EXPLOSIONS AT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER

The public might know more of what really happened to the World Trade Center if the New York Police Department and New York Fire Department had been allowed to do their jobs. But, as with the JFK assassination, their work was taken from them by federal officials, who immediately closed off the crime scene and shut out both the public and local authorities from their consultations. People were even arrested for taking photographs of Ground Zero.

The FBI took charge of the criminal investigation while the little-understood Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), an agency created and controlled by the president, took responsibility for determining what happened to cause the collapse of the Twin Towers. FEMA seemed determined to haul away the evidence, even before a full and impartial investigation could be made. Such premature destruction of evidence was called into question by Bill Manning, editor of the 125-year-old firemen's publication Fire Engineering in its January 2002 issue.

“For more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut up and sold for scrap,” wrote Manning. “Did they throw away the locked doors from the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire? Did they throw away the gas can used at the Happyland Social Club Fire? Did they cast aside the pressure-regulating valves at the Meridian Plaza Fire? Of course not. But essentially, that's what they're doing at the World Trade Center.

“For more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut up and sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that could answer many questions about high-rise building design practices and performance under fire conditions is on the slow boat to China, perhaps never to be seen again in America until you buy your next car.”

Challenging the theory that the Twin Towers collapsed as a result of crashed airplanes and fires, Manning added, “Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the ‘official investigation’ blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure.

“Except for the marginal benefit obtained from a three-day, visual walk-through of evidence sites conducted by the ASCE investigation committee members—described by one close source as a ‘tourist trip’—no one's checking the evidence for anything. The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately,” Manning declared.

In that same issue, a number of fire officials, including a retired deputy chief from New York's fire department, called on FEMA to “immediately impanel a ‘World Trade Center Disaster Review Panel’ to coordinate a complete review of all aspects of the World Trade Center incident.”

These fire officials noted that the WTC disaster was the largest loss of firefighters ever at one incident; the second largest loss of life on American soil; the first total collapse of a high-rise during a fire in United States history; and the largest structural collapse in recorded history.

“Now, with that understanding, you would think we would have the largest fire investigation in world history,” they wrote. “You would be wrong. Instead, we have a series of unconnected and uncoordinated superficial inquiries…Ironically, we will probably gain more detailed information about the destruction of the planes than we will about the destruction of the towers. We are literally treating the steel removed from the site like garbage, not like crucial fire scene evidence.” Complaints from the federal investigating team of engineers supported these accusations.

Citing delays by federal agencies and incomplete information, the twenty-six member team of ASCE engineers that was formed to study the collapse of the WTC towers finally produced a 296-page report by early May 2002. But even as the report was issued, team leader and structural engineer Dr. W. Gene Corley told Congress there were still many questions left unanswered by his study. “We didn't have time and resources,” Corley complained. It should be noted that in 1995, Corley was selected to lead a Building Performance Assessment Team investigating the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a tragedy, which has also generated much controversy and speculation among conspiracy researchers.

Corley said his team didn't have enough data to create a computer model of the interior damage caused by the aircraft, nor could they model the spread of the fires. The team also griped that federal agencies feuded over funding and to whom the team should be reporting.

The team never had access to 911 emergency calls, which could have helped determine exactly what happened in the minutes prior to the collapse of the buildings, and—this can not be emphasized enough—they confirmed reports that much of the structural steel was removed from the site, cut up, and sold as scrap before they had a chance to examine it.

The team could not even obtain a complete set of building plans until early in 2002. Then they found that floor supports were attached to exterior columns by strong welds and not, as initially believed and widely reported, relatively small bolts.

The hurried and superficial nature of the FEMA inquiry was evident in the conclusion of its report: “With the information and time available, the sequence of events leading to the collapse of each tower could not be definitively determined.” Corley did say the team learned just enough to know that more answers were desperately needed to design protective measures for similar structures that might be future terrorist targets.

Another valid issue was raised by Dr. Judy Wood, who noted, “The Twin Towers together had an estimated 30,000 computers for nearly 50,000 workers. So, 45,000 filing cabinets would not be an unreasonable estimate. It is reported that 200 complete bodies were recovered out of the nearly 3,000 victims, which is about 1/15th. At the same ratio, we would expect 3,000 complete filing cabinets of the 45,000 should have survived intact. Yet only one shrunken filing cabinet was reportedly found.”

