Technical experts are mounting major challenges to official U.S. government accounts of how three World Trade Center skyscrapers collapsed symmetrically and in near-freefall as part of the 9/11 attacks 15 years ago.
Many researchers are focusing especially on the little-known collapse of World Trade Center (WTC) Building 7, portrayed in the 10:08 min. video above.
The 47-story steel-frame building was not hit by an airplane and was located 355 feet north from WTC 1 and 2, "the Twin Towers." It collapsed in 6.5 seconds seven hours after the Twin Towers fell. The first 2.5 seconds of the WTC 7 collapse exhibited absolute free fall, according to scientific measurements by physicist David Chandler.
The collapses exhibited so many signatures of controlled demolition that experts who have studied them are increasingly questioning the official claims of causation, which U.S. authorities and the mainstream media have ascribed to airplane impacts of WTC 1 and 1 and resultant fires.
Last month, Europhysics News published 15 Years Later: On the physics of high-rise building collapses. The report challenged U.S. government findings that the skyscrapers collapsed due to fire. The four co-authors noted that no other steel-framed skyscrapers in world history have ever collapsed from fire (and each of the Twin towers had been specifically designed to more than withstand the impact of a civilian airline like those on 9/11.
Instead, the authors cited compelling evidence that the collapses followed the physics of controlled demolition.
Similarly, the first day of the 9/11 Justice in Focus conference brought together prominent 9/11 technical and legal experts in New York City Sept. 10-11 for an in-depth examination of the physical evidence relating to the WTC collapses, as well as a variety of related issues, such as legal precedents in landmark cases. The second day was a symposium on which legal venues and legal procedures can best advance research and result in legal remedies congruent with forensic evidence evaluated by legal review panels.
Dr. Leroy Hulsey, shown at right in a Justice Integrity Project photo, summed up the results of his University of Alaska team by telling noted public interest attorney Daniel Sheehan that there is "zero" chance that WTC 7 collapsed due to fire, which is the official U.S. government explanation. Hulsey is the chairman of the civil and environmental engineering department at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Hulsey's remarks during the forum at New York City's historic Cooper Union typified other engineering experts' conclusions. The conference "Justice In Focus 9/11 2016" was co-sponsored by the 2,700-member group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911 Truth), a non-profit, non-partisan body.
The group is led by founder Richard Gage, a major speaker at the conference and the featured narrator in the video above. AE911 Truth funded the Alaskan university's research and a free live stream video of the proceedings. The presentations are now available via YouTube, with donations requested here on a voluntary basis to cover costs.
Today's article focuses on these new technical findings regarding 9/11 research. It is part of new Justice Integrity Project "Readers Guide to 9/11 Research and Advocacy." That guide builds on our extensive previous coverage of the topic, and will soon include lists of vital books and films from varied viewpoints and coverage of important new legal advocacy on the issues, encompassed in part by the second day of the program at Cooper Union.
This "Readers Guide" is intended to make easily available in concise formats the major official and alternative studies, news items, commentaries, videos and films on the topic, with representation from diverse and reasonably credible viewpoints that attract significant support. This series thus parallels our three existing "Readers Guides," which separately provided similar arrays of research on the 1960s assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
As in those efforts, this editor, a member of the Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry that co-sponsored the New York event, is involved in research, writing and speaking on those topics, including both days of the forum at the Cooper Union. Nonetheless, this column and our forthcoming coverage provides ample links to alternative viewpoints, as in the appendix below listing major government and popular reports supporting the official verdicts arguing that fire caused the WTC skyscraper collapses.
The Cooper Union in New York City, built in 1859 and photographed by David Shankbone
Physics, Law, Intelligence, Terror, and History
New technical findings about the WTC collapse are the main focus of today's report. But readers unfamiliar with the debate may appreciate first a brief backgrounder on legal, political, and historical dimensions on the scientific debate, especially since the mainstream media seldom provide that context.
For such reasons, the New York conference organizers featured on the first day two lawyers famous for litigating historically important cases involving allegations of sinister crimes. One was Daniel Sheehan, shown at right in one of our photos, a noted public interest lawyer whose cases have included the secret "Pentagon Papers" history of the Vietnam War's beginning, the murder of nuclear power whistleblower Karen Silkwood as she sought to expose safety and national security issues, and exposure of the 1980s Reagan Administration Iran-Contra drug and arms smuggling scandal.
The other featured legal expert on the first day was Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, (shown below in a file photo). He is the honorary president of Italy's Supreme Court following his long career fighting the Mafia and other powerful, corrupt forces in Europe.
