CHAPTER VI: THE COLLAPSE OF WORLD TRADE CENTER 1, 2, AND 7
We now reach the center of the tragedy, the hecatomb of innocent airline passengers and office workers occasioned by the unprecedented and inexplicable collapse of the two World Trade Center towers. Here is where vast numbers of ordinary persons were immolated by the terrorist controllers for the sake of their insane geopolitical plans. Coming from a family which lived in New York for six decades after about 1910, having lived in New York City (Flushing, Queens) from the age of 4 to the age of 16, having attended New York City public schools from the first grade through the twelfth (PS 23, PS 20, JHS 185, Flushing High School), having worked in the city for a year as an adult living in Brooklyn, and having had an uncle who was a New York City policeman, the author is as much of a New Yorker as anyone. 9/11 has marked a decisive new step downward in the city's decline, and the bitter recognition of this tragic situation can only spur on the exposure of the actual process involved in 9/11.
THE KEY: SECONDARY EXPLOSIONS
According to the official version, which the 9/11 commission hardly comments on, the twin towers fell because of the impact of the planes and of the effects of the subsequent fires. The problem is that this is physically impossible, as we will show. The fall of the towers thus depends on some other cause: controlled demolition of some kind is the only possible hypothesis. The key to seeing beyond the official version is to chronicle the presence of secondary explosions, since these are the tell-tale signs of controlled demolition. When we examine the literature, we find a multitude of references to such secondary explosions.
Louie Cacchioli, aged 51, was a firefighter attached to Engine Company 47, based uptown in Harlem. "We were the first ones in the second tower after the plane struck," Cacchioli recounted later. "I was taking firefighters up in the elevator to the twenty- fourth floor to get in a position to evacuate workers. On the last trip up a bomb went off. We think there were bombs set in the building." Cacchioli was trapped in an elevator but was able to escape with the help of some fireman's tools. (People Weekly, September 24, 2001)
Auxiliary Fireman Lt. Paul Isaac Jr. also spoke of bombs in an interview with internet reporter Randy Lavello. Isaac had served with Engine Company 10 in lower Manhattan during the late 1990s, so he knew the area around the WTC. Isaac said that many New York firemen were very concerned about the ongoing cover-up of why the World Trade Center collapsed. "Many other firemen know there were bombs in the buildings," he revealed, "but they are afraid for their jobs to admit it because the higher-ups forbid discussion of this fact. There were definitely bombs in those buildings." Among those suppressing real discussion about what had happened, Isaac cited the neocon heavy James Woolsey, who had been CIA Director under Clinton, who had become the New York Fire Department's antiterrorism consultant. (Marrs 34)
Teresa Veliz was a manager for a software development firm. She was on the 47th floor of the North Tower when American 11 struck. Veliz was able to reach the ground level at about the same time that the South Tower collapsed. Flung to the ground in total darkness, Veliz and a colleague followed another person who happened to have a flashlight. As she narrated later; "The flashlight led us into Borders bookstore, up an escalator, and out to Church Street. The explosions were going off everywhere. I was convinced that there were bombs planted all over the place and someone was sitting at a control panel pushing detonator buttons. I was afraid to go down Church Street towards Broadway, but I had to do it. I ended up on Vesey Street. There was another explosion. And another. I didn't know which way to run." (Murphy; Marrs 34)
Ross Milanytch viewed the scene from the 22nd floor of a nearby building. He reported seeing "small explosions on each floor. And after it all cleared, all that was left of the buildings, you could just see the steel girders in like a triangular sail shape. The structure was just completely gone." (America at War; Marrs 34)
Steve Evans, a reporter for the BBC, happened to be in the South Tower that morning. "I was at the base of the second tower, the second tower that was hit," he reported. "There was an explosion -- I didn't think it was an explosion -- but the base of the building shook. I felt it shake ... then we were outside, the second explosion happened and then there was a series of explosions .... We can only wonder at the kind of damage -- the kind of human damage -- which was caused by those explosions, those series of explosions." (Christopher Bollyn, American Free Press; http://www.zeitenschrift.com/news/wtc/_wahrheit.ihtml )
Fox 5 News, a New York television channel, was able to catch on videotape a large white cloud billowing out near the base of the South Tower. The newsman commented: "There is an explosion at the base of the building .... white smoke from the bottom ... something has happened at the base of the building ... then, another explosion. Another building in the World Trade Center complex ...." (Marrs 35)
