"ABOUT THE BBC REPORT

BBC | The Conspiracy Files: 9/11 - The Third Tower This BBC documentary delves into the final mystery of 9/11: a third tower at the World Trade Centre, which along with the Twin Towers, also collapsed that day. But this skyscraper was never hit by a plane. Watch a preview online.

BBC | The Conspiracy Files A BBC TV series exploring some of the conspiracy theories of modern times. Watch previews online.

BBC The Editors | Impossible Conspiracies Series producer Mike Rudin wrote an online blog discussing The Conspiracy Files.

BBC The Editors | Controversy and conspiracies III Online discussions about 9/11 conspiracies.

BBC Online | Timeline: WTC 7 Key events leading up to and following the collapse of the World Trade Centre Building 7.

FURTHER READING & ONLINE RESOURCES

Report: Fire, not bombs, leveled WTC 7 building | USA Today | 21 August 2008 Federal investigators said Thursday they have solved a mystery of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: the collapse of World Trade Center building 7, a source of long-running conspiracy theories...

World Trade Center 7 Report Puts 9/11 Conspiracy Theory to Rest | Popular Mechanics | 21 August 2008 Conspiracy theorists have long claimed that explosives downed World Trade Center 7, north of the Twin Towers. The long-awaited report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) conclusively rebuts those claims. Fire alone brought down the building, the report concludes, pointing to thermal expansion of key structural members as the culprit. The report also raises concerns that other large buildings might be more vulnerable to fire-induced structural failure than previously thought.

Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report | Popular Mechanics Popular Mechanics examines the evidence and consults the experts to refute the most persistent conspiracy theories of September 11.

ABC Unleashed | Unanswered 9/11 questions | 16 May 2008 The September 11 attacks have joined the Kennedy assassination and the moon landings as a favourite for conspiracy theorists. Hereward Fenton is one of those who suspects a more complex explanation than an Al Qaeda plot to ram jet planes into buildings.

Revisiting 9/11/2001 - Applying the Scientific | April 2007 A scientific analysis by Dr. Steven E. Jones. [PDF 2.25Mb]

A physicist critiques Steven Jones' new paper | Stephen Phillips | May 2007 An article published online, May 21, 2007.

Who really blew up the twin towers? | The Guardian Online | 5 September 2006 As the fifth anniversary of 9/11 nears, Christina Asquith finds academics querying the official version of events.

Why the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Won't Go Away | Time Magazine | 3 September 2006 An article by Lev Grossman, published by Time, on why conspiracy theories are so seductive.

Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers | NIST | September 2005 In response to the World Trade Centre collapse, the National Institute of Standards and Technology conducted a 3-year building and fire safety investigation to study the factors contributing to the probable cause (or causes) of post-impact collapse of the WTC Towers (WTC 1 and 2) and WTC 7. Read their final report. [17.32Mb]

BBC Reports Live that WTC7 has fallen, yet it still stands | YouTube This YouTube video shows a BBC report announcing the collapse of WTC7, whilst the building still stands in view.

The 9-11 Commission Report Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

CONSPIRACISTS, DEBUNKERS & GOVERNMENT LINKS

9/11 Commission www.9-11commission.gov/

911 Myths www.911myths.com/

9-11 Research www.911research.wtc7.net/

9-11 Review: A Resource for Understanding the 9/11/01 Attack www.911review.com/

911Truth.org www.911truth.org/

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth www.ae911truth.org/

British 9/11 Truth Campaign www.911truthcampaign.net/

Debunking 911 www.debunking911.com/

FEMA Federal Emergency Management Administration www.fema.gov/

Journal of 9/11 Studies A peer-reviewed, open-access, electronic-only journal, covering the whole of research related to the events of 11 September, 2001. www.journalof911studies.com/

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Access all of the findings of the NIST on the World Trade Center investigation. wtc.nist.gov/

NIST National Institute of Standards and Technology wtc.nist.gov/

Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice stj911.org/

We Are Change wearechange.org/"

"ABC News anchor Peter Jennings said "Anybody who ever watched a building being demolished on purpose knows that if you're going to do this you have to get at the under infrastructure of a building and bring it down." Talk:World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theories#Is this WP:SYN?

