To: Cy Vance, Jr. District Attorney of New York County;
Thomas Wornom, Bureau Chief, Special Prosecutions Bureau
New York County District Attorney Office
ATTN: Special Prosecutions Bureau
1 Hogan Place, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10013
June 18, 2010
Dear Sirs:
I trust that by now you have watched footage of World Trade Center 7’s destruction,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0pTj8ulP0g
and read the witness statements sent to your office by hundreds of citizens.
If so, I also trust that you are gravely concerned and determined to fulfill your responsibility to investigate the destruction of Building 7.
Due to the illegal destruction of evidence at the Building 7 site — which I will discuss in my letter to you next week — evidence that Building 7 was intentionally demolished will have to be derived primarily from expert analysis of video footage, and scientific analysis of the little remaining physical evidence.
The evidence that I ask you to please examine, discussed fully below my signature, involves:
1) The sudden free fall descent of the entire structure of Building 7 for approximately 105 feet, or 8 stories, over a period of approximately 2.25 seconds,
as officially acknowledged – but not explained – by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in its final report on Building 7 issued in November 2008.
2) NIST’s failure to produce a collapse model that reproduces the observed destruction of Building 7, and its failure to release its model to the public for independent verification, which renders NIST’s report non-falsifiable, unscientific and therefore fraudulent.
[ … but not to bj and albury .. ]
3) A melted steel member from Building 7 indicating highly exothermic reactions that can be explained only by the presence of incendiaries used to demolish the building.
Again, thank you for your attention to this most important matter.
Respectfully,
(1) Free Fall Descent
In its July 2008 Draft Report for Public Comment, NIST initially claimed that Building 7 collapsed 40% slower than free fall acceleration.[i] NIST’s lead technical investigator, Shyam Sunder, stated in the WTC 7 technical briefing that free fall could only happen when an object “has no structural components below it.”[ii] And as experts will testify, the only way this can be achieved in a building is to remove the structural components with explosives.
A concerned citizen and high school physics teacher named David Chandler objected to NIST’s initial claim, pointing out that, based on video footage of Building 7’s destruction, NIST’s claim contradicted “a publicly visible, easily measurable quantity.”[iii] Mr. Chandler wrote a comment to NIST, saying, “Acknowledgement of and accounting for an extended period of free fall in the collapse of WTC 7 must be a priority if NIST is to be taken seriously.”[iv]
Responding to the criticism, NIST in its final report issued in November 2008 did finally acknowledge that Building 7 descended at free fall. “This free fall drop continued for approximately 8 stories, or 32.0 meters (105 ft), the distance traveled between times t = 1.75 s and t = 4.0 s [a period of 2.25 seconds].”[v] However, NIST did not attempt to explain how Building 7’s free fall descent could have occurred.
Although NIST did not explain the acknowledged free fall descent of Building 7, Mr. Chandler does account for it in Part 3 of his video, NIST Finally Admits Freefall, saying:[vi]
“In the case of a falling building, the only way it can go into free fall is if an external force removes the supporting structure. None of the gravitational potential energy of the building is available for this purpose, or it would slow the fall of the building. The fact of free fall by itself is strong evidence of explosive demolition, but the evidence of explosive demolition is even stronger than that.”
Mr. Chandler goes on to describe two particular attributes of Building 7’s free fall descent that make the evidence for explosive demolition even more overwhelming:
“What is particularly striking is the suddenness of onset of free fall.
Acceleration doesn’t build up gradually.
The graph [measuring the building’s descent] simply turns a corner.
The building went from full support to zero support instantly.”
Secondly:
“The onset of freefall was not only sudden, it extended across the whole width of the building…
The fact the roof stayed level shows the building was in free fall across the entire width.”
Mr. Chandler summarizes the meaning of these observations, saying:
“The collapse we see cannot be due to a column failure, or a few column failures, or a sequence of column failures. All 24 interior columns and 58 perimeter columns had to have been removed over the span of 8 floors low in the building simultaneously to within a small fraction of a second, and in such a way that the top half of the building remains intact and uncrumpled.”
