From 9/11 to 3/11, Part 1, a personal journey.

"Science" used for deception vs using actual science.

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{Note: I don’t capitalize “i”  unless it starts a sentence.  “You,” he,” “she,” “we,” “they” are not capitalized likewise.  It’s my rebellious stance against the self-centeredness and self-absorption which are so prevalent in this culture.]

As everyone knew by the evening of September 11. 2001, aka “9/11,” the world had changed forever, nothing would ever be the same again. Many government policies and social mores which were not considered remotely acceptable as of the previous day became completely accepted.

Indeed, these changes were lauded by the vast majority of Americans and inhabitants of other advanced industrial nations. They had become convinced that their safety was threatened by “foreign terrorists.”. Many fundamental changes occurred in the way people live and interact. The vast majority of these changes have not been reversed.

As drastic as these developments were, they were dwarfed by events which took place in the first three months of 2020, culminating with the declaration of a global pandemic emergency by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, exactly 18 and a half years after the first event, in other words almost exactly a full lunar nodal cycle.

Many articles have analyzed the parallels between the two events. In this one here, i will focus on how the official narrative in both situations, and even much of the opposition narrative, have relied upon the general ignorance of the public in regards to science.

Indeed the cultivation of phobia about the very idea of informing one’s self of these matters, in the face of official explanations of what was going on, explanations completely at odds with actual science, has been normalized.

Such an attitude inevitably leads to the desired result, “leave it to the experts, listen to what they say, do what they tell you to do.” The New York Times even informed its readers that they should eschew doing their own research because they couldn’t possibly properly understand what they find.

THE DAY IT STARTED

I encountered this myself in regard to 9/11 in a very direct and striking way. I say “striking” given that unlike most people i have a degree in engineering (mechanical engineering, City University of New York, 1970), and before that went to a science-oriented high school, The Bronx High School of Science.

I was basically channeled into engineering by my parents since i was old enough to have math classes at school. But this did not prevent me from initially in general accepting the official explanations of what had transpired on 9/11.

Throughout this education, and through my brief stint as a mechanical engineer in the corporate world, one point was repeatedly drummed into me: engineers and scientists specialize in specific areas. And going with what the experts say and write is the ticket to success or at least to not being socially marginalized. “One day you too will be an expert in something” was also part of this message.

So, i woke up on the morning of 9/11 at 6:30AM California time and stumbled into the bathroom, preparing for a day of work teaching second year calculus to UC Berkeley students, mostly engineering and physical sciences majors. Being an instructor of stat and math at this academic research center had been my job since early 1973.

I turned on the bathroom radio to get my dose of the usual-that-time-of-day mellow music from my local (Berkeley) Pacifica station, KPFA, to accompany me while i did the shower and got dressed. Instead, i was hearing jumbled news reports, quickly picking up on the story that planes have impacted the WTC towers.

Within a couple of minutes, the station’s most senior news person had taken over from the morning’s usual crew of interns and second level on-air personnel. They informed us that the US was under attack by “terrorists” who had flown two hijacked airliners into the towers, and that there was news of a truck bomb at the Pentagon. The story there had morphed by end of the hour into one of a hijacked airliner being flown into the building.

Once out of the bathroom, i decided to just turn on CNN. Little did i expect what i was to see. CNN’s coverage, anchored at that point by Aaron Brown, was continually showing the two burning towers, and a re-run of the video showing a plane flying into the second tower hit, WTC2, the South Tower.

No video had yet surfaced of a plane impact with WTC1, the North Tower. This was not surprising, as the number of media cameras providing live coverage of the towers went from zero to hundreds after the first impact. Indeed, only one video of that first impact has ever surfaced, shot by two French video makers, the Naudet brothers. They were making a documentary about the New York Fire Department, and just “happened” to be in the right place at the right time to capture that event.

Within a quarter hour or so, quite suddenly, WTC2 came crashing down, pretty much descending vertically with some large debris appearing to be cast off horizontally. The tone of the coverage turned hysterical. We soon got street level looks at terrified people running away.

The fact that the second building hit came down first, 56 minutes after impact, did not make an impression on me. I was too much in shock. Things got even worse after another half hour or so when WTC1 came down in exactly the same way, 102 minutes after it was hit, in a more direct manner.

After that, videos of the two collapses were being run almost constantly. Some commentary began surfacing about how this was most likely the work of Islamic terrorists, soon narrowed to al Qaeda.

