[Editor's note:  First published on 10 
September 2011, this overview of 9/11 
has endured as an introduction to why 
we, the people, should not passively 
accept what we have been told about 
9/11 by The 9/11 Commission, which, 
like The Warren Commission on the 
death of JFK, was a whitewash that
was intended to conceal what really 
happened for a fictional narrative. It
appears here with several tweaks.]

20 Reasons the “Official Account” of 
9/11 is Wrong
Jim Fetzer
As the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, I would observe that our members,
building on prior research by earlier students of 9/11, have established more 
than a dozen disproofs of the official government account, the truth of any one 
of which is enough to show that the government’s account–in one or another of 
its guises–cannot possibly be correct.
1. The impact of planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the buildings
down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank DeMartini,
the project manager, has observed), the planes alleged to have hit were similar to
those they were designed to withstand, and the buildings continued to stand after
those impacts with negligible effects.

2. Most of the jet fuel, principally kerosene, burned up in those fireballs in the first
fifteen seconds or so. Below the 96th floor in the North Tower and the 80th in the
South, those buildings were stone cold steel (unaffected by any fires at all other
 than some very modest office fires that burned around 500 degrees F), which
functioned as a massive heat sink dissipating heat from building up on the steel.
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3. The melting point of steel at 2,800 degrees F is about 1,000 degrees higher than
the maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed
1,800 degrees F under optimal conditions; but the NIST examined 236 samples of
steel and found that 233 had not been exposed to temperatures above 500 degrees
F and the others not above1200.
4. Underwriters Laboratory certified the steel in the buildings up to2,000 degrees F
for three or four hours without any significant effects, where these fires burned
neither long enough or hot enough at an average temperature of about 500 degrees
for about one hour in the South Tower and one and a half in the North Tower to
weaken, much less melt.
5. If the steel had melted or weakened, then the affected floors would have displayed completely different behavior, with some degree of asymmetrical sagging and tilting,
which would have been gradual and slow, rather than the complete, abrupt and total
demolition that was observed.Which means NIST cannot even explain the initiation
of any collapse sequence.
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6. The top 30 floors of the South Tower pivoted and fell to the side,turning to dust
before it reached the horizontal. So it did not even exist to exert any downward
pressure on the lower 80 floors. A high-school physics teacher, Charles Boldwyn,
moreover, has calculated that, if you take the top 16 floors of the North Tower as
one unit of downward force, there were 199 units of upward force to counteract it.
7. William Rodriguez, who was the senior custodian in the North Tower and the
last man to leave the building, has reported massive explosions in the sub-base-
ments that effected extensive destruction, including the demolition of a fifty-ton-
capacity hydraulic press and ripping of the skin off a fellow worker, where they
filled with water that drained the sprinkler system.
8. Rodriguez observed that the explosion occurred prior to reverberations from
upper floors, a claim that has now been substantiated in a new study by Craig
Furlong and Gordon Ross, Seismic Proof: 9/11 Was an Inside Job, demonstrating
that these explosions actually took place as much as 14 and 17 seconds before
the presumptive airplane impacts.
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9. Heavy-steel-construction buildings like the Twin Towers are not generally cap-
able of pancake collapse, which normally occurs only with concrete structures of
lift slab construction and could not occur in redundant welded-steel buildings, such
as the towers, unless every supporting column were removed at the same time,
floor by floor, as Charles Pegelow, a structural engineer, has observed.
10. The demolition of the two towers in about 10 seconds apiece is very close to
the speed of free fall with only air resistance, which Judy Wood, Ph.D., formerly
a professor of mechanical engineering, has observed is an astounding result
that would be impossible with extremely powerful sources of energy. If they were
collapsing, they would have had to fall through their points of greatest resistance.
11. Indeed, the towers are exploding from the top, not collapsing to the ground,
where their floors do not move, a phenomenon Wood has likened to two gigantic
trees turning to sawdust from the top down,which, like the pulverization of the
buildings, the governments account possibly explain. There were no “pancakes”.
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12. WTC-7 came down in a classic controlled demolition at 5:20 PM after Larry
Silverstein suggested the best thing to do might be to pull it, displaying all the
characteristics of classic controlled demolitions: a complete, abrupt and total
collapse into its own footprint, where the floors are all falling at the same time,
yielding a stack of pancakes about 5 floors high.
13. Had the Twin Towers collapsed like WTC-7, there would have been two
stacks of “pancakes” equal to about 12% the height of the buildings or around
15 floors high. But they were actually reduced to below ground level. Since there
were no “pancakes”, there cannot have been any “pancake collapse” of either
building, where the buildings were destroyed by different modes of demolition.
14. The hit point at the Pentagon was too small to accommodate a100-ton
airliner with a 125-foot wingspan and a tail that stands44-feet above the ground;
the debris was wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies,
no luggage, no tail! Not even the engines were recovered, which means that the
official account is not true.
<br>
15. The Pentagons own videotapes do not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building,
as even Bill O'Reilly admitted when one was shown on The O'Reilly Factor; at 155
feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 77-foot Pentagon is high and
should have been present and easily visible; it was not, which means that the video
evidence also contradicts the official account.
16. The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectory flying at high
speed barely above ground level physically impossible, because a Boeing 757 at
over 500 mph could not have come closer than about 60 feet of the ground, which
means the official account is not even aerodynamically possible, as an aeronautical
engineer has explained to me.
17. Data from a flight recorder provided to Pilots for 9/11 Truth by the National
Transportation Safety Board corresponds to a plane with a different approach and
altitude, which would have precluded its hitting lampposts or even the building itself,
which means that, if this data corresponds to a Boeing 757, it would have flown
over the Pentagon rather than hit it.
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18. Had Flight 93 disappeared into an abandoned mine shaft, as the government
maintains, then they should have brought out the heavy equipment and the bright
lights and dug and dug, 24/7, in the hope that, by some miracle, someone might
possibly have survived. But nothing like that was done. Even the singed trees and
shrubs were trimmed to make it impossible to subject them to chemical analysis.
19. There is more, especially about the alleged hijackers, including that they were
not competent to fly these planes and that their names are not on any original,
authenticated passenger manifest. Several have turned up alive and well and
living in the Middle East. The government has not even produced their tickets as
evidence that they were even aboard the aircraft they are alleged to have hijacked.
20. President Bush recently acknowledged that Saddam Hussein had nothing to
do with 9/11. The Senate Intelligence Committee has reported that Saddam was
not in cahoots with Al Qaeda. And the FBI has acknowledged that it has no hard
evidence to tie Osama to 9/11. If Saddam did not do it and Osama did not do it, t
hen who is responsible for the death of 3,000 citizens that day?
We believe that it is the highest form of respect to those who died on 9/11 and
their survivors to establish how and why they died,which our own government
manifestly has not done. With the American media under the thumb of a corrupt
administration, we cannot count on the press to perform its investigative function.
But we can do our best to expose falsehoods and reveal truths about 9/11.
Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus at  
the University of Minnesota and the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.