Greetings fellow Plebs & Peasants,
There has long been speculation about how the explosives were brought into WTC 7 unnoticed in order to enable the obvious controlled demolition that it was. But what if the building was designed from the beginning with the ability to collapse into its own footprint? Gives Larry Silverstein’s ‘pull it” statement a whole meaning IMO.
- jw
Source: Global Research
September 11, 2001: Eyewitness Evidence of Explosions in the Twin Towers
Global Research, July 29, 2023
Propaganda In Focus 9 June 2023
In remembrance of Prof. Graeme MacQueen, we publish this article which is Chapter 17 of his book “The Pentagon’s B-Movie: looking closely at the September 2011 Attacks“.
Many of us are convinced that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were brought down on September 11, 2001 through controlled demolition. But the question at once arises: if this is what happened, would somebody not have noticed?
The answer is that many people did notice. There is a good deal of eyewitness evidence for the demolition of buildings 1 and 2. This paper will give a brief overview of this evidence.
Before we look at the evidence, we must first confront one of the most common objections in response to it. Eyewitness evidence, say the objectors, is “soft,” untrustworthy, and unreliable. According to such critics, it does not matter how many eyewitnesses there are to an event or who these eyewitnesses are or how their accounts relate to each other; the best plan is just to dismiss everything they say. This is an odd view. There is no support for it either in social scientific studies of eyewitness testimony or in the scholarly literature on criminal investigation (255).
Eyewitness evidence certainly has its vulnerabilities: we know that eyewitnesses can misperceive, misremember and deceive. However, as with other kinds of evidence, we have developed ways of checking to see if what the witnesses report is accurate. For example, we look for corroborating evidence – further eyewitness evidence as well as evidence of entirely different kinds.
Moreover, eyewitness evidence is highly relevant to the investigation of explosions. The National Fire Protection Association’s manual on fire and explosion investigations states clearly that in an explosion investigation, “the investigator should take into consideration all the available information, including witness statements” (256).
The present paper offers not only an overview of eyewitness evidence of explosions but also a critique of the handling of this evidence by the 9/11 Commission and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. But both of these organizations make extensive use of eyewitness evidence and obviously consider it valid and important. Therefore, disagreements with NIST and the 9/11 Commission on the legitimacy of eyewitness testimony are not at the level of principle but at the level of application.
One especially important source of eyewitness testimony is the oral histories of the Fire Department of New York (technically, World Trade Center Task Force Interviews), released in 2005 by the City of New York (257). The New York Times had taken the city to court to obtain the release of the documents, and when the material was released the newspaper hosted the oral histories in the form of a series of separate PDF files on its website.
The oral histories were collected by the World Trade Center Task Force of the FDNY after New York City fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen decided it would be important to have a record of what the members of the department experienced on that day. The Task Force interviews comprise 10-12,000 pages of statements by approximately 500 “FDNY firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics collected from early October, 2001 to late January, 2002” (258).
Professor David Ray Griffin, with the help of able researchers, was the first scholar to ferret out fascinating descriptions of explosions from this material (259). The author of the present paper published a subsequent article after reading the oral histories, “118 Witnesses: the Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers” (260).
The presentation and analysis below build on this earlier work. As the evidence is presented, three important points will emerge. First, the conviction that the Towers came down because of explosions was common on 9/11. Second, there is substantial eyewitness evidence supporting this conviction. Third, this evidence has been ignored or suppressed by both the 9/11 Commission and NIST.
The Explosion Hypothesis Was Common on 9/11
In discussions of the events of 9/11, it is often implied that the original, obvious, and natural hypothesis concerning the destruction of the Twin Towers is some variety of gravity-driven collapse. It was obvious to everyone on 9/11, we are led to believe, that the Towers came down because the buildings simply could not withstand the plane strikes and subsequent fires and therefore gave way. Those who say the buildings came down because of explosions – who hold to an “explosion hypothesis” in the broad sense – are, according to this view, late arrivals. They are folks, it is argued, who came along after 9/11 and over-thought an initially simple situation due to a conspiratorial mind-set.
In fact, it is easy to prove that this is a falsification of history. Proponents of the explosion hypothesis were extremely common on 9/11, especially at the scene of the crime. Many people made their judgment on the basis of what they directly perceived while close to the buildings, while others accepted as a matter of course that complete and energetic pulverization of these enormous buildings must have entailed explosions. Below are five of many examples supporting these views.
In a video clip preserved from 9/11, ABC television reporter N. J. Burkett is seen standing close to the Twin Towers. He draws our attention to the firefighters at the scene and to the burning buildings themselves. Suddenly, the South Tower begins to come apart behind him. As the pulverized debris shoots into the air, Burkett says: “A huge explosion now, raining debris on all of us. We better get out of the way!” Mr. Burkett’s statement shows no evidence of over-thinking the situation or of a conspiratorial mindset. He certainly did not come along after 9/11: he expressed his judgment before the debris of the building had even reached the ground. Then he ran for his life. Half an hour later he would run for his life again as the North Tower came down (261).
In CNN’s same-day coverage of the events of 9/11, Mayor Giuliani was asked questions about explosions in the Twin Towers on two separate occasions. The second occasion is a press conference at about 2:39 p.m. A female reporter (off screen) asks the Mayor: “Do you know anything about the cause of the explosions that brought the two buildings down? Was it caused by the planes or by something else?” (262). Notice that she does not ask if there were explosions: she assumes there were. She does not ask if these explosions brought down the Towers: she assumes they did. She merely wants to know what caused the explosions – the planes or “something else.”
