Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley
Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:54 am
PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 6 CONT'D.)
CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS: "BORDERLINE CRIMINAL"
The scandalous eradication of the WTC crime scene was one of the main themes of hearings held by the House Science Committee on March 2, 2002. Congressman Anthony D. Weiner, a New York Democrat, led off by contrasting the businesslike handling of the crash scene of Flight 186 on November 12, 2001 with the chaos and disdain for the integrity of evidence that had prevailed on the WTC pile under Giuliani's management: "Within literally moments of that plane crash, the National Transportation Safety Board was on the ground sequestering evidence, interviewing witnesses, subpoenaing information, if necessary, and since then, they have offered periodic reports. One month and a day earlier, when the World Trade Center collapsed, nothing could have been further from the truth. According to reports that we have heard since, there has been no comprehensive investigation. One expert in fire engineering concluded that there was virtually a nonexistent investigation. We haven't examined any aspects of the collapse that might have impacted rescue worker procedures even in this last month. Second, reports have emerged that crucial evidence has been mishandled. Over 80 percent of the steel from the World Trade Center site has already been sold for recycling, much of it, if not all of it, before investigators and scientists could analyze the information."
Weiner pointed out that at the flight 186 Rockaway crash scene on November 11, he had been able to "watch the National Transportation Safety Board point to pieces of evidence, [and] say to local law enforcement, don't touch this or it is going to be a felony if you do." (House March 104) That had been the procedure before 9/11, and it had become procedure once again after 9/11; only in regard to the 9/11 events did these methods, mandated by federal law, go out the window. It was a massive breakdown of the rule of law, and all in the service of the coverup.
Weiner pointed out that there was also plenty of blame to go around for the federal government as well. This centered on inter-agency turfwars, always a favorite means used by moles to disguise the scope and motivation of what they are really doing; "... we have allowed this investigation to become woefully bogged down and in fighting and lack of cooperation among agencies. Researchers from FEMA did not get timely access to the designs of the building. News accounts have said there has been friction between engineers in FEMA because of concerns about where the information would wind up. Even the National Science Foundation, which has awarded grants to several scientists to study the collapse, but didn't coordinate these efforts with FEMA or the American Society of Civil Engineers."
The reality was even worse. FEMA's Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) was carried out not by full-time government officials, but rather by a group of volunteer investigators, with a budget of just $600,000. (Ken Starr's budget for hounding Clinton: more than $40 million.) FEMA volunteers had no subpoena power, and could not stay the hand of steel recyclers or confiscate evidence if they required it. They were denied the blueprints of the buildings. They generally could not enter ground zero, apart from an early walking tour. They never saw a piece of steel wreckage until October. Out of millions of fragments, the FEMA BPAT was able to save only 156 from the recyclers.
Weiner also deplored the parsimonious budget that had been granted to the investigation: "... finally, we have seen and noted the painfully that the financial commitment to this investigation simply is not there. It is not uncommon to spend tens of millions of dollars investigating why a plane crashed. But we have yet to spend even a million dollars on this investigation, and the Bush Administration has refused to commit to release the full funding necessary." (House March 48)
In a later hearing, Weiner elaborated that "thousands of tons of steel were carted away and recycled before any expert could examine what could have been telltale clues. Support trusses, fireproofing fragments, and even burned-out electrical switches that might have given scientists and engineers insight were lost forever even before an investigation was underway. (House May 20-21)
Weiner was also well aware that the Giuliani administration, just like the Bush regime in Washington, was behaving with implacable hostility towards any and all investigations. "We just heard testimony that the city was the opposite of cooperative. That they had refused to provide basic information," said Congressman Weiner at the March hearings. He told the government witnesses from FEMA and other agencies: "The idea that there was some level of cooperation, I have to tell you, the anecdotal record is replete with stories of people having cameras confiscated from them, being stopped at checkpoints. You are officials of the United States Government. The idea that this should have to be a subject of a long negotiation over what information would be at your disposal, to me is most troubling." (House March 133) Indeed, the FEMA's Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) was not even allowed on the scene until October.
Weiner's concerns were shared by Virginia Republican J. Randy Forbes, who complained that he was "disappointed to learn that investigators were unable to examine recovered pieces of steel from the Twin Towers before they were recycled. I am also troubled that investigators had difficulty in obtaining blueprints, design drawings, and maintenance records because of liability concerns from the buildings' owners. (House March 55) It even turned out that, despite repeated urgent requests, the investigators were being denied the out-takes of the video tapes shot by the various television networks operating around the WTC on 9-11. This is a reminder that moles are sometimes just as necessary in the private sector as they are in government.
Glenn P. Corbett, Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, reminded the committee that "handling the collapse study as an assessment has allowed valuable evidence -- the steel building components -- to be destroyed. The steel holds the primary key to understanding the chronology of events and causal factors resulting in the collapse. The collapse of the world Trade Center towers were the largest structural collapses in world history. A disaster of such epic proportions demands that we fully resource a comprehensive, detailed investigation. Instead, we are staffing the HPAT with part-time engineers and scientists on a shoestring budget." (House March 78) Corbett called for a World Trade Center Disaster Commission, but the Bush administration was not interested.
Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a Berkeley professor of civil engineering, related his own shock in discovering that the structural steel was simply being shipped out: "I believe I was the first one to find out that the steel was being recycled. New York Times reporter Jim Glanz told me two weeks after the quake-after the collapse. And I tried to contact the city and also the New York Times reporters tried to make sure we could have access to the steel to do the research. It was not happening. And I went myself-directly contacted the recycling plant and made the arrangement." (House March 128) Even so, most of the steel was soon gone.
Congressman Crowley of New York correctly suggested that the flagrant illegalities and abuses of the crime scene would permanently undercut whatever explanation the government was seeking to purvey: "I do believe that conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this. They are going to make the Warren Commission look like a walk in the park. And that is unfortunate not only for the Members of Congress who are trying to work on this issue, but for all the families out there that are listening very carefully to what we are talking about today, what these experts are saying. And I just think there is so much that has been lost in these last six months that we can never go back and retrieve. And that is not only unfortunate, it is borderline criminal." (House March 129)
Congressman Christopher Shays of Connecticut, a liberal Republican like Giuliani, ran interference for the Mayor. He rejected the idea that the WTC was a crime scene where there was still something to be discovered, something to be proven; Shays said he had "a particular bias that the actions against us weren't criminal acts, they were acts of war, acts of terror. And I kind of bristle when I think of our treating this as a criminal act in which we have to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that someone did it and they were at the scene or whatever you need to deal with in a crime." (House May 115) This chauvinistic rhetoric was a cover for the urgent need of annihilating the evidence. For this school of thought, there was no need for evidence because there was nothing to prove and nothing to learn; they thought they knew what happened a priori thanks to CNN and Bush. The supposed government of laws was in eclipse.
