Itomas HKean

CHAIR
Date:
«e H. Hamilton
VICE CHAIR.

jchaid Ben- Veniste

TO: TEAM
tadeland

'red F.Fielding
FROM: Dianna Campagna

unie S. Gorelick

bde Gorton The attached correspondence from

i\m T /^hrnan
is being forwarded to you for i and consideration. A copy has
imothyj. Roemer
also been sent to Te for their information. If you
ones R. Thompson
have any questions, please call me on 331-4082. Thank you.
hilip D. ZelilsDw
XECUT1VE DIRECTOR

TEL (202) 331-4060

FAX (202) 296-5545
www.9-1 lcommission.gov
 9/11 Personal Privacy

James R. Hanson !

February 11, 2004

Thomas H. Kean, Chairman

Lee H. Hamilton, Co-Chairman
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
Upon the United States
301 7th Street J8W
Washington, DC 20407

Gentlemen:

The enclosed report brings to attention an aspect of the 9/11

attack that has gone almost unnoticed, but which is in fact a
central element in the atmosphere of deception which has
accompanied that event. Many more people were involved in that
episode than the 19 hijackers. Who were they?
Watching Aaron Brown's interview with Governor Kean last week I was
in a sense reassured, yet left with a feeling that his remarks did
not match the scope of facts which many of us feel should come out.
You said, Governor Kean, that the Commission will make
recommendations to make the American people safer, "And if we do
that well, that could even be more important than the part of the
report that tells the authoritative story."
I find this puzzling. The American people are as safe as we need
to be if the present system is simply followed with honesty and
diligence; our feeling of safety would come from knowing that our
government is not our enemy, something we cannot tell from its
flagrantly secretive nature. Thus "authoritative" is the key word
—something that the Warren Commission report was not, because it
was a lie prepared to calm (a word for manipulate) the American
people. If we have a deep-seated problem of falsehood in our
federal government, it should be revealed even if it does not
promote safety. Government agencies with integrity promote the
kind of safety we desire.

I offer the enclosed report as a service to you and the other

members of the commission so that your report will not be one
scoffed at because of major unanswered questions that undermine
your credibility. I note (as in my report) that the National
Institute on Standards and Technology will not have its technical
work done until June 30, nor its draft report until September 30,
after your work presumably is finished. The NIST findings will be
critical to determine why the buildings fell, not just for safety
reasons, but to know whether their fall was devised other than by
the aerial attack. If we have traitors in our midst, is this not
an important part of the "full and complete account of the
circumstances surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks" as per your
charter?" If the NIST comes to the conclusion that there is no way
Building 7 could have fallen without human involvement other than
the attacks on the towers, and that a law enforcement agency or
agencies should investigate because of the implication, at the very
least, of arson, and your work is "finished," from the point of
view of historic importance your report will be relegated to the
"better government" file, of note only as an example of the
weakness of government commissions.
The Warren Commission had the charter of determining who did the
deed, but ducked it. If your commission does not include anything
on the potential arsonists, how can your report be complete?
I have been impressed by Kristen Breitweiser, who speaks for the
New Jersey widows of 9/11, whom I have seen on television. Her
comment on the Commission's work that appeared in a Washington Post
article last month, after meeting with "several commission leaders"
was "We've had it. It is such a slap in the face of the families
of the victims. They are dishonoring the dead with their
irresponsible behavior." I tend to take her seriously.
Another widow, Mrs. Ellen Mariani, filed suit against the President
and others in November for acts committed in "covering up" events
of 9/11.
I have the sinking feeling that Mrs. Breitweiser's disgust at the
conflict of interest of your executive director, Mr. Zelikow, is
because she knows more than I do about the line of communication
through him to Condoleeza Rice and the ungodly assemblage currently
befouling the White House.
Mrs. Mariani is calling for an independent investigation of 9 / 1 1 .
I had thought that was you. No?

Yours truly,

Encl.
 '9/11 P e r s o n a l P r i v a c y

James R. Hanson

We still don't know what happened on 9;/11

Twin towers, immense columns pridefully thrusting into the sky, the
symbols of economic strength and vitality of the United States of
America and of its largest city, are each struck\y a hijacked
commercial airliner carrying unwitting passengers to their deaths.
Shortly, incredibly, to the absolute amazement i o f everyone,
structural engineers especially, the towers collapse into rubble.
Can we believe our eyes? Lost in the rubble which has turned
virtually to powder are the bodies of almost three thousand
Americans. Struck by debris from the towers, the lower buildings
that surround the towers are broken, set afire by; the falling
debris from the towers, and destroyed. \t apart from the group of

is a seventh building, close enough to be struck by light debris,

but not crushed like the others. However, it is afire,;: burning all
day, until it, too, falls to the ground in a heap. \n another day, this fall

took the headlines. But no one died in this building.; Given the
immense scope of the other destruction that day, its fall seemed of
little moment, an asterisk. \t examined carefully, it

comparable with that of George Orwell's "1984," as one looks more

closely Building 7 comes to resemble the "memory hole" of his
fictional society. What facts, secrets, embarrassing Documents,
damning evidence went to a dark eternity in that collapse, to
become part of the dusty rubble that was carried away and disposed
of, forever lost to human attention? \e attached report—"Th

an assembly of facts and observations to aid the person who wonders

what the fact-finding commissions will come up with, or should come
up with, if their findings are not suppressed. After two and a
half years, a government study has begun which could be the key to
understanding the tragedy of September 1 1 , 2001. \ am a retired attorne

country's course that occurred following this disaster. It is my

hope that we may find the truth, to which this report is dedicated.

James R. Hanson
February 7,2004
THE STRANGE COLLAPSE OF BUILDING SEVEN

Status report: February 7, 2004

James R. Hanson

At 5:20 p.m. on September 1 1 , 2001 the 47-story Building 7 of the

World Trade Center (WTC 7) began its sudden disintegration into a
pile of rubble. The event seemed strange, yet strangely normal for
a day such as that, seven hours after the north tower had done the
same thing in a much more catastrophic and spectacular way, the
second of the two towers struck by large aircraft and set afire
with jet fuel. Thus far, their fall has been attributed partly to
the impact that tore up structural members, leading to failure of
supporting columns when lightweight steel cross-supports lost their
integrity in the heat of the jet fuel fires. Amateur analysts
suggest explosives as the cause; the professionals don't even tip
their hats to that, although given the obsessive secrecy that has
surrounded the event, it seems they should at least consider and
reject it as a possibility, giving their reasons.
All seven buildings in the World Trade Center complex were
destroyed. The lesser buildings near the towers were crushed and
burned. WTC 7, set apart from the others, did not suffer their
damage, but burned and collapsed nonetheless. The New York Times
and other media for months thereafter referred to WTC 7 as having
been felled by burning debris. The Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA), first to make an official report, referred to it in
the same manner, yet in fact said that it did not know what had
caused the fires in WTC 7, nor why it fell.