The quest for more answers coupled with congressional outrage over the obstacles thrown in front of Corley's engineering team prompted President Bush to pledge $16 million for a follow-up study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST’s National Construction Safety Team (NCST), after more than a year of administrative and organizational activity, finally announced in early 2004 that a draft report on the World Trade Center disaster might be “realistic and achievable” by September 2004. The final reported was issued only in November 2008.

A good portion of the NIST team's effort went to study the February 20, 2003, West Warwick, Rhode Island, nightclub fire, which claimed one hundred lives and apparently their $16 million budget was taxed. In an initial report to Congress in December 2003, the group complained of the “recurring problem” of insufficient staff for on-site inspections and subsequent research and tests. “The scale and complexity of the current World Trade Center disaster has strained NIST’s existing resources,” they reported.

They did, however, recommend the creation of a NIST Building and Fire Research Laboratory with a permanent staff funded for $2 million, the establishment of a safety team investigation reserve fund for another $2 million, the establishment of a program to “familiarize local and state investigating authorities about the NCST Act, and a “research program investigating the factors affecting human decision making and evacuation behavior during emergencies in buildings.”

The report echoed complaints from the FEMA engineering team by stating the group's major challenges were lack of data (“through most of 2003, significant gaps existed in the data collection related to almost all of the project areas.”) and the future need to deploy safety teams immediately to an incident for the collection of physical evidence and witness testimony. The NIST inquiry also declined to hear testimony from New York firemen or building engineers despite repeated efforts on their part to contact the panel.

Therefore, the large gaps left in the official record of the WTC collapses have been forced to be filled in by others. Perhaps the best information that we now have about the collapses of the towers comes from independent researchers—most notably from a growing list of courageous scientists and academics noted earlier, whose names can be found listed at the website Scholars for 911 Truth, Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice as well as Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Observers have long noted that the physical characteristics of the collapses of the two towers were almost identical. That has permitted physicist and pioneer critic of the official story, Jim Hoffman, to compile the list below that describes principal features of the destruction of both towers. These observations are based on intensive independent study of the surviving evidence, as contrasted with the “official” explanation of a gravity collapse caused by fire. One can easily see that critical mysteries about the towers’ collapse remain unsolved, in large part due to the destruction of evidence and the under-funded inadequate investigations that followed.

1. The cores of the towers were obliterated and the perimeter walls were shredded. According to Hoffman, “there is no gravity collapse scenario” or probable explanation by fire that can account for the complete leveling of the 47 massive columns that comprised the towers’ cores, or the ripping apart of their sturdy perimeter walls. But if not, what scenario does explain this?

2. Nearly all the concrete was pulverized in the air, so finely that it blanketed parts of lower Manhattan with inches of dust. In a gravity collapse, according to Hoffman, “there would not have been enough energy to pulverize the concrete until it hit the ground, if then.” With regard to this observation, the crucial unanswered question becomes: How then was it possible for the non-metallic components of the buildings to turn to dust as fine as flour—and further, which begin to appear so massively at the very outset of the collapse? Independent scientists cited by Hoffman in a highly technical paper have shown that the energy required for the pulverization of this much concrete and for the stupendous expansion of the dust clouds is as much as “100 times greater than could have been produced from each tower's gravitational potential energy” (i.e., mass times height).

3. Parts of the towers were thrown up to 500 feet laterally. Hoffman: “The downward forces of a gravity collapse cannot account for the energetic lateral ejection of pieces.” But what forces caused these lateral explosions?

4. Explosions were visible before many floors had collapsed. “But in the South Tower collapse,” writes Hoffman, “energetic dust ejections are first seen while the top is only slightly tipping, not falling.” Compression pressure therefore cannot account for this ejected dust. Numerous eye-witness reports of explosions in the buildings have already been recounted.

5. The towers’ tops 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,” claims Hoffman, “the falling building and its debris should have occupied about the same volume as the intact building.” Some observers compared these pyroclastic clouds with those seen in nuclear explosions.

