By Jay Levin and Tom McKenzie
Just a few years ago Ed Munyak, a fire protection engineer for the city of San Jose, seemed like a lonely, out-there figure, a sometimes-target because of his outspoken position on the events of Sept. 11, 2001. These days, hundreds of other building trade professionals have joined him in challenging the official narrative about the collapse of three buildings at New York’s World Trade Center (WTC) on that fateful, traumatic day.
Munyak, of Los Altos Hills, is a mechanical and fire engineer whose job is to review building plans to ensure they comply with the California Building and Fire Code. In 2007, after speaking out on his own for a few years, Munyak signed on with a then-fledging organization called Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth (AE911 Truth), founded by Bay Area architect Richard Gage.
Today, far from being isolated, Munyak now counts as allies 804 professional architects and building engineers from around the country. Collectively, they have joined Munyak’s call for an independent technical investigation of the causes of the WTC buildings collapse. In doing so, they reject the federal government’s conclusions that two airplanes alone brought the buildings down—without the aid of pre-planted explosives.
Munyak and his fellow AE911 supporters recently received acknowledgement from the FBI’s counterterrorism division, which concluded that the organization’s core evidence deserves—and will get—FBI scrutiny. In a letter, Deputy Director Michael J. Heimbach assessed AE911’s presentation as “backed by thorough research and analysis.”
Munyak and his professional allies insist that they are not conspiracy theorists, and they refuse to speculate on the “why” or “who” of 9/11. Munyak described their basic position in an interview.
“Buildings do not fail from fire related causes in the way that World Trade Center 1, 2 and 7 failed. Steel frame or composite steel buildings, modern high-rise buildings—they just do not collapse catastrophically like that. It’s impossible.
“Only if you sever columns in some other way will those buildings collapse. It takes too much energy, and that energy was not there even with adding in all that jet fuel. It defies all engineering analysis and theory that those buildings collapsed in that manner. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Apparently reinforcing this position, a team of three scientists working at technical laboratories in the United States and Denmark reported in April that analysis of dust that they say was gathered at the World Trade Center found evidence of the potent incendiary/explosive “super thermite,” used by the military.
The re-investigation movement received attention this week after it percolated into the high ranks of the Obama administration.
The President’s green jobs advisor, Van Jones, resigned on Sept. 5 amidst a controversy over his statements about Republicans and his endorsement of a 2004 statement by the group 9/11 Truth.org, when he was head of an Oakland non-profit organization.
The letter, signed by more than 100 official-version doubters, called for “immediate public attention to unanswered questions that suggest that people within the [Bush] administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”
My thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of all who died during this tragedy. I would also like to thank all of the Fire Fighters, Police Officers, Police Dogs, Search and Rescue Workers and their dogs, and other heroes who worked so hard to find people, and save lives 8 years ago when this horrific thing happened to our country. May God Bless America and keep us safe from harm.
Puh-leeze. There’ll always be crackpots out there who deny the truth and stir things up with crazy theories. Get a life.
Stir things up? Read the article. This man explicitly stated that he was not delving into conspiracy theories. His only point is that there is likely more to the story. It’s not his place guess what that is.
Kooks always say “we are not delving into conspiracies.” But they always are.
1) The engineer who designed the towers agrees completely with the collapse.
2) countless peer-reviewed papers show, without any doubt, the science is solid. This, and #1 really trumps any argument one can make.
3) Just because it doesnt make sense to a handful of crackpots, doesn’t mean the explanation is false.
There were no internal columns to sever, by planted explosives or otherwise.
The support for the floors came from I-beams that spanned the entire length of the floor and attached to the perimeter of the buildings. This was done because the architect wanted to create an entirely open floor with no internal columns to block views.
The I-beams supporting the affected floors failed as a result of 1) the fireproofing material being blown off upon impact by the jets, and 2) being superheated by burning jet fuel and office materials.
When the I-beams failed, the floor they supported simply collapsed in on one another as we so poignantly saw on that horrible day.
No conspiracy – just physics with a hefty dose of pure evil. Sorry.
There’s a big difference between just saying there should be an investigation and claiming there were explosives planted, although this point seems much too subtle for the American media. And letting something happen by ignoring warning signs is not the same thing as doing it yourself.
It’s true that jet fuel does not burn at a temperature hot enough to cause steel to fail. According to a study by the American Society of Civil Engineers, the high temperatures were caused by the burning of materials already in the buildings, such as furniture, flooring and roofing, etc. In other words, fire codes for highrise buildings are inadequate.
So there really is a coverup, in the sense that to prevent something similar from happening in the future would require a very expensive retrofitting of all highrise buildings. It’s easier to let the blame rest on terrorists by not taking a good look at what really happened.
It is important to remember the heroism of the public safety people in NYC and reflect on the trsgic death of the innocent. Conspiracy theorists are creeps. We have one in Santa Clara, Steve Hazel who blames Bush and Kerry for the terrible deaths. Hazel also speaks of how police officers deserve to be shot. We fight and die for freedom for bums like Hazel, and we often forget the people who did the fighting and the dying.
