By Richard Gage, AIA, Architect
When obtaining licensure, architects and engineers commit themselves to upholding their respective profession’s code of ethics. More than 3,000 architects and engineers are meeting this ethical obligation regarding 9/11. They are questioning the official reports of the collapse of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2 and 7. These reports, published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an arm of the U.S. Department of Commerce, have supported an endless “post-9/11 era,” in which $5.6 trillion of taxpayer funds have been spent waging wars around the world and implementing unconstitutional policies at home ever since that tragic day in 2001.
Here are fourteen key questions these architects and engineers are asking—questions that remain unanswered and ignored by our government to this day:
- Why did 47-story WTC Building 7, the third WTC high-rise destroyed that day, descend symmetrically at free-fall acceleration for a third of its seven-second collapse? Even NIST acknowledged that this fact can mean only one thing: The structure below the upper portion offered “no resistance.” And the only possible way there was no resistance, according to the laws of physics, is that the lower structure was “removed.” What removed it?
2. NIST now attributes the catastrophic collapse of Building 7 to a previously unheard-of phenomenon called “thermal expansion,” which it blames on “normal office fires.” (NIST no longer gives credence to its earlier claims that falling debris from the North Tower or an explosion of a diesel fuel tank contributed to the tower’s collapse.) Based on NIST’s outlandish “thermal expansion” hypothesis, must we conclude that our understanding of fire science, building materials, and structural behavior has been deeply flawed all along? If so, then why has the International Conference of Building Officials (ICBO) steadfastly resisted all proposed post-9/11 changes to structural building codes?
Punctuating these points in a NIST executive summary testimony, members of AE911Truth testified in writing: Undisputed Facts Point to the Controlled Demolition of WTC 7 and delivered to NIST on a December 18, 2007, teleconference call in response to NIST’s preposterous new theory. They produced the fifteen-minute, made-for-PBS documentary on the destruction of WTC 7, narrated by actor Ed Asner.
3. How did the building mass of the upper section of each Twin Tower (WTC Buildings 1 and 2) destroy the 80,000 tons of structural steel at nearly free-fall speed, as if the steel framing weren’t even there?
4. Given that open-air jet fuel fires burn at only about 600° F (per manufacturers specifications), that normal office fires burn at only 1,500° F or so, and that the melting point of steel is above 2,700° F, what thermal energy source could have produced the several tons of molten metal observed flowing out of the South Tower shortly before its collapse? This lava-like flow was also seen under the rubble for weeks in the aftermath of the Twin Towers and Building 7 destruction. The numerous witnesses of the molten metal included the World Trade Center’s chief structural engineer, Leslie Robertson.
5. What explains the chemical evidence of thermite, an incendiary material found on the ends of steel beams and in pools of molten iron in the World Trade Center debris? In Appendix C of its BPAT Report, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) documented “evidence of a severe high temperature corrosion attack on the steel, including oxidation and sulfidation with subsequent intergranular melting.” These marks are clearly not features of gravitational collapse, of hydrocarbon fuel, or of normal office fires. Yet NIST summarily dismissed this key evidence when its engineers took over the investigation from FEMA.
6. What is the source of the billions of previously molten iron microspheres, which are well-documented in samples of the World Trade Center dust? Both the United States Geological Survey (USGS), in its “Particle Atlas of World Trade Center Dust Report,” and engineering consulting firm RJ Lee Group, Inc., in its December 2003 “WTC Dust Signature Report: Composition and Morphology,” document these once-molten droplets of iron. But neither the USGS nor RJ Lee explains how the microspheres got there! Importantly, the microspheres contain the chemical signature of thermite, an incendiary used by the military to cut swiftly and cleanly through structural steel.