Tom Elliott was at work at his desk in the offices of Aon Corp. on the 103rd floor of the South Tower just before 9 AM. When the North Tower was hit, he decided to leave the building and began walking down the stairs with a small group of people. At the 70th floor, Elliott was encouraged by a woman to disregard the announcement on the public address system that there was no need to evacuate. When Elliott had reached the 67th floor, United 175 struck the South Tower, above where he was. Elliott later told a reporter what he was able to observe after that; "Although its spectacularly televised impact was above Elliott, at first he and those around him thought an explosion had come from below. An incredible sound -- he calls it an 'exploding sound' - shook the building and a tornado of hot air and smoke and ceiling tiles and bits of drywall came flying up the stairwell. "In front of me, the wall split from the bottom up," Elliott recounted. Elliott was able to get out of the South Tower by 9:40. (Christian Science Monitor, September 17, 2001)
At 11:56 AM, NBC News broadcast a segment in which reporter Pat Dawson summarized a conversation he had just had with Albert Terry of the FDNY. Terry had told the reporter that he had about 200 firefighters in the WTC buildings at around 9 AM. Then, Terry said, he had heard a kind of secondary explosion. Dawson:
Just moments ago I spoke to the Chief of Safety for the New York City Fire Department, who was obviously one of the first people here after the two planes were crashed into the side, we assume, of the World Trade Center towers, which used to be behind me over there. Chief Albert Terry told me that he was here just literally five or ten minutes after the events that took place this morning, that is the first crash. The Chief of Safety of the Fire Department of New York City told me that shortly after 9:00 he had roughly ten alarms, roughly 200 men, trying to effect rescues of some of those civilians who were in there, and that basically he received word of a secondary device, that is another bomb, going off. He tried to get his men out as quickly as he could, but he said that there was another explosion which took place. And then an hour after the first hit here, the first crash, that took place, he said there was another explosion that took place in one of the towers here. So obviously, according to his theory, he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building. One of the secondary devices, he thinks, that [detonated] after the initial impact he thinks may have been on the plane that crashed into one of the towers. The second device, he thinks, he speculates, was probably planted in the building. So that's what we have been told by Albert Terry, who is the Chief of Safety for the New York City Fire Department. He told me that just moments ago. (Wisnewski 135-136)
Proponents of the official version have attempted to explain some of these explosions as having been caused by gas escaping from leaks in gas mains, but this cannot account for the phenomena described by Terry. Nor can such other explanations as exploding transformers, etc.
Ann Thompson of NBC reported at 12:42 PM that she had reached the corner of Broadway and Fulton on her way to the World Trade center that morning when she heard an explosion and a wall of debris came toward her. She took refuge in a building. When she came out again about 10:30, she heard a second explosion. Firemen warned her about another explosion. (Wisnewski 136; Trinkhaus, 4 ff.)
The eyewitness Michael Benfante told a German TV camera team: "As I was leaving, I heard it. I looked back, and the top of the North Tower was exploding. And even then I did not believe that the whole tower could fall. I thought, only the top exploded and is now going to fall on me. I turned around again and ran away. I felt the rumble of the explosions, the thunder of the collapsing building." (German ARD network, "Tag des Terrors -- Anschlag aus heiterem Himmel," August 30, 2002, Wisnewski 136)
A reporter tried to film a standup with the WTC in the background, but was interrupted by the sound of an explosion: "We can't get any closer to the World Trade Center. Here you can see the firemen who are on the scene, the police and FBI officers, and you see the two towers -- A huge explosion! Debris is coming down on all of us!" ("Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit," West German Television, Cologne, July 24, 2002; Wisnewski 136)
Yet another eyewitness reported: "We heard a huge explosion, and everything got black. Glass was falling down, people were getting hurt when the glass hit them. It was a big explosion, everything got dark, this here is not snow, it's all from the building, a horrible nightmare." "I was on Sixth Avenue and I had just tried to call somebody when I heard an explosion and saw how the people were throwing themselves on the ground, screaming and crying, I looked up and saw all that smoke, as the tower came down, and all that smoke in one tower." (Segment by Oliver Voegtlin and Matthias Fernandes, NTV, September 11, 2001)
Another European documentary showed a man with glasses recovering in a hospital bed who recalled: "All of a sudden it went bang, bang, bang, like shots, and then three unbelievable explosions." ("Terror gegen Amerika," RTL, September 13, 2001)