6. The tops of the towers fell at nearly the rate of free fall, in less than fifteen seconds. “We've examined this previously. These astounding rates of fall, according to Hoffman's technical explanation, “indicate that nearly all resistance to the downward acceleration of the tops had been eliminated ahead of them. The forms of resistance, had the collapses been gravity-driven, would include: the destruction of the structural integrity of each storey; the pulverization of the concrete in the floor slabs of each storey, and other non-metallic objects; and the acceleration of the remains of each storey encountered either outward or downward. There would have to be enough energy to overcome all of these forms of resistance and do it rapidly enough to keep up with the near free-fall acceleration of the top.”

The issue of the cause of the collapse of the towers has become so salient that one wealthy American activist, Jimmy Walter, has offered a one million dollar reward to anyone who can prove that explosives were not used in the World Trade Center. Walter has gained notoriety and headlines by his efforts—costing him millions—to educate ordinary Americans and Europeans about the possibility that 9/11 is an inside job.

Concerns over the validity of the free-fall scenario based on fires in the buildings were echoed by former Bush I administration official Morgan Reynolds, a Texas A & M professor emeritus of economics, who was also former chief economist for the Department of Labor and former director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis. Reynolds is also a leading member of scholarsfor911truth.org.

“Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapses of WTC 1 (North Tower), WTC 2 (South Tower), and the much-overlooked collapse of the 47-story WTC Building 7 at 5:21 p.m. on that fateful day,” wrote Reynolds. He added, “Controlled demolition would have required unimpeded access to the WTC, access to explosives, avoiding detection, and the expertise to orchestrate the deadly destruction from a nearby secure location. Such access before 9/11 likely depended on complicity by one or more WTC security companies.” His detailed analysis of both the World Trade Center collapses and the Pentagon strike may be found at www.lewrockwell.com/reynolds/reynolds12.html.

Reynolds also speculated on why WTC Building 7 was brought down later on 9/11. “Why would the killers destroy WTC 7, especially since a collapse would arouse suspicion in some quarters?” he asked. “A logical if unproven theory is that the perpetrators used Mayor Giuliani's sealed OEM [Office of Emergency Management] ‘bunker’ on the 23rd story of WTC 7 to conduct the Twin Tower implosions and then destroyed the building and evidence to cover up their crimes, just as a murderer might set his victim's dwelling ablaze to cover up the crime (one in four fires is arson). Giuliani's ‘undisclosed secret location’ was perfect because it had been evacuated by 9:45 a.m. on 9/11, it enabled unmolested work, provided a ringside seat, was bullet- and bomb-resistant, had its own secure air and water supply, and could withstand winds of 160 mph, necessary protection from the wind blasts generated by collapsing skyscrapers.”

The professor also joined the chorus of criticism leveled at FEMA officials for the rapid removal of WTC debris which prevented later study. “The criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be saved for forensic analysis but FEMA had it destroyed before anyone could seriously investigate it,” stated Reynolds. “FEMA was in position to take command because it had arrived the day before the attacks at New York's Pier 29 to conduct a war game exercise, ‘Tripod II,’ quite a coincidence. The authorities apparently considered the rubble quite valuable: New York City officials had every debris truck tracked on GPS and had one truck driver who took an unauthorized one-and-a-half hour lunch fired.”

Responding to the question of why controlled demolitions have never been considered by the official government investigations of 9/11, Reynolds said, “If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an ‘inside job’ and a government attack on America would be compelling.”

Several experts and numerous independent observers, including news anchors, viewed did the destruction of the World Trade Center towers as more more like a controlled implosion than terrorist-caused destruction. Former wrestler and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, host of a popular cable show entitled Conspiracy Theory, in 2008 stated, “I did watch the film of Building 7 going down and in my opinion, there is no doubt that that building was brought down with demolition.” It is important to note that Ventura formerly served as a member of the Navy SEAL’s Underwater Demolition Team, extensively trained in the use of explosives.

