Rather than taking Sam's Remembrance thread off topic, I've decided to start a thread specifically on the subject of 9/11. I've been personally involved in 9/11 truth since that day. Over the years a lot of information, misinformation and disinformation has been generated about 9/11 -- the biggest lie being that these events were a total surprise to the US government and military and that they were perpetrated by Islamic extremists who "hate us for our freedom." The consequence of this lie has been not only the direct deaths of thousands of innocent people but the subsequent deaths of hundreds of thousands, the acquisition of extraordinary domestic powers by the US government.

There is much we still do not know and may never know about what exactly happened on 9/11 but one thing we do know is that what we've been told is NOT what happened.

To begin I offer this video as an introduction and beneath that a review of a recent book on the subject of WTC 7 (also called The Solomon Brothers Building) which was home to offices of the Secret Service, the CIA, the Securities and Exchange commission and numerous banks. WTC 7 fell at 5:20 in the afternoon of 9/11, was not hit by a plane, had some (but relatively slight) damage due to falling debris and a few small fires on two floors. However, at 5:20 PM, this 47 story building collapsed straight down in less than 7 seconds.



The Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA) could not explain this collapse and said soon afterward that their best guess was structural damage and fire -- but even this 'best guess' had a low probability of occurrence. Years later the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) put forward a "final report" regarding the destruction of WTC 7 which steadfastly refused to acknowledge "controlled demolition" as the most likely cause.

Recently author David Ray Griffin (a theologian and philosopher who has written several books on the subject of 9/11) has written a scathing critique of the NIST report. Here is a review of Griffin's book:

Quote:

