A Heretic Seeks 9/11 Truth

David Ray Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006) 246 pp. Reviewed by Ben Douglass, E.I.T.

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State registration boards require an individual to meet fairly rigorous criteria before they will license him to practice as a professional engineer in their jurisdiction. First, he must obtain an accredited bachelor’s degree and pass the Fundamentals of Engineering Exam. Then, he must practice for a certain space of time (typically, five years) under the supervision of a licensed professional engineer. Finally, after he has completed this training period, he must pass the Principles and Practices of Engineering Exam.

Similarly, the Catholic Church requires an individual to meet fairly rigorous criteria before it will allow him to teach as a Catholic theologian. He must earn the relevant degrees, and he must obtain a mandatum from his local bishop signifying that he teaches within the full communion of the Catholic Church, and that he will teach authentic Catholic doctrine.

Both of these provisions are wise, because they prevent someone incompetent as an engineer from practicing engineering incompetently, or someone incompetent as a theologian from teaching theology incompetently.

Or both, as in the case of David Ray Griffin.

David Ray Griffin is a process theologian who believes that the Bush administration orchestrated the September 11 attacks in order to create a pretext for expanding the American Empire in the Middle-East. He is quite adept at amassing data, but, being neither an engineer nor a Catholic, Griffin lacks the intellectual tools necessary to interpret his data correctly. Thus, while he succeeds on certain points, he fails to prove his thesis.

Griffin spends most of chapter 1 establishing historical precedent for the United States engaging in false flag operations, that is, operations in which the state frames an enemy for some war crime or unjust act of aggression in order to discredit it or justify an attack upon it. Many of Griffin’s historical opinions are debatable.¹ However, I am willing to grant the general thrust of his argument in this section, that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the American state might murder some of its own citizens in order to achieve what it perceives as a greater good. So, I will not simply dismiss Griffin’s theory of the September 11 attacks with Bill Clinton’s “How dare you?”,² but will give him an honest hearing and consider his arguments dispassionately.

In chapter 2, Griffin presents the reader with the testimonies of several eyewitnesses to the September 11 attacks, many of whom say things which at first glace appear to support the hypothesis that the World Trade Center (hereafter WTC) Towers were demolished by explosives. However, closer examination reveals that the evidence which they provide is explicable within the mainstream interpretive narrative, i.e., that it was the impact of jetliners and the subsequent explosions and fires which alone caused the Towers to fall.

For example, many witnesses report hearing a large explosion, and seeing debris ejected from the sides of the building, a moment before the collapse of each tower. Their perception is understandable, but inaccurate. In this regard, the reader will do well to review the frame by frame recording of the South Tower collapse, taken at a distance, available here. Notice, in the first few frames, that the whole structure tilts above the point of impact. This process begins prior to any sharp, horizontal ejection of debris. It is very clear from these pictures that the building ejects debris concomitantly with, and in proportion to, its progress in failure. This observation is consistent with the hypothesis that the collapse is causing the ejection of debris. No explosives are necessary. Similarly with the North Tower, viewable here. Keep your eye on the ridge of the roof; it drops noticeably within one frame of the first visible expansion of the debris cloud (the ridge does not drop before the appearance of the debris cloud because the North Tower collapse started in the interior of the structure and moved outward to the facade). Contrariwise, in many of the videos of the South Tower which are taken from the ground, the top of the building is obscured by smoke, and it is impossible to see its first motions downwards, and thus it does appear as if the building ejects debris prior to the onset of collapse. This would explain why many people erroneously reported this sequence of events, and why some reported that, prior to collapse, the South building blew out at a floor below the point of impact. Presumably, the same would apply to the North Building, though I am unaware of any videos of the North Building collapse taken from a perspective near the base of the Tower (obviously, since the South Tower collapsed first, everyone with a camera would likely be either further away or dead at that point).

