by James H. Fetzer
As the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, I would observe that our members, building on prior research by earlier students of 9/11, have established more than a dozen disproofs of the official government account, the truth of any one of which is enough to show that the government’s account–in one or another of its guises–cannot possibly be correct.
Overview of New 9/11 Research
1.The impact of planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the buildings down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank DeMartini, the project manager, has observed), the planes alleged to have hit were similar to those they were designed to withstand, and the buildings continued to stand after those impacts with negligible effects.
2.The melting point of steel at 2,800 degrees F is about 1,000 degrees higher than the maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed 1,800 degrees under optimal conditions; but the NIST examined 236 samples of steel and found that 233 had not been exposed to temperatures above 500 degrees F and the others not above 1200.
3.Underwriters Laboratory certified the steel in the buildings up to 2,000 degrees F for three or four hours without any significant effects, where these fires burned neither long enough or hot enough—at an average temperature of about 500 degrees for about one hour in the South Tower and one and a half in the North—to weaken, much less melt.
4.If the steel had melted or weakened, then the affected floors would have displayed completely different behavior, with some degree of asymmetrical sagging and tilting, which would have been gradual and slow, not the complete, abrupt and total demolition that was observed. Which means the NIST cannot even explain the initiation of any “collapse” sequence.
5.William Rodriguez, who was the senior custodian in the North Tower and the last man to leave the building, has reported massive explosions in the sub-basements that effected extensive destruction, including the demolition of a fifty-ton hydraulic press and the ripping of the skin off a fellow worker, where they filled with water that drained the sprinkler system.
6.Rodriguez observed that the explosion occurred prior to reverberations from upper floors, a claim that has now been substantiated in a new study by Craig Furlong and Gordon Ross, “Seismic Proof: 9/11 Was an Inside Job,” demonstrating that these explosions actually took place as much as 14 and 17 seconds before the presumptive airplane impacts.
7.Heavy-steel-construction buildings like the Twin Towers are not generally capable of “pancake collapse,” which normally occurs only with concrete structures of “lift slab” construction and could not occur in redundant welded-steel buildings, such as the towers, unless every supporting column were removed at the same time, floor by floor, as Charles Pegelow, a structural engineer, has observed.
8.The demolition of the two towers in about 10 seconds apiece is very close to the speed of free fall with only air resistance, which Judy Wood, Ph.D., formerly a professor of mechanical engineering, has observed is an astounding result that would be impossible without extremely powerful sources of energy. If they were collapsing, they would have had to fall through their points of greatest resistance.
9.Indeed, the towers are exploding from the top, not collapsing to the ground, where their floors do not move, a phenomenon Wood has likened to two gigantic trees turning to sawdust from the top down, which, like the pulverization of the buildings, the government’s account cannot possibly explain. There were no pancakes.
10.WTC-7 came down in a classic controlled demolition at 5:20 PM after Larry Silverstein suggested the best thing to do might be to “pull it,” displaying all the characteristics of classic controlled demolitions: a complete, abrupt and total collapse into its own footprint, where the floors are all falling at the same time, yielding a stack of pancakes about 5 floors high.
11.The hit point at the Pentagon was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125-foot wingspan and a tail that stands 44-feet above the ground; the debris was wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail! Not even the engines were recovered, which means that the official account is not true.
12.The Pentagon’s own videotapes do not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building, as even Bill O’Reilly admitted when one was shown on “The O’Reilly Factor”; at 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 77-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present and easily visible; it was not, which means that the video evidence also contradicts the official account.
13.The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectory—flying at high speed barely above ground level—physically impossible, because a Boeing 757 flying over 500 mph could not have come closer than about 60 feet of the ground, which means that the official account is not even aerodynamically possible.
14.Data from a flight recorder provided to Pilots for 9/11 Truth by the National Transportation Safety Board corresponds to a plane with a different approach and altitude, which would have precluded its hitting lampposts or even the building itself, which means that, if this data corresponds to a Boeing 757, it would have flown over the Pentagon rather than hit it.
15.If Flight 93 crashed into an abandoned mine shaft, as the government maintains, then they should have brought out the heavy equipment and the bright lights and dug and dug, 24/7, in the hope that, by some miracle, someone might possibly have survived. But nothing like that was done. Even the singed trees and shrubs were trimmed, apparently to make it impossible to subject them to chemical analysis.
There is more, especially about the alleged hijackers, including that they were not competent to fly these planes and their names are not on any original, authenticated passenger manifest. Several have turned up alive and well and living in the Middle East. The government has not even produced their tickets as evidence that they were even aboard the aircraft they are alleged to have hijacked. Did Osama call from a cave in Afghanistan and charge them to his MasterCard?
President Bush recently acknowledged that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The Senate Intelligence Committee has reported that Saddam was not in cahoots with Al Qaeda. And the FBI has acknowledged that it has “no hard evidence” to tie Osama to 9/11. If Saddam did not do it and Osama did not do it, then who is responsible for the death of 3,000 citizens that day?
We believe that it is the highest form of respect to those who died on 9/11 and their survivors to establish how and why they died, which our own government manifestly has not done. With the American media under the thumb of a corrupt administration, we cannot count on the press to perform its investigative function. But we can do our best to expose falsehoods and reveal truths about 9/11.