote: "Underground fires raged for months. O'Toole remembers in
February seeing a crane lift a steel beam vertically from deep within the
catacombs of Ground Zero. 'It was dripping from the molten steel," he
said'" (Lin, 2002). Greg Fuchek, vice president of sales for LinksPoint,
Inc., which supplied some of the computer equipment used to identify human
remains at the site, described the working conditions as "hellish," partly
because for six months, the ground temperature varied between 600 degrees
Fahrenheit and 1,500 degrees or higher. Fuchek added that "sometimes when
a worker would pull a steel beam from the wreckage, the end of the beam
would be dripping molten steel" (Walsh, 2002). And still more witnesses
spoke of molten steel.[34]

This testimony is of great significance, since it would be hard to imagine
what, other than high explosives, could have caused some of the steel to
melt.



The importance of the nature of the collapses, as summarized in these 11
features, is shown by the fact that attempts to defend the official theory
typically ignore most of them. For example, an article in Popular
Mechanics (2005), seeking to debunk what it calls some of the most
prevalent myths about 9/11 fabricated by "conspiracy theorists,"
completely ignores the suddenness, verticality, rapidity, and totality of
the collapses and also fails to mention the testimonies about molten
steel, demolition rings, and the sounds of explosions.[35]



2. Testimonies about Explosions and Related Phenomena

in the 9/11 Oral Histories



Most of these 11 features---all but the slicing of the core columns and
the molten steel in the basements---are features that, if they occurred
before or during the collapses of the towers, could have been observed by
people in the area. And, in fact, testimonies about some of these
phenomena have been available, since shortly after 9/11, from
reporters,[36] fire fighters,[37] police officers,[38] people who worked
in the towers,[39] and one prominent explosives expert, Van Romero, [40]
who said on that very day after viewing the videotapes, that the collapses
not only resembled those produced by controlled implosions but must, in
fact, have been caused by "some explosive devices inside the buildings"
because they were "too methodical" to have been chance results of the
airplane strikes (Uyttebrouck, 2001).[41] Some of these testimonies were
very impressive. There were, however, only a few of them and they were
scattered here and there. No big body of testimony was readily accessible.

But this situation has dramatically changed. Shortly after 9/11, the New
York Fire Department recorded over 500 oral histories, in which
firefighters and emergency medical workers recounted their experiences of
that day. [Emergency Medical Services had become a division within the
Fire Department(Dwyer, 2005a).] Mayor Bloomberg's administration, however,
refused to release them. But then the New York Times, joined by several
families of 9/11 victims, filed suit and, after a long process, the New
York Court of Appeals ordered the city to release the bulk of these oral
histories, which it did in August 2005[42] (Dwyer, 2005b). The Times then
made them publicly available (NYT, 2005).[43]

These oral histories contain many dozens of testimonies that speak of
explosions and related phenomena characteristic of controlled demolition.
I will give some examples.



Explosions

Several individuals reported that they witnessed an explosion just before
one of the towers collapsed. Battalion Chief John Sudnik said: "we heard .
. what sounded like a loud explosion and looked up and I saw tower two
start coming down" (NYT, Sudnick, p. 4).

Several people reported multiple explosions. Paramedic Kevin
Darnowski said: "I heard three explosions, and then . . . tower two
started to come down" (NYT, Darnowski, p. 8).

Firefighter Thomas Turilli said, "it almost sounded like bombs going off,
like boom, boom, boom, like seven or eight" (NYT, Turilli, p. 4).

Craig Carlsen said that he and other firefighters "heard explosions coming
from . . . the south tower. . . . There were about ten explosions. . . .
We then realized the building started to come down" (NYT, Carlsen, pp.
5-6).

Firefighter Joseph Meola said, "it looked like the building was blowing
out on all four sides. We actually heard the pops" (NYT, Meola, p. 5).

Paramedic Daniel Rivera also mentioned "pops." Asked how he knew that the
south tower was coming down, he said:

It was a frigging noise. At first I thought it was---do you ever see
professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and
then you hear 'Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop'? . . . I thought it was that.
(NYT, Rivera, p. 9)



Collapse Beginning below the Strike Zone and Fire
According to the official account, the "pancaking" began when the floors
above the hole caused by the airplane fell on the floors below. Some
witnesses reported, however, that the collapse of the south tower began
somewhat lower.