7. Why did more than 100 FDNY first responders describe, in great detail, the sounds of explosions and flashes of light immediately before and during each tower’s collapse? Why did we not know about these thousands of pages of FDNY “oral history” evidence until August 2005—and only then after a court order mandated their release? FDNY’s own chief of safety, Albert Turi, and its top chief, Ray Downey (who is the “premiere collapse expert in the country,” according to a fellow chief), were both heard to remark on the presence of explosives in the towers after the airplanes hit them but prior to their failures. Why were 118 FDNY testimonials, which referred to multiple, violent explosions, ignored and unreported by the 9/11 Commission and by both NIST and FEMA?
8. What was the energy source that pulverized 400,000 cubic yards of concrete into a fine powder in midair? Through what mechanism was the energy source applied? Why did that fine powder blanket Lower Manhattan as each of the three buildings was collapsing? Calculations show that the energy requirement for this pulverization and for the rapid expansion of the subsequent dust clouds was far greater than the available gravitational potential energy of the structures. This simple energy imbalance alone proves the official explanation impossible. Is this the same energy source that is responsible for the vaporization of more than 10,000 steel file cabinets and of 1,100 human bodies that were never found — not even the smallest traces of their DNA?
9. How were four-ton steel members ejected horizontally from the Twin Towers at 70 miles per hour, and why did they land up to 600 feet away? A simple gravitational collapse would only allow up to 100 feet of “drift,” so what provided the energy required for them to travel six times that distance?
10. Why were virtually no floors found at the base of either Twin Tower? There were originally 110 floors in each Tower—each of them one acre in size. What could explain the disappearance of a total of 220 acres of four-inch-thick concrete floors (180,000 tons of concrete) and of each floor’s steel decking and trusses?
11. What caused the explosive ejections of pulverized building materials that appeared as many as 60 stories below the rapidly descending “collapse” of each Tower? These “squibs,” readily visible in all of the publicly available videos, indicate that building materials were being ejected at a speed of more than 160 feet per second.
12. Why does the seismic evidence collected by Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory corroborate the evidence that supports the explosive demolition theory instead of supporting the official collapse theory?
13. Why did NIST refuse to test for residue of explosives, citing the nonsensical, unscientific rationale that such tests “would not necessarily have been conclusive”? Meanwhile, an international team of scientists found and documented nano-thermitic explosives residue in the World Trade Center dust. Moreover, the National Fire Protection Association’s NFPA 921 document, “Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations,” requires such testing when there is “high order damage,” as there obviously was at the World Trade Center.
14. How can we allow this September 2007 admission by NIST to go unexplained: “[W]e are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse [of the Towers]”? Inexplicably, NIST did not even attempt to “analyze the structural behavior after the initiation of collapse.”
The answers to these questions are highlighted in the YouTube video documentary 9/11: Explosive Evidence—Experts Speak Out, which relies upon basic physics and simple, rational forensic inquiry to examine the flawed official explanation of the World Trade Center destruction.
The evidence gathered by AE911Truth has been publicly presented to audiences in well over one hundred U.S. cities and in dozens of foreign countries. The response from both building professionals and the public has been stunning. After hearing the facts, at least eighty-five percent of attendees who initially believed the official story of “fire-weakened steel” have changed their minds — based on their newly informed opinion that supports the theory of controlled demolition with explosives and incendiaries.
The body of clear, scientific evidence has been vetted not only by architects and engineers but also by hundreds of physicists, chemists, and other science-based experts who have also signed the AE911Truth petition demanding a new investigation. After we made an appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal in 2014, our 40-minute interview became the most-watched video on the entire C-SPAN website, with more than one million views.
The explosive evidence we have amassed raises urgent concerns for our country’s counterterrorism, law enforcement, and public safety professionals. Indeed, the evidence has led Joel Hirschhorn, Ph.D., a senior staff member of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and an AE911Truth.org petition signer, to suggest, “First, let the technical truths emerge. Then, if necessary, cope with the inevitable political and conspiracy issues.”
Richard Gage, AIA, is a San Francisco Bay Area architect of 30 years, a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and one of 3,000 members of the non-profit organization Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, founded in 2006.
