By Kevin Ryan
MUJCA is dedicated to a Truth that is larger than a simple revelation of facts. These people of faith understand that there is a root cause which we all need to understand.
The lies of 9/11 point very urgently toward this root cause, and if we fail to realize and act upon it then getting the truth out could actually make things worse. That is, if we take the path of easy answers, and treat the lies of 9/11 as simply the acts of those we call “ evildoers ” , then we ’ ll miss the chance to make real change. We won ’ t see how similar lies have been behind almost all social crises of the past and present, and more importantly we won ’ t see how lies like these have always been used to control us, and distract us from higher goals.
In order to avoid a potentially greater catastrophe than
we currently face, if that is imaginable, perhaps one day with a larger global
population that is even more dependent on delicate supply systems, we need to
learn how and why we lie to ourselves. In doing so, we may be able to prevent the greedy few
from using our weakness against us as they ’ ve done with the
crimes of 9/11. This kind of
learning requires a real commitment to Truth, one which corresponds well with
the intent of the world's great religions, and therefore with the mission of
MUJCA.
* * *
Looking for Truth in Credentials: The WTC
“Experts”
by Kevin Ryan
When Matthew
Rothschild, editor of the online magazine The Progressive, wrote an article
called “Enough of the 9/11 Conspiracies, Already”, we all knew he was not
talking about the conspiracy theory that the US government sells us to justify
the expanding 9/11 Wars.[1] To the contrary, in writing that article Mr.
Rothschild was selling that same theory himself. What he actually meant was that
people should not question the US government’s story of terror because
credentialed experts have been found to support it. But the fact is that the
experts found to support the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 are
predominantly those who profit from doing so. That’s not to say that all of
these people were “part of the conspiracy”. But they are, whether consciously or
not, a part of the cover-up. And that, of course, is the greater
crime.
The Bush
Administration employed a number of such credentialed experts to give us
multiple explanations for the unprecedented destruction of three tall
steel-framed buildings at the World Trade Center (WTC). Unfortunately, all of
those explanations have proven to be false, and this fact reminds us that
academic credentials don’t necessarily make a person more capable of, or more
likely to, tell the truth.
Exactly how they
could find so many experts on the fire-induced collapse of tall buildings is not
immediately clear, considering such an event had never happened before. But it
did help that the questions were quickly framed as being solely matters of
structural engineering, a sub-field of civil engineering, because structural
engineers cannot find work without continual government approvals. A Chemistry
laboratory manager like myself can work without permits or licenses, but people
can’t just go out and build a bridge or a tall building on their own. The
extensive paperwork necessary to complete civil engineering projects is obtained
by working closely with, and staying on good terms with, local and national
authorities. That fact may not be enough to ensure vocal support for the
official story of “global collapse,” but it has been enough to keep most
structural engineers from publicly opposing the intransigent government stance
on the WTC events.
From where, then,
has the vocal support come within the engineering community? Matthew Rothschild
points to some interesting characters when he says that “I made a few calls
myself”, including to Gene Corley and to Mete Sozen. Additionally, Rothschild
says that he consulted “some of the top building design and engineering firms,”
like Skidmore Owings & Merrill, and Greenhorne & O’Mara. To emphasize
just how solid the government’s story is, he adds that he “also contacted
engineering professors at MIT and other leading universities in the country, and
none of them puts any stock in the 9/11 conspiracy
theories.”
What Mr. Rothschild
failed to tell us is that Gene Corley and Mete Sozen not only created the
reports that he is defending, but have also, for many years, worked for the US
Department of Defense (DOD) through the Blast Mitigation for Structures Program
(BMSP). Since 1997, this program has provided the DOD with expertise in
explosives, and has been funded at $10 million annually.[2] After 9/11,
astronomical increases in DOD funding are likely to have benefited all DOD
partners and programs, like DOD’s Nunn-Perry award winner, Greenhorne &
O’Mara, and those involved with the BMSP. Of course, the DOD was probably
already awash in back-budget funds prior to 9/11, as indicated by the missing
trillions reported by the DOD on 9/10/01.[3]
Rothschild also
failed to let us know that Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), one of his
independent engineering firms, is responsible for the architectural design of
the new Freedom Tower. SOM gained that contract at the personal insistence of
Larry Silverstein, the original owner of WTC 7 and the WTC towers’ leaseholder.