Small wonder, all in all, that the august, 125-year old fireman's trade paper Fire Engineering blasted the entire inadequate investigation process in January 2002 editorial. Editor Bill Manning wrote that "for more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut up and sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that could answer many questions about high-rise building design practices and performance under fire conditions is on a slow boat to China, perhaps never to be seen again in America until you buy your next car ." Manning charged that "Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the 'official investigation' blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure." "The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately," Manning demanded. Elsewhere in the same issue, a fire official deplored that "we are literally treating the steel removed from the site like garbage, not like crucial fire scene evidence." (Fire Engineering, January 2002)
An extremely serious aspect of the botched investigation of the World Trade Center events involved the issue of the four black boxes from the two planes (American 11 and United 175) -a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data reporter from each plane. The official version, as codified by the 9/11 commission, claims that not one of these black boxes was ever found. But a New York City firefighter named Nicholas De Masi claimed that he escorted FBI agents into the WTC ruins and helped them to find and recover three of the four missing black boxes. DeMasi's account is supported by the WTC volunteer Mike Bellone, who said that he had seen at least one black box being taken from the wreckage. The three black boxes were removed from the wreckage with the help of DeMasi's all terrain vehicle, according to this account. Then the three black boxes were taken away by the FBI, and have never been heard of again. The black boxes of the two planes that apparently hit the WTC are the only cases in which black boxes from jetliners have not been recovered. DeMasi wrote about this experience in his book Ground Zero: Behind the Scenes, which was published by Trauma Recovery and Assistance for Children (TRAC Team) in 2003. Here DeMasi recalls: "There were a total of four black boxes. We found three." DeMasi's story has been denied by the FBI and the FDNY. It has been largely ignored by the controlled corporate media, except for an article in the neocon New York Post which alleged that TRAC team was heavily in debt. (Philadelphia News, October 28, 2004)
THE FEMA BPAT REPORT OF MAY 2002: "A HALF-BAKED FARCE"
The worthy culmination of this "half-baked farce" was the FEMA BPAT report issued in May 2002. A key section is the one entitled "Structural Response to Fire Loading," where the central tenets are developed in all their intimate poverty. According to the FEMA/ASCE experts:
• As fire spread and raised the temperature of structural members, the structure was further stressed and weakened, until it eventually was unable to support its immense weight. Although the specific chain of events that led to the eventual collapse will probably never be identified, the following effects of fire on structures may each have contributed to the collapse in some way. Appendix A presents a more detailed discussion of the structural effects of fire.
• As floor framing and supported slabs above and in a fire arm are heated, they expand. As a structure expands, it can develop additional, potentially large, stresses in some elements. If the resulting stress state exceeds the capacity of some members or their connections, this can initiate a series of failures.
• As the temperature of floor slabs and support framing increases, these elements can lose rigidity and sag into catenary action. As catenary action progresses, horizontal framing elements and floor slabs become tensile elements, which can cause failure of end connections and allow supported floors to collapse onto the floors below. The presence of large amounts of debris on some floors of WTC 1 would have made them even more susceptible to this behavior. In addition to overloading the floors below, and potentially resulting in a pancake-type collapse of successive floors, local floor collapse would also immediately increase the laterally unsupported length of columns, permitting buckling to begin. As indicated in Appendix B, the propensity of exterior columns to buckle would have been governed by the relatively weak bolted column splices between the vertically stacked prefabricated exterior wall units. This effect would be even more likely to occur in a fire that involves several adjacent floor levels simultaneously, because the columns could effectively lose lateral support over several stories.
• As the temperature of column steel increases, the yield strength and modulus of elasticity degrade and the critical buckling strength of the columns will decrease, potentially initiating buckling, even if lateral support is maintained. This effect is most likely to have been significant in the failure of the interior core columns.
Concerning the twin towers FEMA, had only agnostic conclusions to offer: "With the information and time available, the sequence of events leading to the collapse of each tower could not be definitively determined." Concerning WTC 7: "The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue." (911research.wtc7.net) The World Trade Center disaster was the centerpiece of an event which the Bush administration had seized on to start what may well turn out to be a world war, but that main event could not be explained, many months after the fact.
The FEMA report is redolent of conscious distortion and of fraud. The illustrations in the spring 2002 FEMA report do everything possible to make the twin towers look like flimsy, unstable structures. In one cross-section (Figure 2-1 ), the core columns are depicted in about one third of their actual dimensions. FEMA gives short shrift or no shrift at all to the cross-bracing core beams and the core columns. One picture (D-13) shows what is purportedly a core column with a construction hard hat on it to convey its dimensions, but this column is about half the size of the real core columns.
FEMA's illustrations offered in support of their theory of truss failure (2-20, 21, 22) show no steel columns in the core of the building at all. These fake diagrams duly impressed the radical empiricists at the New York Times, who quickly reported that the interior core of the buildings was a hollow steel shaft, not 47 massive steel box columns.
The heart of the FEMA argument is that the astronomical temperatures allegedly reached by the fires weakened the floor trusses, leading to each floor pancaking onto the one below. As the floors fell away, the columns in the facade as well as the core columns remained standing, but they then quickly buckled at the points where they were bolted together, and came crashing down. This theory is not based on observation, but on pure speculation. It is a purely cinematic explanation of what happened -- it tries to account for the phenomenon of collapse, but takes no notice of whether such a process could occur in the real world. In fact, the floor truss/pancake theory cannot function in the real world. Even if the floors failed, the strong structure of the 47 central columns, minus a very few which might have been severed by the impact of the airlines (even fewer in the South Tower) would have remained standing. That would have left a 110-floor steel spine intact, and this is not what was observed. Many of the deceptive drawings contained in the FEMA report then became the inspiration for the graphics used in the NOVA documentary program on this subject which was aired on PBS.