Mr. Chandler’s analysis has been validated by the expert opinions of dozens of structural engineers associated with the organization Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth,[vii] who will confirm based on their professional experience and knowledge of steel-frame structures that free fall cannot be achieved unless the supporting structure is removed with explosives.
(2) Inaccurate and Non-falsifiable Collapse Model
More than six years after starting its investigation, NIST issued its final report on Building 7 in November 2008. The most important part of NIST’s report was a collapse model that bore no resemblance to the observed collapse. In Part 3 of NIST Finally Admits Freefall, Mr. Chandler explains the centrality of the model in NIST’s investigation:
“NIST’s so-called investigation actually consists of finding a way to reproduce the mysterious collapse of the building using a computer model. The assumption is that if the computer model can be made to reproduce the observed collapse pattern, that must be how it happened… The very process of running the model until it produces the kind of results you’re looking for is called selection bias. If you think about it, NIST’s methodology is explicitly based on selection bias. Even if you can show what might have happened, it doesn’t show what actually did happen.”
So, despite adjusting its inputs to achieve the desired result, the NIST model does not come close to reproducing the observed collapse:[viii]
This is also apparent by watching the two video animations of NIST’s collapse model and comparing them to video footage of the observed collapse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC0U36QWWAA
The clearest discrepancy is the deformation of the external structure in the model, which does not occur in the observed collapse. Mr. Chandler identifies a second glaring discrepancy, saying:
“One fact we do know about NIST’s model is it does not allow for free fall.
The best they could do is 5.4 seconds for the building to crumple down through 18 floors.
Crumpling absorbs energy, and that makes free fall impossible.
There’s nothing in the models we have been shown that even resemble a three-stage collapse with a free fall component.
After all, as Shyam Sunder put it himself, ‘free fall happens only when there are no structural components below the falling section of the building.’
Any natural scenario is going to involve a progression of failures and these don’t happen instantaneously.”
Although NIST’s model is false, based on its failure to reproduce the observed collapse,
it cannot be falsified because NIST did not release its modeling data. Mr. Chandler explains:
“NIST claims their computer model can account for the observed phenomena, so let’s look at NIST’s model — except we can’t. The software they used to do the modeling is available, but their model actually consists of all the numbers and measurements and assumptions together with any tweaks to the system they might have used to get it to come out they way the wanted. If that information were released, their results could be checked by anyone with the appropriate skills and software tools. But NIST has not released the numbers. All we have been shown are some of the selected animated outputs they were able to get their model to produce… The very fact that NIST has not released their model strongly suggests they don’t want their results checked. In other words, their results are intended to be taken strictly on faith.”
Non-falsifiable findings requiring faith to be accepted as true are the very definition of non-science. By purporting to conduct a scientific investigation but making its findings non-falsifiable, NIST committed scientific fraud. This fraud is a strong indication that NIST’s intention was to cover up the demolition of Building 7.
(3) Evidence of Exothermic Reactions Produced by Incendiaries
Ignoring the Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations put out by the National Fire Protection Association, NIST did not test for evidence of explosives, because, according to NIST spokesperson Michael Newman, “If you’re looking for something that isn’t there, you’re wasting your time… and the tax payers’ money.”[ix]
NIST also claimed that no steel was recovered from Building 7.
While it is true that virtually all of the steel from Building 7 was destroyed illegally, this claim blatantly contradicted Appendix C of the FEMA Building Performance Study, which called for further study of a piece of steel recovered from Building 7 that had experienced a “severe high temperature corrosion attack.”[x] The Worcester Polytechnic Institute Journal, Transformations, described this piece of steel, saying:[xi]
“A one-inch column has been reduced to half-inch thickness. Its edges — which are curled like a paper scroll — have been thinned to almost razor sharpness. Gaping holes — some larger than a silver dollar — let light shine through a formerly solid steel flange. This Swiss cheese appearance shocked all of the fire-wise professors, who expected to see distortion and bending — but not holes.”
