From those who were there: investigation reveals that at least 156 witnessed WTC explosions from Truth and Shadows
Todd Heaney and Frank DiLeo of Engine 209 help an injured firefighter. Photo: NY Daily News.
By Craig McKee
So much of the most important evidence the 9/11 Truth Movement has in its arsenal can be attributedto the work of researchers who went above and beyond what others were willing to do.
One who has made such a contribution is Canadian academic Graeme MacQueen. The retired university professor and author of The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy took on the daunting task of examining close to 12,000 pages of oral histories given by employees of the Fire Department of New York in the weeks and months after 9/11. These accounts reveal that many witnessed explosions in the World Trade Center that morning, supporting the position that the towers were brought down in controlled demolitions.
“It’s all well and good to say these buildings were demolished, but surely someone would notice, right?” MacQueen said in an interview. “Well, they did.”
This treasure trove of eyewitness evidence was just waiting to be examined, but for years the City of New York was determined to keep that from happening. It took a lawsuit by the New York Times to force the release of the pages in 2006.
The idea for the project, MacQueen explains, came from an article written early that year by David Ray Griffin, entitled “Explosive Testimony: Revelations about the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral Histories” in which 31 witnesses to explosions in the towers were identified. Fascinated by the selection of first-hand accounts that Griffin had presented, MacQueen thought a more detailed analysis of all 503 histories could reveal more. The accounts—from firefighters, emergency medical technicians, and paramedics—were recorded between early October 2001 and late January 2002.
“They suffered through the thing; many of them are sick now,” he explains. “They can tell me what they saw, what they heard, what they felt — just remarkable. What an opportunity to just get a sense of what it was like that day.”
As MacQueen discovered, many gave vivid descriptions of explosions. After carefully examining all the accounts, he arrived at a “cautious” total of 118 who reported blasts (he says he was actually criticized for underestimating).
“They’re more reliable, in my opinion, than most newspaper accounts because these people were taped, and the audio tapes were transcribed,” he says. “You get the name of the person; you get where they were, who interviewed them, and when they were interviewed. This is really useful.”
MacQueen: eyewitnesses important.
While the figure of 118 became established within the Truth Movement—even though people were often not aware of where it had originated—MacQueen decided in 2011 that he could investigate whether there were witnesses to explosions other than FDNY employees. He examined police accounts assembled by the Port Authority Police Department and looked at many media reports that featured interviews with eyewitnesses and first-hand reports by journalists.
The result of this phase of work was a second paper, entitled “Eyewitness Evidence of Explosions in the Twin Towers,” which he presented at the International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001, better known as the Toronto Hearings, that September. His findings led him to increase the cautious total of witnesses to 156.
“I wasn’t just worried about my own credibility, I was really worried about the credibility of the movement,” he said, adding that there could be many more who witnessed explosions, and he encourages others to continue this research.
In MacQueen’s second paper, he quotes firefighters Dennis Tardio and Pat Zoda, who many have seen in various 9/11 videos (including the Naudet brothers documentary) describing the series of explosions they witnessed. MacQueen writes:
Zoda says, as he moves his hand: “Floor by floor, it started poppin’ out.” Tardio concurs and uses the same hand gesture: “It was as if they had detonated, detonated (Zoda: “Yeah, detonated, yeah”), you know, as if they were planted to take down a building: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” Zoda adds: “All the way down. I was watching and running.”
The paper quotes Paul Lemos, a set designer who was in the WTC vicinity to participate in filming a TV commercial:
All of a sudden I looked up and about twenty stories below…the fire…I saw, from the corner, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom…just like twenty straight hits, just went down and then I just saw the whole building just went ‘pshew’…and as the bombs were goin’ people just started running and I sat there and watched a few of ‘em explode and then I just turned around and I just started running for my life because at that point the World Trade Center was coming right down…
Why eyewitnesses are so important
When he first began to look at the oral histories, MacQueen explains, he thought it would be helpful for the movement if he could contribute some “solid and quantifiable” data that could help test the controlled demolition hypothesis, adding that the eyewitness record is a valuable complement to all the forensic evidence that has been gathered. He admits there are significant prejudices against eyewitness accounts because many feel they are unreliable. But, he says, it is possible to learn a great deal from what eyewitnesses describe when the accounts are analyzed and when they are combined with other types of evidence.
