By Bill Willers | Dissident Voice | March 30, 2020
What seemed to allow this deadly night to descend was that the intellectual patterns that were supposed to be in charge of things, that should comprehend the threat and lead the fight against it, were paralyzed.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, pg 305
I become frustrated with people who remain ignorant because of laziness.
— Bruce Coville, Thoughtful Thinker
Later in the day on 9/11/2001 a third building, WTC Building 7, descended at nearly free-fall speed with such perfect symmetry as to serve as a textbook example of excellence in prepared demolition. The official reason for the collapse of the 47 story, steel-framed skyscraper was given in 2008 by Shyam Sunder of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): “WTC 7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings.” It had taken seven years for NIST to fabricate a tortured videotaped explanation obviously out of sync with the actual collapse. The explanation reeked so visibly of scientific fraud that demonstrating that Building 7 was professionally wired for destruction became seen as the factor that could best be used to expose the larger web of lies surrounding the 9/11 events.
In years following 9/11, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth was formed, as were similar truth-seeking organizations for pilots, lawyers, scientists, firefighters, religious leaders, and many more (even cops). But mainstream journalism has been silent, dismissive or openly hostile to individuals and groups questioning the official account. The now jaded epithet of “conspiracy theorist”, a 1960s invention of the CIA, soon gave way to the insults of “truther”, and even “troofer”. But perhaps the best indicator of governmental/media defense of the preposterous but official account of 9/11 may be seen in a March 8, 2010 Washington Post editorial that threatened a prominent Japanese politician and his entire Party for suggesting controlled demolition as cause for the 9/11 collapses, and that Japan should have its own independent investigation. The Post, long linked to the CIA, used in its threat identical derogatory language seen widely in attacks on people and groups aware of the physical impossibilities inherent in the government’s explanation: “bizarre”, “half-baked”, “intellectually bogus”, “lunatic fringe”, “fact-averse”, as if the terminology had derived from a single source. Well, imagine that!
In 2015, researchers at the University of Alaska’s Institute of Northern Engineering, funded by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, began a four-year study of details of the WTC7 collapse. The Final Report, released on March 25, concluded that WTC7 was destroyed not by office fires but “by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.” Four years and a third of a million dollars, and that’s IT? What is so maddeningly frustrating – now after nearly two decades – is that all these engineers and architects refuse to take the next appropriate step and openly state, as a “working hypothesis”, that the building was prepared for demolition. All were trained in the physics of Isaac Newton’s universe, and all of their data point to that and nowhere else.
In the name of science and good sense, all of these engineering physicists have an obligation to speak much more clearly. I am a zoologist and therefore lack the professional standing to frame a hypothesis for an engineering issue, but there is a crying need for an openly-stated hypothesis from the professional community. What other than professional demolition could cause dozens of massive steel columns to “fail” simultaneously to such an extreme degree as to allow for free fall of a skyscraper, even for a moment? I’m serious. If there is another possible explanation that makes physical sense, all of these architects should just state it. Instead, what they suggest people do is send the Final Report to their members of Congress. Really! Such a level of naïveté is unacceptable and is merely a recipe for more years of failure to win a “new” investigation — as if the 9/11 Commission whitewash could qualify as a legitimate investigation.
One might argue that US journalism had some excuse to be blind to the demolition of WTC7 as long as the NIST report could be cited, but as of now, the reputation of NIST is a smoking ruin, and rightly so. Leaders of the NIST report lied before the eyes of the world, and if they have a shred of decency remaining they would be publicly begging for forgiveness. And the same would apply to the members of the 9/11 Commission who certified the deception, Max Cleland the sole exception, his having resigned in disgust early on. In particular, consider the 9/11 Commission’s Executive Director, Phillip Zelikow. Look over the array of governmental positions the man has enjoyed, and then reflect on what it must say about inner workings of the U.S. Government that he remains honored and in key positions rather than behind bars. Further, what does it say about political involvements of the University of Virginia that he heads its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences?
Becoming aware of the depth of rot and corruption throughout upper levels of government, media and academia is absolutely heartbreaking. Elements within and without the U.S. Government, in concert with a mercenary journalism, have executed a monstrous and convoluted deception on the American people and the world, and as Ben Bagdikian wrote in The New Media Monopoly, “Once a basic untruth is rooted, it blurs a society’s perception of reality and, consequently, the intelligence with which society reacts to events.” As psychologist Robert Griffin has put it: “9/11, and facing the truth about it, is important to the soul of America. Values that have come from the official story have corrupted us emotionally, mentally and spiritually.” Accordingly, the engineering community, rather than just dumping years of accumulated data onto a lay society, has a moral obligation to state, in clearest terms, a hypothesis as to what caused the steel of WTC7 to fail.
Bill Willers is an emeritus professor of biology, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. He is founder of the Superior Wilderness Action Network and editor of Learning to Listen to the Land, and Unmanaged Landscapes, both from Island Press.