As technical experts provided their evidence, the former judge-prosecutor drew on experiences that included the Mafia murder of his brother to provide strategic guidance for the audience. That focus, like Sheehan's, was on how the emerging evidence might point the way to accountability for attacks that killed nearly 3,000 innocent victims at the World Trade Center.
The next segment of our Readers Guide series will focus more heavily on those legal accountability issues aimed in part to piece a cover-up apparently orchestrated by a few, but tolerated by my others in leadership and the public distracted by other matters.
Yet the attacks continue to serve as justification for what the Bush administration called the Global War on Terrorism.
The Obama administration, which began with the president-elect's famous vow in January 2009 to "look forward" not backward, has in essence continued fight wars in the Middle East and Central Asia against terrorists whose connection with 9/11 is highly strained.
Indeed, White House Director of National Intelligence James Clapper this week confirmed at a Washington Post forum that the United States will be fighting in the Middle East for generations against what he described as terrorists.
This is merely one example of how the historical stakes remain high. Clapper is shown on stage in a Washington Post photo, with Post national security columnist David Ignatius to Clapper's right conducting the interview. The Justice Integrity Project was invited to attend the event in the Post's new headquarters, and this editor is shown in a tan jacket near the front at right.
Earlier this month, the 9/11 conference was convened in the Cooper Union, which was founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper. It offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.
On Feb. 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln spoke there in its same Great Hall as a dark horse candidate for the 1860 Republican nomination for president. Historians regard Lincoln's powerful pro-Constitution, anti-slavery speech as securing for him the nomination from the then-new party. He is shown in a Matthew Brady photo taken on the day of his speech.
On that same stage, experts convened this month to try to unravel for the audience remaining technical mysteries about 9/11.
Official U.S. Government Reports on WTC Collapses
The 9/11 terror attacks most memorably focused on the two WTC skyscrapers in New York, "The Twin Towers."
Each collapsed about an hour after what has been reported as airplane hijackings of American Airlines Flight 11 (containing the most notorious of the hijackers, Mohammad Atta, shown at right in a file photo) and United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston. Authorities said 19 radical Islamists recruited by Osama bin Laden undertook the hijackings as part of an Al Qaeda conspiracy against the United States and its prominent landmarks.
Lesser known is that WTC 7, a 47-story structure about two football fields away from the other two towers, also collapsed about seven hours after the other two skyscrapers and without being hit by any aircraft.
Also, the Pentagon suffered a murderous attack and fire that morning from what was reported as the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77, departing from Dulles Airport in Virginia. Hijackers also reportedly commandeered United Airlines Flight 93 departing from Newark, which crashed near Shanksville, PA that morning, killing all passengers and crew.
A series of anthrax attacks began also of mailings of the spores in September, 2001 with discovery of victim targets extending between Oct. 3 and November. At least 22 people were known to have become infected, five fatally, according to Dr. Graeme MacQueen, a speaker at this month's Cooper Union conference and author of a concise, heavily endnoted book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception.
The best-known targets of the anthrax letters were the U.S. Senate offices of Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT), and news offices of ABC, CBS, NBC and the National Enquirer and its sister newspaper, the Sun. The only fatality among those prominent targets was a Sun photo editor. But the terror prompted major alarms in Washington just as Congress was passing the Patriot Act and authorizing a war of reprisal against Afghanistan for its role in hosting bin Laden, a Saudi national.
As described more fully in an appendix below, the first government study was an inquiry completed in December by the Senate and House intelligence committees. It was led by their chairs, Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL, below at left in a photo by Noel St. John) and House Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL), shown at right in an official photo from his later post as Bush administration CIA Director.
Its report is here under its formal name: The Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. Inquiry members, especially Graham, repeatedly complained that their inquiry was artificially rushed and shortchanged in investigative resources by the Bush administration.
Its 28-page report on who funded the hijackers was suppressed until pressure by victim families and others forced President Obama and congress to make the report public in July, as reported here in Report On Saudi 9/11 Terrorists Prompts Outrage, New Questions. The report showed help to two accused hijackers from the San Diego area by entities associated with the Saudi Royal Family, including Saudi Ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar.
After the close in 2002 of the congressional Joint Inquiry, pressure from family members of the nearly three thousand victims resulted in the formation at year-end of "The 9/11 Commission" After Henry Kissinger withdrew as nominee for chairman, the commission's leaders were New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean (R) and deputy chairman Lee Hamiliton, a retired Democratic congressman from Indiana.
