By Josef Hanji
Copenhagen, Denmark — March 14, 2015
In an article titled “Madness in the Royal Library” published in the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen on December 7, 2012, journalist Søren Villemoes accused esteemed chemist Dr. Niels Harrit of being a “crackpot” for daring to conclude that the destruction of three World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, was a controlled demolition.
Harrit, a 40-year professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen and co-author of a scientific paper on the nano-thermite found in dust samples taken from Ground Zero, filed a libel lawsuit against both the newspaper’s editor, Anne Knudsen, and the offending journalist. After he lost his case in City Court on August 16, 2013, he appealed to the Danish High Court.
The High Court set a court date of March 12, 2015, for the case to be tried. Last month, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth informed Harrit’s supporters of the impending appeal and helped raise funds from those supporters to pay his legal expenses.
Below, we will describe how Dr. Harrit’s appeal fared.
The High Court session had it all — persuasive forensic evidence, courtroom drama, and the strong voice of a reputable scientist who expertly defended the basic laws of physics as well as the evidence of nano-thermite in the WTC dust. Though the verdict will not be known until April 9, it is clear to this observer that Dr. Harrit did an excellent job, not only solidifying his integrity and expertise in the eyes of the public, but also advancing the cause of the 9/11 Truth Movement in the process.
Though the High Court case was to convene at 9:30 AM, the court room was already 80% full by 9:00 AM. The 16 seats on the court benches quickly became 20 as people moved closer together. Four more chairs were brought in, but after they, too, were quickly occupied, other would-be onlookers were turned away. By the time the three judges entered the court room, it was filled to capacity.
The trial started with Dr. Harrit, who represented himself, asking the court to indulge him as he reviewed the City Court trial and verdict. He also requested the judges’ guidance in case he made any mistakes during the proceedings. In fact, the legal counsel he had received in advance from Danish attorney Mads Krøger Pramming, chairman of the Danish whistleblower organization Veron, made Harrit’s presentation mistake-free. This observer got the impression that, had he not chosen to study and teach chemistry, Dr. Harrit would have made a formidable lawyer.
On display was not only the intellect of a professor who inspires students but the prowess of a music and theater performer who impresses audiences — the latter talent developed in Harrit’s after-hours during many of his 70 years. Combining his classroom and stage skills, he proved himself a masterful speaker as he read the “Madness in the Royal Library” article aloud to the judges.
In it, Villemoes had written about a 2012 art exhibition at the Royal Library of Denmark that portrayed “The Armenian Genocide.” Calling it “madness” for the library’s director to have allowed the Turkish government to also tell its side of the genocide story, Villemoes went on to cite other examples of “madness”: the beliefs of creationists, Holocaust deniers, and 9/11 skeptics such as Dr. Harrit. Indeed, while Dr. Harrit’s reading was as compelling as listening to a great musician performing, it was his sincerity that caught everyone’s attention.
Finally, it was time for Dr. Harrit to present the first piece of new evidence. He projected a video of World Trade Center Building 7’s collapse onto the wall of the High Court. As the video played the 6.5-second collapse of the 600-foot, 47-story building over and over, the professor described what was happening, and in so doing showed himself to be a logical scientist who naturally had questions about a phenomenon that was identical in appearance to a controlled demolition. From the expression on one judge’s face — a look of disbelief that 9/11 skeptics know quite well — it was obvious he had never before seen the video. Whether the other two judges had watched the collapse of WTC 7 before is hard to say; their faces were inscrutable. Making the judges watch WTC 7 fall again and again was what Dr. Harrit later called his biggest achievement of the day.
Dr. Harrit also presented various documents he had submitted as attachments to the case, including the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition (currently signed by 2,332 credentialed architects and engineers and 20,100 other supporters), the 2009 nano-thermite report he co-wrote with a team of scientists (“Active Thermitic Material Found In The Dust From The 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”), the AE911Truth-sponsored polls taken by professional pollsters in the USA and Canada (in both countries, roughly half of those surveyed believed, after being shown the collapse of WTC 7, that it either definitely was or most likely was a controlled demolition).
Next, the plaintiff quoted from the 2005 report published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which purportedly explained the collapse of The Twin Towers. He homed in on what he considers to be the most important footnote written since WWII — namely, footnote 13 on page 82.
First Dr. Harrit read it to the judges in English:
The focus of the investigation was the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower. For brevity in this report, this sequence is referred to as the “probable collapse sequence,” although it does not actually include the structural behavior of the towers after conditions for the collapse initiation were reached and collapse became inevitable.