Because of the difficulties of the pancake theory, busy academics have whipped up new theories to try to meet obvious objections. Apologists for the official version start with the notion of killer fires -- fires which, even though they are fed by carpets, paper, and office furniture, are able to melt steel. From here they develop the notion of progressive total collapse -the buildings do not fall to one side, but simply collapse in place upon their own foundations. Since no modern steel framed skyscraper had ever succumbed to fire, the attempted coverup then required new pseudo- theoretical constructs. One of these was the column failure, or wet noodle, theory. This suggested that fires melted the core columns, and that was that. Of course, even the coverup cannot change the fact that the fires were not hot enough to melt the core columns. Steel is a very effective conductor of heat, meaning that a serious hot spot on one floor is likely to be dissipated up and down the columns that pass through that hot spot. The internal and external columns, that is to say, act as cooling ribs. According to a study by Corus Construction cited at http://www.911research.wtc7.net, the highest temperature reached by steel in the presence of hydrocarbon fires was logged at about 360 degrees Fahrenheit -far below what is needed to weaken steel.
Given the disadvantages of the column failure theory, the truss failure theory was advanced. The trusses were relatively lightweight metal structures which attached the metal decks bearing the concrete slabs of each floor to the core columns and the columns in the facade. The trusses offered the added advantage of being invisible from the outside, so that it was possible to assert without fear of being refuted that they had gotten extremely hot.
MIT Professor Thomas Eagar is one who has rushed into the many breaches of the FEMA report in an attempt to shore up its credibility. Not content with trusses and pancakes, Eagar has propounded the zipper theory, which he has judiciously combined with the domino effect. Eagar's argument is that if the angle on one side of the building had given way, then the unbearable load on the other angle clips would have caused the entire floor to become totally unzipped in just a few seconds. According to Eagar, "If it had only occurred in one little corner, such as a trash can caught on fire, you might have had to repair that corner, but the whole building wouldn't have come crashing down. The problem was, it was such a widely distributed fire, and then you got this domino effect."
( http://www.911research.wtc7.net/talks/w ... eagar.html ) In reality, the buildings had been designed to resist a Boeing 707, not just a trash can fire.
FACT CHECK
The melting point of steel is 1,538 degrees Celsius, equal to 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, although it will weaken and buckle at somewhat lower temperatures. But the absolute maximum that can be achieved with hydrocarbons, such as the kerosene-like mixture used for jet fuel is 825 degrees Celsius or 1517 Fahrenheit -- unless the mixture is pressurized or pre-heated through the admixture of fuel and air , which in this case it could not be. Diffuse flames burn at a lower temperature, and fires fed by inadequate oxygen are cooler still. The best estimate is that the fires in the towers were burning at a temperature substantially less than 800 Celsius. The collapse of the towers through the effects of the fires is thus a physical impossibility.
LOIZEAUX PREDICTED THE COLLAPSE
In the March hearings of the House Science Committee, Robert F. Shea, the Acting Administrator of the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration noted that "the World Trade Center was a tragedy. And, frankly, it was an anomaly. No one who viewed it that day, including myself, believed that those tower would fall. Our collective thought process for laymen and engineers and firefighters changed that day forever." (House March 60)
At those same hearings, a leaflet was distributed by the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, an organization which included many members of the victims' families. Here the Congressmen were reminded: "The collapse of the Twin towers caused the biggest loss of life in a single incident on U.S. soil since the Civil War. Their collapse constituted the first failures of high-rise protected steel structures in history. Not a single structural engineer, including those working for the firm that built the Twin Towers and those working in the Fire Department of New York, seems to have anticipated their collapse, even when those individuals saw the extent of the fires raging in the buildings. The Twin Towers were designed to withstand the impact of the largest passenger jets of their day, a Boeing 707. ..." (House March 167)
However, it turned out that there was at least one expert who claimed that he had immediately intuited that the towers could collapse. As John Seabrook wrote in the New Yorker, "among the dozens of people I have spoken to recently who are experts in the construction of tall buildings (and many of whom witnessed the events of September 11th as they unfolded), only one said that he knew immediately, upon learning, from TV, of the planes hitting the buildings, that the towers were going to fall. This was Mark Loizeaux, the president of Controlled Demolition Incorporated, a Maryland-based family business that specializes in reducing tall buildings to manageable pieces of rubble. 'Within a nanosecond,' he told me. 'I said, "it's coming down." And the second tower will fall first, because it was hit lower down."' Loizeaux was billed as a "structural undertaker" whose job was to destroy old buildings. Here is Loizeaux' version of how he foresaw the disaster:
But how could Loizeaux know what no other expert claimed to know, and which went against a hundred years accumulated by civil engineers in building skyscrapers? If suspects are those who had the means, the motive and the opportunity, then Loizeaux may well have had the means. According to the demolitions man:
Naturally, the pancake theory was original neither to Loizeaux nor to FEMA. The pancake theory had been advanced by "Osama Bin Laden" in the remarks attributed to him, allegedly made in mid- November 2001, and widely publicized by the US government in December 2001. Here Bin Laden is alleged to have commented: "We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. (Inaudible) Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for." But there are indications that the stocky figure shown on the tape may not be the supposedly ascetic Bin Laden at all, but a double or ham actor. (Meyssan 2002 192)
REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM: WTC 7
In the May House Science Committee W. Gene Corley, the American Society of Civil Engineers representative on the BPAT, conceded that "Building 7, which was across the street from the main towers, also collapsed and provided us with the first example that we recognized of a building collapsing as a result of fire." (House May 30) WTC 7 presents the image of a classical controlled demolition. Whereas the twin towers are seen to explode, WTC 7 implodes -- it falls in upon itself with none of the spectacular mushroom plumes of smoke and powder which had marked the demise of the larger twin towers. The foundations collapse before the facade, the middle of the building collapses before the outer walls, and streamers of smoke are emitted from the facade. WTC 7 did imitate the twin towers by collapsing almost exclusively upon its own foundations. WTC 7 contained electrical generators and a supply for diesel fuel to operate these, and apologists of the official version like Gerald Posner have seized on this circumstance to make the collapse of this building plausible. But there has been no sign of raging diesel fuel fires, as can be seen from the photos of the fall of WTC 7, so the apologists are grasping at straws.