Timothy Burke said that "the building popped, lower than the fire. . . . I
was going oh, my god, there is a secondary device because the way the
building popped. I thought it was an explosion" (NYT, Burke, pp. 8-9).

Firefighter Edward Cachia said: "It actually gave at a lower floor,
not the floor where the plane hit. . . . [W]e originally had thought there
was like an internal detonation, explosives, because it went in
succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down" (NYT,
Cachia, p. 5).

The importance of these observations is reinforced by the fact that
the authors of the NIST Report, after having released a draft to the
public, felt the need to add the following statement to the Executive
Summary:

NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting
that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using
explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001. . . . Instead, photos and
videos from several angles clearly showed that the collapse initiated at
the fire and impact floors and that the collapse progressed from the
initiating floors downward.

Firefighters Burke and Cachia presumably now need to ask themselves: What
are you going to believe, your own eyes or an official government report?



Flashes and Demolition Rings

Some of the witnesses spoke of flashes and of phenomena suggestive of
demolition rings. Assistant Commissioner Stephen Gregory said: "I thought
. . before . . . No. 2 came down, that I saw low-level flashes. . . . I
. . saw a flash flash flash . . . [at] the lower level of the building.
You know like when they demolish a building?" (NYT, Gregory, pp. 14-16).

Captain Karin Deshore said: "Somewhere around the middle . . . there was
this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash.
Then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that
building had started to explode. . . . [W]ith each popping sound it was
initially an orange and then a red flash came out of the building and then
it would just go all around the building on both sides as far as I could
see. These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going
both up and down and then all around the building" (NYT, Deshore, p. 15).

Firefighter Richard Banaciski said: "[T]here was just an explosion. It
seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed
like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions"
(NYT, Banaciski, pp. 3-4).

Deputy Commissioner Thomas Fitzpatrick said: "It looked like sparkling
around one specific layer of the building. . . . My initial reaction was
that this was exactly the way it looks when they show you those implosions
on TV" (NYT, Fitzpatrick, pp. 13-14).



Horizontal Ejections

A few witnesses spoke of horizontal ejections. Chief Frank Cruthers said:
"There was what appeared to be . . . an explosion. It appeared at the very
top, simultaneously from all four sides, materials shot out horizontally.
And then there seemed to be a momentary delay before you could see the
beginning of the collapse" (NYT, Cruthers, p. 4).

This testimony is important, because the official theory holds that the
ejections were produced by the floors collapsing. So listen to firefighter
James Curran, who said: "I looked back and . . . I heard like every floor
went chu-chu-chu. I looked back and from the pressure everything was
getting blown out of the floors before it actually collapsed" (NYT,
Curran, pp. 10-11).

Battalion Chief Brian Dixon said, "the lowest floor of fire in the south
tower actually looked like someone had planted explosives around it
because . . . everything blew out on the one floor" (NYT, Dixon, p.
15).[44]



Synchronized Explosions

Some witnesses said that the explosions seemed to be synchronized. For
example, firefighter Kenneth Rogers said, "there was an explosion in the
south tower. . . . I kept watching. Floor after floor after floor. One
floor under another after another . . . [I]t looked like a synchronized
deliberate kind of thing" (NYT, Rogers, pp. 3-4).[45]



Why Does the Public Not Know of These Reports?
If all these firefighters and medical workers witnessed all these
phenomena suggestive of controlled demolition, it might be wondered why
the public does not know this. Part of the answer is provided by Auxiliary
Lieutenant Fireman Paul Isaac. Having said that "there were definitely
bombs in those buildings," Isaac added that "many other firemen know there
were bombs in the buildings, but they're afraid for their jobs to admit it
because the 'higher-ups' forbid discussion of this fact" (Lavello, n.d.).
Another part of the answer is that when a few people, like Isaac and
William Rodriguez, have spoken out, the mainstream press has failed to
report their statements.