In footage known as the “Matthew Shapoff video,” acquired from NIST through a Freedom of Information Act request, there are several people (off screen) chatting while they watch the events at the World Trade Center unfold at a distance and film them with their video camera. Suddenly, through their camera we see the North Tower begin to throw pulverized debris in all directions in huge plumes as it disintegrates. After a horrified, “oh, my God!” we hear a male voice, presumably that of Shapoff, exclaim as follows: “That was a bomb that did that! That was a fuckin’ bomb that did that! There’s no goddamn way that could have happened!” (263). Again, this is a spontaneous reaction to what Shapoff was observing.
New York firefighter Christopher Fenyo, in a passage from the World Trade Center Task Force interviews, speaks of a debate that began among firefighters who were on the scene. The debate started after the destruction of the South Tower but before the destruction of the North Tower – in other words, between about 10:00 and 10:30 a.m. “…At that point a debate began to rage because the perception was that the building looked like it had been taken out with charges.” As with Shapoff, the statement concerns not just explosions generally but the intentional destruction of the building with explosives. That is, people were already debating a subcategory of the explosion hypothesis, the controlled demolition hypothesis, before 10:30 on the morning of 9/11.
The FBI’s name for its investigation of the 9/11 incidents is PENTTBOM, which stands for “Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing Investigation.” Is it possible that when this name was assigned someone in the FBI thought a bombing had taken place? (Recall that according to the current official narrative there was no bombing at any of the affected locations.) On the day of 9/11, USA Today’s foreign correspondent Jack Kelley was seen telling his TV audience that the FBI’s “working theory” at that time was that “at the same time two planes hit the building…there was a car or truck packed with explosives underneath the building, which exploded at the same time and brought both of them down” (264). Given that Kelley was later shown to have routinely fabricated stories for USA Today, his allegations about the FBI would have to be corroborated. However, the general hypothesis ascribed here to the FBI – the buildings were brought down through the use of explosives – was common on 9/11. For example, Albert Turi, FDNY Chief of Safety, told NBC’s Pat Dawson not long after the destruction of the Towers that, in Dawson’s words, “according to his [Turi’s] theory he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building” (265).
These five examples have been offered in support of the contention that the explosion theory, even in its most robust form (deliberate destruction through explosives), was familiar to eyewitnesses on the day of 9/11. It was widely accepted as a reasonable theory. That many people held this theory does not mean it is correct, but it suggests that if this theory is to be rejected it must be rejected on the basis of evidence, not because it is regarded as late, unnatural, exotic or conspiratorial.
There is strong eyewitness evidence supporting the explosion hypothesis.
The eyewitness evidence is strong in terms of both quality and quantity. The quality of the evidence is found in the richly detailed, mutually corroborating accounts of what was witnessed. At the same time, the quantity of evidence is impressive in both the number and variety of eyewitnesses who discuss explosions in their statements.
Quality
A conversation between Dennis Tardio and Pat Zoda about the destruction of the North Tower was captured on film by the Naudet brothers on the day of 9/11 (266).
Tardio and Zoda repeatedly affirm each other’s accounts, both with words and with hand gestures. The hand gestures are like a series of karate chops starting high and going quickly downward. The witnesses evidently want to suggest that there were many discrete, energetic events that they observed, and that these started high up and then moved rapidly down the building at regular intervals.
Zoda says, as he moves his hand: “Floor by floor, it started poppin’ out.” Tardio concurs and uses the same hand gesture: “It was as if they had detonated, detonated (Zoda: “Yeah, detonated, yeah”), you know, as if they were planted to take down a building: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” Zoda adds: “All the way down. I was watching and running.”
These are firefighters and they are used to encountering the standard sorts of explosions that occur in building fires. But they do not talk about smoke explosions, or “boiling-liquid-expanding-vapor” (BLEVE) explosions, or any of the other expected forms of explosion. Instead, they are talking about, and acting out with dramatic gestures, something altogether different. They say that what they saw resembled a controlled demolition.
The next example is Paul Lemos, who, on 9/11, was in the vicinity of the World Trade Center to participate in the filming of a commercial. Lemos was interviewed on videotape on 9/11 near the World Trade Center, with WTC-7 still standing in the distance (267). He was filmed by a different film maker at a different location than the firefighters just described. This footage appears to be entirely independent of the Tardio/Zoda footage just discussed. However, when Lemos begins describing the demise of the North Tower, he uses the same hand gestures as Tardio and Zoda: rapid chops that start high and move at regular intervals down the building.
Here is what he says as he performs his gestures:
“All of a sudden I looked up and about twenty stories below…the fire…I saw, from the corner, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom…just like twenty straight hits, just went down and then I just saw the whole building just went ‘pshew’…and as the bombs were goin’ people just started running and I sat there and watched a few of ‘em explode and then I just turned around and I just started running for my life because at that point the World Trade Center was coming right down…”
Lemos is even bolder than Tardio and Zoda, in that he does not qualify his statement by saying “as if they had detonated.” He refers openly to “bombs” and he says he watched them “explode.” In any case, the Tardio/Zoda footage and the Lemos footage are both rich in detail and mutually corroborating. The rich detail is apparent from the transcript, and the corroboration comes not just from the language used but also the hand gestures. These men clearly perceived the same event and came away with the same idea – that explosive devices in the buildings were used to bring them down.
