The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7

Over the last few years I have reviewed all of David Ray Griffin's books on 9/11, which now amount to over 2,500 pages of close analysis. For readers not familiar with his earlier work, a reminder that he was best known as a philosopher of religion and process theologian, and has published over 25 books in this field. He was asked to write an article on 9/11 and began with the orthodox story; the more he delved into it, the less plausible did these official explanations seem, and the result was his 2004 book The New Pearl Harbour. Since then he has produced analyses of the shortcomings of the 9/11 Commission report and a book specifically responding to 9/11 debunkers. Many uninformed people are under the impression that so-called 9/11 conspiracy theorists are unhinged and have no rational basis for their views. This could not be further from the truth, but in order to realise this for oneself, one does need to plough through some detail as set out in Griffin's books in order to appreciate the full force of his arguments in relation to the evidence.

This latest book on the collapse of WTC 7 is subtitled 'why the final official report about 9/11 is unscientific and false'. This sounds like an extraordinary claim, but Griffin amply proves his case by means of forensic analysis of the evidence. Many readers will have seen videos of the collapse of WTC on the Internet. If you have not done so, I recommend you stop reading now and have a look for yourself. You will notice that the building collapses on its own footprint at more or less free fall speed. It has all the features of a controlled demolition, which as attested by many demolition experts. And yet this most plausible hypothesis was ruled out by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) in its official report, where they claim, incredibly, that they found no evidence for it! Griffin conducts a systematic controlled demolition of the official report, showing conclusively how it unscientifically rejects the most likely theory and then advances unscientific arguments for its own theory of fire causing the collapse. The main problem is that their conclusions were politically set in advance, so the report is effectively a political document rather than an impartial scientific investigation. NIST was asked how it was that the building collapsed as a result of fires when fires have never brought about the collapse of a comparable structure, either before or since.

According to the 9/11 truth movement, the attacks were in fact a 'false flag' operation 'in which evidence is planted to implicate the groups or countries the actual perpetrators wish to attack.' Moreover, the official account of the attacks, when subject to close critical scrutiny, can be shown to be false. Griffin has established this case in his earlier books. Unlike the Twin Towers, the 47-story WTC 7 was not hit by a plane, and, if it came down as a result of fire, this would be unprecedented. So how and why did it collapse? This is the 'mystery'. Griffin enumerates key similarities between the collapse of WTC 7 and the features of controlled demolition through implosion: the collapse started from the bottom and suddenly; the building came down totally, leaving none of its steel columns intact; it came straight down, symmetrically; it came down in free fall or close to it; the concrete was pulverised into tiny particles, and the debris ended up in a relatively small, compact pile. Given these features, it is completely implausible that WTC 7 could have come down in this way without the aid of explosives. The NIST spokesman Shyam Sunder nevertheless brazenly maintained that 'we did not find any evidence that explosives were used to bring the building down.'

Why did they find no such evidence? Griffin explains in detail how NIST ignored all physical and testimonial evidence supporting the implosion hypothesis, including testimonies of explosions from people both inside and outside the building. They distorted the evidence of two city officials inside the building, one of whom subsequently changed his story to fit in with the official explanation, a distortion uncritically repeated in a BBC documentary, as Griffin shows. NIST also ignored evidence that some senior members of the New York Fire Department knew in advance that the building was going to come down. Finally, expert testimony that WTC 7 was brought down by explosives was also dismissed. They misleadingly claim that the explosion hypothesis had been 'carefully investigated', adding that NIST had 'found no evidence supporting the existence of a blast event'. One can only comment that Nelson 'saw no ships' at the Battle of Copenhagen when he put a telescope to his blind eye.

The second part examines the alternative NIST theory that WTC 7 was brought down by ordinary fires on a few floors, the temperature of which could not even have reached the necessary heat to melt the building's steel columns. Griffin analyses the main components of the NIST thermal expansion fire theory and finds them all inadequate, especially how a single failed column can lead to a total and near free-fall collapse leaving not a single column standing. More significantly, he shows how the report itself is not only unscientific but actually contains fabrication and falsification of evidence on at least 20 separate counts. The falsity of the report's conclusion follows from the overwhelming likelihood, given the available evidence, the WTC 7 was brought down by controlled demolition. If this is the case, then this building was not brought down by Muslim terrorists but rather by domestic terrorists with the ability to plant explosives and orchestrate a cover-up, of which the NIST report itself is a significant component. An appendix puts forward the further hypothesis based on evidence that explosions at the bottom of the building began at 9.30 a.m. (the building came down in the late afternoon) that it was meant to have come down at 10.45, in which case the subsequent evidence for controlled demolition would have been obscured.

This is arguably the most important of Griffin's books since it deals with a building that was not struck by a plane and therefore requires a different hypothesis to explain its collapse (although there is also good evidence that the Twin Towers came down through explosions). The implications of his conclusions are far-reaching since the US political authorities have systematically misled the public about the causes of 9/11, which have been a critical plank for subsequent foreign policy decisions, which had been outlined a year previously in Project for a New American Century. All that was needed to get the public behind this agenda was a 'New Pearl Harbour' in the guise of 9/11. Griffin has had to fill the role of the investigative journalist and has shown immense courage and stamina in persevering with his work over the last seven years. The book is essential reading for anyone who wants to get to grips with the reasons behind this momentous event and the ways in which official explanations can be proved to be totally unconvincing and inadequate, a triumph of political expediency over scientific integrity.