TonySzambotiFor this important interview we welcome Tony Szamboti, mechanical engineer and 9/11 researcher, who joins us for a detailed discussion on crucial evidence that, in the words of his research group, "clearly demonstrate(s) that the reports produced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on the destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) were unscientific and fraudulent."

With the group's recently-published white paper as our focus, "Areas of Specific Concern in the NIST WTC Reports" which lists 25 Points seriously challenging NIST's work in this area, we discuss striking new evidence demonstrating that NIST intentionally omitted significant structural components from its analysis of Building 7, and explore the almost inescapable conclusion that this was done in order to avoid the explanation of controlled demolition. We also discuss the potential these findings might have for legal action.

(Tony Szamboti is a U.S. Navy Veteran, he holds a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Villanova University, and has worked predominantly in the Aerospace industry for the last 28 years.)

Original Audio  music148    Notes  Open-folder-info48                                                                      Transcribed by Sarah Brand—Proofread by Anon. & Tony Szamboti

 

Julian Charles:  Hello everybody, Julian Charles here of TheMindRenewed.com, coming to you as usual from the depths of the Lancashire countryside here in the UK. And today on this 26th of November, 2014, I am very pleased to welcome to the programme Tony Szamboti, who is a mechanical engineer and a member of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. A US Navy veteran, Tony holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Villanova University and has spent the last 28 years working predominately in the aerospace industry. He has authored or co-authored a number of peer-reviewed articles published by the esteemed Journal of 9/11 Studies and was one of the experts featured in the documentary by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth called 9/11: Explosive Evidence—Experts Speak Out. Tony, welcome to the programme. Good to speak to you.
 
Tony Szamboti:  Nice to be here, Julian.
 
JC:  Now, the reason I invited you to join us on the programme was because a couple of weeks ago I was contacted by a colleague of yours who is a member of your team of engineers that’s been looking into the 9/11 World Trade Centre collapses. He drew my attention to a white paper that you’ve recently published. This paper, written by various members of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, is called “Areas of Specific Concern in the NIST WTC Reports” [external PDF]. It lists 25 points that you say offer the most convincing proof that the WTC collapse reports produced by the US National Institute of Standards & Technology are — and I’m going to use the words that are appended to that report — “unscientific and fraudulent.” This colleague of yours suggested that you would be the person to come on and tell us about that document and the implications it has for complaint and possibly legal action. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about.
 
But, Tony, could we start with you personally, just so that we’ve got a clear idea about your work and experience. I mean, you say that you’ve been working in the aerospace industry for twenty-eight years or so. So could you give us an idea of what kind of work you’re involved in with that?
 
TS:  Yes, mostly aircraft equipment and structures, and also satellite equipment and structures. I say 'predominantly' because I also worked at what was RCA Broadcast, which wasn’t far from where I live here in southern New Jersey. They actually designed and built the antenna stack that was on the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. I worked there from 1992 to 1994. So that was heavy structural work in addition to aerospace work I’ve been involved in besides that.
 
JC:  Was it that connection that prompted you to start looking at the collapses?
 
TS:  Actually, no, it wasn’t. What prompted me to start looking at the collapses was: I was working actually at BAE Systems here in the States on September 11th, 2001. We were in a design review with another company that’s got British ties — Alenia Marconi. We had designed something for them, and we were in a design review. Somebody got a call on a cell phone that one of the World Trade Centre Towers was hit. You're thinking it’s a Cessna or something like that — a small aircraft. Fifteen minutes later he got another call that another aircraft had hit, and they were big aircraft. At that point we knew something was not right.
 
At 9:30 we had a break and we were right next to the cafeteria. Big companies generally have TVs in the cafeteria nowadays, in the last 20 years or so. And so we went to the cafeteria and watched the TV, and you see the Towers smoking at that point. It wasn’t long — just less than a half hour later — that the South Tower, which was the second one hit, came down. You know, it was just a shocking thing. And then we didn’t go back right away, and everybody was fooling around. Then you saw the North Tower come down. I just looked at it in — you know, you’re in shock, to some degree. I couldn’t understand where all the energy came from to do that; it seemed like to flow to the ground. But I wasn’t suspicious, I’m not going to say that. I just was in shock that that could happen.
 
Coming home that night, on the radio I heard about a third building coming down. They said that it was World Trade Centre 7. It was 47 stories tall and they gave some idea of its length and width — a rather large building. It was 300-foot long — it's trapezoidal — on average 300-foot long and 144-foot wide. They said it completely collapsed. I just couldn’t understand. I’m thinking it must have been right up against the Towers, and been completely gutted. But even still, I am imagining myself in the basement of one of these very large buildings, like a parking garage. And there are these massive concrete-encased columns. How does this thing completely collapse like this? No aircraft hit it. I didn’t know where it was located, so I was perplexed about that.
 
Well, in 2004, I used to watch the History Channel on Sunday mornings. They had a show on called “History Center” that I liked. There was a show on before that called "History’s Business," from 8:30 to 9:00 AM. They would have past and present captains of industry like Jack Welsh of General Electric, the CEO of Southwest Airlines — people like that. So Larry Silverstein was on this show, “History’s Business.” Larry was the owner of World Trade Centre 7. He had taken over the Twin Tower complex in 2001 from the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey. He leased them for 99 years at a cost of $115 million a year.
 
So he was on, and this had to be in early 2004, because they showed the new Freedom Tower. It’s built now. They call it One World Trade Centre. They had a design competition, and the design that won was a 1,776-foot-tall building with the [unintelligible] antenna at the top. They showed that design, they talked about 9/11, and at the end, the host says to Larry very matter-of-factly, “What happened to 7?” I had been perplexed about it. Larry very matter-of-factly said, “Building 7 was a controlled demolition” — using those words. I wasn’t suspicious. It was like a head-slap moment for me. I said, "Oh, that makes sense." . . . He even talked about [the building being] “so damaged” [that] “for safety reasons” they took it down.WTC7
 
JC:  Larry Silverstein himself, you say, used the words “controlled demolition”?
 
TS:  I would swear in a courtroom that’s what he said, yes.
 
JC:  Is this the quote where he says that “. . . the decision was made to pull it”?
 
TS:  No, that was on Frontline in September 2002. This had to be 2004 when I saw this, because they showed that new building design. That had to be after December 2003. Well, he said that and I said, “Oh, that made sense.” I wasn’t asking, "When would there have been a chance to set the charges?" or anything. I didn’t think about that. I thought they could do it. And in early 2006, I heard about the physics professor from Brigham Young University bringing up issues with molten metal in the rubble of the three collapsed buildings. I didn’t know about that. When I heard it, I thought, "Was it a quirky anomaly? I have to read his paper."
 
JC:  This is Steven Jones, is it?     
 
TS:  Yes, this is Steven Jones, the physics professor from BYU. He had written a paper called "Why Indeed Did the World Trade Centre Buildings Collapse?" [external PDF]. So I’m reading the paper and he’s talking about Building 7, which is what caught his attention. And only then did I ask myself, “Wait a minute, when did they get a chance to set the charges in Building 7?” I saw Silverstein say it was a controlled demolition. I hadn’t heard anything else. I didn’t even know there was a 9/11 Truth Movement. I said, "There’s a problem with this." It started dawning on me, and then I started looking into it. Looking at the Towers, you can see explosive jets coming out of the Towers — certainly at the corners and out on the sides at times. So it all started to look like this was a set-up and that very possibly those aircraft impacts were nothing but causal ruses to blame outsiders, so . . .


JC:  It did not cross your mind that perhaps Al Qaeda could have got in very, very quickly and planted those explosives?
 