Mr. Rothschild may also not be aware that William Baker, a top executive at SOM,
was involved in several of the official WTC investigations and reports that have
been generated. In any case it is clear that the “Freedom Tower” would not be
the publicity-rich project it is today if an alternative explanation forced us
to rename it the “There Goes Our Freedom
Tower”.
Getting back to
those experts at BMSP, we see that DOD employs a number of consulting firms to
help out Corley and Sozen, in what is called the Blast Mitigation Action Group
(BMAG), including ARUP, ARA, SAIC, SGH, Thornton-Tomasetti and Weidlinger
Associates.[4] It should be noted that most of these firms were major
contributors to the various official explanations for collapse of the WTC
buildings, as well as being government contractors in fields related to
terrorism. Strangely, despite their overwhelming expertise in the use of
explosives, none of their explanations for the WTC events had anything to do
with explosives.
That’s not to say
that these characters never deal with explosives, however, as Corley and Sozen
were two of the four members of the Oklahoma City (OKC) engineering
investigation, along with Paul Mlakar and Charles Thornton. The work they did
followed the damage estimates found within the Federal Emergency Management
Administration’s (FEMA) OKC report, written by Greenhorne & O’Mara. Although
none of these credentialed experts even toured the site at OKC, Corley and Sozen
were able to produce an engineering report that was a highly questionable
extrapolation of minimal evidence, primarily the size of a bomb crater, provided
to them by the FBI.[5] Their report was created in support of the “One Guy, One
Truck Bomb” political story that directly contradicted testimony given by
several leading experts, including USAF General Benton
Partin.
After spending 25
years dealing with explosive weaponry, General Partin independently studied the
damage done to the Murrah building in the month before the evidence was
destroyed, and made several strong statements to members of the US Congress. In
July of 1995, General Partin wrote to Senator Trent Lott, stating, “The attached
report contains conclusive proof that the bombing of the Aflred P. Murrah
Federal Building…was not caused solely by the truck bomb. Evidence shows that
the massive destruction was primarily the result of four demolition charges
placed at critical structural points at the third floor level.” He added “No
government law enforcement agency should be permitted to demolish, smash and
bury evidence of a…terrorist attack without a thorough examination by an
independent, technically competent
agency.”[6]
When speaking about
the unprecedented destruction of evidence, General Partin was referring to the
demolition of the Murrah Building by Mark Loizeaux’s company, just five days
after Partin made his strong statements directly to the US Congress. But Partin
might as well have been talking about the WTC six years later, where much of the
steel evidence was destroyed in the month before engineering investigators began
inspecting the scene. It was noted by the House Committee on Science, as they
reviewed early shortcomings of the WTC investigation, that, “Some of the
critical pieces of steel…were gone before the first BPAT team member ever
reached the site.”[7] At the time of this destruction of evidence, Gene Corley
was in charge of the investigation and his OKC partner Charles Thornton’s
company was in charge of the site at Ground
Zero.
In any case, it is
clear that Rothschild’s primary experts have a long history of involvement in US
government interests, and in highly questionable engineering reports. But surely
the “engineering professors at MIT and other leading universities in the
country” could not all be so tied to US government interests. There must be some
objective members within the group of scientists supporting the Bush
Administration’s theories, and some agreement among scientists around the
world.
The truth is that
interpretation of the events at the WTC does include some agreement from all
parties. We all agree that no tall steel-framed building in history has ever
collapsed uniformly at nearly free-fall speed into a pile of rubble for any
reason whatsoever, outside of demolition. And we’re in agreement that the first
three occasions of such an event supposedly occurred all on the same day, all in
the same place. To round out a quick agreement, we can all safely say that these
improbable events were the emotional basis for the passing of legislation that
had already been written (e.g. the Patriot Act), and for the invasion of several
strategically-important countries, the plans for which were already in the
works.