Review of "The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7," a New Book by David Ray Griffin Brilliant Spotlight Exposing Criminal 9/11 Cover-Up by US Government Agency by Tod Fletcher In THE MYSTERIOUS COLLAPSE OF WORLD TRADE CENTER 7: WHY THE FINAL OFFICIAL REPORT ABOUT 9/11 IS UNSCIENTIFIC AND FALSE, David Ray Griffin provides an overwhelmingly convincing case that the latest official US government account of the events at “Ground Zero” on September 11, 2001, is false. He examines in detail the whole series of publications by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) purporting to explain the highly “mysterious” collapse of World Trade Center 7, a 47-story steel-framed skyscraper across the street from the North Tower, which was not struck by a plane and yet collapsed into its footprint, at nearly free-fall speed, shortly after 5 PM that day. That the sudden collapse of Building 7 constitutes a “mystery” is an admission of the major media and NIST itself, which for years said it was having a hard time understanding what had occurred. After a long series of preliminary attempts, admitting that a full explanation had not been achieved, NIST issued its “Final Report” in November 2008, claiming to present a scientifically-verified and complete account of the causes of the building’s collapse. As critics of the ever-changing official explanations point out, however, the “mystery” is the result of failure by government and media to consider the most likely explanation, one that accords with a vast amount of physical and testimonial evidence, which is that the building was brought down by controlled demolition. As Griffin brilliantly demonstrates throughout this powerful indictment, NIST, a purportedly scientific agency of the federal government, has produced an official “explanation” that fails to follow basic scientific principles and meet established scientific standards. The publication of its “Final Report” therefore amounts to nothing less than scientific fraud, which when committed by a federal science agency is a criminal act. Despite its claims to have produced a final, definitive, scientific report on WTC 7’s collapse, NIST in fact has ignored, suppressed, or distorted all the evidence for controlled demolition, while fabricating fake “evidence” to support its own “explanation.” In the Introduction, Griffin lays out the background to NIST’s “Final Report," surveying the agency’s earlier “interim” reports and the evolution of its attempts to explain the “mystery.” In its “Final Report," NIST abandoned its earlier claim that structural damage from debris from the North Tower was a significant cause of Building 7’s collapse, asserting that the principal cause was very hot and long-lasting fires of office materials in the building set ablaze by the falling debris. Part I of the book, “NIST’s Unscientific Rejection of the Most Likely Theory,” examines in six chapters the methods used by NIST to avoid considering controlled demolition as a possible explanation of the building’s collapse. Controlled demolition is the most likely hypothesis because never before 9/11 had a steel-framed skyscraper collapsed due to fires. All previous instances of sudden, rapid collapse of such buildings into their footprints had been the result of intentional, controlled demolition using explosives. As Griffin demonstrates in Part 1, a very large amount of physical and testimonial evidence supporting the “most likely hypothesis” exists, and it was all ignored, dismissed, or distorted by the authors of the “Final Report.” In Chapter 1, “NIST as a Political, Not a Scientific, Agency,” Griffin shows that NIST, as an agency of the Commerce Department, was under tight political control by the Bush administration. He quotes from a whistleblower from the agency who described in detail how political appointees in the “front office” vetted every scientific statement issued by NIST, and how the statements were then vetted by “the HQ staff of the Department of Commerce,” the National Security Agency and the Office of Management and Budget. In Chapter 2, “Some Principles of Scientific Method,” Griffin begins by considering what constitutes scientific fraud, and then distinguishes between scientific fraud in the strict sense and in a broader sense. Scientific fraud in the strict sense has been committed by NIST if it can be shown that i) the agency has fabricated evidence to support its claims; ii) that it has falsified evidence; or iii) that it has ignored relevant evidence. Scientific fraud in the broader sense has been committed by NIST if it can be shown that it violated further scientific principles, including these: extra-scientific considerations should not be allowed to determine conclusions; an investigation should begin with the most-likely hypothesis; straw-man arguments should be avoided; unprecedented causes should not, without good reasons, be posited to explain familiar occurrences; and scientists should not make claims implying that laws of nature have been violated. In Chapter 3, “NIST’s Refusal to Begin with the Most Likely Hypothesis,” Griffin establishes that the most likely hypothesis to consider in attempting to explain the collapse of WTC 7 must be that it was brought down by controlled demolition using explosives, for two reasons. First, no steel-framed skyscraper prior to 9/11 had ever collapsed for any reason other than demolition; on 9/11, however, and in one small area, three such buildings came down, purportedly due to fires, and in the case of the Twin Towers, additional damage caused by airliner impacts. (In his earlier book, DEBUNKING 9/11 DEBUNKING, Griffin has already demonstrated that NIST’s “explanation” for the disintegration and fall of the towers does not stand up to rational scrutiny.) Second, the collapse of WTC 7 “exemplified many of the signature features of the type of controlled demolition known as implosion”: the collapse started from the bottom and was sudden and total, the building came straight down and fell at close to free-fall speed, its concrete was pulverized to dust, and the debris pile was relatively small (p. 27). When fires result in “high-order damage,” evidenced by shattered structures, pulverized debris, and significant lateral ejections of material, guidelines established by the National Fire Protection Association in its “Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations” mandate official agencies to investigate the possibility of explosives, but NIST never undertook any such investigation. In Chapter 4, “NIST’s Ignoring of Physical Evidence for Explosives,” Griffin lays out the physical evidence suggesting that the building was brought down by controlled demolition: video evidence of “squibs” of smoke and pulverized material blown laterally out of the building as it collapsed; a vertical row of blown-out windows from the 29th to the 37th floors, unexplainable by NIST’s account; molten metal in the debris under the building; an array of scientific reports of extremely high temperatures, far above the temperatures which could be reached by fires burning in office materials, as proposed by NIST; thinning and sulfidation of steel recovered from the building; extreme heat and unusual emissions at the collapse site for months afterwards; and red/gray chips found in dust from the building’s collapse, which on analysis by independent researchers Steven Jones, Kevin Ryan, Niels Harrit, and others, proved to be nanothermitic, derived from a very advanced type of explosive. NIST in its “Final Report” failed to take any of this evidence into account, simply pretending it did not exist. In Chapter 5, “NIST’s Ignoring of Testimonial Evidence for Explosives,” Griffin first reviews NIST’s prior ignoring of