Lemos also tells an interesting anecdote about a conversation with a person who was introduced to him as an architect, which is relevant to the tampering with and suppression of eyewitness evidence. Lemos states, “…now, they told me afterwards it wasn’t explosions. I was talking to one of the architects that they pulled in.” It is unclear who “they” is referring to in this statement, but a reasonable supposition can be made that “they” refers to the authorities on the scene. Therefore, it appears that the authorities had an architect there on 9/11 telling people like Paul Lemos what they had and had not perceived.
Regardless of whether or not this “architect” had a sinister purpose, we can be sure of the following facts about the architect: (1) unlike Lemos, he was not himself an eyewitness (he had been “pulled in” to the scene); (2) he would not have had time to carry out a thorough canvassing of eyewitnesses; (3) he certainly did not have time to do a comprehensive review of photographs and videos of the collapse; and (4) there is little possibility he could have studied the remains of the building in any detail – either the steel or the dust. Despite all of this, he feels he can tell an eyewitness what that eyewitness did not perceive. Not only is the architect making an unwarranted judgment, his behavior is extremely irregular insofar as it makes conducting an unbiased investigation much more difficult. Homicide investigations, fire investigations, and explosion investigations have strict principles, and in each case it would be unheard of to walk onto a crime scene and taint the evidence by interfering with an eyewitness.
This discussion of the architect is also important because of its wider significance. In the months following 9/11, many eyewitnesses muted, qualified and even rejected their own initial judgments after hearing that authorities had adopted a structural failure hypothesis that had no room for explosions. The structural failure hypothesis that was most common during that period, and that was widely advanced as correct, was the “pancake” hypothesis of sequentially failing floors. The pancake hypothesis has since that time been discredited and abandoned (it was specifically rejected by NIST) but in the early days it did a fine job of weakening the confidence of eyewitnesses who thought they had perceived explosions.
Examples of firefighters revising their judgment of what they had perceived on the basis of what authorities were saying at the time are common in the World Trade Center Task Force interviews.
Dominick DeRubbio says in his description of the destruction of the South Tower: “It was weird how it started to come down. It looked like it was a timed explosion, but I guess it was just the floors starting to pancake one on top of the other.”
James Drury says in his statement about the North Tower:
“…we started to hear the second roar. That was the north tower now coming down. I should say that people in the street and myself included thought that the roar was so loud that…bombs were going off inside the building. Obviously we were later proved wrong…”
John Coyle starts his important statement about the South Tower in a very tentative way:
“The tower was—it looked to me—I thought it was exploding, actually. That’s what I thought for hours afterwards… Everybody I think at that point still thought these things were blown up.”
All of these witnesses recall their initial impressions of what they saw and thought (and in the case of Drury and Coyle the initial impressions of their friends and colleagues who were also on the scene), and then try to back away from these impressions. Thus, we have clear evidence of both how common the explosive demolition theory was on 9/11, and how it was later marginalized – not by sound science but by speculative theories given a stamp of approval by authority figures.
Returning now to the issue of corroboration, there are additional evidentiary sources that corroborate the descriptions given by Zoda, Tardio and Lemos of regular, descending energetic events. First, here are three examples of corroborating eyewitness testimony.
Ross Milanytch, an employee at nearby Chase Manhattan Bank, says of the South Tower: “It started exploding…It was about the 70th floor. And each second another floor exploded out for about eight floors, before the cloud obscured it all.”
John Bussey, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, said this of the South Tower:
“Off the phone, and collecting my thoughts for the next report, I heard metallic crashes and looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor, spewing glass and metal outward. One after the other, from top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors blew to pieces.” (268)
Kenneth Rogers of the New York Fire Department said this about his experience with the South Tower:
“…we were standing there with about five companies and we were just waiting for our assignment and then there was an explosion in the south tower… A lot of guys left at that point. I kept watching. Floor after floor after floor. One floor under another after another and when it hit about the fifth floor, I figured it was a bomb, because it looked like a synchronized deliberate kind of thing.”
Corroboration can be even more impressive when it involves an entirely different form of evidence. Paul Lemos explicitly says that he was watching the North Tower, and, more specifically, a corner of the North Tower, when he saw the explosions. Evidence that corroborates his judgment that there were explosions occurring at a corner of the North Tower is found in high quality footage filmed during its destruction (269). This footage clearly shows a rapid sequence of forceful and focused ejections, apparently explosive, moving down the building. The size and velocity of these ejections can be measured, which means their existence and basic characteristics are not open to question.
Thus, there is a high degree of corroboration among the different eyewitness accounts, and between eyewitness evidence and other evidence.
Some who object to this compilation of eyewitness testimony say that what these witnesses experienced may not have been explosions at all. Falling bodies, crashing elevators, snapping columns and even sonic booms have all been proposed as alternative explanations. These assertions can be addressed by analyzing, quite closely, the statements of another eyewitness.
The witness is Sue Keane. She was, on 9/11, an officer in the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) where she had been for eight years. Before this she had spent 13 years in the U.S. Army, where she received training on how to respond to explosions.
Listed below are six common characteristics of explosions as described by former FBI explosives expert James Thurman in his book, Practical Bomb Scene Investigation (270). These characteristics are matched to selections from statements Sue Keane gave to the authors of the book, Women at Ground Zero (271). These statements, given within a few months of the 9/11 events, are supported by her separate handwritten submission to the Port Authority Police Department.
