According to the "9/11 Truthers" the Trade Towers in New York were destroyed by controlled demolition. For this we hold them in contempt, as looney conspiracy theorists. The RAND Corporation on the other hand is held in great esteem for its objective research and analysis .
If the "Truthers" want to shed their stigma and have the American people consider their story, the RAND Corporation might be their sa lvatio n, because the two display an identifiable overlap.
Born after WWII as a think-tank for the Pentagon, RAND addresses today th e spectrum of public affairs. Its website lists these concern s : Children, Families, and Communities; Cyber and Data Sciences; Education and Literacy; Energy and Environment; Health, Health Care, and Aging; Homeland Security and Public Safety; Infrastructure and Transportation; International Affairs; Law and Business; National Security and Terrorism; S cience and Technology; Social Equity; and Workers and the Workplace. i
O ur confidence in RAND is well placed. The evidence of their integrity has been scrutinized by the Media Bias/Fact Check organization. Among the universe of media groups they rated RAND as "Least Biased," "High" for factual reporting, and "High" for credibility . ii The Heritage Foundation by contrast is rated far-right biased, and "Mixed" for factual reporting and credibility. iii
Of particular note at RAND is their project, Countering Truth Decay . It grew from a book published in 2018: Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life. From the Preface:
Much has been written about the growing disregard for facts, data, and analysis in political and civil discourse in the United States. Increasingly, it seem s that import ant policy debates, both within the federal government and across the electorate, are as likely to hinge on opinion or anecdote as they are on objective facts or rigorous analysis. iv
Enter the "9/11 Truthers." The "disregard for facts, data, and analysis" is their raison d'etre.
There's the overlap.
T h e " Truthers" own passion for countering truth decay is displayed in searching their websites. On every page the Bush Administration stands accused of disregarding facts and data, with particular respect to the collapse of the Trade Towers.
Scrutinizing carefully the history of the movement reveals "The Truthers" for who they are and what they have to say.
The 9/11 Truth Movement today is not a tiny isolated fringe. It is a worldwide force of tens of thousands of concerned and committed people. "Truth" organizations are found in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Puerto Rico, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. v
A dozen or so national organizations are active in the U.S. and localized groups are found in 43 state s. One of the core nationwide groups is Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Supporting it are 3,700 professional architects and engineers, and 32,900 persuaded citizens. A typical state level group is Colorado for 9/11 Truth . Serving as the Truth Movement's clearinghouse and archive is The International Center for 9/11 Justice .
The Truth Movement was borne in curiosity. Still in memory was a B-25 bomber in 1954 crashing into the Empire State Building, which withstood the collision and remained standing with only localized damage. The Trade Towers were designed to absorb the impact of a Boeing 707 flying at 600 mph. vi W hy did they cascade into rubble in a matter of 15-20 seconds?
In 2005 the National Institute of Standards and Technology published its Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers. It was the Bush Administration's explanation for the collapse of the buildings : the Trade Towers were brought down by the impacts of the aircraft and the subsequent fire s.
By this time t he 9/11 Truth Movement had its own vigorous investigation underway, and they saw in the NIST report a stupefying example of "the growing disregard for facts, data, and analysis."
T he "Truthers" knew of a contradicting history. In the roughly 100 years of steel-framed building construction, many such structures endured devastating fires; some were fully involved and gutted, but every single one remained standing. During those years, however, many cases of total collapse were recorded as well, and every one was intentional, through the use of controlled demolition in one form or another. vii
According to the NIST Final Report that's not what happened to the Trade Towers. Instead, this did: the crashing airplanes scraped the fireproofing insulation from the structural steel, causing the core columns to be weakened by the heat of the fires, causing the concrete floors to sag, causing the perimeter columns to be pulled inward, and that is when the "...top sections of the buildings tilted..and began their descent." (Th e NIST relied on computer modeling to reach this conclusion, not the scrutiny of evidence.)
And then, "Once the upper building sections began to move downward, the weakened structures in the impact and fire zones were not able to absorb the tremendous energy of the falling building sections , and global collapse ensued." viii
The top sections acted like pile drivers, pancaking the buildings to street level in a sequence of collapsing floors.
