Challenging The Official WTC Explanation

Former high-level officials challenge the conventional explanation of how and why the Twin Towers came down

By Richard Clark
November 3, 2007 at 06:58:31
OpEdNews

A 2,000 word article, Seven CIA Veterans Challenge 9/11 Commission Report, appeared September 23, 2007 in OpEdNews. (Link provided below.) The article details severe criticism of the 9/11 Commission Report by seven CIA veterans and calls for a new investigation. Here follows a brief quote or two from several of the individuals whose testimony is included in the article:

Ray McGovern, former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council and 27-year CIA veteran: "The 9/11 Report is a joke." “It has long been clear that the Bush-Cheney administration cynically exploited the attacks of 9/11 to promote its imperial designs. . . (And there is) evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited.”

William Christison, former National Intelligence Officer (NIO) and former Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political, and 29-year CIA veteran: "We very seriously need an entirely new, very high level, and truly independent investigation of the events of 9/11. I think you almost have to look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a joke and not a serious piece of analysis at all." “The North and South Towers of the World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth because hijacked aircraft hit them.”

Robert Baer, 21-year CIA veteran and specialist in the Middle East, was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal upon his retirement in 1997. During an interview by Thom Hartmann, Baer, after commenting on the financial profits being made from 9/11, was asked:

“What about political profit? There are those who suggest that someone in (the U.S.) chain of command had pretty good knowledge that 9/11 was going to happen -- and really didn't do much to stop it -- or even obstructed efforts to stop it because they thought it would lend legitimacy to Bush's failing presidency.”

Baer replied: “Absolutely.”

Hartmann then asked, “So you are personally of the opinion that there was an aspect of 'inside job' to 9/11 within the U.S. government?"

To which Baer replied, "There is that possibility, the evidence points at it."

When Hartmann continued, "And why is this not being investigated?”

Baer replied, "Why isn't the WMD story being investigated? Why hasn't anybody been held accountable for 9/11? We held people accountable after Pearl Harbor. Why has there been no change in command? Why have there been no political repercussions? Why has there been not been any sort of exposure on all this? It really makes you wonder."

Robert David Steele has 25 years of combined service in the CIA and the U.S. Marine Corps. Second ranking civilian in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988 - 1992. Member of the Adjunct Faculty of Marine Corps University.

His comment: "I am forced to conclude that 9/11 was at a minimum allowed to happen as a pretext for war. "I'm absolutely certain that WTC 7 was brought down by controlled demolition. There's no way that building could have come down without controlled demolition."

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/print_friendly.php?p=genera_alan_mil_070922_seven_cia_veterans_c.htm

Additional statements questioning the official account of 9/11, and calls for a new investigation, by hundreds of high-level military officers (now retired) and other highly-credible individuals, can be found at http://patriotsquestion911.com/

Here’s some of the evidence that prompts them to call for a new investigation:

20-ton sections of steel beams were propelled, laterally, for a distance of up to 400 feet where they lodged in the sides of nearby buildings. (See video footage of this at http://www.ae911truth.org/.

Molten metal was seen (and videotaped) gushing out the side of one of the twin towers. (Jet fuel, rugs and office furniture & equipment burn at a temperature that is much much lower than the temperature it takes to liquefy steel. What can liquefy steel? Thermate, and incendiary compound that burns at 4500 degrees F., which would have had to have been surreptitiously planted at many strategic locations.)

Various explosions (some quite powerful) were seen, heard and felt by hundreds of people, including many firemen and policemen, prior to the collapse of the twin towers, but occurred well after the airliners collided with the buildings.

Huge numbers of extremely tiny iron spherules (formed when steel or iron vaporizes at extremely high temperatures) can be found in most of the 9/11 dust samples. (Why is this significant? Jet fuel burns at 1800 degrees Fahrenheit while office furniture, rugs and computers burn at an even lower temperature. Iron and steel don’t vaporize until their temperature gets close to 4000 degrees F. So what does burn at a temperature capable of vaporizing steel? Incendiary compounds known as thermate and thermite, which burn at 4500 degrees F. See more about this later in this article.)