All i could think of was what i would tell my students. I decided i should focus on turning down the heat on any war fever, and grasped on to the idea which was quickly to become prevalent on the left and even “ultra left,” a political milieu i had been a part of since the early 1970s.

This was an attitude which was to become known as “Blowback.” According to it, 9/11 was a consequence of terrible things that the US government had done in the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and Latin America over the years; the chickens had come home to roost. And, consequently., we were to better not keep the cycle of violence going by responding with more and disproportionate violence.

This is what i told my students. A few of whom wanted to go and bomb someone (especially one student who was from New York, where i grew up). But they generally listened politely. In fact, they seemed incredibly willing to just go on and talk about math as quickly as possible.

Once back home from work after the work day, including a trip to the Farmers Market where it seemed no one wanted at all to talk about what had happened, i turned on the TV. And i soon was astounded to see a third steel frame hi rise come down in seconds.

The audience was told it was apparently “undermined” by the two earlier collapses. The coverage quickly pivoted back to the day’s main story. I just didn’t have it together to question what i had seen, but something about the whole thing just struck me wrong.

The next day, i was scheduled to see my now-deceased friend Tod Fletcher, to discuss an article he had been writing for posting on line. It was about the then-recent crackdown on anti-globalization protesters at the G7 summit in Genoa, Italy.

We met on campus by the famous Campanile Tower on campus. Soon we began whispering to each other that there was something about the whole thing which smacked of a government operation, though we couldn’t figure out why or how.

I also started reading anything i could find online from the dissident community. Most of it went along the “blowback” line. People were increasingly using that very term. I did see Mike Ruppert, a writer whom i had been reading regarding the “war on drugs” via his articles in High Times and his own webpage, start raising questions about government foreknowledge.

But he was emphatic that the newly-offered official explanation of what had happened to the WTC towers, that the fires from the plane impacts had melted the steel the structures were made of, was totally sound. He stated that questions about that explanation were a dead-end diversion.

Tod was more Web savvy than me, had better access. He also did not have a nearly full time job, meaning he had a lot more free time. So he looked and looked, and provided me with a stream of information.

So did a new show on KPFA, Guns and Butter. It had initially been created to focus on the worsening global economic situation (something which was quickly forgotten after 9/11), and on the coming crisis of Peak Oil. But soon it started presenting questions about what had transpired, featuring Mike Ruppert among other people.

I also saw an article about how the laws of physics definitively contradicted the notion that the fires could have melted the towers. But within a week of 9/11, that first official explanation had been discarded in favor of a new one.

The new story was that the fires weakened the structural steel of the columns anchoring the frames of the towers and made it impossible for them to support the weight of the buildings. My mind was too overwhelmed, my self-confidence in understanding structures too inadequate, for me to question this account, no matter that the first account was such a blatant lie.

I was well trained as a mechanical engineer. Thus i knew that my specialty was mechanical systems, anything which involved motion, be it engines, heating/ventilating/air conditioning systems, moving vehicles (cars, elevators, trains,...), assembly lines,...

Structures however were the province of civil engineers, specifically structural engineers, especially ones deemed “experts.” I would be laughed at if i were to question their pronouncements. This i learned not only in my classes, but also in the summer jobs i held during my college years and my one job as an engineer after i graduated.

Never mind all the classes i had in basic structures/structural materials and the follow-up lab course, a year of metallurgy/materials science, lots of thermodynamics/heat transfer, and lots of stress analysis. These fields of knowledge are needed when designing anything from a tiny gadget to an industrial facility.

I may have turned during the first several years of my post-college-graduation life into someone advocating a complete rebellion against capitalism. But i did not question such notions of narrow expertise. I did not do so even with my experience over the years around 3 Mile Island, toxic waste dumps, and GMOs. After all, a few “experts” did break ranks and come out to support the anti-corporate perspective on those events.

On the other hand, no “experts” were speaking out regarding 9/11. A few web pages were questioning the official story, but i wasn’t familiar with them. And besides, none of them were done by engineers or even credentialed scientists.

Tod and i had been doing deep questioning since the early ‘90s about the mechanistic materialism paradigm which has dominated science since the Middle Ages. This is a paradigm whose dominant metaphor for understanding real world phenomena is that of the mechanism or the machine. But this questioning did not seem to matter much at this point.