3. Implications



The official theory about the collapse of the towers, I have suggested, is
rendered extremely implausible by two main facts. First, aside from the
alleged exception of 9/11, steel-frame high-rise buildings have never been
caused to collapse by fire; all such collapses have all been produced by
carefully placed explosives. Second, the collapses of the Twin Towers
manifested at least 11 characteristic features of controlled demolitions.
The probability that any of these features would occur in the absence of
explosives is extremely low. The probability that all 11 of them would
occur is essentially zero.[46]

We can say, therefore, that the official theory about the towers is
disproved about as thoroughly as such a theory possibly could be, whereas
all the evidence can be explained by the alternative theory, according to
which the towers were brought down by explosives. The official theory is,
accordingly, an outrageous theory, whereas the alternative theory is, from
a scientific point of view, the only reasonable theory available.[47]





4. Other Suspicious Facts



Moreover, although we have already considered sufficient evidence for the
theory that the towers were brought down by explosives, there is still
more.



Removal of the Steel: For one thing, the steel from the buildings was
quickly removed before it could be properly examined,[48] with virtually
all of it being sold to scrap dealers, who put most of it on ships to
Asia.[49] Generally, removing any evidence from the scene of a crime is a
federal offense. But in this case, federal officials facilitated the
removal.[50]

This removal evoked protest. On Christmas day, 2001, the New York Times
said: "The decision to rapidly recycle the steel columns, beams and
trusses from the WTC in the days immediately after 9/11 means definitive
answers may never be known."[51] The next week, Fire Engineering magazine
said: "We are literally treating the steel removed from the site like
garbage, not like crucial fire scene evidence (Brannigan, Corbett, and
Dunn, 2002). . . . The destruction and removal of evidence must stop
immediately" (Manning, 2002).

However, Mayor Bloomberg, defending the decision to dispose of the steel,
said: "If you want to take a look at the construction methods and the
design, that's in this day and age what computers do.[52] Just looking at
a piece of metal generally doesn't tell you anything."[53] But that is not
true. An examination of the steel could have revealed whether it had been
cut by explosives.

This removal of an unprecedented amount of material from a crime
scene suggests that an unprecedented crime was being covered up.[54]

Evidence that this cover-up was continued by NIST is provided by its
treatment of a provocative finding reported by FEMA, which was that some
of the specimens of steel were "rapidly corroded by sulfidation" (FEMA
2002, Appendix C). This report is significant, because sulfidation is an
effect of explosives. FEMA appropriately called for further investigation
of this finding, which the New York Times called "perhaps the deepest
mystery uncovered in the investigation" (Killough-Miller, 2002). A closely
related problem, expressed shortly after 9/11 by Dr. Jonathan Barnett,
Professor of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic
Institute, is that "[f]ire and the structural damage . . . would not
explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly
evaporated" (Glanz, 2001). But the NIST report, in its section headed
"Learning from the Recovered Steel," fails even to mention either
evaporation or sulfidation.[55] Why would the NIST scientists apparently
share Mayor Bloomberg's disdain for empirical studies of recovered steel?



North Tower Antenna Drop: Another problem noted by FEMA is that videos
show that, in the words of the FEMA Report, "the transmission tower on top
of the [north tower] began to move downward and laterally slightly before
movement was evident at the exterior wall. This suggests that collapse
began with one or more failures in the central core area of the building"
(FEMA 2002, ch. 2).[56] This drop was also mentioned in a New York Times
story by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, which said: "Videos of the north
tower's collapse appear to show that its television antenna began to drop
a fraction of a second before the rest of the building. The observations
suggest that the building's steel core somehow gave way first" (Glanz and
Lipton, 2002). In the supposedly definitive NIST Report, however, we find
no mention of this fact. This is another convenient omission, since the
most plausible, and perhaps only possible, explanation would be that the
core columns were cut by explosives---an explanation that would fit with
the testimony of several witnesses.



