Censorship in Academia - Cornell University

I've been a Cornell Staff member for about thirty years, and pretty much every work day, I work with metal. Mostly machining, but also, bending, shearing, welding, annealing, heating, heat treating, etc.. One thing I've learned through my experience, is that gradually heated steel loses its strength gradually, not instantly. Since WTC7's free fall and symmetric drop displayed all the characteristics of a controlled demolition, and none of a fire induced collapse, I've always been skeptical of the government's "explanation" - that gradual heating of parts of the steel frame due to limited office fires caused WTC7's drop.

Now that free fall acceleration has been well documented and finally acknowledged by government hired researchers at the NIST, this explanation also seems to be at odds with the findings of Sir Isaac Newton,. With that in mind, for the past year or so, I've been trying to solicit opinions regarding WTC7's free fall and symmetric drop from professors in Cornell's engineering department. All of my initial email inquiries were ignored, and followup inquiries produced only one response, which was limited to a few words of condescension and sarcasm. None of the professors would address the actual research and evidence I provided, or respond to my questions. Brief, polite, and detailed phone messages were also ignored.

So, I decided to submit a guest column to Cornell's student run paper, The Cornell Daily Sun. Again, my first submission was ignored, but my followup submission did receive a reply, which stated only that my piece would not not be published. No reason was given. I explained to the editors that I would be willing to make some changes if there are some key words or phrases that prompted the censorship, but no explanation for the censorship was forthcoming. I find censorship at a University particularly troubling, since this is an institution where the free and open exchange of ideas, information, and knowledge are not only encouraged, but the very reason for the institution's existence.

My hope now is that members of the 9-11 Truth community will contact the Cornell Daily Sun by email and phone, and politely explain why 9-11 Truth is such and important and relevant topic, and that by censoring the open discussion of the facts related to 9-11-01,and perpetuating the government's 9-11 myth, the Sun is also perpetuating the government's 9-11 wars - wars that come with a very heavy price, in lives, taxpayer dollars, and our economic stability. And of course, these wars reduce rather than increase global security.

The editors at the Sun can be reached as follows:

Keenan Weatherford, editor in chief: editor@cornellsun.com

Tony Manfred, associate editor: associate-editor@cornellsun.com

The phone number at the Sun is 607-273-3606

Here is my censored guest column. If you decide to contact the Sun, please let me know.

Thanks,
Henry Hansteen

9-11-01: Myth vs Physics 10-15-10

Over the past few years, I've probably sent a dozen or so emails to Cornell engineering professors, asking them what I believe are clear and reasonable questions. Most of the professors do not reply at all, a few replied just to tell me that they are unable to answer my questions, and one reply was spiced with condescension and sarcasm. I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed in them. My Grandfather was a Cornell Professor, and he left me with a much different impression . The question is basically this - what can and what can't cause a 47 story, hurricane and earth quake resistant, steel framed high rise to suddenly crush itself with near perfect symmetry, while accelerating at a rate that is indistinguishable from free fall? That's what video evidence, government hired researchers from the NIST, and independent 9-11 truth researchers all agree took place on 9-11-01 when World Trade Center 7 dropped. The entire perimeter frame transitioned from standing straight to accelerating downward at the same rate it would have fallen through air. This building was supported by over forty massive interconnected steel columns that extended from bedrock to the roof, and the vast majority of them were never even exposed to any fire. According to the government’s final report, issued by NIST in November of 2008, structural damage from debris impacts didn’t contribute to WTC7’s free fall and symmetric drop. It is now blamed on nothing but ordinary office fires that occupied only a few floors in a small area of the building. The steel frame was designed to easily support several times the weight of the building. Like all steel framed high rises, it was designed with incredible reserve strength.