September turned into October. I was busy being a worker, dealing with preparing students for midterms, and with growing activity opposing what appeared to be a likely US attack on Afghanistan. This we were told by KPFA programmers was to be our sole focus, never mind “conspiracy theories” about the events.

These involved questions about the passenger lists not including any of the alleged hijackers. And questions were being raised about the flight trajectory of the plane which allegedly hit the Pentagon. This path involved a corkscrew descent doing a 270 degrees turn, something which would be hard for an experienced pilot flying a jet fighter, let alone a hijacker with near zero flight experience flying an airliner.

The correct line, we were told, was to oppose war moves while putting forth the “alternative” of “improved security measures” and “better intelligence coordination.” No wonder we could stop neither the war nor the PATRIOT Act.

This was a strategy guaranteed to fail. It relied entirely upon self-righteousness and moralistic appeals to a populace scared out of its wits. It did not involve any questioning of the alleged basis in reality of that fear.

Some people did begin to speak out. Mike Ruppert began doing a lecture tour, presenting evidence of US government foreknowledge. But he rigorously lashed out at those who raised the matter of physical evidence. He also put forth pieces about the US government plans for a war in Central Asia to guarantee control by the US over strategic global resources.

Meanwhile, a small “ultra-left” group i had been working with, doing a web page, was coming apart, with one of the participants starting to go on blatantly racist rants about Central Asia and Muslims. Another one, while not racist, did buy the line of “Islamic fascism is behind this.” And the third just trying to keep on good terms with everyone. Our group was history by late November, though i kept the webpage, in fact revived it in 2010 with Tod.

Then, a woman named Soula, whom i had been casual friends with, who had started sending 9/11-related material to her friends via email, told me that the Guns and Butter hosts, Bonnie Faulkner and Kellia Ramarez, were organizing a group of people with left background who were questioning the official story. We coalesced into an actual group by February ’02. It was called the Consortium. Our first gathering being an outing to Mike Ruppert’s lecture as his tour got to San Francisco that month.

We raised lots of questions about US government foreknowledge and the possibility it allowed the attacks to take place. But we heeded Ruppert’s admonitions to eschew physical evidence, in no small part because many in the group felt their grasp of science was not good enough to figure out such stuff. Some of them almost seemed proud about their supposed inability to understand basic science or anything which required the retention of learned science material.

In September ’02, i came across a web piece by someone named Jeff King from Massachusetts, with science/engineering background. It raised questions about the timing of the collapses of the Twin Towers. i.e. that the time it took for them to collapse was almost the same as it would have been for the roofs to come down to ground level were they facing nothing but air resistance, though they came down though many dozens of floors of steel and concrete. This time of descent thus appeared to be violating the laws of physics.

I also became aware that large structural members were cast off horizontally from the Twin Towers as they came down, an apparent violation of Newton’s First Law, that the net force in any direction acting upon an object is equal to the product of the mass of the object in question and its acceleration. This would require a horizontal force in a situation in which gravity was alleged to be the only force involved. The matter stewed in my mind for months.

In March ’03, the war was extended to Iraq, and again a mass mobilization took place in the streets, on a much bigger scale than for the Afghan war. The public was appealed to on the basis that “Iraq didn’t carry out 9/11.” Not surprisingly, the mass demonstrations in late ’02 and early ’03 failed to stop the war.

The day after the war was launched, at an anti-war march, i met a guy named Jim Hoffman, who was handing out stuff about the WTC towers, and indeed about WTC7, the third hi rise that came down on 9/11. This was a matter i had totally forgotten about. His handout totally shredded the official story by basically using just 8th grade science to disprove the official story.

I emailed Jeff King to inquire about this. The next thing i knew, i was in an email discussion group with King, Hoffman and several other people. Some members of the Consortium began showing interest, and we ourselves coalesced into a local physical evidence group. Hoffman went on to create a site which is very informative about all things related to the WTC.

Other members of the Consortium and of the San Francisco 9/11 Truth group strongly opposed our efforts as being “divisive” and “guaranteed to go nowhere.” And other members simply expressed their felt inability to deal with this matter. Science wasn’t their thing, never had been their thing, and it intimidated them.

