American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [88]
For my TV show, I interviewed a witness named William Rodriguez, a janitor who happened to have a master key and rescued many people and got honored at the White House as a national hero. He says that shortly before American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 AM, an explosion simultaneously rocked the building so hard “it pushed us up.” Rodriguez later testified behind closed doors to the 9/11 Commission, but his name was never mentioned in the report. Rodriguez also gave the commission and the FBI a list of fourteen people who’d been with him, but not a single one was ever contacted. He produced his boss for us, who looked me right in the eye and in essence told me the same story. What’s happened to Rodriguez today? He’s on the no-fly list. A guy who went back in to save people, with no regard for his own life! When he goes somewhere, he’s pulled out of the line, interrogated, harassed. All because, I guess, he didn’t give the “proper testimony” they wanted.
Some people have argued that the twin towers went down, within a half hour of one another, because of the way they were constructed. Well, those 425,000 cubic yards of concrete and 200,000 tons of steel were designed to hold up against a Boeing 707, the largest plane built at the time the towers were completed in 1973. Analysis had shown that a 707 traveling at 600 miles an hour (and those had four engines) would not cause major damage. The twin-engine Boeing 757s that hit on 9/11 were going 440 and 550 miles an hour.7
Still, we are told that a molten, highly intense fuel mixture from the planes brought down these two steel-framed skyscrapers. Keep in mind that no other such skyscraper in history had ever been known to collapse completely due to fire damage. So could it actually have been the result of a controlled demolition from inside the buildings? I don’t claim expertise about this, but I did work four years as part of the navy’s underwater demolition teams, where we were trained to blow things to hell and high water. And my staff talked at some length with a prominent physicist, Steven E. Jones, who says that a “gravity driven collapse” without demolition charges defies the laws of physics. These buildings fell, at nearly the rate of free-fall, straight down into their own footprint, in approximately ten seconds. An object dropped from the roof of the 110-story-tall towers would reach the ground in about 9.2 seconds. Then there’s the fact that steel beams that weighed as much as 200,000 pounds got tossed laterally as far as 500 feet.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) started its investigation on August 21, 2002. When their 10,000-page-long report came out three years later, the spokesman said there was no evidence to suggest a controlled demolition. But Steven E. Jones also says that molten metal found underground weeks later is proof that jet fuel couldn’t have been all that was responsible. I visited the site about three weeks after 9/11, with Governor Pataki and my wife, Terry. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but they had to suspend digging that day because they were running into heat pockets of huge temperatures. These fires kept burning for more than three months, the longest-burning structure blaze ever. And this was all due to jet fuel? We’re talking molten metal more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.8
Probably the most conclusive evidence about a controlled demolition is a research paper (two years, nine authors) published in the peer-reviewed