TS:  Well, yeah, I guess it did, but the fact of the matter is the authorities in the United States haven’t interrogated anybody that had access to the interiors of buildings. I found that out later. I started looking into it, and I said, “Somebody could have done that. Who did it?” I didn’t say immediately it was somebody in the United States. But I knew that [the destruction] wasn’t because of the aircraft impact — certainly Building 7 wasn’t, and Building 7 was a controlled demolition. I watched Silverstein say that. And by the way, when I started to realise that there was something wrong, I contacted the History Channel. Every show for years they would say, "If you want this show on DVD or CD or VHS, just call this number or go to this website." Well, I called them about that show and I asked them about it, and they told me that series was not available to the public.
 
JC:  [Chuckles]
 
TS:  You know this show certainly existed and I saw it, and I’m not making this up. I have no reason to make it up. I’m a 58-year old engineer. It doesn’t behove me to do that. So I looked into it, and it turns out that this is not what we’ve been told, unfortunately.
 
JC:  Well, of course we’re going to be getting into some of the detail about the 25 points of this white paper that you published — well, some of the significant points anyway, in a few minutes from now. But I think it would be good first to get an idea of this group of engineers that you’re part of, and the complaint and legal avenues that you and your colleagues are beginning to pursue, before we start getting into any technical details of the findings themselves. So could you tell us a little bit more about this group of engineers?
 
TS:  Yes, the group of engineers — there are some in the UK and some here in the States. Originally, they came to me, as they knew I was a researcher in this, and I was familiar with one fellow here, David Cole. It turns out there are several fellows over there, some of them use acronyms to protect themselves, but they were part of the group, and they would have meetings on, like, Pal Talk. They did quite a bit. They looked at a lot of different things. They did some videos that showed things weren’t right. One of them, a guy from here in Vermont, happened to notice — I should say that the drawings [of Building 7] were released in late 2011, and [the engineers] undertook a review. We’ve never gotten the drawings from the Towers. All we have is what’s in the NIST reports.


JC:  Right.
 
TS:  And I guess some architectural drawings, but you need the structural drawings and details.
 
JC:  So these are Building 7 drawings? But I understand not all of them have been released. Is that right?
 
TS:  Well, probably around 80% have been released. They withheld some, yes, they did — some shop fabrication or detailed drawings. Well, anyway, when they looked at it, they noticed this one assembly that NIST — I should say that NIST claims that what happened with Building 7 was that a girder was pushed off its seat . . .
 
JC:  Yeah, can I just stop you there, because I don’t want to get into all the details of this now. I just want to ask you so that people know what this group of engineers is. Is this group made of people who are members of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth?
 
TS:  Some of them are, yeah.
 
JC:  OK. Now, I understand that in December last year the well-known lawyer, Dr William Pepper, wrote a letter on behalf of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth [external PDF] to the Inspector General at the US Department of Commerce, putting various complaints about NIST’s work, especially to do with Building 7, based on the research of this group that you’ve just been talking about. Now I know that William Pepper is very well-known over in the States, but in the UK probably not so much. So could you tell us just a little bit about who William Pepper is. I mean, in what capacity is he acting on behalf of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth in this?
 
TS:  Right. Well, William Pepper is best known for representing the Martin Luther King family in a civil suit in Memphis, Tennessee, in the ’90s, where they won a judgement against a defendant — somebody they filed suit against — that was alleging that it was part of a conspiracy. And they won the suit. I think it was only $100 that changed hands, but it was the point of the matter. He wrote a book called An Act of State showing that the Martin Luther King’s assassination was in fact a conspiracy, and there was some governmental involvement in it. So that is what he’s most well-known for. He’s basically a human rights attorney, and I think he has a connection to the UK also.
an act of state 
JC:  Yeah, and he’s representing Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth in some way, is that right?
 
TS:  Yeah, he did, he wrote this letter, and he’s involved with Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, yes.
 
JC:  Okay, now in the letter he makes it clear that he believes that the Inspector General, a Mr. Todd Zinser, is obliged to open an investigation into what NIST has done with respect to Building 7. Let me just quote from the letter:
 

“Mr. Zinser, quite frankly the credibility of NIST and the Department of Commerce requires that you open an investigation into the potential negligence and/or misconduct by the lead investigators of NIST’s Building 7 Investigation, and that NIST be directed to produce a corrected analysis and report on the collapse of Building 7.”

 
So what has been the result of Dr Pepper’s letter? Has the Inspector General agreed to do anything about this?
 
TS:  Well, actually, he remanded it to NIST, whose reports we are challenging — and that were being challenged in the letter. He remanded it to them, and allowed them to answer. Basically, they said they’d looked into the assertions in the letter, they don't feel the need to change their report, and they stand behind their work. They didn’t support their position at all on any of the specific challenges that were in that letter. And there was a technical analysis included with that letter. They did not feel the need to discuss any of it. That’s how they answered in April. However, recently there’s [been] ongoing discussion between Dr Pepper and the Inspector General, and there are some other things happening relative to the licences of some of these engineers that put those reports out.
 
JC:  So, does it look like some kind of legal action is going to take place, do you think?
 
TS:  I think it can. NIST has a formal process called Request for Correction. Basically, the Pepper letter was that, but some people are saying we have to follow their formal process, and if they don’t then there are grounds to go to court for a remedy. Essentially, the way they answered William Pepper’s letter was to say that we’re not doing anything — just a stonewall. [For] any engineer [who] looks at this, what we’re talking about here is that they left out pertinent structural features that would have made a difference had they been included. It’s obvious why they left them out. They left stiffeners off that girder that were part of it, and they had no reason to leave them off other than they claim that the girder got pushed off its seat and that the flange folded up. The stiffeners that were on [the girder] would have stopped that from happening. So in the report the girder shows up without stiffeners on it. Like I was saying, one of the fellows in this group found the stiffeners on the drawings once they were released, and that started the ball rolling.
 
JC:  Yeah, okay. Well, let’s turn to some of these technical complaints then against NIST. There are loads of things we could talk about with these 25 points, but I want to start, if we may, with the points that Dr Pepper stresses in that letter to the Inspector General, and they concentrate particularly on Building 7. So, let me just do a quick recap, if I may, on what NIST basically says about Building 7. I’m taking this from Kevin Ryan’s words when he gave his presentation at the Toronto Hearings in 2011 [part one - part two]. I’ll just say what he says and you can add to it or correct if I misquote him. This is what Kevin Ryan said:
 

“Thermal expansion of the floor systems surrounding column 79 led to the collapse of Floor 13, which triggered a cascade of floor failures. In this case the floor beams on the northeast corner of the building expanded enough that they pushed the girder spanning between columns 79 to 44 to the west on the 13th floor. This movement was enough for the girder to walk off its support at column 79.”

 

Okay, so does that sum it up, would you say?
 
TS:  That’s the NIST claim that Kevin was giving there, right?
 
JC:  Okay. So the point that Dr Pepper stresses in this letter corresponds to points 1 and 2 in the white paper. I want to ask about point 6 as well. So we’ll start with point 1. Here you say in point 1 that NIST has omitted from its considerations what you’re just talking about—girder stiffenerswhich you know from the technical drawings of Building 7 would have been present in that construction, and they would have prevented NIST’s scenario from playing out. So could you explain to us how that works? Why would they have prevented that explanation from being true?
 
TS:  Right. If you look at the stiffeners, they come out . . . The girder is an I-beam-shaped, and these stiffeners come out from the web across to the edge of the flange.
  StiffenersPhoto sm
JC:  Okay, can I just stop you? What’s the ‘web’ and what’s the ‘flange’?
 
TS:  The web of a girder I-beam is the deep, vertical part. The flanges are the horizontal plates top and bottom, but the web is the centre vertical portion. And these stiffeners are basically horizontal and vertical pieces that come out at the end of the girder from the web out to the edge, out to the flange at the bottom. They are additional plates that are welded to the web and the flange.
 
JC:  Okay, so am I right in thinking that they are actually stiffening the connection between these things. Is that right?
 