Then he translated it into Danish. He went on to explain that the footnote was a prime example of “academic terror” in the NIST report. That is, not even a reader trained in physics and familiar with physics reports would be able to understand what this footnote said when reading it for the first time. The professor’s point was proved when the judge in charge of keeping the court protocols asked Dr. Harrit to translate the last sentence again.
Dr. Harrit pointed out that between the lines in this footnote NIST was actually admitting that there is no public theory on how the North Tower and South Tower were destroyed, nor is there an explanation of the collapse sequence, as the report stops at the moment the towers were about to go down. Upon hearing this explanation, the accused Søren Villemoes raised his eyebrows in seeming surprise and leaned back in his chair.
The day of 9/11 Truth evidence schooling for Villemoes and the judges had hardly begun. The plaintiff proceeded with the next bit of evidence: A screenshot from a Facebook update Villemoes had written the day after the City Court trial in 2013 showed him admitting that he had not been fair to Dr. Harrit.
After Dr. Harrit had presented his case to the High Court, it was time for the four witnesses to take the stand, one by one.
A young lawyer representing Villemoes (substituting for lawyer Søren Juul, who had handled the case in City Court) rose from his chair and started speaking. Acting nervous and seeming unprepared, he started asking Niels Harrit questions in a barely audible voice. He tried to make a case to the court that Dr. Harrit was saying the United States itself was behind the 9/11 attacks. To that charge, Harrit replied that he was a natural scientist and that he has conducted science-based presentations on the collapse of WTC 7 more than 230 times without ever pointing fingers at any suspects. “I believe in the rule of law,” Dr. Harrit said, “and there has never been any a legal investigation of 9/11 in court, making it impossible for a person like me, who believes in the law, to name anyone who should have committed the crime.”
Villemoes then took the stand. Harrit first asked the journalist about the 2013 Facebook comment he had made about not having treated the chemist with fairness. Villemoes answered that he had felt pity on Dr. Harrit after the City Court case. Next, Harrit brought up a statement Villemoes had made in City Court, in which he claimed to have seen Harrit’s lecture about WTC 7 but couldn’t remember where he had seen it. Villemoes answered that he now recalled the lecture had been on the Danish island of Bornholm. Harrit pointed out that he had given that lecture in June 2013, just two months before the City Court date. He remarked how odd it was that Villamoes couldn’t remember (in City Court) where he had seen it two months earlier but could now remember it (in High Court) one and a half years later. “For how long did you watch my lecture?” Dr. Harrit then asked. Villemoes replied that he had seen only five minutes of the 2½-hour long lecture — an answer that revealed his factual basis for criticizing Dr. Harrit to be exceedingly weak.
In City Court, Villemoes had claimed that the WTC dust in the nano-thermite report could have been unauthentic. That charge gave Dr. Harrit a reason to submit the WTC dust as evidence to the High Court. In so doing, Dr. Harrit verified the authenticity of his dust samples by pointing to two photographs on page 24 in the nano-thermite report, which showed the same kind of iron microspheres found in the dust by RJ Lee Group in 2003 and by the US Geological Survey in 2005. He then held before Villemoes a plastic bag with his own sample of WTC dust, dragging a strong magnet along the side of the plastic, trying to make a little rim of black particles gather near the edges of the magnet. On the first attempt, Villemoes failed to see the black rim. But on the second try, he said he could see it, and Dr. Harrit told him that, since we all know that magnets attract iron, this was the iron microspheres being separated from the dust particles not containing iron. This was proof that a thermitic reaction had taken place on 9/11, Dr. Harrit told Villemoes.
After a short break, the court reassembled to carry on with the two last witnesses. One witness was architectJan Utzon, who had worked on recent projects for the Sydney Opera House in Australia, which his father Jørn had designed nearly 50 years earlier. The other witness was a former colleague of Dr. Harrit, Per Hedegaard, who taught physics at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Utzon had already taken the stand as a witness in City Court, where he represented AE911Truth and its signatories. Dr. Hedegaard was a new witness who purportedly had changed his position from being against the theories presented by Dr. Harrit to admitting that the official explanation of what happened to WTC 7 was in violation of Newton’s laws of physics.
Jan Utzon reiterated the testimony he had already given at City Court, telling the judges that no steel-framed high-rise has ever collapsed due to fire and that he had no doubts about the collapse of WTC 7 being a controlled demolition.