South Tower Tipping and Disintegration: If the north tower's antenna drop
was anomalous (from the perspective of the official theory), the south
tower's collapse contained an even stranger anomaly. The uppermost
floors---above the level struck by the airplane---began tipping toward the
corner most damaged by the impact. According to conservation-of-momentum
laws, this block of approximately 34 floors should have fallen to the
ground far outside the building's footprint. "However," observe Paul and
Hoffman, "as the top then began to fall, the rotation decelerated. Then it
reversed direction [even though the] law of conservation of angular
momentum states that a solid object in rotation will continue to rotate at
the same speed unless acted on by a torque" (Paul and Hoffman, 2004, p.
34).

And then, in the words of Steven Jones, a physics professor at BYU, "this
block turned mostly to powder in mid-air!" This disintegration stopped the
tipping and allowed the uppermost floors to fall straight down into, or at
least close to, the building's footprint. As Jones notes, this extremely
strange behavior was one of many things that NIST was able to ignore by
virtue of the fact that its analysis, in its own words, "does not actually
include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for
collapse initiation were reached" (NIST 2005, p. 80, n. 12). This is
convenient because it means that NIST did not have to answer Jones's
question: "How can we understand this strange behavior, without
explosives?" (Jones, 2006).

This behavior is, however, not strange to experts in controlled
demolition. Mark Loizeaux, the head of Controlled Demolition, Inc., has
said:



[B]y differentially controlling the velocity of failure in different parts
of the structure, you can make it walk, you can make it spin, you can make
it dance . . . . We'll have structures start facing north and end up going
to the north-west. (Else, 2004)



Once again, something that is inexplicable in terms of the official theory
becomes a matter of course if the theory of controlled demolition is
adopted.



WTC Security: The suggestion that explosives might have been used raises
the question of how anyone wanting to place explosives in the towers could
have gotten through the security checks. This question brings us to a
possibly relevant fact about a company---now called Stratesec but then
called Securacom---that was in charge of security for the World Trade
Center. From 1993 to 2000, during which Securacom installed a new security
system, Marvin Bush, the president's brother, was one of the company's
directors. And from 1999 until January of 2002, their cousin Wirt Walker
III was the CEO (Burns, 2003).[57] One would think these facts should have
made the evening news---or at least The 9/11 Commission Report.

These facts, in any case, may be relevant to some reports given by people
who had worked in the World Trade Center. Some of them reportedly said
that although in the weeks before 9/11 there had been a security alert
that mandated the use of bomb-sniffing dogs, that alert was lifted five
days before 9/11 (Taylor and Gardiner, 2001).

Also, a man named Scott Forbes, who worked for Fiduciary Trust---the
company for which Kristen Breitweiser's husband worked---has written:



On the weekend of [September 8-9, 2001], there was a "power down"
condition in . . . the south tower. This power down condition meant there
was no electrical supply for approximately 36 hours from floor 50 up. . .
The reason given by the WTC for the power down was that cabling in the
tower was being upgraded . . . . Of course without power there were no
security cameras, no security locks on doors [while] many, many
"engineers" [were] coming in and out of the tower.[58]

Also, a man named Ben Fountain, who was a financial analyst with Fireman's
Fund in the south tower, was quoted in People Magazine as saying that
during the weeks before 9/11, the towers were evacuated "a number of
times" (People Magazine, 2001).



Foreknowledge of the Collapse: One more possibly relevant fact is that
then Mayor Rudy Giuliani, talking on ABC News about his temporary
emergency command center at 75 Barkley Street, said:



We were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade
Center was gonna collapse, and it did collapse before we could get out of
the building.[59]



This is an amazing statement. Prior to 9/11, fire had never brought down a
steel-frame high-rise. The firemen who reached the 78th floor of the south
tower certainly did not believe it was going to collapse. Even the 9/11
Commission reported that to its knowledge, "none of the [fire] chiefs
present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible" (Kean
and Hamilton, 2004, p. 302). So why would anyone have told Giuliani that
at least one of the towers was about to collapse?

