Another physicist assails official 9/11 story

Draft 5

Crockett Grabbe, a longtime physics professor at the University of Iowa, is convinced that the twin towers and a third World Trade Center building were felled by explosives.

In an exclusive interview with INN World Report's Lenny Charles, the physicist, who has done research for NASA and the Naval Research Laboratory, disputed an argument by a government physicist, Manuel Garcia, that the 47-story World Trade Center 7 had been brought down by fires weakening key points.

Garcia's article may be found in Counterpunch. The Grabbe interview is available via innworldreport.net. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has yet to complete its inquiry into WTC7's collapse. For more background on Garcia's views, see Scientists clash over 9/11 collapses at 911science.blogspot.com (link at right).

Grabbe endorsed an argument by Steven Jones, recently retired as a Brigham Young University physics professor, that the quantity of melted steel found at the trade center sites indicated the use of a Thermite-type explosive. The fires in the buildings did not pack enough energy to melt steel, he said. The NIST has also said the fires were insufficient to melt steel, but said nothing about much molten steel found on site.

The physicist, who has been listed in Who's Who in Science and Engineering, said if collapse of the 47-story WTC7 was initiated as Garcia theorized, it should have fallen chaotically -- not symmetrically nor so swiftly. Additionally, Grabbe argued that though there may have been enough thermal energy for Garcia's model, there wasn't enough power -- the rate at which energy is expended -- to account for the quick, symmetrical collapse.

Grabbe also said that the top block of World Trade Center 2, the first building to fall, had too little energy to knock down the entire building. The laws of the conservation of momentum seem to have been violated in the government theory, he said, an argument previously made by David L. Griscom, a former government physicist who once worked for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (See the "politics" link on Griscom's consulting firm web page http://www.impactglassresearchinternational.com)

Grabbe cited a number of "squibs" -- puffs of smoke -- prior to collapse in each building that he called direct evidence for the use of explosives. He also said the idea that the twin towers had each fallen as a result of compression from gathering momentum had only a very remote probability of truth. The NIST offered no explanation for most of the puffs.

Grabbe, like Garcia, specializes in plasma physics and has a number of recent research papers to his credit. Grabbe is also an expert in the earth's magnetic field, an area of endeavor important to space technology and hence to NASA and the Pentagon.

In the era of the "Star Wars" debate, Grabbe wrote a book on space weapons, an area where plasma physics is important. In the INN interview, the scientist never brought up the possibility that the buildings were destroyed with Star Wars particle beam weaponry, a conjecture put forward by a few people with academic credentials.

Professors push against 9/11 coverup

An increasing number of professors and experts are challenging the official claims about the attacks of 9/11.
Thanks to the georgewashington blog for putting together a good piece on that point, with many useful links.

http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2006/09/jones.html

The latest is a physics prof in Iowa. More on him later, hopefully.

How to counter Giuliani on 9/11

So Giuliani says that a Democrat as president would increase the risk of another 9/11.

Giuliani is the former federal prosecutor, who, as mayor, took no notice of the failure to preserve the physical evidence of the trade center collapses. NIST probers later lamented that they had little to go on since almost all the steel had been hurriedly shipped overseas as scrap. In fact, as mayor, Giuliani had to have been deeply involved in that process.

As a former federal prosecutor, it is impossible that he doesn't know that 9/11 was an inside job and that, at most, al Qaeda operatives were low-level pawns. Clearly he feels that "the system" won't call him on his baloney.

Yet, the best antidote to Giuliani is a congressional focus on the unresolved questions concerning 9/11. Sure, right now the Democrats think that the Iraq war issue suffices for their political purposes. However, it's easy enough to go from debunking the official WMD myths that led to the Iraq war to debunking the official 9/11 myths that were used to pave the way to that war.

Yes, the corporate press won't touch the 9/11 issue right now. BUT, in the heat of a presidential campaign, the "inside job" issue may just go mainstream (although, in fact, it is mainstream if you go by what a significant portion of the public believes).

Troubled Times and missing news

The New York Times company is under fire from dissident investors for a lackluster return on their dollar.

Hassan Elmasry, of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, led a symbolic no-vote protest at the annual shareholders meeting. More than 42 percent of Class A shares were represented by the dissident shareholders and more than half these dissidents were not part of the Ochs-Sulzberger family which controls the board.

Some may say that the Times' troubles are all about technicalities of the media market.

