The Eleventh Day

claimed that the fires were not especially hot, that there was no evidence that the heat was “breaking windows.” In fact, video and photographs show hundreds of windows broken, with either flame or smoke visible.

Griffin, who on the one hand argues that the fires in the Twin Towers were not hot enough to fatally weaken the steel columns, on the other hand asserts that molten steel was seen. For steel to have melted, he writes, “would be very strong evidence” that the columns were in fact “cut by explosives.”

There is in fact no good evidence—evidence, as distinct from verbal eyewitness recollections—that any steel, as distinct from other metals like aluminum, melted. According to Mackey, moreover, explosives, “particularly those used in real controlled demolitions, do not melt steel. They destroy steel through impulse.”

One possible scenario, Mackey writes, might support steel having melted at the very moment of collapse. That, he says, would fit not with the use of explosives but of “high-temperature incendiaries,” such as thermite—the presence of which has been postulated by skeptic Dr. Steven Jones.

Jones has claimed to have discovered “thermitic” material in four samples of dust from Lower Manhattan. There are multiple problems with Jones’s assertion, however, the first of them a problem that requires no scientific knowledge.

In all criminal investigations, a key factor is what detectives call the “chain of evidence” or “chain of custody.” To be truly useful, evidence must have been handled with extreme care, to obviate questions as to its authenticity or origins. Dr. Jones’s samples of dust emerged five years after 9/11, following an appeal by him for dust that might have been preserved.

One handful of dust reportedly came from a citizen who scooped it up on 9/11 from a handrail near the end of the Brooklyn Bridge, then preserved it in a plastic bag. Another was reportedly found the following day on a pile of laundry near an apartment window. Of the two other samples, both also picked up in Manhattan apartments, one had lain unretrieved—exposed to other particles entering through broken windows—for about a week.

To a detective—and in this case a scientist is indeed a sort of detective—such samples are interesting but much less than reliable. In a criminal case—and were the samples of, say, bloodstains containing DNA—they would be laughed out of court. There is no true chain of evidence in any of these instances.

Even were the provenance of the dust well established, moreover, some fellow scientists reject Jones’s claim to have identified the incendiary thermite. Elements in the samples are as likely, they say, to have come from material one would expect to find in dust from the Trade Center—like paint.

There is disapproval, too, of the way Jones’s thermite conclusions—grave, were they to be taken seriously— have been presented. The findings have not been subjected to peer review, the process under which a scholarly work is subjected to scrutiny by other experts in the same field. While most scientists consider peer review essential, Jones’s thoughts on thermite seem first to have appeared in a paper he posted on a university website, then in the Journal of 9/11 Studies. The website of the Journal, of which Jones is coeditor, claims that it is “peer-reviewed.” Fellow scientist Ryan Mackey dismisses that assertion as a “masquerade … cargo-cult science.”

Thermite aside, Griffin and like-minded theorists espouse the idea that explosives of some sort were used to bring down the towers. They base their suspicion to a great degree on what witnesses said they saw and heard— understandably, or so one might think.

Wall Street Journal reporter John Bussey, for example, reported in a Pulitzer- winning article that from the Journal building near the South Tower he “heard metallic crashes and looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor.… One after another, from top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors blew to pieces.”

Bussey later recalled having seen “individual floors, one after the other exploding outward.” “I thought to myself, ‘My God, they’re going to bring the building down.’ And they, whoever they were, had set charges.” “It just descended like a timed explosion,” said Beth Fertig of WNYC Radio, “like when they are deliberately bringing a building down.”

The skeptics also pounced early on what Van Romero of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology—unlike the reporters an expert on explosives—told the Albuquerque Journal on the day of the attacks. “My opinion is, based on the videotapes,” he said, “that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse.”

Ten days later, however, Romero reversed himself. It had initially looked to him as though explosives triggered the collapses, he said, but a further look at the videotapes led him to agree with colleagues that— essentially as the NIST would conclude four years later—the buildings fell because fire weakened their steel structures.

There’s the nub. So many people, with less expertise in explosives than Romero or none at all, merely said what they thought they saw and heard. “Then we heard a loud explosion or what sounded like a loud explosion,” Fire battalion chief John Sudnik recalled, “and looked up and I saw Tower Two start coming down.” “First I thought it was an explosion,” said firefighter Timothy Julian. “I thought maybe there was a bomb on the plane, but delayed type of thing, you know, secondary device.”

“There was what appeared to be at first an explosion,” said Chief Frank Cruthers, also describing the collapse of the South Tower. “It appeared at the very top, simultaneously from all four sides, materials shot out horizontally. And then there seemed to be a momentary delay before you could see the beginning of the collapse.”

“The lowest floor of fire in the South Tower actually looked like someone had planted explosives around it,” said battalion chief Brian Dixon. “Everything blew out … I thought, ‘Jeez, this looks like an explosion up there.’ ”

Dr. Griffin seized on these accounts and more. On occasion, however, he was less than professorial in his editing. Griffin omitted, for example, what battalion chief Dixon said in his very next sentence, after recalling that he thought he was witnessing an “explosion.” He had continued, “I guess in some sense of time we looked at it and realized, ‘No, actually it just collapsed.’ That’s what blew out the windows, not that there was an explosion there.”

Without having done a statistical study of the some five hundred formal interviews conducted with 9/11 emergency workers, it appears to the authors that the vast majority of them referred not to apparent explosions— as in detonations—but usually more vaguely, to loud bangs, thunder, rumbling, booms, or trainlike sounds.

There may even have been some actual explosions, but not ones indicating deliberate demolition. “You heard nothing but explosions all day,” firefighter Salvatore Torcivia remembered. “The fires, the jet fuel burning. The nearby buildings had air conditioning and refrigerator units—they were all exploding from the super heat. It sounded like bombs going off. I believe the Secret Service had their armory in one of the towers. That stuff, ordnance, was going off.”

After an analysis of Griffin’s eye and ear witnesses to explosion, his critic Ryan Mackey notes that all were nonexperts, “relaying their impressions of a horrifically chaotic and deadly experience.” There is no good reason to consider the witnesses’ words evidence of the use of explosives.

To believe explosives were involved, moreover, one would have to account for how they were planted—in multiple locations—in advance of the attacks. Griffin states that demolition of the Twin Towers would have required more explosive than did that in 2000 of the Seattle Kingdome stadium—at the time the largest structure ever brought down by controlled implosion.

His tormentor Mackey, calculating that this would have meant bringing more than 60,000 kilograms of explosive into each tower, notes that the professor “produced no explanation of how such a staggering amount of explosives could have been smuggled into the Towers without detection, how it could have been placed without being seen, how many individuals would have been required to plant it all.”

The 2005 report of the National Institute of Standards and Technology summed up the matter. Its experts had found no evidence, the report said, “for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives.”

The authors have seen nothing, in all the verbiage of the skeptical literature, to persuade us otherwise.

IN 2010, Dr. Griffin came out with yet another book, on what he described as “The Official Account’s Achilles’ Heel.” The “smoking gun” that he and others see is the collapse on the evening of September 11 of the forty- seven-story World Trade Center Building 7.