From there, however,
the views of the government’s credentialed experts diverge from those who are
more interested in objectively seeking the truth. The initial facts of agreement
should lead any objective person to seek a detailed investigation that leaves no
hypothesis un-examined. But for the government’s credentialed experts, only one
hypothesis was worthy of consideration, a fire-based failure of all three
buildings that jibed with the overall official version of the events of that
day.
In support of that
fire-based triple play, the experts gave us a progression of false stories. The
media gave us the first false story, with help from PhD engineers, some of whom
were contributors to the official reports. Eduardo Kausel, an “engineering
professor at MIT” and contributor to the WTC report generated by the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), suggested to us in Scientific
American that this catastrophe was probably due to the jet fuel fires melting
the steel in the buildings.[8] He was joined in this early theory by a handful
of other PhD engineers and professors around the country, and by the US
government’s top suspect - Osama Bin Laden. The US State Department still
promotes the melting steel theory by promoting the alleged confession video of
the alleged Bin Laden, which Matthew Rothschild finds convincing as well. In
this confession video, the credentialed expert Bin Laden said -- “Due to my
experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane
would melt the iron structure of the building..."[9] Apparently Bin Laden’s plan
was a complete failure after all, because even the experts now agree that jet
fuel-accelerated office fires cannot melt steel (or Iron for that
matter).
Another structural
engineer who made early claims of melting steel, in the infamous 2002 Nova video
“Why the Towers Fell”, was Matthys Levy. Mr. Levy was a principal at the BMAG
consulting firm Weidlinger Associates that, later, with the help of many other
PhD engineers, produced a report on the WTC disaster as part of an insurance
claim by Larry Silverstein.[10] This Silverstein-Weidlinger investigation was
based on extensive computer modeling and involved many of the same contractors
that contributed to the government studies. Their final report told us that
floor failure had nothing to do with the WTC disasters, but “that the failure of
columns alone, independent of the floors, explains the collapses.”[11] At the
time, Levy told us “There is no doubt left about the sequence of
failure.”[12]
Unfortunately, the
credentialed experts were wrong again. Until NIST’s final report came out in
2005, the “Pancake Theory” had replaced the column failure theory as the most
widely accepted explanation for collapse. FEMA, along with a professor of
Engineering from Northwestern, Zdenek Bazant, championed this theory of
pancaking floors as the major explanation for the collapse of both towers,
directly contradicting the Silverstein-Weidlinger report. This was strange,
considering many of the same experts were involved in both the FEMA and
Weidlinger investigations, including Gene
Corley.
Amazingly enough,
just last summer NIST finally admitted that the explanation could not involve
pancaking floors either, by saying “NIST’s findings do not support the “pancake
theory” of collapse”.[13] NIST’s findings, first reported in their final draft
report of October 2004 and built over a period of several years, originally
consisted of two considerably different stories for the two towers. But NIST
modified this nine months later in their final, final draft report, giving just
one story for both towers about “widely-dislodged” fireproofing and sagging
floors pulling the external columns inward, with no mention of pancaking. Their
final, final collapse initiation sequence, the essence of their report, is now
known to be false in every aspect.[14]
Through the years,
NIST and the other official investigators ignored the demolition hypothesis
completely, as can be seen from their reports and archived presentations. That’s
not surprising though, as the scientists working for FEMA and NIST, and
therefore for the Bush Administration, would not likely lead their investigation
toward a result that would limit or stop the 9/11 Wars. For example John Gross
of NIST and Therese McAllister of Greenhorne & O’Mara, who not only
co-authored the most important sections of NIST’s report, but were also primary
authors of FEMA’s report, continue to act deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to
evidence for the demolition hypothesis.[15] And we can imagine that all those
“independent” contractors who contributed to the ever-changing story, who were
also consulting firms for the DOD’s interesting Blast Mitigation Action Group,
would be hard-pressed to offer an explanation that would require a less
militarily focused solution.