But then again, consider the news that the editors, who are controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, regularly bypass, such as a great deal of heavy-duty stuff about 9/11. The educated public is becoming increasingly skeptical of the Times as a reliable source. Also, so much news is buried or ignored these days that the news columns have become boring.

Recall John Kerry's recent disclosure that he had inside information that World Trade Center 7 had been felled by controlled demolition for safety reasons. This is shocking, in that the NIST claims it has no knowledge of such a controlled demolition and is trying to come up with an alternative scenario that, from what we know at present, would have done Rube Goldberg proud.

Go to the Times search engine and try to find that story. Nada.
No follow-up. No questions of the senator, the NIST, others in Congress, the FBI. Zilch.
That's a pathetic result for a NEW YORK newspaper, in particular.

Now suppose you are Elmasry or another investor who lives and works in New York and who personally knew a number of colleagues who were killed on 9/11, wouldn't you be hopping mad? Though these investors may feel that they can't talk about the editorial content, surely at least some of them must be thinking about the Times' role in shielding a certain group from inspection of its 9/11 activities.

A perplexing incident

A reader writes,

Paul,
Something very odd just happened when I clicked on the link to access your site [this blog, concerning the Kerry disclosure]. I have broadband now, I wait for the window to pop open. Well, it did pop open, but for a couple of blinks of the eye it wasn't your site -- it was a page that had a military or police type emblem in the middle with a four- or five-figure number underneath it, some lines of copy under that... but I'm giving you an impression of an impression. It definitely looked "official." Then the window went dark and your site popped open. I am not making this up.

Kerry: WTC7 felled by controlled demolition

It has just come to my attention that John Kerry has recently told a questioner that it was his understanding that World Trade Center 7 was brought down by controlled demolition because of a danger of a wall collapsing.

A video is found at
http://www.jonesreport.com/articles/220407_kerry_wtc7.html

This brings us back to my previous assertions that lawmakers apparently were told that WTC7 was brought down by controlled demolition but that that fact was kept quiet for "national security reasons" (i.e., because the public might then suspect that the twin towers were likewise demolished).

So now we have the NIST, which after all these years, is still studying the collapse, saying it has found no evidence of controlled demolition in the WTC7 collapse -- thus contradicting the statements of the owner, Larry Silverstein, and of a presidential candidate, John Kerry.

See the Kerry video at http://www.newcitizenship.net

Now you may say that you can accept the idea that WTC7 was demolished for security or safety reasons but that the action was kept quiet because of problems of public perception. But here we have again the issue of a government which fibs to the people, as occurred with respect to WMDs and the run-up to the Iraq war.

So will the NIST, or its contractor studying the collapse, be sure to interview Kerry or at least send his office a request for more information? What about the FBI? Will it interview Kerry as to where he got that information? Or maybe the FBI was actually a source of that information.

Note: Kerry's general comments show a disinclination to vouch for a 9/11 conspiracy. His comment about WTC7, in fact, is aimed at a "reasonable" explanation of collapse. However, he very well may not have realized that he was disclosing confidential information. He could well have forgotten that he had been briefed on a national security basis.

Winnipeg Sun editor vents 9/11 skepticism

The quest for a truthful international inquiry into 9/11 got a boost from the editor of the Winnipeg Sun.

In a column published Wednesday, John Gleeson argued that the controlled demolition theory of the collapse of the trade center towers "has won persistent support from engineers and academics from other disciplines."

In a discussion of the work of various academics who favor a "inside job" scenario, Gleeson said, "You can see why these scholars are calling for an independent, preferably international investigation."

The editor cast such academics as David Ray Griffin, the theologian turned 9/11 skeptic, in a favorable light.

To read Gleeson's column, go to
http://www.winnipegsun.com and search: gleeson, 9/11

BTW, I have updated my energy calculations for the World Trade Center collapses and have found that the collapse of the top block onto the bottom provided, in each case, five orders of magnitude less energy than the energy that should have been available for the resistance force.

Please see my "The case of the missing energy" at blog http://kryptograff.blogspot.com

I specifically request that engineers and physicists check my calculations and see whether I am right. I will gladly publish the comments of any professional on this matter. And, if convinced I am in error, I will pull the post. But, so far, it looks good to me.

Ex-Scientific American writer a 9/11 skeptic

The post on the GOP insider is just below this one.