On the morning of the 9/11 attacks, CBS’s Dan Rather, in an interview with Jerome Hauer, then director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness, “Based on what you know, and I recognize we're dealing with so few facts, is it possible that just a plane crash could have collapsed these buildings, or would it have required the, sort of, prior positioning of other explosives in the, uh, in the buildings? I mean, what do you think?” Hauer responded with a concise explanation which matched that of the subsequent official explanation, “No, I, uh, my sense is just the velocity of the plane and the fact that you have a plane filled with fuel hitting that building, uh, that burned, uh, the velocity of that plane, uh, certainly, uh, uh, had an impact on the structure itself, and then the fact that it burned and you had that intense heat, uh, probably weakened the structure as well, uh, and I think it, uh, was, uh, simply the, uh, the planes hitting the buildings, and, and causing the collapse.”

It might be noted that until 2000 Hauer was director of Rudy Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management and a managing director of Kroll Associates, then in charge of security for the World Trade Center complex. It was in his capacity as a public health official that Hauer advised the Bush White House to begin taking the anti-anthrax drug Cipro more than a week prior to the anthrax mail attacks that followed the events of 9/11.

Both North and South Towers had 47 core columns made of steel with 236 steel columns around the outer perimeter, for a total of 566 columns. Explosives would have been required at each column to bring down the building by conventional controlled demolition. This would not have been a small undertaking.

Such questions concerning the collapse of the towers also were immediately advanced by experts in demolition and firefighting, only to die away in the subsequent media blitz of “official” pronouncements. Many people, experts and laymen alike, also asked why the South Tower collapsed first when it was not as extensively damaged as the North Tower, which burned for almost an hour and a half before its collapse?

Numerous sources have claimed that bombs rather than the planes caused the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

Van Romero, vice president for research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and a former director of the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center said televised images of the collapse of the WTC towers suggested that explosives were used to create a controlled demolition.

“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,” Romero told the Albuquerque Journal on September 11, 2001.

Romero, who ironically was in the Washington area during the 9/11 attacks attempting to gain government funding for defense research at his school, said the collapse of the WTC was “too methodical” to be the chance result of airplanes colliding with the structures. He said it appeared more like the controlled implosions used to demolish old buildings.

“It could have been a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points,” he said, adding that the detonation of bombs within towers is consistent with common terrorist strategy. “One of the things terrorist events are noted for is a diversionary attack and secondary device. Attackers detonate an initial, diversionary explosion that attracts emergency personnel to the scene, then detonate a second explosion,” he explained.

Within 10 days, Romero reversed himself, telling the Albuquerque Journal that following conversations with “other experts” he came to understand that “Certainly the fire is what caused the building to fail.” He did concede that the final collapse may have been caused when fire reached an electrical transformer or other source of combustion within the building, leaving open the question of explosions. There was no word of whether or not New Mexico Tech received its federal funding requests although in 2010 the school now provides provide counterterrorism training to firemen, policemen, and first responders in courses entitled “Incident Response to Teroristic Bombings” and “Prevention and Response to Suicide Bombing Incidents.”

Many have wondered about the witnesses who claimed to have heard multiple explosions within the buildings. One such witness was the head of WTC security, John O’Neill, who stated shortly before he himself became a victim that he had helped dig out survivors on the 27th floor before the building collapsed. Since the aircraft crashed into the 80th floor, what heavily damaged the 27th floor?

Another of those mentioning bombs was Louie Cacchioli, a fifty-one-year-old fireman assigned to Engine 47 in Harlem. “We were the first ones in the second tower after the plane struck,” recalled Cacchioli. “I was taking firefighters up in the elevator to the twenty-fourth floor to get in position to evacuate workers. On the last trip up a bomb went off. We think there were bombs set in the building.” The fireman became trapped in an elevator but managed to escape with the use of tools.

Cacchioli claimed he was misquoted. In later years, he cooperated with the editors of Popular Mechanics who published Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts, and gave guided tours of Ground Zero.

But FDNY Auxiliary Lt. Paul Isaac, Jr. also mentioned bombs, telling Internet reporter Randy Lavello that New York firemen were very upset by what they considered a cover-up in the WTC destruction. “Many other firemen know there were bombs in the buildings,” he said, “but they are afraid for their jobs to admit it because the higher-ups forbid discussion of this fact.” Isaac, who was stationed at Engine 10 near the WTC in the late 1990s, said the higher-ups included the FDNY’s antiterrorism consultant, James Woolsey, a former CIA director. “There were definitely bombs in those buildings,” Isaac added.

