Jones has claimed to have discovered “thermitic” material in four samples of dust from Lower Manhattan. There are multiple problems with Jones’s assertion, however, the first of them a problem that requires no scientific knowledge.
In all criminal investigations, a key factor is what detectives call the “chain of evidence” or “chain of custody.” To be truly useful, evidence must have been handled with extreme care, to obviate questions as to its authenticity or origins. Dr. Jones’s samples of dust emerged five years after 9/11, following an appeal by him for dust that might have been preserved.
One handful of dust reportedly came from a citizen who scooped it up on 9/11 from a handrail near the end of the Brooklyn Bridge, then preserved it in a plastic bag. Another was reportedly found the following day on a pile of laundry near an apartment window. Of the two other samples, both also picked up in Manhattan apartments, one had lain unretrieved—exposed to other particles entering through broken windows—for about a week.
To a detective—and in this case a scientist is indeed a sort of detective—such samples are interesting but much less than reliable. In a criminal case—and were the samples of, say, bloodstains containing DNA—they would be laughed out of court. There is no true chain of evidence in any of these instances.
Even were the provenance of the dust well established, moreover, some fellow scientists reject Jones’s claim to have identified the incendiary thermite. Elements in the samples are as likely, they say, to have come from material one would expect to find in dust from the Trade Center—like paint.
There is disapproval, too, of the way Jones’s thermite conclusions—grave, were they to be taken seriously—have been presented. The findings have not been subjected to peer review, the process under which a scholarly work is subjected to scrutiny by other experts in the same field. While most scientists consider peer review essential, Jones’s thoughts on thermite seem first to have appeared in a paper he posted on a university website, then in the Journal of 9/11 Studies. The website of the Journal, of which Jones is coeditor, claims that it is “peer-reviewed.” Fellow scientist Ryan Mackey dismisses that assertion as a “masquerade … cargo-cult science.”
Thermite aside, Griffin and like-minded theorists espouse the idea that explosives of some sort were used to bring down the towers. They base their suspicion to a great degree on what witnesses said they saw and heard—understandably, or so one might think.
Wall Street Journal reporter John Bussey, for example, reported in a Pulitzer-winning article that from the Journal building near the South Tower he “heard metallic crashes and looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor.… One after another, from top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors blew to pieces.”
Bussey later recalled having seen “individual floors, one after the other exploding outward.” “I thought to myself, ‘My God, they’re going to bring the building down.’ And they, whoever they were, had set charges.” “It just descended like a timed explosion,” said Beth Fertig of WNYC Radio, “like when they are deliberately bringing a building down.”
The skeptics also pounced early on what Van Romero of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology—unlike the reporters an expert on explosives—told the Albuquerque Journal on the day of the attacks. “My opinion is, based on the videotapes,” he said, “that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse.”
Ten days later, however, Romero reversed himself. It had initially looked to him as though explosives triggered the collapses, he said, but a further look at the videotapes led him to agree with colleagues that—essentially as the NIST would conclude four years later—the buildings fell because fire weakened their steel structures.
There’s the nub. So many people, with less expertise in explosives than Romero or none at all, merely said what they thought they saw and heard. “Then we heard a loud explosion or what sounded like a loud explosion,” Fire battalion chief John Sudnik recalled, “and looked up and I saw Tower Two start coming down.” “First I thought it was an explosion,” said firefighter Timothy Julian. “I thought maybe there was a bomb on the plane, but delayed type of thing, you know, secondary device.”
“There was what appeared to be at first an explosion,” said Chief Frank Cruthers, also describing the collapse of the South Tower. “It appeared at the very top, simultaneously from all four sides, materials shot out horizontally. And then there seemed to be a momentary delay before you could see the beginning of the collapse.”
“The lowest floor of fire in the South Tower actually looked like someone had planted explosives around it,” said battalion chief Brian Dixon. “Everything blew out … I thought, ‘Jeez, this looks like an explosion up there.’ ”
Dr. Griffin seized on these accounts and more. On occasion, however, he was less than professorial in his editing. Griffin omitted, for example, what battalion chief Dixon said in his very next sentence, after recalling that he thought he was witnessing an “explosion.” He had continued, “I guess in some sense of time we looked at it and realized, ‘No, actually it just collapsed.’ That’s what blew out the windows, not that there was an explosion there.”
Without having done a statistical study of the some five hundred formal interviews conducted with 9/11 emergency workers, it appears to the authors that the vast majority of them referred not to apparent explosions—as in detonations—but usually more vaguely, to loud bangs, thunder, rumbling, booms, or trainlike sounds.
There may even have been some actual explosions, but not ones indicating deliberate demolition. “You heard nothing but explosions all day,” firefighter Salvatore Torcivia remembered. “The fires, the jet fuel burning. The nearby buildings had air conditioning and refrigerator units—they were all exploding from the super heat. It sounded like bombs going off. I believe the Secret Service had their armory in one of the towers. That stuff, ordnance, was going off.”
