9/11: Cold Case
A former Bush-appointed official is calling for a new, independent, scientific investigation into 9/11
By Daniel Boniface (editorial@boulderweekly.com)
“[Morgan Reynolds] thinks the collapse of the World Trade Center, the crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Penn., and the attack on the Pentagon were all weaved together as an elaborate inside job, a claim that only forensics can prove…”The whole thing is stupid when reason is applied to the evidence,” he says…He claims the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies are responsible for fabricating the idea of hijacked planes…”Building 7 is arguably the most potent smoking gun refuting the government account and implicating the government as creating these terrorist attacks,” Reynolds says…He likens terrorism to the perceived communist threat during the Cold War. “When you lose the Soviet Union as our big bogeyman enemy, then you have to cook up something else,” he says. “And we have the Muslim world now. One in six in the world, isn’t that great?”
With the advancements in forensics, many crimes that would otherwise go unsolved are being cracked in laboratories across the country, bringing justice and closure to victims who have suffered great atrocities. DNA and other forensic evidence is the smoking gun that ties murderers and rapists to crimes they thought they’d gotten away with.
Mainstream television is making a killing off the recent breakthroughs in police work, with shows featuring this expertise bringing in high ratings. From documentaries like Cold Case Files, to fictional programs like CSI: Miami, Americans are gripped by the drama associated with this technology.
A recent documentary featured local authorities in Seattle who studied tiny paint particles found on murder victims, eventually discovering they were from a high-grade paint used at a lone automobile paint shop in the area. The composition of the particles eventually led to the capture of serial killer Gary Ridgeway, the notorious Green River Killer.
Doubtless, scientific investigation has become the best option for solving unsolvable crimes.
And now a former Bush appointee is asking why this forensic science has not been used to its fullest in solving what was arguably the greatest crime in American history.
Morgan Reynolds, Bush’s chief economist for the Department of Labor from 2001-02, is an outspoken leader in a movement calling for a full-scale, unbiased, independent scientific study into the events of Sept. 11, 2001. He claims the story the government wants Americans to believe is riddled with inconsistencies and untruths, and he recently penned a comprehensive paper detailing those oversights. He thinks the collapse of the World Trade Center, the crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Penn., and the attack on the Pentagon were all weaved together as an elaborate inside job, a claim that only forensics can prove.
The lead up
Reynolds began working for the Bush administration on Sept. 4, 2001.
“A week later,” he says, “the gates of hell opened.”
He was sitting in his office and first heard that something was happening from an e-mail he received from his son in Kansas City. He wandered down the hall and started watching CNN’s coverage on a TV in a co-worker’s office.
“I looked at this tower on fire, black smoke, and I said, ‘That tower will not fall,'” Reynolds says.
Of course, both towers later collapsed, which he says shocked experts and amateurs alike. But at the time, he says he didn’t assume it was an inside job. He continued to work under the Bush administration for 16 months—which he says was four months too long—and was far too busy with his duties to give 9/11 a more inquisitive look.
As time went on, he began to get increasingly unhappy with Bush’s policies.
“They didn’t listen to me, except to respect my technical knowledge,” Reynolds says.
He stepped down three months prior to the invasion of Iraq, a war he opposed from the start.
“I knew that all of this was a lie,” he says. “And it’s all been confirmed. This is beyond a reasonable doubt that the Bush/Cheney administration lied us into Iraq, and now it’s not going well and more and more people are unhappy.”
The Downing Street Memo, which states that intelligence was being fixed around the policy to invade Iraq, supports this claim. His realization that Bush hadn’t been truthful about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq led him to doubt Bush on other issues.
“I said, ‘What else would they lie about?’ Well the obvious thing is 9/11. This gave them the wherewithal to do their big global domination preeminence project,” he says.
The other thing that sparked his interest was the 2004 book New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin. He concluded that Griffin made a very compelling case that the government was complicit, if not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The term “New Pearl Harbor” was taken directly from the declaration of principles in the neo-con “Project for the New American Century.” The document said, in order to succeed in their project, a significant amount of money needed to be funneled to the military annually, and this would be a slow process, save a “catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
This raised more red flags for Reynolds. He began investigating 9/11 and found very illuminating evidence that he says contradicts the government’s account of what happened. And while he is still uncertain of exactly what took place, he says he can at the very least prove the government’s tale incorrect.
He began writing an article to this effect and published it on June 9, 2005, at lewrockwell.com.
In his article, he writes, “The government’s collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms, but its blinkered narrowness and lack of breadth is the paramount defect unshared by its principle scientific rival—controlled demolition.”