Other firemen also supported the idea of multiple explosions in the towers. Their testimonies came from 503 oral histories recorded by the New York Fire Department in late 2001. The tapes were of both fire personnel and emergency medical workers. The city had refused to release the tapes until ordered to do so by the New York Court of Appeals acting on a suit filed jointly by the New York Times and several 9/11 victims’ families. They were publicly released in August 2005, only lightly covered by the mass media and remain largely unknown to most Americans. In these unpublicized histories, more than 100 New York firemen reported multiple explosions at the Word Trade Center. None of these persons were mentioned in The 9/11 Commission Report.

Comments in these tapes, some of which were edited, related to the possibility of controlled demolitions in the WTC. These included:

FDNY Captain Dennis Tardio: “I hear an explosion and I look up [at the South Tower]. It is as if the building is being imploded from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom.”

New Jersey Fire Police Officer Sue Keane: “[I]t sounded like bombs going off [in the South Tower]. That's when the explosions happened…I knew something was going to happen…It started to get dark, then all of a sudden there was this massive explosion… [In the North Tower] another explosion. That sent me and the two firefighters [with her] down the stairs…I can't tell you how many times I got banged around. Each one of those explosions picked me up and threw me…There was another explosion and I got thrown with two firefighters out onto the street.”

FDNY Battalion Chief John Sudnik: “[W]e heard a loud explosion or what sounded like a loud explosion and looked up and I saw Tower Two start coming down.”

FDNY EMS Paramedic Daniel Rivera, “At first I thought it was—do you ever see professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear, ‘Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop’? That's exactly what—because I thought it was that. When I heard that frigging noise, that's when I saw the building coming down.”

FDNY Assistant Commissioner Stephen Gregory: “I thought…before… [Tower] No. 2 came down that I saw low-level flashes… Lieutenant Evangelista…asked me if I saw low-level flashes in front of the building and I agreed with him because I…saw a flash, flash, flash… [at] the lower level of the building. You know, like when they demolish a building, how when they blow up a building, when it falls down? That what I thought I saw.”

FDNY Captain Karin Deshore: “Somewhere around the middle of the World Trade Center, there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially, it was just one flash…Then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that building had started to explode. The popping sound and with each popping sound it was initially an orange and then a red flash came out of the building and then it would just go all around the building on both sides as far as I could see. These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going both up and down and then all around the building.”

FDNY Deputy Commissioner Thomas Fitzpatrick: “We looked up at the [South Tower]…All we saw was a puff of smoke coming from about two-thirds of the way up…It looked like sparkling around one specific layer of the building…My initial reaction was that this was exactly the way it looks when they show you those [building] implosions on TV.”

FDNY Firefighter Christopher Fenyo: “At that point [the collapse of the South Tower], a debate began to rage because many people had felt that possible explosives had taken out 2 World Trade and officers were gathering companies together and the officers were debating whether or not to go immediately back in or to see what was going to happen with 1 World Trade [the North Tower] at that point. The debate ended pretty quickly because 1 World Trade came down.”

Survivor Teresa Veliz, manager for a software development company, was on the 47th floor of the North Tower when it was struck. “I got off [the elevator], turned the corner and opened the door to the ladies’ room. I said good morning to a lady sitting at a mirror when the whole building shook. I thought it was an earthquake. Then I heard those banging noises on the other side of the wall. It sounded like someone had cut the elevator cables. It just fell and fell and fell.”

Veliz reached ground level with a coworker when the South Tower collapsed, knocking them down. In near total darkness, she and the coworker followed someone with a flashlight. “The flashlight led us into Borders bookstore, up an escalator and out to Church Street. There were explosions going off everywhere. I was convinced that there were bombs planted all over the place and someone was sitting at a control panel pushing detonator buttons. I was afraid to go down Church Street toward Broadway, but I had to do it. I ended up on Vesey Street. There was another explosion. And another. I didn't know which way to run.”

Ross Milanytch watched the horror at the WTC from his office window on the 22nd floor of a building a couple of blocks away. “[I saw] small explosions on each floor. And after it all cleared, all that was left of the buildings, you could just see the steel girders in like a triangular sail shape. The structure was just completely gone,” he said.