Not a single word in the Final Report supported this scenario, with "facts, data, and analysis." It was anecdotal. It was unsubstantiated opinion .
The Truth Movement rejected the pancaking scenario totally, initially by comparing it to the video images. If the floors simply collapsed vertically in sequence , what explained the boiling clouds of building debris and concrete dust blasting out laterally twice the width of the buildings? What were those energetic puffs of smoke and debris expelled from the buildings, 20 to 30 stories below the collapse front? ( In the trade, they're called "demolition squibs." ) Sections of steel girders rocketed from the buildings horizontally for hundreds of feet : in a pancaking building, wouldn't they drop straight down ? A pancaked building should result in a quadrangular pile of debris not a great deal larger than the dimensions of the building, 208 feet on a side: why were the debris piles roughly circular in shape, and six times wider than the buildings? Largely intact concrete floors should have piled up in the debris, admixed with bent and broken structural steel. But no floors survived; most of the concrete in the floors was pulverized into billowing clouds of dust, 424,000 tons of it blanketing Lower Manhattan . ix That required an input of energy far greater than pancaking floors could generate from gravity alone.
The undeniable reason to reject the NIST scenario is its violation of Newton's Third Law of Motion: since every action propagates an equal-but-opposite reaction, unidirectional, top-down pancaking is physically impossible,
Large buildings have been demolished by pancaking, without the use of explosives, by the abrupt destruction of the mid-level floor in the building. A French technique called Vèrinage does this, removing the vertical supports of the mid-level floor with synchronized hydraulic jacks. As equal-and-opposite actions take place the pancaking proceeds both upward and downward equally from the mid-level floor until the destruction is complete. The pancaking is bidirectional, by Isaac Newton's intractable dictum .
(YouTube videos of Vèrinage demolitions can be viewed here. )
The compromised floors in the Trade Towers were far above mid-level, so any (bidirectional) pancaking would cease not far below the impact zones, leaving tall smoking stumps in the Manhattan skyline.
But there were no stumps. There were mounds of rubble. Total destruction. Caused by what?
The Truth Movement argues for explosives, and to this day they are ostracized, the claim of controlled demolition still dismissed with impatient vehemence.
Is our denial based on fact, drawn from evidence and objective analysis? Or is it an example of post-truth social behavior, of truth decay ? We prefer to parrot a comfortable opinion, because the intentional destruction of the Trade Towers is a concept too ghastly to bear. It raises inescapable questions--who did it and why?--and the prospective answers are unthinkable . We scoff go on .
If this is irresponsible citizenship, can we atone by agreeing on this: we truly need to know the truth about 9/11, however painful it might be, and then act on it.
What might happen if the story of controlled demolition was delivered by a messenger of impeccable integrity? If the 9/11 Truth Movement is not to be trusted, can we ask the RAND Corporation to check their work?
i See, RAND Corporation website, here:https://www.rand.org/research.html
ii See, "Rand Corporation Bias and Credibility," Media Bias/ Fact Check website, here: Click Here
iii See, "Heritage Foundation Bias and Credibility," Media Bias/Fact Check website, here: Click Here
iv See, Jennifer Kavanagh Michael D. Rich, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life, Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2018, p. iii.
v See, the 9/11 Grassroots website, here: Click Here
vi See, " FAQ #2: Were the Twin Towers designed to withstand the impact of the airplanes?," Architects and Engineers for 9/11Truth website, here:Click Here See also, "THE WTC WAS DESIGNED TO SURVIVE THE IMPACT OF A BOEING 767, " Indymedia website, December 2, 2002, here:Click Here.
vii See, Ted Walter, Beyond Disinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade CenterBuildings 1,2, and 7, Berkeley: AER Publications, 2015, p. 4.
viii See, Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, Washington: U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology, September, 2005, Section E.3, Summary ofFindings, pp.xxxvii-xxxviii, here: Click Here
ix See the report on the environmental effects of the buildings' collapse by the National Resources Defense Council, here: Click Here
1
1
1