She also gave a speech on the floor of the Arizona Senate that included her support for the demolition theory, its proponents, and its relevance to current foreign policy in the US. Johnson said in her speech:

You don’t have to embrace every theory about 9/11. Indeed, there are some that should be soundly rejected. But if you believe, as these scientists, architects and engineers do, that the buildings were brought down by explosive demolition, then you must also agree that we need a new investigation. I have no preconceived notions about who did it and I am not pointing the finger of blame at anyone. But I do think that the worst attack on U.S. soil in American history deserves the best investigation possible.

"US GOVERNMENT SITES

National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist)

Federal Emergency Management Administration (Fema)

9/11 Commission (full report)

CONSPIRACY SITES

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth

Journal of 9/11 Studies

Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice

911 Truth.org

9/11 Blogger

9/11 Research

9/11 Review

WTC7.net

We are change

British 9/11 Truth Campaign

CONSPIRACY FILMS

Loose Change

Improbable Collapse

9/11 mysteries

DEBUNKING SITES

Debunking 9/11

Screw Loose Change

9/11 Myths

9/11 Debunker

9/11 Guide

WTC7 Lies

Popular Mechanics"

"[...] The official explanation is that ordinary fires were the main reason for the collapse of Tower 7. That makes this the first and only tall skyscraper in the world to have collapsed because of fire. Yet despite that all the thousands of tonnes of steel from the building were carted away and melted down.

The way official bodies have investigated Tower 7 at the World Trade Center has made some people think they're hiding something. Its destruction was never mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. [...]

Inevitably the officials have been criticised for being slow and even of being frightened to publish. [...]

In April 2005, the first thousand DVDs of Dylan Avery's Loose Change movie were pressed. It cost just $2,000 to make. It was a critical moment for the development of the movement. The makers of Loose Change claim it has now been viewed by more than a hundred million people.

Steven Jones, a former physics professor at Brigham Young University, who has become the leading academic voice in the movement, first watched a video of the collapse of Tower 7 in the spring of 2005. But when he did, he said he was taken aback as a physicist.

The American architect Richard Gage's conversion came in 2006 when driving along he heard an independent radio station interviewing the theologian David Ray Griffin.

"I had to do some real soul searching and some research. And the more I discovered the more disturbed I became and realized I was looking for... the architects and the engineers."

Finding that they hadn't really entered the fray by then, Gage decided he had to act.

"It just came to me, I had to start an organization Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth."

The fifth anniversary of 9/11 was a huge moment for "truthers". Under the media spotlight protests intensified, websites were spawned and internet films proliferated.

With the publicity also came the "debunkers", challenging the "truthers" at every stage.

After Loose Change came a website called Screw Loose Change. And internet film 9/11 Mysteries was followed by Screw 9/11 Mysteries. [...]

And the "truthers" have fought back. When the US technology magazine Popular Mechanics launched a book called Debunking 9/11 Myths, it was countered with a book by David Ray Griffin called Debunking 9/11 Debunking. [...]

And over time schisms have opened up in the 9/11 "truth" movement.

So-called "no-planers" believe that commercial aeroplanes did not actually crash into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon or a field in Pennsylvania. Some have suggested lasers from outer space were used.

"Planers" believe aeroplanes were used but argue that only controlled demolitions can explain the collapses of the World Trade Center towers.

Then there are the LIHOPs and MIHOPs. Most "truthers" are MIHOPs - they think the government Made It Happen On Purpose, planning and orchestrating the 9/11 attacks.

But LIHOPs believe the government just Let It Happen On Purpose, to allow them to justify wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a clampdown on civil liberties."

Richard Sisson says the sulfur came from gypsum in the wallboards [...]

"As well as housing offices of leading financial companies, Tower 7 also had some unusual tenants: the Secret Service, the CIA, the Department of Defence and the Office of Emergency Management, which would coordinate any response to a disaster or a terrorist attack.

Dylan Avery, the writer and director of the internet film Loose Change, thinks the building was suspicious:

"You have to look at what was inside Building 7. You had the largest CIA field office ... you had a number of government agencies inside the building. [...]

Some people argue that the US government had to demolish Tower 7 because it is where plans were hatched for a massive conspiracy on 9/11 and even that the hijacked planes were guided to their targets from Tower 7. Others believe the government also wanted to destroy key files held there about corporate fraud. [...]

However, the chief counter-terrorism adviser to President Bush on 9/11, Richard Clarke, does not think there is anything mysterious about Tower 7. He told The Conspiracy Files:

"I was in the World Trade Centre 7 on a number of occasions. This was a commercial office building in downtown New York. The fact that there were some government agencies in there, is certainly true, but there were lots of other people in there too and you could have rented an office or floor anybody could have." [...]