The most reasonable answer, especially in light of the new evidence,
is that someone knew that explosives had been set in the south tower and
were about to be discharged. It is even possible that the explosives were
going to be discharged earlier than originally planned because the fires
in the south tower were dying down more quickly than expected, because so
much of the plane's jet fuel had burned up in the fireball outside the
building.[60] This could explain why although the south tower was struck
second, suffered less structural damage, and had smaller fires, it
collapsed first---after only 56 minutes. That is, if the official story
was going to be that the fire caused the collapse, the building had to be
brought down before the fire went completely out.[61]

We now learn from the oral histories, moreover, that Giuliani is not
the only one who was told that a collapse was coming. At least four of the
testimonies indicate that shortly before the collapse of the south tower,
the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) had predicted the collapse of at
least one tower.[62] The director of OEM reported directly to
Giuliani.[63] So although Giuliani said that he and others "were told"
that the towers were going to collapse, it was his own people who were
doing the telling.


As New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer has pointed out, the 9/11 Commission
had access to the oral histories.[64] It should have discussed these
facts, but it did not.

The neglect of most of the relevant facts about the collapses,
manifested by The 9/11 Commission Report, was continued by the NIST
Report, which said, amazingly:

The focus of the Investigation was on the sequence of events from the
instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower.
For brevity in this report, this sequence is referred to as the "probable
collapse sequence," although it does not actually include the structural
behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were
reached. . . . [Our simulation treats only] the structural deterioration
of each tower from the time of aircraft impact to the time at which the
building . . . was poised for collapse (80n, 140).

Steven Jones comments, appropriately:

What about the subsequent complete, rapid and symmetrical collapse of the
buildings? . . . What about the antenna dropping first in the North Tower?
What about the molten metal observed in the basement areas . . . ? Never
mind all that: NIST did not discuss at all any data after the buildings
were "poised for collapse." Well, some of us want to look at all the
data, without computer simulations that are "adjusted" to make them fit
the desired outcome. (Jones, 2006)



Summary: When we add these five additional suspicious facts to the eleven
features that that the collapses of the Twin Towers had in common with
controlled demolitions, we have a total of sixteen facts about the
collapses of these buildings that, while being inexplicable in terms of
the official theory, are fully understandable on the theory that the
destruction of the towers was an inside job.





5. The Collapse of Building 7



As we have seen, the 9/11 Commission simply ignored the facts discussed
above. Still another matter not discussed by the Commission was the
collapse of building 7. And yet the official story about it is, if
anything, even more problematic than the official story about the
towers-as suggested by the title of a New York Times story, "Engineers Are
Baffled over the Collapse of 7 WTC" (Glanz, 2001).[65]



Even More Difficult to Explain

The collapse of building 7 is even more difficult to explain than the
collapse of the towers in part because it was not struck by an airliner,
so none of the theories about how the impacts of the airliners contributed
to the collapses of the towers can be employed in relation to it.

Also, all the photographic evidence suggests that the fires in this
building were small, not very hot, and limited to a few floors.
Photographs of the north side of the building show fires only on the 7th
and 12th floors of this 47-floor building. So if the south side, which
faced the towers, had fires on many other floors, as defenders of the
official account claim, they were not big enough to be seen from the other
side of the building.[66]

It would not be surprising, of course, if the fires in this building were
even smaller than those in the towers, because there was no jet fuel to
get a big fire started. Some defenders of the official story have claimed,
to be sure, that the diesel fuel stored in this building somehow caught
fire and created a towering inferno. But if building 7 had become engulfed
in flames, why did none of the many photographers and TV camera crews on
the scene capture this sight?

The extreme difficulty of explaining the collapse of building 7--assuming
that it is not permissible to mention controlled demolition---has been
recognized by the official bodies. The report prepared under FEMA's
supervision came up with a scenario employing the diesel fuel, then
admitted that this scenario had "only a low probability of
occurrence."[67] Even that statement is generous, because the probability
that some version of the official story of building 7 is true is the same
as it is for the towers, essentially zero, because it would violate
several laws of physics. In any case, the 9/11 Commission, perhaps because
of this admission by FEMA, avoided the problem by simply not even
mentioning the fact that this building collapsed.