An eyewitness who worked in an office near the WTC described his experiences to a reporter for the American Free Press. He was standing in a crowd on Church Street, about two and a half blocks from the South Tower. Just before the South Tower collapsed, he saw "a number of brief light sources being emitted from inside the building between floors 10 and 15." He saw about six of these flashes and at the same time heard a "a crackling sound" just before the tower collapsed." (Christopher Bollyn, American Free Press, December 2, 2001; Wisnewksi 137)
Kim White, 32, who worked on the 80th floor of the South Tower, was another eyewitness who reported hearing an explosion. "All of a sudden the building shook, then it started to sway. We didn't know what was going on," she told People magazine. "We got all our people on the floor into the stairwell ... at that time we all thought it was a fire ... We got down as far as the 74th floor ... then there was another explosion." (Christopher Bollyn, American Free Press, December 2, 2001)
A black office worker wearing a business suit that was covered with dust and ashes told the Danish television network DR-TV1: "On the eighth floor we were thrown back by a huge explosion." (Wisnewski 138)
The German network SAT 1 broadcast a report featuring survivors who also were talking about explosions. One of these eyewitnesses, by the name of Tom Canavan, was cut off in mid-sentence by two FBI agents who barged in, grabbed him as he was speaking, and hustled him away; this scene was captured on tape. (Wisnewski 138)
NBC TAPES SHOW CONTROLLED DEMOLITION EXPLOSIONS
In his best-selling study and also in his prime-time special broadcast on German television in August 2003, Gerhard Wisnewski employed out-takes from NBC News cameras near the World Trade Center to provide actual examples of what are almost certainly controlled demolition charges being detonated. On the NBC tape, we see the two towers burning and emitting clouds of black smoke. Then, at about frame 131 of the tape, there emerges a cloud of white-grey smoke along about two thirds of the 79th floor of the South Tower. Two thirds of the southeast facade correspond to the dimensions of the central core column complex, which would be where controlled demolition charges would have to be placed. This line of white-grey smoke billows up, contrasting sharply with the black smoke from the fire. At about frame 203, another line of white- grey smoke emerges several floors below the first, and billows up in its turn. This represents decisive photographic evidence of controlled demolition charges being triggered in the World Trade Center. (Wisnewski 216)
Andreas von Bulow, the former Social Democratic Technology Minister of Germany under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, noted in his study of 9/11 that news tapes show smoke being forced out of the hermetically sealed windows of both towers in the minute or so just before they fell. (Von Buelow 146-147) This is very likely also evidence of controlled demolition charges or other artificial processes going on inside the buildings.
FIREMEN WERE CONFIDENT OF EXTINGUISHING THE FIRE
The Guiliani administration in New York City, and its successor, the Bloomberg administration, refused for a long time to allow the public to hear tapes of the radio conversations among the FDNY firemen on the scene at the WTC. In the summer of 2002, press accounts surfaced which indicated that firemen had been able to climb to the Sky Lobby on the 78th floor and been able to survey the extent of the fire from there. The fuselage of United 175 had struck the 80th floor, and one of its wings had clipped the 78th floor itself. The FDNY officers describe a situation with only two pockets of fire, and they express confidence that they will be able to fight the fire successfully with two hose lines. Two officials who are mentioned by name on the tape are Battalion Chief Orio J. Palmer and Fire Marshal Ronald P. Bucca, both of whom died when the South Tower collapsed. "Once they got there," the Times says, "they had a coherent plan for putting out the fires they could see and helping victims who survived." According to the New York Times summary, the two officers "showed no panic, no sense that events were racing beyond their control .... At that point, the building would be standing for just a few more minutes, as the fire was weakening the structure on the floors above him. Even so, Chief Palmer could see only two pockets of fire and called for a pair of engine companies to fight them ....
The limited transcripts made available on the internet were as follows:
Battalion Seven ... Ladder Fifteen, we've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines. Radio that, 78th floor numerous Code Ones.
The audio tape has never been released to the public. The Justice Department claims that it is evidence in the trial of Zacarias Moussawi in Alexandria, Virginia. (New York Times, August 4, 2002) Christopher Bollyn, already cited, commented: "The fact that veteran firefighters had 'a coherent plan' for putting out the 'two pockets of fire' indicates they judged the blazes to be manageable. These reports from the scene of the crash provide crucial evidence debunking the government's claim that a raging steel-melting inferno led to the tower's collapse." (Marr 38-39)
Earlier in the morning, Pete Ganci, the Chief of the Department, and thus the highest- ranking uniformed firefighter in the city, had told Giuliani: "We can save everybody below the fire. Our guys are in the building, about halfway up the first tower." (Giuliani 8) Ganci was killed in action later in the day.