The only supposedly
independent corroboration that the Bush scientists at NIST could produce for
their appalling pack of lies was from that old respected scientific institution,
Popular Mechanics. This Hearst magazine is not, as most people know, a
scientific publication in any way, shape or form. When they talk about
Mechanics, they do not mean Quantum Mechanics or Statistical Mechanics, or even
Classical Mechanics. Popular Mechanics (PM) is simply a gloss-covered
advertisement for numerous consumer items ranging from ATVs to lawn mowers. You
know – mechanics.
This hasn’t
prevented many who cling to the official story from using PM as their scientific
champion. For example, in his poorly researched hit piece against “conspiracy
theorists”, British essayist George Monbiot foists Popular Mechanics upon us,
saying they “polled 300 experts” to support their findings.[16] But science is
not about popularity, and PM’s “poll” of “structural engineering/building
collapse experts” actually consisted of only about 33 people, some of them
listed as photographers, media-relations staff and spokespersons. Of those that
were engineering-related, most were in some way related to OKC, FEMA, NIST or
DOD, and many were responsible for the Weidlinger report, the Pancake Theory, or
the NIST report.[17] It turns out that, when it comes to scientific explanations
for terrorist acts, it’s a small world after
all.
It's in PM’s book,
“Debunking 9/11 Myths”, that we find this survey. Here they include other
figures like Forman Williams, although they fail to tell you that Dr. Williams
was also a member of NIST’s top advisory committee, and therefore was defending
his own work. Williams is presented by PM as a disinterested academic expert,
but one must wonder how disinterested Williams was when the University of
California San Diego received $393 million in federal grants in 2005, the same
year the NIST WTC report came out, with his own Engineering department receiving
$44 million of that sum.[18] Another of PM’s disinterested experts was
Engineering professor Richard Fruehan of Carnegie Mellon University, an
institute that received $100 million in federal grants that same year, with
Engineering and research grants accounting for approximately half of the
total.
In the case of
Popular Mechanics, we see people being quite openly deceptive in their strong
support of the Bush Administration’s terror story. In their book they promote
false claims that the government no longer supports, including the Pancake
Theory. They also promote other, more ridiculous ideas including the claim that
massive damage was done to the basement levels of a WTC tower by a bolus of jet
fuel that meandered its way through several elevator shafts in the jogged
elevator system, moving carefully around the elevators themselves and waiting
all the while to explode in the sub-basements over 90 stories below.
Additionally, PM repeats the false and ludicrous claim that the buildings were
designed for airliner impacts, but not for jet fuel fires. In fact, John
Skilling, the actual chief engineer of the WTC, made it clear in 1993 that jet
fuel fires were considered in the structural
design.[19]
In the forward to
PM’s book, Republican Senator John McCain describes how he feels the truth
behind September 11th is more mundane than “conspiracy mongers” would have us
believe. Strangely, he refers us to the “banality of Nazi evil” to show that
9/11 was probably not an elaborate conspiracy. That is, according to McCain,
9/11 was probably NOT part of a simple plan by corporate-funded politicians to
maintain and expand their power, but was instead the work of a small group of
powerless fanatics whose plans to bring about worldwide totalitarian rule were
held back only by our own cherished freedoms. That’s a tough bit to swallow, to
be sure, but the idea that a Hearst publication would resort to the “banality of
Nazi evil” is absolutely astounding. That’s because in writing this forward,
Senator McCain joined an infamous group of Hearst publication authors, including
Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, who wrote for Hearst, the latter until
1938.[20]
Those of us fighting
for the truth about 9/11 owe it to the victims of the expanding 9/11 Wars, and
to ourselves, to reveal these ongoing lies from corporate criminals and their
credentialed “experts”. It is becoming increasingly obvious that those giving us
one false story after another, while simultaneously ignoring much of the
evidence of 9/11, might have more than just a cozy relationship with this
government, and more than a benign past. It seems quite possible that some among
those providing these explanations are knowingly complicit in the greater crime
of a 9/11 cover-up.