“Eyewitness evidence is really important,” he asserts. “Ordinary people can identify; they can relate to that. If you start evoking their high school physics, they just tune out. But if you can say, look, this was a cop who was on the scene and says there was an explosion that was so strong it picked him up and threw him across the concourse—well, they can relate to that.”
Firefighters offer vivid descriptions of explosions.
Eyewitness evidence certainly has its vulnerabilities: we know that eyewitnesses can misperceive, misremember and deceive. But, as with other kinds of evidence, we have developed ways of checking to see if what the witnesses report is accurate. For example, we look for corroborating evidence—further eyewitness evidence as well as evidence of entirely different kinds.
He makes the point that it is important not only to look at how many people perceived explosions but also how many of the histories seemed to contradict them.
“You don’t just cherry pick; you don’t just look for things that support your hypothesis, you look for the opposite as well.”
MacQueen explains in the second paper that of the 156 eyewitnesses, 121 are from the Fire Department of New York, 14 are from the Port Authority Police Department, 13 are reporters (most of whom were working for major television networks), and eight are listed as “other”—mostly civilians who worked in the area of the Towers.
“Members of the FDNY and PAPD are what we call “first responders.” So 135 out of 156 witnesses, or 87% of the total, are first responders. This is significant because these people have had much more experience of explosions than most of us. Moreover, their statements were given to superior officers as part of their professional duties, and the circumstances in which the statements were collected make this eyewitness evidence, in my view, very strong.”
One of the challenges for MacQueen when he began his project in 2006 was how to analyze the documents—what to look for, what would support the existence of explosions, and what would count against it. He read through the accounts once to determine a list of terms that would be relevant to the subject and then a second time to record how many featured key words like “explosion,” “bomb,” “implosion,” and “blast.” As he proceeded, he says he made a point of erring on the side of caution—meaning that someone who mentioned a loud rumbling or other similarly vague description was not included in the total.
A
number of those interviewed for the oral histories later changed their
view about explosions, MacQueen concedes, but this came after the
official narrative was firmly established, and that narrative did not
include the use of explosives. Some firefighters who originally said
they experienced explosions later came to think they must have been
mistaken because the official story had the buildings coming down
primarily because of office fires.“Our memory of these things will change, and it will tend to be in the direction of the social consensus,” MacQueen points out.
But despite some changing their story as time passed, most of those who reported explosions have stuck to their stories, and their powerful and revealing oral histories are a tremendously valuable resource for anyone who wants to know what happened at Ground Zero that day.
“It’s extremely important,” he says. “The whole global war on terror is at stake here.”
***
A few examples of what fire department employees describedRichard Banaciski
South Tower: We were there I don’t know, maybe 10, 15 minutes and then I just remember there was just an explosion. It seemed like on television they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.
Gregg Brady
North Tower: We were standing underneath and Captain Stone was speaking again. We heard — I heard 3 loud explosions. I look up and the north tower is coming down now…
Edward Cachia
South Tower: As my officer and I were looking at the south tower, it just gave. It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit, because we originally had thought there was like an internal detonation explosives because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down.
Frank Campagna
North Tower: That’s when it went. I looked back. You see three explosions and then the whole thing coming down. I turned my head and everybody was scattering.
Craig Carlsen
South Tower: I guess about three minutes later you just heard explosions coming from building two, the south tower. It seemed like it took forever, but there were about ten explosions. At the time I didn’t realize what it was. We realized later after talking and finding out that it was the floors collapsing to where the plane had hit. We then realized the building started to come down. The second one coming down, you knew the explosions. Now you’re very familiar with it.
John Coyle
South Tower: I started running after him and looking over my shoulder. The tower was–it looked to me–I thought it was exploding, actually. That’s what I thought for hours afterwards, that it had exploded or the plane or there had been some device on the plane that had exploded, because the debris from the tower had shot out far over our head… But nobody knew what had happened. I still thought it had exploded, something had exploded. At that point I had no idea what had happened. It seemed that the thing had blown up.
North Tower: Everybody I think at that point still thought these things were blown up. So I was fully expecting anything else to blow up.
Frank Cruthers
And while I was still in that immediate area, the south tower, 2 World Trade Center, there was what appeared to be at first an explosion. It appeared at the very top, simultaneously from all four sides, materials shot out horizontally. And then there seemed to be a momentary delay before you could see the beginning of the collapse.
Kevin Darnowski
South Tower: At that time I started walking back up towards Vesey Street. I heard three explosions, and then we heard like groaning and grinding, and tower two started to come down.
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