I have studied the facts available in publications and in the

media, including the internet, and including many photographs, in
an attempt to make sense of the collapse of WTC 7. I am in the
same position as FEMA—I find nothing to indicate how WTC 7 caught
fire, or why it burned the way it did. It has been my conclusion,
however, that burning debris ranks almost as low on a scale of
probability as spontaneous combustion. I am tempted to say it was
impossible, but my distance from the scene requires a degree of
humility.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has the

ball at this point. Its investigations are to "establish the
likely technical causes of the building failures." (NIST Home Page
http://wtc.nist.gov) Technical work is to be completed by June 30
for a draft report due September 30. On February 12 NIST will hold
a public hearing in New York City as part of its information input
for the studies; the next meeting of its Advisory Committee will be
held the last week in April. On January 15 the committee responded
to an article in Engineering News-Record entitled "Research May
Never Pinpoint Sequence of Events on 9 / 1 1 " by letter which stated
in part: "While we recognize that it is possible there may not be
1
a unique collapse sequence, we are not far enough along in our
analyses to make that determination at this time." At the December
2, 2003 Advisory Committee meeting in Gaithersburg, Md. , it was
reported that much of the "heavy lifting" still lay ahead, that
information to investigate the tower collapse was complete, but not
that for WTC 7. (http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/ncstmin_dec2-
3.htm)
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released a report in
May, 2002 anticipating a later thorough investigation such as that
of NIST. The FEMA report is informative, serving as a basic
document. It provides useful facts, questions, and potential
routes toward answers, but with all its detail, it does more to
strengthen doubts concerning the destruction of WTC 7 than to
dispel them. FEMA plans no further study, (http://www.fema.gov/
library/wtcstudy.shtm)
Although NIST has spent a good deal of effort studying the towers'
collapse, its contract for development of structural models and
collapse hypotheses for WTC 7 was not awarded until October 27,
2003. It is WTC Project No. 6, entitled "Development of World
Trade Center Building 7 structural models and collapse hypotheses."
WTC 7 has not been the subject of discussion in the major media for
some time, and of very little in any media.
Because of the initial inconceivability of that day's events, the
towers have been the focus of the principal conspiracy theories,
with which NIST has been deluged. That the WTC 7 collapse has not
been notable is understandable because of the spectacular nature of
the collapse of the towers, and the fact that no one died in WTC 7,
but its neglect is in itself a rather spectacular mystery. It was
said that the failure of the towers was historic because no steel-
structured building had ever fallen due to fire. In the
examinations thus far, the factor of having a large aircraft full
of jet fuel strike the building and demolish a good part of it at
a particular spot has been prominent in attempts to explain why
that collapse occurred. Many or most of those who have looked at
the details believe that the jet fuel, without the huge impact
damage, would not have caused the collapse. Yet the truly historic
event from the standpoint of a steel-structured building being
brought down by fire is the fall of WTC 7. It was not struck by an
aircraft, nor was jet fuel present to cause the kind of fire which
is the suspected ingredient in the towers' collapse. It contained
some 40,000 gallons of diesel fuel to supply emergency electric
generation, which is offered as serving the role that aviation fuel
played in the towers. Reading this, one can picture a holocaust,
but that picture is not accurate. Numerous fires burned gently at
first, growing throughout the day: if from diesel fuel, from a leak
rather than the rupture of a tank.
Damage from tower debris

In its December 2003 progress report, NIST asked for photos or

videos of the south face of WTC 7, to determine how the building
may have been damaged. Their inventory includes 6,100 photographs
and 5,726 video clips. Seeking photographs wherever I could, I
experienced the same frustration. A photograph of the front of the
building taken after the fall of the north tower is a bridge to
other facts, a significant piece of evidence. Was it substantially
damaged, or almost completely intact? Was its photographic
potential so dull that no one thought to shoot it? If smoke
obscured it much of the time, that may be the only picture
available. WTC 6, burning, along with rubble that fell from it,
was creating smoke that was being sucked up the front of WTC 7 as
if it were a chimney, just as were the dust clouds from both tower
collapses which behaved the same way, clearly seen in photographs.

Figure 1-7 in the FEMA report (following page) is a map of the area
overlain with circles to indicate the approximate radius of the
landing of exterior columns and other heavy debris, and an outer,
wider circle indicating the radius that received aluminum cladding
and other light debris. Also indicated are special areas where
debris deposit exceeded its circle. WTC 7 is well outside the
heavy debris circle, but its south face is within the lighter
debris circle; testimony of firemen confirmed that some windows
were broken out in the south face, with some other facial damage,
but no severe damage was reported, such as that to the next-door
Verizon Building. The heaviest of the lighter debris consisted of
lengths of aluminum cladding that covered the exterior supporting
columns. Columns were 36-foot pieces of 14-inch square steel
"boxes" attached to steel panels, three to a panel. In place,
windows filled the spaces between columns. Cladding covered the
columns in pieces which were uniformly about eleven feet long, so
that when the building fell, they broke loose singly. Omnipresent
in photographs, in flight they look like boards, light enough to
have an aerodynamic quality. The steel columns, all with the same
14-inch square exterior, differed in weight and thickness, heavier
from top to bottom, e.g. 101st floor 1/4 inch, 80th floor about 3/4
inch, at the very bottom between 3 and 4 inches. If any "flew,"
they were the higher and lighter ones, although they evidently
still tended to depart attached in groups of three.