However, critics argue that the evidence they have seen suggests there was very little fire in Tower 7 and certainly not enough to cause it to collapse. A fire protection engineer, Scott Grainger, who has joined Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, told the BBC:

"The fires weren't burning on all the floors simultaneously. They were scattered about on the floors.

"And as they burn they're going to move through the building so they'll certainly heat up some of the steel in an area. But then as it moves on when it consumes the combustibles there, the chairs, desks, the tables, whatever papers were there. Then there's no longer any source of heat." [...]

Lt Frank Papalia of the New York Fire Department told the programme:

"We looked at it and said there's so much fire in this building, nobody's going to put this fire out".

Photographer Steve Spak, who took some of the clearest images of the damage to Tower 7, told the BBC there was smoke on a lot of floors on the south side of the building and numerous floors had fires.

"Through my experience of taking fire photography for the last 30 years, to me that's an indication of extremely heavy fire condition and a dangerous fire condition." [...]

However, critics say the report has been too long coming. Some have even suggested the way official bodies have investigated Tower 7's collapse makes it looks like they are hiding something.

The first inquiry into Tower 7 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or Fema, said the building collapsed because intense fires burned for hours, fed by thousands of gallons of diesel stored in the building. But it also said this had "only a low probability of occurrence" and more work was needed. Critics point out that was six years ago. [...]

According to Richard Gage, an American architect who founded Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, the skyscraper was destroyed by a controlled demolition:

"Building 7 is the smoking gun of 9/11. It is the most obvious example of controlled demolition with explosives." [...]

They point to Danny Jowenko, a Dutch demolition expert who has been in the business for 28 years, and who when shown footage of Tower 7's collapse said:

"That is a controlled demolition... absolutely. It's been imploded. It's a hired job done by a team of experts." [...]

Critics of the official account believe they have found evidence of the unconventional demolition of Tower 7 using a substance called thermite.

Thermite is a substance that can literally melt steel and is made up of iron oxide and aluminium.

Sceptics base their claims for this on an analysis of the dust from the World Trade Centre site after the attacks. In this dust they have found tiny iron rich spheres. These spheres can only be formed in very high temperatures - temperatures higher than those reached in the fires in the towers before their collapse.

The former professor of physics, Steven Jones, believes the spheres he has found in the dust from the World Trade Centre site match the spheres you get in a thermite reaction. He argues that thermite is the explanation for the presence of iron and aluminium in the spheres.

However, other scientists say there are other explanations for presence of these tiny iron rich spheres.

They could have come from the cutting torches used after 9/11 to clear the site, from any building work on the site before the attacks or even from the collapse of the Towers themselves. [...]

Professor Richard Sisson says it did not melt, it eroded. The cause was the very hot fires in the debris after 9/11 that cooked the steel over days and weeks.

Professor Sisson determined that the steel was attacked by a liquid slag which contained iron, sulphur and oxygen.

However, rather than coming from thermite, the metallurgist Professor Sisson thinks the sulphur came from masses of gypsum wallboard that was pulverised and burnt in the fires. [...]

Critics say that by using the phrase "pull it" Larry Silverstein let slip the fact that he was involved in a decision to bring the building down. They point out that Silverstein took out a $3.5bn (£1.75bn) insurance policy on the Twin Towers just two months before the attacks. A policy that was to pay out in the event of a terrorist attack. [...]

Because of the furore over the use of the words "pull it" in the interview, on 9, September 2005, Mr Dara McQuillan, a spokesman for Silverstein Properties, issued the following statement on the issue:

"In the afternoon of September 11, Mr Silverstein spoke to the Fire Department Commander on site at Seven World Trade Centre.

"The Commander told Mr Silverstein that there were several fire fighters in the building working to contain the fires.

"Mr Silverstein expressed his view that the most important thing was to protect the safety of those fire fighters, including, if necessary, to have them withdraw from the building.

"Later in the day, the Fire Commander ordered his fire fighters out of the building and at 5:20pm the building collapsed. No lives were lost at 7 World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001.

"As noted above, when Mr Silverstein was recounting these events for a television documentary he stated, 'I said, you know, we've had such terrible loss of life. Maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it.' Mr McQuillan has stated that by 'it', Mr Silverstein meant the contingent of fire fighters remaining in the building." [...]