One member even sent our list a claim that WTC7 was destroyed by a pulse of heat from the main towers after they had disintegrated which traveled through the ground, via “convection.” This is absolute garbage, but some people believed it because they knew this person and trusted this member. I did not accept this notion at all, and neither did others, so this time we fully pushed back, confident in out analysis.

Ruppert attempted to intervene in a major way, even defended his retention on his page of the article from 9/13/01 supporting the original “fires melted the buildings” official story, though now that official story was in its third version, having discarded the “column theory” as well.

In 2002 the official story had become the “truss failure theory.” It claimed that horizontal structural supports called trusses expanded due to heat, and snapped free of the vertical support columns they allegedly were not secured to, causing the columns to fall outwardly. This is what was shown on TV specials (e.g. PBS) as the “pancaking” effect.

In November ’03 Ruppert admitted being wrong, but still insisted the physical evidence was a dead end, He was to do so till his death by suicide in 2014.

It wasn’t till March 2004, at an international 9/11 truth gathering in San Francisco, at which Jim Hoffman did a knockout presentation on the WTC, that the tide fully turned in the truth movement. That same year, David Ray Griffin put out a book about “The New Pearl Harbor,” a deep questioning of the official story which even raised the matter of the three WTC collapses.

Griffin was an academic who had been prominent in the articulation of process philosophy, the paradigm which is the alternative to mechanistic materialism. Tod was also quite involved with this milieu. Via a mutual friend of theirs, Tod connected with Griffin. He later on came to edit Griffin’s subsequent numerous books about the subject till the day Tod died in 2014.

A fourth version of the official WTC explanation was issued in September 2005, contradicting the first three as well as the physical evidence and laws of physics, just like the other three versions before it. There was something about this report which set the stage for today’s lies.

The report, published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, an arm of the US Department of Commerce, admitted that of the 170 structural steel samples examined by its analysts, 167 of 170 did not even reach 250 deg C (482 deg F). The other three did not reach 600 deg C (1112 deg F) needed for structural steel to lose 50% of its strength.

This 50% loss of strength was what versions 2 and 3, claimed had happened. Yet this report too stuck to this claim, and asserted that the structural steel reached temps of 1400 deg F, on the basis of computer models.

By the way, the claimed temperature is the temperature which the fires reached per the computer model. Thus, an assumption was made that fire temps instantly translate to steel temps. This is a highly inaccurate assumption given the ability of steel to conduct away heat. And these were only short-term sir temps, not sustained for very long.

When asked by Jennifer Abel of the Hartford Advocate why there was no attempt to look for evidence of explosives in the WTC wreckage, A NIST spokesperson named Michael Newman responded that there was no need for that since the investigators knew there was no such evidence present. This line of “reasoning” and usage of computer models as if they are the same as material reality was to return in a different form in 2020.

Like versions 2 and 3, this “explanation” of what happened to the Twin Towers assumed that the process of destruction involved the top portions (above the plane impact zones) acted like pile drivers, destroying lower portions. The videos of the collapses, however, show that both top portions disintegrated during the descent.

In fact one of them, WTC2, clearly tilted away from the vertical orientation it had while intact, before ceasing to do so and disintegrating. [See photo at the top of thei article] This in itself is a highly incriminating development given the law of conservation of angular momentum, which would have dictated continued rotation barring a large opposite force.

The WTC1 top also began disintegrating before it started to descend, as evidenced on videos by the antenna on the roof, which begun to descend before the top section as a whole began doing so. But then, this report openly stated in its beginning that the analysis was not gonna deal with anything which happened after the collapses were initiated, enabling the blatant disregarding of the observable physical evidence.

None of the four versions of the official story as to what happened to the Twin Towers was/is compatible with the physical evidence and the laws of physics, and the versions were/are all mutually contradictory. See “Expert vs Expert” by professional (i.e. licensed) civil engineer Jonathan Cole. Version 4 remains to this day the official story regarding what happened to the Twin Towers.

At first, the naysayers focused on how “none of you is a scientist.” Then, physicist Steven Jones of Brigham Young U came forth with a devastating attack on the official story. “Well, he isn’t an engineer.” Then, Judy Wood, an ME professor from Clemson, came forth, but “she is not a civil engineering.” (Wood unfortunately was to eventually go off in a bad direction)

Then, architects came forth, including one living in the San Francisco Bay Area named Richard Gage who heard Griffin interviewed on Guns and Butter on a drive home from work, looked at things, and decided to jump right in. Gage went on to found Architects and Engineers For 9/11 Truth, which gathered together people with degrees in engineering and architecture who were critical of the official narrative.