The owner of the WTC complex was Larry Silverstein, who recounted the fall of WTC 7 in the September 2002 PBS documentary, America Rebuilds, complete with this astounding revelation: "I remember getting a call from the ... fire department commander , telling me that they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'we've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing is to pull it. And they made the decision to pull and we watched the building collapse." "To pull" would appear to be the jargon term in controlled demolition circles for the deliberate detonation of charges leading to the destruction of a building. And if WTC 7 was pulled, why not WTC 1 and 2? (Marrs 43)
ANOMALIES OF THE WTC COLLAPSE
The twin towers did not simply collapse as a result of gravity; they were violently pulverized in mid-air in an explosive process which hurled debris hundreds of meters in all directions -they were vaporized by an explosive force. Anomalies abound. The North Tower was hit first, was hit hardest in its core columns, and had more jet fuel burn inside its structure than the South Tower -- but the North Tower exploded later. The South Tower was hit later, with a more glancing blow which had less impact on its core columns, and which also caused more jet fuel to be consumed outside of the building in a spectacular plume; the South Tower's fires were less severe -but the South Tower fell first. WTC 7 was never hit by anything, and had fires only on two floors (there are no photos of WTC 7 enveloped in flames and smoke) -- but WTC 7 fell anyway. WTC 6 witnessed an explosion and fire which has never been explained or even addressed. Finally, we have the embarrassing fact that steel frame skyscrapers are virtually indestructible by fire. The official version of events argues that, at least as far as the towers are concerned, it was the combined effect of crash impact plus fire which caused the collapses. But even the South Tower collapsed well after most of the jet fuel had burned away, and a fire based on paper, rugs, and furniture melts steel even less than one based on jet fuel. By all indications, the South Tower began the collapse sequence precisely at the moment when, well after the impact had been absorbed, the fires too were subsiding. The hole made in the North Tower by American 11 had cooled so much that, just before the collapse of the North Tower, survivors were observed looking out through the gash in the side of the building. (Marr 41)
The upper floors of both towers, after showing symptoms of high pressure which forced smoke out through the widows, exploded into spectacular mushroom clouds. Debris and other ejecta were thrown at speeds of 200 feet per second to distances of up to 500 feet in all directions. The clouds then descended, always emanating from the towers as these fell. The mushroom clouds had expanded to two or three times the diameter of the towers after five seconds, and had expanded to five times the diameter of the towers after 15 seconds. Blast waves broke windows in buildings over 400 feet away. In the thick mushroom clouds, solid objects were hurled out ahead of the dust, another telltale sign of explosive demolition.
One might have expected the buildings to tip over at an angle starting at the points where they had been hit like a tree which leaves a stump as it falls towards the side where it has been most chopped, but instead they did not topple and there were no stumps; apart from some initial asymmetry in the top of the South Tower, the two towers both collapsed down on themselves in a perfectly symmetrical way -- a suspicious sign, since this is one of the prime goals and hallmarks of controlled demolition.
The fall of the twin towers took place at breathtaking speed. The tops of the buildings reached the ground as rubble no more than 16 seconds after the collapse process had begun. A weight in a vacuum would have taken 9.2 seconds to cover the same distance. This meant that air resistance and little else had slowed the fall of the upper stories. This indicates that the lower floors must have been demolished and pulverized before the upper stories fell on them. The building, in other words, had been pulverized, and in many areas vaporized, in mid-air. No gravity collapse could have created this phenomenon.
The non-metallic elements of the twin towers, especially the cement slabs which formed the horizontal surface of each floor, were pulverized into a fine dust, with particles of less than 100 microns in diameter. This was the dust which pervaded lower Manhattan as the explosive clouds spread from hundreds of yards in all directions. This dust took a long time to settle, but the Giuliani administration tried to convince office workers in the area that there was no danger. All the steel in the building superstructures was simply shredded. The exceptionally strong central core columns were neatly diced into 10 or 20 floor segments -- something which has never been explained.
According to Jim Hoffman, the leading expert on the collapse of the World Trade Center and the source heavily relied on here, the energy necessary to create the mushroom clouds and expand them to the extraordinary dimensions actually observed to pulverize virtually all the concrete in the towers, and to chop the steel into segments is far greater than the gravitational energy represented by the buildings in the first place. According to Hoffman, there must have been powerful additional energy sources at work. When prodded to do so at recent conferences, Hoffman has been willing to speculate that these energy sources might have been unconventional ones. High energy microwave interferometry using coaxial beams for constructive and destructive interference might be a possibility, but this would require so much energy that, if it had to be delivered as conventional electric current, it would necessitate a cable about half a meter in diameter -- and there is no evidence of this. So the problem remains intractable.
THE TWIN TOWERS WERE ROBUST STRUCTURES
The twin towers were robust structures. The structure of the twin towers was represented first of all by an internal core of 47 steel box columns which measured 36 by 90 centimeters; the steel was thickest near the base, where it attained a thickness of 10 centimeters (about four inches), and tapered gradually down to 6 centimeters on the upper floors. There were 236 exterior columns in the buildings' facades; these were 10 centimeters thick at the base, but only 6 millimeters thick in the highest floors. Each floor was a steel plate into which concrete had been poured. In the center of the building was a reinforced core featuring four steel columns encased in concrete. The structure is abundantly cross-braced, so that stress in one sector could be efficiently shifted to other parts of the structure. All steel columns rested directly on the bedrock under Manhattan. This structures had been designed to withstand 140 mile per hour winds, and had resisted them successfully for more than thirty years. They had been designed by Lee Robertson, the structural engineer who built the towers to absorb the impact of a Boeing 707, an aircraft roughly comparable in size and fuel capacity to the aircraft that appear to have struck the towers on 9/11.
In the case of the twin towers, the technical problem of how to account for the immense quantities of energy released would seem to point to an energy source beyond the capabilities of conventional controlled demolition. For a possible explanation of what kind of energy source could have been at work, we must turn our attention to the realm of new physical principles, and thus to the class of directed energy weapons which are probably most familiar to the general public in connection with President Reagan's SO- called star wars speech of March 23, 1983. We may be dealing here with high energy microwave interferometry using coaxial beams for constructive and destructive interference. The inherent problem with this conjecture, as engineer Ken Jenkins has pointed out, is that such a device would require a power cable half a meter in diameter, and the presence of such a power cable has not been demonstrated. The solution to this problem will indeed require more time and research.
CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS: "BORDERLINE CRIMINAL"
The scandalous eradication of the WTC crime scene was one of the main themes of hearings held by the House Science Committee on March 2, 2002. Congressman Anthony D. Weiner, a New York Democrat, led off by contrasting the businesslike handling of the crash scene of Flight 186 on November 12, 2001 with the chaos and disdain for the integrity of evidence that had prevailed on the WTC pile under Giuliani's management: "Within literally moments of that plane crash, the National Transportation Safety Board was on the ground sequestering evidence, interviewing witnesses, subpoenaing information, if necessary, and since then, they have offered periodic reports. One month and a day earlier, when the World Trade Center collapsed, nothing could have been further from the truth. According to reports that we have heard since, there has been no comprehensive investigation. One expert in fire engineering concluded that there was virtually a nonexistent investigation. We haven't examined any aspects of the collapse that might have impacted rescue worker procedures even in this last month. Second, reports have emerged that crucial evidence has been mishandled. Over 80 percent of the steel from the World Trade Center site has already been sold for recycling, much of it, if not all of it, before investigators and scientists could analyze the information."
