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As I write, 9/11 truth attorneys have appealed a dismissal by a Manhattan judge who, days ago, denied standing to plaintiffs who lost loved ones in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The surviving family members seek to present evidence before a Grand Jury that explosives were used to destroy the World Trade Center.
The 9/11 attorneys and the structural engineers who stand behind them are prepared to prove in court that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the government agency tasked to investigate the collapse of Building Seven (WTC-7), covered up the controlled demolition of the building. Assuming a discovery process happens in a courtroom, anything is possible. The truth may emerge. The question is: will the 9/11 attorneys be granted due process under the US Constitution to introduce the evidence?
Some of this evidence came to light recently during an independent assessment of NIST’s final report on WTC-7 by a team of engineers at the University of Alaska.
While visiting Fairbanks in August 2018, I was fortunate to meet the team’s lead engineer, professor Leroy Hulsey. At that time, the team was nearing completion of its work. As we chatted over coffee, Dr Hulsey explained that his engineers ruled out fire as the cause of the WTC-7 collapse early in their investigation. NIST had argued in its report that building fires on the lower floors weakened a critical column (#79) in the northeastern portion of the building, causing it to fail. This allegedly caused two nearby columns (#80 and #81) to fail, setting in motion a “progressive collapse.”
Hulsey’s team found, however, that NIST misrepresented key structural details of WTC-7, invalidating its fire-induced collapse model.
I asked Dr Hulsey if he had access to the original blueprints. He replied that his team had something better, namely, the actual construction records and diagrams. These tell the full story because contractors do not always follow blueprints exactly during construction. Modifications are common.
When Hulsey’s team incorporated the actual structural details of WTC-7 in a computer model and ran simulations of NIST’s collapse scenario, the building did not collapse. The tower withstood the loss of three major columns due to the steel-frame’s redundant strength. The loads were simply transferred to other columns.
His engineers then ran more simulations, each time subtracting another column until they induced a collapse. However, instead of collapsing in the manner that was observed on 9/11, the building tipped over to the southeast. Numerous videos taken from different angles show that the 47-story steel frame tower dropped straight down into its footprint.
After repeated trials, Hulsey’s team concluded that NIST’s progressive collapse scenario was not feasible. At this point, they began exploring other collapse scenarios in an attempt to duplicate the actual event captured on film. There was only one match: the simultaneous failure of every core column, followed 1.3 seconds later by the simultaneous failure of every perimeter column. The pattern should be recognizable because this is the standard sequence employed in controlled demolitions.
Free Fall
The excellent work done by Hulsey’s team reinforces the case for explosives, which was already compelling by 2008. In August of that year, the public was allowed to comment on NIST’s WTC-7 draft report at an open hearing. A physics teacher named David Chandler took advantage of the occasion and asked probing questions that proved so embarrassing that NIST was compelled to modify the language in its final report, released shortly thereafter. In it NIST concedes that WTC-7 dropped in a free fall acceleration. It was a damning admission because the agency had previously acknowledged that free fall is the signature of a controlled demolition.
As we know, Building Seven housed the CIA, the Department of Defense, major securities traders, and the offices of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where the records of many ongoing SEC investigations into corporate crime were stored, including Enron. All of these records were destroyed on 9/11. The SEC subsequently tabled all of these criminal investigations, which turned out to be very convenient (and profitable) for corporate America.
NIST claims it never found evidence of explosives at the World Trade Center (WTC). The reason, of course, is because the agency never looked, even though this is a standard protocol after large building fires, not to mention the worst terrorist attack in US history.
Independent scientists did look. In 2007, a physicist from Brigham Young University, Dr Steven Jones, reported the discovery of tiny flakes of unexploded thermate in WTC dust samples collected immediately after 9/11.
Thermate differs from its cousin thermite in that it contains elemental sulfur, which has the effect of greatly lowering the melting point of iron. Thermite is composed of iron-oxide and aluminum and is occasionally used in demolition work. Sulfur is sometimes added to speed up the reaction. Jones also found an abundance of tiny iron-rich microspheres in the dust, hard evidence that steel had melted. Other researchers also reported finding microspheres.