This was one of the Commission's most amazing omissions. According to the
official theory, building 7 demonstrated, contrary to the universal
conviction prior to 9/11, that large steel-frame buildings could collapse
from fire alone, even without having been hit by an airplane. This
demonstration should have meant that building codes and insurance premiums
for all steel-frame buildings in the world needed to be changed. And yet
the 9/11 Commission, in preparing its 571-page report, did not devote a
single sentence to this historic event.



Even More Similar to Controlled Implosions

Yet another reason why the collapse of building 7 is especially
problematic is that it was even more like the best-known type of
conventional demolition--namely, an implosion, which begins at the bottom
(whereas the collapse of each tower originated high up, near the region
struck by the plane). As Eric Hufschmid has written:



Building 7 collapsed at its bottom. . . . [T]he interior fell first. . . .
The result was a very tiny pile of rubble, with the outside of the
building collapsing on top of the pile.[68]



Implosion World.com, a website about the demolition industry, states
that an implosion is "by far the trickiest type of explosive project, and
there are only a handful of blasting companies in the world that possess
enough experience . . . to perform these true building implosions."[69]
Can anyone really believe that fire would have just happened to produce
the kind of collapse that can be reliably produced by only a few
demolition companies in the world? The building had 24 core columns and 57
perimeter columns. To hold that fire caused this building to collapse
straight down would mean believing that the fire caused all 81 columns to
fail at exactly the same time. To accept the official story is, in other
words, to accept a miracle. Physicist Steven Jones agrees, saying:

The likelihood of near-symmetrical collapse of WTC7 due to random fires
(the "official" theory)---requiring as it does near-simultaneous failure
of many support columns---is infinitesimal. I conclude that the evidence
for the 9/11 use of pre-positioned explosives in WTC 7 (also in Towers 1
and 2) is truly compelling.[70]



Much More Extensive Foreknowledge

Another reason why the collapse of building 7 creates special problems
involves foreknowledge of its collapse. We know of only a few people with
advance knowledge that the Twin Towers were going to collapse, and the
information we have would be consistent with the supposition that this
knowledge was acquired only a few minutes before the south tower
collapsed. People can imagine, therefore, that someone saw something
suggesting that the building was going to collapse. But the foreknowledge
of building 7's collapse was more widespread and of longer duration. This
has been known for a long time, at least by people who read firefighters'
magazines.[71] But now the oral histories have provided a fuller picture.



Widespread Notification: At least 25 of the firefighters and medical
workers reported that, at some time that day, they learned that building 7
was going to collapse. Firefighters who had been fighting the fires in the
building said they were ordered to leave the building, after which a
collapse zone was established. As medical worker Decosta Wright put it:
"they measured out how far the building was going to come, so we knew
exactly where we could stand," which was "5 blocks away" (NYT, Wright, pp.
11-12).



Early Warning: As to exactly when the expectation of the collapse began
circulating, the testimonies differ. But most of the evidence suggests
that the expectation of collapse was communicated 4 or 5 hours in
advance.[72]



The Alleged Reason for the Expectation: But why would this expectation
have arisen? The fires in building 7 were, according to all the
photographic evidence, few and small. So why would the decision-makers in
the department have decided to pull firefighters out of building 7 and
have them simply stand around waiting for it to collapse?

The chiefs gave a twofold explanation: damage plus fire. Chief Frank
Fellini said: "When [the north tower] fell, it ripped steel out from
between the third and sixth floors across the facade on Vesey Street. We
were concerned that the fires on several floors and the missing steel
would result in the building collapsing" (NYT, Fellini, p. 3).

There are at least two problems with each part of this explanation.
One problem with the accounts of the structural damage is that they vary
greatly. According to Fellini's testimony, there was a four-floor hole
between the third and sixth floors. In the telling of Captain Chris Boyle,
however, the hole was "20 stories tall" (2002). It would appear that Shyam
Sunder, the lead investigator for NIST, settled on somewhat of a
compromise between these two views, telling Popular Mechanics that, "On
about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom--approximately
10 stories--about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out"
(Popular Mechanics, March 2005).

