Thanks, 7man.

Canadian Professor disputes official representation on 9/11

Friday 23. Mar 2007

No way World Trade Center Towers were brought down simply from planes, jet fuel and fire

by Graeme MacQueen

Sometime in late 2005 I had a conversation -- quite a heated one, actually -- with an American dissident who said that 9/11 was obviously carried out by the U.S. government. I expressed some scepticism about this and he said that I obviously hadn’t done my homework and didn’t know the first thing about the issue. I realized after that conversation that he was actually right. I’d tinkered with the issue by reading long pieces on the internet late at night but I hadn’t really done my homework. Being, I guess, a scholarly sort of guy, and having by this time taken early retirement so that I could work for peace and justice in whatever way I wished, I ordered some the leading books, downloaded key articles, and set to work.

I was very surprised when I began to realize how weak the official story was. I can remember the exact moment when I felt -- my god, there’s no way those 3 towers were brought down by planes, jet fuel and fire. One tower, maybe. A structural flaw in the tower, a set of coincidences. Two towers -- we’re getting into a highly unlikely situation, even though their construction was similar, because the planes hit in different ways. Three towers (including WTC 7 now, which wasn’t hit by a plane), the odds against this are astronomical. So then I began taking a much closer look and spending more and more time looking into all this. As for the things I was reading, I found out about Scholars for 9/11 Truth and stayed largely glued to that website. Joined the organization, read all the now standard works by Griffin, Jones and others.

Now we get to the part about why I wrote a 9/11 article. When I read David Ray Griffin’s piece, "Explosive Testimony" I was staggered. By two things. First, by the fact that these 10,000-12,000 pages of interviews with the FDNY existed. What a resource! How come nobody told me about it before? Why hadn’t I learned about it in the mass media? I was like: Hello, doesn’t everybody realize how important this is? I mean, if I were a prosecutor in a homicide trial and I suddenly realized I had 10,000 pages of testimony by eyewitnesses, collected shortly after the crime! Secondly, I was staggered by the stuff he quoted. Clear, in some cases detailed, and as far as I could see very credible - coming from people with no axe to grind and with tons of experience with high-rises and fires and collapses and so on.

As soon as I read that article I knew I had to read those 10,000 pages for myself, even if it was just to feel grounded in primary sources. As a scholar (I haven’t talked about the part of me that is a text scholar working in Buddhist texts - later) I’ve always wanted to work in primary sources. After reading the results of other people’s research, after reading secondary literature, I start to get antsy. Give me the primary sources and let me make my own conclusions. And by now I realized we actually have all sorts of primary source material on 9/11 - the idea that we can never know what happened is silly. We’ve got material evidence, photographic evidence, seismic evidence and eyewitness evidence - not to mention certain principles to guide us, such as: we won’t accept anything that violates the laws of logic or the laws of physics. So, this was a case of eyewitness evidence.

Let me pause on this for a moment. There’s a lot of talk - on the internet, in the media, etc. -- about how unreliable witnesses are. This sort of evidence is often called "soft" and a lot of people tend to dismiss it. This is bizarre. The whole of the social sciences and humanities depends on the use of human subjects - studying what they do, but also talking to them, exploring what they think, reading what they’ve said. Now, any good social scientist, philosopher or literary critic can tell you how many fences have to be crossed before you get from human perception to facts about the external world-testimony from human subjects does not give us a transparent window -- but this does not mean eyewitness evidence cannot be used or isn’t important. You don’t just refuse to look at it, you work out principles of interpretation.

I recently read a paper by Charles Regini, an FBI agent, talking about the establishment of Cold Case Homicide Squads in the U.S. These are groups of investigators who try to solve homicide cases that have gone unsolved for at least a year. He concludes, "resolution of nearly all CCS cases still comes from eyewitness identification." To ignore or dismiss eyewitness testimony is absurd.

If we wish to prove the towers were brought down through controlled demolition we have to do the hard work of interlinking all the types of evidence. In a broad sense this has been done; but I think there's a lot of work yet to be done.

Examination of photographs and videos strongly suggests explosions: we have squibs (smoke or fire shooting forth suddenly) appearing at different floors in advance of the collapse; we have a great shaking of the earth preceding the collapse, visible in the quaking of cameras on tripods; we have the trajectory of the matter in the plumes of powdered building that make no sense in a gravity-driven collapse; we have the pulverization of the buildings and the pyroclastic cloud; we have apparent flashes-small but visible in some videos-and so on. We also have seismic evidence, but I'm not qualified to assess it so I direct you to the St911 website, LINK. We have physical evidence, despite the fact that most of the steel was shipped off before forensic examination could take place.

As the FEMA report indicated quite a while ago, some of the remaining steel shows corrosion and the presence of sulphur, which Dr. Jones has argued indicates thermate (used to cut steel--contains sulphur to lower the melting point of steel). We have samples of the actual powder to which most of the building was reduced. And so on.

Again and again we find that the nature of these things cannot be explained through the official narrative, such as that is. In my opinion, there actually isn't any official explanation of the collapses at the moment, since NIST has rejected the pancake theory but hasn't given us any proper theory of total collapse to replace it. I’m afraid I don't think "global collapse ensued" is a theory.

But, on the other hand, as far as I know there's been no attempt yet to take all these different pieces of evidence and put them together to produce a detailed, definitive narrative of the collapse.

By detailed, I mean: suppose a firefighter says, then there was a huge explosion and a big piece of metal flew out of the tower and hit the Financial Center. Now, I want us to look and see if he might be talking about a particular piece of metal in the Financial Center known from photographs. If a firefighter says, I saw a puff of smoke twenty floors below where the planes hit, I want to ask: can we find this puff on the video? That's the kind of detailed matching I'd like to see. It's not that I think we need this level of detail to have a strong hypothesis (we've already got a strong hypothesis); it's just that the more detail we have the stronger the hypothesis is. It's a lot of work and we have no funding. But we have more and more people doing research and coordinating it through the internet.

Terrorists (in the broad sense, including state terrorists) sometimes conduct an initial attack on a target, and then when first-responders or caregivers arrive they make a second attack, sometimes through an explosive device or "secondary device" that explodes and injures those who have come to help the victims of the first attack. Basically, you cleverly cause an enormous strain on the social fabric by injuring more people, by injuring those who help the injured, by discouraging people from following their natural altruistic tendencies to help each other, and so on. Many of the firefighters, when they heard the explosions going off in the towers, thought they might be "secondary devices" in this sense-meant to directly injure first-responders. I don't think it initially occurred to any of them that these explosions were actually meant to bring down the towers, though they learned that quickly enough.

So let me just interpret your question to mean, why are explosions in the Towers important and what does their presence tell us? First of all, any major fire may include explosions of various kinds-could be gas utilities, for example, or fine air-borne particles or hot gases under pressure-but the kind of explosions we're interested in are explosions that were causally related to the collapses. That is, they contributed in a major way to the catastrophic collapse of two massive, 110-storey buildings. Normal explosions accompanying fires would not do this.

Now, although there are various collapse theories that utilize explosions, I think by far the strongest are those that say the buildings were carefully wired with explosives in advance of 9/11...

Continued...
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