Some of these were civil engineers too. “But they are nut wings, and besides not structural engineers.” Then structural engineers joined in. One of them is Roland Angle, professional structural engineer with a degree from UC Berkeley who was trained in the US Army’s Special Forces in demolition. He is the current head of AE911Truth, who in May 2023 delivered two talks. One was about WTC7,

the other about the Twin Towers.

At that point we were told that this was old stuff, no one cares any more. Some members of the truth movement to this day still insist the official story in all its mutually contradictory versions, all of which contradict the laws of physics and the physical evidence, is correct.

American society at large, and most people in the world, still believe the official story, as do most members of the “left” and “ultra left,” in spite of challenges such as the Web article in 2010 by Griffin. “Left Despisers of 9/11 Truth: Do You Believe In Miracles”? It featured 9 open violations of the laws of physics which one would have to overlook in order to believe the official narrative, in other words events which apparently came about due to miracles.

One of these “miracles” involved the ample evidence of molten steel and iron spheres found in the WTC dust. This presence would require steel and iron to melt, meaning temperatures of 2800 deg F, over 1000 deg F above any temperature possibly resulting from hydrocarbon fires (a maximum which the fires did not remotely reach). It would also require the violent flinging of the molten metals over large distances, needed to render them into spherical shapes ( the minimizing of the surface tension of a fluid particle)

Three of these “miracles” involved WTC7, about which 2 official reports were issued, long after the initial claim of “undermining” had been forgotten. The first one in 2004 made a preliminary conclusion that the tower came down due to large amounts of debris from the Twin Towers falling on it and that the contents of a large diesel fuel storage tank in the building’s basement caught fire.

The final version came out in August 2008. It repudiated those two notions, but came out with a novel theory that a single structural member, weakened and expanded by localized fires within the building, undermined the entire frame and brought down the structure. It included an assertion that contrary to many comments by people examining the matter, the building had not descended in free fall acceleration, as this would violate the laws in physics.

In November 2008, an addendum was issued which admitted that free fall acceleration did take place. No comment. This addendum referred to the main report, in fact to the section which .... denied free fall acceleration. Amazing.

This report too relied heavily on computer modeling. Its contents belied its conclusions. A video simulation of its analysis showed a building coming down with is walls caving in, whereas the actual event involved the walls staying vertical.

A claim was made that the key structural member i mentioned earlier moved because it was not braced, initiating the collapse, but an FOI request revealed the blueprints showed that this member was in fact braced. Fire temps were claimed in the conclusion, temps which were not supported by the actual analysis in the body of the report. Again, this sounds very familiar in terms of recent papers purporting to demonstrate the existence of a certain virus.

One can see a pattern of blatant falsification and an appeal to “expertise” to legitimate the dominant narrative. This is enabled by a widespread public phobia of looking at “science,” and thus limiting most of the few who even bother trying to read the reports to just reading the conclusions.

David Ray Griffin wrote a full book about the matter of WTC7, which i regard as his finest book regarding 9/11. It was condensed into a single article written by Griffin in September 2009.

Eventually, i wrote my own piece on the WTC. It grew out of a review i posted at Amazon of Griffin’s 2011 book, “9/11: Ten Years Later.” One of the Web’s leading opponents of the 9/11 Truth Movement, James Bennett, who runs Screw Loose Change, started posting attacks on my review.

I ended up trapping him in a loop of self-contradictions, quoting out of context and just plain lying. This was made into an article, The Trapping of Screw Loose Change, posted in November 2011.

A corrective note; the WTC dust which contained molten steel and iron sphere which i refer to was found not on the roof of the building i mentioned, but in the basement. This makes my argument stronger, instantly falsifies any attempt to explain this off as the result of heavier iron/steel particles setting down on the roof earlier than average for the entire dust cloud created]

A STORY OF A STAGED PANDEMIC

Cut to early 2020. As stories of what looked like a pandemic emerged from China, and signs of this supposedly spreading elsewhere mounted, my initial reaction was to believe the basic framework of the story. My trust in my ability to discern facts about biology was far lower than even my trust in my ability to analyze structures had been on 9/11, no matter my subsequent experience……..[continued in Part 2]

Part 2 in its entirety can be found here.