Some did fly. Figure 1-7 depicts places in which columns landed
outside the "heavy debris" circle, and even at or beyond the outer
edge of the "lighter debris" circle, one being the front of the
Verizon Building next door west of WTC 7. Neither was within the
cluster of six World Trade Center buildings that circled the Plaza.
Harder hit by north tower debris was the front of buildings in the
World Financial Center across West Street. WFC 2 and WFC 3 were
damaged at the lower level by heavy debris which also reached the
all-glass Winter Garden between them, partly surrounding it.
The "X's" in Figure 1-7 do not necessarily mark single sets, but
may be places where multiple sets fell. In photographs of the area
between WFC 2 and WFC 3 the debris has the appearance of a sea of
three-column sets, like rafts that washed into the area, the
rushing sea splitting as it reached the round "nose" of the Winter
Garden, making it look like a glass submarine emerging from the
depths. The scene reminds one of an avalanche, but it is apparent
that what in fact occurred was that a section of the exterior of
Tower One which did not go down simultaneously with the main
collapse, fell over, as would a tall tree, in a line precisely
perpendicular to the tower's west wall. To reach the WFC buildings
as it did, beyond even the lighter debris circle, it had to exceed
500 feet, which it did, reaching almost 600 feet to partly surround
the Winter Garden.
Puzzled at the anomaly of columns falling this far, I found the
solution in a photograph by Steve McCurry in a book by Magnum
Photographers entitled "New York September 11." In a series of
four photographs in which McCurry caught the eight-second collapse
of Tower One, with WTC 7 in the foreground almost totally blocking
a view of the lower half of the tower, I couldn't figure out what
the structure was that appeared beyond WTC 7 which hadn't been
there in the first two photographs. It was a peculiar structure
protruding behind the west end of the roof of WTC 7, resembling a
stubby tower with tall poles reaching far to the sky. Its location
was where the west exterior wall of Tower One had been seconds
earlier. In the photograph, the immense dust clouds can be seen
rolling out in all directions, giving one the impression that the
main debris had just then "squashed" at the bottom. Measuring from
the place where Tower One stood in the first photo, I found that
the tallest "pole" reached to a spot 450 feet beneath the top of
the tower (thus 800 feet from the ground), with a bulkier shape of
fuzzy detail topping out at about 620 feet above ground level.
This would be at about the 54th floor, the tip of the long, slender
object reaching to the tower's 70th floor. If this structure then
fell as if cut near the ground, like a 620-foot tree, it would
reach far enough to smash into the fronts of WFC 2 and WFC 3, as it
in fact did, extending beyond the nose of the Winter Garden that
lay between them, to surround it with fairly solid debris (I
measured this as 575 feet). Within a fraction of a second after
this photograph, the wall of exterior columns was pushed over by
the force of the debris just finishing its fall inside the tower.
One can picture a whipping motion of this wall as one would throw
a spear, the lighter end (your hand) moving the fastest, causing a
segment to release and fly free to stick in WFC 3 at its 20th
floor, causing the substantial damage that occurred at that spot.
In their book "City in the Sky / The Rise and Fall of the World
Trade Center," James Glanz and Eric Lipton write that what struck
the building was a pair of steel columns hurled "with unimaginable
force westward." (p. 282) This falling-tree phenomenon probably
also accounts for the columns that struck the Verizon Building on
its south face. Although that strike was not within the
perpendicular of the west wall of the tower, it is nonetheless best
explained as having been flung from the same "crack-the-whip"
motion of the exterior wall, its direction modified because it was
attached at that corner to the north wall, its movement constrained
by it.
My purpose in going into this detail is to point out that severe
damage at this distance was an exception to the general rule of the
heavy debris circle. WFC 2 lost many windows from light debris;
the 10th floor setback roof at the front contained the evidence,
mostly lengths of cladding. There were a few pieces of cladding on
the 25th floor setback roof. WFC 3 was also clobbered by light
debris, some flying deeply into the building through windows—
again, at a distance where its force was obtained from the whipping
effect near the top of the "tree." None of that debris brought
fire, which was associated with debris that fell within the "heavy
debris" circle.
FEMA's survey listed 56 buildings damaged to one degree or another.
(Chap.7, p.3) To the south, Tower Two debris slightly exceeded the
heavy debris circle with columns that struck and severely damaged
90 West Street and 130 Cedar Street, and the lower front of the
much taller Bankers Trust Building, all just beyond the edge of the
heavy debris circle. The first two of these three buildings caught
fire, the only ones outside the Trade Center Plaza cluster that did
so, other than WTC 7. These were low buildings (24 and 12 stories,
respectively) which took heavy hits on their roofs, unlike the 40-
story Bankers Trust Building next door whose roof was beyond its
reach. Whether this made a difference in reasons for catching
fire, I do not know, but it is obvious that a building which takes
a hit on its roof has been invaded in a much more vital way than
one struck with downward-falling debris against a vertical surface,
which was the case with WTC 7. Photographs show pieces of cladding
on the Bankers Trust roof, near the front, within the lighter-
debris circle.
The only thing one can state with certainty at this time about
damage to WTC 7 from the north tower collapse is that there has
been no report of damage to the degree caused by heavy debris,
which is not surprising, in that at its closest the building was
100 feet outside the heavy debris circle. FEMA does not show it to
have been hit by high-flying columns as was WFC 3 and the Verizon
Building. Witnesses reported seeing facial damage, such as broken
windows. Photographs show pieces of cladding lying in the street,
and it is reasonable to assume these eleven-foot aluminum channels
smashed windows where they didn't hit masonry, although it is
difficult to envision one entering a window its full length because
at that distance it would have been falling downward against the
vertical surface when it struck. If cladding did enter, it would
have carried neither fire nor heat sufficient to start a fire.
Fire accompanied heavy debris which brought burning debris with it.
An example of heavy debris that contained no fire is the "tree"
that fell to smash the fronts of WFC 2 and 3. This was essentially
composed of nothing but steel columns which were from levels where
there was no fire. The fire closest to WTC 7 was across Vesey
Street in WTC 6, which did not collapse.
Why did it fall?
The FEMA authors reiterate their admitted ignorance, referring to
work that needs to be done to find out why WTC 7 collapsed. Still
awaiting first word from NIST as to their theory, the fallback
hypothesis that has been offered by some is that WTC 7 was
destroyed intentionally, at a time when it would not be noticed
because of the major calamity to which it would appear to be
connected. It has been remarked that the way the building fell,
the collapse resembled a commercial demolition. Given the elapse
of so much time without information to the public, the
unnecessarily hasty and illegal disposal of items critical to an
informed investigation (see excerpt from Fire Engineering Magazine
infra), the strange cloak of secrecy that was, and is, imposed on
operations since day one, the reluctance of the Bush administration
to create an investigatory body aggravated by its further tardiness
in provision of evidence requested by the 9/11 Commission, it
should surprise no one that there are critics who suggest motives
for destruction of the building. (Discussed further below.)
The fall of WTC 7 was not quite like a commercial demolition. (See
http://www.implosionworld.com and http://www.howstuffworks.com.)
But then, the perpetrators would not have needed or wished their
work to be perfect, other than for the total destruction of its
contents. WTC 7, half as tall and half again as wide as one of the
towers, separated from adjacent buildings on all sides by city
streets, when it fell caused major damage at its rear to the roof
and corner of 30 West Broadway, owned by the City University of New
York, and opened holes in the Verizon Building on its west, which
would have been an embarrassnent to a building demolition expert,
even though the collapse would set a world record for office
building demolitions, surpassing the implosion of Hudson's
Department Store in Detroit, at 439 feet, by several stories in
height. The Post Office Building next door east of WTC 7 was
relatively unscathed as was the Irving Trust Building across
Barclay Street to its northwest. Other than that, its collapse
left a great pile of rubble within a trapezoid formed by four
streets, burying everything in a heap that burned for days—
presumably inspired by diesel fuel.
There were no deaths, no one to rescue, no bodies to be recovered—
these being the reasons given for the haste to get the tower rubble
out of the way. WTC 7's evacuation was begun after the first
airplane struck the north tower, so that it must have been almost
completely empty of people well before the time it caught fire. It
seems that the early effort to remove debris would have been better
devoted to the towers, given the stated reasons for haste.
FEMA admits that it doesn't know why WTC 7 fell, or, if it was
because of the fire, what its source was, how the fire got started,
or how it spread. "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." (Chapter 5, p. 31)

WTC 6, housing U.S. Customs, was in a position to run interference

for the south face of WTC 7. The Godzilla-sized boiling cloud that
chased terrified New Yorkers down the streets in the television
footage we have seen was deflected by its nine stories, the main
thrust of it missing WTC 7, although cluttering the streets on
either side of it. The main debris from the north side of the
tower fell well short of WTC 7, dropping into the middle of the
Customs House, WTC 6, creating a chasm that went through to the
basement. In photographs, it is apparent also that heavy debris
fell beyond the chasm to knock pieces out of the edge of WTC 6's
roof at Vesey Street. The lowest part of WTC 7 directly across
from that part of WTC 6 was sheltered to a degree by the very
broad, 95-foot-long pedestrian bridge that ran between the two
buildings. WTC 3, 4, 5 and 6 were severely damaged by heavy,
burning debris, essentially destroyed without collapsing other than
a center section of Building 5, its failure thought due to fire.