After an analysis of Griffin’s eye and ear witnesses to explosion, his critic Ryan Mackey notes that all were nonexperts, “relaying their impressions of a horrifically chaotic and deadly experience.” There is no good reason to consider the witnesses’ words evidence of the use of explosives.
To believe explosives were involved, moreover, one would have to account for how they were planted—in multiple locations—in advance of the attacks. Griffin states that demolition of the Twin Towers would have required more explosive than did that in 2000 of the Seattle Kingdome stadium—at the time the largest structure ever brought down by controlled implosion.
His tormentor Mackey, calculating that this would have meant bringing more than 60,000 kilograms of explosive into each tower, notes that the professor “produced no explanation of how such a staggering amount of explosives could have been smuggled into the Towers without detection, how it could have been placed without being seen, how many individuals would have been required to plant it all.”
The 2005 report of the National Institute of Standards and Technology summed up the matter. Its experts had found no evidence, the report said, “for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives.”
The authors have seen nothing, in all the verbiage of the skeptical literature, to persuade us otherwise.
IN 2010, Dr. Griffin came out with yet another book, on what he described as “The Official Account’s Achilles’ Heel.” The “smoking gun” that he and others see is the collapse on the evening of September 11 of the forty-seven-story World Trade Center Building 7.
Though not struck by an airplane, Building 7 was catastrophically damaged by chunks of debris from the collapsing North Tower, caught fire, and burned all day. When it in turn fell, WTC 7 became the first known instance in the world of a tall, modern, steel-reinforced building brought down apparently as a result of fire.
According to the NIST, in its 2008 report, WTC 7 was brought down by “fire-induced progressive collapse,” a chain of events technically unlike those in the Twin Towers, beginning with the failure of one key structural column. The NIST “found no evidence supporting the existence of a blast event.”
There has long been witness testimony militating against the notion that the WTC 7 collapse was triggered by explosions. Fire Department interviewees recalled having anticipated the collapse of WTC 7 from early in the afternoon of September 11. Frank Fellini, a senior chief, said the building was a “major concern” because of the hit it took from the fall of the North Tower. “When it fell, it ripped steel out from between the third and sixth floors … We were concerned that the fires on several floors and the missing steel would result in the building collapsing. So for the next five or six hours we kept firefighters from working anywhere near that building.”
“Early on,” Deputy Chief Peter Hayden said, “we saw a bulge in the southwest corner … a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors … by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse.”
Daniel Nigro, who succeeded as head of the department following the death of Chief Ganci, said he personally ordered a collapse zone cleared around the building three hours before the building tumbled, at 5:20 P.M.
Conspiracy theories on the fate of WTC 7, Nigro wrote in 2007, “are without merit.”
ON, THEN, to the idea that the Pentagon was hit not by American Flight 77 but by a missile. Food for that thought has been photographs taken after the initial explosion—and before the collapse of a major portion of the facade more than half an hour later. The pictures appear to doubters to show a hole, amidst the smoke, only some eighteen feet wide.
A Boeing 757 like American’s Flight 77 has a wingspan of 124 feet 6 inches and a tail 44 feet 6 inches tall. “How could such a big airplane have created such a small hole?” asked Dr. Griffin. The missile theory, he thought, “fits the physical evidence much better.”
The apparent size of the hole does at first glance seem odd. It seems curious, too, that photographs do not show sizable airplane debris scattered around outside the building. To draw conclusions from those visual oddities, however, is to ignore the mass of eyewitness testimony from people who saw a low-flying airliner roar toward the Pentagon. It is to reject a wealth of other evidence and to spurn the opinion of technical experts.
As in New York, no formal National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident investigation report was issued on the Pentagon crash, because the disaster was treated from the start as a crime scene. There could and probably should have been one, not least because—unlike the scene in the aftermath of the New York attacks—there was initially a crash site that air transport investigators could have examined. Both the remains of the airplane and rubble from the building collapse, however, were removed early on—the airplane debris reportedly to an FBI warehouse—for storage as evidence.
The nearest thing to an investigative probe into the Pentagon strike is the 2003 report by a team from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Its title, “The Pentagon Building Performance Report,” reflects the group’s brief—to focus on the damage done to the nation’s defense headquarters. The seven-month probe, however, inevitably also involved close study of the crash itself, and the resulting report reflects absolutely no doubt that the catastrophe was caused by an airliner.
To say otherwise, says Professor Mete Sozen, a member of the ASCE team, is “hogwash.” “To look at only the photograph of what some people see as the ‘small’ entry hole in the facade,” Sozen told the authors in 2010, “is to see only part of the reality. Much of the facade is obscured by smoke in the photos, and our work—judging by the locations of broken or heavily damaged columns in the wall—showed that the real damage consisted of a ragged series of holes stretching to a width of some ninety feet.”
Why, then, do the photographs taken before the facade’s collapse not show more clearly the virtually wingtip-to-wingtip entry gashes seen when similar planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11?