1. Sound
Keane: “A couple of minutes later, it sounded like bombs going off. That’s when the explosions happened.”
2. Positive blast pressure phase
“The windows blew in…we all got thrown.” “Each one of those explosions picked me up and threw me.”
3. Partial vacuum during positive blast pressure phase
“There was this incredible rush of air, and it literally sucked the breath out of my lungs.”
4. Negative blast pressure phase
“Everything went out of me with this massive wind… Stuff was just flying past. Then it stopped and got really quiet, and then everything came back at us. I could breathe at this point, but now I was sucking all that stuff in, too. It was almost like a back draft. It sounded like a tornado.”
5. Incendiary or thermal effect
“…he threw me under the hose, which in a way felt great, because I didn’t realize until then that my skin was actually burning. I had burn marks, not like you’d have from a fire, but my face was all red, my chest was red.”
6. Fragmentation and shrapnel
“…there was stuff coming out of my body like you wouldn’t believe. It was like shrapnel. It’s still coming out.”
The handwritten PAPD report of this brave and obviously traumatized individual, which corroborates the above account in several crucial respects, is directly available in the PAPD documents released in 2003 (272). One page of that report is reproduced as follows.
On what reasonable grounds can we exclude Sue Keane’s statements as we attempt to determine the causes of the destruction of the Twin Towers?
In summary, the eyewitness testimony of Tardio/Zoda, Lemos and Keane are examples of “quality,” meaning evidence that is rich in detail. Below, the issue of “quantity” of eyewitness evidence is considered.
Quantity
It is difficult to formulate a complete account of eyewitnesses who describe, expressly or implicitly, explosions near the time of the destruction of the Twin Towers. Neither the FBI, nor the 9/11 Commission, nor the National Institute of Standards and Technology have published a count. I have compiled the most complete known list of witnesses to explosions at the Twin Towers. There are 156 such witness statements. The two graphs presented below summarize certain aspects of the list.
Figure 8-1: Witnesses by Profession/Agency
Of the 156 eyewitnesses, 121 are from the Fire Department of New York. Another 14 witnesses are from the Port Authority Police Department. Thirteen are reporters, most working for major television networks. Eight are listed as “other,” usually people who worked in the vicinity of the Towers.
Members of the FDNY and PAPD are typically referred to as “first responders.” So 135 out of 156 witnesses, or 87% of the total, are first responders. This is significant because these people have much more experience with explosions than most people. Moreover, their statements were given to superior officers as part of their professional duties, and the circumstances in which the statements were collected make this eyewitness evidence very strong.
The reporters also occupy an important position in the list because their accounts in most cases are directly captured on videotape. Their voice inflections and often their body language can be examined in detail. The reporters’ accounts are also important because they are in most cases given spontaneously, with little reflection, very soon— minutes or even seconds—after the event they witnessed. Spontaneous witness statements are widely viewed as credible because there is little time for internal or external filtering of what is stated. In fact, the U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence typically do not admit into court statements made by witnesses outside of court, which are referred to as hearsay. However, one exception to the rule against hearsay is the “excited utterance” exception. The excited utterance exception allows hearsay to be admitted when it is “a statement relating to a startling event or condition made while the declarant was under the stress of excitement caused by the event or condition.” (Fed. Rules Evid. 803(2)). As expected, with respect to 9/11, the distorting tendencies in recollection have worked against the explosion hypothesis, for the simple reason that people progressively adjusted their stories as time went on to better accord with what they were being told by authority figures (273).
Before discussing the next graph, it is appropriate to describe how the list of explosion witnesses was compiled. Eyewitnesses are included in the list if they use, in their statement, at least one of the following terms: “explosion” (or the corresponding permutations of “to explode”), “blast,” “blow up” (or “blow out”) “bomb” (or “secondary device”), or “implosion.” There is also a category called “other CD,” which includes cases that do not use one of these terms, but that are in some respects strongly suggestive of controlled demolition. The point of this method is not merely to be able to quantify explosion reports, but to reduce the list compiler’s role in the interpretive process. Eyewitnesses are included in the list not because an outside observer interprets what they witnessed as explosions, but because the eyewitnesses themselves interpret what they witnessed as explosions.
Additionally, there are processes available to investigators that can help check the quality of the evidence. The witnesses can be closely scrutinized (names, occupations, reliability, experience); motives for deception can be looked at; quality of sources can be examined; chain of custody for all witness accounts can be verified; and, of course, corroboration through other evidence of both similar and dissimilar kinds can be confirmed. Corroboration is so massive in the present case that the other processes have received less attention.
The “explosion” category is by far the largest, with 112 eyewitnesses. However, the “bomb” category, with 32 eyewitnesses, is extremely important as well. Most of the people on this list speaking of bombs are firefighters, and it is clear from their use of the word “bomb” that they are not talking about the sort of explosion they expect to encounter in a high-rise fire.
Now, there are three common objections to the demolition argument as based on eyewitness evidence. Two have been addressed already: eyewitness evidence is “soft” and can be disregarded; and eyewitnesses may have mistakenly reported explosions when, in fact, non-explosive events (such as falling elevators) were at issue. The third objection is the only one that can be taken seriously. It is this: there are many natural forms of explosion that occur in large fires, and the mere fact that there were explosions does not mean that explosives were used. It is an unjustified leap, claim these objectors, to go from eyewitness statements about explosions to the controlled demolition hypothesis.