FEMA singles out the southwest corner of WTC 7 as most likely to

have been damaged by debris, not far from the Verizon Building
damage at a similar distance from Tower One. This corner was one
of two hot spots in the WTC 7 debris found by the U.S. Geological
Survey, measured several days after the collapse, most likely from
rupture of one or more of the fuel tanks located there caused by
the building collapse. The hotter spot was in the northeast part,
which has been noted as an anomaly. It is this latter heat that
appears most relevant, because the location is where the structural
collapse had to occur to cause the building to come down as it did,
and it is the place where FEMA attempted to find a source of heat
sufficient to cause the collapse. It is clear from videos of the
collapse that the initial failure occurred in the lower floors
about a third of the way in from the east side of the building,
causing a "kink" clearly visible on the north side of the building,
running from the roof apparently all the way down the building,
aggravating as the fall continued, so that east and west sides
collapsed toward one another. There was a 6,000-gallon tank
containing diesel fuel on the second floor between the low-rise
elevators in the middle of the building, to serve the city's Office
of Emergency Management on the 23rd floor, which was the only large
quantity other than the 36,000 gallons in four tanks at ground
level and below in the southwest corner, but as with those tanks,
no facts are apparent to encourage a theory that it ruptured prior
to the collapse.

For a heat source in the location where the structural support had
to fail to cause the observed collapse, FEMA suggested that there
would have had to be a breach in the fuel distribution piping to
engines running specific electric generators. These would have
started automatically when power went out at 9:59 a.m. as the south
tower fell. WTC 7 would not have been struck by debris until the
north tower fell at 10:28 a.m., so there would have been no
collapse-related fire, if caused by debris, prior to that moment.
Risers for the fuel oil distribution system from the tanks were in
a utility shaft in the opposite (west) end of the building. Except
for the part of the diesel oil distribution system serving the
Salomon Smith Barney (SSB) generators, systems were in the west end
where the generators were located, with relatively short horizontal
distribution piping. (Chap.5, p.14) Of nine SSB generator sets on
the 5th floor, all were in the west end of the building but four
which were in the northeast, supplied by a 2 1/2-inch iron pipe
contained in an outer welded black iron pipe 4 inches in diameter.
The larger pipe was designed to contain leaks in the 2 1/2-inch
pipe which if of sufficient quantity would fill a containment
vessel, triggering shut-off of the pump. This sturdy pipe, which
was the only medium by which diesel fuel would have been carried to
any part of the east side of the building based on the facts
offered by FEMA, traversed most of the length of the 5th floor
along the north side of a concrete masonry wall, west to east,
passing a 1 - to 2-story mechanical equipment room built around main
truss elements, the failure of which is theorized as permitting the
collapse. (The north side of the masonry wall is the side away
from any potential debris damage.)

Fire service personnel reported that fires were initially seen to

be present on "non-contiguous" floors on the south side of the
building at approximately floors 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, and 19, which
given their early appearance connotes debris as the cause (which I
find unlikely). A photograph taken at 3:36 p.m. shows a thick
cloud of smoke coming up the south face, obscuring the entire side
of the building, with small amounts emanating from the 27th and
28th floors at the west face near the corner. The south face would
have been viewable as soon as the dust had settled from the
collapse of Tower One, this being the photograph that NIST does not
have in its collection. After each tower collapse, a dust cloud
rose higher than WTC 7 and obscured its face for some minutes (the
first had cleared when the north tower fell). In later photos,
where there had been a dust cloud covering it, there appears to be
a white cloud that is presumably smoke, in one photo appearing to
emanate from a single level clear across the front of WTC 7. This
does not necessarily signify that WTC 7 was on fire. Across the
street, WTC 6 was burning, with rubble in the street, and both the
dust and the smoke rose up the face of WTC 7 in a chimney effect
caused by the steady northwest wind which blew across its sharp-
angled southwest corner to create a low-pressure area at the
building's south face. Smoke seen coming up from the ground floor
level at the southwest corner brings the large diesel fuel tanks to
mind which are located there, but diesel oil produces dark smoke
due to its carbon content when combustion conditions are not ideal,
as inside a building, where oxygen supply would become increasingly
limited.
Fires on floors 7 and 8 are visible in a color photograph of the
east side of the building made at 3 o'clock. In the photo no
windows on that side of the building are open or broken. Also
through a window on that side, one can see a fire on the 12th
floor. A photograph taken later that day shows flame and smoke
pouring out of the same 12th floor windows, evidently broken out by
the fire—which may explain broken windows that show in other
photographs late in the day. (One writer suggests that windows may
have been broken out intentionally to supply oxygen.)
On the north, FEMA says that photographs and videos show that fires
were located on the 7th, 8th, 11th, 12th, and 13th floors; on the
west face, the 29th and 30th floors. No visible fires were
reported on the 1st to 5th, 9th, 14th to 18th, 20th to 26th, and
31st to the top of the building.
A mystery arises in the appearance of these fires in non-contiguous
spots all over the building, giving the appearance of someone
busily setting them wherever there was something to get burning.
There were no fires on the vacant floors 14, 15, 16, and 17,
although fires were spotted just above and below these floors, on
13 and 18. The fires seemed small from outside, some growing
throughout the day.
There were clearly lots of fires, and there was lots of diesel oil
in the building. A superficial survey of the event would leave one
with the impression that it would be a wonder if the building did
not fall down, given all that fuel. But the tanks were in places
where they would not be ruptured to initially fuel the fire, nor
would the fire outside the tanks cause their rupture until the
collapse caused them to split, and some didn't break even then.
The FEMA report-writer theorizes that diesel fuel could have been
the source of the fire if a fuel line were broken. As noted, the
fuel lines were double-walled iron pipe, which would have required
a major whack for both to break in one blow. Assuming that the
pump started automatically when the building lost power, and a pipe
was severed as a result of the collapse of Tower One in a way that
the containment-vessel trigger did not turn off the flow, a fire
that burned long enough and hot enough to affect a major steel
supporting member if it was near one or two of the critical trusses
on the east side of the building. The pipe ran past this critical
area, the mechanical equipment room that housed the main trusses on
the 5th floor. At 75 gallons per minute, which the pump would
provide if the line were broken, SSB's 6,000-gallon tank would
empty in three hours. In FEMA's hypothetical, with a partial leak
at 30 gpm the tank would not empty until it had flowed for seven
hours. The oil would need to pool under the leak here and somehow
be set afire. (Diesel oil is flammable at 160 degrees F. From a
10
City of Columbus fire captain I learned that in training exercises
if diesel oil is to be set afire, unlike the case of gasoline whose
fumes will start even from static electricity, a match will go out
if touched to the oil, so that a fusee is used.)
The truss inside the mechanical equipment room could be reached by
the heat from the fire if the door to the room was left open, or if
the door failed due to the heat. This is not known. There is one
more "if" to be placed in front of all this: the building would
have fallen if the loss of one or both of the trusses at that point
would have had that effect, which is a question for the NIST study.
As with the towers, WTC 7 had exterior support columns all the way
around its perimeter, which were intact when the fire started.
FEMA also noted that WTC 7 did not have the light horizontal
members that are being particularly examined for the towers'
collapse, but were much shorter and of heavier steel.
As previously noted, the foregoing scenario is offered by FEMA as
the most likely, although unlikely, to have occurred. FEMA:
"Further investigation is required to determine whether the
preceding scenarios did or could have actually occurred." (p. 30)
FEMA has set the stage by spelling out a major investigation, one
that should be unusually intriguing for engineers, fire protection
agencies, those with building code responsibilities, and, I must
add, crime investigators and politicians. If it was arson, it is
ultimately political.
The problem of evaluating fires lower than the 6th floor, which
would be necessary for the building collapse, is that the floors
are windowless with louvers which would not have afforded a direct
line of sight between the open floor space and the louvers. On
record, no one saw any breakage in that area that would have
allowed any notable interior damage.
The other yawning question is why the fires could not have been
fought. Water was said to be limited because of a broken 20-inch
main on Vesey Street. "In addition, firemen made the decision
fairly early on not to attempt to fight the fires, due in part to
the damage to WTC 7 from the collapsing towers." (p. 21) The
building had a sprinkler system and standpipes, of limited effect.
If there was no water to fight fires, it is one thing, but if there
was water, the excuse that fires could not be fought because of
"damage to WTC 7 from the collapsing towers" is another. The FEMA
report at one point states that there was no manual firefighting
effort, that is, firemen manning hoses. That very well could be
the case if the 20-inch main was the only source of water for the
building. Fireboats were brought in to pump water from the Hudson
River for the tower fires. It was no farther to pump for WTC 7
than it was for WTC 4 and 5. If the limitation was the number of
fireboats, however, there is no question that the tower fires had
priority. I do not have the information to analyze this further.