THE CASE OF WTC 6
CNN broadcast the image of smoke rising up from street level near the base of Building 6, the Customs House. This video footage had originated at 9:04, about one minute after United 175 struck the South Tower. Remember that WTC 6 was on the north side of the north tower, so any explosions there cannot be regarded as having been generated by the impact to the South Tower. A powerful explosion inside WTC 6 had hurled a cloud of gas and debris 170 meters high. A CNN archivist commented, "We can't figure it out." (Marrs 36) This incident was soon eclipsed by the collapse of the South Tower, and has tended to be forgotten. The various official reports have had precious little to say about WTC 6. Overhead views of the ruins later showed a large crater in the steel structure of WTC 6; it was clear that this crater could not have been caused by fire. (Von Bulow 163- 164)
THE AGONY OF THE FDNY
FDNY lost 343 firefighters that day, more than their casualties in the previous hundred years. It is worth asking why this came about. In the case of fires in high-rise skyscrapers, outside ladders cannot be used above a certain level. Therefore, the firemen are trained to use staircases to climb up to the fire and fight it within the building. They could do this with a certain degree of confidence because no modern, steel-framed, fireproof building had ever collapsed as a result of fire. On 9/11, three of them -- WTC 1, WTC 2, and WTC 7, all collapsed. Veteran firefighters knew what they were doing. Their losses are not attributable to any mistake on their part, but, in all probability, to the fact that the twin towers and WTC 7 were brought down by some form of controlled demolition.
The 1 Meridian Plaza fire in Philadelphia had burned lustily for many hours in 1991, but came nowhere near collapsing. The 1 Meridian fire burned for 19 hours, leaping from floor to floor and burning out as combustible materials were used up. On May 4-5, 1988, the 62-story First Interstate Bank Building in Los Angeles - -a structure that was more or less comparable to the twin towers -- burned for more than three hours, with bright, intense flames licking up the sides of the building. In a post-blaze assessment, Iklim Ltd., a company that specializes in building inspections and structural analyses after fires, concluded: "In spite of the total burnout of four and a half floors, there was no damage to the main structural members and only minor damage to one secondary beam and a small number of floor pans."
These comparisons were noted with some discomfort by the New York Times, which commented that "High-rise buildings are designed to be able to survive a fire, even if the fire has to burn itself out. The strategy is to ensure that the steel support structures are strong enough or protected well enough from fire that they do not give way in the time it takes for everything inside an office building, like furniture, to burn. In major high-rise fires elsewhere in the country, such as the 1 Meridian Plaza fire in Philadelphia in 1991 and the First Interstate Bank fire in Los Angeles in 1988, this approach has worked. But the fires at 7 World Trade Center raged mainly on lower floors and never burned out, and in the chaos of Sept. 11, the Fire Department eventually decided to stop fighting the blazes." One can sense the acute embarrassment of the mythographs; this is all just absurd. "What the hell would burn so fiercely for seven hours that the Fire Department would be afraid to fight it?" said one member of the investigation team quoted in this same article. (New York Times, March 2, 2002)
THE ROMERO ANALYSIS
An important early contribution to the discrediting of the official version regarding the WTC came in an interview with a New Mexico expert in mining technology which appeared a few days after 9/11. This highly realistic analysis appeared in the Albuquerque Journal of September 14, 2001 under the headline "Explosives Planted in Towers, New Mexico Tech Expert Says," the byline belonged to Olivier Uyttebrouck.
Televised images of the attacks on the World Trade Center suggest that explosive devices caused the collapse of both towers, a New Mexico Tech explosion expert said Tuesday. The collapse of the buildings appears "too methodical" to be a chance result of airplanes colliding with the structures, said Van Romero, vice president for research at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
"My opinion is, based on the videotapes, that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse," Romero said. Romero is a former director of the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center at Tech, which studies explosive materials and the effects of explosions on buildings, aircraft and other structures.
Romero said he based his opinion on video aired on national television broadcasts. Romero said the collapse of the structures resembled those of controlled implosions used to demolish old structures. "It would be difficult for something from the plane to trigger an event like that," Romero said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C.
Romero said he and another Tech administrator were on a Washington- area subway when an airplane struck the Pentagon. He said he and Denny Peterson, vice president for administration and finance, were en route to an office building near the Pentagon to discuss defense-funded research programs at Tech.
If explosions did cause the towers to collapse, the detonations could have been caused by a small amount of explosive, he said. "It could have been a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points," Romero said. The explosives likely would have been put in more than two points in each of the towers, he said.
Romero said that if his scenario is correct, the diversionary attack would have been the collision of the planes into the towers.
