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5.0 out of 5 stars WTC7: The definitive "must read" analysis of the U.S. Federal Government cover-up, September 9, 2009
By E. Woodworth (Victoria, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
Many people are unaware that at 5:20 PM on September 11th, a third massive building in the World Trade Center complex suddenly and inexplicably collapsed at free-fall speed into its own footprint.
"Seven", a handsome 47-storey steel-frame building constructed in 1987, stood about 300 feet north of the North Tower. Though other buildings in the complex stood closer to the towers and were damaged by falling debris, none were structurally obliterated and reduced to the neat pile of rubble that was the strange destiny of this monolithic structure. (It's rapid, mysterious straight-down collapse is commonly featured on youtube and Google video.)
WTC7 had the dimensions of a football field and would have defined the skyline in any city but New York or Hong Kong.
Early attempts were made by insurance companies, and by the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA), to explain this unprecedented global collapse of a steel-frame high rise building. Meanwhile, NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, toiled away for seven years at finding inputs for its computer simulations that would show how office fires could bring down a steel building.
Professor Griffin's book is the history and refutation of the fluctuating and self-contradictory explanations which emerged through a series of interim NIST studies and which culminated in its final 729-page report in November 2008. NIST's conclusion: WTC7 was the first steel-frame building in history to be structurally demolished by fire alone.
The contortions required to put a scientific face on this claim were ludicrous in the extreme. In order to exclude the possibility of a controlled demolition, it was necessary to overlook a great deal of prima facie physical evidence which attended the collapse. Several television anchors covering the scene on 9/11 had commented that, in Dan Rather's words, "Amazing, incredible, pick your word. For the third time today, it's reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen too much on television before, where a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down."
Dan Rather's comments were supported by photographic and video evidence of horizontal squibs emanating from the windows, and of a vertical row of windows blown out just as the building started to collapse.
Berkeley Professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl's reported that a steel I-beam from WTC 7 had been partially vaporized - a phenomenon which required heat (over 5,000 degrees F.) far exceeding the temperatures NIST projected from a jet-fueled hydrocarbon fire causing office contents to burn.
The "New York Times" had referred to the extremely thin melted steel, with holes like Swiss cheese, as the "deepest mystery" about WTC 7. Such evidence was simply left out of the NIST report: what NIST was unable to contort, it simply overlooked.
These are but two of many physical anomalies, including molten iron running like lava beneath the buildings, and beams pulled from the rubble weeks later, dripping molten steel, which the NIST reports left out, and which Dr. Griffin has documented from written reports and eyewitness accounts.
There is also strongly suppressed testimonial evidence. That the British Government would use its broadcaster, the BBC, to make, and then remake within 3 months, two nearly identical documentaries on WTC 7, is evidence that a great deal hangs on the public perception of this building's demise. If Seven fell to reports of explosions and therefore controlled demolition, which is what the BBC attempts to refute, then Britain's ally the United States would have some serious explaining to do on the world stage.
The story of Barry Jennings' suppressed evidence is certainly one for the history books, and is first told in its fullest available detail here - though much remains unanswered and should be pursued through formal investigation.
Jennings, the respected and credible emergency coordinator/deputy director of the Emergency Services Department of the New York City Housing Authority, was trapped with New York City's corporation counsel, Michael Hess, in a north-facing WTC 7 stairwell for about 90 minutes, soon after the first Tower was hit at 8:56 AM. Later that morning and afternoon, Jennings and Hess both reported clear and unmistakable evidence of horrific explosions, heat, and smoke, below their position on the 8th floor, during the time before the first tower fell at 10:28.
Hess later changed his story about the explosions, but Jennings stuck to his guns. Jennings, aged 53, whose testimony the BBC prominently challenged in both documentaries, was suddenly admitted to hospital and died in late August 2008, just days before the release of the final NIST report on Seven - and in between the two BBC documentaries. There was no obituary, and no detective has been able to pursue (let alone establish) the cause of his death.
A great strength of Griffin's book is that it explains, in layman's terms, the principles of scientific method which are normally followed in scientific investigations, and then demonstrates how the varieties of fallacious reasoning which negate these principles destroy the validity of NIST's Final Report.
Griffin's chapters are peppered with such analyses. In the end it becomes clear that the NIST report is not just invalid - it's demonstrably fraudulent in its violations of scientific method. Its computer simulations completely fail to incorporate the mass of photographic and testimonial evidence that points to evidence of controlled demolition, and much of its input data is contradicted by photographs contained in the report itself.
The 22 manifestly hollow claims supporting the fire "hypothesis" are neatly summarized at the end of the book.
In summary, the NIST Final Report on Building 7 goes far beyond incompetence: it's a defensive political document -- a travesty of the scientific method, and one which should be widely reported to the agencies which uphold the standards of scientific inquiry into truth.
This reviewer believes that it is critically important that this book be read by millions of people across the land. It is the lever that will open the can of worms underlying the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Lack of knowledge about these events is allowing an apparently misled President Obama to up the ante in Afghanistan, without meeting what should be a groundswell of public resistance. At the same time he is wasting vital resources which could be directed towards alternative energy solutions for the far more critical problem of global warming.
If enough people read this book, perhaps an impartial commission will be forced into being to truly investigate the fate of Seven, and following upon its inevitable conclusions, the fate of the Towers, which remain standing in our minds as ghostly icons of fear supporting the vastly misguided global war on terror.