Commissioner Max Cleland of Georgia, a former Democratic senator from Georgia who had lost three limbs during Vietnam combat, came to criticize the commission's investigation as inadequate. But he resigned before completion when the Bush administration offered him a job he needed after losing his senate seat during a brutal election campaign when he was accused of being soft on terrorism. He is shown on the cover of his memoir below.
Other commissioners, most of them affiliated with law firm, government and foundation jobs heavily funded by intelligence and defense industries, ratified the 2004 report, available here. The commission prepared its conclusions under the tight control of Executive Director Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor and a past and future colleague of high-level Bush administration figures, including National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice.
Rice, whose White House responsibilities included preventing terror attacks, was promoted to become Secretary of State during the second Bush term. She then brought Zelkow into the State Department as legal counselor after he completed his commission work.
The 9/11 Commission report skimped on technical reasons for the collapse of WTC 7, which remained little known to the public even though its collapse increasingly concerned those critics who knew of the strange circumstances of the collapse of the 47-story building in about 6.5 seconds.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provided the major technical reports on the WTC collapses. The first was a Final Report released in September 2005 primarily on World Trade Center Buildings 1 and 2. The report, Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster, listed as its primary authors Dr. Sivaraj Shyam-Sunder, then-director of NIST Building and Fire Research Laboratory.
In 2008, shortly before the end of the term-limited Bush administration, NIST issued a Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. Its primary author was listed as Dr. Richard G. Gann, a senior research scientist at NIST Building and Fire Research Laboratory.
Meanwhile, family members of victims, ailing first responders, insurers, building owners, and others pursued litigation that inevitably involved technical issues at times.
Many of the suits went before U.S. District Judge Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in Manhattan. A major insurance claim for $7 billion by WTC 7 leaseholder Larry Silverstein went before U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey. But relatively little of the technical aspects of the litigation became resolved in public fashion, especially questions by critics with no formal role in the case.
One reason was because a major suit by family members against Saudi entities has been vacated because courts awarded the Saudi defendants sovereign immunity. Congress has voted unanimously to carve out an exception to help the families in legislation called JASTA (Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act). But President Obama vetoed the bill Sept. 23. An influential congressman on the matter, who asked to speak on background, predicted to the Justice Integrity Project Sept. 22 that votes existed in both houses to override the president's vote, with that view repeated by other reporting.
Many other lawsuits have been settled, thereby avoiding litigation risk and public scrutiny.
The New York Times reported Sept. 9 that Hellerstein, shown in a photo, believes the process has worked well. The story was Judge in 9/11 Suits Feels No Regret That None Ever Went to Trial by Benjamin Weiser.
Families have amassed a trove of internal documents and depositions. "But none of the material was ever aired before a jury," the judge noted. "Each of the 96 victims’ cases filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan was settled confidentially...." The reporter quoted the judge as conceding that by not holding a trial, there was a “loss of information” to the public. “But it pales in my mind,” he said, “with the fact that the people who were suing for money got their money.”
Obstacles To Research
Sporadic questions, research and criticism of WTC collapses has occurred beyond that raised by litigants. But the research process has been extremely difficult.
For one thing, then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (shown in a file photo) oversaw a comprehensive and rapid clean-up undertaken under extraordinary security, purported to protect national security, privacy of victims, and crime scene evidence. Under this tight security, government and private workers carted away both evidence and debris to locales (including smelting factories in China) far beyond the reach of independent investigators.
Furthermore, any such would-be researchers have been for the most part swept up in the horror of the event and patriotic themes of national unity, which is interpreted to include support for all levels of government and ostracism of those doubting the official story.
As time moved on, career and other economic pressures tended to prevent either experts or concerned citizens from pursuing inquiries.
A prominent factor limiting such inquiries at least since the mid-1960s has been fear of the "conspiracy theorist" smear, which is particularly effective against journalists, academics, and those who make their living (or who have spouses employed) in government-related sectors. Declassified documents indicate that the CIA and its allies in business, media, and the non-profit world developed the phrase to smear those who might question the veracity of the Warren Report blaming President Kennedy's assassination solely on Lee Harvey Oswald.
The insult is especially damaging to the careers of those in architecture and engineering. That's because those fields often involve government contracting work. Economic conditions since the 2008 recession remind everyone that financial security cannot be taken for granted. So, it takes a strong civic commitment for those working in such fields to work on such research. Almost no one would experience a career boost, and many might legitimately fear reprisals.