Maybe it's because he is Canadian. Maybe it's because he is now a professor emiritus.
But why does a man like A.K. Dewdney get the brush-off from U.S. politicians?

Dewdney, a longtime professor of computer science at the University of Western Ontario, has written a slew of popular math books and been a regular contributor to Scientific American. At least one of his books has been re-issued by Springer-Verlag, a well-known publisher of mathematical books.

Then one day Dewdney had the bright idea of testing whether cell phone calls reputedly from jetliners hijacked on 9/11 were a likely possibility.

What he found was that cell phone usability decreased with increasing altitude. But even at lower altitudes, contact was only intermittent.

Obviously, this finding brings into question the official accounts, especially the accounts of Flight 93 over Pennsylvania. In fact, I once saw an internet report that quoted a telephone company spokesperson as expressing puzzlement about the purported high-altitude cell calls, which were made reputedly in addition to the airphone calls made by some passengers.

Dewdney specialized in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science. In latter years, he focused on computer modeling of biological phenomena.

I think -- but am not positive -- that Dewdney went public with his early cell phone experiment soon before he retired. Dewdney is another example of the "old guy phenomenon," whereby professionals who have retired, and presumably have little to lose professionally, speak out about 9/11 deception.

His credentials are found at
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/faculty/akd/akd.html
http://www.csd.uwo/ca./faculty/akd/PERSONAL/hp.html

His site devoted to debunking official 9/11 myths is found at
http://physics911.net/
and his cell phone report is found at
http://physics911.net/projectachilles

GOP insider: 9/11 fit White House plan

The attacks of 9/11 fit in very well with the already planned war to topple Saddam, says a former speechwriter for the first President Bush in a scathing denunciation of the current Bush presidency.

In his book "Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy Rollers and Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP" [Sourcebooks, 2007], Victor Gold says the neo-conservatives around the current President Bush were highly motivated to arrange a pretext for war.

Gold writes, "Had it not been for 9/11, the Bush White House, determined to go to war, would no doubt have seized on some synthetic provocation, on the order of the one LBJ used to push through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965," adding that a number of elder neocons were at the time Johnson Democrats.

The expansion of the war to include North Vietnam and to justify major troop deployments was based on a murky incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in which North Vietnamese coast guardsmen may have fired on a U.S. destroyer.

Citing a 1998 neocon letter to President Clinton urging "regime change" in Iraq, Gold says that once Bush gained office war was a foregone conclusion. "There would be regime change in Iraq. All that the Neo-Con war hawks, in the Bush administration and out, needed to bring it about was an excuse to invade. Looking back a half-decade and knowing what we now know, who could doubt that if al Qaeda hadn't obliged the Neo-Cons with 9/11, the Kristolites would have torn a page out of history and, with Rupert Murdoch playing the role of William Randolph Hearst, given us a reprise of the sinking of the Maine?"

Bill Kristol, editor of the Murdoch-published Weekly Standard, is a leading neocon.
In 1898, the battleship Maine inexplicably blew up in Havana Harbor and the Hearst press led a cry for war against Spain, though Spain's complicity in the incident was unlikely.

Gold said that, even with 9/11, war against Iraq was a hard sell, and the WMD deception was necessary. He takes pains to point out the holes in the official WMD line and has some acerbic comments about Israel's low-profile responses to this alleged threat.

Gold is a Goldwater conservative, having served as press aide to Goldwater and later to Spiro Agnew. In the 1980s, Gold was a senior adviser to President George H.W. Bush and co-wrote a book with him. Gold also describes himself as a friend of the Bush family.

Gold applauds Goldwater's response to Jerry Falwell as someone the GOP should have kicked in the pants and laments the influence of "theo-cons" in the GOP. An oustpoken faction of the religious right, especially those with TV access, have promoted a strong backing of the state of Israel based on certain interpretations of scripture.

Gold's stinging rebuke of the current state of GOP affairs is part of a growing chorus of noted Republicans who express severe dissatisfaction with the younger Bush.
However, Democrats are in no mood to begin impeachment proceedings, seeing little partisan gain. Thus, unless more GOP critics are more forthright about 9/11 suspicions, impeachment or forced resignation seems unlikely.

Dispute over Pentagon crash data

Data released to a 9/11 truth group contradict official claims about a jetliner crashing into the Pentagon, the group says.

Pilots for 9/11 Truth says that its examination of data released by the National Transportation Safety Board disclosed the following points:

. The altitude data show the aircraft was on a trajectory that would have brought it at least 300 feet above light poles that were reportedly struck.