TS:  Right. They would stiffen the connection; they would stiffen the flange. They’re meant to help keep the web from what they call ‘crippling’ or ‘buckling’ — local buckling — but they would also stiffen the flange. So, what NIST says happened is that the girder actually is sitting on its seat and when it was pushed by beams on one side of it, the web, which handles most of the load, would be pushed past the edge of the seat, and the flange, which is less than an inch thick, can’t handle the load that’s on that girder—that it would fold up, or bend upward and fail, and the girder would fall.
 
If the stiffeners are there, and they’re coming from the web out to the edge of the flange, the flange can take a lot more bending. Instead of just being 1” thick, it has an 18-inch-high, 3/4-inch-thick stiffener stiffening it. It wouldn’t fail in bending. [NIST] left them off, and it’s quite obvious why they left them off, because [they knew] that flange wouldn’t fail [with the stiffener on it]. So now . . . the beams that are pushing the girder can only expand so much — at 600 degrees centigrade they can only expand 5.5 inches. Well, the seat was 12 inches wide. Originally they claimed it was only 11 inches, and that was another error that we corrected them on. The drawings showed it was 12 inches wide. At any rate, the beams can only push the girder so far, but with those stiffeners on there, you’d have to push it about 10 inches. They can’t get that much push, so [that’s why] in the [NIST] report you don’t see where they show that girder; you don’t see the stiffeners. But they’re on the drawings. The drawings came out several years after the report, and [NIST hasn’t] responded to this. They’re saying, "Our analysis showed that the stiffeners weren’t needed." Really! Why would you even do an analysis to show that?
 
JC:  So when you actually go to the NIST report on Building 7, you actually see a drawing of this without the stiffeners in place?Stiffeners sm
 
TS:  That’s exactly right. There’s an 11-page technical analysis that went along with the Pepper letter. It shows what the drawing actually showed and shows what the NIST report figure showed, and you’ll see it without the stiffeners in the report.
 
JC:  And you say that if the stiffeners were in place, as you say they were in fact in place, that there’s no way enough energy could have been produced to actually get past that stiffener and cause the accident to take place?
 
TS:  No, no! In fact, anybody who has done an analysis — which I have and others have — [knows that] you can’t get enough stress. The deeper something is, the stiffener crook allows it to take a lot more load without over-stressing it. It can take somewhere around five times the load that was on it with the stiffeners on there. Without the stiffeners, it would have bent up and folded, sure. But you’re talking about a 7/8-inch-thick flange that, unstiffened, that could bend up, versus a 7/8ths-inch-thick flange with an 18-inch-high, 3/4-inch-thick stiffener across it that can take a lot more bending.
 
It’s sort of like if you took a diving board, per se, you can see how, when it’s horizontal, it’s springy. But if you turn the diving board 90 degrees and now try to make it flex, it’s a lot harder, because the resistance to bending is a function of the depth cubed. We call it ‘moment of inertia’. You can see when I put that 18-inch-high stiffener on there, it’s going to stiffen that 7/8-inch-thick flange quite a bit, and it does. And [NIST] left them off, because they couldn’t get the flange to fail, and then when they’re called out on it, they don’t want to answer. So that’s what’s going on. They’re sort of caught.
 
JC:  Am I right in thinking that they haven’t released the drawing, which most obviously shows that part of the building, but that you’ve got evidence of it from other drawings?Errata sm
 
TS:  That’s right. They didn’t release what’s called the shop drawing for that girder, which is the fabrication drawing, or the detailed drawing. However, those stiffeners are shown and detailed on the assembly of that girder and the seat for it at column 79. And they’re detailed — the stiffeners are detailed, and so is the seat. They also claim the seat . . . Even though they can only get 5.5 inches of push from these beams to the east of that girder, interestingly, in their report, they said the seat was only 11 inches wide. But then it turns out, when the drawings came out, the seat is 12 inches wide. So they did address that. They said, alright, it was a mistake on their part, the seat is actually 12 inches wide. And they said they need 6.25 inches of lateral push, even though they don’t say how they’ll get that.
 
JC:  So, before, they needed 5.5 inches, is that right, of lateral push?
 
TS:  Right, right . . .


JC:  Okay, so now they need an extra bit, and they’re not actually explaining how they get it at all.
 
TS:  That’s right. That’s right.
 
JC:  Would it be possible to get that if you heated the beams sufficiently — that they would expand that much?
 
TS:  No, what’s interesting is just above 600 degrees what happens is, with the load on it, the beams start to sag, and you get a sort of competition between how much it expands and how much it shortens through the sagging . . .
 
JC:  Ah ha!
 
TS:  . . . and when you do that — and a number of us have done those calculations — you get more sagging and shortening than you do expansion. So there’s a limit — it's somewhere around 640 [or] 639 degrees centigrade — where it actually shortens more for every degree increase in heat. It shortens more than it expands.
                                                                                                                                               
JC:  Okay. But do you know actually where that point of diminished returns actually occurs? I mean, how long does it get before you start losing it?
 
TS:  I think it’s somewhere around about 5.6 inches [or] 5.7 inches, and that’s it, . . .
 
JC:  Wow
 
TS:  So . . .

 
JC:  And yet they’ve said that it did in fact reach 6.25 inches and they’ve not justified that at all.
 
TS:  No, they haven’t, and that’s without the stiffeners they need 6.25 inches. When you put the stiffeners on there, they need, like, 10 inches.

 
JC:  [Both chuckle] Right, Okay.
 
TS:  The 6.25 is just because of the seat actually being 12 inches wide where [previously] they said it was 11 inches — it seems like to match their 5.5 inches max or so. And then, when they were called on the 12-inch-wide seat, they said 6.25 inches without justifying where they would get that from. And like I said, there’s diminishing returns, you can’t even get near 6 inches.
 
JC:  Yeah, yeah, but they’ve admitted this one error, but they’ve replaced it with another error, in a sense.
 
TS:  That’s right. They’ve admitted to the seat width [error], and they’ve admitted to leaving the stiffeners off now. And there’s another one: the beam closest to the north face in that corner, there are lateral support beams that are missing in their analysis, too.LateralSupportBeams sm
 
JC:  This is point number 2, isn’t it, in the 25 points here.
 
TS:  Right, right.
 
JC:  So, this is the three support beams on the 13th floor beam. Is that correct?
 
TS:  That’s right.
 
JC:  Okay, so they’ve got three missing beams. What difference does that make?
 
TS:  Well, they’re saying that that beam buckled when it was expanded against the girder, because the girder couldn’t move because it was locked into between the flanges of the exterior column. But they took the beams off. And what happens is those three beams coming from the exterior into this 52-foot-long beam. Well, when the three support beams are there, it’s much harder to buckle that beam. In buckling, it’s a function of the length squared. The slenderness is a function of the length squared.

 
JC:  Could you explain what ‘slenderness’ means in this context?
 
TS:  Right. If everybody can imagine, if you have a long skinny pole, it’s easy to push on and have it bend horizontally, that’s slenderness. The thinner it is and the less supported it is and the longer it is, it’s easier to make it bend and buckle. If we can imagine something going up the side of a house that’s unsupported — say, 25-foot-tall, maybe a 1-inch-diameter or a 2-inch-diameter rod — you can see it would be somewhat slender. Now if I bring supports off the side of the house at prescribed equal distances, three of them, you could see that it would be a lot harder to buckle that.
  LateralSupportBeams1 sm
JC:  Yes, okay, and you describe that as a reduction in slenderness?
 
TS:  That’s exactly right. And it’s a function of length squared. So if I have it broken up into quarters, it’s actually 16 times less slender than it is without those support beams.
 
JC:  Wow.
 
TS:  It wouldn’t buckle, it would just have deflected the girder. The analysis shows that, and they left them off, too.
 
JC:  So the drawings actually show those three beams there, but when you actually turn to the NIST report on Building 7, they’re not there.
 