Reynolds says a controlled demolition theory leaves fewer scientific questions into how the towers toppled, explains why there were so many unexplained breaches of standard operating procedure by major organizations, and explains why Bush and company were too quick to visit the site and pass major legislation in its wake.
“They knew they were in no danger, because it was an inside job,” he says. “They broke every SOP, just like if you believe the 9/11 Commission report history, then everybody from the FAA to NORAD broke standard operating rules.”
The planes and the impact
Reynolds acknowledges there are lots of theories surrounding events on 9/11, ranging from mild to wild. One of the more extreme notions circulating among conspiracy theorists is the idea that there were no planes—or at least not the types of planes the government claims were involved.
“That’s one hypothesis you have to entertain,” he says with a chuckle. “There’s no wreckage from all four crashes.”
And while some of the theories in circulation might seem extreme or ridiculous, he says he can prove that no Boeing 767 collided with the towers.
“The holes are too small,” he says. “You can’t disappear these things that way.”
In his article, Reynolds writes that the Boeing 767’s wingspan was 40 feet larger than the holes made by the impact into the Twin Towers, and the strength of the steel would have been too great even to allow the plane to penetrate the outer wall.
“If you run an aluminum plane into that thing, the plane is just going to get ripped,” he says.
He says the mass of the plane was only three one-hundredths of 1 percent of the mass of the building. The collision would have been like a mosquito running into a mosquito net. Beyond that, he says the plane never would have been able to “park” inside the building in the way it did. A Boeing 767 would take up three-quarters of the length of the building and would have certainly been stopped by the thick steel core, which took up 28 percent of the floor space in the center of the tower, he says.
“Planes don’t fold up like accordions do. They smash. They disintegrate. They break apart. The whole thing is stupid when reason is applied to the evidence,” he says.
Reynolds questions why there has not been an open scientific debate or investigation into these problems with the mainstream explanation.
“There are all kinds of problems with the conventional story. And the Pentagon hole—everybody that’s looked into it knows that the 757 Boeing didn’t crash into the Pentagon,” he says.
In referencing the Pentagon attack, he reads a line from a book he’s currently studying called Synthetic Terror by Webster Tarpley:
“This question of physical impossibility is often the most obvious weak point of the official explanations of terrorist action.”
This is the approach Reynolds takes when examining the evidence. If something is physically impossible, it could not have happened and some other explanation must be found. Among the events he believes could not have happened is the total vaporization of the plane that allegedly struck the Pentagon.
He also questions the ability of the alleged hijackers to manually crash the widebody Boeing 767s into the Twin Towers at breakneck speeds.
“I defy anybody to fly a 767 at sea level at 550 mph. Sea level? Bull shit. Pardon my French,” he says. “And then Mohammed Ata at the stick—he’s going to hit a tower 200 feet wide. Wow!”
Reynolds says all of the mainstream theory falls into the category of synthetic terror—where the poison and the antidote are brewed in the same batch. He claims the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies are responsible for fabricating the idea of hijacked planes, which would account for why the planes’ transponders were shut off for a brief period of time and why there are varying reports, including reports from the BBC, that five to eight of the alleged hijackers are still alive today.
“It’s like this ragtag bunch of patsies that they pinned it on, the 19 Arab hijackers,” he says, “it was physically impossible for them to perform these feats of flying.”
He also questions why the black cockpit flight recorder boxes were not located.
“The perps arranged a two-hour show for America. That’s what it comes down to,” he says. “I don’t believe these were conventional flights at all.”
Reynolds says amateur investigators like himself might not be able to find all the answers, but they can show where the government’s explanations are false.
“You show me another aircraft crash vaporization in history,” Reynolds says. “It’s never happened. It will never happen.”
The fire
According to the accepted story of 9/11, the towers collapsed because the jet fuel fire burned so hot that it melted the steel.
“But the number one fact is, never in the history of steel skyscrapers has one collapsed because of the intensity of the fire. Never—we’ve had over a century of experience—but for three in one day, 9/11. So that’s awfully suspicious,” says Reynolds.
According to a special feature in the journal JOM, titled “Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science, Engineering and Speculation,” by Thomas W. Eagar and Christopher Musso, the World Trade Center fire was a diffuse flame. Of the three types of fires—jet burner, pre-mixed, and diffuse—the latter, in which fuel and oxidants mix in an uncontrolled manner such as in fireplaces and at the World Trade Center, generates the lowest heat intensities.
The report also states that if jet fuel were mixed with pure oxygen, its top temperature would reach 3,000 degrees Celsius. However, when mixed with air, as it was at the World Trade Center, the temperature drops to at most one-third the maximum temperature because air includes water molecules. This temperature—1,000 degrees Celsius at most—would not be sufficient to melt steel.