Both CNN and the BBC reported that Tower 7 was about to collapse or had collapsed when in fact it was still standing. Some have even suggested this shows the media were handed scripts by the conspirators.

The BBC says this was simply an honest mistake on what was probably the fastest moving, most chaotic and most confusing story they had ever covered. After an investigation the head of BBC World News, Richard Porter, told The Conspiracy Files:

"The investigations we've carried out suggest very strongly that we were working on the basis of an incorrect news agency report."

The news agency Reuters have given this statement to the BBC:

"On September 11, 2001, Reuters incorrectly reported that one of the buildings at the New York World Trade Centre, 7WTC, had collapsed before it actually did. The report was picked up from a local news story and was withdrawn as soon as it emerged that the building had not fallen." [...]

There is no evidence that anyone died in Tower 7 on 9/11. However, conspiracy talk shows and websites seized on a recent interview for Loose Change with the crucial eyewitness Barry Jennings.

The writer and director of Loose Change, Dylan Avery, told The Conspiracy Files: "The amount of detail that Barry gave us in this interview was unreal. He says he was stepping over dead bodies in the lobby."

Barry Jennings himself disagrees with their interpretation of his words. Barry Jennings told the BBC: "I didn't like the way you know I was portrayed. They portrayed me as seeing dead bodies. I never saw dead bodies"

Dylan Avery is adamant that he didn't take anything out of context. He played The Conspiracy Files a recording of Barry Jennings words: "The fire fighter who took us down kept saying do not look down. And I kept saying why.

"He said do not look down. And we're stepping over people and you know you could feel when you're stepping over people."

However, Barry Jennings told the BBC: "I said it felt like I was stepping over them but I never saw any.

"And you know that's the way they portrayed me and I didn't appreciate that so I told them to pull my interview.""

"[...] The contentious Twin Towers documentary has run several times on The Groton Channel and on CCTV, the cable access channel for Concord and Carlisle, and has raised hackles for both its content and its lack of community ties. The two-hour "9/11: Blueprint for Truth" movie - which is popular among those in the self-described 9/11 Truth Movement, some of whom believe the US government enabled the destruction of the World Trade Center as a pretext for war - is based on a lecture given by San Francisco-area architect Richard Gage to a Canadian audience. [...]"

"When I first said "hello" to Kevin Barrett, I was somewhat taken aback. The tall, bearded lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was seeing students in his office and struck me as soft-spoken, almost laid-back. He just didn't "seem" controversial.

But there is no doubt he has attracted a fair amount of controversy. Sixty-one Wisconsin legislators have said he should stop teaching. So has the governor. The university has received more than one thousand emails from alumni, many saying they'll stop donating unless Kevin Barrett goes.

Barrett belongs to a small but vocal group of academics who are writing and publishing ideas which charge the U.S. government played a role in the 9/11 attacks. He argues that members of the Bush administration knew about the attacks ahead of time, and at the very least, allowed them to occur."

"WORLD TRADE CENTER - La version officielle est dans le collimateur de l'architecte Richard Gage, qui donnait une conférence mardi à Genève. [...]

[...] Sauf que l'homme est un éminent architecte étasunien, fer de lance de la contestation de la version officielle sur les attentats du World Trade Center.

Fondateur de l'association Architectes&ingénieurs pour la vérité sur le 11 septembre, dont une pétition réclame la réouverture de l'enquête, celui qui confesse avoir longtemps voté républicain, avant d'être «retourné» par les mensonges de l'administration Bush, enchaîne les conférences aux Etats-Unis, au Canada, et ces jours-ci en Europe. A Genève, il était l'invité d'un comité romand baptisé «Le 11 septembre en question» (notre édition du 15 septembre dernier).

L'hypothèse tient cependant en deux mots: démolition contrôlée. Plus de cinq cent vingt architectes, ingénieurs et physiciens soutiennent que l'effondrement «en chute libre» du World Trade Center n'a pu être causé par la seule combustion – les avions n'ayant eu qu'un impact «marginal» sur la structure des tours. Conçu pour résister au feu et constitué de dizaines de milliers de tonnes d'acier et de béton, un gratte-ciel, explique Richard Gage, peut brûler longtemps sans céder – et de citer en exemple l'Empire State Building, percuté en 1945 par un B-25, ou le Windsor Building de Madrid, resté debout après vingt-quatre heures d'incendie en 2005. [...]