The announced discovery of thermate in the WTC dust should have been headline news nation-wide. Yet, there was no mention of it in the New York Times or Washington Post. And the rest of the US media followed their silent “lead.”
Jones continued to study the WTC dust and later co-authored a more detailed paper with Niels Harrit, a Danish chemist, and other scientists. Their peer-reviewed article appeared in an online science journal in 2009. To this day, it has never been rebutted.
The authors identified the constituents of the tiny flakes and found them to be thermitic in nature. The grains of iron-oxide were extremely small, roughly 100 nanometers across, indicating the use of the more explosive form of thermite known as nano-thermite or super-thermite. When the authors ignited the flakes, they found they were more energetic than conventional explosives. These reactions also produced iron-rich microspheres like those found in the WTC dust.
Nano-thermite was developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was available by April 2000, seventeen months before 9/11.
But nano-thermite and thermate were probably not the only explosives used to bring down the towers. The box columns that supported World Trade Center One and Two were seven inches thick at the base (as reported by NIST). And many of these massive core columns had been severed at or near ground level. In the years after 9/11, a debate raged within the 9/11 truth community about what kind of additional explosives had been used. Many believed thermate/thermite could not reliably have done the job on the gigantic columns.
The powerful blasts that destroyed the core columns just before each tower fell shook Manhattan. The explosions caused a cloud of dust to rise from street level; this was captured on film. And the stupendous noise of the explosions was heard and felt by many thousands of New Yorkers (and recorded) at least as far away as Hoboken, on the west shore of the Hudson River. Yet, all of the eyewitness accounts were dismissed as the wild ravings of conspiracy kooks.
These tremendous explosions no doubt also help to explain the large quantities of molten steel found beneath the WTC ruin. The heat must have been incredible, because, in the days after the attacks, New York City fire fighters pumped millions of gallons of water onto the smoking piles, to no effect. Dogs brought in by first responders to help locate survivors in the wreckage suffered serious burns, and some of the dogs died. Workers on site said their rubber boots melted. Clean up crews were still reporting molten steel as late as February 2002.
Building fires and burning jet fuel cannot explain the iron microspheres and molten steel. Not even close.
An air quality study produced additional evidence. After the attacks, a University of California (Davis) physicist, Dr Thomas Cahill, brought a team to New York and set up air monitoring stations across lower Manhattan. Cahill’s team documented the most toxic air he had ever seen over the course of his long career. In his write up Cahill mentions an anomaly he could not explain: an abundance of nano-sized particles spewing from the WTC ruin. Ordinary building fires do not produce large quantities of nano particulates, which are evidence of extreme temperatures.
After analyzing the data, Cahill issued a dire health warning. Nano particles of glass, chemicals and heavy metals easily infiltrate the human body. They damage the heart and other organs, and even cross the blood brain barrier. Cahill predicted a continuing health crisis for local residents and for clean-up workers, many of whom did not wear protective masks because they were told the air was safe to breathe. In subsequent years, thousands of first responders, firemen, and construction workers suffered life threatening leukemias, other cancers, as well as ischemic heart and lung disease. Many more Americans died as a result of the toxic fumes than perished in the attacks.
Although the evidence I have summarized is legally conclusive, I am in contact with a physicist who has gone even further. He has attempted to arrange for materials scientists to conduct radio-isotopic studies of WTC steel samples. Unfortunately, so far, none of the labs in Europe or Japan have agreed to run the definitive tests, probably because they were warned off by US officials.
Stay tuned. 9/11 attorneys intend to pursue this historic case all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. In the coming days, Americans will learn if the US judicial system is capable of delivering justice to the families of the victims. Only the truth about the 9/11 attacks can heal our nation.
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Mark H. Gaffney is the author of two books about the September 11, 2001 attacks: The 9/11 Mystery Plane (2008) and Black 9/11 (2nd edition, 2016). Mark can be reached for comment at [email protected]