This could also explain why some people reported hearing a great noise and feeling a tremendous shaking in the ground immediately “before” the buildings began to collapse. What they were hearing and feeling would have been the onset of collapse, and they simply could not see that the buildings were collapsing until the process was already partially underway. This would be especially understandable if, as it appears, the interior of the Towers collapsed before the facade.

On page 23, Griffin relates some interesting information about a large explosion which occurred in the basement of the North Tower soon after impact. Presumably, this explosion would have been caused by burning jet fuel falling down the elevator shafts, and blowing up some of the building’s electrical or mechanical (heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and plumbing) systems. But Griffin has a different interpretation. He proceeds to quote an engineer as stating that, if he were to destroy the towers, he would “put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure.”³ Thus Griffin implies that the government planted bombs in the WTC basements in order to bring the towers down. This is possibly the silliest interpretive blunder in the whole of Griffin's book; he does not seem to realize the obvious fact that, whatever caused this explosion in the basement, it was irrelevant to the mechanism by which the building actually collapsed! The columns did not fail first at the basement, but at the point of impact (94-98th floors for the North Tower). The bases of both Towers retained structural integrity until they were crushed by the building collapsing on top of them.

Griffin also supplies the testimony of several witnesses who were inside the buildings in the minutes before collapse, and heard and felt an extended series of “explosions” shake the buildings over this period. What these witnesses perceived could have been actual explosions in the electrical and mechanical systems. Or, what they perceived as explosions could have been simply the local failure of individual structural members (columns, beams, joists, connections, slabs, etc.). This could produce a sound similar to an explosion, and would release strain energy⁴ which would be dissipated in the form of vibrations, i.e., by violently shaking the rest of the structure. Lastly, the collapse of the South Tower violently shook those still inside the North Tower, so it makes sense that they would have perceived this as an explosion.

Moving on, in chapter 3 Griffin attempts to prove that the mainstream interpretive narrative of the September 11 attacks violates the laws of physics. The Towers could not have collapsed, he says, due solely to the impact of a jet liner and the ensuing explosion and fire. Something more, he alleges, was required.

He begins by appealing to the precedent of other high rise steel structures which have endured hotter and longer lasting fires than the WTC Towers, yet survived (First Interstate Bank, Los Angeles, 1988; One Meridian Plaza, Philadelphia, 1991; Parque Central Tower, Caracas, 2004). But Griffin is not comparing apples to apples; none of these buildings had several of their columns severed by a jet liner. Moreover, their structural systems were different from the system which supported the WTC Towers. Once these factors are taken into consideration, it is quite understandable how the Towers failed. Indeed, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Final Report explains how the impacts and fires could have caused collapse and, as an engineer, I find these explanations to be well supported by hard evidence, and highly plausible moreover, in spite of their lack of historical precedent. Here it will be necessary to digress and summarize them.

NIST on the WTC Towers Collapse

NIST estimates the structural damage to the North Tower from the initial impact on the North face as follows: “35 exterior columns severed, 2 heavily damaged [out of 63 in the North face]; 6 core columns severed, 3 heavily damaged; 43 of 47 core columns stripped of insulation on one or more floors; Insulation stripped from trusses covering 60,000 ft2 of floor area.”⁵ The load on the severed columns would then have redistributed to the intact perimeter columns nearest them, and to the core.

Well over half the jet fuel in the plane remained inside the building after impact, and this ignited a powerful fire which spread to the South side of the building in the minutes following. The heat from this fire significantly reduced the strength of the steel. Indeed, the NIST team found direct evidence that some perimeter columns were heated above 250°C [482°F], in which case they would have lost approximately 20% of their strength. Furthermore, since the WTC wreckage had been cleared away prior to the beginning of the investigation, the team was only able to recover and examine 3% of the perimeter columns and 1% of the core columns from the fire floors. Thus, it is probable that other columns had been heated to even higher temperatures, perhaps enough to lose half or more of their strength.