The detonation of bombs within the towers is consistent with a common terrorist strategy, Romero said. "One of the things terrorist events are noted for is a diversionary attack and secondary device," Romero said. Attackers detonate an initial, diversionary explosion that attracts emergency personnel to the scene, then detonate a second explosion, he said. Romero said that if his scenario is correct, the diversionary attack would have been the collision of the planes into the towers. ( http://www.abqiournal.com/aqvan09-11-01.htm -- removed from archive; see http://www.emperors-clothes.com/news/albu.htm )
Here was an honest appraisal from a qualified expert. Romero successfully identified some of the main anomalies presented by the spectacle of collapse, and proceeded from there to the only tenable hypothesis: controlled demolition. He was also acutely perceptive in seeing that the aircraft impacts could not in themselves have been the cause of the fall of the twin towers; they rather had to be regarded as a diversion or cover story to make the fall of the buildings plausible to public opinion. However, the America of late September 2001 was marked by a climate of neo- cCarthyite hysteria wholly antithetical to public truth; Van Romero later retracted his highly insightful remarks, and is rumored to have since found preferment from the federal government.
But numerous foreign experts arrived independently at similar conclusions. Steffen Kretz, the news anchor of the Danish television channel DR-1, reported that "the World Trade Center Tower collapsed after two more explosions." In a commentary of this same network, it was stated that the World Trade Center collapsed after an additional explosion. (Wisnewski 138) On 9/11, Denmark's DR-1 broadcast an interview with Jens Claus Hansen, a high-ranking officer of the Danish Military Academy. His view was: "Additional bombs must have been placed inside the WTC towers -- otherwise they would not have collapsed as they actually did." Another guest was the former NATO General Keld Hillingsoe, who commented: "Additional bombs must have been installed in the buildings." (Wisnewski 138) The Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende, the leading conservative paper in the country, published an interview with the explosives expert Bent Lund, who pointed out that fire alone could not have caused the collapse of the twin towers. He estimated that about a ton of explosives must have exploded inside the buildings in order to bring them down in this way. (Berlingske Tidende, September 12, 2001; Wisnewski 138)
THE VIEW OF A SWISS ENGINEER
Another leading authority who raised the issue of sabotage from within the towers was Hugo Bachmann, professor emeritus of building dynamics and earthquake engineering at the world- famous Swiss Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich -- where Einstein had taught. As Bachmann told the Neue Zuricher Zeitung Online on September 13, 2001, at first glance there seemed to be two possibilities in the fall of the towers. The first was the fire and its effect on the steel supports. But Bachmann had an alternative: "In the second scenario, an additional terrorist action would have caused the collapse of the buildings. In this way, according to Bachmann, buildings like the World Trade center can be destroyed without great logistical exertion." The article went on to say that "Bachmann could imagine that the perpetrators had installed explosives on key supports in a lower floor before the attack." If the perpetrators had rented office space, then these "explosive tenants" could have calmly placed explosive charges on the vulnerable parts of the building "without having anyone notice." Bachmann thought that it was less likely that explosives in the below ground parts of the building could have caused the collapse. Here the logistic problems would be harder to solve in order to put the charges in the right places, and the foundations were probably of more stable construction than the steel towers. Bachmann commented that "the question of whether in fact one of these two scenarios is applicable cannot be answered at this time." But he felt it was a central issue that the second scenario should get more attention, whether or not it applied to the WTC. Bachmann observed that anyone who had enough knowledge of static structures and explosives technology could in principle destroy any building, since every structure has its Achilles heel. An attack aimed at that weak point would be relatively easy to carry out, but would require careful and time-consuming planning. Not all buildings were equally vulnerable, but the twin towers of the World Trade Center were in Bachmann's opinion probably among the more sensitive targets. (Wisnewski 141-143)
OPPORTUNITIES FOR TAMPERING
There are numerous pieces of unconfirmed anecdotal evidence suggesting strange and unusual activities in the World Trade Towers in the days and weeks before their destruction. One New York businessman told me in an interview three years after the fact that he had visited a client in one of the towers numerous times during the months preceding the attack, and had always found that certain elevators were out of service. Another report came from Scott Forbes, an employee of Fiduciary Trust, a firm which was located on floors 90 and 94-97 of the South Tower. Eighty-seven employees of Fiduciary Trust were killed on 9/11. In an email account, Forbes reported that over the weekend of September 8-9, 2001, floors 50 and above of the South Tower experienced a "power down," meaning that all electrical current was cut off for about 36 hours. The reason officially cited was that the electrical cables in the building were being upgraded. Forbes was an information technology officer in charge of Fiduciary Trust's computer network; his attention was engaged by the power down because it fell to him to shut down all the company's computers and related systems before the power went out. After the power down, he had to turn the computers back on again, and restore service on the network. Because there was no electric power above the fiftieth floor, there were also no security cameras and no security locks. There were however many outside engineering personnel coming in and out of the tower at all hours during the weekend. Forbes lived in Jersey City and could see the WTC towers from his home; when he saw the conflagration on the morning of 9/11, he immediately related it to the events of the previous weekend. ( http://www.serendipity.li/wot/forbes01.htm )