The authors of Appendix C explained that, “the severe erosion found in several beams [in the debris field of Building 7] warranted further consideration.”[xii] [Underline added for emphasis] They hypothesized that a eutectic formed in the steel at approximately 1000° C due to a slow sulfidation process in the debris pile, however, independent researchers challenged this hypothesis, arguing that: [xiii]
“[T]o form a molten iron-oxygen-sulfur eutectic at about 1000° C would require a very high concentration of sulfur… The fact that sulfur evaporates at a low temperature, 445° C, along with the very low levels of elemental sulfur in office buildings appears to preclude the possibility that the eutectic could have formed as a result of a slow sulfidation process in the debris pile.”
The authors of Appendix C concluded by saying, “No clear explanation for the source of sulfur has been identified,” however, independent researchers have discovered a simple explanation for the source of sulfur by testing several dust samples collected near the WTC site. In their paper, entitled Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, nine researchers, led by chemist Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen, conclude:[xiv]
“[T]he red layer of the red/gray chips we have discovered in the WTC dust is active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material.”
On the other hand, NIST ignored FEMA’s data and asserted that steel temperatures in Building 7 never exceeded 600° C.[xv]
As the District Attorney of New York County, you have the power to subpoena and perform tests on the melted steel member from Building 7, which should be in the possession of FEMA or NIST, and to subpoena and perform tests on the remaining WTC dust samples currently in the possession of the USGS.
[i] National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), ‘Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 — Draft for Public Comment,” Washington, DC. August 2008. Chapter 3 p.41. https://wtc.nist.gov/media/NIST_NCSTAR_1A_for_public_comment.pdf
[ii] NIST WTC 7 Technical Briefing, August 26, 2008. https://911speakout.org/NIST_Tech_Briefing_Transcript.pdf Transcript p.16
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Quoted by David Ray Griffin, “The Mysterious Collapse of WTC 7: Why NIST’s Final 9/11 Report is Unscientific and False,” GlobalResearch.ca, September 14, 2009. https://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15201
[v]NIST NCSTAR 1A, “Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7,” Washington, DC. November 2008. p.45 https://wtc.nist.gov/NCSTAR1/
[vi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3mudruFzNw
[vii] https://AE911Truth.org
[viii] NIST NCSTAR 1–9A, “Global Structural Analysis of the Response of World Trade Center Building 7 to Fires and Debris Impact Damage,” Washington, DC. November 2008. p.111. https://wtc.nist.gov/NCSTAR1/NCSTAR1-9index.htm
[ix] Jennifer Abel, “Theories of 9/11,” Hartford Advocate, January 29, 2008. https://www.ae911truth.org/press/23
[x] Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), “World Trade Center Building Performance Study,” Washington DC. May 1, 2002, Appendix C, p.1–13. https://www.fema.gov/rebuild/mat/wtcstudy.shtm
[xi] JKM, “The ‘Deep Mystery’ of Melted Steel,” WPI — Transformations https://www.wpi.edu/News/Transformations/2002Spring/steel.html
[xii] Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), “World Trade Center Building Performance Study,” Washington DC. May 1, 2002, Appendix C, p.1. https://www.fema.gov/rebuild/mat/wtcstudy.shtm
[xiii] Jones, Farrer, Jenkins, Legge, Gourley, Ryan, Farnsworth, Grabbe, “Extremely high temperatures during the World Trade Center Destruction,” Journal of 9/11 Studies, January 19, 2008. https://journalof911studies.com/articles/WTCHighTemp2.pdf
[xiv] Harrit, Farrer, Jones, Ryan, Legge, Farnsworth, Roberts, Gourley, Larsen, “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” Bentham Open Access, 2009. https://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM
[xv] NIST, “Questions and Answers About the NIST WTC 7 Investigation,” Updated 04/21/2009. https://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/factsheet/wtc_qa_082108.cfm