“We’ve had skyscraper fires go 19 hours, very intense, very widespread and still not bring down a steel skyscraper,” Reynolds says, referring to the Meridian Plaza fire in Philadelphia in 1991.
Reynolds cites Eagar’s work in his June 9 article. Eagar is a professor of materials engineering and engineering systems at MIT. His report also refutes the idea that the aluminum in the aircraft ignited, saying extremely rare conditions are needed to ignite aluminum. Had the aluminum caught fire, the flame created would have been white hot and visible through the smoke and soot, he states.
The collapse and cover-up
Reynolds cites many problems with the government’s theory of the collapse and the subsequent reports that back up the theory. He feels the reports that support the government theory have been created so that the intelligence fits the findings. According to that theory, the steel melted near the floors where the jet fuel ignited, causing those floors to crash into the ones beneath them, bringing the buildings down.
“They don’t have the breadth of the controlled demolition theory, which can account for all of the properties that went on,” he says. “The pancake theory is preposterous. It doesn’t even pass the laugh test. It’s just stupid.”
He writes that when viewing the collapse in real time, the towers both fall at 9.8 meters per second squared—or a free-fall state. The only way he sees this being possible is if the resistance was blown away from beneath it. In the pancake theory, he claims the building would have taken longer to fall and would have stalled briefly at each floor.
The other important piece of evidence was the white dust that coated the city following the collapse. Reynolds says only an explosive force could turn reinforced concrete into dust. Subsequently, he says, the dust and debris should have been subjected to extensive forensic testing in an attempt to locate explosives residue.
“They got the evidence away as quickly as they could,” he says of government authorities.
In his article, Reynolds writes that the debris was loaded into dump trucks that were outfitted with GPS units used to monitor that the scrap was delivered from point A to point B in the proper amount of time. One driver was fired for taking an unscheduled hour-and-a-half lunch break, he says. FEMA didn’t want this debris to fall into the wrong hands, he claims.
“The wrong hands meaning scientists or engineers who could test it,” he says.
Former editor in chief of Fire Engineering Magazine, Bill Manning, was one of the first to take issue with the scoop-and-dump. Although he says he’s not a conspiracy theorist, he says there was a lot that could have been learned from the debris from an engineering standpoint. He says just like NASA and the National Transportation Safety Bureau (NTSB) learns valuable lessons from studying wreckage, engineers could have learned how to build better fire-resistant buildings from studying the debris.
However, now that the debris has been shipped off and sold as scrap, this investigation cannot take place.
Another piece of evidence that should be subjected to forensic scrutiny should be the very limited airplane wreckage found in New York, wreckage that Reynolds claims was planted because it doesn’t appear to be burned.
“It doesn’t look right,” he says. “You can kind of argue whether or not this is United Airlines gray or not, or whether it’s a dull silver. It doesn’t look right. I’m satisfied with that, that we don’t have any real parts from any of these four crashes.”
Forensic investigation into the paint and other aspects of the wreckage could reveal telling evidence about the crashes, he claims.
Building 7 and security access
“Building 7 is arguably the most potent smoking gun refuting the government account and implicating the government as creating these terrorist attacks,” Reynolds says.
It is the only steel-framed building in history to fall strictly because of fire damage, as it was not damaged by an alleged aircraft impact, he says. If one compares video of the fall of Building 7 with that of any other controlled demolition, the similarities are eerie, he says.
Reynolds claims Building 7 was a traditional building implosion, blowing out the base and letting the structure collapse into itself. He says the reason they had to implode Building 7 was to dispose of evidence that would have pointed to the controlled demolition of the Twin Towers.
“There are some reasonable doubts, but it’s a plausible theory with some arguments in its favor,” he says.
The ramifications
Reynolds thinks the points he has made prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there should be a new forensic investigation into the matter, but he is disappointed with the response of the majority of Americans who dismiss him as a conspiracy theorist.
“Overall, I think it’s the head-in-the-sand approach to danger,” he says. “This is too horrible a proposition to entertain, because if you go there, the consequences are going to be so tremendous, so let’s avoid these consequences and kind of live normally. That’s the idea. But it’s not working. You can’t live normally by believing the fairytale.”
Reynolds refers back to the book Synthetic Terror, saying the government has orchestrated this farce as a way to gain the public’s support and a way to keep pumping money into the military. He likens terrorism to the perceived communist threat during the Cold War.
“When you lose the Soviet Union as our big bogeyman enemy, then you have to cook up something else,” he says. “And we have the Muslim world now. One in six in the world, isn’t that great?”