SEISMIC EVIDENCE
The seismic effects of the collapse of the towers were observed and measured by Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory just up the Hudson River in Palisades, New York. Here seismographs recorded two spikes reflecting two shock waves in the earth on the morning of 9/11. The crucial fact is that these two spikes came just before the collapse of the towers began. Specifically, Columbia scientists at the facility registered a tremor of 2.1 on the Richter scale at 9:59:04 EDT, just before the beginning of the collapse of the South Tower, and a 2.3 shock just as the North Tower began to come down at 10:28:31 EDT. Both tremors were recorded before the vast majority of the mass of the buildings hit the ground. Although they were not of earthquake proportions, these were considerable shocks, about twenty times more potent than any previously measured shock wave generated by a falling building. The 1993 WTC truck bomb had produced no seismic effects at all -- it had failed to register. At 5:20 local time on the afternoon of 9/11, there was also a 0.6 tremor from the collapse of WTC 7, also at the beginning, rather than the end, of this building's collapse. Dr. Arthur Lerner-Lam, the director of the Columbia Center for Hazards and Risk Research, commented that "during the collapse, most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage -- but not causing significant ground shaking." But Lerner-Lam declined to draw any conclusions from the glaring anomaly represented by his data, which the 9/11 commission has also avoided. (Marrs 39 ff.)
After most of the pile was removed, experts found that there were pools of what appeared to have been molten metal which had congealed on foundations of the buildings many levels underground. Some steel appeared to have partially melted, other steel had undergone alternations to its crystalline structure, and still other steel was full of holes, like a Swiss cheese.
GIULIANI OBLITERATES THE WTC CRIME SCENE
Mayor Giuliani, by pedigree, was a creature of the highly repressive bureaucratic- authoritarian apparatus which had consolidated itself in the Justice Department during the Reagan years. He now performed yeoman service in defense of the 9/11 myth, a myth which had its most obvious vulnerability in its most spectacular point: the unprecedented and physically inexplicable collapse of the twin towers. Giuliani used the pretext that his term was ending on December 31, 2001 to organize the massive obliteration of the WTC as a crime scene. Parallel to this, Giuliani engineered a confrontation with the New York firemen, both to divert public attention from his tampering with the evidence, and also to neutralize the potential of the firemen, the one group which might have denounced the presence of controlled demolition charges in WTC 1, 2, and 7, of which, as we have seen, they were well aware.
During the crisis, Giuliani had been eager to exploit for his own political image the immense admiration and gratitude which had been expressed around the nation and the world for the epic feats of the New York firefighters. The firemen were now the most revered symbols in the country: typical was the cover of Newsweek's post-9/11 issue, which showed some firemen raising a flag over the ruins, with an evident allusion to the flag raising on Iwo Jima. Giuliani made a practice of appearing in public wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the letters "FDNY." The police he relegated to his windbreaker, which bore the legend "NYPD." Giuliani proved to be treacherous in practice to both, and he did this by playing the firefighters against the police, and vice versa -- all in the service of the 9/11 coverup. The firemen, once revered, would soon be "inexcusable," according to Giuliani.
CONTROLLED DEMOLITION AGAIN
Giuliani brought in Controlled Demolition, the same highly suspect firm which had finished the demolition of the Murragh Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, and which had disposed of the evidence there in the process.
This contract was let surreptitiously just eleven days after 9/11, and empowered Controlled Demolition to recycle the steel of the World Trade Center. Giuliani has not a word to say about this in his memoirs. The city accepted rock-bottom prices for the steel; the priority was to make it disappear fast. Trucks hauling the steel away were equipped with $1,000 Global Positioning System locators to ensure that none of them went astray, and that no suspect steel ended up in the back yard of a maverick 9,/11 researcher. All investigators, in fact, were banned from ground zero. Now Controlled Demolition would eradicate any chance of using the abundant physical evidence present in "the pile," as the mass of twisted rubble of the WTC quickly came to be called. It was a scene out of Kafka -- it was impossible to find out which officials were superintending the destruction of the evidence, to save a myth that was being used to set in motion a world war.
