Let’s begin with the World Trade Center. On the morning of September 11th, the 400-meters high twin skyscrapers were hit successively by two airplanes: first into the North Tower (WTC1) at 8:46 am, and then into the South Tower (WTC2) at 9:02 am. The planes were identified as two Boeing 767s flying out of Boston, chartered respectively by American Airlines (AA11) and United Airlines (UA175). The south tower collapsed on itself vertically at 9:59 am, less than an hour after being struck. In an identical fashion, the north tower collapsed two hours after the impact, at 10:28 am. In total, 2751 people are reported to have died, including 157 passengers and the crew on both aircraft.



How could these steel-framed skyscrapers collapse vertically and at the speed of free fall? The sequence of events infers a direct relationship of cause and effect between the aircraft impact and collapse, confirmed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the government institute that produced the World Trade Center Building Performance Study in May 2002. To assuage the protests raised by this report, further investigation was entrusted to the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), which would publish its Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Towers in September 2005. Both reports are based on the assumption that the planes caused the towers to fall and make no mention of any other hypothesis. More specifically, they say that the fire resulting from the impact of the planes severely weakened the steel structure, thereby causing the collapse of one floor, which then caused a chain reaction rather callously referred to as “pancake collapse”.



A few months before the attacks, on January 25th 2001, the head of construction for the WTC, Frank DeMartino, said in a videotaped interview that each twin tower “was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it. […] I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jet liners”, because its structure, made of two tubes of steel columns and crossbars, is somewhat like a mosquito net; “This jet liner is like a pencil puncturing this screen netting. It really does nothing to this screen netting”. We will never know how DeMartino would have explained the collapse of the towers eight months later, because he died that day in his North Tower office. But the hundreds of academics gathered around Steven Earl Jones in the association Scholars for 9/11 Truth, and the nearly two thousand architects and engineers gathered around Richard Gage in the association Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, declare that it is physically impossible that the planes and resulting fires would have been sufficient to cause the collapse of the towers.  “No steel building has ever been destroyed by fire”, noted Bill Manning, editor of Fire Engineering magazine in the January 2002 issue, adding that the government investigation was “a half-baked farce”. Steel begins to melt at a temperature close to 1500 °C; after the ball of fire resulting from the airplane fuel’s immediate ignition on impact, the fire did not exceed 1000 °C, as was indicated by the black smoke escaping from towers. NIST even admitted that “none of the recovered steel samples showed evidence of exposure to temperatures above 600 °C for as long as 15 minutes”.

According to dissenting engineers, the only explanation for the collapse of the towers is the use of explosives. The theory relies on several observations. First, there are hundreds of testimonies from firefighters and other witnesses who heard and felt the rumblings of explosions before the collapse. In 2005, the New York Fire Department (FDNY) released 503 recorded oral testimonies given by firefighters shortly after the events: 118 of them describe sequences of synchronized explosions just before the collapse, well below the zone of impact. For example, Karin Deshore’s testimony, who was in the South Tower: “Somewhere around the middle of the World Trade Center, there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that building had started to explode. The popping sound, and with each popping sound it was initially an orange and then red flash came out of the building and then it would just go all around the building on both sides as far as I could see. These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going both up and down and then all around the building”. Hundreds of firefighter survivors,who believe that the towers collapsed due to explosions and not the planes, have formed the association Firefighters for 9/11 Truth. Their testimonies are consistent with those of civilian survivors such as janitor William Rodriguez, who claims to have felt powerful explosions in the basement of the North Tower before and after the impact of the aircraft. Although decorated for his heroic conduct on that day (he saved five people with his own hands), Rodriguez was unable to have his testimony heard by the authorities, and he is continuing to try and make his voice heard in the protest movement.



The use of explosives is also the only possible explanation for the horizontal projection of huge sections of the outer frame, clearly visible in the films of the towers’ collapse. Some of these chunks of steel weighing hundreds of tons were propelled over 150 meters and lodged in neighboring buildings. According to Dwain Deets, former research director at NASA, these powerful horizontal projections are irrefutable proof that explosives were used. Furthermore, only powerful explosives could have caused the pulverization of all the non-metallic parts of the building, such as concrete, furniture and even human bodies; between 2005 and 2006, more than 700 small human fragments were found on the roof of the neighboring building that housed the German Bank. The pyroclastic dust that flooded through the streets at high speed after the collapse, not unlike the dust from a volcano, is consistent with the hypothesis of explosives: it indicates a high temperature mixture of hot gases and relatively dense solid particles, a phenomenon impossible from a simple collapse.



Finally, the presence of molten metal in the wreckage, observed by countless witnesses for more than three weeks after the attack, is inexplicable within the framework of the official theory, but is easily explained by the presence of incompletely burned explosives, their combustion slowed by lack of oxygen. Firefighter Philip Ruvolo testified before Étienne Sauret’s camera for his film Collateral Damages, “You’d get down below and you’d see molten steel — molten steel running down the channelways, like you were in a foundry — like lava”. The engineer Leslie Robertson, co-designer of the twin towers, testified at the National Conference of Structural Engineers on October 5th, 2001: “As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running”. Herb Trimpe, who accompanied the Red Cross for several months at Ground Zero, shows that, “even in January […] you could actually feel the heat”. This evidence is confirmed by satellite images from NASA indicating that a month after September 11, temperatures of 727 ° C and 747 ° C were still existent beneath the rubble.