testimonial evidence for explosions in the Twin Towers before their disintegration. He then presents in detail a wide array of testimonial evidence supporting the most-likely hypothesis, implosion. These testimonies came from credible witnesses, including a New York Daily News reporter and a New York Police Department officer located outside the building before it came down, who heard explosions inside it; detailed accounts from two high-level NYC employees, Barry Jennings and Michael Hess, of their experiences inside the building that morning, where they heard and felt large explosions before the Twin Towers had collapsed; testimonies, again from highly credible witnesses, to foreknowledge of the building’s collapse; premature television reports that the building had come down, before it had actually collapsed; and even witnesses to Fire Department of New York personnel announcing that the building was going to be “brought down.” Griffin shows that NIST either ignored this evidence or went to great lengths to distort it by constructing an elaborate false chronology of the testimonial evidence which it could not simply ignore. In Chapter 6, “NIST’s Straw-Man Arguments against Explosives,” Griffin analyzes the reasons presented by NIST for its refusal to investigate the possibility that explosives were responsible for WTC 7’s destruction. He shows that they employed “straw-man” arguments based on highly-implausible scenarios for the types and quantities of explosives used and then argued that these scenarios are … implausible! The principal scenario NIST focused on, needless to say, was not one that has been proposed by any actual independent researchers as a plausible one. Griffin then shows that high-level personnel at NIST, including four directors from 2001 to 2008 as well as key advisors to the agency, had extensive professional involvement with and expertise in the technology of nanothermitic materials, the very type of explosive proposed by independent researchers as most likely to have been used on 9/11. Indeed, as Griffin details, NIST is engaged in partnerships with academic and federal government research units around the country to develop nanothermitic technologies. In Part II, “NIST’s Unscientific Arguments for Its Own Theory,” Griffin dissects the arguments made by the agency in putting its own “explanation” forward. He shows in detail the failure of the authors of the “Final Report” to adhere to standard scientific principles, including their failure to base their analysis on empirical facts and physical tests (preferring “black box” computer models in which any parameter can be tweaked until the desired result is obtained), their distorting of data or fabrication of “data,” and their failure to eliminate glaring internal contradictions within their arguments. In Chapter 7, “NIST’s Theory of an Unprecedented Collapse: an Overview,” Griffin provides an overview of the complex theory promulgated by NIST. He first explores NIST’s claim that the collapse of the building was unprecedented. NIST makes this claim implicitly in advancing its own candidate for the principal causal mechanism, thermal expansion of steel from office-materials fires. Because there is no known prior case in which thermal expansion of steel caused a steel-framed skyscraper to collapse, but there are many cases of implosion of such buildings, NIST’s proposal raises the question whether it violated the scientific principle to avoid invoking unprecedented causes to explain familiar occurrences. Then Griffin surveys the major features of the NIST “explanation” to orient the reader for the detailed discussion in following chapters. In Chapter 8, “The Initiation and Spread of Fires: NIST’s Unempirical Account,” Griffin examines closely NIST’s claim that the fires in WTC 7 started as a result of the rain of debris which hit the building when the North Tower disintegrated and fell. He shows that NIST’s claims that fires in the building started at this time (10:28 AM) are unsubstantiated, and that the fires therefore could not have burned for as long as NIST contended they did. He points out that NIST itself admitted that most of the fires in the building may have started quite a bit later in the day, in the middle and late afternoon, and thus have burned for less than three hours and even as little as 40 minutes. In Chapter 9, “Fire and Steel Temperatures: Implausible Claims Based on Distorted Data,” Griffin shows that NIST’s claims regarding the temperatures reached by the fires themselves and the steel structure of the building exposed to those fires are both wildly exaggerated. This extreme overestimation was made possible by the use of computer models, which were manipulated by NIST “investigators” to achieve the desired result (the agency had used the same method in its earlier reports on the destruction of the Twin Towers). There is in fact no evidence to support the fire temperatures or the fire durations claimed by NIST. In a similar manner, NIST “simulated” the temperatures reached by the steel structure of the building, and claimed wildly implausible temperatures for which there is no actual evidence, based on the assumption (contrary to fact) that steel has no thermal conductivity! In Chapter 10, “From Thermal Expansion to Global Collapse: Fabrications and Contradictions,” Griffin shreds the last pillar of NIST’s account: its claim that thermal expansion of steel floor beams and girders caused “global collapse.” He shows that this claim is based on highly implausible assumptions, outright fabrications, denial of the existence of structural elements that did in fact exist, and fabrication of a “differential thermal expansion” result from its computer simulations by modeling heating of the steel beams but not of the floor slabs! Griffin delivers the coup de grace by showing that NIST was forced to admit that WTC 7 did indeed fall at free-fall speed for more than two seconds during its collapse, which would only be possible if all resistance to the fall had been eliminated by removal of the lower portion of the building by explosives. This demonstrates that NIST has resorted to a miraculous “explanation” of the collapse of Building 7, in which no explosives were used and yet free-fall still occurred, and has thus violated the scientific principles of non-contradiction and impermissibility of claims implying that laws of nature have been violated. In the “Conclusion,” Griffin summarizes the many ways in which standard principles of scientific investigation were violated by NIST in its “Final Report.” On this basis, he concludes that the Report is false, and then discusses the implications of this fact. The only possible conclusion is that WTC 7 was demolished “by domestic terrorists with the ability to plant explosives in it and then to orchestrate a cover-up” (p. 255). If this is true of Building 7, it must be true as well of the Twin Towers. When these conclusions are drawn, it is clear that the entire basis and pretext for the ongoing war in Afghanistan (and now Pakistan) is false. Muslims did not bring down these buildings. The events of 9/11 were quite simply the largest, most heinous false-flag operation of all time. THE MYSTERIOUS COLLAPSE OF WORLD TRADE CENTER 7 by David Ray Griffin is an epoch-making book, of tremendous importance for our future. Griffin has shone a spotlight on the Achilles’ heel of the US government’s account of 9/11. NIST’s failure to defend the official story of the collapse of WTC 7 lays bare the weak spot that will make it possible for us to bring this monster down and stop the wars of aggression abroad and the growing police-state at home. You owe it to your country and the world to read this book. The book can be purchased through Amazon

