You didn’t see anything about it in the mainstream media, but two weeks ago
at a conference in San Francisco, more than one thousand architects and
engineers signed a petition demanding that Congress begin a new
investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center
skyscrapers on 9/11.
That’s right, these people put their reputations in potential jeopardy –
because they don’t buy the government’s version of events.
They want to know
how 200,000 tons of steel disintegrated and fell to the ground in 11
seconds. They question whether the hijacked planes were responsible – or
whether it could have been a controlled demolition from inside that brought
down the Twin Towers and Building 7.
Richard Gage, a member of the
American Institute of Architects and the
founder of Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth, put it like this:
“The
official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of
Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and
fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction.”
He’s
especially disturbed by Building 7, whose 47 stories came down in “pure
free-fall acceleration” that afternoon – even though it was never hit by an
aircraft.
This is a subject I take up in my new book,
American Conspiracies, published
this week by Skyhorse.
An excerpt follows:
Some people have argued that the twin towers went down, within a half hour
of one another, because of the way they were constructed. Well, those
425,000 cubic yards of concrete and 200,000 tons of steel were designed to
hold up against a Boeing 707, the largest plane built at the time the towers
were completed in 1973.
Analysis had shown that a 707 traveling at 600 miles
an hour (and those had four engines) would not cause major damage. The
twin-engine Boeing 757s that hit on 9/11 were going 440 and 550 miles an
hour.
Still, we are told that a molten, highly intense fuel mixture from the
planes brought down these two steel-framed skyscrapers.
Keep in mind that no
other such skyscraper in history had ever been known to collapse completely
due to fire damage. So could it actually have been the result of a
controlled demolition from inside the buildings? I don’t claim expertise
about this, but I did work four years as part of the Navy’s underwater
demolition teams, where we were trained to blow things to hell and high
water.
And my staff talked at some length with a prominent physicist,
Steven
E. Jones, who says that a “gravity driven collapse” without demolition
charges defies the laws of physics. These buildings fell, at nearly the rate
of free-fall, straight down into their own footprint, in approximately ten
seconds. An object dropped from the roof of the 110-story-tall towers would
reach the ground in about 9.2 seconds.
Then there’s the fact that steel
beams that weighed as much as 200,000 pounds got tossed laterally as far as
500 feet.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) started its
investigation on August 21, 2002. When their 10,000-page-long report came
out three years later, the spokesman said there was no evidence to suggest a
controlled demolition. But Steven E. Jones also says that molten metal found
underground weeks later is proof that jet fuel couldn’t have been all that
was responsible. I visited the site about three weeks after 9/11, with
Governor Pataki and my wife Terry.
It didn’t mean anything to me at the
time, but they had to suspend digging that day because they were running
into heat pockets of huge temperatures. These fires kept burning for more
than three months, the longest-burning structure blaze ever.
And this was
all due to jet fuel? We’re talking molten metal more than 2,000 degrees
Fahrenheit.
Probably the most conclusive evidence about a controlled demolition is a
research paper (two years, nine authors) published in the peer-reviewed Open
Chemical Physics Journal, in April 2009. In studying dust samples from the
site, these scientists found chips of nano-thermite, which is a high-tech
incendiary/explosive.
Here’s what the paper’s lead author, Dr.
Niels Harrit
of the University of Copenhagen’s chemistry department, had to say about the
explosive that he’s convinced brought down the Twin Towers and the nearby
Building 7:
“Thermite itself dates back to 1893. It is a mixture of aluminum and
rust-powder, which react to create intense heat. The reaction produces iron,
heated to 2500 degrees Centigrade. This can be used to do welding. It can
also be used to melt other iron. So in nano-thermite, this powder from 1893
is reduced to tiny particles, perfectly mixed. When these react, the intense
heat develops much more quickly.
Nano-thermite can be mixed with additives
to give off intense heat, or serve as a very effective explosive. It
contains more energy than dynamite, and can be used as rocket fuel.” [i]
Richard Gage is one of hundreds of credentialed architects and structural
engineers who have put their careers on the line to point out the detailed
anomalies and many implications of controlled demolition in the building
collapses.
As he puts it bluntly:
“Once you get to the science, it’s
indisputable.”