Figure 8-2: Witnesses by Term Used
The types of explosions that typically accompany a fire are described in detail in various publications, probably most authoritatively in the National Fire Protection Association’s Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations. There the NFPA describes four types of explosion that would have been expected to accompany the fires in the Twin Towers.
BLEVE (“boiling-liquid-expanding-vapor-explosion,” as with an exploding boiler)
Electrical explosion
Smoke explosion (i.e. backdraft)
Combustion explosion (e.g., natural gas, jet fuel vapor)
There are three characteristics of the eyewitness statements that rule out all four types of explosion. That is, these four sorts of explosions may well have occurred, but they do not account for the main explosions witnesses say they perceived. Here are the three characteristics that must be explained.
Identification
If the explosions encountered were the type typically encountered in fires, the firefighters would be expected to recognize them as such and name them. There are very few instances where they do so. On the contrary, they clearly feel these were different types of explosion than those they were used to encountering, as evidenced by, for example, the number of references to bombs.
Power
Many eyewitnesses clearly thought they were watching explosions destroy the Twin Towers (“I looked up, and the building exploded…The whole top came off like a volcano”). But none of the common four types of fire-related explosions could accomplish this. Recall that according to NIST, the Twin Towers were essentially intact beneath the point where they were hit by the planes. While BLEVEs and combustion explosions sometimes destroy structures such as wood frame houses, there are no examples of these explosions causing the destruction of such robust steel structures as are at issue here. Also, there is no evidence that the right conditions for such explosions (for example, the necessary quantities of natural gas or jet fuel) existed in the Twin Towers at the time their dramatic destruction began.
Pattern
As described above, many eyewitnesses reported regular, rapid energetic events in sequence down the building, which cannot be explained by any of the four common types of explosion. If these patterned ejections are the result of explosions, they can only be explosions resulting from explosives.
Eyewitness Evidence Was Ignored/Suppressed by the 9/11 Commission and NIST
The discussion above gives a brief overview of the eyewitness testimony available to investigators. The last main point here is that this evidence has been ignored or suppressed by both the 9/11 Commission and NIST.
In its 585 pages, the 9/11 Commission Report contains one partial sentence referring to eyewitness reports of explosions at the time of collapse. The context is a discussion of firefighters who were on upper floors of the North Tower when the South Tower came down. The sentence fragment is as follows: “…those firefighters not standing near windows facing south had no way of knowing that the South Tower had collapsed; many surmised that a bomb had exploded…” (274). In other words, according to the 9/11 Commission, a subcategory of firefighters – those in upper floors of the North Tower with an impeded view—mistook the collapse of the South Tower for a bomb. The implication here is that the explosion witnesses, presumably few in number, made a mistake.
Of course, a careful examination of the available eyewitness testimony, as set forth above, would show that it is categorically false that all or most of the explosion witnesses were in the upper floors of the North Tower, and that only those with an impeded view thought a bomb had exploded. The truth is that witnesses were in a great variety of locations and many of them had an exceptionally clear view of the Towers.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology gave even worse treatment to the eyewitness testimony. One of NIST’s stated objectives is to “determine why and how WTC 1 and WTC 2 collapsed following the initial impacts of the aircraft” (275). But in the 295 pages of this report, there is not a single reference to eyewitnesses who perceived explosions in the Twin Towers.
Some may argue that this is not surprising because NIST deals with hard evidence, not soft evidence. NIST is concerned with things like column size, temperatures reached, and the yield strength of steel; NIST does not deal with eyewitnesses. This is a misconception. The truth is that NIST openly discussed its attention to eyewitnesses.
Very early in its investigation of the Twin Towers, NIST adopted a sophisticated method of collecting eyewitness evidence, and the results can be seen in Chapter 7 (“Reconstruction of Human Activity”) of the NIST final report. Telephone interviews, face-to-face interviews, and focus groups were all used (276). Note, for example, the following statement: “225 face-to-face interviews, averaging 2 hours each, gathered detailed, first-hand accounts and observations of the activities and events inside the buildings on the morning of September 11” (277). Although Chapter 7 is not about the destruction of the Towers, elsewhere NIST explicitly recognizes the relevance of eyewitness evidence to the understanding of how the buildings came down (278). Yet NIST somehow fails to note even one eyewitness reference to explosions or bombs, not only among its interviewees but also in the literature. It misses, for example, all of the 156 eyewitnesses used as the basis of this paper, even though it had access to all of the sources used to compile the list.
The 9/11 Commission and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, apparently following the lead of the FBI, have violated standard principles of investigation. Whether this is evidence of incompetence or of deliberate cover-up is irrelevant to my present argument. Either way, it is obvious that the official investigations carried out to this point have been grossly inadequate and that a new and thorough investigation is essential.
Prof. Graeme MacQueen, was an author and distinguished professor of religious studies, Hamilton, Ont. Canada. He was a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
The Pentagon’s B-Movie
Looking Closely at the September 2001 Attacks
by Graeme MacQueen
rat haus reality press, 15 March 2023
Graeme MacQueen received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Harvard University and taught in the Religious Studies Department of McMaster University for 30 years. While at McMaster he became founding Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster, after which he helped developed the B.A. program in Peace Studies and oversaw the development of peace-building projects in Sri Lanka, Gaza, Croatia and Afghanistan. He was a member of the organizing committee of the Toronto Hearings held on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, was a member of the international 9/11 Consensus Panel, and was co-editor of The Journal of 9/11 Studies.