ugh. 2 much t'read

and everyone else who didnt read...

This is a clip about Muslim propaganda against Israel. I really dont know where to put this, nor if this is out of context. But I feel this must be shown, criticized and appraised. If there is no truth in this video then thats fine, but if this is by a small inch true, this is horrible.

I've only watched the first 36 seconds and I'm already wondering whether I want to watch the rest of it. Are there Muslims who demonize Jews? Yes. Are their Jews who demonize Muslims? Yes. Are there Protestants who demonize both Jews and Muslims? Yes. Are there Catholics who demonize Protestants, Jews and Muslims? Yes.

When do we begin to ask the question, who benefits from all this "demonizing" going on? When do we begin to find out who is really behind 9/11 -- because IF nanothermite was found in the WTC dust, and scientists who I trust indicate that they have found it and that this can be verified by anyone who cares to look, then this is ONE HUGE HOLE in the narrative government, military and media have foisted upon us.

Who has benefitted from this? Muslims? Jews? Protestants? Catholics? Anyone invested in the oil industry did. Anyone invested in the military did. Anyone invested in private security did. For these people, 9/11 has made them hundreds of billions of dollars.

Not bad for a morning's work.

Now Im sure that what Ive posted is definitely out of context. I by all means agree that the American people and probably a majority of the world had been fooled and was used by the companies whose interest is in propagating themselves. And it all boils down to money, for it is this world's ultimate source of human power. Everything else is bent by it, for it is scarce.

What I've intended to convey by sharing this video is the degree upon which people will do to achieve that. They brainwash, they propagate hate, and its sickening.

Be it American vs the Arab nations
Be it the Jews vs the Muslims

This is all getting out of hand. Humanity at some point has to realize who the real enemy is here. Its not the other nations, its not the other religions, its not other people. We're all the same people with the same basic needs in life, why can't we all help each other since were all want the same thing? It is because our real enemy is in fact, ourselves. It is our (cliche alert) human nature. But we are better than human nature, we are beyond that. We are not mindless animals, we are sentient. And our biggest fault is that we allow ourselves to be as low as the animals. We allow ourselves to be complacent and sway to our human nature. It is human nature to greed, envy, hate, etc. but it doesn't mean we will be controlled by it. Humanity will always have this human nature, for it is nature, it is inherent. What we need to do is fight it, rise above it.

There are no good people and there are no bad people. Because people are both good and bad. What determines them is on what they choose to act upon.

You know, just a thought.

Not "just a thought," Nick. I very much appreciate what you're saying. I don't agree with all of it but I do agree with the thrust of it. Unfortunately I have to work today so don't have the time to write a thorough response just now. I'll try to get to it later but I'm going to have guests this evening after work so not sure when I'll have the chance. Just wanted to say I appreciate conversations like this.

More later...

Thanks, Trev. You and I think a lot alike. I can't say that I know for sure what "human nature" is. One thing is for sure, we are conditioned to think in certain ways. We make our decisions in life based upon what we believe to be true, whether it is true or not.


What the advocates of 9/11 Truth are saying is we have a very serious problem here. Here are two trailers for a documentary that is coming out in a few days: Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup. I met the director, Dylan Avery, in May of 2006. We're friends on facebook. Dylan barely remembers meeting me it was so long ago and so many things have happened in his life since. He had just made the first and second editions of "Loose Change" at the age of 19/20 all done basically on his lap top. In early 2006 it was the most downloaded movie on youtube, literally seen by millions of people in a matter of months. When I met Dylan I said to him, "You had no idea what you were getting yourself into, did you?" He had to agree, he hadn't. A lot has changed since then.

Its September 22, 2009. Something is supposed to happen, but I dont know what. Mr. Mike, any clues?

So some of the great shifts in power in history were all based on the manipulation of the people, through some climactic event perpetrated to mold the beliefs and will. We clamor for righteousness, we scream injustice. But is that enough? We hope to prevent another 9/11, but can we? Can we really see when we are being played right under our noses?

I haven't yet seen the film. I hope it provides some clear answers.

"You're treating a symptom, and the disease rages on, consumes the human race. The fish rots from the head as they say. So my thinking why not cut off the head?"

-Dr. Horrible of Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog

Just so people know, the 21st of September is International Peace Day. It ties unfortunately with September 11, 2001 when it was first supposedly to be announced. Nonetheless, the day exists, and one day, we'll have peace year long.

The Film. (get the popcorn, its 1 hour and 22 mins long)