An object can only accelerate at the rate of free fall if all of its gravitational energy is converted to motion, and none is used to move, bend, crush, or break other objects. Believing that WTC7’s massive steel frame could accelerate through itself at free fall while bending, breaking, and shearing tens of thousands of tons of undamaged structural steel is, in effect, little different than claiming that a car will accelerate down Buffalo Street hill at the same rate whether it’s on the open road or rolling directly through a long row of parked cars. I’ve heard a few people speculate about “buckling”, and how quickly a vertical steel column will fail once it has buckled. This theory doesn’t hold up to analysis, though. Video evidence shows that most of the steel columns in WTC7 were never exposed to any fire, so obviously, gradual heating could not have caused them all to fail at the same instant. Also, steel columns in the process of buckling still have far more structural integrity than air, and could not cause the entire structure to suddenly accelerate at free fall. And even if the entire structure had been engulfed in a raging inferno, the steel would lose it strength gradually, rather than instantly. Revisiting my auto analogy, auto bodies and frames are specifically engineered to buckle, because buckling absorbs tremendous amounts of energy, which rapidly reduces the speed of a vehicle during an impact, and would have reduced (or stopped) the rate of WTC7’s free fall and symmetric drop. The structural integrity of the parked cars is not reduced to that of air once they begin to buckle. This is true even if some of the parked cars are on fire. Gradual heating cannot reduce the integrity of steel to that of air in an instant, and neither office fires nor buckling can explain how the structural integrity of all of WTC7’s exterior columns vanished in an instant.

What can explain WTC7’s free fall and symmetric drop, along with the extremely high temperatures and the molten and vaporized steel? What can explain the instant, total, and simultaneous failure of all of WTC7’s steel columns in an instant, the government’s refusal to test for incendiaries of any type, and its rapid destruction of the forensic evidence? Demolition explains all the evidence, and a team of nine scientists have discovered highly refined military grade nano thermitic material in dust and steel samples. I suggest reading http://www.911research.com and http://www.911speakout.org for those interested in verifying the points I’ve made here. If you think the points I've made here are valid, please present them to Cornell’s engineering professors and encourage them to take get informed and take a stand. This is too important an issue to be ignored, and the price for perpetuating the government’s impossible 9-11 conspiracy theory and the resulting 9-11 wars is too high. There comes a time when silence is complicity.

Henry Hansteen

Falling objects

At Cornell University...newage physics...
... falling objects increase velocity when they strike other objects.

Keep trying. Try shorter pieces on occasion with different approaches.

Pass out DVDs with the AE911Truth flyers around campus. Also place the DVD-info under the doors of faculty offices. I did these actions at a University. Over time, it does have an impact.

TomT Saturated the College Town of Commerce TX

TomT Trooper!

We need more like him.

Excellent advice TomT!!

Here are some more resources:
http://www.911sharethetruth.com/
https://www.ae911truth.net/store/

Also short and pointed letters to the editor with a positive viewpoint on taking on the numerous and overwhelming facts of 9/11 usually have the best chance of being published in my experience.

A Counter-Propaganda Machine!

Good work TomT. Efforts like yours are more often than not the only thing between an informed and uninformed public.

Effective counter-propaganda can reverse misleading propaganda.

Good essay, well-written.

They don't reply because 1) they know they can't answer, and/or 2) they are afraid, and/or 3) the "scientific" consensus there, as elsewhere, is so stifling they are not even aware of what you are saying.

9/11 is getting to be like the Catholic Church--the cover-up is as bad, maybe worse, than the crime.

Are US steel frame building codes now obsolete?

When will NIST be issuing their revised building safety codes for steel frame skyscrapers?

Since thousands of buildings across the nation are now at risk for sudden collapse due to office fires, shouldn't the people who live and work in those buildings at least be warned of the danger?

And how much more steel and how many more steel columns are required for new buildings to make sure they don't suffer the same fate at WTC7?

These are critical questions for engineers to ask. After all there are huge legal liabilities involved now. If I design a skyscraper knowing from actual events that it could fall down if some small fires break out, I'm taking a big risk right?

Great letter Henry Hansteen exposing the patent absurdity of NIST's position. My understaning is that NIST was once the pinnacle of engineering excellence and exactitude. Tragic that the entire agency has been so completely debased.

Great Essay

I have an appointment with my philosophy professor today to discuss 911 and how the truth movement is ignored. I think its pathetic how people ignore it like it doesn't matter.

Good luck getting your letter published! Students seem more open to this than professors.

This sounds like a great idea

This sounds like a great idea for a mass student movement. Have as many college students as possible discuss the questions about the collapses to get the attention of the academics. They are scared like most Americans when it comes to this. But I believe that some of them will react positively and they can have a big impact.

You're welcome

I share the same experience, but nowatdays I blog about it, to document the censorship. I would like to translate your entry to german language for my blog...

thanks Henry....