Reviews:
We have been told that the truth will set us free. Less emphasized is how the truth will stalk, haunt and disquiet us along the way. Few of us really have the tenacity to dwell for any length of time with those sorts of truths. Doing so is like dwelling in deep waters where it’s dark, cold, and the temptation to surface too quickly threatens us with a kind of spiritual bends. Fewer of us still try to give elusive truths their full account under the scrutiny of peers and public. Among these fewest of few, Graeme MacQueen stands out, making this remarkable collection of essays, spanning 15 years of epochal shifts in world affairs, one for the bookshelf of the ages. – Matthew Witt has a Ph.D. in urban studies from Portland State University and since 2001 has been Professor of Public Administration, University of La Verne, California.
As I reflect on how I managed to penetrate the multi-layered shield of propaganda concealing the crimes of 9/11, I realize that two things were most important for me. On the one hand, there was the physical evidence, such as the free fall of Building 7, and, on the other hand, there were the writings and lectures of Graeme MacQueen. Graeme MacQueen clothed the skeleton of physical evidence with a living body. His rigorous approach to evaluating available evidence is an outstanding example of the overwhelming power of science. – Ansgar Schneider, physicist and mathematician, Dr. rer. nat. Universität Göttingen, author of Stigmatisierung statt Aufklärung (Eng) and Generation 9/11(Eng).
Click here to read the e-Book.
The original source of this article is Propaganda In Focus
Copyright © Prof. Graeme MacQueen, Propaganda In Focus, 2023
Source: Global Research
Undisputed Facts Point to the Controlled Demolition of WTC 7
By Richard Gage
Global Research, March 28, 2008
Response to NIST’s Invitation for Written Comments
Documentation of spoken remarks presented on December 18 conference call with the NCST Advisory Committee
Emailed to NIST on January 3, 2008
Richard Gage, AIA – Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth
I’m Richard Gage, AIA, a licensed architect of 20 years. I represent Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a fast-growing body of more than 230 architects and engineers dedicated solely to bringing out the truth about all three high-rise building collapses on 9/11. We believe that we have answers to your questions about the puzzling collapse of World Trade Center 7.
In more than 100 steel-framed, high-rise fires (most of them very hot, very large and very long-lasting), not one has collapsed, ever. So it behooves all of us, as your own former chief of NIST’s Fire Science Division, Dr. James Quintiere, said, “to look at real alternatives that might have been the cause of these collapses.”
Let’s start with temperatures – 1,340° F. temperatures, recorded in thermal images of the surface of the World Trade Center rubble pile a week after 9/11 by NASA’s AVIRIS equipment on USGS overflights. Such temperatures cannot be achieved by oxygen-starved hydrocarbon fires. Such fires burn at only 600 to 800° F. Remember, there was no fire on the top of the pile. The source of this incredible heat was therefore below the surface of the rubble, where it must have been far hotter than 1,340 degrees.
Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc., who was hired for the Building 7 cleanup, said that “molten steel was found at 7 WTC.” Leslie Robertson, World Trade Center structural engineer, stated that on October 5, “21 days after the attacks, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running.” Fire department personnel, recorded on video, reported seeing “molten steel running down the channel rails… like you’re in a foundry – like lava from a volcano.” Joe O’Toole, a Bronx firefighter, saw a crane lifting a steel beam vertically from deep within a pile. He said “it was dripping from the molten steel.” Bart Voorsanger, an architect hired to save “relics from the rubble,” stated about the multi-ton “meteorite” that it was a “fused element of molten steel and concrete.”
The knowledge that this evidence even exists was denied by one of your top engineers, John Gross, in his appearance at the University of Texas in April of this year.
Steel melts at about 2,850 degrees Fahrenheit, about twice the temperature of the World Trade Center Tower 1 and 2 fires as estimated by NIST. So what melted the steel?
Appendix C of FEMA’s BPAT Report (attached to this email) documents steel samples showing rapid oxidation, sulfidation, and intergranular melting. A liquid eutectic mixture, including sulfur from an unknown source, caused intense corrosion of the steel, gaping holes in wide flange beams, and the thinning of half-inch-thick flanges to almost razor-sharpness in the World Trade Center 7 steel. The New York Times called this “the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation.”
NIST left all of this crucial forensic evidence out of its report. Why? Because it didn’t fit in with the official conspiracy theory.
Last year, physicist Steven Jones, two other physicists, and a geologist analyzed the slag at the ends of the beams and in the samples of the previously molten metal. They found iron, aluminum, sulfur, manganese and fluorine – the chemical evidence of thermate, a high-tech incendiary cutting charge used by the military to cut through steel like a hot knife through butter. The by-product of the thermate reaction is molten iron! There’s no other possible source for all the molten iron that was found. One of thermate’s key ingredients is sulfur, which can form the liquid eutectic that FEMA found and lower the melting point of steel.
In addition, World Trade Center 7’s catastrophic structural failure showed every characteristic of explosive, controlled demolition. You can see all these characteristics at our website www.AE911truth.org. The destruction began suddenly at the base of the building. Several first responders reported explosions occurring about a second before the collapse. There was the symmetrical, near-free-fall speed of collapse, through the path of greatest resistance – with 40,000 tons of steel designed to resist this load – straight down into its own footprint. This requires that all the columns have to fail within a fraction of a second of each other – perimeter columns as well as core columns. There was also the appearance of mistimed explosions (squibs?) at the upper seven floors on the network video recordings of the collapse. And we have expert testimony from a European demolitions expert, Danny Jowenko, who said “This is controlled demolition… a team of experts did this… This is professional work, without any doubt.”