TS:  In their analysis it’s not there — in the figures they show in their analysis it’s not there. And they’ve admitted to this in a letter to a senator that was given to a constituent. They’ve admitted to both the stiffeners on that girder being omitted and these three lateral support beams. They’ve admitted to that, and they’re saying, "Well, they’re not needed, though.” That’s what they say.
 
JC:  Alright, so we have a catalogue here of "errors" or "mistakes". We’ll see what we make of that in a minute. There’s also point 6 that I wanted to ask you about in the white paper that your colleague suggested was very important, and this concerns something that Kevin Ryan mentioned on this programme — actually in our last interview with him. I think it might be good to go over it again very briefly. This has to do with the use of composite beams and shear studs in Building 7, and how NIST seemed to change its mind as to whether those were there or not. Could you explain what these composite beams and shear studs are?ShearStudsPhoto
 
TS:  Yeah. Basically, everybody can imagine you have girders and beams that your flooring goes on — the concrete deck. What they do is make the concrete deck composite with the girder or beam by using studs that are welded on to the top of the girder or beam, and it makes it like a T-beam, with the concrete acting with the beam because of the shear studs that are trapped in the concrete but they’re welded to the beam. So it works together, and that gives you greater stiffness.
 
NIST said in their draft report of 2004 or 2005 on Building 7 that there were no shear studs on the girders in the core, okay? And then later on they said, when they came up with this other explanation in their final report, they said there were no shear studs on any girders. Well, this girder that they say walked off its seat and fell down eight floors — if it had had shear studs you couldn’t have pushed it off its seat, because these shear studs go from the top of the girder into the concrete floor. The floor is 5 inches thick. The beams pushing on it would have buckled before you could push that girder anywhere, having studs going into the floor.
 
So when they put out their final report, they said there were no shear studs on that girder, even though earlier they only restricted that statement to girders in the core. Well, this girder is not in the core. It goes from the core to the exterior. So they changed what they were saying there. It’s funny, because on other drawings of that same girder, on different floors in the building, it shows shear studs.
 
Additionally, there’s a fellow who was the project manager for Frankel Steel — they were the supplier of the steel, the erector of the building — who in the '80s wrote a paper about Building 7. It’s quite a large building, like I was saying. In fact, it’s three-quarters the volume of the Empire State Building — so people get a feel for how big this building was, volume-wise. In his paper he shows 33 shear studs on that girder. Now he’s talking about all the floors. NIST was asked about that, and they said there’s no reference to any single floor in his papers. The fellow’s name was John Salvarinas. So there’s a lot of controversy over that. But even if they didn’t have shear studs — I’ll give them that — if those stiffeners are on that girder, they can’t push it off. Now the alternative was that beam buckling in the north. If the lateral support beams are on that, that [beam] can’t buckle. So they don’t have a way to get that girder off of that seat. For eight floors to collapse, to initiate the collapse like they say, it doesn’t work if these omitted features are included in their analysis.
Salvarinas
JC:  Is it right that there would be some drawing showing the shear studs, but they’ve just not released that yet?
 
TS:  That’s possible, but in my mind the shear studs are less of an issue because there are other things that make them moot — and that’s the stiffeners and the lateral support beams.
 
JC:  Yeah.
 
TS:  It just shows you that they did have a change there, but the fact that the seat is 12 inches wide, they left the stiffeners off, and they left those lateral support beams off — you can give them the shear studs. It becomes a moot point; it’s overcome by other things we learned that they left off that are greater, and they can't get there when those things are included. So, fine, they can say that the shear studs were left off, but it’s not going to get them there.
 
JC:  But whatever, we have yet another, and I’m going to put this in inverted commas, “mistake” that seems to all be in one direction pointing towards the conclusion that they want to present.
 
TS:  That’s right, that’s right, there’s lots of “mistakes” that go in the direction that they want to present. Yeah, they’re all in that direction.
 
JC:  They’re certainly very, very, very suspicious indeed. So, another couple of points here to do with this white paper — points 3 and 4. Point 3 has to do with the free fall and the possibility of the use of explosives. In point 3, you say that NIST acknowledges that Building 7 did fall at true free-fall speed for 2¼ seconds — a distance of about 100 feet — but that even though NIST acknowledges this (although I understand they didn’t acknowledge it for quite a long time until, I think, it was David Chandler challenged them a few years ago), they don’t address the implications of this fact. So could you spell out what those implications are?
 
TS:  Sure. Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator for NIST, said it himself in a press conference. He said that the structure in free fall is a structure that has no resistance below it. So, to be in free fall at free-fall acceleration, the upper section of the building that’s falling can’t be doing any work. It can’t be buckling or crushing or deforming anything below it. Because to get the free fall, all the potential energy needs to be converted through kinetic energy. The moment it starts doing any other work — doing any of those other things, deforming or buckling or crushing — it has to slow down.
 
So the fact that this upper section of the building, the roof line, falls at true free-fall acceleration for over a hundred feet symmetrically — the entire upper section of the building — [means that] it’s not doing any work. So there’s no resistance, there’s no structure beneath it for those eight stories. And [for NIST] to admit that it’s in free fall but not address the implications is disingenuous in the least, and that’s what they’ve done. They had to admit to it because you can measure it, and Chandler said that. He said that to them —it’s a publicly verifiable item. How do you not admit to that? So, they did admit it, but they didn’t address it.
 
JC:  And you say that because of this they should really have looked into the question of explosives, because that’s the most obvious cause of such a phenomenon. But they didn’t.ShyamSunder

 
TS:  No, they didn’t. In fact, they say that none of the steel was saved from Building 7. If they’re claiming that this is the first steel-framed, high-rise building in history that collapsed due to fire — that’s what their claim is — yet none of the steel was saved? That’s incredible. I don’t know another word that can describe that. I mean it’s just extraordinary. The whole thing begs of disingenuousness and is highly suspicious. And then when we find out later, three years after the report, when the drawings are released, that they left off pertinent structural features, I think it ices the cake that there’s a serious problem and there needs to be an investigation of what was going on when NIST did these reports.
 
JC:  Now, I understand that they should have looked for explosives, according to a particular protocol. This is the National Fire Protection Standard NFPA-921. This is a guide for fire and explosion investigations. Does that actually say that that’s what you’re supposed to do?
 
TS:  Yeah, well, it says that you’re supposed to do that in the case of high-order damage, which there was, and complete collapse, that type of thing, and you’re supposed to. . . . They also say if you don’t save the steel or test for accelerants or explosives, you need to be prepared to explain why you haven’t. They haven’t explained that.
 
JC:  This is very interesting, because, actually, I did listen to an interview conducted by Allan Rees of No Lies Radio with Dr S Shyam Sunder. I think this was hot on the heels of the actual release in 2008 of the Building 7 report itself. He asked Dr Sunder, “Why did you not test for explosives,” and Dr Sunder said something like, “Well, we thought that that wasn’t a very feasible hypothesis, and that’s why we didn’t look for it.” I mean, I thought that that was quite incredible. How do you react to that information?
 
TS:  Yeah, well, what would give him a reason to believe that it wasn’t a probable hypothesis? When something’s coming down with no structural resistance under it, you have to think that some kind of device removed the structural integrity. What could that be? Mostly, those types of things are explosives, and there were witnesses who heard explosions. So he’s being disingenuous there.
 
JC:  I might actually insert that little bit of audio there, because it’s quite a remarkable thing that he says there. As you know, [he said, in effect,] “We looked at these things and we decided that that wasn’t an avenue that we were going to look at because it didn’t seem to fit with what we thought was credible.”
 
TS:  Well, it may have been an avenue he was told not to look at, so I’m not going to put it all on Dr Sunder, other than the fact that there are people above him that may have told him not to look there. I don’t know. All I know is that they should have looked there. Everything points to the fact that any legitimate investigation would have in fact looked there, especially with the symmetric free fall of a building. That can only happen one way.
 
JC:  Yeah.
 
TS:  And he even admitted that. He said there’s no structural resistance under a structure in free fall. So, he’s sort of contradicting himself.
 