. The rate of descent wouldn't permit the jet to have both clipped the two light poles and been caught on the FBI's "five-frames" surveillance video.

. The NTSB record of data halts at least one second before the official time of impact.

. If the data trends are continued, the aircraft would have passed 100 feet over the Pentagon roof.

The group includes pilots and other aircraft industry professionals with many hours of flight time.

Their press release is found at
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_24288.shtml
If link fails, try http://axisoflogic.com and search "pilots for 9/11 truth"

Hopefully, the group will publish their specific analysis rather than just the conclusions.

WTC7 probers studying controlled demolition

The government is still having a heck of a problem solving the mystery of World Trade Center 7's collapse.

In March 2006, the NIST granted Applied Research Associates, a defense constractor, a contract to come up with a computer simulation of the collapse, based on NIST input data. The NIST specified that ARA was to use only the input data provided by the government.

But, the ARA scientists were, it seems, not happy and came back to NIST and obtained contract revisions. In Jan 2007, the NIST authorized ARA to study "impact damage and fire effects" on its own and also to determine whether a blast or series of blasts might have brought down the building. NIST says it finds "no evidence of controlled demolition" but, ARA apparently needs to know whether blasts of certain magnitudes could have done the job.

Now, why didn't NIST consider studying such blast scenarios for the other two buildings? Well, they were hoping to evade that chore for WTC7, but evidently ARA just wouldn't play along. On the other hand, it's hard to believe that ARA will be permitted to say, well yes, the building most likely was felled by explosives.

Yet I can bet that the ARA experts dread the idea of being accused of scientific flimflam and demanded the right to study the explosives scenario. Let's be aware that the FEMA probers pointedly said that their best scenario for WTC7's collapse had only a "low probability." Of course, they didn't mention controlled demolition, but they clearly suspected it.

And ARA surely knows how lame is the probe of the twin tower collapses in that NIST did no work to examine the possibility of controlled demolition -- even though its experts had quite a lot of difficulty coming up with a model that led to collapse and eventually settled on one with highly dubious hidden assumptions.

My own calculations (see my post on WTC energy sums on http://kryptograff.blogspot.com) show a huge energy deficit between the energy needed to fell the building and the energy available from gravitational collapse.
I'd be glad if a professional engineer or physicist would check my calculations and let me know the result.

Bush bunch suspends laws of physics
I've noticed that many of the 9/11 debunkers are the same sorts of people who disingenuously debunked the oil industry's contribution to global warming. These folks exploited relatively minor differences of opinion among experts, along with the malformed opinions of some amateurs, in order to create the false impression that scientists were very iffy about the oil industry's part in the hot-house effect.

Also, some of these debunkers would engage in ad hominem attacks (against the person) when the scientific evidence was inconvenient. That's certainly a standard tactic of many of those who seem over-anxious to prove there was no inside conspiracy.

Now suppose I am correct about the energy deficits in the collapses of the twin towers.
It's not impossible of course for a small amount of energy to initiate the collapse of a high-energy system. It's known as the butterfly effect. Or think of a small boxcutter, properly placed and used, able to take a human life.

However, how would a small amount of energy carry high destructive power in the case of a 400-meter-tall Manhattan skyscraper? There are only two ways that I can think of:

1. A critical structural flaw (which I'll call the "keystone effect").

2. Resonance vibration, such as is believed to have brought down the Tacoma Narrows bridge in 1940.

However, the NIST did not identify any critical structural flaw for WTC1 or WTC2 of the type that would have resulted in an obvious collapse scenario (though comments were made about various design issues). Some modern buildings have a "keystone" but it's for show; no high-rise uses a keystone. In fact, high-rises tend to be built with plenty of damage-control redundancy.

As for resonance, the NIST examined the sway factor of the building and did not find that the impact of a jetliner would have provided sufficient oscillation to cause much problem.

Remember, no engineer in the world builds a steel structure that doesn't take into account the resonance frequency of the structure. I have a physics textbook which shows huge dampers inside Citicorp's Manhattan tower. These dampers tend to reduce the energy of each oscillation, so that even if the building vibrates momentarily at its resonance frequency, the amplitude and frequency will be quickly damped.

So then, though it is not utterly impossible that one tower collapsed because of a fluke combination of force interactions, it is quite unlikely. And for a SECOND tower to fall as a result of some other fluke combination of forces is far less likely.