I don’t believe a case can be made that the 9/11 attacks were the result of a simple conspiracy, at least not a conspiracy in the traditional sense of the word. I find it impossible to accept the notion that any single organization of foreigners could assemble a team of men willing to sacrifice their lives to a cause, and that these “martyrs” would:
be able to dodge detection by authorities inside a foreign country, and
successfully smuggle weapons past multiple airline security checkpoints, and
possess the skill to coordinate an impeccably timed assault on four separate aircraft, and
possess the ability to successfully commandeer and fly complex airplanes across hundreds of miles airspace, and
have the inexplicable luck to defeat the most sophisticated air defense system in existence, and then
crash them into targets with very narrow profiles.
Yes, there might be nations with teams of highly trained commandos possessing the needed skills, but nations able to attract, train, and outfit such units do not raise their young men to be martyrs. In nations where martyrdom is culturally acceptable, that acceptability is based on the people’s perception of their desperate predicament in dealing with a vastly more powerful adversary, and no such nation has ever possessed the ability, or inclination, to plot do daring an adventure as was undertaken in the 9/11 attack.
Nevertheless, the attacks did occur and Arabs were martyred, so there has to be some way to make the pieces fit, but it cannot be done by viewing the events as the result of a simple conspiracy by members of a single, rogue organization. Instead, we should relieve ourselves of that concept and consider how it is that powerful nations have historically made bad things happen elsewhere in the world without getting blamed.
When tasked with toppling an undesirable foreign government without resorting to war, a nation seeking to protect itself diplomatically will never deploy its operatives in a high-risk frontal assault; it will instead seek-out the existing opposition (be they political dissidents or neighboring enemies), co-opt them through traditional means (support, trickery, quid pro quo, etc.), and facilitate the mission with minimal risk of political exposure. This is the way the CIA toppled banana republics, it is what JFK and Henry Cabot Lodge did when CIA (agent Lucien Conein) signaled the green light to the disgruntled generals of the Vietnamese army (who then murdered president Ngo Dinh Diem), and what Israel did when its MOSSAD facilitated the creation of Hamas twenty years ago as part of its campaign to undermine Yasser Arafat’s PLO.
That there existed, prior to 9/11, a group of terrorists motivated to topple the towers was known to everyone, as Arabs had already tried and failed to do it in 1993 with a huge truck bomb. To most Americans these bombers were viewed as pure evil, but unless you believe that they represented the only evil in the world you have to accept the possibility that someone out there saw these terrorists as potentially useful. Consider this Element #1 in my hypothesis.
Is it inconceivable that an entity not connected with radical Islam might see benefit in a major terrorist attack in America? Not hardly. In fact, on September 12, 2001, the day after 9/11, the NY Times asked Benjamin Netanyahu what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, and he replied, “It’s very good.” Netanyahu, a fierce patriot, hoped to make Americans see Israel’s enemies as indistinguishable from their own, and thus make Israel’s problems—and enemies, America’s.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/international/12ISRA.html?ex=1210478400&en=2438436608ef699b&ei=5070).
If a nation like Israel, one notorious for espionage, false-flag operations, intelligence interception, and conducting brazen operations on foreign soil, can recognize benefit in a tragic attack against its supposed ally, it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that the terrorists (whom we know existed) might have been infiltrated and/or unknowingly appropriated by foreign operatives. Consider this Element #2.
There are a number of oddities in the 9/11 story (particularly regarding our missing-in-action air defenses) that would cause any objective investigator to look for military/political insider activity. Is such activity impossible or without precedent? Again, not hardly. Treason is not out of fashion (Air Force Colonel Larry Franklin was convicted in 2006 of spying for Israel). Neither is megalomania, greed, or duplicitous foreign influence in Washington. It is, now, a matter of public record that the US government has, at least once, considered the idea of staging an attack on itself in order to justify a desired course of action (the invasion of Cuba); see Operation Northwoods (which included the use of remote controlled aircraft). Consider this Element #3.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf
Absent sophisticated assistance, history has shown it to be very difficult for terrorists to accomplish anything more elaborate than detonating an isolated bomb or hijacking a single airplane. The 9/11 Commission gave us an answer that simply doesn’t fit the evidence, and there is plenty to justify it being challenged by anyone, no matter their credentials or political affiliations.
frustrated finfan,
I think the framework of your scenario is plausible. It’s reasonable to surmise that the orchestrators of the attack were not among the 19 terrorists who died that day.
However, I’m not convinced that their plan needed the assistance of any inside help. Chances are it was as brilliantly simple as it appeared to be, audaciously relying only on the predictable incompetence, apathy, ass covering, and bureaucratic bumbling of numerous government agencies, and upon the scientifically calculated fact that flying those planes into the towers would cause them to fall.
Simple plan.
But who was behind it?
al Qaeda? bin Laden? We’ve been conditioned to focus our blame on these convenient villains, but we should not be locked into this shaky hypothesis.
Frankly, your conspiracy theory rings as true as any other theories I’ve heard.