Interview with David Ray Griffin
http://wholelifetimes.com/2006/09/griffin0609.html
9/5/2006
Ed. Note: This is a longer version of the exclusive CE interview that appears in the September issue of WLT.
If you had to distill the most compelling elements of the collapse of the two World Trade Center towers right now, what points are most disturbing?
There are two big ones: One is simply that steel frame, high-rise buildings have never collapsed because of fire, or fire and externally induced damage. Secondly, all such collapses have been caused by explosives and these collapses have at least 10 characteristics of the particular kind of controlled demolition known as controlled implosion, where the building falls basically straight down. When you go through those 10 characteristics, not a single one of them can be accounted for by the official theory, the fire plus impact theory. And then if you said, well okay, let’s say it’s never happened before and it would be very unlikely but let’s say there’s one chance in a hundred, let’s be very generous—that one of them could have occurred. But that all 10 of them could have occurred in the same building and then in two buildings, you’re talking about chances one in a trillion or something like that, so the chance is essentially zero that it could have happened by the official theory.
How could those towers have collapsed into a pile of rubble only a few stories high, when the core of each tower consisted of 47 massive steel columns? You’ve got these 47 columns that go from the sub basements to the top. How could those all have just collapsed into a pile of rubble?
The 9/11 Commission settled that easily. They said the core of each building consisted of a hollow steel shaft that just had elevators and stairwells in it. You can’t get a bigger lie. The unique thing about the towers when they were built was their unique structure of just having the core thing and then the perimeter columns and then trusses that connected the core to the outside, so you’ve got this tremendous amount of space with no pillars whatsoever. So any book you would read about the WTC would talk about those things and they just denied their existence. I mean, it’s just audacious that the press won’t report on those huge lies.
But wouldn’t the administration have realized that people are going to investigate this? We’re not a nation of dummies.
We are a nation that is very poorly informed by its mainstream media, a nation that has had drilled into it that we are America the Good, we make mistakes but we’re never deliberately evil. We’ve had drilled into us that people who believe in conspiracy theories are idiots, so we wouldn’t want to be one of those. But most importantly we’re a nation with a controlled press, a corporately controlled press. We do not have free press. And in fact, if you want to say that the definition of a free press is one that is not controlled by religion, one can say ours is, because we really have a religion of capitalism–we like to call it free enterprise—and that’s what controls our press, so we do not have a free press any more than the Soviet Union had a free press.
They’ll just say, “He holds the ridiculous theory that explosions planted by our own government brought the building down” but they never say, “Now what’s the evidence?” And they would certainly never bring me or Jim Hoffman or Jim Fetzer on to NBC or ABC or CBS or to say what is the evidence for that.
Building 7 was 47 stories high and not hit by an airplane. Do we know why it collapsed?
It’s still not covered, even by the 9/11 Commission Report. Building 7 was the least covered of the buildings that collapsed and the least understood, but the most glaring example of potential complicity by the administration.
It is the most obvious because with the Towers, one can think that somehow the planes hitting them caused them to weaken and fall down but with Building 7, it would be the first building in history that was ever brought down entirely by fire alone. And so it’s obviously the biggest embarrassment for the government, so the 9/11 Commission handled Building 7 by simply not mentioning that it collapsed. This should have been a world-shaking event that would have led all insurance companies around the world to say, now we know, steel framed high rise buildings can totally collapse because of fire alone, so we’ve got to up our premiums greatly. But they didn’t even mention this historic event. Now we come to the NIST Commission, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, have put out a report claiming that they have given an explanation of why the World Trade Center towers collapsed. It’s completely bogus but I won’t go into that, I’ll just say, they have not yet released their report about Building 7 because obviously they know they don’t have a plausible story to tell.
FEMA could not explain it either?
FEMA did the first investigation, and they came up with a scenario in which maybe timbers from one of the towers came over and set the diesel fuel on fire and turned Building 7 into Towering Inferno. Of course the photographs show that there were fires on only two or three floors of the 47-story building at most. But nevertheless, they say maybe this is what happened, but then at the end of all that they said, the best possible explanation we could give has a very low probability of occurrence. So in other words, they admit they couldn’t explain it.
Wasn’t the collapse captured on video and didn’t it in fact look like a controlled demolition?
It was even more obviously a case of controlled implosion than the Towers, because the Towers, the collapse had to begin near the top where the planes had hit because that was going to be the story. But Building 7 was just a traditional controlled implosion, where it starts from the bottom and the walls fold in on themselves and it collapses into a very tiny pile of rubble. And so to show you what lack of confidence NIST has in its report, a fellow named Ed Haas, who has a muckraker report that you can find on Google, called up the spokesman for NIST, named Michael Newman, and said, you know you’ve got all these physicists who reject the official story and they believe that it was an inside job, why don’t we settle all this by having a debate on national television, between some of these scientists and your NIST scientists? And Newman said no NIST scientist is going to debate. And he’s reiterated that. So he has said nobody from NIST will ever debate their report. In other words, they will not defend it in public, even though it’s a taxpayer supported project and they should be demanded to report it. So that shows you how flimsy the official story is. And they still have not issued a report on it. They will not debate their report on the Towers. Obviously, they’re not going to defend their debate on Building 7—they won’t even issue it, just hope the public forgets about it. Because the press does not keep reminding people that Building 7 did collapse and it’s a total mystery.
What was your first major tip-off that something might be inaccurate in the reporting of the events of that day?
Mainly I was focusing on the question of, “Why no interceptions?” Why, with the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, nobody scrambled to stop these planes from flying into the various targets. We have standard operating procedures that evidently work flawlessly about 100 times a year, where planes are scrambled and there are interceptions made within 10 to 15 minutes of the first sign there’s anything wrong (the three standard signs are they lose radio contact, the transponder goes off or the plane deviates from its course). If they can’t get it corrected within about a minute they contact the military, and the military calls NORAD and has them scramble a couple of fighters from the closest airbase that has fighters on alert—these are all over the country and these planes can go very fast and so normally it only takes about 10 or 15 minutes. And here, 20 minutes, 40 minutes with the Pentagon—nothing happened. So that was the first evidence I focused on that suggested it wasn’t just a matter of foreknowledge but was actual complicity in the attacks, ordering a stand down (not taking action). Because the other evidence that I looked at early on was all the evidence of foreknowledge and of actual interference with investigations.
You suggested that the FBI had repeated warnings from multiple sources that there was going to be an attack on the World Trade Center, which they systematically ignored.
That was part of it. Some of them were that explicit. Others were simply where they were investigating Osama Bin Laden, or members of Al Qaeda, people who were taking flying lessons and so on, various kinds of investigations where FBI members trying to do their jobs got stopped by FBI headquarters. And then after 9/11 the stories about not really going after Bin Laden.
Was it the British press that suggested we deliberately allowed Bin Laden to escape?
One of their mainstream newspapers concluded that the so-called Battle of Tora Bora was just a farce.
Why didn’t the Pentagon collapse when it, too, was hit by an airplane?
A question you might ask about the Pentagon is, it was allegedly hit by an airplane about the same size as the one that hit each of the towers—why did the seismic measurements not register? You get a definite impact registration when each of the towers is hit. But when the Pentagon is hit, nothing. Whatever hit the Pentagon did not really shake the earth. Those seismic reports are available for anybody who wants them, so if you Google “9/11 seismic reports,” you would find it.
End Part I