The fire also caused the struts of the floor trusses in the South side of the building to buckle, with the result that the trusses dramatically sagged and began to exert a powerful inward pull on the perimeter columns on the South face. This pull, in combination with thermal expansion on the interior face of the columns, caused these columns to dramatically bow inward, as much as 55 in. This buckling is visible in photographs.⁶

This would effectively take the South wall out of commission. Its load would then attempt to redistribute to the already overloaded core. And at this point, it would not surprise me if the core columns were to fail, which they did. The whole section of structure above the point of impact tilted slightly towards the South; this was soon followed by total collapse.

I will here make a digression within a digression in order to answer an objection to the narrative above. The scions of the “9/11 Truth” movement make much of how immensely over-designed the Towers allegedly were, such that the core should have been able to stand even granting that so many perimeter columns on the North and South Faces were destroyed. They note that 9/11 was not a windy day, and thus the columns would not have been subjected to nearly their design loads. However, this argument fails to distinguish between the perimeter columns, which were designed to resist both gravity and wind forces, and the core columns, which were designed to resist gravity loads only. Hence, the core columns even under normal conditions would have already been loaded to probably one third or more of their ultimate capacity. As such, it should not surprise us that they failed under the extraordinary conditions of 9/11.

Another consideration which one must keep in mind is that the stresses released from the severed columns would not have redistributed evenly to the remaining columns. Rather, they would redistribute disproportionately to the columns closest by. This could have resulted in the chain reaction known as progressive collapse: one member fails, which sends stress to the member next to it, causing it to fail, which in turn sends stress to a third member, and so on until the structure becomes globally unstable. Given the tilt in the North Tower just prior to collapse, I suspect that when the South wall buckled it shrugged off most of its load to the core columns nearest itself; these columns failed in turn which eventuated in the failure of the entire core. In sum, the hypothesis of planted explosives is in no way necessary to explain the observed behavior of the North Tower.

The story of the South Tower’s fall is similar, albeit with some significant differences. “UA Flight 175 was heading approximately 15 degrees east of Plan North when it hit the south face of WTC 2 about 23 ft east of center.”⁷ It severed 33 exterior columns and an estimated 10 core columns. Because the plane struck the building off center and at an angle, it severed columns in the southeast corner of the core, with the result that “the building core leaned slightly to the southeast above the impact zone”⁸ and the load redistributed disproportionately to the East wall. The ensuing fire soon caused the floor trusses on the East side of the building to sag and thereby exert an inward pull on the East perimeter columns. The columns bowed inward. The East wall thus lost its ability to carry its load and attempted to shrug it off onto the core and onto the South wall. These already weakened structures were unable to support this increase in load, and the entire building section above the point of impact began to tilt southeast, as seen in the video referenced above. This was followed immediately by catastrophic collapse.

Signs of Demolition

Back to Griffin. Griffin proceeds to enumerate eleven features of the collapses of the WTC Towers which, he says, one would expect if and only if they had been demolished by explosives.⁹ He asks whether it is more reasonable, then, to believe that the buildings were subject to planned explosive demolition, or to believe in the extended concatenation of miracles allegedly necessary for the collapses to have perfectly mimicked the behavior of a planned explosive demolition. I will briefly engage a selection of these arguments point by point.

(1) Sudden onset. In an explosive demolition, the onset of collapse is sudden, whereas in a collapse induced by fire, catastrophic failure should be preceded and precipitated by bowing and bending of beams and columns and the total tilting of the tower. Unfortunately for Griffin’s case, bowed columns and tilting were in evidence prior to the collapse of the Trade Center buildings. See above.

(2) Straight down. When engineers demolish a building in a planned implosion, they are able to make the building collapse neatly into its own footprint. But in lieu of the precise calculations required to achieve straight down collapse, a tall building should be expected to fall over. Again, unfortunately for Griffin, the South Tower did significantly tilt as it fell. And as for the North Tower, its perimeter columns failed on both the North and the South walls. This “balanced” condition would have the result that the building’s center of mass and center of resistance to vertical loads would be roughly coincident (both near the geometric center of the building). In this situation, a roughly straight down collapse is to be expected; there would have to be a large eccentricity between these two points in order to induce a bending moment (rotational force) large enough to significantly tilt the massive tower over. And neither tower collapsed neatly into its own footprint, as evidenced by all the wreckage from the towers which smashed into adjacent buildings.