The different accounts of the problem on the building's south side are
not, moreover, limited to the issue of the size of the hole. According to
Deputy Chief Peter Hayden, the problem was not a hole at all but a
"bulge," and it was "between floors 10 and 13" (Hayden, 2002).

The second problem with these accounts of the damage is if there was a
hole that was 10 or 20 floors high, or even a hole (or a budge) that was 4
floors high, why was this fact not captured on film by any of the
photographers or videographers in the area that day?

With regard to the claims about the fire, the accounts again vary greatly.
Chief Daniel Nigro spoke of "very heavy fire on many floors" (NYT, Nigro,
p. 10). According to Harry Meyers, an assistant chief, "When the building
came down it was completely involved in fire, all forty-seven stories"
(quoted in Smith, 2002, p. 160). That obvious exaggeration was also stated
by a firefighter who said: "[Building 7] was fully engulfed. . . . [Y]ou
could see the flames going straight through from one side of the building
to the other" (NYT, Cassidy, p. 22).

Several of the testimonies, however, did not support the official
line. For example, medical technician Decosta Wright said: "I think the
fourth floor was on fire. . . . [W]e were like, are you guys going to put
that fire out?" (NYT, Wright, p. 11). Chief Thomas McCarthy said: "[T]hey
were waiting for 7 World Trade to come down. . . . They had . . . fire on
three separate floors . . . , just burning merrily. It was pretty amazing,
you know, it's the afternoon in lower Manhattan, a major high-rise is
burning, and they said 'we know'" (NYT, McCarthy, pp. 10-11).

The second problem with the official account here is that if there
was "very heavy fire on many floors," why is this fact not captured on any
film? The photograph that we have of the north side of the building
supports Chief McCarthy's view that there was fire on three floors. Even
if there were fires on additional floors on the south side of the
building, there is no photographic support for the claim that "the flames
[on these additional floors went] straight through from one side of the
building to the other."

Moreover, even if the department's official story about the collapse of
building 7 were not contradicted by physical evidence and some of the oral
histories, it would not explain why the building collapsed, because no
amount of fire and structural damage, unless caused by explosives, had
ever caused the total collapse of a large steel-frame building.[73] And it
certainly would not explain the particular nature of the collapse---that
the building imploded and fell straight down rather than falling over in
some direction, as purportedly expected by those who gave the order to
create a large collapse zone. Battalion Chief John Norman, for example,
said: "We expected it to fall to the south" (Norman 2002). Nor would the
damage-plus-fire theory explain this building's collapse at virtually
free-fall speed or the creation of an enormous amount of dust-additional
features of the collapses that are typically ignored by defenders of the
official account.

The great difficulty presented to the official theory about the WTC
by the collapse of building 7 is illustrated by a recent book, 102
Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers,
one of the authors of which is New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer, who
wrote the stories in the Times about the release of the 9/11 oral
histories. With regard to the Twin Towers, Dwyer and his co-author, Kevin
Flynn, support the theory put out by NIST, according to which the towers
collapsed because the airplanes knocked the fire-proofing off the steel
columns, making them vulnerable to the "intense heat" of the ensuing
fires.[74] When they come to building 7, however, Dwyer and Flynn do not
ask why it collapsed, given the fact that it was not hit by a plane. They
simply say: "The firefighters had decided to let the fire there burn
itself out" (Dwyer and Flynn, 2005, p. 258). But that, of course, is not
what happened. Rather, shortly after 5:20 that day, building 7 suddenly
collapsed, in essentially the same way as did the Twin Towers.

Should this fact not have led Dryer and Flynn to question NIST's theory
that the Twin Towers collapsed because their fireproofing had been knocked
loose? I would especially think that Dwyer, who reported on the release of
the 9/11 oral histories, should re-assess NIST's theory in light of the
abundant evidence of explosions in the towers provided in those
testimonies.[75]



Another Explanation: There is, in any case, only one theory that explains
both the nature and the expectation of the collapse of building 7:
Explosives had been set, and someone who knew this spread the word to the
fire chiefs.