Weiner pointed out that at the flight 186 Rockaway crash scene on November 11, he had been able to "watch the National Transportation Safety Board point to pieces of evidence, [and] say to local law enforcement, don't touch this or it is going to be a felony if you do." (House March 104) That had been the procedure before 9/11, and it had become procedure once again after 9/11; only in regard to the 9/11 events did these methods, mandated by federal law, go out the window. It was a massive breakdown of the rule of law, and all in the service of the coverup.
Weiner pointed out that there was also plenty of blame to go around for the federal government as well. This centered on inter-agency turfwars, always a favorite means used by moles to disguise the scope and motivation of what they are really doing; "... we have allowed this investigation to become woefully bogged down and in fighting and lack of cooperation among agencies. Researchers from FEMA did not get timely access to the designs of the building. News accounts have said there has been friction between engineers in FEMA because of concerns about where the information would wind up. Even the National Science Foundation, which has awarded grants to several scientists to study the collapse, but didn't coordinate these efforts with FEMA or the American Society of Civil Engineers."
The reality was even worse. FEMA's Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) was carried out not by full-time government officials, but rather by a group of volunteer investigators, with a budget of just $600,000. (Ken Starr's budget for hounding Clinton: more than $40 million.) FEMA volunteers had no subpoena power, and could not stay the hand of steel recyclers or confiscate evidence if they required it. They were denied the blueprints of the buildings. They generally could not enter ground zero, apart from an early walking tour. They never saw a piece of steel wreckage until October. Out of millions of fragments, the FEMA BPAT was able to save only 156 from the recyclers.
Weiner also deplored the parsimonious budget that had been granted to the investigation: "... finally, we have seen and noted the painfully that the financial commitment to this investigation simply is not there. It is not uncommon to spend tens of millions of dollars investigating why a plane crashed. But we have yet to spend even a million dollars on this investigation, and the Bush Administration has refused to commit to release the full funding necessary." (House March 48)
In a later hearing, Weiner elaborated that "thousands of tons of steel were carted away and recycled before any expert could examine what could have been telltale clues. Support trusses, fireproofing fragments, and even burned-out electrical switches that might have given scientists and engineers insight were lost forever even before an investigation was underway. (House May 20-21)
Weiner was also well aware that the Giuliani administration, just like the Bush regime in Washington, was behaving with implacable hostility towards any and all investigations. "We just heard testimony that the city was the opposite of cooperative. That they had refused to provide basic information," said Congressman Weiner at the March hearings. He told the government witnesses from FEMA and other agencies: "The idea that there was some level of cooperation, I have to tell you, the anecdotal record is replete with stories of people having cameras confiscated from them, being stopped at checkpoints. You are officials of the United States Government. The idea that this should have to be a subject of a long negotiation over what information would be at your disposal, to me is most troubling." (House March 133) Indeed, the FEMA's Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) was not even allowed on the scene until October.
Weiner's concerns were shared by Virginia Republican J. Randy Forbes, who complained that he was "disappointed to learn that investigators were unable to examine recovered pieces of steel from the Twin Towers before they were recycled. I am also troubled that investigators had difficulty in obtaining blueprints, design drawings, and maintenance records because of liability concerns from the buildings' owners. (House March 55) It even turned out that, despite repeated urgent requests, the investigators were being denied the out-takes of the video tapes shot by the various television networks operating around the WTC on 9-11. This is a reminder that moles are sometimes just as necessary in the private sector as they are in government.
Glenn P. Corbett, Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, reminded the committee that "handling the collapse study as an assessment has allowed valuable evidence -- the steel building components -- to be destroyed. The steel holds the primary key to understanding the chronology of events and causal factors resulting in the collapse. The collapse of the world Trade Center towers were the largest structural collapses in world history. A disaster of such epic proportions demands that we fully resource a comprehensive, detailed investigation. Instead, we are staffing the HPAT with part-time engineers and scientists on a shoestring budget." (House March 78) Corbett called for a World Trade Center Disaster Commission, but the Bush administration was not interested.
Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a Berkeley professor of civil engineering, related his own shock in discovering that the structural steel was simply being shipped out: "I believe I was the first one to find out that the steel was being recycled. New York Times reporter Jim Glanz told me two weeks after the quake-after the collapse. And I tried to contact the city and also the New York Times reporters tried to make sure we could have access to the steel to do the research. It was not happening. And I went myself-directly contacted the recycling plant and made the arrangement." (House March 128) Even so, most of the steel was soon gone.
Congressman Crowley of New York correctly suggested that the flagrant illegalities and abuses of the crime scene would permanently undercut whatever explanation the government was seeking to purvey: "I do believe that conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this. They are going to make the Warren Commission look like a walk in the park. And that is unfortunate not only for the Members of Congress who are trying to work on this issue, but for all the families out there that are listening very carefully to what we are talking about today, what these experts are saying. And I just think there is so much that has been lost in these last six months that we can never go back and retrieve. And that is not only unfortunate, it is borderline criminal." (House March 129)
Congressman Christopher Shays of Connecticut, a liberal Republican like Giuliani, ran interference for the Mayor. He rejected the idea that the WTC was a crime scene where there was still something to be discovered, something to be proven; Shays said he had "a particular bias that the actions against us weren't criminal acts, they were acts of war, acts of terror. And I kind of bristle when I think of our treating this as a criminal act in which we have to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that someone did it and they were at the scene or whatever you need to deal with in a crime." (House May 115) This chauvinistic rhetoric was a cover for the urgent need of annihilating the evidence. For this school of thought, there was no need for evidence because there was nothing to prove and nothing to learn; they thought they knew what happened a priori thanks to CNN and Bush. The supposed government of laws was in eclipse.