(3) Dust Clouds. Griffin cites a paper¹⁰ by a software engineer named Jim Hoffman, who offers what he claims to be a conservative estimate of the amount of energy required to pulverize the concrete in the North Tower and cause the dust cloud to expand to the extent that it did. Hoffman’s purpose is to demonstrate that the energy required to produce the observed phenomena is much greater than the gravitational potential energy of the standing tower, thereby proving that some other energy source besides gravity (i.e., explosives) contributed to the building’s destruction. Well, Hoffman’s estimate comes out to 2,817,000 Kilowatt-hours, or about 10 terajoules. This is roughly equivalent to a sixth of the explosive force of the nuclear bomb we dropped on Hiroshima; obviously, Hoffman has gone off track at some point.¹¹ This estimate is way too large, for it would be nonsensical for the Neocon imperialist conspirators who allegedly blew up the WTC Towers to use this much overkill.

In a similar vein, Griffin cites the observations of Jim Hoffman and one Jeff King to the effect that the buildings began to eject dust very near the onset of collapse, before the falling structure had accelerated to any high speed. At this point, falling concrete floors would only be banging into one another at 20 to 30 mph, and this impact would not be sufficient to pulverize the concrete and create dust clouds of it. I would offer to Hoffman and King the suggestion that this dust which they see being ejected is not pulverized concrete, but the remains of flammable materials which have burned up in the fire. The dust and gas is being expelled from the interior of the tower because the pancaking floor slabs are squeezing the air out from between them.

Moving on, Griffin trains his guns on the “official” explanation of the collapse of WTC Tower 7, a 47 story steel frame building which was not struck by a plane and which looked, from the North side at least, to be completely intact prior to its sudden collapse. His case is as flawed with respect to this tower as it was to the others. However, I have already engaged in enough belabored technical argumentation for one review. The NIST report on WTC 7 should be released to the public soon, so I will refer the reader to NIST if he desires a competent accounting of what caused this tower to collapse.

Faint Praise and Damnation

Where Griffin is most successful is in his analysis of the timeline of the morning of September 11 in chapter 4. Specifically, he succeeds in demonstrating contradictions between the various accounts of events put forth at sundry times by different government agencies. Likewise, he raises disturbing questions as to why the military failed to shoot down any of the hijacked planes before they reached their targets. Can the evidence he amasses be explained simply as a function of incompetent government agencies each trying to pass the buck to the other? Or is something more sinister at work here? Griffin’s case merits a deeper analysis which is beyond the scope of this review.

There is also much that is good and praiseworthy in chapter 6. Here Griffin exerts himself to expose and criticize the secular messianism of the Neoconservatives: their desire to end all evil by spreading the American Empire by force. He exposes, for example, the longstanding Neocon desire to attack Iraq, the satisfaction of which was made possible by September 11. But the passion and rigor with which he dissects Neoconservative warmongering only make it all the more regrettable that, when it comes time to offer an alternative to the American Empire, Griffin simply opposes one secular messianism with another. For he will later advocate one world government which will obviate the war-system and break the power of demonic symbolic structures.¹²

Still more regrettable, he attempts to press Christianity into the service of his messianism. In chapters 7 and 8 Griffin proceeds to pervert a science infinitely more noble than structural engineering (engineering’s sovereign queen, in fact): theology. He spends most of chapter 7 hijacking Jesus, the incarnate Son of God who is consubstantial with the Father, and recasting him as a mere anti-imperialist guru who was revelatory of God's love because he was a real nice guy. And in chapter 8 Griffin demonstrates that a believing Jew or Muslim is closer to being a Christian than he is.