Se pose alors la question: «Qui?» Lors de la foire aux questions, Richard Gage évite prudemment ce terrain-là: «Nous nous contentons de preuves scientifiques. Se prononcer sur les responsabilités nous ôterait toute crédibilité.» Le Pentagone et son «avion fantôme» ne sont pas abordés, car «il y a trop d'avis divergents sur ce cas». «Ce qui est sûr, affirme l'architecte, c'est qu'Al-Qaïda est hors sujet. La thermate ne se fabrique pas dans les cavernes d'Afghanistan!» Et Gage de renvoyer à des auteurs controversés comme David Ray Griffin, partisan de la thèse du complot intérieur[2]. «Obama n'y changera rien, seule la pression populaire peut faire rouvrir l'enquête bâclée sur le 11-Septembre.»"

"About the Program

Editors and contributors to the book, "9/11 and American Empire," assess the Bush administration's responsibility for the attacks on 9/11, arguing that key administration officials either purposefully ignored the threats leading up to the attacks or were complicit in the planning them. The panelists say that the administration has used the attacks to enact long established plans to expand American empire. The participants are: David Ray Griffin (co-editor/contributor), Peter Dale Scott (co-editor/contributor), Peter Phillips (contributor) and Kevin Ryan (contributor). Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern moderates the discussion. The event was hosted by Berkeley, California-based Pacifica radio station KPFA (www.kpfa.org).

About the Author

David Ray Griffin, professor emeritus of philosophy and theology at the Claremont School of Theology, is the author of "The New Pearl Harbor" and "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions." Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and former professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK" and "Drugs, Oil, and War." Peter Phillips, professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and director of the Project Censored media research program, is most recently the co-editor of "Censored 2007: The Top 25 Censored Stories" and "Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney." Kevin Ryan is a former site manager with Environmental Health Laboratories. Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA, is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) and a contributor to the book "Neo-CONNED! Again.""

"About the Program

David Ray Griffin takes a critical look at the official 9/11 Commission Report. Professor Griffin argues that "omissions and distortions" in the report amount to a cover-up by government officials and says that the available evidence suggests that the Bush administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks. Professor Griffin covers topics he says have been inadequately answered by the commission. These include questions surrounding the attack on the Pentagon, the way in which the World Trade Center towers collapsed, and the behavior of President Bush and his Secret Service detail following notification that a second plane had hit the WTC. The talk was hosted by the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth (www.mujca.com) and took place at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Includes Q&A.

About the Author

David Ray Griffin is professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, where he taught for over 30 years (retiring in 2004). He has authored or edited over two dozen books, including "God and Religion in the Postmodern World," "Religion and Scientific Naturalism," and "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11.""

"Yet today, more than five years on, this accepted version of what happened on 9/11 is being challenged by a 90-minute internet movie made for £1,500 on a cheap laptop by three young American men. The film is so popular that up to 100 million viewers have watched what is being dubbed the first internet blockbuster.

The movie was shown on television to 50 million people in 12 countries on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 last autumn. More than 100,000 DVDs have been sold and another 50,000 have been given away. In Britain, 491,000 people have clicked on to Google Video to watch it on their computers.

Called Loose Change, the film is a blitz of statistics, photographs pinched from the web, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony, all set to hip-hop music. And it is dramatically changing the way people think about 9/11.

A recent poll by the respected New York Times revealed that three out of four Americans now suspect the U.S. government of not telling the truth about 9/11. This proportion has shot up from a year ago, when half the population said they did not believe the official story of an Al Qaeda attack. [...]

Mr Meacher, who last year proposed holding a screening of Loose Change at the House of Commons (he later changed his mind), has said of 9/11: "Never in modern history has an event of such cataclysmic significance been shrouded in such mystery. Some of the key facts remain unexplained on any plausible basis."

These words were written in a foreword for Professor David Ray Griffin's bestselling book, The New Pearl Harbour (a pointed reference to the conspiracy theory that President Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to assault the U.S. fleet in 1941, in order to force America into World War II).

Griffin, now nearing retirement, is emeritus professor at the Claremont School of Theology in California and a respected philosopher. While Loose Change is capturing the interest of internet devotees, Professor Griffin's equally contentious theories are receiving standing ovations in book clubs across the U.S. [...]