JC:  Yeah. It sounds like he’s in a very difficult position himself, actually.
 
TS:  He may well be, that’s right.
 



Inserted audio exchange between Allan Rees of No Lies Radio and Dr Shyam Sunder


No Lies Radio:  “Last year physicist Stephen Jones and two other physicists and a geologist analysed the slag at the end of the beams, and they found iron, aluminium, sulphur, manganese and chlorine, the chemical evidence for thermate, a high-tech incendiary cutting charge used by the military. The bi-product of thermite is molten iron. Now, in your investigation did you interview these physicists or examine their evidence and findings?”
 
Dr Sunder:  “No, we did not.”


NLR:  “Why not?”
 
Dr S:  “For a very simple reason. We looked at all of the alternative hypotheses that were being presented. So we considered all of the possible hypotheses, and then we made a technical judgement in terms of what would actually be a credible hypothesis. And among the credible hypotheses we identified were the diesel fuel that was stored to power up the emergency generators in the building; the transfer elements — transfer trusses, girders and overhangs that were in the building because the office building was built on top of an electric substation; and third, we wanted to look at hypothetical blast events, because there was some suggestion, though we had not seen any evidence of it, that the manner in which Tower 7 — Building 7 — seemed to collapse was similar in some features to a controlled demolition. Beyond that, we looked at clearly the information about alternative theories beyond these three or four that I’ve just mentioned, and did not feel that any of them were credible enough in our technical judgement.”
 
NLR:  “Okay. Now, National Fire Protection Association — NFPA 921 — Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations dictates in a fire investigation that certain residues be tested for. Shouldn’t you have tested those residues that Steven Jones has found, according to your own dictates?”
 
Dr S:  “No. As I said before, the process we followed was very systematic. We looked at possible hypotheses, we decided technically what would muster to be a credible hypothesis, and then we proceeded to investigate those credible hypotheses more in detail. The hypotheses that we deemed not to be credible, we decided were hypotheses that needed way more information to be even feasible. They’re not even feasible. Just because thermite or thermate exists in some dust particles does not necessarily translate into thermate being the cause of the building’s failure. There’s no theory around it; there are just observations — isolated observations.”

 



JC:  There was this business about Dr John Gross. In the 25 points paper you have a picture of him there actually standing next to, and even holding, I think, a piece of steel that’s clearly been subject to very, very high temperatures. And yet, when he was asked in some sort of public situation, was there any molten steel, he denied it, didn’t he, saying: “No, no, there’s no testimony to that,” or something along those lines. Did you want to explain what happened with that?

TS:  Yes, well, he’s standing right next to a beam that obviously experienced some level of melting — temperatures that could cause melting. That’s the only way those holes could get in that web of that beam. And then he’s saying that he knows of nobody who has seen it, or talked about molten metal. Well, he had a photo taken with something that had to have had experienced melting. He’s being disingenuous. Again, the whole thing is disingenuous.
  DSCN0398 Iwankiw sm
JC:  That’s an incredible one. I can see why you included that in the report.
 
TS:  Yeah.
 
JC:  It’s very striking.
 
TS:  We didn’t know for a long time that he was there; it wasn’t until the reports came out that he was in the yards early on, and he admits on video that he was in the yards. Well, yeah, he’s holding onto a beam that had to have experienced melting. There’s no other way to get those holes that I know of.

 


Inserted audio exchange between Anonymous Questioner and Dr John Gross


Questioner:  “I’m curious about the pool of molten steel that was found in the bottom of the Towers.”

 

Dr John Gross:  “I am, too.” (Chuckles) “Please tell me about it. Have you seen it?”
 
Q:  “Well, not personally, but eyewitnesses there found huge pools of molten steel beneath the Towers, and some scientists don’t think that the collapse of the building could have melted all that steel. And a physics professor analysed some of the steelSteven Jonesand he found evidence of thermate residue, which would explain how the buildings collapsed by means of pre-planted explosives. So, have you analysed the steel for those residues?”
 
Dr JG:  “First of all, let’s go back to your basic premise that there was a pool of molten steel. I know of absolutely nobodyno eye witnesses who have said so, nobody who has produced it. I was on the site, I was on the steel yards, so I can't... I don’t know that that’s so.”
 
Q:  “There’s a video out there.”
 
Dr JG:  “Steel melts at around 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. I think it’s probably pretty difficult to get that kind of temperatures in a fire, so I don’t know the basis. I can’t address your question if I don’t know the basis.”
 
Q:  “Well, NASA picturesthermal imagesshow those sorts of temperatures in the basement.”
 
Dr JG:  Would you send them to me?”
 
Q:  “Okay.”
 



 
JC:  Another very serious observation that’s connected to what you’re just saying about the way this building just came down in this very symmetrical kind of way is this observation that when we look at the video footage, we don’t see any — well, not much, anyway — distortion as it’s coming down. And yet the computer modelling by NIST actually produces these images which show really quite considerable distortion. So doesn’t that in itself kind of disprove what NIST is saying here?
 
TS:  Of course. They didn’t replicate the failure, is what it says. They try to say that one column — because of the girder falling off its seat and the floors collapsing — that that one column was left unsupported laterally. The column could take so many floors being unsupported, but it couldn’t go continuous, so it would have had [to be] unsupported for eight or nine stories. They say it buckled, caused the east side interior to collapse, then it had a progression from east to west, and then the exterior collapsed under its own weight because it was no longer supported laterally. Buckling sm
 
The problem with that is the east side of the exterior doesn’t deform in the real building, when they’re saying the whole east side of the interior came down. In their model it does, as it should, okay, because columns can only go so far without lateral support. They can’t go 47 stories; they would fall under their own weight. If you support them laterally, you are keeping them from bending, bowing out and buckling. You don’t need a lot of support. It’s only about 6/10ths of a percent on each floor. But the point is, once they get slender like that, if the whole interior came down on the east side, the east side exterior would in fact deform inward. You see that in their model, where they’re saying this happened, and they show the east side interior coming down.
 
In the real world, in the real video, that doesn’t happen. The exterior is not deforming inward like it is in their model. So their model didn’t replicate the real failure. I can tell you what I think happened. It's not hard to say, if you took out the 24 columns, they would pull the exterior inwards causing them to buckle. If you took out eight stories of the core, the 24 core columns, they would pull the exterior inward and it would all come down at once, and you would replicate what you see in the video. They didn’t do that.
 
JC:  Presumably because that would have presented them with a kind of demolition situation again?
 
TS:  That’s right, exactly right, you’ve got it. I think you had to take out eight stories of the central core, which is the 24 interior core columns. I think that’s what happened.
 
JC:  And you had to do that, would you say, simultaneously rather than some sort of progressive collapse?

 
TS:  Well, it’s almost simultaneous. The way they do this, in order to keep a building like that in its own footprint, which Building 7 certainly did to a large degree — and that’s all they are ever shooting for in a controlled demolition — you take out the very centre of the core a split-second. It progresses from the centre out, and that keeps everything pulled in. This happens in less than a second — eight stories of that core would have been taken out in less than a second. You could have had a quarter-second or a half-second between the very centre core columns and the outer core columns.
 
JC:  Okay, well, there are other technical problems I would also like to ask you about, to do with the Twin Towers, because your white paper covers — well, there are 11 points actually to do with that as well. So I just want to ask you about a couple of them. Point 20 asks — I’m going to go to point 18 first, actually. This echoes something that, again, Kevin Ryan mentioned in our interview with him. Now you say that NIST introduced this artificial force — Kevin Ryan calls it an imaginary force. This is 5,000 lbs. of imaginary force to each perimeter column, because their computer models weren’t giving them the results they were looking for. Now, is it as bold as that? They were just adding something to make it work?
 