Griffin subscribes to a school of thought known as process theology, which conceives of God as “the soul of the world”¹³ who did not create the world out of nothing, but instead organized it out of pre-existent chaos. In this view, God influences creation towards good, but He is never capable of infallibly ensuring the outcome of any event. “The battle between divine and demonic power is therefore a real battle, with the outcome still undecided,”¹⁴ declares Griffin. Good is not all powerful. Evil might actually be ultimately victorious. Thus Griffin denies the existence of divine providence, and it goes without saying therefore that his theology is intrinsically exclusive with both trustful abandonment to divine providence and with the theological virtue of hope.

Likewise, Griffin rejects the plenary inspiration and inerrancy of Sacred Scripture,¹⁵ and feels free to dismiss or manhandle the text when it suits his purposes. This stands to reason. Since God, in Griffin’s view, can never infallibly ensure that a creature will speak or act in a certain way (indeed God never knows just what a creature will do next), God is actually incapable of communicating perfectly through creatures. Thus Griffin’s theology in principle excludes the possibility of God delivering a body of revelation which could be the material object of faith. No wonder Griffin feels free to pick and choose what he likes from the Bible, rather than believing in it with faith: his theology is intrinsically exclusive with the theological virtue of faith.

Surely this system is the synthesis of all heresies. It could have been devised with the express intent of preventing souls from coming to know God by revelation and loving Him with supernatural charity. Since Griffin’s theology is incompatible with faith, hope, and charity, it is incompatible with salvation. Griffin is an older gentleman, so is urgently necessary that Catholics pray for him and articulate a rigorous critique of his heresies.

Ben Douglass, E.I.T.

[1] E.g., Griffin insinuates that the CAI was behind the murder of Italian Prime minister Aldo Moro. Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11, p. 10.

[2] "Bill Clinton Takes On 9/11 Conspiracy Protesters"

[3] Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11, p. 23.

[4] Strain energy is the potential energy stored in a stressed structural member, equal to the work required to produce its elastic deformations.

[5] NIST NCSTAR 1, Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, pp. 22-23. Trusses, for the uninitiated, are structural members which resist bending forces by means of a series of diagonal tension and compression struts. Trusses can serve the function of floor beams, which they did in the WTC Towers.

[6] Cf. Ibid., p. 33, Figure 2-12.

[7] Ibid., p. 38.

[8] Ibid., p. 41.

[9] Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11, pp. 39-44.

[10] "The North Tower's Dust Cloud"

[11] I am indebted for this line of argument to Mike King's essay, "Good Science and 9-11 Demolition Theories."

[12] Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11, pp. 139-140, 148, 190-191.

[13] Ibid., p. 135.

[14] Ibid., p. 137.

[15] Ibid., p. 119.

Sungenis, 9-11 Truther, Sacrifices Truth

Not surprisingly, Robert Sungenis was the first to fire off a letter to the editor of Culture Wars objecting to this review. I reproduce his letter, in part, below. My response follows. I have added candor to the version of my response which was published alongside Sungenis' letter in Culture Wars, Vol. 27, No. 5 (April 2008), pp. 7-11:

I'd like to comment on Ben Douglass' review of Griffin's book regarding 9-11. Although I am by no means an expert in engineering, I don't think such expertise is needed to uncover the weakness of Douglass' arguments. Common sense can go a long way in this case. First, the smoking gun of 9-11 (pun unintended) is Building 7 - something that Douglass does not even mention, much less investigate, but which Griffin and every other 9-11 critic has meticulously documented. (Griffin covers it in chapters 3-4, the very chapters Douglass says he critiqued). Building 7 is a phenomenon that cannot be excused by positing scenarios of how buildings collapse by structural failure rather than explosives. The facts are these: Building 7 already had explosives planted in its structure before 9-11 arrived. We know this because, at a little after 5:00pm on 9-11 the New York Fire Department called Larry Silverstein (the owner of both the Twin Towers and Building 7) and told him that the fires had gutted a major part of Building 7, and they asked him what he would like to do about it. Silverstein, who is caught on audio tape in his reply and which the whole world has heard, told the NYFD chief to "pull it." A few minutes later, Building 7 collapsed into a pancake of rubble after the pre-set explosives were ignited. It descended to earth in less than 10 seconds, demolition style. Fire from jet fuel was not the cause of the collapse of Building 7. That is a fact...