Small wonder, all in all, that the august, 125-year old fireman's trade paper Fire Engineering blasted the entire inadequate investigation process in January 2002 editorial. Editor Bill Manning wrote that "for more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut up and sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that could answer many questions about high-rise building design practices and performance under fire conditions is on a slow boat to China, perhaps never to be seen again in America until you buy your next car ." Manning charged that "Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the 'official investigation' blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure." "The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately," Manning demanded. Elsewhere in the same issue, a fire official deplored that "we are literally treating the steel removed from the site like garbage, not like crucial fire scene evidence." (Fire Engineering, January 2002)
An extremely serious aspect of the botched investigation of the World Trade Center events involved the issue of the four black boxes from the two planes (American 11 and United 175) -a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data reporter from each plane. The official version, as codified by the 9/11 commission, claims that not one of these black boxes was ever found. But a New York City firefighter named Nicholas De Masi claimed that he escorted FBI agents into the WTC ruins and helped them to find and recover three of the four missing black boxes. DeMasi's account is supported by the WTC volunteer Mike Bellone, who said that he had seen at least one black box being taken from the wreckage. The three black boxes were removed from the wreckage with the help of DeMasi's all terrain vehicle, according to this account. Then the three black boxes were taken away by the FBI, and have never been heard of again. The black boxes of the two planes that apparently hit the WTC are the only cases in which black boxes from jetliners have not been recovered. DeMasi wrote about this experience in his book Ground Zero: Behind the Scenes, which was published by Trauma Recovery and Assistance for Children (TRAC Team) in 2003. Here DeMasi recalls: "There were a total of four black boxes. We found three." DeMasi's story has been denied by the FBI and the FDNY. It has been largely ignored by the controlled corporate media, except for an article in the neocon New York Post which alleged that TRAC team was heavily in debt. (Philadelphia News, October 28, 2004)
THE FEMA BPAT REPORT OF MAY 2002: "A HALF-BAKED FARCE"
The worthy culmination of this "half-baked farce" was the FEMA BPAT report issued in May 2002. A key section is the one entitled "Structural Response to Fire Loading," where the central tenets are developed in all their intimate poverty. According to the FEMA/ASCE experts:
• As fire spread and raised the temperature of structural members, the structure was further stressed and weakened, until it eventually was unable to support its immense weight. Although the specific chain of events that led to the eventual collapse will probably never be identified, the following effects of fire on structures may each have contributed to the collapse in some way. Appendix A presents a more detailed discussion of the structural effects of fire.
• As floor framing and supported slabs above and in a fire arm are heated, they expand. As a structure expands, it can develop additional, potentially large, stresses in some elements. If the resulting stress state exceeds the capacity of some members or their connections, this can initiate a series of failures.
• As the temperature of floor slabs and support framing increases, these elements can lose rigidity and sag into catenary action. As catenary action progresses, horizontal framing elements and floor slabs become tensile elements, which can cause failure of end connections and allow supported floors to collapse onto the floors below. The presence of large amounts of debris on some floors of WTC 1 would have made them even more susceptible to this behavior. In addition to overloading the floors below, and potentially resulting in a pancake-type collapse of successive floors, local floor collapse would also immediately increase the laterally unsupported length of columns, permitting buckling to begin. As indicated in Appendix B, the propensity of exterior columns to buckle would have been governed by the relatively weak bolted column splices between the vertically stacked prefabricated exterior wall units. This effect would be even more likely to occur in a fire that involves several adjacent floor levels simultaneously, because the columns could effectively lose lateral support over several stories.
• As the temperature of column steel increases, the yield strength and modulus of elasticity degrade and the critical buckling strength of the columns will decrease, potentially initiating buckling, even if lateral support is maintained. This effect is most likely to have been significant in the failure of the interior core columns.
Concerning the twin towers FEMA, had only agnostic conclusions to offer: "With the information and time available, the sequence of events leading to the collapse of each tower could not be definitively determined." Concerning WTC 7: "The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue." (911research.wtc7.net) The World Trade Center disaster was the centerpiece of an event which the Bush administration had seized on to start what may well turn out to be a world war, but that main event could not be explained, many months after the fact.
The FEMA report is redolent of conscious distortion and of fraud. The illustrations in the spring 2002 FEMA report do everything possible to make the twin towers look like flimsy, unstable structures. In one cross-section (Figure 2-1 ), the core columns are depicted in about one third of their actual dimensions. FEMA gives short shrift or no shrift at all to the cross-bracing core beams and the core columns. One picture (D-13) shows what is purportedly a core column with a construction hard hat on it to convey its dimensions, but this column is about half the size of the real core columns.
FEMA's illustrations offered in support of their theory of truss failure (2-20, 21, 22) show no steel columns in the core of the building at all. These fake diagrams duly impressed the radical empiricists at the New York Times, who quickly reported that the interior core of the buildings was a hollow steel shaft, not 47 massive steel box columns.
The heart of the FEMA argument is that the astronomical temperatures allegedly reached by the fires weakened the floor trusses, leading to each floor pancaking onto the one below. As the floors fell away, the columns in the facade as well as the core columns remained standing, but they then quickly buckled at the points where they were bolted together, and came crashing down. This theory is not based on observation, but on pure speculation. It is a purely cinematic explanation of what happened -- it tries to account for the phenomenon of collapse, but takes no notice of whether such a process could occur in the real world. In fact, the floor truss/pancake theory cannot function in the real world. Even if the floors failed, the strong structure of the 47 central columns, minus a very few which might have been severed by the impact of the airlines (even fewer in the South Tower) would have remained standing. That would have left a 110-floor steel spine intact, and this is not what was observed. Many of the deceptive drawings contained in the FEMA report then became the inspiration for the graphics used in the NOVA documentary program on this subject which was aired on PBS.
Because of the difficulties of the pancake theory, busy academics have whipped up new theories to try to meet obvious objections. Apologists for the official version start with the notion of killer fires -- fires which, even though they are fed by carpets, paper, and office furniture, are able to melt steel. From here they develop the notion of progressive total collapse -the buildings do not fall to one side, but simply collapse in place upon their own foundations. Since no modern steel framed skyscraper had ever succumbed to fire, the attempted coverup then required new pseudo- theoretical constructs. One of these was the column failure, or wet noodle, theory. This suggested that fires melted the core columns, and that was that. Of course, even the coverup cannot change the fact that the fires were not hot enough to melt the core columns. Steel is a very effective conductor of heat, meaning that a serious hot spot on one floor is likely to be dissipated up and down the columns that pass through that hot spot. The internal and external columns, that is to say, act as cooling ribs. According to a study by Corus Construction cited at http://www.911research.wtc7.net, the highest temperature reached by steel in the presence of hydrocarbon fires was logged at about 360 degrees Fahrenheit -far below what is needed to weaken steel.
Given the disadvantages of the column failure theory, the truss failure theory was advanced. The trusses were relatively lightweight metal structures which attached the metal decks bearing the concrete slabs of each floor to the core columns and the columns in the facade. The trusses offered the added advantage of being invisible from the outside, so that it was possible to assert without fear of being refuted that they had gotten extremely hot.