The ultimate confirmation of the use of explosives came in February 2009, when an international team of chemists led by professors Niels Harrit of Copenhagen University and Steven Earl Jones of Brigham Young University (Utah), after having examined wreckage dust materials at WTC, published an article in the scientific journal Open Chemical Physics Journal, “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9-11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”. They discovered nano-thermite (a high-tech explosive capable of cutting through steel beams) in the WTC dust. The media felt compelled to report such indisputable scientific evidence, but in a such a way as to minimize its importance. For example, on the French television program C à Vous, December 2nd 2009 on France 5, the reporter commented: “And so what does this mean? It changes little in regards to the facts on the towers’ collapse. Obviously, there is no point challenging that two planes hit the towers. But it means that the explosive may have been put there previously before the impact of the planes into the WTC, and the shock of the planes’ impact collapsed [sic] and detonated the thermite. And it would mean that the WTC security was perhaps much worse than what we were led to believe at the time”. What the repetition of the phrase “it means” does is impress on the listener the conclusion that it doesn’t mean that the Al-Qaida theory collapses. In fact, it does mean just that, for nano-thermite is a high-tech explosive that only an industry at very high level of sophistication, such as military industry, is capable of producing. The media’s presentation of information such as above works like a vaccine: a small dose of devitalized information injected once, and only once, immunizes against the conspiracy fever, all the while protecting against accusations of media censorship.



In the eyes of many researchers, the truly decisive proof of the use of explosives did not come from the twin towers (Towers 1 and 2 of the WTC, but from Tower 7, a neighboring skyscraper of 47 floors that collapsed at 5:20 pm, about seven hours after the twin towers. Its fall, shot from multiple angles and visible on the Internet, occurred at the speed of free fall within seven seconds, both perfectly symmetrical and vertical, looking exactly like a standard “controlled demolition”. The mass media remained so silent about this third tower that few people have heard of its collapse. FEMA mentions it in its 2002 report, concluding that a fire had broken out and must have caused the collapse, but that: “The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence”. Under pressure from citizen groups dissatisfied with such weak explanations, NIST was tasked with confirming the fire thesis in a special report on Tower 7, one that was dragged out until November 2008, after a preliminary report in June 2004.



If the collapse of Tower 7 is in the eyes of many scholars to be the “smoking gun”, it still remains difficult to explain the motive for the blast. If the collapse of the Twin Towers was done to shock public opinion and prepare for the war against terrorism, what was the interest to demolish Tower 7, which no plane had hit and was categorically ignored by the press? We do not know, but one can assume that the collapse of Tower 7 was scheduled for the morning, so as to be rendered invisible by the dust cloud from the Twin Towers. This assumption stems from the testimony of two New York City police officers, Michael Hess and Barry Jennings, who were in Tower 7 at 9:15 when they felt a series of explosions. Even more troubling, was that television networks were informed of the collapse of Tower 7 before it even took place. CNN correspondent Alan Dodds reported by telephone at 11:07 am that a firefighter had just told him that a third building of fifty floors had collapsed. Similarly, Aaron Brown announced on CNN at 4:15 pm: “We are getting information now that one of the other buildings, Building 7 in the World Trade Center complex, is on fire and has either collapsed or is collapsing”.



Some 9/11 truthers conjecture that Tower 7 had to be destroyed because it had been home to the technical center of the plot: indeed, its offices housed the Emergency Command Center of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, as well as government agencies such as the Department of Defense, the CIA and the Secret Service, not to mention the Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which held all the records of the investigation of Enron, the biggest financial scandal in history.



The man who could certainly give the reason for the collapse of Tower 7 is its owner Larry Silverstein, the real estate shark who also leased the Twin Towers to New York City in the spring of 2001. Interviewed for the PBS documentary America Rebuilds in September 2002, Silverstein said about Tower 7: “I remember getting a call from the fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse”. Because it is impossible to “pull”, i.e. “demolish” a skyscraper in a few hours, Silverstein subsequently retracted, explaining that by “pull it”, he meant “evacuate” the team of firefighters from it, as if that decision was his responsibility. To finish with Silverstein, it is important to know that just after acquiring the Twin Towers in the summer of 2001, he renegotiated the insurance contracts to cover them against terrorist attacks for the amount of $3.5 billion, and made sure that he would retain the right to rebuild after such an event. After the attacks, he took his insurers to court in order to receive double compensation, claiming that the two planes were two separate attacks. After a long legal battle, he pocketed $4.5 billion. This was a good turn of fortune, given the additional fact that the Twin Towers had to be decontaminated for asbestos, a process which had been indefinitely pushed back since the 1980s because of its cost estimated at nearly $1 billion in 1989; in 2001, the New York Port Authority was all too happy to shift responsibility to Silverstein.



Preparing the “controlled demolition” of a building such as Tower 7 requires weeks or months of work by a highly qualified team with free access to all technical access points. The leading suspect, alongside Silverstein, is the company Securacom (later Stratesec) responsible for WTC security, including the “control of access” to the buildings. Coincidentally, Securacom also had “control of access” for two other important sites in the attack: United Airlines, and Dulles Airport in Washington. And even more coincidentally, Securacom was run by the President’s cousin, Wirt Walker III, from 1999 to January 2002, together with the President's brother, Marvin Bush. Scott Forbes, a director of Fiduciary Trust, whose offices were in the South Tower, reported that during the weekend prior to the attacks, the power was cut for 36 hours on the 48th floor, ostensibly to replace the tower’s wiring. The company had been notified three weeks in advance. Nothing like it had ever been necessary since the towers’ construction; “without power there were no security cameras, no security locks on doors, and many, many ‘engineers’ coming in and out of the tower”.