I did the same thing at the University of Michigan physics department. They would not accept the challenge of explaining how the three buildings could have collapsed.
It was very educational to see how bought out academics are....

good job....

excellent letter

I had the same experience with NC State Physics dept.

I contacted them twice, each time with nice letters. All thirty some professors.
Only two responded at first, very soon after they got my letter, with no commitment to anything.
After that, nothing.
It was censorship.

Here is the website for my 911blogger piece about it:

http://911blogger.com/news/2009-09-23/followup-letter-nc-physics-profess...

I was going to do a bit more correspondence with university professors, but realized that it was useless. These people do not want to lose their jobs. They will not stand up to truth and justice. They are simply very well educated cogs in the system.

Thanks Henry

That's an excellent post Henry, and I appreciate the support people are showing on here. All too often we feel like we are alone, when actually there is a world-wide movement asking the same questions.

We invited many professors at UC Berkeley to come to our event, Lifting the Fog, and held it on campus, and almost all of them ignored it.

But many students did come, and our guests were hosted on radio programs locally, it brought researchers together, etc. -- there were many benefits.

Post your essay widely -- Facebook, twitter, blogs, etc. -- and do as much as you can, and then redirect into another way if you can't make any headway.

It would be interesting to see how many ways there are to reach out on a campus. One person in STJ, early on, went in person to engineering and physics professors and handed them the paper. He did a survey. He asked first what their position was on the why the towers came down. They typically repeated the official story or didn't know. He then asked if they had read the NIST Report. Invariably, they had not. He then asked if they had read Steven Jones' paper, and naturally they had not. He then gave them the paper.

If you noticed when Richard Gage did his tabling at the AIA conference in the Bay Area, the vast majority of building professionals had NOT ever seen or heard of Building 7. That's important because B7 really does open the door for a lot of people.

Could Richard Gage be brought to Cornell to speak somehow? (Perhaps he already has . . .)

There are many options to waking up the slumbering professors! People these days respond best to media and in-person meetings, offerings like a free lunch (which is how AE first got architects to come out to see their presentations), etc.

You've started with a good essay. Now keep going.

Thanks for all the positive

Thanks for all the positive feedback and suggestions. Like the folks in Egypt, if we keep up the pressure, eventually, we *will* get results. Maybe we can have a few thousand people at Ground Zero on 9-11-11.
I hope people here are contacting the Cornell Sun and passing on the link to others.
Henry.

You might have to grovel a bit, but it's a worthy cause

First of all, I applaud your efforts and your persistence. Keep it up.

In terms of laying out your case, you have written a fine letter. Unfortunately there are political matters that need to be considered. Too many people might loose face, or find themselves in uncomfortable positions, if your letter is published. So, it won't be published in that form. However, you may well be able to get a very similar letter published if you are willing to write it in such a way that it does not make anyone in your immediate neighborhood look bad.

In a paper I tried to publish in the Journal of Political Philosophy, I called Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule intellectual cowards. But Vermeule is on the editorial board of the journal, and Sunstein is such a big name that the editor probably didn't want to offend him. So, my paper was denied peer-reviewed. Is it censorship? Yes. Is it unfair? Yes. Is it cowardly? Yes. Is it understandable? Well, I suppose it is. So I published it elsewhere. In your case, you may want to stick with the same venue but take the edge off.

Think about what your ultimate goal is, and what strategy will help you make progress toward that goal. You might send a friendly letter to someone on the paper's staff asking about what the policies are, and what you can do to meet whatever expectation they have for considering submissions like yours.

Best of luck,
Kurtis

Keep trying different approaches

You could catch one of these professors coming out of a lecture and show him/her this 6 second video of WTC 7 imploding on a cellphone or other such device.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixwx19t2IMQ

In addition to free fall you could ask if they think that the failure of a single column could reduce a 47 story building to a pile of rubble in 16 seconds and NIST claims.

One correction: There were 82 columns, not 40.

24 core columns and 58 perimeter columns.

WTC 7 Collapse video on our mobile phones

Brilliant idea, Chris.
I used FreeCorder.com to download it to my Blackberry, and it plays great.
Here is the MP4 file for everyone's convenience, in showing WTC 7.
http://911Experiments.org/WTC7/WTC7Collapse.MP4