MIT Professor Thomas Eagar is one who has rushed into the many breaches of the FEMA report in an attempt to shore up its credibility. Not content with trusses and pancakes, Eagar has propounded the zipper theory, which he has judiciously combined with the domino effect. Eagar's argument is that if the angle on one side of the building had given way, then the unbearable load on the other angle clips would have caused the entire floor to become totally unzipped in just a few seconds. According to Eagar, "If it had only occurred in one little corner, such as a trash can caught on fire, you might have had to repair that corner, but the whole building wouldn't have come crashing down. The problem was, it was such a widely distributed fire, and then you got this domino effect."
( http://www.911research.wtc7.net/talks/w ... eagar.html ) In reality, the buildings had been designed to resist a Boeing 707, not just a trash can fire.
FACT CHECK
The melting point of steel is 1,538 degrees Celsius, equal to 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, although it will weaken and buckle at somewhat lower temperatures. But the absolute maximum that can be achieved with hydrocarbons, such as the kerosene-like mixture used for jet fuel is 825 degrees Celsius or 1517 Fahrenheit -- unless the mixture is pressurized or pre-heated through the admixture of fuel and air , which in this case it could not be. Diffuse flames burn at a lower temperature, and fires fed by inadequate oxygen are cooler still. The best estimate is that the fires in the towers were burning at a temperature substantially less than 800 Celsius. The collapse of the towers through the effects of the fires is thus a physical impossibility.
LOIZEAUX PREDICTED THE COLLAPSE
In the March hearings of the House Science Committee, Robert F. Shea, the Acting Administrator of the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration noted that "the World Trade Center was a tragedy. And, frankly, it was an anomaly. No one who viewed it that day, including myself, believed that those tower would fall. Our collective thought process for laymen and engineers and firefighters changed that day forever." (House March 60)
At those same hearings, a leaflet was distributed by the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, an organization which included many members of the victims' families. Here the Congressmen were reminded: "The collapse of the Twin towers caused the biggest loss of life in a single incident on U.S. soil since the Civil War. Their collapse constituted the first failures of high-rise protected steel structures in history. Not a single structural engineer, including those working for the firm that built the Twin Towers and those working in the Fire Department of New York, seems to have anticipated their collapse, even when those individuals saw the extent of the fires raging in the buildings. The Twin Towers were designed to withstand the impact of the largest passenger jets of their day, a Boeing 707. ..." (House March 167)
However, it turned out that there was at least one expert who claimed that he had immediately intuited that the towers could collapse. As John Seabrook wrote in the New Yorker, "among the dozens of people I have spoken to recently who are experts in the construction of tall buildings (and many of whom witnessed the events of September 11th as they unfolded), only one said that he knew immediately, upon learning, from TV, of the planes hitting the buildings, that the towers were going to fall. This was Mark Loizeaux, the president of Controlled Demolition Incorporated, a Maryland-based family business that specializes in reducing tall buildings to manageable pieces of rubble. 'Within a nanosecond,' he told me. 'I said, "it's coming down." And the second tower will fall first, because it was hit lower down."' Loizeaux was billed as a "structural undertaker" whose job was to destroy old buildings. Here is Loizeaux' version of how he foresaw the disaster:
I thought, "Somebody's got to tell the Fire Department to get out of there .... I picked up the phone, dialed 411, got the number, and tried it -- busy. So I called the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management" -- which was in 7 World Trade. "All circuits were busy. I couldn't get through."
But how could Loizeaux know what no other expert claimed to know, and which went against a hundred years accumulated by civil engineers in building skyscrapers? If suspects are those who had the means, the motive and the opportunity, then Loizeaux may well have had the means. According to the demolitions man:
First of all, you've got the obvious damage to the exterior frame from the airplane -- if you count the number of external columns missing from the sides the planes hit, there are about two-thirds of the total. And the buildings are still standing, which is amazing -- even with all those columns missing, the gravity loads have found alternate pathways. O.K., but you've got fires -- jet-fueled fires, which the building is not designed for, and you've also got lots of paper in there. Now, paper cooks. A paper fire is like a coal-mine fire, it keeps burning as long as oxygen gets to it. And you're high in the building, up in the wind, plenty of oxygen. So you've got a hot fire. And you've got these floor trusses, made of fairly thin metal, and fire protection has been knocked off most of them by the impact. And you have all this open space -- clear span from perimeter to core -with no columns or partition walls, so the airplane is going to skid right through that space to the core, which doesn't have any reinforced concrete in it, just sheetrock covering steel, and the fire is going to spread everywhere immediately, and no fire-protection systems are working -- the sprinkler heads shorn off by the airplanes, the water pipes in the core are likely cut. So what's going to happen? Floor A is going to fall onto floor B, which falls onto floor C; the unsupported columns will buckle; and the weight of everything above the crash site falls onto what remains below -- bringing loads of two thousand pounds per square foot, plus the force of impact, onto floors designed to bear one hundred pounds per square foot. It has to fall." (The New Yorker, November 19, 2001)
Naturally, the pancake theory was original neither to Loizeaux nor to FEMA. The pancake theory had been advanced by "Osama Bin Laden" in the remarks attributed to him, allegedly made in mid- November 2001, and widely publicized by the US government in December 2001. Here Bin Laden is alleged to have commented: "We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. (Inaudible) Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for." But there are indications that the stocky figure shown on the tape may not be the supposedly ascetic Bin Laden at all, but a double or ham actor. (Meyssan 2002 192)
REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM: WTC 7
In the May House Science Committee W. Gene Corley, the American Society of Civil Engineers representative on the BPAT, conceded that "Building 7, which was across the street from the main towers, also collapsed and provided us with the first example that we recognized of a building collapsing as a result of fire." (House May 30) WTC 7 presents the image of a classical controlled demolition. Whereas the twin towers are seen to explode, WTC 7 implodes -- it falls in upon itself with none of the spectacular mushroom plumes of smoke and powder which had marked the demise of the larger twin towers. The foundations collapse before the facade, the middle of the building collapses before the outer walls, and streamers of smoke are emitted from the facade. WTC 7 did imitate the twin towers by collapsing almost exclusively upon its own foundations. WTC 7 contained electrical generators and a supply for diesel fuel to operate these, and apologists of the official version like Gerald Posner have seized on this circumstance to make the collapse of this building plausible. But there has been no sign of raging diesel fuel fires, as can be seen from the photos of the fall of WTC 7, so the apologists are grasping at straws.