But, according to the allegations of Loose Change (which are endorsed by Professor Griffin), the science does not stand up. Steel does not begin to melt until it reaches around 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, but open fires of jet fuel - such as those in the Twin Towers inferno - cannot rise above 1,700 degrees.

Professor Griffin and the makers of Loose Change are convinced the Twin Towers were deliberately blown up."

"[...] Jones is co-chairman, with James H. Fetzer, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, a group of college faculty members who believe conspirators other than pilots of the planes were directly involved in bringing down New York's Trade Towers.

The group, which Jones said has 200 members, maintains a Web site at www.st911.org. [...]

He ticked off several pieces of evidence for his thermite fire theory:

First, he said, video showed a yellow, molten substance splashing off the side of the south Trade Tower about 50 minutes after an airplane hit it and a few minutes before it collapsed. Government investigators ruled out the possibility of melting steel being the source of the material because of the unlikelihood of steel melting. The investigators said the molten material must have been aluminum from the plane.

But, said Jones, molten aluminum is silvery. It never turns yellow. The substance observed in the videos "just isn't aluminum," he said. But, he said, thermite can cause steel to melt and become yellowish.

Second, he cited video pictures showing white ash rising from the south tower near the dripping, liquefied metal. When thermite burns, Jones said, it releases aluminum-oxide ash. The presence of both yellow-white molten iron and aluminum oxide ash "are signature characteristics of a thermite reaction," he said.

Another item of evidence, Jones said, is the fact that sulfur traces were found in structural steel recovered from the Trade Towers. Jones quoted the New York Times as saying sulfidization in the recovered steel was "perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the (official) investigation." But, he said, sulfidization fits the theory that sulfur was combined with thermite to make the thermite burn even hotter than it ordinarily would.

Jones said a piece of building wreckage had a gray substance on the outside that at one point had obviously been a dripping molten metal or liquid. He said that after thermite turns steel or iron into a molten form, and the metal hardens, it is gray.

He added that pools of molten metal were found beneath both trade towers and the 47-story WTC 7. That fact, he said, was never discussed in official investigation reports."

In defense of the decision to dispose of the steel, Mayor Bloomberg said: "If you want to take a look at the construction methods and the design, that's in this day and age what computers do." ^[1] David Ray Griffin notes that this is exactly what Manning had worried about when he warned that "the investigation into the World Trade Center fire and collapse will amount to paper-and computer-generated hypotheticals.

Its tenants included Salomon Smith Barney (which leased 44% of the available office space), ITT Hartford Insurance Group (8%), the Securities and Exchange Commission (8%), the Secret Service (5%), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Regional Council (3%).

Smaller tenants included the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense, though these shared a single floor with the IRS. Altogether, U.S. local, state, and federal government agencies occupied 11 of the overall 47 floors, or about 28% of the available 39 floors of office space.

A call to action by Bill Manning, the chief editor of the trade journal Fire Engineering, is often quoted in this connection. In a January 2002 editorial, Manning called the early ASCE investigation (which would later turn into the FEMA building performance study) a "half-baked farce" and said that "the destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately." He said that the cleanup of the WTC site differed in many respects from that of other engineering disasters.

The debris removal process began shortly after the attacks, and concluded in May 2002.

"[...] Last winter, “Investigate 9/11” banners seemed to be popping up all over the place. Bill Clinton was heckled by “truthers” in Denver while campaigning for his wife. Truthers picketed the Academy Awards in LA – despite this year’s winner of the best actress Oscar, Marion Cotillard, reportedly being one of them. But then, she’s French. Literature lovers in that country pushed Thierry Meyssan’s L’Effroyable imposture (The Appalling Fraud) – which asserts that 9/11 was a government plot to justify invading Iraq and Afghanistan and increase military spending – to the top of the bestseller list in 2002.

Country music star Willie Nelson is assuredly not French, but a week or so before the Oscars he described as naive the notion that the “implosion” of the Twin Towers was caused by crashing jets. Meanwhile the European Parliament screened the Italian documentary Zero, in which Gore Vidal, Italian playwright Dario Fo, and Italian MEP Giulietto Chiesa blame the US government, not al-Qaeda, for 9/11. The following month, Japanese MP Yukihisa Fujita raised his own doubts about the official story at a seminar in Sydney. A busy season for the “9/11 Truth” movement. [...]