TS: Yeah, they actually did that. And they said they had pictures of the columns being inwardly bowed on the south face of the North Tower 22 minutes before collapse. There’s no video that I know of that shows that. So when they did their model, their finite element model, and they sagged the trusses on the interior, they did not pull the exterior columns inward. So they said because they had this picture showing it, that they’re claiming it occurred 22 minutes before, they said, “Well, we’re going to put this load on there that we think happened somehow” (but they don’t have any evidence of it) “to cause that inward bowing.” And that’s what they did.
 
JC:  So they just needed it, so they plucked it out of the air?
 
TS:  That’s right, that’s exactly right. It’s a circular argument, and the fact that they are claiming that photo was taken 22 minutes before is also suspicious, because the Twin Towers would have been taken down the same way as Building 7. You pull the core, and that pulls the exterior inwards. So, those exterior columns were certainly pulled inwards, but it was when the collapse occurred. They’re trying to say it was 22 minutes before, and that’s what caused the collapse. But there are problems with that, too, because just having that one wall fail is not going to cause enough of a load on the orthogonal walls on the east and west of the Tower and the core. There’s only 20 percent of the capacity of those exterior columns beings used. So if you lost the south exterior wall, there’s not enough load there to cause the east and west walls to collapse — or the core.

 

NIST only goes up to the point where they say the Towers were poised to collapse. But they don’t prove it. They just make a claim that this whole section was failing, as though that would cause additional failure. Well, 60 percent of the columns on the north face were broken when the aircraft impacted the building. The wall didn’t fail; it redistributed the load of those missing columns through the spandrel beams on every floor to the remaining columns on that face.

 

In addition to that, the chief engineer, John Skilling, of Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson — the firm that designed the Twin Towers — was asked about it in 1993, when the bombing occurred in the basement. (Of course, that was a 1,200-lb truck bomb and that didn’t take down the building; it made a big hole in the basement — a 36-foot diameter hole through several floors — but didn’t take the building down). And he said then that you could lose a full face and the corners and 50 percent of the columns on the two sides, and the building would still be able to take a 100 mph wind.
  
Okay, he also said that there was a white paper done about aircraft impact and that it could take a 600 mph 707, which was the largest plane at the time in the ’60s. It could take an impact from that and there’d be a horrendous fire from the fuel, but the structure would still be there. They did that analysis in the ’60s. The buildings could probably take multiple impacts. So the NIST analysis is not legitimate. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go to the point where it shows you why the rest of the building would fail, or why the collapse would propagate horizontally, which is the next point you wanted to discuss.
 
JS:  Well, absolutely, yes, indeed. This is rather a difficult one to ask, but the bit that I really connected with was when you said how these buildings came down in a sort of ‘disintegration’ phenomenon. We see the upper section of each building disintegrating as it comes down, and the implication of this seems to be that the mass was not available then to serve as a pile driver — which is what people seem to talk about — so much that it crushed the lower part of the building. Can you explain how that works then?
 
TS:  Yeah, if you watch the video closely, what happens is the North Tower — which is easier to analyse because it doesn’t tilt like the South Tower did (the South Tower section tilted 23 degrees; the North Tower doesn’t) — actually, the [explosion in the North Tower] initiates at the 98th floor, and that initiation occurs in actually less than a second across the entire 98th floor. It comes down very evenly for the first two or three stories. How you get that even an initiation can only happen one way. I think there was a fire fighter in the New York Fire Department―the man was killed―who, when asked, said that it was just too even. He thought that there were explosives there just from that perspective, and I certainly do, too, for that reason.
 
JS:  So what you’re saying is that it should really, according to their version of things, it should have failed at one corner, or something like that?
 
TS:  Yeah, it should have failed south to north in a progressive way. It didn’t. It failed very rapidly across one full floor, the 98th floor, and then you’re talking about this disintegration. What really happens is that the next floor down, the 97th, doesn’t fail — the floor above fails. Then the floor above that and above that. At least two, if not three, floors above it failed. So, you have the 98th fail and then the 99th, 100th and the 101st seemed to disintegrate, losing all structural integrity before anything happens below.
 
What that appears to be — and this is speculation on my part, but I think it’s informed speculation — if there were charges in that building and there was an aircraft impact, the aircraft impacted between the 95th and 96th floors at a 10-degree downward angle. Interestingly, the 98th floor was above the aircraft impact, just above it. So the collapse didn’t even occur where the aircraft impact damage was. There was essentially no aircraft impact damage on the 98th floor. It got hit by about five foot of wing tip, because the plane was rolled 30 degrees, and that’s it. NIST didn’t even see fit to show any damage on the 98th floor in their models — in their figures in their report — because there was none, essentially. But that’s where it initiates. So that makes you wonder, “Why didn’t it initiate at the 98th floor?” The same thing happens with the South Tower, where it initiates at the 82nd floor, and the aircraft hit somewhere around the 79th and 80th.
 
JC:  And you can see this on the video, can you?
 

{youtube}xGAofwkAOlo{/youtube}


TS:  Yes, you can see it where the 98th floor is, but NIST admits that it initiated in the North Tower on the 98th floor. And again, we’ve looked at the North Tower much more because it doesn’t have that extreme tilt. So, it initiates on the 98th floor, which is above the aircraft impact damage. The horizontal propagation occurs in somewhere around 7/10ths or 8/10ths of a second. Now, people have to remember, these buildings were 207 feet, a little over 63 metres, on a side. That’s just under 300 feet corner to corner. The southwest corner and the northeast corner, which are diagonally 300 feet from each other — just under that — come down within a second of each other. So this is very rapid horizontal propagation. It’s clear that it’s not due to a progressive failure from one side of the building to the other. It’s clear that this was happening through some kind of demolition devices on that floor. I don’t know how else you get that to happen. A progressive collapse cannot happen that quickly or evenly across an entire floor of something that large, that wide. It just doesn’t work like that.
 

JC:  And the NIST report doesn’t address that; it only goes up to that point. Is that right?
 
TS:  It only goes up to the point where they say that the south wall buckled because of the inward bowing, and they stop there. And then they depend on this professor from Northwestern University — his name is Professor Zdenek Bazant. He talks about why it propagated vertically. Neither one of them talk about how the horizontal propagation occurred. They skip over that.
 
JC:  And he came up with explanations within about two days of the events?
 
TS:  Yeah, he wrote a paper [external PDF] to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ journal called the Journal of Engineering Mechanics. He says that there would have been a powerful jolt, and that that’s a dynamic load. It’s true that you can have a natural collapse, even though the structure underneath is built to handle several times the load above it. You can have it when you get an impact. The reason for that is that you have an amplified load. The static load is equal to mass times gravity. Everybody’s familiar with that. That’s what we call weight. But this amplification in an impact — most people are aware that we have an impact when we drop something on the floor and it breaks, whereas if we just set it on the floor or the table it wouldn’t break. So there’s a greater load. And the way that’s caused is, in addition to the mass times gravity static load, in an impact you have the mass times the deceleration of the impacting object, and that causes an amplified load on the object it’s impacting.
 
For instance, when you hit a nail with a hammer, if you just held a nail against a piece of wood with your thumb and index finger, and you just laid the hammer head on top of it, you can imagine it’s not going to drive the nail into the wood, right? But now, if you swing the hammer against the head of the nail, you can realize it’s going to drive it. Well, what’s driving it is you’re getting this amplification that’s greater than the static load of the hammer head. But what happens: the hammer head decelerates, and that’s that amplified portion that I’ve just mentioned — the mass times the deceleration. It’s actually accelerating the impacted object. In that case, it would be accelerating the nail into the wood. But the key thing here is that the impacting object, which would be the upper section of the building, in this case, has to decelerate.
 
Well, it turns out that when you measure it — and this didn’t happen for several years after 2001, when a number of people measured it, including Graeme MacQueen and David Chandler — there was no deceleration. So this powerful jolt that Dr Bazant theorised [in fact] didn’t exist. He didn’t know that. [But] he had to admit that it didn’t decelerate. And, interestingly, in 2010 he wrote a paper saying why the motion history was smooth — why you don’t see the deceleration. He wrote that and published it in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics again. He said it was only 3% deceleration and you wouldn’t see it.
 
