The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [48]
To a detective—and in this case a scientist is indeed a sort of detective—such samples are interesting but much less than reliable. In a criminal case—and were the samples of, say, bloodstains containing DNA—they would be laughed out of court. There is no true chain of evidence in any of these instances.
Even were the provenance of the dust well established, moreover, some fellow scientists reject Jones’s claim to have identified the incendiary thermite. Elements in the samples are as likely, they say, to have come from material one would expect to find in dust from the Trade Center—like paint.
There is disapproval, too, of the way Jones’s thermite conclusions—grave, were they to be taken seriously—have been presented. The findings have not been subjected to peer review, the process under which a scholarly work is subjected to scrutiny by other experts in the same field. While most scientists consider peer review essential, Jones’s thoughts on thermite seem first to have appeared in a paper he posted on a university website, then in the Journal of 9/11 Studies. The website of the Journal, of which Jones is coeditor, claims that it is “peer-reviewed.” Fellow scientist Ryan Mackey dismisses that assertion as a “masquerade … cargo-cult science.”
Thermite aside, Griffin and like-minded theorists espouse the idea that explosives of some sort were used to bring down the towers. They base their suspicion to a great degree on what witnesses said they saw and heard—understandably, or so one might think.
Wall Street Journal reporter John Bussey, for example, reported in a Pulitzer-winning article that from the Journal building near the South Tower he “heard metallic crashes and looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor.… One after another, from top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors blew to pieces.”
Bussey later recalled having seen “individual floors, one after the other exploding outward.” “I thought to myself, ‘My God, they’re going to bring the building down.’ And they, whoever they were, had set charges.” “It just descended like a timed explosion,” said Beth Fertig of WNYC Radio, “like when they are deliberately bringing a building down.”
The skeptics also pounced early on what Van Romero of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology—unlike the reporters an expert on explosives—told the Albuquerque Journal on the day of the attacks. “My opinion is, based on the videotapes,” he said, “that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse.”
Ten days later, however, Romero reversed himself. It had initially looked to him as though explosives triggered the collapses, he said, but a further look at the videotapes led him to agree with colleagues that—essentially as the NIST would conclude four years later—the buildings fell because fire weakened their steel structures.
There’s the nub. So many people, with less expertise in explosives than Romero or none at all, merely said what they thought they saw and heard. “Then we heard a loud explosion or what sounded like a loud explosion,” Fire battalion chief John Sudnik recalled, “and looked up and I saw Tower Two start coming down.” “First I thought it was an explosion,” said firefighter Timothy Julian. “I thought maybe there was a bomb on the plane, but delayed type of thing, you know, secondary device.”
“There was what appeared to be at first an explosion,” said Chief Frank Cruthers, also describing the collapse of the South Tower. “It appeared at the very top, simultaneously from all four sides, materials shot out horizontally. And then there seemed to be a momentary delay before you could see the beginning of the collapse.”
“The lowest floor of fire in the South Tower actually looked like someone had planted explosives around it,” said battalion chief Brian