Nonetheless, members of the AE911 Truth group that Gage helped found have led the way in fostering rigor upon the many different theories regarding 9/11, some of which are likely wacko and some doubtless concocted by provocateurs (as in similar studies) to discredit legitimate independent researchers.
They focus on the collapse of the three WTC towers as best within their technical expertise. Similarly, the conference in New York focused almost entirely on the WTC collapses, not the other events.
Even Professor MacQueen, author of the book on anthrax, devoted his time to his study of witness statements regarding WTC collapses.
He concluded that 156 witnesses are on record as saying they perceived an explosion, blast or similar occurrence emanating from WTC structures. By his tabulation, 120 of these 156 witnesses were fire department workers who can be presumed to have more experience than most witnesses in distinguishing between a "fire" and an explosion. His point was that firefighters can distinguish between explosions that are natural in fires (to be expected, and structurally irrelevant) and explosions that are not expected and that are destroying the Towers. This is why he pointed out that 31 firefighters use the term "bomb" when describing what they witnessed.
C-SPAN, a public affairs service project of the cable industry, has proven far more open in sharing responsible criticism of 9/11 official reports, just as C-SPAN provides more informed discussion of 1960s assassinations issues than the corporate-controlled (and often government-regulated) media. Thus, a Gage C-SPAN appearance discussing the WTC collapse issues is reputed to be one of the most-viewed C-SPAN episodes in the network's entire four-decade history.
Consensus Evidence?
Another attempt at rigorous study of inherently complicated evidence is that by Consensus 9/11, a co-sponsor of the New York conference this month. Its website publishes what it calls a consensus of 9/11 best evidence. Here is a link, amplified below.
The 9/11 Consensus Points. The official claims regarding 9/11 are contradicted by facts that have been validated by a scientific consensus process, and which include the following points of “best evidence.” The 48 Consensus Points are divided into the ten categories below, which in turn link to the individual 48 points:
The "consensus" effort thus extends beyond the Architects & Engineers in focusing on events beyond the WTC collapses and in seeking to draw implications about those events, including the evolution of blame for hijackers into a still-ongoing Global War On Terror, a term devised by the Bush administration but carried on in effect by the Obama administration in many similar ways.
Many individual news articles, commentaries and videos have been published on these topics. But mainstream professional organizations have remained highly resistant to examinations of evidence.
Meanwhile, Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein has led a legion of thought-leaders, Democrat and Republican alike, in denouncing "conspiracies." Sunstein, co-author of a widely used law school casebook on constitutional law and regarded as a liberal for most of his career, has served with his wife Samantha Power in enormously influential national security, legal, and media posts during recent years.
Sunstein is a friend of President Obama, and served during the first term as White House regulation czar at the Office of Management and Budget. In effect, he supervised all federal regulation on any topic, via the powers of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
In the 2013 White House photo at right, Vice President Biden is shown with him swearing Sunstein's wife Samantha Power as the current U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
Power, also a high-ranking Obama aide during the first-term advocating for ramped up fights against "terrorists," made global news Saturday night by walking out of UN National Security Council speech by her Russian counterpart. He was complaining about a U.S.-led air attack killing or wounding approximately 200 Syrian soldiers fighting ISIS. Details: U.S. admits carrying out airstrike that Syria claims killed 62 soldiers. The attack helped lead to the breakdown of a ceasefire negotiated for months.
For such careers, 9/11 has provided talking points justifying many proposals normally regarded as unconstitutional police state tactics.
In 2008, Sunstein co-authored a working paper "Conspiracy Theories" that argued that the government so badly needs to fight bad ideas that it should recruit journalists and professors on a covert basis to disrupt circles where bad ideas exist, especially criticism of official accounts of the 9/11 attacks. The alternative, he suggested, would be for the government to forbid bad ideas or to tax their proponents heavily.
Although the proposed program would seemingly affirm the darkest fears of those who far a police state, Sunstein amplified his argument in his 2014 book Conspiracy theories and Other Dangerous Ideas, published by Simon & Schuster. The book was filled with brief references to topical and academic matters. It failed to address 9/11 WTC evidence at all, much less in a sustained manner.
Nearly all such advocates rarely if ever address specific "theories," but instead smear opponents on a personal basis, as in a 2011 book from HarperCollins Among the Truthers by Jonathan Kay, a Yale Law School graduate and a managing editor at the National Post newspaper. The well-connected conservative pundit Kay, like his neo-liberal counterpart Sunstein, advocates for the official government's story and avoids any attempt at addressing opposing evidence, even in Kay's 340-page book.