There is some evidence that the truthers are swaying the rest of us. A New York Times/CBS News poll in 2006 revealed that only 16 per cent of Americans polled believed the Bush administration was telling the truth about 9/11. More than half thought it was “hiding something”. This is not the same as believing the government actually launched the attacks, but a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll the same year found that more than a third of those questioned suspected that federal officials assisted in the attacks or took no action to stop them so that the US could go to war. [...]

First up was Richard Gage, a San Francisco architect who founded Architects, Engineers & Scientists for 9/11 Truth, which now claims to have 379 professional members. Gage told us that the collapse of the Twin Towers could not have been due merely to gravity, the impact of the airliners and the resulting jet fuel fires – which would not have been hot enough to weaken the steel sufficiently. Behind him on the video screen was the south tower of the World Trade Center. Smoke poured from its upper floors. A respectful silence fell over the audience, followed by gasps as the building appeared to dissolve before our eyes.

While I have seen this footage countless times, it seems that I had clearly never understood what I was seeing. The destruction of the Twin Towers, along with the collapse of the nearby 47-storey World Trade Center 7 building, had all the hallmarks of controlled demolition, according to Gage. They all came straight down, almost at the speed of a free-falling object, right into their own footprints. Steel-framed buildings had never collapsed because of fires before. On this day three did, one of which, “Building 7”, was not even hit by an aircraft.

Gage, who had worked himself into a fever, exhorted the audience to stand up and be counted: “A country is at stake.” Then he welcomed on to the stage the star of the evening, Steven Jones. A softly spoken physicist, Jones is the movement’s designated martyr and seems to promise what the truthers so desperately need: scientific credibility.

Jones entered into truther lore in 2006 when he was put into early retirement by Brigham Young University in Utah after giving public lectures on his paper “Why indeed did the WTC buildings collapse?”, which he published on the website of the university’s physics department. Jones contended that the towers were demolished by cutter charges which had been placed throughout the buildings, probably involving an incendiary called thermite. BYU’s College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and the structural engineering faculty, followed by the university administration, disowned him.

Still, Jones is no fool. He has published more than 50 scholarly papers, including pieces on cold nuclear fusion in journals such as Scientific American and Nature. He invented a cooker which uses solar power and has donated models to poor families in the developing world. Jones tells us he believes laboratory testing of dust from Ground Zero will reveal residue from a thermite reaction. [...]

Griffin now thinks the evidence to the contrary is incontrovertible. Until 2002, he had busied himself far from the rancour of public controversy writing rather obscure philosophical books and teaching philosophy of religion at the Claremont School of Theology. But the course of his research changed abruptly when he heard a visiting British theologian question the official account of 9/11. Two years later, Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor, with a foreword by British MP Michael Meacher, became a touchstone in the 9/11 Truth movement. He has since written others, including one detailing the “omissions and distortions” of the 9/11 Commission, the report of which fits the definition of “conspiracy theory” neatly, he says. “They started with the conclusion that al-Qaeda did it and didn’t even consider the alternative that it was an inside job.” [...]

If the 9/11 truth movement is fighting a kind of asymmetric war against official sources of knowledge, it is also battling itself. As the movement morphs into an international activist group, it recognises that if it is to convince middle Americans, it must distance itself from its exotic fringe. Once, it was the Mihops versus the Lihops. These factions, who sound like warring species from an H.G. Wells story, are those who believe the government Made It Happen On Purpose and those who think it Let It Happen On Purpose. The Mihops are in the ascendancy.

The genesis of all this can be traced back to a schism that followed the first real attempt to bring scholarly credibility to the 9/11 sceptics. In 2005, Steven Jones was invited to form a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth by James Fetzer, a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Minnesota and the author of some 20 books on the philosophy of science and artificial intelligence. Fetzer teaches critical thinking, and is nothing if not critical. He has been campaigning for more than a decade to prove that the Zapruder film is a hoax perpetuated by the same government intelligence agencies that orchestrated JFK’s assassination.

But within a year, Jones had written to all members of Scholars announcing that he and others no longer wanted to be associated with Fetzer, who was, in the rebels’ opinion, holding them up to ridicule. Fetzer had backed a theory by Judy Wood, a former assistant professor in mechanical engineering at Clemson University, proposing that the Twin Towers were brought down by a “directed energy” weapon developed as part of the US government’s Star Wars programme. It prompted a stampede to a new group, Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, headed by Jones. Confusing the two groups would be like mistaking Monty Python’s Judean People’s Front for the People’s Front of Judea: this was a major doctrinal split. [...]"