Giuliani, along with ghostwriter Ken Kurson, has produced a relentlessly self-laudatory and self- promoting autobiography entitled Leadership. This work constitutes a monument of hypocrisy. During one of his visits to the WTC site, the Mayor noticed that many visitors were taking pictures of the site. Because there was so much to hide, he found this troubling: "I noticed a disturbing phenomenon -- hundreds of people carrying disposable cameras and handheld video cameras. I understood the impulse -- this was a historic event, and experiencing it up close had a tremendous impact. At the same time, this was a crime scene, and a dangerous one. I did not want anyone to get hurt, or to damage evidence as they scouted out the best angle for their snapshots. If we didn't do something about it immediately, it would soon be out of control, a voyeur's paradise, and we risked the site developing a distasteful freak show aspect." (Giuliani 49) An independent photographic documentation of the crime scene, one the FBI would not be able to confiscate? Horrors! Giuliani promulgated his infamous order that all photos were illegal in the area around the WTC complex. Those who risked a snapshot also risked going to jail.
When it was a question of preventing public scrutiny, Giuliani considered the WTC pile a crime scene where there was evidence that had to be preserved. But when it was a question of sending the crucial evidence to the other end of the world, Giuliani's motto became "scoop and dump" -- with the help of Controlled Demolition. As Thomas Van Essen, Giuliani's fawning appointee as Fire Commissioner, described the scene: "... a full-blown recovery operation was under way, and the site had become an enormous construction zone. Trucks and plows rolled around everywhere. Giant cranes lofted massive steel beams over the heads of the men below." (Van Essen 263) The steel was being sent to a city land fill at Fresh Kills, Staten Island.
According to Van Essen, by the end of October Giuliani was filled with humanitarian concern about the danger of accidents to those working on the pile. One of the main groups present there were firefighters who were seeking the bodies or other remains of their hundreds of fallen comrades. According to the literary provocateur Langewiesche, "there were some among the construction workers and the police who grew unreasonably impatient with the firemen, and became overeager to repeat the obvious -- in polite terms, that these so-called heroes were just ordinary men. On the other hand, the firemen seemed to become steadily more self-absorbed and isolated from the larger cleanup efforts underway." (Langewiesche 158) "Firemen were said to prefer watches from the Tourneau store, policemen to opt for kitchen appliances, and construction workers (who were at a disadvantage here) to enjoy picking through whatever leftovers they came upon -- for instance, wine under the ruins of the Marriott hotel, and cases of contraband cigarettes that spilled from the US Customs vault in the Building Six debris." (Langewiesche 159) Langewiesche reported with great gusto the discovery of evidence that the firemen had been looting even before the towers came down. "Fifty feet below the level of the street they began to uncover the hulk of a fire truck that had been driven deep by the collapse." According to Langewiesche, the field superintendent who only wanted to get on with the job at hand felt "delight, then, after the hulk of the fire truck appeared, that rather than containing bodies (which would have required decorum), its crew cab was filled with dozens of new pairs of jeans from The Gap, a Trade Center store. When a grappler pulled off the roof, the jeans were strewn about for all to see. It was exactly the sort of evidence the field superintendent had been waiting for. While a group of initially bewildered firemen looked on, the construction workers went wild." (Langewiesche 161) The firemen, we must remember, were those who knew most about the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, and they were also the group most likely to tell what they knew. In this sense, the firemen posed perhaps the greatest immediate threat to the 9/11 myth upon which the oligarchy had staked so much. The obvious campaign of psychological warfare against the firemen, therefore, was of world- historical importance. Given the stakes, it would be impossible to exclude that the dungaree incident which Langewiesche found so delightful had been cynically staged as a means of keeping the angry and rebellious firemen off-balance, distracted and confused. The jeans could easily have been planted at a quiet moment during the graveyard shift. Langewiesche's reporting came out during the fall in the Atlantic Monthly, and rankled deeply among the angry firemen and the bereaved families.