Many column sections seen in the wreckage of the twin towers were cut at 45-degree angles, and have, close to the cut lines, lots of previously-melted 'drippings' produced when the steel was melted at a temperature much higher than can be produced by an acetylene torch. Besides, no worker cutting up columns with an acetylene torch is going to make the cut at a 45-degree angle; he's going to cut straight across the beam, at an angle that is 90-degrees from the centerline of the length of the beam.

Why? Because it is a shorter distance, and that means less work.

Source for the above information is http://www.ae911truth.org/, which is the web site of an investigative organization whose 200+ members are all either professional architects or professional engineers.

If there were no high-powered explosives detonated inside the twin towers, as the official explanation contends, then defenders of that official explanation must provide us with an alternate theory as to how those column and/or beam sections got embedded in the sides of buildings that were 400 feet away.

(The compressed air created by floors collapsing one upon the other could provide nowhere near the force required to propel a 20-ton beam or column section that far.)

In addition, defenders of the official explanation must provide us with a plausible fuel source for the temperatures approaching 4000 degrees F. which would have been necessary to vaporize parts of many of the steel beam remnants found in the wreckage.

The evidence for incendiary cutting of steel consists of the video evidence, the forensic evidence in the dust and rubble, and the testimony of eyewitness early responders and survivors who saw glowing molten metal flowing out of window openings.

These incendiary events and the forensic evidence strongly suggest that the official story is wrong.

The chemistry of the iron-aluminum-rich microspheres that are found in the dust from the rubble, the chemical content of these microspheres suggest that the official story is wrong.
http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/200704/JLobdillThermiteChemistryWTC

So when could the explosives and incendiary materials have been planted?

The official record shows that various floors of each of the twin towers were completely closed off 'for repairs,' for days at a time. Monitoring TV cameras on these floors were disconnected. http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2005/11/how-could-they-plant-bombs-in-world.html.

Owner Larry Silverstein was perhaps in on the deal. Why suspect this? Well, for one thing he received a fabulous insurance settlement, after purchasing the WTC complex under very unusual circumstances. http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/silverstein.html.

The terrorist attack on the twin towers saved him the immense expense of having the towers demolished in the conventional way.

(The towers had many structural problems. Two applications to have the buildings demolished were submitted by the previous owners because of the advanced galvanic corrosion that was taking place at each of the thousands of joints where aluminum parts were mistakenly put in tight contact with steel structural members.)
http://redlineav.com/tsg.deposition.contd.2.html

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that explosives and incendiary compounds might have been planted at strategic locations within the Twin Towers.

For example:

Bomb-sniffing dogs were inexplicably prevented from doing their job in the Twin Towers five days before 9-11

Various floors in the Twin Towers had been evacuated a number of times in the weeks preceding 9/11

There was a ‘power-down’ in parts of the Twin Towers on the weekend before 9/11, security cameras were shut down, and many workers ran around busily doing things unobserved.

And, as an interesting coincidence, a Bush-linked company ran security at the trade center, thus giving it free reign within the buildings.
http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2005/11/how-could-they-plant-bombs-in-world.html

In addition to these facts, demolition-and-building-collapse experts have raised the possibility of "explosive tenants" -- i.e. tenants in the Twin Towers who might have planted explosives in their own rented office spaces. http://911blogger.com/node/2487

Obviously none of this is PROOF of anything. All it does is show what the possibilities are, so that in combination with all the other circumstantial evidence that explosives may well have been planted, a completely independent investigation is warranted.

And how could we rule out another investigation after we absorb the testimony of hundreds of very credible witnesses such as these:

“[T]here was just an explosion [in the south tower]. It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.”-- Firefighter Richard Banaciski

“I saw a flash flash flash [at] the lower level of the building. You know like when they demolish a building?”--Assistant Fire Commissioner Stephen Gregory

“[I]t was [like a] professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear 'Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop'."-- Paramedic Daniel Rivera

____________________________________________________________________
The above quotations come from a collection of 9/11 oral histories that, although recorded by the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) at the end of 2001, were publicly released only on August 12, 2005.

Prior to that date, very few Americans knew the content of these accounts or even the fact that they existed.