Fire cannot produce these effects. Fire produces large, gradual deformations and asymmetrical collapses. Thermate can produce all of these effects used in conjunction with linear shaped charges. If the thermate is formed into ultra-fine particles, as has been accomplished at Los Alamos National Laboratory, it is called super-thermate, and is very explosive.
The National Fire Protection Association’s NFPA 921 Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations (1998 Edition) dictates in fire investigations that certain residues should be tested for. Thermate would leave behind signs of sulfidation/corrosion by sulfur. Such residues were in fact noted in Appendix C of the FEMA BPAT report (see note 11). “If the physical evidence establishes one factor, such as the presence of an accelerant, that may be sufficient to establish the cause even where other factors such as ignition source cannot be determined.” Thermate and sulfur obviously qualify as accelerants in this case (with regard to the destruction of steel which in turn could have caused the near-free-fall-speed collapse). (The fires were not particularly suspicious, but Building 7’s collapse was, because of its symmetry and speed.)
Because NIST seems to have forgotten or neglected to apply key features of the scientific method, I am including as an attachment to this submission Steven E. Jones, “Revisiting 9/11/2001 — Applying the Scientific Method”, Journal of 911 Studies, April 2007, Journal of 9/11 Studies: JonesWTC911SciMethod.pdf.
How much longer must we endure NIST’s cover-up of how Building 7 was actually destroyed? Millions of Americans, including the 230+ architects and engineers and 600 others of AE911Truth.org, demand that NIST come clean with a full-throttle, fully resourced and transparent forensic investigation of the evidence of the controlled demolition of Building 7.
The original source of this article is Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth
Copyright © Richard Gage, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, 2008
Source: 9-11 Research
Squibs
High-Velocity "Demolition Squibs" Are Visible in the Twin Towers' Collapses
Squibs are "blasting caps (initiators) used in the explosive industry to set off high explosives." 1 In discussions of the collapses of the WTC skyscrapers, the term has been appropriated to describe the physical appearance of puffs or jets of dust emerging from buildings during a demolition, caused by the detonation of explosive charges. Several such "squibs" can be seen in videos and photographs capturing the collapses of the North and South Towers.
It has been suggested that the evident squibs could have been added to the photographs and videos after the fact, given that much of this evidence has found its way onto the web via undocumented routes. However, the squibs show up in many diverse videos and photographs, and we have not been able to find any showing the squibs to be absent. A conspiracy of incredible proportions would be required to forge such convincing evidence of squibs in such diverse sources.
Squibs in the North Tower
Some of the clearest visual evidence of squibs in the North Tower is found in a video bearing the KTLA 5 banner. It shows two very distinct squibs emerging from the North Tower's northwest side, which is in profile on the tower's right, at about two and five seconds into the collapse.
Photographs
The photograph on this page shows two puffs of dust emerging from the walls well below the expanding dust cloud. The position and timing of the one on the northwest (right) face suggest that it is an early stage of the second squib seen in the KTLA 5 video.
The first photograph on this page shows a puff of dust to the right of the visible north corner of the North Tower. That appears to be the beginning of the first squib.
Most of the photographs of the North Tower collapse show it after the second squib has already been subsumed by the dust cloud. We can find no photographs of the North Tower that should show the squibs but do not.
Videos
Other broadcasts besides KTLA 5's showed one or both of the squibs on the tower's northwest wall. This video, taken from close to the North Tower's base, shows the first squib very distinctly as a conical jet of gases that are lighter in color than the expanding dust cloud above.
This video (in wmv format) clearly shows the second squib emerging from the North Tower's northwest side.
This video broadcast by CNN provides one of the most complete records of the North Tower's collapse. It hides the squibs behind the banner, but even so you can distinctly see the second squib through the bluish semi-transparent part of the banner.
Another video shows the two squibs as clearly as the KTLA 5 video, and from a similar vantage point. It is not available on this site, but is found on the video 911: The Greatest Lie Ever Sold.
Squibs in the South Tower
Squibs are also apparent in the South Tower's collapse, though they don't appear to be as energetic as the two North Tower squibs examined above. In this photograph a red arrow highlights a row of puffs of dust emerging from the southeast face of the South Tower about 10 floors below the bottom of the zone of total destruction.
The same squibs are clearly visible in the first two collapse sequences of this ABC News video montage of the South Tower collapse.
Gravity-Collapse Explanations
Defenders of the gravity collapse theory consistently invoke the explanation that the ejections of dust are caused by pancaking floors squeezing out air and dust. The Popular Mechanics article attacking 9/11 Truth contains the following passage.
Like all office buildings, the WTC towers contained a huge volume of air. As they pancaked, all that air--along with the concrete and other debris pulverized by the force of the collapse--was ejected with enormous energy. "When you have a significant portion of a floor collapsing, it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window," NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder tells PM. Those clouds of dust may create the impression of a controlled demolition, Sunder adds, "but it is the floor pancaking that leads to that perception."
NIST's final Report on the Twin Towers mentions the piston theory to attempt to explain away the ejections:
The falling mass of the building compressed the air ahead of it, much like the action of a piston, forcing material, such as smoke and debris, out the windows as seen in several videos.
There are several problems with this explanation, which we designate the piston theory.
