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134 of 142 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
WTC7: The definitive "must read" analysis of the U.S. Federal Government cover-up, September 9, 2009
This review is from: The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report About 9/11 Is Unscientific and False (Paperback)
Many people are unaware that at 5:20 PM on September 11th, a third massive building in the World Trade Center complex suddenly and inexplicably collapsed at free-fall speed into its own footprint.
"Seven", a handsome 47-storey steel-frame building constructed in 1987, stood about 300 feet north of the North Tower. Though other buildings in the complex stood closer to the towers and were damaged by falling debris, none were structurally obliterated and reduced to the neat pile of rubble that was the strange destiny of this monolithic structure. (It's rapid, mysterious straight-down collapse is commonly featured on youtube and Google video.)
WTC7 had the dimensions of a football field and would have defined the skyline in any city but New York or Hong Kong.
Early attempts were made by insurance companies, and by the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA), to explain this unprecedented global collapse of a steel-frame high rise building. Meanwhile, NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, toiled away for seven years at finding inputs for its computer simulations that would show how office fires could bring down a steel building.
Professor Griffin's book is the history and refutation of the fluctuating and self-contradictory explanations which emerged through a series of interim NIST studies and which culminated in its final 729-page report in November 2008. NIST's conclusion: WTC7 was the first steel-frame building in history to be structurally demolished by fire alone.
The contortions required to put a scientific face on this claim were ludicrous in the extreme. In order to exclude the possibility of a controlled demolition, it was necessary to overlook a great deal of prima facie physical evidence which attended the collapse. Several television anchors covering the scene on 9/11 had commented that, in Dan Rather's words, "Amazing, incredible, pick your word. For the third time today, it's reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen too much on television before, where a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down."
Dan Rather's comments were supported by photographic and video evidence of horizontal squibs emanating from the windows, and of a vertical row of windows blown out just as the building started to collapse.
Berkeley Professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl's reported that a steel I-beam from WTC 7 had been partially vaporized - a phenomenon which required heat (over 5,000 degrees F.) far exceeding the temperatures NIST projected from a jet-fueled hydrocarbon fire causing office contents to burn.
The "New York Times" had referred to the extremely thin melted steel, with holes like Swiss cheese, as the "deepest mystery" about WTC 7. Such evidence was simply left out of the NIST report: what NIST was unable to contort, it simply overlooked.
These are but two of many physical anomalies, including molten iron running like lava beneath the buildings, and beams pulled from the rubble weeks later, dripping molten steel, which the NIST reports left out, and which Dr. Griffin has documented from written reports and eyewitness accounts.
There is also strongly suppressed testimonial evidence. That the British Government would use its broadcaster, the BBC, to make, and then remake within 3 months, two nearly identical documentaries on WTC 7, is evidence that a great deal hangs on the public perception of this building's demise. If Seven fell to reports of explosions and therefore controlled demolition, which is what the BBC attempts to refute, then Britain's ally the United States would have some serious explaining to do on the world stage.
The story of Barry Jennings' suppressed evidence is certainly one for the history books, and is first told in its fullest available detail here - though much remains unanswered and should be pursued through formal investigation.
Jennings, the respected and credible emergency coordinator/deputy director of the Emergency Services Department of the New York City Housing Authority, was trapped with New York City's corporation counsel, Michael Hess, in a north-facing WTC 7 stairwell for about 90 minutes, soon after the first Tower was hit at 8:56 AM. Later that morning and afternoon, Jennings and Hess both reported clear and unmistakable evidence of horrific explosions, heat, and smoke, below their position on the 8th floor, during the time before the first tower fell at 10:28.
Hess later changed his story about the explosions, but Jennings stuck to his guns. Jennings, aged 53, whose testimony the BBC prominently challenged in both documentaries, was suddenly admitted to hospital and died in late August 2008, just days before the release of the final NIST report on Seven - and in between the two BBC documentaries. There was no obituary, and no detective has been able to pursue (let alone establish) the cause of his death.
A great strength of Griffin's book is that it explains, in layman's terms, the principles of scientific method which are normally followed in scientific investigations, and then demonstrates how the varieties of fallacious reasoning which negate these principles destroy the validity of NIST's Final Report.
Griffin's chapters are peppered with such analyses. In the end it becomes clear that the NIST report is not just invalid - it's demonstrably fraudulent in its violations of scientific method. Its computer simulations completely fail to incorporate the mass of photographic and testimonial evidence that points to evidence of controlled demolition, and much of its input data is contradicted by photographs contained in the report itself.
The 22 manifestly hollow claims supporting the fire "hypothesis" are neatly summarized at the end of the book.
In summary, the NIST Final Report on Building 7 goes far beyond incompetence: it's a defensive political document -- a travesty of the scientific method, and one which should be widely reported to the agencies which uphold the standards of scientific inquiry into truth.
This reviewer believes that it is critically important that this book be read by millions of people across the land. It is the lever that will open the can of worms underlying the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Lack of knowledge about these events is allowing an apparently misled President Obama to up the ante in Afghanistan, without meeting what should be a groundswell of public resistance. At the same time he is wasting vital resources which could be directed towards alternative energy solutions for the far more critical problem of global warming.
If enough people read this book, perhaps an impartial commission will be forced into being to truly investigate the fate of Seven, and following upon its inevitable conclusions, the fate of the Towers, which remain standing in our minds as ghostly icons of fear supporting the vastly misguided global war on terror.
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72 of 77 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant Spotlight Exposing Criminal 9/11 Cover-Up by US Government Agency, September 9, 2009
This review is from: The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report About 9/11 Is Unscientific and False (Paperback)
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.
In Part II, "NIST's Unscientific Arguments for Its Own Theory," Griffin dissects...
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67 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Weakest Link in the Implausible Official Story, September 14, 2009
This review is from: The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report About 9/11 Is Unscientific and False (Paperback)
As a former professor of metallurgical engineering and senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment my only complaint is that I did not write this superb book. Once again David Ray Griffin has demonstrated his first class analytical capabilities. His intellectual achievements give remarkable credibility to the 9/11 truth movement that I proudly support. I too have long argued that the unusual collapse of WTC 7 more than any other event on 9/11 provides proof positive that the official story still supported by the government, nearly all of the mainstream media and far too many Americans is surely a fraud, a lie and a shameful historic blot in American history. How people can still condemn 9/11 truthers for believing that the US government in some way had a hand in creating the 9/11 tragedy is even more mind boggling than the official story itself. This book should be required reading in every American school. Here is the really big and critical question: Will the mainstream media give this newest Griffin book the attention it so richly deserves? I fear not. Any true pursuit of justice must look backward and accept the possibility of terribly painful findings. If President Obama truly believed in pursuing justice he would not only read this book but more importantly use his powers to get a new, comprehensive and credible investigation of 9/11. Does Obama have the integrity to do this? I fear not.
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