Another Canadian professor — Richard Johns, from the University of British Columbia, who, by the way, is a philosopher of science but has a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering (I think it’s from the University of Nottingham in the UK) — and I wrote a discussion paper [external PDF] challenging and critiquing the paper Bazant wrote with one of his graduate students, Jia-Liang Le. It turned out that they were claiming figures for the strength of the columns that were way under what they actually were, even though they weren’t saying that. They were just giving values that were way under the actual columns. In addition, he used free fall through the first story, and that wasn’t true when you measure it. It’s about 2/3rds of free fall. Well, that makes a big difference for kinetic energy, where the energy is a function of the velocity squared. It actually fell, through the first twelve feet or so, when it would have been moving at 6.1 meters per second, I think. When you square that, that’s like a little over 36. In free fall, it would have been moving at 8.5 metres per second velocity after the first twelve feet, and that gives you somewhere around 72 or so. It’s like double. So he’s doubling the kinetic energy velocity component.
 
He uses the maximum design load mass, which wasn’t what the buildings were actually carrying. That’s like the maximum load for your car — say it failed with only you in the drivers’ seat and nothing else in the car. Then, to do the analysis, you use the absolute maximum design load, as if the car had five adults in it and the trunk was full. Well, that’s not true. That’s what he does. He increases the mass that way to get much more kinetic energy. Then he uses a column strength — what they call the plastic moment value, which is the amount of energy needed to bend the column — that’s at least half of what it actually was. We showed that in our discussion paper critiquing the Bazant paper. They refused to publish ours, but without showing that we were wrong. This went on over 27 months. So the American Society for Civil Engineering journals are withholding information from the public just like NIST did, unfortunately.
 
JC:  So Bazant is actually arguing therefore this pile-driving phenomenon?
 
TS: Yeah, that’s what he’s arguing. But there’s no deceleration.
 
JC:  Sure. So actually this makes Chris Mohr’s point in the debate with Richard Gage sort of irrelevant, then, where he was saying that as this pile driver was coming down, even though it was disintegrating, it was still a mass and so you can’t think that it was compromised by being shattered at all. And Richard Gage was saying, yeah, but would you rather have a box of apples falling on your head or a box of liberated apples falling on your head.
 
TS:  Yeah, I know. Chris Mohr was saying the mass was still there.
 
JC:  That’s right.
 
TS:  But it’s like what you call a quasi-static load at that point, Julian. It’s not capable of applying an amplified load. It would be like your hammer head being a load of marbles. Now try to drive the nail with your load of marbles.
 
JC:  Right.
 
TS:  See my point? If it’s solid, it’ll deliver. If it’s not solid, if everything is not held together, [it won’t deliver]. Now, if you took all those marbles and bonded them together with some kind of strong glue, you could use it like a hammer. But if it’s not — if it’s all loose stuff — it won’t hit with the same import.
 
JC:  Sure, sure.
 
TS:  So Chris Mohr’s not right there. Now, at some point that load of rubble can collapse it once it’s enough to fail it statically or quasi-statically, but it can’t deliver a dynamic load. And you would need about ten floors of that. Those floors — just the floors, the slabs — that was a pretty robust structure. OK, they had these double, 32-inch-deep trusses every 80 inches — every two metres, just under 80 inches. Every two metres they had double, 32-inch-deep trusses going from the core to the exterior. Then they had bridging trusses — four of them. And if you look at them and do an analysis on it, that also had a 4-inch slab on top, which was composite with those trusses. It was a very robust system. In my analysis, and with other engineers, when you heated those trusses to 700 degrees C, with the composite floor on it, they’d only sag about 2 inches. NIST wanted to claim over 40 inches of sagging, and, to do that, they buckled the diagonals in the truss, which is going to be very hard to do. But, that’s what they did.
 
JC:  So yet another case of them doing what fits what they want to achieve, rather than what the evidence would actually suggest.
 
TS:  That’s right.
 
JC:  So I want to ask you, more generally, looking at this white paper as a whole with its 25 points — and no doubt there are more things that could be said, but you have 25 there in the paper, particularly considering the very striking points that Dr Pepper addressed in that letter to the Inspector General — are you clear now that we have a situation where this is a moment of proof that NIST, or a group of people within NIST, was either grossly negligent or fraudulent in their work? Do you think we’re at the position now where we can say there’s proof of one or the other of those?
 
TS:  Yeah, I do. Unfortunately, I do believe that. I’m not willing to pass judgement in the sense that without some proper process and I can say that that report is fraudulent and was done intentionally to make the case that was asked for, somehow, because it’s not what happened.
 
JC:  You’re prepared to say that it’s fraudulent, but it couldn’t possibly be just negligence.
 
TS:  No, it wasn’t negligence. They admitted they left those parts out intentionally, and that couldn’t be due to negligence. They intentionally left out the stiffeners and the lateral support beams, and I think made the seat 11 inches wide, even though the drawing showed it was 12 inches. I think that was intentional. I’m telling the truth. I mean, I believe it was intentional, yes, I think.
 
JC:  There’s a difference there. So you think it’s intentional, but they haven’t actually admitted to it being intentional?
 
TS:  Well, they’ve admitted to intentionally leaving them out. As far as leaving them out to help them make their case, that’s a motive-type thing. They did intentionally leave them out. The seat width, they say, was a mistake. But leaving out the stiffeners and the lateral support beams was intentional. They say they did it because they weren’t needed. So they’re not admitting to fraud. They're admitting to, in the case of the seat width, they’re saying that was an error. Okay, we’ll change it. But now we need more lateral travel, even though they don’t say how they get that.
 
And then in the case of the omitted structural features, they say, well, they weren’t needed. Well, you’re not allowed to remove structural features from an analysis that would affect the results. And they certainly do, without stating so up front. They don’t state that in the report. And don’t forget these were found three years after that report was issued. And they didn’t admit to them for two years, also. They were asked about this in March of 2012. They admitted to the stiffeners in October 2013 — 19 months later. And then [they finally admitted to] the support beams in July of this year (2014). So they haven’t admitted to leaving these things out for 19 months and then essentially 27 months.

 
JC:  Can you think of any reason why they would want to intentionally leave things out of their report, other than they were being breathed on in some way politically?
 
TS:  That’s the only thing I can think of, because there’s no benign explanation. There’s no reason to leave these things out. You’re not supposed to. The propensity is to put things in. If you do a structural analysis and leave things out that would affect the results, that’s an improper report, that’s inappropriate. They certainly affected the results. So it can only be that they were left out because they wouldn’t get the results they were asked to get. That’s the only reasonable explanation for it.
 
JC:  So how important a juncture do you think this is for 9/11 Truth with this information that you presented to me today?
 
TS:  Well, I don’t use the term ‘9/11 Truth’.AE 125 X 125
 
JC:  OK.
 
TS:  I don’t even like to use that in terms of a movement. That's nothing against you.
 
JC:  Yeah.
 
TS:  I’m an engineer; these people are wrong. A lot of us have signed this AE9/11Truth petition, if you will, asking for a new investigation. This shows in black and white that it’s needed. And all we’re getting is stonewall, which is nonsense. There’s going to be a remedy at some point. This is becoming political instead of doing the right thing. That’s what’s going on. You’re not hearing about it in the press, and you should be — other than shows like yours. You’re not hearing it in the mainstream media. This is a big thing. If that building came down in another way, people should know about it, and the whole thing should be questioned — on what happened on 9/11. Because it was used to justify wars. If the wrong people were blamed and attacked, that has a lot of import. We owe a lot of big apologies around the world. There’s a lot of things that need to be corrected if that’s true, and it certainly appears that way.
 