11
The murder of Building 7 as a "whodunnit"
Times articles concerning 9/11 that refer to WTC 7 refer to the
"strange collapse" (11/29) and "mystery." Engineers find it "one
of the deepest mysteries their profession has faced." (Science
Times section, by James Glanz, 12/4/02.) At this point we are left
with the FEMA report admission that "the best hypothesis has only
a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation,
and analyses are needed to resolve this issue." (p. 31)
According to an article in the September 22, 2002 issue of the
Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Larry Silverstein, builder and owner of
WTC 7 (also owner of the towers and WTC 4 and 5) was told by the
fire department on the afternoon of 9/11 that WTC 7 was going to
collapse. Silverstein, who had just finalized a 99-year lease on
the Twin Towers six weeks earlier, lost four members of his staff
in the tower collapse, escaping death himself only because a
meeting with Port Authority officials scheduled that morning to be
held on the 88th floor of the north tower was cancelled at the last
minute.
It is surprising to learn that someone knew the building would
fall, contrary to longstanding engineering assumptions and historic
precedent. Hysteria would be another explanation, but not when the
building falls within an hour or so after the warning is given.
WTC 7 stands out for a number of reasons. The other buildings of
the World Trade Center were so close to the towers that their loss
was unavoidable. Something different had to happen for WTC 7 to be
included in the disaster. Numerous other buildings were pelted
with the same kind of debris that struck WTC 7 without catching
fire. WTC 7 suffered no structural damage of any significance,
making it the historic standout. We could scarcely believe the
horror of the towers' collapse, struggling to rationalize it
because of the great damage caused by being struck by large
airplanes and a huge amount of jet fuel. Any trauma to WTC 7,
including the fire, was so gentle and inauspicious as to make its
demise seem magical. It did not have the structural weakness that
the engineers are citing to justify their belief that fire may have
caused the towers' collapse—long beams of steel too thin to resist
the heat of a jet fuel fire. There was no "pancake" collapse to
explain the exceptional fall as with the towers; the failure
occurred at about the 5th floor, and for reasons yet unexplained,
the interior and exterior columns that supported the building also
failed from the 5th floor to the top so that nothing was left but
a segment of skeletal steel structure resting atop the burning
rubble. If it was brought down by a commercial demolition, none of
this would be odd.
The seismograph at Columbia University showed that the collapse
took 18 seconds, compared with 8 seconds for Tower One and 10
seconds for Tower Two, even though WTC 7 was less than half as
12
tall. (Chap. 1, p. 10) Since it fell much more slowly, shouldn't
much of the building have remained intact, albeit broken, instead
of turning into a pile of rubble like the towers? Someone computed
that the 15-story top segment of Tower One, above the break, was
doing 180 mph when it hit the ground, which may explain why it was
smashed into unidentifiable powder. (Does it?) But in the case of
WTC 7, doing the math, when the 47th floor hit the ground it was
doing only 44 mph at the most, unless due to retardation by
structural integrity its fall was closer to the average speed of
its fall, 22 mph. In other words, if you drop a 47-story building
six floors to the ground, does the whole building disintegrate?
That's what an intentional demolition with explosives looks like,
so they can haul it away more easily, but they have to place
explosives around very cannily to get that result. If the building
were being brought down to destroy evidence, the objective would be
to create a pile of unidentifiable rubble. That neighboring
buildings were damaged would make it look less contrived.
This is an explanation of demolition by explosives from the
Howstuffworks web site:
"Blasters approach each project a little differently, but the basic
idea is to think of the building as a collection of separate
towers. The blasters set the explosives so that each 'tower' falls
toward the center of the building, in roughly the same way that
they would set the explosives to topple a single structure to the
side. When the explosives are detonated in the right order, the
toppling towers crash against each other, and all of the rubble
collects at the center of the building. Another option is to
detonate the columns at the center of the building before the other
columns so that the building's sides fall inward."
There are any number of ways a building can be brought down, but
"Generally speaking, blasters will explode the major support
columns on the lower floors first and then a few upper stories. In
a 20-story building, for example, the blasters might blow the
columns on the first and second floor, as well as the 12th and 15th
floors. In most cases, blowing the support structures on the lower
floors is sufficient for collapsing the building, but loading
columns on upper floors helps break the building material into
smaller pieces as it falls. This makes for easier clean-up after
the blast."
For steel columns, blasters use RDX-based explosive compounds which
expand at a high rate of speed (e.g. 27,000 feet per second).
"Instead of disintegrating the entire column, the concentrated,
high-velocity pressure slices right through the steel, splitting it
in half." (http://science.howstuffworks.com/building-implosion.htm)
Wires connect the explosives to detonaters at a safe distance from
the building, but if WTC 7 was felled by insiders, as has been
alleged, they likely had military skills in remote detonation.
13
Those who desire no inquiry will surely charge that this is
fanciful. It would seem that any argument could be settled by
examination of the piece of truss, or two trusses, that had to be
sliced through in order to create the precise type of collapse that
occurred. Let us examine those pieces of steel. Unavailable, you
say? This doesn't leave "the authorities" in a good light. As the
editor of Fire Engineering pointed out, this was a crime scene.

A stack of coincidences can only be piled so high before it

collapses of its own weight. This is not the place to go into the
cloud of very normal suspicion that has been created by our own
government concerning its actions both before and after 9/11. It
has been noted in the present atmosphere that the person who gives
his government his unquestioning trust has dedicated his future to
tyrannical control. The chain by which the dog was tied up after
his past invasions of the chicken coop is found to be broken. The
chickens are missing. There are fresh chicken bones in the yard,
feathers in a trail between the chicken coop and the dog house.
The dog lies contentedly, the picture of innocence. Small chicken
feathers stick to the blood smears around his face. Yet, dog may
be as innocent as he appears, noble beast guarding his master's
house. Another dog did the dirty work while this fine one slept
(for he bears no wounds of a fight). It is a pure coincidence that
a link in his chain has been pulled open, setting him free. If he
found pieces of fresh chicken in his yard, what would you expect
him to do, even if in his innocence he dragged feathers toward his
dog house, leaving a false trail. The neighbors have seen no other
dog in the area. The break in the chicken coop wire is at the same
place it was before, when dog was caught in the act, and forgiven,
but thereafter chained.

