Why this would be a miracle was explained by Chandler, who said: “Free fall can only be achieved if there is zero resistance to the motion.”62 In other words, the upper portion of Building 7 could have come down in free fall only if something had suddenly removed all the steel and concrete in the lower part of the building, which would have otherwise provided resistance. If everything had not been removed and the upper floors had come down in free fall anyway, even for only a second, a miracle – meaning a violation of laws of physics – would have happened.
That was what Sunder himself had explained the previous August, saying that a free-falling object would be one “that has no structural components below it” to offer resistance. But then in November, while still defending its fire theory of collapse, NIST agreed that, as an empirical fact, free fall happened. For a period of 2.25 seconds, NIST admitted, the descent of WTC 7 was characterized by “gravitational acceleration (free fall).”63
Knowing that it had thereby affirmed a miracle, NIST no longer claimed that its analysis was consistent with the laws of physics. In its August draft, in which it said that the collapse occurred 40 percent slower than free fall, NIST had repeatedly said that its analysis was “consistent with physical principles.” One encountered this phrase at least three times.64 In the final report, however, every instance of this phrase had been removed. NIST thereby almost explicitly admitted that its report on WTC 7, by admitting free fall while continuing to deny that explosives and incendiaries were used, is not consistent with the principles of physics.
Implications
NIST thereby implicitly acknowledged that Building 7 was intentionally demolished. It also thereby implicitly admitted the same about the Twin Towers, because the collapses of these buildings manifested many of the same tell-tale signs of controlled demolition as did WTC 7, plus some additional ones, including the horizontal ejection of sections of steel columns, weighing many thousands of pounds, more than 500 feet from the towers. (These ejections occurred at the outset of the collapses, after which the Towers came straight down.).65
And with this implicit admission that the collapses were examples of controlled demolition, NIST undermined the al-Qaeda theory of 9/11. Why?
For one thing, the straight-down nature of the collapses of the Twin Towers and Building 7 means that the buildings were subjected to the type of controlled demolition known as “implosion,” which is, in the words of a controlled demolition website, “by far the trickiest type of explosive project,” which “only a handful of blasting companies in the world . . . possess enough experience . . . to perform.”66 Al-Qaeda terrorists would not have had this kind of expertise.
Second, the only reason to go to the trouble of bringing a building straight down is to avoid damaging nearby buildings. Had the World Trade Center buildings toppled over sideways, they would have caused massive destruction in Lower Manhattan, crushing dozens of other buildings and killing tens of thousands of people. Does anyone believe that, even if al-Qaeda operatives had had the expertise to make the buildings come straight down, they would have had the courtesy?
A third problem is that foreign terrorists could not have obtained access to the buildings for all the hours it would have taken to plant incendiaries and explosives. Only insiders could have done this.67
7. Explaining the Ignorance about WTC 7
NIST’s admission that Building 7 came down in free fall for over two seconds should, therefore, have been front-page news. The same is true, moreover, of the various other things I have reported – NIST’s fabrications; NIST’s omission and distortion of testimonial evidence; NIST’s omissions of physical evidence, such as the Swiss-cheese steel and the particles showing that iron and molybdenum had been melted; and the later discovery of nanothermite particles in the WTC dust. Especially given the fact that the collapse of Building 7 had been declared a mystery from the outset, the world should have been waiting with bated breath for every new clue as to why this 47-story building had come down. Upon hearing Building 7 mentioned, nobody in the world with access to CNN should have asked, “Building what?” How do we explain the fact that five and even nine years after the mysterious collapse of this building, ignorance about it was still widespread?
To begin answering this question, let us return to James Glanz’s statement that the collapse of WTC 7 was “a mystery that under normal circumstances would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world.”68 As I stated before, the abnormality seems to have been such that videos and even the very fact of this building’s collapse were deliberately suppressed. What was this abnormality?
SCADs
A symposium in the February 2010 issue of American Behavioral Scientist, one of our leading social science journals, argues that social scientists need to develop a scientific approach to studying an increasingly important type of criminality: State Crimes Against Democracy, abbreviated SCADs,69 understood as “concerted actions . . . by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty.” Having the “potential to subvert political institutions and entire governments . . . [SCADs] are high crimes that attack democracy itself.”70
Distinguishing between SCADs that have been officially proven, such as “the Watergate break-ins and cover-up . . . , the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia . . . , the illegal arms sales and covert operations in Iran-Contra . . . , and the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson by revealing his wife’s status as an intelligence agent,” on the one hand, and suspected SCADs for which there is good evidence, on the other, the symposium authors include in the latter category “the fabricated attacks on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 . . . , the “October Surprises” in the presidential elections of 1968 . . . and 1980 . . . , the assassinations of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy . . . , the election breakdowns in 2000 and 2004 . . . , the numerous defense failures on September 11, 2001 . . . , and the misrepresentation of intelligence to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq.”71
Besides regarding 9/11 as one of the suspected SCADs for which there is good evidence, this symposium treats it as its primary example. The abstract for the introductory essay begins by asserting: “The ellipses of due diligence riddling the official account of the 9/11 incidents continue being ignored by scholars of policy and public administration.”72 The symposium’s final essay, criticizing the majority of the academic world for its “blithe dismissal of more than one law of thermodynamics” that is violated by the official theory of the World Trade Center collapses,73 also criticizes the academy for its failure to protest when “Professor Steven Jones found himself forced out of a tenured position for merely reminding the world that physical laws, about which there is no dissent whatsoever, contradict the official theory of the World Trade Center Towers’ collapse.”74
The authors of this symposium point out, moreover, that the official theory of the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers has serious implications for science and engineering. If NIST’s explanation “provides the most robust account of the Towers’ collapse, based on known science,” then some previously accepted physical laws would need to be revised:
“[These laws] would have to succumb, at some point, to the theoretical claims purported to explain the Towers’ collapse: New laws determining when steel melts and the phases at which such material loses its tensile strength would have at some point to replace existing science-based presumptions.”75