The squibs contain thick dust of a light color, apparently from crushed concrete and gypsum. But these materials would not have been crushed until the pancaking floors above impacted the floor emitting the squib. Thus the dust would not be produced until the air was already squeezed out, so there was no source of the dust for the squib.
The squibs emerge from the facade 10 to 20 floors below the exploding rubble cloud inside of which the tower is disintegrating. The thick clouds appear to contain the pulverized concrete of the floor slabs, which was the only concrete component of the tower. But the piston theory requires that the floors have already pancaked down to the level of the squib, making them unavailable for the production of the concrete dust more than 10 floors above.
The piston theory requires a rather orderly pancaking of the floor diaphragms within the intact sleeve of the perimeter wall. Such a process should have left a stack of floor diaphragms at the tower's base at the end of the collapse. But there was no such stack. In fact, it is difficult to find recognizable pieces of floor slabs of any size in Ground Zero photographs.
The North Tower exhibits three distinct sets of squibs at different elevations of the building. Each set is visible as two distinct squibs on the same floor, one emerging from about the horizontal center of each of the tower's two visible faces. This pattern is is far too focused and symmetric to be explained by the piston theory, which would produce similar pressures across each floor and over successive floors.
The pancaking of floors within the perimeter wall would have created underpressures in the region above the top pancaking floor. But we seen no evidence of dust being sucked back into the tower.
References
1. Fireworks Glossary, usfireworks.biz,
Source: LP.org
Harry Browne’s Famous 9/12 Letter, with a Foreword from Scott Horton
By Reed Cooley on September 12, 2022 in Features
On September 11th, 2001, in the aftermath of the most deadly foreign attack on the United States since 1941, then-recent Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne sat down and hammered out this simple and honest take on the situation. He warned that our government had surely provoked the attack through their wanton violence in the Middle East and that we should be careful not to overreact in a way that would compound our terrorism problem.
If Browne had won the election of 2000, September 11th almost certainly would not have even happened since he would have already removed the U.S. military from Saudi Arabia and ended U.S. support for Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, the major motives of the attackers. If the attack had proceeded regardless, Browne’s War on Terrorism surely would have been over by Christmas 2001 and we would live in a very different, and much better, world today.
The Democrats aren’t even pretending to be antiwar anymore. They lead the War Party now. And the America First Republicans are late to the game and slow in coming.
It is up to us, the libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party of this country to take the lead of the antiwar movement, to finally bring an end to the War on Terrorism, Great Power Competition with the Eastern powers and the doctrine of American global hegemony before war finally destroys what’s left of our old republic.
Join the Libertarian Party in our fight to end US involvement in Yemen. Today, visit 1833StopWar.com to see how one phone call can add your voice to the support for the resolutions in front of the House and Senate. We’re also continuing the fight to pass Defend the Guard legislation in 50 states.
- Scott Horton
When Will We Learn?
By Harry Browne
Originally published on 9/12/01
The terrorist attacks against America comprise a horrible tragedy. But they shouldn’t be a surprise.
It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth – that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda. But sanity was a prior casualty: it was the loss of sanity that led to war in the first place.
Our foreign policy has been insane for decades. It was only a matter of time until Americans would have to suffer personally for it. It is a terrible tragedy of life that the innocent so often have to suffer for the sins of the guilty.
When will we learn that we can’t allow our politicians to bully the world without someone bullying back eventually?
President Bush has authorized continued bombing of innocent people in Iraq. President Clinton bombed innocent people in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Serbia. President Bush, senior, invaded Iraq and Panama. President Reagan bombed innocent people in Libya and invaded Grenada. And on and on it goes.
Did we think the people who lost their families and friends and property in all that destruction would love America for what happened?
When will we learn that violence always begets violence?
Teaching lessons
Supposedly, Reagan bombed Libya to teach Muammar al-Gadhafi a lesson about terrorism. But shortly thereafter a PanAm plane was destroyed over Scotland, and our government is convinced it was Libyans who did it.
When will we learn that “teaching someone a lesson” never teaches anything but resentment – that it only inspires the recipient to greater acts of defiance.
How many times on Tuesday did we hear someone describe the terrorist attacks as “cowardly acts”? But as misguided and despicable as they were, they were anything but cowardly. The people who committed them knowingly gave their lives for whatever stupid beliefs they held.
But what about the American presidents who order bombings of innocent people – while the presidents remain completely insulated from any danger? What would you call their acts?
When will we learn that forsaking truth and reason in the heat of battle almost always assures that we will lose the battle?
Losing our last freedoms
And now, as sure as night follows day, we will be told we must give up more of our freedoms to avenge what never should have happened in the first place.
When will we learn that it makes no sense to give up our freedoms in the name of freedom?
What to do?
What should be done?
First of all, stop the hysteria. Stand back and ask how this could have happened. Ask how a prosperous country isolated by two oceans could have so embroiled itself in other people’s business that someone would want to do us harm. Even sitting in the middle of Europe, Switzerland isn’t beset by terrorist attacks, because the Swiss mind their own business.
Second, resolve that we won’t let our leaders use this occasion to commit their own terrorist acts upon more innocent people, foreign and domestic, that will inspire more terrorist attacks in the future.
Third, find a way, with enforceable constitutional limits, to prevent our leaders from ever again provoking this kind of anger against America.
Patriotism?
There are those who will say this article is unpatriotic and un-American – that this is not a time to question our country or our leaders.
When will we learn that without freedom and sanity, there is no reason to be patriotic?
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