Giuliani: trade center 'implosion' was bizarre

Rudolph Giuliani says the collapses of the twin World Trade Center towers struck him as strange.

Asked during a CSPAN broadcast whether he expected the towers to fall, the former longterm mayor and former federal prosecutor replied:

"Yeah, but not the way they did. It occurred to us that they might ultimately collapse over -- the way buildings usually collapse, which is in stages.

"It looked like at some point the top of the building would come off, and then maybe the middle of the building, and then maybe there'd be a shell left -- the way Number 7 came down at 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon over a period of time.

"But the idea that it would implode, the implosion that took place, I actually did not realize that until much later."

Giuliani said he was inside the police command post when the towers fell.
Later he saw a televised broadcast of a collapsing tower.

"It was a shock to see it just implode like that," the GOP presidential candidate said on April 19, weeks before he accused rival Ron Paul of seeking to blame American policy for the attacks. Paul has recently said that he believes a 9/11 coverup of incompetence took place but asserts that there is no evidence of U.S. government complicity in the attacks.

Giuliani's comments may be found on YouTube.

Giuliani's reference to a supposed slow, graduated fall of the 47-story building 7 conflicts with video footage available on the internet, which shows a very rapid and complete fall. However, internet video footage is not always reliable, because of data compression problems and possibly because of tampering.

Seismographs recorded 18 seconds of shaking during WTC7's collapse, as opposed to 8 and 10 seconds for each twin tower.

[Crockett Grabbe, an Iowa physics professor, corrected a reporting error of mine. See his comment below.]

The political ramifications of 9/11 suspicion are heating up, with the Rocky Mountain News' editorialist claiming that the 9/11 truth movement is a plot by Marxist professors. The paper is following in the footsteps of Fox News commentators who have been trying to equate suspicion of the government with lack of patriotism and leftism.

The News lashed out at Howard Zinn, a radical professor who has said that 9/11 skeptic David Ray Griffin's observations deserve further investigation, charging that it was people like Zinn who were responsible for the results of a recent poll that showed that a third of Democrats believed George Bush knew about the attacks in advance.

In fact, there has been a strong current in the far left opposing taking 9/11 skepticism seriously. Radical writer Noam Chomsky has urged the left to avoid the issue, Alexander Cockburn's leftwing magazine Counterpunch has run articles trying to substantiate the official claims and the progressive magazine The Nation ran a cover story with a headline that equated 9/11 skepticism with paranoia.

Though 9/11 skepticism may be unwelcome to some presumed public opinion molders, the topic appears to be emerging as a potent political issue in the presidential primary campaigning.

The "inside job" wrangle has at least one precedent in U.S. history: the controversy over Soviet penetration of the U.S. government during and after World War II. Released CIA and KGB files essentially confirm that extensive higth-level Soviet penetration of the government occurred, one of the results being far-too-rapid Soviet development of the atomic bomb.

More recently, China's development of a lighter-weight nuclear weapon was attributed to an inside job in the weapons laboratories, though a scientist "suspect" has never been charged in that matter. In fact, after 9/11, CIA and FBI resources for countering communist inside jobs were redirected toward Islamic radicalism. "The heat was off" communist networks in the U.S. government.