Another, long-ago, New York City plane crash may offer an insight. A plane that smashed into the Empire State Building in dense fog in 1945—a B-25 bomber with a sixty-five-foot wingspan—created a hole only twenty feet wide. The Empire State is a reinforced masonry structure, as is the Pentagon—which was built during World War II. The walls of both make substantial obstacles, more substantial than the relatively fragile glass and steel sides of the Twin Towers.
Here is what the ASCE team’s Sozen, professor of structural engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, believes happened to the Boeing that smashed into the Pentagon:
Think of the external shell of the plane as a sausage skin, and the function of the structural frame as being mainly to contain the internal pressure at altitude. The plane’s structure doesn’t have much strength. What creates the power generated on impact is what we call its “mass and velocity.” And much of the mass in the case of a Boeing 757–200 is in the fuel-filled wings.
On September 11, the Boeing was reported to have approached the Pentagon flying very low, just a few feet off the ground, at some 530 mph. Eyewitnesses said the right engine hit a portable generator on the ground outside, the left engine a steam vault. Then the nose cone hit the limestone facade, and the facade’s columns cut into the fuselage. The right wingtip, which hit next, would have been cut by the columns. But when parts of the fuel-filled wing close to the fuselage impacted—given the speed at which it was traveling and its greater mass—it was the columns that would have been destroyed or badly damaged. The same series of events would have happened when the left wing impacted (though in reverse order because of the angle at which the plane hit the building). That is why the gash in the facade of the building was not as wide as the wingspan of the airplane.
By the time the aircraft’s mass had penetrated the building—by about its own length—it had been transformed into a violent flow of small and large projectiles of solid and fluid that ricocheted off the internal parts of the building. The ensuing fire, we concluded, devoured the flammable part of the airplane’s debris inside the building. The Boeing’s tall tail and rudder assembly would have been shattered when it impacted with the edges of building slabs on the upper levels.
That may seem a compelling, credible explanation of what befell Flight 77. The skeptics, however, have long made much of the supposed lack of debris at the crash site. Photographs published in “Pentagon 9/11,” the account of the day’s events by the Defense Department’s Historical Office, however, do depict some debris outside the building: mangled pieces of metal, one clearly marked “AA,” for American Airlines, another evidently a part of the fuselage bearing part of the airline’s livery, and smaller material—fragments rather than chunks.
The ubiquitous Griffin has suggested that evidence may have been “planted.” Dr. Fetzer, cofounder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, went further and suggested how the planting may have been achieved. “Don’t be taken in,” he said. “Debris begins to show up on the completely clean lawn in short order, which might have been dropped from a C-130 … or placed there by men in suits who were photographed carrying debris with them.”
Preposterous. Reports, and photographs taken before removal by the FBI, reflect the finding of significant remains of the aircraft inside the building: seats, including one from the cockpit still attached to a piece of floor, cockpit circuitry, pieces of Rolls-Royce turbofan engines, landing gear, pieces of the nose gear, a wheel hub, a piece of the nose cone, a piece “the size of a refrigerator,” a tire. Some
parts, reportedly, bore Boeing part numbers consistent with the airplane that crashed.
Try telling Tamara “T” Carter that the debris at the Pentagon was planted. Carter, herself an American Airlines flight attendant, went to the scene two days later as a volunteer to serve refreshments to the cleanup crews. She has recalled seeing recognizable parts of a plane, the internal American upholstery with which she was familiar—and body parts. She and family members were also shown photographs of items that they might recognize, jewelry, clothing, and the like. “I’m here to tell you,” she said a year later, “that my friend’s arm with a bracelet exactly like this”—Carter held up a bracelet—“was found. We buried it in Washington, D.C.”
The friend, a close friend, had been fellow flight attendant Renee May, who on 9/11 got through by phone from Flight 77 to alert authorities to the hijacking. To Carter, who knew all the crew members killed that day, the loss was personal. “I saw pieces of our American Airlines 757,” she said. “If anyone thinks the plane did not go in there, then what happened to all my friends and where did all those body parts come from? Every crew member’s body was found.”
A random check supports this. Renee May’s ashes were divided between her parents, who scattered them on the sea off San Diego, and her fiancé on the East Coast. Fellow flight attendants, married couple Kenneth and Jennifer Lewis, were interred in Virginia. Another colleague, Michele Heidenberger, was buried in Maryland. Their captain, Charles Burlingame, lies in Arlington Cemetery.
Such facts, in the view of the authors, render the claims voiced by the skeptics outrageous, cruel insults to the memory of the dead. Human remains were painstakingly collected and identified for all but five of Flight 77’s sixty-four passengers and crew, and for all of the 125 people killed at the Pentagon. Have the “no-planers” seen the horrific photographs of bodies and body parts at the Pentagon, as carbonized and petrified in death as the victims of the eruption that destroyed Pompeii? No retrieval of human remains was more poignant than that of one of the children on board.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 12