Eyewitness Evidence of Explosions in the Twin Towers

• ‘Eyewitness Evidence of Explosions in the Twin Towers’ by Graeme MacQueen

  Many of us are convinced that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were brought down on September 11, 2001 through controlled demolition. There is no support for it either in social scientific studies of eyewitness testimony or in the scholarly literature on criminal investigation (255).Eyewitness evidence certainly has its vulnerabilities: we know that eyewitnesses can misperceive, misremember and deceive. Moreover, eyewitness evidence is highly relevant to the investigation of explosions. But both of these organizations make extensive use of eyewitness evidence and obviously consider it valid and important. One especially important source of eyewitness testimony is the oral histories of the Fire Department of New York (technically, World Trade Center Task Force Interviews), released in 2005 by the City of New York (257).

• The explosion hypothesis was common on 9/11

  In discussions of the events of 9/11, it is often implied that the original, obvious, and natural hypothesis concerning the destruction of the Twin Towers is some variety of gravity-driven collapse. Suddenly, through their camera we see the North Tower begin to throw pulverized debris in all directions in huge plumes as it disintegrates. There’s no goddamn way that could have happened!” (263). That is, people were already debating a subcategory of the explosion hypothesis, the controlled demolition hypothesis, before 10:30 on the morning of 9/11.The FBI’s name for its investigation of the 9/11 incidents is PENTTBOM, which stands for “Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing Investigation.” Is it possible that when this name was assigned someone in the FBI thought a bombing had taken place? ( However, the general hypothesis ascribed here to the FBI - the buildings were brought down through the use of explosives - was common on 9/11. That many people held this theory does not mean it is correct, but it suggests that if this theory is to be rejected it must be rejected on the basis of evidence, not because it is regarded as late, unnatural, exotic or conspiratorial.

• There is strong eyewitness evidence supporting the explosion hypothesis.

  The eyewitness evidence is strong in terms of both quality and quantity. The quality of the evidence is found in the richly detailed, mutually corroborating accounts of what was witnessed. At the same time, the quantity of evidence is impressive in both the number and variety of eyewitnesses who discuss explosions in their statements.

• Quality

  A conversation between Dennis Tardio and Pat Zoda about the destruction of the North Tower was captured on film by the Naudet brothers on the day of 9/11 (266).Tardio and Zoda repeatedly affirm each other’s accounts, both with words and with hand gestures. This discussion of the architect is also important because of its wider significance. It looked like it was a timed explosion, but I guess it was just the floors starting to pancake one on top of the other.”James Drury says in his statement about the North Tower:“…we started to hear the second roar. That was the north tower now coming down. Thus, we have clear evidence of both how common the explosive demolition theory was on 9/11, and how it was later marginalized – not by sound science but by speculative theories given a stamp of approval by authority figures.

• 1. Sound

  Keane: “A couple of minutes later, it sounded like bombs going off. That’s when the explosions happened.”

• 2. Positive blast pressure phase

  “The windows blew in…we all got thrown.” “Each one of those explosions picked me up and threw me.”

• 3. Partial vacuum during positive blast pressure phase

  “There was this incredible rush of air, and it literally sucked the breath out of my lungs.”

• 4. Negative blast pressure phase

  “Everything went out of me with this massive wind… Stuff was just flying past. Then it stopped and got really quiet, and then everything came back at us. I could breathe at this point, but now I was sucking all that stuff in, too.

• 5. Incendiary or thermal effect

  “…he threw me under the hose, which in a way felt great, because I didn’t realize until then that my skin was actually burning. I had burn marks, not like you’d have from a fire, but my face was all red, my chest was red.”

• 6. Fragmentation and shrapnel

  “…there was stuff coming out of my body like you wouldn’t believe. It’s still coming out.”The handwritten PAPD report of this brave and obviously traumatized individual, which corroborates the above account in several crucial respects, is directly available in the PAPD documents released in 2003 (272). One page of that report is reproduced as follows. On what reasonable grounds can we exclude Sue Keane’s statements as we attempt to determine the causes of the destruction of the Twin Towers?In summary, the eyewitness testimony of Tardio/Zoda, Lemos and Keane are examples of “quality,” meaning evidence that is rich in detail. Below, the issue of “quantity” of eyewitness evidence is considered.

• Quantity

  It is difficult to formulate a complete account of eyewitnesses who describe, expressly or implicitly, explosions near the time of the destruction of the Twin Towers. Neither the FBI, nor the 9/11 Commission, nor the National Institute of Standards and Technology have published a count. I have compiled the most complete known list of witnesses to explosions at the Twin Towers. The two graphs presented below summarize certain aspects of the list.