John Bussey, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, watched the collapse of the South Tower from the ninth floor of the newspaper's office building. “I…looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor…. One after the other. From top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors flew to pieces.”

WNYC Radio's Beth Fertig was on the scene and reported, “It just descended like a timed explosion—like when they are deliberately bringing a building down…It was coming down so perfectly that in one part of my brain I was thinking, ‘They got everyone out, and they're bringing the building down because they have to.’”

Fox 5 News in New York City, shortly after 10 a.m. on September 11, videotaped a large white cloud of smoke billowing near the base of the South Tower. The commentator exclaimed, “There is an explosion at the base of the building…white smoke from the bottom…something has happened at the base of the building…then, another explosion. Another building in the World Trade Center complex…”

This view was supported by Steve Evans, a reporter for the BBC, who was in the South Tower at the time of the attacks. “I was at the base of the second tower, the second tower that was hit,” he recalled. “There was an explosion—I didn't think it was an explosion—but the base of the building shook. I felt it shake…then when we were outside, the second explosion happened and then there was a series of explosions.… We can only wonder at the kind of damage—the kind of human damage—which was caused by those explosions, those series of explosions.”

The most compelling testimony came from Tom Elliott, who was already in his office at Aon Corp. on the 103rd floor of the WTC South Tower before the planes struck. Elliott said he was at his computer answering emails when a bright light startled him shortly before 9 a.m. A rumble shook the building and he could see flames accompanied by dark smoke that appeared to be crawling up the outside of the building. He also felt heat coming through the windows. Strangely, there were no alarms.

“I don't know what's happening, but I think I need to be out of here,” Elliott recalled thinking to himself. Elliott and two others began walking down the building's stairwell when they ran into a few others. The absence of more people and the lack of alarms made them feel they had prematurely panicked.

He recalled that as his small group reached the 70th floor, they heard the announcement that the building was secure and there was no need to evacuate. “Do you want to believe them?” one woman said to Elliott. “Let's go!” He followed the woman down the stairs. After descending three more floors, Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. An article in the Christian Science Monitor described what happened next:

“Although its spectacularly televised impact was above Elliott, at first he and those around him thought an explosion had come from below. An incredible sound—he calls it an ‘exploding sound’—shook the building, and a tornado of hot air and smoke and ceiling tiles and bits of drywall came flying up the stairwell.”

“In front of me, the wall split from the bottom up,” Elliott said. He said people in the stairwell panicked and tried to flee upward until some men pointed out that the only escape was downstairs. By about 9:40 a.m., Elliott managed to stumble out of the South Tower and make his way to his roommate's office in Midtown, where he broke down sobbing upon learning of the tower's collapse.

Elliot's description of explosions below the buildings are supported by others, such as FDNY EMS Lieutenant Bradley Mann who told of the ground shaking before each tower collapsed. “Shortly before the first tower came down, I remember feeling the ground shaking. I heard a terrible noise, and then debris just started flying everywhere. People started running,” said Mann in the oral history tapes. After returning to the area, he noted, “[W]e basically had the same thing—the ground shook again, and we heard another terrible noise and the next thing we knew the second tower was coming down.”

Then there are the accounts of engineers working below ground level. Mike Pecoraro told The Chief Engineer magazine he was working in the 6th sub-basement of the North Tower when the lights flickered. This was followed by a loud explosion. Pecoraro and a coworker made their way up to a C level machine shop but found it “gone.” “There was nothing there but rubble,” recalled Pecoraro. “We're talking about a 50-ton hydraulic press—gone!”

Working their way upwards to a parking garage, the pair found it too was destroyed. “There were no walls, there was rubble on the floor, and you can't see anything,” Pecoraro recalled. Ascending two more levels to the tower's lobby, they were astonished to find more debris including a 300-pound steel and concrete fire door wrinkled up “like a piece of aluminum foil.” By now, Pecoraro was convinced that a bomb had gone off in the building.

