By Russ Baker on Aug 14, 2014
I was standing blocks from Building 7 of the
World Trade Center complex and staring directly at it when it collapsed.
Working for the Los
Angeles Times, I arrived that morning just in time to see
an enormous cloud of dust and people running away. I had not yet known of the
rapid and deadly descent of the South and North towers. That afternoon, I
called in a series of
reports to a staffer in the New York bureau.
I was literally on the phone with the office at
5:21 p.m., describing the fires burning in the structure as the building
began—and completed— its remarkably fast, smooth descent to the ground. I
described the building neatly pancaking, and the Pulitzer Prize winner on the
other end taking my dictation declared: “That sounds like a controlled demolition.”
Controlled Demolition
In fact, I have seen controlled demolitions
before and since—and indeed, that was exactly what the destruction of Building
7 looked like, except perhaps for a marginally slower collapse of the top
portion
As with most people, I was baffled by how
Building 7—a smaller, 47-story tower that had not been hit by a plane and was
separated from the Twin Towers by low-rise buildings–would come down at all. It
just made no sense.
How exactly the building did come down has never
been properly explained. An investigation
by the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded
that the building was hit by debris from the collapsing North Tower that
started fires. However, it ruled out diesel fuel, structural damage from the
debris and structural elements (trusses, girders, and cantilever overhangs) as
causes of the collapse. It said
the lack of water to the sprinkler system was an important factor in allowing
fires to rage all afternoon. But the panel declined to state how the fires
could bring down the building—and in such a rapid manner.
Reasonable Doubts
For many years, those who have been troubled by
things that did not make sense regarding the 9/11 attacks have been
marginalized as kooks. To be sure, some entertain enormously elaborate, complex
scenarios that assume unspeakable evil carried out by a bewildering number of
individuals, nations, and institutions.
However, fair-minded people who have carefully
studied the evidence are troubled by the “official story,” just as they are
troubled by the official explanations of the assassinations of American leaders
over half a century, and other traumas ranging from the Oklahoma City bombing
to the Boston Marathon bombing.
There is a reason so many people don’t trust the
security apparatus and its allies in government, academia and the media, or the
reassuring stories they tell us time after time that “there’s nothing to see
here, folks.”Or to allow even the most reasonable question into the public
discourse.
That kind of question hasn’t been possible with
the mystery of Building 7. Until now.
A small group, NYC Coalition for Accountability
Now (NYC CAN), run and largely staffed by a young man named Ted Walter, has
come up with a solution: Get the public to legislate a formal inquiry into
building collapses.
Noting that no high-rise building has ever
collapsed as a result of fire, and seizing on the official position that the
destruction of Building 7 cannot be definitively explained, Walter’s group has
proposed that the city explore all building collapses since and including 9/11.
The proposed inquiry pointedly excludes Buildings 1 and 2, the collapses of
which have been much investigated and debated. It does not explicitly mention
Building 7—but then it does not have to. Building 7 is unique in that it was
not hit by a plane. Any serious investigation of building collapses would start
with Building 7.
The mechanism for this is to seek to have New Yorkers
vote on a ballot measure, the High-Rise Safety
Initiative. Its supporters face a tough challenge ahead, and have
already hit some formidable road blocks. Still they persevere.
Not Your Run-of-the-Mill “Kooks”
Ted Walter does not fit the caricature of the
unshaven, grumpy, shouting activist. He’s a calm, thoughtful, precise fellow.
He grew up in Wisconsin and Mozambique, where his father was an official of a
private aid group, got a BA at New York University and a Masters in Public
Policy at UC Berkeley, and then worked for San Francisco’s Board of
Supervisors.
He’d arrived in New York from Mozambique at age
19 to attend college two weeks before the attacks. “9/11 was essentially my
introduction to New York,” he says.
The first thing that struck him was to wonder
why, so long after the first planes hit the World Trade Center, another plane
was unimpeded in hitting the Pentagon. Where were the U.S.’s vaunted defenses?