Amazingly enough, a version of this theory was publicly stated by an
insider, Larry Silverstein, who owned building 7. In a PBS documentary
aired in September of 2002, Silverstein, discussing building 7, said:



I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling
me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire,
and I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest
thing to do is pull it."[76] And they made that decision to pull and we
watched the building collapse. (PBS, 2002) [77]



It is very puzzling, to be sure, that Silverstein, who was ready to
receive billions of dollars in insurance payments for building 7 and the
rest of the World Trade Center complex, on the assumption that they had
been destroyed by acts of terrorism, would have made such a statement in
public, especially with TV cameras running. But his assertion that
building 7 was brought down by explosives, whatever the motive behind it,
explains why and how it collapsed.

We still, however, have the question of why the fire department came to
expect the building to collapse. It would be interesting, of course, if
that information came from the same agency, the Office of Emergency
Management, that had earlier informed the department that one of the
towers was going to collapse. And we have it on good authority that it
did. Captain Michael Currid, the president of the Uniformed Fire Officers
Association, said that some time after the collapse of the Twin Towers,
"Someone from the city's Office of Emergency Management" told him that
building 7 was "basically a lost cause and we should not lose anyone else
trying to save it," after which the firefighters in the building were told
to get out (Murphy, 2002, pp. 175-76).[78]

But that answer, assuming it to be correct, leaves us with more
questions, beginning with: Who in the Office of Emergency Management knew
in advance that the towers and building 7 were going to collapse? How did
they know this? And so on. These questions could be answered only by a
real investigation, which has yet to begin.





6. Conclusion



It is, in any case, already possible to know, beyond a reasonable doubt,
one very important thing: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an
inside job, orchestrated by domestic terrorists. Foreign terrorists could
not have gotten access to the buildings to plant the explosives. They
probably would not have had the courtesy to make sure that the buildings
collapsed straight down, rather than falling over onto surrounding
buildings. And they could not have orchestrated a cover-up, from the quick
disposal of the steel to the FEMA Report to The 9/11 Commission Report to
the NIST Report. All of these things could have been orchestrated only by
forces within our own government.

The evidence for this conclusion has thus far been largely ignored by
the mainstream press, perhaps under the guise of obeying President Bush's
advice not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories." We have seen,
however, that it is the Bush administration's conspiracy theory that is
the outrageous one, because it is violently contradicted by numerous
facts, including some basic laws of physics.

There is, of course, another reason why the mainstream press has not
pointed out these contradictions. As a recent letter to the Los Angeles
Times said:

The number of contradictions in the official version of . . . 9/11 is so
overwhelming that . . . it simply cannot be believed. Yet . . . the
official version cannot be abandoned because the implication of rejecting
it is far too disturbing: that we are subject to a government conspiracy
of 'X-Files' proportions and insidiousness.[79]



The implications are indeed disturbing. Many people who know or at least
suspect the truth about 9/11 probably believe that revealing it would be
so disturbing to the American psyche, the American form of government, and
global stability that it is better to pretend to believe the official
version. I would suggest, however, that any merit this argument may have
had earlier has been overcome by more recent events and realizations. Far
more devastating to the American psyche, the American form of government,
and the world as a whole will be the continued rule of those who brought
us 9/11, because the values reflected in that horrendous event have been
reflected in the Bush administration's lies to justify the attack on Iraq,
its disregard for environmental science and the Bill of Rights, its
criminal negligence both before and after Katrina, and now its apparent
plan not only to weaponize space but also to authorize the use of nuclear
weapons in a preemptive strike.

In light of this situation and the facts discussed in this essay---as
well as dozens of more problems in the official account of 9/11 discussed
in my books---I call on the New York Times to take the lead in finally
exposing to the American people and the world the truth about 9/11. Taking
the lead on such a story will, of course, involve enormous risks. But if
there is any news organization with the power, the prestige, and the
credibility to break this story, it is the Times. It performed yeoman
service in getting the 9/11 oral histories released. But now the welfare
of our republic and perhaps even the survival of our civilization depend
on getting the truth about 9/11 exposed. I am calling on the Times to rise
to the occasion.

_____________________________________________________________________
looking for a better newsgroup-reader? - www.recgroups.com




.