...[O]ne does not need an engineering degree to figure out that Building 7 came down by demolition. We have Larry Silverstein on tape giving the order, and we all saw the building descend to earth demolition-style right after Silverstein's conversation with the NYFD. Incidentally, for the last six years, Mr. Silverstein has refused to explain why he said the words "pull it." Again, common sense tells us why the normally loquacious Silverstein was silent for the last few years. "Pull it" is a common phrase in demolition jargon for bringing down a building by pre-set explosives. About a month ago, Mr. Silverstein broke his six-year silence and stated that by "pull it" he meant that the NYFD should get the firefighters out of the building because there had already been "so much loss of life." I'll leave it to you to make your own conclusions about using the pronoun "it" to refer to firefighters, especially since there were no firefighters left in Building 7 at 5:00pm. Before you do, consider this: six months before Larry Silverstein said "pull it," he took out a casualty insurance policy on the Twin Towers and Building 7 to the tune of almost 2 billion dollars, specifically adding a clause that protected the buildings in case of destruction by "terrorism." How convenient, especially since the Twin Towers, being so high, were already designed to sustain crashes from fuel-laden airliners.

Conclusion: Since we know positively that Building 7 had pre-set explosives and that these explosives had to be placed weeks in advance, what's to stop us from suspecting that the Twin Towers also had pre-set explosives, especially since the Towers descended to earth in the same demolition-style (straight down without falling to the left, right, backwards or forwards) as Building 7?...

Robert Sungenis

In response to Robert Sungenis' letter, I have to concur that common sense does indeed go a long way toward establishing the truth of these matters. So does making a good faith effort to get one's facts straight. And Sungenis, in his reckless haste to implicate a Jew in mass murder, has clearly done nothing of the sort. Indeed, his letter is filled with so many and such easily demonstrable falsehoods as to indicate to me that its author holds truth in relative disregard. Let's dissect some of those falsehoods.

First, I did mention WTC7 in my review.

Second, Larry Silverstein's conversation with Daniel Nigro (who, incidentally, was not the NYFD chief at the time) on the afternoon of September 11 was not recorded on audio tape, as far as anyone involved in this debate is aware. No such recording has ever been released to the public; much less has "the whole world" heard one. So, we are here presented with a curious anomaly: Robert Sungenis has never heard an audio tape of Larry Silverstein talking with Daniel Nigro on September 11. Yet, Robert Sungenis claims that the whole world has heard an audio tape of Larry Silverstein talking with Daniel Nigro on September 11! Does Sungenis not include himself in the category "the whole world"? I will leave it to the reader to search out the most charitable interpretation of this anomaly.

Anyway, the "9/11 truth" argument which Sungenis is attempting to reproduce is based, not on a recording of the original conversation, but on an interview with Larry Silverstein in the PBS documentary "America Rebuilds" in which Silverstein describes that conversation. That documentary first aired in September 2002.

Third, "pull it" is not "a common phrase in demolition jargon for bringing down a building by pre-set explosives." Professionals in the demolition industry such as Brent Blanchard have rejected this claim of the 9/11 truth movement. The only time "pull it" is used in demolition jargon is to denote attaching cables to a building and literally pulling it down. And this is manifestly not the mechanism by which WTC7 was destroyed.

Fourth, Silverstein did not issue any orders to the New York Fire Department in the conversation in question. His exact words in the documentary interview are as follows:

I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, you know, 'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is just pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse.