The conclusion that dog has done the deed cannot be ignored,
casually dismissed, or not considered. Was he guilty? What
thinketh the reader?

Dog with a bad rep: the CIA

WTC 7 was an office building, beginning at the 7th floor. There

was some office space on the 3rd floor, plus a lobby, conference
room and cafeteria, but the building was peculiar in that most of
the floors beneath the 7th contained transformers, generators, fuel
storage, switchgear, and within the west side, loading docks. The
transformers belonged to the Consolidated Edison power system for
the area, and were in place well before WTC 7 was built around them
in 1987. There is no indication that any of the electric
generators or their switchgear contributed to the fire, unless
diesel oil was involved, that being the only fuel yet proposed as
responsible for maintaining a fire of sufficient temperature and
duration to heat steel to the breaking point.

An early tenant, still officed in the building on September 1 1 , was

Salomon Smith Barney (SSB), occupying the top - 17 office floors.

14
The most likely fire source identified in the FEMA report (above)
was the fuel line for the company's emergency generators on the 5th
floor. A number of financial companies were in the building—
Standard Chartered Bank, Federal Home Loan Bank of New York, First
State Management Group, ITT Hartford Insurance Group, Provident
Financial Management, American Express Bank International—
occupying various floors from 7 to 27.
But the peculiar importance of the building, and possible
significance for our study, can be seen in the presence of notable
federal agencies. The Central Intelligence Agency had an
undercover establishment that was not identified by name (referred
to as "clandestine" by the New York Times) on the 25th floor along
with offices of the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of
Defense. The IRS also had the 24th floor; New York City's Office
of Emergency Management had the 23rd; floors 1 1 , 12, and 13 held
offices of the Securities and Exchange Commission; floors 9 and 10
the U.S. Secret Service.
The seven-story heap of burning debris that was WTC 7 represented
a significant wound in government, in the ashes of documents,
records, and files that left a good-sized memory hole in federal
operations including enforcement actions of an unknown number and
importance.
The CIA aroused the most interest among conspiracy analysts, as it
should, given its history. The Times said that this station is
believed to have been the largest and most important CIA domestic
station outside the Washington area, and that its destruction
seriously disrupted United States intelligence operations.
(11/4/2001) That article reported that all of the agency's
employees were safely evacuated soon after the hijacked planes hit
the twin towers, and it was thought that because of well-rehearsed
procedures, classified documents would have been effectively
destroyed, although a special team scoured the debris after the
attack in search of secret documents.
"The agency's New York station was behind the false front of
another federal organization, which intelligence officials
requested that the Times not identify. The station was, among
other things, a base of operations to spy on and recruit foreign
diplomats stationed at the United Nations, while debriefing
selected American business executives and others willing to talk to
the CIA after returning from overseas. The agency's officers in
New York often work undercover, posing as diplomats and business
executives... " (Times 11/4/2001)
The office was deeply involved in counterterrorism efforts,
according to the article, handling investigations of the 1998
embassy bombings in East Africa and the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S.
Cole in Yemen. As with the attack on the towers, those events were
characterized by serious failures in security, of which there had
15
been plenty of forewarning, and complaints by State Department
staff. The Cole incident resembled the collapse of WTC 7 in the
shrugging of shoulders by the Clinton administration—and the
media. The ship could have been refueled at sea, the normal
practice, but instead tempted fate by anchoring in a port known to
be Osama bin Laden's home town and a major terrorist center. U.S.
Navy requirements for ship security there did not meet Navy
standards, and even these lesser precautions were not followed by
the captain. Fourteen American sailors died, yet there was no
board of inquiry, and the captain was not punished—unlike the
submarine skipper who surfaced under a Japanese boat full of
students shortly before that, drummed out of the service. With the
Cole, it was just U.S. sailors. Further investigation of that
incident would at the very least be impaired, as it would with an
unknown number of other cases.
In a publication analyzing the 9/11 attack entitled "Painful
Questions" Eric Hufschmid does an imaginative job of suggesting
possibilities, based on photographs and circumstances. Whether
supportable or not, it would be useful for anyone who would be a
detective in this case. The Times noted that the occupants of the
CIA quarters would have had a view of the twin towers burning.
Hufschmid noted that it was perfect as a command center for the
terrorist strike, although he is picturing the city's Office of
Emergency Management on the 23rd floor, which had been expensively
reinforced in many ways as a "bunker" to withstand a disaster, able
to supply its own water, air and electricity, with the
aforementioned 6,000-gallon tank for diesel fuel. (Criticized by
the fire department, the city enclosed the tank with eight-inch-
thick masonry.) The FEMA report shows the occupant on the next
floor up as the IRS, but this in fact may have been a secret CIA
location.
HufSchmidt's theory, which is technically feasible, is that the CIA
from that perfect vantage point controlled the aircraft that struck
the towers. The aircraft involved in all the attacks, Boeing 757's
and 767's, have electronic controls which can be overridden from
the ground, flown, and landed securely without pilots. (Other
planes, such as the Boeing 747, do not.) The path of Flight 11 to
Tower One brought it from the north directly over WTC 7 to strike
the tower. Flight 175's route from the south would have taken it
precisely to WTC 7 if Tower Two had not been in the way. It has
also been pointed out that Flight 77 first overflew the Pentagon,
then made a sharp drop of several thousand feet while making a
complete circle to hit the west side of the Pentagon precisely at
ground level, a remarkable (impossible) feat for an unskilled
pilot. Again, if the aircraft was being taken over from the ground
upon arrival at its target, and if the ground control had to bring
it in on a line toward it, as hypothesized in the twin towers
situation, the controller would have had an ideal spot inside the
Pentagon. I got out a map of the Pentagon published in the Times
and laid a ruler from the point struck by the airplane, following
16
its direction of entry, and it took me across the building straight
to Donald Rumsfeld's office. I don't really think they would be
doing that from Rumsfeld's office. However, we know that instead
of going to the National Military Command Center on the next floor,
where national emergencies are supposed to be centrally controlled,
he stayed in his office "making telephone calls" after the second
tower was hit, and when Flight 77 plowed into the Naval Command
Center on the other side of the building, he said he thought it
must be a bomb. Complete surprise to him, even though the FAA,
NORAD, the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, and Dick Cheney down
in the subbasement control room at the White House knew it was on
the way.
The question arises also for Flight 93. Where was the remote
control target for that one? The secure location was the Pentagon.
Was it about to be hit again, and is that why there was a sudden,
panicky effort to get interceptors aloft to shoot it down, because
someone big enough discovered the plan and intervened to say
"enough"? If the 9/11 Commission doesn't come up with a complete
and detailed analysis of what happened that day, it will have
failed in its mission. The fall of Flight 93 is a patent mystery,
not clarified by the story of onboard heroics. The residents near
Shanksville will show you where they found pieces of the airplane
miles away from the huge hole in the ground, where it went straight
in. In the accepted theory, there was no reason for pieces to come
off miles from the crash site. No story yet told credibly explains
that event. This is a "Building 7" phenomenon—on its face, with
the facts that are apparent, it doesn't fit the explanation being
accepted by the media and passed on to us for truth. Let's start
with this theory and work back: Flight 93 was shot down by the
interceptor that followed and caught up with it, in this case,
unlike the others, at supersonic speed.