When Per Hedegaard finally entered the court room, he looked nervous and confused. Asked specific questions by Dr. Harrit, he was unable to give direct answers. For example, even though the looping video of the collapse of WTC 7 was shown a second time during the testimony of Utzon and a third time when he took the stand, Dr. Hedegaard said he could not see any violation of physical laws. While agreeing that the collapse of WTC 7 looked close to free-fall acceleration, he noted that it was too complicated for him to say for sure.
“But what does it mean when a building is falling 9.8 metres per second squared, Per?” Harrit asked. The professor of physics said he did not know. “This means the building is in free fall, Per,” Harrit elaborated. “And when a building is in free fall, is there then energy left to destroy the supporting structure?” Hedegaard’s answer was confusing. He talked about how energy moved faster than free-fall and suggested that WTC 7 could have fallen even faster than free-fall.
“But Per, you told me you had looked at the data, and that you supported it,” Harrit responded. Again, Hedegaard gave a confusing answer. The judge in charge of court protocols asked the witness what data it was that he actually supported. “Only the report,” he replied, referring to the nano-thermite report. “I read some of it, and it looked good.”
Hedegaard had earlier calculated, on his own, that at least 60 tons of thermite would have been needed to take down the Twin Towers, and on that basis he found it difficult to believe that controlled demolition had been used to level those two buildings.
Though Hedegaard did say he found the nano-thermite report “good,” his other answers were clearly not what Harrit had been expecting. An obviously disappointed Harrit told the judges he had no more questions for the witness.
Villemoes’ lawyer asked Hedegaard if he could support statements he had made about Harrit quoted in an article used in City Court — statements substantiating that Dr. Harrit was a “crackpot”. Hedegaard replied that he still agreed with his statements in the article, in which he had called Harrit’s theories “nuts.” That became the final answer from the last witness of the day.
After a lunch break, the High Court reconvened and gave both Niels Harrit and the lawyer for the accused Villemoes each 30 minutes to give their final statement, called a procedure.
Those who had seen the outstanding procedure Harrit gave in City Court 1 ½ years earlier now witnessed a procedure that was even more brilliant, displaying the skills of a top-drawer attorney. He named paragraph 267of the Danish Criminal Code and Article 10, Sections 1 and 2, of the European Human Rights Convention, pointing out that should Villemoes be found not guilty, then the Danish criminal code is obsolete. All other libel cases tried in Danish courts, he said, have been decided based upon the occurrence of a factual basis for the utterance. Yet in this case, Harrit declared, “We have seen no facts from Villemoes showing any kind of factual basis for his claims. And this is why the court must find him guilty in libel, according to the law.”
Harrit referred to the historical court case against Galileo Galilei in 1633, where the accused was brought in front of the inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church and tortured until he renounced his belief that the earth rotated around the sun and acknowledged that the earth was the center of the universe.
When he concluded his procedure, there was no doubt that Dr. Harrit had made an impact upon the High Court. The three judges looked as if they approved the legal points he made, and both Villemoes and his lawyer appeared a bit shaken.
Villemoes’ lawyer, in his procedure, said there was no reason to put forward a factual basis for the statements his client made in the article, as it could be read in all the official 9/11 reports. His statement seemed weak compared to all the evidence brought forward during the day — evidence showing that it is more than reasonable to question the official 9/11 story about Osama bin Laden and the 19 alleged hijackers who, armed with box cutters, managed to carry out a highly coordinated attack on the world’s most advanced military power.
The judgment from the three High Court judges runs for four weeks from the court date, meaning the verdict will be announced on April 9, 2015, at 10 AM Denmark time. Coincidentally, this date is precisely 75 years after the 1940 German occupation of Denmark during WWII. On April 9, 2015, we will see whether the system of justice in Denmark protects the free speech of the common man or continues the deception that has plunged the world into an endless “War on Terror.” Hopefully, we will one day look back on this date as the occasion when the Danish High Court acknowledged that skepticism about the official story of 9/11 is a legitimate way of thinking and ordered that it be protected within the Danish laws of free speech.
Less than an hour after the trial ended, Dr. Harrit did this interview with www.911truth.dk, in which he gives his view of the High Court meeting.
Besides listening to that interview, you can visit Niels Harrit’s Facebook page, which details his contributions to the 9/11 Truth Movement.
Support from all over the world for this High Court case has been overwhelming to both Dr. Harrit and the 9/11 activists who helped raise awareness for this historical event. Thank you to all who have followed and supported his case. May justice be served.
