Army Reserve major who runs a Web journal called MilitaryCorruption.com, thought he could see something in the footage of the underside of Flight 175, as it tore toward the South Tower. “I have seen attachments that look like that—on military aircraft … It could have been even a missile.…”
Morgan Reynolds, who served as chief economist in the Department of Labor under President Bush, has described the official wisdom on the collapse of the Trade Center as “bogus,” explicable only as “professional demolition.” “We know,” said Paul Roberts, an assistant secretary of the treasury under President Reagan who himself has some engineering training, that “it is strictly impossible for any building, much less steel-columned buildings, to ‘pancake’ at free fall speed. Therefore, it is a non-controversial fact that the official explanation of the collapse of the WTC buildings is false.”
Seven CIA veterans have found fault with the official account. William Christison, a former director of the Agency’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis, has been vocal on the collapses. In a lengthy article, he declared himself impressed by the “carefully collected and analyzed evidence” suggesting that the two Trade Center Towers and Building 7 “were most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings before 9/11.” He had time, too, for the theory that the Pentagon was hit not by an airliner but perhaps by a “missile, a drone, or … a smaller manned aircraft.”
Military men and members of parliaments in several foreign nations have raised questions about the towers’ collapse. A bevy of show business figures and celebrities—including actors Charlie Sheen and Marion Cotillard, director David Lynch, comedian Rosie O’Donnell, and singer Willie Nelson—have drawn attention to the issue. So has former Minnesota governor turned television star Jesse Ventura, who showcased 9/11 on his television show
Joel Hirschhorn, a former engineering professor who has often testified to congressional committees, believes that studies by scholars and professionals in relevant fields “reveal the collapse of the three World Trade Center buildings was not caused by the two airplanes exploding into the Twin Towers.… Why have the government and official investigations not come to the same controlled demolition conclusion?”
Dwain Deets, former director for aeronautical projects at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, stated that “The many visual images (massive structural members being hurled horizontally, huge pyroclastic clouds etc.) leave no doubt in my mind explosives were involved.” Larry Erickson, a retired aerospace engineer and research scientist for NASA; David Griscom, a research physicist for the Naval Research Laboratory; and Robert Waser, a former research and development engineer with the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory, all joined their names to a petition signed by a thousand architects and engineers requesting a new investigation.
Because the attacks began in New York, because they killed so many people, and because the Twin Towers were iconic, the strike on Washington, D.C., has tended to take second place in the public mind. The crash at the Pentagon has also preoccupied the skeptics, though, and appearances suggest they are in impressive company.
Colonel George Nelson, U.S. Air Force (retired), a former aircraft accident investigator, commercial pilot, and airframe mechanic, said that—on the evidence as he saw it in 2006—“any unbiased rational investigator” would conclude no Boeing 757 was involved in either the crash at the Pentagon or in Pennsylvania.
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Latas, aerospace engineer, airline captain, and former president of an Air Force accident board, found discrepancies between the Flight Data Recorder information on Flight 77 and the 9/11 Commission’s account.
Former Army Captain Daniel Davis, who served with Air Defense Command before becoming a senior manager at General Electric Turbine [jet] Engine Division, declared himself puzzled by the seeming lack of substantial airplane wreckage at the Pentagon. “Where,” he wanted to know, “are all of those engines?”
Former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who was at the Pentagon when it was hit on 9/11, later went public with a lengthy essay expressing her suspicions. “There was a dearth of visible debris on the relatively unmarked lawn, where I stood only minutes after the impact,” she wrote. “There was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner.… It was, however, exactly what one would expect if a missile had struck the Pentagon.”
From French author Thierry Meyssan to Lieutenant Colonel Kwiatkowski, that is the notion that has proved durable among the doubters. The Pentagon was hit not by an airliner but by a missile.
The perceived Pentagon mysteries have given the skeptics free rein. A group calling itself Citizen Investigation Team claimed in 2010 to have “proof” that “the plane that was seen flying low over Arlington on 9/11/01 did not in fact hit the Pentagon.” Rather, it pulled up and flew over it at the last moment—all part, the authors would have us believe, of a “skilfully executed deception.”
Only a tiny community of believers, perhaps, credit such bizarre hypotheses So influential have the skeptics proven, however, above all but not only thanks to the Internet, that many people are at least somewhat hooked.
The authors’ contacts during the more than four years of work on this book—including both professional and social conversations with hundreds of people—seemed to confirm that many citizens, and not only young people, doubt that they have been given the full picture of what occurred on 9/11.
Such widespread doubt demands corroboration based on solid evidence—or rebuttal.
ELEVEN
THERE HAVE BEEN THREE MAIN OFFICIAL REPORTS ON THE NEW YORK collapses. First, the World Trade Center Building Performance Study, compiled in 2002 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and other bodies. Second, there was the far more thorough—248 pages coupled to forty-two companion reports—2005 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). There is also the institute’s eighty-eight-page report on the collapse of Trade Center Building 7, issued in 2008.
More than two hundred technical specialists, eighty-five from NIST and the others from the private sector and the academic world, worked on the institute’s report on the Trade Center. Its conclusion as to why the towers collapsed in essence differed from FEMA’s earlier finding only in the detail of its analysis.
The impact of the planes, NIST’s experts said, severed steel support columns and dislodged fireproofing—a vital factor—and started fires that reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius. The intense heat had the effect of weakening floors to the point where they sagged and pulled inward until outer columns—on the south face of the North Tower and the east face of the South Tower—in turn bowed inward.
That is the process, according to the NIST, that led the towers to collapse. The institute found “no corroborating evidence” for theories that the towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted in advance. It said that even the perception that the towers “pancaked,” as a cursory look at video footage might suggest—and as is associated with films of demolition using explosives—is inaccurate. NIST’s reading of the evidence, moreover, is that there was no failure of the floors—falling down one upon another one by one—but rather that the
What ammunition do the conspiracy theorists have to challenge the NIST account, and what is it worth? We came across a study of just that, dedicated solely to Professor Griffin’s criticism of the NIST reports on the Trade Center, and written by a NASA research scientist named Ryan Mackey—in language anyone can understand. In his analysis of Griffin’s work, Mackey applies what the astrophysicist Carl Sagan called a “baloney detection kit.”
Vital tools in the kit include independent confirmation of the facts, not confining oneself at the outset to a single hypothesis, and adherence to Occam’s Razor—the principle that precedence should be given to the simpler of competing theories.
The approach of Professor Griffin, the conspiracy author who presents himself as reasoned and judicious, in Mackey’s view “violates every single tenet” of the baloney detection kit. Mackey demonstrates as much, successfully in our view, over some three hundred pages. Errors made by Griffin regarding the NIST report, Mackey writes, “are so numerous and substantial as to discourage further analysis of his claims.” Here, large and small, are examples of Griffin’s claims, Mackey’s rebuttals, and on occasion points of our own.
Contrary to the NIST’s finding that fires so weakened the Twin Towers as to cause their collapse, Griffin has
