A former Bush-appointed official is calling for a new,

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http://www.boulderweekly.com/archive/090805/coverstory.html

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 )

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 *. 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?"

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