The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [49]
Dr. Griffin seized on these accounts and more. On occasion, however, he was less than professorial in his editing. Griffin omitted, for example, what battalion chief Dixon said in his very next sentence, after recalling that he thought he was witnessing an “explosion.” He had continued, “I guess in some sense of time we looked at it and realized, ‘No, actually it just collapsed.’ That’s what blew out the windows, not that there was an explosion there.”
Without having done a statistical study of the some five hundred formal interviews conducted with 9/11 emergency workers, it appears to the authors that the vast majority of them referred not to apparent explosions—as in detonations—but usually more vaguely, to loud bangs, thunder, rumbling, booms, or trainlike sounds.
There may even have been some actual explosions, but not ones indicating deliberate demolition. “You heard nothing but explosions all day,” firefighter Salvatore Torcivia remembered. “The fires, the jet fuel burning. The nearby buildings had air conditioning and refrigerator units—they were all exploding from the super heat. It sounded like bombs going off. I believe the Secret Service had their armory in one of the towers. That stuff, ordnance, was going off.”
After an analysis of Griffin’s eye and ear witnesses to explosion, his critic Ryan Mackey notes that all were nonexperts, “relaying their impressions of a horrifically chaotic and deadly experience.” There is no good reason to consider the witnesses’ words evidence of the use of explosives.
To believe explosives were involved, moreover, one would have to account for how they were planted—in multiple locations—in advance of the attacks. Griffin states that demolition of the Twin Towers would have required more explosive than did that in 2000 of the Seattle Kingdome stadium—at the time the largest structure ever brought down by controlled implosion.
His tormentor Mackey, calculating that this would have meant bringing more than 60,000 kilograms of explosive into each tower, notes that the professor “produced no explanation of how such a staggering amount of explosives could have been smuggled into the Towers without detection, how it could have been placed without being seen, how many individuals would have been required to plant it all.”
The 2005 report of the National Institute of Standards and Technology summed up the matter. Its experts had found no evidence, the report said, “for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives.”
The authors have seen nothing, in all the verbiage of the skeptical literature, to persuade us otherwise.
IN 2010, Dr. Griffin came out with yet another book, on what he described as “The Official Account’s Achilles’ Heel.” The “smoking gun” that he and others see is the collapse on the evening of September 11 of the forty-seven-story World Trade Center Building 7.
Though not struck by an airplane, Building 7 was catastrophically damaged by chunks of debris from the collapsing North Tower, caught fire, and burned all day. When it in turn fell, WTC 7 became the first known instance in the world of a tall, modern, steel-reinforced building brought down apparently as a result of fire.
It was, The New York Times reported later, “a mystery that under normal circumstances would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world”—had its collapse not been eclipsed by that of the Twin Towers themselves. The Times said engineers expected to spend months piecing together the “disturbing puzzle.” In the event, it took the NIST’s experts seven years.
According to the NIST, in its 2008 report, WTC 7 was brought down by “fire-induced progressive collapse,” a chain of events technically unlike those in the Twin Towers, beginning with the failure of one key structural column. The NIST “found no evidence supporting the existence of a blast event.”
There has long been witness testimony militating against the notion