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9-11 Archive 2004

Was 9-11 an Inside Job?

September 29, 2004

Three years ago, in the aftermath of 9-11, I reported that eyewitnesses had seen and heard officially unexplained explosions in the World Trade Center buildings before and during their collapses. Van Romero, an explosives expert at New Mexico Tech, told the Albuquerque Journal on 9-11: "My opinion is, based on the videotapes, that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse." The collapse was "too methodical to be a chance result of airplanes colliding with the structures," Romero said.

However, for no apparent reason, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) attacked me and a newspaper that published my articles for publishing evidence of explosions at the World Trade Center. Why would an organization ostensibly dedicated to defending civil rights and Jews find fault with an article about explosions at the WTC? Three months after 9-11, the ADL accused American Free Press of using the 9-11 attacks "as grist for its mill."

"Its Oct. 29, 2001 issue," the ADL wrote, "includes an article by Christopher Bollyn titled, ‘Some Survivors Say Bombs Exploded Inside WTC,' in which Bollyn suggests that the ‘mainstream media' is ignoring ‘eyewitness accounts of bombs that exploded inside the World Trade Center before the collapse of the twin towers.'" Yet today, in spite of evidence that explosives and missiles were employed to demolish the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon, the controlled press continues to avoid this subject.

During a Sept. 11 memorial service at St. Paul's Chapel across the street from the WTC, the priest described what he heard as the towers were collapsing: "Boom, boom, boom," the priest recalled, "the sound of the floors collapsing." However, the sounds described by the priest and New York City firefighters could more likely be explained as explosives demolishing the central support columns rather than 110 concrete floors collapsing at the rate of 10 per second.

Photographs and videos provide evidence that explosives in the towers caused the collapse of the three WTC buildings owned or leased by Larry Silverstein: the twin towers and WTC7, which was admittedly "pulled" deliberately.

"Cognitive dissonance," by Walter Chukwu of 911uncovered.com says, is "the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information." This Chukwu says, prevents people from accepting evidence "that the U.S. government carried out the 9-11 attacks."

Jim Marrs, author of Inside Job: Unmasking the 9-11 Conspiracies, is not affected by cognitive dissonance. Compiling information from numerous sources, Marrs builds the case that 9-11 was an "inside job." His work contains an analysis of the U.S. military's failure to intercept the four "hijacked" planes, questions the relatives' group wants President George W. Bush to answer, as well as a draft of 9-11 widow Ellen Mariani's Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization lawsuit against President Bush and other high government officials.

Marrs presents six arguments that disprove the official version of a fire-induced gravity collapse and indicate that explosives in the towers' cores snipped the 47 central support columns, bringing the towers down. First, the towers' cores were obliterated. No gravity collapse scenario can explain how the massive central box columns, with 4-inch-thick steel walls were cut. The powerful explosives required to demolish these central support columns would explain the pulverization of concrete and the enormous pressure, which threw debris and girders hundreds of feet from the towers.

The pulverization of concrete cannot be explained in the gravity collapse scenario. More than 100 times the towers' gravitational potential energy would be required to pulverize the concrete. Where did that energy come from? Steel beans were ejected 500 feet sideways. "The downward forces of a gravity collapse cannot account for the energetic lateral ejection of pieces," 9-11 researchers Jim Hoffman wrote.

Videos and photographs show explosions in the towers occurring well below the level of the collapse. Energetic dust ejections are seen while the top of the South Tower is slightly tipping. There is "no known source of the dense powder in these clouds of ejected dust," Marrs says. The tops of the towers mushroomed into thick dust clouds much larger than the original volumes of the buildings. "Without the addition of large sources of pressure beyond the collapse itself," Hoffman says, "the falling building and its debris should have occupied about the same volume as the intact building." That is, after all, what was observed when the 47-story WTC 7 collapsed neatly into its basement, with absolutely no lateral projections, at about 5:20 p.m.

That the towers fell at the rate of free fall defies the laws of physics. The cold and undamaged parts of the towers failed to slow the collapses. This indicates that resistance to the downward acceleration of the towers had been eliminated. Evidence that the central support columns had been cut prior to the collapse, which I reported in October 2001, can be seen in videos where powerful bursts of dust are seen being ejected from the towers well below the level of the collapse. At the time, I reported an eyewitness seeing a number of brief light sources being emitted from inside the building between floors 10 and 15 accompanied by "a crackling sound" before the tower collapsed. "Even a layman can see that the free-fall scenario based on fires in the building has almost no plausible explanation at this time," Marrs concludes.

During the recent "Confronting the Evidence" conference held in New York City, an individual who worked in the North Tower told me that prior to 9-11, elevator shafts were guarded by security guards while being "out of service" for "weeks and months." Because explosive charges would have to have been placed near the elevator shafts in the towers' cores, I am investigating contractors who had access to the towers in the year prior to 9-11.

MAJOR DEMOLITION

Two demolition companies, both of which have numerous branch companies, had been operating around the WTC and Pentagon sites: LVI Services, a New York-based asbestos abatement and demolition company headed by Burton T. Fried, and Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Md., headed by Mark Loizeaux.

LVI Demolition Services and CDI have cooperated on major demolition projects during the past decade: Las Vegas's Sands Hotel Tower in 1996, Las Vegas' Aladdin Hotel & Casino in 1998 and Denver's Terrecenter in 2002.

On Sept. 13, 2001, Engineering New-Record (ENR), a national weekly for the construction industry, reported: "LVI Services Inc, New York City, which has done extensive asbestos abatement work in the towers in the past, is involved in similar work now as well as other cleanup efforts."

I asked LVI's president Fried about the work his company did in the towers prior to 9-11. "We did not do it," Fried said. "It was a company called AASI, but they went out of business. Asked abut the evidence that the twin towers and WTC 7 were destroyed by demolition charges, Fried replied, "No comment." Requests to ENR and the Port Authority regarding LVI's alleged work in the towers have so far gone unanswered.

LVI has worked with the Department of Energy and uses an asbestos-digesting product developed by the Brookhaven National Laboratory and W.R Grace & Co. I inquired at the Las Vegas office of LVI Environmental of Nevada Inc. and was told, "We don't speak to the press." LVI's Las Vegas office is headed by Joe Catania, political director of the Nevada Republican Party.