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.