If the reader has no doubts about the reasonability of the U.S.
defense reaction to the four hijacked aircraft, he should, if the
9/11 Commission is permitted to reveal the FAA records that were so
instantly sequestered by the FBI, make a study of the times
involved and attempt to rationalize them as an honest defense
reaction.
An article in the Times for 9/12 told of Mayor Giuliani hearing of
the jet crashes while at 50th Street and Fifth Avenue and going
immediately to the 23rd floor Emergency Command Center, but there
finding that "officials" had decided the building should be
evacuated. So he and several other top officials walked over to
nearby city offices at 75 Barclay Street, when the south tower
fell, "making clear that the neighborhood was unsafe," whereupon
they went searching for other quarters. Hufschmidt points out that
the "Axis of Good" thus had the whole day in WTC 7 to do as they
pleased. He said that CNN reported that someone reported a fire at
4:10 p.m., and that others said they were told, between 4 and 5
p.m., that they should get away from the building because it was
17
going to collapse. Hufschmidt's theory: the Axis of Good left the
bunker at about 4 p.m., one of them making a phone call to the fire
department to create an official record that the building was truly
on fire, and as they walked away from the building told people to
stay away. Again, this is just a theory, but it works as a model
until we receive some reliable facts upon which we may evaluate it
for ourselves.
I do not recommend "Painful Questions" as authority, nor for
accuracy or rationale, only as ideas for a detective to enable
thinking "out of the envelope." Some of HufSchmidt's theories are
obviously erroneous, given later-acguired information. In
fairness, one can say the same thing about the Axis of Good, and
they are the ones hiding the facts.
And the Securities and Exchange Commission?
There were no fires seen on the floors housing the CIA, IRS, DOD,
or the city's OEM bunker. However, fires were spotted on floors 9
to 13, housing the U.S. Secret Service and the Securities and
Exchange Commission, and below that the American Express Bank
International on 7 and 8. On September 14 American Express ran an
ad in the Times assuring its clients that it maintained multiple
electronic records of all accounts and transactions at several
secure locations around the country. "Your data and records are
safe with us."
Not so the SEC. By 9/11, the Enron angst had been noted. Jeffrey
Skilling, who had been CEO for six months, on August 15 had
announced his resignation "for personal reasons," which followed a
fall in share prices during the year. He said that things were
fine with the company. It had been riding high the year before, as
one of the largest contributors to George W. Bush's presidential
campaign. The Times on June 3, 2001 : "Kenneth L. Lay, the
chairman, has close ties to Mr. Bush, as he did to Mr. Bush's
father, and he has had considerable access to the White House."
The administration's energy strategy suggested that the federal
government exercise more power over electricity transmission
networks, a longtime Enron goal, the article said. Mr. Bush
selected two people for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
who were favored by Enron. Karl Rove, Lawrence Lindsey, and I.
Lewis Libby reported that they had divested themselves of their
Enron holdings, all noted by the Times to be millionaires. Two
days before the WTC attack, September 9, Alex Berenson began his
"Market Watch" column with: "Something is rotten with the state of
Enron." Two days later, this ominous cloud merged inconspicuously
with a larger one.
Whether the 320 staffers at the Northeast Regional Office of the
SEC were working on anything to do with Enron, may be unlikely.
The fraud was only the most serious in a rash of delinquencies in
high corporate office. Enron was only the flagship. The damage to
18
the SEC is described in the 9/28 issue of the Times:
"All the employees escaped unharmed on Sept. 1 1 , but the offices
were destroyed, as were files containing depositions, trading
records and other documents for several hundred cases. They ranged
from a sweeping investigation into initial public offerings
underwritten by major brokerage firms, like Credit Suisse First
Boston, to the commission's pursuit of what it calls boiler-room
operations.
"That's not all. Informal notes from interviews and jottings on
documents or memo pads that helped the S.E.C. build cases were also
destroyed—not to mention Rolodexes full of contacts. In a few
cases, securities lawyers say critical pieces of evidence were
probably destroyed, too."
Former SEC lawyers say that staff will have to rethink hundreds of
cases, including about 100 now in litigation. One was quoted: "If
you analyzed three to four years of insider trading, looking at
monthly statements, it's going to be very, very difficult. The
emphasis of the office had been accounting fraud and earnings
management that misled investors—i.e., the Enron problem.
While I can envision the CIA covering its tracks by blowing up a
building, I cannot produce in my mind a credible scenario for
bringing down the house just to hide some corporate defalcation,
although one does not know what to picture, or how extensive it
might have been, had some set of investigations continued. It's
just one of those things that is connected by fate, if not by human
decision. There were fires on all three floors occupied by the
SEC, no doubt including case files. If one knew of the likelihood
that WTC 7 would collapse, in advance of the 9/11 attack, he might
devise to have his files, or those of his friends, transferred to
that office. Who would have the motive? Who would have the power?
This is a can of strange worms, is it not?
Perhaps the WTC 7 tenant that should be brought into the sunlight
is the Department of Defense, for it is the agency, with its
defense-industry friends, that had the most to gain from the attack
in a financial and political sense. The Secret Service is shown in
the FEMA report occupying two floors: should it be classed with the
CIA in terms of clandestine activities? Someone may also have
thought the Internal Revenue Service had something in its files
that would be embarrassing to be brought out, but that agency puts
so much in computer files that a critical loss from the WTC 7
collapse would be highly unlikely. Should we let the mayor's
office off the hook? The city only recently let NIST see its
communications records. If this were a fictional mystery story, we
would learn in the last chapter that the villain was Salomon Smith
Barney, which has been virtually invisible, with 18 floors of
equipment, records, and files lost. There were firms in the towers
19
that lost more, including personnel, so SSB gets no attention.
I see it as useless to hope that such things will be investigated.
My priority would be a thorough and honest investigation of how WTC
7 caught fire, and why it collapsed. This is not a slight thing.
For some reason, this and the'towers' collapse, to say nothing of
the crash at the Pentagon, were considered off limits to inquiry
and investigation. Admission was tightly limited, making it
difficult for the volunteer civil engineers who came to preserve
evidence, which was quickly disposed of as if those in charge
wished it not to be seen. The FBI seized the FAA records of
communications to NORAD and to Washington and to other traffic
control centers, which the 9/11 Commission apparently has by now,
in that it says it has all the records it needs. Chairman Kean
this week told Aaron Brown on CNN that at least some person on the
Commission has seen every document they have requested, but before
being content with that, one should check with the New Jersey
widows who are the foremost searchers for the truth of 9/11. The
visible part of the Commission's study has concerned only airline
security and immigration activities. It wants to quiz the
President, the White House staff, and top defense officials (I hope
to see their own explanation of their strange, sluggish, uninformed
reaction), but thus far its invitation has not been honored.
Surely the NIST, in its investigation for purposes of finding what
went wrong so that buildings may be more safely built, will let us
know if they find something more than negligence.
The important thing about WTC 7, which is a white elephant in the
government explanation, is that if anyone with a recognized voice
concludes that the collapse was rigged, it will mean that massive
frauds on the people do not have to stay buried for historians to
speculate upon decades from now. It will also mean that collapse
of the towers should be viewed from a different point of view—that
our starting assumption should be that the dog is up to his old
tricks.
In the motion picture "The Truman Show" an insurance salesman named
Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is outside his typical American
subdivision house in Smallville on a bright, summery day when