Given the vast power of the government, the intimidation factor against witnesses, researchers and whistleblowers is hardly theoretical.
What's New
That recap of history is necessary to show why independent research and news reporting on it have moved so slowly even on such a pivotal world event, and why it is largely (but not exclusively) pursued by professionals who are not at the vulnerable early stages of their careers, or are based outside of the United States.
We can now be relatively brief in citing new research from technical experts, whose work speaks for itself.
Europhysics News, the publication of a prominent society of physics experts in Europe, published in August a report, 15 Years Later: On the physics of high-rise building collapses co-authored Steven Jones, Robert Korol, Anthony Szamboti, and Ted Walter.
Jones is former full professor of physics at Brigham Young University. Korol is a professor emeritus of civil engineering at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Szamboti is a mechanical design engineer with over 25 years of structural design experience in the aerospace and communications industries. Ted Walter is the director of strategy and development for Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
They concluded that the WTC collapses could not have been caused by fire, as NIST and other conventional wisdom had argued. Instead, the said say “the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition.”
Also, they said: “Given the far-reaching implications, it is morally imperative that this hypothesis be the subject of a truly scientific and impartial investigation by responsible authorities.”
The report received straightforward coverage by the conservative site World Net Daily (WND) in 9/11 conspiracy gets support from physicists' study and from the left site Global Research in Fifteen Years Later, Physics Journal Concludes All Three WTC Towers Collapsed on 9/11 Due to Controlled Demolition, but little coverage in the mainstream media.
Global Research summarized findings this way:
The comprehensive study in Europhysics Magazine directly challenges the official narrative and lends to a growing body of evidence that seriously questions the veracity of the government narrative.
In 2002, the National Institute of Standards and Technology remarked that the case was exceptionally bizarre. There were no other known cases of total structural collapses in high-rise buildings caused by fires and so it is deeply unusual that it should have happened three times in the space of one day, noted NIST.
Official investigations have never been able to thoroughly and coherently explain how this might have happened and various teams tasked with examining the collapse have raised difficult questions about the veracity of the government’s story.
Perhaps most damning of all, the experts claimed that after a thorough forensic analysis of video footage of the building’s collapse, it revealed signs of a controlled implosion. Additionally, Jones has co-authored a number of papers documenting evidence of unredacted nano-thermitic material in the WTC dust.
The authors of the study note that the buildings fell with such speed and symmetry that they there was no other feasible explanation for the sudden collapse at free fall speeds – directly refuting studies that attempted to debunk the idea that the building fell without resistance. These respected experts’ new forensic analysis only adds to the growing movement of people calling for a new and impartial investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center.
Revealing the scope and breadth of public disbelief in the official government narrative surrounding the events of 9/11, even presidential candidate Jill Stein has recently called for a new investigation.
Europhysics co-author Anthony Szamboti drew on his experience Sept. 10 to join the speaking faculty at Cooper Union. Among other technical speakers was David Chandler, a high school physics teacher shown at right and credited with exposing NIST claims about the WTC 7 collapse that required NIST to issue a correction.
WTC 7 was a special focus of discussion. Indeed, an entire website devoted to evidence about its collapse.
More generally, Gage argued that even if the three WTC buildings were destroyed by fire (which he does not believe) it would remain baffling that government authorities would not study the situation more since destruction by fire, he said, would mean that existing fire prevent building codes throughout the nation would need to be revised.
One unannounced speaker was Karl Golovin, a retired U.S. Customs agent who had been assigned with his colleagues after 9/11 to search WTC rubble that had been shipped to a New Jersey landfill.
He was invited to the stage in part to describe how he had bought a full-page advertisement in the Washington Times casting suspicion on the 9/11 official accounts. The ad on Page 3 of the newspaper's Sept. 9 edition was headlined: Congress Receives '48 Pages' 9/11 Reading Assignment. That referenced a 48-page AE911 Truth booklet. Golovin had purchased enough copies to personally deliver one to each of the nation's 541 U.S. Senators and House members, including those from territories.
Golovin used his brief slot at Cooper Union to suggest that he thinks he and his former law enforcement colleagues had been assigned clean-up duties to help dispose of evidence of controlled demolition.
He attempted also at a Sept. 20 forum at the Newseum to persuade CNN to investigate such evidence, as shown here in a video excerpt of the program