“When I walked out into the lobby, it was incredible,” Pecoraro recalled. “The whole lobby was soot and black, elevator doors were missing. The marble was missing off some of the walls. 20-foot section of marble, 20 by 10 foot sections of marble, gone from the walls. The west windows were all gone. They were missing. These are tremendous windows. They were just gone. Broken glass everywhere, the revolving doors were all broken and their glass was gone. Every sprinkler head was going off. I am thinking to myself, how are these sprinkler heads going off? It takes a lot of heat to set off a sprinkler head. It never dawned on me that there was a giant fireball that came through the air of the lobby.” He said much later he heard the accounts of jet fuel spilling down the elevator shaft, blowing off all the elevator doors and flames rolling through the lobby.

The lobby of the North Tower was so unrecognizable that many people streaming down the stairs seeking to escape the building bypassed the lobby and had to be directed back up. After moving with other building personnel to the South Tower where he helped evacuate the building, Pecoraro made a dramatic and hazardous escape when the tower collapsed.

Pecoraro's experiences in the basement all occurred prior to the tower's collapse. Yet, according to the official story, there had been only the airplane strike about 95 floors above them.

Adding details that support Pecoraro's account of explosions in the basement was William Rodriguez. President Bush and others hailed him as a hero at the time for his rescue efforts on 9/11. It was widely reported that Rodriguez had adeptly guided rescue workers and had single-handedly saved a number of lives. He was the last person to escape as the North Tower collapsed. But when Rodriguez later went public, it was with a very different account of the WTC tragedy.

Rodriguez had worked for the New York and New Jersey Port Authority for about twenty years. In 2001, he was in charge of maintenance for three stairwells in the North Tower.

Arriving at 8:30 a.m. on September 11, Rodriguez went to the maintenance office located on the first sub-level, one of six sub-basements beneath ground level. There were a total of fourteen people in the office at this time. As he was talking with others, there was a very loud, massive explosion that seemed to emanate from between sub-basements B2 and B3. There were twenty-two people on B2 sub-basement who also felt and heard that first explosion.

At first he thought it was a generator that had exploded. “When I heard the sound of the explosion, the floor beneath my feet vibrated, the walls started cracking and everything started shaking,” said Rodriguez. Seconds later there was another explosion way above, which made the building oscillate momentarily. This, he was later told, was a plane hitting the 90th floor.

Upon hearing about the plane, Rodriguez started heading for the loading dock to escape the explosion's fire. When asked later about those first explosions he said: “I would know if an explosion was from the bottom or the top of the building.” He was clear about hearing explosions both before and after the plane hit the tower.

Rodriguez said a fellow worker, Felipe David, came into the office. “He had been standing in front of a freight elevator on sub-level 1 about 400 feet from the office when fire burst out of the elevator shaft, causing his injuries. He was burned so badly from the basement explosion that flesh was hanging from his face and both arms.” Rodriguez led David outside to safety but returned to the building after hearing screaming inside.

Water from the fire sprinklers from all of the floors had gone into the elevator shaft and there were people trapped below who were in danger of drowning. Rodriguez was able to lower a long ladder into the shaft to enable their escape.

Rodriguez held one of the five master keys that opened all of the stairwell doors at each of the floors in the 110-story building. The other four key holders, though trained for emergencies, had already left the building. Firemen from New York City Unit Six arrived. Each fireman, in addition to protective clothing, had about 70 pounds of equipment. Rodriguez led the firemen up stairwell B.

Reaching the 27th floor, firemen were becoming exhausted from the weight of their equipment. Ascending the stairs, Rodriguez as well as the firemen heard explosions from the 20th through the 30th floor. Chunks of the building fell around them and they could literally hear the building coming down. The firemen continued to climb and give aid.

On the 33rd floor, Rodriguez found the air thick with smoke. Grabbing some dust masks from a maintenance office, he was able to help a woman to evacuate. While on that floor, Rodriguez said he heard what sounded like the movement of heavy equipment and furniture on the 34th floor. This puzzled him because he knew that floor had been closed due to a construction project.

Rodriguez accompanied firefighter to the 39th floor where he was told to turn back. As he began his descent he heard the plane hit the South Tower. Racing through the wrecked lobby, Rodriguez took cover under a fire truck where he was later discovered. After receiving first aid, he joined the effort to find survivors. Rodriguez spent hours giving closed-door testimony before the 9/11 Commission, yet his eyewitness account does not appear anywhere in the 576 page report and in 2010, he posted a link to the commission archives—which indicated his testimony was marked “restricted” and “secret.”