without warning a theater spotlight crashes onto his driveway in
front of him. He is at first startled, then baffled, looking up
into the empty blue sky. He quickly turns back to what he was
doing. In the background shortly thereafter we hear an
authoritative news-announcer voice laughingly describing a passing
airplane dropping parts all over town. Truman does not recognize
this opening clue that his world, in which he had lived from
childhood, was different from what he had always thought. (My
evaluation of The Truman Show as modern morality play is not
original. I discovered that it has its own website, which
describes if as "a story that reveals an essential truth about what
is happening to society in the 20th Century." To that I would only
add: the 21st. See http://www.transparencynow.com/truman.htm)
20
In the incident on September 1 1 , 2001, in Manhattan, on a bright,
summery day, while the national consciousness was directed at the
ruins of the two towers and the sight of firemen and rescue workers
scrambling over the heaps of rubble in the hopes of finding someone
alive, seven hours after the destruction of the other buildings, a
47-story building at the edge of the complex suddenly crashed to
the ground. An authoritative news-announcer voice came on to
explain that another Trade Center building, having caught fire from
burning debris, had collapsed, finishing the set. Just another day
in Smallville.
The uniquely indispensable nature of disaster evidence
Bill Manning, editor of Fire Engineering Magazine, was furious
about the hurried disposal of debris, declaring it illegal. From
his January, 2002 editorial:
"Did they throw away the locked doors from the Triangle Shirtwaist
Fire? Did they throw away the gas can used at the Happyland Social
Club Fire? Did they cast aside the pressure-regulating valves at
the Meridian Plaza Fire? Of course not. But essentially, that's
what they're doing at the World Trade Center." (Disposal, at that
time less than half done, was completed in April of that year.)
"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 the slow boat to China, perhaps never to be seen again in
America until you buy your next car.
"Such destruction of evidence shows the astounding ignorance of
government officials to the value of a thorough, scientific
investigation of the largest fire-induced collapse in world
history. I have combed through our national standard for fire
investigation, NFPA 921 , but nowhere in it does one find an
exemption allowing the destruction of evidence for buildings over
10 stories tall.
... "Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the 'official
investigation' blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of
Civil Engineers 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 reason that editor Manning is upset about the loss of evidence
is that it is only through "mistakes" such as fires that occur when
they shouldn't have that adequate precautions can be taken for
building in the future. Especially strange collapses such as that
of the towers, and of WTC 7, are the most significant, because it
means that something that intelligent people, building within fire
codes, had done very wrong. If the fault cannot be found, it is
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destined to happen again. This is the whole point of the book "To
Engineer is Human" by Henry Petroski, professor of civil
engineering at Duke University, pointing out that the development
of engineering techniques and standards has come from human error.
In New York City this subject has been taken very seriously for
more than a century of skyscraper construction. A history of
skyscrapers is presented graphically in the January, 2003 issue of
Civil Engineering, beginning with the New York World tower in 1890.
Following came the Masonic Temple in 1892, and the Manhattan Life
building in 1894, which was the first to reach 400 feet. Park Row
in 1899 was still under 500 feet. By 1907 the Metropolitan Life
Building had passed 700 feet, in an atmosphere of growing doubt as
to the wisdom of building so far into the sky. New York City's
fire chief, Edward F. Croker, in connection with an article in the
Sunday New York World for September 22, 1907 wrote:
"I have always contended that a fifteen-story building of no more
than 150 feet in height should be the limit for absolute safety
from serious fire. Above that height there is a chance for an
appalling fire, and the higher the buildings are, the graver the
danger."
His reasoning: "The apparatus of the Fire Department is effective
at a little above 150 feet. To fight a fire in the 30th or 40th
story of a building is impossible from the street, and building
appliances are more or less inefficient."
His conclusion: "While New York City may never have a great fire
that will sweep away the top layer of its skyscrapers, it is an
ever-present danger. Attempts to make the buildings absolutely
fireproof may succeed, but the one sure way to avert a great
disaster will be to put a limit on the height of buildings and keep
it there."
In re-reading those three paragraphs, I am unable to contend that
any one of them is untrue. If one dismisses it as impractical
advice, he must do so with the assumption that there will be
intelligent building codes, conscientiously enforced, which means
that fire anomalies, especially, must be analyzed.
The World article resulted from a meeting called by the Building
Codes Revision Committee, at which the president of the New York
Board of Fire Underwriters, George W. Babb, warned that the city
had already exceeded the safety limit for skyscrapers by hundreds
of feet. He said that he did not believe in the theory that tall
buildings formed a barrier against fire spreading from building to
building, but on the contrary, "we claim that those immense
structures will collapse as readily as any other class if certain
conditions prevail during the conflagration." The article noted
that a previous chief had expressed the same belief ten years
earlier.
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The full-page graphics of the article are dramatic: in the midst of
a field of skyscrapers and fire there are two identical towers,
both beginning to break and topple at the same point relatively as
that of the south tower of the WTC. The writer concludes: "Of
course it is not to be supposed that Chief Croker' s men cannot
attack a fire raging in a sky-scraper more than 150 feet above the
ground. It is well known that they will undertake to fight any
fire anywhere, above ground or below, and if ever a fire breaks out
500 feet above the ground level in the Singer Building, or 600 feet
above the street level in the Metropolitan Life Building, they will
undertake to extinguish it. (Ed: How well we know that!) But ...
it is apparent that the difficulties and dangers confronting not
only the firemen, but all the big and little buildings in that
district, will be enormous."
I guess we've always known that. But prior to September 1 1 , 2001
this would have seemed more quaint than apocryphal.
The importance of Building 7
The significance of the investigation of the collapse of Building
7 of the World Trade Center on the afternoon of 9/11, for me, is
that the collapse looks contrived. If that is so, doesn't it mean
that some group with an inside government track knew that the twin
towers would be attacked—not only attacked, but collapse, which
surprised everyone?
Was someone that smart about how the towers were constructed and
what the effect of large aircraft striking them would be? When one
fell, it wasn't a unique event, a fluke. They fell in an almost
identical way, which makes it appear that someone had that figured
out, that they would both come down. This was an impressive piece
of work—to destroy all seven buildings of the World Trade Center.
Did someone know it would work that way—all depending upon getting
particular people onto particular aircraft at the right time,
people for whom boarding an aircraft was no certainty due to their
illegal status and foreign identity? An anonymous military
intelligence officer quoted by the Times said: "We couldn't do
that." Another said that the extremely professional way the event
could have been pulled off required the involvement of a government
agency.
To ensure that 19 foreigners, nine of them illegals, got aboard
four particular flights required an arrangement that overcame the
rules; and if the towers had to fall down for the project to
succeed, without fail, they would be rigged with explosives, which
is what it looks like in photographs. If someone had figured out
how to bring down WTC 7 with explosives, making it look like a fire
had done it, and that could not have been planned and prepared for
in the seven hours between the tower collapse and the collapse of
WTC 7, whoever did it had to know that the north tower would
collapse. Was the knowledge of the perpetrators so precise that
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