Notice that Silverstein merely offered the fire department the suggestion that they "pull it"; it was the fire department which "made that decision to pull." "They made that decision to pull." In fact, Daniel Nigro himself takes credit for the decision, which is only logical since he was the man in charge in this situation and Larry Silverstein had no authority over him. I quote Nigro's words in The New York Times and Fire Engineering, respectively:

The most important operational decision to be made that afternoon was the collapse had damaged 7 World Trade Center, which is about a 50 story building, at Vesey between West Broadway and Washington Street. It had very heavy fire on many floors and I ordered the evacuation of an area sufficient around to protect our members, so we had to give up some rescue operations that were going on at the time and back the people away far enough so that if 7 World Trade did collapse, we wouldn't lose any more people. We continued to operate on what we could from that distance and approximately an hour and a half after that order was given, at 5:30 in the afternoon, World Trade Center collapsed completely...

The biggest decision we had to make on the first day was to clear the area and create a collapse zone around the severely damaged 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story building heavily involved in fire. A number of fire officers and companies assessed the damage to the building. The appraisals indicated that the building's integrity was in serious doubt. I issued the orders to pull back the firefighters and define the collapse zone. It was a critical decision; we could not lose any more firefighters. It took a lot of time to pull everyone out, given the emotionalism of the day, communications difficulties, and the collapse terrain.

Notice in particular Nigro's words "I issued the orders to pull back the firefighters." Silverstein and Nigro are talking about the same thing when they use the word "pull," i.e., abort the mission, pull the team out of the area. The reason Silverstein referred to firefighters with the singular pronoun "it" is because he referred to the team or contingent of firefighters.

This is the only interpretation of Silverstein's words which makes any sense at all. Look at the context. He states that the reason he wants the firefighters to "pull it" is because "we've had such terrible loss of life" (contrary to Sungenis' claims, this phrase is not a six-year-later gloss on Silverstein's words, but an integral part of his original remarks). That is to say, a lot of firefighters have already died today, so maybe the best thing to do is to get the firefighters out of the vicinity of WTC7. This is a perfectly logical statement.

On the other hand, according to the "9/11 truth" interpretation, what Silverstein is really saying is that since so many firefighters have already died today, maybe the best thing to do is blow up the building! This is a complete and utter non sequitur! Furthermore, why on earth would Silverstein, calmly, collectedly, and with complete presence of mind, admit to demolishing WTC7 on national television? Did he want to incriminate himself? Common sense indeed! This argument is so absurd that even some members of the 9/11 truth movement, such as Jim Hoffman, have admitted that Silverstein is not here admitting that he demolished the building. They argue rather that he is deliberately obfuscating.

Fifth, how does Sungenis know that Silverstein's conversation with Nigro took place at 5:00 p.m.? Silverstein doesn't say so. Based on Nigro's statement that he gave the order to pull an hour and a half before WTC7 collapsed, the conversation must have taken place some time before 4:00.

Sixth, there was no "six-year silence" during which Silverstein refused to explain the meaning of his words. As noted above, he made the comments in question in a documentary which first aired in September 2002. About a year after this, various figures in the 9/11 truth movement such as Alex Jones began to argue that Silverstein had admitted to demolishing the building. Two years after that, a spokesman for Silverstein properties clarified that by "pull it" he meant "pull the team out of the building." This statement was released in September 2005 (Sungenis thinks this statement was released "about a month ago"; probably, this is because Sungenis found out about it a month ago). Of course, anyone should have been able to figure out this meaning based simply on the original context of Silverstein's words, but some people can just be incredibly sloppy and tendentious exegetes at times.

In Robert Sungenis' case, those times include, but are not limited to, whenever his subject's last name is Silverstein, or Goldberg, or some such. Sungenis' letter sheds absolutely no light on the true course of events of the September 11 attacks. On the other hand, it does shed a great deal of light on the psychology of one Robert Sungenis. That is, when a Jew is in his crosshair, he sacrifices truth. Do not believe him.

Ben Douglass
Herndon, VA