It is also true
that, like Matthew Rothschild, many of us simply want quick and easy answers, in
order to relieve ourselves of any need to think about the facts of 9/11 and the
changes in worldview that might be demanded of such an examination. The problem
is, the easy answers have all been wrong, while at the same time the experts
have ignored one fairly simple hypothesis that is now becoming obvious to many.
It should be clear that this is because the credentialed experts we’ve been
dealing with are all quite well invested in maintaining the official version of
events.
1. Enough of the 9/11 Conspiracies, Already, The Progressive, Matthew Rothschild, September 11, 2006 http://www.progressive.org/mag_wx091106
2. For a short description of DOD’s BMSP, see “Department of Defense Should Broaden Communication Efforts to Protect Federal and Civilian Buildings From Bomb Attacks”, The National Academy of Sciences, November 2001, http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=10230
3. Missing Trillions: Rumsfeld Buries Admission of Missing 2+ Trillion Dollars in 9/10/01 Press Conference, 911Research.com, http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/trillions.html
4. US Army Corps of Engineers, Blast Mitigation Action Group (BMAG), Consulting Firms, https://bmag.usace.army.mil/consulting_firms.php
5. Blast Loading and Response of Murrah Building, Mlakar, Corley, Sozen, Thornton, 1997, http://www.terrorisminfo.mipt.org/pdf/forensicengineering2.pdf
6. General Partin’s letter to Senator Lott can be found in its entirety in the Final Report on the Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, April, 19,1995, The Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee, Appendix, page 378-380. This letter is also reproduced here -http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/OK/PARTIN/ok8.htm
7. See Context of 'March 6, 2002: House Committee on Science Holds Hearing on WTC Collapses Investigation, Cooperative Research, http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a030602collapseheari...
8.“When the Twin Towers Fell”, Scientific American, October 9, 2001 http://www.public-action.com/911/jmcm/sciam/
9. The US State Department still appears to be promoting this first false theory by promoting Osama (Fatty) Bin Laden’s baseless statements. US State Department website: The Top September 11 Conspiracy Theories, http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=pubs-english&y=2006&m=A...
10. Profile: Weidlinger Associates, Cooperative Research http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=weidlinger_associat...
11. “Report Ties WTC Collapses to Column Failures”, Engineering News-Record, 10/25/02, McGraw Hill Construction, http://www.construction.com/NewsCenter/Headlines/ENR/20021025b.asp
12. Study Absolves Twin Tower Trusses, Fireproofing, Engineering News-Record, 11/04/02 http://enr.construction.com/news/buildings/archives/021104.asp
13. Answers to Frequently Asked Questions, August 2006, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster, http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
14. See my essay, What is 9/11 Truth? – The First Steps, at the Journal of 911 Studies, http://www.journalof911studies.com . Also see the critique of my presentation Review of 'A New Standard For Deception: The NIST WTC Report' A Presentation by Kevin Ryan, Jim Hoffman, 911Research.com, 10/15/06 http://911research.wtc7.net/reviews/kevin_ryan/newstandard.html
15. See video of John Gross’ presentation at the University of Texas Austin, with testimonies and evidence of molten metal at the WTC. Project for New American Citizens, http://911blogger.com/node/6104
16. “A 9/11 Conspiracy Virus is Sweeping the World, But it Has No Basis in Fact”, George Monbiot, The Guardian, February 6, 2007, http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2007519,00.html
17. Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand up to the Facts, Dunbar & Reagan, Hearst Press, 2006. Note: See also Eduardo (melting steel) Kausel’s glowing review in the front cover.
18. See Fedspending.org, Grants, http://www.fedspending.org/
19. City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center, James Glanz and Eric Lipton, (New York: Times Books, 2003), 138
20. Remembering “The Chief”, PBS’s Online NewsHour, 9/07/00, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec00/nasaw_9-7.html