In THE MYSTERIOUS COLLAPSE OF WORLD TRADE CENTER 7, David Ray Griffin provides an overwhelmingly convincing case that the latest official US government account of the events at "Ground Zero" on September 11, 2001, is false. He examines in detail the whole series of publications by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) purporting to explain the highly "mysterious" collapse of World Trade Center 7, a 47-story steel-framed skyscraper across the street from the North Tower, which was not struck by a plane and yet collapsed into its footprint, at nearly free-fall speed, shortly after 5pm that day.
That the sudden collapse of Building 7 constitutes a "mystery" is an admission of the major media and NIST itself, which for years said it was having a hard time understanding what had occurred. After a long series of preliminary attempts, admitting that a full explanation had not been achieved, NIST issued its "Final Report" in November 2008, claiming to present a scientifically-verified and complete account of the causes of the building's collapse. As critics of the ever-changing official explanations point out, however, the "mystery" is the result of failure by government and media to consider the most likely explanation, one that accords with a vast amount of physical and testimonial evidence, which is that the building was brought down by controlled demolition.
As Griffin brilliantly demonstrates throughout this powerful indictment, NIST, a purportedly scientific agency of the federal government, has produced an official "explanation" that fails to follow basic scientific principles and meet established scientific standards. The publication of its "Final Report" therefore amounts to nothing less than scientific fraud, which when committed by a federal science agency is a criminal act. Despite its claims to have produced a final, definitive, scientific report on WTC 7's collapse, NIST in fact has ignored, suppressed, or distorted all the evidence for controlled demolition, while fabricating fake "evidence" to support its own "explanation."
In the Introduction, Griffin lays out the background to NIST's "Final Report", surveying the agency's earlier "interim" reports and the evolution of its attempts to explain the "mystery." In its "Final Report", NIST abandoned its earlier claim that structural damage from debris from the North Tower was a significant cause of Building 7's collapse, asserting that the principal cause was very hot and long-lasting fires of office materials in the building set ablaze by the falling debris.
Part I of the book, "NIST's Unscientific Rejection of the Most Likely Theory," examines in six chapters the methods used by NIST to avoid considering controlled demolition as a possible explanation of the building's collapse. Controlled demolition is the most likely hypothesis because never before 9/11 had a steel-framed skyscraper collapsed due to fires. All previous instances of sudden, rapid collapse of such buildings into their footprints had been the result of intentional, controlled demolition using explosives. As Griffin demonstrates in Part 1, a very large amount of physical and testimonial evidence supporting the "most likely hypothesis" exists, and it was all ignored, dismissed, or distorted by the authors of the "Final Report."
In Chapter 1, "NIST as a Political, Not a Scientific, Agency," Griffin shows that NIST, as an agency of the Commerce Department, was under tight political control by the Bush administration. He quotes from a whistleblower from the agency who described in detail how political appointees in the "front office" vetted every scientific statement issued by NIST, and how the statements were then vetted by "the HQ staff of the Department of Commerce," the National Security Agency and the Office of Management and Budget.
In Chapter 2, "Some Principles of Scientific Method," Griffin begins by considering what constitutes scientific fraud, and then distinguishes between scientific fraud in the strict sense and in a broader sense. Scientific fraud in the strict sense has been committed by NIST if it can be shown that i) the agency has fabricated evidence to support its claims; ii) that it has falsified evidence; or iii) that it has ignored relevant evidence. Scientific fraud in the broader sense has been committed by NIST if it can be shown that it violated further scientific principles, including these: extra-scientific considerations should not be allowed to determine conclusions; an investigation should begin with the most-likely hypothesis; straw-man arguments should be avoided; unprecedented causes should not, without good reasons, be posited to explain familiar occurrences; and scientists should not make claims implying that laws of nature have been violated.
In Chapter 3, "NIST's Refusal to Begin with the Most Likely Hypothesis," Griffin establishes that the most likely hypothesis to consider in attempting to explain the collapse of WTC 7 must be that it was brought down by controlled demolition using explosives, for two reasons. First, no steel-framed skyscraper prior to 9/11 had ever collapsed for any reason other than demolition; on 9/11, however, and in one small area, three such buildings came down, purportedly due to fires, and in the case of the Twin Towers, additional damage caused by airliner impacts. (In his earlier book, DEBUNKING 9/11 DEBUNKING, Griffin has already demonstrated that NIST's "explanation" for the disintegration and fall of the towers does not stand up to rational scrutiny.) Second, the collapse of WTC 7 "exemplified many of the signature features of the type of controlled demolition known as implosion": the collapse started from the bottom and was sudden and total, the building came straight down and fell at close to free-fall speed, its concrete was pulverized to dust, and the debris pile was relatively small (p. 27). When fires result in "high-order damage," evidenced by shattered structures, pulverized debris, and significant lateral ejections of material, guidelines established by the National Fire Protection Association in its "Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations" mandate official agencies to investigate the possibility of explosives, but NIST never undertook any such investigation.
In Chapter 4, "NIST's Ignoring of Physical Evidence for Explosives," Griffin lays out the physical evidence suggesting that the building was brought down by controlled demolition: video evidence of "squibs" of smoke and pulverized material blown laterally out of the building as it collapsed; a vertical row of blown-out windows from the 29th to the 37th floors, unexplainable by NIST's account; molten metal in the debris under the building; an array of scientific reports of extremely high temperatures, far above the temperatures which could be reached by fires burning in office materials, as proposed by NIST; thinning and sulfidation of steel recovered from the building; extreme heat and unusual emissions at the collapse site for months afterwards; and red/gray chips found in dust from the building's collapse, which on analysis by independent researchers Steven Jones, Kevin Ryan, Niels Harrit, and others, proved to be nanothermitic, derived from a very advanced type of explosive. NIST in its "Final Report" failed to take any of this evidence into account, simply pretending it did not exist.
In Chapter 5, "NIST's Ignoring of Testimonial Evidence for Explosives," Griffin first reviews NIST's prior ignoring of testimonial evidence for explosions in the Twin Towers before their disintegration. He then presents in detail a wide array of testimonial evidence supporting the most-likely hypothesis, implosion. These testimonies came from credible witnesses, including a New York Daily News reporter and a New York Police Department officer located outside the building before it came down, who heard explosions inside it; detailed accounts from two high-level NYC employees, Barry Jennings and Michael Hess, of their experiences inside the building that morning, where they heard and felt large explosions before the Twin Towers had collapsed; testimonies, again from highly credible witnesses, to foreknowledge of the building's collapse; premature television reports that the building had come down, before it had actually collapsed; and even witnesses to Fire Department of New York personnel announcing that the building was going to be "brought down." Griffin shows that NIST either ignored this evidence or went to great lengths to distort it by constructing an elaborate false chronology of the testimonial evidence which it could not simply ignore.
In Chapter 6, "NIST's Straw-Man Arguments against Explosives," Griffin analyzes the reasons presented by NIST for its refusal to investigate the possibility that explosives were responsible for WTC 7's destruction. He shows that they employed "straw-man" arguments based on highly-implausible scenarios for the types and quantities of explosives used and then argued that these scenarios are ... implausible! The principal scenario NIST focused on, needless to say, was not one that has been proposed by any actual independent researchers as a plausible one. Griffin then shows that high-level personnel at NIST, including four directors from 2001 to 2008 as well as key advisors to the agency, had extensive professional involvement with and expertise in the technology of nanothermitic materials, the very type of explosive proposed by independent researchers as most likely to have been used on 9/11. Indeed, as Griffin details, NIST is engaged in partnerships with academic and federal government research units around the country to develop nanothermitic technologies.
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