• FIGURE 8-1: WITNESSES BY PROFESSION/AGENCY

  Of the 156 eyewitnesses, 121 are from the Fire Department of New York. As expected, with respect to 9/11, the distorting tendencies in recollection have worked against the explosion hypothesis, for the simple reason that people progressively adjusted their stories as time went on to better accord with what they were being told by authority figures (273).Before discussing the next graph, it is appropriate to describe how the list of explosion witnesses was compiled. However, the “bomb” category, with 32 eyewitnesses, is extremely important as well. The third objection is the only one that can be taken seriously. It is this: there are many natural forms of explosion that occur in large fires, and the mere fact that there were explosions does not mean that explosives were used.

• FIGURE 8-2: WITNESSES BY TERM USED

  The types of explosions that typically accompany a fire are described in detail in various publications, probably most authoritatively in the National Fire Protection Association’s Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations. There the NFPA describes four types of explosion that would have been expected to accompany the fires in the Twin Towers. BLEVE (“boiling-liquid-expanding-vapor-explosion,” as with an exploding boiler)Electrical explosionSmoke explosion (i.e. backdraft)Combustion explosion (e.g., natural gas, jet fuel vapor)There are three characteristics of the eyewitness statements that rule out all four types of explosion. That is, these four sorts of explosions may well have occurred, but they do not account for the main explosions witnesses say they perceived. Here are the three characteristics that must be explained.

• Identification

  If the explosions encountered were the type typically encountered in fires, the firefighters would be expected to recognize them as such and name them. There are very few instances where they do so. On the contrary, they clearly feel these were different types of explosion than those they were used to encountering, as evidenced by, for example, the number of references to bombs.

• Power

  Many eyewitnesses clearly thought they were watching explosions destroy the Twin Towers (“I looked up, and the building exploded…The whole top came off like a volcano”). But none of the common four types of fire-related explosions could accomplish this. Recall that according to NIST, the Twin Towers were essentially intact beneath the point where they were hit by the planes. While BLEVEs and combustion explosions sometimes destroy structures such as wood frame houses, there are no examples of these explosions causing the destruction of such robust steel structures as are at issue here. Also, there is no evidence that the right conditions for such explosions (for example, the necessary quantities of natural gas or jet fuel) existed in the Twin Towers at the time their dramatic destruction began.

• Pattern

  As described above, many eyewitnesses reported regular, rapid energetic events in sequence down the building, which cannot be explained by any of the four common types of explosion. If these patterned ejections are the result of explosions, they can only be explosions resulting from explosives.

• Eyewitness evidence was ignored/suppressed by the 9/11 Commission and NIST

  The discussion above gives a brief overview of the eyewitness testimony available to investigators. Of course, a careful examination of the available eyewitness testimony, as set forth above, would show that it is categorically false that all or most of the explosion witnesses were in the upper floors of the North Tower, and that only those with an impeded view thought a bomb had exploded. The National Institute of Standards and Technology gave even worse treatment to the eyewitness testimony. One of NIST’s stated objectives is to “determine why and how WTC 1 and WTC 2 collapsed following the initial impacts of the aircraft” (275). Although Chapter 7 is not about the destruction of the Towers, elsewhere NIST explicitly recognizes the relevance of eyewitness evidence to the understanding of how the buildings came down (278). Whether this is evidence of incompetence or of deliberate cover-up is irrelevant to my present argument.

• 255) The importance of eyewitnesses in criminal investigation is affirmed in such publications as: Charles Regini, “The Cold Case Concept,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Aug. 1997; Charles Welford and James Cronin, “Clearing up Homicide Clearance Rates,” National Institute of Justice Journal, April, 2000; and Vivian Lord, “Implementing a Cold Case Homicide Unit: A Challenging Task,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Feb. 2005. Among social scientists an attack against naive acceptance of eyewitness evidence (and especially against a naive view of human memory) was led some time ago by Harvard’s Elizabeth Loftus. Lexis Law Publishing, Charlottesville, 3rd ed., Available online at: http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060118104223192260) Graeme MacQueen, “118 Witnesses: the Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers.” Journal of 9/11 Studies, 2006, p. 47. See Loftus and Doyle, p. 54: “The ‘contamination’ of recollection can occur through witnesses talking to other witnesses, through questions asked by authorities, by media accounts.” And in the same volume (p. 98): “it has been shown that highly credible people can manipulate others more readily. National Institute of Standards and Technology.

• https://propagandainfocus.substack.com/p/eyewitness-evidence-of-explosions-in-the-twin-towers