He also tried to talk to investigators for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) but was ignored. “I contacted NIST…four times without a response,” he recalled. “Finally, [at a public hearing] I asked them before they came up with their conclusion…if they ever considered my statements or the statements of any of the other survivors who heard the explosions. They just stared at me with blank faces and didn't have any answers.”

He also said he contacted the FBI but they never followed up. The media also seemed uninterested. Rodriguez said CNN spent most of a day filming and interviewing him at his home but, when the interview aired, it was severely edited. Rodriguez said one reporter not so subtly warned him to keep quiet or he could be in jeopardy. “You do not know who you are dealing with!” he was told. His response was, “I am living on borrowed time since I probably should be dead anyway.”

In late 2004, Rodriguez filed suit in a Philadelphia federal court under the provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, naming George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others as being complicit in the 9/11 attacks. Rodriguez claims that top officials either planned the attacks or had foreknowledge of the attacks and permitted them to succeed for the purpose of exploiting a “New Pearl Harbor” in order to launch wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. The lawsuit entitled Rodriguez v. Bush, et al., Civil Action No. 04 CV 4952, was filed in the US District Court in Philadelphia on October 22. (For details on the lawsuit, see www.911forthetruth.com)

“If what the government has told us about 9/11 is a lie,” said Rodriguez explaining why he chose to file suit against government officials, “somebody has to take action to reveal the truth. If suing President Bush is what I have to do to accomplish that, so be it.”

Rodriguez's account has been corroborated by José Sanchez, who was in the workshop on the fourth sub-level. Sanchez said that he and a coworker heard a big blast that “sounded like a bomb,” after which “a huge ball of fire went through the freight elevator.”

Foreign news accounts also noted testimony regarding explosions. A story in the London Guardian said that, “police and fire officials were carrying out the first wave of evacuations when the first of the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Some eyewitnesses reported hearing another explosion just before the structure crumbled. Police said that it looked almost like a ‘planned implosion.’”

A CNN video of the scene at the WTC showed smoke boiling up from the street level prior to the collapse of the towers, apparently from the eight-story WTC Building 6, more popularly known as the Customs House building. Nothing of significance had struck street level at that time. Did the billowing smoke come from a premature detonation?

Due to a delayed broadcast, there was some initial confusion about just when the smoke began. However, CNN’s Public Affairs Department confirmed that the video footage of an apparent explosion at ground level was made at 9:04 a.m., just one minute after Flight 175 struck the South Tower and long before either tower collapsed.

Asked what might have caused the smoke seen in the video, the CNN archivist replied, “We can't figure it out.” Later, arguments were made that CNN’s time code was wrong and that the billowing smoke was simply dust from the collapsing South Tower.

Lending support to the idea that Building 6 was ravaged by a separate explosion were photos depicting a very noticeable huge circular hole with deep crater blasted from this building which was not hit by airplanes and still standing after the towers collapsed.

According to news reports, the FEMA team of engineers commissioned to investigate the WTC tragedy was barred from entering the Customs House building. FEMA officials reported that because the structure was considered “very dangerous,” there was “no data collection” from Building 6. Yet, the FEMA report blithely stated, “Building Five was the only building accessible for observation [by the team of engineers] …the observations, findings and recommendations are assumed to be applicable to all three buildings.” A spokesman for the Export-Import Bank of the United States confirmed the 9:04 time of the blast but said all of the eight hundred or so employees of the Customs House building had already been evacuated after the W TC North Tower was struck.

Other occupants of the building, which included the Customs Service, the Departments of Commerce, Labor, and Agriculture and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, declined to explain either the early blast or the massive crater at the center of the Customs House ruins. No explanation for this explosion or crater has been forthcoming.

But if there were bombs in the towers, how did they get there? What kind were they? What is powerful enough to bring down a 110-story steel and concrete skyscraper? The public was left with the official explanation that high-temperature fires caused by burning jet fuel and office furnishings melted 47 internal structural steel beams, causing the towers to drop into their own foundations.