JC:  I mean, one of the things which William Pepper made clear in the letter was that the intention is not to discredit NIST. That’s not what it’s about. He gave every opportunity there to make sure NIST can sort this out. We don’t have to go wildly public with this if indeed NIST can make the corrections that are necessary. But, as you say, their reaction has not been to go along that route. And he said in the letter that maybe it would be necessary to introduce some kind of legal action. He does mention that. And you said earlier in the interview that you think it’s possible things might go in that direction. So, do you think that the most likely thing is to go for NIST as a whole or, indeed, individuals?
 
TS:  Well, I think it’s going to be approached both ways. Certain individuals would have been responsible for certain sections that are clearly incorrect. If there is something I have wrong, say, a report or something, and it’s incorrect and I don’t know it’s incorrect, and you bring it to my attention, up to that point it’s still a mistake. If I correct it, then there’s no problem. If I refuse to correct it and state that it’s correct, even though it’s clearly incorrect based on all forms of logic that we recognise, or, say, it’s mathematical and I don’t correct it, at that point it is no longer a mistake, it’s intentional.
 
So we have approached them and asked them. We’ve called them errors or things that were omitted. We didn’t say these were intentional. And they’ve refused to correct them. They refuse to recognise that there was any error. It’s clear that there are errors. It’s clear that if those omitted features were included, their failure hypotheses would not work. It’s not even close. It’s not even close.
 
JC:  So, one way or another, the truth has to come out about this. Except the only thing I’m considering here is if indeed there is fraud that has taken place, they are going to be a lot of people in high places who do not want this to be found out about. And therefore, what chance do you think there is that any legal action you take is going to be compromised by these very same people?
 
TS:  Well, now, it becomes a corruption and a political thing, and only corrupt influence can stop it.
 
JC:  Yeah.
 
TS:  We’re not naïve. We’re aware that that can happen. But the actual things on paper about the building itself could not fail the way they’re saying. Whether that comes out in public and the court is another story, because then it’s a political issue that they’ve made it into by not admitting to the reality — the structural reality. So, yeah, I think it seems to be that’s what’s going to happen, in the sense that it’s going to go to court at some point. There will be some remedy. There will be some action against individuals in some way, shape or form. We’ll see. You know, everybody’s not dishonest. However, there’s a good bit of concern, because of high-powered political people not wanting this out, that they’ll try to shut it down.
 
JC:  So on that score, I suppose, the most important thing is for as many people across the globe, and particularly, of course, in the US, to know about this and so to bring kind of a media and social pressure to bear upon this?
 
TS:  Right, and that’s one of the reasons I’m appearing on your show, to let people know that things were left out of those reports. Structural features were left out of their analyses and those reports — [structural features] that would have made their failure hypotheses impossible.
 
JC:  So, if that’s the case, then as many people need to know about this as possible. What practical steps would you say each of us can take to ensure that as many people as possible do in fact get to know about this?
 
TS:  Well, you can notify your political representatives that there needs to be a new investigation. I think you can do that as much as you can. The problem is that a lot of separate individuals, citizens, unless they’re united in a large group, are going to have a hard time. You know, you can still ignore a lot of individuals. In high political places that’s happened. We’ve had proof of these kinds of things in the past and nothing’s happened.
 
I said to you earlier, before we went on the air, that once I learned the way these buildings came down wasn’t the way we’ve been told and that the aircraft impacts couldn’t have done that to the Towers and that certainly Building 7 wasn’t hit by a plane — and it’s clearly a controlled demolition, even though NIST tries to say it’s fire — they’re clearly wrong and they have to leave things out to even try to show that.
 
It occurs to me and to a lot of other people, due to [what happened in] the aftermath, that this was about garnering public support for clandestine oil wars. There’s no question that Iraq was about oil. There’s a lot of conjecture that Afghanistan is about oil also, because of the Caspian area above it, and there was supposed to be a pipeline put through there. It hasn’t gone through yet, but that was the intent for years. Oil seems to be the problem. With our food, we learned to do that renewably quite a while ago, so we don’t fight about food in general. But with naturally occurring oil, we’re still hunter-gatherers. We’re looking for the wild patch of oil here and there, and it seems we’re fighting about it. Now, most people wouldn’t support a war for oil per se. So that’s what I think 9/11 was about, to get us to support the use of our military — both the American and British militaries — for clandestine oil wars.
 
JC:  Sure, but as I said to you before we started the interview, isn’t it slightly one dimensional to put it all down to oil, when we consider somebody — for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski — who says that whoever controls the Middle Eastern area basically controls the world? Isn’t it bigger than just oil?
 
TS:  Well, actually, when you say that, I think, "What’s in the Middle East?" Predominantly, it’s oil. And if you control that, yeah, you control the world. So, I still come back to oil being the major reason that this kind of thing would be pulled to garner public support for action. In the United States, quite often some politicians have been heard to say: “Oh, that’s a national security issue. I can’t say anything.” I think that’s generally a euphemism for oil supplies. It’s an overriding concern. Our societies are very dependent on oil. It did a lot for us, I’m not going to argue that. I’m not totally anti-oil. I’m saying I don’t want to have wars over it.
 
Coming back to what the average person can do, other than the political thing of trying to apply political pressure, [we can] support renewable energies. That has both a political component as well as an individual ideal. We can make all the electric we can ever need in a number of ways — windmills, wave buoys, hydroelectric, river turbines, tidal turbines, things like that, as well as solar panels and solar troughs (the parabolic dishes that focus [the sun's rays] for heating water and making steam). All you have to do is turn a turbine in some way or another [to make electricity], either hydraulically or with steam. We don’t need oil or even coal to do that. [The implication is that electric vehicles can then be used]. There are a lot of other ways. That’s what people can do to remove the concentration of power.

 

The other thing: Mahatma Ghandi said something I thought was quite appropriate for the average person. He said — of course you realise this — but he said no matter how insignificant you believe what you can do is, it’s important that you do it, because a lot of little actions finally create large actions. We can’t continue to fight over diminishing resources. Do we want to go back to the insanity of World War II? I think most people would answer "No!"
 
JC:  Well, I very much hope you’re right that we won’t continue along that line. And as you say, what can we do other than to act individually and in groups — if we can form groups — to try to change things. And you say each little action counts, absolutely. And so I suppose that’s what we’ve been doing here, just two people having a conversation. Who knows what influence that will have?
 
So, Tony, I have to say thank you very much indeed for joining us on the programme. I’m very glad that that colleague of yours did get in touch with me, and that you agreed to come on, because I think what you’ve presented today — and considering the detailed criticism of NIST’s work that we heard from Kevin Ryan back in the summer as well — I think that we now have very, very good reason to be extremely suspicious about NIST’s work in this area. And I very much hope that your efforts to hold NIST — or all the various individuals within NIST — to account will be successful, and that the truth about 9/11 will become much, much more clear to all of us, and that it will become more socially acceptable as well to ask questions about it. I hope that this interview will inspire all of us to do what we can, whatever it is we can do, to help bring that about. So, thank you, Tony, for coming on, and I wish you every blessing in your continued work.


TS:  I appreciate that, Julian. It was a pleasure to be on with you.

 


Disclaimer: The views expressed by Tony Szamboti in this interview are his responsibility alone; they do not necessarily reflect those of The Mind Renewed.

Technical images courtesy of Tony Szamboti, appearing here with kind permission.

Photograph of Dr John Gross: According to Consensus 9/11: "This Iwankiw (photographer) photo is taken from NIST FOIA Request #12-057, February 07, 2012. Its file number is DSCN0397_Iwankiw, from file WTC7_Beam_Photos_Scrap_Yard_OCT_2001.rar."

 

rss-icon-32youtube-icon-32facebook-icontwitter-icon-32

Logo220x220

Copyright © 2024 The Mind Renewed : Thinking Christianly in a New World Order.

All Rights Reserved.

SSL site seal - click to verify