He also found it odd that a building collapse
would involve entire structures virtually vaporizing in the air.
It was not until the spring of 2006 that Walter
began determinedly researching the events. “During the course of a couple
months of reading everything I could find, I came to the conclusion that the
official account of 9/11 was false,” he says.
In 2008, others launched something called the NYC
9/11 Ballot Initiative. Walter volunteered as a petitioner, then managed paid
canvassers. The next year, he founded a group, NYC CAN, along with some family
members of 9/11 victims, and assumed control of the ballot initiative. Although
they submitted 80,000 signatures, more than the required number, the city
successfully challenged the initiative in court and kept it off the ballot.
This was hardly surprising. In certain parts of
the country, especially in many Western states and municipalities, major policy
is often legislated directly at the polls. Not so in New York City, which has
long made it virtually impossible to qualify such a measure for the ballot. In
fact, New York City voters have only seen two of them in half a century.
Nonetheless, in the spring of 2013, Walter and
his group talked with a top New York City election attorney, decided there
might be a chance at prevailing despite the long odds, and began moving forward
with another attempt. It became the High-Rise Safety Initiative.
Between May 1 and July 31, they gathered more
than 100,000 signatures, far more than the 30,000 required to gain a place on
the ballot. They submitted the first 67,000 of those on July 3, and plan to
submit the remaining 33,000 on Sept. 4, which is more than double what’s
required to override the City Council.
As anticipated, the City challenged the
petition—claiming that not enough signatures are valid, and that the petition
language is not legally valid. Walter and company filed suit against the City
to have that determination annulled, and were due to go into court on Aug. 14.
The group believes that it has overcome the usual
issue of invalid signatures by filing so many—and because even in its 2009
effort, it was able to prove that enough signatures did pass muster. Now, it
must pass the arcane statutory hurdles the city created exactly to prevent such
measures. Walter thinks they have a chance.
The case should be decided by mid-September. If
the initiative is successful, it will be on the November ballot.
Officials Mortified
The mayor, a liberal named Bill DeBlasio, has not
had kind things to say about the effort—presumably not unlike what his
predecessors, Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, might have had to say. As
reported by Crain’s New York
Business:
“From what I’ve heard it’s absolutely
ridiculous,” a peeved Mr. de Blasio said in response to a reporter’s question.
“And it’s inappropriate, after all the suffering that went on 9/11 and since.
It seems to be this is a very insensitive and inappropriate action.”
Crain’s itself couldn’t help referring to the
group as “conspiracy theorists,” an unfortunate term that instantly assumes no
credibility to those asking what may in fact be legitimate—if
uncomfortable—questions.
The speaker of the New York City Council, Melissa
Mark-Viverito, a close ally of the mayor, lashed out: “Instead of wasting New
Yorkers’ time and hard-earned taxpayer dollars humoring conspiracy theorists
with wild fantasies, the City Council will continue to focus on passing sound
legislation.”
A Skilled Communicator
Walter is very much a creature of the Internet
Age. On the heels of Mark-Viverito’s statement, he was quick to put out an
“Action Alert” email to his supporters:
Now we and the High-Rise Safety Initiative are
calling on you to tell Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito that there are no wild
fantasies here. The only wild fantasy is the one she chooses to believe—namely,
that a 47-story skyscraper collapsed symmetrically, at free-fall acceleration,
from small isolated fires.
Please take five minutes today to email the
Speaker’s office with this message: The only “wild fantasy” is a skyscraper
collapsing from fire. Explain to the Speaker and her staff why a 47-story
steel-frame skyscraper cannot collapse from fire, and ask them to watch
the 15-minute video Solving the
Mystery of WTC 7, which features more than a dozen experts, who
harbor not wild fantasies, but irrefutable scientific evidence.
If Walter and his group succeed in forcing a
serious inquiry into the building collapse, they will have achieved what almost
no one else in the 9/11 movement has: transforming a chaotic debate infused
with powerful emotions and anger into a sober, methodical exploration of one
portion of this sprawling, dark saga.
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