So, in the case of the twin towers, it would appear that the Bush bunch has suspended the law of conservation of energy (which is sometimes called the first law of thermodynamics).

Well, perhaps at least in the case of WTC7 there is a clear "keystone" structural flaw. As the NIST's chief investigator Sunder has said, that 47-story building could have collapsed if only one column had been compromised. Once that column gave, the whole structure would, supposedly, have crashed at near the free-fall rate.

However, FEMA experts were very doubtful that the building, which housed the CIA's New York station along with Pentagon offices, could have been brought down by fire alone.

My reading of the FEMA and NIST reports suggests that WTC7's big puzzle -- realizing that much information is either missing or being passed over in official silence -- is how the fuel oil managed to pool for several hours before a high-intensity fire ignited.

Here's why:

1. The pumping system would have had a routine spill failsafe, whereby a plunger in a moat lifts a shutoff switch when that moat fills with fluid. No explanation is available of why that shutoff system supposedly failed.

2. The Fire Department quickly shut off power throughout the WTC complex, so no outside-source electricity was available to power the pump bringing fuel-oil up from a ground-level tank. Hence, the building's emergency generator would have been needed to power the pump. Yet, for the emergency generator to work, fuel oil sent via that pump or some other pump seems to have been necessary, though, again, the schematics are missing,

So then, apparently we have the pump supplying fuel to the generator which in turn supplies electricity to the pump, in a closed cycle. The U.S. Patent Office won't accept patent applications for perpetual motion machines, but evidently such a device works in a top-secret building. Must be some advanced DARPA stuff, I guess.

Scientists have the means to measure how long it would take such a system to cease functioning (not long, in this case, I suspect). They use calculations based on the second law of thermodynamics, which states that a system that does work always dissipates some energy, which is why perpetual motion machines can't operate in our world.

---

[Insert, April 4, 2007] This all is somewhat confusing, and I don't have my copies of the relevant reports at hand right now.

But, what we have is this: the upper-floor day tank did not hold enough fuel oil for a fire with sufficient thermal energy to compromise the steel support. So, to escape the explosives scenario, the idea was that fuel was being pumped up from the ground-level tank and was spilling out for hours, thus forming a large enough pool to bring enough energy to bear. Isn't it convenient that the spill sensor didn't work and shut off the supply?

Now in order for the pump to keep drawing up fuel from below, a sensor in the day tank would have had to have taken a continuous low reading, meaning it would have to have been drained continually, so apparently the leak occurred at or after that point in the system.

My thinking is that the emergency generator was fed fuel from the day tank. So a day's supply of fuel would keep the generator busy all day with no problems of circularity. However, if the day tank was being emptied rapidly and being replenished by being pumped up from below, then we have circularity, in which the second law of thermodynamics appears to have been suspended.

---

So there we have it: The Bush bunch has suspended the first and second laws of thermodynamics in the interests, I suppose, of national security.

Seismic issues
I first drew attention to problems with the available fall time data on my page
"Trade center collapse times: omissions and disparities" at http://angelfire.com/ult/newzone/fallrates.html
The data are essentially based on readings of the Lamont-Doherty Near Earth Observatory seismograms. But the seismographic data is somewhat iffy, giving a reading of 8 seconds for WTC2, 10 seconds for WTC1 and 18 seconds for WTC7.
Now I am not a seismologist and I wish to cast no aspersions on Lamont-Doherty's experts.
However, given that ascertaining of correct fall times should have been high priority, one wonders why the FBI, NIST and others did not reach out to the seismographic systems run by the federal government. The feds run a worldwide system of seismographs that were emplaced to detect underground nuclear explosions. But, of course, that's not all they're good for. Also, the U.S. Geological Survey is a hub of seismographic analysis.
Now if there was any fuzziness in the Lamont-Doherty data, the normal thing, I would think, would be to check it against everybody else's data. Sophisticated computer programs are able to compare the input of a large number of stations to arrive at fairly accurate results.
Yes, perhaps such an attempt wouldn't have improved the data. But there is no record of such an attempt being made.
Here's something else of interest: Seismographs are now so sensitive that they can detect human footsteps meters away. So even though the surface waves were weak by seismic standards, one suspects that they weren't so weak as not to be detected for quite some distance by military seismographs.
Anyway, the real issue is that the fall time record has been given the brush-off by the Bush bunch and its flunkies.