On October 31, Halloween, Giuliani decreed without any meaningful consultation that there would be an upper limit of 25 firefighters on each shift at the WTC pile, along with 25 New York City policemen and 25 Port Authority patrolmen. Soon "the rescue workers were up in arms. Stories went around that we had simply given up on finding bodies; that the mayor wanted to speed the cleanup so it would be finished before he left office; that we had recovered gold from the trade center and didn't care about anything else ... Union officials started telling the workers we were haphazardly trucking everything to Fresh Kills -- a 'scoop and dump' operation." (Van Essen 265)
Langewiesche defends the Mayor's justification of cutting the firemen's representation on the pile: "when Giuliani gave 'safety' as the reason for reducing their presence on the pile, he was completely sincere." (Langewiesche 161) In his view, the big problem on the pile was "firemen running wild." (Langewiesche 162) In mid-October, an audience of firemen, policeman, widows, and orphans loudly booed several members of the Giuliani administration, but also Senator Hillary Clinton and a local Democratic politician. (Van Essen 258) On Friday, November 2, Giuliani was able to harvest the results of his provocations. In the morning, more than 1,000 firemen came together at the WTC. Their chants included: "Bring the brothers home! Bring the brothers home", "Do the right thing!", "Rudy must go!", and "Tom must go!", a reference to Fire Commissioner Thomas Van Essen, a Giuliani appointee. Their signs read, "Mayor Giuliani, let us bring our brothers home." Speakers denounced Giuliani's hasty carting off of wreckage and remains to Fresh Kills as a "scoop and dump" operation. One well-respected former captain appealed to the crowd: "My son Tommy of Squad 1 is not home yet! Don't abandon him!" This was met with a cry of "Bring Tommy home!" from the assembled throng. This scene soon degenerated into an altercation between the firefighters and the police guarding the site, and then into a full-scale riot. Twelve firefighters were taken to jail, while five policemen were injured. Giuliani had gladly sacrificed the 9/11 myth of national solidarity to the needs of his campaign of psychological warfare and provocations against the firemen. It was All Souls Day, the day of the dead, November 2, 2001.
At a press conference that same day, Giuliani hypocritically condemned the actions of the firemen as inexcusable. The police wanted to make more arrests, and were scanning videotapes of the riot to identify firefighters. The city was appalled by what had happened; many newspapers were anti- Giuliani this time. One trade union leader, Gorman, called Giuliani a "fascist," and referred to the Police Commissioner and the Fire Commissioner as Giuliani's "goons."
On Monday, November 11, Giuliani and his officials were again confronted by 200 angry firefighters and bereaved families at a meeting. Giuliani was accused again and again of running a "scoop and dump" operation. One widow protested: "Last week my husband was memorialized as a hero, and this week he's thought of as landfill?" When Van Essen stammered that the department had been overwhelmed, a widow replied, "Stop saying you are overwhelmed! I am overwhelmed! I have three children and my husband is dead!" Dr. Hirsch of the "biological stain" theory discussed below tried to defend Giuliani by arguing that nothing resembling an intact body was being found any longer, but he was shouted down by firemen who knew from their experience on the pile that this was not so. Van Essen was forced to concede that, based on photographic evidence he personally examined, remains were indeed still be found that had to be "considered intact bodies." (Van Essen 270-271)
Giuliani's rush to eradicate the crime scene without regard to the preservation of human remains thus served two important goals. He was able to destroy much pertinent evidence, and he succeeded in throwing the firefighters on the defensive and playing them off against the police, the construction workers, and other groups. He was able to split the firefighters themselves. The firefighters were tied into knots emotionally, and were left with no time or energy to pursue the issue of justice for their heroic fallen comrades, which could only have been served by directly raising the issue of the indications of controlled demolition in numerous points of the World Trade Center complex. Nor was the cynical oligarchical strategy limited to Giuliani: at the 9/11 commission's last set of hearings in New York City, the FDNY, NYPD, and other line departments of the city were mercilessly baited by the likes of former Navy Secretary John Lehman, who told them that their operational coordination was inferior to that of a Boy Scout troop. So far the firefighters have not been able to mount a challenge to the 9/11 myth, which necessarily portrays them as incompetent, in spite of their heroism and huge losses. Only by demolishing the myth, only by unearthing the story of controlled demolition, can the immense historical merits of the firefighters be duly recognized.
Giuliani's memoir is mainly for self-aggrandizement, but it also attempts to shore up the official version at certain key vulnerable points, since the Giuliani legend and the 9/11 myth are now inextricably intertwined. The following remarks are attributed to Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, the Medical Examiner of New York City in the late afternoon of 9/11: "Most of the bodies will be vaporized. We're going to end up with biological stains, where the tissue has become shapeless, amorphous masses of matte ." According to Giuliani, Hirsch estimated that the temperature inside the building had reached 2,000 degrees (presumably Fahrenheit). Such a temperature is impossible in the physical universe as we otherwise know it to be constituted. (Giuliani 22)