The owner of the WTC complex was Larry Silverstein, who recounted the fall of WTC 7 in the September 2002 PBS documentary, America Rebuilds, complete with this astounding revelation: "I remember getting a call from the ... fire department commander , telling me that they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'we've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing is to pull it. And they made the decision to pull and we watched the building collapse." "To pull" would appear to be the jargon term in controlled demolition circles for the deliberate detonation of charges leading to the destruction of a building. And if WTC 7 was pulled, why not WTC 1 and 2? (Marrs 43)
ANOMALIES OF THE WTC COLLAPSE
The twin towers did not simply collapse as a result of gravity; they were violently pulverized in mid-air in an explosive process which hurled debris hundreds of meters in all directions -they were vaporized by an explosive force. Anomalies abound. The North Tower was hit first, was hit hardest in its core columns, and had more jet fuel burn inside its structure than the South Tower -- but the North Tower exploded later. The South Tower was hit later, with a more glancing blow which had less impact on its core columns, and which also caused more jet fuel to be consumed outside of the building in a spectacular plume; the South Tower's fires were less severe -but the South Tower fell first. WTC 7 was never hit by anything, and had fires only on two floors (there are no photos of WTC 7 enveloped in flames and smoke) -- but WTC 7 fell anyway. WTC 6 witnessed an explosion and fire which has never been explained or even addressed. Finally, we have the embarrassing fact that steel frame skyscrapers are virtually indestructible by fire. The official version of events argues that, at least as far as the towers are concerned, it was the combined effect of crash impact plus fire which caused the collapses. But even the South Tower collapsed well after most of the jet fuel had burned away, and a fire based on paper, rugs, and furniture melts steel even less than one based on jet fuel. By all indications, the South Tower began the collapse sequence precisely at the moment when, well after the impact had been absorbed, the fires too were subsiding. The hole made in the North Tower by American 11 had cooled so much that, just before the collapse of the North Tower, survivors were observed looking out through the gash in the side of the building. (Marr 41)
The upper floors of both towers, after showing symptoms of high pressure which forced smoke out through the widows, exploded into spectacular mushroom clouds. Debris and other ejecta were thrown at speeds of 200 feet per second to distances of up to 500 feet in all directions. The clouds then descended, always emanating from the towers as these fell. The mushroom clouds had expanded to two or three times the diameter of the towers after five seconds, and had expanded to five times the diameter of the towers after 15 seconds. Blast waves broke windows in buildings over 400 feet away. In the thick mushroom clouds, solid objects were hurled out ahead of the dust, another telltale sign of explosive demolition.
One might have expected the buildings to tip over at an angle starting at the points where they had been hit like a tree which leaves a stump as it falls towards the side where it has been most chopped, but instead they did not topple and there were no stumps; apart from some initial asymmetry in the top of the South Tower, the two towers both collapsed down on themselves in a perfectly symmetrical way -- a suspicious sign, since this is one of the prime goals and hallmarks of controlled demolition.
The fall of the twin towers took place at breathtaking speed. The tops of the buildings reached the ground as rubble no more than 16 seconds after the collapse process had begun. A weight in a vacuum would have taken 9.2 seconds to cover the same distance. This meant that air resistance and little else had slowed the fall of the upper stories. This indicates that the lower floors must have been demolished and pulverized before the upper stories fell on them. The building, in other words, had been pulverized, and in many areas vaporized, in mid-air. No gravity collapse could have created this phenomenon.
The non-metallic elements of the twin towers, especially the cement slabs which formed the horizontal surface of each floor, were pulverized into a fine dust, with particles of less than 100 microns in diameter. This was the dust which pervaded lower Manhattan as the explosive clouds spread from hundreds of yards in all directions. This dust took a long time to settle, but the Giuliani administration tried to convince office workers in the area that there was no danger. All the steel in the building superstructures was simply shredded. The exceptionally strong central core columns were neatly diced into 10 or 20 floor segments -- something which has never been explained.
According to Jim Hoffman, the leading expert on the collapse of the World Trade Center and the source heavily relied on here, the energy necessary to create the mushroom clouds and expand them to the extraordinary dimensions actually observed to pulverize virtually all the concrete in the towers, and to chop the steel into segments is far greater than the gravitational energy represented by the buildings in the first place. According to Hoffman, there must have been powerful additional energy sources at work. When prodded to do so at recent conferences, Hoffman has been willing to speculate that these energy sources might have been unconventional ones. High energy microwave interferometry using coaxial beams for constructive and destructive interference might be a possibility, but this would require so much energy that, if it had to be delivered as conventional electric current, it would necessitate a cable about half a meter in diameter -- and there is no evidence of this. So the problem remains intractable.
THE TWIN TOWERS WERE ROBUST STRUCTURES
The twin towers were robust structures. The structure of the twin towers was represented first of all by an internal core of 47 steel box columns which measured 36 by 90 centimeters; the steel was thickest near the base, where it attained a thickness of 10 centimeters (about four inches), and tapered gradually down to 6 centimeters on the upper floors. There were 236 exterior columns in the buildings' facades; these were 10 centimeters thick at the base, but only 6 millimeters thick in the highest floors. Each floor was a steel plate into which concrete had been poured. In the center of the building was a reinforced core featuring four steel columns encased in concrete. The structure is abundantly cross-braced, so that stress in one sector could be efficiently shifted to other parts of the structure. All steel columns rested directly on the bedrock under Manhattan. This structures had been designed to withstand 140 mile per hour winds, and had resisted them successfully for more than thirty years. They had been designed by Lee Robertson, the structural engineer who built the towers to absorb the impact of a Boeing 707, an aircraft roughly comparable in size and fuel capacity to the aircraft that appear to have struck the towers on 9/11.
In the case of the twin towers, the technical problem of how to account for the immense quantities of energy released would seem to point to an energy source beyond the capabilities of conventional controlled demolition. For a possible explanation of what kind of energy source could have been at work, we must turn our attention to the realm of new physical principles, and thus to the class of directed energy weapons which are probably most familiar to the general public in connection with President Reagan's SO- called star wars speech of March 23, 1983. We may be dealing here with high energy microwave interferometry using coaxial beams for constructive and destructive interference. The inherent problem with this conjecture, as engineer Ken Jenkins has pointed out, is that such a device would require a power cable half a meter in diameter, and the presence of such a power cable has not been demonstrated. The solution to this problem will indeed require more time and research.