Why have we not known about them until recently? Part of the answer is that the city of New York would not release them until it was forced to do so. Early in 2002, the New York Times requested copies under the freedom of information act, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration refused. So the Times, joined by several families of 9/11 victims, filed suit. After a long process, the city was finally ordered by the New York Court of Appeals to release the records (with some exceptions and redactions allowed). Included were oral histories, in interview form, provided by 503 firefighters and medical workers. (Emergency Medical Services had become a division within the Fire Department.) The Times then made these oral histories publicly available.

Once the content of these testimonies is examined, it is easy to see why persons concerned to protect the official story about 9/11 would try to keep them hidden. By suggesting that explosions were occurring in the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, they pose a challenge to the official account of 9/11, according to which the towers were caused to collapse solely by the impact of the airplanes and the resulting fires.
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060118104223192

More from that site:

There were many reports about an explosion in the basement of the north tower.

For example, janitor William Rodriguez reported that he and others felt an explosion below the first sub-level office at 9 AM, after which co-worker Felipe David, who had been in front of a nearby freight elevator, came into the office with severe burns on his face and arms, yelling "Explosion! explosion! explosion!"

Rodriguez's account has been corroborated by Jose Sanchez, who was in the workshop on the fourth sub-level. Sanchez said that he and a co- worker heard a big blast that "sounded like a bomb," after which "a huge ball of fire went through the freight elevator."

Engineer Mike Pecoraro, who was working in the sixth sub-basement of the north tower, said that after an explosion he and a co-worker went up to the C level, where there was a small machine shop. "There was nothing there but rubble," said Pecoraro. They then went to the parking garage, but found that it was also gone. Then on the B level, they found that a steel-and-concrete fire door, which weighed about 300 pounds, was wrinkled up "like a piece of aluminum foil." Having seen similar things after the terrorist attack in 1993, Pecoraro was convinced that a bomb had gone off.

Given these testimonies to explosions in the basement levels of the towers, it is interesting that Mark Loizeaux, head of Controlled Demolition, Inc., has been quoted as saying: "If I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure."

Multiple Explosions

In June of 2002, NBC television played segments from tapes recorded on 9/11. One segment contained the following exchange, which involved firefighters in the south tower:

Official: “Battalion 3 to dispatch, we've just had another explosion.”

Official: “Battalion 3 to dispatch, we've had additional explosion.”

Dispatcher: “Received battalion command. Additional explosion.”

So the question arises: Why these oral histories kept from the public for four years?

Also: How can they be reconciled with the “official conspiracy theory” put forward by the Bush administration?

And why do the mainstream mass media continues to marginalize the testimony of these eyewitnesses?

In conclusion and summary, the trick of this Administration and the corporate media in general, appears to have been to swing public opinion as fast and furiously as possible through a blitz of emotion -- until a majority opinion had been reached, thereby allowing human reason and reflection no time to evaluate findings like these:

* Steel supports were "partly vaporized," which would require a temperature near 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit to accomplish — and neither office materials nor jet fuel can generate temperatures anywhere near that hot -- all of them burn at temps below 1600 degrees F. Fires caused by jet fuel from the hijacked planes lasted at most a few minutes, and office material fires would burn out within about 20 minutes in any given location. (Indeed, at one point firemen reported that fires were nearly out.)

* Molten metal found in the debris of the World Trade Center may well have been the result of the high-temperature reactions of a commonly used incendiary such as thermite (which burns at 4500 degrees Fahrenheit).

* Multiple loud explosions in rapid sequence were reported by numerous observers who were in and near the towers, and these explosions occurred far below the region where the planes struck. So what caused these extremely powerful explosions (if not planted explosives)?

Finally, why won't BushCo release 6,899 photographs and 6,977 segments of video footage for "independent scrutiny? Why won't they release, for independent analysis, a small sample of the once-molten metal found at Ground Zero? (Could it be that chemical traces of an incendiary compound like thermite would be found in any such sample?)
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635160132,00.html

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Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've always been more interested in political economics and what's going on behind the scenes in politics, than in mechanical engineering, and because of that I've rarely worked more than 6 months a year, devoting much of the rest of the year to reading and writing about that which interests me most.

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